Rebecca West Gianni Celati

GIANNI CELATI:
THE CRAFT OF EVERYDAY STORYTELLING

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REBECCA J. WEST
Gianni Celati
The Craft of Everyday Storytelling
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000

Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-4772-6
Printed on acid-free paper
Toronto Italian Studies
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
West, Rebecca }., 1946-

Gianni Celati: the craft of everyday storytelling
(Toronto Italian studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-4772-6
i. Celati, Gianni, 1937- - Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
II. Series.
FQ4863.E36z88 2000 853'-9i4 099-932869-7
This book has won the Modern Language Association of America's Aldo
and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary
Studies. It has been published with this financial assistance, and with the
financial assistance of the Division of the Humanities, the University of
Chicago.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its pub-
lishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
To Bill, Gemma, and G.T.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Gianni Celati: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch xi
Introduction: Meeting Gianni Celati 3

1 Bartleby: Preferring Not To 18
2 The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 60
3 The Permeable Gaze 91

4 A Family of Voices: Celati's 'Parents/ 'Siblings/ and 'Children' 138
5 Celati's Body Language: Orality, Voice, and the Theater of
Ephemeral Mortality 181
6 Africa, Gamuna, and Other Travels: Moving Narratives 221
Provisional Conclusions: Venturing into the New Millennium 270
Notes 287
Bibliography 303
Index 323
Acknowledgments
My thanks to all those who gave me inspiration; moral, intellectual,

and material support; and encouragement. My colleagues in the Italian
program at the University of Chicago, Elissa Weaver, Franco Nasi, and
especially Paolo Cherchi, believed in my ability to write this book, and
Paolo told me many times just to sit down and do it; for all of their care
I am most grateful. My graduate students and research assistants,
Sarah Hill and Davide Papotti, generously shared their own work on
Celati and related matters and gave me invaluable material help in get-
ting the manuscript into final shape. Barbara Naess of Chicago did a
wonderful job of translating a needed source from German to English.
Philip Gossett, dean of the Division of the Humanities at the Univer-
sity of Chicago, provided both collegial and financial support, for
which I am most indebted to him. Colleagues farther afield also lent
their ears and critical acumen to various aspects of this adventure. I
warmly thank Victoria Kirkham for our many stimulating discussions;
Penny Marcus for her terrific brainstorming on possible titles for the
book; Anthony Tamburri, Robert Dombroski, Lino Fertile, Robert
Lumley, Michael Hanne, and the lamented Gian Paolo Biasin for their
specific suggestions and general support; Franco Ricci and Albert
Mancini for providing articles; Francesco Muzzioli, Marco Belpoliti,
Marianne Schneider, Daniele Benati, Gillian Haley, and Vincenzo Cotti-
nelli for obtaining and sending needed materials from Europe. I aired
some of my work on Celati at Purdue University, Berkeley, the Univer-
sity of Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania; thanks to col-
leagues who invited me to speak and to audiences for listening. Ron
Schoeffel and Anne Forte at the University of Toronto Press were
unfailingly cordial, kind, and efficient, and I thank them greatly.
x Acknowledgments
Gianni Celati is owed an enormous debt of gratitude for his diffi-

dence regarding my desire to write a book on his work. When he mod-
estly said that I surely had better things to do with my time, I was
irrevocably convinced that I did not.
To my intimate circle - my sister, my closest friends, my companion
Bill, the cats - I can only say that, without you, my everyday life of
work and play would not have been and would not continue to be the
ongoing adventure in love and learning that it is.
Gianni Celati:
A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch
Gianni Celati was born in Sondrio, in northern Italy, in 1937. He stud-

ied at the University of Bologna, where he wrote a thesis on James
Joyce. Subsequently he taught Anglo-American literature at that uni-
versity for many years, and he had visiting professorships at Cornell
University and at the University of Caen in the 19705 and early 19808.
In the mid-igSos Celati left his teaching post at Bologna and moved
permanently to Brighton, England, where he continues to write fiction
and essays and to translate works from the French and English. A
great peripatetic, Celati has traveled extensively throughout Europe
and North America, where he has done many public readings of his
works; most recently, his wanderlust has taken him to West Africa.
Celati began to publish essays in the 19605 on Joyce, Celine, Bakhtin,
and other writers and theorists, many of which centered on a critique
of institutional forms of language and literature. These essays ap-
peared in journals associated with the Italian neoavant-garde, such as
// Verri and Quindici. His first published fictional work, the 1971
Comiche (Slapstick silent films), with an introduction by Italo Calvino,
was included in an Einaudi Publishing House series oriented towards
experimental writing by young voices. In the 19705 Celati also pursued
his interest in translation, and he produced Italian versions of works
by Swift, Gerhardie, and Celine. A collection of his critical essays ap-
peared in 1975 under the title Finzioni occidental!: Fabulazione, comicitd e
scrittura (Western fictions: Fabulation, comicality, and writing). Mean-
while, Celati continued to write fiction and three works appeared in
the 19705: Le avventure di Guizzardi (The adventures of Guizzardi,
1973); La banda dei sospiri (The gang [or soundtrack] of sighs, 1976); and
Lunario del paradiso (Paradise almanac, 1978). Later described as a tril-
xii Gianni Celati: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch
ogy made up of 'racconti comuni/ or everyday tales, these three books

were published in one volume, with a completely rewritten version of
Lunario del paradiso, under the title Parlamenti buffi (Funny chatter) in
1989. These semi-autobiographical works, in which anarchical young
protagonists seek to make their way in a world dominated by repres-
sive families and frightening authority figures, reflect the rebellious
mood of the late sixties and precede by almost two decades the recent
trend in Italy of youth-oriented fiction. They also show Celati at his
most linguistically experimental, varying as they do from the comi-
cally grotesque agrammaticalities of Guizzardi's speech to the collo-
quial spoken style of La banda del sospiri and Lunario del paradiso.
Having received some positive critical response to his first fictions
(especially to Le avventure di Guizzardi, which won the coveted Bagutta
literary prize in 1974), by the late 19705 Celati nonetheless felt the need
to withdraw from the literary scene in order to rethink his approach to
writing. He published some essays and translations after the 1978
Lunario del paradiso, but remained essentially absent from the main-
stream publishing world until 1985, when his collection of minimalist
stories, Narratori delle pianure (Narrators of the plains), appeared and
was received with great critical enthusiasm. Since then Celati has pub-
lished many works, including Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (Four sto-
ries on appearances, 1987); the above-mentioned Parlamenti buffi, 1989;
Verso la foce (Towards the river mouth, 1989); L'Orlando innamorato rac-
contato in prosa (The 'Orlando innamorato' [of Boiardo] told in prose,
1994); Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Performance
of the actor Vecchiatto in the theater of Rio Saliceto, 1996); and Avven-
ture in Africa (Adventures in Africa, 1998). In 1991 his translation, with
an introduction and annotated bibliography, of Melville's 'Bartleby'
appeared, and he has also recently published Italian versions of Jack
London's The Call of the Wild and Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme.
Among Celati's many activities of the last decade are the cofounding
and coediting of the journal // Semplice: Almanacco della prosa and the
direction of two video films, Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial
road of souls) and II mondo di Luigi Ghirri (The world of Luigi Ghirri),
the latter an homage to the work of the late photographer Ghirri, with
whom Celati closely collaborated in the early and mid-1980s, when he
was exploring the geographic and literary spaces of the Po valley and
writing the stories that now make up Narratori delle pianure.
Celati's fiction has been recognized with several literary prizes,
including the Premio Bagutta for Le avventure di Guizzardi, the Premio
Gianni Celati: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch xiii
Scole and Premio Grinzane-Cavour for Narratori delle pianure, the Pre-
mio Mondello for Parlamenti buffi, and the Premio Feronia (from the
city of Fano) for Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto. His Avventure in Africa won
the first Zerilli-Marimo Prize in 1998; this prize was awarded by a jury
made up of non-native, English-speaking specialists of Italian litera-
ture (primarily graduate students from North America and the United
Kingdom) and included support for the translation into English and
publication of the book. Although many of Celati's works have been
translated into French, Spanish, and German, only two books have
appeared to date in English (Narratori delle pianure [Voices from the
Plains] and Quattro novelle sulle apparenze [Appearances]), both pub-
lished by the Serpent's Tail Press in England. With the projected publi-
cation of an English-language version of Avventure in Africa by the
University of Chicago Press Celati will find a new audience of readers,
who will discover in him a contemporary Italian writer of great origi-
nality and Calvino-like appeal. At least, that is this reader's hope.
A comprehensive listing of Celati's production, including essays,
translations, videos, and fictional works, is provided in the Bibliogra-
phy. Italian quotations throughout the text have been translated into
English.
GIANNI CELATI:
THE CRAFT OF EVERYDAY STORYTELLING
Introduction:
Meeting Gianni Celati
'The odd ones, the eccentrics, the atypicals end up proving to be the most
representative figures of their time.'
Italo-Calvino1
From the heyday of the neoavant-garde, in the early and mid-1960s, to

the more recent fiction of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and today's
younger generation of writers, Italian fictional modes and critical
responses to them have tended to privilege the epistemological under-
pinnings of narrative prose. As past experimentalism gave way to
today's postmodernism, the widespread 'crisis of reason' has condi-
tioned both poetics and practice, and current fiction in Italy grapples
with the same impossibility of representation and of foundational
knowledge that vexes (or inspires) writers elsewhere. The problem of
the referent plagued Calvino, for example, especially in his last years,
as his phenomenologically oriented Palomar attests, while Eco appears
to enjoy the game of literary self-referentiality and the 'hall of mirrors'
effect that self-conscious texts such as his can so masterfully produce.
The crisis of authorial consciousness in modern literature explored
by Roland Barthes in his now classic 1968 essay, 'The Death of the
Author,' permeates postmodern texts both creative and critical, as
writing itself, rather than the 'human person' behind the text, takes
center stage. While foundationlessness may be the plight of language
and textuality, however, the Author is anything but 'dead' in contem-
porary Italian culture. As Foucault wrote in his essay, 'What Is an
Author?' we need an author's name on a text in order to show that the
writing 'is not everyday ordinary speech,' and that it 'must be received
4 Gianni Celati
in a certain mode ... and must receive a certain status' (in Rabinow, ed.,
The Foucault Reader; 107). Thus, in today's Italy, individual names,
rather than statusless 'everyday' writing, continue to rule supreme,
with the same tenacious strength as they have throughout the canoni-
cal construction known as the 'history of Italian literature.' There are,
however, some writers (not Authors) in Italy who are part of a different
line, one that veers away from the mainstream highlighting of names
and status and that views writing more as a shareable craft than a soli-
tary art. Gianni Celati belongs to this latter line, and is indeed by now
its most eminent contemporary representative. Celati is, I believe, one
of those 'odd, eccentric, atypical ones' whom Calvino thought of as
ending up being most representative of their age. In its totality, Celati's
work over the last thirty years represents what could be called 'artisa-
nal' or 'workshop' postmodernism that, while in no way completely
distinct from the more dominant line, nonetheless differs from that line
in its orientation to ontology (being) rather than epistemology (know-
ing), and in its dedication to writing as a lifelong apprenticeship and
an ideally 'nameless' pursuit. Like anonymous storytellers of yore,
Celati is less interested in being an Author of Artful Texts that reveal
consolidated knowledge (or, conversely, debunk the possibility of
knowing) than in being the practictioner of a craft that might permit
him to create fictions of some value in exploring our shared humanity
and in living within our world of everyday contingencies. This artisa-
nal approach to writing should not be seen as naive, however, for it is
the result of years of the most serious study, of complete immersion in
the debates and texts of modern and postmodern literature and criti-
cism alike, and of a ceaseless journeying through thought and creative
activity. Following that journey means moving through a literary and
critical landscape that extends far beyond the work of one writer. The
itinerary takes us from the period of intense questioning and theoriza-
tion of the Italian neoavant-garde of the sixties, when the concepts of
capturable reality and transparently representational language were
both held in serious doubt, through the attacks launched in the 19705
on 'grand narratives' and on traditional instruments for seeking
knowledge in many disciplines, from philosophy to historiography to
literary criticism, to today's millennial, postmodern search for ways
out of the impasse of foundationlessness. Celati has been intensely
involved in all of these phases of recent thought and practice, and he
has come to ask the same questions that haunt other contemporary
thinkers and artists: Where do we go for imaginative, ethical, and spir-
Introduction 5
itual sustenance when foundations have been razed, when art has
become in great part a self-enclosed, self-referential game, and when
the society of the spectacle has all but cancelled age-old traditions and
ancient ways of being? His long voyage has brought him to an under-
standing of the necessity of belief to our age; not, however, belief as
dogma or as something handed down to us from past generations, but
rather as something we ourselves must construct and sustain. As a
writer, Celati's focus is on the belief-giving potential of everyday sto-
ries, or what he calls 'fictions in which to believe/ a concept that I shall
explore in some depth in this study.
Before beginning to follow the journey through Celatian postmod-
ernism that is both ethically and aesthetically motivated, and which I
am convinced takes us into a landscape little seen in the sketchy
glimpses of contemporary Italian literary and critical culture currently
available to foreign observers, I want to tell my own small story of dis-
covery and eventual belief. Meeting Gianni Celati was and remains for
me the entry into a creative and critical realm that exceeds by far the
work of this one man. This book is my attempt at exploring that realm,
with Celati as guide and companion. First, however, let me tell the
story of a meeting.
Rome, Spring 1979
I am a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where I am writing a

book on Eugenio Montale's poetry. Some months before, while still in
the United States, I had written a 'fan letter' to Gianni Celati occa-
sioned by my discovery of his 1973 novel, Le avventure di Guizzardi (The
adventures of Guizzardi). As I think back to that discovery, I feel again
the sense of delight that invaded me and that made me want to read
more of this writer's work. What struck me was the book's radically
comic effect, the richness of its linguistic, tonal, and structural inven-
tiveness, and, above all, its delightful strangeness. I had never before
encountered Italian such as this, nor a character anything like the sad
clown Guizzardi. In my enthusiasm, I wrote to Celati that I loved his
book and that I would be honored to meet him when I came to Italy,
perhaps by going to Bologna, where I knew he lived and taught at the
university. I received no answer, and in fact more or less forgot about
my letter in the busy move from Chicago to Rome. Then, many months
later, I was called to the hall phone on my floor of the Academy.
'Pronto?'
6 Gianni Celati
I heard in response a soft, hesitant voice: 'Pronto, sono Gianni

Celati/
I literally could not believe my ears! A writer was calling me? (This
was many years before I began to have the courage to contact various
writers on whom I worked, before I began to understand that they
were people, not 'divinities' inhabiting some untouchable universe of
the printed word.)
The soft voice continued: 'I got your letter. Thanks/ I stammered out
a reply, mixing French and English with my stuttering Italian. As
always in moments of intense emotion, my linguistic competence was
short-circuited.
'You're welcome, sir. Sending the letter was a little 'ose,' un po' 'dar-
ing,' what is the Italian word? Excuse me, I'm very excited. Might we
meet? Obviously, whenever it's convenient for you, wherever ...'
There was a brief silence, then the soft, hesitant, tenuous voice once
more: 'But, but, in fact, I'm calling from here/
'You're here, in Rome!?'
'What I mean is that I'm calling from here, from this place, here
downstairs/
I felt lightning-struck. 'Oh my God, I'm coming, I'm coming down,
I'll just be a minute, just a second, prego, prego/
Thus began our acquaintance, in a way that has continued to seem to
me both intensely unreal and yet viscerally lived: 'filmic/ and height-
ened as few moments in life are. Celati and I spent that afternoon walk-
ing in a park on the Janiculum near the Academy, talking and talking
as we walked and walked. I later came to know that he is an indefati-
gable walker, someone for whom moving through space is as neces-
sary as breathing. As we watched the people passing by us, Celati
commented on the comical sight of a very small jogger with a 'monu-
mental' dog. He also used the word 'monumental' to describe a kind of
literature that he did not like: the so-called romanzo ben fatto or 'well-
made novel' of realist proportions, with an omniscient, paternalistic,
and controllingly 'pedagogical' narrator. As we chatted, we realized an
odd fact: we had already met, seven or eight years before, in New
Haven, Connecticut, when I was a graduate student at Yale and he was
a visiting professor at Cornell. There had been a party at the home of
one of my professors - who was a friend of a Cornell professor - and
thus Celati had found himself at the gathering. We had been intro-
duced, but in the party din I didn't quite catch his name and I really
didn't know who that quiet, rather melancholy fellow sitting on the
Introduction 7
floor in a dark corner of the living room might be. We certainly didn't
have any conversation.
After hours of walking and talking, the Roman afternoon drew to a
close, and Celati said he had to go back to Bologna. We said goodbye in
front of the Academy. Turning around briefly as he pushed back the
hair on his forehead, and with a wave of the hand, Celati disappeared
into the twilight. As I stood there, still feeling dazed and as if I were
waking up from a dream or coming down off the screen at the end of a
film in which I had just watched myself playing an unexpected role,
words from a poem by Montale, on which I had been working that
morning before getting the fateful phone call, came into my mind. In
the poem, 'La bufera' (The storm), the poet writes of the beloved lady
as he watches her depart: 'ti rivolgesti e con la mano, sgombra / la
fronte dalla nube dei capelli, / mi salutasti - per entrar nel buio' (you
turned around and with your hand, pushing aside / the cloud of hair
on your forehead, / you saluted me - then to go into the darkness). I
felt at that moment all the weight, and all the strangeness, of coinci-
dences, of connections made across time and space, and of what I can
only now call the 'literariness' of life and the 'life' of great literature
that can put its signature, so to speak, on certain lived moments,
thereby highlighting and crystallizing a feeling, an emotion, an other-
wise inexpressible sentiment.
Several years after that meeting in Rome, I entered into a phase of

work that concentrated on contemporary Italian prose fiction. In con-
junction with that work, I was writing an article on Celati's 1985 collec-
tion of stories, Narratori delle pianure (Narrators of the plains), in which
I was seeking to explore the use of space in the overall meaning of the
volume. In the intervening years Celati and I had kept in touch, and I
had read all of his fiction and much of his critical writing. Yet I hadn't
thought back to that Roman encounter until I began work on the arti-
cle, in which I analyzed, among others, a story called 'L'isola in mezzo
all'Atlantico' (The island in the middle of the Atlantic). In support of
my reading, I cited a 1984 essay by Celati, 'Finzioni a cui credere' (Fic-
tions in which to believe), in which he wrote: 'Siamo gia da sempre e
per sempre nella rappresentazione' (We have already always been and
shall always be within representation; 13). And I realized that my
memory of that afternoon in Rome made these words clear, and was
deeply conditioning my reading of the tale in question.
In the story, an Italian amateur ham radio enthusiast begins an
8 Gianni Celati
exchange across the waves (both radio and oceanic) with a certain
Archie, who lives on an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic.
Archie speaks only English, a language that the Italian does not know
very well. With the help of an English friend, the Italian begins to
translate and to understand Archie's transmissions, which are centered
on the physical ambience of the island on which he lives. After some
time has passed, the Italian and his English girlfriend travel to the
island to find Archie, but they discover that he is no longer there.
Instead, they meet a friend of Archie, whose name is also Archie, and
who tells them the 'true story' of the unfindable first Archie. The lay-
ered narrative of Celati's tale underlines the 'already told' and 'repre-
sented' nature of any 'reality' or 'true story': everything we come to
know is, in the end, a translation, a re-presentation (like the words in
English of the first Archie translated by the girlfriend, or the story of
the first Archie told by the second Archie). Moreover, when the Italian
and his girlfriend travel to the island, their experience even of its phys-
ical reality has already been conditioned by the first Archie's previ-
ously sent descriptions. They go there looking for direct contact with
Archie and with the island - for the 'originals' of a man and a place
known indirectly through radio transmissions - but they find instead a
second Archie who mediates their knowledge of the first Archie
through words and an island that is unavoidably shaped through prior
description. They are, in short, 'always and ever within representa-
tion.' As I wrote in my article, Tl mondo "reale" e dunque esso stesso
un mondo narrato e non esiste una realta pre-narrativa accessibile in
quanto vi si abita' (The 'real' world is itself, therefore, also a narrated
world, for there is no pre-narrational reality that is accessible merely
by being inhabited).2 This may be a conclusion conditioned by the
postmodern 'era of "hyper-representation"' in which we live, and in
which 'reality itself begins to be experienced as an endless network of
representations.' W.J.T. Mitchell further comments that 'categories
such as "the thing itself," the "authentic," and the "real" which were
formerly considered the objects of representation (or as the presence
achieved by formal purity) now become themselves representations'
('Representation/ in Lentricchia and McLaughlin, eds.; 16-17). Or it
may be that dwelling within language has always meant that the 'real'
is ineluctable except insofar as we represent it to ourselves and others
linguistically. Literature is, of course, one of the means by which our
shared human habitat in the realm of language is most 'brought home'
to us (or that we are 'brought home').
Introduction 9
The 'true' and 'real' meeting with Celati in Rome was for me an
experience that shed light on this 'represented' quality of so-called
reality. My feeling then of being in a film or in a story, which I had
attributed to the surprise and intensity of the meeting, was, upon
retrospective meditation, what I came to think of as an epiphany of
estrangement. Estrangement is formalistically understood as a liter-
ary or filmic device that, if successful, makes us see the 'real' as some-
how more 'real.' Yet my epiphany had to do with a more or less
opposite effect: the 'real' revealed itself not as immediacy, but as repre-
sentation. In an entirely different context and to different critical ends,
Lauren Berlant notes that 'experience' can be understood as 'some-
thing produced in the moment when an activity becomes framed as an
event, such that the subject enters the empire of quotation marks,
anecdote, self-reflection, memory. More than a category of authentic-
ity, "experience" in this context refers to something someone "has," in
aggregate moments of self-estrangement' (note 31; 288). Literary rep-
resentation is one of the important 'territories' of this 'empire,' for it
recreates, for the writer as well as for us, the readers, that 'self-
estrangement' that can illuminate the generally murky flow of un-
considered experience, finding in it meanings that are widely share-
able. Celati's farewell wave was most truly lived by me as the wave of
Montale's poem. I was in and of representation, not because the meet-
ing was not intensely and vitally lived, but because its meaning was
and is mediated by language.
Retelling the 'true story' of my first meeting with Celati here and
now, again by means of language, convinces me yet again of the abso-
lutely fundamental necessity of expressive form to lived life, of telling
to living and knowing, and, conversely, of lived life to meaningful nar-
ration. This credo informs much of Celati's work, as he has sought over
the past quarter of a century to craft 'fictions in which to believe.' In his
essay of that title, he wrote: 'Crediamo che tutto cio che la gente fa
dalla mattina alia sera sia uno sforzo per trovare un possibile racconto
dell'esterno, che sia almeno un po' vivibile. Pensiamo anche che questa
sia una finzione, ma una finzione a cui e necessario credere' (We
believe that everything people do from morning to night is an effort to
find some possible story about the external world that might be at least
a little liveable. We also think that this is a fiction, but it is a fiction in
which it is necessary to believe; 'Finzioni a cui credere'; 13). This
emphasis on Tiveability,' on inhabiting the world through stories
we tell ourselves and others, reveals the ontological preoccupations
10 Gianni Celati
underlying much of Celati's writing, especially that of the last decade.

As already mentioned above, scholarship on recent, post-Calvino nar-
rative in Italy has for the most part emphasized instead the epistemo-
logical concerns of writers working under the sign of the 'crisis of
reason' that permeates the so-called postmodern in its many guises.
(Lyotard's early text on the postmodern was subtitled 'A Report on
Knowledge' [emphasis added].) Writers such as Carlo Emilio Gadda,
Umberto Eco, Leonardo Sciascia, and Luigi Malerba, as well as Calvino
himself, have probed what JoAnn Cannon calls, using Elio Vittorini's
term, the 'conoscibilita' or 'possibility of knowing' the world. She fur-
ther asserts that such writers' works 'reflect in varying degrees what
Umberto Eco has called "una crisi della Ragione" (a crisis of Reason)'
(10). Unlike Celati, then, this strain of narrative presumably empha-
sizes the creation of fictions that might make the world 'at least a little
knowable (rather than Celati's 'liveable'). Yet, as Hay den White has
stated, The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on
derive via the Latin gnarus ("knowing," "acquainted with," "expert,"
"skilful," and so forth) and narro ("relate," "tell") from the Sanskrit
root gna ("know")' (in Mitchell, ed., On Narrative; i). The terms - and
the concepts - of knowing and telling are, therefore, profoundly
related. Nor does Celati's move from the more expected 'knowability'
of the world to its possibly enhanced 'liveability' through 'believable
fictions' mean that his work is entirely disjoined from the more main-
stream epistemological underpinnings of postmodern writing. Know-
ing is, however, suspect for him, for it is deeply allied with the
aggression and dominance implied in the term 'mastery.' Celati abhors
the 'monumental,' as well as what he calls 'ogni interpretazione comp-
lessiva del mondo' (every comprehensive interpretation of the world),
preferring more and more explicitly to search for a mode of expression,
a narrative positioning that 'non spia un bottino da catturare, che non
va in giro per approvare o condannare cio che vede, ma scopre che
tutto puo avere interesse perche fa parte dell'esistente' (does not search
for booty to capture, does not go about in order to approve or condemn
what it sees, but instead discovers that everything can have some inter-
est because it is part of the existent) ('Finzioni a cui credere'; 13). The
world is infinitely narratable when approached from this point of view,
for the issue is no longer the radical limits of our ability to know it, but
rather the discovery and refinement of linguistic and structural tools of
the writing trade that might succeed in conveying and rendering more
liveable even some small 'part of the existent.' That discovery and that
Introduction 11
refinement are artisanal activities, carried out in a long apprenticeship

in the workshop of tradition, innovation, and language itself.
Why a study dedicated to Gianni Celati? In Italy, the self-evident
appropriateness of such an undertaking would obviate the question.
There, Celati is by now recognized as one of the most respected of the
so-called post-Calvino generation, although inclusion among the
'younger' writers of the last twenty years is due more to Celati's non-
establishment proclivities and his restless self-remaking than to an
actual chronological membership in that group (he was born in 1937).
In spite of his~very intermittent involvement in the mainstream Italian
literary scene and his disdain for both the Institution of Literature and
the academic culture that to a great extent supports that institution, he
is nonetheless seen in his native country as a serious artist whose body
of work is worthy of critical attention.3 In a 1997 poll of the most-
admired and most-studied (by both Italian and non-Italian scholars)
contemporary Italian writers, Celati came in sixth, after Eco, Tabucchi,
Claudio Magris, Vincenzo Consolo, and Guido Ceronetti ('I professori
amano Eco e Tabucchi/ in La Repubblica). Yet no Italian (or other) critic
has written a book-length study of Celati's production; his works tend
instead to be discussed and briefly analyzed in journalistic or antho-
logical venues (see Almansi, Tani, or La Porta, for example). Some of
the most respected Italian literary critics have reviewed and com-
mented on Celati's work over the years, from Renato Barilli to Guido
Fink to Francesco Muzzioli, and Calvino himself very early on, in the
late sixties, championed the then young writer's cause.4 Celati has also
received some serious critical attention in England, especially since his
move there in the 19805 and the translation into English of two of his
collections of short stories (see Voices from the Plains, 1989, and Appear-
ances, 1991). Michael Caesar and Robert Lumley are two English schol-
ars who have written on Celati, the former in, among other places, the
1986 issue of Nuova Corrente dedicated to Celati's fiction, and the latter,
translator of Narratori delle pianure, in the volume of essays edited by
Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Fertile, entitled The New Italian Novel
(1993). Celati's work has stimulated interest in New Zealand as well,
mainly because of the attention paid him by the scholar Michael
Hanne, who, in addition to publishing on Celati himself, has directed
several Masters' theses on the writer. On this side of the ocean, Celati is
now well known among specialists of contemporary Italian literature,
although this was not the case some fifteen or twenty years ago, when
I first began to read his fiction. Unlike his mentor Calvino or the arch-
12 Gianni Celati
famous Umberto Eco, Celati is not, however, known to a broad Ameri-

can reading public. His books have not been translated in the United
States and his name has seldom been raised in the few considerations
of contemporary Italian fiction written for the general American reader
in the New York Review of Books or the New Yorker, for instance, which
have in recent years paid some attention to little-known Italian voices.
Yet, as a writer, critic, translator, and original thinker about the mean-
ing and function of creative writing, Gianni Celati is to my mind one of
the pre-eminent Italian voices of the second half of this century. Fur-
thermore, to know more about his work over the last three decades is
to know more about a vast range of topics and issues of pertinence to
postmodern literary and critical culture. Celati's work, which is like an
apprenticeship in its continued investigation of the potential and limits
of the act of writing, succeeds, moreover, in making the world more
liveable, for it consistently seeks to bring everyday life and literature
closer together, rather than emphasizing the gulf between lived experi-
ence and language, as much self-consciously literary writing ends up
doing with its citational pastiches, its extreme effects, and its constant
search for 'originality.'
My study begins with an analysis of a figure emblematic of Celati's
very particular negative preference: Melville's Bartleby. Bartleby's
refrain - 'I would prefer not to' - could well be Celati's own motto
regarding, among other things, the game of Literature as Institution, a
game he has consistently refused to play. I seek to uncover and explore
the constellation of literary, philosophical, and ideological issues that
whirl about this primary figure within the Celatian universe before
moving on to the questions raised .by the label 'literary minimalism,'
which I argue is applicable, albeit with a somewhat eccentric defi-
nitional twist, to Celati's writing of the 19805 as well as to certain
constants throughout his production. The role of visual media -
photography and cinema - in Celati's writing is then considered. Sub-
sequently, 'his' writers, those with whom he especially feels the affinity
of a shared craft, those whom he has translated, and on whose works
he has written, become the subject of inquiry. I then consider the role of
orality, voice, and performance in Celati's work, from the first fictions
of the 19705 to his recent work over the last few years. A final chapter
is dedicated to a discussion of his latest book, Avventure in Africa and,
more generally, to the relation of errancy and writing in Celati's works.
In an open-ended Conclusion, I briefly discuss the concept of 'willed
failure' as seen in Melville and in a recent Celatian tale and conclude
Introduction 13
with a provisional assessment of Celati's overall contribution to Italian

letters. Fundamental to an understanding of Celati's poetics and to the
meaning of his writing is his very particular definition of the term
'preference/ which is in turn linked to his preoccupation with writing
as an activity closely tied to being in the world. How Melville's Bar-
tleby serves as an emblematic figure for a contemporary Italian writer
is a question that lies at the heart of my study. In spite of many shifts in
perspective and changes in writing style over the last three decades,
Celati's fundamental modesty ('pudore' in Italian, a term that has been
theorized in significant ways by contemporary Italian philosophers of
the school of so-called pensiero debole or weak thought, and about
which I have more to say later) and even something akin to shame in
being known by the title of 'author' remain constant, adding up not
only to a unique style but also to an ethical stance of deep resonance.5
Celati published his translation with commentary of Melville's 'Bar-
tleby' in 1991. Beginning my study with Bartleby seems, therefore, to
reverse the usual order employed in a monographic consideration of a
writer, which usually proceeds chronologically from the early works to
the most recent, a critical procedure faithful to a progressive, teleologi-
cal vision of a fictional corpus. Indeed, the very word corpus reveals the
biological metaphor underlying such a methodology: the 'body' of
work is looked at from its 'birth' to its youthful 'development' and
finally to its full-fledged 'maturity' and eventual closure or 'death.' I
have chosen instead to follow a non-linear, erratic, and 'zigzagging'
path through Celati's work, for I am convinced that such a critical
mode can be as legitimate and perhaps even more successful in draw-
ing out the primary articulations of a writer's themes and style.6
Anthony Tamburri has proposed a related mode in his concept of the
'retro-lector/ with which he argues that 'in the case of many writings
that we consider anti-canonical, problems relevant to interpretation
cannot be resolved simply through the employment of a reading of the
chronological type vis-a-vis the other works of the same author' (i). In
Celati's case, I believe that critical errancy is without a doubt more
suitable. The already standardized view of his work as dividing rather
neatly between the 'young' or early essays and fictions of the 19605
and 19705 and the 'mature' or later production of the 19805 and 19905
(a view I must admit to having adopted myself in some essays dedi-
cated to his fiction) is heuristically useful but not, upon reconsidera-
tion, the most accurate portrait of the 'body' known as 'Celati.' This
body is more unruly than a neat dissection into 'youthful' and 'mature'
14 Gianni Celati
might suggest; the ways in which it has grown and come into some-
thing like a describable form are linearly and circularly conditioned, as
quite old concerns and goals and new directions continually mingle
throughout the critical and fictional texts written over the last thirty
years. As in the case of a human body, so in Gelati's body of work are
the 'young' contours palimpsestically present under the more 'mature'
lines of the most recent production. Celati was, for example, already
talking about his fascination with the figure of Bartleby when I first
met him that fateful day in Rome in 1979. That it took another twelve
years for him to translate and publish his version of Melville's story is
not surprising to me, since I have incubated this study for at least as
long.
Errancy and modesty are qualities characteristic of Celati's style, both

human and literary. My further meetings with him since 1979 have for
the most part been marked by his propensity simply to show up unan-
nounced, without fanfare, as if stopping to chat were just a casual
moment of respite from his more or less constant travels through life.
Our second meeting occurred in the summer of 1983, when I was
teaching on a Program Abroad for American students and living in the
villa of Byron's last mistress outside of Florence. A setting of faded
glory, the musty villa, with its library of forgotten, odd books and its
unkempt grounds, was ghostly and perfectly suited to the apparition
of Gianni Celati, who knocked on the door one morning, only to disap-
pear the next day after an all-night session of grappa-induced hilarity,
fortune-telling (via the reading of palms), and shared, easy conviviality
with me and my villa-mates. Subsequent meetings have taken place in
modest trattorias in the countryside; on the steps of Bologna's San
Petronio; in Florence's Santa Croce piazza at twilight; in a car driving
along the small, winding roads outside Siena; in my kitchen, with my
cat Gemma sitting at our feet; in Celati's apartment in Bologna where,
on one unforgettable day, he read to me some of his rewritten first
book, Comiche, and had me laughing until I cried. There have been
some more formal meetings, as when he came to the Purdue Univer-
sity Annual Conference on Romance Languages, Literatures, and Film
as an invited keynote speaker; when he did a reading from his prose
version of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato at my university; or when he
read the stories of others from the 'almanac of prose/ II Semplice, which
he coedited, to an audience of fascinated listeners at the Chicago Ital-
ian Cultural Institute. But it is the unplanned, informal sort of encoun-
Introduction 15
ter that I associate with Celati's innate 'style/ which is deeply allied
with a conception of both life and art as constant searching, unex-
pected connections, and 'feminine' permeability. Encounters happen,
as books happen; life and thought come to us, perhaps especially when
we are least involved in seeking them out. Errant modesty; modest
errancy: these are a modus vivendi and a modus scribendi that form an
ethics and a poetics, the meanings of which the words that follow look
to trace and to unfold.
I offer a final introductory comment. I have mentioned the impor-
tance of the figure of Bartleby to Celati's poetics, so it can reasonably
be assumed that there is an implied identification between the literary
character and the Italian writer. Indeed, so strong is the identification
that I had originally thought of calling my study Celati the Scrivener.
There are, however, other deeper reasons for which I call Celati a
'scrivener,' and which I want briefly to explain. The 'founding father'
of Italian literature, Dante Alighieri, proposed the definition of 'scribe'
for himself, both in his first work, the Vita nuova, and in his master-
work, the Divine Comedy. In the great poem, he is 'God's secretary, tak-
ing down reality as dictation' (Barolini, 90), as his use of the words
'scriba' (in Paradiso X) and 'noto' (I copy; in Purgatorio XXIV) make
explicit. There are, of course, strong theological implications in his use
of the term: the poet is one who 'copies' God's 'Book/ which is the cre-
ated world, made to be read by us humans in order to understand the
Divine Plan.7 But there are implications, even in Dante, that I believe
can be seen as not strictly theological, and that instead have primarily
to do with literary creation and the poet's relation to language. As a
'scribe' or 'scrivener/ a writer sees language as anterior to individual
will, and himself as one who ultimately 'copies/ whether what is cop-
ied is a 'Divine Plan' as written in the created world or multiple
'books' that have no foundational status, but rather simply emerge
from the anteriority of language. Noumenal or nominal, there is
implied a pre-text of and for writing, into which each individual act of
writing taps. In Dante's view, this pre-text is fundamentally historical,
literary, and theological in nature, and involves the unfolding of events
over time, the classical literary heritage and the more immediate back-
ground of the place and meaning of vernacular poetry for him and his
contemporaries, and the 'Book' of the created universe. For contempo-
rary writers, it is something quite different.
The postmodern exasperation of the long history of the concept of
writing as copying, and of the one who writes as a scribe or scrivener -
16 Gianni Celati
now fully divested of any theological or transcendental resonances -

is seen, among other places, in Roland Barthes's conceptualization of
the 'death of the author/ In his eponymous essay, Barthes writes that
'the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text'; further-
more, 'the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture/ and the scriptor can only copy from 'a ready-
formed dictionary/ Barthes mentions Bouvard and Pecuchet, 'those
eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridic-
ulousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only
imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original' ('The Death of
the Author'; 146). For Barthes, Derrida, and other 'post-theological'
thinkers, this foundationlessness can be both limiting and liberating. It
limits drastically any authoritative positioning of discourse, any philo-
sophical or ideological claims to 'Truth' that might be located outside
of discourse itself, yet it also liberates thought and creativity alike, as
they are folded into what Barthes called 'an art of living' and a 'float-
ing' state (like the signifier itself) 'which would not destroy anything
but would be content simply to disorientate the Law' ('Writers, Intel-
lectuals, Teachers'; 215). Such a benevolent view of foundationlessness
can be questioned (witness the many debates over the last twenty-five
years or so, since Barthes wrote the above words and Derridean ideas
began to make incursions into American theory), and the working out
of the ideas regarding writing to which I have merely and superficially
alluded, is a complex process. But it is nonetheless true that through-
out the history of literary creation the concepts of authoritative
'authorship' and more modest 'scribal' activity have generated and
been maintained in an unresolved tension for both writers and critics.
Gianni Celati is a self-described 'scribe' rather than an 'author/ In
interviews and essays over the years, he has time and again referred to
himself as 'someone who writes' and to the results of this activity as
'scritti' (written things) rather than 'novels,' 'essays,' or even 'texts/
His aversion to the title of 'author' is linked to his aversion to expres-
sions and forms in which some implication - no matter how hidden or
transformed - of a claim to authority is at the basis of literary elabora-
tion. In much of his work, he appears to accept the sheer anteriority of
language, yet it also seems that he reaches towards some transcendent
realm. This apparently contradictory view is reflected in his belief that
the shared human search for narratives that might make sense of exist-
ence is a 'fiction' in which, however, it is necessary to 'believe/ His
'workshop' approach to writing has sustained a rich and long career of
Introduction 17
dedication to the powerful potential of carefully crafted words: a

potential that is never perfectly fulfilled but that fuels the imagination
and its amazing products. There is a Leopardian quality to this poetics
of illusory faith; the world is illumined, if at all, by moonlight, by the
lunatic fantasies of imaginative aperceptions, rather than by the sun-
light of rational concepts. A modest scrivener who 'prefers not to' may
tell us more about inhabiting this sublunar world than any confident
'author'; how and why this may be so are questions, among others, by
which the following study is motivated.
Chicago, Summer 1997
The first meeting in Rome is long ago and far away, but Celati's words
are closer than ever. I write about them for him, for his readers, for his
future readers - and for myself, in order to clarify why I too have come
to love 'preferring not to/
1
Bartleby:
Preferring Not To
'Bartleby is not a metaphor of the writer, nor the symbol of any other thing. It is
a violently comic text, and the comic is always literal. It is like a short story by
Kleist, Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Beckett, with which it shares a subterranean and
prestigious lineage. It means only what it literally says. And what it says and
repeats is i WOULD PREFER NOT TO.'
Gilles Deleuze1
'I would prefer not to/ With these simple words Melville's Bartleby
brings into being a compellingly mysterious world of unexplained
motivations, which readers have tried to decipher for more than a cen-
tury. Translated and commented upon by many of this century's writ-
ers, from Borges and Beckett to Georges Perec and Italo Calvino,
'Bartleby/ written in the winter of 1852-3 and published in 1856 in the
collection The Piazza Tales, is a haunting story. It is also, as Celati's read-
ing of it convincingly and surprisingly argues, deeply funny, Violently
comic/ to use the words of Deleuze. Critical analyses of the story in the
earlier decades of this century tended to concentrate instead on such
unqualifiedly unfunny issues as the emargination and silencing of art-
ists in capitalist society, the limits of utilitarian philosophy, and the
battle between predestination and free will.2 Many other interpreta-
tions - from the psychologistic to the biographical to the theological -
have been advanced. In the annotated bibliography included in the
edition of Celati's translation and introduction of the story, Bartleby lo
scrivano (1991) he mentions Dan McCall's 1989 volume The Silence of Bar-
tleby, which outlines in some detail the many methodologies and critical
conclusions applied to and drawn from the tale. Describing McCall's
Bartleby: Preferring Not To 19
book, Celati writes: 'this is the first book entirely dedicated to the figure
of B. It examines the various deliriums or fixed ideas upon which the
"Bartleby industry" - that is, the non-stop "industrial-strength" pro-
duction of academic articles on our story - has been based ... However,
the explanations of the story that the author introduces in the second
part [of his book] still seem to be victims of the academic mirage: that is,
the mirage of being able to explain, by means of documentation, some-
thing that is destined to remain unthinkable unless one changes one's
very habits of thought, or habits of life' (no). Celati's own reading,
which I shall discuss in detail later on, is a clear reflection of his absolute
commitment to an approach that demands that sea change.
Bartleby's silent and passive existence has long fascinated Celati,
and it might even be said that there is a sort of identification with 'the
scrivener who gives up writing and remains immobile, looking at a
wall, imperturbable and laconic, deaf to every reasonable persuasion,
unshakeably mild' ('Introduction'; vii). The writer who is attracted to
silence is not solely of our postmodern era, of course, but such an
attraction does seem particularly appropriate to these times of a loss of
faith in foundations and in effectual correspondences between signs
and things. Yet more than the refusal or inability to communicate his
motives, it is Bartleby's undeniable 'thereness' that most captures
Celati's attention. Celati defines this unshakeable, inertial presence of
Bartleby as his 'preference,' the very word (in its verb form 'prefer')
that the scrivener uses in response to all solicitations of action or expla-
nation, and which Celati emphasizes even more by translating 'I
would prefer not to' with the nominal 'Avrei preferenza di no' (I would
have a preference not to). 'Preference' for Celati signifies, with refer-
ence to the term's etymology, an a priori disposition (prae-ferre, to carry
before), a predilection that all of us have as an 'absolute anteriority,' an
'elementary destiny/ a 'way of being,' like the bodies and faces we are
born with, and to which great comic figures remain true with 'saintly
devotion' ('Introduction'; xii, xiii). Bartleby, like Popeye, might say
'I yam what I yam'; like the absurdist character, Chance the gardener,
his essence is in 'being there,' beyond whatever interpretations and
responses others might have of or to him. But what do we do with
'thereness' when we cannot interpret its meaning or meanings, and
when every attempt at establishing a shared space of intentionality is
blocked by inertia and passivity? And why do the attributes of a figure
who is unalterably and solely what is there before our eyes often
simultaneously appear to us tragic and comic, deep and shallow?
20 Gianni Celati
In order to get closer to some possible answers, it is useful, I think,

to go back to one of Celati's earliest sources of inspiration: the very
Bartleby-like character, Buster Keaton (whom Celati called his 'favorite
philosopher' in an interview with Franco Marcoaldi, included in Mar-
coaldi's review-article of Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, 'Sentimenti
Celati/ L'Espresso, 1987, 155), as well as to the concept of the comic -
greatly conditioned by silent film characters like Keaton, Chaplin, Lau-
rel and Hardy, and Harry Langdon - that informs Celati's first fictions,
especially Le avventure di Guizzardi. In a reading of Beckett, 'Su Beckett,
1'interpolazione e il gag' (On Beckett, interpolation and the gag),
included in Celati's 1975 volume of critical essays, Finzioni occidentali:
Fabulazione comicita e scrittura (Occidental fictions: Tabulation, comical-
ity, and writing), the writer emphasizes the central role played in many
of Beckett's texts by a dialogic recognition of a 'you' to whom the nar-
rator is directing his words. This recognition of the reader is coupled
with self-conscious interpolations that reflect 'all that which turns the
impersonality of the written norm toward the less solemn moment of
its production, toward the idiosyncrasies of the act of writing.' Instead
of a form of writing that pretends to capture some pre-comprehended
external and referential sense, this writing infused with interpolations
orients us towards ' the precariousness of the act of its production' and
shows the writer as a 'scribe' instead of an 'author,' one who 'with
great difficulty [plucks] the word from a silence that proceeds and gen-
erates it' (57).3 Writing filled with interpolations, deviations, as it were,
from linear narrative transparency, is, in Beckett, comic in that it is no
longer a 'fixed monument of an authoritative expressivity, but instead
[is] entirely resolved in the lunatic virtuosity of recitation' (60), and is
made up, therefore, of verbal gags, which are very similar to those of
cinematic slapstick comedy. As we know, Beckett's Waiting for Godot
was inspired by the exchanges of Laurel and Hardy, and he cast Buster
Keaton in the leading role of his magnificent venture into film-making,
Film. Celati proceeds to discuss the gags used by his beloved Beckett,
which run the gamut from self-canceling assertions such as those dear
to Groucho Marx,4 to those based on the problem of the balance or
positioning of the body such as are seen in Chaplin's or Keaton's
drunken walks, to those having to do with the individual's relation to
an object or objects such as are common to music hall and silent film
both. However, the two types of gags most pertinent to Celati's own
early fiction as well as to his interpretation of Bartleby are, in my opin-
ion, those based either on slowed-down or absent comprehension
between two individuals, and those rooted in the expulsion of a char-

acter. The first is best exemplified in the classic exchanges between
Laurel and Hardy, and the second is, in Celati's view, a typical element
of Buster Keaton's art. These gags have to do respectively with incom-
prehensibility and sheer presence or 'thereness/ both of which condi-
tion much of Celati's work over the years.
Taking up the gag originating in expulsion, it may appear at first
that such a movement has more to do with absence than presti ice, but
Celati's discussion of this motif - based in large part on Jean-Pierre
Coursodon's study entitled Keaton et C.ie (Paris, 1964) - emphasizes its
'presentifying' function. Keaton is often thrown out of a place, and this
leit-motif can be linked to more general themes of abandonment, exclu-
sion, and the like. Coursodon notes that High Sign, Keaton's first short
feature, begins with this image of expulsion, which is accompanied by
a written message: 'Our hero came from nowhere. He wasn't going
anywhere, and he got kicked out of somewhere.' The French critic
comments that these words present the initial expulsion as a kind of
birth: a coming into the world. Celati quotes further: Tn film after film,
the Keatonesque character is put into the world in spite of himself, and
afterward he tries to return to the lost paradise of the matrix' (70). Both
Keaton and many of Beckett's characters often then find themselves in
an oneiric, estranging dimension, not knowing how they got there or
where they are going. What follows, in cinema and texts alike, are
wanderings through space, casual adventures, and absolutely nontele-
ological structures. The characters are kicked out and into absolute
'thereness.' Furthermore, characters who are expelled or abandoned
are 'poor lost souls/ as much outside of societal controls and norma-
tive, goal-oriented behavioral patterns as the narratives that contain
them are outside of more traditional narrational techniques. Celati
therefore sees expulsion as an extremely important conditioning motif
in that the interpolations, digressions, and errancy that make up this
antilinear kind of comedic effect are its 'logical' result.
The gag based on incomprehension, perfected by Laurel and Hardy,
depends not on the solitude of the expelled type, but in great part on
the interaction of a 'catatonic' individual and an 'hysterical' one. The
less the passive partner responds, the more the active partner becomes
agitated. Time is slowed down as the lack of response is underlined by
the ever increasing and often loudly vocal furor of the 'hysteric.'
Although Buster Keaton did not perform as a member of a partner-
ship, his 'catatonic/ unchanging expression sets up a relationship
22 Gianni Celati
between him and all of us who are watching him that inevitably puts
us in the role of the 'hysteric/ In an essay published in The New Yorker
Anthony Lane writes: 'Viewed from the side, [Keaton] has always
reminded me of the solemn, grieving, figures in Giotto's frescoes' (72).
The beautiful, pictorial quality of his unpenetrable expression evokes
in us a sense of some deep sadness beneath, which we would want to
reach and to comprehend. Yet there is also the sense of a complete lack
of depth, a blankness that covers nothing but more blankness. This lat-
ter quality is emphasized in the less sculptural, less handsome, and
much more dopey inexpressivity of the uncomprehending and incom-
prehensible Laurel, for example. In both cases, however, the impene-
trability of their inarticulate presence invites a sheer delirium of
frustration from others, who want to uncover some intentionality in
their overwhelming, mute 'thereness.' As Melville's narrator com-
ments regarding the scrivener's behavior: 'Nothing so aggravates an
earnest person as a passive resistance' (28). Thus, both expulsion and
incomprehensibility emphasize sheer beingness, which is unreachable
by the logical norms of social and verbal interaction.
The connection perceived by Celati between Bartleby and comic
characters such as those played by Laurel and Keaton becomes clearer
when the motifs of 'expulsion-birth' and 'catatonic impenetrability' are
put into play. As is evident from the criticism discussed above, years
before Celati's translation of and commentary on Melville's story
appeared he was already exploring these elements of comic writing
which, I believe, later reappear, if within a changed critical and philo-
sophical context, in his analysis of the scrivener. Not only did Celati
write critically about comic writing (primarily although not exclu-
sively regarding the works of Beckett), he also wrote fiction that clearly
embodies many of the techniques outlined in the critical work. His
Guizzardi, of the 1973 Le avventure di Guizzardi, is a close relative of
Keaton and Bartleby both, and he is deeply tied to a Beckettian comi-
cality. Guizzardi begins his erratic itinerary through multiple adven-
tures after having been expelled from his place of origin: 'Quindi dover
partire dalla citta della mia giovinezza abbandonando 1'una e 1'altra
verso avventure che ancora non sapevo quanto spiacevoli potessero
sembrarmi' (Thus having to leave the city of my youth abandoning
both toward adventures that I as yet did not know how unpleasant
they would seem to me; 13).5 This departure is preceded by Guiz-
zardi's sole experience of pleasure and consolation: foreign language
lessons given by the 'untiringly' admired Signorina Frizzi. His parents,
instead of showing the same 'grande comprensione [di] spirito' (great

understanding of spirit) as the patient Signorina, harass him con-
stantly, insisting that he must find work: 'devi lavorare Danci!' Guiz-
zardi, or Danci, as his mother calls him, has a most particular style of
self-expression, an almost dementially garbled and agrammatical lan-
guage that blocks rather than facilitates communication. His parents
react to his attempts at self-explanation with the hysteria and furor
typical of the aggressive figure in the 'catatonic-hysterical' partnership;
his mother is instantly capable of creating hysterical scenes, 'dimo-
strandosi in un attimo capacissima di scena isterica con roteamenti di
occhi impressionanti e rotolii per terra di finta svenuta' (with impres-
sive eye-rolling and rolling around on the floor in a fake swoon). His
father screams at him, chases him with his belt in order to beat him,
and threatens: Ti faccio prendere!' (I'll get you caught!) (10-11). After
his expulsion from this unhappy home, Guizzardi darts from adven-
ture to adventure (as his name implies, for 'guizzare' means 'to dart'),
a prisoner of chance and his own radical inarticulateness. Although his
continuous, astonishingly garbled stream of words, which make up the
narrative we read, would seem to distinguish him from the 'catatonic,'
mute form of passive resistance seen in comics like Keaton and Laurel,
as well as in the laconic Bartleby, he is their brother in his stubborn
devotion to his 'preference not to,' that is, his perdurability as Guiz-
zardi and only Guizzardi. Nothing changes him, elevates him, enlight-
ens him or, ultimately, does him in. (In this last quality of endurance,
he is much more akin to Keaton than to Bartleby.) Pursued, battered,
sexually used, plunged into excrement and inclement weather, Guiz-
zardi goes on and on, and his proliferating narrative ends with his
defiant cry: 'Me 1'hanno fatta me 1'hanno fatta! ... Pero non me la fanno
phi!' (They've screwed me over they've screwed me over! ... But they
won't screw me over any more!; 167). A summary of Buster Keaton's
real misadventures equals or maybe even surpasses the unlikely catas-
trophes of Celati's protagonist: 'Before Keaton was three, he had fallen
down a flight of stairs, nearly smothered in a costume trunk, had been
alone in a burning building, lost the better part of a finger in a clothes
ringer, was almost blinded by a rock which he had thrown in the air,
and, in an episode that sounds like a scene from one of his films, was
sucked out of a window by a cyclone that took him sailing over a small
Kansas town landing him gently in the middle of a deserted Main
Street' (Banner; 4). Expelled into the world, the misfit, as if in a dream,
goes on, but never toward, and his very endurance is both deeply
24 Gianni Celati
comic and compellingly mysterious, especially for those whose lives

seek order, logic, and explainable teleologies.
In 1987, more than a decade after the publication of Finzioni occidental!

and Le avventure di Guizzardi, Celati put into print the story of Baratto,
another Bartleby-like character. In the story of Guizzardi, the comic
effects of expulsion, incomprehensibility, and endurance are high-
lighted, while in 'Baratto' (included in the volume of stories entitled
Quattro novelle sulle apparenze [Appearances]), silence and the refusal to
enter into the pact of communicative intentionality come to the fore.
As Robert Lumley notes: 'Baratto has regularly been likened to Bartleby
the Scrivener [sic], the obvious model for his mute refusal of the social
obligation to speak' (in Baranski and Fertile; 54). The character Baratto,
who shares the first three letters of his sole name with Bartleby, is a
gym teacher and rugby player who one day is left 'without thoughts'
and then becomes mute. Similarly, between the late seventies and mid-
eighties, a 'mute' Celati had virtually ceased publishing and his reap-
pearance in 1985 with the collection of stories Narratori delle pianure
(Voices from the Plains) seemed to manifest a radical break with his ear-
lier comic style. If we focus on the emblematic figure of Bartleby and,
above all, on the constellation of textual, linguistic, technical, and
philosophical issues that attach to him, however, I believe that there is
more continuity over time among Celati's superficially diverse writing
projects than might first seem to be the case. The pared-down prose of
Narratori and the strongly philosophical orientation of the four stories
in Apparenze led critics to judge this writing to be indicative of a com-
pletely new direction, yet at least in the case of 'Baratto/ such a devel-
opmental sequentiality is not applicable, for Celati sent a version of
this story to me in 1983, commenting in the accompanying letter that
he had recuperated it from 'old notebooks of years ago, when [he] was
living in Paris.' He called the story 'a little heavy' (un po' pesante) and
'painful' for him (e per me penoso). Nonetheless, it is also comic, in
much the same way that 'Bartleby' is a conceptually comic tale, for
Baratto's refusal to speak, like Bartleby's reiterated and opaque
response, T would prefer not to/ touches the depths of absurdity into
which the search for interpretability plunges us.6
Baratto's name signifies 'exchange' or 'barter/ and the verb form
'barattare' can, by extension, mean 'discorrere con qualcuno del phi e
del meno' (chat with someone about this and that). Baratto, untrue to
his name, we might say, refuses to enter into the ceremony of linguistic
exchange, for he one day suddenly feels that 'there is nothing to dis-
cuss!' ('non c'e niente da discutere!' 'Baratto/ in Quattro novelle sulk
apparenze [1987]; 9). On the day that inaugurates his period of mute-
ness, some vague thoughts enter his head as he rides home on his
motorcycle from a rugby match that he has abruptly abandoned; they
are stimulated by the landscape he observes, and come together in the
phrase 'C'e del fumo in questo paesaggio' (there's smoke in this land-
scape; 11). He stops to observe better the smoke or vapor, but realizes
after a bit that he is no longer thinking that phrase because the air is
clear and he can see the cultivated fields right up to the horizon. Upon
his arrival home, his neighbor, an old pensioner, is watering his pot of
azaleas on the landing, and remarks to Baratto: The days are getting
longer/ but Baratto responds, 'adesso non posso rispondere' (I can't
respond now; 11), in a wonderfully paradoxical locution (he 'responds'
that he 'can't respond') that shows the distance between the signified
and the signifier.7 After eating a sandwich while standing up in the
kitchen - part of a daily routine that includes clearing the table that his
wife sets every morning - Baratto watches the screen and listens to the
buzz of the television, which he has turned on to an empty channel, all
the while fanning his head. Phrases from television commercials enter
his mind, and he walks back and forth, fanning his head and listening
to the phrases, until he realizes they have gone away. He then performs
other routine actions - washing the edges of the kitchen sink where
ants tend to crawl, brushing his teeth, climbing the circular staircase to
the bedroom, undressing - and, as he looks at himself nude in the
wardrobe mirror, he thinks: 'A cosa potrei pensare adesso?' (what
might I think about now?). He observes the clicks of the second hand
of the alarm clock 'without understanding what they might wish to
indicate to him personally' and, as no idea comes to mind, he takes his
penis in his hand and thinks: 'Sono rimasto senza pensieri' (I'm left
without thoughts).8 Thus his silence of many months starts, after
which 'a poco a poco e cominciata la sua guarigione' (slowly, bit by bit,
his recovery begins; 12).
In these opening paragraphs two elements of Baratto's silence are
emphasized: first, he stops speaking after he is 'left without thoughts';
second, his entry into silence is accompanied by routine or automatic
actions. Although we do not know for sure that Bartleby is 'without
thoughts/ we do know that his work as a copyist is of the most auto-
matic, mechanical sort, and that he dies when he has stopped all rou-
tine activity, including copying and eating. Just as the scrivener takes
26 Gianni Celati
to standing silently and looking at a brick wall, Baratto also begins to

stand and look, first at the blank television screen, then at his own
image in the mirror, then at the left corner of an abandoned country
house, known as a 'house of ghosts/ He 'closes one eye in order to
observe [the corner] better. He raises a leg, scratching the calf of his
other leg with his foot, and he remains thus balanced, tottering (a vacil-
lare),with a meditative air and one closed eye/ The verb 'to vacillate' is
used here to indicate a physically precarious state - standing on one
foot - but it has already appeared twice in the description of Baratto's
day of entry into muteness, first, when Baratto looks at himself in the
mirror and thinks, 'What might I think about now?' only to remain 'a
vacillare davanti allo specchio' (vacillating in front of the mirror) as no
phrase comes into his mind, and then, when wondering what the
alarm clock's clicks 'might want to indicate to him personally/ he 'resta
a chiederselo per un po/ ancora vacillando, ma non gli viene in mente
nessuna idea' (continues to ask himself this question for a bit, still vac-
illating, but no idea comes to his mind; 12). In the earlier version of the
story that Celati sent to me in 1983, the phrases containing the word
Vacillare' are absent, as is the entire episode of the abandoned house,
so that it is perhaps correct to place some emphasis on the repetitions
of the term later added to the published version. It reappears once
more in the published version in place of another recurrent word,
'ondeggiare' (to waver) that is used in the earlier version, so that the
two terms would seem to be synonymous for Celati, or at least very
close in meaning.9 Both terms indicate physical and mental hesitation,
a stance vis-a-vis subjectivity, the external world, and writing that
Celati will later explicitly theorize in his critical writing on 'narrative
reserve' (which I shall discuss in some detail in another chapter). A
related term, 'oscillare,' is used repeatedly by Pier Aldo Rovatti in his
essay, 'Elogio del pudore' (In praise of modesty), where it indicates a
philosophical and ethical 'weakening' of the subject, in order that iden-
tity might constantly construct itself in the uncertain space of shifting,
oscillating experience. Baratto's subjectivity is clearly in this 'weak-
ened' space, yet he is fully capable of action, although not yet of
speech, as long as he performs routinely and mechanically (shopping,
preparing food, jogging, brushing his teeth, undressing, etc.); nonethe-
less, he 'vacillates' and 'wavers' when stationary, seemingly unable to
pull himself out of his observing stance. His other typical modes of
being are either 'catatonic,' as when he closes his eyes and falls into an
apnea-like, breath-holding state, or 'errant/ as when he rides about on
his motorcycle without any apparent direction. Unlike his predecessor

Bartleby, he thus manages to remain minimally functional, although
similarly closed off from any exchange with those around him.
The first words of the story, I'll tell the story of how Baratto, return-
ing home one evening, remained without thoughts, and then the con-
sequences of his living as a mute for a long time/ seem to suggest a
cause and effect relation between lack of thoughts and lack of speech.
Interestingly, in the earlier, much shorter, version, the opening sen-
tence does not include the second clause, thus leaving aside the issue
of muteness. In the earlier version, after the first part of the story in
which the first day of Baratto's silence is described, the narrator passes
immediately to the following: 'During the months of silence, one
should not believe that Baratto had stopped thinking/ so that a cause
and effect relation is disavowed. In the published version, several
pages of additional narration intervene between the description of the
first day and the assertion above, and these pages have to do with the
reaction of others to Baratto's muteness, as well as with their attempts
at interpreting it. Baratto is described as continuing to perform his
daily, automatic actions, as falling into his 'apnea' or into actual sleep,
and, above all, as observing the world around him and listening to
sounds. The attempts to interpret his behavior range from his wife's
conviction that he is angry at her because of her extramarital indiscre-
tions; to a local bartender's contention that Baratto is probably just
tired of responding when people talk to him; to three nurses who work
with patients released from the insane asylum and who think he is
behaving irrationally; to an ex-school companion, now a lawyer and a
Jehovah's Witness, who thinks Baratto has suffered a grave disappoint-
ment and must forget worldly disappointments and turn his thoughts
to the second coming of Christ. In all of these cases, people are simply
projecting their own preoccupations onto Baratto, much as Melville's
Wall Street lawyer projects his interpretations onto the recalcitrant
Bartleby. The exceptions in Baratto's case are the old pensioner and his
wife, who simply welcome the mute into their home (for seven
months!), so pleased are they to have someone to tell their life stories
to, and the principal of the school where Baratto is a gym teacher, who
is deeply moved and upset by Baratto's silence, and thinks to himself:
'E uno che non si da pensieri, ne pensiero per i pensieri degli altri su di
lui' (He's someone who doesn't give himself thoughts (doesn't worry),
nor does he give himself thought about the thoughts of others concern-
ing him). The principal concludes that Baratto perhaps 'has been
28 Gianni Celati
touched by grace' (23). After Baratto is barred from the school because
of his odd behavior, he tries several times to follow routine and to
return, and the principal watches these attempts 'hidden behind a win-
dow,' fascinated by this 'shadow who goes by without worrying about
being a shadow. An apparition that is already a disappearance. As if
nothing in him were excited about affirming anything.' These words
seem to be the closest to Celati's own views, but he ironically under-
cuts their potential quality as an authorial 'declaration of meaning' by
writing that the school secretary answers that 'she sincerely did not
understand even half of what the principal meant/ and even the prin-
cipal himself wonders 'what the sentences he had just pronounced
might mean' (25). The connection between speech and thought is con-
sistently questioned, therefore, not only in Baratto but also in all of
those around him. Voicing thoughts or opinions does not make them
any more true or consonant either with our subjective intentions or
with the sheer externality of others and of the world.
If Baratto is presented as one who typically Vacillates/ there are
other terms that are repeatedly applied to him, which have to do with
observation and listening. Throughout the period of muteness, while
others are seeking to interpret his intentions, Baratto looks at elements
in the external world, beginning with the corner of the 'house of
ghosts' ('Baratto s'e fermato ad osservare quello spigolo'), moving on
to the neck and breasts of the wife of one of his rugby team-mates, who
is attracted to men who don't talk, and who comes to his home to offer
herself to him ('Baratto 1'ha esaminata, soffermandosi ad osservarle il
collo e il seno'), to anything and everything in his sights:'... vagando in
tranquillo silenzio per le strade del centro cittadino, spesso gli accade
di perdersi in giro ad osservare tutto quello che viene ai suoi occhi. Si
ferma ad osservare la gente, le case, gli spigoli, il cielo e le grondaie'
(wandering in peaceful silence through the streets of center city, often
it happens that he loses himself as he goes around in observing every-
thing that comes to his eyes. He stops to observe people, houses, cor-
ners, the sky and the gutters; 15-19). He listens as well: to the old
couple ('Baratto si siede. A partire da quel momento resta in casa dei
due pensionati per circa sette mesi, quasi sempre seduto nella stessa
poltrona a guardare la televisione assieme a loro, oppure ad ascoltarli
parlare' [Baratto sits down. From that moment he stays in the two pen-
sioners' house for around seven months, almost always seated in the
same armchair watching television with them, or listening to them
speak]), or to the sounds made as his students play basketball ('lui
ascolta assorto i rumori della palla sul linoleum, il rimbombo dei passi,
1'eco delle grida dei ragazzi' [he absorbedly listens to the noise of the
ball on the linoleum, the boom of steps, the echo of the boys' shouts];
21). His looking and listening come to a culmination when he and fel-
low gym teacher Berte go on a motorcycle trip together and Baratto
begins to follow some Japanese tourists around as they visit various
spots of interest. They end up following the bus on which the tourists
are traveling as far as Heidelberg, and Baratto, who has already taken
to bowing back to the polite bows of the Japanese tourists, seems to
feel very well: 'si direbbe che lui abbia finalmente trovato il suo
popolo, e che si senta simile a quegli stranieri condotti in giro a bran-
chi, amministrati da guide che recitano strane lintanie di nomi, persi
nel grande mistero turistico del mondo' (one could say that he had
finally found his people, and that he felt himself to be similar to those
foreigners led around in herds, taken care of by guides who recite
strange litanies of names, lost in the great touristic mystery of the
world; 27). Baratto is introduced to a tiny Japanese widow by the Japa-
nese tourist couple who first attracted his attention, and he spends an
entire afternoon seated across from her in a restaurant, listening to her
non-stop and very fast Japanese. His friend Berte watches them and
notes that from time to time Baratto opens his eyes wide, or shakes his
head or reaches out to pat her arm, and that the widow seems very flat-
tered by his attention. How could it be that Baratto feels so at home
with someone whose language he does not know? The narrator
answers that 'it shouldn't amaze us' that Baratto understands her so
well, for 'by now he is getting better, and beginning to think only the
thoughts of others' (28-9). As his subjectively conditioned dominance
of the external world has receded, he has become 'permeable' (to use a
word used by Celati in an interview with me when discussing the type
of subjectivity congenial to him), an observer and listener who can
interact without the need of language or the imposition of his own
thoughts or opinions.
It is at this point in the published version of the story that the asser-
tion concerning Baratto's thinking, which disavows a cause and effect
relation between silence and lack of thoughts, is now inserted. We are
told that instead he has merely stopped having thoughts 'that oppress
him' (che gli gravano nella testa). He knows that when he meets some-
one he should shake hands or make some salutational gesture, or that
he should nod his head or smile when someone talks to him, but 'such
things don't require thoughts that are his thoughts exactly, and he gets
3O Gianni Celati
along by thinking the thoughts of others' (cose del genere non richie-
dono pensieri che siano proprio suoi pensieri, e se la cava pensando i
pensieri degli altri'; 29). In the following, extremely tragicomic epi-
sode, in which Baratto, now back home again, makes the acquaintance
of a doctor who lives across the hall from the old pensioner and his
wife, the conventions that make language and linguistic exchange pos-
sible are further explored. The doctor is a lonely soul, who says that
'the more people one knows in this city the more one feels oneself to be
a stranger, and since he knows almost everyone he feels as if he were
an Eskimo.' Moreover, he has recently been abandoned by his girl-
friend who has told him that living with him was 'like being dead.' As
Baratto sits listening to the doctor's laments, the phone rings and the
doctor returns only after having talked for three hours with his ex-
girlfriend, who phoned to tell him that 'he had only made her lose
time, during the best years of her life.' The wonderful idiocy of a three-
hour conversation dedicated to the topic of wasting time is more or
less lost on Baratto, who has fallen asleep halfway through the doctor's
story. He wakes up in the night to find the doctor standing before him;
after turning on some lights (because 'with a little light things are bet-
ter, things are really better'), the doctor sits down next to Baratto and
deliberates, prefacing his meditations with the observation that he
knows that he seems to be a loser, but that's not surprising since his
parents also seemed to be losers and his grown son 'also seems to be a
loser, he has the face of a refrigerated eel/ Having thus thoroughly
deflated any serious 'authoritative' quality that might attach to the
doctor's following words (much as the principal's 'serious' observa-
tions about Baratto's apparent lack of desire to prove anything were
deflated), Celati puts into the 'loser's' mouth what can be seen as the
main, highly philosophically conditioned, point of the entire story: 'Ma
io dico: che non sia tutta una messinscena? Ad esempio, questa citta
una messinscena, le donne che fanno soffrire una messinscena, il
lavoro una messinscena, il nostro aspetto da deficienti un'altra messin-
scena. Che non sia tutta una grande montatura,un sogno da cui non
riusciamo a svegliarci? Ma le dico di piu: che non sia anche la luce una
messinscena? E i suoni che sentiamo, le cose che tocchiamo, e il buio e
la notte, non potrebbe essere tutta una grandissima messinscena? Tutta
una commedia delle apparenze,che ci fanno credere chissa cosa e
invece non e vero niente? (31).10 The reiterated word, 'messinscena,'
refers to a theatrical or filmic production, a 'show/ a mise en scene, that
implies that we are all 'actors' who must play established roles. And,
as the doctor and Baratto watch the sun come up and observe the
sights and sounds of the new day (lights going on behind lowered
blinds, bells ringing, the telephone booth on the corner, the sound of a
car engine), they both think 'that the comedy of appearances goes on
all the time out there, it never stops.' The doctor realizes that he is shar-
ing the same thoughts with Baratto, not because he has magically pen-
etrated into Baratto's mind, but because 'Baratto doesn't have real and
true thoughts that are his. They are instead the thoughts of others that
come to mind, those of someone passing along the street, of someone
raising a blind, of someone starting up a car in the distance.' And it is
'thanks to so many people thinking the same things [that] the phrase
"it's dawn" really means that it is dawn with all its various appear-
ances.' So even the sceptical doctor can accept that this 'mise en scene
of a dawn is real' (all quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 30-2).
There are traces of many literary and philosophical sources for the
ideas on language and on the subject's relation to the external world that
infuse this story. From Kafka, whose Die Baume is cited as the epigraph
to the volume, to Melville, whose scrivener is a close model for Baratto,
to Wittgenstein's insights into the conventions of language, to Heideg-
ger's investigations into the inhabitability of the world, to the Italian
philosophers of 'weak thought': all and more, including Shakespeare's
'the world is a stage' and Calderon's 'la vida es sueno/ inform this tale.
Because it was written many years before its publication in 1987 and
substantially revised and expanded from its first early version, 'Baratto'
reflects many layers of diverse interests: Celati's penchant for the comic
mode evident in his fictions of the early seventies; his studies in the late
seventies and early eighties of sociolinguistics and especially of the 'cer-
emonies' of conversational exchange and written narration alike; his
orientation to the visual and to externality, reflected in his work with
photographer Luigi Ghirri and in the resultant stories, Narratori delle pia-
nure of 1985; his sustained meditations on Bartleby that resulted in the
translation with commentary of 1991. The description of the world as a
mise en scene adumbrates his involvement in the visual medium of
video and the creation of the visual story Strada provinciale delle anime,
also in 1991, as well as his even more recent interest in the overtly the-
atrical and performative, as evidenced in his rendering into prose of
Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, which Celati has read aloud, replete with
gestures, in many public performances, and in his 1996 book, Recita
dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Performance of the actor
Vecchiatto in the theater of Rio Saliceto), which is written in the form of
32 Gianni Celati
a theatrical piece. This palimpsestic quality of 'Baratto' is evidence, I

believe, of the continuities in Celati's work, critical and creative alike,
which can be understood as ongoing, open-ended 'research' rather than
a series of finalized masteries of ideas, techniques, or visions of the
world. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I want to continue, there-
fore, to zigzag through Celati, using as my anchor the apparently
immoveable figure of Bartleby, but keeping in mind the words of Kafka
that serve as epigraph to the tales of appearances in which the story of
Baratto is found: 'For we are like tree trunks in the snow. Apparently
they, quite smooth, adhere to the surface, and with a shake one should
be able to push them aside. No, one cannot, because they are solidly
fixed to the ground. However, look, even this is only an appearance.'
In his 1993 essay on Celati, Robert Lumley makes the important point
that 'Celati's articulateness about writing has encouraged others to
read him on his own terms' (in Baranski and Fertile; 44). This assertion
is, to my mind, a fundamental insight both into Celati's work and the
typical critical reactions to that work, as is evident from my approach
to various of his texts in the preceding pages. Before moving on to an
analysis of Celati's reading of 'Bartleby,' I want now to try to read cer-
tain fundamental aspects of his 'preferring not to' in terms that are not
(or at least not explicitly) his, not because I do not find his terms deeply
engaging, but because they usually do not tend to illuminate certain
aspects of his work and of his position in contemporary narrative that I
believe are significant. I hope to avoid a psychologizing approach, for I
am looking for a way into a number of broader literary and critical
issues rather than into Celati's head. I shall limit these issues to two.
First, is there something that we can legitimately call 'contemporary
Italian narrative,' as opposed to 'contemporary narrative' tout court?
Second, do highly elaborated poetics play an inevitable role in our
readerly and critical reception of narrative as it has been created over
the last thirty years? In other words, do contemporary writers, many of
them articulate theorizers about writing, still want, even need, us to
'read them in their own terms,' or is this tendency, as seen so clearly in
Celati, now an exception rather than the rule?
In response to my first question, I shall begin by asserting my belief
that there is indeed something very 'Italian' about contemporary nar-
rative in Italy, in spite of the partially correct and widely held view of
today's prose fiction as transcending national boundaries (at least in
the Western, American-European context). Celati can be seen as an Ital-
ian writer not only because he writes in Italian, but, more importantly,
because his writing reflects a tradition and conception of narrative that
are deeply rooted in Italy. This 'Italianness' might appear to be sub-
merged, even willfully hidden, under the typically non-Italian sources
and models to which the writer most often makes reference: Beckett,
Melville, Kafka, American and English silent films, to repeat those
already discussed, but to which could be added Patricia Highsmith,
Angela Carter, Milan Kundera, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Roland
Barthes, and many others (many of whom I consider in a later chapter).
It is as if the Italian literary context - with the notable exception of
Calvino - is 'repressed' in favor of a more cosmopolitan contingent of
fellow writers. This preference is explainable, at least in part, by
Celati's academic literary orientation. From the beginning it lay in the
direction of French and Anglo-American texts and traditions, as his
university thesis on Joyce, his early translations of Beckett and Celine,
and later of Swift, Melville, Jack London, and others attest. Nor can we
forget that for years he taught Anglo-American literature at the Uni-
versity of Bologna. This extra-Italian orientation is also due, I believe,
to a horror of provincialism that characterizes not only Celati but in
many ways the collective literary enterprise of this century's (and per-
haps not only this century's) Italy. From the historical avant-gardes of
the first decades of the twentieth century to the neoavant-gardes of the
late fifties and sixties to today's postmodern literary culture, Italian
writers have frequently been torn between the inherently provincial
nature of their tenuously unified nation and its locally conditioned lin-
guistic diversity (evidenced most clearly in dialects) and a model of
historical, political, and linguistic unity that Manzoni, among others,
upheld and promoted in his immensely influential novel / promessi
sposi. Nations whose identity as such was older, more solidified, and
much less preoccupied with the ever present 'questione della lingua,'
which accompanies Italian literature from Dante to contemporary
writers, provided a wider European context to which Italy sought to
join its literary culture. France in particular but also Germany, Spain,
and England were looked to as highly nonprovincial cultures that had
succeeded in escaping radical social, political, and linguistic fragmen-
tation. Of course historically Italian letters have had great resonance
outside of Italy, especially during the age of Humanism, and certain
authors of genius - Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Vico,
Leopardi, Pirandello - have consistently played important roles in the
broader Western canon. Yet, because of centuries of foreign domination
34 Gianni Celati
and the enduring reality of local, regional, and, precisely, provincial

alliances, customs, and dialects, within its own confines Italy has
posed many difficult problems of identity to its writers. To use a gen-
dered metaphor, Italy has over the centuries absorbed into its penetra-
ble body - like a woman - the cultural and specifically literary
influences of its dominators, yet has at the same time sought - like a
man - to proclaim itself as 'impenetrable' in its inherent 'Italianness.'
The basic raw material of the writer - language - was no more 'natu-
rally' given as a collectively shared inheritance than was unified
nationhood, as the centuries-old 'questione della lingua' makes abun-
dantly clear. The effects of this 'identity crisis' on this century's Italian
literature have been complex, but in terms of prose fiction it was the
Manzonian model - humanist, linguistically 'purified' of residual dia-
lectal elements, and dedicated to a vision of Italy as religiously,
socially, and politically unified - that fundamentally conditioned sub-
sequent writers' choices and goals. Until, that is, Manzoni and other
high-cultural models began to seem too limiting, too stifling, too 'liter-
ary' in essence, as can be seen, for example, in Celati's turn in recent
years to the 'provincial' heritage of Ferrarese literary culture, as well as
to more local forms of orality. But by the late fifties, a collective effort to
rethink and reorient the institution of Italian literature had begun.
The two labels most commonly evoked in descriptions of Italian
prose fiction of the last fifty years are 'neorealism' and 'neoavant-
gardism.' The first pertains to the immediate post-Second World War
period, when writers self-consciously sought new linguistic, stylistic,
and structural means to write about a radically changed reality; the
second refers primarily to another moment of open theorization and
experimentalism from the mid-fifties through to the late sixties, when
Italian writers once more actively engaged in a search for new direc-
tions. Maria Corti has rightly asserted in her reading of what she calls
the three prevalent 'fields of tension' of post-war Italian literary culture
- neorealism, the neoavant-garde, and neoexperimentalism - that it is
more historically accurate when analyzing the neoavant-garde to
speak of three distinct, if ultimately interrelated, moments. From 1956
to 1959, the neoavant-garde as a cultural movement did not exist,
according to Corti; rather, 'its antecedents ... are clearly characterizable,
from the contributions of "II Verri," an important journal created by
[Luciano] Anceschi in 1956, to the creative contributions of [Edoardo]
Sanguineti (Laborintus is from 1956) and those of [Elio] Pagliarani even
earlier' (// viaggio testuale; 114). This preliminary moment is followed
by a second phase, represented most clearly by the work of the 'Novis-

simi/ a group of poets including Alfredo Giuliani, Pagliarani, Antonio
Porta, and Luigi Balestrini, who 'signposted ... the category of the
"end" of then prevailing literary models at both a thematic and formal
level, and also [signaled] the category of "beginning" even if the
former was signaled more strongly than the second in analogy with
that which happens in all avantgardes' (ibid.; 115). The third moment
is that of the Gruppo 63 and the journal Quindici (1967-9), 'whose spe-
cific sociocultural and political physiognomy requires a rather differ-
ent approach than the one that is pertinent to the Gruppo 63' (ibid.;
114). It is generally correct, then, to speak of a 'neoavant-garde'
present from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, but it is more accurate to
distinguish its various phases. This renewal of literary culture was
characterized by an extremely self-conscious theorizing bent, as writ-
ers and critics sought to redefine the role and meaning of literature
within Italian society. Umberto Eco has called this tendency to theorize
'the prevalence of poetics over the work' (in Russo; 99), which is a
quality of all avant-gardes. Corti as well writes of the 'enormous theo-
retical-critical activity' of the writers of the neoavant-garde, which she
sees as indicating its 'prevalently rational nature' (// viaggio testuale;
111). Thus, what becomes most 'Italian' about fiction written in Italy
during this critical stage is precisely an emphasis on explicit poetics
that explain the creative work and direct the reader in deciphering its
meanings. Celati came of age in this period, and subsequently pub-
lished his first critical essays in the late sixties and early seventies in
journals such as Quindici and // Verri, aligning himself in this way with
a neoavant-garde preference for open theorizing and self-explication,
both of which continue to mark his work.
The neoavant-garde sought a radical problematization of both con-
tent and form, as representational art and the very concept of 'reality'
were put into question. There was also a strong sense that literature,
and especially the novel, had become 'merce' or 'goods' within the
context of rapid capitalistic growth such as the economic boom of the
fifties had brought to Italian society. The majority of the writers and
critics involved in the neoavant-garde projects were on the political
Left, and saw their contestations of the placidly consumeristic bour-
geois literary industry as socially and politically relevant as well as
artistically motivated. Yet, in a retrospective consideration of the
period of the Gruppo 63 and other neoavant-gardistic activities of the
sixties, Calvino (among others, such as Alberto Arbasino and Alfredo
36 Gianni Celati
Giuliani, who, unlike Calvino, were active participants in the Gruppo,

all of whom commented in short articles in the newspaper La Repub-
blica on 9 October 1984 under the rubric 'Rivochiamo la vicenda e il
significato del Gruppo 63' [Let's re-evoke the affair and the meaning of
the Gruppo 63] ) specified politics as one of the factors in the demise
of an effective militant cultural renewal, and attributed the dissolution
of much of the neoavant-garde's force to 'the hegemony of politics
within Italian culture, or better: the hegemony of political language
over every other dimension of language. It has already been said many
times that the neoavant-garde entered into a crisis because the ambi-
ence that should have furnished its potential public was caught up in
the years around 1968 in a devouring politicization to the exclusion of
any other kind of discourse ... The poverty and groundlessness of
political discourse, in short, once more dominated the potentiality,
polyphony, and prehensile flexibility of literary discourse.' In fact, by
the late sixties most 'members' of the movements of the sixties had
retreated from any collective cultural or theoretical activity and, in
1977, the important militant organ for the publication of experimental
texts, the Cooperativa Scrittori, which had been founded and run by
several ex-members of the Gruppo 63, essentially collapsed and,
what's worse, did so without distributing rights or revenues to its
members. Moreover, literal terrorism, in the form of the Brigate Rosse
and neo-fascist groups alike, had replaced intellectual and cultural 'ter-
rorism' by the late seventies, and the old dichotomy of the protective
'center' versus the dangerous 'margins' rose up with renewed force.
Celati's earliest essays and fiction (Comiche of 1971, Le avventure di
Guizzardi of 1973) emerged out of a shared, collective sense of 'prefer-
ring not to' accept the modes and models of mainstream literary cul-
tural production; his fiction of the later seventies (La banda dei sospiri of
1976 and Lunario del paradiso of 1978), and his volume of essays Finzioni
occidentali (1975) and other theoretical essays of that period, reflect a
continued desire to investigate the new parameters opened up by prior
neoavant-garde activity. His retreat into virtual silence from the late
seventies to the mid-eighties signified, among other things, his aware-
ness that 'preferring not to' was no longer a shared attitude nor a via-
ble stance within a literary industry no longer deeply involved in self-
questioning and the pushing of limits.
Many of the 'survivors' of this intense period of theoretical and cre-
ative investigation and experimentation have gone on to achieve suc-
cess as prose writers (Malerba, Vassalli, Manganelli, Eco). Eco is one of
the few who has continued to explore his own poetics and to theorize
widely about diverse aspects of literary activity within, of course, the
context of a spectacular internationally conditioned fame that marks
him as an exception rather than as 'typical' of his generation's writers
and thinkers. The fact that ex-militant cultural figures, writers and aca-
demics alike, continue to review fiction in daily newspapers (Giuliani
of the ex-'Novissimi' or Pietro Citati come to mind) means that writers'
poetics, whether implicit or explicit, continue to play some role in the
reception of their work, but the rampant theorizing of the sixties has
for the most part disappeared in favor of the superficial touting of new
talents and the ceremonial valorizing of tried and true older writers.
Celati is, therefore, an exception in the current context, for he has never
stopped exploring and transforming his poetics, discussing diverse
hypotheses regarding the function of narrative, and probing the valid-
ity of issues, models, and modes brought to the fore in neoavant-garde
debates.
One of the very few studies of the neoavant-garde to go beyond
either nostalgic reminiscence or ideologically motivated bitter recrimi-
nations is Francesco Muzzioli's 1982 book entitled Teoria e critica della
letteratura delle avanguardie italiane degli anni sessanta (Theory and criti-
cism of the literature of the Italian avant-gardes of the sixties). Unlike
Gian Carlo Ferretti's 1979 study, // mercato delle lettere (The market of
letters), which emphasizes the failure of the neoavant-garde to radical-
ize the instruments of cultural dissemination - especially publishing
houses - and to escape its 'fundamental elitism' (133), or Nello Ajello's
1974 Lo scrittore e il potere (The writer and power), in which the title
word 'power' serves to define the dynamics of the neoavant-garde's
'game/ Muzzioli aspires to avoid politics in favor of a detailed exami-
nation of the theories of literature that animated Italian debates in the
sixties. His conviction that there is a 'residual validity' to many of the
hypotheses advanced during that period, so that 'the theoretical bases
for elaborating a new idea of literature are still to be looked for in the
cruxes and the problems discussed and left open by the voices of the
sixties' (6), leads him to analyze in rigorous detail the criticial and the-
oretical thought of, among others, Giorgio Manganelli, Sanguineti, and
Celati. This revitalization of still useful ideas about literary elaboration
and meanings, while seeking to transcend politically conditioned
polemics and nostalgia, is consonant with much of Celati's work, as
it manifests an unbroken line of commitment to that 'potentiality,
polyphony, and prehensile flexibility of literary discourse' whose dis-
38 Gianni Celati
appearance in the late sixties Calvino so lamented. This is not to sug-

gest that Celati has remained dedicated to the openly 'progressive' and
even revolutionary spirit that characterized the neoavant-garde, for he
understood as well or better than others involved in that collective
moment that projectual collectivities and shared programs of cultural
renovation were already in the seventies a thing of the past. Rather, he
has built on his early, 'neoavant-gardist' interests - in linguistics, phi-
losophy, formalism and structuralism, and their 'post' forms, in a pro-
cess of deepening that has resulted in the layered, palimpsestic quality
of his production.
When Calvino was asked, in the 1984 article referred to above, to
consider what might have remained of the avant-garde and neoavant-
garde experiences of this century, he responded: 'The legacy of the his-
torical avantgardes [that is, those of the early decades of this century]
consists above all of archives of scattered texts, curious documents,
rare little journals and publications, all of which give back to us a cer-
tain potential of energy that was typical of that era.' As for the more
recent neoavant-garde of the sixties, he suggests that we can best
answer the question of what remains of it by 'examining a list of books
that are considered significant in the last twenty years - of any author,
an ex-member of the neoavant-garde or not - in order to see in which
of them might be present some trace of the seismic movements that
acted on the world of literary forms (in Italy and in Europe) at the
beginning of the sixties. An examination of this kind can reserve some
surprises, giving their just due to those indirect effects that in literature
are always those that count the most/ It is undeniable, I think, that
Celati's Guizzardi can be considered one of those significant books, and
it is equally undeniable that it contains many traces of the 'seismic
movements' of the early sixties, such as the reactivation of issues per-
taining to the comic (from extraliterary sources such as the cinema, but
also from the analyses of the carnivalesque most evident in Bakhtin's
work), to orality, and to linguistic and philosophical investigations of
the relation between signified and signifier. Celati's continued interest
in the basic mechanisms of narrative, in the 'ceremony' of linguistic
exchange, and in the necessity of avoiding any facile codification either
of one's own writing or of the institution of literature makes of him a
writer whose work has gone on reserving surprises and bearing traces
of many of the more recent 'seismic' transformations in theory, criti-
cism, and philosophically informed literary thought. In sum, he is a
thoroughly Italian writer, profoundly shaped by the context in which
he came of age, yet thoroughly de-provincialized in both his poetics

and his creative work. Celati goes on 'preferring not to/ staying clear
of trends and fashions, up-to-date styles and forms of debate, and the
currency of market-driven art. The seriousness with which his critical
and creative work continues to be taken within today's Italian literary
milieu is, I think, one of the most significant signs that he is in fact one
of those 'atypicals' who, as Calvino noted, 'end up being most repre-
sentative of their age.'
In my Introduction, I referred to a 'zigzagging' approach to my analy-

ses of Celati's work. The preceding discussion of the broader context of
literary debates over the last thirty years or so reinforces, I hope, the
particular validity of such an approach in the case of this writer, whose
neoavant-garde precedents and postmodern developments intertwine
in highly non-linear ways. As I turn to Celati's recent, 'postmodern'
commentary on Melville's 'Bartleby/ I want first further to gloss my
critical metaphor of the zigzag with reference to an essay by one of the
proponents of contemporary philosophical (postmetaphysical) 'pen-
siero debole' or 'weak thought/ a piece called 'Elogio del pudore' (In
praise of modesty) by Pier Aldo Rovatti. This strain of theoretical
thinking is pertinent to Celati's reading of the Melville story as well,
and to the emblematic figure of the scrivener in his most contemporary
guise of meaning, which is connected to but also distinct from the
meanings he brought to earlier texts such as Guizzardi and 'Baratto.'
Rovatti's essay appeared in a 1990 collection of the same name, which
he coedited and cowrote with Alessandro Dal Lago; in it the philoso-
pher seeks to defend and to explain further the project of those think-
ers who had come to be known as 'debolisti' from the appearance of
work by Gianni Vattimo and others in the mid- and late eighties.11 Tak-
ing up the issue of the ethical component of postmetaphysical weak-
ness, Rovatti writes: '... with the name of "ethics" we can try to mark
an edge or a line that might identify the comprehensive attitude with
which these philosophies (Husserl's phenomenology, Heideggerian
thought) leave behind the traditional idea of truth and knowledge.
Ethics thus comes to indicate a dominant tonality, a shift in the way of
thinking.' This tonality or shift is characterized as a refusal of a search
for 'concepts, rules, Man, Morality/ in favor of 'a movement of thought
within and also against itself/ Searching for a figurative definition of
this movement of thought, Rovatti suggests a series of terms, first neg-
ative then positive: This image or figure can no longer be that of a
40 Gianni Celati
push: a push onward, a progressing, a programizing, a projecting ...

nor is it any longer or only a going beyond, an enlarging, a transcend-
ing: nor is it only a crossing, a proceeding, a taking, a taking possession
of. But neither is it only an approximation, an attempt to adhere to
things. If anything it is a figure of withdrawal (ritiro), of drawing back:
diminution, suspension, the step backwards, checking oneself, inhabit-
ing distance/ In giving oneself over to this mode of thought, it is possi-
ble to remain 'in a continual, oscillating (altalenante) movement, in the
ambivalent and uncertain place that is the place of our experience.' But
this 'place' is not in fact a place in the sense of something fixed; rather,
it is itself 'a movement, a going and coming, a pendulum; and its lan-
guage, finally, will no longer be able to be a code, a rigid exchange
between things and words, but will have to open itself in its turn to
mobility and oscillation' (43-4). Zigzagging, as I have so far done,
among Celati's works of criticism and fiction best reflects Celati's own
'oscillating' mode, and allows me the critical mobility that I believe is
essential to my task. The zigzag provides as well a spatial image for the
poetics, themes, and narrative modes evident throughout Celati's
work: his recourse back to certain neoavant-gardistic preoccupations
intertwined with his reworking of them in the light of postmodern
concerns; the waning and waxing of linguistic experimentalism; the
preference for highlighting the twilight figures of the marginalized; the
mixture of tragic and comic themes. Ideologically, the zigzag repre-
sents the play between engagement and disengagement so profoundly
typical of Celati, and lastly, it is a figure for what might be called 'weak
projectuality,' in which process is emphasized much more than 'end,'
even though 'end' in both senses (termination and goal) looms large,
especially in his work of the nineties. Zigzagging indicates movement
forward, but attenuated, deflecting movement. There is also something
innately exhilarating and liberating about it: movement for move-
ment's sake, and thought for thought's sake, freed of any predeter-
mined, linearly argued, and finalizing 'truths.' As Lumley writes:
'... the searches and researches made by the restless characters of
Celati's fiction are never concluded' (57). And these 'searches and
researches' are spatially rather than temporally conditioned, for time
does not allow us to zigzag.
Writing about Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag asserts that 'Ben-
jamin's recurrent themes are, characteristically, means of spacializing
the world: for example, his notion of ideas and experiences as ruins'
(Under the Sign of Saturn; 116). These words are equally applicable to
Celati's preference for zigzagging spatialization, as are the following:

Tor the character born under the sign of Saturn, time is the medium of
constraint, inadequacy, repetition, mere fulfillment. In time, one is only
what one is: what one has always been. In space, one can be another
person ... Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward
from behind, blows us through the narrow funnel of the present into
the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions,
intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead ends, one-way streets'
(116-17). It is immediately clear that much of what is called 'postmod-
ern' in today's critical, theoretical, and creative positionings seeks to
escape the linearity of historical time in favor of the 'teeming possibili-
ties' of spatial imaginings. It is in this sense that Celati might be called
a 'postmodern' writer, although his preferred literary and critical mod-
els derive as much from the modernist as the postmodernist tradition,
and his devotion to writing as an artisanal activity finds its roots in
ancient, premodern models.
Celati's reading of Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener' reveals signs of

having been influenced by (or of being at least close to) the postmod-
ern, postmetaphysical 'weak thought' alluded to above (as well as the
theoretical writing of postmodernists Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes,
and Giorgio Agamben), but it also resonates with the thought of the
great modernists, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, and the post-
Freudian but decidedly non-Lacanian work of the late Italian psycho-
analyst Elvio Fachinelli. In a recent rewriting of the first part of the
introduction (for inclusion in a forthcoming collection of essays on
diverse writers entitled Studi di affezione), Celati alludes as well to the
thought of Spinoza (one of Deleuze's preferred thinkers). Before inves-
tigating these connections, however, I want to give a straightforwardly
descriptive account of Celati's introduction, using both the published
version and the slightly expanded revised notes. (Because I quote
extensively from the essay, I do not give specific page numbers for each
citation; it appears on pages vii-xxvi of Bartleby lo scrivano, 1991). In
these writings, Celati gives us the results of a very long and extensive
meditation on the haunting figure of the scrivener and, more broadly,
on Melville's thought as expressed not only in this story but in other
narratives as well. From the story and its author, Celati moves into a
sweeping consideration of language, writing, and being, as the impli-
cations of the scrivener's tale are unfolded in all of their ontological
resonance.
42 Gianni Celati
Melville's fictional scrivener Bartleby, employed by a Wall Street

lawyer, eventually begins to respond to all requests with a disturbing 'I
would prefer not to/ In spite of the many attempts of his employer, the
narrator, to understand his refusal to work, Bartleby persists in his pas-
sive resistance, to the point of remaining in the offices all the time, say-
ing nothing about his past or his present motives. He is eventually
carried off to prison, where he dies from starvation. Described as 'reso-
lutely mild' (inespugnabilmente mite) in the first lines of Celati's intro-
duction, Bartleby is first defined as a 'figure of that which cannot be
saved.' However, Celati glosses his 'unsaveability' by adding that 'it
could be thought that he is a figure of someone who has no desire to let
himself be saved, as if the salvation that others propose were just as
irremediable as the desolation toward which he goes.' His story takes
place at a time when Wall Street was becoming the center of American
finance, which had 'already expanded into the entire world with vari-
ous business activities.' Against this 'historically monumental, if
entirely implied, background,' the scrivener's story is so irrelevant as
to be almost unparaphraseable. The 'monumentality' of everything
Wall Street evokes is replaced by 'limits,' 'small spaces,' 'minimal acts/
'trifles/ as if under the sign of 'an abandonment of aspirations to great-
ness, and a mourning for the titanic anxieties of expansion/ Bartleby is
the 'incarnation of this mourning/ for he is poor and immobile, in
exact contrast to the riches and mobility that sustain capitalistic expan-
sion. His poverty and immobility are expressed in the scarcity and
repetitiveness of his speech, his emblematic 'I would prefer not to/
Celati sees the source of our fascination with this story in that repeated
phrase, which makes us want to know what 'secret' is hidden under it,
what thoughts are in the head of such a character. Yet Melville's 'nar-
rative game' consists precisely in blocking our interpretations and
instead making us smile at the way this phrase upsets the assumption
that dialogue and reasonable agreement lead to understanding others.
Because Celati sees Bartleby's refrain as the key to the story's hold on
us, he proceeds to investigate the refrain itself, rather than what might
be 'behind' it. He notes that it is not a 'true refusal/ but rather a 'slightly
mannered way of refusing an invitation' and of 'keeping oneself
between a yes and a no in order to preserve distances and equilibrium/
Because it is mannered and emphasizes distance rather than directness,
it seems more 'British' than 'American/ Such language, however, is
entirely inappropriate to Bartleby's circumstances; he is not being
'invited' to do something, he is being given orders by his boss. It is as if
the scrivener had heard the phrase somewhere else and is now using it
in a new, if unsuitable, way. Thus, it comes out as an 'eccentric manner-
ism that makes [us] laugh.' (Here Celati implicitly defends his 'eccen-
tric' translation of it as 'avrei preferenza di no' instead of the expected
'preferirei di no/ the latter of which is neither funny nor surprising in
Italian.) There is also a 'haughtiness' about the usage, and the lawyer in
fact notes in Bartleby a kind of haughtiness or cold reserve. Celati fur-
ther states that the phrase is spoken mildly, inexpressively, mechani-
cally, like the sounds of acquiescence we mechanically make during a
conversation simply in order to signal that we are present. But one
could just as well be talking to a wall when these sounds are all the
response one gets; in the story the lawyer notes that talking to the scriv-
ener is like talking to the bust of Cicero on his desk. Celati concludes,
therefore, that the lack of understanding between the lawyer and the
scrivener is not dependent on something that the latter is hiding, 'like a
secret to discover.' Instead, Bartleby has the air of 'someone who has
nothing to say, except for the mechanical phrase in which he concen-
trates his way of being.' Celati also suggests that it is possible to think of
him as 'an extreme figure of resignation, who has eliminated any and
every superfluous behavior and shows only that which he finds himself
to be in the world, just an "any old" presence (una presenza qualsiasi),
without aspiring to anything else.' This 'presenza qualsiasi' will take on
strong philosophical resonance, as Celati's discussion later develops
the implications of 'mere' presence.
In Celati's reading of the phrase T would prefer not to/ there is a
lack of intentions underlying it. Intentional speech always makes us
seek an agreement with others, which is precisely what Bartleby does
not do. He 'acts as if resignation had cancelled in him the delirium of
intentions, rendering him unrealistically self-sufficient.' Nor does the
priority of his 'preference' seem to stem from some personal intention;
rather, he gives himself over to it as if it were ineluctable. His behavior
is 'purely inertial' in as much as it is ineluctable, just as our daily habits
are ruled by a kind of inertia. Celati next connects 'preference' to
'inertia'; a preference is, in his definition, an 'anteriority/ a 'pre-exist-
ing signal' that derives from our 'way of being' and has nothing to do
with intentions or agreements with others. This 'priority of an inertial
tendency' characterizes comic characters, who show it 'with their tics,
mannerisms or idiosyncrasies.' Moreover, such Very dear figures' (like
Don Quixote and Bartleby) entrust themselves to their preferences 'in a
state of devotion like that of saints.' Celati concludes that all of us have
44 Gianni Celati
this 'absolute anteriority' in our given individuality, our faces that we

did not choose, our mannerisms that 'give us over to a social represen-
tation that we did not ourselves decide upon.' Kierkegaard, Celati
remarks, called this a 'destiny of anomaly7; it is 'the terrible experience
of being individuals/ an experience that Bartleby and other comic fig-
ures seem to accept 'with active resignation, with irresistible devotion,
and in fact as "preference," or a loving transport/ Celati thus seems to
see intentions and agreements with others as ways in which we seek
an escape from the anomaly of our unique individuality and way of
being. Generalities and typologies function in this way too, as does
language; presence, however, is not reducible to 'types/ so that literary
characters who are coherent in their actions and intentions do not
touch the way of being of actual individuals, only the generalities
applied to Being. Bartleby is in this sense a representation of the ulti-
mately 'incommensurate singularity' of every individual and every
presence in the world, and Celati thus sees in Melville's thought 'an
extreme form of Spinozism.'
The philosophy of Spinoza is brought into the discussion of Bartleby
only in the revised version of the introduction. Celati sees Melville's
thought as taking off in the direction of Spinoza's concept of 'divine
inertia'; every individual and every presence in the world is 'an incom-
mensurable singularity, that expresses in its attributes the anteriority of
an infinite essence about which one can say nothing.' Melville's devel-
opment of this concept brings him to speak of an 'unconditional
democracy of all things/ on the one hand; on the other, it is implied
that 'thought must suspend itself before states of presence, before phe-
nomenological manifestations, which are divine because [they are]
ineluctable, and as such they absolve thought from the necessity of giv-
ing answers regarding the general inertia of bodies and things.' It is
therefore futile to seek some 'secret' by trying to plumb the depths of a
way of being, because manifested presence is 'absolute in being simply
what it is.' There is only the nameless silence of anteriority, there where
we seek instead to find a secret, and we can only suspend thought in
the face of this silence, from which no answer will come. Celati next
refers to a letter by Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which Melville
underlines the fact that in subordination to a political power 'there
always comes into play the idea of something hidden and frightening,
held like a secret by a 'symbolic order.' Thus a political system can
become crushing in its power, for it implies by its 'big words' that it
holds the answer to the 'secret' which others seek to possess, but can
never possess (because there is no secret). In Celati's view, Melville saw

'the weight of this supposed secret... at the basis of that oppressive lie
which is social consensus.' Instead, Melville wants to reach 'visible
truth/ which is 'learning the absolute condition of present things, just
as they strike the eye of those who are not afraid to look at them/ Bar-
tleby is Melville's most perfected representation of this 'visible truth'
towards which his writing strives, according to Celati's reading.
In the next section of his introduction, Celati concentrates on the
way in which Bartleby is rendered an unreachable presence, an 'appa-
rition.' He is not described in any detail; the external spaces in which
the scrivener is placed are conveyed to us from the perspective of the
lawyer, who is a 'watchman/ so that the spaces become 'frames of sur-
veillance' (inquadrature di sorveglianza). Celati mentions Kafka at this
point as an author who expressed well the 'vivid and animalesque'
quality of 'creatures installed in their territory and the extraneous one
to be watched' (like a cat in its space that watches a bird that has
entered the cat's territory). As in old photographs of unknown people,
who appear in the frame of the picture as distant and inaccessible, their
exclusion from any territoriality, nameable group, or 'symbolic affilia-
tion' accentuates their undeniable and absolute 'presence.' Bartleby is
similarly framed in the story; he is extraneous, isolated, and thereby all
the more unconditionally present. The 'territory' into which he comes
- and whose static, mechanical, habitual aspect is troubled by his
arrival - is the lawyer's office, which in Celati's reading is more Dick-
ensian than airily and expansively representative of 'the great Ameri-
can financial epic' of Wall Street. The office and its inhabitants function
in a 'static economy, inside a shell, like life inside a family, where
human styles or mannerisms can still be released in a useless way, with
strange devices of habits regulated by their eccentricities.' This 'ani-
malesque' static quality, highlighted by the 'animalesque' nicknames
of the other copyists Turkey, Ginger Nut and Nippers, is intruded
upon and radically disturbed by the appearance of Bartleby.
The remaining pages of Celati's introduction are dedicated to
explaining in what exactly consists the 'disturbance' brought by Bar-
tleby. The 'obvious' explanation - that the scrivener refuses to do any
copying and instead spends his time contemplating a blank wall - is,
Celati concedes, 'quite a good reason for surprise.' However, he asserts
that he does not believe that 'the facts themselves are determinant - the
so-called "facts" of a story are only a signpost for attracting our atten-
tion toward a knot of emotional tonalities.' Instead, Bartleby brings
46 Gianni Celati
with him 'a desert wind' that perturbs the 'enchantment of life in the
shell.' The lawyer's speech is soon affected by this 'desert wind/ in
such a way that his eloquence, seen in his 'beautiful syntax full of sub-
ordinates, adversatives, concessives, correlatives/ turns into a dry and
laconic style of speech, like that of Bartleby. Thus Celati sees the distur-
bance brought by Bartleby as upsetting not only the bureaucratic life of
the office but also 'the activity carried on there, the activity of writing,
the use of words.' Bartleby's renunciation of writing is therefore
'emblematic.' In Melville's writing in general, Celati sees 'an inertial
and always dispersive [way of] proceeding, writing that... opens itself
in all directions, as if in a piercing vacillation in the face of distance, the
uncapturability of the presences in the world.' In Moby Dick 'the prob-
lem of writing is how to hold everything together, the very long
descriptions of whaling, the metaphysics and the dialect, the Elizabe-
than dialogue and the tale of the sailor.' In stories such as 'Cock-A-
Doodle-Do/ written in the same period as 'Bartleby/ or 'The Encanta-
das/ written right after 'Bartleby/ Celati sees a kind of writing that
'makes its way toward something distant and uncapturable, without a
goal, by means of listings in every direction.' In the figure of Bartleby,
Melville's writing finally opens itself up to 'an inert stranger, deprived
of real "facts" that have to do with him, and who in addition knows
how to answer with a sole phrase.' Suddenly, it is as if Melville's
'inertial' and directionless manner of writing, and 'having little to say,
nothing of importance of which to inform the reader, revealed an
unimagined power.' Celati sees this 'extreme reduction of the superflu-
ous' as the 'summit of all of Melville's research.' The answer, then, as
to what sort of 'disturbance' Bartleby introduces into writing is that it
makes explicit 'the little, the nothing, on which one can always sur-
vive, and [the] aridity that the soul's voices have to confront at one
time or another.' In getting rid of all superfluity, writing that 'experi-
ences the aridity of the desert' can no longer 'use a beautiful rhetoric of
familiarity [which has] a protective intent, like a border of words.'
Celati notes that the lawyer's language, which upon the arrival of Bar-
tleby loses its 'familiar rhetoric/ reveals the aridity that he too must
confront. Unlike those critics who see the lawyer as a Pharisee unable
to understand Bartleby, Celati believes that it is precisely the lawyer
who conveys to us the transcendent sense of profane immanence
brought on the 'desert wind' of the scrivener's appearance: 'With the
loss of a feeling of familiarity, by means of the separateness and disper-
sion of bodies in deserts of abandonment, another experience seems to
be born, about which the lawyer talks to us at length.' That other expe-
rience is the feeling of 'infinite fraternity' with all otherness, as Melville
called it in a letter to his friend Hawthorne: The Divinity has been torn
apart like the bread of the last supper, and we are its crumbs. From
here [comes] this feeling of infinite fraternity/
Celati ends his introduction with a brief discussion of the 'potency'
(potenza) of the scrivener. The term 'potenza' in Celati's usage in fact
means both 'potency' and 'potential/ and is defined as 'something that
rests in itself without actualizing itself, the capacity to think nothing -
a way of being that resolves itself in that which it does, not in that
which it thinks.' In Pierre, Melville writes of 'the state of repose of
things, like the repose in itself of a sleeping face'; he comments that in
this state of repose there is neither 'any urgency of expansion toward
the external' nor 'any [sense of] being overwhelmed internally,' only
'passive suspension.' This suspension is, in Celati's reading, a state of
'potenza' or power-potential, for it is that which is kept in reserve that
creates real strength. Against utilitarian precepts of action and deci-
sive, assertive speech, which are dedicated to the 'expansive motions
of the Ego,' there is offered in Melville the idea of 'potenza' or reserved
potential, which is the 'inertia that characterizes states of presence.'
Celati ends by asserting that this is true of writing also, the power of
which 'is not found in this or that thing to say, but in little or nothing to
say, in a condition in which the duty of writing is annulled.' Writing
should be without 'expectations/ and its power will reveal itself if it
remains 'suspended only as a "preference/" With this conclusion, it is
not difficult to understand why Bartleby should have become an
emblematic figure for this writer: someone, that is, for whom writing
as preference is carried out in that 'extraterritorial space' in which 'vis-
ible truth/ beyond the protective cliches of the familiar territories of
social consensus and belonging, might be reached.
Celati's introduction to 'Bartleby' is an attempt to avoid yet another

'definitive' interpretation of the story, but it is, in the end, interpreta-
tive, even if the meanings found in the figure of the scrivener and in
the story overall are anchored squarely in the words of Melville, rather
than in some externally applied methodological or ideological 'grid/
This is a reading deeply conditioned by ontological concerns, which in
turn are inextricably bound up with the function and meaning of
human language, especially as it subsumes its user in the process of
writing 'without expectations/ In his reading of the story, Celati seeks
48 Gianni Celati
to reveal the normative 'habits of thought' and 'habits of life' that are
radically questioned by the figure of Bartleby; rather than attempting
to interpret the story objectively, Celati's words reflect how his own
'habits' have been deeply altered by contemplating the scrivener's tale.
I mentioned above several possible 'influences' or associated sources
that may have fed into Celati's reading. It is more accurate, I think, to
speak instead of ideas and modes of writing that have deeply condi-
tioned Celati's 'habits of thought' and 'habits of life,' which he says
must be implicated in an understanding of Bartleby. If one believes
that it is possible to explain the story 'with documents to hand,' one is
still a 'victim of the academic mirage' (note 88, Celati's commentary of
McCall's The Silence of Bartleby; no). Similarly, an attempt to 'explain'
Celati's reading 'with documents to hand' strikes me as a 'mirage,' in
that such an attempt would go entirely counter to the very meanings
his introduction seeks to reach. I therefore want simply to allude to
other writers and thinkers whose words resonate, in what I find to be
significant ways, with Celati's, in order better to position the Italian
writer's transformed habits of thought and life in a broader context of
literary, critical, and philosophical attitudes.
In the preceding discussion of the comedic elements relating to Bar-
tleby as seen in Celati's 'Baratto/ I alluded to the importance of Beckett
in the formation of Celati's analysis and application of certain linguis-
tic techniques for producing comedy, such as interpolation and gags
based on expulsion and incomprehensibility. Another modernist
writer of great relevance to Celati's theory and art is Franz Kafka, with
whom he has fairly often been compared. Guido Almansi's exception-
ally perceptive - one could almost say unsurpassable - reading of
the 'early' Celati (Comiche, Le avventure di Guizzardi, and La banda dei
sospiri) rightly reminds us that Kakfa, along with Beckett and silent
film comics, was one of Celati's 'admitted masters' (maestri confessati)
during the period in the seventies when his first fictions were written.
Almansi sees Kafka's The Trial as an important model for Guizzardi.
The critic tells us Kafka himself considered The Trial 'comic-grotesque'
and that he 'would read aloud to his friends with great bursts of laugh-
ter and much enjoyment of himself (che lo scrittore stesso leggeva agli
amici fra grandi risate divertendosi un mondo) ('II letamaio di Babele';
56). If Guizzardi partakes of that 'comic-grotesque' quality, the Kafka
who haunts the figure of Bartleby - as read by Celati - is, however,
more the creator of The Metamorphosis,' 'A Hunger Artist,' and the
aphoristic pieces of Meditation. In the first story, the plight of Gregor
Samsa, while admittedly much more 'internally' recounted, so that we

share in the 'dung beetle's' inarticulate misery, is similar to Bartleby's
positioning in Melville's story as one who is 'extraterritorial,' spied
upon by the members of the 'familial clan/ and as a messenger of dis-
turbance, that 'desert wind' that carries a desolate and permanent aura
of unfamiliarity. From a life dedicated to commerce, to the industry
and 'busy-ness' of a utilitarian and capitalist social economy, Gregor
moves to a life of solitude, silence, and eventual total stasis: 'Soon he
made the discovery that he was now unable to stir a limb ... the deci-
sion that he must disappear was one that he held to even more
strongly than his sister ... in this state of vacant and peaceful medita-
tion he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning'
(Metamorphosis; 127). Both Bartleby and Gregor gradually cease all
action, and their shut-down from life is emphasized in their respective
stories by their refusal of food: '"I'm hungry enough," said Gregor
sadly to himself, "but not for that kind of food"' ('Metamorphosis';
119); '"I prefer not to dine today," said Bartleby, turning away. "It
would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners'" ('Bartleby'; 151).
The ingestion, digestion, and elimination of food and the waste it pro-
duces are natural processes that the unnatural 'machine' of a society
based on production and consumption replicates, of course. Gregor
and Bartleby come to find that even natural consumption is 'disagree-
able/ however, for it is implied that these extraneous beings need a
world in which other kinds of nourishment sustain existence. Kafka's
hunger artist also makes clear his need for another kind of food: "T
couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should
have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else"' (The
Hunger Artist'; 255). Celati does not discuss consumption, either natu-
ral or social, in his reading of 'Bartleby/ for he clearly wants to arrive at
conclusions that are far from those conditioned by materialist or gener-
ally socio-political perspectives.12 Yet in his analysis, centered on the
alienation, separateness, and aridity of the level of experience opened
up by Bartleby's arrival into the familiarly social, Celati has recourse to
Melville's words to Hawthorne: 'the Divinity has crumbled like the
bread of the last supper, and we are its crumbs. From this [comes] this
feeling of infinite fraternity' ('Introduzione'; xxiv). It is possible to infer
that, for Celati, the 'food' sought by Melville's and Kafka's characters
would be 'infinite fraternity/ or the 'crumbs of divine bread' that we all
are: that which neither others individually nor societies collectively
can ever give them, as long as physical hunger (the body) and industri-
50 Gianni Celati
ally produced 'hungers' (the psyche) are what drive human action.
What is missing is the spirit or soul, which is not nourished either by
purely materialist or purely libido-driven acts of consumption.
I believe that the aphoristic pieces included in Kafka's Meditation are
also sources of Celati's 'habits of thought/ which deeply inform his
reading of 'Bartleby' (it is not by chance that a quotation from 'The
Trees/ included in Meditation, serves as an epigraph for the collection
in which the Bartleby-like 'Baratto' appears, the volume Quattro novelle
sulle apparenze, published in 1987. The brief pieces of Meditation come
from a voice that is, for the most part, positioned in that extraterritorial
space of unreachable, individual being emblematized in the figure of
the scrivener. In 'Resolutions/ for example, the narrator describes an
effort to 'lift [oneself] out of a miserable mood': 'I force myself out of
my chair, stride round the table, exercise my head and neck, make my
eyes sparkle, tighten the muscles around them. Defy my own feelings,
welcome A ... amiably tolerate B. in my room, swallow all that is said
at C.'s, whatever pain and trouble it may cost me, in long draughts.'
But this willed effort towards sociability can be stopped by 'one single
slip/ and so 'perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively,
to make yourself an inert mass, ... to throttle down whatever ghostly
life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyard
and let nothing survive save that.' How 'Bartleby-like/ this self-
suspension, this 'inertia'! And how much like the manneristic 'prefer-
ence' of the scrivener is Kafka's concluding image: 'A characteristic
movement in such a condition is to run your little finger along your
eyebrows' (28-9). In 'Bachelor's 111 Luck/ the 'extraterritorial' state is
embodied in the figure of the bachelor, who must 'beg for an invitation
whenever [he] wants to spend an evening in company/ must suffer
alone if ill, must 'say goodnight at the front door, never to run upstairs
beside one's wife/ must eat alone and must 'admire other people's
children.' These generalities of the condition of bachelorhood, which
are fairly unaffecting, are stunningly illuminated in the final lines of
the piece: That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and
later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real
forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand' (30). 'A palpable
body/ 'a real head/ 'a real forehead/ and that 'hand' that 'smites' that
forehead: seldom has the 'anomaly' of individual being that Celati dis-
cusses in his introduction been so unforgettably evoked. Finally, in 'On
the Tram/ the narrative voice begins: 'I stand on the end platform of
the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this
town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I
might rightly advance in any direction' (35). The Kierkegaardian sense
of 'the terrible experience of being an individual' mentioned by Celati
in his introduction comes to mind here as well, and is intensified by the
appearance of another individual, a girl, who is 'as distinct to [the nar-
rator] as if [he] had run [his] hands over her.' He describes her clothes
and her looks in detail, concluding with her ear, which is 'small' and
'close-set'; he goes on: 'Since I am near her I can see the whole ridge of
the whorl of her right ear and the shadow at the root of it. At that point
I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she
keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?' (36). The 'terrible,'
'anomalous/ and necessarily silent ontic dimension of individual exist-
ence of which Celati writes at some length in his discussion of Bartleby
is masterfully and piercingly captured in Kafka's words.
Walter Benjamin - another of Celati's 'masters' - wrote in his amaz-
ing essay, 'Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death':
'There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka's works. One is to inter-
pret them naturally, the other is the supernatural interpretation. Both
the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the
essential points' (in Illuminations; 127). Celati's reading of 'Bartleby'
similarly avoids interpreting the story according to explicitly psycho-
analytic and theological models, although there is a reaching towards
an anti-materialist conception of both writing and experience that indi-
rectly alludes to psyche and soul. Robert Lumley sees a 'mystical
dimension' in Celati's more recent attitudes concerning writing, which
is tied to 'the transitoriness of both human and natural phenomena';
moreover, in his writings, especially those of more or less the same
period as the Bartleby translation and commentary (late 19805, early
19905), Lumley detects that 'losing oneself (one's way, one's self-
possession) is presented as a path to wisdom' (in Baranski and Fertile;
57). Death has also become a foregrounded topic, linked in its inelucta-
bility to the ultimate unknowability of presence and being.
Two thinkers have played particularly central roles in the shaping of
Celati's 'habits of thought' pertaining to the so-called mystical realm:
philosopher Giorgio Agamben and psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli. In
the case of the former, it is difficult to say who has acquired what from
whom, so close are their shared concerns on a number of issues. (They
are friends, so that mutual 'influence' is no doubt the result of informal
conversations and exchanges of thought rather than the impersonal
reading of one another's work.) Agamben, who participated in Hei-
52 Gianni Celati
degger's seminars at Thor in 1966 and 1968, has edited the complete
works of Benjamin in Italian, and has written many books from the
early seventies to the present, several of which have been translated
into English (Language and Death: The Place of Negativity [1991]; The
Coming Community [1993]; Idea of Prose [1995]). In his 1990 La comunita
che viene (The Coming Community), there is a chapter entitled 'Bartleby/
and in 1993 an essay, 'Bartleby o della contingenza' (Bartleby or con-
tingency), was published along with Deleuze's 'Bartleby o la formula'
(Bartleby or the formula) in a small volume called Bartleby: La formula
della creazione (Bartleby or the formula of creation). In the former, much
shorter piece, Agamben uses the figure of Bartleby as representative of
the 'qualsiasi' or 'whatever' (quodlibet) quality that 'inheres in potenti-
ality and possibility' (The Coming Community; 34). His larger goal in the
book is to describe a future human community that would be founded
on singularities that refuse any category of belonging, and that would
remain, instead, in the suspended state of sheer potentiality to be
found in 'whatever' identity. Agamben explains this potentiality by
turning to Aristotelian thought; in the De anima, Aristotle argues,
according to Agamben, that 'thought, in its essence, is pure potential-
ity; in other words, it is also the potentiality not to think, and, as such,
as possible or material intellect, Aristotle compares it to a writing tab-
let on which nothing is written.' Because of this potentiality to not-
think, to not-actualize itself, 'thought can turn back to itself ... and be,
at its apex, the thought of thought.' The writing tablet on which noth-
ing is written is called tabula rasa, although Agamben reminds us that
the ancient commentators of Aristotle noted that it would be better to
speak of a rasum tabulae, 'that is, of the layer of wax covering the tablet
that the stylus engraves.' When thought thinks itself, it thinks of that
rasum tabulae 'that is nothing but its own passivity, its own pure poten-
tiality (to not think).' Thus, 'the writing table writes by itself or, rather
writes its own passivity.' Agamben concludes therefore that 'the per-
fect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impo-
tence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure
act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect).' In the Arabic tradition agent
intellect is represented as 'an angel whose name is Qalam, Pen'; Bar-
tleby is, in this context, 'the extreme image of this angel that writes
nothing but its potentiality to not-write' (all quotations from the Com-
ing Community; 35-6). The similarity of this argument to Celati's is, I
think, evident. Celati writes of Bartleby's 'potenza,' which is Agam-
ben's 'pure potentiality'; he also comments on writing's power, which
resides 'not in having this or that thing to say, but in having little or
nothing to say/ and in 'remaining suspended only as a "preference"'
('Introduction'; xxvi). In both Agamben and Celati, thought and writ-
ing are most 'powerful' when they express only themselves and their
endless potential, rather than when they actualize themselves in this or
that intentional content.
In his longer essay, 'Bartleby o della contingenza/ Agamben devel-
ops his meditation on potentiality in an extremely dense and complex
argument, which draws on Islamic thought, the sceptical tradition,
medieval theological commentary, Leibnitz, and beyond, in order to
arrive at the proposition that Bartleby represents the transcendence of
the basic principals of truth and of contradiction at the basis of the
Western philosophical tradition. Agamben writes: 'A being that can be
and, at the same time, not be, is called, in essential philosophy, contin-
gent. The experiment, into which Bartleby makes us hazard, is an
experiment de contingentia absoluta' (76). His suspension in a preference
not to is between what is - and might not have been - and what is not -
and might have been. Agamben reads Melville's inclusion of the
'rumor' concerning Bartleby's prior employment in the Dead Letter
Office as yet another sign of the state of absolute contingency that the
scrivener is meant to represent, for 'letters never delivered are the sign
of joyous events that might have been able to be, but were not real-
ized.' Agamben notes that the phrase, 'on errands of life these letters
speed to death/ is 'a barely concealed quotation from Romans 7.10 ...
"And the commandment, which was ordained to life I found to be
unto death'"; he further comments that the term 'commandment'
(entole) is better translated as 'errand' or 'mandate.' Paul is here
comparing the 'deathly' essence of the Letter of the Law and the life-
bringing essence of the Spirit or, as it is stated in Corinthians 3.6, 'the
letter killeth, but the spirit bringeth life.' Bartleby is a kind of Messiah,
then, who brings a new message, but it is not one, like that of Christ,
that redeems that which has been, but rather one that saves that which
has not been: precisely the non-actualized potential that his suspended
being emblematizes. Agamben reads this as a sign of 'palingenesis'
whereby the 'new creature' (and, by extension, all of creation) 'reaches
the unverifiable center of his "self-verification or non-self-verifica-
tion'" (92). In this perspective, all that which has been created has
within itself its potential not to have been created; conversely, all that
which has not been created has within itself its potential to have been
created. Everything is thus in a state of suspension, an unresolved
54 Gianni Celati
oscillation between being and nonbeing, like a 'dead letter' that con-
tains the potential for life while 'speeding toward death.' Celati's reit-
eration of the term 'oscillation' in his tale of Baratto takes on deeper
significance when read in the context of Agamben's theorizing, just as
his reading of Bartleby's 'potenza' is more brightly illuminated.
Celati's conception of writing as an activity that remains suspended
merely as a preference points to this 'palingenesis/ which can be
understood also as a kind of infinite rebirth or transmigration of the
'soul' of language in its endless potential. The one who writes taps into
this potential not by having something to say, but by having nothing to
say: by a completely nonproprietary relation to both thought and lan-
guage. The self is, therefore, set aside, for 'expressing oneself is anti-
thetical to this belief. An enraptured state is implicit in this mode of
relating to language, a state in some ways similar to, although not
identical with, a mystical raptus. Here, the late psychoanalyst Elvio
Fachinelli's work becomes pertinent, especially as seen in his 1989
study La mente estatica (The ecstatic mind). In the brief Tremessa' or
preliminary clarification of the intent of the study to follow, Fachinelli
writes that he will 'search around (frugare) in a perceptual, emotional
and cognitive stratum, that has been received for the most part as a
border area, dangerous as far as the affirmation of a well individuated,
personal "I" is concerned' (11). This stratum is that of ecstatic experi-
ence, which Fachinelli sees as a 'disconoscimento' or 'unknowing' that
opens up many experiences, including 'probably the most creative
experiences of human life.' Mysticism is 'only one of its forms'
(Fachinelli's italics), and he believes that investigating the many other
forms of ecstatic experience is 'an anthropological exigency (his italics
again) that we should neither lose nor waste.' In answer to those who
would see this research as 'an attempt to destroy or weaken Reason, or
perhaps even the "I" itself,' he counters that ecstatic experience might
instead contribute to 'saving the "I" from the urgent risk of being
absorbed into technical, scientific, and bureaucratic Reason' (12). The
volume that follows contains chapters dedicated to Fachinelli's own
personal experience of the 'oceanic'; to Meister Eckhart, Dante, Proust
and Bataille, Poincare and Proust, Saul Bellow; to Freud's relationship
with Fleiss; and to the Lacanian concept of the Thing.' In his general
comments on ecstasy included in the section entitled 'Zerografie'
(Zerowritings), Fachinelli emphasizes ecstasy's oxymoronic qualities,
which are similar to Agamben's characterization of the state of pure
potentiality as what both 'is' and 'is not': 'At the point at which the
limit between the subject and the object disappears, there emerges a
sense of an all that is also nothing. Experience of the allnothing, of the
fullempty' (33). He also quotes Hegel, who wrote in his Science of Logic
that '"in the passage from nothingness to being there is a point at
which being and nothingness coincide and their difference disap-
pears." It is in this coincidence of being and nothingness, a "pure
emptiness," laden with tension, that the ecstatic one lives for an
unquantifiable period of time' (37). In Celati's view of writing as a state
of 'suspension' without 'expectations/ it is possible to see a relation
with the 'ecstatic mind' of Fachinelli. Writing understood in this way is
not 'expression/ a 'pressing forth' (ex-premere) of an individually con-
ditioned interiority, but rather 'ecstasy/ a loss of self in the oxymoronic
silence of the great sea of language from which and to which writing
comes to the surface only to sink back, in an endless suspension
between pure potential and activated manifestation.
I think it significant that Fachinelli refers to Romans 7 in order to
explain the Lacanian connection between the Thing' and the 'Law':
the same passage used by Agamben in order to get at the meaning of
Bartleby's 'dead letters.' Fachinelli defines Lacan's term, das Ding, as
'the central place of desire/ which is identified with the 'primordial
mother.' Even though this 'primordial matrix of desire' is in and of
itself unreachable, it (or, better, its incarnation in the real mother) is
nonetheless also prohibited in the form of the incest tabu. Lacan reads
Romans 7 ('I knew sin only by means of the Law. I would not have
known concupiscence if the Law had not said: "Do not desire."') as
explaining well the relation between the Thing and the Law; he merely
substitutes for the word 'sin' the term Thing.' But Fachinelli points out
that Lacan omits Paul's main point, which is that Paul has a new rela-
tion with the Law, one based on the spirit, not the letter. This new
relation is, of course, the basis for a radical 'jump' or 'shift' not only
within the individual Paul, but also within an entire culture. Fachinelli
concludes that 'Lacan's omission stands out as the symptom of an
incapacity to go beyond the order of obedience and transgression'
(194). The ecstatic, 'mystical/ relation with the Law, based on an
embrace of the spirit (or, in nontheological terms, the figurative or
poetic aspect of experience and its representation in language) opens
out onto 'excessive joy/ which is repressed or circumscribed by an
order based on either obedience or transgression; mystical ecstasy thus
goes beyond the barrier of incest into 'an anthropological aspect [that
has been] up to now refused or feared or simply assimilated into a reli-
56 Gianni Celati
gious contextualization' (195). I think it possible to say that Bartleby is

himself beyond obedience or transgression, and his ineluctable pres-
ence sends us glimmers of a realm of experience that could (although
certainly Melville's story does not directly imply this) be profoundly
liberating, both as regards concepts of the individual self and those
that have been at the basis of our organization and understanding of
collective human existence. If writing can tap into this liberating
potential, so to speak, then it partakes of the sacred, understood not as
an aspect of organized religion, but as an integral element of being:
that spiritual element that an exclusively rational concept of human
meaning has drastically marginalized, and maybe even sought to sup-
press entirely, for fear not of suffering, but of 'excessive joy.' It is per-
haps in this sense that Bartleby's tale is comic, for it can be read as the
story of a liberation from the tragic tyranny of the Law into the 'Divine
Comedy' of a subjectivity lived as the joy of the infinitely suspended
sheer potential of mere Being.
My zigzagging journey through some of the writers and thinkers of

importance to the shaping of Celati's thought and practice may seem
to have carried me far from the laconic scrivener who gives the title to
this chapter. I believe, however, that no matter how distant the echoes
of these diverse writings might appear to be in the words that Celati
writes about Bartleby, they nonetheless resonate with a kind of
oblique, 'weak' power, like whispered phrases that haunt us. One final
digression, then, before leaving behind the beloved figure who silently
stares at a blank wall, seeks a kind of nourishment the world cannot
give to him, and goes on 'preferring not to' until he no longer exists. In
a number of essays dedicated to diverse writers, Celati has continued
to develop his ideas about what writing is or could be. I want to refer
now to his reading of one of those writers, Antonio Delfini, because I
think that the ideas put forth in this essay are of special pertinence to
the concept of writing adumbrated in the introduction to 'Bartleby.'
Delfini is typically presented (when considered at all) as a radically
'eccentric' writer; he had little success while alive (he was born in
Modena in 1907 and died in 1963), but critics have dedicated more
attention to his writings in recent years, especially with the 1982 publi-
cation of his Diari (Diaries) and the republication of other works such
as Poesie della fine del mondo (Poems of the end of the world). Celati
begins his essay, 'Antonio Delfini ad alta voce' (Antonio Delfini out
loud), by quoting extensively from 'Racconto che non scrivero' (A
story I shall not write), which dates from 1960 and is included in
Delfini's Diaries. The extract begins: 'After all the harm they've done to
my mama, to my sister and to me, I: with my heart in a tumult, sick,
horribly frightened by the systems of the bourgeoisie of my city ... I:
left without land and without belongings, left without affections, tor-
tured for a joke even by the doctor of P. who has reduced me [to a state
in which] my jaws are swollen and my ears almost deaf, robbed by a
faithless, very rich fiancee ...: I have quite decided to write a story, an
enormous, boundless, fully terrible, vindictive, and condemnatory
story: a story that should have become a novel; a novel that should
have turned into the reality of a Resolute History' (quoted in Celati's
'Antonio Delfini ad alta voce'). Celati argues that it is not the autobio-
graphical element of this outpouring that interests him; rather, it is the
'generosity of [Delfini's] errors,' and the 'energy of a raptus that is quite
without defenses, being completely open and exposed to the offenses
of the world.' Delfini writes not according to the rules of grammar, but
'by ear/ and his 'deformed syntax' and 'swollen sentences' imply a
'flurry of enunciative possibilities that open out at every turn of
phrase.' Celati writes that we can easily assume that Delfini had no
idea where he was going as he 'followed the momentary wave of his
syntax/ Furthermore, Delfini typically did not get very far along as he
rode the waves of his errant writing. He himself wrote in his Diaries
that he had begun various books hundreds of times, all left unfinished.
Celati writes that we can see a Tack of will' or even a kind of 'laziness'
in this inability to conclude, but Delfini in fact explains it as a basic
incapacity to decide among various possibilities, a sense of suffering
caused by the necessity of 'having to say' and 'having to do' one thing
or another. This lack of decisiveness can be considered 'a misfortune'
(una disgrazia), but Celati instead points out that too many writers
write novel after novel, 'simply because they must say and must do,
since they are writers/ The results are not often very illuminating, for
writing done because one feels that one must write is, in Celati's opin-
ion, worth little. He therefore admires Delfini's 'wisdom' in having
understood, very early on in his life, that, in Delfini's own words,
'"every sign (words) [is] different from that which one means ... the
individual claims to give to his expression the exact sign that corre-
sponds to it, [but] given that signs are incredibly far from that which
the individual means, the result easily becomes a greater confusion"'
(Diari; 108). Delfini instead begins with an admission of 'defeat'; he
'intends' nothing, because he knows before he starts to write that his
58 Gianni Celati
words cannot capture his meanings. Celati notes that one of Delfini's
'little tricks of language in order to go forward' is the hypothetical past
mode - 'I would have done, I would have said, I would have been, etc/
- which writer and critic Ginevra Bompiani calls the 'eventual past'
(passato eventuale). Delfini can then give himself over to the pleasure
of 'momentary contingency/ as a non-existent past creates itself in the
present of his non-intentional writing. Whether fuelled by happiness
or desperation, Delfini often succeeds in abandoning himself to writ-
ing. Celati does not want to accept that this is 'ingenuousness/ as crit-
ics are wont to say, for he comments: 'This is like imputing to someone
who is happy the fact that he sees nothing beyond his happiness. Hap-
piness can only be a momentary state to which one abandons oneself,
and as soon as it is seen from outside it collapses in disenchantment/
Instead, he finds a wonderful 'music' in Delfini's prose, such as the
passage cited from the 'Story I Shall Not Write/ in which there is no
separation between a 'major' and a 'minor' key, and we don't know if
we should laugh or cry, if this 'is a drama or a lunatic comedy/ When
words 'take off as they do in this passage, there is no clear distinction
between desperation and happiness, only the contingency of the
moment, beyond history, and beyond any finalizing outcome. In order
to hear this music, Celati writes that Delfini should be read aloud, so
that the 'momentary' and 'contingent' nature of his prose can 'resound
in our ears/ Presumably (Celati does not write this), we readers or lis-
teners might also then be carried along on the waves of language,
beyond desperation and happiness, beyond the strictures of intention-
ality, or, in Lacanian terms, beyond 'obedience' or 'transgression/
Celati admires Delfini's way of writing, which is more allied to
'humming' (canticchiare) or 'grumbling' (brontolare) than to the 'neu-
tral' language of 'those who "know how to talk/" the language of
social or literary eloquence that excludes 'the stutterers, the timid, and
also the happy people who love to say silly things/ Those who speak
knowing what they mean are those who make up 'culture': 'intellectu-
als who claim a clarity without clouds in the sky of their ideas/ The
admiration shown for Delfini's non-intentional mode of writing
implies an admiration for a mode of being as well, one that is not
entrapped in project-oriented, ideologically conditioned actions, but
which instead admits to the fundamental errancy and contingency of
existence.
We are thus brought back one last time to the scrivener, whose 'pref-
erence not to' signals, like Delfini's writing, a withdrawal from the
games of intentionality and mastery that condition our world of

actions and words, making us blind to the 'excessive happiness' possi-
ble in sheer existence and deaf to the music inherent in language. In
Celati's view, the 'comedy' of Bartleby's tale is not incidental to what-
ever meaning it conveys; rather, the scrivener is 'comic' in the strongest
sense of the word, as he triumphs over the adversity of individual,
anomalous existence by giving himself over to it entirely, even unto
death. In the light of Celati's long and deep meditation on the 'ineluc-
tably mild' scrivener, it is possible, I believe, to view the Italian writer's
work, both creative and critical, as aspiring to nothing other than the
continuation of a craft that is refined in the workshop of existence, and
that might nourish others with a deepened awareness of our 'infinite
fraternity': with a crumb of the bread of laconic messengers who
briefly float, like all of us, on the desert wind of ultimately unknowable
life.
2
The Antimonumental:
Redefining Minimalism1
'I don't know if it is an excess or a lack of sensibility, but it's a fact that great
tragedies leave me almost indifferent. There are subtle pains, certain situations
and relationships, that move me quite a bit more than a city destroyed by fire.'
Silvio d'Arzo2
Celati disliked having the term 'minimalist' applied to his writing of

the 19805, for it suggested membership in a literary school or participa-
tion in a trend that critics had defined in reference to several different
art forms (architecture, music) of the recent past, and had 'reactivated'
in order to describe the works of younger writers who began to pub-
lish in the eighties. From Celati's perspective, therefore, the term could
be seen as the result of the typical critical 'endeavor of quickly consult-
ing a code and explaining by means of it/ rendering it impossible to
adhere to 'the taste of the thing ... [to have] any involvement in that
taste' ('Oggetti soffici/ [Soft objects]; 14).3 It is undeniably true that lit-
erary minimalism, in the United States as well as in Italy, has been
more negatively defined and criticized than positively or neutrally
received, that, in short, many critics do not seem to have a taste for it.
Having first come into use in the Italian context in the early 19805, min-
imalism was a critical term borrowed from the United States at a time
when there were few clearly discernible lines or directions in the so-
called new Italian fiction, and critics tended to go on about the 'empti-
ness' and 'chaos' of the current literary scene. Lino Fertile has pro-
posed that one of the reasons for the often negative quality of critical
assessments of the directions of eighties' Italian fiction is that 'the
unexpected ways in which Italian society has evolved since 1968 have
The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 61
called into question the very foundations of contemporary literary his-

toriography, with the consequence that the literary universe appears
now fragmented, confused, contradictory, and empty' (in Baranski and
Fertile, eds.; 17) Given the Italian critical penchant for the creation of
detailed and clearly definable taxonomies, schools, and 'isms' of all
sorts - from the 'stilnovismo' of Dante's era to the 'decadentismo,' 'cre-
puscolarismo/ 'futurismo,' 'neorealismo,' and 'neoavangardismo' of
more recent periods, it is not surprising that new labels, new terms,
new categorizations were sought for what was happening in literature
in the 'post-neo' era of the last twenty or so years. Minimalism was one
of those new terms, applied to a number of younger writers whose
work was, in fact, quite diverse, as if calling them by the same name
would insure that a 'school' would be conjured into being. Celati
found himself dropped into this pool and associated with writers such
as Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Andrea De Carlo, and Daniele Del Giudice, all
of whom began to publish fiction in the 19805, and all of whom were
born in the 19505, that is, almost two decades after Celati. It is little
wonder that he disliked being called a 'younger writer' in the early
and mid-1980s, with all of the implications of novelty, immaturity, and
'up-to-dateness' that such a label implies. His inclusion in this 'school'
was due in great part to his reappearance on the literary scene in 1985
with the collection of short stories, Narratori delle pianure, after a rela-
tively long (seven years) 'disappearance'; he thus seemed to be a 'new'
voice, and a 'minimalist' one at that, given his turn to the short narra-
tive form and the pared-down quality of his style. That critics wrote of
a 'minimalist' Celati was not entirely perverse, therefore, but neither
was Celati's rejection of this label, on what are, I believe, infinitely
more convincing and even more historically accurate grounds.
As a critical catchword, 'minimalism' has been used to describe a
multitude of creative endeavors, from Bauhaus architecture to certain
forms of modern music, from trends in pictorial art of the sixties and
beyond to the fiction of American writers such as Raymond Carver,
Anne Beattie, and Bret Ellis. In his succinct and very useful discussion
of literary minimalism in the Italian context, Stefano Tani rightly notes
that American literary minimalism actually came on the scene later
than its Italian analogue: 'American minimalism is in reality an even
more recent phenomenon than our young narrative, given that it was
only in 1984 that David Leavitt's first book, family Dancing, had the
catalyzing function in the States for the success and reorientation of the
market toward the new recruits that in Italy Andrea De Carlo's Treno di
62 Gianni Celati
panna had in 1981' (140-1; my translation). Nonetheless, young Italian

writers such as De Carlo were 'legitimated by American parallels' (Fer-
tile; 17); furthermore, the term served as an identifying mark by means
of which Italian fiction of the eighties could more easily be drawn into
discussions of fiction in the American context directed towards a broad
readership. An example of this kind of coverage is Sergio Perosa's The
Heirs of Calvino and the Eco Effect/ which appeared on the front page
of the New York Times Book Review of 16 August 1987. In this piece, Pe-
rosa surveys Italian fiction two years after Calvino's death, and writes
that 'the very young are active and rampant, even if in a subdued,
"minimalist" tone/ He emphasizes the American-Italian connection by
mentioning the anthology of new, 'young' narrative edited in 1986 by
Tondelli, whose title, Sotto i 25 Anni (Under 25) 'is obviously meant as
the Italian equivalent of the American anthology 20 Under 30, edited
by Debra Spark' (25). This is one of the very rare times when Celati is
mentioned in a nonacademic venue (Perosa cites his Narratori delle pia-
nure as one of the several examples of a return to the short story form).
Yet most critics who have written on the new Italian narrative as it took
shape in the 19805 are careful to highlight the differences between
American and Italian minimalism. Perosa comments, regarding com-
parisons, that 'qualifications are of course needed, and distinctions
must be made.' His way of distinguishing between Italian and Ameri-
can minimalists, true to the simplistic generalizing typical of such sur-
veys for a general readership, is to assert that writers such as Tondelli,
Celati, Tabucchi, and Parise do not appear to be 'interested, as their
American contemporaries seem to be, in giving a close view of family
life and family relations; nor do we find in them a phantasmagoric pre-
sentation of city life and city landscapes as, for instance, in Jay Mclner-
ney's New York in Bright Lights, Big City, or in Bret Easton Ellis's Los
Angeles in Less Than Zero' (25). Fertile also writes that the term mini-
malism must be 'qualified' when applied to Italian fiction, and he
points out that 'Italy has its own indigenous tradition of minimalist
writing/ whose 'most recent and accomplished representative this cen-
tury was perhaps Carlo Cassola/ in whose sixties' novels 'the social
and political dimensions of experience were utterly rejected in favour
of the calligraphic description of a banal, humble, and insignificant
domesticity' (17). Nor does Tani make an exception to this critical ten-
dency to 'distinguish'; he emphasizes the important role played by the
standardization of Italian - via a more universal educational system
and especially via the medium of television - in the shaping of Italian
minimalists. More than shared thematic or genre-related elements (the

prevalence of the short story, for example), it is the consolidation of a
'linguistic koine, of a generation of writers who in great part grew up
with television ... far from any dialectal influence' (145-6; my transla-
tion) that characterizes Italian minimalism. For the first time, young
writers truly do speak the same language and are thus assured a larger
audience for their works: an audience made up of television watchers
like themselves, who have lost all ties with a dialectally inflected real-
ity. Whether seen as a kind of writing allied to the short fiction form,
thematically reflective of unexceptional quotidian life, or embodied in
standardized, flat, and uninflected Italian, 'minimalism' was sum-
marily used in an attempt to taxonomize the so-called new fiction of
the 19805 and to define a 'young generation' of Italian writers who
began to publish around the time of Calvino's death. That Celati was
included in this 'group' (rather than recognized as a model for a
much more specific direction among some younger writers, including
Ermanno Cavazzoni and Daniele Benati) reflects the superficiality that
can result from an excess of terminological zeal.
This brief discussion of the recent history of the term minimalism
reveals, I hope, how approximate and instrumentalized the term was
when it was 'quickly' pulled out of the American critical 'code,' as
Celati would put it, and applied fairly willy-nilly to the 'new Italian
narrators' of the 19805, which ostensibly included Celati redux. I would
like instead to concentrate some attention on the term itself, first as it
was (negatively) defined in the American context, and, next, as it
might be (positively) redefined, and reactivated as a more legitimate
and accurate way of understanding some aspects of Celati's work not
only of the eighties but also earlier and later. In fact, I must admit that I
am not convinced that 'minimalism' should be used at all in defining
that work, because the term has more or less solidified into a certain
denotative and connotative field of critical meaning that does not
apply to Celati. Yet I am attracted to the effort of redefining the term,
perhaps precisely because I remain unconvinced that it has been done
justice. Like so many other widely used critical terms - postmodern-
ism, for example - it exists almost in spite of the lack of consensus as to
what precisely it means, and exploring its heuristic usefulness as well
as its limits seems to me to be a potentially clarifying undertaking.
What 'minimalist' designates, in a very general sense, is obvious
enough: a stripping down (structurally, stylistically, thematically,
tonally); an avoidance of decoration or ornament; a desire, as Mark
64 Gianni Celati
Twain put it, to 'eschew surplusage.' A dictionary definition of the

term defines it as 'being or offering no more than what is required or
essential. This definition, so placidly transparent on the surface, pro-
vokes rebellion against its appeal to common sense, however, for how
does one ever determine what constitutes 'no more than what is
required or essential' in the realm of art? Creativity seems to be an
ally of the ever-unquiet human desire for 'more' rather than the
implied satisfaction of 'enough. Why would writers wish to attain just
'enough/ to 'offer no more than what is required or essential/ no mat-
ter what form that offering took? Or, on the other hand, is this not
what art always aspires to? And, if so, what distinguishes the 'essenti-
ality' of minimalism from basic artistic essentiality and creative econ-
omy? Leaving aside these ahistorical questions, and turning to the
temporally determined critical context in which terms are born and
live, it is clear that literary and other kinds of minimalism have been
defined in great part by what they react to and against (as is the case
with most historically conditioned taxonomic terms). Just as 'roman-
ticism' is understood as a reaction to 'neoclassicism/ or 'neoavant-
gardism' as a rejection of 'neorealism/ so literary minimalism is seen
at least in part as an oppositional countering of mimetic maximalism.
The radical limits of such definitional strategies are evident. It may be
true to say that 'small' is 'not big/ but we are still left to grapple with
what smallness in fact is. Frederick Barthelme, whose writing was
called minimalist, highlighted the fundamental inadequacy of defin-
ing minimalism by what it is not in a 1988 piece in the New York Times
Book Review wittily entitled 'On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist
Spills Bean.' He listed the basic 'charges against so-called "minimal-
ist" fiction/ which are, he believes, based 'on some ideas of what
fiction used to be, or is thought to have been. The main failings attrib-
uted to minimalist writing are '(A) omission of big "philosophical"
ideas, (B) not enough history or historical sense, (C) lack of (or wrong)
political posture, (D) insufficient "depth" of character, (E) common-
place description too reliant on brand names, (F) drabness of style, (G)
moral poverty.' Barthelme comments that 'the charges are typically
framed in the negative because these are criticisms of what this fic-
tion isn't, not of what it is' (all quotations from page i). To define or to
criticize something in terms of what it is not is an ancient and
honored rhetorical strategy, in theology, politics, literature, and life,
but to be ancient and honored is not necessarily always to be ade-
quate or right. My interest is in considering what a positive approach
to defining 'minimalism' might yield, one that might get beyond the
most obvious and self-evident generalities such as 'spareness' or
'essentiality/
John Barm, another writer who 'stood accused' of minimalist writ-
ing in the recent past, commented on a different failing of the criticism
dedicated to minimalism: the lumping together of writers of quite dif-
ferent styles and poetics under this vaguely defined term. He wrote in
a 1986 essay called 'A Few Words About Minimalism' that 'like any
clutch of artists collectively labeled, the writers just mentioned [Bar-
thelme, Beattie, Carver, Mason, Robinson, Wolff] are at least as differ-
ent from one another as they are similar' (2). In the piece quoted above,
Barthelme also writes of the many works that have 'been colored with
this broad, if single-haired, brush.' But he says that he will nonetheless
use the collective 'we' when discussing minimalism: 'I have been
charged [with being a minimalist] and, even though I don't feel a spe-
cial kinship with others similarly charged - say, Raymond Carver, Ann
Beattie, Mary Robinson - I do feel the kinship of appreciating their
work, thinking it serious and compelling, worthy of attention' (25).
This tendency to put many writers together in the same boat was
equally widespread in Italian critical assessments of the new fiction of
the 19803, and Celati thus found himself afloat with a number of much
younger and extremely different writers, some of whose work he also
found 'worthy of attention/ if certainly not directly modeled on or
analogous to his own. It is clear that many American writers were on
the defensive when it came to being called 'minimalists'; they felt it as
an 'accusation' rather than a definition of their work. The 'new' gener-
ation of Italian writers were not as defensive about the term, perhaps
because it is so much an aspect of Italian critical assessments to label
and historicize, and perhaps also because it implied (or said outright)
that their fiction shared attributes of a Zeitgeist that was 'American/
that is, 'cutting-edge/ 'up-to-date/ and fashionably 'young' in much
the same way as Nike shoes, fast food, and blockbuster movies were.
Again, it is not difficult to understand Celati's aversion to being
painted with this 'brush' of youthful contemporaneity.
In the following attempt to redefine minimalism as the term might
pertain to aspects of Celati's work, I want first to use it in a nontechni-
cal sense, as something like a synonym for 'subdued' or 'understated.'
Other words that come to mind are 'modest' and 'antimonumental/
although this last term is guilty of the crime of defining by means of
opposition or negation. I begin with some general observations, then
66 Gianni Celati
move towards a more detailed and specific redefinition of what in

Celati's writing over the years might be called 'minimalist/
First, throughout his career as teacher, theorist, essayist, and writer,
Celati has consistently distanced himself from the monumental
machines known as the Institutions of Literature and Academia, opt-
ing instead for a constant but minimal involvement - on the sidelines,
so to speak - in the games of these powerful public spheres. Next, his
so-called production over the last thirty years might be seen as mini-
mal, compared with that of writers such as Calvino, or multimedial
creators such as Pasolini. And, until relatively recently, it seemed that
his influence on younger generations of writers was minimal, again
unlike Calvino or, before him, Carlo Emilio Gadda. In spite of the
ostensibly negative connotations of such a characterization, Celati's
voice has been heard over the past several decades by those who have
been able to listen to the resonances of understatement as much as to
the louder tones of ever-present and more imposing 'music.' There
have been some exceptionally good listeners, among them Calvino,
who heard Celati very early on and discerned a talent worth following.
Calvino in fact introduced Celati's first novel, Comiche, in 1971.
Although Celati published only four novels in the 19705, he wrote
many theoretical essays and translated several texts from the French
(Beckett, Celine) and English (Swift, Conrad). He also published the
volume of essays, Finzioni occidental! (Western fictions), in 1975. Even
during his period of ostensible silence, from the late seventies to the
mid-eighties, Celati continued to write and publish essays in some-
what out-of-the-way journals such as Iterarte and Quindi, and, in the
context of his teaching of Anglo-American literature at Bologna, he
produced an insightful and useful manual on narrative techniques
entitled Frasi per narratori (Sentences for narrators) in 1983. In 1985, he
'reappeared' with the collection of stories, Narratori delle pianure, and
has published fiction, essays, and translations steadily since then. Yet
Celati continued to be true to his 'minimalizing' public style when, in
1987, in an interview by Antonietta Lapenna published in the journal
Gradiva, he refused to speak of 'forthcoming' work, stating instead that
for him writing was not some current 'work-in-progress,' but rather 'a
much more fragmentary and casual thing, an accumulation from
which something suddenly comes forth, something that is almost
always a failure' ('Conversazione con Gianni Celati'; 56). In spite of his
higher level of visibility on the literary scene in this decade, then, his
involvement with the literary establishment remains minimal and fun-
damentally antagonistic. Celati has consistently refused the role of

'author/ which in Italy typically means playing a highly public role:
intervening in literary debates pronouncing on the present and future
not only of literature but of all manner of social and political issues,
and so forth. In sum, his dedication to writing has been 'maximal/
while his involvement in institutionalized letters has been willfully
'minimal.'
The characterization of Celati offered above has to do with an extra-
textual style of being rather than with style as seen in written texts.
Turning to the issue of style in the textual sense, it would first appear
that to call Celati's earlier fictions 'minimalist' would be to distort out
of all recognizable shape the usual meaning of the term. Better, then, to
speak of a 'minimalizing tendency/ which pertains to poetics and prac-
tice both. As for Celati's poetics - his basic orientation to and idea of
writing, his narrative choices, his literary 'ideology/ if you will - from
the very beginning of his work as a writer, he has consistently rejected
the model of what he called 'il racconto monumentale' or the 'monu-
mental tale/ that is, the 'maximalist' fiction described so well in Bar-
thelme's list of attributes lacking in minimalist fiction. The Manzonian
model - so determinant for modern Italian fiction - in which an omni-
scient narrator projects a scenic, coherent, and instructional interpreta-
tion of characters and events onto the screen of a highly polished and
carefully articulated narrative, is refused by Celati in favor of a pan-
oramic, non-linear, and antididactic narrative mode closer in origin to
the picaresque romance that to the full-blown realist bourgeois novel.
In his fictions written in the 19705, Celati adopts the point of view of
emarginated types (insane people in Comiche, idiots in Le avventure di
Guizzardi, adolescents and exiles in La banda del sospiri and Lunario del
paradiso), thus eroding the sanctity of the normative family and the
dominance of rationality inherent in more traditional novelistic visions
of experience in which marriage, personal growth, and mastery of the
'art of living' play such foundational roles. Celati's characters in these
texts are instead unprotected by normative social institutions, lost in
futile searches or caught up in absurd 'adventures' that do not lead
anywhere, least of all to illumination. More significantly, Celati does
not write about these characters from the standpoint of a 'rational/
fully integrated, and normatively adjusted narrator; he writes through
them, using a first-person voice that speaks directly in a highly eccen-
tric, stylistically 'incontinent' (the term is Celati's own) language in
Comiche and Guizzardi, and in the groping, confused language of
68 Gianni Celati
adolescence and love-befuddled early maturity in La banda and Luna-

rio. One of the sources of inspiration for the first two books was the
writing of Celati's high school and college students who, in trying to
imitate the contours of correct, polished expression, produced instead
what Celati called 'masterpieces of dissent' in writing that 'followed
the curve of spoken speech and extended itself extraordinarily through
a kind of fabulatory incontinence' (quoted by Calvino in his blurb on
Comiche included in the 1971 edition). The extraliterary models behind
these early fictions (college essays, silent films), the concentration on
eccentric protagonists, and the refusal to emulate anything even
remotely resembling the 156110 stile' or high style of traditional Italian
literary language all distanced Celati from the 'maximalist' Italian tra-
dition that began with Manzoni and continued through the main-
stream realist novels of this century.
In these fictions written in the 19705, Celati also avoided well-made
themes; his content as well as his language was 'improper,' consisting
of 'fatti deboli' or weak facts. In place of the strong causalities and his-
torically resonant content of the 'maximalist' tradition, he substituted a
proliferation of basically unrelated, trivial events, strung together on
the crooked thread of the protagonists' wanderings. For example, the
poor lost soul Guizzardi experiences a haphazard series of mainly neg-
ative 'adventures' before ending up on a park bench where, in the final
lines of the book, he decides to rest. His adventures end at this point
only because he stops moving and not because any resolution or logi-
cal 'end' has been reached. Celati's third novel, La banda dei sospiri, con-
cerns an adolescent boy nicknamed Garibaldi who seeks to escape the
oppressive limits of the middle-class family into which he has been
born. Celati explicitly designates the book (in the cover blurb) a 'rac-
conto comune' (an ordinary or mediocre story) in clear contrast to the
'racconto monumentale' that reflects momentous historical events or
spectacular spiritual epiphanies. He further comments that the book
was born not of the desire to present us with 'penetrating interpreta-
tions of History' but with the world of 'quotidian causality and repeti-
tion. Similarly, the fourth novel, Lunario del paradiso, recounts the
'everyday' adventures of Giovanni as he pursues his beloved Antje in
her native Germany; the book ends with Giovanni's return to Italy and
the actual scene of writing of the book we have just read: 'We're now in
April, says my typewriter, and we've finished.' An imagined 'spy' next
door whispers to the writer that the book is 'a complete falsification/
to which the narrator replies in the final words of the novel: 'you too
try to write yourself some stories and you'll see that this is the god-
damned truth' (184-5). The book maintains throughout the casual and
antiliterary tone of a spoken remembrance that constructs itself as it
goes, rather than according to some pre-established order or meaning.4
In what sense, then, are these fictions of the 19705 'minimalist'? On
the level of what critic Maria Corti calls 'the form of the expression'5
(contrasted to 'the form of the content'), they are anything but; the lan-
guage of Comiche and Guizzardi especially is, as Guido Almansi wrote,
'expansive, noisy, comic, acrobatic, aggressive, carnal, violent, ungram-
matical, ribald' ( 'Gli idilli padani'; 14). If Guizzardi is at all categorize-
able, for example, it would best be placed under the rubric of
'expressionism/ understood in the Italian critical context, in Maria
Corti's words, as that 'stylistic current that runs through the history of
all of our literature, from its origins right up to the present/ and which
is made up of works by '"irregular" writers who give special impor-
tance to the linguistic problematic' (Viaggio ml '900; 695). Almansi
offers the genial term 'gut novel' to describe these experimental texts,
and makes a clear-cut distinction between them and the more 'cere-
bral' writings of the 19805 and 19905. In comparing the 'early' to the
'later' Celati, Almansi (who clearly vastly prefers the early version)
used the image of the proverbial thin man inside every fat one; Celati's
first fictions were written by a 'fat' writer who wallowed in linguistic
'carnality' and excess, but inside lurked 'a thin writer who pushed him
toward the heaths of minimalism, there where Beckett elaborates his
version of laconic literature, and the Kafka of the short parables con-
denses the anguish of the universe into minimalist formulations of
very dry writing' ('Gli idilli padani'; 14). I agree that Celati's writing in
the 19705 is not expressively minimalist, and can easily be seen as radi-
cally different, in its linguistic and stylistic traits, from the pared-down
stories he began to write in the 19803. Where, then, might be that conti-
nuity, that 'minimalist tendency' which I believe is to be found
throughout Celati's writing?
Long before the 'new' eighties' generation of Italian writers 'discov-
ered' the thematics of banal quotidian life and sought inspiration in
extraliterary models such as the cinema or everyday spoken language,
Celati had not only made these 'discoveries/ but had written both crit-
ically and creatively about and by means of them. In his fiction of the
19705, he did not opt for the 'commonplace description' and 'drabness
of style' listed by Barthelme as qualities typically ascribed to minimal-
ist writing, but I think it possible to use the rest of that list for an oper-
jo Gianni Celati
ation I now want to attempt, an operation not of applying the

(negative) definitions of minimalism's shortcomings, but rather of
reversing those definitions, with the goal of 'positifying' the term, of
delving into what minimalism might be rather than what it fails to be.
It is possible that by considering Celati's work specifically, some light
might be shed on the category of minimalism itself, in which so many
writers, both here and abroad, have recently been included. My goal is,
therefore, twofold: first, to propose some positive definitions of mini-
malist tendencies and, second, to highlight Celati's particular contribu-
tion when viewed under the sign of the minimal.
Barthelme's list opens with the charge of 'omission of big "philo-
sophical" ideas.' Reversing this negative definition, I propose instead
that minimalist fiction has 'small' philosophical ideas or, more radi-
cally, has no philosophical ideas (since, traditionally, 'philosophical
ideas' are always 'big,' and cannot be associated with 'smallness' in
any way). Minimalism could then be a term used to describe a type of
narrative that implicitly or explicitly rejects the dominant perception
and practice of philosophy as the realm of Trig ideas.' Rather than
being criticized as a form of narrative expression that 'lacks' philo-
sophical resonance, minimalist writing could be understood as itself
pointing to a deficiency or radical limitation within traditional Western
philosophical and literary cultural orientations, which are often blind
to the presumption of mastery and power contained within their own
rhetorical and analytical strategies. Celati's seventies' fiction clearly
reflects this challenge to metaphysical, self-privileging Thought and
Literature based on the acceptance of the superiority of 'big' ideas over
'small' ones. His writing opts instead to concentrate on the 'local' (the
commonplace, unexceptional story) the 'physical' (corporeally condi-
tioned humor), and casual rather than linear, progressive structures of
discourse, the latter of which presuppose the existence of locatable and
fixable 'ends' and philosophical or narrational 'Truths.' His stories and
essays written since the mid-eighties similarly highlight a postmeta-
physical perspective, albeit with very different techniques, as seen in
the Bartleby-like, laconic character Baratto, or in the quiet tonality and
pared-down prose style of the stories in Narmtori delle pianure. The
directions that Celati explored in his fictions of the seventies were, in
fact, prophetic in many ways of certain current postmetaphysical, post-
modern emphases on localized knowledge, weakened subjectivity, and
the fractured status of foundational 'grand narratives,' the Italian ver-
sion of which culminated in the pensiero debole or 'weak thought' school
headed up by Gianni Vattimo. That Celati explored these concepts in

extravagantly 'carnal' prose meant that the term minimalist never
came into play, yet in terms of his poetics and of his choice of marginal-
ized characters and unexceptional, 'mediocre' stories, he was in fact
writing in a way that was to a great extent subsequently 'discovered'
by much younger writers and philosopher-critics working in a decid-
edly minimalist manner within a decidedly postmodern context.
Moving on to Barthelme's second negative definition, 'not enough
history or historical sense,' and reversing this to assert positively that
minimalism often questions the assumptions at the basis of historically
conditioned narrative, the issue of history and especially of historic-
graphic projects emerges. One of the fundamental queries raised by the
suggestion that minimalist fiction does not contain 'enough history or
historical sense' is: Precisely what is history? More to the point, what is
historical representation, either fictional or factual, and what forms does
it take? In considering these questions, Hayden White has written that
'the official wisdom of the modern historiographical establishment has
it that there are three basic kinds of historical representation, the
imperfect "historicality" of two of which is evidenced in their failure to
attain to full narrativity of the events of which they treat. These three
kinds are the annals, the chronicle, and the history proper.' The two
'imperfect' kinds - the annals and the chronicle - fail to reveal them-
selves 'as possessing a structure, an order of meaning'; instead, the
annals form 'completely lacks this narrative component, consisting
only of a list of events ordered in chronological sequence,' while the
chronicle 'often seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but
typically fails to achieve it. More specifically, the chronicle usually is
marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure.' White summarizes:
'While annals represent historical reality as if real events did not dis-
play the form of story, the chronicle represents it as if real events
appeared to human consciousness in the form of unfinished stories'
('The Value of Narrativity'; 5). He then proceeds to question the
assumptions that claim the superiority of fully narrativized historical
representation over the 'failed' narrativizing modes of annals and
chronicle forms. Minimalist fiction, criticized for its Tack' of history or
historical consciousness, might be seen as not so much lacking in his-
tory as displacing a mode of historical representation that is, like tradi-
tional realist fictional and historical representation, fully plotted,
narrativized, and conclusive. Instead, minimalist fictions tend to use
the 'flawed' techniques of annals or chronicle representation, 'mere
72 Gianni Celati
sequence without beginning or end' or 'sequences of beginnings that

only terminate and never conclude/ as White describes them. These
fictions, accused of a 'lack of historical consciousness/ may instead be
contributing to a different 'history/ made up of the common locales,
unimportant individuals, and unexceptional experiences of quotidian
life in our times.
In the late 19605 and early 19705 Celati was meditating seriously on
the meaning of history and historiographic writing in the context of
conversations with his colleague at Bologna, historian Carlo Ginzburg
and with his friend and mentor Calvino; all three were rethinking
modernism and modernity, making use of the thought of Benjamin,
Deleuze and Guattari, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, and others.
Their interest centered on an archeological conception of historical
knowledge - elaborated most rigorously by Foucault - and some of the
results of this work are available in Celati's essay 'II bazar archeolog-
ico' (The archeological bazaar), a complex piece that is best read, as
Celati himself told me, in conjunction with Calvino's 'Lo sguardo
archeologico' (The archeological glance), given that the essays were the
result of collaboration between the two. I shall return to a detailed dis-
cussion of this work further on; for now, I simply quote the following
from Celati's essay: 'History is always history of the leaders and of
monuments, while archeology is instead the tale by Ruzante "che iera
vegnu de campo" [who had returned from the field]' ('II bazar archeo-
logico'; 20); '... [archeology] always works on local and molecular
wholes, not being able to achieve the leap from quantity to quality, to
choose an abstract axiom that might take account of the totality of
events by means of a focal point' (21-2). There is no reason to make of
history a temporal rather than a spatial field, when in place of the
search for individual identity there is noted pure exteriority in relation
to us and to our origins. It is exactly in those spaces [that] are marginal-
ized or simply ignored by memory-tradition, that resides that differ-
ence without which history is tautology' (32). 'History is always the
physical world, with its monuments and its streets, the streets that lead
to the monuments, the monuments that line up the streets, the cities
that rise up around monuments, the streets that join cities with impor-
tant monuments and leave others outside. Archeology, if it is a science,
is the science of margins. It is the science of that which is left outside
the city, or is buried in the city, behind the grand facades, or on the
dark side of vistas' (32). Minimalist fictions' concentration on often
spatialized visions of the 'local' and the 'molecular' - such as is seen in
Celati's own Narratori delle pianure - is reflective of this revised 'histori-

cal sense/ rather than of some simple 'lack' of it.
Moral as well as factual value is connoted by the phrase 'conclusive
evidence.' Another negative quality of minimalist writing indicated in
Barthelme's list is 'moral poverty.' I think that it is significant that min-
imalist writings seldom contain overt 'morals' in the stories they tell.
To positivize this definition, I would say that minimalism expresses
'moral inconclusiveness'; that it typically leaves the drawing of conclu-
sions to the reader rather than incorporating a necessary moral within
the logical and structural emphases of the stories themselves. The cur-
rent debate regarding the validity of using experiential data as repre-
senting conclusive evidence in a legal sense serves to underline the
complexities inherent in the very concept of 'evidence/ and the related
problem (The 'Rashamon' effect, if you will) of moralizing based on
any single given narrative of experience.6 Here again, White's
approach is useful. His interest is finally in 'the value attached to nar-
rativity itself, especially in representations of reality of the sort which
historical discourse embodies.' He argues that 'narrativizing discourse
serves the purpose of moralizing judgements/ and that the ostensible
failure of annals and chronicles to do justice to history is less ascribable
to the shortcoming of the modes of perception they imply than to 'their
failure to represent the moral under the aspect of the aesthetic.' White's
final question - 'Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?' - is, of
course, highly pertinent to fictional as well as historiographic modes of
representation (all quotations from White, The Value of Narrativity';
22-3). I think it absurdly reductive to state that minimalist fiction
actively seeks to avoid or is innocently unaware of moral questions (as
is implied in the accusation of 'moral poverty'); what this mode of nar-
ration tends to avoid is, instead, an overt 'moral' to the stories told. In
his 1975 essay quoted above, Celati writes: 'History, be it as historiogra-
phy or as a literary adaptation, an epic or a novel, tends always to
resolve the meaning of great gatherings of facts by means of the artifice
of agnition: that point, original scene or declaration of a truth, at which
discontinuities are annulled through the revelation of their direction ...
this is the moral of the story, the denouement, which pre-modern narra-
tive could not do without. Now, agnition is by its nature anagogic, that
is, it "carries upward," renders sublime or lifts the brute mass of events
from the materiality of pure experience, in order to transfigure it into
signs, symbols, acquisitions of knowledge of a comprehensible des-
tiny ...' (21). Minimalist writing tends to emphasize the antisublime
74 Gianni Celati
quality of modernist writing by remaining squarely fixed in the realm

of materiality, the literal, and the directionless. Celati's Guizzardi, for
example, can be seen as a 'symbol' of the emarginated types of modern
society - the homeless, the inarticulate -, as, in short, an incarnated,
'sublime' indictment of contemporary society. We readers are com-
pletely free to choose to see him as such. But we are also free to see him
as the fictional sum of a stylistic practice dedicated to recreating corpo-
real, cinematic humor in language; as 'representative' of nothing
beyond language's remarkable flexibility and inventiveness, or of the
errant contingency of everyday events. There is no authorial narrating
voice in the book that directs us towards a clear 'moral,' nor is there
any structural conclusiveness, by means of a denouement, that reveals to
us an end (in the double sense of termination and goal) that was inher-
ent - and therefore inevitable - in both the etiology and development
of the narrative events themselves. There is a 'moral of no clear moral,'
on the other hand; we are left to consider fundamental questions of
decidability, evidentiary knowledge, justice, 'final' meaning. I would
therefore argue that the so-called moral poverty of much minimalist
writing is instead moral complexity, and that, in this sense, it is a narra-
tive mode much more reflective of real, lived experience than many
moralizing tales still told to us by literature and other, more potentially
'dangerous' forms of discourse in the social and political spheres.
This brings me to the last two items on Barthelme's list of minimal-
ism's 'negative attributes': 'lack of (or wrong) political posture,' and
'insufficient "depth" of character.' In the case of the first accusation, it
is clear that minimalism's challenge to traditional representational
techniques in which experience is recreated mimetically and teleologi-
cally can be seen as a broader 'political' challenge to the ostensible
permanency of values connected with transparent and moralizing nar-
ratives. In Italy, the 'younger' writers identified with minimalism in
the 19805 tended to reflect the generalized confusion and exhaustion
felt throughout the political sphere, whether left or right. Certainly,
their writing revealed more cynicism than active engagement, more
soft-pedaling of identifiable ideological convictions than propositions
of a 'strong/ project-oriented political mentality. In the United States,
John Earth suggested in his 1986 essay that a sort of 'hangover' of
depression produced by the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle may
have had something to do with the development of a minimalist mode,
or what he called a T don't want to or cannot talk about it' attitude. He
also suggests that the energy crisis of the 19805 may have militated
against profligacy of any sort, including the narrational. The question

of 'lack of (or wrong) political posture' is, to my mind, too vaguely
posed to be of much worth in redefining minimalism ('wrong' accord-
ing to whose version of what view of politics?), and I would say only
that minimalist preferences regarding philosophical thought, history,
and morality do not so much lack political resonance as they challenge
'strong' political and ideological discourses by obliquely putting into
doubt the foundational bases of any and all master narratives, no mat-
ter in which realm they are deployed.
I find more useful the charge of 'insufficient "depth" of character' in
my operation of 'positifying' minimalism. Minimalist fiction does
indeed tend to eschew the creation of fully rounded, psychologically
complex, and 'deep' characters whose thoughts, motivations, and feel-
ings are set forth in detailed scenes ('showing') or extended authorial
interventions ('telling'). Instead, the minimalist mode gives us bare-
bones exposition, little description of 'inwardness,' and desultory dia-
logue of the unrevealing, everyday sort We the readers are again left
with the task of deciding what kind of 'people' these characters are, and
what their motivations might in fact be. Rather than branding this style
as insufficient it is possible to read it positively as partaking in the
broader uncertainties of our era regarding identity and the categories of
'deep' and 'shallow, 'inner' and 'outer.' In my discussion of Bartleby
and of the concepts regarding identity attaching to this figure, I high-
lighted how Celati's work since the eighties has explored the realm of
'visible truth' and 'appearances' rather than that of 'hidden' essences.
Yet even in his most early fiction, it is possible to see a rejection of psy-
chologically conditioned characterization; characters such as Guiz-
zardi, Garibaldi, and Giovanni do not themselves have any inkling of
their 'innermost' motives for action and thought, and they move
through the external world - skim the 'surface,' so to speak - in an
errancy that is linguistic as well as spatial. Like his fiction from the 1985
Narratori delle pianure and continuing through the subsequent collec-
tions of stories, Quattro novelle sulle apparenze and Verso la face, as well as
the very recent Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto, in
which Celati's interests in the significance of appearances, sheer exter-
nality, and the theatricality of self-presentation through language are
explicitly shown, his early fictions already manifested a preference for
surface, and 'shallow' embodiments of character. As in the case of Bar-
thelme's other ostensible deficiencies so too in this case do we see at
work the assumption that 'depth' is good and desirable and 'superfi-
76 Gianni Celati
cial' is bad and dangerous, a critical view that, at least with regard to
Celati's work, does not do justice to the complexities of his underlying
poetics and the resultant stylistic and structural elements of his fictions.
From this fairly linear exercise of reversing the 'negative' attributes of

minimalism, I return now to the zigzagging mode most congenial to
my view of Celati's work. I have attempted to make the point that
Celati did not rise up as a 'reborn minimalist' in the mid-eighties; his
earliest fictions and essays show a fundamental minimalizing ten-
dency and a related poetics of antimonumentalism that are continu-
ously part of his research, if in different theoretical guises and
variously transformed narrative styles, over the last several decades.
Two essays published in the 19705 and one published in the early 19805
testify in diverse ways to this basic antimonumentalism, all of which I
want to discuss in the pages that follow. Before doing so, however,
remaining faithful to the zigzag, I turn first to the volume Parlamenti
buffi, published in 1989. In this volume Celati includes Le avventure di
Guizzardi (1973), La banda del sospiri (1976), and Lunario del paradise
(1978), the last novel having been completely rewritten. This volume is
not simply a new edition of old works, not only because of the rewrit-
ing of Lunario, but also because of the way in which Celati now charac-
terizes them in his introductory piece, 'Congedo dell'autore al suo
libro' (The author's farewell to his book). The comic, 'carnal' effects
that were so much at the heart of these fictions when they were first
written are not denied, but they are radically downplayed in the new
characterization of them as 'parlamenti/ a term that Celati appropri-
ates to his own writing and which he tells us was used in the past to
designate a 'gathering dedicated to discussions and story-telling, like
those ancient meetings on love, of men and women brought together in
a pleasant place.' Celati also notes that 'parlamento' was also used sim-
ply to mean a 'conversation' or a 'simple discourse, such as the one
that our excellent story-teller Masuccio Salernitano writes for his book
of tales "Discourse of the author on his book."' The term can be
extended to allude to 'the taste of moving one's tongue, that is, of
speaking for the pleasure of speaking, with empty and nonsensical
chit-chat.' This is what the term 'parlamento' means in the lexicon of
Folengo - 'our great comic poet' - and in 'a famous funny dialogue by
Angelo Beolco, known as Ruzante.' This meaning - casual and insig-
nificant speaking for the pleasure of it - is the one that he wants to
apply to his own fictions, in which there are 'three characters who
recite their stories, something that happens not without a great waste
of breath, and with quite minimal benefit, except for blessed laughter
that does some good' (all quotations from 'Congedo'; 7). Rather than
being presented as having their origin in the context of the neoavant-
garde experimentalism of the late sixties and early seventies, these
writings are now situated within a much older Italian literary tradition,
which includes medieval and Renaissance conversations on love and
ancient modes of storytelling. There is also the fairly self-conscious ref-
erence to Folengo and Ruzante as models for these modern comic texts.
The emphasis has shifted from the comic materiality of language to
the 'vanity' of language understood as 'wasted breath/ from the
embodied fullness of linguistic inventiveness to the dematerialized
emptiness of any and all linguistic elaboration. The second brief sec-
tion of the 'Congedo' speaks directly to these 'parlamenti' from Celati's
past; in a rhetorical move, an apostrophe, which is more typical of the
lyric tradition, Celati has his book ask 'Non e vanita tutto quello che ho
detto?' (Isn't everything I've said mere emptiness?), to which the
author of them replies: 'Si, libro, questo certamente tu sei, fiato perso e
tempo perduto' (Yes, book, this you surely are, wasted breath and lost
time). This exchange is followed by a harsh critique of the contempo-
rary Italian literary scene, in which 'prizes and public recognition' are
the desperate goal of those who seek to guarantee that their own
'wasted breath and lost time' have some value: all the institutions and
trappings of public glory 'calm them a bit, puffing them up and raising
them above terraferma afterward only to make them still more anxious,
at that moment when each has his own prize, each very fearful that the
lost breath of another might be less lost than his own.' Celati calls these
signs of public valorization of writing 'parlamenti dell'avarizia' (gath-
erings or chatter of avarice) that exist only in order that others recog-
nize one's own worth; they are also 'patetici sotterfugi per scansare
1'estremo giudizio che ci aspetta' (pathetic subterfuges for dodging the
final great judgment that waits for us). (This 'grumbling' mode is remi-
niscent of Delfini's 'scrittura brontolante' and will emerge centrally in
Celati's 1996 Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto al teatro di Rio Saliceto, which I
discuss at length in a later chapter.) Celati thus concludes that being
forgotten is the best thing that can happen to a book ('niente e migliore
dell'oblio'), and he tells his own book to 'go tranquilly into the world,
for the very little time that has been given to you,' repeating that his
writing is made up of nothing more than 'recite e sciocchezze' (recita-
tions and nonsense) in which breath is 'abundantly' wasted, as is nee-
78 Gianni Celati
essary in order to speak, that is, to practice the 'art of lost breath' (all
quotations from 'Congedo'; 8-9). Celati's antirnonumentalism, shown
in the earlier characterization of these fictions of the seventies as 'com-
monplace stories/ is here intensified by means of an even more radical
denial of any lasting meaning or significance that might attach not
only to these works but to any written elaboration of language, any
text. Although written, the fictions are 'wasted breath/ as ephemeral
and unfixable as spoken speech. With this new frame to his earlier
works, Celati seeks, I believe, to bring them into the realm of 'appear-
ances' and 'ephemera' in which his more explicitly minimalist fictions
of the eighties reside, or, at the very least, to suggest that there is less of
a divide between the view of writing that conditioned the early comic
texts and the later, less comic ones than might seem to be the case. The
new presentation of these fictions is not, to my mind, entirely success-
ful, for it is as if we are to forget the attitudes towards comic fiction that
Celati had at the time he wrote these 'commonplace stories' in favor of
seeing them solely as linked to the Vanity' of orality, which is an atti-
tude underlying his short fictions of the eighties and beyond. Nonethe-
less, I think that it is significant that Celati presents his early work
under the sign of radical antirnonumentalism and highlights once
more the modest and minimal claims that he makes regarding their
lasting status as 'Literature.' Nor is it insignificant, as I hope to make
clear in the following discussion, that Parlamenti buffi is dedicated to
the memory of Celati's great friend, mentor, and collaborator Italo
Calvino, a writer and thinker who provided an outstanding model of
modesty and who engaged in a constant reconsideration of the poten-
tial as well as the limits of literary writing, even though he himself had
become something like a 'monument' within Italian letters.
Calvino's essay, 'Lo sguardo dell'archeologo' (The archeologist's

glance) was first published in his 1980 collection of essays entitled
Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e societa (Bygones: Discourses
on literature and society). The essays range from those written in the
mid- and late fifties to those written in the late seventies, and are, as
Calvino explains in his two-page presentation of them, 'declarations of
poetics/ general programs that he often tended to elaborate and just as
often tended then to forget. He notes that he began his career with the
'youthful ambition ... of a project for the construction of a new litera-
ture that would serve in the construction of a new society' (clearly an
allusion to the post-war period in which so-called neorealist ideals
dominated). As he writes these words in 1980, however, Calvino says

that 'the world I have under my eyes couldn't be more opposite to the
image that those good intentions projected onto the future/ The society
of 1980 shows itself to be 'like a collapse, like a landslide, like a cancer
... and literature survives dispersed in the fissures and disconnections/
thus revealing what was no doubt already present within him in the
optimistic period of the 19505, that is, 'the sense of the complexity, mul-
tiplicity, relativity, and multifacetedness that determines an attitude of
systematic perplexity' (all quotations, in my translation, from Una
pietra sopra; vii-viii). The collaboration with Celati and others took
place, then, in a time (the late sixties and early seventies) when the role
of the 'intellettuale impegnato' or engage intellectual with which
Calvino began more than twenty years before had already disappeared
under a 'landslide' of complexity, and writers and thinkers from many
disciplines were struggling to deal with their 'systematic perplexity' in
order to forge some feasible idea of the future. Calvino attaches a. note
to 'Lo sguardo dell'archeologo' in which he specifies that the brief
piece had never been published before, although it had been written in
1972 , and that it was a sort of program statement for a journal that he,
Celati, Guido Neri, Carlo Ginzburg, and 'other friends' were thinking
of founding (they never did; I discuss this project in a later chapter).7
He further states that these pages were written in order to be discussed
among these friends, and that the essay contains some ideas that they
had all agreed on already, and others that reflect more 'personal orien-
tations/ In his use throughout of the plural 'we/ Calvino makes clear
that this piece is intended as a collective statement; in its brevity, it is
obvious that what we are reading is an outline, a 'working document/
so to speak, rather than a polished essay.
The main thrust of Calvino's essay is in the direction of much that
has since come to be associated with full-blown postmodern and post-
colonial critical thought. He writes that all of the methods that have
been used over centuries to define a unified 'Subject' - 'L'Uomo' (Man)
- and which can be brought together into a 'general methodology'
called 'History/ have by now been revealed as having too many cracks
and fault lines to be able to claim any longer that they are workable.
'Man' is still the operative category, but it now functions as antagonist
to the historical 'protagonist/ the unified Subject, 'Man/ The human
'Subject' has changed into 'the human race of great number in expo-
nential growth on the planet, the explosion of the metropolis, the end
of economic-ideological Eurocentrism, [and] the refusal on the part of
8o Gianni Celati
the excluded ones, the inarticulate ones, the omitted ones, to accept a
history [that ] for them is founded on expulsion, obliteration, cancella-
tion from any role/ Moreover, Calvino asserts that 'all parameters, cat-
egories, and antitheses that had been used in imagining and classifying
and projecting the world have been put into discussion/ including 'the
rational and the mythic, work and existence, male and female/ and
even more elementary categories are in doubt: 'affirmation and nega-
tion, high and low, me living and the thing/ Because 'we' (Calvino,
Celati, and the other collaborators) are 'dissatisfied' with a world that
has become less and less 'habitable/ and because these intellectuals are
convinced that the world cannot be changed before new tools for con-
ceptualizing it are found, they are happy to undertake the work of
rethinking everything; that is, all the knowledge that they thought they
had mastered as 'a point of arrival, a consolidated acquisition, a cer-
tainty/ Calvino offers the warning that going back over and rethinking
what I would call 'cultural capital' is, however, dangerous, 'a precise,
already experienced danger/ if this form of regression is in any way
'fetishized' or 'ideologized' (idoleggiare, ideologizzare) They want to
use the 'archeologist's glance or look' (sguardo), rather than the histo-
rian's, and to remain on the side 'of the outside, of objects, of mecha-
nisms, of languages/ in order to point out and describe detailed
elements of the present, and not in order to explain it, at least not
quickly, thus avoiding a fall back into the teleological perspective of
history. Nor do they wish to enjoy a 'complacency of the inexplicable/
for the subject is still at the center of such a perspective. They are
attracted by the linguistic, structural, and semiotic methods employed
by several schools of that time (early seventies) and wish to employ
them, but in a 'different research space' in which what matters is the
'extraction of objects' (content) with the concurrent 'estrangement of
meaning/ Calvino then comes to the culminating declaration: it is
literature that is 'the field of energies that supports and motivates this
convergence and comparison of research and operations in diverse
fields, even if those fields appear to be distant or unrelated/ He and his
collaborators consider literature and literary poetics as a 'space of
meanings and forms that have value not just for literature. We believe
that literary poetics can lead to a poetics of making; more: of self-
making' (italics Calvino's). The essay ends by stating that if a 'new
project' or 'new atlas' of literary nature results, it will not be the foun-
dation, but the result, of their collaborative work, which seeks to be 'a
mutual enlargement of horizons/ based on research into that which
they hold most dear' (quel che ci sta a cuore), which is 'the context in
which literature takes on meaning' (all quotations from Una pietra
sopra; 263-6). This is a remarkable document, a prophetic one, in fact,
for it expresses perspectives on traditional forms of knowledge and an
embrace of a form of interdisciplinarity, primarily between humanistic
and social-scientific disciplines, that will come widely to shape current
research only in the last decade or so. But it is decidedly not prophetic
with respect to the role of literature in this research. The faith implicit
in Calvino's words in the great potential of the literary as a space for
truly important developments of the social, political, epistemological,
and ontological kinds seems almost quaintly antique, given today's
academic (and nonacademic) emargination of literature in favor of
other forms of cultural production such as visual media and popular
culture 'texts' of all sorts except the standardly literary.
I have quoted from Calvino's piece fairly extensively because I think
that it provides the necessary context from which Celati's 1975 essay, 'II
bazar archeologico' emerged, and also because it reveals the funda-
mental role played by literary elaboration in their shared research of
the early seventies. In order to understand Celati's writing, not only in
the era of self-consciously theoretical neoavant-gardism, but also in
subsequent periods, it is essential, I think, to see how unremitting his
commitment to the realm of literary creativity is, no matter how far he
has roamed over other areas of thought and creativity, such as the his-
toriographic, the philosophical, the visual, and the socio-political. His
move into the 'archeological' mode described by Calvino is in the ser-
vice of fictional elaboration as much as, if not more than, more broadly
defined cultural and social interests. His highly detailed and com-
plexly argued piece, Tl bazar archeologico,' makes this orientation to
the particular potential of literary writing abundantly clear. Celati
begins with a consideration of 'that syndrome that is being modern/
by returning to a 'beginning point' that is made up of Rimbaud, Dada,
and the Surrealists, then moving on to Kafka, Benjamin, Deleuze and
Guattari, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Derrida. Celati's reading of the 'mod-
ern' is centered on the fall of the monuments that represented premo-
dernity, as the fragmentary, the unimportant detail, the 'nonsensical,'
and the formerly marginalized and excluded zones of human experi-
ence emerge as sites of modern interest and potential meaning.
Already in this essay of 1975 (obviously it contains ideas elaborated at
least as early as the beginning of the seventies along with Calvino and
others), Celati writes of the need for a fiction that would be peripatetic
82 Gianni Celati
and represent 'a search without a goal, spatialization and flanerie, an

uninterrupted visit to the molecular places of a heterotopic city where
infinitely float the remains of extraneity, objects and traces of that
which has been lost and that no museum is prepared to preserve/ In
the 'new/ ostensibly 'minimalist' fictions of the mid-eighties, by writ-
ers such as Del Giudice, De Carlo, and Tabucchi, critics immediately
noted the emphasis on unexceptional details and non-linear, spatially
conditioned representations as novel and highly innovative aspects of
their writing; yet Celati, Calvino and a few others had been investigat-
ing the modernist bases for these tendencies years before, a fact that
went relatively unnoticed by the critical establishment.
In his period of 'silence/ from the late seventies to the mid-eighties,
Celati published some essays and gave some interviews that reveal his
ongoing research into ways of continuing to be committed to creative
literary work, and it is to three of these pieces, mentioned earlier, that I
now wish to turn. First, Celati published an essay, 'Oggetti soffici' (Soft
objects), in the June 1979 issue of an out-of-the-way journal edited by
the 'Circolo artistico di Bologna/ entitled Iterarte, dedicated to the topic
of 'Arte Affettuosa' (Affectionate art). He also gave a brief interview on
this 'affectionate art' that is included in the same issue. After the fall of
the neoavant-garde around the time of the student movements of 1968
when, as Calvino noted years later, everything became caught up in
the language of politicization, leaving little room for the 'flexibility' of
literary discourses ('Rievochiamo la vicenda'; 1984), there was an after-
math lasting throughout the seventies (the so-called anni di piombo or
years of lead, dominated by explicit terrorism) during which many art-
ists and writers who had been strongly involved in political activism
withdrew into themselves in order to rethink their positions vis-a-vis
engage activities. At more or less the same time as the Iterarte issue on
'Arte Affettuosa' appeared (1979), a group of younger poets had come
together under the rubric of Toesia Innamorata' (Enamored poetry), a
tendency similar to that of 'affectionate or loving art/ as clearly
reflected in their chosen adjective. In the introduction to the 1978
anthology, La parola innamorata, the editors Giancarlo Pontiggia and
Enzo Di Mauro explain aspects of the shared poetics that have shaped
the volume; poetry is seen as 'a futile game/ a 'light form/ a 'superflu-
ous grace/ and it must abandon all claims to be a form of knowledge.
Critic John Picchione summarizes this mode of writing well in a 1993
essay on poets of that generation: 'Rejecting a critical perspective on
historical problematics and, at the same time, a critical language capa-
ble of arousing tension, their poetry advocates the seductive poetic

word, a word essentially in love only with itself.' He points out that
this poetry emerged in a cultural context 'characterized by the
Nietzschean "Renaissance," Heideggerian philosophy, Lacanian psy-
choanalysis, and the explosion of Deconstruction,' at a time - as is clear
in the Calvino-Celati 'archeological project' as well - when 'there is no
ground for truth, for the "self," or for a collective sociopolitical project/
and when the ideas of 'a unitary, ultimate meaning in history' and 'ref-
erentiality' itself are deeply in question (Picchione, in Picchione and
Smith; 490). The concept of 'arte affettuosa' arises out of the same con-
text, and is defined in the opening essay 'Arte affettuosa?' by Carlo
Gajani as 'una nuvola, qualcosa a carattere dispersive, che si trova un
po' ovunque' (a cloud, something with a dispersive character, that is
found a little bit everywhere; 5). Rather than 'Art' in the traditional
sense, it is 'an art' in the sense of a super fare or a 'know-how' that can
be expressed in phenomena as diverse as graffiti, clothing, personal
letters, handmade belts (that is, more or less those items related to 'hip-
pie culture') as well as more traditionally 'artistic' forms such as assem-
blage and pastiche as seen in the works of Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and
Oldenburg. 'Affectionate art' has to do with Barthes's concepts of
'pleasure' and 'fascination' that have been 'suppressed by the ideolo-
gies of artistic production'; it has also to do with the retrieval of affec-
tionate social relations, posing as it does the question 'per chi si parla?'
(for whom does one speak?) (Iterarte; 5-6). In all of these directions in
poetry, art, and critical thinking about literature, there is a clear 'mini-
malizing tendency/ a lowering of tonality and a weakening of subjec-
tivity, in which Celati's thought and practice can similarly be situated.
In spite of the fact that Celati's essay on 'soft objects' fits well into the
issue dedicated to 'affectionate art/ the writer makes it clear in the
brief interview included in the same issue that he is not a 'member' of
this 'movement'; he thus remains true to his preference for avoiding all
rubrics and labels, no matter how congenial to his work and thought.
When asked if 'this kind of thing we've called affectionate art' interests
him, Celati responds: 'Mi interessa quasi tutto, purche non sia una cosa
di stato' (I'm interested in almost everything, as long as it isn't a State
[institutional] thing). He calls doing or making something in a non-
institutionally determined way 'an art' (italics mine), and says that
when we engage in an art, we perforce use expressive means, even if it
is merely a question of moving our hands. We engage in an art - no
matter what the expressive means used - in order to Took for someone
84 Gianni Celati
who wants [us]' (se si fa una cosa che non sia per lo stato, si fa qualcosa
per andare a cercare qualcuno che ti desidera). Celati believes that
when a creative person works according to an 'official' concept of art
and is satisfied by having a 'patente d'artista' (the official licence or
stamp of approval given by the title of 'artist'), that person tends to
make some sort of distinction between 'imaginary desires' and 'real
life/ rather than recognizing that our desires are 'real and imaginary at
the same time.' In his by-now typical manner, Celati criticizes 'official
art' and its 'official critics,' who look to point out 'the most advanced
forms' of art (Celati comments, 'ma chi se ne frega' [but who gives a
damn]), or else act as if they were 'judges in a court. He concludes:
'Mai che anche lui cerchi chi lo desidera. E scemo e cadaverico: invece
di pensare alia sua separatezza pensa ai destini dell'arte' ([the critic
never thinks that] he too is looking for someone to want him. It is stu-
pid and deathly: instead of thinking about his separateness, he thinks
about the fortunes of art). Celati's interest is instead in making use of
the 'stili del mondo' (styles of the world) as a 'tramite affettuoso'
(affectionate medium) between his separateness and others, by 'steal-
ing a little from here and there and without any particular project' (all
quotations above from Iterarte; 20).
Although Celati's emphasis on 'wanting to be wanted by others' will
disappear in later declarations in which any form of 'desire' is seen as
potentially dangerous and harmful, the highlighting of artistic (or
what Celati will later call 'artisanal') activity as an affectionate medium
for connecting with others will reappear in comments made many
years later in relation to the concept of 'narratives of the reserves.' In
both moments, that is, in his seventies' work with Calvino and others
centered on archeological knowledge and his essays such as 'Oggetti
soffici' of the same decade, as well as in his critical and creative writing
of the eighties and beyond, a poetics of modesty is sustained and 'Art'
is toned down to 'an art' of minimal pretensions.
The 1979 essay, 'Oggetti soffici' can be read, I think, as a culmination
of Celati's involvement with various 'counter-cultural' tendencies
from the late sixties to the late seventies. It looks back over a period of
activism and subsequent disillusionment with political programs, and
is both more rooted in these experiences and more 'dated' in its topics
and examples than his other theoretical and literary-critical essays of
more or less the same era. Celati criticizes the 'utopie calde' or 'hot Uto-
pias' of the recent past, based on a 'politica calda' (hot politics) that
forces its advocates always 'to repeat exactly the message, the order of
the program: struggle (lotta), engagement, democracy, participation,

maschilism, emargination, movement, workers, socialism.' He pro-
poses instead 'cold Utopias' and 'tranquil, minimally declarative
enthusiasms' that are like the 'soft dissonances of cool jazz.' The crite-
rion for judging one's enthusiasms would be 'mi piace/non mi piace'
(I like it, I don't like it), rather than those provided by critical taxono-
mies of good or bad taste. The writer is, therefore, attracted by the 'soft
art' of Claes Oldenburg, which the artist himself described in Store
Days of 1967 as, among other things, 'art that doesn't just sit warming
its ass in a museum'; 'art that children lick'; 'art that you put on and
take off like trousers'; 'art of lost and thrown-away things.' Celati likes
the 'quotidian' nature of this view of art, for it privileges nothing, and
defines art as that which deals with the non-exemplary and the unex-
ceptional. In a discussion of historically conditioned modes of consid-
ering art (and experience) that is reminiscent of the views expressed in
the earlier essay, Tl bazar archeologico/ Celati writes: 'It is only in rela-
tion to a supposed exemplarity of certain facts that one can speak of
historical advancement ... "advanced" would be something that is
placed on a line of development, and "remains" like a monument for
the centuries. There is no possibility of historical selection without this
idea of the exemplary monument that "remains," hard and lasting
(duro e duraturo), in the midst of the infinity of anonymous happen-
ings.' A number of 'antimonumental,' and therefore 'likeable,' artifacts
are then mentioned (all very reflective of counter-cultural tastes of the
sixties and seventies): Krazy Kat comics, Warhol's seriographs of Elvis,
the plastic statues of George Segal, and, above all, the food sculptures
of Oldenburg. Celati proposes that the entire 'cosmology' of middle-
class society - which this sort of 'minor art' reflects - is reducible to
'corporeal sensuality' and has nothing to do with the categories of
looking (lo sguardo) or of contemplation, which are 'official' epistemo-
logical instruments for capturing and knowing reality. Because 'soft
objects' absorb and dissolve the 'codes for sorting out' differences
('ancient/modern, reactionary/progressive, well made/badly made,
opaque/understandable'), they solicit reactions rather than judgments,
the latter of which are of the realm of aesthetics based on the evalua-
tive look and distant contemplation. The essay ends with the assertion
that 'mass culture' cannot be genuinely experienced or judged accord-
ing to the 'neoclassical' techniques of distant contemplation and evalu-
ation, for mass culture is by now the 'production of reality in a general
sense (not works "by artists," "by writers," etc.)'; we are all in this real-
86 Gianni Celati
ity and no one can claim to enjoy the privilege of not being a 'mass
subject' (soggetto-massa) (all quotations above from Iterarte; 10-15).
Celati will not remain committed to this 'sensual' perspective for very
long; nonetheless, even in its rather glaringly 'dated' counter-cultural
quality, this essay can be read as yet another expression of the 'mini-
malizing tendency' discernible throughout Celati's work. Against the
monumentality of historicized and High Art views of experience and
cultural production, he offers the soft objects and permeable subjectiv-
ity of unexceptional quotidian experience.
By 1982-3, when the essay, 'L'Avventura non deve finire: Conver-
sazione attraverso gli occhi' (The adventure must not end: Conversa-
tion through the eyes), appeared in the Modenese journal Quindi,
Celati had moved away from the bodily and sensual 'minimalism' of
the seventies towards a more contemplative involvement with exter-
nality that would come to dominate his writing of the mid- and late
eighties. In this piece, he defines an 'adventure' as the opposite of a
search for the fulfillment of a 'tangible and localizable desire'; instead,
it is like the characters of myth and certain literary texts who 'must ful-
fill a necessary journey' although they have no specific goal or pre-
defined desire to be satisfied. Celati describes this 'journey' as the
search for the 'Other' or otherness in general. When, as in the historical
or realist novel, dates and geographic places are put into play, how-
ever, the 'Other' is replaced by simply another geographic, historical, or
touristic horizon. Conversely, 'otherness' is not dateable or localizable,
but eternal, mythic, and cyclically perdurable, according to Celati.
When asked what it means to tell a story in our era, Celati suggests
that it is to tell 'the story of the Other' (raccontare la storia dell'Altro),
which means to attempt to capture in words 'the suffering of becoming
"human" and of remaining "human"' which we all experience, if in
infinitely different ways.' And he states that our 'adventures' as
'generic humans' take place 'only in common routine, in that which is
the same for everyone, and it is that which no one notices because it is
not sensational. [These adventures] have to do with the minor or infin-
itesimal aspects of [our] adaptation to the world.' The 'obvious/ which
we tend not to notice, looking instead for epiphanies, illuminations,
and extraordinary experiences, is, according to Celati, 'perhaps our
only kingdom' (1'unico nostro regno), and he therefore wants to write
stories that capture something of the 'obviousness' and 'ordinariness'
of shared humanness. He dares to use what for many is 'an ugly
word' - 'nostalgia' - to define what he lacks and is looking to regain:
'a narrative tone that might unite me with others, because everything I
know how to write are things that are separate from the life of others.'
A topic that the writer believes he is capable of writing about as a 'true
and strong feeling/ and a widely shared one, is that of 'being lost.'
Celati notices this 'state of affairs' everywhere he goes, so he does not
view it as merely a personal sensation. He quotes Sartre: 'solo gli spor-
caccioni non si sentono perduti' (only despicable people do not feel
lost). The essay ends with yet another typically Celatian critique of the
literary establishment, which is made up of 'books, successes, gossip
about newness, the artifices of criticism, [all of which] are worth noth-
ing' (all quotations above from Quindi, 8-11). Stories that convey
instead something of the sensation of being lost, of lack of domination
and mastery of experience and self both, are those that Celati wants to
write, in a toned-down voice and simple style, and with unexceptional
themes drawn from the 'common routines' of living. It is not surpris-
ing, then, that the short stories subsequently published in Narratori
delle pianure, Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, and the 'stories of observa-
tion' in Verso lafoce can all, to one degree or another, be included in the
category of 'minimalist' writing, given the directions followed by
Celati in these preceding years of ongoing research into the liveability
and narratability of the world.
In addition to the many areas of critical, theoretical, and artistic
thought and production studied by Celati throughout the seventies
and eighties, he also developed a particular interest in sociolinguistics
and the philosophy of language; he dedicated much study to the work
of Dell Hymes and William Labov in the former field, and to that of
Wittgenstein in the latter. In an unpublished taped interview I did with
him in 1985, during which we discussed the motives and motifs sub-
tending his then recently published Narratori delle pianure, Celati
remarked: T was very interested in the ceremony of the story. It's not
that there exist popular narrators, but rather that everyone is a narra-
tor. I was interested in this elementary cultural ceremony, when we
succeed in recognizing that, in a series of facts, that is a story: we have
"made the point." All this year I've greatly studied Labov and Witt-
genstein; I put to myself very elementary problems of language: What
is a description? What is a descriptive form? How do we succeed in
speaking together about experience? And the conclusion in its most
elementary form is: When we recognize a story, we recognize a
moment in which experience is organized.' The 'elementary ceremony'
of narration - oral or written - is thus now seen as a cognitive and
88 Gianni Celati
organizational mode that transcends literature and informs lived and

shared experiences of the world.
Various elements of Celati's poetics as developed over many years
come together to condition his overtly 'minimalist' style of the eighties,
therefore: his antihistoricist antimonumentalism; his desire to find a
'narrative tone' that might tie his sense of 'being lost' with the 'lost-
ness' of others; his preference for unexceptional, quotidian themes; and
his interest in the 'elementary ceremony' of narration in which we all
share as we seek to organize our experience. Commenting on his
pared-down narrative style in Narmtori, he said (in the 1985 interview):
'In novels usually the problem is to have "strong facts" and then
"strong causalities." I instead was working according to a very differ-
ent principle. In order to highlight "weak facts" and weak causalities I
had to augment the transparency of words. The transparency grew if I
was more limpid in my writing, if I was as simple as possible in my
writing. So it was a problem of simplifying form to the maximum, to
get to the simplest form I could.' In order to allow the 'weak' or insig-
nificant everyday facts to take on their full value, a value allied to what
Celati called their 'minimo silenzio' (minimum silence) and their 'twi-
light' quality, he sought to bring out the empty spaces between words,
the 'punti meditativi' (meditative points) of that which is left unsaid.
His techniques for creating transparency included the use of the most
basic descriptive and temporal indicators (who, when, where, how),
and the creation of a 'panoramic' diegetic style (as contrasted to a 'sce-
nic' style in which direct discourse and setting are mimetically and the-
atrically constructed). Celati also sought to capture a 'deferential' as
opposed to a 'contractual' mode of narration; he went back to very
early forms of narration such as are found in the medieval Novellino
and in popular, oral tales, in order to find examples of this 'deferential'
mode, whereby the reader is not assumed to be in a position of pre- or
co-knowledge with the narrator, but rather is allowed the maximum
freedom to bring to bear his/her imagination and personal situated-
ness on the story being recounted. A small illustration of how this
works is to be found in the use of the indefinite article rather than the
definite; in writing 'a woman' instead of 'the woman/ the narrator per-
mits the readers to choose a type of woman suitable to the story from
their individual perspectives, rather than imposing 'the' particular
woman of the narrator's choice, who may or may not capture the read-
ers' interest. Celati preferred this deferential mode because he saw it as
rendering storytelling more anonymous and flexible (more akin to the
'once upon a time' style of fables or folktales), and as emphasizing the

shared and collective nature of narration. The writer is not an 'autho-
rial' (or authoritative) presence, therefore, but a permeable, receptive,
and anonymous 'scrivener' or copyist of stories that he merely passes
on to others.
Celati's 'minimalist' stories of the eighties reveal several interests
that he will develop further over succeeding years: orality, the visual,
the social ceremony of narration by which we organize experience. As
I have already discussed in the preceding chapter, his interest in
silences and 'spaces for meditation' is revealed in the somewhat 'mys-
tical' turn that his work around the figure of Bartleby takes. The recita-
tional aspect of storytelling will be developed in his rewriting of
Boiardo's Orlando innamorato and his theatrical Recita dell'attore Vec-
chiatto, both written in order to be read aloud and performed replete
with gestures. Celati's concentration on the externalities of experience,
as seen in his collaboration with the photographer Luigi Ghirri and
the writing that results from that work, will culminate in a 'video-
racconto/ or video-story, Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial road
of souls). The label of 'minimalism' is, therefore, inadequate to the
complexities of Celati's poetics and practice, both of which are mani-
festations of ongoing, never-ending research into how to live and how
to write in a 'maximal' world. I prefer my term 'antimonumentalism/
for I think that it captures better the salient aspects and qualities of
Celati's literary and ethical styles. In his short fictions written in the
eighties, Celati did not put on the fashionable clothes of the minimalist
in order to be seen as 'up-to-date/ 'contemporary/ or a member of
Italy's 'new generation' of younger writers. A more appropriate meta-
phor would perhaps be one relating, again, to the 'monuments' in
which he does not believe: his is a long and patient process of chipping
away, as he unendingly subjected the ostensibly solid foundations of
historically and rationally determined literary narrative forms to dis-
mantlement, arriving finally to the skeletal, essential, yet infinitely
complex question that was stated as: 'What is a narrative?' Celati's
answer is modest, minimal even: a narrative is a way of organizing
experience.
This conclusion is very close to that expressed by his fellow traveler,
Calvino, who wrote in his essay on 'Exactitude' in Six Memos for the
Next Millennium: The universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it
falls inevitably into a vortex of entropy, but within this irreversible pro-
cess there may be areas of order, portions of the existent that tend
9O Gianni Celati
toward a form, privileged points in which we seem to discern a design

or perspective. A work of literature is one of these minimal portions in
which the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning - not
fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive
as an organism' (70-1, italics mine). Both writers express a fundamen-
tally antimonumental view of literary creation, and both sought over
the years to keep the living, organic quality of meaning as captured in
literary writing as far from a 'mineral immobility' as possible. Celati
cannot and should not be read as a 'card-carrying' minimalist at any
point in his work, yet there is no doubt that the minimalist credo, 'less
is more/ is supremely applicable to his writing, whether it is a 'less'
embodied in the comic carnality of his first fictions, in the 'everyday
stories' of his third and fourth books, or in the spare prose of his more
recent short tales. In all of these modes, it is that 'minimal portion of
the existent,' which might be crystallized into a meaningful form, that
he pursues, in order to make life more liveable and art still allied to the
never-ending task of being human. Stories are one of the fundamental
aspects of shared humanness; as Ursula Le Guin put it in her wonder-
fully and wittily entitled meditation on the why, how, and wherefore of
storytelling, 'It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: or, Why Are We Hud-
dling About the Campfire?': 'In the tale, in the telling, we are all one
blood ... we will all come to the end together, and even to the begin-
ning; living, as we do, in the middle.' Or, as Celati might agree to put
it, 'zigzagging, as we do, through the middle, without any monumen-
tal design.'
3
The Permeable Gaze1
'Neither the optical explanation of visual perception nor the evolutionist the-
ory of the slow, hazardous development of the eye in response to the stimulus
of light - neither of these dissolve the enigma which surrounds the fact that, at
a certain moment, the visible was born ... As a response to this enigma, the first
faculty accredited to the most important gods was that of sight: an eye, often
an all-seeing eye. Then it could be said: The visible exists because it has already
been seen.'
John Berger2
The visual and the verbal: what a long and rocky road these two basic
elements of human experience and representation have traveled
together. W.J.T. Mitchell reminds us that 'the riddles of language and
imagery' are no closer to a solution now than they were centuries ago:
The situation is precisely the reverse: language and imagery are no
longer what they promised to be for critics and philosophers of the
Enlightenment - perfect, transparent media through which reality may
be represented to the understanding. For modern criticism, language
and imagery have become enigmas, problems to be explained, prison-
houses which lock the understanding away from the world' (Iconology;
8). The 'father of Italian literature/ Dante Alighieri, included his own
contribution to the 'enigma' of these elementary modes in the tenth
Canto of the Purgatorio, in which he wrote of 'visibile parlare' or Visi-
ble speech' in the form of sculpted stories of exemplary humility
carved on the first terrace of the purgatorial mountain where the sin of
pride is purged. The poet writes that 'He who never beheld any new
thing / wrought this visible speech, / new to us because here it is not
92 Gianni Celati
found' (lines 94-6). The 'here' to which he refers is our terrestrial

sphere, where such miracles of visible and animatedly material stories,
of a perfect union between the image and language, do not exist. Dante
also dramatizes another fundamental question with his creation of
Visibile parlare': If sculptures made by God are so lifelike and ani-
mated as to put 'not only [the Greek sculptor] Polycletus but also
nature herself to shame' (lines 32-3), where does the real end and imi-
tation or representation begin? In the context of Dante's work as a poet,
the distinction between divine 'making' and human 'finding' is
extremely important; God is the Tattore' or 'Maker' of all that which is
real, while human creativity can only 'find/ and poets are 'trovatori'
(finders), not makers in the ultimate sense. But this distinction is
blurred and elided in innumerable ways throughout the Divine Com-
edy, and it is not for nothing that the issue is played up on the terrace
where the sin of pride - the origin of elemental human trespass - is
purged. And it is also not for nothing that Dante problematizes not
only language, but also the image: that which is seen. The canto in
question is filled with terms referring to sight: some form of verbs of
seeing - 'vedere' (to see), 'guardare' (to look at), 'mirare' (to gaze at) -
are used over half a dozen times, and terms such as 'occhi' (eyes) and
'vista' (sight) equally as much. Nothing regarding the 'enigma' of the
relation between language and image is 'solved' in the canto, yet there
is a sense in which Dante 'verifies/ so to speak, Berger's view quoted
above as epigraph, when the medieval poet writes that God is 'He who
never saw any new thing.' 'The visible exists because it has already
been seen/ as Berger puts it, whether we continue to believe along
with Dante that it is a Divine Eye that has 'already seen' or 'the stimu-
lus of light' that slowly formed the human eye, which in turn brought
the visible to light. The implication in both cases is that, analogously,
language exists because 'it has already been spoken.' There is perhaps
some sort of absolute anteriority to both language and the visible, but
neither human experience nor human art can reach it, and thus we
remain in the realm of the finding of language and the visible, rather
than that of origination.
For the last hundred years, a version of 'visibile parlare' has in fact
existed, however, in the form of cinematic representations, Visible nar-
rations' whose language is the syntax of juxtaposed images and whose
main target is the human eye. Photography has also been associated
with language, either in the sense that it has its own 'language/ or that
it is inevitably 'invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at'
The Permeable Gaze 93
(Victor Burgin, 'Seeing Sense/ quoted by Mitchell in Picture Theory;

282). Yet both the cinema and the photograph have also been described
as fundamentally different from the linguistic realm, as materially rep-
resenting reality in ways that language cannot. In the Italian context,
we need only think of Pier Paolo Pasolini's complex theoretical medita-
tions on the 'realism' of cinematic representation, which folds back
over itself to reveal the 'natural cinema' that is reality3 or, as I shall dis-
cuss later, the writings on photography of Luigi Ghirri, in which he
similarly emphasizes the inherently 'seen' nature of reality that pho-
tography and its many uses make us better understand. Celati too has
long accompanied the pair - visual and verbal - on his own journey in
the country of stories, and the role of the 'eye/ more than the role of the
'I/ has always been of fundamental concern to him.4 Like Pasolini and
Ghirri, Celati's research and practice can be assimilated into a kind of
generically 'postmodern' sensibility, which refuses a naive, prerepre-
sentational real out there beyond language and images both; yet, also
like them, he is motivated by something like a spiritualized ontological
sense that does not simply stop at the level of the 'society of the specta-
cle/ but ventures into the 'prerational' and quasi-mystical areas of
thought explored by, among others, Deleuze (in his writings on cin-
ema, but also, as has been seen, in relation to the philosophical issues
raised by Bartleby's presence). In this chapter, Celati's work will be
viewed, then, from the perspective of issues pertaining to the visual,
the visible, and the spatial, including the more specific questions of
how photography and the cinema have entered into his poetics and
practices of writing. Celati's perspectives - geographic, creative, and
critical; the visible; visual media; the spaces seen by his eyes and
explored by his mind and heart - these are the topics I hope to put into
focus in the pages that follow.
In the preceding chapter, I touched on Celati's, Calvino's and others'

interest in 'lo sguardo.' This is a complicated term in Italian, for it
means many things that are expressed in English by several different
words. It includes the meanings of a 'glance or look/ as in 'giving a
glance at' (dare uno sguardo); an 'expression' in the eyes, as in 'a sweet
expression' (un dolce sguardo); a 'gaze/ as in 'a penetrating gaze' (uno
sguardo penetrante); and simply 'eyes/ as in 'to lower one's eyes'
(abbassare lo sguardo). In Calvino's use of the word in his essay,
'Lo sguardo archeologico/ it means something like 'the perspective' or
'orientation' of the archeologist, as it does in Celati's piece, 'Oggetti
94 Gianni Celati
soffici/ in which he writes of 'lo sguardo' of the aestheticizing or con-

templative kind, which is the 'look' or 'perspective' that is motivated
by an epistemological search for codifiable meanings, distinctions, and
the like. Seeing has historically been associated with knowing, of
course; in Italian as in English, 'to see' can also mean 'to understand/
as in 'I see your point.' Our Western tradition has long supported the
idea that we look precisely in order to come to know and to compre-
hend the object of our gaze. But with knowing comes 'mastery/ and
the metaphors of 'domination/ 'penetration/ and 'possession' that
typically have accompanied epistemologically oriented operations of
the eyes and the mind render decidedly unneutral not only the seman-
tic fields in question but the very operations themselves. My use of the
word 'gaze' in the title of this chapter implicitly contains within it the
multiple resonances of the Italian 'sguardo/ and I want to keep these
various meanings in play as I look with my 'sguardo' at Celati's
'sguardo.'
Celati's preference (in the sense with which he endows the word in
his discussion of Bartleby) for spatial rather than temporal conceptions
of experience and writing is followed by him with that 'devotion'
Melville's scrivener dedicates to his ineluctable anteriority. Although I
do not wish to enter into a lengthy consideration of the many impor-
tant implications of such a preference at this place in my discussion, I
do think it helpful to what follows at least to allude to the genre- and
gender-related resonances of that preference. As Mitchell argues in his
wonderfully insightful rereading of Lessing's Laocoon: An Essay upon
the Limits of Poetry and Painting, the 'oppositions that regulate Lessing's
discourse' (basically, painting and poetry) activate a whole series of
oppositional terms relating respectively to the former and the latter:
'space-time'; 'body-mind'; 'external-internal'; 'feminine-masculine.'
Space is thus a category tied to the 'silence' and the 'narrow sphere of
external display' of the feminine sphere, an association that has been
maintained and instrumentalized in a myriad of contexts both before
and after the eighteenth-century context in which Lessing was carrying
out his debate (Iconology; no). In anticipation of some of the conclu-
sions I seek to draw further on in my discussions of Celati's 'permeable
gaze/ I shall say now that over the years Celati's writing moves more
and more explicitly into a 'feminine economy/ although such a ten-
dency was there from the beginning of his published career.
Space is also traditionally associated with blurred genres, such as
certain tendencies in the history of painting in which the narrational
and the pictorial overlap; Celati's writing is similarly 'blurred/ espe-

cially the short story mode he begins to use in the eighties. Are these
stories diaristic or documentaristic or purely fictional? There is no way
that these writing modes can easily be sorted out one from the other.
Already in his early fictions in which his characters meander through
space, and we have no sense that time affects or touches them in any
way there are 'autobiographical' elements that blur the strict line
between genres. In his later short fictions there are more allusions to
passing time, yet space remains the fundamental structuring device of
the stories. In Celati's essay on the emergence of the modern, 'II bazar
archeologico/ discussed in the preceding chapter, he explores the (very
Benjaminian and Foucauldian) archeological idea of history as ruins,
traces, objects scattered in space: an idea antithetical to a temporal -
and therefore progressive - view of historical knowledge. Space, there-
fore, is endowed with diverse functions and meanings in Celati's poet-
ics and practice in the earlier years of his work: it is a narrative
structuring device, an idea of history, and it is both imaginatively and
critically employed according to the particular issues or projects in
question. There is nothing 'local' about this interest in and deployment
of spatial concepts during the sixties and seventies for they remain an
abstraction for the most part. In the short fictions that Celati began to
publish in the mid-eighties the category of the 'spatial' still functions
abstractly, but there is a decided shift to a localizing mode by means of
which critical ideas are anchored to geographic specificity: the Po river
and the 'valle padana,' or plains spreading out around it. This shift
was occasioned in great part by Celati's involvement with photogra-
pher Luigi Ghirri and by their mutual exploration of the Po region.
Ghirri's photographic poetics and practice were deeply influential, and
stimulated much writing by Celati, both essayistic and creative. Conse-
quently I want to begin this discussion of Celatian space with those of
his writings most directly tied to Ghirri's work, and then move on to a
close consideration of two exemplary works of this period: the collec-
tion of stories Narratori delle pianure and the video, Strada provincials
delle anime.
Celati's travels along the Po valley with Ghirri produced a flurry of
writing activity after several years of very intermittent creative and
critical work (from the late seventies to the mid-eighties).5 He has him-
self acknowledged the tremendous debt of inspiration owed to Ghirri,
whose approaches to his own work and beliefs regarding creative
engagement with the world around us coincided in important ways
96 Gianni Celati
with Celati's. Before the 1985 publication of Narratori delle pianure, the
volume of stories that marked Celati's 'reappearance' on the Italian lit-
erary scene after several years of relative silence, two 'previews' by
Celati of the modified significance of spatial issues to his new fictions
appeared, both directly tied to Ghirri. One was, 'Verso la foce: Report-
age, per un amico fotografo' (Towards the river mouth: Reportage, for
a photographer friend), published in the 1984 volume of photographs
by diverse photographers, including Ghirri, Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in
Italy); the other was the declaration of new poetics already alluded to,
the 1984 'Finzioni a cui credere' (Fictions in which to believe), pub-
lished in the December issue of the journal Alfabeta as part of the 'Acts'
of the Palermo convention on The Meaning of Literature' held in
November 1984. Although 'Verso la foce' was published first, in the
early part of 1984, it no doubt would not have found as wide a reader-
ship as 'Finzioni a cui credere,' because of the former's inclusion in a
photographic collection; that is, a book directed to a less generally liter-
ary-critical, more 'specialized' sector. Thus, 'Finzioni' had an impor-
tant public function in resituating Celati within the context of debates
regarding the meaning of literature, and it is all the more notable that it
is entirely shaped around Ghirri's work.
The essay opens with a basic question: 'quali finzioni sono possibili,
a quali finzioni e possibile credere?' (which fictions are possible, in
which fictions is it possible to believe?). Celati writes that he finds no
'examples in recent Italian fiction for developing this point,' and - in
his typically scathing critical mode when it comes to the establishment
- he clarifies: 'because the men of culture whom we have underfoot
think only of the opposite: to unmask brilliantly every possible fiction,
traveling to conventions in order to dictate comprehensive interpreta-
tions of the world.' (I should point out that Celati did not attend the
Palermo convention, although he sent this piece in as his contribution
to the debates.) He says that he will therefore turn to the work of Luigi
Ghirri, in which there is no trace of the 'cultural ostentation by which
we are asphyxiated.' The writer immediately connects Ghirri to a spe-
cific locale, the town of Formiggine near Modena, where the late pho-
tographer lived. Although the particular resonance of the Emilia-
Romagna region for Celati is not made explicit, it is, in fact, an
extremely important aspect of the closeness he developed with Ghirri.
Celati was born in Sondrio in northern Lombardy, but his family was
originally from Ferrara, and he spent his university years and several
decades after that in Bologna; Ghirri was born in Scandiano and grew
up in Sassuolo, near Modena. As Sarah Hill writes: Tor both of them,

working in the Po valley was a multi-layered experience which
involved an exploration of their own personal and family narratives,
as well as the wider narratives of the place itself/ In an interview that
Hill conducted with Celati in 1995, he affirmed the significance of their
shared region of origin, commenting that when he and Ghirri tried to
work on projects in Tuscany and Switzerland, '"sono venuti malissimi
perche non c'era lo studio. Cioe, sono venuti male perche qui (the Po
valley) avevamo la possibilita di studiare per anni lo stesso luogo.
Mentre li siamo andati un po' come turisti... ecco la differenza"' (they
turned out very badly because there was no [background of] study.
That is, they turned out badly because here we had had the possibility
of studying the same locale for years. While we had gone there a little
like tourists ... that's the difference) (Hill; 75-6). There is a kind of
'homecoming' in Celati's turn to Ghirri, then, that is particularly nota-
ble in comparison with his earlier, highly 'unprovincial' topics of inter-
est, and his tendency to look to non-Italian writers and theorists for
inspiration and creative sustenance. The very closeness and ordinari-
ness of lived-in, quotidian external locales provided both Ghirri and
Celati with precisely the kind of inherently unexceptional raw material
they sought to give some form in their creative representations of con-
temporary human existence, much as the everyday (but unlocalized)
realities of family life had fuelled Celati's 'ordinary tales,' La banda del
sospiri and Lunario del paradiso. In the nineties, Celati would explore as
well the culturally 'familial' inheritance of the literature of the region,
and especially Ferrarese literary culture in the form of Boiardo's great
epic, Orlando innamorato. For now, though, in explaining his new poet-
ics of 'believable fictions/ he does not make explicit the significance of
this particular regional orientation; rather, Celati directs our attention
to Ghirri's ability to 'raccontare lo spazio vuoto' (recount the empty
space) of asphalt-covered lots surrounded by uniform little houses,
and the emptiness of a solitary, almost always deserted bar nearby, all
of which make up the local scene outside of Ghirri's home. Ghirri has
photographed such lots, such houses, such a bar in a manner that sug-
gests neither approval nor condemnation, but instead 'discovers that
everything can be of interest because it is part of the existent/ Celati
calls this achievement 'una radicale pulizia negli intenti o scopi dello
sguardo' (a radical cleansing regarding the intentions or goals of the
gaze or look), and this 'cleansing' is what might sustain written fictions
as well.
98 Gianni Celati
It is made clear in Celati's explanation of Ghirri's accomplishment

that the avoidance of exceptional objects of the gaze or exceptional
effects imposed upon objects in order to render them 'interesting' is at
the basis of his photographic work. Celati notes that the little uniform
houses that Ghirri has photographed, for example, houses lined up
like those in American suburbs, 'wouldn't have attracted any photog-
rapher, [and] would have horrified any person of letters' because they
normally represent 'la noia del guardare, il mondo senza interesse'
(the boredom of looking, the world without interest). However, Ghirri
succeeds in seeing in their uniform geometry, their regular lines and
symmetries, and their colors, an attempt at 'furnishing quotidian emp-
tiness as best as one can.' In observing them frontally, Ghirri captures
'perspectives similar to those of the Quattrocento, symmetries of a neo-
classical kind, and colors that recall Piero della Francesca.' Celati sums
up: 'In breve, ha scoperto in quelle noiose villette una forma di vita, un
esempio di cultura del vuoto' (In brief, he has discovered in those bor-
ing little houses a form of life, an example of the culture of emptiness).
He calls this sort of operation a 'story' that is neither 'dark' nor 'gray'
but rather one that tells us about the myriad of such places that sur-
round us and in which we 'feel ourselves to be dispersed.' This is a
view of the external that shows to us the interest to be found in the
ordinary 'appearances' in the midst of which we live, and of which we
are ourselves an integral part, rather than a view of the external world
as fundamentally different and separate from us because represented
primarily with 'exceptional,' 'noteworthy,' or 'artistic' images or stories
that have nothing to do with the way daily life is actually experienced,
no matter where or by whom.6 Celati believes that Ghirri's ability to
'lower the threshold of intensity' in his photographs allows him to
bring out 'subtleties' and to 'suture appearances dispersed in empty
spaces': in short, to 'organize experience' and thus to 'give relief to our
shared sense of separateness and insignificance. This is what fictions in
which to believe should seek to do as well: to organize experience; to
give relief - Celati writes that 'there exists no story worth the trouble of
being made, if it doesn't give relief (even tragedy gives relief, the bril-
liant unmaskings of every fiction, instead, do not)' -; to see the 'worlds
of stories' that are out there in 'every point in space'; and to follow a
way of thinking and imagining 'that doesn't become paralyzed in a
disdain for all that is around us' (all quotations from Tinzioni a cui cre-
dere'; 13). Implicit in this short essay is Celati's long aversion to the
search for original 'artistic' effects merely for the sake of originality or
exceptionality, yet there is something quite different in his 'take' on

writing. Rather than concentrating on the act of writing itself or on
what is ultimately a kind of dismantling of subjectivity by means of the
sheer materiality of language (as seen in his earlier works), now he
quite literally looks to - and at - externality as the origin and locus of
writing, containing, as the spaces around us do, infinitely potential sto-
ries if we only can learn how to see (rather than immediately to try to
interpret) them.
Space is, therefore, still a fundamentally conditioning element for
Celati's fictions, but it is localized and specific space: the landscapes
and towns of the Po valley. Space itself is 'pared down,' localized, and
explored not so much as a broad epistemological category, but as an
inhabited locus of contemporary life. To see this localized space dif-
ferently is to enter into a series of more theoretical considerations,
however, for there is nothing 'natural' about the familiar for Celati,
anymore than are natural the abstract categories of 'history,' 'knowl-
edge,' or 'writing.' Celati enters into the collaboration with Ghirri with
the same critical spirit that animates all of his work; and he theorizes
the experience of seeing as much as he theorized earlier experiences
of the family, vagabondage, history, and the materiality of language.
The other piece centering on Ghirri and published during Celati's
period of collaboration with him is 'Verso la foce: Reportage per un
amico fotografo' (Towards the river mouth: Reportage for a photogra-
pher friend), a diaristic record of a trip through the Po valley region in
which the new way of seeing - and thus of writing - is evident. This
important piece is included in a volume of photographs by diverse
photographers, Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy), along with an essay
by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, 'Appunti' (Notes), that offers a rich mini-
history of photography in Italy and makes explicit the innovative
aspect of the approach to and results of the work included in the vol-
ume. Quintavalle, a distinguished art historian and critic who was an
important mentor of and commentator on Ghirri's work, emphasizes,
among other qualities, the 'monumentality' of so-called art photogra-
phy that to a great extent has dominated representations of Italy and
determined the idea of Italian culture available not only to non-Italians
but to the Italian people themselves. In his concise yet dense survey of
the Italian photographic tradition, Quintavalle recalls the close link
between painting and early photography: 'The work of Anderson, Ali-
nari and their imitators, the work of photographic documentation of
Italy [relating to] its "monuments" is done as a system of reflections of
ioo Gianni Celati
the graphic, etched, drawn image, for which reason the points of view
of photographs are those of eighteenth-century etchings, and they
don't change/ Later, postcard photography, especially under the Fas-
cist Regime, continues the orientation to monuments - cathedrals, pub-
lic edifices, churches - and ignores the spaces of everyday life and
people. After Fascism a 'realist' photography emerges, but Quintavalle
states that it constructs a 'myth of the genuineness of the countryside
[and] of ancient habits' (mainly centered on the south of Italy) more or
less at the same time as Italy is in fact becoming heavily industrialized;
this photographic mode is, therefore, deeply conservative rather than
truly reflective of lived reality. Thus, there are two dominant traditions
in Italian photography - monumentalist and pictorialist - and both are
strongly tied to authoritarian, institutionalized, and fundamentally
conservative cultural and political agendas. If Italian cinema, espe-
cially neorealist cinema, discovered a new and different space that con-
tradicted the 'official' Italian spatial 'reality' forwarded by Fascism
(Quintavalle specifically mentions Visconti's discovery in Ossessione of
'another landscape ... a dimension of the countryside, of the earth, of
people and above all a space that is new/ which was, in fact, the anti-
monumentality of the voile padana), post-war photographers were
more Crocean in their aestheticized approach to landscape, indulging
in research that was 'loaded with ecstatic contemplation' and 'Artistic'
attitudes regarding the representation of a looked-for 'pictorial' reality.
Cinema and photography in Italy, it is implied, developed along quite
different lines, with the result that the conservative, aestheticizing
point of view continued to condition photographic work until two
other models began to emerge: the 'neo-American' and the Bressonian.
Quintavalle sees Bresson as having been most 'adaptable to the pro-
foundly Crocean bases of [Italian] photographic culture' in the fifties
and sixties, with the result that a 'mythic' view of Italy, made up of
'sunset on the Arno and on the Tiber, on the lagunas or on the canals,
on the Po or in the Maremma/ gave little room for photographic real-
ism of any sort. We are left today with an Italy made up of a pictorially
'ancient' south, of (mainly northern) monuments, of beaches with fake
blue skies that sing the praises of mass vacations, and of lovely dawns
and sunsets - with a few cute dogs and young lovers thrown in for
good measure. Old models (the monumentality of Rome beloved of
travelers to Italy for centuries, nineteenth-century landscape painting,
and Bressonian 'Art,' among others) have not relinquished their hold
on Italian photographic culture, with the result that vast portions
of Italian geographic and human realities have been obliterated or

flattened. (All quotations in this paragraph are from Quintavalle,
'Appunti/ Viaggio in Italia; 7-14.)
Those portions of the existent that have been effaced by 'monumen-
tality' or by 'art' are precisely what the photographers of the volume in
question are looking to represent (just as Celati had always been look-
ing to ways of writing that also escaped these categories, and the idea
of culture subtending them). Quintavalle highlights the importance of
Ghirri's work in rethinking the Italian idea of photography from the
bottom up, inspired in part by the photographer's study of American
New Photography and especially Walker Evans, but also indebted to
other conceptual artists and photographers at work in the early seven-
ties when Ghirri began to dedicate himself more or less exclusively to
photography. This is, of course, the period when Celati is also deeply
involved in reconceptualizing writing and looking for a different 'idea
of literature' that might move beyond the 'monumental,' high art
mode that had shaped Italian literary culture from its beginnings. Even
though Ghirri and Celati did not meet and begin to collaborate until
the early eighties, they came together already prepared to find signifi-
cant, mutually stimulating, and fundamentally shared convictions
about what they were searching for as creative and critical thinkers.
They also had a region in common - Emilia-Romagna - and it is thus
all the more understandable that their meeting resonated with an
almost miraculous heightening of creativity and a new depth of
thought for both.
In the late seventies, Celati had made a trip to the United States dur-
ing which he had hoped to involve himself in film-making. It was not a
happy trip, nor was this a period generally of positive work for the
writer. (When I first met him in Rome in early 1979, he said he was
'sickened' by Italian society and literary culture and had no real desire
to try to write fiction any longer.) Years later, in an interview con-
ducted by Manuela Teatini for a 1991 issue of the journal Cinema e
Cinema after the completion of his video-story, Strada provincial delle
anime, Celati was asked how his interest in the Po valley landscapes of
the video had begun. He responded that when he returned from
America in 1979, he decided one day 'to go to see the little town where
[his] mother was born.' He continued: T believe that it all started from
there, my rethinking of the provinces, and then I gave myself over to
these explorations of the Delta of the Po that lasted for several years'
(Tl sentimento dello spazio'; 25). I think it significant that Celati went
102 Gianni Celati
in search of his origins, of his matrix, so to speak, precisely at a time

when the 'paternal' institutions to which he had looked for support
and inspiration (in spite of his fundamental lack of belief in such insti-
tutions) - that is, the Italian literary establishment and the American
film-making industry - had 'let him down.' His 1978 Lunario del para-
diso had not been well received, and his experiences in California (later
fictionalized in a story, 'Storia di un apprendistato' [Story of an
apprenticeship], included in Narratori delle pianure) were alienating and
disappointing. After turning quite literally to the 'margins/ that is, to
the provincial Italy of his mother's origin, he was invited by Ghirri to
work on the project that resulted in the photographic show and subse-
quent volume, Viaggio in Italia. The first substantial result of this literal,
geographic reorientation and metaphorical, creative, and critical 'con-
version' - in the etymological sense of a 'turning around' that has a
natural, cyclic, seasonal quality to it, a turn that was also a return to a
matrix - was the writing contained in the essay published in Viaggio in
Italia, 'Verso la foce' (subsequently radically revised for inclusion in the
volume of 'stories of observation' of the same name published in 1989).
What I alluded to above as the 'feminine' symbolic quality of Celati's
long-standing preference for a spatial orientation was now reinforced
by a 'maternal' symbolic potential that I believe infuses his work of
this period and beyond. The Italian provinces have long carried with
them a maternal significance, related to the perdurability of local
mother tongues - dialects - and to strong ties with 'mother earth/ that
is less visible in urban centers of institutionalized culture and industri-
alization. Celati's journey to his actual mother's place of birth was,
therefore, also a journey into a different symbolic space than he had
heretofore inhabited.
'Verso la foce' is called a piece of 'reportage/ and it shares some of
the characteristics of this writing mode. As the genre dictates, Celati
writes from direct observation, and he recounts real events that
occurred in real places. But it is also different from 'reportage' in that
he is not seeking objectively to transmit newsworthy events, nor does
he avoid mixing the 'real' and the 'imaginary/ the latter in the form of
little stories that have the quality of fables or parables, or allusions to
books of fiction he reads while on the road that provide oblique com-
mentary on his own writing. One of the most notable changes from his
earlier ways of writing, which tended to divide fairly traditionally
between the fictional and the essayistic modes, is evident in this hybrid
of genres; furthermore, he writes primarily in the present tense, thus
making clear that what we are reading was created on the move and
on the spot. Celati even mentions at one point that he feels dizzy as he
stands writing in his notebook. The most salient feature of the piece is
its emphasis on description: of landscapes, architecture, people; in
sum, on external elements observed by Celati. The choice of what
exactly to describe, not to speak of how, parallels the task of the pho-
tographer, who must pick out and frame only part of the seen, then
deciding from which angle and with what sort of usage of light the
portion of the existent in question will be shot. Celati is, in one sense,
an 'eye' that frames and 'captures' the seen; in this role, he is like the
lens of a camera, an 'obiettivo' in Italian: a term that underscores objec-
tivity. But he is also the subjective, observing human presence who
understands and represents the seen 'in a certain light' and from a par-
ticular 'angle/ just as all thought is conveyed. His goal (like Ghirri's),
however, is to avoid both the ostensibly detached 'objectivity' of the
documentaristic 'reportage' model, and the engulfing 'subjectivity' of
the aestheticizing model, by means of a 'permeable gaze' whereby
externality conditions the choices of the subject as much as the subject
conditions the meanings found in the outside world. Mario Moroni
calls this Celati's 'paradigm of observation/ which is based on a 'cen-
trifugal' mode by means of which 'the narrating subject constantly dis-
tances from himself the referents towards which he is directing his
own observation or reflection, thus avoiding that [subjectively deter-
mined] centering that would be provoked if the writer kept his own
perceptions and observations tied to himself... Instead Celati seems to
give room to descriptive/reflective processes that have the capacity to
open themselves toward externality, creating in turn spaces for a possi-
ble perception/meditation on the part of the reader' (Moroni; 308). The
writer 'vacillates' (a word, as I've mentioned in the discussion of
'Baratto/ that later takes on important significance) between subjectiv-
ity and objectivity, in his search for a form of writing that might acti-
vate new perceptual and meditative possibilities for others.
If the 'objective' element of this form of writing is tied to the visibly
external (as the opening line with its reference to light shows),7 the
writer's subjectivity is expressed through the little fables he imbeds in
his 'reportage/ the allusions to the books he is reading as he travels
through the Po landscapes, and the references to his desire to see his
mother's birthplace. The first two elements are of the realm of the
imagination, while the third is openly autobiographical. Yet they are all
united under the sign of a 'feminine symbolic/ in the sense that they
104 Gianni Celati
contribute to the 'permeability' of the writer as he searches for a rela-

tion with the external world different from one based on mastery, dom-
ination, or codification. Here, Ghirri's idea of photography is also
relevant; he calls it a 'journey,' but it is not a linear, teleological one.
Instead, photography is 'un itinerario tracciato, ma con molti scarti e
ritorni, casualita ed improvvisazione, una linea a zig-zag ... credo che
la fotografia sia semplicemente la rappresentazione di come si perce-
pisce la realta, il mondo esterno, ma questa percezione non e mai
univoca o codificabile, e piuttosto un vedere e un sentire "a strati"' (a
mapped-out itinerary, but with many swerves and returns, chance and
improvisation, a zigzag line ... I believe that photography is simply the
representation of how one perceives reality, the external world, but this
perception is never univocal or codifiable, it is instead a seeing and a
feeling 'in layers') ('II sentimento dello spazio'; 49) The 'layers' of per-
ception that Celati's writing reveals include the spaces opened up by
others' writing, his retracing of his mother's travels through space, and
the intertwining contours of his little tales and the immediate spaces of
his own trip. He specifically mentions Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet,
Malcolm Lowry's October ferry to Gabriola, and H.G. Wells's The Coun-
try of the Blind as books he is reading during his zigzagging journey. He
comments explicitly only on the last, but if we, his readers, know these
texts, we (or I should say T) can experience our (my) own imagined,
oblique connections between Celati's words and those of these other
writers, thus 'deviating' into our (my) own layers of thoughts and per-
ceptions. For me, the reference to Flaubert's last book relates to Celati's
lack of faith in the codification of experience, to his desire to revalorize
the cliches by which we live, and to the concept of writing as copying
rather than origination. Lowry's book conveyed to me a strong sense of
exile, and an unquiet, journeying subjectivity similar to Celati's.
Wells's Country of the Blind, is a text that - perhaps unlike Flaubert's
and Lowry's (I say 'perhaps' since nothing is said about how these
books specifically interrelate for Celati) - makes the reader think about
the metaphorical resonances of blindness and sight, the unseen and the
seen. Wells's story is imbricated with one of Celati's little 'fables' about
a man who once 'dreamed that he was in an unknown place in the
mountains.' His guide was explaining to him that 'in those mountains
lived many other populations, but each population is invisible to all
the others.' The man then asked how the guide knows that they exist if
they are invisible; the reply is: Terche me lo sento addosso' (because I
feel them up close: literally, I feel them on my back). Wells's story,

instead, according to Celati's reading of it, has a tone that makes us
believe that the blind people were wrong to beat the sighted man
whose descriptions of the seen world they cannot accept, a tone that
'doesn't give up [offering] judgements and opinions that we have on
something we don't know' ('Verso la foce'; 32). It is highly significant, I
think, that Celati includes these stories about the unseen (the invisible
populations, the world according to the blind) within his 'reportage'
on the seen, for they subtly emphasize the equally important role of the
imagination (that which is materially unseeable) in the formation of
our perceptions of experience. Imagination is described, in the 1989
volume Verso la foce, as the 'uneliminable goddess who guides every
gaze' (ineliminabile dea che guida ogni sguardo; 103); as Moroni com-
ments: The primary force seems precisely to be the imagination,
presented here as a feminine presence who guides the gaze' (italics
mine; Moroni; 308). Celati's insistence on wanting to visit his mother's
birthplace can be understood as related to - even as an emblematic
sign of - his 'permeable/ 'feminine' journey into imaginative as well as
physical space. When Celati finally gets to her town, Sandolo, after
walking for around an hour along the road, he sits down on the guard
rail on the side of the highway, 'in order to try to imagine' the town. He
has 'only generic images, a piazza, bars, a church with the clock in the
tower. Also images of barns, buses from the past, gravel roads.' He also
has a 'vision of a little church with a terracotta facade' ('Verso la foce';
26). After a bit, the writer gets up and turns back towards another
town, without even paying a short visit to his mother's actual town. In
searching for his mother's past experience, the visible, present town
cannot give him what he wants, nor does his imagination provide him
with particularly illuminating visions. There is no epiphany, either
from the external or the internal realms, but it is their intermingling
that characterizes his arrival to the matrix. The actual physical journey
back to his mother's town is co-existent with his faint imaginings of
the town. Neither is valorized in any absolute or conclusive sense,
however; both are simply presented as parts of the existent that the
writer's words share with us. The external, the internal, and the words
themselves are all traces that, moment to moment, allude to something
beyond them that cannot be captured, explained, or dominated. It is
the sheer ordinariness of Celati's trip, of his thoughts once he arrives,
and of his unemphatic, plain prose that reveals to us, his readers, the
106 Gianni Celati
vast complexities of experience and representation, be they real, imagi-

native, or some hybrid mixture of both.
After the publication in 1984 of these two 'previews' of Celati's new

perspectives on the role of the external and visual in his writing, over
the next six or so years appeared several texts that reflected his con-
tinuing involvement in approaches that were deeply influenced by the
collaboration with Ghirri. Before moving on to analyses of Narratori
delle pianure and Strada provinciate delle anime, both of which show the
influence of photographic issues as theorized by Ghirri, I want to dis-
cuss an essay by Celati on Ghirri's photography, included in the 1989
volume of the latter's photographs entitled // profile delle nuvole: immag-
ini di un paesaggio italiano (The profile of clouds: Images of an Italian
landscape), as well as an unpublished piece on Ghirri which Celati
co-authored with Giorgio Messori, entitled 'Luigi Ghirri, leggere e
pensare per immagini' (Luigi Ghirri, reading and thinking through
images). To complete the bibliography of writings related to Celati's
work with Ghirri I should mention the 1986 anthology, Esplorazioni
sulla Via Emilia: Scritture nel paesaggio (Explorations of the Via Emilia:
Writings in the landscape) and its companion volume of photographs,
Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia: Vedute nel paesaggio (Explorations of the Via
Emilia: Views in the landscape); the 1989 volume, Verso lafoce (Towards
the river mouth), in which are included radically reworked parts of the
essay 'Verso la foce' discussed above, as well as new material, all of
which Celati called 'racconti d'osservazione' (tales of observation); and
the 1987 collection of stories, Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, which
includes 'Baratto' and other stories (especially 'Luci sulla Via Emilia'
[Lights on the Via Emilia], which appeared in the Via Emilia volume
mentioned above) that are more or less tied to this phase of Celati's
research into the visible. All in all, almost a decade - from the early
eighties to the early nineties - is characterized by an intense involve-
ment with theories and practices conditioned by meditations on the
external world, perspective, space: all in turn tied to shared problemat-
ics of photography and narration.
The essay that accompanies Ghirri's II profile delle nuvole, 'Commenti
su un teatro naturale delle immagini' (Comments on a natural theater
of images) is, in a certain sense, the culmination of Celati's thought on
Ghirri's photography. It is made up of commentary on the specific
photographs in the volume and general remarks on Ghirri's work, and
Celati takes actively into account his friend's own thoughts and
approaches to his art. The essay, which is printed before the photo-
graphs, appears in dated segments that extend from May to October,
thus maintaining the diaristic and immediate quality of his writing in
'Verso la foce.' The photographs that follow are not dated, however, so
there is no direct connection to be made between the time frame of
Celati's comments and the moments when the photographs were
made. The relation between text and image is further complicated by
the placement of phrases, taken from here and there in Celati's essay,
under some of the photographs, although the phrases are not specific
to those particular photographs. As W.J.T. Mitchell has noted in his
The Ethics of Form in the Photographic Essay/ the photographic essay
is 'the ideal place to study the interaction of photography and lan-
guage/ but the questions raised by this genre are not easily answered.
If, as Mitchell reminds us, the traditional 'formal requirements of the
photographic essay' are that it and the photographs be understood as
'coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative/ according to
James Agee's introduction to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which
includes the photography of Walker Evans, this equality, indepen-
dence, and collaboration are not achieved by simple means (The Eth-
ics of Form'; 9). In fact, while Celati's essay emphasizes collaboration it
does not assert 'mutual independence' or 'coequality'; rather, the
points of contact between photographic and narrational perspectives,
and between his and Ghirri's poetics, are highlighted.
The first section of Celati's essay, dated 10 May, begins with an indi-
rect quotation from Ghirri: 'Ghirri ha spesso parlato della fotografia
come una specie di racconto di fantascienza' (Ghirri has often spoken of
photography as a kind of science fiction story). (This and subsequent
quotations are all from 'Commenti su un teatro naturale delle imma-
gini'; 20-35.) Celati explains that Ghirri says that the seen world is not
the same as the photographed world, just as 'the world of a man who is
crying is not the same as that of a man who is laughing, and the world
of someone who lives in a place cannot be the same as that of the
learned man who manipulates models in which no one can live.'
Ghirri's description of this difference is illustrated by reference to the
science fiction of J.G. Ballard, in which everything seems normal at the
beginning, but this normalcy is broken by a Tittle swerve' (piccolo
scarto) that produces an altered perception of normalcy, thus making us
see a completely different and basically unnatural world. This is the
formalist concept of 'estrangement/ of course, that both makes the real
more 'real' and yet renders it new, uncanny, as if never before seen. For
io8 Gianni Celati
Ghirri, according to Celati, this 'swerve' can almost always be brought

back to a question of light, which changes constantly and thus makes it
impossible that the same photograph can be taken in two different
moments. Celati calls this the 'state of contingency' that is inherent in
the photographic act. The writer notes that Barthes saw this contin-
gency as an indication of the death adhering to all that which is photo-
graphed, but further notes that Ghirri prefers to see contingency as a
renewing element, in that perception itself is thus perpetually renewed.
Celati then makes the analogy with writing: a story is also made up of
'states of contingency, passages from one moment to another. However,
if every moment is a swerve, in respect to the preceding one, that
renews expectations, then every moment renews the perception of
the entire story/ Photography, seen in this light, is the opposite of the
'eternity' sought by art, and Ghirri wants precisely to highlight the pos-
itivity of its radical contingency. Celati quotes Ghirri as saying that
'photos are only images for remembering something, notes to put in an
album. In the end this is a use of photography close to everyday use,
and different both from [the use] of the art photo and from that of the
documentary photo.' Although Celati does not make the connection
explicit, it is clear that he now sees his writing in a similar light: as nei-
ther 'Art' nor document, but rather as a way to remember something
and to pass that remembrance on to others. In an interview published
in the same year (1989) as the essay in question, Celati speaks of narra-
tion as a ceremony that 'forms images that are transmitted without
power games, in their space of preservation. Only thus can they then
become memory, reminiscence for others' ('II transito mite delle
parole'; 15). Photographs and stories refer us back to others already
made and forward to those to be made in the future, reminding us of
the contingent nature of all that which is or has been existent, a contin-
gency in which we all share with something akin to that 'infinite frater-
nity' sensed by Melville and expressed in his 'Bartleby.'
In the next section of Celati's essay, dated 12 May, he again begins by
quoting Ghirri: '"You are in a room, the light through the blinds
projects shadows on the ceiling. A car passes by on the street, and you
see its silhouette on the ceiling. That's photography, its beginning is
here. Then film and lenses come, but, before anything, there is this
experience of images reflected by means of the effect of a passage of
light."' Perspective is introduced in terms of the way in which passing
light is focalized through a small opening, as in the castle of Fontanel-
lato near Parma, where there is a dark room the size of a human being.
There, a small hole exists in the wall through which light projects onto
the wall an upside-down image of the piazza outside. Looking at the
piazza in this way is like 'spying' on the world and seeing it as a 'dou-
ble'; this view also narrows down and makes more precise that which
is seen. Celati comments: Thus it seems to me that a point of view can
be understood, also in literature and in philosophy. Whoever looks
from a point of view that is more precise because more limited, finds
himself spying on the world as if it were an estranged thing.' Ghirri
sees this reduction and precision as a 'way of making you look [at
externality] better/ but not as a way of seeing everything with com-
plete clarity. He (and Celati) wish to avoid seeking the 'utopia of seeing
completely clearly/ however, preferring instead to capture in their
work something of the 'enveloping embrace' of common vision, which
does not narrow and reduce the seen into precise elements. To achieve
this, Ghirri typically uses wide-angle shots in which the foreground is
often a bit out of focus 'because [it takes in] many diffused appear-
ances in the landscape.' Again, although Celati does not make the anal-
ogy explicit, it is possible to read his fiction of this period as looking to
avoid a 'spying/ dominating point of view that makes everything
recounted completely clear and masterfully interpreted.
Celati next discusses the way in which Ghirri's photographs are
ordered in the volume in question (in a section dated 27 June). He sees
it as a kind of analogical game, according to Ghirri's belief that a mon-
tage is always created by a group of photographs, like the 'narration'
that appears as one leafs through a family album. If a photograph (like
a painting) is generally presented in our time as having a unique value
in and of itself, as being detached from contingency, this convention
(which was born and flourished between the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury and the eighteenth century) is simply that: a convention. Ghirri
instead thinks back to the great narrative cycles of Giotto and of Beato
Angelico, and to the altars of Sassetta - to pre-Renaissance images, in
short - in which, as Celati puts it, 'one image carries you to another,
and the overall sense of what you see does not depend upon an aes-
thetic evaluation, but on the comprehension of a story that speaks of
events to be remembered' (akin to Dante's sculptures of 'visibile par-
lare' referred to above, which recall for our edification stories of acts of
great humility). Celati once more makes the distinction between the
'eternity of Art' and 'events to be remembered'; in the first case, an
impossible 'fixity of contemplation' is implied, while in the second 'all
the surroundings and movements' that bring us to look at a photo-
no Gianni Celati
graph (or, it is implied, a painting, or a story) are valorized. We

approach things in order to look at them 'by means of rhythms ... per-
ception participates in a musical involvement, like a dance.' Celati
notes that his friend is happy to hear it put in this way because he often
thinks of his photographs as 'bits of songs.' (With this comment, Celati
brings out the deeply collaborative nature of their work, as he and
Ghirri actively exchange thoughts and ideas that are the very immedi-
ate basis of the essay we are reading.) The connection between Ghirri's
'montage' of photographs and Celati's grouping of stories in the vari-
ous collections he published from the mid-eighties to the early nineties
is evident; in both, the goal is to avoid the contemplative fixity of High
Art and to honor the contingency both within the photos and the
stories and outside of them in the spaces where we, the viewers and
readers, dwell along with the photographer and the writer.
In the next several sections of the essay (dated 3, 4, and 5 Septem-
ber), Celati explores the issue of perspective, emphasizing the fact that
'there is always a way of looking already foreseen, or guided, by the
thing that one looks at/ This concept sounds quasi-mystical at first
hearing, yet Celati explains it in terms of elements in the landscape and
architecture of the Po valley that Ghirri photographs, which orient the
eye to the horizon or to frontal symmetries typical of the area. Celati
notes that 'all of this is part of an ambience, where perspectives spring
up like mushrooms/ By following the 'plot' created by various analo-
gies of symmetries and perspectives, Ghirri weaves together 'an album
of things that can be seen, indicated in the way in which they ask to be
seen'; this weave is much like the 'intreccio' or plot based on the inter-
twining of narrative threads, such as was used by Ariosto in his epic
poem, whereby the reader's 'look' is dislocated and divided among
many different stories that go forward simultaneously. There are also
'affective resonances' that Ghirri tries to bring out in his work, such as
the 'theatricality' of some forms of Italian architecture or the 'diffused
illusionism' so much a part of the geography and villas of the Po val-
ley. In his photographs of piazzas and streets and walls of old Po valley
towns, taken at night, Ghirri brings to our eyes the artificiality of their
colors and lights, which is entirely modern (due to electricity), thus
revealing the 'fairy tale' quality of contemporary scenes. The atempo-
rality of these representations of what in fact surrounds us every day
and night in our cities and towns is like that of a fable or fairy tale, but
Celati writes that 'one can also say that time that passes away every
day along with us is suspended time, like the clouds that float, chang-
The Permeable Gaze ill
ing their forms in a strange suspension.' Ghirri's photographs, like

Celati's fictions, are 'antimonumental'; they guide us to an under-
standing of the radical contingency and atemporality of everyday,
lived experience (as well as its 'fairy tale' quality), rather than to a doc-
umentaristic or historical mastery of experience as abstraction.
On 11 September, Celati writes of the difficulty he sometimes had as
he traveled through the Po valley with Ghirri in avoiding a sense of the
monotony and predictability of certain ambiences, such as those found
in suburban environments where there are always the same street
signs, geometrically placed houses, and prefabricated gardens. Ghirri's
response was that 'monotony is nothing other than the disappointed
feeling of someone who always expects new illusionisms, as if one
needed to be seduced even in order to take one step.' With this attitude
is born 'the strange idea that there is "something to be seen," like an
absolute quality of locales'; instead, 'there is never anything to be seen,
there are only things that we happen to see with more or less enthusi-
asm, independently from their quality. A sadness attenuates all the col-
ors of a landscape, and being in love revivifies them.' When one is
blocked by a sense of monotony, Ghirri advises looking to the horizon,
which displaces the glance toward openness and can give back to us a
sense of the ''story' of all the phenomena that embrace us. Celati notes
that this is particularly difficult in a country like Italy, where a kind of
architectonic and cultural 'illusionism' dominates that makes it seem
as if 'the perception of openness can only be this: a glimpse between
two monuments.' In the next section, dated 15 September, Celati pur-
sues this idea of 'opening out the gaze' towards all the objects around
us without the usual evaluative process of deciding whether they are
'interesting' or not. As we take in the colors and tonalities of the exter-
nal world, things seem to be 'a kind of warehouse of remembrances,
where everything goes on having a meaning even if it has no use.'
From this attitude can come a sense that the so-called exotic and the so-
called familiar are not so different, and that 'there is no longer any
great voyage that is more stirring than a stroll in order to see the colors
of the world.' This embrace of the obvious and the 'banal' is very much
a part of Celati's writing, as can be seen in both his early 'everyday sto-
ries' and in his later, more overtly 'minimalist' tales. There is no dis-
dain or irony in this approach to the existent and to its representation
in images and words, for, as Ghirri comments in the section dated
i October, he has no desire to 'unmask the obvious,' instead seeking to
find 'shared affective elements' in the seen world around us. Celati
112 Gianni Celati
adds that this commonality has to do with the fact that 'the observed
world is not that which appears through the point of view of a sole
individual. It is that which, before him, is already common to various
observations and representations, because it belongs to a form of life/
The writer sees in Ghirri's photographs something like a challenge to
the usual prejudices regarding the common or 'trite/ for he often takes
photos of what could be called 'stereotypes of this country of melo-
drama/ for example, Verdi's theater in Busseto, which is so rosy red
and ordered as to appear to be itself a set; or a confessional that looks
like a trompe-l'oeil, which makes Celati think of Stendhal's idea of Ital-
ian melodrama. It seems that Celati is here highlighting Ghirri's accep-
tance of certain stereotypically Italian scenes, the 'obviousness' of
which recalls habits and modes of seeing that are a shared tradition.
In the next section, dated 2 October, Celati elaborates on Ghirri's
attraction to so-called 'stereotypical' scenes, specifying that the pho-
tographer transforms them into phenomena of colors that are similar
to the atmospheric colors his photos present to the eye. Thus, internal
scenes and objects are 'pulled toward the open' and presented 'in a
great theater that opens out toward the external.' This effect of open-
ness is achieved by means of the use of light 'that is always enveloping
and never indicated as a partial source.' But Celati sees the effect as
depending on something less material as well, which he calls Ghirri's
'appetite of the gaze.' We are then drawn into a sort of 'contagion' that
stimulates our own 'appetite' to see, which Celati calls 'attention to the
splendor of all things enveloped in light.' Disenchanted or unhappy
people cannot see in this way, but those who 'have a good rapport with
the horizon and with the sky' (called 'the two final borders of the great
natural theater of images') can take in this splendor.
Celati maintains throughout his essay an exquisite balance between
concrete description and abstract interpretation of Ghirri's photo-
graphs. The final three sections of the essay, dated 3, 4, and 6 October
are, however, increasingly lyrical, achieving what might be called an
almost miraculous form of 'poetical analysis' that is as beautiful as it is
illuminating. He writes of Ghirri's 'laborious construction of a duree' in
many of his photographs, which gives us a sense of the 'works and
days' made and lived by common artisans as well as by great artists
like Giorgio Morandi. There are also photographs of the 'celebrations'
that follow work, such as local fairs. Of these, Celati writes that 'they
give [me] a sense of nostalgia for a film that I'll never be able to see and
that doesn't exist, calling [me] back to moments of enchantment that
I've perhaps only dreamed of.' This feeling of impossible nostalgia for
the nonexistent reminds the writer of an anecdote told by Robert
Walser about a dedicated reader of Gottfried Keller's tales, who one
day begins to cry while she laments: The world is not like this.' It
seems to Celati that it is only through a 'laborious exercise in order to
use well the inauthenticity and artificiality of all words and images
that each moment in the world might be redeemed and freed' (riscat-
tare). All of the contingent and passing moments of existence can thus
be transformed into 'phenomena of the great natural theater, limited
only by the horizon and the tent of the sky/ and artifice in this sense
can be seen above all as a sign of 'good will.' Celati concludes: 'The
weeping of the woman of whom Walser speaks is nothing other than
the affective basis of all of this: [a sense of] compassion for the world'
(la pieta per il mondo). Artifice is explained here in what I see as a fun-
damentally novel and enormously stimulating manner: according to
this view, the craft and craftiness of art are not used in order to create
effects for the sake of effects, but rather in order to bring us to a felt
understanding of the 'impossible' beauty of the existent.
Among the last photographs included in the volume are a series of
landscapes leading towards the mouth of the Po river. Celati calls them
the 'crowning achievement' of Ghirri's 'plot of images/ in that they
give us images of zones that are 'almost unapproachable photographi-
cally, because where there is only sky and horizon photography finds
itself uneasy' (a disagio). It is precisely this difficulty that makes
the images so exceptional, for Ghirri manages to gather 'all those
extremely tenuous resonances' of infinitely diffused space that make it
'lookable.' Celati recalls the eighth elegy of Rilke ('We never have,
before us, not even for a day/ pure space ... There is always world/
and never that nowhere without negations'), commenting that Rilke
means with the word 'world' the 'obviousness of things and appear-
ances, already given in order to be called in a certain way, in order to
be seen in a certain manner, and on which all of our self-possession
or normalcy depends.' For the writer, the photographer's craft, may-
be more than any other work of our time, 'seems to testify to this
limit of the representations that give sense to our normalcy and self-
possession.' And the 'limit' is not social or historical, but spatial: 'it is
the horizon as the ultimate stage of all possible apparitions, and the
sky as the ultimate background of colors and tones that give an affec-
tive quality to the phenomena around us.' Celati finds in Ghirri's pho-
tography the crowning achievement of bringing appearances back to
H4 Gianni Celati
this stage and to this background, thus presenting 'all the appearances
of the world as suspended phenomena, and therefore no longer as
"facts" to be documented/ This achievement is tied to the concept of
'vaghezza/ which Celati defines as 'the feeling we have about phe-
nomena'; the photographs of horizon and sky call us to 'an elementary
attention to phenomena of color and light [that are] so indefinite, inde-
finable, so as to undermine the very idea that there might really exist
documentable "facts."' Ghirri succeeds by using the 'artifices of
"vaghezza": this ancient term of Italian art, in order to say something
that resembles the phenomena of the clouds, the sky, and the horizons/
I purposely did not translate the word "vaghezza," for it is not trans-
latable by one sole term in English. It is indeed an 'ancient term/ used
in its nominal, adjectival ('vago') and verb ('vagheggiare') forms by
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cellini, Leopardi, and many others
throughout the centuries, in order to signify many things: indetermi-
nacy; loveliness; errancy; a loving gaze; desire; grace. Leopardi saw
'vaghezza' as the essence of the poetic, and sought to create its effects
by means of words that he believed were intrinsically 'vaghe/ such as
'luna' (moon) and 'dolce' (sweet). In using this word, Celati seems to
be reaching towards this complex and rich semantic field both in order
to define Ghirri's 'crowning achievement' and to express something of
the effect produced by his images of sky and horizon. Although the
writer does not speak here of the 'lunar' quality of 'vaghezza,' I think
that the enchantment before the visible that he describes can be associ-
ated with the poetic effects of moonlight, as contrasted to the 'harder/
more rationally determined concept of perception when deployed
under the sign of the sun. (I'll discuss below the important role played
by the Leopardian moon in Celati's own video-story.) The moon is, of
course, 'feminine' in our symbolic order, allied as it is to the soft, the
attenuated, the irrational, the cyclic. Just so is Celati's 'preference' for
approaches to the visible such as Ghirri's, in which the affective and
undocumentable essence of the seen conditions and guides his eye,
which seeks to 'caress' rather than to 'capture' the seen world.
In the final section of the essay, dated 6 October, Celati writes that in
rereading what he has written, he finds that he has behaved like some-
one 'too lost in interpretations, knowing well that all interpretation is
suspended in air, and nothing will ever be able to bring it back to
earth/ To counter this, he is suddenly seized by the opposite mania,
which is to 'ask only technical questions, to search for precise facts
alone/ He therefore asks Ghirri how it is that a photographer can
The Permeable Gaze 11.5
achieve all these artifices; Ghirri answers that 'as someone who writes
can only entrust himself to words and sentences, so a photographer
can only entrust himself to the manner of framing things/ But how can
one know how things 'ask' to be framed in landscapes, like those at the
mouth of the Po, which are not in any way constructed architecturally?
Again, Ghirri can respond precisely, saying that even in these flat, open
spaces there are ways of seeing that are determined by the openings of
valleys or the longitudinal vistas across cultivated fields. But most
important is to find 'points of the gaze that may be comprehensible to
others. It is necessary to give up one's own point of view, otherwise
one spies rather than looking. Working on the framing one can find
certain approximations that might recall a common vision and a spon-
taneous gaze.' Just as Celati began the essay with recourse directly to
Ghirri's words, he ends with a quote from his friend: 'Everything that
you see, lives only in the framing. Even the sea, how can I photograph
it if not by putting it in a frame like a painting? If you like, it is like a
window from which you look at phenomena, and you are like a child
who must do an essay, writing about that which he saw. You look out
of the window, but who is it who is looking? I remember that story by
Calvino, who says: "it's the world that looks at the world/" Implicit in
Celati's comments on Ghirri is the idea that writing, like photography,
can also aspire to a permeable gaze rather than a masterful point of
view, and such writing might thus result in texts that emerge from
something like an 'eye' that is attuned to commonality, not an T that
clings to its singularity.
Thus ends a remarkable meditation on the work of one photogra-
pher, on photography generally considered, and on representation
whether through words or images. The relationship between the pho-
tographs and the essay is based on a series of shared issues regarding
our ways of perceiving and representing the existent, that which is
both separate from us and that of which we are a part. The question is
not how or whether the writing and the image are 'coequal' or 'mutu-
ally independent,' but rather how they are both ways of framing and
communicating shared and shareable human experience. In this essay,
Celati conveys how much he has learned about the role of perception
and representation through his collaboration with Ghirri, but it is
equally evident that, in asking the questions and having the responses
he did to the work of Ghirri, the writer in turn stimulated an explana-
tory eloquence on the part of the photographer that perhaps would not
have been born without Celati's intense engagement with the issues at
n6 Gianni Celati
stake. Thus, the 'fully collaborative' nature of the photographic essay,

as defined by Agee and quoted by Mitchell, comes to the fore as the
primary quality of this stupendous volume.
The last piece of writing relating directly to Ghirri to which I want
briefly to allude is an unpublished essay written by Celati and Giorgio
Messori entitled 'Luigi Ghirri, Leggere e pensare per immagini' (Luigi
Ghirri, reading and thinking through images). In this piece, the rele-
vance of Ghirri's photographic work to the craft of writing narratives
is made more explicit. Many points already made in the essay dis-
cussed above are repeated: the ways in which Ghirri's photography
brings out the 'already seen' nature of the visible by often including
people shot from behind -who are looking at something; his highlight-
ing of the common uses of photography as a mode of remembrance by,
for example, taking pictures of photo albums and of shop windows in
which wedding and family photos are displayed; his emphasis of the
ways in which people order the space around them, seen in his photo-
graphs of suburban houses and gardens; his desire to valorize the par-
tial and contingent nature of the framed image; his wish to avoid a
'conquering' and 'spying' gaze, instead looking to underscore his com-
plicity with the given and the habitual qualities of the seen as shared
by all those who live within the spaces being observed. Now, however,
Celati and Messori define observation as understood by Ghirri as a
form of 'reading.' If we can learn to 'read' as Ghirri observes the seen,
they claim, then we can stop trying to 'define the unique and original
character of a certain author, because we realize that [the author] is
using a language common to everyone, and that his great resource is to
be found precisely in the use of this common faculty that binds us and
permits us to understand one another.' Ghirri has helped Celati and
Messori to understand that 'the world is already given, it already has a
sense, and has ways of organizing experience, and it is only because of
this that it is livable.' As in the case of Bartleby, here too it is asserted
that there is no 'secret' to be unveiled, but only representational modes
that permeate existence and make it shareable if not comprehensively
understandable. We can find our way 'home' again if we understand
that the world is a 'book' that has already been read by others before
us, and is thus filled with representations to which we should seek to
join our own, while alluding to all that which is beyond our own
'frame.' Celati and Messori write: '[This is] the end of secrets to be
seized, of the mania to reveal something, of the tricks of intellectual
pride that would want to explain the world to us from the top of a
tower of Babel. Everything becomes already seen, already said, but

precisely for this reason we recognize better the digressions and sur-
prises relating to the already seen and the already said/ As a photo-
graph frames a portion of the existent, it becomes 'a measure of our
seeing, a measure of our experience/ and it also reminds us of all that
is cancelled out by the act of framing, thus drawing us into a recogni-
tion of the 'rest of the non-represented real/ Although this essay does
not refer to Celati's stories of the mid-eighties and beyond, I believe
that it is possible, especially in the case of Narmtori delle pianure, to
see put into language these principles of observation, framing, and
ordering. In this volume, Celati recounts the 'narratives' or already-
observed worlds of others, rather than writing from his own singular,
authorial perspective; he also works to create a sense in his readers of
the untold stories and external spaces beyond the tales included in his
'frame/ It is to a closer look at how spatial elements condition this col-
lection that I therefore now turn.
From the cover photograph (by Ghirri) of a snowy road leading
towards a misty, indistinct 'elsewhere' - which includes a back view of
Celati looking towards that 'elsewhere' - to the map of the plains that
serves as visual preface and, finally, to the locales of the stories them-
selves, Narratori delle pianure involves us in a meditation on space and
externality. The space evoked by the volume's paratextual elements
(title, cover photo, map) seems, at first glance, if not highly specific, at
least somewhat delimited: the 'plains' of the title. The prefatory map
shows us the Via Emilia as it more or less follows the river Po from its
source near Gallarate northwest of Milan to its mouth into the Adriatic;
it is also doted with the names of cities and towns in the Po valley
region. Even if readers do not personally know this area of Italy, they
can associate certain qualities with the space of plains country: flat-
ness, openness, simplicity. Gaston Bachelard wrote in his The Poetics of
Space that 'there would always be nuances, too, between dreamers who
are calmed by plain country and those who are made uneasy by it,
nuances that are all the more interesting to study since the plains are
often thought of as representing a simplified world' (204). We thus
enter into this 'plain country' already calmed or uneasy, depending on
the associations it evokes in us.
In approaching Celati's plains, I want to discuss certain techniques
of spatial representation by which these stories are shaped. The basic
building blocks of any story are spatial and temporal in nature, means
by which we recognize what we read or hear as a story. Celati's use of
n8 Gianni Celati
spatial building blocks results not only in effective stories but also in
an implicit meditation on the narrative process itself, as well as on tra-
ditional modes of organizing and interpreting experience. Rather than
imposing an interpretative grid on these stories from without, I want
to try to show that their 'meanings' are literally imbedded in and indis-
solubly linked to the narrational constructs Celati uses, rather than to
external ideologies or value judgments by which content is more com-
monly evaluated. I take my departure for the reading that follows from
Celati's own words on the acts of reading and analyzing narrative fic-
tions: 'Una narrazione scritta e un'esperienza solitaria come il sogno,
non spartibile con nessuno, se non nei suoi aspetti tecnici' (a written
narration is a solitary experience like a dream, not shareable with any-
one, except in its technical aspects) (Frasi per narratori [1984]; 67).
Whether we are 'calmed' or 'made uneasy' by our individual, solitary
journeys through these plains has finally to do with our singular points
of view, rather than with a perspective provided by a paternalistic
interpreter of his own writing, that is, an 'author' in the traditional
sense. Celati's use of space opens out perspectives that allow for many
responses; my own, merely one of those many, follows.
The real world to which these stories refer - the Po valley - is, in the
prefatory map, represented as a number of place names connected by
dark lines, presumably roads or itineraries followed. Printed across
two pages, the map invites a reading from left to right (or west to east),
the usual direction of the eye's movement as we read. The map is
schematic: black and white, without any indications of distances, it
does little more than evoke, in a rudimentary way, a real geographic
space. The stories repeat the 'direction' of the map. The first story
names Gallarate, the place name farthest left on the map; then follow
references in subsequent stories to Bollate, Codogno, Milan, Piacenza,
Cremona, and so on, finishing at the end of the book on the right-hand,
eastern side of the map in Chioggia. There is thus a mirroring of the
actual space in the textual space, and in the movement from left to
right, west to east, that both delineate. We 'travel' through the stories
(as through any book) on a trajectory schematized by the map, which
is metaphorically representative of the reading (and writing) process
itself. The basic spatiality of writing is highlighted, and its reliance on
temporal elements is greatly downplayed in the volume's paratextual
modes of presentation.
Just as the map is starkly minimalist, so too is the prose of the stories.
Both are wide open spaces that refuse the embellishments of topo-
graphical or rhetorical 'color.' Along with the narrator, we the readers

must fill up these spaces through an imaginative effort that transcends
the emptiness of the map, rather than relying on precise images or
imbedded interpretations that are completely and decisively drawn.
The opening story, which I discussed briefly in the Introduction to this
study, tells us of just such an imaginative effort/ as the Italian ham radio
operator and his English girlfriend receive Archie's messages from a
far-off island and the Italian radio correspondent begins 'to imagine
that island as if he had seen it with his own eyes' (12). The spatial coor-
dinates of the story (Italy - the far-off island) suggest, as does the pref-
atory map, abstract notions about space that pertain to writing and
reading. The difficulties of meaningful exchange via language and its
reception are clearly outlined by means of this setting: distance, lack of
a fully common language, reticence, physical absence, Yet, on the other
hand, the power of even approximate communications is evidenced as
well, for the Italian is able to imagine a space beyond him 'come se la
vedesse la fuori' (as if he saw it there outside). He must work at this
'seeing,' however, by enlisting the help of his girlfriend, who can trans-
late English for him, and by giving himself over to imagination. Later,
when the couple visit the island, they recognize the locales described to
them by Archie: They recognized almost everything and were able to
orient themselves as if they had already been there' (13). Celati thus
pulls his characters out of an imaginary space into a 'real' space, albeit
one that is still accessible to us, his readers, only through words. None-
theless, this movement outward is important to an understanding of
the basic impetus of the volume, which, like Ghirri's photographs,
seeks to pull our perception towards the external rather than to fix it
onto a self-referential, aesthetic artifact. We, like the Italian ham radio
operator and his friend, first 'see' the island as an imaginative recon-
struction; we then 'see' it along with them as it 'really' is. Within the
spatial frame of the story (first Gallarate, then the far-off island), an
extratextual 'there' or 'elsewhere' is brought in, with the result that the
frame itself is dilated and eventually broken through. An analogous
effect might be imagined as seeing a landscape on a film screen and
then, the screen having been removed, seeing before our eyes that very
landscape. But, of course, this is in fact not possible in written represen-
tation, for the 'realness' of the island, deeply conditioned by its preced-
ing represented status, is belied by its strongly mediated essence.
Archie is in fact absent and a second Archie tells the first Archie's story
to the couple, thus emphasizing even more the inaccessibility of a
120 Gianni Celati
'pure' presence. The 'real' world is, therefore, an already narrated

world, for there is no prenarrational reality that is accessible merely by
being inhabited. The doubling effect, emphasized in the repeated name
of the two Archies and in the unseen, imagined island and the subse-
quently seen one, shows that 'here' and 'there/ 'in' and 'out/ 'real' and
'represented/ are conceptual categories of great complexity. As Celati
wrote elsewhere, 'we are already and shall always be within represen-
tation' (Tinzioni a cui credere'; 14).
In Eccentric Spaces, Robert Harbison wrote: 'A map reader's exhilara-
tion comes from the sensation of not being tied to Place, of having bro-
ken the bonds of the local, and when this point of view enters painting
in the sixteenth century, preeminently with Bruegel, what a sense of
freedom it gives!' (126). This Bruegelesque plenitude is implied in the
first story discussed above, when the couple 'break the bonds of the
local' and discover that 'there are worlds of stories in every point of
space, appearances that require ever new stories' (Tinzioni a cui cred-
ere'). In his review of Narratari delle pianure, published in the magazine
Panorama shortly after the volume's appearance, Ghirri wrote: 'Mi ven-
gono in mente, a proposito di questi racconti, soprattutto alcuni quadri
di Bruegel, brulicanti di personaggi che si muovono in ogni direzione
nello spazio che li contiene, tanto da riempirlo: cosi sono i personaggi
che affollano le pagine di questo libro, sullo sfondo di un paesaggio
anch'esso in movimento e in continua mutazione' (Regarding these
stories, there come to my mind above all certain of Bruegel's paintings,
swarming with characters who are moving about in every direction in
the space that contains them, so much so that they fill it up: thus are
the characters who crowd the pages of this book, on the background of
a landscape itself in movement and constant mutation ('Una carezza al
mondo'; 24-5). Ghirri's review (a noteworthy reversal of roles, in that
typically photographic insights are not employed to comment on writ-
ten narratives, but rather photographs are themselves more commonly
'explained' by language) also underscores the 'magic-mysterious
aspect of the existent' that Celati's stories convey, as they open out
onto 'places in which every trace is at the same time recognizable and
unrecognizable' (Ibid. 24). The spatial configurations referred to by
Ghirri as a filling up of empty space, and a continual movement and
mutation within space, are fundamental to the volume's 'meaning/ as
well as to the 'magic-mysterious' quality it conveys. The spatial meta-
phors of in and out, empty and full, static and dynamic, not only serve
to structure the volume; as Juri Lotman has noted, 'the language of
spatial relations turns out to be one of the fundamental means for the
comprehension of reality/ and, further, spatial concepts 'are material
for the construction of cultural models with a content [that is] abso-
lutely not spatial' (The Structure of the Poetic Text; 262). Thus we move,
with Celati, from spatial settings to metatextual commentary to cul-
tural models, as space emerges as a bearer of meanings quite beyond
its basic role within the textual, narrational weave.
Behind these extended meanings are the meditations on perception,
space, and representation that the writer shared with Ghirri, as well as
his earlier theorizing on narration and history, all of which I have com-
mented on in some detail in preceding pages. In Narratori delle pianure,
we see the putting into fictional form of many of these meditations.
Regarding the concept of the filling up of a simplified world such as is
represented by the plains country according to Bachelard, the stories
with their always diverse characters and events make of the 'simple/
'empty' spaces of the Po valley a world filled to the brim with com-
plexity and plenitude. What is assumed to be 'empty/ that is, in terms
of value, without worthwhile artistic content, substance, or signifi-
cance, is, in fact, 'full/ that is, substantive and meaningful. As in Brue-
gel's paintings, the characters and events are not monumental or
historically significant, however; rather, they are essentially quotidian,
marginal, dispersed, and 'weak/ outside, that is, of the superstructure
of 'that homogeneous and totalizing continuity that is called history'
(Tl bazar archeologico'; 14). These are people and events of the realm
of the contingent, of the 'empty' spaces ignored by history, the diver-
sity, uniqueness, and fullness of which are revealed. Turning to the
issue of constant movement through space that these stories high-
lights, it is possible to read in this emphasis a radical reconceptualizing
of narrative itself. If we think of narrative as 'spatialized time/ then
traditional fictional or historical narratives have storylines that are con-
ditioned by a progressive, teleological idea of space, a Tine' that is in
fact profoundly temporal in nature. That is, we get from 'here' (begin-
ning) to 'there' (end) in linear narratives, but we perceive this motion
as though it were exclusively through time leading to something,
rather than through dilatory space that fans out in all directions. If,
however, we substitute a more purely spatial concept of motion (as
does Celati in these stories), value judgments based on progress and
totalizing closural conclusions become much harder to impose on the
material being narrated. Space can be framed, moved through,
expanded, contracted, but it, in and of itself, is neither progressive nor
122 Gianni Celati
linear. Space has been defined as 'the field available for the disposition
of the objects of reality'; Celati's characters move through this available
expanse in circular, reiterative, non-linear itineraries that bring to mind
the flaneurs of the modern sensibility as well as the web-surfers of post-
modernity. They are not necessarily going somewhere; they are simply
going. That is, they are involved in process rather than in end. And, as
Ghirri notes, the spaces through which they move are also constantly
mutating, so that there is an intensification of the effect of diversity and
openness of perspective. In addition, Celati consistently uses a 'pan-
oramic' mode of narration (which depends on grammatical indices
such as the imperfect tense, on generic temporal references such as
'once upon a time/ 'one fine day/ and on the avoidance of direct dis-
course).8 This mode is characteristic of ancient, popular, and oral tradi-
tions of storytelling in which analytical and interpretative precision is
suppressed in favor of narrational dynamism. The dynamism of con-
stant motion by which both the characters and the narration itself are
propelled is seldom broken by static, 'scenic' modes of narration in
which events are summarized or explicit judgments or morals drawn.9
There are many examples of erratic or wandering motion in the sto-
ries of Narratori; I give here just a few specific examples. In the second
story, 'Ragazza giapponese' (Japanese girl), the homonymous protago-
nist first moves from New York to Los Angeles on the advice of her
astrologer. She then moves to the 'northern edge of the city' because her
astrologer tells her that 'it would be more suitable [for her] to live in a
hilly area' (17). She then moves to Milan and later to Bollate, where she
stays. The girl believes in predestination and in the necessity of follow-
ing one's 'predestined road/ but her movements, as logical and fated as
they may be to her, can also be seen as arbitrary, aimless, and literally
erratic. The 'bambini pendolari' (commuting children) of the third story
fulfil the meaning of their title through their movements, for 'pen-
dolare' means not only 'commuting' but also 'oscillating.' Their reason
for wandering about Milan is that they are looking for someone who is
not boring. They follow various promising individuals, but are always
disappointed. One foggy December Sunday, they meet a woman who is
lost and, in following her, they too end up lost in a cold, unfamiliar
place. The final sentence of the story tells us that, having gone so far
and ending up so cold, sad, and lost, 'the suspicion came to them that
all of life might be this way' (25). In the tale entitled 'Storia d'un
apprendistato' (Story of an apprenticeship), the narrator is himself the
protagonist. He moves from Los Angeles to the small town of Alden,
Kansas, in order to visit his friends Bill and Edith. He then goes to see
the daughters of Alden's mayor, who live in Hudson, New York, subse-
quently moving on to New York City where 'he wanders around the
streets/ After a meal with an Italian family in Queens, he returns to
Italy where, in Piacenza, 'everything by now being far off, he even suc-
ceeded in writing the story of his apprenticeship with Bill and Edith,
that is, this [story] (37).10 In the final story, 'Giovani umani in fuga'
(Young humans in flight), four boys flee the police, have no idea where
to go, and end up in a place they have heard about along the way called
la sacca dei morti' (the bay of the dead) where they get into a small
boat. Since they have nowhere else to go, 'they continued to row; they
had the idea that, continuing to row, they might get somewhere' (146).
In these, and other, stories, the movements through space result in
diverse outcomes: staying put; ending up lost; writing; continuing to
row. No one outcome is privileged, however, as a conclusive or illumi-
nating denouement. Just as the first story leads to a place 'out there/ the
final story orients us to that 'somewhere' the boys are seeking, which is
also a 'somewhere' beyond the frame of the book in which ever new
stories are available for the telling and the listening. As poet and critic
Alfredo Giuliani put it: 'In the fleeing horizon the book fixes provi-
sional boundaries. For this reason this is a wise book: its parts make up
a whole that in reality resonates as [itself] a part of a whole that extends
beyond the book, into the great plains' ('II trentanovelle').
With the constant wanderings of his characters, Celati creates a sense
of labyrinthine space. The 'breaking of the frame/ exemplified in the
first and last stories, ironically also contributes to a 'no-exit' sensation,
for 'outside' is no more directly accessible or interpretable than
'inside'; in fact, there may well be no difference between them, since
we are all within representation. The 'simplified world' represented by
the open spaces of the plains can bring us face to face with the inescap-
able limits of our mortality and of our access into the heart of meaning
and being. Whether this conclusion 'calms' us or makes us 'uneasy/
and whether we are ultimately heartened or discouraged by this
erratic voyage through the non-linear space of the existent, depends on
our own individual and unique assumptions about 'here' and 'there/
experience and its representations, process and end.
In this last section of the chapter, I turn to Celati's work as a video

maker. As is evident in the influence of silent-film comics on his early
writing, Celati has long been drawn to cinema as a source of inspira-
124 Gianni Celati
tion for his prose works. In the early 19905, after many years of collabo-
rative work with Ghirri, he more or less reversed the process, turning
to film-making as an art form suited to the elaboration of his narrative
visions. The mediatory factor between writing and making videos was
photography specifically, and, behind both prose fiction and film-
making, the more general issues pertaining to visibility, perspective,
space, and the host of technical and philosophical concerns he
explored while working with Ghirri and other photographers. Moving
into a visual medium, Celati both explored the inherent limitations of
purely verbal expression and revealed the deep connections between
verbal and non-verbal modes of creativity. We can 'read' his video,
Strada provinciate delle anime (Provincial road of souls), for example, as
if it were one of his written works dedicated to the visible world, for it
has strong affinities with those texts. In fact, it has been called a 'video-
racconto' or 'video-story' (in the interview, 'II sentimento dello spazio'
[The feeling of space]). In her rich meditation on such crossovers,
Text/image border tensions' (in The Politics of Postmodernism), Linda
Hutcheon focuses on photography as a particularly suitable site for
analyzing what she calls 'fringe interference'; she writes 'My particular
interest in this chapter is in those photographic "fringe" constructions
that combine the visual and the verbal, mass media and high art, artis-
tic practice and aesthetic theory, and, in particular, in the spots where
these apparent opposites overlap and interfere both with each other
and with mainstream notions of "art"' (118-19). These 'fringe effects'
are, in fact, at the heart of much art that we call 'postmodern,' and are
central to the complexities which Celati's recent written and video
works (both very influenced by photographic theoretical concerns) in
particular explore and embrace.
I want to begin to explore Celati's not unexpected move into film-
making and the creation of a video film, the heart of which is human
motion through space, by referring back briefly to the collection Narra-
tori delle pianure, which, as I have discussed, includes as frontispiece a
map of the plains in the title. In Calvino's 'Ipotesi di descrizione di un
paesaggio' (Hypothesis of description of a landscape), included as
opening piece to the Via Emilia collection of stories, he makes the
connection, as Celati's map implicitly does, between moving through
a landscape and writing, seeing both as fundamentally spatial in
essence: 'Anche se adesso che sono seduto qui a scrivere sembro fermo,
sono gli occhi a muoversi, gli occhi esteriori che corrono avanti e in-
dietro seguendo le lettere che corre da un margine all'altro del foglio, e
gli occhi interior! che anche loro corrono avanti e indietro tra le cose
sparpagliate nella memoria' (Even if now when I am seated here in
order to write I seem fixed, my eyes move, my external eyes that run
back and forth following the letters that run from one margin of the
sheet of paper to the other, and my interior eyes that also run back and
forth between the things scattered in my memory; 11). We might think
of writing as a kind of 'mapping' of space, as the outer and inner eyes
follow a trajectory that is the movement of words over the page, and
the motions of the remembering and creating mind. But it is to Celati's
map itself that I want to direct some further attention - or I should say
not only to this map, but to the thoughts on the external world and our
relation to representations of it that maps generically stimulate. These
thoughts in turn will lead into a consideration of Celati's video, which
is, among other things, a map come alive through moving images and
peopled spaces.
Maps are basically graphic, pictorial representations of real space,
but they are themselves, oxymoronically, concrete abstractions. They
are highly referential and mimetic of the material world they depict,
and yet they are so minimalist, so lacking in what is really there in
those places named and placed, as to be mere ghosts or shadowy traces
of the world. (I am not speaking of topographic maps that are highly
marked by diverse coloration and that mimic the swell of mountains,
for example, but rather of everyday black-and-white maps of countries
and cities to which we most commonly refer.) One of the best medita-
tions on maps I have read is contained in Robert Harbison's Eccentric
Spaces; he writes: 'From cities of brick to cities in books to cities
on maps is a path of increasing conceptualization' (124). Mapping,
whether real or metaphorical, has great resonance in the realm of post-
modern theorizing, perhaps because it is precisely one of the most con-
ceptual of activities. We are deeply engaged in reconceptualizing our
world, in discovering just where we are, just what our relation to space
is, just how humankind can preserve collective habitations and indi-
vidual homes in a world more and more made up of ungrounded sub-
jectivities, migrations, shifting boundaries, and literally homeless
people. If our sense of place is radicalized, however, our maps are, as
Harbison eloquently argues, 'all old-fashioned ... with their easy conti-
nuities between near and far, seeing to the end of every prospect, a
concept at ease with its field. The maps in daily use represent a pre-
nineteenth century, a medieval, agrarian world, and only choose to dis-
tinguish between country and town. In Europe today not much of
126 Gianni Celati
either remains' (139). Maps stimulate nostalgia, then, not only for the
places on them which we have visited, but also for their calm contain-
ment and ordering of the world. They stimulate restlessness as well,
for maps are associated with 'being on the road/ speaking to the
nomadic impulse, the attraction to the ever-different, the not-yet-
experienced, which continues to lure us even in this 'global village' of a
world where little is farther away than a television screen or a fax.
Nostalgia and restlessness or nomadism are aspects of contempora-
neity in the industrialized, technologized West on which a tremendous
amount of media production and consumer goods depend. Nostalgic,
comforting trips, and so-called adventures for the restless or bored are
marketed according to what might be called 'aestheticizing' and 'docu-
mentarizing' techniques; the former emphasizes the beauty, calm, and
warm corporeal appeal of some 'long ago and far away' (a la Baude-
lairian 'Invitation au voyage': 'La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute, / luxe,
calme et volupte'), while the latter takes a stark 'you are there and this
is what it's really like' approach. Commercial photography and main-
stream films play a huge role in packaging and selling such views of
the world. In advertising and entertainment of all sorts - television
commercials, magazines, travel brochures - photographs and moving
pictures lure us with their gauzey, lovely scenes or their 'realistic'
depictions of far-off places and promised 'adventures.' As I've empha-
sized above, Ghirri avoids either aestheticizing or documentarizing. In
discussing Ghirri's appeal to him in an informal interview with me in
1985, Celati spoke of this avoidance, which he saw as 'cleansing the
gaze/ allowing for a less manipulated and manipulating vision. He
also spoke of the 'lowering of the threshold' of representational inten-
sity; that is, Ghirri's ability to eschew beautifying the scenes he shot (as
so much of the photography of 'scenic Italy' does in what I have called
the nostalgic mode) or, conversely, uglifying the seen, emphasizing the
warts on the face of the world, so to speak, in the name of documenta-
ristic 'realism/ 'starkness/ and the like. Instead, Ghirri tries to find a
frame for what is photographed that does the least violence to the seen,
a kind of 'natural' frame or orientation that 'caresses' rather than 'pos-
sesses.' The horizon itself most often provides this 'take' on the world:
the line where sky and earth meet, and where verticality emerges out
of horizontality in a balance provided by landscape rather than by a
strong imposition of the viewer's expectations or predispositions. If
nostalgia can be seen as a longing for an irretrievable 'home/ and rest-
lessness as a desire to escape the boundaries of the homey and familiar,
then Ghirri's (and Celati's) work can be seen as attempts to reach the
more genuine 'home' embodied in the horizon. Art critic, writer, and
screenwriter John Berger refers to Mircea Eliade's work on the ontol-
ogy of the concept of 'home' as 'the place from which the world could
be founded.' He continues: 'Home was the center of the world because
it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one.'
Verticality established ties with the gods above and the dead below,
while horizontality represented the 'traffic of the world ... thus, at
home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and the dead in the
underworld ... and at the same time, one was at the starting point and,
hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys' (And our faces,
my heart, brief as photos; 56). Something of this founding, spiritual
nature of 'home' is captured in Ghirri's photographs and in Celati's
writing of this period. Celati's narrative 'mapping/ like Ghirri's land-
scape photography, avoids aestheticizing (turning experience into
'high art') and documentarizing (seeking a mimetic replication of the
real in language); instead, the contingent essence of both the non-
verbal world and the verbal expression of it in stories and diaristic
writings is sought, and this contingency in turn is related to the con-
cept of a true human space of habitation.
Celati's stories and diaries all reflect this poetics of the contingent.
There is an open-endedness to these writings in distinct opposition to
closural narratives, created by means of an emphasis on constant
movement through space, shifting perspectives, multiple points of
view, and a highlighting of written language's limitations in capturing
experience. There is also a strongly philosophical orientation, which
could be called both phenomenological and ontological, as Celati
seeks, through observation and description of the external, to arrive at
some sense of the meaning and place of being. The storyteller does not
dominate the stories he recounts; rather, he transmits them in as
unadorned a manner as he can, mindful always that he himself is as
much a part of the disorienting spaces as is that which he recounts. His
task is to organize and thereby to 'dare sollievo' (give relief), in Celati's
words, not by constructing deluding myths of comprehensibility, clo-
sure, or absolute existential security, but by showing in his tales that
the world is always narratable, even if not ultimately knowable. Narra-
tion thus reassumes its ancient role of consolation, by showing us that
our contingency is our humanity, that a story (even our own) is only
one in an infinite number of possible stories, past, present, and future,
and that - to put it in an unfortunately cliched (unfortunately consid-
128 Gianni Celati
ered so, since it is an importantly true) phrase - we are all in it together,

and are all destined for the same end. As Guido Fink says in his blurb
to Quattro novelle sulk apparenze: 'Di fatto tutto questo libro e un gioco
per abbassare le pretese dell'io, rendendolo perduto o disperse tra le
altre apparenze' (In fact all of this book is a game for attenuating the
pretenses of the 'I/ rendering it lost and dispersed among other
appearances). Celati writes in his brief 'Note' that prefaces the volume
Verso la face that 'ogni osservazione ha bisogno di liberarsi dai codici
familiari che porta con se, ha bisogno di andare alia deriva in mezzo a
tutto cio che non capisce, per poter arrivare ad una foce, dove dovra
sentirsi smarrita. Come una tendenza naturale che ci assorbe, ogni
osservazione intensa del mondo esterno forse ci porta piu vicino alia
nostra morte; ossia, ci porta ad essere meno separati da noi stessi'
(every observation needs to be liberated from the familiar codes it car-
ries along with itself, it needs to drift in the midst of all that which it
doesn't understand, in order to get to a mouth, where it will have to
feel itself to be lost. Like a natural tendency that absorbs us, every
intense observation of the external world will perhaps bring us closer
to our own death; that is, it will bring us to being less separated from
ourselves. Verso la foce; 9-10). This assertion may appear to bring us
back to Barthes's sense of death inherent in photography, but for Celati
'being closer to our death' has the positive valence of 'being less sepa-
rate from ourselves,' and thus better able to live in a world that is not
oppositionally hostile, but rather companionably caducous.
These emphases reappear in the video film, Strada provinciale delle
anime, to which I now turn. First, some background information on the
making of the film. Celati had spoken for some time about his wish to
make what he called a 'pseudo-documentary.' That is, the 'realism' of
the documentary would be maintained in terms of shooting scenes
and conversations as they occurred, but the film would be constructed
according to a highly self-conscious artistic vision. In a recent inter-
view by Manuela Teatini, Celati was asked what aspects of the docu-
mentary interest him the most, and he responded: 'Non credo molto ai
documentari, perche 1'idea che le immagini ti mostrino davvero come
e fatta la realta appartiene a un modo di pensare che non e il mio. A
me sembra che i documentari siano racconti come tutti gli altri. Pero
mi piace poco anche 1'idea di "fiction" in cui il cinema e irrimediabil-
mente incastrato' (I don't believe much in documentaries, because the
idea that images really show you how reality is made belongs to a way
of thinking that isn't mine. To me it seems that documentaries are sto-
ries like all other stories. However, I also don't much like the idea of
'fiction' in which the cinema is irremediably caught (11 sentimento
dello spazio'; 25-6). Clearly, the mixing of 'real' documentary and 'fic-
tional' art film forms acts on both, blurring the boundaries between
life and art, internal and external. With the financial support of RAI 3,
Celati was finally able to produce the film, which was shown once
shortly after its completion on television, to what sort of audience
response it is hard to imagine. When I saw Celati in Italy in the sum-
mer of 1992, he lamented the treatment accorded his film: it was
shown very late at night and at least one part of the sound-track mix
was missing. He asked that it be shown properly, but so far no re-
showing has been scheduled. Celati also mentioned, as a visual refer-
ence point, the importance of Edward Hopper's painting to his takes,
as he and Ghirri (and the 'tourist-group' cast, made up of thirty rela-
tives and friends) traveled through the Po Delta region gathering
many hours of shots that were eventually edited down into the film of
around one hour.
Let me begin with a bare-bones description of the video. A group of
tourists takes a bus tour through the landscapes and towns of the Po
Delta. That is, in a sense, it. There is no plot as such; there are no
'meaningful' human interactions or extraordinary occurrences. The
film is, quite consciously I believe, about 'nothing.' And, although I
have called it a 'silent movie' in the title of the essay that is the basis of
these remarks, I should say that it is not literally silent, but rather
reaches after the silent, seeks to 'ascoltare il silenzio' (listen to silence),
to apply Paolo Valesio's wonderful phrase.11 Celati uses various
sounds - music, human voices - as well as actual silences to great effect
throughout. The video-story brings together many threads that run
through the recent writing: the locales are, of course, those also found
in Narratori delle pianure and Verso la face; the dialogues and mono-
logues are often 'mini-stories' which, in being seen and heard on
screen, remind us of the basic corporeal orality and presence of story-
telling, just as the written texts seek to do; the constant emphasis on
seeing and being seen harks back to the interest in appearances as in
Quattro novelle sulk apparenze.
This film works on our imaginative capacities much more than on a
rational apperception of the world. In her excellent study, The Body in
the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema, Angela Dalle Vacche uses
Vico (among others) as a starting point for her consideration of cine-
matic representation. She reminds us that 'Vico believed that human
130 Gianni Celati
beings acquire knowledge only by representing themselves, and by

translating mental processes into visible, anthropomorphic forms.' The
earliest forms of these self-representations were, however, much more
image-oriented than abstractly verbal, as 'this early language was
without sound. The visual dimension played a crucial role in this mute
language because primitive people had no speculative skills, only
imaginative ones ... Vico's sense that the first language of humankind
was mute, visual, and corporeal may very well have been preserved in
the cinema' (10-11). These three adjectives can be applied as well to
Celati's art, both verbal and visual, in which he seeks to transcend the
limits of traditional linguistic representations by heightening our
awareness of the eloquence of silence, of seeing and being seen, and of
the body's role in imagining and reasoning alike.
Strada provinciate delle anime uses several means to stimulate our
imaginative skills, relying more on the understated and the suggestive
than on the straightforwardly expository presentation of scenes. As the
film opens, Celati's voice-over tells us that thirty people took off in a
'corriera azzurra' (blue bus) on a trip through the Po Delta 'per vedere
in un altro modo' (in order to see in another way). Another voice tells
us, 'Non abbiamo visto niente di speciale' (we saw nothing special),
simply 'tante case' (so many houses) and 'tanta gente come noi' (so
many people like us). As they start out, the tour group's bus comes to a
signpost indicating that the road ahead is called 'la strada provinciale
delle anime' (the provincial road of souls). In the interview with Tea-
tini, Celati says that the road and its name provided 'a logic for our
story' (28). The voice-over commentary tells us that the road 'non porta
da nessuna parte' (doesn't lead anywhere). Throughout the video, a
varied musical soundtrack accompanies the movement through space,
sometimes classical and soaring, sometimes jazzy and dissonant.
Diverse voices provide a 'human soundtrack' as well.12 The initial
moment at the signpost serves to highlight the literally 'provincial'
locales that the group will visit (no well-known or major cities will be
stops on this itinerary), but the reference to 'souls' ('delle anime')
immediately takes us out of the realm of the solely literal, and into that
of imaginative and spiritual journeys. (Parenthetically, one of my stu-
dents consistently referred to the film as Strada provinciale delle anime
perse, (lost souls), thus showing the tenacious influence of a Dantesque
perspective generated by the word 'anime.') The provinces in which
the film will wander also take on the metaphorical sense of the place of
art as described by Fellini (quoted by John Berger in his essay 'Ev'ry
Time We Say Goodbye/ in Keeping a Rendezvous): 'What is an artist? A

provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality
and a metaphysical one ... it's this in-between that I'm calling a prov-
ince, this frontier-country between the tangible world and the intangi-
ble - which is really the realm of the artist' (18-19). When asked in the
interview with Teatini if the provinces can be more inspirational than
urban environments, Celati answered: 'L'idea di recuperare la provin-
cia non mi dice niente, perche mi sembra solo una trovata sociologica e
d'attualita. lo penso che la provincia sia prima di tutto una categoria
dello spirito' (The idea of recuperating the province doesn't appeal to
me, because it seems to be only a sociological or timely finding. I think
that the province is above all a category of the spirit; 28). As I sug-
gested above, it is possible, then, to see the provinces as presented in
the video as a different, more 'feminine' symbolic order, which valo-
rizes imaginative, spiritual 'reality' in contrast to the hierarchies and
institutions of the order of the Father.
The members of the tour group - now associated with the 'souls' of
the road marker - are quite 'normal'; they are old and young, men and
women, couples and single people, Italian and non-Italian. They travel
comfortably in a typical tour bus, where we see them talking to each
other, looking out of the windows, dozing, reading, writing, looking
sometimes interested in their surroundings, sometimes supremely
bored. The various legs of the journey are identified by means of inter-
polated written commentaries in the style of silent-film dialogue boxes,
scrolls and all. These are not well-known spots, for this is not a part of
Italy that has been developed by the tourist industry either for its own
citizens or for foreign visitors. As they move 'verso la foce' of the Po,
roughly between Rovigo to the North and Ferrara to the South, they
stop at little-known places like Goro, Codigoro, Argine Agosta, and
Comacchio. They also stop in many unidentified landscapes, where
marshy plains stretch out to the horizon and no towns are visible. For
the most part, the weather is overcast, misty, and rainy, adding to the
sense of being nowhere in particular. When they arrive at a town, they
get off the bus, walk around, chat with local citizens, look at their sur-
roundings, and generally show the sort of mild befuddlement that tour
groups often show when not being strongly 'orchestrated' by a leader.
In fact, it is precisely to this aimlessness that Celati directs attention. As
we gradually stop waiting for 'something to happen/ we too become
caught up in a sense of aimless motion through space, which can be
either pleasant or disturbing, depending on individual expectations.
132 Gianni Celati
The sense of solitude in company is also quite strong, for even the cou-
ples seem unable to help each other to break through the state of mild
disorientation brought on by this trip (and perhaps all trips, especially
those not clearly goal-oriented or highly choreographed by an authori-
tative leader). Although both Celati and Ghirri are in the film, neither
actively directs the action, instead more commonly merging themselves
into the desultory conversations and casual strolls of the group. As
comic counterpoint, there is an 'organizer/ a man with a microphone
and a gruff manner of speaking, who throughout the trip tries to round
up the errant group, arranges for hotel and restaurant accommoda-
tions, and generally does his best to give some order and form to their
wanderings. In spite of his efforts, the group members more often than
not look slightly bewildered and a bit lost. At a certain point, a voice-
over muses: 'E meglio sentirsi persi o guardare solo quello che ti hanno
detto di guardare?' (Is it better to feel lost or to look only at what they
tell you to look at?). Celati's preference is clear. We, the spectators, thus
join the travelers - who are themselves spectators - in having to con-
struct meanings for what we see that depend much more on something
like errancy and daydreaming (individual imagination) than on linear-
ity and logic ('grand narratives').
In spite of its unemphatic, understated tone, the film reveals a strong
underlying composition. The oblique shots of landscapes, the music,
and the voice-over commentaries and casual conversations all work in
subtle accord to bring out the main 'topics': life as errancy; genuine
seeing as opposed to media-produced images; the basic solitude of
individual existence. There are moments in the film that stand out,
however, in spite of the overall lack of emphatic highlighting. One of
them is profoundly lyrical. The group is gathered around a campfire,
obviously enjoying an evening of drinking and chatting. The camera
pans to the moon shining down on them, and various members of the
group (including Celati) recite Leopardi's 'Canto notturno di un pas-
tore errante dell'Asia' (Nocturnal song of a wandering shepherd of
Asia). As the quiet voice begins 'Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che
fai, / silenziosa luna?' (What are you doing, moon, in the sky? Tell me,
what are you doing / silent moon?), we are drawn into the spell cast
not only by the recitation but by the entire film which, like the poem,
asks 'ove tende / Questo vagar mio breve?' (where tends / this my
short wandering?). The commonality of the group in this scene (and,
by extension, our general commonality in the human condition) also
resonates deeply with the lines 'tu forse intendi, / Questo viver
terreno, / II patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia; / che sia questo morir,
questo supremo / scolorar del sembiante, / E perir dalla terra, e venir
meno / Ad ogni usata, amante compagnia' (you [the moon] perhaps
understand / this terrestrial existence, / what might be our suffering,
sighing; / what this death might be, this ultimate / paleness of the
face, / and vanishing from the earth, and losing / every known,
beloved company). Existence as spiritual nomadism, as the 'errar' of
which the film's itinerary is made up, is similarly highlighted in the
lines 'Ed io pur seggo sovra 1'erbe, all'ombra, / E un fastidio
m'ingombra / La mente, ed uno spron quasi mi punge / Si che, sed-
endo, piu che mai son lunge / Da trovar pace o loco' (And still I sit on
the grass, in shadow, / and a dis-ease weighs upon / my mind, and a
spur almost stings me / so that, sitting, more than ever I am far / from
finding peace or habitation). This scene is surely one of the most effec-
tive - and affecting - uses of poetry as self-gloss to be found in cinema.
During this nocturnal scene, we also see interspersed shots of the
earth taken from outer space, and the Leopardian sense of 'solitudine
immensa' (immense solitude) is thus visually underlined. The basic
errancy of life is also once more underscored as the group arrives next
to the town of Contarina, and a silent film type of written comment
appears on the screen: 'Certe volte non si sa piu dove andare' (some-
times you don't know where to go anymore). As the group waits for
arrangements to be made at a local restaurant and hotel, the vacuity of
so much of human speech is summed up in the soundtrack overlay of
droning voices of newscasters whose 'blah-blah' is in painful contrast
to the 'silences' of the film. The group ends up, appropriately enough,
at a desolate little beach bar named 'Bar Ultima Spiaggia' (The Last
Beach Bar), where a paltry, rundown amusement park is another pain-
ful contrast to the natural beauty we have seen throughout the trip. As
the film moves towards its close, Celati thus brings out those aspects of
human-made, commercial 'reality' most in opposition to his vision. A
story is told (again, in the form of a voice-over) as the group leaves the
bar for the last bus ride; the story implicitly speaks to the issue of the
falsity of media images and the harm they do to real human beings. A
woman has a husband who watches variety shows all the time on tele-
vision. He especially watches 'le donne mezzo nude' (half-naked
women) and the wife feels like an old rag - 'uno straccio' - in contrast.
Finally, she tells her husband, 'O me, o la televisione' (me or televi-
sion), but he thinks she is overreacting and takes her to a doctor who
prescribes tranquilizers. Her husband continues to watch the half-
134 Gianni Celati
nude women on television each evening, and the drugged-up woman

takes to wandering 'da sola per gli argini' (alone around the embank-
ments). The woman recounting the story says she has seen the so-
called crazy wife wandering about 'come un'anima in pena' (like a
soul in pain). Are we also 'anime in pena/ alone, unseen, invisible in a
world of hyped-up, false images?
There is a leit-motif that runs throughout the film: the group photos
shot by Ghirri at almost every locale. At the end of the film, these pho-
tos are displayed in an abandoned villa, used as a German command
post during the Second World War, while a story about invisible peo-
ple is recounted. The group has felt their collective 'invisibility' as they
moved through the diverse spaces of the trip, their lack of impact or
effect on the places they arrived at, saw, and left. Yet the story, told by
Celati as a dream he had (more or less the same story recounted in his
'Verso la foce'~ discussed above), speaks of the tenacity of the invisible,
the 'phantom effect' that the past presences of people produce on land-
scape and human-made places alike. He says that he dreamed of 'posti
spopolati' (unpopulated places) containing 'popolazioni invisibili'
(invisible populations). When he is asked in the dream how he knows
that these invisible people are there, he answers: 'Me le sento addosso'
(I feel them weighing on me). The setting itself is rife with such 'phan-
toms/ filled with signs of the Germans' presence, just as the photo-
graphs capture the past presence of the group in the many places they
visited. As I have indicated in preceding discussions, Celati has writ-
ten of history as precisely these spatial traces, countering the more
traditional view of history as 'una successione ininterrotta di eventi
collocabili in un continuum cronologico' (an uninterrupted succession
of events [that can be] ordered into a chronological continuum). If his-
torical writing is to preserve the absolute alterity and 'pure externality'
of that which is past, then we need a spatial concept because 'e proprio
in quegli spazi emarginati o semplicemente ignorati della memoria-
tradizione che risiede il diverso senza il quale la storia e tautologia' (it
is precisely in those spaces [that are] marginalized or simply ignored by
memory-tradition that difference resides, without which history is tau-
tology) ('II bazar archeologico'; 14).
In an earlier scene with a mayor interested in developing a saleable,
commodified image of his town and the natural areas around it, Celati
speaks animatedly of the wrong-mindedness of such a desire, as if pack-
aging an image robs it of its invisible soul, just as photography is viewed
as soul-robbing by certain peoples. In what is no doubt the film's most
assertive scene (which comes just before the 'Leopardi' scene), Celati
rails against this 'Americanization' (read commodification), while the
mayor insists that tourism is needed to bring money into the depressed
area, and that poetry cannot save the world. Celati's film seems to sug-
gest that a 'poetic' emphasis on the invisible soul of the world, which we
can catch glimpses of only if we surrender completely to a disempow-
erment of assertive subjectivity, may not 'save the world/ but late cap-
italistic approaches have certainly gone far in ruining it. The ecological
concerns subtending the film are thus subtly brought out; these 'under-
developed' marshes and unvisited towns of the Po Delta are obviously
loved by Celati precisely for their invisible resonance and their lack of
'tourist appeal/ even while they are lamented as being on the verge of
losing their soul to commercial visibility.
My comments have underlined the thematic and philosophical simi-
larities, the shared stylistic preference for understatement - verbal and
visual - and the structural errancy of both texts and film. What further
brings these works together is their creation of a mode of reception
among readers and viewers that depends on openness to categories of
experience that counter more traditional categories activated by liter-
ary 'high art' and mass media alike. Where literature and the media
commonly have a sort of horror vacui, Celati embraces voids: silences,
empty spaces, 'vacuous' speech and scenes. Seeing and being seen are
most often allied to a concept of the self - be it author or consumer - as
dominant and self-assertive subjectivity; Celati looks instead for the
invisible in the visible, and for the shareable, and the permeable,
whether natural or human.
In 1998, Celati's second video appeared. Entitled Tl mondo di Luigi

Ghirri/ it is a moving visual tribute to his late friend. This very per-
sonal documentary includes both family members and other fellow
travelers of the photographer, who explore the landscapes so dear to
him as they celebrate his art. There is a delicacy of tone and vision in
this video that is difficult to capture in words; everything is under-
stated, and sweetly, even at times comically elegiac, while maintaining
a supremely poetic quality. The pamphlet that accompanies the video
tells us that it 'was developed with the way of seeing that Ghirri him-
self suggested, and taught with his photographs: the development
of a vision of the ambience that is an affectionate way of looking at
things.'13 Friends and admirers of Ghirri were invited to various places
dear to him: the castle of Fontanellato in the province of Parma where
136 Gianni Celati
there is a camera oscura dating from the early nineteenth century (a

room from which, through a small hole, one can view the piazza and
see its projection upside down, as if through the lens of a camera, and
which for Ghirri showed that photography is not only a modern tech-
nical invention but also a very old idea of vision); the plains and archi-
tectural constructions around Reggio Emilia; the banks of the Po river.
People close to Ghirri provide a running commentary on these places,
which were loved and photographed so often by their late friend, and
the video ends with an open-air banquet, held on the Po riverbank on a
spring evening, at which photographs by Ghirri are projected onto a
fluttering cloth screen whose ripples in the light wind capture a beauti-
ful sense of evanescence, much as Ghirri's art sought to do. Celati
could not have found a more fitting way of remembering and honoring
Ghirri than by means of this video made up of the locales and land-
scapes of the photographer's life and work, commented on by those
who were closest to him and to his vision. The places and landscapes
we see as we view the video are also being seen within the video by the
affectionate gazes of Ghirri's companions in life and art, so that the
mediated and 'already seen' nature of the world is implicitly high-
lighted. Celati manages to bring out the existential and philosophical
nuances of Ghirri's work not by overtly stating them, but by making
them come alive to our sight through the everyday locales and simple
words of the video's participants. If this video is ultimately very mov-
ing, it is precisely because it avoids the traditional rhetoric and struc-
ture of memorials (eulogies; solemn remembrances of Ghirri's art;
tearful farewells), opting instead for a companionable little journey
through the spaces that inspired Ghirri and, through his work, which
led others to see those spaces 'as they wish to be seen.' Near the end of
the video, as we watch old footage of Ghirri himself at work in the
landscape until he disappears out of the camera's view, and the slides
of his photographs shimmering on the wind-blown cloth screen, a
sense of celebration intermingled with a sense of profound loss leaves
us both elated and contemplative. (I saw the video with a group of my
graduate students and use the plural 'we' to describe our collective
response.) There is no better tribute to a mentor than showing how
well his 'lessons' have been internalized, and Celati's video does just
that, with extraordinary grace and palpable affection.
In conclusion, I want to comment briefly on the ethical as well as

aesthetic implications of Celati's poetics of the contingent, based on a
'permeable gaze/ In doing so, I hope to begin to counter some views of

ontological postmodernist thought that see 'weakened' approaches to
being and creating such as Celati's as resigned or irresponsible, and
bereft of ethical or political force. The external world, like us, is embod-
ied in materiality, and we living humans share in what Celati might
call the absolute condition of presence. The best, perhaps, that we can
ever do with things, places, and people is to recognize what Melville
named the 'unconditional democracy of all things' and what Celati
explores in his writings and video work as the 'state of potential' of
silent things. In the last words of the introduction to 'Bartleby,' Celati
writes: 'La potenza sta in cio che viene tenuto in riserbo, sta nel riserbo
che tiene sospese le forze e i moti espansivi dell'io' (Power is found in
that which is held in reserve, it is found in the reserve that maintains in
suspension forces and expansive motions of the T; xxvi). Learning to
respond to the external appearances of things and places - not to speak
of other people - with full respect for their separate beingness. means
shedding expectations of systematizable 'meanings' and ultimately
clarifying revelations. A permeable subjectivity is not resigned to inac-
tion or to being passively overwhelmed by otherness and by that
which is external to the self. Rather, one's subjectivity is open to the
difference of other subjectivities, not only those in the present, but also
those of the past that have contributed to our habits of ways of seeing
and understanding. This is not indifference, this is not irresponsibility;
this, I think, is attuning ourselves to literal conviviality. For if Being is
truly recognized as democratic - everything and everyone equally are -
then violent pre-emption and dominance of things and others will per-
haps diminish. Celati's 'silent movie about nothing/ with its refusal of
a masterful mentality, its 'caress to the world' in shots of the external
made with a respectful gaze, and its implicit valorization of being, as
well as his Po valley writings and his video tribute to Ghirri are, I
think, significant contributions to the creation of another way of look-
ing, both for the creator and for the audience. This phase of his work
quietly posits modes of seeing and being that have philosophical and
ethical resonance far beyond the dominant aestheticizing and docu-
mentarizing tendencies of so many of the contemporary literary and
media-orchestrated representations of experience to which we are
more accustomed.
4
A Family of Voices:
Celati's 'Parents/ 'Siblings/
and 'Children7
'We are always using the words which come from everybody else - stories,
anecdotes, descriptions - so we are always mixed up with other people, and
that's why this idea of the author who is the owner of his own words, his own
style, is something like a natural catastrophe if you consider that language is a
natural thing.'
Gianni Celati1
'Writing, as defined by the literary industry, is all about individuals. I own my

writing; that is copyright... [But] to write is to write to another. Not for another, as
if one could take away that other's otherness, but to another ... The loss of
friendship, the giving over of friendship to business based on individualism,
has caused loss of energy in the literary world. Think, for a moment, with how
much more energy one does something for a lover or for a close friend than
when one acts only in the service of oneself.'
Kathy Acker2
We first learn that 'we are always mixed up with other people' from
our experiences as members of a family. It is a common reaction, how-
ever, to be annoyed or even insulted if we are told that we look or
sound much like our parents or our siblings, for this kind of observa-
tion seems to imply that we are not uniquely 'ourselves/ but rather are
determined in some fundamental way by our origins, our shared
genes, our relations. Celati, on the other hand, not only accepts the idea
that we are always replicating elements that come from a wide web of
connections, he actively embraces this commonality, especially as it
A Family of Voices 139
pertains to the use of language. His relation to other writers is reveal-

ing in this regard; he has translated many works, especially from the
English, American, and French traditions, and he has written widely
on many writers, living and dead, with whom he has felt an affinity. I
therefore employ the metaphor of the family in my title as a way of
organizing the discussions of some of these works that follow, as well
as in order to put into focus the connective approach that Celati takes
to the writing of others. As one of my epigraphs, taken from Kathy
Acker, shows, however, I also thought of using the metaphor of
'friendship/ deciding against it in the end because I wanted to make
certain 'genealogical' distinctions that do not work well in the context
of relations based on friendship, which tends to transcend the genera-
tional and chronological differences implicit in families. Nonetheless,
the metaphor of friendship does apply as well, as seen in the fact that
Celati has written on and translated mainly those other 'scriveners'
whose voices speak to him in companionable ways, for he has stated
that it is a question of Voice' for him: 'Our problem with language con-
cerns rhythms and voices and tonalities ... voices in the sense that
nobody can read a text without hearing a voice - some kind of voice or
different voices' (Lumley interview, The Novella and the New Italian
Landscape'; 45). I'll investigate more fully the issue of Voice' in the fol-
lowing chapter (where I tie it in with related topics such as orality and
theatricality in Celati's writing); in this chapter, I want instead to give
names to some of the voices that make up a sort of system of kinship
with Celati, studying both his work on them and elements in their
work in common with his writing that I have discerned. This 'family' is
composed of living and dead writers, Italians and non-Italians, women
and men, those who came before Celati as 'parents,' those with whom
he has a 'sibling' status, and those who are like 'children' to him. Many
of the family members will merely be mentioned, for there are too
many to be able to fit them all into the confines of a chapter. Unlike real
families, this (very extensive) one is based on elective affinities, prefer-
ences, choice; in this sense, it is of an 'ideal,' even Utopian 'family
home' in language that I write.
I begin by listing some of the voices that enter into this family
romance. Of the many fathers to whom Celati has paid homage by
means of translations or essays on their writings, three of the most
important - Melville, Beckett, and Kafka - have already been discussed
in an earlier chapter.3 Calvino's shaping presence has also been
alluded to, and I shall have more to say about this 'father' below. Celati
140 Gianni Celati
has also translated and written commentary on works by Swift,

Stendhal, Celine, and Jack London, among others. He has commented
on Delfini, Imbriani, Manganelli, Tomaso Garzoni, Ariosto, Boiardo,
Flann O'Brien, Joseph Conrad, and Milan Kundera, all of whose writ-
ing has resonated in his own work in a variety of ways, some as
'fathers/ some more as 'brothers.' The 'siblings/ on whom for the most
part Celati has not written, but to whom he has referred in formal
interviews or informal conversations, include Angela Carter, John
Berger, Patricia Highsmith, and Susan Sontag (here we see that the sis-
ters outnumber the brothers). The younger writers who could be called
'children' in some sense include Ermanno Cavazzoni, Marco Belpoliti,
and Daniele Benati, as well as others who contributed to the volume
Narratori delle riserve and to the almanac, // Semplice. Looking at this -
admittedly highly constructed - genealogy, it is not without interest to
note certain immediately discernible contours that shape the 'line' of
the Celatian family. The Italian literary tradition is well represented by
many writers from past centuries, but, with the salient exception of
Calvino, there are very few other writers of this century or, particu-
larly, of Celati's own generation to whom he has dedicated overt atten-
tion. It is equally clear that his early academic interest in French and
Anglo-American literature has continued to determine to a fair extent
his preference for writers in these traditions. There are few women
writers about whom Celati has expressed either formal or informal
interest, apparently feeling more affinities with other, often less main-
stream male writers such as Imbriani, Delfini, and Flann O'Brien. The
women writers most often mentioned to me (and I presume to others)
have been Patricia Highsmith, Susan Sontag, and Angela Carter, all of
whom are considered 'eccentric' to one degree or another: they are cer-
tainly not easily inscribed into mainstream or traditionalist fictional
modes. It is also evident that Celati has written most often about other
prose writers or narrative, epic poets; lyric poets and playwrights are
not generally included in his published meditations on the writing of
others (in spite of the fact that he moves into these genres in his recent
book, Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto, thus manifesting a strong interest in
poetry and theater). The obvious exception to this rule is the poetry of
Leopardi, another of Celati's important 'voices' throughout his career.
Generalizations such as I am making here are approximate and partial,
of course; they do not acknowledge the vast depth and breadth of
Celati's literary erudition, nor do they indicate that writers from other
traditions - for example, German and Austrian writers such as Peter
Handke, Robert Walser, Bertold Brecht, or writers from Lithuania,

Latvia, Estonia, the Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries
whom, as Celati wrote to me in the fall of 1997, he had occasion to meet
at a recent conference in Finland - also find some space in the family
'home/ No simple limit can be placed on the extent of Celati's interest
in the writing of others, nor on his readiness to enter into collaborative
work, whether it be on a specific project, such as with Ghirri or with
those involved in the almanac, // Semplice, or in less formal exchanges,
such as those he had with Calvino and Carlo Ginzburg in the late 19605
and early 19705 or with Benati and Cavazzoni later on in the context of
the 'Narratori delle riserve' rubric in // Manifesto and subsequently in
the volume of the same name. When he has taught in France and the
United States, Celati has given seminars on a wide variety of literary
topics, genres, and eras, including the Renaissance epic, Leopardi, and
French literature. In listing specific writers, my goal is merely to high-
light those voices to whom Celati has dedicated concentrated and
extended attention, rather than to suggest that these are the only writ-
ers for whose works he feels affinities or to whom he has directed his
critical interest. The following pages will follow the 'family line' only
in regard to a very few of the members of what is, finally, a remarkably
extended and diverse family.
'Fathers'
Calvino, the Cogitator
Italo Calvino was perhaps the most obvious mentor figure for Celati, a
writer who promoted Celati when he began his published career, and
one with whom Celati continued to carry on critical and creative dia-
logues until Calvino's death in 1985. In actual age, Calvino is chrono-
logically more an older 'brother' to Celati than a father (he was born in
1923, Celati in 1937), yet his position as an already quite famous writer
at the time of Celati's debut in the early seventies, as well as his wealth
of literary experience in earlier contexts, such as neorealism, which
Celati was too young to have been a part of, meant, I believe, that he
played more of a parental than a sibling role. Celati did not in any way
directly model his writing on Calvino's; indeed, he tended more often
than not to disagree with his mentor's choices and directions as a fic-
tion writer. Yet they shared a critical bent, a need to theorize on literary
topics, and a drive constantly to renew their own writing and to inter-
142 Gianni Celati
rogate the directions of contemporary Italian literary culture. Calvino's

postface to Celati's first published fiction, Comiche, reveals his admira-
tion for Celati's talents as a thinker about literature, and his words
could just as well have been applied to Calvino himself: 'Celati... has
revealed himself as an extraordinary personality, [that ] of the elabora-
tor of literary theories and [that] of the polemicist, [who is] inexhaust-
ible in his proposals and in the richness of [his] references and
suggestions.' Calvino was equally 'extraordinary' as a critical thinker
about and theorist of literature; the richness of his own thought is seen
in collections of his essays such as Una pietra sopra, Lezioni americane,
and La strada di San Giovanni, in which we find theoretical elaborations
extending from the fifties up to the last year of his life. I have already
briefly discussed Calvino's and Celati's collaboration, along with Gin-
zburg and others, on topics relating to historical representation and
archeological approaches to knowledge, as well as on the creation of a
literary journal; they also collaborated in later years, although less for-
mally, on the problematics of literary description, phenomenological
approaches, and other issues of concern to both.
Celati's writings on Calvino are not extensive, but there exist a few
pieces and some informal commentary, on which I want now to focus
my attention. These date mainly from the period shortly before
Calvino's premature demise in 1985 to the late eighties, and are in
great part tied to the writers' mutual interest in moving writing into
the space of the external, the visible, and the describable; in short, the
period of Palomar for Calvino and that of the collaboration with Ghirri
and the resultant works discussed in the preceding chapter for Celati.
In my unpublished 1985 interview with Celati he spoke at some length
about Calvino and this conversation serves as my starting point. I then
move first to his 1984 essay on Palomar and subsequently to a brief con-
sideration of Calvino's involvement in the Po valley volume, Esplorazi-
oni sulla Via Emilia, before returning to their collaboration on the
proposed journal, All Baba, and concluding with Celati's piece in the
journal Riga on Calvino's death.
In the taped interview I did with Celati in 1985, shortly after the
appearance of Narratori delle pianure and the death of Calvino, he spoke
both about his work with Ghirri and the writing that resulted and
about more general problems relating to contemporary Italian literary
culture. 'Permeability/ and 'soft monumentality' were terms that again
entered into his description of what he was trying to do in his recent
writing, and he spoke of liking writers who have no pretensions of pre-
senting a 'meaning' in their works, but who instead 'succeed in dis-

solving the pretense of calling the other toward a meaning.' Moving
into a wider discussion of contemporary Italian culture, Celati noted
the fairly recent disappearance of a strong, shared, humanistic educa-
tion and, along with it, of a space for literary creation and reception
based on more or less universally shared humanistic culture, the place
of which had been taken over in great part by the cinema and then by
industrialized literature. Italy had until the last half of this century a
firmly fixed Institution of Letters based in large part on the strong con-
cept of the Author and a literary language distinctly separate from the
language of everyday life. Literature tended to occupy an elite zone of
high cultural, academic discourses. Celati saw the renewing work of
the sixties' avant-garde (Gruppo 63 and others) as concentrating pri-
marily on a critique of dominant narrational modes, rather than on
finding 'credible narratives' and a new 'dignity for narrative' in a con-
text that was increasingly being taken over by the commodification of
literature (according to the American model, Celati believes). He spoke
of the 'colonizing' of Italian literary-critical work in those years by
Trench metalanguages' (which was reflected in his and Calvino's
cases by many years of work on figures such as Foucault, Derrida,
Barthes, and other French theorists, as we have seen), and he called
this tendency a desire to maintain in Italy an 'esprit de finesse' that, he
asserts, in the end 'ha bloccato molto' (blocked a great deal) of what
might have been work directed towards finding some 'space of habit-
ability' (dimora) for Italian narrative in the radically changed context
of contemporary Italian society. In the immediate post-war period dur-
ing which writers such as Vittorini and Pavese (and the very young
Calvino) were writing, the Crocean concept of 'poetry' still dominated
and narrative prose could find dignity 'only in its more or less direct
reflection of immediate realities.' Somewhat later, according to Celati,
Calvino succeeded in making a clear and incisive 'clean break' (taglio)
with what had come before, not only by means of his 'natural talents as
a narrator' (which Celati says he had more than Pavese, and, indeed,
more than any others who wrote in the late forties and into the fifties),
but also by 'recuperating a space of narrativity' for Italian storytelling
through his work on Italian fables: 'If my hypothesis is true, that one of
the tasks of this culture has been to recuperate a space of narrativity
that might be legitimated, then from this point of view the break that
Calvino makes in our culture, both with his first books and with the
[collection of] Italian fables, is very decisive. Because the essence of his
144 Gianni Celati
importance is there, [deriving from] the fact that starting with him a
free space opens up/ Celati analogized the effect of Calvino's work to
that produced by the Grimm brothers in German literary culture (he
called using this analogy a way of 'grasping the question in an archeo-
logical manner'). Calvino (and Manganelli, another important refer-
ence point in this discussion) refused to 'take as a given the institution
of Italian literature ... instead they continually kept it in play in order to
clear out a little free terrain, something that, by the way, is not done in
the academic setting/ Celati again uses an analogy from the English-
language tradition, which, at the time of Henry James and Joseph Con-
rad, 'was frozen by a language that had become specialized. [I ] think
that this is the problem of the literary institution/ The American James
and the Polish Conrad 'unblocked' the English language and aided in
rearticulating a 'lingua franca' that had a liberating effect on English
prose. (It should be recalled that Calvino wrote his university thesis on
Conrad, and it may well be that his thoughts on the Polish writer were
important for Celati's view of the latter.)4 Similarly, Celati sees the
problem that Calvino's work affected positively as 'on the order of lan-
guage that we possess for describing a world there where it might be,
not for reflecting [a fictionalized world]/ Heidegger's comment on
Holderlin, that is, that we look for language that helps us 'to inhabit
the world poetically,' is directly related to the search for this 'lingua
franca/ In Celati's view, Italian literary culture has not yet (by the mid-
eighties, the time of the interview) found this 'dimora' or space of hab-
itation for literary language that might aid us in 'adapting ourselves to
the [contemporary] world/ although he sees Calvino as one of the
most significant figures in redirecting the search in this direction.
One of the ways in which Calvino, Manganelli, Sanguineti, and
other writers actively rethought Italian literature, especially during the
period of neoavant-garde and experimental literary movements of the
sixties (Celati likes neither adjective, which he says were 'categories
imposed from without' by journalistic and academic critics) was to put
into play metaphors and themes having to do with 'the end': of the
world, of the author, of literature itself. In fictions by Manganelli and
those by Calvino from Le citta invisibili onward (excluding Palomar,
which Celati sees as taking a new turn towards the observable world),
Celati specifies a positioning of narrative in a sort of separate 'after-
world' to which come echoes of the 'real' world that has died or is
made up of nothing but incomprehensible and unrepresentable traces.
Celati comments: 'I must say that this is the thing from which I had to
free myself, and I struggled a lot to liberate myself from this point of
departure, which was that of my Comiche and also Guizzardi.' (In these
early fictions, we do indeed see the influence of an idea of the 'end' of
reality and thus of any form of 'natural' representation of it, as lan-
guage is radically estranged and distorted in the alienated spaces
through which Celati's characters move.) Yet Celati sees this sort of
writing - his own and that of a certain Calvino - as having been a
'work of cleansing, of recleansing a space in order to open up a possi-
bility of a "lingua franca," in the service of an adaptation [to reality]').
However, Celati makes it clear that he does not think it accurate to see
this sort of 'experimental' literature as a manifestation of the 'margins'
rising up to attack the 'center,' dichotomous terms that he attributes to
an instrumentalized (leftist) use of cultural discourse that is, in his
opinion, highly conservative in the end, in that such ('ferociously aes-
theticizing') dichotomizing 'evokes all the narcissism of the White Sub-
ject, that is, an ecstasy in the face of all that which He is not.' Instead,
he believes that the work that he, Carlo Ginzburg, Calvino, and some
others did in the sixties and seventies was directed towards 'disman-
tling this dichotomy/ highlighting instead the fact that all knowledge
and all representational modes are now nothing more or less than
'traces,' the contours of which we can only follow and the effects of
which we can only inhabit both existentially and in language.
Celati acknowledges, however, that Calvino attained the status of 'a
kind of monument/ because the so-called center of institutionalized
culture valorized him, even if his work could more validly be seen as
being carried out in and on 'marginalized' literary-cultural spaces. He
recounted during our interview an anecdote that makes clear Calvino's
own awareness of this fact: 'One time we were at the seashore, at Forte
dei Marmi, and Le citta invisibili had come out and it was selling very
well. And Calvino said: "My God!, I wrote something that very few
will understand" [ho scritto una cosa che capiscono pochissimi] ... but
it's the name of the author that sells, and there's nothing to be done."'
Our interview ended with my question of what Calvino might have
gone on to do after the last book to be published before his death, Polo-
mar. Celati responded that he is really not sure, although their last con-
versations had to do with the problem of description, and the last thing
Calvino gave him were four short descriptive pieces based on paint-
ings by Domenico Gnoli (more on these below). Celati also said that
they continued up to the end to argue about the problem of what
Barthes called 'the illusion of the referent.' For Celati, the issue was not
146 Gianni Celati
that of an 'illusion/ but rather that of 'the mechanism of common sense

[that] makes it such that I hope that you [his reader] imagine some-
thing that is there, that exists, if not, then there is the whole problem of
narrational "credibility."' Calvino continued to be preoccupied with
the problem of the illusion of the referent, as is evident in the stories of
Palomar, but found there a way to stop trying to solve it by means of a
'full-proof cognitive grid. Celati ended the interview by telling me
Calvino's final words before he went into his predeath coma: 'Vanni di
Marsio, fenomenologo ... le rette ... le parallele' (Vanni di Marsio, phe-
nomenologist ... straight lines ... parallels). This was in the context of
my question about Calvino's interest in the phenomenology of Mer-
leau-Ponty and Husserl, as reflected in Palomar. Celati's comment on
this was that the strict line between philosophical and fictional writing
was being broken down, as is evident in the work of Giorgio Agamben
and Aldo Gargani, philosophers of 'weak thought' who use language
poetically and fictionally in order to express philosophical ideas. I
believe that he implied by these comments that it was not a question of
applying philosophical ideas to an analysis of Palomar, but rather of
reading it as fictionalized philosophy, or philosophical fiction.
Much of what Celati had to say in this 1985 interview had already
been put into print in his article, 'Palomar, la prosa del mondo/ which
appeared in Alfabeta in its April 1984 issue; this essay is the basis for the
revised version, 'Palomar nella prosa del mondo,' published in 1987 in
the two-volumed number of Nuova Corrente on Calvino, to which I shall
also refer. Georges Perec's Especes d'espaces and an essay by Lino Gabel-
lone, 'Gioco del mondo senza giocatori' (Game of the world without
players), are also considered in .the Alfabeta piece, in which Celati
emphasizes that Palomar is a 'rare example of Italian prose in which so-
called knowledge is not used in order to sell judgments on the world,
but in order to construct a story about the fragility of every explanation
of the external world that we have at our disposition.' Celati reads the
book as 'a long goodbye' (un lungo congedo) directed towards the
things of this world, which are 'no longer objects of knowledge, themes
of life or authorial tricks, but finally ... points of silence, on which we
have no obligation to pronounce.' Like Perec, Calvino no longer tries to
explain 'how the world is made/ nor does he try to 'reinvent the exter-
nal by means of fantastic or aesthetic forms.' Descriptions are used in
order to 'inventory' and 'organize' the seen, not in order to tell us what
they might ultimately be or mean. Mr Palomar's cogitations 'don't get
anywhere, luckily/ and Calvino seems to be confessing 'the vanity of
his [character's] cogito, and of the cogito itself, [that] famous apparatus
for demonstrating the foundations of our thoughts/ Celati sees as new
in this work a salutary 'grain of madness' that has its origins in Palo-
mar's realization that all of his 'presuppositions' about the foundations
of assertions and actions are useless in the face of 'solitude/ 'the power
of silence and the implicit/ and 'the limits of the [human] race.' Gabel-
lone's essay, dedicated to Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno, leads Celati
into a brief discussion of the topic, which he also brought up in our
interview, of 'literature of the end of the world/ He again includes
Perec - as well as Queneau - in his comments on Calvino, calling them
all narrators who in certain of their works were willing to embrace the
inconclusiveness and obviousness of stories. Calvino played on this
fact in Se una notte by frustrating our expectation of conclusive stories,
instead weaving together a number of beginnings of narratives without
any end, apart from the 'obvious' happy ending of a marriage in the
frame story. The parodic approach used by Calvino in this book shows,
however, that he is still 'inside a modern thematic of the incapacity of
confronting the great obstacle, the alienation of narrating/ but in Palo-
mar, he gets beyond this obstacle by having a protagonist who is noth-
ing more than 'an instrument of observation/ thus accepting 'the
somewhat comic and unavoidable opacity of the means used in order
to capture the external: eyes, images, words, categories/ The external
world is 'opaque' to our sight, and our means of 'capturing' reality -
and sense - must rely on the 'obviousness' of words, systems of orga-
nizing experience, and categories, while nonetheless appreciating 'the
grain of the weave of words or of lines that veil our gaze/ much as the
stories of Palomar succeed in doing. In the re-elaboration of this essay
for Nuova Corrente, Celati writes of Mr Palomar's inability to stop cogi-
tating, even when he decides to do so by simply describing every
moment of his life, instant by instant, in order to stave off death. He
wants, in other words, to put himself 'outside of time' by placing him-
self at an Archimedean point from which he can play dead, and count-
ing off the instants of his life, but at the very moment that he decides
this, he dies. Cogitation thus comes up against its ultimate limits. It is
significant, I believe, that Celati, who is an addicted cogitator, sees the
step taken in Palomar by another indefatigable cogitator, Calvino, as a
positive acknowledgment of the radical limits of the cogito, as both
writers move towards forms of narration that respect the ultimately
unreachable 'thereness' of externality, beyond whatever cogitations
they or we might apply to it.
148 Gianni Celati
In the 1990 interview with Bob Lumley, Celati refers to Calvino in

explaining why he gave up writing for several years after his work in
the seventies: The real reason I gave up writing was that I didn't
believe that there was any credibility in normal literature, which is
industrial literature, in the sense that you have to accept and take for
granted that you are reading a fiction ... [which] then implies that you
are in a fictionalized position vis-a-vis your everyday life, which
implies you're in a separate position vis-a-vis your own experience. I
wasn't satisfied with this idea of fiction and this is why I didn't agree
with Calvino. I wasn't on his line because Calvino, on the other hand,
was pushing towards a kind of literature which was totally separate
from what could be everyday experience, except in his last book Polo-
mar' (The Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 43). As I tried to
make clear in the preceding chapter, Celati's turn to the external world
and his work on seeing and describing it 'as it wants to be seen' were
ways for him of positioning literature more in line with everyday expe-
rience and with the common communicative pacts that we enter into
when seeking to reach others. Similarly, this interest in description and
spatial perspectives is seen not only in Palomar but also in a brief piece
by Calvino included in the 1986 collection, Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia,
entitled 'Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio' (Hypothesis of de-
scription of a landscape), as well as in pieces he wrote on four paint-
ings by Domenico Gnoli: 'La scarpa da donna' (The lady's shoe); 'La
camicia da uomo' (The man's shirt); 'II bottone' (The button); and '"II
guanciale" (The pillow).5 These latter pieces are descriptions of paint-
ings done in the sixties by Gnoli, but they go far beyond 'mere'
description, becoming meditations on the meanings we can attribute to
these everyday objects by focusing our eyes and our signifying sys-
tems on them. (A certain Barthes comes to mind in these exercises.)
The task of describing a landscape also becomes a brief meditation on
method: 'Ogni volta che ho provato a descrivere un paesaggio, il
metodo da seguire nella descrizione diventa altrettanto importante che
il paesaggio descritto' (Every time I have tried to describe a landscape,
the method to be followed becomes as important as the described
landscape' ('Ipotesi'; 11). Calvino remarks that if he chooses to move
around in the space he is seeking to describe in order to see it from dif-
ferent points of view, this movement is like the movement of writing
itself (as the quotation I used from this essay in the preceding chapter,
which emphasizes the spatial and temporal nature of writing, makes
clear), and it is therefore 'natural that a written description is an opera-
tion that distends space into time, unlike a painting or even more a
photograph that concentrates time in a fraction of a second to the point
of making it disappear, as if space could exist by itself and be sufficient
unto itself/ Calvino concludes that, as he moves around spatially in
order to describe a landscape from several perspectives, time, of
course, is also changing, so that 'a description of a landscape, being
filled with temporality, is always a story: there is an I in motion who
describes a landscape in motion, and each element of the landscape
is filled with its temporality, that is, with the possibility of being
described in another present or future moment' (12). Impossible, I
think, not to hear echoes of Ghirri's and Celati's views in this piece, so
that it might be fair to conclude that Calvino, the 'father,' whose atti-
tudes concerning literary creation so influenced Celati when he began
to write in the late sixties, was in turn influenced in his final work by
the 'son' whose central goal in the eighties was to find 'fictions in
which to believe,' which were in turn tied to a new emphasis on credi-
ble descriptions of the visible that might organize the spaces and times
in which contemporary life is lived.6
The intensity of Celati's and Calvino's collaboration is nowhere
more evident than in their epistolary exchanges regarding the pro-
posed journal All Baba, a project that engaged their energies for several
years off and on at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the sev-
enties. Due to the hard work of Riga editors Mario Barenghi and Marco
Belpoliti, we now have available in print a detailed record of the
phases of this project: letters by Calvino, Guido Neri, Celati, and Carlo
Ginzburg; essays by these writers and by Enzo Melandri; and a recent
letter to the editors by Celati, in which he recounts his memories of
their work of thirty years ago. (Parenthetically: Celati cowrote, with
Ivan Levrini, a wonderful piece, 'In memoria di Enzo Melandri,' which
appeared in the third issue of // Semplice [1996], in which the late phi-
losopher's influence on Celati's forma mentis is clear. Celati and Levrini
note that Melandri taught them that philosophy can be considered a
'genere immaginativo che fa bene allo spirito' [an imaginative genre
that does good to the spirit; 177]). This is the period from which
emerged Calvino's 'Lo sguardo dell'archeologo'; Celati's 'II bazar
archeologico'; Ginzburg's 'Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario'
(Spies: roots of a presumptive paradigm); Melandri's La linea e il circolo;
and other subsequently highly important revisionist literary critical,
philosophical, and historiographical directions. Calvino assiduously
critiques Celati's ideas and writings in his letters to his young col-
150 Gianni Celati
league, while Celati continues to propose directions and titles for the
journal in intermittent correspondence, even when he goes to the
United States to teach. The collaborators are all voracious consumers of
critical texts, with an especially huge appetite for French thinkers such
as Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes; ideas fly furiously between and
among them with an enthusiasm rarely seen since.
Celati's 1997 letter to the editors of this issue of Riga is an invalu-
able document, for it contextualizes and explains the origins of the
project while giving a very personal glimpse into his close relation-
ship with Calvino. Celati makes it clear that it was Calvino who espe-
cially wished to 'ask something more of literature above and beyond
the usual routine of successful books' ('II progetto "Ali Baba"
trent'anni dopo' [The 'Ali Baba' Project Thirty Years Afterward]; 313).
Celati also writes that Calvino's books written after this period are
'unthinkable' without this 'long debate' behind them. Celati and
Calvino first met at a convention in Urbino in 1968, where the latter
spoke with 'extraordinary enthusiasm' about the events in Paris that
May, which made the older writer feel a great sense of liberation, 'as
if a weight had been lifted' (313-14). Calvino also spoke of Einaudi's
proposal that he reactivate Vittorini's journal, II Menabo, which had
been suspended after Vittorini's death, saying that he wanted to do
something different, however, which would involve people outside of
official cultural circles. Celati notes that Calvino seemed to prefer the
company of younger people during this period, and so he sought out
Celati, Ginzburg, Paolo Fabbri, Paolo Valesio, and others born ten or
more years after him. Thus began the project of AH Baba and the long
friendship between Celati and Calvino. Their mutual attraction to the
most abstruse flights of theory and to endless cogitation bound them
together, although Celati writes that in retrospect he now sees a
'disastrous intellectualism' in his critical and theoretical writings for
the project, while he believes that Calvino's 'theoretical flights' were
seen by the older writer 'more than anything else as an imaginative
adventure' (315). Most striking in Celati's letter is the repetition of
phrases such as 'we talked for hours'; 'we chatted for days on end';
and so on. The fervor of these long informal exchanges is captured
somewhat in the letters that survived and that are now available in
Riga.
The complexity, richness, and importance of this project are such
that an entire chapter, at the very least, would need to be dedicated to
its full analysis. The letters and essays reveal the lineaments of a cru-
cial moment in Italian critical and theoretical work, a moment that can
be thought of as marking the decisive move from the modern to the

postmodern. Calvino and Celati were deeply involved in this seismic
shift and, indeed, in some very real sense forwarded it. They traced the
fall of 'grand narratives' and the emergence of 'foundationlessness'
with all of the intensity, confusion, exhilaration, and sense of promise
that colored the late sixties throughout Europe and America. Looking
back to this period of fervent work, Celati sums up:
Se le grand! costruzioni in ferro ottocentesche erano i segni d'una certezza

scientifica senza debolezze - una certezza che si reggeva sull'ossessione
dell'acciaio, del duro e del duraturo, dell'esperienza non deperibile, della
cosa che rimane e non passa via - negli anni di lavoro assieme a Calvino
mi sembra che abbiamo assistito al tramonto di queste ossessioni. II
modello teorico-scientifico, il modello del modelli, adesso non ti aiutava
piu a vivere e forse neanche a pensare. La routine quotidiana, irrisoria e
banale, la parzialita del sintomi che ci legano ai luoghi, la casualita d'ogni
espressione e d'ogni passione, la variability d'ogni soggetto umano, tutto
cio non riusciva piu a diventare conoscenza, modello, insegnamento
storico, per mancanza di un quadro di omogeneita e completezza. Cosi
noi abbiamo imparato ad accettare la deperibilita e 1'instabilita profonda
di qualsiasi forma di sapere.
(If the great constructions in iron of the nineteenth century were the signs
of a scientific certainty without any weaknesses - a certainty that was
held up by the obsession with steel, with the hard and the lasting, with
imperishable experience, with the thing that remains and does not pass
away - in the years of work with Calvino it seems to me that we were
present at the decline of these obsessions. The theoretical-scientific model,
the model of all models, now no longer helped you to live and maybe not
even to think. Daily routine, trivial and banal, the partiality of symptoms
that bind us to places, the chance nature of every expression and every
passion, the variability of every human subject, all that no longer could
succeed in becoming knowledge, model, historical lesson, due to a lack of
a picture of homogeneity and completeness. Thus we learned to accept
the profound perishability and instability of any form of knowledge.) Tl
progetto All Baba'; 321
These words may speak more to Celati's current view than to that of
Calvino at the end of his life, for the latter went on looking for con-
ceptual and structural grids by which his writing might capture and
order the lived world.7 Nonetheless, it is true that Palomar reveals a
turn to parody in relation to the limits of cognitive models, and an
152 Gianni Celati
ability to show the 'craziness' of a character who, like his creator,

would still wish to overcome the chaos, instability, and fragility of
human experience.
Celati's public 'congedo' or goodbye to Calvino took the form of a

piece called 'Morte di Italo' (Italo's Death), which appeared in the jour-
nal Riga (9, November 1995). Celati's tells us that the piece is based on
notes he wrote down a few days after Calvino's funeral 'only in order
to remind myself of the situation and the feelings of the moment.' (All
quotations that follow in the discussion of this essay are from 'Morte di
Italo'; 204-8.) Calvino died in a hospital in Siena, and Celati - with
other friends and family members - got there shortly before his death,
but did not see him alive. Calvino's wife Chichita told them of her hus-
band's last words, which he spoke 'as if he were still ruminating about
something to be written, and at a certain point he said this phrase:
"The eyeglasses are the judge." Then a pataphysical comment, in
French: "Je suis un abatjour allume" (I'm a lighted lampshade), this,
according to Chichita, because the aneurism had made him feel a tre-
mendous burning in his head.' Calvino woke up at one moment and
asked if he had had an accident, then told the doctors that he was
thirty years old and lived on the Boulevard Saint Germain (Celati com-
ments, 'where he went for a walk almost every evening, when I was in
Paris'). The last words, which I already quoted above, were spoken as
if he were reading a book, that is, the words were Very clearly articu-
lated.' Celati comments regarding these last words ('Vanni di Marsio,
fenomenologo ... le rette ... le parallele') that for Calvino 'geometry was
an idea of clarity, and he had little love for the hole in our soul, the
dark that we have inside of us. He refused, he refused these things. He
liked [instead] I'esprit de geometric, like an upside-down Pascal. In most
recent times, he had begun to study Husserl's phenomenology. Vanni
di Marsio is a name that doesn't exist: his last utterance says it all.' Per-
haps the quality that most distanced Celati and Calvino from each
other was the embrace of that 'dark hole' by the former, and the search
for geometric clarity by the latter.
Calvino was positioned in a coffin in a 'very big room of the hospi-
tal,' but 'in a ridiculous way, it seems, [for they had put] lace all around
his head.' When Celati went to see him, Calvino seemed 'all shrunken
down, and his face was disfigured by a big bump on his forehead,
where they had opened it up in order to operate on him.' But, although
he was changed in these ways and also because his hair had been cut,
Celati nonetheless saw 'a trace of his old wry smirk on his lips. People
of all sorts began to arrive to view the body, from the prefect of Siena
(who was 'rigid as a cod') to the commanding officer of the Carabinieri
(who greeted the widow 'in a more human way, almost excusing him-
self, and then, moved, he went away'); from housewives on their way
to the market, to school children (who 'went up on tiptoe to see the
dead man'), priests, nuns, sick people, nurses. Celati notes that Natalia
Ginzburg was the person he most loved in all that human traffic;
Francois Wahl instead seemed 'a tortured man: he grumbled that his
mother had died a year ago, then Foucault, now Italo. Sic transit gloria
mundi, I wanted to answer him.' Celati obviously has no patience for
self-pitying reactions to the loss of beloved others.
Celati next recounts a dream he had that night when he and Carlo
and Luisa Ginzburg went back to their hotel. In it, Calvino was seated
on a tractor that was throwing gravel off to two sides, in preparation
for the laying of an asphalt road. The road being constructed 'joined
two far-off cities, and Italo had something to do with its construction,
as if he were a supervisor of the works'; Celati adds: 'I thought a lot
about this dream, in the sense of this road that joins far-off places.' The
next day, when he returns to the hospital, 'the atmosphere of mourning
still pleased [him]/ for there was nothing organized about it as people
of all kinds continued to arrive and 'timidly look at the dead man.' But
a drastic change in atmosphere occurred that night, when Celati saw
arriving on the main piazza 'four figures of high culture, looking like
big parasites who were ashamed of being there, who were ashamed of
death. They seemed to be dogs with their tails between their legs, not
because of pain or sadness, but because mourning embarrassed them.
One of them even said these precise words to me: "You know, death
seems to me a dirty thing, undignified and anti-aesthetic."' The next
morning things had gone from bad to worse, as newspapers began to
report the death of Calvino, 'but there wasn't one single article worth
reading/ This was so, according to Celati, because his friend had
become 'the symbol of a privilege, the symbol of literature as a worldly
privilege, a mirage that was beginning to be put back into circulation
for the first time since D'Annunzio's era/ The comments that follow
are, I think, worthy of being cited at some length:
[Calvino] who for so many years had derided the mania of 'becoming a
writer/ who had tortured himself so as not to give in to the ease of the
'famous name/ now had become himself a trap. There is a return to
154 Gianni Celati
D'Annunzian mythologies in an industrial form, literature officially

figures among the advertised products for consumers, from now on there
will only be this mounting of 'names of renown' that are waved about in
the newspapers. And all those aspiring to the worldly privilege of the role
of 'writer' now pop out like mice in search of cheese ... I saw that now
Italo was completely in the hands of [our men of culture, the haute bour-
geoisie, the great parasites], he was a dead man of the Great Caste ... They
spoke only of books, of their books, of their successes, of their superior
knowledge, of articles in the newspapers, of the things that one should be
reading, that one should not be reading. They were so absorbed in their
trafficking that the context of mourning didn't even graze them one little
bit.
Celati went with the Ginzburgs to the little seaside cemetery in

Castiglione della Pescaia, on the Ligurian coast not far from Calvino's
childhood city of Rapallo, but even there, in spite of flyers produced
by order of the mayor of the town that spoke of Calvino as a 'local
author/ nothing was in the least like 'a small-town rite, [instead]
everything stank of publicity and worldliness.' Nothing was left but
to escape from it all, which Celati and the Ginzburgs in fact did.
Celati ends by explaining that, if he cried that evening, it was because
'everything had passed away, there was nothing to be done, one must
abandon this cynical and swindling country.' Yet he still remembers
Calvino's 'boyish smirks by means of which he often showed that he
was not at all at ease in life, and that he could play the fool when he
wanted to. These are things that are not written about in the newspa-
pers, nor do they interest university professors: because our black
side, that sometimes becomes our most radiant side, is not discuss-
able in the terms of the famous cultural "lure/" So ends what is,
finally, not so much a lament for Calvino's demise as a lament for the
way in which he was immediately instrumentalized in the construc-
tion of a posthumous symbolism built around his 'Great Author' sta-
tus, when Celati instead sees him as a writer who consistently sought
to escape the limits and the privileges of this so-called status, and to
go on seriously interrogating literature's potential both for himself
and for the Italian tradition. In spite of his renown, Calvino was, for
Celati, an exceptional example of what a great writer is: an indefatiga-
ble thinker about and self-renewing creator of meaningful and share-
able fictions. That Calvino was one of Celati's 'fathers,' as well as a
brotherly 'fellow traveler' is, I think, indisputable; that Celati did not
and does not simply 'imitate' and model his writing on Calvino's,
however, is equally indisputable. They seemed to have had a relation-
ship that real fathers and sons would no doubt envy, made up as it
was of mutual intellectual support, engaging disagreement and
debate, and unsentimental, yet genuine affection. I detect no 'anxiety
of influence' at work in Celati's connection with Calvino; instead, as
with Ghirri and perhaps some rare others, Celati gave as good as he
got, in an exchange that had little or nothing to do with an avid
search for success or official 'validation.' Maybe the best way to say
what I mean is this: they cogitated together as well as, if not better
than, apart, and the unfinished, open-ended, ongoing quality of their
shared cogitations at the time of Calvino's death is the best indication
of the fundamental meaning of their interactions over the years,
which were ceaseless attempts at exploring the infinitely flexible and
complex field of human endeavor known as literature.
Garzoni, the Magician of the World Made Words
If Calvino shared with his 'son' Celati a tenacious tendency to cogitate,

and to elaborate theoretical and critical ideas about literary creation
(as well as a restless and ever-changing creativity as seen in both of
their shifting fictional voices over the years), Tomaso Garzoni (1549?-
1589) might be seen as fulfilling a very different sort of need: the need
to traverse, by means of the imagination, the infinite and magical
expanses of the world made words. I do not want to suggest that there
is a clear-cut distinction between thought and fantasy, nor that such a
distinction, if it can be made at all, relegates Calvino solely to the realm
of the rational, thinking mind. My point is, instead, that Celati's rela-
tion with Calvino is characterized more by their mutual theoretical bent
than by their imaginative fictional elaborations; while Garzoni is
beloved not so much for his encyclopedic 'rage to order,' but rather for
the ways in which his works open up possibilities for 'fantasticating on
the incredible variety of the world' (in Celati's unfinished, unpub-
lished essay, 'La piazza universale di tutti i mestieri' [The universal
square of all professions] to which I refer throughout this discussion).8
The long-standing importance that Garzoni has had for Celati is evi-
dent in his assertion that 'as a young man I read [La piazza universale] ...
[and] through the years as I traveled, I often went to look for it in Ital-
ian and foreign libraries, because that unfindable book was like fuel for
me.' Why a sixteenth-century text of over a thousand erudite pages
156 Gianni Celati
should be so beloved of a contemporary writer is a question that lies at

the heart of the discussion that follows.
Tomaso Garzoni's La piazza universale di tutte le profession! del mondo e
nobili e ignobili, nuovamente formata et posta in luce da Thomaso Garzoni da
Bagnacavallo was published in Venice in 1585. It is an encyclopedic
work that speaks 'of the professions of everyday life, from the most
noble to the most vile/ and Celati sees it as 'a mine of words, because
there are so many unknown Italian words, from the arts, from science/
even though much of the work is almost impossible to decipher in its
'amassed erudition/ As a young reader, Celati was especially taken
with the descriptions of scenes on the public piazza: 'of the spectacles
of traveling actors, charlatans and salesmen of "smoke and mirrors"; of
acrobats, clowns, mimes, and buffoons; of whores, pimps, thieves,
swindlers, and pilgrims who recount shameless lies about their travels.
It was a world entirely made of masks, nothing and no-one that wasn't
a mask' (in Celati's unpublished essay). The occasion that prompted
the writing of this essay was the 1996 publication by Einaudi of a
critical edition of this enormous work, edited by Paolo Cherchi and
Beatrice Collina: Celati explains: 'I'm writing this article now in order
to announce that [the book] has finally been re-published after three
centuries, and I hope that my enthusiasm is shared by at least fifty or
so people/ He also thanks the recently deceased scholar, Piero Campo-
resi, who first suggested the undertaking, and whose studies first put
Garzoni's work back into favor.
Celati describes Garzoni's Piazza as a kind of 'ethnographic work/ in
that it includes 'all the habits by means of which a community of
humans coheres/ but it is also something like 'an encyclopedic atlas:
those great volumes filled with illustrations and information of all
kinds, into which we stuck our noses as children in order to fantasize
about the incredible variety of the world/ There is 'a fantastic flavor'
and 'a sense of the marvelous' in this work, as Garzoni uses the 'tone
of a carnival barker, who speaks and speaks at breakneck speed in
order to attract the public/ The work is presented by its author as a
'monstrous edifice' (edificio mostruoso), and Celati notes that the
adjective 'mostruoso' is used in its etymological sense, as that which is
shown (monstrare), as the author 'makes certain rare things appear, in
the manner of magicians/ And it is by means of an 'open-minded faith
in the power of words' that Garzoni, like Ariosto before him, shows
the marvels of the world, which itself can in turn be magically trans-
formed by words that have the power to 'do miracles, alter the course
of events, and create great enchantments that amaze everyone/ Celati

cites a passage that he holds especially dear, and which exemplifies
Garzoni's view of the world as word: The thirty-seventh discourse of
the Piazza universale is dedicated to the profession of cartographers and
cosmographers, therefore Garzoni feels that he must describe the geo-
graphic maps of his time, according to the four parts of the world then
known. Thus a tangle of geographic names emerges, that for a normal
modern reader have no meaning whatsoever, being names attributed
by cartographers to often unknown regions, and moreover [names]
that are often badly transcribed, wrong, imagined, useless. But when
he gets to Italy, and in particular to Romagna, it is important to him to
indicate also the little town of Bagnacavallo: that is, the place where
Tomaso Garzoni, by profession a churchman, was born and died.'
Celati delights in imagining Garzoni as he writes in his little hilltop
town, while the immense and unknown spaces of the world spread out
beyond him: 'But for him the world is made only of names, which sig-
nify only as magic words ... and he sits there writing, not in the midst
of the infinite and frightening spaces of which Pascal speaks, but in the
midst of names and words that cover all possible spaces.' Words are,
finally, Garzoni's 'mask' and, like someone playing his fixed role, this
'mask' allows him to perform 'the recitation that gives him the right to
exist in the world, his recitation of existence.' Garzoni's world is not
'the world of facts,' but one made entirely of words, of 'si dice' (it is
said), so that all of space and time are filled, and there is no horror vacui
whatsoever. Celati notes that this is what occurred once 'on the piazza
of a town, where the "it is said" of collective life embraced all things
and functioned as a universal intellect.' Thus, the contemporary writer
implies that he finds a comforting sense of human collectivity in the
vast and erudite collection of words and names put together by Gar-
zoni, for it is finally a work that 'dresses up' (travestire) the world in
words, the world that 'will forever remain unknown, forever a fable
that people tell to one another in a hundred thousand manners.' Any-
one who writes with such a passion for words, no matter what he
writes, makes of his words 'a fantastic figuration and vision of the cos-
mos: because to recount (favellare) means to create fables (fabulare).' I
think that, for Celati, reading this vast repertory of professions, names,
and unknown and even imaginary places on early maps of the world,
is another way of traveling, of moving through space that, as in his
Narratori delle pianure, is filled in a Brueghelesque way with teeming
figures of life, and is also space in constant motion and transformation.
158 Gianni Celati
Garzoni's is also a work that appeals strongly to Celati's idea of experi-

ence as that which is always recounted ('si dice'), so that the external
world itself is nothing other than the endless 'stories' that we humans
tell about it. The world is, in this sense, 'monstrous/ but in the positive
sense of that which is revealed and shown (monstrare), and a passion
for words can render it magical and 'spectacular/ as, in fact, all exter-
nality inevitably is, according to Celati's permeable gaze.
In the second part of the essay on Garzoni, Celati brings the Piazza
into the realm of this century's fictional modes, and compares the
encyclopedic style of writing found in La piazza universale, which cre-
ates a 'city of words/ to Joyce's Ulysses and Perec's La vie, mode
d'emploi, the latter of which he sees as perhaps 'closer to Garzoni's
model/ because of the way in which the material to be recounted in
both is divided up and distributed. One of the editors of the recent edi-
tion of La piazza, Paolo Cherchi, also highlights the similarity of the
text to much modern literature, so that Garzoni has a great appeal for
today's reader who is 'educate dai pastiches gaddiani o malerbiani,
dalle citazioni erudite e rare di Borges, dal funambolismo verbale di
certa prosa baroccheggiante moderna, daH'automatismo di certe scrit-
ture d'avanguardia' (educated by Gadda's and Malerba's pastiches, by
the rare and erudite citations of Borges, by the verbal acrobatics of a
certain neobaroque modern prose, and by the automatisms of certain
writings of the avant-garde) ('Invito alia lettura della Piazza'; Ixv-lxvi).
Garzoni divides up his 'public square' according to the professions
that are practiced on it, and, according to Celati, this 'is similar to
Perec's idea of designing a Parisian apartment building, subdividing
his chapters by the floors and apartments that make it up.' Celati notes
that the building is 'eminently imaginary' because, for one thing, tele-
vision doesn't exist in these apartments, and he calls it something like
'an old Wunderkammer' or chamber of marvels. Most contemporary
novels lack this quality of 'eidetismo' or visually conditioned knowl-
edge, because while being Very visual and cinematographic, they tend
toward the typical blindness of the "world of facts": they must use
words as positive data, and are blind to the miracle of words.' Celati
insists that language is not positivistic, and always has its basis in the
imaginary: 'nothing has ever been said that didn't have an imaginative
foundation/ The contemporary view of the novel as having to do with
the 'world of facts/ and as moving through these facts linearly, 'subor-
dinating the use of words to the thread of facts to be recounted/ in
order then to arrive at a 'logical conclusion/ results in fictions that are
much more 'monological, monotonal, and monoschizoid' than the

fairly uncategorizable writings of Garzoni in which there is instead 'a
game of limitless accumulation' as seen also in Joyce's characters'
wanderings through the streets of Dublin, in Gadda's 'unresolvable
tangle/ and in Perec's 'zones [created] in order to be filled with
words.' These are all modes of writing in which we can enjoy strolling
in a zigzagging manner, without being concerned about getting to a
'logical' conclusion, enjoying what Celati calls 'the illegal essence of
life.' The non-linear quality of the Piazza, in coeditor Beatrice Collina's
words, gives us 'una prospettiva che non contempla la verticalita e la
gerarchia, ma solo la circolarita nella quale gli estremi si incontrano' (a
perspective that does not contemplate verticality and hierarchy,
but only circularity in which extremes meet; 'Un "cervello" univer-
sale'; cvi). Thus can be seen again Celati's preference for errancy,
understood as directionless, circular, and nonhierarchical movement
through space, and as the acceptance of error as one of the basic
attributes of human existence.
Many elements in Celati's work over the years are implicitly glossed
by his words on Garzoni: avoidance of the linear and logical; dedica-
tion to the 'magical' quality of the rich repository of language at our
disposal; emphasis on the 'masks' or roles that we play according to
our 'preferences' and to the social conventions that label us; the the-
matic of 'life as voyage' through the ultimately unknown and unknow-
able ineluctability of human existence. Celati finally calls Garzoni's
work 'a picaresque novel,' in the sense that it is a rare example in the
Italian tradition of a 'novel about existence as a perpetual swindle,
which renders moral judgments useless.' He came to understand, after
years of trying to master Garzoni's vast work, that the 'sensation of
ignorance' it stimulated in him as a young man 'depended on a most
beautiful fraud [made up of] the words into which I was pulled.' The
implication is, of course, that this 'fraud' is what we have; words are
what the world is for us, and, if we cannot logically 'master' existence,
we can nonetheless wander through its endless spectacle with a sense
of wonderment, eyes wide open, like those of a child who gazes at a
fearful but fascinating monster that might even reveal itself to be love-
able in the end. These two 'fathers,' one a seeker of order and a tireless
thinker about the task of writing, and the other a gatherer of 'magical'
words and a dedicated appropriator of erudite materials, both speak to
aspects of Celati's search for 'fictions in which to believe,' and they
continue to inform his own work in important ways.
160 Gianni Celati
'Siblings'
Unlike the 'fathers' discussed above, the 'siblings' of Celati are often
writers about whom he has not written formal essays. It may even be
erroneous to call many of these writers 'siblings/ for they are not all
necessarily sharply distinguishable from his 'fathers/ in that he also
considers them writers from whom he has learned much. I think that
the difference may be found perhaps in the more obvious points of
similarity between Celati's and these writers' actual writing styles,
more than in implicit or explicit poetics. I want, therefore, to dedicate
some space to Angela Carter, Patricia Highsmith, and John Berger,
while simply noting that Susan Sontag has been more of a 'sibling' in
the realm of critical writing, where the interest in Modernism (Ben-
jamin, Kakfa, etc.), for example, has been strongly shared. Carter,
Highsmith, and Berger are names that often came up in conversations I
have had with Celati over the years, when he would not typically say
more than that such and such a book was 'wonderful/ or that I would
surely enjoy reading one of their recent publications. Furthermore,
with these writers the concept of 'friendship' comes back into play, not
only because Celati had (and has, in the case of Berger) actual friend-
ships with some of them, but also because they all share in what
Adriana Cavarero calls the feminine symbolic mode of 'narrative
friendship/ in which recounting stories is a way of getting at the par-
ticularized and unique 'who' rather than the universalized 'what' of
human identities. Cavarero explains: 'The self, in the degree to which it
is a who and not a what, in fact has a reality [that is] completely external
and relational. The self [as] exhibited in action as much as the narrat-
able self are completely given over to others. In this total giving over
there is therefore no identity that reserves protected spaces or intimate
rooms of impenetrable refuge for self-contemplation. There is no interi-
ority that might invent itself as an inexpressible value' (Tu che mi guardi,
tu che mi racconti; 86). The 'externality' and 'relationality' of the narrat-
able self are qualities emphasized in the fictions of Carter, Highsmith,
and Berger (and, of course, Celati) in a variety of ways, so that I think it
can be said that for all of them the 'neuter/ universalizing realm of
patriarchal modes of discourse is fundamentally antithetical to their
critical and creative conceptions of fictional narration. This basic rejec-
tion of totalizing 'exemplarity' and, on the other hand, their embrace of
the ultimate unknowability of individual 'who-ness' or particularity
(akin to the Kierkegaardian 'destiny of anomaly' to which I referred in
the discussion of Bartleby) unite these quite different writers in a bond

of 'narrative friendship' that is also, in terms of a 'feminine' symbolic
logic, 'sisterly' because outside of the historically and traditionally (i.e.,
patriarchally) conditioned Western idea of writing as a search for the
Authorial expression of a generalizable 'humanness' (the Subject).
Angela Carter, the Spectacular Woman
Carter's voice is quite literally unlike any other, while at the same time
it draws on, 'recycles/ parodies, and 'steals' (in Cavarero's sense of
taking from the dominant tradition in order to revise it [see her
Nonostante Platone]) a multitude of other voices. Mary Russo quotes
Linda Hutcheon's description of Nights at the Circus, for example, in
which the latter writes that 'the novel's parodic echoes of Pericles, Ham-
let, and Gulliver's Travels ... are all ironic feminizations of traditional or
canonical male representations of the so-called generic human-Man'
(Russo, 'Revamping Spectacle,' in The Female Grotesque; 161). Because
Carter's writing is filled with allusions to 'intertexts from high and low
culture' (Russo; 161), it might seem that she is an exquisitely 'postmod-
ern' writer, whose works mirror above anything else an all-consuming
textuality, with little reference to extratextual reality. Yet her stories are
moving in a way that cold parodies are not; moreover, their very liter-
ariness somehow solicits exhilaration, consternation, and joy at the
sheer abundance of verbal inventiveness and lived experience both.
Carter has been called a 'feminist writer' as well as a 'political writer,'
whose revisions of canonical representations of women seek to revo-
lutionize not only literature but also society. These critical views of
her work are doubtless useful in the context of literary-theoretical
approaches in which creative writing is seen primarily as a source of
ideas, themes, and/or 'programs.' In my brief consideration of Carter, I
want instead to emphasize her visual imagination, which, in its connec-
tions with spectacle and the spectacular, in turn connects her with the
'eidetic' quality found by Celati in Garzoni's world made word. To
write the world as spectacle is to embrace its externality, its surface; to
write characters who are spectacular is to see them in their 'masks/ by
means of which they enter into relational identities, rather than to
probe their ostensibly inexpressible interiors. Carter's women charac-
ters are unavoidably seeable: they are big, eccentrically striking in
physical appearance, decked out in all manner of showy dress and
makeup. They are absolutely present in their 'who-ness/ for they can-
162 Gianni Celati
not easily be categorized as 'whats' (typical wives, mothers, sweet-

hearts, nurturers, intellectuals, voluptuaries). Their identities are fully
external and relational, as they themselves or other characters attempt
to 'recount' them, to get some hold on their ineluctable and unique
beings. They fly or slither or otherwise escape from the generalizing
categories of 'whamess,' tied as they are to their uniquely spectacular
and spectacularized 'destinies of anomaly/
If Carter often recreated the spectacular nature of individual identity
and of the visible world by means of a richly ornamental, baroque prose
style that spectacularized language itself (this approach is akin to
Celati's extreme expressionism as seen in Guizzardi, for example), she
also used the 'alien' setting of Japan as a staging ground for the wonders
of surface by means of which we recount ourselves and are, in turn,
recounted.9 In the story 'A Souvenir of Japan' (in Burning Your Boats; 27-
34), she tells a tale, in the first person and in relatively unornamental
prose, of a love affair with a Japanese man, who 'sometimes ... seemed
to possess a curiously unearthly quality,' like that of a 'pixie' or a 'gob-
lin.' His lover says, 'I should like to have had him embalmed and been
able to keep him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all
the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.' As
unknowable as he was in his surface, exotic beauty ('his elegant body
which had such curious, androgynous grace'; his hair 'so heavy his neck
drooped under its weight'; his mouth 'purplish and his blunt, bee-stung
lips like those of Gauguin's Tahitians'; his skin 'as smooth as water as it
flows through the fingers'), she felt herself to be equally unknowable,
'so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a
fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inex-
pressibly exotic.' She had the sensation of being 'a female imperson-
ator'; with her 'pink cheeks, blue eyes and blatant yellow hair,' she was
a blaring, alien instrument in a landscape of monotonal dark hair and
brown eyes that created 'a sober harmony of subtle plucked instruments
and wistful flutes/ Her lover was so physically delicate that she feared
she might smash him: 'He told me that when he was in bed with me, he
felt like a small boat upon a wide, stormy sea/ Her summation of their
intense relationship tells us that she 'was suffering from love and I knew
him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words,
I knew him only in relation to myself/ The entire city in which they lived
seemed 'a cold hall of mirrors which continually proliferated whole gal-
leries of constantly changing appearances, all marvelous but none tan-
gible/ In a culture based on appearances - one that 'has elevated
hypocrisy to the level of the highest style' - gestures and rituals made it
seem that 'if we believe in something hard enough, it will come true
and, lo and behold! they had and it did.' As they lived in 'images of eva-
nescence/ she found that the 'most moving' were 'the intangible reflec-
tions of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing
but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to
possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.'
Although this story can be read as a meditation on the distance created
by deep cultural differences, I read it instead as a revelation of the exter-
nality of relations between two 'who's' who cannot escape the limits of
'whatness' (diminutive, masculinist Japanese man; large, physically
spectacular, 'liberated' English woman), thereby of necessity bound to
fail in 'possessing each other's otherness.' Ceremony; gesture; mutual
instrumentalization: these are the bases of relationality, since the 'des-
tiny of anomaly' into which each of us is born makes it impossible for us
to be anything other than mirrors to each other, or else reciters of socially
and culturally coded roles that permit harmonious co-existence. This is
a view of human interaction that is quite similar to that represented by
Celati in his stories on appearances, such as 'Baratto,' as well as in his
interpretation of Bartleby as a symbol of unreadable, unique 'who-ness.'
In another story about the love affair in Japan, 'Flesh and the Mirror/
in Burning Your Boats; 68-74, Carter again writes in the first person
about the woman of 'A Souvenir of Japan/ who has returned to Yoko-
hama in order to find her Japanese lover once more. The writer merci-
lessly dissects her own 'game/ which consisted in looking for 'a
climate with enough anguish and hysteria in it' to satisfy her belief that
'unpleasure' was a sign of 'real life/ She found what she sought, for
her lover did not meet her upon her arrival, although he was expected.
She then took a train to Tokyo, and there, in the midnight rain, she
walked about looking for the face of her lover. In retrospect, she thinks
she knows what she was trying to do: 'to subdue the city by turning it
into a projection of my own growing pains/ She exclaims: 'What solip-
sistic arrogance!' Deep into what she calls her 'Bovary syndrome/ she
imagined some more intense level of 'real' experience, permeated with
romantic pain. She watched herself 'experiencing' rather than giving
herself over to experience. Yet her image of herself as a suffering,
spurned lover is turned upside down by a casual sexual encounter
with a young man whom she meets as she wanders about: 'My sensi-
bility foundered under the assault on my senses. My imagination had
been preempted/ As she lay in bed with the stranger after they had
164 Gianni Celati
made love, she looked at herself in the mirror above her, and notes:
The mirror distilled the essence of all the encounters of strangers
whose perceptions of one another existed only in the medium of the
chance embrace, the accidental. During the durationless time we spent
making love, we were not ourselves, whoever that might have been,
but in some sense the ghost of ourselves. But the selves we were not,
the selves of our own habitual perceptions of ourselves, had a far more
insubstantial substance than the reflections we were.' When she finally
meets up with her lover the next day, they quarrel immediately, and
spend the night in a squalid room that is 'a parody' of the room shared
with the casual lover. She felt 'out of character,' but couldn't decide if
she felt this way when feeling guilty about the casual encounter, or
when not feeling guilty about it. The woman realizes now that her des-
perately sought lover was really only 'an object created in the mode of
fantasy,' and that 'his self, and, by his self, I mean the thing he was to
himself, was quite unknown to me.' They soon part, and 'then the city
vanished; it ceased, almost immediately, to be a magic and appalling
place.' It had become 'home/ and the woman says that, although she
continues to 'turn up [her] coat collar in a lonely way and [is] always
looking at [herself] in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at
all to [her] character, whatever that is.' She concludes The most diffi-
cult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything
else is artful/ Once more, Carter powerfully puts before us the exter-
nality of relations with others, and the unknowability of our own
'inner' selves, which our actions belie more often than not. The 'per-
ceptions' that strangers have of one another are conditioned by
'chance' and the 'accidental': by the radical contingency of experience,
in short. Like Celati, Carter does not suggest that 'innerness' doesn't
exist, only that we are already from the moment of birth materially
enmeshed in the externality of the visible world even before 'accident'
puts us into relations with others. Through the stories that others tell
us about ourselves - implicitly through our interactions with them, or
explicitly in their verbal characterizations of us - we learn that we are
all 'spectacles' for each other (in the sense of that which is shown and
seen, and in the sense of an instrument of focalization). The self is thus
'external' and 'relational,' and Carter's fictions heighten the 'spectacu-
larity' of which we are all part, sometimes by means of literally 'spec-
tacular' or 'grotesque' female characterizations, and sometimes, as in
the stories discussed above, by bringing out the estranging effects of
cultural, sexual, and uniquely private experiences of difference and
otherness. That many of her fictions are located in the world of the the-
ater, the circus, or the openly 'unrealistic' realm of the fairy tale or fable
is not at all surprising, given her belief in the performative, external
nature of existence, as contrasted to the ostensibly fixed, internal
nature of essences. Carter's imagination results in works that are often
like the Wunderkammer mentioned by Celati in conjunction with his
comments on Garzoni's spectacular 'public square'; like her protago-
nists, we are enthralled by the spectacle revealed to us, and no more so
than the spectacle of ourselves on the stage of the 'great theater of
images,' which, as Celati would also have it, is our infinitely narratable
world, and our only 'reality.'
I think it fair to say that Carter's writing appeals to Celati for other
reasons as well (and perhaps not at all for the reasons I've suggested
above). She was first and foremost a storyteller, rather than an author of
some theoretical notion of the 'contemporary novel.' She loved fables,
the carnivalesque, verbal wit, and 'eccentric' characters, as Celati does.
And, as Salman Rushdie puts it, 'Angela Carter was a thumber of
noses, a defiler of sacred cows. She loved nothing so much as cussed -
but also blithe - nonconformity' ('Angela Carter, 1940-1992'; 5). All of
this would have endeared her to the anti-establishment Celati. More-
over, she created a marvelously engaging voice in her fictions, one that
is as 'heard' as it is read. Her work lends itself to being read aloud, to
being performed, so performative and spectacular it is in its almost car-
nal immediacy. For me, she is one of those rare writers for whom I feel
a sense of lived companiability, as if she herself were bursting through
the printed page straight into my own messy room, my own confu-
sions, my own joys and sorrows. I cannot say that Celati was 'influ-
enced' by her, or she by him; nor does such a coldly abstract notion
apply, in any case. But I do think that he mentioned her work to me as
he did for reasons that help to shed light on his own idea of what
writing is and should be: fictions in which to believe, even when they
tell us about puppets, vampires, winged women, monsters, and all
varieties of 'unrealistic' experience. Carter's courageously outrageous
imagination, her inventiveness, and her earthy grounding in the abun-
dant unlikeliness of life make of her a likely 'sister' for Celati, however
one tries to define their connection.
Patricia Highsmith, Mistress of the Mundane and Monstrous
Patricia Highsmith is more appreciated as a 'serious' writer in Europe

i66 Gianni Celati
(where she lived for most of her adult life) than in the United States, so
it is not surprising that Celati saw her as something other than a 'mys-
tery writer/ Although she is known in North America at least as the
author of Strangers on a Train, on which the famous Hitchcock film was
based, and perhaps also as the creator of the unforgettable Tom Ripley,
I had not read any of her work until Celati mentioned her to me during
our 1985 interview. I read her first in Italian (she is widely translated
there), having found a very complete section dedicated to her books in
a feminist bookstore in Rome. In the interview, Celati called High-
smith's Edith's Diary 'one of the most beautiful books of this century.'
He continued: 'It is one of the most beautiful things ever written. I
believe that Patricia Highsmith has a precise and clear sensation of the
"ontic" dimension ... then, I very much like her use of the panoramic
mode of narration ... I think that the best modern narrators are women.
Given the problems of our culture, of the sort of life we are living, it is
feminine narration that is the most important thing there is. Henry
James, for example, is also a great feminine narrator.' These, to me, fas-
cinating if somewhat cryptic remarks, in addition to the tremendous
praise lavished on Edith's Diary, made of Highsmith a writer I very
much wanted to get to know, if only in order to understand Celati bet-
ter. What I in fact gained was a genuine and tenacious new love for a
writer whose books are among the very few that I have read and
reread with always intense pleasure.
Patricia Highsmith was born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas. Her
parents divorced when she was very young and she did not meet
her father, Jay Bernard Plangman, until she was twelve years old. Her
stepfather's name was Highsmith, and she used his name for years
before he legally adopted her, on the occasion of her need to obtain a
passport, when her name had to be legalized. She was raised primarily
by her grandmother, with whom she lived in Greenwich Village. High-
smith attended Barnard College, where she majored in English litera-
ture, but she soon emigrated to Europe and settled eventually in
Switzerland's Ticino region near the Italian border, in a town of 250
inhabitants. She died in 1995, having never married. The Chicago Tri-
bune obituary noted that 'Miss Highsmith had no known survivors.'
Given the lesbian relationship at the basis of an early novel, it is now
assumed that she was gay.
It seems that Highsmith is one of those Tove them or hate them' kind
of writers. Julian Symons, the British crime writer and expert on the
genre, is one of the Tovers,' but he tells us in his study of the crime
novel, Bloody Murder, that his friend, editor Victor Gollancz, read High-
smith's The Two Faces of January on the advice of Symons, and told him
later that he 'intensely disliked' the book. On the other hand, Gore
Vidal has called her 'one of our greatest modernist writers/ and 'cer-
tainly one of the most interesting writers of this dismal century.' Aub-
eron Waugh sees her as 'something more than a first-class novelist. She
represents a hope for the future of civilization' (quotations from Joan
Dupont, 'Criminal Pursuits'; 61-6). Whence such strong praise, which
seconds Celati's view of her work? It may be that a great deal of the
power of Highsmith's fiction derives from her trademark use of the
'double/ and her particularly intense and original variations on this
ancient and archetypal device. Examples include Bruno and Guy of
Strangers on a Train, the former a psychopath who murders Guy's
estranged wife and then expects Guy to reciprocate by murdering his,
Bruno's, domineering father. In The Blunderer, Mel kills his wife, while
elsewhere, Walter, trapped in a miserable marriage, imagines how lib-
erating it would be if his wife were to die. He eventually does kill his
wife, by pushing her over a cliff just as Mel had done; Mel then
becomes obsessed with proving Walter's guilt. There are variations on
this mirror-image doubling in Those Who Walk Away, The Two Faces of
January, and the Tom Ripley books. The intermingling and blurring of
the categories of 'good' and 'evil' that result are much more compelling,
and more philosophically resonant, than the typical crime writer's
strict separation of the realm of wrongdoing from the realm of the Law.
Tom Ripley is an especially fascinating character because he contains
within himself the two sides of good and bad that are more often
explored through the use of male couples. He is a murderer, a black-
mailer, a fraud, yet he is capable of generous and loving acts; looked at
in one light, he is simply a 'monster/ but in another he is a multifaceted
and deeply complex human being. Symons comments on this aspect of
Highsmith's writing that 'there are no more genuine agonies in modern
literature than those endured by the couples in her books, who are
locked together in a dislike and even hatred that often strangely con-
tains love.' One of the most striking aspects of Highsmith's doubles is
their ultimate opacity; their creator does not give us any sign that she
can interpret and judge their actions, nor does she shed any light on
their 'essence/ for descriptions of actions and interactions are her focus.
Highsmith's refusal to judge and fix her characters, preferring instead
to portray them in all of their ambiguity, is very much akin to Celati's
avoidance of psychologizing and moralizing narratives.
168 Gianni Celati
Another aspect of Highsmith's fictions that is similar to Celati's

emphasis on descriptive and externalizing narrative is her great talent
for evoking specific locales in believable and even minute detail. Many
European film directors have been drawn to her books, perhaps in part
because of the basic dramatic interest to be found in her reverse mirror-
image male couples, but also perhaps because of her representations of
spaces that are both highly visual and yet ultimately replete with sym-
bolic allusiveness. Rene Clement, Wim Wenders, Hans Geissendorfer,
and Claude Chabrol - in addition to Alfred Hitchcock, of course - have
all adapted Highsmith novels to the screen.10 Because of her own travels
throughout Europe, the writer is easily able to shift around the locales of
her books among many different countries; she has also set some books
in the United States, most notably in small town milieus. Her excep-
tional powers of observation result in descriptions of people, conversa-
tional styles, specific places, food and drink, and so forth that are
completely believable and often immediately recognizable as highly
accurate representations of mundane realities. Within these mundane,
known spaces, however, monstrous acts of violence occur, but there is
nothing 'sensationalistic' about their descriptions either. Indeed, it is
their very understated, prosaic presentation, against the backdrop of an
everyday scene, that renders the criminal acts, and, by a sort of 'bleed-
ing into effect/ the locales themselves, eerie and alienating. This may be
what Celati meant by the 'ontic' dimension in Highsmith, whereby
events are 'appearances' on the surface of given spatial grounds; they
simply are, rather than mean this or that definable significance.
More than Highsmith's themes, plots, characters, or locales, it is her
remarkable narrative style that is most striking. She said herself that
'style' as such did not interest her; in the interview folded into
Dupont's 1988 article quoted above, she commented, 'I retype my
books two-and-a-half times. I like retyping for neatness and polish, not
style - style does not interest me in the least. Emotion is worth more
than the intellect.' She mentioned liking Francis Bacon's paintings, per-
haps as an implicit analogy with her writing, seeing him as an artist
who 'represents what is really happening in our times.' Her prose is
unadorned, and the stories are told linearly and without any structural
or rhetorical embellishments. More importantly, according to Celati's
perspective, they are told 'panoramically' rather than 'scenically.' This
means that actions, dialogues, and characters are 'looked at' as they
flow, as if from some external vantage point, rather than stopped,
staged, 'explained' or 'penetrated into' by a pedagogical narrator. In
his guide to studying narrative techniques, Frasi per narratori, Celati

writes: 'With the panoramic mode of narrating, events flow without
much specification, only as a becoming, the line of the story that goes
on. With the scenic mode of narrating, events are specified, taken apart
in various gestures, points of view, or in various pieces of direct dis-
course ... and they become a consequence of little acts' (19). According
to him, 'showing,' which is allied to a scenic mode, 'is analytical, and
immobilizes the line of the story/ while 'telling/ which is allied to a
panoramic mode, 'passes with few words from one point of the line of
the story to another' (33). He further explained in the interview with
Lumley: 'normally when we tell stories in everyday life we don't use
the scenic organization very much, that is we don't tell a story scene by
scene. Normally there is a scene which is the climax of a story, but
instead, in most literature - which is standardized literature, Ameri-
canized literature, you are supposed or obliged to narrate scene by
scene because it's more like the movies, and has a stronger grip on
the reader. Instead, with the Italian novella, Boccaccio for instance, the
scene is only the climax of the story; otherwise you have the repetitive
experience of life that you have to organize' ('The Novella and the
New Italian Landscape'; 42). In Highsmith, the result of her panoramic
style is a kind of 'surface' recounting, as events flow by in a predomi-
nantly uninflected manner, much as events in daily life do.
In Edith's Diary, this daily, quotidian quality is brought out even
more than in her other novels precisely by the use of a diary as the pri-
mary structuring device of the plot. The fascination lies in the abso-
lutely equal weight that is given to Edith's made-up, happy 'reality' as
elaborated in her diary, and to the misery, drab quality, and loneliness
of her 'actual' existence. No strict line is drawn between fantasy and
real life and, in fact, her daily written version is much more real to
Edith than the people and events surrounding her in the 'real' world.
Her diary 'reality' eventually takes over her extratextual reality, and
she ends up falling down her living room stairs to her death as she car-
ries down an idealized sculpted head of her shiftless son Cliffie for a
psychiatrist (brought in by her ex-husband who had left her years
before for a younger woman) to admire (this would be the 'scenic cli-
max' described above by Celati). Edith is, by all logical judgment,
crazy, yet Highsmith's dispassionate narration instead convinces us of
the monstrous craziness of everything around her, of a reality made up
of faithless husbands, worthless sons, and, in terms of the broader real-
ity, the Vietnam War, perhaps the greatest craziness of all. Early in the
170 Gianni Celati
book, Edith thinks about her diary (before she begins making up her
alternate reality) and the narrator states: 'She seldom looked back at
what she'd written in her diary. It was simply there, and an entry
helped her sometimes to organize and analyze her life-in-progress.'
Edith does, however, remember certain entries, such as one written
eight years before: '"Isn't it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no
meaning at all?" ... Such an attitude wasn't phony armor, she thought,
it was a fact that life had no meaning. One simply went on and on,
worked on, and did one's best. The joy of life was in movement, in
action itself (10-11). This entry could be read as Highsmith's apologia
pro arte sua, and as an implicit allusion to the very style (or lack thereof)
of the book, which 'goes on and on/ finding its and our sense of life in
sheer imaginative movement and narrational flow. The dynamism of
Highsmith's writing, which pushes the narrative forward without
authorial intervention, is a basic quality of storytelling as contrasted to
the dominantly scenic or staged strategies of modern novelistic modes;
Highsmith can be seen, then, as a teller of tales rather than a self-
conscious stylist: an approach in harmony with Celati's preference for
narration that implicitly or explicitly taps into the great wealth of 'nat-
ural' stories that experience provides, and which all of us are capable
of recounting as we organize and analyze our 'lives-in-progress.'
John Berger: A Voice of the Visible and the Invisible
Berger is well known as an art critic, a screenwriter, and a prolific fic-

tion and non-fiction writer. His books and essays on photography and
painting are numerous (About Looking, Ways of Seeing, The Sense of Sight,
Another Way of Telling, among others), and his more recent fictions,
especially the trilogy Into Their Labours, were highly praised. Interested
in the visible and the invisible, in both appearance and existence,
Berger is also, like Celati, dedicated to pursuing a limpid, direct narra-
tive and critical voice that eschews trendy theoretical embellishment or
self-consciously 'artistic' effects. In his attention to the details of van-
ishing peasant culture and his long fascination with the ways in which
we have access to the seen world he is very much like a 'brother' to the
more recent Celati, himself having turned to externality and issues per-
taining to elemental communal ceremonies such as 'natural/ everyday
narratives of existence. Another quality in common between the two is
their avoidance of a concentration on the subjective, specifically on
their own subjectivities, preferring rather to seek out shared historical
and contemporary modes of being and of representing the existent. In

my brief consideration of Berger, I discuss only one recent essay,
Toward a Small Theory of the Visible/ which Celati read in manu-
script form some time before its publication in the Winter 1996 issue of
The Threepenny Review. The ideas presented in this piece are very simi-
lar to those expressed in recent interviews and essays by Celati in
which the visible is his primary topic. It is also not without pertinence
to note that Berger is, like the Italian writer, an expatriate, an English-
man who decided to live in a small French peasant community: in
short, a self-willed exile from mainstream urban life. Celati similarly
left his teaching position at the University of Bologna several years ago
and has spent long periods of time in travels to places off the beaten
track of 'culture/ such as the Hebrides islands, the French provinces,
and, most recently, Western Africa. Both writers are entirely aware of
the most contemporary directions in theoretical and critical thought
pertaining to their interests, but both prefer to work in settings that are
distinctly separate from the institutional centers that generate and sus-
tain such thought within socially and academically validated struc-
tures. This chosen ex-centricity is, therefore, one of the salient aspects
of their 'brotherly' connection.
In his essay, Berger distinguishes between appearances and the exis-
tent (All quotations are from 'A Small Theory of the Visible'; 30-1). He
argues that today's technologies, which surround us with images, have
'turned appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of
light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.'
Appearances are now 'volatile/ disembodied, unconnected from the
physicality of the body and of its real appetite, and, most importantly,
from what Berger calls 'Necessity [which] is the condition of the exis-
tent.' Instead, late capitalist society 'requires only the not-yet-real, the
virtual, the next purchase/ with the result that we, the spectators, do
not have a greater sense of freedom but 'a profound isolation/ Berger
further argues that until recent times 'all the accounts people gave of
their lives, all proverbs, fables, parables, confronted the same thing: the
everlasting, fearsome, and occasionally beautiful struggle of living
with Necessity, which is the enigma of existence/ Now, existence is no
longer communicated in reference to Necessity; we share instead 'the
spectacle, the game that nobody plays and everybody can watch/ Peo-
ple are left having to attempt to find the place of their existence 'single-
handedly/ which only deepens the sense of profound isolation in
which we live.
172 Gianni Celati
Berger next recounts a dream he once had, in which he was 'a dealer
in looks or appearances.' He discovered the secret for getting inside
whatever he was looking at in order 'to arrange its appearances for
the better/ But 'for the better' did not mean making the seen more
beautiful or more a representative type of something, but rather 'mak-
ing it more itself ... more evidently unique.' He believes that painting,
more than any other art, 'is an affirmation of the existent, of the physi-
cal world into which mankind has been thrown/ and it succeeds when
it confirms 'a magical "companionship" ... between the existent and
human ingenuity.' This affirmation is the result not of observation, but
of an encounter, a collaboration between the seeing and the seen; and
the artist is therefore not a 'creator,' but a 'receiver': 'What seems like
creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.' I think that
it is clear that Celati's belief in necessary permeability is deeply allied
to the view of painting expressed here; mutatis mutandis, it could be
said that the writer is a receiver, who gives form to what he has
received. As in Berger's dream, the goal is neither to 'aestheticize' nor
to 'documentarize' the seen (and the heard, when it comes to lan-
guage), but to find forms of representation whereby the 'itselfness' of
the existent can be captured and transmitted. It is equally clear that
concepts such as 'expression of the self/ and 'mastery of externality'
are radically antithetical to receptivity understood in this way. I best
approach the idea of artistic receptivity as described by both Berger
and Celati by thinking of it not, however, as self-cancellation or self-
abnegation, but as the reaching after a participatory self, an enmeshed
subjectivity: the 'infinite fraternity' of Melville or the encircling wheel
of all creation in which Dante's own desire and will are caught up at
the end of his journey. The self then considers the existent, in the ety-
mological sense of co-existing with the stars (cum sidera), rather than
in the sense of either aggressively conquering or passively acquiescing
to its ultimate mysteries.
If the artist is to be receptive to the 'will-to-be-seen' of the visible, it is
also necessary that the invisibility of the likeness be recognized. Berger
describes his efforts to draw the face of a friend, Bogena, which he calls
'very mobile' and beautiful, both attributes that add to his difficulties.
He cannot draw her well when she is present before his eyes, but after
she leaves he finds that she has left behind her 'likeness' in his head,
which he only has to draw out. He finally succeeds, and is elated by
Bogena's face's appearing, because the face 'had made a present of what
it could leave behind of itself (Berger's italics). He generalizes from this
experience, stating that 'when a person dies, they leave behind, for
those who knew them, an emptiness, a space: the space has contours
and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours
is a person's likeness and is what the artist searches for when making a
living portrait. A likeness is something left behind invisibly/ (This idea
is captured beautifully in a poem by the Italian poet Antonia Pozzi,
who committed suicide in 1938 at the age of twenty-six: 'E poi - se
accadra ch'io me ne vada - / restera qualche cosa / di me / nel mio
mondo - / restera un'esile scia di silenzio / in mezzo alle voci -' [And
then - if it will happen that I go away - something of me will remain in
my world - a thin streak of silence in the midst of voices will remain].)
It is possible, I think, to say that 'likeness' is another word for 'repre-
sentation/ and it can, therefore, again be transferred to the realm of
language. If the visible representation of an absent and now invisible
past presence is a 'likeness/ then the verbal representation of the silent
anteriority of past words is also a 'likeness/ which depends equally on
a search for what is left behind. Celati makes this point in the interview
with Lumley, when he says: 'Language is a memory, or, better still, a
form of recollection ... you don't have or possess a language; you recol-
lect it as a certain possibility for adapting yourself to a flow. It flows
and you are in it. In this sense, you get into language, if I can say that,
only when you have the feeling that it is something passing by, some-
thing that you have lost and you remember' (The Novella and the
New Italian Landscape'; 49). Both Berger and Celati seem to be speak-
ing of something akin to the idea of the 'trace/ which for them is not a
mystical concept, but rather a fact of the existent as it includes its his-
tory (and continuity), its disappearances as well as its appearances. In
today's society of the spectacle, the historical commonality of funda-
mental aspects of the shared existent is lost, so that we are left with nei-
ther the visible nor the invisible, but only the isolating simulacra of the
virtual. Berger's conclusion is that 'to paint now is an act of resistance
which answers a widespread need and may instigate hope/ as, I think
it fair to say, for Celati, to write now can be another act of resistance,
against the solitude of today's dominant profit-driven idea of human
existence that must perforce suppress and disregard the existent in
favor of constant 'turnover' and a single appetite for 'more.'
These 'siblings/ writers admired and even loved by Celati, tell us
much about his own work as it has been 'permeated' by theirs. Carter's
exuberant and often outrageous embrace of the spectacular; High-
smith's 'styleless' recounting of the mundane and monstrous in every-
174 Gianni Celati
day life; Berger's delicate meditations on the visible and the invisible:
all of these qualities are to be found in Celati's versions of likenesses of
the existent, not as imitations of given models, but as shared reso-
nances that bring very disparate writers together into a family of
voices whose individual members are as different as they are alike, as
is true of all kinship.
'Children'
Celati played the role of 'parent' in his work of gathering together gen-
erally younger writers under his rubric of 'Narrators of the Reserves'
in the newspaper il manifesto and subsequently in the 1992 volume of
the same name. The term 'riserva' means several things: reserve or
understatement; preservation; and reservations or hesitancies. The
underlying idea - of a protected space, like an animal preserve or
reserve - is akin to the idea of 'family' that I have applied in this chap-
ter, for in both there is a quality of shared and mutually supportive hab-
itation in a congenial space that sustains and forwards existence. Celati
uses a quotation from writer Anna Maria Ortese as epigraph for the
volume Narratori delle riserve, in which 'home' is a central metaphor for
writing: 'Scrivere e cercare la calma, e qualche volta trovarla. E tornare
a casa. Lo stesso che leggere. Chi scrive e legge realmente, cioe solo per
se, rientra a casa; sta bene. Chi non scrive o non legge mai, o solo su
comando - per ragioni pratiche - e sempre fuori casa, anche se ne ha
molte. E un povero, e rende la vita piu povera' (To write is to search for
calm, and at times to find it. It is to return home. The same as to read.
Whoever really writes and reads, that is, only for him/herself, returns
home; is well. Whoever never writes or reads, or only on command -
for practical reasons - is always homeless, even if he/she possesses
many. That person is poor, and makes life more poor). Celati gathers
his 'children' (although I doubt that he would ever think of them as
such) into a 'home' of 'real writing,' while he implicitly seeks to gather
us, his readers, into a home of 'real reading.' He informs us in his brief
introduction to the volume that 'in this book each writer goes along
his/her own road, no category can unite so many diverse vocations,
and therefore the totality should be seen as an album of particular
cases.' (The concept of an 'album' is reminiscent of Ghirri's character-
ization of the structure of his volumes of photographs.) The only recur-
rent element that Celati sees is the fact that in all of them 'writing can
be sufficient unto itself, in the sense that it doesn't need to have
recourse to external stimulation, social or contemporary problems, or

some kind of expertise or exciting revelations/ Celati also notes that
many of these writers emphasize the 'already written' nature of all
writing, which is in turn based on an 'already given and observed'
world; he reiterates: 'the visible is always the already seen, and the say-
able is always the already said.' His conclusion is that 'writing brings
us closer to the reserves of things that were already there on our hori-
zon, before us. And from now on, we can live without new visions of
the world.' We have heard these same views expressed elsewhere in
reference to his own writing, so that it seems fair to conclude that, like
a father, he appreciates traits in these writers that are similar to his
own, while nonetheless recognizing how different they all are not only
from him but from each other.
Younger and lesser-known writers who are tied, like Celati, to an
Emilian-Romagnole background, are among those whom we might
legitimately call his 'children,' at least in the sense of geographic affini-
ties with the better-known Celati. The two I have specifically in mind
are Ermanno Cavazzoni and Daniele Benati, both born in Reggio
Emilia. But I think that their link to Celati is more than merely geo-
graphical, for the older writer has actively fostered their careers, hav-
ing found in them a certain consonance of poetics and practice that
can, I think, fairly be called 'Celatian.' Both have stories included in the
volume Narmtori delle riserve, but this is not a debut for either; Cavaz-
zoni had already published two books (the 1987 // poema dei lunatici
and the 1991 le tentazioni di Girolamo, followed later by Vite brevi di
idioti}, and Benati had published, among other work, a translation of
Flann O'Brien's The Poor Mouth (La miseria in bocca) for which Celati
wrote the preface; since the appearance of Narratori delle riserve he has
published a collection of stories entitled Silenzio in Emilia.11 Cavazzoni
attained some prominence when Fellini adapted his // poema dei lunatici
to the screen as what turned out to be the great director's last project,
while Benati is less directly present on the Italian cultural scene,
having moved to Boston as a lettore or state-appointed lecturer at the
University of Massachusetts. Both Cavazzoni and Benati were on the
editorial board of the relatively short-lived 'Almanac of Prose,' // Sem-
plice, and published several short pieces in it. All three writers thus
have moved in shared geographic and literary-cultural spaces, and the
writing of all three reflects a kind of To valley' line, made up of an
interest in 'quirky' subjects (O'Brien; inmates of insane asylums [the
'idioti' of Cavazzoni's book]; narrative modes unconnected to institu-
176 Gianni Celati
tionalized literature). All three shun rhetorical embellishments in favor

of an orally based tonality, which is, in each case, quite distinctive.
In his introductory blurbs on each writer included in Narratori delle
riserve, Celati presents a short characterization of what for him is the
most recognizable quality of the writing in question. Of Cavazzoni, he
says that his books seem to belong to 'a literature unto itself... founded
on the taste for verbal ravings/ Celati tells us that he first met Cavaz-
zoni in the Ariostesque Mauriziano Hall of Reggio Emilia, where the
latter was speaking about his research into the archives of the mental
asylum there. These clinical records of the inmates' 'stupifying stories/
written or told by them, are the basis of the stories he writes in Vite
brevi di idioti, which Cavazzoni told Celati were absolutely not
invented by him. It turns out that the phrase used by Celati in his own
writings (and in his video) - 'populazioni invisibili' or 'invisible popu-
lations' - comes from Cavazzoni, who used it to describe the people in
the inmates' stories. Celati calls Cavazzoni's writing 'an entrustment to
words that is subdued, constant, rhythmic and without any anxious-
ness,' and he calls this entrustment like that of 'someone who stays
apart, like a monk, or an asylum inmate, or like a decadent and rather
fanciful nobleman, and in sum someone who belongs to an "invisible
population" (which is certainly not the population of so-called "writ-
ers," a lugubrious tribe on which [Cavazzoni] has written a beautiful
parable).' Celati had many years ago tried to capture something like
the voice of a madman, in his first book, Comiche, and he too has used
such documents of ranting or simply naturally flowing orality (such as
that of tales told by peasants) in his own work. We also saw Celati's
preference for 'raving' tonalities in his admiration of Delfini's voice,
based as it is often on fits of 'grumbling.' The oral quality of Cavaz-
zoni's writing would naturally appeal to Celati, as would its un-
anxious, rhythmic, and quite naturally comic essence.
In Benati, Celati finds instead a tonality that is very much allied to
the 'narrative slope of his places' (of origin; i.e., Reggio Emilia). Celati
hears in his spoken and written language 'a world of sounds that is
self-sufficient, already ready to tell stories,' and he remarks that this
may be why Benati got along so well with the Irish, l^ecause they don't
fool around either, as to a world of sounds for telling stories' (anche
loro non scherzano mica, come mondo di suoni per raccontare storie).
Celati says that reading a story by Benati like the one he has included
in the volume seems to him 'to correspond to an experience [that is]
not very literary [but] a little theatrical. It's like listening to someone
who speaks all by himself for an entire evening, in the locality of

Masone, on the Via Emilia, where Benati was born and lived.' Again, it
is the natural and oral quality of Benati's writing that appeals to Celati,
as the younger writer draws on the reserves of tonalities and rhythms
with which he grew up in order to recount stories. Furthermore,
Celati's long interest in Beckett (and O'Brien) takes on an even more
layered significance when considered in the light of his and Benati's
perspectives on Irish literature, in which what Benati has called 'a
strong propensity for narration' has been one of its constant character-
istics over the centuries, from the cycles of Celtic sagas to oral Gaelic
tales and on through to writers born in Dublin such as Swift, Sterne,
and Beckett. In a brief but extremely illuminating piece on the recently
renewed interest in Irish writers, 'Gente d'Irlanda' (People of Ireland),
Benati points out that Joyce's stranglehold on successive generations of
Irish writers has been broken by today's young voices; furthermore,
the exhortation by Joyce that Ireland throw off the yoke of Roman
Catholicism (when ironically he himself produced another kind of
yoke for Irish letters) is countered by Beckett's response to a question
of why such a poor country had produced so many writers: '"All due
to the priests and the English. They screwed us over so royally that
they brought us back to life. After all, when you're at the most fucked-
up last beach, all you can do is sing"' (28). Reading Celati's words on
Benati, and Benati's on Irish writers, a web of affinities between these
two writers, and among them and others of long-standing importance
to Celati (Swift, Beckett, Joyce, O'Brien), begins to stretch its threads
out and around a 'familial' space that is as multilayered and rich as
any genealogical map. The 'father' Celati and the 'son' Benati have in
turn shared 'fathers' and 'brothers' and even 'children' (as translators,
they have both 'given life' within the Italian context to writers from
other languages and traditions), so that the interrelationships are even
more complex.
Of Family, Friends, and Critical Metaphors
And so the metaphor of a family of voices, which extends over time and
space, takes on concrete contours when Celati's 'kin' are explored. Yet I
cannot quite give up on the other metaphor with which I began -
friendship - for friends are what these voices can be for us, the readers:
outside of the immediate family, perhaps, but able to join in a common-
ality of fictions in which to believe. My dominant metaphor of 'family'
178 Gianni Celati
and kinship implies a kind of 'anthropological' critical view of relations

between and among diverse writers and texts, while 'friendship' tends
more in the direction of a kind of 'ethical' approach. I have not brought
up the terms 'influence' or 'intertextuality/ although they inevitably
hover around any consideration of relations between a writer and his
preferred writers. In this final, brief section, I want to comment further
on both the terms I have chosen and those I have not, in order to clarify
what I see as Celati's positioning vis-a-vis other writers whom he
admires, whose texts he has translated, on whose work he has written,
and from whom he has learned about the craft of narrating.
At this current juncture of critical and theoretical thought pertaining
to literary creativity, the concept of 'influence' is for all intents and
purposes defunct, for it presupposes a textual stability and traceable
origins that are no longer seen as acceptable views of written language.
In the place of 'influence,' the concept of 'intertextuality' has risen up,
whereby the foundationlessness and inherent unoriginality of all
writing are emphasized. While recognizing the valuable perspectives
on literature that both concepts have provided, I have wished to by-
pass both in the above discussions, for I find them fundamentally
antithetical to the idea of literal interdependence and commonality that
subtends Celati's work. Certainly, the latter and more recent term -
intertextuality - is more congenial to Celati, given the literary-critical,
theoretical, and cultural moment in which he was shaped and works,
and the contemporary perspectives of which are deeply imbricated in
his own perspectives. Thus, the way in which intertextuality displaces
or cancels out an originating 'author'; its opening out onto other
discursive practices, such as philosophy, history, anthropology, and
psychoanalysis; and its emphasis on the fragmentary and open-ended
nature of textuality are all discernible in his poetics and practice. Yet,
on the other hand, the concept of intertextuality is not congenial to the
existential, communicative, and ethical (humanistic) goals to which
Celati is oriented, for it concentrates heavily on the purely linguistic,
non-referential essence of linguistic expression. As is clear in many
of Celati's comments, and specifically in those having to do with
Calvino's perspective, he wants to get beyond the problem of the
'illusion of the referent' by turning to what he himself calls a sort of
'common sense' view about the organizational and communicative
functions of narrative. His interest is in finding ways of narrating that
do not simply reflect the existent (in what would be a naively mimetic
approach), but rather ones that simultaneously draw upon and assist
our actual perceptual and explanatory modes collectively used in

inhabiting the existent. Again, the idea of 'fictions in which to believe'
emerges as one of central importance to this perspective; these fictions
are sought not because they are fixable and verifiable truths about
existence, but because they are 'credible/ and provide us with a sense
of orientation and, possibly, meaning, even if these latter are also illusory,
just as direct imitations of the real would be. Celati writes stories not in
order to underscore what is perhaps (as he implicitly recognizes) the
infinitely self-echoing and self-mirroring essence of endless intertextu-
ality, but in order to tap into narrative's potential to make life more liv-
able. He is, in a very real sense, poised between a profoundly
humanistic faith in the communicative and meaning-making role of
language and a profoundly postmodern awareness of the fundamental
opacity and self-referentiality of language that block communication
and defy fixable meanings. In the terms of my metaphors, it could be
said that Celati recognizes that familial ties and bonds of friendship
may be 'fictions' about the shareability of existence, and that the essen-
tially unshareable and separate existence of each person is the 'reality';
yet family and friendship are 'fictions in which to believe/ historically
as well as currently, while a concentration on our essential separate-
ness (which death brings home to each of us in its unavoidable real-
ness) does not in any sense make life more livable.
Family and kinship structures are basic to all social orders, and, no
matter their diverse particularities from culture to culture, they share
in a foundation based on the concepts of organization and bonds. Nar-
rativizing modes, and the stories that result, are, according to Celati
(and not only him), also based on the virtually universal human need
to organize and to share existence. When literary writing taps into this
'anthropological' quality of narration, as it does in a wide variety of
ways in the writing of Celati's 'family' by elective affinity, then he finds
a sense of commonality and a wealth of techniques that serve his own
writing. Narration also plays a 'comforting' role (the sense of 'sollievo'
that Celati has said he finds in 'credible' fictions, and which is
destroyed in willfully 'aestheticizing' fiction), and is, therefore, similar
as well to genuine friendships. In this case, it is not so much the social
as the interpersonal level of ties that is emphasized. In The Company We
Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne Booth has written: 'As Aristotle says, a
true friendship is a relation of virtue with virtue, or as we might trans-
late - remembering again that "virtue" was for him a much broader,
less moralistic term than it is for us - a relation of strength with
180 Gianni Celati
strength and aspiration with aspiration' (174). The 'comfort' that Celati
mentions is, I think, something like this relation of virtue with virtue,
in the ancient sense of the Italian term virtu, which meant both a natu-
ral bent towards goodness and a potentiality (as in 'virtual' in English).
(We also inevitably think of Machiavellii's insistence on the need for
both Virtu' and 'fortuna' for success.) Writing in which is shown a gen-
uine passion for the goodness and potentiality of human language is
writing that has an ethical valence, not in the overt morals it conveys,
but in its very con-viviality or friendly co-existence with the language
of others before and after us. Celati has a 'relation of aspiration with
aspiration' in his connection with other writers; a connection describ-
able neither as fixed lines, of influence nor floating circles of intertextu-
ality, but rather as infinite and immeasurable spaces that teem with a
family of voices.
5
Celati's Body Language:

Orality, Voice, and the Theater of
Ephemeral Mortality
'And during the seventies Celati will give himself over to experimenting in his
texts with the possibilities of inserting "uncultured" spoken [language]; indeed
with the possibilities of translating onto the page a discourse based on tones of
the voice, or even on the movement of the character's entire body ... Writing
and orality seem inextricably tied one to the other.'
Francesco Muzzioli1
Palimpsestic Meditations on the Oral and the Spoken:

Celati's Theoretical Writings from the Sixties to the Nineties
In Nanni Moretti's 1993 film, Caro Diario (Dear Diary), one of the epi-
sodes follows Moretti himself through the maze of medical diagnoses
and treatments he must undergo in his attempt to re-find his lost good
health. Moretti has appeared as protagonist in the majority of his films,
but there is a significant shift in the meaning of his presence in Caro
Diario, in which he moves, as Millicent Marcus states, from '"uomo-
simbolo" [man-symbol] whose body stood for the collective body of
the Ecce Bombo world' to his own singular body 'in all its material spec-
ificity.' Moretti now emphasizes the radical limits of his own body,
which is vulnerable to disease, thus establishing 'a new pact with
his audience, forging a link which is no longer generational, socio-
political, or meta-cinematic, but which implicates us in the most
universal of all human struggles' (that is, the struggle to go on living)
(Marcus; 244-5). In some of his post-Po valley work, Celati similarly
has attempted to forge a link with his readers that is based on a recog-
nition of our mortal limits and our universally shared corporeal needs,
182 Gianni Celati
pleasures, and pains. Specifically, in his involvement in the creation of

the 'almanac of prose/ 17 Semplice, and in his 1996 performance piece,
Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Performance of the
actor Vecchiatto in the theater of Rio Saliceto), we see that the material
body, as the seat of speech, emotions, ailments, and inevitable aging
and death, is highlighted. In the almanac, the title of which refers to the
ancient medicamentum simplex or medicinal herbs grown in il giardino
dei semplici (the garden of herbs), the underlying metaphor is that of
writing and reading as 'cure/ In Vecchiatto, the protagonist is the old
actor Attilio Vecchiatto, who rails on stage against his fate as the real
'final curtain' threatens to fall. Furthermore, in Celati's active attention
to orality, as seen in his prose rewriting and public readings of
Boiardo's Orlando innamorato as well as in the openly theatrical nature
of Vecchiatto, which he also performs in public readings, his own body
and voice are implemented in the conveyance of his words. Yet behind
these recent projects there is, once again, a very long history of critical
work and creative practice pertaining to the role of materiality in liter-
ature. Orality, voice, and performance are topics of fundamental
importance to Celati's writing from the very beginning of his career;
they return in his post-Po valley work in new, but nonetheless retro-
spectively conditioned, forms. And I therefore go back to my critical
zigzagging in what I believe to be the most suitable way of approach-
ing the directions that Celati's writing has taken since his own path
veered away from the extraordinarily rich collaboration with Ghirri
which, as we have seen, was centered on the visible and the external. I
say 'veered' because there is no clean break with the issues explored in
that work, but rather a shift in focus that nonetheless keeps in play
aspects of those issues, such as the essential theatricality of representa-
tions of the existent and the fundamentally oral nature of storytelling
as contrasted to the primarily written nature of mainstream prose fic-
tion. Nor, in fact, is the most recent writing a strict change in direction
from the overall emphases discernible in the last thirty years of Celati's
work, since, as I discuss further on, some of his earliest theoretical
essays of the sixties as well as his first published fictions of the seven-
ties speak very clearly to the problematic of writing's relation to orality
and bodily materiality. It would be wrong to speak of a seamless con-
tinuity or of a linear development of a set of themes and concerns,
however, for Celati's work is instead a palimpsest and, at times, a
pentimento, wherein he revisits issues from entirely new perspectives,
sometimes to alter his view entirely, sometimes to revalidate the rele-
Celati's Body Language 183
vance of very old preoccupations. I seek to avoid a linear and progres-

sive analysis, therefore, instead preferring to investigate this set of
concerns as one would approach a text or a painting in which partially
cancelled words and images emerge from behind the most recent ver-
sion, thus enriching and complicating it.
Celati's recent turn to public recitations of his prose version of

Boiardo's Orlando innamorato and of the openly theatrical Vecchiatto is
not so much a new direction as an intensification of his very early ori-
entation to the spoken word. He has always insisted that reading aloud
is the best way to hear not only his narrative voice but also the voice of
any narration. Hearing a voice is different from looking for a specific
content or meaning; the former is allied to an orally conditioned recep-
tivity of something or someone external to and other than ourselves,
while the latter is tied to a mentally conditioned desire or need to mas-
ter that something or someone. But hearing a narrative voice goes
beyond the strictly aural, for it ideally stimulates an imaginative capac-
ity for recreating the full, material presence of that which the written
word seeks to communicate. Thus, hearing a voice implies seeing, by
means of a 'mind picture/ both the one who is narrating in the text and
the events that are being narrated. A performance or public reading of
a text can aid the process whereby we see as well as hear, and an
overtly theatrical performance literally materializes the word pictures
through the body or bodies of the performer[s]. It is not surprising,
then, that a trajectory that goes from reading aloud for oneself, to pub-
lic readings of nontheatrical texts (such as his short stories or the
Boiardo), to performances of a theatrical recitation (such as Vecchiatto)
is traceable in Celati's work, for all of these orally oriented modes have
to do, for him, with the evocation of the material presence of otherness
that is textually represented in the written word.
In an essay entitled 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all'altro' (Narra-
tive positions in respect to the other), published in 1996, Celati argues
that naturalist and realist modes of narration (such as are found in
Zola, Sartre, Iris Murdoch, or Moravia, indeed in the majority of texts
that form what has become the dominant realist mode in the modern
Western novelistic tradition) tend to be based primarily on descriptions
and authorial explanations of the kind that imply that factual data are
being communicated from some 'scientific/ objectifiable standpoint
(the well-known claim to 'omniscience' or 'impersonality'). As a result,
'not only is it the narrator who withdraws from the scene, making
184 Gianni Celati
him/herself hidden and detached like a god, but in reality it is also the
"other-than-the-narrator" who withdraws from the scene, the other
who might see things in a very different way. The other disappears,
[that one] who in respect to each of us exists precisely as someone with
feelings and sensations different from ours, which can be understood
only by means of our imaginative and affective capabilities' ('Le posiz-
ioni narrative'; 7-8). We are now thoroughly conditioned to read narra-
tives, according to Celati, as if they were 'impersonal models of
knowledge' in which we might find 'scientific' or 'ideological' or
'sociological' explanations of reality, and we read them in an attempt to
'grasp the author's so-called important message.' What is lost in this
mode of narrating and reading (and what brings me back to the topic at
hand - orality) is 'the most complex question for us humans, but also
the essential basis of our sensibility: ... the other-than-us together with
whom we must live, the other who has thoughts and fantasies different
from ours, the other, listening to whom we begin from infancy to learn
the subtleties of language' (9). The 'matter-of-factness' and correctness
of the dominant language of today's fictional narratives 'does not
evoke any human voice, any specific tonality of a way of speaking of
the "others-than-us"' (10). Celati sees this orientation in terms of the
way in which today's 'industrial' or market-oriented fiction has
replaced the narrator with the figure of the 'so-called writer/ who feels
called upon to impersonate the official role of the 'writer' understood
as a highly specialized and socially sanctioned profession. Instead, a
genuine ('vero e proprio') narrator is not a 'professional/ but 'at the
most someone who occasionally practices a trade' ('mestiere'), just as in
the past tellers of fables, balladeers, and 'even those old characters who
told their life stories for the pure joy of telling' were genuine narrators
(10-11). It is immediately noticeable that, with these examples, Celati
identifies narration with orality, in the same way that he identifies the
very acquisition of speech with listening to the voices of others. And, of
course, writing understood as a trade or craft is placed in contrast to
the more dominant view of writing as a profession; the former is car-
ried out by 'artisans' of words, while the latter is typically related to
concepts such as 'mastery' and 'social position.'
Before discussing the elaboration of these views as presented in the
rest of the 1996 essay, I want to 'veer' back to another essay, Tarlato
come spettacolo' (Spoken language as spectacle), first published in
1968 in an issue of the journal // Verri dedicated to Celine and then
republished in the 1976 volume, Gruppo 63: Critica e teoria (I shall
quote from the latter). Celati's very first publications were theoretical
essays, which he published from the early sixties in journals such as
// Marcatre, Quindici, and // Verri, all identified to one degree or another
with the neoavant-garde. // Verri, edited by philosopher Luciano
Anceschi, was founded in Milan in 1956 and had as its primary goal
the publication of new voices in literature and criticism; it maintained
a phenomenological orientation, due in great part to Anceschi's
interests, although it was open to a wide variety of methodologies and
disciplinary emphases, including psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthro-
pology, and structuralism. With its embrace of an anti-idealistic and
antidogmatic perspective, the journal sought to communicate the in
fieri, evolving aspects of critical and creative activity of the period, and
it was quite receptive to non-Italian writers and perspectives (thus the
issue on Celine). Even before 1968, however, the young Celati had
already published a number of essays in which he entered into debates
about literary language, stimulated in great part by Saussurian linguis-
tics, structuralism, and Russian Formalism, especially the work of
Sklovski and Propp. From the early sixties, Italian critics and writers of
a neoavant-garde bent (Eco, Alberto Arbasino, Edoardo Sanguineti,
Calvino, and others) had emphasized the autonomy and artificial, lin-
guistic constructedness of literary texts, in direct opposition to a realist
conception of representation; influenced by work on the signifier and
the signified, on 'deep' narrative structures (a la Propp), and on the
purely formal aspects of literary structures, the Italian neoavant-garde
of the sixties produced a veritable mountain of theoretical essays (in
the etymological sense of 'attempts'), to which Celati added his not
inconsiderable share. For example, in 1965, in Marcatre, a journal
founded in Genoa in 1963 and dedicated to the transmission and dis-
cussion of the most current developments in literature, art, and music,
Celati published a piece entitled 'Salvazione e silenzio dei significati'
(Salvation and silence of signifies), in which he emphasized the greater
role of langue, in contrast to what he saw as an excessive emphasis on
the innovatory capacities of an individual author's parole. Already he
was highlighting the shared linguistic inheritance (langue), stating that
'no author "creates" a language, at the most he/she accentuates its
expressive tendencies' (quoted in Muzzioli; 137). As he moved away
from an approach dominated by Saussurian linguistics and formalist
proposals regarding the structures and mechanisms of narrative, Celati
became more and more interested in the transgressive potential of lit-
erary language, an interest that, by the end of the sixties, was strongly
186 Gianni Celati
influenced by the work of Bakhtin on the carnivalesque. As Muzzioli

writes: 'It should be said first of all that Celati is one of the first Italian
commentators of Bakhtin's ideas on carnivalesque laughter ... from
[these ideas] he derives a faith in the comic, as an alternative tradition
and force [capable of] eroding "high Western culture," which is
[instead] based on the "dramatic model" of tragedy' (237). Celati's
essay on Celine therefore falls after the early, more structuralist work
and shortly before his overt embrace of Bakhtinian ideas. Celati will in
fact later designate Celine as the modern 'heir' of Rabelais in his 1975
Finzioni occidentali, in which he argues that the original Rabelaisian
laugh, 'that of "good humors," purgative and diuretic, could no longer
find today the ties that it had with the community and with the earth,'
so that the early modern 'gigantesque clowns' described by Bakhtin
return, but 'in the "excessive delirium," [which is] psychotic and
schizophrenic, [and] in the body of the persecuted and hounded fool'
(quoted in Muzzioli; 238), such as is seen in Celine. The body and the
material realm thus emerge as primary sites for Celati's theoretical and
creative work from the late sixties through the early seventies, when
Comiche and Guizzardi appear, both fictions obviously influenced by
concepts of corporeal notions of comedy.
In the 1968 article, Tarlato come spettacolo,' Celati begins by high-
lighting the role of both orality and the gestural body in reading a writ-
ten text. He states that we often mentally reproduce the sound of
certain passages as we seek to decipher them, even when reading
silently: 'we use our experience as speaking beings in order to figure
out a text, creating a form of cinesthesic analogy that might give us the
message.' We also often have recourse to a mental reproduction - even
if vague - of a gesture-based representation, that is, of the gestural
style of the character whose Voice' we read. Celati emphasizes that he
distinguishes between 'gestural' and Visual,' because the former is
inextricably bound to the aural aspects of the spoken, such as pitch,
accent, and emotional intonation, while the latter refers primarily, if
not exclusively, to observable positions and movements of the seen
body. By defining the 'spoken' aspect of a written text in this way,
Celati seeks to avoid identifying it either with 'low or popular linguis-
tic usages' or, especially, with 'their written imitations that are pre-
sented to us in old and new realist texts' (in Gruppo 63: Critica e teoria;
226-7). He wants, then, to distance his perspective from those that
approach orality as part of popular or folk culture, as well as from
those that employ strictly formalist and structuralist categories such as
the mimetic and the diegetic aspects of a narrative text. Thus, he distin-
guishes among the written word, which can be melodic but not ges-
tural; the oralized written word, such as is found in dialogues; and the
spoken written word, which is spectacularized in the sense that our
understanding of it requires an actual or imagined 'spectacle' made
up of gesture, emotional intonations, pauses, emphases, and other
nuances. This last kind of writing solicits a 'participatory' response
akin to that which is stimulated by a theatrical representation. We
could also add that it is in some sense related to other forms of perfor-
mance art, such as John Cage's 'silent pieces,' which reject the idea of
'the self-contained, self-sustaining "object" and redraw the work of art
as an occasion or event marked out by a self-reflexive attention or
receptivity' (in Nick Kaye, Postmodernism and Performance; 93).2
Celati sees Celine as one of the very few 'highbrow writers of our time
who have taken note of the decline of the participatory function of the
literature of the elite' (Celati's italics; in Gruppo 63; 228); instead of exas-
perating the self-referential, non-participatory essence of the purely
written word, as many modern writers have done to the point of illegi-
bility, Celine and some others have adopted expressive forms that reac-
tivate the spoken and gestural aspects of written literary language,
thus tapping into its participatory potential. Celati himself will follow
this direction in his earliest fictions, wherein his protagonists (like
Guizzardi) speak to us directly, not in 'oralized' dialogue, but in 'spo-
ken' voices that rely heavily on an implied spectacle of their bodies'
movements, emphases, tonalities, and the like. This orientation to
spectacle will resurface in his work of the nineties, albeit with different
emphases and in different forms, as eccentric, 'deformed/ and strongly
spectacularized writing will be replaced by epic and theatrical genres,
written in order actually to be performed by Celati himself.
As in his essay on interpolation and gag in Beckett, which I dis-
cussed in an earlier chapter, so too in this analysis of Celine's 'spec-
tacularized' writing Celati provides very specific examples of the
techniques employed by the French writer. He emphasizes that such
techniques are in the service of providing that 'supplement of commu-
nication' that gestures, glances, intonations, and other bodily aspects
of a present speaking subject provide in life. Celati notes that in a cul-
ture like that of the Elizabethan period, when 'the institution of the
spectacle included all forms of literary production,' when, in other
words, everything written was destined to be recited, 'the [written]
word was naturally gestural or spoken, because it was born condi-
188 Gianni Celati
tioned by the necessities of perfomance and of acting conventions'

(228-9). But as this culture disappeared, and as the literary institution
of the written word came to dominate, published texts solicited the
reader's immersion in the facts described, facts transmitted by an
impersonal authorial narration, and these texts did not attract the
reader's attention to the performative, spoken, and gestural aspects
earlier inscribed in written texts. According to Celati, writers such as
Richardson, Dickens, and especially Sterne succeeded in retrieving
something of the 'spoken' qualities of the texts of preceding eras, and
Celine can be seen as a writer who has connections with this Anglo-
Saxon tradition, in that 'the characteristic aspect of [his writing] is not a
bizarre typographical styleme, but rather the carrying out of research
directed toward restoring to the word its spectacularizing qualities,
and thus reactivating the participatory function in the literature of the
elite' (230). As Celati enters into a detailed examination of the tech-
niques employed by Celine, he notes that analogy is at the basis of
these operations, for it is the 'mechanism that permits our silent ges-
tural reading' (231). The techniques are categorized as 'signals of dura-
tion' (segnali di durata), which are analogous to signals of diction or
voice in actual spoken speech, and as 'signals of intonation' (segnali
d'intonazione), which are analogous to gestural signals. The former (of
duration) can be broken down into 'pauses of resumption' and 'pauses
of drifting/ both of which are reproduced on the page by means of
very specific punctuation (commas, periods of suspension, exclama-
tion points, question marks, and various combinations of these signs),
which Celati assiduously exemplifies with illustrative passages. He
concludes his analysis by suggesting that further investigation could
concentrate on the many combinations of these techniques according
to categories such as 'the level of emphasis, rhythm, type of gesturality
suggested, and so on' (234), such that a system of conventions based on
extralinguistic elements could be brought to light. Celati's concluding
analogy is that which exists between 'spoken' written language and
music, 'musicality' being the essential quality of a 'spoken,' gestural
text, as the quotation from Celine that ends the piece makes clear:
'Regardez Shakespeare, lyceen! 3/4 de flute, 1/4 de sang' (235). 'Writ-
ten language as spectacle' is thus visually and aurally conditioned, as
we read stylemes that ask for an activation of an imagined presence
that is both seen and heard.
From this attention to the gestural aspect in Celine's writing to a the-
oretical concentration on Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque is not
surprising, for the transgressive aspects of carnival (attention to the

lower bodily stratum, to excrement, to blasphemy, to sexuality, etc.) are
all useable in the creation of a 'participatory' narrative style whereby
readers are drawn towards the material body from which language
issues, in contradistinction to writing that 'immaterializes' the nar-
rated 'facts' that appeal primarily to an intellective, transcendentaliz-
ing reception.3 Many years later, when performing his prose version of
Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, Celati will refer to the very particular
'sound' of the original, which he tried to capture in his rewriting of it.
Similarly, his many recent references to 'voice' in various interviews
and essays can be seen as deeply related to this early interest in the
'parlato' as a mode of written language distinguishable from both the
dominant mode of nongestural literary writing and from the popular
or 'folk' mode of orality. His recent Vecchiatto is ostensibly overtly the-
atrical; called a 'recitation' or a performance (una recita), the text is
written in the form of a monologue by the old actor, with comments
from time to time by his faithful consort Carlotta, in which Celati
makes abundant use of the gestural punctuation he saw in Celine
many years before (exclamation points, question marks, periods of sus-
pension, etc.). It actively solicits its readers' participation in the 'mate-
rial' presence of the couple as they gesticulate, modulate tonalities, and
speed up or slow down their words, all of which is inscribed into the
stylemes used rather than in authorial stage directions or description. I
shall return to a more detailed analysis of this text below, but for now I
want simply to note the accuracy of Marco Belpoliti's insight into the
overall production of Celati when considered in the light of 'spoken'
written narration, which, as I hope to have shown, is one of those
many recurring critical and creative elements sustaining his work over
the last thirty years. Belpoliti writes:
The card that Celati had played in Lunario, but also in preceding books
[Comiche, Le awe nt lire di Guizzardi, La banda del sospiri] and that now sud-
denly is manifested in Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto,
was that of theatricality. In his first books there is always a theater staged
by one sole voice, often lying, paranoid, obsessive ... the theater is the
place of the voice, of its dispersion ... [in Vecchiatto there is] again a mono-
logue - of the imaginary or quasi-real actor Attilio Vecchiatto - [who]
bitterly concludes his rambling recitation: 'Life is something that hap-
pens, you don't know what it is, it is only a state of mind.' ... Celati
therefore makes theater without wanting to, as in the past he made 'new-
190 Gianni Celati
generation literature' while actually not making it (just as he wrote a

travel book, Verso la foce, that does not belong to [the category of] travel
literature). (In 'L'attore Vecchiatto porta in scena la lingua jazz di Celati')
[The actor Vecchiatto brings to the stage the jazz language of Celati']; 3.'
Celati's turn to a theatrical mode in Vecchiatto, like what was defined as

his turn to minimalism in Narratori delle pianure, or what was seen
as his turn to travel literature in Verso la foce (and no doubt will be seen
as such in his Avventure in Africa, which I consider in the next chapter),
is not, therefore, the adoption of a new 'artistic' style that might
proclaim the writer's versatility or 'growth/ but rather an organically
conditioned development of long-standing preoccupations as they are
re-elaborated in different critical contexts and offered to readers in
need of different forms of fictions in which to believe.
Celati's work of the sixties and seventies is, however, finally not so
different from his work of the eighties and nineties, in the sense that
from the beginning of his career he has focused on what might be
called the humanized and humanizing elements of 'postmodernity/
thus consistently refusing to enter into a conception of literary and
more general cultural production as a mere reflection of our alienating,
technological, cynical, commodified, and game-playing global reality.
His mode is that of a 'soft militancy,' which has dared to talk of and,
more importantly; to generate through his writing a sense of participa-
tion, of belief, and of the unavoidably shared quality of materiality and
mortality. This he has done in the second half of a century that instead
has moved ever more rapidly towards solipsism, isolating virtual real-
ities, and a universalized 'society of the spectacle,' which has nothing
to do with Celati's concept of the spectacle, but which instead silences
unique voices, cancels out individual bodies, and makes of the living a
faceless mass of zombie-like 'walking dead/ rather than animated
mortals for whom death is a convivial inevitability. Nowhere is Celati's
stake in the human and humanistic potential of late twentieth-century
narrative more evident than in his continuing work on orality, voice,
and the great 'theater' of the prose of the world, some further theoreti-
cal aspects of which I now want to consider.
In the sixties Celati based his theoretical work on the 'oral' aspects of
narrative primarily on methodologies developed in the fields of lin-
guistics, formalist analysis, and structuralist approaches. In the subse-
quent decade, he turned to sociological and socio-linguistic studies
pertaining to the communicative realm of the 'everyday/ such as
Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Dell Hymes's

ethnographies of communication, and William Labov's studies of non-
standard English. Thus, years before the now widespread 'postmod-
ern' theoretical emphasis on socio-political, ethnographic, and
anthropological analyses of quotidian life and the local, Celati was
already seeing these lived realms as among the most appropriate focal
points of late twentieth-century theoretical investigation. As the seven-
ties began, Celati had added Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, de Certeau,
and many other 'postmodern' thinkers to his ever-growing list of
sources, as his long-standing meditations on language and social inter-
action were deepened and rendered always more complex. His recent
creative writing indirectly reflects, at the conceptual as well as the for-
mal level, these extensive critical and theoretical investigations, as my
analyses of them will later seek to show.
Returning, then, to the 1996 essay, 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto
all'altro/ with which I began my specific consideration of Celati's writ-
ings on orality and voice, it is clear that it, like so many of Celati's
recent pieces, implicitly resonates with the echoes of many layers of
earlier critical work, as well as the music of new perspectives. Having
asserted that a 'true' narrator is not a professional, Celati elaborates on
the idea of 'natural narration/ asserting that 'just as there is a natural
talking that we do effortlessly in our language, so too there is also a
natural narrating by means of which all the speakers of a language
imaginatively understand one another without need of lots of explana-
tions' (11). According to this view, we are all constantly narrating, tell-
ing our stories to others, referring to our states of mind, our travels,
and so on, and we are almost all quite capable of recognizing a boring
narrator in life, unless, that is, we have lost this capacity by becoming
'people of culture' who believe in coded 'messages' and privileged
explanations of the world. This perspective is heavily indebted, I
believe, to the socio-linguistic work of William Labov, among others,
whose research into the nonstandard English of black ghetto children
strongly interested Celati in the late seventies and early eighties. Labov
emphasized that much research into the language skills of these chil-
dren - which often concluded that they were severely deprived and
used substandard language - was, in fact, based on 'power relation-
ships' [between educated adults and the children] that were 'too asym-
metrical' (The Logic of Nonstandard English/ in Language and Social
Context; 191). Labov instead sees the social situation in which the chil-
dren live as the 'most powerful determinant of verbal behavior' and
192 Gianni Celati
asserts that 'an adult must enter into the right social relation with a
child if he wants to find out what a child can do' (191). When Labov
approached his assessment of the language skills of black children on
their 'turf/ so to speak, he discovered that they were 'bathed in verbal
stimulation from morning to night/ and that they in fact engaged in a
great deal of 'competitive exhibition of verbal skills: sounding, singing,
toasts, rifting, louding/ by means of which they sought to 'gain status
through the use of language' (191-2). They were, in fact, 'natural narra-
tors' who avoided as much as possible a 'boring' style by means of
imaginative, witty, and entertaining elaborations through which they
gained a certain status vis-a-vis their peers. This analysis predates the
current critical work on 'rap/ but it certainly shares in its validation of
alternative modes of expressivity, and of verbal as well as musical cre-
ativity that emerge out of the context of black culture.
Labov not only reorients us to the positive aspects of an ostensibly
'substandard' verbal style; he also points out that his work in the black
speech community 'makes it painfully obvious that in many ways
working-class speakers are more effective narrators, reasoners and
debaters than many middle-class speakers who temporize, qualify, and
lose their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail.' He further criticizes
specifically 'cultured' or learned language - 'in every learned journal
one can find examples of jargon and empty elaboration' - and asks if
this verbal code is really 'so flexible, detailed and subtle as some psy-
chologists believe/ suggesting instead that it is simply 'an elaborated
style (Labov's italics) rather than a superior code or system' (192-3). He
concedes that many academics seek to rid their writing of 'that part of
middle-class style that is empty pretension' and try to keep 'that part
that is needed for precision/ but he concludes that the average middle-
class speaker does not do so, and ends up 'enmeshed in verbiage, a
victim of sociolinguistic factors beyond his control' (193). Interested
in the extent to which white middle-class standards of proper lan-
guage should be imposed upon children from other racial and socio-
economic groups, Labov insists that we must first perform a critique of
those standards in order to determine how truly useful they are for 'the
main work of analyzing and generalizing' and to what extent they are
instead 'merely stylistic - or even dysfunctional' (192). His own analy-
sis and critique clearly conclude that 'all too often "standard English"
is represented by a style that is simultaneously over-particular and
vague. The accumulating flow of words buries rather than strikes the
target. It is this verbosity that is most easily taught and most easily
learned, so that words take the place of thought, and nothing can be
found behind them' (202). The connections of Labov's work with
Celati's views of 'natural' narration and 'artificial/ high-cultural narra-
tion are, I think, clear; in both, middle-class standards, enforced by
educational and broader cultural assumptions regarding proper lin-
guistic modes, result in the repression of expressive forms that are
deeply embedded in everyday contexts of exchange, sharing, competi-
tion, and sheer entertainment. To whom one is narrating is of supreme
importance, as is the broader social community in which one-on-one
verbal exchanges take place. Thus, both the individual listener and the
shared communal background play essential roles in effective and
humanly meaningful narration, while standardized, professionalized
styles, whether oral or written, support a cancellation of those 'effec-
tive narrators' who are validated by Labov's work.
Celati identifies writers of the past, like Pinocchio's creator, Carlo Col-
lodi, and the narrative epic poet Ariosto, as among those, like the 'nat-
ural' narrators observed by Labov, whose accents and tones took into
account 'the immediate public to whom the narration was directed/ a
public made up of individuals who were capable of imagining 'the
worth of the voices evoked and the special taste for narrating certain
things in a certain ambience.' Contemporary, 'industrialized' writers
instead tend to think only of an amorphous and undifferentiated 'great
public/ defined in great part by the mass media according to statistical
and sociological categories, with the result that 'the other is only an
anonymous thing onto which one must impose oneself, a generic figure
to be persuaded, a certain number to make things add up well.' Celati
laments that in this current context of the generalized anonymity of the
'public/ it is more and more difficult for any of us to conceive of writing
and reading as a 'deep collaboration/ or of the other to whom we speak
as 'precisely the source of [our] speaking' ('le posizioni narrative
rispetto all'altro'; 12-13). Both those who narrate and those who listen
to and read narratives are adversely affected by the current mass-
medialogical, educational, and professionalized environment in which
an idea of narration as 'an imaginative way to speak to one another in a
circle and in friendship' has been substituted with an idea of narration
as 'explanations of the world, products for a general public, and mate-
rial for "people of culture"' (13). We can begin to get out of this prison
of deafness and achromatism first by recognizing that we have indeed
lost certain abilities of perceiving the subtleties of language, and then
by learning to read well. For Celati, learning to read well means having
194 Gianni Celati
the benefit of an example or model of reading that 'succeeds in making

[us] hear variations of tone, of rhythm, of pitch, sentence by sentence, in
such a way that each word of the narration might have a specific and
changing sense - also the commas, also the different pauses suggested
by conventional punctuation, or the implicit pauses that conventional
punctuation does not succeed in indicating' (15). Here we can see the
continuity between Celati's early analyses of Beckett and Celine, and
his recent interest in public readings, for attention to the built-in 'spo-
ken' tonalities, pauses, and changing modulations of written texts is at
the basis of both. And the implied relation with the specific 'other' is
also a foundational principle that has conditioned Celati's critical and
creative work from the beginning, as writing and reading follow 'the
variations of the expressions of another, just as it would happen also in
a natural situation' (15). His readings are not theatrical in any tradi-
tional sense of the word, therefore; rather, they avoid the coded styles
and techniques of actors' speech modes in favor of the recreation of
'natural,' everyday oral modulation.
As Celati moves towards the end of his essay, he remarks that 'it is
quite strange that an entire academic civilization has forgotten that
words have a sound, and that every sound of words is accompanied by
infinite other expressive phenomena' (16). For him, to narrate is to give
oneself over to the variations of voices in a given language 'like water
that flows without any moment of fixity'; both narrator and reader (lis-
tener) reach an accord when they succeed in activating 'a capacity to
perceive an infinite mobility in others/ and when they recognize 'our
shared capacity to adhere imaginatively to that infinite mobility, with
no need of definitions, explanations, or other manifestations of compe-
tence' (16). Instead, it is now more common to address others by means
of explanations, fixed definitions, and given phrases, a practice due, in
Celati's opinion, to a view of the other as a 'judge/ Thus, in profes-
sional and generally social relations, when the other is viewed as 'a
threatening authority,' we feel that we must defend ourselves by show-
ing that we 'have all of our papers [documents] in order' (le carte in
regola), but this 'debt' that we feel we owe to authority, embodied
symbolically in the abstract 'Other,' is infinite, and can never be paid.
The infinite 'debt' nullifies our sense of 'the loving gift or the sign of
affective devotion' that linguistic exchange could (and should) be.
Celati writes that Nietzsche spoke of this 'infinite debt' and of the
necessity of getting rid of it by subsuming the other into oneself: 'liber-
ation from the infinite debt with the other ... consists, that is, in giving
[the other] a place among our emotions - with the love or the hate that
is due him/her - but removing [the other] from that frontal position,
similar to that of a judge: removing his/her symbolic threat' (17). As
the other is taken into ourselves, the 'weight of the symbolic' that
attaches to the generalized 'Other' is removed, replaced instead by 'the
infinite mobility [of the other] that is not fixed in any one definition.'
Celati thus seeks to write without any fixed definitions, given phrases,
or cultural quotations, and to give himself over to 'the contingency of
changing moments without any guarantees,... to the incomprehensible
flow of life just as it is' (17-18). (Celati's Avventure in Africa, which I dis-
cuss in the following chapter, is an excellent example of writing that
captures this 'incomprehensible flow of life just as it is.') Dwelling and
writing within the variable movement of the contingent means that
language 'returns to being made up only of changing voices, and not of
hard and definitive things like [the language of] scientific, historical,
and sociological data, or current events; thus one rediscovers blessed
common sense, that is, the instinct or sensibility that ties us to others.'
Celati concludes that common sense is at the heart of the many ques-
tions we ask ourselves as we read a narration: 'How do I imagine this
sentence in this particular instant? How do I imagine this character in
this wandering of his thoughts? How do I imagine the pause that
should be made between this moment and the other? How do I imag-
ine all this flow of things that nothing can reduce to objectivity?' (18).
As in his Po valley work on the representation of the external world,
here too the 'goddess Imagination' guides us through the infinitely
rich and constantly mutating maze of the great theater of the existent.
There are many Voices' that echo throughout this essay, assimilated
into Celati's (deceptively) simple critical prose. Bakhtin is here, but
now it is the Bakhtin of 'dialogism' rather than of the carnivalesque;
Merleau-Ponty is here as author of The Prose of the World, the very title
of which Celati appropriated for his essay on Calvino's Palomar; and
Wittgenstein is here as the most important philosopher of ordinary lan-
guage. The ethical thrust of Celati's view of narration is supported by
all of these thinkers. In a rich and subtle critique of de Man's refusal of
the ethical, intersubjective implications of writing, Adam Zachary
Newton uses Bakhtinian thought, among others, to explain his (New-
ton's) idea of 'narrative ethics' (the title of his book). Newton's empha-
ses are applicable to Celati's view as well, I believe; he writes, for
example, of Bakhtin's conception of meaning as 'bestowal' and 'gift,'
and elaborates: 'Since the very fact of alterity obliges a constant inter-
196 Gianni Celati
play across the borders of self and other, ... narrative is ethics in the
sense of the mediating and authorial role each takes up toward
another's story. The "gift-giving, consummating potential" (as Bakhtin
puts it) that one bears another is most meaningfully bestowed narra-
tively - across time, and through a call of/for stories' (Newton; 48).
Celati would not agree that narrating from within a sense of the indi-
vidual other has a 'consummating' potential, however, for he shuns all
such elements of completion in favor of the highlighting of mutable
contingency that finally brings his thought closer to Merleau-Ponty's
concept of 'the prose of the world' and Wittgenstein's reintroduction of
'ordinary language' into philosophy as the conditioning element of all
discourse, including the scientific and philosophic. De Certeau expli-
cates these views well when he writes about Wittgenstein: 'We are sub-
ject to, but not identified with, ordinary language. As in the ship of
fools, we are embarked, without the possibility of an aerial view or any
sort of totalization. That is the "prose of the world" Merleau-Ponty
spoke of. It encompasses every discourse, even if human experiences
cannot be reduced to what it can say about them/ Scientific methods
allow themselves a kind of 'forgetting' of this fact in order to constitute
themselves, while philosophers 'think they dominate it so that they can
authorize themselves to deal with it' (de Certeau's italics; The Practice
of Everyday Life; 11). When Celati rails against totalizing 'explanations
of the world' and the coded language of professionalized discourses
and 'industrial' fiction, he would appear to have in mind the dominant
pull of these modes of willful forgetfulness and ostensible domination,
which take us farther and farther away from an acknowledgment and
a practice (a la Wittgenstein) based on our shared passage on the 'ship
of fools.' And, like Wittgenstein, Celati concentrates on linguistic
behavior and uses, because, in de Certeau's words, 'to discuss lan-
guage "within" ordinary language, without being able "to command a
clear view" of it, without being able to see it from a distance, is to grasp
it as an ensemble of practices in which one is implicated and through
which the prose of the world is at work' (11-12). The ethical implica-
tions are to be found in the realization that, because we are in the same
boat when it comes to language, 'since in short there is no way out, the
fact remains that we are foreigners on the inside - but there is no outside'
(de Certeau; 13-14). The 'aerial view' upon which pretensions to domi-
nation and mastery must perforce be founded gives way to a basic and
shared alterity, and to what I would call a 'horizontal' attention to the
practices of the 'ordinary' in which we are all implicated. I think that
this is what Celati means by 'natural' narration, wherein certain ordi-

nary practices and uses of language are employed as reflections of the
'inside' (that always and ever 'representation' in which we all already
are implicated), rather than as authoritative, privileged expressions of
an individual point of view.
To give oneself over to this participatory mode of narration is to
admit, perhaps, to a kind of defeat of epistemological claims, but, on
the other hand, it is to embrace forms of being - the ontological aspect
- on which depend shared and shareable linguistic practices. Writing
that captures something of the infinite modulations of contingent
voices is what Celati aspires to in his recent narratives, and his public
readings of those writings are given as 'gifts' and as 'mini-lessons' on
how to learn again to listen to those tonalities that are ignored or can-
celled out by message-oriented searches for fixable meanings. In short,
belief in the 'gift' substitutes for anxious judgments; consolation for
consolidated assertions; affection for mastery.4 In Jessica Benjamin's
psychoanalytical approach to the problem of interpersonal (and, in her
study, male-female) patterns of domination and submission to power,
she uses the term 'intersubjectivity' to argue that we need to embrace
the paradox of relations with others wherein the other 'is outside our
control and yet we need him. To embrace this paradox is the first step
toward unraveling the bonds of love. This means not to undo our ties
to others but rather to disentangle them; to make of them not shackles
but circuits of recognition' (The Bonds of Love; 221). Benjamin's feminist
revision of psychoanalytical approaches to the problem of domination
is relatable to Adriana Cavarero's feminist revision of philosophically
conditioned approaches to narrative, wherein the latter emphasizes the
ways in which we are given our own sense of identity and self through
the 'circuits of recognition' of others' narrations of our lives (Tu che mi
guardi, tu che mi racconti). Although Celati himself does not refer to
feminist work in his own recent theoretical elaborations regarding nar-
ration, it is possible to see his work as implicitly 'feminist' in its con-
certed search for ways out of Oedipally conditioned, death-oriented
anxieties of mastery and, conversely, into ways of life-oriented inter-
subjectivities, firmly anchored in the immanence of everyday lived life.
Celati innamorato: Boiardo in Prose
More than twenty-five years ago, Calvino and Celati discussed the idea
of rewriting in prose the great epic poems of the Renaissance. Calvino
198 Gianni Celati
in fact pursued this idea in 1970 with his beloved Ariosto's Orlando
furioso, producing a condensed and annotated version directed towards
the general reader. As Kathryn Hume writes: 'Calvino reanimates the
tradition of Italian literature for the post-war age. Not only does he
"recycle" Marco Polo, Ariosto, Galileo, and folk-tales in his own stories,
he also edited a condensed version of Ariosto and encouraged other
such projects to make the classics more accessible to a popular audi-
ence' (Calvino's Fictions; 10). Calvino's desire to recuperate the great lit-
erary and popular traditions of Italian culture went hand-in-hand with
his desire to involve readers of all types, whether specialized or gen-
eral. Celati did not take up the idea of rewriting a classic until the nine-
ties, however, at which time he had become very involved with the
Viva Voce (Out Loud) project, founded in 1992 by the Fondazione San
Carlo of Modena and the Emilia Romagna Theater, and which spon-
sored public readings, public discussions on vocality, and periodic
encounters during which writers read their works to one another. This
project in fact led to the founding of the 'Almanac of Prose,' // Semplice,
which in its six issues from 1995 to 1997 continued to promote attention
to orally conditioned modes of writing. Celati's 1994 publication of
L'Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa is dedicated to 'those who love
to read books out loud,' and, unlike Calvino's version of Ariosto's great
continuation of Boiardo's poem, it is a complete retelling in prose rather
than a condensation and summary of the original.
Before the stimulus of the Viva Voce project, Celati's collaboration
with photographer Luigi Ghirri had already brought him 'home,' not
only to a geographic region (the Emilia-Romagna), but also to a Po val-
ley literary tradition to which he had not dedicated much explicit
attention in the first decades of his career. As the writer reconnected
with the spaces and the texts of the Emilia-Romagna region, he began
to feel a strong tie to Ferrarese culture especially (Ferrara is the city of
origin of his family), and to believe that there is something quite spe-
cific and magical about Po valley culture, which continues into the
present day (he expressed these views to me during a 1995 visit to Chi-
cago). In his introductory remarks to his Boiardo in prose, Celati for-
mulates this perspective in reference to the great poems of Boiardo,
Ariosto, and Teofilo Folengo (the Baldus): 'Questi tre poemi sono forse i
massimi capolavori di tutto il genere cavalleresco, e formano anche
1'orizzonte d'una letteratura padana ancora da scoprire, cioe una lette-
ratura dotata di caratteri autonomi e molto diversi rispetto a tutte le
altre letterature europee' (These three poems are perhaps the greatest
masterpieces of the entire chivalric genre, and they also form the hori-
zon of a Po valley literature still to be discovered, that is, a literature
endowed with autonomous characteristics that are very different in
respect to all the other European literatures) ('Premessa'; ix). Boiardo's
poem is a homecoming for Celati in many ways; it brings him home to
imagination and a renewed desire to narrate (Tiu di qualsiasi altro
poema, {'Orlando innamomto di Boiardo mi sembra che accenda la mia
passione immaginativa e stimoli il mio desiderio di raccontare' [More
than any other poem, Boiardo's Orlando innamorato seems to me to
ignite my imaginative passion and to stimulate my desire to narrate])
(Tremessa'; ix); it brings him home to the literary culture of his fam-
ily's city of origin, and it brings him home to a literary tradition
strongly conditioned by orality and by the participatory quality of
texts written in order to be recited. Years ago, when Calvino first sug-
gested to Celati that rewriting the great epics would be a good project,
the younger writer was seeking to escape the limitations of 'home,' as
all young people do. In the nineties, he was more than ready to go
home again, and to build on both the affective and the literary ties to
his region of origin. In the introductory remarks to his prose Boiardo,
Celati expresses it thus: 'in Boiardo we find that sense of native lan-
guage that we had as children, when there was no difference for us
between Italian and dialect, and all words adhered to the occasion with
a most common or a most odd, a most trivial or a most refined sound,
but always according to our ear and not according to an academic
rule.' It is not just the sound of Boiardo's dialectally inflected language
that is 'comforting/ however; it is also the fact that, coming back to the
poem in a non-Italian context where Celati has now long lived
(England and elsewhere), he finds that in the poem there is 'something
that always carries me back to the emotions of family life. Those crazy
knights or ladies of his poem have impulses and heartfelt rushes that I
seem to know very well, because I remember them as being exactly
that way in my family members or acquaintances of childhood' (ix-x).
He calls this return from afar to something known and familiar 'like
the search for a small homeland,' and specifies that this 'homeland' is
'mental/ and that it has to do with 'survival' (sopravvivenza) by
means of imagination and a renewed conviction in the need to 'run
after enchantments and illusions' (x). If we try to turn everything into
'critical consciousness' (consapevolezza critica), as Celati himself
clearly was driven to do in his earlier critical work, we lose the ability
to be ingenuous readers, swept up in the magical and imaginatively
200 Gianni Celati
liberating adventures of love-crazed knights and exquisite ladies. In

short, there is something of Pascoli's or Elsa Morante's faith in the 'fan-
ciullino' (little child) in Celati's homecoming. We become as children
again, caught up in the sheer joy of imaginative elaboration, play, and
shared enjoyment in the magic of stories.5
Celati situates his version of Boiardo in a long line of retellings, be
they in verse, in prose, in Sicilian puppet theater, or in painted images
of both the academic and the popular tradition. Interconnected as they
are, these diverse versions form a 'spider's web' (ragnatela) of echoes,
remembered figures and episodes, and past narrators; the poem also
connects with Berni's rifacimento of it, with the versions of anonymous
cantari, with Andrea da Barberino's prose summaries, and on to 'the
most important poems like Luigi Pulci's Morgante, ... and Ludovico
Ariosto's Orlando furioso' ('Premessa'; viii). In today's context, Celati
suggests that" the poems of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Folengo 'perhaps
should all be completely retold in prose, in order to keep the memory
of a tradition alive, and in order to give space to a narrative instinct
that industrial literature risks suffocating entirely' (ix). His own prose
retelling of Boiardo was written in order to be recited aloud, and Celati
specifies that 'it is a recital in 43 parts, to be performed over 43 weeks:
or at least slowing the reading down as much as possible, a reading
done for a group of pleasant and non-pedantic people' (xi). This is pre-
cisely what Celati has done; he has given many public readings of his
version in Europe and in the United States, seeking always to reach
Boiardo's own declared and 'very noble' goal: ' to chase ennui and bad
thoughts away' (scacciare la noia e i cattivi pensieri; xi). When Celati
read to a group of students and faculty at my university (a wonderful
event that is now preserved on videotape), it was clear that even the
youngest beginning students of Italian were thoroughly engrossed in
the far-flung adventures of knights and ladies, and thoroughly amazed
at how genuinely entertaining the public reading of an old classic
could be. Celati thus goes on spinning the spider's web, capturing in
its gossamer threads the hearts and minds of audiences who are much
more used to ephemeral blockbuster spectacle than to historically reso-
nant 'childish' storytelling. This is a form of pedagogical engagement
that is, to my mind, vastly more effective than a hundred lectures on
the 'joys of reading' or on the 'importance of a historical perspective'
could ever be.
If much of the enchanting effect of Celati's Boiardo is due to his great
talents as a public reader of texts, it is also true that much is due to the
written version itself, which uses various techniques of orality to draw

readers into its flow and 'sound/ A comfortable rhythm of reading is
established, first, by means of the book's division into forty-three rela-
tively short chapters, the main topics of which are indicated with titles
('Angelica's appearance,' 'Carlo Magno saved by Ranaldo/ 'Ruggero
and Bradamante meet/ etc.). Next, the narrator's 'voice' on the page
guides us through the complex events, reminding us often that he is
basing his version on an already existing poem that has established
who the characters are, what they are like, and what the unfolding
events are. One of the recurring phrases used to emphasize this pretex-
tuality is 'come dice il poema' (as the poem says), employed many
times throughout the chapters. Celati also helps us through the maze
of interlaced episodes by subtly highlighting the spatiality of the text;
he sets a scene, introduces the necessary characters, and then writes
'lasciamo' (let's leave) such and such a place and characters, going on
to another setting and cast of characters. When returning to earlier
scenes, he writes 'torniamo' (let's return) to that scene, thus giving his
readers a sense of reading as a voyage - a zigzagging trip - that, while
non-linear, is nonetheless carried out over an imaginable space made
up of diverse places and filled with recognizable characters. In Chapter
5, 'II viaggio di Orlando' (Orlando's voyage), Celati explicitly writes of
the spatial metaphor, comparing the knights' wanderings to the
swarming of ants over a map: 'Often these knights set out to look for
someone thus, without knowing where they are going, vaguely
attracted to one direction, like ants that come from far off to find a little
uncovered food. In fact, the knights' voyages seem like those of ant
swarms on a map; and, like in our childhood fantasies, the map is an
infinite terrain of adventures that arrives to the ends of the earth, but
without any precise length in the crossings' (29-30).6 Next, characters
are described according to their salient qualities, their characteristic
costumes and looks, and they are, therefore, always reliably who they
are, no matter how long we have 'left' them in order to follow others.
Celati makes some use of direct speech, but never interrupts the narra-
tive flow of the story for long, with the result that we hear the charac-
ters' voices yet are never drawn away from the all-encompassing
dynamism of their non-stop adventures, which are told panoramically
from a panoptical point of view. Lastly, the endings of the chapters are
both closural and open-ended, simultaneously providing a satisfying
sense of a pause or a 'rest-stop' after each episode, and at the same
time luring us on with a promise of wonders to come. These tech-
202 Gianni Celati
niques all add up to a participatory solicitation, even if we are reading

silently and by ourselves.
The first chapter, 'Apparizione di Angelica' (Angelica's appearance)
provides examples of several of the above-outlined narrative tech-
niques. A compact chapter of a little over six printed pages, it opens
with a direct reference to the source text ('II poema del conte Matteo
Maria Boiardo da Scandiano incomincia dicendo ai signori che ascol-
tano di stare bene attenti e fare silenzio' [Count Boiardo of Scandiano's
poem begins by saying to the people who are listening to be very atten-
tive and to remain quiet]), followed shortly by the repeated phrase
'dice il poema' (says the poem). The scene is briefly set with the start-
ing place and first character of the story, the King of Sericana in India,
Gradasso, who 'wanted to come to France in order to defeat Charle-
magne.' The chapter then shifts scenes to Charlemagne's court with
the recurrent 'lasciamo' (Ma adesso lasciamo andare Gradasso e
veniamo in terra d'Occidente [But now let's leave Gradasso to go on
his way and let's come to the West]), and later, after a short explana-
tory interpolation, uses the equally recurrent 'torniamo' (let's return).
The characters are endowed with their essential characteristics in a few
swift descriptive strokes: Charlemagne's weakness for believing in the
treacherous Gano, 'who made him see black for white and who
wanted to chase Orlando and Ranaldo from court'; Angelica's extreme
loveliness, ' una fanciulla, dice il poema, che sembrava una mattutina
Stella, e sembrava un giglio, e sembrava una rosa dei verzieri, e faceva
sfigurare tutte le gran bellezze di donne alia corte di re Carlo' (a
maiden, says the poem, who seemed a morning star, and seemed a lily,
and seemed a rose of the garden, and made ugly all of the great beau-
ties of the ladies at the king's court); the magician Malagise's suspi-
cious nature and his immediate recourse to his book of incantations;
Orlando's unease in the face of such loveliness. It is, in fact, Orlando's
voice which first interrupts the narrative flow, as he ruminates to him-
self: 'Ahi, pazzo Orlando, come ti lasci dalla voglia trascinare! Non
capisci che stai andando fuori dalla strada guista di Dio? Ah, io che sti-
mavo tutto il mondo un niente, eccomi qua che sono vinto senza armi
da una fanciulla' (Oh, mad Orlando, how you are letting yourself be
carried away by desire! Don't you understand that you are going out-
side the righteous path of God? Ah, I who considered the entire world
a trifle, here I am conquered and weaponless before a maiden). The
spotlight is thus brought to shine on the title's central character, as his
enamored state is established as his dominant feature by his very own
first words, just as the title has fixed him as 'innamorato.' At the end of
the chapter, Celati connects imaginative thought with the adventures
about to unfold, writing of the magician Malagise's flying devils who
carry him to Angelica's homeland of Cathay or China: 'Come si vede i
diavoli vanno veloce come i pensieri, che in un attimo portano la testa
lontanissimo, per un incanto inspiegabile delle parole. Dunque con
questo incanto noi possiamo attraversare in un attimo il terreno
d'avventure del nostro poema' (As we see, the devils move quickly
like thoughts, which in an instant take our heads very far away, by
means of an unexplainable spell of words. Therefore with this spell we
can in an instant cover the [vast] terrain of adventures of our poem).
With this tantalizing promise, the chapter ends with an invitation to go
on reading: 'E adesso, come dice il poema, altri bei fatti potrete sentire
se 1'altro canto tornerete a udire' (And now, as the poem says, other
beautiful things you will be able to hear if you return to listen to the
next canto) (all quotations from 'Apparizione di Angelica'; 3-9). This
chapter, like all subsequent ones, is thus extremely engaging, as the
narrative voice invites us into the amazing adventures about to unfold,
tells us of great passions and magic spells, gives us the information we
need in order to know who these characters are and what motivates
them, and, above all, sweeps us up into a narrative dynamism that is
very like the exciting movement through space of a wonderful voyage.
Love, competition, strengths, weaknesses, wiles, and tricks: the basic
building blocks of Boiardo's poem are those of our shared histories and
of our own lives, acted out on the great 'map' of imagination's territo-
ries no less engagingly than on the streets of our own lived lives. How
could we resist coming back for more? According to Fernando Savater,
we do in fact resist or are indifferent to storytelling's function of trans-
mitting remembered and repeated common human experiences and
emotions, for the 'transmissibility of experience' and the 'general
validity of the foundation of things' are, in today's era of foundation-
lessness, 'bogged down in the pure innovation that invalidates the
entire past and compromises the entire future.' We are afflicted with a
'general fidgetiness ... so that the aspirations of storytelling are more
and more alien to us even when they are not suspect' (Childhood
Regained; 12). Savater suggests that we perhaps dislike or are suspi-
cious of the fundamental role of memory and repetition inherent in
storytelling because those tales of 'the despotic power of feudal lords,
the obscurantism of magicians and bishops, the periods when mace
and sword were the only guarantees of survival/ when retold, remind
204 Gianni Celati
us that history may reveal that, instead of progress, merely versions of

more of the same make up our contemporary reality. But he insists that
it is not history as repetition that storytelling brings, but rather 'poetry,
creation. In storytelling what return are the pillars of our human condi-
tion: the encounter with sea and forest, a definition of ourselves with
respect to animals, the adolescent's initiation into love and war, the tri-
umph of cunning over strength, the reinvention of solidarity, the
rewards of boldness and mercy. And also the marks of time's claws,
the separation of those who love each other, exploitation and usury,
feeble senility, death' (12-13). M it is true that such foundational and
essentialist perspectives on human experience can and have been chal-
lenged in recent times, it is also nonetheless true that the universally
shared experience of mortality itself is not to be challenged. The
human life span, shorter or longer as the case may be, has limits;
within those limits we all (or most) love, fight, run after illusions and
dreams. These 'pillars of our human condition' hold up Boiardo's great
edifice, and in Celati's retelling we are being encouraged to recognize
and cherish the constructions they build, rather than to deconstruct
them in the name of particular interest groups, separatist politics, or
fact-based searches for 'important messages.'
In the final chapter, 'Un amore di Fiordespina' (A love of Fiorde-
spina), Charlemagne's Paris is under fierce attack, and the horrible
scenes of death and destruction are vividly recounted. At this climax
of action, a great storm breaks out, which interrupts the battle and
sends all the soldiers running for shelter. The many brave knights
whose adventures we have followed over the zigzagging course of the
poem are enveloped in fog and darkness, disappearing from our sight:
'E adesso la nella nebbia e nel buio vediamo sparire i campioni che
abbiamo seguito in tante battaglie ... Li vediamo svanire nelle tenebre
come fantasmi, e mai piu li incontreremo in avventure e in battaglie,
fino a quando il grande poeta Ludovico Ariosto non verra a resusci-
tarli nel suo poema' (And now there in the fog and the darkness we
the champions whom we have followed in so many battles disappear
... We see them fade into the dark shadows like ghosts, and never
more shall we meet up with them in adventures and battles, not until
the great poet Ariosto will come to resuscitate them in his poem; 333).
This hauntingly evocative image of the disappearance of such robustly
alive figures, who turn into 'ghosts' as they fade into the dark fog,
captures the ephemeral essence of the great theater of mortality; like
Boiardo's 'champions,' we too act out our passions and follow our
illusions on the stage of life, only to disappear into the mists unless
some great poet brings us back to life with the revivifying power of
art.7 But the story does not end on this elegiac note, for Fiordespina's
story of budding love for Bradamante is next recounted. Not knowing
that Bradamante is a woman (because of her short hair and male
dress), Fiordespina's passion is lit for the 'bel viso' (beautiful visage)
of the sleeping 'knight/ Celati emphasizes the delicate lunacy of the
situation, in which 'one was burning with desire for the other, but
the other lacked that which the former one desired'; he tells us that
'the two girls on the lovely meadow were about to make some upset-
ting discoveries/ but we never get to experience 'meraviglia' and 'sor-
presa' (amazement and surprise) along with them because 'il poema e
arrivato alia fine' (the poem has arrived to its end). The elegaic tone
returns as Boiardo tells us that, as he recounted the vain love of
Fiordespina, Italy was under attack by foreign troupes 'which came to
depopulate every place, bringing desolation wherever they passed.'
Thus, wars, calamities, sadness, and, a few months later, the death of
the poet made any further storytelling impossible. Real destruction
and death have taken the place of the imagined scenes of battle, and
the final elegy is sung for us. (As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in
'Spring and Fall/ 'It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret
you mourn for.') To counter the heavy burden of mortality, Celati
retells the wondrous adventures of knights and ladies, hoping at the
end of his recitation that his listeners will 'not have your heads full of
opinions and prejudices, rules and formulas, judgments and pat
phrases, so that this poem might be a comfort in life, lightening a little
your thoughts. And more than this one cannot hope for any mortal,
while we all go along, raving, toward our end' (all quotations from
'Un amore di Fiordespina/ chap. 43; 329-37). For Celati, the spider's
web extends not only to all the fictional versions of chivalric adven-
tures, but also to our shared mortality, our own passions and illusions,
and our own adventures of lunacy and love.
In the 'Epilogue' to his version in prose, Celati returns to the local
map of Boiardo's region, focusing our attention on the actual locales in
which the poet lived and through which he passed as he elaborated the
global adventures of his characters from 1476 to 1494. Boiardo lived in
Scandiano, located in the hills that descend into the valley of the Sec-
chia, surrounded by plains that go towards Modena on the right and
Reggio Emilia on the left. There is a road, we are told, that then as now
crosses the plains towards Ferrara, and Celati imagines that Boiardo
206 Gianni Celati
must have gone along this road thousands of times when he visited the
Ferrarese court in order to read his poem to his 'great friend/ Duke
Ercole d'Este. Celati further imagines that he must have been thinking
often about the strange adventures of his knights as he traveled this
road, and the poet might even have thought that this local terrain was
the very terrain of those adventures, that 'toward Ferrara, between
Cento and Bondeno, there were all the bridges and rivers and groves
and fountains and paths and woods encountered by his knights' (338).
Because 'the world [is] there where one lives, on the roads one travels,
on the horizon that you have before your eyes when you wake up/
Celati further believes that, as Boiardo looked out over the plains from
the hills of Scandiano, he 'saw' the far-off lands of his characters, and
that these very characters perhaps are still there, 'on the road between
Cento and Bondeno, hidden in a bush, Gradasso, Rinaldo, Angelica,
Fiordelisa, Ruggero, Bradamante, Orlando, Marfisa, and the others:
perhaps they have remained there, invisible inside a bush, but audible
if you go and listen to them from close up.' They must be quite con-
fused, Celati writes, wondering where they are, why their great adven-
tures have been blocked, whether they are prisoners in an enchanted
garden, and they 'therefore are waiting for someone to come and liber-
ate them, someone passing by those parts/ He concludes: 'I believe
that if you pass by close to that bush and listen carefully, you'll hear a
buzzing like that of a power station.' This is because the constant agita-
tion of the knights has created a kind of electrical current, a power that
'shakes us, and invades us like a current; something that gives us emo-
tional palpitations, and makes us boil with fantasies; something that
puts into motion an alacrity of the heart and the head, and even some-
times becomes quite tiring' (339). The very landscape of today is per-
meated with the presence of these exciting characters, so that it is both
a real landscape and a poetic landscape - an imaginative territory -
that can be 'heard' and 'felt' by anyone who is willing to lend an ear
and open affective channels.
In his highly original study, Geografie della scrittura (Geographies of
writing), in which are combined the expertise of the geographer with
that of the literary critic, Davide Papotti analyzes the literary land-
scapes of the middle Po region, noting that 'the existence of a tradition
with a notable temporal weight influences writers, both in the percep-
tion of spaces and in the consideration of their own work' (48). He fur-
ther suggests that a regional orientation can result in 'the idea of a
spontaneous generation of characters and stories from the ambience,
and the narrator becomes similar to a peasant who harvests the crops
produced from the fertility of the earth' (57). Particular attention to
one's native region gives the writer a sense of territoriality and of
knowing the terrain, so to speak, so that he/she understands almost
instinctively where, when, and how to listen and to observe in order to
discover the riches to be harvested. Another kind of 'permeability' is at
work here, as the writer is 'naturally' attuned to both the observable
nuances of the known landscape, and to the hidden resources of
regional cultural production, past traditions, and subtle linguistic
inflections. Celati alludes to the treasures to be found in and around
Ferrara; hidden in bushes, penetrating into the very hills and roads of
the area, the chivalric poetry of Boiardo and others is waiting to be re-
excavated, brought back to life, and shared once more with contempo-
rary people who may well have forgotten or simply not noticed the
natural resources of their own cultural inheritance.
In his work with Ghirri and other photographers, Celati emphasized
the visual elements of this treasury, while in his retelling of Boiardo's
poem, as in so much of his past critical and creative work, he under-
lines its aural qualities. As Papotti writes: The sonorous dimension is a
fundamental component of our immersion in an ambience' (99). Some-
times writers emphasize natural sounds associated with a particular
locale; at others, they underscore noise, such as that produced by mod-
ern life (traffic, industry, etc.). Metaphors associated with the domain
of music can be utilized to bring out the 'tonalities' of a region, or of a
mood produced by certain landscapes (much as film scores function as
commentary or support of visual images). Silences are equally elo-
quent; they can endow a landscape with 'a suspended atmosphere of
stupefied repose,' they can function as a 'sign of desolate human
absence,' or they can remind us of the passing of time, which itself
'seems to possess an [impalpable] sound all its own' (Papotti; 102-8).
The very 'sound' created by a poet's language can capture this music
in landscapes, but can also create Keatsian 'unheard' and therefore
sweeter melodies that take us from real landscapes into the territories
of the imagination. Celati hears these fantastic melodies in the 'buzz-
ing' that comes forth from hidden characters, and he seeks to bring
them to our ears through his retelling of their magical adventures. The
question of whether our contemporary ears can any longer hear all
that a voice such as his wishes to transmit to us is unresolved, but
Celati's hope, if not something as strong as belief, remains undaunted
as we all move into the new millennium.
208 Gianni Celati
A Voice of Old Age: Vecchiatto against the 'Cannibals'
How might Celati's long-standing interest in orality and voice be seen

as an instrument for championing the humanity of the old? By 'old/ I
mean precisely old people, not tradition, the 'good old days/ or any
other generic category of the so-called venerable. First, the writer's
respect and affection for the storytelling talents of old people are well
known. In the story, 'Baratto/ for example, it is the old couple next
door who contribute importantly to the title character's cure, by taking
him into their home and allowing him to sit and silently to absorb the
stories of their long lives. In his essay, 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto
all'altro/ which I discussed above, Celati refers to the 'often extraordi-
nary way' in which old people, following their natural 'taste for narrat-
ing/ succeed in telling wonderful life stories (11). And in his video-
story, Strada provinciate delle anime, old people are often highlighted
both visually and in terms of the words they speak: the old woman,
who tells the group that asks why her town shows signs of many
departures that 'when we're old, we all go away'; the old tailor, who
responds to the question of which clients are the most difficult to fit,
that 'hunchbacks are the most difficult because they have humps';
another old man, who stands amidst a group of younger fellow travel-
ers and gazes silently and benevolently beyond the camera's eye.
These and many other moments throughout his fictions reveal Celati's
genuine love for the old; in his most recent book, Avventure in Africa, he
is clearly thrilled when an African guide shows amazed amusement at
Celati's own status as a sixty-year-old 'old man.' The writer has said to
me in conversation that growing old is for him the greatest adventure,
one that he feels himself privileged to be experiencing. What broader
implications are to be found in this perspective, and how do they con-
nect with the topics of orality and voice - besides the more obvious tie
with the issue of mortality - to which this chapter is dedicated? And to
what specific ends does Celati create an old character, Vecchiatto
(whose very name signifies 'old' or vecchio), as the voice of his recent
work?
In the context of today's literary scene in Italy, Celati's choice to
write a book about an old man places him in an implicitly oppositional
relation to the dominant current trend of youth-oriented writing. In his
cover commentary on Vecchiatto, the writer makes his position explicit:
'Come molti vecchi coniugi, i due attori Attilio e Carlotta Vecchiatto
parlano quasi sempre assieme, hanno gli stessi pensieri, in una recita
che ormai nessuno ascolta. Interpretano il dramma della vecchiaia in

un'epoca che crede solo alia pubblicita per giovani' (Like many old
couples, the two actors Attilio and Carlotta Vecchiatto almost always
speak as one, they have the same thoughts, in a recitation that by now
no-one listens to. They interpret the drama of old age in an era that
believes only in publicity for the young). One of the most highly touted
versions of this youth orientation is the writing of the so-called canni-
bali (cannibals), very young writers whose works are variously associ-
ated with the film genre of 'splatter/ hard metal rock or aggressive rap,
and violent mystery and fantasy stories a la Stephen King. The name of
the group may be an allusion to the twenties' avant-garde critic and
poet Osvaldo de Andrade's manifesto entitled Antropofago as well
as to his wife Tarsila do Amaral's 'cannibal' paintings, both of which
reflected the central tenet of the movement, Anthropophagy, which
was that Brazilian artists needed to devour all outside influences,
digest them, and make them into something completely new. In any
case, the transgressive and shocking aspects of art are emphasized in
both the avant-gardists of yesterday and the young Italian writers of
today. Some of the best known are Niccolo Ammaniti, Aldo Nove, and
Tiziano Scarpa, although Andrea Pinketts, Luisa Brancaccio, and oth-
ers could be included in the category known also as 'i pulpisti,' a direct
allusion to Quentin Tarantino's film, Pulp Fiction. None of these writers
is over forty years of age; most are in their early to mid-thirties, some
even younger.
The 'cannibals' have been taken up by the media and by critics, both
journalistic and academic, as the 'school', of the moment. An anthology
of short stories by the 'cannibals/ edited by Daniele Brolli, was pub-
lished in 1996 in the 'Stile Libero' (Free Style) series of Einaudi; entitled
Gioventii cannibale (Cannibal youth), it is described on the cover as Ta
prima antologia italiana dell'orrore estremo' (the first Italian anthology
of extreme horror), and contains ten short stories under the rubrics
of 'Daily Atrocities/ 'Ferocious Adolescence/ and 'Melancholies of
Blood/ Some titles of novels or collections of stories by the individual
writers give a further idea of their emphases: Fango (Mud) by Amman-
iti; Gin nel delirio (Down in delirium) by Alda Teodorani; Va' dove ti
porta il clito (Go where your clit takes you) by Daniele Luttazzi (this last
a 'desecrating' echo of Susanna Tamaro's best-selling 'sentimental'
novel, Va' dove ti porta il cuore (Go where your heart takes you). Well-
known academic critic Cesare Garboli held a public discussion with
Ammaniti, Nove, and Scarpa in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome in
2io Gianni Celati
July 1997 (as one of the series of public conversations called 'Libri
in Campo' [Books in the square]); a short interview with Garboli
announcing the evening's event appeared in the cultural insert, Tut-
tolibri, of the newspaper La Stampa the day of the discussion, 10 July
1997. In the piece, entitled 'Garboli makes a dare to the cannibals' (Gar-
boli sfida i cannibali), the critic, known for his critical work on Antonio
Delfini, Sandro Penna, Giovanni Pascoli, and Elsa Morante - writers,
that is, by now highly respected by canonical critics - is asked why he
has let himself be seduced by the 'splatter fiction' of these young writ-
ers. Garboli explains that he was at a dinner with Vargas Llosa one
evening in Rome, and Ammaniti was also at his table. Garboli was
most interested in what these so-called cannibals read, and he found
Ammaniti's affection for nineteenth-century literature intriguing. The
critic also found it interesting that these young writers felt themselves
to be very far from the preceding generation of writers like Andrea De
Carlo, whom they consider already 'dead' (trapassato); he notes that
they give him the impression of 'having consumed literature, even that
literature that ended up discussing itself: that of Calvino or of Manga-
nelli.' Their idea of literature is a 'unidimensional literature, willfully
without depth,' and Garboli sees them as allied to Godard and Robbe-
Grillet for their interest in 'looking' (called a 'rinascita dello sguardo,' a
rebirth of the gaze) as they survey all aspects of contemporary culture
and reality, use it, and throw it away in order to move on. He defines
them as a product of the 'culture industry,' constructed as a 'school'
precisely in order that they might make 'a jolting impact, a collective
impression,' but he is not sure of the length of the life of this new
'trend/ for the talents and interests of the individual writers who
ostensibly make it up are quite different. Lasting or not, the cannibals
are the flavor of the moment, so to say, and critical attention (not only
Garboli's) is focused on their innovations, their youthful vitality, and
their desire to capture the intensity of contemporary existence as it is
permeated with violence, perversions, and the 'sex appeal' of thing-
ness, virtuality, and the random (quotations from Orengo, 'Garboli
sfida i cannibali,' Tuttolibri; 3).
The desired liquidation of the past, even the immediate past as rep-
resented in writers like De Carlo or Tondelli, not to speak of the 'far-
off past made up of writers like Calvino and Manganelli (with whom
Celati would presumably be placed), is yet another manifestation of a
persisting avant-gardist approach to cultural production in Italy,
which implies a very different kind of attachment to today's reality
than Celati's. As they look to the ever new, the cannibals immerse
themselves in an immediacy consisting of inexplicable impulses, repel-
lent randomness, 'cool' violence, and completely meaningless sex.
Their young characters wander in confused errancy, looking for some-
thing intense to make them feel alive, or they take drugs in order to
escape their overwhelming sense of nullity. Daniel Brolli writes in his
introduction to the anthology, Gioventu cannibale, that in this writing is
seen 'the end of every kind of social contract/ which in turn leads these
new authors 'to act outside of classical literary conventions/ with the
result of 'an experimental writing that mixes substances [that are] far
from one another ... scholastic humor, advertising slogans, popular
melodies, consumer products ... everything often smeared with much,
much blood' ('Le favole cambiano' [Fables are changing]; viii). Their
language is that which 'constantly pushes itself beyond and which in
this "going beyond" frees itself from the past while discovering new
territories that sweep the public arena clean of the last remains of "lit-
erature."' It is therefore against both correct literary models and tradi-
tional notions of morality that they work, and the anthology is thus
presented as having the ambition of 'being a sign of a change in the
[collective] Imaginary, [one] which gets out of the limbo of culture con-
trolled by moralism in order to appropriate for itself a language with-
out compromises' (ix-x). It is difficult not to see this attitude as a late-
twentieth-century attempt yet again to 'epater les bourgeois/ to shake
up the 'fathers/ and to take up the banner of youthful contemporane-
ity much as the historical avant-gardes of the beginning of this century
did. That these young writers are being strongly backed as a 'school'
by the official channels of cultural promulgation is also a recognizable
continuance of the Italian practice of labeling and categorizing into
'isms' whatever new style of writing appears on the literary horizon.
My goal is not to discredit entirely the work of the individual writers
known as 'cannibals' or 'pulpists/ for some of them (in my opinion,
Andrea Pinketts above all) are talented narrators who succeed in writ-
ing genuinely imaginative and engaging fictions. Rather, I have dis-
cussed their recent fame as the literary backdrop upon which Celati's
Vecchiatto should, I think, be discussed, for it then becomes clear that
Celati's book about an old couple is quite willfully oppositional, and as
far away from the intensities of cyberpunk, splatter, and pulp as possi-
ble. It might be thought that Celati's long-standing interest in ordinary
language and lived quotidian experience makes of him a sort of natu-
ral 'ally' or model for these younger writers, who also openly disdain
212 Gianni Celati
the Insitution of Literature and high cultural modes of producing liter-

ary texts. But in fact this is not the case, for Celati's work is in the direc-
tion of finding and reactivating through credible narratives some
possibly positive and shareable aspects of contemporary existence, not
in highlighting the ostensibly inevitable cyber-age solitude and disillu-
sionment shown in the cannibals' portraits of today's amorality and
anomie. Nor is their goal of writing about sensational acts of bloody
violence in the name of desperate 'intensity' congenial to Celati, whose
search for the last many years has been precisely in the direction of
lowering the threshold of intensity and of the exceptional in favor of
common unexceptionality. His Vecchiatto is, among other things, an
explicit solicitation to readers to consider the place of portraits of the
old and the forgotten in a literary context that tends fairly exclusively
to valorize the young and the currently fashionable.
Vecchiatto is not merely a reactive text. In addition to countering a
generalized emphasis on youth and mass-medial contemporary life, it
also adds a different tonality to Celati's 'spoken' language: that of
complaint. In place of the comic tones of Guizzardi, the subdued,
meditative tones of Narratori delle pianure and Verso la face, or the shift-
ing but always exuberant tones of Boiardo raccontato in prosa, there is
now the grumbling tone of an old man, who sometimes explodes into
outright anger. Forwarding his critique of literature and language seen
as disembodied social institutions, Celati quite emphatically puts the
'tongue' back in 'lingua,' and the 'flavor' back in 'gusto' with the rant-
ing of the cantankerous old actor. In a previous chapter, I discussed
Celati's admiration for Antonio Delfini's writing, which he associates
with the directionless flow of humming or grumbling. Vecchiatto's
erratic speech is very similar to the errancy of grumbling, as he wan-
ders from topic to topic without any obvious point except that of
expressing his irritation and dissatisfaction. This recourse to the non-
linear, improvisational quality of sustained complaint is distantly
related to an ancient form in Provencal poetry: the enueg (ennui or
annoyance). One of the best poets of complaint was the so-called
Monge de Montaudon, a nameless monk who wrote at the end of the
twelfth century. His enuegs, like most, are characterized by simple lan-
guage and rhyme schemes, and both plazers (poems about likes) and
enuegs (about dislikes) 'like the cigales [grasshoppers] of their native
underbrush, hop from topic to topic ... Humankind being what it is,
the enueg was the more popular form.'8 These poems, like Celati's text,
draw on daily and current realities, and are extraordinarily 'spoken' in
their tonalities. Although a stylized poetic form, the variety of com-

plaints has the sound of genuine and personal dislikes that reveal
much about both lived life in that long-ago era and individual person-
alities of the diverse poets who wrote enuegs. And, as Richardson, who
is quoted above, rightly notes: 'One can imagine calls for encores -
and sly interpolations/ They solicit participation, in short, much as
Celati's recent writing aims to call forth his readers' active involve-
ment in the world that is conjured up through words. Like mortality,
we all share in our propensity to dislike certain things and to com-
plain about them; there is something both widely recognizable and
deeply cathartic, then, about the mode of complaint that Celati taps
into through Vecchiatto.
Marco Belpoliti wrote concerning Celati's latest work that 'today as
before the problem is that of language, a language that is not only a
means of expression, but an end in and of itself, and at the same time, a
symptom of something else. Of what? Of an uneasiness' ('L'attore Vec-
chiatto porta in scena la lingua jazz di Celati'; 3). Like his earlier char-
acters, according to Belpoliti, Vecchiatto serves as an 'alter-ego' for
Celati, one who gives the writer a language with which to recount his
own story, which is also the story of and by others. The falsity of all
names is ironically highlighted in the insistence on Vecchiatto's real-
ness, and Celati can rid himself of any autobiographical tinge to this
litany of complaints precisely by attributing it to an actual person. He
dons a verbal 'mask' from behind which he can play with tonalities
that are not necessarily his, but that transmit 'genuine' expressions of
dismay regarding a variety of topics, from the marginalization of the
old to the commodification of experience in the mass media. Angelo
Guglielmi further develops this idea of the mask in his review, 'II
Celati furioso: II testamento di un attore' (Celatifurioso: An actor's tes-
tament), published in La Repubblica's cultural section in 1996 shortly
after the appearance of the book. The critic points out that Celati could
not have said directly what he has his character say - or at least not as
effectively. Vecchiatto, as a Shakespearean actor and an old man, can
make use of the 'classical theme of the evil of existence/ which is asso-
ciated with canonical writers such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Leo-
pardi; further, he can make some claim to wisdom because of his
advanced age and extensive experience, references and claims not suit-
able to Celati, who is neither 'a writer with the position of a classical
[writer] nor "an old grumbler/" Guglielmi identifies four characteris-
tics of Vecchiatto that serve Celati's purposes well: he is 'an Italian
214 Gianni Celati
actor trained on Shakespeare's texts; a complaining old man close to

death; [one] who really existed; [one] who is famous abroad and for-
saken in Italy/ Vecchiatto as a Voice' for Celati thus has many advan-
tages: 'being an Italian actor renders his preachy, trumpeting language
tolerable; being moribund confers authority and worthiness of being
listened to; being a "real" person has the quality of liberating Celati,
who limits himself to reporting things said by others, from every stylis-
tic or thematic responsibility; being famous constitutes an objective
guarantee of quality ... and discourages every kind of contestation and
intolerance.' Setting up his text as he does, Celati provides himself
with an excuse to show that he is what Guglielmi calls a 'total writer,
ready to prove himself in the language of prose, of the theater, and of
poetry.' He does this, in the case of prose, by donning the masks of
several 'critics,' who have 'written' the blurbs on Vecchiatto that open
the volume; in the case of theater, by making the body of the book a
'transcription' of Vecchiatto's last stage performance; and in the case of
poetry, by publishing the heretofore 'unpublished sonnets of Vec-
chiatto': all, of course, written by Celati himself. The masks are many,
then, and they are all masks that permit forays into varying voices and
tonalities, as well as into implicit and explicit critiques of various
aspects of contemporary life.
If Celati is not quite a 'grumbling old man,' his own season of life is
closer to winter than to spring (he turned sixty in 1997). In contrast to
the more spring like preoccupations of his early works, or the sum-
mery, middle-aged mellowness of the period of the Po projects, his
main character or alter ego is now an embittered, cantankerous old man
rather than a love-crazed youth (as in Lunario del paradiso) or an eternal
adolescent (as in Guizzardi). The book (with a wonderful cover photo-
graph by Luigi Ghirri of what looks to be a provincial theater) tells us
on the cover blurb that Vecchiatto (1910-93) was an actor of inter-
national renown, admired by Laurence Olivier, Jean-Louis Barrault,
Jeanne Moreau, and many other greats of the stage and screen. We are
further informed that after thirty years of tournees in South America,
Vecchiatto arrived in New York in 1965, where he created a small
Shakespearean theater in the Italian neighborhood of the Bronx, specif-
ically at 1237 Decatur Avenue. He was invited to France in 1976 and,
after performing at the Vieux Colombier Theater in Paris he traveled to
many European cities, where he presented his adaptations of Shakes-
peare to enthusiastic audiences. But when Vecchiatto returned to Italy
in 1988, he sadly could find no work, except for what was to be his last
performance in the small provincial theater of the town of Rio Saliceto,

in the province of Reggio Emilia. The blurb states that this is the only
Italian performance 'of a glorious classical actor, also an author of dra-
mas, essays, poetry (among which the sonnets published here)/ and
the performance is here 'reconstructed by means of a monologue in
two voices' (those of Attilio and his wife Carlotta). The 'ruse' continues
on the back flap, where we read an excerpt from 'critic' Eliane Des-
champs-Pria's Presentazione ai sonetti di Attilio Vecchiatto, 'published' in
the Bouillon de Culture of Caen in September of 1994. Here is reiterated
the sad fate of Attilio in his native country; after 'fifty years of theatri-
cal vagabondage/ in 1988 he begins to try to find work in Italy, but
nothing comes through except for Milan's famous theatrical figure
Giorgio Strehler's failed attempt to bring him to the Piccolo Teatro of
that city, and the humiliating gig in Rio Saliceto. The book's paratex-
tual material thus orients us to expect a genuine transcription of an
actual event, even if we may already suspect that there is a game afoot,
first because of the series, 'I Narratori' of Feltrinelli, in which the book
appears and, second, because of our prior knowledge of Celati's never
quite transparent 'sincerity' (as seen already in his Narratori delle pia-
nure, made up of ostensibly 'transcribed' stories told by others).
Nonetheless, given Celati's interest in preserving and transmitting
unknown or ignored texts - as seen most recently in some of the mate-
rials included in the journal // Semplice, for example - this book seems
to be perfectly consonant with that interest, and therefore possibly
truly what it purports to be. We open the book to find a number of
excerpts from reviews and critical pieces dedicated to Vecchiatto's
career, written by such well-known figures as Susan Sontag, John
Berger, and Professor Franco Fido, an expert on Italian classical theater.
A reader unfamiliar with Celati's work might find these 'objective' crit-
ical texts further evidence of the realness of Vecchiatto, but anyone
who knows something of the writer immediately realizes that these
commentators are close acquaintances and respected colleagues of
Celati, and the excerpts themselves are very Celati-esque in their
emphases and tonalities, even if often convincingly like something
these individuals might have written. For example, Fido, a Venetian-
born scholar and one who has dedicated himself to Venetian culture
and to its greatest theatrical figure, Goldoni, 'naturally' writes of Vec-
chiatto's origins in Venice and emphasizes his 'recognizable Venetian
intonation even when he performed in foreign languages' (6). Or
Berger, true to his predilection for the 'invisible' aspects of the seen,
216 Gianni Celati
writes that Vecchiatto never wanted any recordings made of his perfor-
mances because 'to his mind the spectators absolutely should not see
on the stage a theatrical representation, but [instead] they should
imagine by means of the words a drama that remains invisible. Thus
he succeeded in reducing the theater to the naked scene, to the naked
stage of poverty, as he often would say, and he made us rediscover it as
the zone of our agonizing struggle with the shadow' (8). Or Sontag, a
New Yorker to the bones, writes about Vecchiatto's Bronx theater,
which was located in the back of a barber shop, and to which 'on
Thursdays and Saturdays flocked the Italians of the neighborhood, but
also many people who came from Manhattan' (7). These and the other
blurbs add up to a complete biography of Vecchiatto, detailing his
travels in South America and Europe, his origins, his family, his
diverse experiences. They end with an excerpt from Vecchiatto's
'diary/ dated September 1991, in which he had written: The dear
theme of death, only this attracts me. I would wish that whoever
remembers me might begin to consider my name a funny sound from
times past, a joke recited by someone who is not I. In the total death to
which I aspire, I never want to appear as a name tied to a certain suc-
cess: much better the false that renders us uncertain and redeems us,
because a name is only a falsity' (9). Knowing how strongly Celati
detests the emphasis on having a 'name' (as seen, for example, in his
comments on the official responses to Calvino's death in the preceding
chapter), it is impossible not to read this as coming straight from
Celati. The mask is in place, but alter ego and writer merge completely
in this declaration. There can be no doubt that the book is Celati's ver-
sion of the 'lost manuscript' trick of distinguished lineage (Cervantes,
Manzoni), as he puts on the mask of 'transcriber' and humble scriv-
ener of his character's last recitation and unknown poetry.
As a Shakespearean actor, Vecchiatto quite naturally uses the great
figures of the Bard when he turns from his vociferation against con-
temporary life and the media to a reading of his 'operetta morale,'
which he has composed as an exemplary story about the trajectory of a
man's life. The title given to his piece, 'Operetta morale/ is Leopardian,
and it emphasizes the importance of this great poet and moralist as
another fundamental source of inspiration for the book. A quotation
from the Pensieri, which capped the 'blurbs' of the introductory sec-
tion, and which was supposedly found in Vecchiatto's diaries, had
already tipped us off to Leopardi's role. The quotation speaks to the
theatrical nature of existence, which is verified by the fact that 'the
world always speaks in one way, and operates in another. Since today
we are all actors in this comedy, and hardly anyone is a spectator,
because the empty language of the world fools only children and
idiots, it follows from this that such a performance has become inept,
boring and labored without any motive' (10). Leopardian cosmic pessi-
mism infuses Vecchiatto's 'Operetta/ recited in snippets interspersed
with various diversions, as it moves from youth to old age, using
Shakespearean characters as types signifying basic aspects of a man's
life experiences. According to Attilio, first the young man 'is drawn
blindly towards love like any old Romeo who runs after the beautiful
Giulietta'; then comes maturity, when he recognizes death 'like Hamlet
before his father's ghost'; then he marries and has children, and is con-
sumed with ambition - 'like Macbeth he would butcher even his king
in order to get ahead of others' -; finally, he is old and, like Lear, he
'goes on dragging through the blind tunnel of his fixations, listening
only to those who agree with him.' Throughout life, however, the
thoughtful man is haunted by the intimation of its nullity, and Vecchi-
atto exclaims: 'It is pallid thought that turns us into succubi, it is the
light of consciousness that transforms us into sheep groping about in
the dark ... the terrible thing is only to think think think ... like prince
Hamlet, like king Lear!' (44-71). In spite of the tragic vision being
expounded, the recitation is comically presented, for there are only
three spectators as it begins (including an old lady with her shopping
bag, and a young fellow holding a Coca Cola and wearing a motorcy-
cle outfit), and a few others drift in as Vecchiatto speaks, interrupting
his flow and occasioning more grumbling. His faithful consort Carlotta
continually interrupts as well, trying to calm her husband down, mak-
ing comments to the audience about her husband's past glories, gloss-
ing when and where certain parts of the 'Operetta' were written. The
effect is of a fragmented discourse that is almost lost in the digressions,
as the following excerpt shows:
Attilio: I was saying that the young boy looks for the maternal breast in
every woman ... and the young male animal is blindly dragged toward
love, like any old Romeo who runs after the beautiful Giulietta ...
Carlotta: We met each other performing Romeo and Giulietta in Buenos
Aires ...
Attilio: But what does that have to do with anything?
Carlotta: Forty-five years ago, lady ... It's to explain, Attilio, see how
they're listening?
218 Gianni Celati
Attilio: Ah, talk talk talk! I feel the weight of nauseating phrases that
press down on me always more ...
Carlotta: Don't think about it Attilio!
Attilio: Cold, cold this world is! ... Don't you all feel how everything is
frozen by numbers, advertising, earnings? ... We shouldn't say anymore
that a man comes into the world, we should say that he comes into cosmic
cold, he comes into the desert of the night of the soul, he comes into the
earnings of users of passive people ... Listen, listen! (44-5)
The fictional audience is drawn into the performance as Attilio and

Carlotta direct their reminiscences and rambling thoughts to them,
begging them to understand what is being said. We, the external audi-
ence, are also thus drawn into the immediacy of the recitation, as if we
too had wandered into the little provincial theater along with the lady
with her shopping bag and the young man in motorcycle gear. Every-
thing feels improvised and unrehearsed as the old couple give them-
selves over to an extemporized 'performance' that is made up more of
grumbling and memories than of a rehearsed and fixed piece. One of
Carlotta's urgent interruptions is the story of a recent incident in a
supermarket, and she tells it to the inattentive, restless, and even
mocking audience, which by now has swelled to six people. She and
Attilio had gone into the store and there they saw a photography
booth, 'one of those little machines for making photos quickly.' An old
woman had just had her photo taken, and was looking at it, saying:
'Ah I'm not like that! No, no, I was never like that.' She was showing it
to passersby and asking 'But does it seem to you that I look like that?
But how is it possible that I've become like that? I'm not so old! I don't
have all the wrinkles that show in this photograph!' No one pays any
attention to the old lady except for Attilio, who 'came forward to speak
a comforting word/ telling her: 'Madam, you are certainly not the per-
son whom you see in this ugly photo ... Madam, don't believe in the
exteriority of these machines that destroy the lineaments of the soul!
You are certainly not this horrible image of modern technology.' The
audience's response is to laugh, to which Carlotta responds: 'Go ahead
and laugh! But you must learn that we get old, and as we age the body
collapses, shrivels, becomes fat or wrinkled, becomes like wax, already
like dead flesh, have you understood? ... Yes, even you will become
old, and you'll see yourselves someday like that poor lady ... Because
you must know, young people, that what we think of ourselves is more
than anything else a memory of how we once were. And thus at a cer-
tain age we find that we are all caricatures of ourselves, even you
young people who are laughing!' (quotations from 51-2). Attilio ends
up getting thrown out of the supermarket after he went to lodge a
complaint with the manager about the photo machine that upsets sen-
sitive people by destroying the lineaments of their soul, and he suffers
the further indignity of having his own umbrella broken over his head.
The story makes no impression on the audience, however, and Attilio
sadly goes on telling his 'Operetta morale' as they one by one leave the
theater, until only the old woman with the shopping bag remains.
The last performance of Attilio Vecchiatto is a spectacular failure.
Even the old woman with the shopping bag loses interest, falls asleep,
and then quietly leaves without saying a farewell to the couple on the
stage. The lights have gone off, and they must grope their way out of
the theater, back out into the inhospitable world filled with advertise-
ments, 'asses, breasts, underpants, bras, expensive cars, a world of
crazy rich people with televisions radio telephones [that serve] only to
exchange fashionable idiocies' (73). Attilio and Carlotta wonder if they
might go and perform for the geese in the countryside - 'at least they
would listen to us' - and they hope for death, but in the end Attilio
gathers his courage and tells his faithful consort: 'Forward, blindly
forward ... There is no return, only going forward! Forward until the
end ...' As they step out into the night, their last laconic exchange is
filled with courageous resignation:
Carlotta: Are you still thinking?

Attilio: To hell with cursed thinking! No more cold, blindly forward ...
Carlotta: What are you saying?
Attilio: Come on! They won't get us ...
Carlotta: Here, I'm coming, it's dark ...
Attilio: We need to disappear ...
Carlotta: But Attilio, can you see me?
Attilio: No, no, for God's sake, come on, don't be afraid. There's no
need to be afraid of anything, enough with anxiety that ruins every-
thing ...
Carlotta: Attilio, where are we?
Attilio: We're outside ...
Carlotta: I feel so much air, the wind is blowing ...
Attilio: There was so much air, the wind was blowing.
Carlotta: Attilio.
Attilio: Carlotta. (76-7)
220 Gianni Celati
The tragicomic, blustery tone of the 'performance' has modulated into

a quiet melancholy key, as the old couple wind down and stand in the
dark windy night, facing their inevitable end. (Distinguished actor
Mario Scaccia recently brought Vecchiatto to life in over one hundred
stage performances throughout Italy.)
The sonnets of Vecchiatto explore the same themes as the 'recita': the
vanity of worldly pursuits; the ephemeral nature of carnal desire; the
lack of justice in today's dog-eat-dog society; the worthlessness of old
people in our youth-oriented consumer culture. The poems are remi-
niscent of Antonio Delfini's Poesie dellafine del mondo (Poems of the end
of the world), ferocious denunciations of the hypocrisies of human
existence by another of Celati's preferred authors. These fifty-seven
compositions - all in the form of Shakespearean sonnets - maintain the
'spoken' tonality of the book, as if their author were talking to himself,
using a poetic form as a kind of sottovoce or hummed base note on
which he creates variations. In all of the diverse literary echoes,
themes, genres, registers, and voices that make up the volume, the
constant emphasis on the inevitable decline of the mortal body stands
out. I thus return to the topic with which I began this chapter: the indi-
vidual body in all its material specificity. Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto is a
memento mori, a tragicomic reminder of the inherent limits of our bod-
ies; it is, as well, a plea for mutual understanding and solidarity as
mortals, in place of the cold search for power, be it in the form of
money, fame, or social standing. A genuinely original book in its 'spo-
ken' language, its mix of the tragic and the comic, and of prose, theatri-
cal writing, and poetry, Vecchiatto is Celati's bittersweet message to the
world, and specifically to contemporary Italy, a society so deeply
entangled in power games as to be deaf to such messages. Perhaps, in
Italy as elsewhere, we shall listen to such "body language' only when
the frailty of our own bodies begins to speak to us, only when our own
hearts flutteringly move towards the final beat.
6
Africa, Gamuna, and Other Travels:
Moving Narratives
'... but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples,

extracted from many objects: and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my
travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.'
Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act IV, Scene i)
Is it sadness that pushes us to travel, or travel that makes us sad? Bruce

Chatwin reminds us that 'Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensees, gave it
as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our
inability to remain quietly in a room' (The Songlines; 161). Although
travel can bring a joyful sense of freedom from ourselves, it can make us
miserable and, like lovemaking, can result in a profound post-voyage
tristesse, a 'most humorous sadness,' that has as much to do with the
return to ourselves as to our daily routines. The word 'travel' is itself
indicative etymologically of suffering and hard labor, and being on the
road typically produces longings for home, nostalgia for some other
(younger) self, or simple loneliness.1 And, like amorous feelings (eros
and voyages into strange territories often being brought together in the
literary imaginary), travel is notoriously difficult to write about effec-
tively and with originality. Celati has spent much of his existence trav-
eling about, and he has written many works that fall loosely into the
categories of 'road stories' or 'travel writing,' from his early Avventure di
Guizzardi to Lunario del pamdiso, up to his more recent Po valley stories
such as the 'racconti d'osservazione/ Verso la face. His latest writing is
explicitly tied to literal travel; Avventure in Africa is made up of diary jot-
tings produced during a trip to Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania in January
1997, and is organized in 'Notebooks' kept while on the road, rather than
222 Gianni Celati
in chapters. He has also recently written short 'ethnographic' pieces on

the land and people of Gamuna, an imaginary territory of strange cus-
toms, linguistic practices, and landscapes. In this chapter I want to focus
attention on Celati's so-called travel writing, in order to investigate the
deep connection in his work between the act of writing and errancy, a
topic already highlighted in earlier chapters, but to which I now wish to
dedicate some further, more elaborated analysis. Celati's apparently
innate 'preference' for constant displacement and his Conradian thirst
for elsewhere lead him neither to the final silence of Bartleby nor to the
heart of darkness, however, but rather to a 'melancholy of his own'; or
perhaps it is the other way around. His deeply ruminative and contem-
plative forma mentis - a kind of constitutional sadness - stimulates his
need for movement through space: travel as antidote to Hamletian
paralysis, or what the old actor Vecchiatto calls 'cursed thought.' Yet
travel ironically stimulates ever more rumination both during and after
the trip and, in Celati's case, ever more writing. In Calvino's essay on
'Leggerezza' (Lightness) in Lezioni americane (Six Memosfor the Next Mil-
lennium), he quoted the same lines from As You Like It that I have used as
epigraph for this chapter, commenting that they reveal that particularly
Hamletian melancholy, which is not 'compatta e opaca ... ma un velo
di particelle minutissime d'umori e sensazioni' (not ... compact and
opaque ... but a veil of very minute particles of humors and sensa-
tions (Lezioni americane; 21). This brand of melancholy is eminently
applicable to Celati as well. Travel is always filled with writerly travail
for this errant scrivener as he is bombarded with 'particles of humors
and sensations' whether moving through the more local spaces of the Po
valley or wandering through the 'exotica' of Northwest Africa. He has
long followed the crooked lines of his own itineraries in search of
'adventures,' which are then transformed into the lines of stories at once
complete and open-ended. Celati is one of contemporary Italy's best
examples of a quite literal embodiment of the ancient metaphors of
human existence as voyage, and of text as trip. Maria Corti's critical
phrase, 'il viaggio testuale' (the textual voyage), is reflected on many
levels in Celati's work; his errant pen moves across the page, which is in
turn filled with hybrid forms of narration, changing landscapes, and
characters on the move, so that thematically, formally, and metatextually
his fictions repeatedly give shape to real and imaginative voyages in
which we, the readers, are invited actively to participate.
As seen in my analyses of Celati's writing in preceding chapters,
notions pertaining to non-linear movement, errancy, and adventuring
Moving Narratives 223
permeate his fictional and critical work. The term 'adventure' holds a
particular appeal to his imaginative and theoretical mindset; he uses it
twice in titles of fictions (Le avventure di Guizzardi and Avventure in
Africa), and it often appears in essays as well as in other fictional
pieces. By using this term, Celati links his writing to a long tradition in
Italian letters, from early prose narratives of adventure to the chivalric
tradition in which knights embark on military and amorous adven-
tures to Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio. The word in Italian has an
interesting history of usage. According to the Zanichelli Dizionario
etimologico, it appears in the thirteenth-century collection of tales, //
Novellino, where it means Vicenda impensata o inconsueta' (unimag-
ined or unusual event); again in thirteenth-century Egidio Romano's
locution, 'per avventura/ where it means 'per caso' (by chance); and
later in Leopardi, where it means 'relazione amorosa breve e non
impegnativa' (brief and casual amorous relation). The term in its verb
form, 'avventurare/ in medieval times meant 'to entrust to fate or to
expose to a risk/ and in the reflexive form meant 'to put oneself in dan-
ger, to dedicate oneself to an uncertain or difficult undertaking.' An
'avventuriero' was a person who 'went around the world looking for
any and all means to make his fortune/ whom Tasso called a 'soldato
di fortuna' (soldier of fortune), and Marino called a 'persona senza
scrupoli' (a person without scruples). The word 'avventura' comes, of
course, from the Latin term advenire, signifying 'to come in the future/
so that adventures are basically unknown future events. Within its
broad and wide semantic field, therefore, are included notions pertain-
ing to chance, danger, sex, surprise, and immorality, all linked to the
potential as well as the threat of futurity. When we embark on adven-
tures, we turn our back on the known past, and move towards the
unknown future, the wide-open spaces in which we might lose our
way and ourselves - or we might find both way and self. Celati's writ-
ing is itself an 'adventure/ stimulated by curiosity, sustained not by a
present clarity but by a future-oriented search. It reflects constant risk-
taking, as the writer - a contemporary 'avventuriero' - quite literally
travels about the world looking not to amass a monetary 'fortune/ but
instead to find the wealth freely there for the taking: potential stories,
of which, for Celati, human experience is fundamentally made.
Ethnographic Excursions into Unseen Territories: The World Told
If Tomaso Garzoni's Piazza universale was one of Celati's 'founding'

224 Gianni Celati
texts, in which as a young man Celati discovered a verbally constructed

world in which infinitely to roam and from which to learn about ways
of life and forms of livelihood at all levels of a past society, there were
other ethnographically oriented studies that equally fascinated him in
his youth. In an unpublished and incomplete essay sent to me by the
writer in the autumn of 1997, 'Rituali di racconto' (Rituals of the tale),
Celati provides a (rare) direct autobiographical sketch of his early stu-
dent years, when at twenty he began work in modern languages and
literatures at the University of Bologna. It is clear in reading these few
pages that from the beginning Celati was drawn to anthropological and
ethnographic representations of human experience and language; con-
versely, he was repelled by the realist literature that dominated Italian
prose fictions in that period (the 19505). He tells us that he began by
studying linguistics primarily, in spite of his ostensible 'major' in liter-
ary studies, and he singles out a book by Luigi Heilman on the dialects
of the Val di Fassa, which he calls 'a revelation: to study how people
speak in a small territory, to reconstruct the invisible nets that bind peo-
ple.' When he went on to read Levi-Strauss for the first time, he writes
that he understood nothing, 'but it seemed to me that I had in my hand
a key that opened all the doors. Reading about far-off populations,
primitive rituals, pathological cases, dialectal usage, uncommon ways
of speaking, fables and folklore, all this excited me.' Celati began to
look for something similar in authors of contemporary literary texts,
but he found the realist novels then in vogue unreadable and 'false.' As
he went through the university and on into the period of military ser-
vice, the young man 'ruminated on these things' (ho rimuginato su
queste cose), read philosophers he did not understand, and wrote 'very
awful stories.' Another breakthrough occurred when a friend who
worked in a psychiatric hospital in Pesaro sent him things written by
mental patients, 'in particular a newspaper edited by an old patient, on
inexpensive paper and in a beautiful calligraphy, with autobiographical
pieces, news of the asylum, delirious ravings of persecution, weather
reports.' Celati was amazed at how wonderfully the old patient wrote
and later, when he was isolated for forty days due to viral hepatitis, he
one day suddenly sat down and wrote a piece in the same style, 'hear-
ing [the mental patient's] voice quite well in my ear.' He explains:
'Almost without realizing it, all of a sudden I was succeeding in writing
precisely as he did, with his syntax, his strange adjectives, and all those
symptoms of persecution that overflowed from every sentence. It was
like putting myself in someone else's place, someone I saw and under-
stood in all of his moods, it was like getting outside of myself with more
fluid sensations than [I usually had]. It was a question of falling into a
kind of sleep as I was writing, completely forgetting myself, like when
one falls asleep.' Celati notes that this anecdote has a long follow-up, as
indeed it did. In fact, his first fiction, Comiche, is modeled precisely on
the maniacal flow of words from the mouth of a paranoid character,
and subsequent books of the 19705 (Guizzardi, La banda dei sospiri, and
Lunario del paradise) all have something of this fluid, verbally obsessive
quality about them. What is emphasized in 'Rituali di racconto' is that
there was a period of seven years when the writer tried to find this vein
again, and could not, with the result that 'everything on the page
became only absurd and unusable/ The lesson he learned from that
long-ago experience of writing 'outside of himself was 'that when one
writes forgetting oneself, one goes a little on a trip into space like shamans,
and one hears voices that bring news, commands, inexplicable suggestions,
and sometimes even words that one does not know at all, but later one discov-
ers that they do exist' (emphasis mine). Writing is a voyage into unknown
territories of language, then, with something magical and unexplain-
able about it, as the writing subject gives himself over to a quite literally
ex-static experience. He is seated at his table, fixed in a place, but he is
nonetheless traveling, through and by means of language, into the terri-
tory of otherness.
Before discussing the remainder of 'Rituali di racconto/ I want to
veer off into a brief consideration of a piece by Lino Gabellone (Celati's
critic friend with whom he created the 'Bottega dei mimi' in the mid-
seventies), in which I believe there is an insightful (and poetic) por-
trayal of Celati as an 'armchair traveler' for whom thought and writ-
ing, from the very beginning of his career, have been voyages into the
seen and, especially, the unseen, narrated existent. The essay-story by
Gabellone is included in the 1986 issue of Nuova Corrente dedicated to
Celati's work, entitled 'Quello che sta fermo, quello che cammina' (The
one who remains in place, the one who walks), and with the dedication
'Apologo, per Gianni Celati' (Apology, for Gianni Celati). This hybrid
piece, somewhere between a tale and a critical essay, tells of a writer
who 'dreams' diverse understandings of his relation to the existent.
(All of the quotations that follow are from Nuova Corrente 33, no. 97;
27-31.) The 'man who remains in place' is described as seated at his
writing desk, surrounded by the usual objects of the writer; he is also
surrounded by a garden outside his window and 'the unwashed win-
dows send images of the world that seem true/ Gabellone describes
226 Gianni Celati
this setting as one in which it seems that 'things were ordered in con-
centric circles at different distances' around 'quello che sta fermo.' For
this writer, things form a sort of 'dark space' (spazio oscuro) inside the
house, in which float seen and 'above all, waited-for' things, for the
one who remains in place is 'one who waits.' In this 'dream/ the writer
remains fixed inside his own habitation, surrounded by known objects
and potentially knowable images of the outside world, which will
come to him only if he waits patiently for them.
Gabellone writes next of a shift in perspective: 'But one day he
dreamed, with his eyes open, something that was not an image:
ephemeral forms, first, that instead of oscillating and then suddenly
recomposing themselves, like the tops of trees and leaves, were gradu-
ally dispersing into a kind of far-off haze and then disappearing.' In
order to understand this process of dispersion and disappearance of
forms and images 'one would have needed a sophisticated mechanism
like that of the cinema, a visual system that might recompose the
glimpsed forms in another, not yet imaginable place.' This 'process of
disappearance' paradoxically went on somewhere else 'according to a
rhythm that imposed on the eye a continual adaptation.' The man
'who remained in place' was still taking refuge in the idea of the
world's consistency, however, a world that he saw as a 'depth from
which all words poured forth.' It occurred to him nonetheless that per-
haps even he had 'disappeared' for someone, that he himself might be
part of that labile process of disappearance that he had sensed, yet this
thought 'had for some time been reabsorbed back into his current posi-
tion [of the one who remains in place], in which everything seemed
already played out, and guaranteed by an already reached immobility.'
I think it is possible to read this 'position' as that of an egocentric sub-
jectivity, which relates the existent to itself, and needs everything that
is not itself to be fixed and immobile in order to be brought back to the
self's definition of it. Gabellone describes this subjective positioning as
made up of 'passi circolari che non scoprivano una strada ma ne cerca-
vano sempre 1'origine, anche se tutti sapevano ormai che essa era
intoccabile' (circular steps that did not find a road but instead looked
for its origin, even if everyone by now knew that [the origin] was
untouchable). The glimpse or intuition of a dispersed, labile, and
disappearing-reappearing world of shifting forms - 'so different from
his' - haunted the meditative writer's thoughts, however: 'The brief,
rhythmic movement, so different from his, which he had glimpsed,
remained in him and in his enclosed space like a light torment, a nos-
talgia for his future: something that crossed a landscape and in it was
lost, tracing a line that went somewhere, not necessarily a straight line:
instead, broken, zigzagging, sometimes curving, it was a line that did
not return, and for this [reason] it seemed to take on a new lightness,
uprooted from any dwelling place (dimora) whatsoever.' As the phrase
'nostalgia for his future' - in the original, 'nostalgia del suo avvenire'
(emphasis mine) - makes clear, a connection can be made between a
new relationship of the self to externality, and an 'adventure/ under-
stood in its etymological sense of a sought-for, future experience of and
in the existent. Gabellone describes the next step as a result of 'lateral
vision, rapid and light, that had a more precise sense not only of dis-
placement that was no longer an entry into space but a going along
with it, accompanying him in his development, but also [a sense] of its
truth.' In this sideways glimpse of the world in its continual movement
and transformation, 'there was ... a precise, undeniable sensation of a
road that was a true path, and like all true paths, it brought that man
across the world.' Still intent on discovering that which existed near
and next to him, the one who remained in place became 'the one who
walks' (quello che cammina), as he began to move across 'the face of
the unknown' (il volto dello sconosciuto) with 'a gaze that was a little
lost among things' (uno sguardo un po' perso fra le cose). It is possible,
I believe, to associate this sideways, lost gaze to what Celati himself
has called 'permeability/ and to see the shift from an identity 'in place'
to one 'on the path' as both an epistemologically and ontologically pro-
found transformation. The 'one who walks' is now a constant 'traveler'
through the existent, and through the 'face' and the language of other-
ness, with no pretensions to fixing either himself or otherness within
origins or foundations pre-elaborated from an egocentric point of
departure. In Heideggerian terms, the writer is beginning to 'dwell
poetically' in the existent as it shows itself in its 'happening' (Ereignis),
and he is thus coming closer to finding the true essence of Being.2
Gabellone next brings his tale back to the issue of writing with
which he began. Like 'the one who remains in place/ the man whose
new identity is as 'one who walks' is also in search of words, but now
it seemed that 'one could read in his face the humility of one who con-
sidered words [to be] deposits left there by time in the places where
they had been born: towns, cities, villages, riverbanks.' These word
deposits do not walk about; rather they, not the writer, are what 'waits'
for 'an attentive ear' to awaken them. The writer calls them, appropri-
ating Husserl, 'il parlar del mondo/ the world's speech, but he is wor-
228 Gianni Celati
ried that it is hypocrisy to try to transfer these deposits into his domain
of words fixed on the page, for the world's speech is part of what is
made in order not to be fixed; that is, it is made to live the life of 'that
which changes and finally is lost/ that realm of disappearance which
he had glimpsed and to which he himself also belonged. Filled with
'unspeakable anguish and almost overwhelming fears/ the writer dug
deep into these questions in his guise of 'the one who remains in
place/ slowly coming to the conclusion that 'the essential is in disap-
pearance, and that every being is there in the world in order to be lost,
along with every one of his words/ Thus, whether remaining in place
or walking, the writer was 'lost within the visible/ for there was
nowhere in particular to go, and his sole desire, therefore, was for a
'forgetfulness' (oblio) of which words were winged messengers,
'almost as if they had come from the other shore of the future (avve-
nire).' Gabellone's tale suggests that in accepting the fate of inevitable
disappearance, a writer like Celati must live within the territory of
what is already lost if he is to 'find' anything. To inhabit the speech of
the world is to have no fixed or foundational home, to be always 'on
the road/ so to say, and to be negotiating always the delicate balance
between the self and alterity.
Gabellone's tale-essay ends with a final 'dream/ at which time the
writer is on the point of dying. He writes that it is perhaps 'a thought
or a message from the gods coming from the beginning of the world.'
This dream or vision releases the writer from 'all of his old errancies,
and gives to him almost an absentminded smile.' The dream is of an
ancient tree, with roots immersed deeply into the earth's sleep, creat-
ing a design against the clear sky. The tree has 'all the force that con-
sists in remaining erect and each of its leaves is a word.' It grows on the
banks of a river that 'flows unconsciously, like a song/ Both tree and
river carry thought along to oblivion. As the 'one who remains in
place' is about to die, he tells himself once more 'that it was enough to
remain where he was, in order that one day or another the world might
come there/ It is implied that persistence is all; one goes on, like a tree
or a river, not in order to reach ultimate clarification, but to reach the
state of disappearance inherent in all of the existent. Writing is thus a
tapping into oblivion rather than a domination and fixing of experi-
ence; it 'flows/ like the river, and it 'persists/ like the tree, in order to
partake of the essence of ephemeral life. Life and writing both are jour-
neys without concrete goals, and both leave traces that are themselves
destined to ultimate disappearance and oblivion. Thought cannot but
travel, although its destination is its inevitable disappearance. The trip

itself is what matters and, if this view is stark, it is nonetheless enough
to sustain life's and writing's dynamism, and to provoke perhaps a
'smile' for the writer and for us, his readers, who will also eventually
be enveloped in the haze of all that passes.
Gabellone's poetic-philosophic description of the 'one who remains
in place' and the 'one who walks' suggests that, fixed or on the move,
the writer seeks a connection, through words, to the alterity of the exis-
tent. Celati's experience of writing while 'forgetting himself brings
him closer to this goal, but does not in any sense end his search. If any-
thing, it inaugurates a life-long search still in progress. In the last few
pages of 'Rituali di racconto,' he describes his continuing consumption
as a young writer of ethnographically and anthropologically oriented
studies, works by Frazer, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Margaret
Mead, and Ernesto de Martino, in which he found 'an infinity of little
tales' that took advantage of 'the normal fascination of narrations/
with, of course, differing styles and voices ('literarily mythological' in
Frazer or 'extremely erudite' in Tylor, for example). Celati concluded
that the 'data' of ethnographic accounts were 'nothing other than tales
made by some narrator, summed up and organized like factual data.'
He gives as example Rasmussen's writings on the shamanistic prac-
tices of Eskimos: 'Rasmussen's summaries of the shamanic practices of
Eskimos seemed to me, in those times, beautiful, detailed, praisewor-
thy, but not for nothing did I read them together with Robinson Crusoe,
which I was studying as the form of the modern proto-novel, and it
even seemed to me that the two books had a similar foundation.' Celati
explains that he does not accuse Rasmussen of novelizing his observa-
tions too much, nor can he judge what the anthropologist might have
understood about the life of Eskimos, but 'independently of the adher-
ence of his reports to so-called reality, his narratives are in and of them-
selves a "cultural datum." That is, they are based on a ritual of the tale
that an Eskimo anthropologist might study like our ethnologists study
the rituals of New Guinea.' Celati is here touching on the problematic
of the 'anthropologist as author,' which is so well set forth and ana-
lyzed in Clifford Geertz's Works and Lives, and which has come to per-
meate and erode the past assumption of 'scientific transparency' that
kept at bay the discursive, tale-building element of ethnographic writ-
ing until fairly recently.
While Celati, as a writer of stories, is not ultimately interested in the
'adherence to so-called reality' of ethnographic texts, but rather in the
230 Gianni Celati
ways in which they too partake of the 'ritual of the tale/ Geertz has the
different perspective of the ethnographer, whose very field is now
deeply threatened by today's widespread and explicit awareness of
what he calls the 'author function.' Geertz sees as essential an open
acknowledgment that ethnography is 'a work of the imagination/
which 'involves telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbol-
isms, and deploying tropes/ yet he understands that this acknowl-
edgment is 'commonly resisted' among ethnographers themselves
'because of a common confusion, endemic in the West since Plato at
least, of the imagined with the imaginary, the fictional with the false/
and because of 'the even stranger idea that, if literalism is lost, so is
fact' (Works and Lives; 140). Geertz does not accept the idea that all fac-
tuality is impossible simply because facts must be presented through
an authorial perspective and through language, and he sees 'dangers'
in the postmodern view of the anthropological vocation as fundamen-
tally a literary vocation. His claim is that, in spite of the complexities
introduced by the explicit acknowledgment of the discursive element
in ethnography, the task of the ethnographer is 'to inscribe a present -
to convey in words "what it is like" to be somewhere specific in the
lifeline of the world: Here, as Pascal famously said, rather than There;
Now rather than Then. Whatever else ethnography may be ... it is above
all a rendering of the actual, a vitality phrased' (141). This definition of
the ethnographic project is remarkably similar to Celati's idea of writ-
ing narratives, which he has come to see as a way of reaching the exis-
tent, and of touching a here and now in all of its contingency and
ephemeral essence. Language itself is the 'field' in which Celati's 'field-
work' is carried out; actual traveling is an instrument by means of
which 'deposits' of the prose of the world, waiting for the attentive ear
and eye, can be mined.3 The 'adventure' or 'future event' towards
which Celati's writing tends is nothing less than, simultaneously, an
idea of literature and an idea of the existent world, both inextricably
bound up in human speech.
In a profound reconsideration of Calvino's work, 'Antropologia ed
etica della scrittura in Italo Calvino' (Anthropology and ethics of writ-
ing in Calvino), Massimo Lollini points out fundamental aspects of this
famous author's poetics and writing that I believe are very similar to
his less famous fellow traveler, Celati. For example, Lollini cites a pas-
sage from Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) in
which Calvino writes: 'La funzione della letteratura e la comunicazi-
one tra cio che e diverse in quanto e diverso, non ottundendone bensi
esaltandone la differenza, secondo la vocazione propria del linguaggio

scritto' (The function of literature is communication among differences
as such, not dulling but instead exalting difference, according to the
very vocation of written language) (quoted in Lollini; 285). Lollini
comments that here as elsewhere in Calvino we see a view of literature
as 'much more than a simple literary art/ and a sense of the writer as
someone who would want to be 'an anthropologist, would want
finally to grasp the blood of authentic life with his creative and imagi-
native capacities' (285). Furthermore, the 'coexistence of self and
world' is at the basis of Calvino's work, as it is in Celati, and, for both,
the writer's own individual perspective (his 'sguardo') cannot be done
away with 'by means of an emphatic effort of will,' no matter how
much he may wish to enter into and merge with 'the sea of objectivity'
(294). What is, for my purposes here, particularly fascinating about
these and other similarities between Calvino's and Celati's views on
the writer's task is the fact that both can be classified as 'errant' writ-
ers, if with significant differences in their status within canonical litera-
ture. In a piece entitled 'Solitudine ed erranza dei letterati' (Solitude
and errancy of literati) Asor Rosa writes that it seems to him that 'Ital-
ian literature from unification on has fostered a very high grade of
resistance and marginalization of figures - and not just a few - of
transgression and difference' (in Lettemtura italiana: Storia e geografia,
vol. 3; 68). He names Dino Campana and Carlo Michelstaedter as
examples of marginalized figures earlier in this century who, in a par-
ticularly extreme form, 'lived an experience that is typical of many
other Italian writers of the Novecento: that of the voyage, of "errancy,"
and, in some cases, of exile.' He mentions Calvino as a more recent
example: 'Calvino ligure-torinese-parigino-romano' (Calvino Ligurian-
Turinese-Parisian-Roman), and concludes that whether 'isolated' or
'wandering/ Italian writers like these reveal 'the sense of an unease, of
a restlessness, that continues to assail Italian writers throughout the
Novecento' (70). We could easily add Celati's name to the list of
'erranti': Celati Emilian-Romagnole, Celati Parisian, Celati English,
Celati American. Yet, unlike Calvino, the younger writer has tended to
remain in that space of dominant Italian literary culture's 'resistance'
to difference, rather than attaining the great stature, fame, and stamp
of approval endowed upon his older semblable by the Institution of
Western Letters. There are many reasons for this, and I do not want to
indulge in invidious comparisons; it is true, however, that Calvino's
centrality is, paradoxically, linked to his 'errancy' among many arenas
232 Gianni Celati
of cultural, literary, and theoretical production and dissemination (the

Turin of Einaudi Publishing, the Paris of Oulipo and then of decon-
structionism, the Rome of fifties' and sixties' establishment and experi-
mental activity both), while Celati's relative 'marginalization' is also
linked to his errancy, but in spaces less powerful and determinant (the
real and figurative 'provinces' of the Anglo-American tradition, which
were not 'in style' in the sixties and seventies as they were in the thir-
ties and forties, and, later, the culture of the Po valley, for example). It
is undeniable, also, that Celati's attitude towards the industry of letters
has always been more openly anti-institutional, and that his long self-
imposed 'exile' from the mainstream publishing scene, from the late
seventies to the mid-eighties, reinforced his profile as an 'eccentric.'
The immense readability of Calvino must also be taken in account.
Celati's work is not reflective of the same 'natural' narrative talents as
Calvino's, remaining more overtly conceptual, and therefore less
immediately engaging for general as well as specialized readers.
Despite the differences in their positions and reception within main-
stream Italian literature, however, Calvino and Celati are both deeply
tied to an 'anthropological' view of writing, whereby the differences
inherent in human spaces, times, and voices are tapped into, brought
to light, and made, through their words, a 'rendering of the actual, a
vitality phrased.'4
Gamuna: Utopia or Dystopia?
The 'Almanac of Prose,' // Semplice, of which Celati was one of the

founding editors, published its first issue in September 1995. The intro-
ductory 'Catalogue of prose according to types' listed fifty-three of a
potentially 'limitless' inventory of prose types, of which the very first
was 'Etnografie e popolazioni immaginate' (Ethnographies and imag-
ined populations). In the January 1996 second issue, Celati's story,
'Fata Morgana,' appeared under this rubric. Part of a longer work-in-
progress entitled Fata Morgana: Notizie sul popolo del Gamuna (Fata Mor-
gana: News on the Gamuna people), a second part was published
under this title in Altofragile: Foglio di scrittura in February 1997. These
stories are made-up ethnographic portraits of the land, language, and
customs of the fictional 'Gamuna/ written as if from the objective point
of view of the anthropological researcher dedicated to providing as
complete a description as possible of a virtually unknown culture.
What we learn of these people is, however, anything but prosaic, for
their world is filled with amazing and disturbing elements that cumu-
latively add up to a powerfully destabilizing reverse reflection of our
own contemporary Western practices and beliefs. Celati has 'traveled'
to this far-off land while seated at his writing desk, and he 'brings
back' to us a report that is as detailed and concrete as it is fantastical
and poetical.
Tata Morgana' is divided into six parts; the first, 'Le allucinazioni
del deserto' (Hallucinations of the desert) begins with a description of
the geography of Gamuna: 'At four hundred kilometers from the sea
toward the North-East, a basalt massif closes off the Gamuna territory
from the influences of the coast populations. On the opposite side, a
moor edged by an immense sandy desert separates it from the roads
that lead to the three large cities of the inner regions. The immense
desert can be crossed only with special means of transport, because
here and there it is formed by vast plates of dry and cracked clay that
are capable of turning from one minute to the next into large quag-
mires similar to those which Arabs called "wadi," and dangerous like
"wadi" in springtime' (Tata Morgana'; 15). Quite specific in detail, this
description does not, however, tell us where exactly this landscape is to
be found, although we (Europeans or Americans) would commonly
surmise that it is not part of our known Western spaces, for 'massifs/
'immense deserts/ and 'wadi' immediately conjure up 'Somewhere
Else.' The 'report' tells us next that the Gamunas often venture out to
the edges of the moor, but that they rarely have the courage to climb
even the lowest sections of the massif, for 'they fear heights like no
other people in the world, and they are seized by upsetting vertigo if
they so much as contemplate the world from the top of a hill' (15). The
explanation of this extreme fear of heights leads into a retelling of the
foundational myth of the Gamuna, centered on the hero Eber Eber. The
Gamuna feel dizzy when they look at the world from an elevated posi-
tion because it seems to them that 'everything below is a sole, contin-
ual illusion (fenomeno di fata morgana) and that every form of life on
earth is nothing other than this kind of mirage.' The myth of Eber Eber
supports this idea of the world, for this hero came from the sea in the
guise of a laughing mosquito who could 'use the phenomena of desert
hallucinations against his enemies' by making everything 'buzz' and
'tremble in desert uncertainty like apparitions of a Morgan le Fey' (16).
(In the story 'Com'e cominciato tutto quanto esiste' [How everything
that exists began], included in Nanatori delle pianure, Celati recounts
another myth of the world's foundation. However, there, also, mosqui-
234 Gianni Celati
toes are important, for they are 'the dead who come back.') The conclu-
sion of this myth was reconstructed by one Augustin Bonetti, an
Argentine colonel and pilot, who was in his time considered to be the
leading expert on Gamuna life. According to Bonetti's account, Eber
Eber lived to an advanced age in the form of a mosquito but, having no
more enemies to confound, he became quite bored. He flew up to the
highest clouds on the wings of a migratory bird in order to look over
the world below; when he got high up, however, 'an overwhelming
vertigo made him plummet to his death on earth/ He was resuscitated
as a young bearded man who now wished to have a banquet with his
dead enemies, whom he called to himself with his powerful laugh. The
enemies came running and as they arrived they said, '"Gamuna!" -
which means "We are here!" (The same word, however, if pronounced
with an evening intonation, means: "We who live here!")/ After the
banquet, Eber Eber went off towards the desert 'with his belly full and
his eyes dancing with laughter, saying that he was going to dissolve
himself into the air like fine, iridescent dust/ This dust and the air's
heat produced in the hero's dead enemies the illusion that they were
alive, and that they had a world full of phantasmagoric visions before
their eyes: 'And this is the illusion from which, according to the
Gamuna, life on earth was born, [life] which is destined to last only for
that very brief moment when the sun's rays make some tiny grain of
desert dust shine in the air/ In spite of the long-ago past when the sen-
sible world was born and the far-off future when this mirage will dis-
appear, for the Gamuna there is only a very brief period of time that
they call 'scintilla d'iridescenza' (scintilla of iridescence), and 'all the
sensible images of any era whatsoever are therefore magical reflections
of this momentary iridescence' (quotations above from 'Fata Morgana';
16-17). Celati gives us a vision of a culture founded on evanescence
and illusion; recognizing this, the Gamuna avoid aerial views of the
world (gazes of dominance and mastery, we might say), for such views
only produce distressing vertigo. By contrast, it is implied that our
Western cultures seek out high positions from which to look at and
define the world, unable or unwilling to remain within the low spaces
of ephemera that appear and disappear: the spaces of the visible, of
light and shadow, of contingent, ever-changing shapes, and of even-
tual death.
The next section of the story, 'Origine dei Gamuna' (Origin of the
Gamuna), tells us of the 'very particular' language spoken by these
mysterious people. The narrator-ethnographer informs us that no-one
knows where they came from, nor can it be said to which ethnic group
they belong. Studies of their dialect have helped little in ascertaining
anything definite about their origins and ethnicity, but, once more, a
detailed description of it is offered. The language is tonal, like Chinese,
and outsiders often have the sense that the Gamuna people 'do not
know what they are talking about, that is, they seem only to listen to
the melody of phrases without attempting to understand what others
might be trying to express/ This impression is due in large part to
the fact that when a Gamuna listens to another person speaking, the
former 'hums a motif that is in tune with the vocalic harmonies of the
latter, a motif that underlines the speaker's state of mind and the musi-
cal tempo being used/ We are told that every conversation essentially
depends on these things, and every sentence is a little musical piece
that the listener already knows or 'that he can very well pretend to
know' (quotations above from 'Fata Morgana'; 17). For a writer like
Celati, who has always been extremely attuned to the aural aspect of
language (the 'sound' or 'music' produced by certain tonalities), the
language of the Gamuna people is, in some sense, utopic. It is basically
a sound, received by others who are attuned to distinguish the affective
component of different tones and who get themselves 'in tune' with
their co-speakers without worrying about 'meaning' or 'content/ We
are thus brought back to one of Celati's major preoccupations as a
writer: that his readers hear and attune themselves to his texts rather
than look in them for messages or fixed interpretations of the world. In
addition to the conventionality of linguistic exchange of which we are
all a part (the Wittgensteinian perspective seen in Celati's work on Bar-
tleby, for example), here there is also a continued emphasis on the
sheer 'music' of speech, such as can be seen in so much of Celati's work
on the oral and spoken aspects of literary writing.5
This 'report' on the Gamuna, ostensibly objective reportage, is, in fact,
an implicit metatextual meditation on the limits of any such 'factual'
documentation, and, in its own matter-of-fact tonality, which clashes
with the fantastic elements that make up Gamuna life, it is a parodistic
exercise in the very ethnographic genre it imitates. It is also a portrait
of our 'here and now' by means of the representation of the Gamuna's
radical 'thereness/ The apparently dystopic quality of their (and, by
analogy, our) everyday life is introduced in the third section, called
'L'incanto greve' (The oppressive enchantment), in which we learn that
the capital city of Gamuna is much like 'a bit of displaced periphery of
any old European or American city/ The city is filled with crumbling
236 Gianni Celati
buildings, abandoned vehicles, and old light posts with dangling

wires; above all, it produces an intense sense of desolation and oppres-
siveness, as if it were located in a place 'of a very intense magnetic
field.' Everything 'seems to undergo an irresistible attraction down-
ward ... so that even birds often fall to earth as they chirp.' This effect is
due in large part to the vast plains and desert spaces that stretch out
around the city in all directions: an 'excessive space that enfolds every-
thing/ and produces strange optical effects, which underscore the 'lost'
quality of buildings such as the 'little station there in the middle of the
dunes [that] makes visitors feel a great sadness, because of how it
appears to be incurably banal, stupidly lost in the limitless emptiness.'
The sense of sadness is greatly heightened at twilight when 'one sees
groups of young Gamunas wandering about not knowing where to go
as they wait for night to fall.' This scene of urban desolation is
recorded, using the Gamunas' own phrase, as 'the oppressive enchant-
ment' by a Vietnamese nun named Sister Tran, who has lived on the
edge of the moor for many years and has kept a detailed diary of her
impressions of Gamuna life. (As in some other fictions, here Celati also
uses the device of reporting the 'already said or written' by means of
the characters Bonetti and Tran.) Sister Tran is fascinated by the 'power
of desolate places' (la potenza dei luoghi desolati), such as is found in
Gamuna Valley, where 'a fine and iridescent dust' comes from the sur-
rounding desert, covering everything and everyone, endowing all with
an 'obtuse and insignificant appearance.' Although this dust can
entrap one and enter into the eyes if doors and windows are not left
open in order to let it float where it will, and although it can bring 'dis-
turbances that not even medicinal chats can cure/ such as 'the intense
desire never to have been born, the melancholy of days that go by, and
the desire to kill someone in order to feel stronger than others/ if left to
disperse itself freely about, the dust 'spreads a fundamental property
onto all things ... also onto people and animals/ This is the 'very great
property of ignoring oneself: that is, to ignore oneself as the earth
ignores itself, to entrust oneself to the oppressive enchantment that
drags everything downward, without ever having anything to say and
anything to complain about.' (quotations above from Tata Morgana';
19-21). Thus, what first seems to be negative (insignificance; melan-
choly; aimlessness) becomes instead endowed with positive qualities:
forgetfulness of self; acceptance of caducity; silence. The stories of the
Po valley gave us a similarly open, flat, presumably 'empty' landscape.
Is Gamuna Valley really a far-off 'There'? Is this strange people's exist-
ence - so much like our Western lives lived out in postindustrial waste-
lands - utopic or dystopic?
The term 'potenza/ used by Sister Iran to describe that which fasci-
nates her ('la potenza dei luoghi desolati'), is one that we have encoun-
tered before, in Celati's essay on Bartleby. Here as there, the word
means both 'power' and 'potential/ and points to a passive quality, a
non-activated 'reserve' of the existent. In the desolate spaces of the
Gamuna's world, there is a potentiality brought in on the desert wind;
similarly Celati sees Bartleby's presence as akin to a desert wind that
blows away conventions and stimulates a sense of 'universal frater-
nity.' The Gamuna people thus seem to be relatives of the scrivener;
like him, they give themselves over to the inherent gravity of sheer
presence and the acceptance of having nothing to say. While their com-
munal life and the setting in which they live it out have aspects of a
miserable dystopia - a decrepit capital city, an inhospitable landscape,
the dust that covers all - there is in fact something utopic about their
There/ in contrast to our 'Here.' First, they have absolutely no preten-
sions to creating universalizing and dominating systems of meaning,
and they are content to find comfort in one another's company: 'in cer-
tain streets of Gamuna Valley there are old abandoned Pullmans or
railroad cars that are fixed up as meeting places for adults who might
wish to chat... especially when they most intensely perceive the sense
of stupidity that invades everything' (21). In the fourth section of the
'report/ called Tl grande Wadi' (The great Wadi), we learn, moreover,
that the Gamuna have a spatially conditioned concept of time, which
releases them from any idea of linearity or progress, and thus from any
desire to master anyone or anything. Time is imagined by them as a
great wadi, a 'stagnant pool' in which nothing ever happens except for
'the turning of the seasons.' Life is felt as a fluidity, like the little cur-
rents stirred up in the wadi in springtime, such that they have virtually
no clear idea of coordinates either temporal or spatial. Many scholars
as well as military personnel who have parachuted into Gamuna Val-
ley have tried unsuccessfully to enlist the natives' help in mapping out
the vast terrain, but they soon realize that not only do the Gamuna
have vague concepts about where they are, they also have 'an abso-
lutely aberrant idea of the world in general, [thinking of it as] a bog or
quagmire as useless as it is immobile, in which nothing remarkable
ever happens' (quotations from Tata Morgana'; 22). The Gamuna peo-
ple are thus similar to Bartleby in another way: they passively resist all
attempts at interpretation, thereby stimulating ever more intense and
238 Gianni Celati
anxious probing by scholarly outsiders (in a relation that recalls the

comic 'catatonic-hysteric' couple discussed in an earlier chapter). Their
world, in its unknowability, holds a great 'power' over seekers of
knowledge, for it is seen as containing some mystery, some potential,
the key to which might open doors onto important meanings. Yet,
because the very concept of 'meaning' does not appear to be a part of
their linguistic exchanges or of their overall relation to themselves and
to the existent, they do not offer the needed key. For them, it simply
does not exist.
As the 'report' on the Gamuna people goes on, it becomes more and
more evident that Celati has written not only a sort of parody of the
traditionally objective claims and goals of ethnography, but also yet
another version of his critique of fixed critical codes and scientifically
conditioned views of human existence and of alterity. In his descrip-
tion of the language and the modes of discourse and narration of the
Gamuna, the writer also tells us again about his own ideas regarding
the realm of linguistic exchange and creation. The Gamuna, for exam-
ple, 'if they must tell a story, never speak of events that go by in time,
but only of various places in which someone found himself embraced
by images and mirages' (22). And when they vocalize 'in their noctur-
nal, closed-mouth babble, listening to the arcane vocalic harmony pro-
duced by them according to a very slow tempo, the adult Gamuna
often have a vision of the researchers and other people who come from
the cities inland.' They see these visitors as susceptible also to the
'oppressive enchantment,' but filled with 'inexplicable agitation, as if
they were always waiting for something, as if something had hap-
pened or should happen, and as if they were always anxious and
impatient to witness something new.' Because the idea of 'something
happening' is so alien to the Gamuna, they gently ridicule the research-
ers, calling them 'those who believe that something happened' (23).
The Gamuna population are particularly ill at ease with attempts to
map their valley, for 'they think of maps as gazes (sguardi) from on
high by someone who is no-one, and who therefore dominates places
from outside the spirit of ia, that is, from outside the oppressive
enchantment that moves humans' feet and pulls them downward.'
Like language, the existent is not something to be dominated; rather,
both are a flow into which one enters, as Celati's work has consistently
attempted to show, as he avoids gazes of mastery and fixed meanings.
The fifth section of the piece, 'Studi sui Gamuna' (Studies on
the Gamuna) shows the cruelty that can result from a dominating,
knowledge-seeking orientation to those who are different from us.

Scholars who want to understand 'how the Gamuna might live so tran-
quilly their wretched and stupid life/ even though these researchers
do not know one word of their dialect and understand nothing about
them, have even gone so far as to capture some adult Gamuna, bring
them back to 'civilization/ and implant electrodes connected to a huge
university computer into their cerebral cortex. The goal was to try to
understand the role of the hypothalamus in the Gamuna's lack of
desire to change or to better their lives, but the actual result was that
eight young Gamuna died of heart palpitations; some others escaped
by levitating out of a window, 'a magic trick that the Gamuna use only
when they are really desperate/ Another twenty or so Gamuna people
ended up in an asylum for the insane, where they were subjected to
visual stimulation tests with pictures of cattle (to which they
responded most), cultivated fields, and objects of Western contempo-
rary life such as cars, ships, airplanes, motorcycles, juke boxes, and
dirigibles (to which they responded not at all). Other researchers criti-
cized the 'backward methods' of these experiments, proposing instead
that a contingent of parachutists should be sent into Gamuna territory
in order to gather information. The parachutists, upon arrival, took all
houses into their possession, rounded up people on the streets, and
kicked anyone who strayed onto their path. They then proceeded to
use handkerchiefs to suspend several Gamuna on a huge tree on the
central square of Gamuna Valley, to shout at them, and to point bazoo-
kas at them, hoping to intimidate them into giving information. The
mysterious result of this was that the Gamuna began to laugh and 'to
speak very closely among themselves as if they were in a bar.' Their
musical, humming language produced a soporific effect in the soldiers,
who one by one fell asleep, only to wake up many days later in the
middle of the desert. Upon their return to 'civilization/ the soldiers too
were subjected to tests with electrodes in their brains connected to the
university computer, but no conclusion could be reached as to why this
strange effect occurred. Thus, every attempt, peaceful or otherwise, to
gain knowledge about the Gamuna world was a failure.
One scholar arrived at a possible explanation of the Gamuna's
strange response to the parachutists' inquisition. It seems that these
people do not believe in the idea of justice, and they therefore have no
courts for deciding questions of guilt and innocence. But in the past
there existed a kind of theatrical representation during which they
would stage a fake trial for the entertainment of their people, consist-
240 Gianni Celati
ing precisely in hanging individuals from the tree and having them
interrogated by a fake judge. Celati concludes the section:
E possibile che i Gamuna appesi abbiano creduto d'essere stati assunti

come attori per uno spettacolo del genere, offerto dai paracadutisti a
beneficio della cittadinanza? Questa e la domanda dello studioso. Ma,
come fa notare la sorella Tran nei suoi diari, cosa significa 'abbiano
creduto'? II vento che li scuoteva, 1'ora del giorno, le chiacchiere medici-
nali, 1'incertezza luminosa del crepuscolo: tutto cio in quel momento era
parte dell'incanto greve che riporta ogni cosa a terra, e ti fa essere cio che
sei, secondo il punto dove sei. Dice un vecchio canto gamuna tradotto
dalla sorella Tran: Tu sei cio che sei, non voler essere altro. Ridi di cio che
sei, se non vuoi essere altro.'
(Is it possible that the hanging Gamuna believed that they had been
taken on as actors for a spectacle of this kind, offered by the parachutists
for the benefit of the citizenry? This is the scholar's question. But, as Sister
Tran points out in her diaries, what does 'believed' mean? The wind that
shook them, the hour of the day, the medicinal chats, the luminous uncer-
tainty of the dusk: all in that moment was part of the oppressive enchant-
ment that brings everything back to earth, and makes you what you are,
according to the place where you are. An old Gamuna song translated by
Sister Tran says: 'You are what you are, do not wish to be other. Laugh at
what you are, if you do not wish to be other.') (Quotations above from
part 5, 'Fata Morgana'; 24-7)
Once again Celati thus underlines the absolute contingency and the-
atricality of existence, and the impossibility of endowing specific
events with universal meaning. The Argentine colonel, Augustin
Bonetti, evidently was one of the very few investigators of the Gamuna
to understand this world-view, as the last section, 'II caso Bonetti' (The
Bonetti case) makes clear. The pilot Bonetti had crashed his airplane
forty years previously at the edge of the moor, and there he died. He
published some twenty articles on the Gamuna, in which he pointed
out that one needed only to adapt to their quite unusual habits, the
most important of which is 'to get used to living like a ghost among
ghosts/ In fact, Bonetti insisted in his articles that he had died and
entered into the ta of the Gamuna world, a term indicating a 'kind of
sleep or perpetual catalepsy.' Respectable researchers protested and it
was decided, at the Ninth World Convention dedicated to little-
studied races and populations, that Bonetti must never be quoted in
any university courses or future scientific publications. Nonetheless, it

is to Bonetti that we owe the name 'Gamuna Valley/ in spite of his own
attempts to explain that, according to the Gamuna themselves (whom
he gradually came to understand), 'gamuna ta' actually only means
'we who are here in the ta.' Ta is neither a philosophical concept, nor a
religious doctrine, nor a physiological state, but rather a very common
word signifying 'this/ so that 'gamuna ta' simply means 'we who are
here in this.' Because the Gamuna used the term when referring to the
valley (among many other places in which they might find them-
selves), Bonetti at first mistakenly assumed it meant 'valley/ and so the
'official' name for the territory stuck. Bonetti elaborated a 'painful con-
gerie of interpretations that showed a decidedly altered mental state' in
his effort to explain this ambiguous phrase, but the best explanation
was found in Sister Iran's diaries. She came to understand that one
merely moves through space from one 'this' or presently occupied
place, to another, guided by the oppressive enchantment. She con-
cludes: 'Now I know that there only exist the "this," the here, the now,
the moment and the place in which I am. Now I know that all the rest
is the inconsistent cloud of phantasms that enfold every moment of
our life.' The narrator ends with a return to Bonetti's 'ravings/ in
which the colonel proposed that for the Gamuna 'nothing exists out-
side of the ta, outside of the empty space of the "this," which is filled
up with our presence; nothing exists outside of the desert emptiness
that is always before their eyes.' To the resounding disdain of the scien-
tific community, Bonetti concluded that the term gamuna should thus
properly be rendered as: 'we who are here to take up a place in the
emptiness like desert mirages.' Celati's 'report' terminates with the fol-
lowing: 'One can well understand the disdain of the scientific and aca-
demic world ... above all [because Bonetti] perhaps wished to suggest
that the Gamuna territory was a kind of realm of the dead, populated
with ephemeral souls who raved in the emptiness. But who any longer
believes in such fantasies?' (quotations above from part 6 of Tata Mor-
gana' ['II caso Bonetti']; 27-30).
Celati travels far in his writing about the Gamuna, arriving in the
end at a world-view that is neither positively utopic nor negatively
dystopic, but rather potentially quite accurate, at least insofar as West-
ern technologized global reality is concerned. Although we are told
that this view is not conditioned by philosophy, religion, or even
physiology, it in fact partakes of concepts and elements from all of
these realms, and it adds up to both a description of and a prescription
242 Gianni Celati
for living in today's foundationless, 'placeless' times. The Gamuna

world is disturbing to researchers because it resists placement and
naming, remaining instead a blank space, a 'nonplace.' At first read-
ing, it may seem that the ta, the 'oppressive enchantment/ and other
'strange' elements of Gamuna life could not be farther removed from
contemporary life in Western society (the life lived in Europe and the
United States, for example, and which most of Celati's readers live),
but, upon reconsideration, Gamuna life and late-twentieth-century,
late capitalist, 'postmodern' existence have a compellingly specular
relation. As Peter Kuon has insightfully pointed out in his recent essay
on Celati's Narmtori delle pianure, 'La vita naturale, cosa sarebbe:
Modernitat und Identitat in Gianni Celatis Narratori delle pianure' (Nat-
ural life, what would it be: Modernity and Identity in Celati's Narm-
tori), 'Celati tries to do with narrative means what a movement that is
gaining ground especially in French sociology does under the head-
ings of "ethnologic des societes contemporaries," "anthropologie du
proche," or "invention du quotidien"' (28; translation from the Ger-
man by B. Naess). In these approaches, Western postindustrial society
is studied, as remote, so-called primitive societies have been subjected
in the past to the scrutiny of anthropologists and ethnographers, in
order to arrive at some understanding of the 'proche' (near) of the
'quotidien,' of the everyday here and now in which those doing the
research are themselves living. One of the salient aspects of postmod-
ern contemporary existence is precisely the 'non-lieu' or nonplace:
transitional spaces such as waiting rooms, hotel rooms, train compart-
ments, and the like, where 'people meet temporarily, without being
connected by tradition or identity' (Kuon refers to the work of Marc
Auge, Non-Lieux: Introduction a une anthropologie de la surmodernite, and
discusses the concept of the 'non-lieu' in part V of his essay; 28-9). The
'placelessness' of our so-called advanced societies' everyday life is
inescapable, for modernity has done its work in bringing us to it. The
question is how to deal with it. The Gamuna accept it, indeed they
have no desire to fix their coordinates or to dominate their contin-
gency from on high, while the avid researchers from outside are inca-
pable of recognizing that they themselves are also implicated in the
foundationless, 'nonplace' nature of Western late-capitalist, postmod-
ern existence. As Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe writes in his essay, 'Blankness
as a Signifier/ 'the condition of placelessness is that of the ultimate
mobility, which is capitalism's central theme' (171). We might substi-
tute the term 'evanescence' for Gilbert-Rolfe's 'mobility' as far as the
Gamuna are concerned, but the similarity to contemporary Western

reality still holds.
Celati's modest proposals for dealing with contemporary First
World postmodern existence that is filled with, even dominated by,
'nonspaces' such as cyberspace, are to be found in the stories of every-
day life in the Po valley as well as in the Gamuna piece. These propos-
als are similar to his view of writing as a search for 'fictions in which to
believe.' In Narmtori delle pianure, as Kuon rightly notes, 'only a few of
Celati's characters become desperate or commit suicide. Most of them
come to an arrangement with modernity, in a strange mixture of exact
observation, odd philosophizing, and awkward storytelling' (29). The
Gamuna people's 'medicinal chats' are moments of communality, and
their stories about the researchers are ways for them to share some
understanding of the incomprehensible. Moreover, they immerse
themselves completely in the ephemeral, downward pull of life, living
as if they were in some sense already dead, and accepting that the 'this'
is all they have or will ever have. The affective component of speech
and of shared storytelling is particularly important in the context of
societies in which foundations, traditions, and myths have been
replaced by rapid change, radical skepticism, and resultant isolation,
for stories can 'create continuity in the confusion of contingent every-
day experience and of modes of communication that mediate reality by
means of impersonal signs and billboards' (Kuon; 29). Celati's work,
from the early eighties to today, has been directed towards resuscitat-
ing both the organizational and the affective power (and potential) of
storytelling, as he has cast himself in the role of the keeper of the narra-
tive ritual, one of the few elemental ceremonies remaining to postin-
dustrial civilization that might be of help in living in these bewildering
times. Storytelling counters individual solitude by emphasizing what
we share with past generations (in this it is related to the epic mode
rather than to the modern lyrical mode that sings singularity), and it
can thus generate a sense of 'place' and a certain foundational quality
that might make us more able to bear our shared 'home' in mortality.
In Celati's stories of the eighties and nineties, as I have suggested in
earlier discussions, the limits of mortality are at the basis of a possible
approach to and continuance of both writing and living. His Gamuna
world, like many stories in Narratori, is imbued with a sense of the inev-
itable 'downward' pull of life and of eventual disappearance. Often
readers and critics of the post-Guizzardi Celati have talked of the
'depressing' quality of his more recent fictions, but Celati's reply (in the
244 Gianni Celati
1990 interview with Bob Lumley) is animatedly clear: 'One thing I can't
stand is when people say "Oh, your stories are so melancholy, so
depressing." But I say "Well, look at you, you're so depressing, all of
you, this society is so depressing, but you are depressing exactly
because you refuse melancholy, you refuse death, you refuse this feel-
ing of finitude, the limits, and that's why you're so depressing, you are
very depressing." From my point of view, melancholy is nothing
depressing, it's a very important feeling. It's something vital' (The
Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 47). Like Benjamin, Celati is
fully convinced that melancholy is the main emotion by means of
which we might understand something of human history and of our
own lived lives, and it is heightened by travel, the Shakespearean 'sun-
dry contemplation' of which produces a vital sadness, as one moves
through the spaces and traces of past as well as present life. This
'philosophy of melancholy' obviously conditions the creation of the
Gamuna world and, in addition to the abstract idea of vital melancholy,
in the second part of the annals of the Gamuna there is added the con-
crete physiological component already seen very clearly in the figure of
the old actor Vecchiatto: the decay of the body as it ages and moves
toward death. (Here, too, we might think of Shakespeare's Jaques in As
You Like it who, in addition to his 'most humorous sadness,' also is
known for the 'All the world's a stage' speech, in which the seven ages
of man are recounted and end with old age and death: 'mere oblivion:
sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything'; Act II, Scene vii). This
ineluctable process is connected to the theme of glory, in a story that
could be subtitled 'Sic passit gloria mundi.' The Gamuna people, we are
told, believe that 'the strange desire to attain glory' does not depend on
the individual, but on the same force that pulls everything downward:
the 'oppressive enchantment.' One cannot resist this force until one
becomes old; it is only at an advanced age that 'stories told to glorify
oneself (called "stories of the dog that has mistaken vision") begin to
appear to be things about which one can laugh publicly, and many old
people go about cackling uproariously among themselves' ('Notizie sul
popolo dei Gamuna'; all quotations above and below from this story in
Altofragile; 7). As old age assails the body, making the bones thin out,
the body more fragile, the flesh more flabby, and the blood circulate
less, the Gamuna come to see the ridiculousness of all pretensions to
self-glorification, especially those having to do with physical or sexual
appeal. In fact, the search for glory is primarily a male preoccupation,
related to 'the call of the erect penis/ while, for women, their physical
beauty makes them most prized in the business of matrimony' and

their attractiveness 'serves only to increase the public glory of the male,
but has no other use.' After marriage, however, men and women both
soon lose interest in one another's market appeal, and begin to look for
ways of glorifying themselves outside of the family circle, such as
'assiduous work, or vain chattering, or seductive flirting, until they
become boring and unbearable.' This is why, from middle age on, the
Gamuna people begin to pray every day to 'the Being of Great Repose,
so that It will bring them as quickly as possible to repentance and the
abandonment of youthful impulses.' This repentance is not easily
attained; only a few very old people reach it, and only when their hearts
no longer seek validation from anyone whomsoever.
This parable of the vanity of normative heterosexual, matrimonially
oriented sexual congress (in every sense of the word) can be read as a
retelling of Celati's own trajectory (at least his fictional one), from the
sex-saturated amorous spasms of his early protagonists, especially
'Giovanni' of Lunario del paradiso, who takes off for Germany in quest
of his desired Antje, to his version of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, in
which all the knights are motivated by their 'erect penises' to pursue
the beauty of Angelica, to the more recent stories in Narratori and Quat-
tro novelle, in which Baratto and many other characters are, in middle
age, moving towards the 'Great Repose.' Erotic love is portrayed as
one of life's greatest adventures, but it is finally ephemeral, fundamen-
tally comic, and even dangerous in its power to make us seek to domi-
nate and possess desired others. Being in love is, quite literally as well
as figuratively, a 'trip,' but one that is destined to end up in the inevita-
ble demystification of old age and death. It is perhaps for this reason
that even the most 'carnal' of Celati's writings are imbued with a dis-
tancing self-irony, a raucous comedy, or a mild sadness, and now, with
his Gamuna, Celati openly declares the nullity of 'voglie carnali' (car-
nal desires) and of the 'bollore del sangue' (boiling of the blood) to
which we are all at some point subjected.
If there is for Celati a pathetic, if very human, silliness to the search
for self-glorification and the urges of the flesh, the abandonment of
such pretensions and needs has a movingly tragicomic aspect. Celati
paints an unforgettable word picture of the last phase of life, when the
Gamuna people renounce all that they have sought in order to 'reduce
the results of years and years of work to the so-called substance of "lost
time.'" This they do in a public ceremony under the huge portico on
the main square of Gamuna Valley:
246 Gianni Celati
The oldest and richest inhabitants gather. And there one can often note
someone who, with exhausting negotiations, tries to rid himself of his
own patrimony, or of his renown as a great businessman. He pretends to
make mistakes, he lets himself be deceived, he answers inappropriately,
dissipating in the confusion and bewilderment of these exchanges all his
glory ... Around the portico, women with motley dresses sell [the essence
of the substance known as 'lost time'] in little ampoules, which many old
people buy in order to cure themselves of headaches. Because it is
assumed that 'the essence of lost time' (considered magical) can refresh
the mind and the blood, and thus orient the businessman who might wish
to lose his entire patrimony in a few minutes. The best deals, in this sense,
are those that transform a rich and respected citizen into a total nullity, so
shabby [misero] that when dead he will not even be remembered by those
still alive.
With a wonderful reverse twist on the common function of deal

making - that is, gain - here are a people whose oldest, richest, and
most savvy businessmen use all of their skill at bargaining to rid them-
selves of their prior gains. Certain of these aged citizens are then seen
at dusk going about 'leaping in the mud, dirtied with cow dung, wear-
ing sheep skins and emitting pitiable bleats.' Others with the ridicu-
lous horns of a cow on their heads go about exhibiting their shriveled
genitals in public, 'cackling as if they [genitals] were the most ridicu-
lous thing in the world/ These wretched creatures are, Celati tells us,
'old people who are repenting, by now well on the way to sanctity.'
When, after several months of such public humiliations, their presence
produces 'a special sneer or grimace typical of onlookers/ it means that
these old people can never again find glory and that their entire lives
are summed up as a pure waste of time 'according to the will of the
Being of Great Repose who always toys with us.' This description
tends primarily in the direction of comedy, but the final paragraph of
the story is much less comic, much more delicately sad and poetic. I
quote it in the original:
Soltanto a questo punto si potra avere la certezza che la propria vita sia
stata soltanto un piccolo bagliore d'iridescenza, uno spettacolo a vuoto
come tanti altri, come un'ombra su un muro o come il riverbero dei raggi
del sole su una duna di sabbia. II raggiungimento di tale certezza ispira
canzoni melodiose, che spesso si sentono levarsi di notte ai margini della
brughiera. Quelle canzoni, bellissime ma senza parole comprensibili, sono
fatte in modo che ascoltandole non si sa mai se ridere o commuoversi o

buttarsi per terra. Lo sguardo serale di certi anziani macilenti esprime
questa particolare incertezza, ed e un segno sicuro di santita.
(Only at this point will one be sure that one's own life has been only a lit-
tle glimmer of iridescence, an empty spectacle like so many others, like a
shadow on a wall or the sun's rays bouncing off a sand dune. The attain-
ment of such certainty inspires melodious songs, that are often heard ris-
ing up at night on the edges of the moor. Those songs, very beautiful but
without understandable words, are made in such a way that, listening to
them, one does not know whether to laugh or to be moved or to throw
oneself onto the ground. The evening gaze of certain emaciated old peo-
ple expresses this particular uncertainty, and it is a sure sign of sanctity.)
Thus ends the story of the Gamuna people, who renounce worldly
gain, glory, and self-importance at the end of their lives, accepting that
their existences have been one with the ephemera of the natural world.
Analogously, writing itself is seen in the later Celati as ephemeral; as
Lumley comments, 'it is not that writing should be abandoned ... but
that it should free itself of the literary aura, accepting its own mortality
and ordinariness' (in Baranski and Fertile, 56). In the 'reports' on the
Gamuna, as in much of the Po valley writing and in the essay on Bar-
tleby, there is a reaching towards the external world, understood as our
shared 'Here/ our human dwelling place. Raffaele Manica, in an essay
entitled 'Celati, la follia serena' (Celati, serene madness), points out the
similarity among all these recent writings, and even sees the Gamuna
stories as self-gloss on the Po valley tales that 'ci fa guardare un rac-
conto con un altro racconto' (make us see a story with another story;
618). Manica also refers to Fachinelli's writings on mysticism - which I
discussed in reference to Bartleby in Chapter i - as pertinent to these
tales that propose 'staying on ground level, running toward silence,
trying to cancel out time, being the space that surrounds us' (618). If
there is a 'mystical' or 'religious' quality to these fictions, it is to be
found in the cultivation of certain attitudes - rather than a sure faith in
doctrinal beliefs - such as humility, gentleness, humor, and acceptance
of even the most radical forms of otherness. Lumley again provides an
excellent summary: 'Many of the lessons in living that can be drawn
from Celati's writings seem indebted to religious sources - the need for
humility, awareness of the finitude of human existence, awe before
nature and the cosmos, doubt about the claims of science, exaltation of
ecstatic experience' ('The Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 57).
248 Gianni Celati
But there is nothing preachy or sanctimonious about Celati's writing,

for he relies on a kind of quirky humor, a soft skepticism, and a de-
cidedly postmodern perspective that refuses all direct moralizing.
Another word that applies to Celati's approach to living as portrayed
in his recent fictions is kindness, which Heidegger points out as a term
of fundamental importance in Holderlin's poem about 'dwelling poeti-
cally' in this world. The philosopher writes: '"Kindness" - what is it? A
harmless word, but described by Holderlin with the capitalized epithet
"the Pure." "Kindness" - this word, if we take it literally, is Holderlin's
magnificent translation for the Greek word charis ... As long as this
arrival of kindness endures, so long does man succeed in measuring
himself not unhappily against the godhead' ('Poetically Man Dwells,'
in Poetry, Language, Thought; 228-9). Above and beyond the call to
kindness or caritas, however, it is, finally, the deep restlessness and
loneliness captured in Celati's fictions that I believe hold most reso-
nance and appeal for our age, indeed, are symptomatic of our era. Con-
versely, his emphasis on the inescapable limits of mortality are no
doubt less appealing, for ours are not times when aging, decline, and
death are aspects of life most wish to confront. Never to settle down;
never to root himself in any one system of thought; never to declare
mastery of the self or the world; never to elaborate fictions of immor-
tality: these are Celati's most typical qualities, which are those of the
eternal wanderer, the itinerant artisan of words: our late twentieth-
century's version of the gentle earthly traveler on a pilgrimage
towards disappearance.
Italian Adventures into Otherness
Consisting of nine Taccuini' or Notebooks, Celati's most recent book,

Avventure in Africa, opens with a prefatory notice that informs us that
Celati left on a trip to West Africa in January 1997 in order to accom-
pany his filmmaker friend Jean Talon.6 They went from Mali to Senegal
and Mauritania; initially Talon's intention was 'to study the possibility
of a documentary on the methods of the Dogon healers used in the
Center of Traditional Medicine in Bandiagara, in North Mali/ but these
plans were soon derailed. Celati writes that he is publishing this book,
made up of diaries, 'just as [I] wrote them along the way, with revi-
sions and adaptations in order to make them readable.' He dedicates
them 'to the friends who want to know where we were, and to those
whom we met along the way.' This straightforward, simple presenta-
tion of what follows is in marked contrast to the elaborately metatex-

tual quality of the recent Vecchiatto, and it reveals a zigzag back to the
diaristic 'reportage' mode seen in the 'stories of observation' Verso lafoce
of the Po valley period, as well as to an openly autobiographical
approach as seen (if more obliquely) in the early Lunario del paradiso
and La banda del sospiri, in which Celati's family and friends, and
his own youthful experiences, were at the basis of his fictional re-
elaboration. Here, however, there is not to be found any explicit
'literariness' or fictionalization whatsoever; the Notebooks recount
events, encounters, reactions, thoughts, feelings, and Celati presents
himself as neither a novelistic author nor even a storyteller, but instead
as a filtering voice that carries this record of happenings to us. Obvi-
ously, the happenings are shaped by the narration of them, and Celati's
subjectivity is on center stage inasmuch as his eyes and his words are
the sole controlling instruments by means of which this 'Africa' is
given to us, the readers. Yet, as will be seen in the following discussion,
this is not a text about 'what Africa means to me,' nor about 'how
Africa transformed me,' or any such ego-centered portrait; nor is it in
any sense an attempt at an 'objective' report on the conditions of life,
the politics, or the social realities of West Africa. My goal, then, in the
pages that follow, is to try to capture something of what in fact this
book is, and to argue for why and how it contributes importantly to the
continuation and renewal of Italian prose letters in these final years of
the twentieth century.
Trips of Others into Otherness
Many Italian writers of this century have written about their trips to
far-off lands (including the United States); Pasolini and Moravia are
two writers, for example, for whom Africa was a subject of particular
importance. What is most significant for my purposes here, however, is
the related fact that the modern Italian novel as such does not have as
distinguished a record of production and lasting achievement as in
other European countries, but that Italian writers - like Moravia and
Pasolini, as well as many others of this century who did in fact write
novels - very often wrote as well some form of travel literature. Taking
the issue of Italian travel writing well beyond the confines of the cur-
rent century, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr has recently argued that 'Italian lit-
erature, since Marco Polo and Dante, has always displayed the greatest
mobility across time and space in both geographical and literary
250 Gianni Celati
terms/ with the result that 'the Italian is arguably the most "well trav-
eled" of the Western European literary traditions' ('An Italian Literary
History of Travel'; 55). Cachey contends that the lack of a special cate-
gory for and of particular critical attention to the genre of travel writ-
ing in Italian literary historiography is due to the fact that 'the entire
tradition comprises a literature of travel, and more precisely a litera-
ture of exile/pilgrimage, into which the attachments of its authors to
regional place have been sublimated' (56) in order to sustain a deterri-
torialized and ideally unified Italian literary identity: an idea of 'Italy/
in short. The 'industrial novel' of standardized language and themes
against which Celati rails in so many of his essays can be seen as a con-
temporary manifestation of an age-old phenomenon in the Italian con-
text, then; this sort of novelistic writing is within the precincts of the
linguistic and literary ideals of 'national identity' by which the Italian
canon has been built up and maintained, and reflects a desire for a 'ter-
ritorial' notion of literature that the actual, highly heterogeneous Ital-
ian linguistic and cultural tradition belies. Cachey's goal of showing
the ways in which travel literature is in fact constitutive of all of Italian
literature is not mine, however. My point is more modest, and has to
do with the fact that, at least in this century, the best prose writing is
perhaps to be found in forms other than the strictly novelistic: hybrid
and ostensibly secondary forms such as the autobiographical, the diary
genre, reportage, and travel writing all employ more flexible narrative
techniques and broader linguistic registers than the 'well-made novel/
and they thus add up to a richer, more authentic reflection of the heter-
ogeneity of Italian culture as well as of its regional linguistic diversity.
Travel writing in particular has also provided a means of auto-analysis
and critique of Italian national identity, as journeys into other territo-
ries have allowed for the drawing of analogies with and differences
from the Italian social, political, and cultural scenes. We see this kind of
displaced self-critique in recent Italian film as well; for example, in Ber-
tolucci's Last Emperor or, earlier, in Rossellini's Germany Year Zero and
in Pasolini's Notes for an African Orestes. Real or imagined trips into
spaces of radical otherness - China, India, and Africa having been the
preferred territories of such alterity for contemporary Italian writers -
have been the source in this century of a great quantity of important
artistic creativity in many fields, including writing, film-making, and
design, to name but a few. Celati's writings on the world of the
Gamuna and his Avventure in Africa thus have affinities with a wide
area of Italian cultural production that dates back at least as far as
Marco Polo and which has intensified in the latter half of the waning
twentieth century, especially with the new 'multicultural' reality of an
Italy now imbued with the presence of immigrants from Africa, East-
ern Europe, and elsewhere.7
In order better to understand the ways in which Celati's African book
differs from some other contemporary writers' deployment of the trope
of travel, as well as the ways in which it shares certain of the directions
and results of yet other writers, I want to consider briefly four texts:
Moravia's Un'idea dell'India (An Idea of India) and Malerba's Cina Cina
(China China), from which Celati's book differs in fundamental ways;
and Pasolini's L'Odore dell'India (The Odor of India) and Manganelli's
Esperimento con I'India (Experience [and Experiment] with India), with
which Celati's work shares some important aspects. I am not suggest-
ing that Celati had these particular texts in mind as he wrote Avventure
in Africa; rather, they are used here as examples and counter-examples
from within the same general category of literary travelogues in order
to reveal the originality of Celati's work and the ways in which it trans-
forms an already well-established genre of prose writing that has
appealed to many Italian writers across the Novecento. I might add par-
enthetically that books about travels within Italy (like Celati's Po valley
texts) have also flourished in very recent times, in texts such as Guido
Ceronetti's Viaggio in Italia (1983), Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Un weekend
postmoderno (1990), and Alberto Arbasino's Fratelli d'ltalia (most recent
version published in 1993). Regarding these 'at-home' travel texts,
Davide Papotti has written that the traditional Grand Tour diary genre
has been replaced by a lucidly self-conscious form of writing: that of the
Italian journeying in his own homeland as if it were a foreign space.
These texts take on the 'dare' of finding alternatives to the repetition of
codified touristic and literary modes of representing Italy - to itself and
to outsiders - in order to 'create alternative models for revitalizing a
genre' ('II libro in valigia: eredita odeporiche nel romanzo italiano con-
temporaneo' [The book in a suitcase: hodeoporic inheritances in the
contemporary Italian novel]; 362). The same can be said about recent
travel narratives of journeys beyond the confines of Italy, in which, as in
ethnographic writing, the 'author function' has come to the fore in all of
its strong (and problematic) self-consciousness.
Alberto Moravia's Un'idea dell'India, published in 1962, is the
account of a 1960 trip to India that he made with Pasolini and Elsa
Morante, then Moravia's wife. Pasolini's L'Odore dell'India, also pub-
lished in 1962, is his record of the same trip. First appearing as a series
252 Gianni Celati
of newspaper articles, Moravia's text is, according to Patrick Rumble,

'driven by a sincere and overwhelming desire to understand India, its
economic plight, its cultural and linguistic diversity, its religious and
caste stratifications from a responsible marxist perspective' ('Ideas vs.
Odors of India: Third Worlds in Moravia and Pasolini, with a Post-
script on Manganelli'; 195). The wish to capture an 'idea' of India, to
master its historical, political, and cultural complexities, results in a
text filled with facts, data, detailed information; the Marxist hope of
finding a progressive story that leads towards a just society dominates
Moravia's narrative and enables him to see a connection between
India's national formation and independence and that of Italy. The text
is 'self-conscious/ then, at least as regards analogies of national iden-
tity formations. However, as Rumble rightly notes, Moravia's 'own
perspective or narrating point of view is never brought into focus.
Throughout the text, he avoids any mentioning of his own physical
comfort, or of the circumstances of the voyage. He will never mention
his traveling companions, Pasolini or Morante' (196). Moravia main-
tains a 'from-on-high,' intellectualizing perspective (what, Rumble
reminds us, Mary Louise Pratt calls the '"monarch-of-all-I-see" per-
spective ... reminiscent of Victorian travelogues' [198]) that must
perforce exclude any and all references to his own bodily frailties or to
the possible limits of his conceptualizing powers. It is wrong to see in
Moravia's text a lack of sincere sympathy for the tribulations of Indi-
ans both past and present, yet his 'colonizing gaze' holds dangers of
which he appears to be unaware. The T and the 'eye' are both univer-
salized, according to the ostensibly neutral, phallocentric, Eurocentric
white male model, and the narrative voice is that of the unassailable
pedagogue and disembodied, 'objective' mind.
Luigi Malerba's Cina Cina, published in 1985, originated in a 1980
trip he took to China as part of a delegation of Italian writers, includ-
ing the poets Vittorio Sereni and Mario Luzi and the writer and critic
Alberto Arbasino. In his introductory 'Author's Note,' Malerba re-
minds us that he has already published a book of stories set in China
(the 1974 collection, Le rose imperiali), although at that time he had
never been to China, and the country was above all 'Oriente, 1'altra
meta del mondo, ma soprattutto un Altrove Letterario dove potevano
depositarsi le mie invenzioni, favole e mitologie inevase' (the Orient,
the other half of the world, but above all a Literary Elsewhere where
my current inventions, fables and mythologies could be deposited; 13).
Malerba goes on to tell us that, before leaving for the trip, he wrote in a
short article published in the Corners della Sera that he did not want to
write a book about China upon his return and, in fact, Cina Cina is not a
book but rather 'a series of minuscule investigations and conjectures
that have neither the structure nor the physical dimension of a book.'
He further declares that he did not want the trip to lead him to deny in
any way his already existing 'mental, literary and emotional relation-
ship' with the then unseen China, which he calls 'a relationship
already acquired, a closed, far-off chapter' (17). Malerba does acquire
some knowledge about real historical and current post-Mao China as a
result of the trip, but Cina Cina remains above all a China of metatex-
tual space in which the usual Malerbian literary techniques of irony,
humor, paradox, and questioning of the very concept of 'reality' reign
supreme. The text consists of seventy-seven brief prose pieces in which
some aspect of Chinese history, current practice, or belief is considered,
most often through the lens of the author's thought-provoking humor.
Malerba also includes epigrams, short poetical compositions that,
again, rely mainly on paradox and humor. For example, there is an epi-
gram entitled 'Banane come uomini' (Bananas like people) that goes:
'Le banane di Canton / sono corte / sono gialle / si producono a mil-
ion' (The bananas of Canton / are little / are yellow / are produced by
the millions); another, 'Davanti al mausoleo di Mao' (In front of Mao's
mausoleum) reads: 'Corre voce che Xiao / Vuole sfrattare Mao / Dal
suo mausoleo / e Mao per dispetto / Si e mezzo putrefatto' (There's a
rumor that Xiao / wants to throw Mao out / of his mausoleum / and
Mao for spite / has half putrified himself). Cina Cina is, as Romano
Luperini writes in his introductory note, finally a portrait of China as
an 'allegory of ... alterity, of the abyss that has opened up between
"name" and "thing"' (8). The book has more to do with Malerba's typ-
ical preoccupation with the difficulties of representing any reality (real-
ity is itself always in question), his penchant for paradox and humor,
and his preference for linguistic play than with China as a real terri-
tory; it is, in short, a supremely literary text.
Celati's Avventure in Africa is, as might be expected, far removed
from Moravia's goal of putting into words his masterful, basically
politically driven 'idea' of India, and it is also distant from Malerba's
fundamentally self-conscious literary approach to an 'idea' of China
that he wishes to preserve as a metatextual space - although Avventure
in Africa has some affinities with this latter approach that I shall com-
ment on when considering Manganelli's book on India, a metatextual
tour deforce. To conclude this rapid glance at other examples of recent
254 Gianni Celati
travel writing, let me turn briefly to Pasolini's L'Odore dell'lndia. Origi-

nating in the same trip as Moravia's, it is a very different kind of travel-
ogue, heavily conditioned by Pasolini's emphasis on his own body and
his sense-oriented absorption of India (hence the 'odor' of the title).
Rumble again provides a good description of the goals of the project:
The travelogue reader's horizon of expectations, his voyeuristic
desires for a keyhole through which to peer, from a safe and unseen
location, onto the "primal scene" of the Third World ... are simulta-
neously raised and denied. In the place of observation is a constant
documentation of the status of the observer: descriptions of Pasolini's
own discomfort with his role, and constant references to the material
and emotional circumstances of his journey' (195). Pasolini's love for
spaces and people as yet untouched and untainted by First World
'progress' in the form of highly developed capitalistic systems (seen in
his written and cinematic portraits of sub-proletarian Rome as well) is
evident not only in this book, but also in his film work dealing with
Africa and India, in which the 'primitive,' sensual opacity and inno-
cence of the Third World are represented as having a positive value
lost to First World society. In spite of the great differences in Moravia's
and Pasolini's portraits of their shared trip to India, both are ultimately
politically motivated and explicitly or implicitly they argue for a his-
toricist perspective on a 'prehistorical' reality. Both therefore pose all of
the problems inherent in such an orientation to otherness: the assump-
tion of 'backwardness' versus 'progress'; of 'primitive' them versus
'advanced' us; of a strict division between the 'bodily' and the 'ratio-
nal.' The message rather than the narrative form itself is the main focus
for both writers, in spite of Pasolini's self-consciousness as an observ-
ing outsider. What Pasolini's text does have in common with Celati's
are the emphasis on the permeable body as it is touched by ever-
changing sights, sounds, and smells, and the writer's refusal to shape
his experiences into a linear, logically driven story.
Giorgio Manganelli's Esperimento con I'lndia was written shortly after
his 1975 trip to India but not published until 1992, two years after the
author's death. The introductory pages establish the metaliterary ori-
entation of the writer (who, after all, insisted throughout his career that
literature is solely about itself and uniquely ruled by the 'God' of rhet-
oric) in an imagined dialogue with an alter ego who is about to depart
for a trip to India. This constitutionally lugubrious chap has been read-
ing the Bhagavadgita, has probably read Hesse's Siddhartha, and he
states that he could 'tear up his ticket... and still have a trip to recount,'
so assiduously has he immersed himself in the literary lore of India

(11-12). Manganelli's narrative proper assumes the first-person voice
and opens with a description of his thoughts while still on the airplane.
He ruminates about his preconceptions of India, all founded on books.
Siddhartha is 'a book full of poetry and of an elegant profundity/ but is
the spiritualized, luminous portrait of India that it paints true? The
narrator asks himself: 'Will India be like that? Reading Hesse's book,
one forgets that excrement exists. This seems noble but, in the long run,
is it honest?' (16-17). As he continues to 'leaf mentally through [his]
modest library [on India]/ stereotypical images dance before his eyes,
of a country made up of reincarnations, the perfume of sandalwood,
lepers, gods, and the immortal Absolute. More and more upset, he
realizes that he wants 'India, not ambiguous, perhaps mediocre litera-
ture/ and, in a mood now of defiance, he thinks: 'All we Europeans
die, my dear Absolute' (20-1). With this thought in mind, he feels the
plane descending and sees the first lights of Bombay.
A writer who always plays on the oxymoronic juxtaposition of the
'high' and the 'low' (we remember that his first fictional work is enti-
tled Hilarotragoedia or 'comic-tragedy'), Manganelli is invaded by an
awareness of the dense, excremental quality of Bombay, which is car-
ried on the 'tropical, watery, soft ... urine-embittered air' that assails
him immediately when he walks out of the airport. This portrait of a
corporeal, lower-body ambience stimulates an ever more abstract,
mental response, however, as Manganelli writes of his sense that
hygienic 'Europe sinks back behind [his] back' as he penetrates into
and is penetrated by 'this world so superbly invaded by its own ter-
restrial essence' (25). He both revels in and is made anxious by the
literally overwhelming materiality of India, which clashes with the
bookish abstractions by which he has formerly 'known' the country.
Like Pasolini, Manganelli is a body permeated by insinuating odors,
more specifically by an all-enveloping air that actively enfolds him,
while he struggles to remain a mind capable of processing and narrat-
ing his sensations and his thoughts. Significantly, this close, inescap-
able contact with externality in all of its sensual presence results in a
clear, light prose style; this in an author - the Manganelli best known
as an author of 'literature about itself - who is famous for his baroque
convolutions and an almost ponderous tendency towards extreme styl-
ization. The prose of Esperimento con I'India flows, carried on the cur-
rent, with an 'airborne' quality that reaches a transparency seldom
found in this master of rhetorical complication. This transparency is in
256 Gianni Celati
striking contrast to the opacity of his subject, India itself, which

remains radically and seductively unknowable. In the end, Manganelli
abandons his literary (and metaliterary) pretensions in favor of
descriptions both of sights and sounds and of his own state of being,
which is primarily one of deep anxiety brought on by India's power to
upset all of his Western (and literary) views on it. When asked by an
Italian friend if he loves India (presumably upon his return), he writes
in response at the very end of the book: 'I do not know what to answer.
In India I met a fear close to death; I met an agile and impossible
seduction; I saw eyes wide-open and without pupils, gods on swings, I
saw monsters and lepers, I brushed up against the warehouse of souls.
Everything fluctuates between madness and revelation. Everything is
easy and untouchable. Innumerable times I met with traces of Siva, the
multiple god, who creates and destroys, the millenarian dancer
enclosed in the magic wheel. "I am poor," says an ancient poem for
Siva, "my legs are his columns, my head is a golden dome. Solid and
immobile things fall to ruin, that which has no remains goes on intact."
Perhaps it is now time to begin to deal with India' (104).
It is true that, as Rumble writes, 'Bombay, Calcutta, Goa, Madras, all
become the backdrop for the spectacle of his "anxiety": "Sono a
Madras e sto male ... La mia competenza in angosce si trova di fronte a
qualcosa di inedito/" As Lyotard might say, this anxiety is the 'product
of contact with the "inhuman," a sensation of the presence of some-
thing unsayable' (2O2).8 Yet it is also true that, 'unsayable' as India
might be, Manganelli writes an uncommonly lucid account of a trip
through the real and material oxymoron of an ungraspable country
('low-high/ 'sensual-abstract,' 'body-soul'), a living oxymoron that
rivals the immaterial figure of speech that is so pervasive in his body of
fictional work. More than the emphasis on the body (as seen in Paso-
lini), it is, therefore, the clarity and lightness of his prose that provide a
point of similarity with Celati's book, which is also a flowing prose
record of a trip through a transforming, utterly absorbing externality.
In addition, Manganelli's recourse to the poem for Siva as a summa-
tion of his experience, in which the ephemeral nature of 'solid and
immobile things' - monuments, in short - is contrasted to the persis-
tence of unfixable, disappearing phenomena, takes us squarely into a
Celatian perspective, which will be reiterated in Avventure in Africa.
These diverse travel books are only a minimal sampling of the wealth
of such texts by this century's Italian writers. They provide a backdrop
and a by-now well-established tradition against which Celati's latest
book can be placed for the purpose of comparison and contrast. The
contemporary travelogue is typically both about other lands and not
about them, but rather about an idea of Italian national identity and his-
tory, or narrative subjectivity, or political and/or philosophical ideas.
The contemporary proliferation of such texts confirms our postmodern
fascination with space, and with spatial metaphors and contextualiza-
tions of thought, in contrast to the temporal, historicizing tendencies of
earlier eras. Yet they also reflect a fascination with travel, displacement,
and errancy that is at least as old as the expulsion from the 'home' of
Eden into the alterity of 'East of Eden/ It is not at all surprising that
critic and fiction writer Maria Corti has dedicated much study to the
figure of Ulysses and is greatly attached to the critical metaphor of the
'textual voyage/ which she elaborates upon in her study of the same
name, as well as in her manuals // cammino della lettura (The path of
reading) and Viaggio ml '900 (Voyage in the Twentieth Century). The
great classical figure of heroic wandering and the writer's valiant voy-
age in the territory of words both lend themselves to infinite imagina-
tive, creative, and theoretical trips. Ulysses and the contemporary
writer alike may choose an itinerary, but multitudinous 'adventures'
intervene to modify those choices; as Corti writes: 'one chooses a route,
but not the adventures that occur during a voyage' (// viaggio testuale; 5).
Celati's version of a travel book records an actual, chosen trip that is
soon changed into a quite different series of adventures; it is character-
ized by its author as a gift given to 'friends who want to know where
we were, and to those whom we met along the way/ It is thus a means
of sharing not the unfolding of a preplanned itinerary but rather the
unexpected adventures, bringing them to others who were not there or
recording them for those who participated in them. It is, therefore, a
written trace of lived adventures, a 'textual voyage' the words of which
faithfully follow the physical spaces of a part of the existent world
through which the writer actually meandered. And it asks us, finally,
again to ponder the questions: Do texts make the world according to an
intentional 'travel plan/ or does the world control our representations
of it by means of unforeseen 'adventures'? Do we write ourselves into
the world, or are we ourselves 'written' by existence?
In Search of Lost Grace: African Adventures
In Celati's unpublished essay discussed above, 'Rituali di racconto/ he

writes of the enormous sense of liberation he found when he sue-
258 Gianni Celati
ceeded in writing in a state of self-forgetfulness. This 'involuntary'

state is, as critic Carla Benedetti has pointed out in 'Celati e le poetiche
della grazia' (Celati and the poetics of grace), comparable to Ben-
jamin's definition of Robert Walser's writing as 'the most perfect
fusion of the involuntary, and supreme intention/ as well as to
Schiller's concept of grace as 'the union of the voluntary and the invol-
untary' (quoted in Benedetti, 'Celati e le poetiche della grazia'; 19). In
invoking the term 'grace,' Benedetti is aware that she is undertaking to
explore a concept that has all but disappeared in contemporary critical
and theoretical debates: 'Of the three fundamental aesthetic concepts,
beauty, the sublime and grace, only the last would seem to have defini-
tively disappeared from modern theories of art' (7). She wishes to
explore the concept, however, because some contemporary writers
have brought it back to our attention, and among these none so insis-
tently as Gianni Celati.9 A term of complex semantic range, 'grace'
pops up in Celati's recent essays and fiction and is implicit in much of
his writing of the last decade, including the most recent Avventure in
Africa, so that the idea of a Celatian 'poetics of grace' that Benedetti
identifies and analyzes is not only accurate but indeed essential to
understanding what he is attempting to do in this latest work.
Why should the concept of 'grace' be allied to a travel book? If
understood as a naturalness that flows out of a perfect union between
the voluntary and the involuntary, grace in writing is forwarded by
being immersed in the flow of happenings that make up a trip, espe-
cially one that does not stick to a planned trajectory and instead gives
itself over to adventures - advenire or 'what comes next.' We have
already seen Celati's preference for writing while literally on the road
in his Po valley Verso la foce, as well as his delight in texts such as
Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, in which writing follows the zigzagging
lines of ever-surprising and diverse adventures. The aim in Celati's
recent writing is to reach a state in which the self is virtually entirely
forgotten and the world 'recounts itself/ so to speak, a state that is
greatly enhanced by movement through spaces filled with happenings
beyond the control of the observer/writer. For Benjamin, boredom or
relaxation could produce the same effect; for Peter Handke, fatigue
brings about a loosening of intentions and a subsequently freer, more
'graceful' writing. Clearly, both boredom and fatigue are common
effects of being on the road in a sustained manner. However, it is
Celati's desire to resuscitate the figure of the storyteller, as opposed to
the contemporary 'industrial' novelist, that most motivates him; the
storyteller understood in Walter Benjamin's terms (which are implicit

in Celati's) was imagined by the people to whom he told his tales as a
traveler, 'someone who has come from afar' (The Storyteller'; 84),
bearing his gift of experiences made into tales told by others before
him whom he has encountered in the wide world, and by himself in
his own versions. If the past societal structures of trade that flourished
in the Middle Ages, according to Benjamin, whereby journeymen trav-
eled about before settling down to become resident master craftsmen,
created the ideal environment for the flourishing of the storyteller,
modern society has all but destroyed the possibility of continuing life
for this essential figure of primarily oral culture. Celati and some few
others who seek to revivify storytelling today no longer find a 'natural'
humus out of which it might grow, and must instead elaborate writing
strategies and create situations for themselves by means of which they
might tap back into a storytelling 'reserve' that has not yet entirely
been made extinct. Celati's search for the lost 'grace' of the natural
storyteller has led him to become more assiduously a 'journeyman,'
this, in a curious reversal, after having already developed his skills as a
'resident master craftsman' through his dedication to learning the arti-
sanal work of writing over many long years of more sedentary study
and practice. Thus, travel and writing are intimately bound up one in
the other, and it is the lost 'grace' of a 'natural' form of narration, not
the mastery of a particular foreign space, that is sought and expressed
in Avventure in Africa.
The aesthetic concept of 'grace,' which is in the recent Celati a poet-
ics and a mode of writing, is not entirely without traces of its tradi-
tional religious meaning in his work. Nor is it without a more broadly
cultural and socio-political potential. In theological doctrine, grace is a
gift freely given by God and it serves to bring us to salvation in spite of
our fallen nature. Bartleby and Celati's own Baratto are figures
'touched by grace'; in the first case, the scrivener opens out a vision of
the 'infinite fraternity' of all existing things for the lawyer (and
through him for us), while in the second the gym teacher succeeds in
forming a sense of solidarity with other human beings such as his
lonely neighbors and the Japanese widow. Ultimate salvation in a dog-
matic sense is not a part of Celati's 'religiosity,' then; rather, his writing
seeks to forward a faith in the positive effects of communality and of
shared mortality, which might 'save' us from the terrors of living and
the anguish of an ever more insidious loneliness in a global reality
dominated by cold technologies and even colder faithlessness. Next,
260 Gianni Celati
the cultural and socio-political implications of texts based on a 'poetics

of grace' are many-fold. In terms of the Italian literary and academic
culture industry, such writing is clearly transgressive and even 'scan-
dalous' in its muting of the importance of the Author figure, its refusal
of 'relevant' themes or 'incisive' portraits of reality, and its equally
strong rejection of academic critical approaches that seek out and
apply methods of analysis focused on literary strategies, literary-
historical facts, ideas of culture, and textuality. Celati's critique of insti-
tutions, be they the powerful instruments of cultural dissemination
such as publishing houses, magazines, television, and newspapers (for
all of which 'newsworthy' and, simply, 'new' products are essential) or
the university Academy, one of the primary functions of which is to
generate and disseminate new knowledge about literature (and about
everything else), is obviously an implicit rejection of those institutions
and, more broadly, of their fundamentally economically driven bases
and raison d'etre. Celati could be seen as a David taking pot-shots at the
Goliath of entrenched First World structures and perspectives, but his
attack is not for that any less sincerely motivated. Of course, there is
the continuing irony of Celati's necessary use of these institutional
instruments in order that his writing be read and its ideas and results
promulgated. The writer's constant attention to academic discourses
coupled with his undisguised disdain for literary critics and profes-
sors, for example, is but one sign of this irony, while his own copious
critical writing makes it an irony to the second degree, for Celati can
'out-professor' us professors! Moreover, his fiction is published by the
important publishing house of Feltrinelli rather than lying unread in a
dusty drawer or merely recited to some few friends for their private
entertainment, as, to give but one famous example, large portions of
Kafka's writings were. Yet, at least in partial response to this paradox
(some might say 'hypocrisy') of the 'rebel' caught in the very net from
which he seeks to escape, we remember that Foucault wrote that 'resis-
tances are all the more real and effective because they are formed right
at the point where relations of power are exercised ... resistance exists
all the more by being in the same place as power' (in Power/Knowledge:
Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77; 142). If a one-time rebel and
'undesirable' (he was barred from entry into the United States for sev-
eral years due to his strong leftist politics), Dario Fo, can be awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature not for the literary excellence of his writ-
ten texts but for the power and significance of his theatrical perfor-
mances based in large part on an ancient oral tradition, then it is not
impossible to imagine a time when some version of Celati's poetics of

grace may be validated and, more importantly, may have some con-
crete effect on the ways in which fiction is made and received - and
given a humanly meaningful place in the dominantly technological
culture of our postmodern world - as we move into the new millen-
nium. As Benedetti comments, Celati's approach to the continuation of
literature's possibilities in both his critical and creative writing is not to
refer constantly to the specific limits and failures of past and current
trends, poetics, or final products, either those of others or his own;
instead, he 'goes decidedly into a sphere that is simultaneously episte-
mological and ethical, philosophical and anthropological. He does not
tell us, for example, that he is returning to pure and simple narration
after decades of the anti-novel, ... he does not tell us which languages
turn out to be the most innovative, or things of this nature: his focus is
an analysis of social communication in our era. Even the degeneration
of the narrative art and the loss of its therapeutic function are
described by him in terms of a global attitude, that of modern man
toward the world' ('Celati e le poetiche della grazia'; 31). Another par-
adox thus emerges: that of a writer for whom the best writing is an
unambitious, modest errancy through language, but whose goal is
nothing short of a global reorientation to the grace (in all senses) of
shared storytelling that we have all but lost.
In spite of the metatextual (and even metaphysical) background for
Avventure in Africa that I have set forth above, it is still a book, like most
travel books, the reading of which tells us an enormous amount about
the actual spaces through which Celati and Talon voyaged. If we did
not already know that Mali is a poor country, where the average life
expectancy is forty-five years; that Mauritania 'is one of the emptiest
countries in the world' with an average life expectancy of forty-seven
years; or that griots or musician-storytellers still roam about Senegal
passing on age-old stories (and that Senegal is 'wealthy compared to
other countries in this region' because of tourism, although average life
expectancy is only slightly better at forty-nine years [data from Adams
et al., The DK Geography of the World]), we come to know these and
other facts about these countries as we read Avventure. But we come to
know them incidentally, through people and occurrences met and expe-
rienced by the two travelers, and not through a fact-oriented exposi-
tion of data. We also learn about what has become virtually a separate
'ethnic group/ that is, contemporary tourists, whose behavior, appear-
ance, and speech are all carefully (and humorously) recorded by Celati,
262 Gianni Celati
himself characterized as one of this ultimately risible 'tribe.' In addi-

tion, Celati elaborates a sort of parallel narrative concerning the adven-
tures in Africa of fictional characters called Cevenini and Ridolfi,
whom he thinks up at one point in the trip. In the fourth Notebook,
part 12, Celati describes the old Italian provincial pair to his friend
Talon: 'Cevenini is half deaf, Ridolfi is blind in one eye and the other
eye is myopic' (80). Back home in their provincial town, Ridolfi had the
habit of regularly going mad every three months, and would break up
all the furniture in his house. His friend Cevenini reads a newspaper
article one day about a famous professor Paponio who has built a Cen-
ter of Medicine in Africa where madness is cured using the magical
methods of African healers. So they take off for Africa, just as Talon
and Celati have taken off with a specific goal in mind, Talon to make a
documentary film about Dogon healers, Celati to assist him in this
project and to learn as well more about the storytelling traditions of
West Africa.
What in fact occurs is a comedy of errors, delays, misinformation,
and wandering about: precisely the sort of trip most beloved of Celati.
Moreover, given the concomitant discomforts (heat, dust, thirst,
exhaustion), this graceful book truly embodies the definition of
'adventures' quoted to me from an unknown source by my friend and
colleague, Slavicist Lisa Crone: 'adventures are hardships seen from an
aesthetic point of view.' Their meandering route provides them with
many encounters with different individuals who become 'main charac-
ters' in the book, and who are sources of fascination, bewilderment,
and affection for Celati. No 'plot,' therefore, provides the motor for this
text; instead, it, like Celati and Talon, zigzags through the existent, pro-
pelled by its own momentum that ends up propelling us readers as
well, as we too soon become enmeshed in the proliferation of sights,
people, and the simple yet compelling moment-by-moment happen-
ings. As I read the book for the first time (before I had even printed it
out from the computer diskette Celati sent to me, and I thought I
would read just the beginning on my computer screen), I literally lost
track of time and space, and I ended up scrolling through the entire
book, so caught up in the text's flow was I; a process of reading that
took several hours and gave me eyestrain (although I had no aware-
ness of any discomfort as I read). This is one of Celati's most fluent and
readable books; it is imbued with grace and, I believe, can put its read-
ers into something like a 'state of grace' understood as pure readerly
pleasure and self-forgetfulness as we swim in the sea of this portion of
the existent. Benedetti rightly notes that when reading some of Celati's
recent stories we 'sometimes notice the artificiality of this lack of arti-
fice, the artificiality of this secondary simplicity that asks us to digest
even the fiction of a narrative suddenly brought back, in the age of
mass media, to its oral and epic sources' ('Celati e le poetiche della gra-
zia'; 31). I agree, but I think that Avventure in Africa succeeds in tran-
scending (or at least in hiding completely) any sign of the 'artificiality
of the lack of artifice' that might mar some recent stories (in Narratori
delle pianure, for example, a collection in which Celati gave us the first
results of his new orientation to simple storytelling). This 'state of
readerly grace' was what drew me to Celati's writing in the first place,
when I read Le avventure di Guizzardi over twenty years ago. Like this
new book of 'avventure,' that early book succeeds in entering into its
own flow and sound (which is very different from that of Avventure in
Africa) so completely that its enormous artifice (the inimitably crazy
and completely invented language of Guizzardi) is utterly hidden. Per-
haps the title that Celati has given to his latest work is an explicit sign
on his part that he himself feels that he has succeeded after many years
in recapturing the 'grace' that fueled Guizzardi's adventures, albeit in
a form of narration that is, in its simplicity and lack of self-conscious
literariness, light years away from that early masterpiece. If my experi-
ence of its captivating readability is any indication, this is without a
doubt the book in which Celati has succeeded in freeing himself from
any conceptually driven residue, and it is, therefore, not only a culmi-
nation of his research into and practice of ancient modes of storytelling
beginning with the Po valley work of the early eighties, but also a
recapturing of that state of self-forgetfulness that he briefly found as a
very young man and subsequently lost.10
The trip to Africa was 'transforming/ as trips can be, not primarily
because of any factual knowledge it brought, but because of what it
helped Celati to stop actively seeking, so that it might be given to him:
the perfect union of the voluntary and the involuntary known as grace.
Like the Renaissance ideal of 'sprezzatura/ however, grace-filled writ-
ing is attained by an arduous process of internalization, cultivation, and
discipline. In the case of the courtier, the entire self was shaped into a
'naturally' elegant, well-spoken, and 'spontaneous' specimen of court-
liness, while in the case of Celati, it is the craft of writing that is honed
by constant artisanal work so that eventually it takes on a naturalness
and a spontaneity internal to its practitioner. In an interview, Celati
commented that 'discipline is the search for a condition of grace, and it
264 Gianni Celati
is this that counts in the end' (quoted in Benedetti, 7, from a July 1991
piece in the journal TIndice dei libri del mese' entitled 'Non fatti, ma
parole! Gianni Celati risponde a Franco Marenco' [Not facts, but words!
Celati responds to Franco Marenco]). As 'undisciplined' and disorga-
nized as the trip itself is, the record of it, now shaped into Avventure in
Africa, is the end result of a writerly discipline sustained'over the last
three decades and essential to the grace-filled writing we now have.
Because I see the primary achievement of this book in its wonderfully
flowing, 'naturally' simple prose and in its overall graceful momentum,
I believe that it is especially difficult to perform a detailed analysis
upon it, taking apart its fluency, so to speak, and thus going against the
very essence of flow, which is its continuous, precisely unanalyzable
nature. In conclusion I choose, therefore, simply to highlight some of
the recurring themes and to quote a few passages in which Celati's
graceful writing and benevolent perspective are clear. I use the term
'benevolence' as a kind of synonym of 'grace/ in the sense that both can
mean 'good will,' and not as an indication of any manner of charitable
condescension towards others.11 First, there is the theme of writing
itself (the metatextual element), introduced in Part 2 of the first Note-
book: 'In order not to consider myself on vacation I must write every
day, as if I were at home, working therefore as usual, but temporarily
dislocated to a concentration camp for tourists.' Throughout the Note-
books, there are references to his writing while on a bus, while seated
under a tree waiting for his friend Talon, while on a train; there are as
well references to the interest it stimulates in observers, who want to
know what he is doing and why, who he is, if he is famous. Because
much of the book is written in the present tense, the events of the trip
and the text itself are practically coterminous, thus creating a strong
sense of immediacy and immersion: a kind of 'you are there' quality
that is essential to the readerly appeal of the book. The Notebooks take
on the aspect of a running 'conversation' with Celati as he makes obser-
vations, ruminates on diverse topics, fantasizes; all in a narrative voice
that is as close to a spoken voice as possible.
Another running theme is that of the life of tourists, who in these
areas of Africa for the most part stand out as a minority of whites in a
world of blacks. The reference to a 'concentration camp for tourists'
quoted above is followed by this passage:
Siamo nell'albergo intitolato hotel de 1'Amitie e mi chiedo di che razza

d'amitie si tratta. I turisti qui sequestrati si capisce al volo che non hanno
nessuna voglia di parlarsi e neanche di vedersi 1'un con 1'altro. In ascen-

sore non sanno dove mettere gli occhi, fare amicizie sembra proibito ... Ma
piu di tutto ci prende alia sprovvista il fatto d'essere bianchi. Perche
siamo qui a rappresentare non quello che siamo o crediamo d'essere, ma
quello che dovremmo essere in quanto bianchi (ricchi, potenti, moderni,
compratori di tutto). E portiamo in giro questa rappresentazione come
uno scafandro, ognuno nel suo scafandro che lo isola dal mondo esterno.
A Jean e venuta quasi una fissazione, e appena vede dei turisti comincia a
ripetermi una parola che s'e inventata: 'Guarda i pingoni bianchi, noi
siamo cosi.' Ha anche scoperto che la regola dei pingoni e di far finta di
non vedersi quando si incrociano per strada, precisamente come fanno i
clienti nell'hotel de 1'Amitie (Notebook I, part 2; 10-11).
(We are in the hotel entitled hotel de 1'Amitie [hotel of friendship] and I
ask myself what possible kind of amitie it might be. The tourists seques-
tered here, one understands right away, have no desire whatsoever to
speak to one another and not even to see one another. In the elevator they
don't know where to put their eyes, getting friendly seems prohibited ...
But above all the fact of being white grabs us by surprise. Because we are
here to represent not what we are or believe ourselves to be, but what we
ought to be as whites (rich, powerful, modern, buyers of everything). And
we carry this representation around with us like a diving suit, each in his
diving suit that isolates him from the external world. Jean has taken on a
quasi-obsession, and as soon as he sees some tourists he begins to repeat
a word to me that he has invented for himself: 'Look at the white
"pingoni," we're like that.' He has also discovered that the rule of the
'pingoni' is to pretend not to see one another when they cross paths on
the street, precisely as the clients of the hotel de 1'Amitie do.)
Throughout the book the rigid protection of privacy and the self-
enclosing unfriendliness of tourists (the opposite of presumed 'good
will') are contrasted with the at least apparently friendly openness of
the native people the travelers meet up with. Celati is not unaware of
the fact that a good deal of the behavior of the Africans is motivated by
a desire to 'milk the "pingoni'" of their assumed white wealth, but he
sees this as perfectly consonant with the roles that both the whites and
the blacks have been assigned in the tourist universe. In part 10 of
Notebook I, he writes: 'In the life of a tourist who goes somewhat far
away, I believe that at a certain point rises up of necessity the question:
"But what did I come here to do?" A question that puts into motion the
great cinema of self-justifications, in order not to say to himself seri-
266 Gianni Celati
ously: "I came here to do nothing." Boys like Moussah and Moham-
med are well aware of this, and they must capture their tourist in order
to help him in the work of doing nothing from morning to night.
Because in all the places of the world people always have something to
do, and this is the greatest marvel of the world, the harmony of habits
that no-one has decided, the confused beauty of animation in the cities.
Instead a tourist is a ghost who dangles, estranged outside of that sole
harmonic dream, exactly because he is transported to a place to do
nothing at all, except to spend money' (17). Being 'milked' for money
is, therefore, precisely what tourists should expect - indeed, what they
need if they are to fulfill their 'role,' while the boys who swarm about
trying to sell things to them are fulfilling their role within the 'doing
nothing' universe of tourism.
Celati later notes the resentment of some tourists at being hounded
by street vendors of souvenirs, and their disdain for the implacable
insistence of these sellers of unwanted items, but he sees it all as yet
another 'ceremony' that should be acted out with good will and
humor, even if in his view tourism clearly perpetuates a 'colonial'
structure that has ostensibly disappeared. In part 13 of Notebook I,
filled with 'ponderous discourse' because Celati can find nothing else
to write about on this day of cloudy skies and great heat, he thinks:
'That a colonial regime no longer exists here perhaps is an abstraction
like so many others, which in any case counts little in the dealings
between white visitors and black population.' The tourist hotels are
like 'tourist trenches/ protective and air-conditioned places where
there are only native vendors with patents, huge breakfasts, and pros-
titutes in the bars. In general, the state has simply taken over the role of
the former colonial administration 'in order to put the lid of all of its
abstractions on these people, who live and carry on their commerce as
they have always done' (19-20). In the next section Celati defines that
commerce as 'the same thing as living,' in that the goal of making
money is not separate from chatting in a cloud of dust, and reaching a
friendly agreement (like in a family, 'comme en famille') seems to be as
important as selling something. As he wanders about with various
native self-appointed 'guides,' he experiences this atmosphere of
exchange that is in decided contrast to the European 'passion for busi-
ness/ which Celati and Talon agree feels more like a means to an end,
and 'the end is only profit that allows you to do what you want inside
the walls of your privacy.' As he enters more and more into the spirit of
'business' for the sake of human contact and friendly exchange, he
finds that even when he refuses to buy anything the sellers seem to
take pleasure in the process, as one might take pleasure in exchanging
meaningless chat with a passerby or a neighbor. The tourists' orches-
trated lives are, by contrast, coldly ceremonial, and the assumption of a
Western model of business cancels out the possibility for what Celati
sees as the beauty of aimlessness and desultory, living exchanges such
as the populace seem to enjoy, and into which he benevolently enters.
In the writer's comments on his preference for this sort of 'benevo-
lent exchange/ Celati implicitly refers to past ethnographic (Mauss,
Bataille, etc.) as well as current philosophical (primarily Agamben in
the Italian context) work on societies based on gift-exchange, which are
in distinct contrast to First World Western societies structured accord-
ing to utility, profit, and rigid supply and demand models of exchange.
Like other travel narratives, Celati's book is filled with these and
other contrastive observations on 'his' Western world and this other
reality in which Westerners are the foreign element. It is also filled with
a myriad of descriptions of landscapes, conversations, and individuals,
like a continuous cinematic unrolling before our eyes of a documen-
tary of everyday, unexceptional existence filmed and shown in real
time. In the final section of the last Notebook, Celati and Talon are on
the plane from Dakar heading towards home when the passengers are
shown a tourist documentary on Senegal; noting that they are seeing
the same places and things they have just seen during their trip ('the
colorful marketplaces, the usual salesladies, the usual carts pulled by
donkeys, the usual villages on the Savana, the cormorants and the pel-
icans'), Talon half-seriously says: 'We have been inside a tourist docu-
mentary/12 Celati then muses: 'Yes, but, getting off the plane in Europe,
here too it's like being in a perpetual documentary, where you see
everything clean, ordered, polished, glossy, flashing, newly remade,
not even one too obvious oversight, one too shabby car, one person
truly toothless, one outfit really out of fashion, one store that has
remained as it was five years ago, one store window with books that
aren't absolutely new.' As the two wander around Paris they see only
this 'other documentary of total newness,' a 'totally inescapable full-
proof documentary' ('totally inescapable full-proof are in English in
the original, as are the words 'glossy' and 'flashing' in the above pas-
sage, as if to underline the Americanized essence of this global up-to-
dateness). The postmodern plenitude of the contemporary French cap-
ital assails us as we try to hide behind our 'glass shields' of privacy
(like the tourists who hide within their 'diving suits'), but, as Celati
268 Gianni Celati
writes in his concluding paragraph, living behind glass shields as we

do and in spite of the fact that we have everything, we begin to feel
that something is missing: 'Ma poi si sa che quando uno e lasciato
dietro un vetro, tende a sentire che gli manca qualcosa, anche se ha
tutto e non gli manca niente, e questa mancanza di niente forse conta
qualcosa, perche uno potrebbe anche accorgersi di non aver bisogno
davvero di niente, tranne del niente che gli manca davvero, del niente
che non si pud comprare, del niente che non corrisponde a niente, il
niente del cielo e deH'universo, o il niente che hanno gli altri che non
hanno niente/ (But then it's known that when you're left behind a
glass, you tend to feel that you're missing something, even if you have
everything and nothing is missing, and this lack of nothing perhaps
counts for something, because you could also realize that you really
have need of nothing, except of that nothing that is really missing, that
nothing tha,t you can't buy, that nothing that corresponds to nothing,
that nothing of the sky and the universe, or that nothing that others
who have nothing have; 178-9). With this play on the word 'nothing,'
which is transformed from a negative lack to a positive quality of
union with the freely given sky and world around us (similar to the old
song 'I've got plenty of nothing and nothing's plenty for me') Celati
closes his Notebooks, written in the state of grace that aimless wander-
ing can sustain and money cannot buy. Travel is a shedding - of pos-
sessions, of self, of pretensions, of preconceptions - and writing is a
light trace of the blessed 'nothing' that remains.13
In Celati's travel writings, it is possible to see more clearly than in
any of his other work his dedication to an idea of writing understood
as immersion rather than expression. He seeks to go into the prose of
the world rather than to speak out from a self in possession of its own
unique language. Indeed, as I have discussed in a preceding chapter,
the very concept of owning language is alien to Celati's perspective. In
the Gamuna tales as well as in Avventure in Africa, the issue of mastery
is highlighted in a variety of ways, in the former by means of explicit
parody of scientific truth-seeking, and in the latter through notes on a
trip in which plans and intentions time and again come to naught.
Nothing is mastered because nothing is masterable; the Gamuna ac-
cept and even embrace the contingency of existence, and the travelers
in Africa accept their role as actors in a 'documentary' the events of
which happened beyond any preconceived plot they might have had
in mind. Writing practiced as a submission to adventures or that which
'comes to us' - whether imagined or real - is freed from subjective
intentions, fixable meanings, and cultural codification: or at least this is

Celati's hope. Traveling in imaginative and geographic spaces is also
traveling within the world's prose, which is a telling of our shared
humanity.
Provisional Conclusions:
Venturing into the New Millennium
'The page is worth something only when you turn it and there is life behind it
that pushes and disarranges all the leaves of the book ... From recounting in the
past tense, and from the present that guided my hand in the exciting passages,
here I am, oh future, I have climbed into the saddle of your steed.'
Italo Calvino1
My own adventure in writing is drawing to its close, and it is now that

conclusions are traditionally drawn concerning what it all adds up to. I
shall, therefore, dutifully indulge in some summary comments - but
only some. For it is the present of Celati's odyssey that still guides my
hand, and it is the unknown future, both of his writing to come and of
other critical responses to the many facets of his work, that holds the
wonderful possibility of disarranging all I have proposed and that
belies anything other than provisional conclusions. This is the blessing
(some might call it the curse), particularly intense when writing about
a living author, that falls on literary theories and on critical readings of
fictional texts, for creative works have lives and destinies far less pre-
dictable than our time-bound academic perspectives can touch. Writers
greatly revered and works widely admired can and do recede into the
darkest and dustiest corners of libraries, or become objects of negative
and disdainful analyses. Conversely, forgotten voices can and do speak
to readers with an eloquence unheard by earlier generations. It is
therefore impossible to predict the fate of Gianni Celati's writings in
the new millennium upon us; my hope rather than my prediction is that
they continue to be read as sources of entertainment, comfort, and
stimulus to thought, and as traces of the humanly important talent for
Provisional Conclusions 271
errant, risk-taking imagining. Nor can I say what turns his future writ-
ing might take - or even if he will continue to write. The continually
adventurous and exploratory nature of his work suggests, however,
that surprises may well be in store as we cross from the twentieth to
the twenty-first century.
Celatian Convalescence
In reading Celati's stories, a 'melancholy of his own' emerges as one of

the primary characteristics of his narratives, particularly those of the
last two decades. This melancholy is like that of the convalescent who
has passed through the delirious trauma of a dire illness, and is now
positioned in its interstitial after-state. As central themes of modern lit-
erature - in the Italian context D'Annunzio, Svevo, and Pirandello are
the salient examples - illness and convalescence are deployed as tropes
of modernity itself, as well as of modern subjectivity as it struggles
with an acute awareness of its own traumatized, destabilized essence.
In one of the most stimulating recent studies of the topos of sickness in
late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European litera-
ture, Barbara Spackman argues that 'the convalescent is socially and
topographically dislocated and occupies a liminal position ... Eviration
and a death of desire occur upon passage into the state of convales-
cence' (Decadent Genealogies; ix). In her gender-oriented reading of
Baudelaire and D'Annunzio, Spackman posits that the woman is
expelled from the scene of male convalescence only in order that her
qualities might be abstracted and applied to the man. The 'death of
desire' is thus in fact a symbolic castration whereby thefallo (phallus),
understood as an emblem of the virile member as well as of all that
which the phallic order represents (Reason, Mastery, Domination), is
replaced by the/a//o, understood as a failing, an error, a lack ('woman,'
in short). These divergent meanings of the Italian term 'fallo' (although
the two terms derive from different etymologies, the first from the
Greek, the second from the Latin) are, I believe, particularly resonant
in the context of a consideration of metaphorical convalescence as it is
seen in both modern and postmodern texts, for they help us to gender-
ize our century's literary and philosophical representations of 'sick-
ness/ and to understand better the processes that have been called, in
various theoretical sites, the 'feminization' of Western postindustrial
culture. Specifically, in the context of certain strains of postmodern
thought and creative writing and, most specifically, in the case of
272 Gianni Celati
Celati, writing can be understood as reflective of an apparently unend-

ing state of convalescence as the writer recovers from the 'phallic' dis-
courses of domination and linear progress that infused modernity.
Celati's own experience in the sixties with the last period of collective
modernist literary aspirations known in Italy as the neoavant-garde,
convinced him of the necessity of finding some other approach to liter-
ary creativity, one that would not be invested in newness, overcoming
the past tradition, or pure literariness. Nonetheless, I have tried to
show how fundamental that period was for Celati's work, especially in
his dedication to theoretical research and experimentation. If he has
divested his writing of certain underlying assumptions that were
formed in the sixties, he has also gone on investigating and refining
some of their implications, in a search for answers to basic questions
regarding language, communication, narration, and the relation of
words to things, all of which were highlighted in the heyday of emer-
gent challenges to the Institution of mainstream modernist literature.
Much of the early twentieth-century historical avant-gardes' art can
be (and has been) seen as an expression of trauma and a search for
ways of wrestling with the shock of the new, not in the liminallity of
the convalescent state but in the still intense agonies of dis-ease. Neo-
avant-garde art had absorbed much of the shock but still reflected a
preoccupation with newness. Certain forms of postneoavant-garde
writing, seen in this light, are indeed a convalescence - 'lunga a volte
come tutta una vita' (as long at times as an entire life), as stated in the
introductory pages of the journal // Semplice - that is made up of some-
thing like an a priori resignation to failure, an intrinsic impossibility of
triumphant overcoming, a permanent interstices. Celati is heir to the
failures of modernity's progressive and projectual dream of a forward-
moving, constant ascension in art as in life, and in this sense he is a
fully postmodern writer and thinker.
In spite of my historicizing perspective, I believe that the roots of
Celati's 'poetics of grace' and his 'fictions in which to believe' also
reach down into the ground of a concept of writing that can be seen
in many diverse writers of many different historical periods: and
nowhere so clearly as in Celati's beloved Melville, whose 'Bartleby/ as
I have discussed, is praised by the Italian writer as a crowning achieve-
ment in the expression of positive resignation and willed failure. I do
not seek in what follows entirely to dehistoricize the issue of what
might be called 'anti-phallic' writing, and Melville certainly belongs
to a period of an ever stronger imposition of modernity's ideal of
progress and spirit of optimism against which his perspective can be

contrasted. Yet I think that the craft and discipline of writing itself,
which entail constantly confronting the radical limits of language and
thus of one's own limits, have brought multitudes of 'scriveners'
through the ages to an implicit or explicit acknowledgment of intrinsic
lack and inevitable failure. Thematized more or less openly depending
on the individual writer and on the traditions of his/her era, the spec-
ter of a priori failure haunts literary texts, becoming an overt feature of
modern and postmodern writing, but nonetheless perceptible in earlier
periods in the works of those writers particularly attuned to the radical
gap between the world and its expression in words. If I am running the
risk of essentialism, so be it; for there are, after all, certain essential ele-
ments of human existence that I believe cannot be denied, including
the limits of mortality and the imperfectabiity of linguistic expression,
both of which permeate literature throughout time. Even if not an
essential feature of literature (and no doubt of all artistic striving,
although I would not dare to plunge into such deep waters), the con-
cepts of impossibility and failure are at the very least overtly thema-
tized within the long Western literary tradition stretching from
classical tales of disastrous hubris to Kafka, Beckett, and so many other
emblematic voices of our modern age. Pulling out but one example
from the vast number of declarations on writing seen from this per-
spective upon which it is possible to draw, I quote from Joseph Con-
rad's 'Author's Note' to his novel Chance: 'From the minds whose
business it is precisely to criticize such attempts to please [i.e., to please
a broad readership], this book received an amount of discussion and of
a rather searching analysis which not only satisfied that personal van-
ity I share with the rest of mankind but reached my deeper feelings
and aroused my gratified interest. The undoubted sympathy [of criti-
cism] ... was, I love to think, a recognition of my good faith in my pur-
suit of my art - the art of the novelist which a distinguished French
writer at the end of a successful career complained of as being: Trop dif-
ficile! It is indeed too arduous in the sense that the effort must be invari-
ably so much greater than the possible achievement. In that sort of foredoomed
task which is in its nature very lonely also, sympathy is a precious thing
('Author's Note' to Chance; 10; italics from 'the effort' onward are
mine). A 'foredoomed task/ writing can never reach the plenitude of
perfected signification and form it seeks, so it is not surprising that the
theme of failure is prominent, especially in an age such as ours that has
shattered earlier humanistic assumptions of human perfectability.
274 Gianni Celati
In John Updike's introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of

Melville's Complete Shorter Fiction, he quotes an 1849 letter written by
Melville to his father-in-law, in which we find: 'So far as I am individu-
ally concerned & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to
write those sorts of books which are said to "fail" - Pardon this
egotism' ('Introduction'; xi). On the same page, in a decided under-
statement, Updike comments that 'Melville rather disdained the com-
mercial aspect of his profession.' In much of Melville's writing can be
seen a thematizing of his 'earnest desire' to write so-called failed
books; sometimes it is the figure of a writer, as in Pierre, which 'con-
tains a nightmarish description of a writer scribbling himself into near-
madness' ('Introduction'; xiii), or, indirectly, in 'Bartleby/ in which a
scrivener gives up his livelihood of writing. Sometimes, the desire to
fail is transferred to figures involved in other forms of invention and
creativity, as-in The Happy Failure' (250-7 in the Everyman's Library
edition, from which I quote). In this allegorical tale, the narrator's eld-
erly uncle has spent years making his 'Great Hydraulic-Hydrostatic
Apparatus/ a machine intended to be used to drain swampland in
order to convert it into fertile fields. If successful, the apparatus will
endow the old man with 'immortal renown,' and will be a source of
pride for his nephew's children and children's children. The uncle
believes that his invention potentially might allow him to surpass even
the 'Roman emperor' who 'tried to drain the Pontine march, but
failed,' for the 'present enlightened age' is capable of amazing achieve-
ments unheard of by past generations. With 'poor old Yorpy/ his faith-
ful black servant who carries the heavy machine on his back (the racist
implications.of which I shall not explore), and his young nephew, the
uncle heads out in a skiff to a remote area, 'Quash Isle,' in order to test
the apparatus far from the prying eyes of others. When they arrive, the
old man fiddles and fusses with the machine's positioning, for 'all
depends on a proper adjustment,' and so the three tip it to one side and
another, always according to the uncle's anxious command of 'a leetle
more ... just a leetle, very leetle bit more.' The inventor is nonetheless
frustrated in his desire to find the perfect position for the apparatus,
and he ends up losing patience, kicking in one side of the machine, and
disemboweling the whole thing. His dream of having come to 'the
hour which for ten long years has, in the prospect, sustained me
through all my pains-taking obscurity,' and his hope of tasting 'fame
[that] will be the sweeter because it comes at the last; the truer, because
it comes to an old man/ are all but destroyed; only upon the insistence
of his nephew does the old man try to put the apparatus back together
again, as 'the stubborn stump of hope, plowed at and uprooted in vain,
put forth one last miraculous green sprout.' The attempt is to no avail,
however, and seeing the uncle's face, 'pinched, shriveled into mouldy
whiteness, like a mildewed grape/ his nephew and Yorpy pull the old
man into the skiff and depart from 'Quash Isle' where dreams - along
with the Apparatus - have indeed been quashed. The narrator then
comments: 'How swiftly the current now swept us down! How hardly
before had we striven to stem it! I thought of my poor uncle's saying,
not an hour gone by, about the universal drift of the mass of humanity
toward utter oblivion.' But as they move along on the current, the
inventor at last lifts his head in order to utter unexpected words: 'Boy,
there's not much left in an old world for an old man to invent ... Boy,
take my advice, and never try to invent any thing but - happiness.' He
then explains his change of heart: 'Boy, I'm glad I've failed, I say, boy,
failure has made a good old man of me. It was horrible at first, but I'm
glad I've failed. Praise be to God for the failure!' The example of his
uncle made of the nephew 'a wise young [man]' who, years later, as he
watched his dying uncle's 'pale resigned lips' move, thought he heard
again 'his deep, fervent cry - "Praise be to God for the failure!"' In the
title of the story, as well as by means of the reiteration of the word 'fail-
ure' in the final passages quoted here, Melville emphasizes - almost
overemphasizes to the point of obsession - his point, which has ethical
and even metaphysical resonance that goes beyond a simple allegory
of a fundamental artistic dilemma.
I believe that we can hear echoes of this story and of others by
Melville in which 'failure' is praised in many of Celati's recent writings,
including old Vecchiatto's last recitation, the reports on the Gamuna
people, and the aimless adventures in Africa. The painstaking tinkering
with the Apparatus in Melville's tale can be read as an allegory of a
mode of writing that seeks formal 'perfection,' and the old man's
dreams of glory as representative of the writer's ambition to attain
immortal glory through his works. Only when he gives up on the
search for perfection and glory does the inventor believe that he has
become a 'good old man' (italics mine) and has thus passed on 'wisdom'
to his young nephew. And, by extension, only when writing is a part of
the 'downward current' and the 'universal drift of the mass of human-
ity toward oblivion' can it be a positive example of 'wisdom' for others,
according to Celati's view. Beyond the allegory of the imperfectability
of writing, there is as well a broader implication, which is that 'good-
276 Gianni Celati
ness' is attainable only when the search for immortalizing glory is relin-
quished. This view of both life and writing is clear in Celati's work,
which is not, however, a silent acquiescence to the futility of human
endeavor, but rather a graceful, benevolent, and ongoing apprentice-
ship in learning how to be a mortal and a writer. For Celati, convalesc-
ing from the dis-ease of ambitious striving, glory-seeking, and the
delirium of intentions is not passive, negative resignation. It is a never-
ending discipline that is carried out in a mental and imaginative space
freed of either defeating 'sickness' or triumphant 'health/ an interim
territory known as mortality in which we are all 'convalescing/ and
into which Celati's 'fictions in which to believe' flowingly adventure.
A Parable of 'Preferring To'
An emblematic tale will be the subject of my final comments on

Celati's continuing research into and writing of what might be called
'narratives for daily living.' 'Parabola del paralitico nel deserto' (Para-
ble of the paralytic in the desert; all quotations from a version sent to
me on diskette by Celati; another version, 'II paralitico del deserto/
was published in 1987 in Dolcevita; 19-23) is the story of Bugli, a male
nurse, who like so many of Celati's recent characters is looking for a
way of existing in contemporary reality.2 With three friends, also male
nurses, Bugli 'passava la vita tra una baldoria e 1'altra' (passed his life
between one spree and another), going out to eat and drink in cheery
company and, above all, organizing weekly orgies with various
women from the town including 'the wives of important people at the
hospital [where Bugli and the others worked].' The narrator informs us
that the town where the four pals live is 'un posto noioso, un posto di
gente arricchita e poco divertente, dove tutti facevano gli stessi dis-
corsi, e tutti conoscevano tutti, e tutti sparlavano degli altri come se
fosse 1'unico gusto della vita' (a boring place, a place of rich and not
very amusing people, where everyone would say the same things, and
everyone knew everyone else, and everyone spoke badly of others as if
this were the only pleasure in life). There follows a list of the usual
activities of the townspeople ('vacations, shopping, politics, new cars,
somebody who was restoring an old house, somebody else who was
opening a shop, somebody who was moving to the nearby metropolis,
and then marriages, separations, fights, friends' and acquaintances'
careers, [all] occasions for chattering'). Nothing exceptional about this
ambience, which is much like that of our contemporary everyday lives
in First World towns, yet it is clear that, when observed in their

evening strolls, these people are Very bored in their nouveaux riches
outfits/ Being 'robust and athletic' types, Bugli and his friends, ex-
swimming champions all, tried as hard as they could not to be bored,
and 'they had invented for themselves an art of quick seduction that in
their town was quite successful ('dava molti frutti'). Their tactic was to
approach the wives of important people with 'witty quips' and then
invite the women to their orgies, which they described to the wives as
'a method of remaining young and happy, a modern remedy that they
had seen in a film. Nothing strange, nothing abnormal: like inviting
someone on a secret vacation in order to recover from the boredom of
everyday existence/ Bugli was particularly good at seducing women
because of his superior boldness, athleticism, and talent for witty rep-
artee, this last due to reading many books. In a little rented house near
a river the men set up a veritable den for orgies, sticking posters of
famous paintings up on the walls, bringing in a huge stereo system
with a mass of recordings for all tastes, and stocking up on food and
drink that they called 'aphrodisiacal/ All seemed well for, in spite of
some gossip about the goings-on in the house, none of the husbands
seemed to know anything about the orgies and the women themselves
didn't talk about them since they enjoyed them and wanted to keep
going back for more. In sum, the practice of inviting women to have
fun 'had become a bizarre legend, but not really too scandalous/ So we
might conclude that Bugli and his friends had indeed found a solution
to the boredom of everyday life, one that did not appear to harm any-
one and, in fact, increased enjoyment for all of the participants.
Into this apparently unproblematic scenario comes one day a prob-
lem, however, in the form of Bugli himself. He begins to have 'strange
thoughts' and confides in his nurse friend Brizzi: 'I don't understand
something, Brizzi. Every time a women gives it to me, I feel like a spe-
cial guy. Then afterward I see in her only a piece of raw meat, but
meanwhile I feel like a special guy only because she gave it to me.
What does this mean?' Brizzi answers with a saying that has become a
sort of motto for the orgy participants: 'Dove c'e gusto non c'e per-
denza' (Where there is enjoyment there is no harm [or loss]; 'perdenza'
is an archaic term). He further responds that the feeling of being spe-
cial comes from being able to tell others about all the women one has
had, and Bugli is even more special in that he has had the wife of the
chief of staff at the hospital. Bugli is unconvinced, though, and contin-
ues to have strange thoughts; he and Brizzi agree that they seduce
278 Gianni Celati
women in order not to feel like the 'nothings' that they are, but Brizzi
doesn't know what else he might do, and a third nurse friend, having
joined in the conversation, calls them both idiots for thinking about
such stupid things. For him, there is no problem in bragging about
conquests to others, thus feeling special, and he concludes: 'What more
do you want?' Bugli is not satisfied with these practical responses to
his strange thoughts, and he goes on elaborating some philosophical
ideas (perhaps as a result of having read so many books!) that leave his
friends unconvinced and irritated. Bugli's proposal that he is nothing
more than a 'reflection on the water' and that his 'specialness' is only
an illusion meets with a worried response from Brizzi, who protests
'But no, you're Bugli!' and then he is so perplexed that he has nothing
more to offer. The other friend is openly irritated, saying that Bugli's
comments are getting on his nerves: 'I don't know where you read
[these ideas], but I don't want to hear them. Because we really did
enjoy those women, I enjoyed them and you enjoyed them, anything
but a reflection in the water! Let's get on with it and do what we do
without such ball-breaking crap, say I!' And so they in fact do go on
with their usual orgies and dinners out, and it appears that Bugli has
forgotten all about his strange thoughts even though he is a bit more
reserved than before and a little less active in approaching women.
This comic tale of contemporary life in a small town takes an unex-
pected turn at this juncture. The fours friends are avid for 'other
adventures,' and decide to buy a van in order to take off for Tunisia.
They do the usual tourist things there - visits to markets, meals in res-
taurants, excursions to houses of pleasure - and then drive to the
desert, where we meet up with them again as they are eating, drinking,
and happily conversing in a Bedouin encampment. Bugli has eaten or
drunk something that has made him sick, however, and he is laid out
on his bed in the van 'as if in a cataleptic state,' thus missing the awe-
some sight of the mirages of water and oases on the horizon. As the
pals see these mirages 'each time they remain amazed as they realize
that they [the mirages] correspond to nothing,' and Brizzi remarks that
it is best that Bugli is asleep, for he would surely note that everything
seems to be an illusion and then 'he would begin to say that we too are
illusions, reflections and all the rest.' The happy friends have no
patience for such attitudes, and remain true to their motto, 'where
there is enjoyment there is no harm.' As they proceed through the
desert, they imagine all the wonderful tales they'll have to tell their
friends and their orgy-partners back home. And, indeed, an amazing
sight rises up before them: the mirage of a huge American hotel right
in the middle of the empty desert. They soon discover that the hotel is
not a mirage, but a hotel for oilmen who came to buy oil in nearby
areas, and the 'midgets dressed in old-style clothes' who so merrily
greet them upon their arrival are descendents of ancient court buf-
foons, now employees of an American firm. 'Curiouser and curiouser/
as Carroll wrote; we begin to wonder how many more odd adventures
are in store for the small-town male nurses. In spite of the unlikely
turns of the plot, Celati's clear, flowing narrative style sweeps us along,
much as fables and fairy tales do, creating in us an ever increasing
desire to know what comes next and how it will all turn out. Encasing
a serious 'philosophical' issue (the real versus the illusory) in a highly
comic mode adds to the appeal of the tale; we the readers are drawn
almost unaware into a number of considerations of potentially 'heavy'
import, all the while that we are entertained by the story's funny
twists. Described as they are, neither Bugli nor his merry band is pre-
sented as a reliable authorial voice; in fact, we may well feel that
Bugli's existential doubts and incipient angst are nothing other than
superficial annoyances, given his willingness to go on with his amoral
and silly lifestyle. Like Baratto, however, Bugli ultimately distin-
guishes himself from the herd if only in his withdrawal from everyday
life; like Baratto, Bugli becomes catatonic and unresponsive, entering
thus into a state of suspension from which he may emerge transformed
and enlightened (or not). As with any adventure tale, we can only read
(or listen) on, unable to predict the next development.
Bugli is endowed with his new sobriquet of 'paralytic of the desert'
by the head midget at the large American hotel, who exclaims upon
seeing the silent figure: 'Oh, il est paralyse!/ an assertion seen by the
pals as 'witty' and which they appropriate in order to name their silent
friend from then on. They next decide to take Bugli to a nearby town in
the desert called Tozeur, a small place lost in the midst of the sands;
and there they leave him in the care of a local doctor, then proceeding
on their way to Algeria. After a few days Bugli finally wakes up, and
becomes friendly with a group of local children who become 'a perma-
nent entourage' as he goes about. The children take him to see the oasis
on the outskirts of town; having noted how 'extremely beautiful, calm,
green, shady, [and] reassuring' the place is, Bugli decides to move
there in order to pursue the strange thoughts that had begun to assail
him back home: 'He wanted finally to rid his head of all illusions that
always pushed him to give himself airs, to make conquests solely so
280 Gianni Celati
that he could believe himself to be an individual of some importance,

while he was nothing other than one of so many ants wandering about
in the world/ Bugli's goal is to convince himself that he is truly a noth-
ing or 'something not very different from a mouse or a dog or a tree.
He wished to succeed in feeling like a simple piece of raw meat, just as
he used to see the women after conquering them.' Thus begins a
period of several months' meditation, as Bugli, 'always seated and
staring/ thinks about being a nothing, sustained by the food that the
children periodically bring to him. The locals are highly suspicious of
this odd character and 'it did not seem right to them that a European
had come to live nearby, eating what the children brought to him, and
perhaps even sodomizing the children as the frequenters of the bar on
main street suspected.' They begin throwing maledictions his way,
calling him a dog, the son of a dog, and someone born from a damned
uterus. But Bugli welcomed this treatment, for he believed that it
helped him in his goal of believing himself to be a nothing; when asked
by some passerby what his name was, he would humbly respond: 'I
am the paralytic of the desert.'
Bugli's martyrdom in the desert would appear to be having the
desired effect, but the narrator next tells us that this is not the case. In
fact, the 'paralytic of the desert' is now even more convinced that he is
truly 'a special guy/ for he alone is experiencing these humiliations
that set him apart from the common herd. The culmination of his mar-
tyrdom arrives in the person of one Habib, a gigolo who always brags
about his ability to seduce any and every male tourist who might pass
through the town. Habib gets it into his head that he will seduce the
stranger in the oasis, and begins assiduously to court Bugli, spending
all of his evenings with the 'paralytic' and doing his best to 'palpate'
and 'caress' him. To add to the humiliation, the townspeople spy on
their evening encounters, eagerly awaiting the moment when Bugli
will give in to Habib. In this situation, Bugli 'was very ashamed, and
every evening he would have liked to flee or to bury himself, terror-
ized by the idea that his Italian friends might come to know something
and might believe that Bugli had become gay.' But he goes on meeting
with Habib and enduring his fleeting caresses as well as the spying of
the townspeople, 'exactly in order to humiliate himself.' Bugli tries to
convince himself that he should give in to Habib: 'Now, Bugli, you are
in the position of those piled-up women on whom you jumped in the
orgies. This disgusting Habib is like you were, one who wants to
impose himself in order to feel like a great man. If you give in to him,
afterward he'll consider you to be a piece of raw meat that has no

importance for anyone ... After such an experience, you'll have the
right to feel like a very humble thing in the universe, like a piece of
wood, a clod of earth, a slab of meat that means nothing.' But Bugli
cannot bring himself to give in to Habib and, being stronger than the
gigolo, he begins using physical force to counter Habib's advances.
Finally, the town gigolo must concede that he has lost the battle, and he
stops using his wiles to seduce Bugli, instead using every means avail-
able to get revenge. Habib stops the children from bringing food to
Bugli, and he comes to the oasis with a group of friends each evening
to spit on Bugli and to throw mice, iguanas, and garbage onto the Ital-
ian while hurling insults. Bugli, 'under his date tree that had become
his house/ responds calmly and modestly with his by-now sole utter-
ance: 'Je suis le paralytique du desert.' He has now passed through an
even more challenging test of humiliation; we therefore wonder if he
has succeeded in his goal of considering himself nothing, if, that is, he
has truly become a kind of Zen master similar to the completely self-
denying Bartleby.
The last pages of the story recount a very different outcome. Bugli
does not passively fade into nothing, as does his prototype Bartleby,
for 'all of [his] attempts to humiliate himself and to feel like a nullity in
the universe went in the direction of failure.' There are even rumors
that Bugli has written postcards in which he announces to the world
that he is about to enter into a state of sanctity, and that he returned to
his old seductive ways with a blond German tourist who passed by his
oasis home. When some tourists from his hometown come to the oasis
in order to see the by-now famous male nurse, they find a raggedly
dressed, scraggly bearded, very thin man who is eating grass and
scratching in the earth for worms and insects to eat. They believe that
they are seeing 'a truly special individual,' and with respect they ask
him if he is the nurse Bugli, to which he replies 'No, I am a nothing.'
Asked further if he needs anything, Bugli says 'Yes, I need to forget
myself.' Genuinely respectful and quite struck by these answers, the
tourists go away, at which point Bugli is extremely happy 'because
thus it was certain that the news of his sanctity would spread through-
out Europe, and certainly to his boring hometown, getting even to the
ear of the hospital chief's beautiful wife.' Bugli is still convinced that
the woman is crazily in love with him, and will run to find him upon
his return, perhaps even offering herself to him for life. Bugli's story in
the desert ends, therefore, with the result that 'the more he humiliated
282 Gianni Celati
himself, the more he wanted his humiliation to be publicly recog-

nized.' In a wonderfully paradoxical summation, we are told that 'he
would have wished to brag with everyone about being a nothing, an
insignificant particle in the universe, or a saint of international fame.'
In short, Bugli fails at failure, for the very insignificance he has sought
is now to his mind a source of great significance.
There remain a few final surprises in this peripatetic tale. Bugli
returns home, accepted unquestioningly by his (heretofore unmen-
tioned) wife. He takes up his work at the hospital where he left off
before his desert adventure, and he joins once more in the orgies and
the merry evenings with his friends. The difference now is that Bugli
has become a loud braggart, annoying and eventually boring everyone
with repeated stories about his humiliations, and self-glorifying asser-
tions as to the many women who are his at the least sign from him,
including the chief of the hospital's lovely wife. Moreover, Bugli says
that he wants to write a book about his adventures by means of which
he will become as famous as Lawrence of Arabia. He corners anyone
who will listen, at the hospital, at the central bar, at the movies, even
on the streets, in order to explain that while in the desert he meditated
on profound things such as what time might be, what death is, what
the universe is, what God might be, and 'above all, what we are.' His
expressed conclusion is that these questions do nothing other than
make him melancholic and 'it is much better not to think about them.'
Only one sure principle remains: 'Where there is enjoyment there is no
harm.' So it appears that Bugli has come full circle, only to end up
where he began. Yet in fact something has changed, for he has become
the laughingstock of his friends and the beautiful wife of the chief runs
away from him, telling him to go to hell. Bugli thus loses his desire to
spend time in merriment with his pals, and he starts to go about with
his wife whom he considers to be 'an uncommon, beautiful, intelligent,
and nice woman who understands him better than all the others.' The
narrator comments on this unexpected conversion: 'Why his wife suc-
ceeded in understanding him better than all the others, and what she
did to get Bugli back on track, this remains the obscure part of the tale.'
All that can be said is that Bugli is now taking evening courses in
English, for he says that 'if he studies English he feels better, since it is
a language that takes your thoughts far off,' and that he is now a nurse
in a mobile unit and often goes to remote places in the countryside to
pick up sick people in the ambulance. Bugli has often resuscitated
dying people, but he says now that he never wonders what death is
because the question doesn't interest him anymore. He has also given
up on the idea of writing a book and of becoming a famous personage
like Lawrence of Arabia.
From a man mindlessly immersed in superficial pleasures, to a man
plagued by deep thoughts and motivated by a desire to attain saintly
self-cancellation, to a man filled with a sense of his exceptionality and
superiority, to a man living a quiet life of marital fidelity and everyday
work, Bugli has passed through a series of phases that have, in the end,
had little effect on his actual daily existence in the small town. The last
paragraphs of the parable suggest an inner transformation, however,
that is of some import:
A friend of mine who knows him well says that recently [Bugli] has
become gray, but above all he speaks with a less arrogant voice and he
looks at you differently. It seems also that the more others ridicule him,
the more he willingly repeats his story and all the thoughts that came to
him in the desert, almost in order to make people laugh behind his back.
At times one has the impression that he tells his story as a duty, but when
he is openly derided for the fixations that came to him under the date tree,
he opens his eyes very wide as if he were extremely surprised. That is, he
looks at you in such an enchanted way, with a kind of happy stupor, that
he seems a much younger and less cunning person than the old Bugli.
What is the truth about Bugli? Some think that he secretly considers
himself a saint; others think that his adventure and his expressed
desire to become a nothing were only inventions made up to fool peo-
ple; yet others think that he is above all a seducer and he made up his
story in order to get women. His wife laughs about all of these expla-
nations, and offers a quite different one: 'She says that he still and
always considers himself the paralytic of the desert. This is by now the
role that he must recite, and he recites it with the resignation that
those who believe themselves to be nothing have. In the end, my
friend adds, in order truly to feel himself to be a nothing, Bugli had to
choose to be someone, as everyone does in order not to attract atten-
tion.' Thus ends the peripatetic tale of Bugli, who at last succeeds in
feeling like nothing special when he consciously assumes the role of
being someone. As long as he seeks actively to be as anonymous and
insignificant as a clod of earth or a slab of raw meat, he distinguishes
himself from others who play their roles in life and who are thus
genuinely anonymous.
284 Gianni Celati
This parable takes the lessons of Melville's scrivener a step further,

and complicates the issue of failure in important ways. Melville him-
self called his desire to write failed books 'egotism/ and Celati's tale
builds on this apparent paradox, bringing the search for failure into the
context of daily lived life in our contemporary world. Bugli's story can
be read as an additional gloss on the emblematic scrivener, one that
suggests that 'preferring not to' may be, in the end, a much more ego-
tistical and self-important mode of being than 'preferring to.' Playing
out a role in life, all the while conscious that it is in fact only a role,
might after all be a more efficacious way of expressing one's insignifi-
cance than refusing all roles in an avid search for self-cancellation. The
issue in Bugli's story seems to revolve around one's attitude to one's
role. Complete lack of self-awareness, such as the merry pals exhibit,
sustains a life of superficial, material pleasures; complete self-aware-
ness, such as Bugli exhibits while in the throes of his desert experiment
with 'sanctity/ leads neither to material pleasure nor to genuine tran-
scendence. Only a sort of gentle self-irony and a modestly resigned
acceptance of one's 'role' appear to support the possibility of some
level of everyday contentment - or, at the very least, continuation. An
exceptional character like Bartleby can provide no model for daily liv-
ing, although his 'saintly devotion' to his passive essence is clearly
admirable in Celati's view. Baratto and Bugli are un-saintly figures of
nontranscendence, and in this they are much closer to our own mud-
dled beings within an immanent world. In their crises they are differ-
ent from those around them who never question the meaning of
existence and who do not come to some realization of the role-playing
nature of lived life, but they are neither saints nor heroes. Celati's sto-
ries are fundamentally comic, not because his characters and their pre-
dicaments are laughably distant from us, but precisely because they
are so close to us and to our own dilemmas. Celati has long believed in
the comforting effect of laughter, and much of his recent writing is a
return to his initial comic mode, with the difference that his characters
are no longer extreme cases of alienation (as in Comiche and Guizzardi),
but rather common types (a gym teacher, a male nurse) living in recog-
nizable small town locales. And here we can see a continued tie to Bar-
tleby, a common scrivener whose amazing story is played out in the
context of a typical law firm. At stake in all of these stories, however,
are the possibility of transcendence and the abiding challenges of non-
transcendence. Celati appears to have reached a view of willed failure
as an approach to living (and writing) that mirrors the same pitfalls as
willed success, in that both are attempts at transcending the mundane

and essential fact of living and writing, which is continuance. Rather
than a mystical bent, then, I think that Celati's current attitude as seen
in Bugli's tale is more akin to a stoical perspective that tells us 'go on/
whether our role is as failures or as successes, for all labels are
ultimately illusory. Celati's stoicism is not impassive, however; it is
tempered with the soft shadows of melancholy and the gentle glim-
mers of the comic and, above all, with a positive appreciation for life's
fundamental unexplainability.
My epigraph quotes Calvino's words - 'la pagina ha il suo bene solo
quando la volti e c'e la vita dietro che spinge' (the page is worth some-
thing only when you turn it and there is life behind it that pushes), and
it is with these words that I end. Celati's works, when cumulatively
read, give to us this sense of the urgent, never-ending push of life in all
of its diversity, inexplicability, and infinite appeal. His writings over
the last thirty years and more of the twentieth century reflect a spirit of
adventure and a seemingly endless capacity for thought and invention
by means of the pen. More than any fixable meanings or absolutely
coherent messages, it is his workshop crafting of deeply thoughtful
and highly imaginative stories of the everyday that is Gianni Celati's
ongoing gift to Italian letters.
Notes
Introduction
1 Asked by Maria Corti, in his last interview (now available in Autografo 6,

1985) to sum up his idea of the meaning of this century's Italian litera-
ture, Calvino responded with these words: 'Gli irregolari, gli eccentrici,
gli atipici finiscono per rivelarsi le figure piu rappresentative del loro
tempo.' He stated as well that poetry remains the 'bearer of values that
prose writers also pursue with different means but the same ends/ and
that 'in narrative the short story and other kinds of "prosa d'invenzione"
dominate, more than the novel, the successes of which are rare and
exceptional.'
2 R. West, 'Lo spazio nei Narratori delle pianure,' 68-9. The mediated nature of
both language and experience was underlined over the course of this
project, and not only in the stories with which I dealt. My essay, written in
English, was translated for the volume, for example, so that reading 'my'
words in Italian when the piece appeared in print estranged me, in both
positive and negative ways, from my own thought.
3 There is an irony in Celati's avowed dislike of academic criticism, given
that he himself taught for many years within the setting of the 'Academy'
(the University of Bologna) and especially given his own profuse critical
production. His dislike is perhaps more akin to deep ambivalence, just as
his relation to his native country is one of 'approach-avoidance.' I discuss
this issue in fuller detail in a later chapter.
4 Calvino introduced Celati's first work of fiction, Comiche, published by
Einaudi in 1971 in the series called 'la Ricerca Letteraria' (Literary
Research) edited by Bonino, Manganelli, and Sanguineti. After detailing the
salient qualities of the book, Calvino ends by praising Celati as 'an extra-
288 Notes to pages 11-20
ordinary personality, that of the elaborator of literary theory and polemi-

cist, whose proposals and rich references and suggestions are
inexhaustible.'
5 That the term 'pudore' is most commonly associated with the feminine
realm is not without pertinence to my use of it in describing Celati. His
work, especially over the last decade, embodies what theorist Aldo Gargani
has called 'la voce femminile,' a symbolically feminine narrative stance that
can be as applicable to texts by men as those by women. Celati himself
called this attitude one of 'permeability' in a 1985 unpublished interview
with me. I discuss this concept in a later chapter.
6 I owe the concept of critical 'zigzagging' to Marilyn Schneider, who pre-
sented a paper several years ago at the MidWest Modern Language Associ-
ation annual convention entitled 'Zigzagging through Calvino.' Calvino
himself made use of this figure of the oblique in many of his stories, as, for
example, in those about Marcovaldo, who builds a city of snow by zigzag-
ging. I want to acknowledge here as well the fundamental importance for
me of Schneider's work on contemporary Italian writers, which, regarding
Luigi Malerba, for example, was genuinely pioneering.
7 This is not the place to enter into the vast bibliography on Dante's Comedy
generally and discussions of his self-characterization as a 'scribe' specifi-
cally. I will simply mention T. Barolini's excellent Dante's Poets: Textuality
and Truth in the 'Comedy' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) as
one of the most lucid critical sources for Dante's ideas on being a poet.
i. Bartleby: Preferring Not To
1 'Bartleby non e una metafora dello scrittore, ne il simbolo di qualsiasi altra

cosa. E un testo violentemente comico, e il comico e sempre letterale. E
come una novella di Kleist, di Dostoevskij o di Beckett, coi quali forma
un lignaggio sotterraneo e prestigioso. Non vuole dire che cio che dice.
E cio che dice e ripete e PREFERIREI DI NO.' Bartleby: La formula della creazione;
9-
2 In his Bartleby lo scrivano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991), Celati includes an intro-
ductory reading of the story as well as an annotated bibliography of studies
dedicated to it, from 1928 to 1990.
3 The original, fuller argument states: 'Allora tutte le interpolazioni, le emer-
genze circostanziali, le annotazioni locali che 1'inscrizione traccia su mar-
gini vuoti del testo, tutto cio che devia la impersonalita della norma scritta
verso il momento meno solenne della sua produzione, verso le idiosincrasie
dell'atto di scrittura, costituisce il residue spurio di una forma che solo
Notes to pages 20-5 289
nella sua stabilita finale diviene autorevole presentificazione del logos.' The
writer involves us 'nella motricita scomposta e contraddittoria di uno
scriba che redige un testo, faticosamente togliendo la parola da un silenzio
che la precede e che la genera.' (So all the interpolations, the circumstantial
emergences, the local annotations that the inscription traces on the empty
margins of the text, all that which turns the impersonality of the written
norm towards the less solemn moment of its production, towards the idio-
syncrasies of the act of writing, constitute the spurious residual of a form
that only in its final stability becomes an authoritative presentification of
the logos. [Beckett involves us] in the tangled and contradictory movement
of a scribe who drafts a text, laboriously plucking the word from a silence
that proceeds and generates it.)
4 Celati's love for the antics of Groucho and his brothers is clear in an odd lit-
tle book that he originally wrote as a private Christmas gift for friends.
Entitled Lafarsa del tre clandestine (The farce of the three hideaways), the
book was published in 1987 by Baskerville Press of Bologna. It takes the
form of a sort of screenplay based on translations into Italian of parts of
several Marx Brothers' films as well as original material by Celati. In the
Foreword, Celati mentions a book on the Marx brothers called Harpo's
Bazaar, which he had begun to write around 1970-2 but never finished.
5 Michael Caesar's article, 'Caratteri del comico nelle "Avventure di Guiz-
zardi/" makes points similar to mine, especially regarding expulsion and
emargination, although his analysis centers primarily on the performative
and generally filmic aspects of the book.
6 Lumley distinguishes between the two stories in terms of the ultimately
'tragic' quality of Melville's, in which 'the scrivener dies closed within him-
self/ and the 'comic' quality of Celati's, in which 'the gym-teacher is cured
of his aphasia' (54). I would instead emphasize the mixed, 'tragicomic'
quality of both, in spite of the more explicitly 'negative' ending of Bartleby
and the apparently 'positive' ending of Baratto.
7 Novero comments on this paradox that Tautore suggerisce al lettore, con
sottile ironia, il rapporto mancato tra pensiero e parola, nei termini di man-
cata adesione del primo alia seconda e di quest'ultima alia realta' (the
author suggests with subtle irony to the reader the failed connection
between thought and word, in terms of the failed adherence of the former
to the latter and of the latter to reality; 315).
8 The offhand (no pun intended!) reference to sexuality when Baratto 'takes
his penis in his hand' is not the only allusion to sex in this story. Baratto's
wife Marta has many 'corteggiatori' (men who court her), for example, and
it is implied that she is a less than faithful consort. The wife of one of
Baratto's fellow rugby players is 'turned on' by his muteness, and offers
herself to him while he 'examined her, stopping to observe her neck and
breasts' (17). She later tells Baratto and others about her husband's obses-
sion with a woman who works in a filling station on the highway and
always smokes Marlboros. Her husband does nothing but talk about the
nameless 'woman who smokes Marlboros/ and one evening a colleague of
his says: 'I'd give a good cigarette to that one to smoke, I would!' (A quella
le darei io una buona cigaretta da fumare!; 34), at which point the husband
Bicchi tries to throttle him, thus losing their friendship, their shared busi-
ness concern, and his livelihood! Sexuality is typically a 'subterranean'
theme in Celati's writing, and one that I shall discuss in some detail in a
later chapter.
9 In the earlier version sent to me, Celati writes that Baratto follows the old
pensioner and his wife into their living room where he 'resta in piedi
ondeggiando' (remains on his feet wavering), whereas in the published
version, they see him in the living room 'vacillare guardandosi attorno'
(vacillating as he looks around; 20). See Pina Piccolo's essay, 'Celati's Quat-
tro novelle: On Vacillation and Suspense,' for another consideration of these
key concepts.
10 (But I say: might it all not be a show? For example, this city a show, women
who make us suffer a show, work a show, our idiotic appearance another
show. Might it not all be a big trumped-up stunt, a dream from which we
cannot awake? But I say more to you: might not light be a show? And the
sounds we hear, the things we touch, and the dark and the night, couldn't it
all be a big show? A whole comedy of appearances, that makes us believe
who knows what and instead it's not true at all?)
11 The label of 'pensiero debole' was first applied to a 1983 collection of
essays, edited by Vattimo and Rovatti, published under that title. The vol-
ume stimulated great debate, and was seen by many more traditional
philosophers as a dangerous mix of 'mere literature' and philosophic theo-
rizing. See the journal Differentia, edited by Peter Carravetta, for the best
reflections in English of the stakes of this debate; see also Remo Ceserani,
Raccontare il postmoderno (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1997), for a summary of
the most salient aspects of Italian postmodernism.
12 In an essay written in 1979, 'Oggetti soffici' (Soft objects), Celati instead
writes at some length about consumption, both real and figurative, in a
context and at a time when his involvement with a critique of certain
assumptions of both the political and cultural right and left was much more
explicit. His approach in this essay is that of literalizing the concept of 'con-
sumption,' writing of 'experience' as 'consumption of an object one finds or
a gesture that one makes, and nothing remains, like on the tongue after
having eaten a dessert/ in opposition to a transcendentalizing view of
experience, which distinguishes between 'authentic' and 'inauthentic,' and
which therefore sees experience as something we 'have' as a 'patrimony
[that must be] managed' (12). I'll discuss this view in greater detail in a later
chapter dedicated to 'taste,' among other topics.
2. The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism
1 This chapter is based in part on my articles 'Gianni Celati and Literary Min-
imalism' and Toward the Millennium: Update on Malerba, Manganelli,
Celati.'
2 'Non so se sia eccesso o mancanza di sensibilita, ma e un fatto che le grandi
tragedie mi lasciano quasi indifferente. Ci sono sottili dolori, certe situazio-
ni e rapporti, che mi commuovono assai di piu di una citta distrutta dal
fuoco.' From the opening lines of the story 'Due vecchi' (Two old people) in
Casa d'altri.
3 In the context of this 1979 essay, Celati is critiquing art critic G.C. Argan's
reading of Oldenburg's 'soft objects.' In seeing the sculptures as signs of
mass culture, which for Argan represents a 'publicity-oriented falsification
of taste/ the critic leads us to a 'distaste' for or dislike of this art, according
to Celati, and thus to a negative judgment of its worth. The entire passage
from which I quote reads: 'So, when [Argan] sees something, he does not
let himself become involved in its effect; his effort is to quickly consult a
code and to explain by means of it... the result of this consultation of a code
cannot be adherence to the taste of the thing, however, nor any involve-
ment in this taste/ (Allora, quando vede qualcosa, [Argan] non si lascia
comvolgere dall'effetto; il suo sforzo e di consultare in fretta il codice e spie-
garvi ... il risultato della consultazione di codice non puo essere 1'adesione
al gusto della cosa, comunque; ne il coinvolgimento in questo gusto.) This
is only one of many examples of Celati's critique of academic criticism,
especially of its tendency to use labels, which the writer has carried out
over the last thirty years.
4 Celati republished several of his fictions of the 19703, including Lunario,
which was completely rewritten, under the title Parlamenti buffi (Turin:
Einaudi, 1989). In the new version, manneristic and self-conscious allusions
to the writing process are for the most part absent. In his comment printed
on the back cover of the 1996 edition of the rewritten Lunario, Celati writes
that 'the ordinary is a part of this dream [that] came from far off (his mem-
ories of the trip to Germany that he made in the 19503), and he felt that he
'absolutely had to rewrite' this book because 'we shouldn't throw dreams
away just because we haven't succeeded in recounting them well; other-
wise we become frustrated people who disdain everything.'
5 Corti defines the 'form of the expression' as 'the organization, at different
interacting levels, of all that which "expresses" the material of the text; the
totality of expressive solutions and of the levels of the text (linguistic,
rhythmic, etc)'; the original Italian text is in her glossary of literary critical
terms in Viaggio nel '900,1091.
6 See, for example, the essays contained in J. Chandler, A. Davidson, and H.
Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across
the Disciplines (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
7 The journal Riga, edited by Marco Belpoliti, has gathered together a wealth
of materials from this project. Riga 14, published in April 1998 and entitled
'Ali Baba: Progetto di una rivista 1968-1972,' includes letters and essays by
the collaborators from the period of the project, and a piece by Celati, writ-
ten expressly for Riga, in which he recalls, from a distance of thirty years,
the experiences he shared with Calvino and others.
3. The Permeable Gaze
1 This chapter is based in part on my articles, 'Lo spazio nei Narratori delle
pianure' and 'Gianni Celati's La strada provinciale delle anime: A "Silent" film
about "Nothing".'
2 John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984); 50-1.
3 See Maurizio Viano's A Certain Realism: Making Use ofPasolini's Film Theory
and Practice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1993), esp. chaps. 2 and 3, in which Pasolini's theoretical writings on cin-
. ema are explored in depth.
4 See Eugenia Paulicelli's study, Parola e immagine (Word and image) (Flo-
rence: Edizioni Cadmo, 1996) and Marco Belpoliti's L'occhio di Calvino
(Calvino's eye) (Turin: Einaudi, 1996) for superb analyses of the interaction
of visual and verbal realms in diverse Italian writers.
5 Sarah Hill's unpublished Master's thesis, 'Fictions to Live In: Landscape,
Writing and Photography in the Works of Gianni Celati and Luigi Ghirri,'
written in 1996 under the direction of Michael Hanne at the University of
Auckland, is an exhaustive and invaluable consideration of the connections
between Celati and Ghirri.
6 The director Nanni Moretti similarly brings ordinary spaces and buildings
to our gaze in his film, Caw Diario. For example, in one part of the film, he
rides around on his motorbike looking at various neighborhoods of Rome,

and comments that it would be wonderful to make an entire movie consist-
ing simply of the facades of diverse houses.
7 The first line is:' Al mattino presto in queste pianure la luce e tutta assorbita
dai colori del suolo' (In the early morning on these plains the light is com-
pletely absorbed by the colors of the ground) ('Verso la foce'; 20). The entire
first paragraph is heavily descriptive, although Celati already underscores
the necessity of subjective perspective, even to the most 'objective' descrip-
tion, with the inclusion of his friend Luciano, who is in the act of photo-
graphing, much as Ghirri often includes a human figure, shot from behind,
who is in the act of observing the scene that Ghirri is photographing.
8 See Roberta Piazza's "The Usual Story": The Narrative Imperfect in Celati
as an Indicator of Information Already Familiar to the Reader' for an excel-
lent linguistic study of the effect produced by Celati's use of verb tense in
this collection. Piazza's main point is that Celati uses the narrative imper-
fect tense in order to 'conjure up the idea of an old story which exhibits a
predictable plot and an expected denouement' (216); this technical analysis
supports my point regarding the old traditions of storytelling that Celati is
following in these tales.
9 In his invaluable coursebook, Frasi per narratori, which was written in the
context of his teaching of narratology at Bologna, Celati discusses in great
detail the 'panoramic' and 'scenic' modes. Many of his terms are taken from
the Anglo-American tradition of criticism on narrative, from Henry James
to Percy Lubbock to Wayne Booth and beyond, just as many of Celati's con-
cepts about the sociolinguistic ceremonies of storytelling are indebted to
Dell Hymes and William Labov's work in that area. For a useful survey of
the latter area of study, see Pier Paolo Giglioli, ed., Language and Social Con-
text (Harmondsworth, England and New York: Penguin Books, 1972).
10 In an interview I did with Celati in 1985, he expressed admiration for the
panoramic style of Patricia Highsmith's Edith's Diary (Harmondsworth,
England and New York: Penguin Books, 1977). I believe that the character
Edith, who keeps a diary in Celati's 'Story of an apprenticeship,' is an
oblique textual homage to Highsmith. I mention this detail as one small
piece of evidence in support of a reading of Narratori that shuns all sugges-
tion of a naively autobiographical or documentaristic-neorealist origin for
the volume. The stories are neither 'confession' nor chronicle 'according to
a model of literature tied to the world of Zavattini and neorealism,' as
Almansi wrote in his 13 August 1995 review of the book in Panorama, but
rather re-inventions of the narrative form that are of the most complex the-
oretical and literary rigor, and deeply influenced by models as diverse as
Ghirri's photography, Highsmith's (and Peter Handke's) stories of the

mundane (yet mysterious and even monstrous), and the research of sociol-
inguists and narratologists.
11 See Ascoltare il silenzio: La retorica come teoria (Bologna: II Mulino, 1986). For
a sensitive summary and discussion of the book's main arguments, see the
review of Emilio Speciale in Annali d'ltalianistica 7 (1989): 490-2. Speciale
concludes that Valesio seeks, among other goals, to break down the barrier
between literary and philosophical texts: 'II tentative molto convincente di
Valesio e quello di superare in nome della retorica questa separazione del
discorso umano che da secoli attraversa la civilta occidentale. Per questo
propone in conclusione di avvicinarsi ai testi e discorsi con un atteggia-
mento contemplative e simpatetico che definisce come "ascolto," non un
atteggiamento passivo, ma iperauditivo, nel senso di essere completamente
recettivi perche le cose, i testi, il silenzio ci parlano' (Valesio's very convinc-
ing attempt is that of transcending, in the name of rhetoric, this separation
of human discourse that for centuries has run through Western civilization.
For this reason [Valesio] proposes in conclusion that texts and discourses be
approached with a contemplative and empathic attitude that he defines as
'listening,' not a passive attitude, but a hyper-auditory one, in the sense of
being completely receptive so that things, texts, and silence speak to us).
These words, mutatis mutandi, could be applied to Celati's explorations of
new approaches to the external world characterized by 'permeability.'
12 Celati creates a 'new way of hearing' as well as of seeing. The soundtrack is
an integral part of the film's effect, as is true of the majority of films. The
difference here is that the sounds of the human voice are as much a part of
that effect as are musical scores or natural sounds. Visual punctuation of
the role of sound is provided in the figure of a soundman in the film who
walks about with a large boom microphone, more often than not listening
to rustling grass or other 'unimportant' sounds rather than honing in on
conversations. In fact, conversations are often muddled or cut short, and
there are moments when sound is entirely cancelled.
13 Ghirri wrote short pieces, entitled 'Paesaggi' (Landscapes), three of which
were published in the journal, // Semplice in its fifth volume (1997). These
little essays reveal his general talent as a writer and his specific ability to
capture aspects of his photographic poetics in words. For example, in
'L'omino sul ciglio del burrone' (The little man on the edge of the ravine),
Ghirri writes of his boyhood affection for the small figure of a human being
often incorporated in old photographs of monumental landscapes included
in atlases. Ghirri saw this 'little man' as being in 'a state of continuous con-
templation of the world,' and as giving a human measure to the spaces
Notes to pages 135-5l 295
being represented. The little man accompanied him in his youthful, bookish
exploration of unknown and fascinating places. But when Ghirri grew up
and began to do photography himself, he discovered that the little human
figure had disappeared from landscape photography and that spaces had
become increasingly 'deserted and incomprehensible.' He concludes:
'L'omino era sparito, se ne era andato via, aveva portato con se la rappre-
sentazione dei luoghi e vi aveva lasciato il loro simulacra' (the little man
had vanished, he had gone away, he had taken with him the representation
of places and had left instead their simulacrum) (// Semplice n. 5; 44). We
might say that Ghirri's work - and Celati's - seeks to put the 'little man'
back into representations of the world, so as to give both representations
and the world itself some human measure.
For another tribute to Ghirri, see the first issue of the journal Transpadana
(1997), which includes some of his photographs as well as written memori-
als to his work.
4. A Family of Voices: Celati's 'Parents/ 'Siblings/ and 'Children'
1 Interview with Bob Lumley, The Novella and The New Italian Landscape:
An Interview with Gianni Celati, Edinburgh Review 83 (1990): 45. Celati
spoke in English during the interview.
2 'Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age/ originally presented to
the Authors' Guild in Palo Alto, California, in March 1995, and now printed
in the journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 28, no. i (Spring
1995): 93-8,
3 See Laura Barile's 'Un ostinato inseguimento: Linguaggio e immagine in
Calvino, Celati, Perec, e ('ultimo Beckett/ in Forum Italicum, 26, no. i,
Spring 1992; 188-200, for an excellent comparative study of these writers.
4 See Maria J. Calvo Montoro's 'Joseph Conrad/Italo Calvino, o della stesura
di una tesi come riflessione sulla scrittura/ in Forum Italicum 31, no. i
(Spring 1997): 74-115, for a very detailed discussion of Calvino's thesis,
defended in 1946 at the University of Turin.
5 See Franco Ricci's Tmmagini in posa, immagini in prosa. Calvino-Gnoli:
Un'arte a parte/ in // Veltro 40, nos. 3-4 (1996): 257-61, for a discussion of
these writings and paintings.
6 See Marco Belpoliti's study, L'occhio di Calvino (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), for a
sensitive and exhaustive consideration of Calvino's dedication to writing as
a way into the observable and describable external world.
7 For a very different view of Calvino, see Carla Benedetti's recent Pasolini
contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998), a
study that stimulated great polemics upon its appearance in early 1998.
Benedetti argues that Calvino was perfectly integrated into the official insti-
tution's idea of literature as convention, while Pasolini never stopped being
in conflict with it, with the result that the latter's 'idea of literature' was and
remains much more open and promising than the former's. See Belpoliti's
very intelligent review of the book Tasolini-Calvino: Requiem per il libro,'
in il manifesto, 22 January 1998, in which, while disagreeing with Benedetti's
view, he nonetheless praises her for stimulating a necessary reconsideration
of a vast range of questions pertaining to literary thought and practice in
this century's Italy.
8 As of now (September 1998), Celati is working on two collections of essays,
Studi di affezione I and- II (Affectionate studies), the former of which will
contain published and unpublished essays on foreign writers, and the latter
of which will contain pieces on Italian writers. I assume that the Garzoni
piece, which I have read in an unfinished version on diskette, will be
included.
9 The interest in Japan as a metaphor for the aesthetic realm and for cultural
codes unites Carter with thinkers such as Barthes, and certain Italian
writers, Calvino among them. In L'occhio di Calvino, Belpoliti provides an
excellent reading of Calvino's 'Japan' primarily centered on the story, 'La
vecchia signora in kimona viola' and on the 'Japanese' novel contained in
Se una notte.
10 Clement made Purple Noon based on The Talented Mr. Ripley; Wenders made
The American Friend based on Ripley's Game; Chabrol adapted The Cry of the
Owl to the screen; and Geissendorfer made films based on The Glass Cell
and Edith's Diary. Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train came out in 1951.
11 See Franco Nasi, 'Agiografie della pianura: Vite brevi di idioti di Ermanno
Cavazzoni/ Romance Languages Annual 7 (1996): 245-53, fr an excellent
reading of the volume. See also Anthony Cronin's No Laughing Matter: The
Life and Times ofFlann O'Brien (New York: Fromm International Publishing
Corporation, 1988), the first full-length biography of the Irish writer. For a
wonderfully original view of the Irish literary tradition and its living pres-
ence in the music and lyrics of a rock group, U2, see Tatiana Pais Becher's
L'Irlanda degli U2. Musica, letteratura e radici culturali (Padua: Arcana Edi-
trice, 1998).
5. Celati's Body Language: Orality, Voice, and the Theater of

Ephemeral Morality
i 'E durante gli anni Settanta Celati si dara a sperimentare nei suoi testi le
possibilita del parlato "non colto"; anzi le possibilita di tradurre sulla carta
un discorso basato sui toni di voce, o addirittura sul movimento di tutto il
corpo del personaggio ... Scrittura e oralita sembrano legate indissolubil-
mente 1'una all'altra/ in Teoria e critica della letteratura nelle avanguardie ital-
iane degli anni sessanta (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1982);
239.
2 Kaye's book explores the general importance of performance to postmod-
ern art; see also Jessica Prinz's Art Discourse/Discourse in Art (New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), in which she analyzes the role of
language philosophy in postmodern art and uses the term 'scripting' to
describe the use by many postmodern artists of brief verbal propositions
that solicit mental or physical responses from the audience (45). Celati him-
self signaled these studies to me as pertinent to an understanding of his
recent performance-oriented writing.
3 Muzzioli provides an excellent reading of Celati's Bakhtinian period, with
particular attention to his 'theoretical tale,' 'La bottega dei mimi' (The
workshop of the mimes), first published in Nuovi argomenti in 1976, in
which great use is made of 'silly' talk, imprecations, and the like. Muzzioli
also emphasizes Celati's concept of the 'mask' of the mime, who repeats a
series of given gestures and recites given words, thus highlighting the
'alreadiness' of representations, and the salience of the surface and of
appearances: all issues that Celati develops in a variety of subsequent theo-
retical and creative texts, as we have seen. See Muzzioli, 239-43.
4 The concept of the 'gift,' which is found in Bakhtin, is also fundamental to
the idea of the ethics of exchange in archaic and non-Western societies such
as it was studied by Malinowski, Mauss, and Bataille. These anthropologi-
cal perspectives can be seen in modern Italian literary and philosophical
works that seek to endow language itself with the 'magic' of a social prac-
tice of exchange based on 'gifting/ which is in direct opposition to a society
of hard economic supply and demand. Giorgio Agamben is the most
famous sustainer of a philosophical idea of the word as the 'gift' that circu-
lates among members of society and thus binds them in a common ethos,
which is also a verbal 'commonplace' or luogo comune. See his // linguaggio e
la morte (Language and death) (Turin: Einaudi, 1982). I need hardly say that
Celati is clearly influenced (once again) by Agamben's thought.
5 Fernando Savater's Childhood Regained: The Art of the Storyteller (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), expresses a view of the ethical implica-
tions of storytelling enjoyment that is akin to Celati's. He writes, for exam-
ple, that 'the storyteller must keep alive the most improbable flame, that of
hope, [and] hope cannot be played with, though only hope permits free
play' (7). Hope is, of course, much more allied to poetic imagination than to
hard facts, just as storytelling is tied to the maintenance of hope-giving
myths rather than the demythologizing task of reason.
6 Celati's reference to the imaginatively stimulating effect of maps recalls
Conrad's Marlow, whose youthful infatuation with maps led him not to
wondrously positive adventures but instead to the 'heart of darkness':
'Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for
hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the
glories of exploration' ('Heart of Darkness,' in The Collected Tales; 21). Con-
rad was one of Calvino's favorite writers, on whom he wrote his thesis, as
mentioned in an earlier chapter, and he remains one of Celati's favorites.
The essential role of imaginative and real traveling in Celati's work will be
the topic of the next chapter.
7 Another great artist of the Po valley, the film director Antonioni, includes a
scene of disappearance, which I find to be very similar to Celati's word pic-
ture, in his film Deserto Rosso, when a group of people stand near the sea
and are gradually enveloped in the swirling mists rising up around them,
as the protagonist Giuliana watches in stunned amazement. Antonioni's
poetic sensibility, conditioned in no small part by his collaboration with
another great poet, screenwriter Tonino Guerra, is akin to Celati's in that
both are acutely aware of the fluid boundaries between life and art, experi-
ence and imagination, and both are masters of the tremendous symbolic
potential of the Italian landscape, especially that of the plains region, the
Valle Padana. It should also be noted that fog is one of the distinguishing
characteristics of the plains region.
8 From the introduction to Beverly Danuser Richardson's Plazer ed enueg, pri-
vately printed in 290 copies (Gurnee, 111.: The Vanishing Press, 1972) and
dedicated to T.G. Bergin, who was Ms Richardson's (and my) professor of
Provencal poetry at Yale University in the late sixties and early seventies.
Her poems are, as far as I know, a very rare example of modern versions of
these highly popular verse forms from the Middle Ages.
6. Africa, Gamuna, and Other Travels: Moving Narratives
1 The Anglo-French verb travailler meant both "to travel" and "to torment."
It seems to have come from a late Latin form trepalium, an instrument of tor-
ture made of three (tres) stakes (poll) or a machine used to tie up horses that
were being shoed' (Luigi Monga, 'Travel and Travel Writing: An Historical
View of Hodoeporics,' Annali d'ltalianistica 14 (1996): 11).
2 Heidegger took the concept of 'dwelling poetically' from Holderlin, of
course, and the philosopher developed his ideas regarding this concept in
several essays, available in the volume Poetry, Language, Thought. The Ital-
ian champions of 'weak thought' (Vattimo, Rovatti, and others) have all
worked extensively with Heideggerian ideas in developing their postmeta-
physical, 'poetic' response to postmodernity; Gabellone may well have
been influenced in the writing of his essay by the 'debolisti.'
3 In 'L'autore come antropologo: Pier Paolo Pasolini e la morte dell'etnos'
(The author as anthropologist: Pasolini and the death of ethnos), Massimo
Riva writes (in my translation): 'It in fact seems a paradox that, at the
heights of an unraveling or a crisis of Western hegemonic culture, literature
is turning to anthropology in search of a "new," unifying prospective,
exactly when anthropology is turning to literature in order to refine the
instruments of its own autocritique ... We feel ourselves authorized (in the
"interpretive" prospective inaugurated by Clifford Geertz) to consider liter-
ature as the critical conscience of ethnographic discourse: in contemporary
critical reflection, we can therefore join the concept of the author as anthropol-
ogist to that of the anthropologist as author' ('L'autore come antropologo';
239-40). Like Pasolini, Celati could be seen in this conceptual light, although
he would himself no doubt prefer to be thought of as a 'keeper of the narra-
tive ritual,' rather than as a version of the postmodern ethnographer.
4 Massimo Rizzante's study, // geografo e il viaggiatore: Variazioni su I. Calvino e
G. Celati (The geographer and the traveler: Variations on Calvino and
Celati) (Fossombrone (Pesaro): Tipografia Metauro, 1993), distinguishes
between Calvino's 'geometric' soul and Celati's more formless 'wander-
lust.' Rizzante notes the 'furore classificatorio' (the classificatory fervor) of
Calvino, even in Palomar, while Celati, 'the archeologist-writer ... does not
classify objects nor describe them with that interpretative pathos, still typi-
cal instead of Calvino' (15-16).
5 In the first issue of // Semplice, under the rubric 'Discorsi di metodo'
(Discourses on method), Celati includes a piece simply entitled 'Modena
18 luglio 1994' (Modena 18 July 1994), in which he discusses various tech-
niques for producing a certain 'sound' in prose writing, including the use of
particular kinds of proper names and the handling of direct and indirect
discourse. The analogy employed throughout the piece is that of writing
with music, and the 'specific experience' of the writer, like that of those
who come to understand something about musical composition and recep-
tion, has to do with the 'formation of an internal ear' (formazione di un
orecchio interno) (142) rather than with rules or grids that are externally
generated and critically applied.
6 In the second issue of // Semplice (January 1996), 52-6, Jean Talon published
a piece called 'Un africano del Fuladu a Bologna/ in which the title's char-
acter, Diawne Diamanka, is described as a Teul balladsinger [cantastorie]'
who was invited in 1988 to Bologna by a group of European anthropolo-
gists so that he could carry out ethnographic observations of the habits and
customs of the Western world. The piece is obviously satirical in intent, as
Diamanka remarks, among other things, that people in Bologna let their pet
dogs defecate all over the streets but get angry if someone drops even one
piece of paper and thus litters the sidewalks; that they blow their noses and
then carefully wrap up the mucus and put it back in their pocket; that
women wear the skins of ferocious beasts; and that knowing how to dance
seems to be a fundamental element in Bolognese courting rituals. Although
Talon ends by noting that Diamanka wrote a song about all of his observa-
tions that he now sings to his people, and that the song is published in an
Italian volume called Sguardi venuti da lontano (Views coming from far off),
the piece has the feel of fiction.
7 In an article by Alberto Papuzzi, published on 12 April 1997 in La Stampa
(23), it is pointed out that 'no other European country hosts such a varied
gamut of foreign immigrants [extracomunitari]/ and that the rate of growth
of immigrant presence has been 100 per cent in the last ten years alone
(around 500,000 in 1987 and over one million in 1997). The largest immi-
grant population is Moroccan, followed by Albanian, Philippine, U.S. citi-
zens, Tunisian, Serb, Romanian, Senegalese, Chinese, Polish, Peruvian,
Egyptian, and so on.
8 'I am in Madras and I am not well... my competence in anxieties finds itself
before something utterly new'; here Manganelli makes allusion to his
Hilarotragoedia, in which there is a 'catalogue' of 'angosce' (anxieties,
anguishes). Rumble's reference to Lyotard is to his The Inhuman.
9 Benedetti in fact sees a fairly hidden line along which Celati's ideas on
grace can be placed, a '"subterranean" line of the literature of this century,
that perhaps has never been adequately brought to light; it is a line that
goes from Proust to Handke, naturally passing through Walser' (18-19).
10 The book was copiously reviewed when it appeared in January 1998; most
reviews were positive, although Vanja Ferretti, writing for Italia Oggi, won-
ders why this book was published: 'Is it always necessary to publish what-
ever a successful writer, as Celati is, writes? Even scratchings? To assert
that, necessarily, even simple annotations must always and nonetheless
express the genius of the author seems to me excessive. But perhaps it
works commercially, for the publisher and the author.' It seems to me,
instead, that Ferretti likely did not read the book, for it is abundantly clear
that these are not 'simple annotations,' but rather 'notebooks' that have
been thoroughly shaped into book form. The idea of the 'author's genius'
on display is thoroughly antithetical to Celati's work as well. I found it
interesting too that many reviewers referred to Celati as a very important
author, a successful writer, etc., and L'Indice even provided a summary of
his career under the title 'Celati chi e?' (Celati, who is he?), in order to fill
the lack created by his exclusion from some recent histories and repertories
of contemporary literature. The most thoughtful reviews are by Belpoliti in
il manifesto, Angelo Guglielmi in Tuttolibri, and Valeric Magrelli in Diario
della settimana. Avventure in Africa won the first Zerilli-Marimo literary
prize, administered by New York University's Italian program and by the
Bellonci Foundation in Italy, the jury for which was made up of English-
speaking readers with competence in Italian (mainly graduate students in
doctoral programs in Italian literature in North America and the United
Kingdom). The prize stipulates support for the translation into English and
publication of the book in North America. Writer and translator Adria Ber-
nardi has completed a version in English that is forthcoming with the Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
11 As I have noted here and there throughout this study, many of Celati's per-
spectives on writing can be associated with certain aspects of feminist
thought. In a recent book by the philosophical feminist collective, Diotima,
the concept of 'partire da se' is discussed, and, in Luisa Muraro's essay,
'benevolence' or 'good will' comes up as a component of 'taking oneself as
the starting point' for thought and relations with the world. Instead of a
Kantian principle of 'good will,' however, this new type of practical philos-
ophy 'does not base itself on good will; it presupposes it and that is enough
... its support is different, it is the modification of self, which means not
having supports, [instead] continuing to negotiate in order to exist'
(Muraro, 'Partire da se e non farsi trovare' [Taking oneself as the starting
point and not making oneself be sought]; in La sapienza di partire da se
(Naples: Liguori, 1996); 10). Muraro also writes that 'taking oneself as the
starting point' is a perspective that highlights our dependencies on others,
while it also 'situates you, at every moment, on the trajectory of your being
that changes, moves, searches/ giving 'a point if view without fixing any-
thing.' In this sense, it is like 'traveling ... which makes you see things as no-
one can make you see them without that displacement' (8-9). Celati's
Avventure in Africa shows throughout a presupposition of good will, a
dependency on others, and a refusal of conceptually fixed points of view,
all of which indirectly resonate with this feminist idea of practical philoso-
phy (which, interestingly, seeks to refute a deconstructionist approach to
contemporaneity, much as Celati's work also does).
12 In the February 1995 issue of the magazine, Travel and Leisure, there is
included a 'tourist documentary' in words and photographs on Mali, called
on the cover The Next Place in Africa.' Presumably it is the next 'In' place,
and the gorgeous photos of places and people, by Aldo Rossi, certainly
make it seductively appealing. The article, called 'The Long, Long Road to
Timbuktu/ by Ted Conover, is well written, informative, and engaging, as
in it he recounts his experiences on the trip there, done with the Berkeley-
based Wilderness Travel outfitters. The tips on outfitters, gear, health pre-
cautions, and shopping, included at the end of the article, seek to assure the
potential tourist to Mali of a clean and ordered trip, something like the
'glossy,' 'full-proof postmodern experience that Celati is precisely seeking
to escape. See Celati's 'Situazioni esotiche sul territorio' for his early (1978)
ideas on Western appropriations of the 'exotic.'
13 Philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine took up the word 'nothing' in his
Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960) where he wrote, in the
section of his book entitled 'Ambiguity of Terms': 'An indefinite singular
term whose ambiguity has especially invited confusion, real and feigned, is
"nothing" or "nobody"'; 133. Quine goes on to mention Plato, Locke, and
Heidegger as among those thinkers who have been 'beguiled' by the term's
invitation to confusion, and he even quotes the Gershwin tune that I quote
as an example of 'tired humor' based on the ambiguity of 'nothing.' (I
thought of it before reading Quine, I might add.) I do not see Celati's play
on the term as either 'confusion' or 'tired humor'; rather, his is an attempt
to give it a positive ethical and human resonance, just as Bartleby's 'prefer-
ence not to' is read as positive, in spite of the scrivener's 'sad' end.
Provisional Conclusions: Venturing into the New Millennium
1 'La pagina ha il suo bene solo quando la volti e c'e la vita dietro che spinge
e scompiglia tutti i fogli del libro ... Dal raccontare al passato, e dal presente
che mi prendeva la mano nei tratti concitati, ecco, o future, sono salita in
sella al tuo cavallo' (II cavaliere inesistente [The Nonexistent Knight]; 125).
2 Many of Celati's characters have names beginning with the letter 'B':
Baratto and his friends Bicchi and Berte; Bugli and his friend Brizzi; the
pilot Bonetti of the Gamuna tale. An entirely unscientific explanation for
this fact could be that plosives are considered 'funny' sounds (I forget
where I read this bit of lore) and the names might therefore forward the
humorous effect that Celati seeks when reading stories aloud. It could also
be nothing other than a coincidence. In any case, these names do sound
'funny.'
Bibliography
Books and Articles by Gianni Celati
Celati, Gianni. 1965. 'Salvazione e silenzio dei significati.' Marcatre 14-15:

112-3.
- 1968. Tarlato come spettacolo.' II Verri 26: 80-8 (republished in Gruppo 63.
Critica e teoria, ed. Renato Barilli and Angelo Guglielmi, 226-43. Milan: Fel-
trinelli, 1986).
- 1968. 'II sogno senza fondo.' Quindici 9: 6.
- 1969. 'Anatomic e sistematiche letterarie/ Libri Nuovi, 5 August (republished
in Riga 14, ed. Mario Barenghi and Marco Belpoliti, 84-7. 1998).
- 1971. Comiche. Turin: Einaudi.
- 1972. 'Al bivio della letteratura fantastica/ Periodo ipotetico 6:10-12.
- 1973. 'II racconto di superficie.' // Verri i (March): 93-114.
- 1973. Le avventure di Gmzzardi. Turin: Einaudi. (2nd ed. 1994. Milan:
Feltrinelli).
- 1974. // chiodo in testa. Pollenza-Macerata: La Nuova Foglio.
- 1974. 'Finzioni occidental!.' Lingua e stile 2: 289-321.
- 1975. Finzioni occidental!: Fabulazione, comicita e scrittura. Turin: Einaudi. 2nd
ed.1986.
- 1975. 'II bazar archeologico.' // Verri 12: 11-35 (republished in Finzioni occi-
dental!, 1986, with an added note, and in Riga 14 (1998): 200-22, ed. Mario
Barenghi and Marco Belpoliti).
- 1976. 'II corpo comico nello spazio.' // Verri 3: 22-32.
- 1976. La banda dei sospiri. Turin: Einaudi (2nd ed. 1998. Milan: Feltrinelli).
- 1976. 'La bottega dei mimi.' Nuovi argomenti 50: 9-20
- 1977. La bottega dei mimi. Pollenza and Macerata: La Nuova Foglio (expanded
version of 1976 piece with the same title).
304 Bibliography
- 1978. Lunario del paradiso. Turin: Einaudi (2nd ed. 1996. Milan: Feltrinelli).
- 1978. 'Situazioni esotiche sul territorio.' In Letteratura esotismo, colonialismo,
ed. Anita Licari, Roberta Maccagnani, and Lina Zecchi, 9-26. Bologna:
Nuova Casa Editrice.
- 1979. 'Oggetti soffici.' Iterarte - Rivista periodica del Circolo Artistico di Bologna
17 (June): 10-15.
- 1983. 'L'avventura non deve finire. Conversazione attraverso gli occhi/
Quindi: per I'invenzione del tempo (Dec. 1982-Jan. 1983): 8-11.
- 1984. Frasi per narratori. Bologna: C.U.S.L.
- 1984. 'Palomar, la prosa del mondo.' Alfabeta 59 (April): 7-8.
- 1984. Tinzioni a cui credere.' Alfabeta 67:13.
- 1984. 'Verso la foce: Reportage per un amico fotografo.' In Viaggio in Italia, ed.
Luigi Ghirri, Gianni Leone and Enzo Velati, 20-35. Alessandria: II Quadrante.
- 1985. Narratori delle pianure. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1985. 'Per rompere il mutismo dell'ovvieta.' il manifesto, 20 September.
- 1985. 'Stili, storie, alle foci del Po, quasi come in Patagonia.' L'Unita. 14 April,
15-
- 1985. 'Tempo che passa.' L'Unita, 14 April, 7.
- 1985. 'La telepatia sentimentale di Milan Kundera.' il manifesto, 9 May, 1-2.
- 1986. 'Condizioni di luce sulla via Emilia.' In Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia:
Scritture nel paesaggio, ed. Giulio Bizzarri, 33-48. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1986. 'Come capirla. Nella nebbia.' La Repubblica, 23 January, 8.
- 1986. 'Un sistema di racconti sul mondo esterno.' Quindi, January: 6-9.
- 1986. T lettori di libri sono sempre piu falsi.' Nuova Corrente 33, 97 (Jan--
June): 3-26.
- 1987. Lafarsa dei ire dandestini: Un adattamento dai Marx Brothers. Bologna:
Baskerville.
- 1987. Quattro novelle sulle apparenze. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1987. Tentative di omaggio a Flann O'Brien.' Preface to La miseria in bocca,
by Flann O'Brien, trans. Daniele Benati, 9-36. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1987. 'Palomar, nella prosa del mondo.' Nuova Corrente 34,100 (July-Dec.):
227-42.
- 1987. 'II paralitico nel deserto.' Dolcevita: 19-23.
- 1987. 'Verso la foce: (estratti da un diario di viaggio).' In Narratori dell'invisi-
bile: Simposio in memoria di Halo Calvino, ed. Beppe Cottafavi and Maurizio
Magri, 65-79. Modena: Mucchi Editore.
- 1988. 'L'angelo del racconto.' /'/ manifesto, 30-1 October, 7-8.
- 1989. Verso la foce. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1989. 'Commenti su un teatro naturale delle immagini.' In II profile delle
nuvole, by Luigi Ghirri, 20-35. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Bibliography 305
- 1989. 'Finzioni a cui credere, un esempio/ In Paesaggio italiano, ed. Luigi

Ghirri, 32-3. Milan: Electa.
- 1989. Parlamenti buffi. Milan: Feltrinelli (Includes the preface: 'Congedo
dell'autore dal suo libro/ 7-10, and the three previously published novels: Le
avventure di Guizzardi, with the added subtitle Storia d'un senzafamiglia, 1973;
La banda del sospiri, with the added subtitle Romanzo d'infanzia, 1976; Lunario
del paradiso, with the added subtitle Esperienze d'un ragazzo all'estero 1978).
- 1989. 'Lo stregone quotidiano. L'estasi e il Sabba.' il manifesto, 23 April.
- 1989. 'Sciamani d'amore. II libro di Carlo Ginzburg.' il manifesto, 30 April.
- 1989. Voices from the Plains. London: Serpent's Tail (English trans. Robert
Lumley of Narratori delle pianure, 1985).
- 1990. 'Una richiesta d'amore/ il manifesto, 11 February.
- 1990. 'I confini dell'oasi.' il manifesto, 17 September.
- 1991. 'Non fatti, ma parole! G. Celati risponde a Franco Marenco.' L'Indice dei
libri del mese 7:17-19.
- 1991. Appearances. London: Serpent's Tail (English trans. Stuart Hood of
Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, 1987).
- 1991. Introduction to Bartleby lo scrivano, by Herman Melville, trans. Gianni
Celati, vii-xxvi. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1992. ed. Narratori delle riserve (With the introduction: 'Note d'avvio/ 9-10).
Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1992. 'Soglia per Luigi Ghirri: come pensare per immagini.' In Luigi Ghirri:
Vista con camera: 200 Fotografie in Emilia Romagna, ed. Paola Ghirri and
Ennery Tamarelli, 186-9. Milan: Federico Motta.
- 1994. L'Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa. Turin: Einaudi.
- 1995. 'Morte di Italo/ Riga. 9 (Italo Calvino: Enciclopedia: Arte, scienza e lette-
ratura, ed. Marco Belpoliti) (November): 204-8.
- 1995. 'Non c'e piu paradiso.' // Semplice, i (September): 30-46.
- 1995. 'Modena 18 luglio 1994.' // Semplice, i (September): 141-6.
- 1996. 'Fata Morgana.' // Semplice 2 (January): 15-30.
- 1996. 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all'altro.' Nuova Corrente 43: 3-18.
- 1996. Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1997. 'Notizie sul popolo dei Gamuna.' Altofragile: Foglio di scrittura 7 (Febru-
ary): i.
- 1998. Avventure in Africa. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- 1998. Tl narrare come attivita pratica.' In Seminario sul racconto, ed. Luigi
Rustichelli, 13-33. West Lafayette, Indiana: Bordighera.
- 1998. Tl progetto Ali Baba trent'anni dopo.' Riga 14: 313-21.
- 1999. 'Leggere e scrivere. Presentazione.' In Racconti impensati di ragazzini,
ed. Enrico De Vivo, 17-37. Milan: Feltrinelli.
306 Bibliography
- (forthcoming). Studi di affezione, (including essays on Ariosto, Delfini, Gar-

zoni, Imbriani, Manganelli, Calvino, Tozzi, Flann O'Brien, Stendhal, Swift,
Ghirri, Celine, Melville).
Celati, Gianni, and Guido Fink, eds. The Celebrated Art of U.S. Short-story Writ-
ing. Modena: Mucchi. 1986.
Celati, Gianni, and Ivan Levrini. 1996. 'In memoria di Enzo Melandri.' //
Semplice 3 (May): 171-7.
Translations by Gianni Celati
Celati, Gianni, trans. 1966. Lafavola della botte, by Jonathan Swift. Bologna:
Sampietro Editore.
- trans. 1969, Futilita, by W. Gerhardie. Turin: Einaudi.
- trans. 1969. // linguaggio silenzioso, by Edward T. Hall. Milan: Bompiani.
- trans. 1971. Colloqui con il professor Y., by Louis Ferdinand Celine. Turin:
Einaudi.
- trans. 1971. II ponte di Londra, by Louis Ferdinand Celine. Turin: Einaudi.
- trans. 1986 II richiamo della foresta, by Jack London. Turin: Einaudi.
- trans. 1991. Bartleby lo scrivano, by Herman Melville. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- trans. 1993. La Certosa di Parma, by Stendhal. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- trans. 1993. Poesie della tone, by Friedrich Holderlin. Turin: Einaudi.
- trans. 1996. Guignol's Band, by Louis Ferdinand Celine. Turin: Einaudi.
- trans. 1997. / viaggi di Gulliver, by Jonathan Swift. Turin: Einaudi.
Videos by Gianni Celati
Strada provinciale delle anime. Directed by Gianni Celati. 58 min. Bologna:

Pierrot e La Rosa. 1991. Videocassette.
II Mondo di Luigi Ghirri. Directed by Gianni Celati. 52 min. Bologna: Pierrot e La
Rosa. 1999. Videocassette.
Works on Celati
Almansi, Guido. 'Celati uno, due, tre.' Nuovi Argomenti, 59-60 (July- Dec.
1978): 74-90.
- 'Gli idilli padani.' Review of Narratori delle pianure, by Gianni Celati.
Panorama, 22 September 1985,14-15.
- Tl letamaio di Babele,' chap. 3 of La ragion comica, 43-61. Milan: Feltrinelli,
1986.
Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio. 'Dalla pianura del Po voci senza tempo/ Review
Bibliography 307
of Narratori delle pianure, by Gianni Celati. La Stampa, Tuttolibri, 3 August
1985, 3.
Barboiini, Roberto. 'Ma Celati sta in riserva.' Review of Narratori delle riserve,
ed. Gianni Celati. Panorama, July 5 1992, 97.
Barile, Laura. 'Un ostinato inseguimento: linguaggio e immagine in Calvino,
Celati, Perec, e 1'ultimo Beckett.' Forum Italicum 26, no.i (Spring 1992): 188-
200.
Barilli, Renato. 'Si per tre crescite.' Review of Narratori delle pianure, by Gianni
Celati. Alfabeta 78 (November 1985): 4.
Belpoliti, Marco. Terribile mitezza di Bartleby, lo scrivano che sa dire di "no/"
Review of Bartleby lo scrivano, by Herman Melville, trans. Gianni Celati. il
manifesto, La talpa libri, 28 June 1991, 6.
- 'Nel delta del Po con Gianni Celati/ Review of Strada provinciale delle anime,
video directed by Gianni Celati. il manifesto, 28 December 1991,13.
- 'Stendhal a caccia della felicita sull'orizzonte padano/ Review of La Certosa
di Parma, by Stendhal, trans. Gianni Celati. il manifesto, La talpa libri, 14 May
1993, 5-6.
- 'II ritorno di Danci, Pinocchio lunatico/ Review of Le Avventure di Guizzardi,
by Gianni Celati. il manifesto, 5 May 1994.
- 'Nell'ipertesto di Orlando e dei paladini, illusioni e abbagli per produrre
meraviglia/ Review of Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa, by Gianni
Celati. il manifesto, La talpa libri, 8 December 1994, 3.
- 'L'attore Vecchiatto porta in scena la lingua jazz di Celati/ Review of Recita
dell'attore Vecchiatto ml teatro di Rio Saliceto, by Gianni Celati. il manifesto, La
talpa libri, 28 November 1996, 3.
- 'Africa sulla carta/ Review of Avventure in Africa, by Gianni Celati. il mani-
festo, La talpa libri, 12 February 1998, 3.
Benedetti, Carla. 'Celati e le poetiche della grazia/ Rassegna europea di letter-
atura italiana, i (1993): 7-33.
Boselli, Mario. 'Finzioni di superficie/ Nuova Corrente 33, 97 (Jan.-June 1986):
75-88.
Caesar, Michael. 'Caratteri del comico nelle Avventure di Guizzardi.' Nuova Cor-
rente 33, 97 (Jan.-June 1986): 33-46.
Calvino, Italo. 'Gianni Celati. Comiche.' Postface to Comiche, by Gianni Celati.
Turin: Einaudi. 1971.
- 'Da Buster Keaton a Peter Handke/ L'Espresso, 30 June 1985, 95.
Corti, Maria. 'Sedotti dalle nuvole/ Review of // profile delle nuvole: Immagini di
un paesaggio italiano, by Luigi Ghirri, with texts by Gianni Celati. Panorama,
28 January 1990, 25-8.
Durante, Francesca. 'Caro Diario/ Review of Avventure in Africa, by Gianni
308 Bibliography
Celati. La Repubblica, La Repubblica delle donne, 24 March 1998.

Ferretti, Vanja. Review of Avventure in Africa, by Gianni Celati. Italia Oggi, 28
February 1998, 2.
Fink, Guido. 'Da dove vengono tutte le storie/ Review of Narratori delle pianure,
by Gianni Celati. Paragone-letteratura 426 (August 1985): 67-73.
Gabellone, Lino. 'Quello che sta fermo, quello che cammina: Apologo, per
Gianni Celati.' Nuova Corrente 33,97 (Jan.-June 1986): 27-31.
Gazier, Michele, 'Divine parodie.' Telerama, 3 February 1999, 41.
Genovese, Rino. 'Un turista ascetico alia ricerca della grazia.' Review of Avven-
ture in Africa, by Gianni Celati. L'Indice del libri 4 (April 1998): 6.
Ghirri, Luigi. 'Una carezza al mondo.' Review of Narratori delle pianure, by
Gianni Celati. Panorama, 30 June 1985,24-5.
Giuliani, Alfredo. 'II trentanovelle.' Review of Narratori delle pianure, by Gianni
Celati. La Repubblica, 13 August 1985.
- 'Celati contrabbandiere d'immagini.' Review of Verso lafoce, by Gianni
Celati, La Repubblica, 5 May 1989.
Guglielmi, Angelo. 'II Celati furioso: II testamento di un attore.' Review of
Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto, by Gianni Celati. La Repub-
blica. 1996.
- 'In corriera lungo 1'Africa: II diario "semplice" di Celati.' Review of
Avventure in Africa, by Gianni Celati. La Stampa, Tuttolibri, 5 February 1998,4.
Hanne, Michael. 'Narrative Wisdom in Celati's Narratori delle pianure.' Rivista di
studi italiani 14, i Qune 1996): 133-52.
- 'Gianni Celati.' In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Italian Novelists since World
War II, 1965-1995, ed. Augustus Pallotta, 77-85. Detroit, Washington, D.C.,
London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1999.
Hill, Sarah. 'Fictions to Live In: Landscape, Writing and Photography in the
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Index
About Looking (Berger), 170 American Academy (Rome), 5

Acker, Kathy, 138,139 American-Italian connection (mini-
adventure, term, 223 malism), 62
The adventure must not end: Con- American New Photography, 101
versation through the eyes. See Ammaniti, Niccolo, 209-10
'L'Avventura non deve finire: Anceschi, Luciano, 34,185
Conversazione attraverso gli Andrade, Osvaldo de, 209
occhi' (Celati) Anglo-American literature, 66, 232
The Adventures of Guizzardi. See Le Another Way of Telling (Berger),
avventure di Guizzardi (Celati) 170
affectionate art, 82-3 Anthropology and ethics of writing
Africa, 249; adventures in, 257-69 in Calvino. See 'Antropologia ed
Agamben, Giorgio, 41, 51-3,54-5, etica della scrittura in Italo
146, 267 Calvino' (Lollini)
Agee, James, 107,116 antimonumentalism, 85, 89-90; anti-
agent intellect, 52 historicist, 88; of Ghirri's photo-
Ajello, Nello, 37 graphs, 111; poetics of, 76; radical,
album, concept of, 174 78
Alfabeta, 96,146 'Antonio Delfini ad alta voce' [Anto-
All Baba (proposed journal), 142, nio Delfini out loud] (Celati
149-50 [essay]), 56, 57
Alinari, 99-100 Antropofago (Andrade), 209
Almanac of Prose, // Semplice. See // 'Antropologia ed etica della scrittura
Semplice: Almanacco delta prosa in Italo Calvino' [Anthropology
Almansi, Guido, 11,48, 69 and ethics of writing in Calvino]
Altofragile: Foglio di scrittura, 232 (Lollini), 230-1
Amaral, Tarsila do, 209 appearances: in Carter, 162-3; and
324 Index
Celati, 75, 78; and the existent, Bachelard, Gaston, 117,121

171-2. See also Baratto 'Bachelor's 111 Luck (in Meditation
Appearances. See Quattro novelle sulle [Kafka]), 50
apparenze (Celati) Bacon, Francis, 168
'Appunti' [Notes] (Quintavalle), 99 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81,186,188-9,
Arbasino, Alberto, 35,185, 251-2 195
'The archeological bazaar.' See 'II Baldus (Folengo), 198
bazar archeologico' (Celati) Balestrini, Luigi, 35
'The archeological glance.' See 'Lo Ballard, J.G., 107
sguardo archeologico' (Calvino) 'Bambini pendolari' [Commuting
Ariosto, Ludovico, 110,140,193,198, children] (Celati), 122
200 La banda del sospiri (Celati), 36,48,76,
Aristotle, 52,179 97, 225,249; emarginated types in,
'Arte Affettuosa' [Affectionate art], 67-8
82,83 Baranski, Zygmunt, 11
Asor Rosa, Alberto, 231 'Baratto', 24-32, 54,70,106; and
As You Like It (Shakespeare), 221,222, Bugli, 284; comparison of versions
244 of, 26-31; connection between
Auge, Marc, 242 speech and thought in, 28-31; and
author, in modern literature, 3; as grace, 259-60; name of, 24-5; old
scribe or scrivener, 15-17 people in, 208; significance of his
The author's farewell to his book. See name, 24-5
'Congedo dell'autore al suo libro' Barenghi, Mario, 149
(Celati) Barilli, Renato, 11
avant-garde, 210, 272; Calvino on, Barrault, Jean-Louis, 214
38-9,185 Barth, John, 65, 74
avventura, meaning of, 223 Barthelme, Frederick, 64-5,67,
'L'Avventura non deve finire: Con- 69-71, 74-6
versazione attraverso gli occhi' Barthes, Roland, 3,16,33,41,83,108,
[The adventure must not end: 143,145,150,191
Conversation through the eyes] 'Bartleby', 108,116,274; as appari-
(Celati), 86 tion, 45; Celati's reading of, 13-15,
Le avventure di Guizzardi (Celati), 5, 19-22, 51, 75, 89,272; comedy
20,22, 24, 36, 38-9,48, 76,145, of, 59; in La communita die viene
214; comedy in, 186; emarginated (Agamben), 52; Dead Letter Office,
types in, 67-8; language of, 69, 53,55; early critical analyses, 18;
162, 225,263; The Trial as model and Gamuna people, 237-8; and
for, 48 grace, 259-60; other comic charac-
Avventure in Africa (Celati), 195, ters and, 22-5; 'potenza', 237. See
221-3,248-61; old people in, 208 also preferring not to
Index 325
Bartleby: La formula della creazione Boccaccio, Giovanni, 33,114,169

(Agamben), 52 The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of His-
Bartleby lo scrivano (Melville [intro. tr. tory in Italian Cinema (Dalle
by Celati]), 18, 41-9; postmodern- Vacche), 129-30
ism of, 39 Bogena (friend of Berger), 172-3
'Bartleby o della contingenza' Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 14,31,89,97,
(Agamben), 53-4 140,182-3,189,198-200, 207,258
'Bartleby o la formula' [Bartleby or Boiardo raccontato in prosa, 197-207,
the formula] (Deleuze), 52 212
'Bartleby the Scrivener' (Melville), 41 Bompiani, Ginevra, 58
Bataille, Felix Henry, 54 Bonetti case. See 'II caso Bonetti'
Baudelaire, Charles, 271 (Celati)
Die Baume (Kafka), 31 Booth, Wayne, 179-80
'II bazar archeologico' [The archeo- Borges, Jorge, 18,158
logical bazaar] (Celati), 72, 81, 85, 'Bottega dei mimi' (Celati and Gabel-
95,149 lone), 225
Beattie, Anne, 61, 65 'II bottone' [The button] (Calvino),
Beckett, Samuel, 18, 33, 66, 69,139, 148
177, 194, 273; and comic writing, Bouvard et Pecuchet (Flaubert), 16,104
22; interpolation and gag in, 20,48, Brancaccio, Luisa, 209
187 Brecht, Bertold, 141
Bellow, Saul, 54 Bresson Robert, 100
Belpoliti, Marco, 140,149,189-90, Brigate rosse, 36
213 Bright Lights, Big City (Mclnerney),
Benati, Daniele, 63,140,141,175-7 62
Benedetti, Carla, 258, 261, 263 Brolli, Daniele, 209, 211
Benjamin, Jessica, 197 Bruegel Pieter, 120-1
Benjamin, Walter, 33, 40-1, 51-2, 72, Bugli, story of, 276-85
81, 244, 258-9 Burning Your Boats (Carter), 162,163
Beolco, Angelo [Ruzante], 76-7 The button. See 'II bottone' (Calvino)
Berger, John, 33, 91, 92,127,130-1, Bygones: Discourses on literature
140, 160, 215-16; voice of the visi- and society. See Una pietra sopra:
ble and invisible, 170-4 Discorsi di letteratura e societa
Berlant, Lauren, 9 (Calvino)
Berni, Francesco, 200
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 250 Cachey, Theodore J., Jr, 249-50
'Blankness as a Signifier' (Gilbert- Caesar, Michael, 11
Rolfe), 242 Cage, John, performance art of, 187
Bloody Murder (Symons), 167 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 31
The Blunderer (Highsmith), 167 Calvino, Chichita, 152
326 Index
Calvino, Italo, 3-4,18, 35-6, 62,66, friendship, 160; and grace, 258-64;
72, 78-84,89-90,115,210,230-2, habits of thought, 50-1; on history,
270; on the avant-garde, 38-9,185; 73; interviews, 142-6; and literary
and Celati, 11; death of, 152-5; Lol- establishment, 66-7, 83-4; and 'lo
lini on, 230-1; and 'lo sguardo', sguardo,' 93-4; meetings with, 5-7;
93-4; as mentor, 139,141-55 melancholy of, 271; public read-
'La camicia da uomo' [The man's ings, 182-3,194,200-6; and role of
shirt] (Calvino), 148 'author,' 16, 67; seventies' fiction,
II cammino della lettura [The path of 66-70; silence of, 82, 96; on the six-
reading] (Corti), 257 ties, 151; theoretical writings,
Campana, Dino, 231 181-97; as translator, 66; in the
Camporesi, Piero, 156 United States, 101-2; as video
Cannibals, youth orientation of, maker, 123-37; world-view of,
209-11 241-5; and writing, 3,14,32,54-8,
Cannon, JoAnn, 10 69,222-3,230
capitalism, growth of, 35 'Celati, la follia serena' [Celati, serene
carnal prose, of Celati, 71 madness] (Manica), 247
Caw Diario (Moretti [film]), 181 'Celati and the poetics of grace.' See
Carter, Angela, 33,140,160; as politi- 'Celati e le poetiche della grazia'
cal writer, 161; spectacular Celine, Louis Ferdinand, 33, 66,140,
woman, 161-5,173 194; spectacularized writing, 187-8
Carver, Raymond, 61,65 Cellini, Benvenuto, 114
'II caso Bonetti' [The Bonetti case] Ceronetti, Guido, 11, 251
(Celati), 240-1 Chabrol, Claude, 168
Cassola, Carlo, 62 Chance (Conrad), 273
Cavarero, Adriana, 160,197 Chance the gardener, 19
Cavazzoni, Ermanno, 63,140-1, Chaplin, Charlie, 20
175-6 characters: of Celati, 122; comic,
'Celati e le poetiche della grazia' 22-5; Popeye, 19
[Celati and the poetics of grace] Chatwin, Bruce, 221
(Benedetti), 258 Cherchi, Paolo, 156,158
'II Celati furioso: II testamento di un Chicago Italian Cultural Institute,
attore' [Celati furioso: An actor's 14
testament] (Guglielmi), 213 Chicago Tribune, 166
Celati, Gianni, academic literary ori- 'children', of Celati's writings,
entation of, 33; autobiographical 139-40,174-7
sketch of, 224-5; bio-bibliographi- China, travels in, 251-3
cal sketch, xi-xiii; birthplace, 96; Cina Cina [China China] (Malerba),
on Calvino, 142; on comic writing, 251-3
22; on documentaries, 128-9; and cinema: neorealism, 100; and the
Index 327
photograph, 93; as visible speech, intro. to Parlamenti buffi] (Celati),

92 76-8
Cinema e Cinema, 101 Conrad, Joseph, 66,140,144,273
Circolo artistico di Bologna, 82 Consolo, Vincenzo, 11
Le citta invisibili, 144-5 Cooperativa Scrittori, 36
Clement, Rene, 168 Corriere della Sera, 253
'Cock-A-Doodle-Do' (Melville), 46 Corti, Maria, 34-5, 69,222,257
Collina, Beatrice, 156,159 counter culture, 84-6
Collodi, Carlo, 193, 223 The Country of the Blind (Wells), 104-5
colonialism, and tourism, 266-7 Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, 21
comedy: of Bartleby, 59; cinematic Crone, Lisa, 262
slapstick, 20; concept of, 20,186; culture: black, 192; oral, 259
corporeal notions of, 186; in Guiz-
zardi, 186 da Barberino, Andrea, 200
comic effects: in Beckett, 20; of Dada, 81
incomprehensibility, 20-1, 24; of Dal Lago, Alessandro, 39
tones of Guizzardi, 22-3, 212 Dalle Vacche, Angela, 129-30
Comiche (Celati), 14, 36,48, 66,142, D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 153-4, 271
145,176,186; emarginated types Dante Alighieri, 15, 33, 54,91-2,109,
in, 67-8; language of, 69, 225 114,172,213
The Coming Community. See La com- d'Arzo, Silvio, 60
munita che viene (Agamben) das Ding (Lacan's term), 55
'Commenti su un teatro naturale De anima (Aristotle), 52
delle immagini' [Comments on a Dear Diary. See Caro Diario (Moretti
natural theater of images] (Celati), [film])
106-17 death: of the 'author,' 16; and like-
commodification: of experience, 213; ness left behind, 173
of literature, 143; scene in Strada 'The Death of the Author' (Barthes),
provincial delle anime, 135 3
La communita che viene [The Coming De Carlo, Andrea, 61, 82, 210
Community] (Agamben), 52 de Certeau Michel, 191,196
Commuting children. See 'Bambini Deconstruction, 83
pendolari' [Commuting children] Deleuze, Gilles, 18,41, 52, 72,81,
(Celati) 93
The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Delfini, Antonio, 56-8, 77,140,176,
Fiction (Booth), 179-80 210,212,220
Complete Shorter Fiction (Melville), Del Giudice, Daniele, 61, 82
274 de Martino, Ernesto, 229
'Congedo dell'autore al suo libro' Derrida, Jacques, 16, 72, 81,143,150,
[The author's farewell to his book, 191
328 Index
desert wind, 49; of Bartleby, 46 'The Ethics of Form in the Photo-

Diari [Diaries] (Delfini), 56-7 graphic Essay' (Mitchell), 107
Dickens, Charles, 188 ethnography, excursions into unseen
Di Mauro, Enzo, 82-3 territories, 223-32
Dine, Jim, 83 Evans-Pritchard, Sir Edward, 229
Divine Comedy (Dante), 15,92 Evans, Walker, 101,107
Dogon healers, 262 everyday: importance of, 97; lan-
Dolcevita (Celati), 276-83 guage, 196; narratives, 170; radical
Down in delirium. See Giu nel delirio contingency of, 111; stories of,
(Teodorani) 276-7,285. See also quotidian
Dupont, Joan, 167-8 themes
'Exactitude' (Calvino), 89-90
Eccentric Spaces (Harbison), 120,125 Experience with India. See Esperi-
Eckhart, Meister, 54 mento con I'India (Manganelli)
Eco, Umberto, 3,10-12, 35-7,185 Explorations of the Via Emilia. See
The ecstatic mind. See La mente estat- Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia
ica (Fachinelli) expressionism, 69
Edith's Diary (Highsmith), 166,169 expulsion, comic effects of, 21,
Eliade, Mircea, 127 23-4
elite, literature of, 187-8 externality, 160,170; as origin of
elitism, 37 writing, 99,106; and others, 164;
Ellis, Bret Easton, 61-2 and space, 117; thereness of, 147; of
'Elogio del pudore' [In praise of mod- visible world, 164
esty] (Rovatti), 26, 39
emarginated types, of Celati, 67 Fabbri, Paolo, 150
Emilia Romagna Theater, 198 Fachinelli, Elvio, 41,51, 54-5, 247
Emilio-Romagna region, 96,101,175, failure: issue of, 274-5,284-5; willed,
198 12-13
enamored poetry, 82 family, metaphor of, 138-9,177-9
'The Encantadas' (Melville), 46 Family Dancing (Leavitt), 61
endurance, comic effects of, 24 Fango [Mud] (Ammaniti), 209
errancy, in Celati's works, 12,14-15 Fascism, realist photography, 100
Especes d'espaces (Perec), 146 Fata Morgana: Notizie sul popolo dei
Esperimento con I 'India [Experience Gamuna [Fata Morgana: News on
with India] (Manganelli), 251, the Gamuna people] (Celati), 232
253-5 'Fata Morgana' (Celati), 232-4
Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia [Explora- 'fathers,' of Celati's writings, 139,
tions of the Via Emilia], 106,124, 141-59,160
142,148 Fellini, Federico, 130,175
essentialism, 273 Feltrinelli publishing house, 260
Index 329
feminine, 271; in Celati, 94,102-5, Gabellone, Lino, 146,225-9

160-1 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 10, 66,158-9
Ferretti, Gian Carlo, 37 gags: Beckett and, 20; Laurel and
'A Few Words About Minimalism' Hardy, 21
(Earth), 65 Gajani, Carlo, 83
fiction: 1970s, 70; of 1980s, 63; in- Galileo, 198
dustrial, 184, 250, 258; Italian, Game of the world without players.
34; prose, 32-3,182; in which to See 'Gioco del mondo senza gioca-
believe, 5, 9, 272 tori' (Gabellone)
Fictions in which to believe. See 'Fin- Gamuna, Utopia or dystopia, 222,
zioni a cui credere' (Celati) 232-48,268
Fido, Franco, 215 Garboli, Cesare, 209-10
Film (Beckett [film]), 20 'Garboli makes a dare to the canni-
films: and Italian national identity, bals,' 210
250; silent, 33 Gargani, Aldo, 146
Fink, Guido, 11,128 Garzoni, Tomaso, 140,155-9, 223^
Tinzioni a cui credere' [Fictions in Geertz, Clifford, 229-30
which to believe] (Celati), 7, 96-9 Geissendorfer, Hans, 168
Finzioni occidental!: Fabulazione comic- 'Gente d'Irlanda' [People of Ireland]
ita e scrittura [Western fictions: (Benati), 177
Tabulation, comicality, and writ- Geografie della scrittura [Geographies
ing] (Celati), 20, 24, 36, 66,186 of writing] (Papotti), 206
Flaubert, Gustave, 104 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini [film]),
'Flesh and the Mirror' (Carter), 163 250
Fo, Dario, 260 Ghirri, Luigi, 31, 89, 214; and Celati,
Folengo, Teofilo, 76-7,198, 200 95-9,102,106-7,126,198; and
Fondazione San Carlo, Modena, 198 photography, 93, 98,101,104,
formalism, 38,185-6; Russian, 185 107-9; review otNarratori, 120-1
Formiggine, 96 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, 242
Foucault, Michel, 3, 72, 81,143,150, Ginzburg, Carlo, 72, 79,141-2,145,
153,191, 260 149-50,153
'Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniver- Ginzburg, Luisa, 153
sary of His Death' (Benjamin), 51 Ginzburg, Natalia, 153
Frasi per narmtori [Sentences for nar- 'Gioco del mondo senza giocatori'
rators] (Celati), 66,169 [Game of the world without play-
Fratellid'Italia (Arbasino), 251 ers] (Gabellone), 146-7
Frazer, Sir James, 229 'Giovani umani in fuga' [Young
'Free Style' series, 209 humans in flight] (Celati), 123
Freud, Sigmund, 54 Gioventu cannibale [Cannibal youth]
friends, metaphor of, 177-9 (Brolli [ed.]), 209,211
330 Index
Giuliani, Alfredo, 35-6,123 mundane and monstrous, 165-70,

Giii nel delirio [Down in delirium] 173-4
(Teodorani), 209 Hilarotragoedia (Manganelli), 255
Gnoli, Domenico, 145,148 Hill, Sarah, 97
Goffman, Erving, 191 historical representation, in fiction,
Gollancz, Victor, 167 71-2
Go where your clit takes you. See Va' Hitchcock, Alfred, 166,168
dove ti porta il clito (Luttazzi) Holderlin, Johann, 144,248
Go where your heart takes you. home, concept of, 127
See Va' dove ti porta il cuore Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 205
(Tamaro) Hopper, Edward, 129
grace, poetics of, 258-64,272 Hume, Kathryn, 198
Gradiva, 66 A Hunger Artist (Kafka), 48
'II grande Wadi' [The great Wadi] Husserl, Edmund, 39,146,152,227
(Celati), 237-8 Hutcheon, Linda, 124,161
Grimm brothers, 144 Hymes, Dell, 87,191
Gruppo, 63, 35-6 Hypothesis of description of a land-
Critica e teoria, 184-6 scape. See 'Ipotesi di descrizione di
'II guanciale' [The pillow] (Calvino), un paesaggio' (Calvino)
148
Guattari Felix, 72,81 Un'idea dell'India [An Idea of India]
Guglielmi, Angelo, 213-14 (Moravia), 251-3
Guizzardi: comic tones of, 22-3, 212; illusionism, 111
as emarginated type, 74 imagination, 105
Guizzardi. See Le avventure di Guiz- Imbriani Vittorio, 140
zardi (Celati) 'L'incanto greve' [The oppressive
enchantment] (Celati), 235-7
Handke, Peter, 140, 258 incomprehensibility, comic effects of,
Hanne, Michael, 11 20-2, 24
Harbison, Robert, 120,125 India, travels in, 251-4
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 44,47,49 industrial fiction, 184, 250,258
Hegel, Georg, 55 'In memoria di Enzo Melandri'
Heidegger, Martin, 31, 39, 83,144, (Celati and Levrini), 149
248 In praise of modesty. See 'Elogio del
Heilman, Luigi, 224 pudore' (Rovatti)
'The Heirs of Calvino and the Eco Into their Labours (Berger), 170
Effect' (Perosa), 62 invisible populations, 176
Hesse, Hermann, 254-5 'Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesag-
High Sign (film), 21 gio' [Hypothesis of description of
Highsmith, Patricia, 33,140,160; a landscape] (Calvino), 124,148
Index 331
/ promessi sposi (Manzoni), 33 Langdon, Harry, 20

'L'isola in mezzo all'Atlantico' [The language: of Celati, 67-8, 230, 268;
island in the middle of the Atlan- connections through, 139,179; of
tic] (Celati), 7,119-20 the Gamuna, 234-5; of human-
Italian, standardized, 62 kind, 130; and image, 92; literary,
Italo's Death. See 'Morte di Italo' 185-6; of Melville, 46-7; as mem-
(Celati) ory, 173; ordinary, 196; philosophy
Italy: American connection, 62; mini- of, 87; of politicization, 82; sources
malism in, 60, 61-3; mythic view of in Baratto, 31; spoken, 186-7;
of, 100; problems of identity, 34 and the visible, 92; written, 188
Iterarte, 66,82 Language and Social Context (Labov),
'It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: or, 191
Why Are We Huddling About the Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of
Campfire?' (Le Guin), 90 Poetry and Painting (Lessing), 94
Lapenna, Antonietta, 66
James, Henry, 144,166 La Porta Filippo, 11
Japanese girl. See 'Ragazza giap- Last Emperor (Bertolucci [film]), 250
ponese' (Celati) Laurel and Hardy, 20,22-3; 'there-
Joyce, James, 33,158-9,177 ness' gags, 21
Law: and the Thing, 55; tyranny of,
Kafka, Franz, 31-3,41, 45, 48-51, 69, 56
81,139, 260,273 Leavitt, David, 61
Kaye, Nick, 187 Left, political, 35
Keaton, Buster, 20-3 Le Guin, Ursula K., 90
Keaton et C.ie (Coursodon), 21 Leibnitz, Gottfried, 53
Keeping a Rendezvous (Berger), 130-1 Leopardi, Giacomo, 33,114,132,135,
Keller, Gottfried, 113 140-1,213,223
Kierkegaard Soren, 44,160-1 Lessing, Gotthold, 94
kindness, of Celati's approach, 248 Less Than Zero (Ellis), 62
knowing: and being, 4; and telling, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee
10 [intro.]), 107
Krazy Kat comics, 85 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 72,224
Kundera, Milan, 33,140 Levrini, Ivan, 149
Kuon, Peter, 242-3 Lezioni americane [Six Memosfor the
Next Millennium] (Calvino), 89-90,
Labov, William, 87,191-3 142, 222, 230-1
Lacan, Jacques, 54-5, 83 Lights on the Via Emilia. See 'Luci
'The lady's shoe.' See 'La scarpa da sulla Via Emilia'
donna' (Calvino) likeness: and death, 173; of the exis-
Lane, Anthony, 22 tent, 174
332 Index
La linea e il circolo (Melandri), 149 The man's shirt. See 'La camicia da
linguistics, 38,87; experimentation, uomo' (Calvino)
40; Saussurian, 185 Manzoni, Alessandro, 33-4, 67-8
literature: author in, 3; commodifica- map: frontispiece to Narratori, 124;
tion of, 143; of the elite, 187-8; as and place, 120; Po valley, 118-19
Institution, 11-12, 66; role of, 81; mapping, and postmodernism,
theories of, 37 124-6
Lollini, Massimo, 230-1 // Marcatre, 185
London, Jack, 33,140 Marcoaldi, Franco, 20
loneliness, in Celati's fictions, 248 Marcus, Millicent, 181
Lotman, Juri, 120-1 Marino Giambattista, 223
Lowry, Malcolm, 104 Marx, Groucho, 20
'Luci sulla Via Emilia' [Lights on the mass culture, 85-6
Via Emilia] (Celati), 106 mass media, commodification in,
'Luigi Ghirri, leggere e pensare 213
per immagini' [Luigi Ghirri, maximalism, 64, 68
reading and thinking through Mead, Margaret, 229
images] (Celati and Messori), 106, Meditation (Kafka), 48,50
116-17 meditations, palimpsestic, 181
Lumley, Robert, 11,24,32,40,51,148, melancholy, philosophy of, 244
169,173,244,247 Melandri, Enzo, 149
Lunario del paradiso (Celati), 36, 76, Melville, Herman, 18,22, 31, 33,
97,102, 214; autobiographical 39-49,108,137,139,172, 272,
approach of, 249; emarginated 274-5; willed failure in, 12,275,
types in, 67-8; language of, 225; 284
and sexuality, 245 // Menabo, 150
Luttazzi, Daniele, 209 La mente estatica [The ecstatic mind]
Luzi, Mario, 252 (Fachinelli), 54
// mercato delle lettere [The market of
McCall, Dan, 18 letters] (Ferretti), 37
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 33,180 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 146,195-6
Mclnerney, Jay, 62 Messori, Giorgio, 106,116
Magris, Claudio, 11 'The Metamorphosis' (Kafka), 48
Malerba, Luigi, 10, 36,158, 251-3 Michelstaedter, Carlo, 231
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 229 minimalism, 60-90; American, 60-2;
Man as Subject, 79-80 Barthelme on, 64-76; and Celati's
Manganelli, Giorgio, 36-7,140,144, work, 60-9,71, 76, 78,86-90,190;
210, 251, 253-6 as critical term, 63-4; Italian, 60,
Manica, Raffaele, 247 61-2; literary, 12; of Po valley sto-
il manifesto, 141,174 ries, 118-19
Index 333
La miseria in bocca [The Poor Mouth] Narrative positions in respect to the

(O'Brien [tr. Benati]), 175 other. See 'Le posizioni narrative
Mitchell, W.J.T., 8, 91, 94,107,116 rispetto all'altro' (Celati [essay])
Moby Dick (Melville), 46 narrative reserve, Celati on, 26, 84
modernism, 41, 72, 81-2,160; move narrative techniques, Celati on,
to the postmodern, 151 169
modernity, 72,272-3 Narratori delle pianure [Narrators of
modesty: and Celati's style, 13-15; the plains] (Celati), 7,24,31,70,75,
poetics of, 84 87-8,95-6,102,106,117-24,129,
'II mondo di Luigi Ghirri' (Celati 142; and Gamuna world, 243; and
[video]), 135-6 Garzoni's world, 157-8; Ghirri's
Monge de Montaudon, 212 review of, 120; historical sense in,
Montale, Eugenic, 5, 7 73; meditative tones of, 212; and
monumentalism, 100-1; photogra- minimalism, 61-2, 66; spatial ele-
phy, 99-100; soft, 142-3 ments in, 117-20; translation by
moral value, 73-4 Lumley, 11
Morandi, Giorgio, 112 'Narratori delle riserve', 141,176;
Morante, Elsa, 200, 210, 251-2 home as metaphor in, 174
Moravia, Alberto, 183, 249, 251-4 narrators, natural, 192
Moreau, Jeanne, 214 'Narrators of the Reserves' (in il mani-
Moretti, Nanni, 181-2 festo), 174
Morgante (Pulci), 200 Natural life, what would it be:
Moroni, Mario, 103 Modernity and Identity in Celati's
mortality, limits of, 243, 248, 273 Narratori. See 'La vita naturale,
'Morte di Italo' [Italo's Death] cosa sarebbe: Modernitat und
(Celati), 152 Identitat in Celatis Narratori'
Mud. See Fango (Ammaniti) neo-American cinema, 100
Murdoch, Iris, 183 neoavant-gardism, 34-8, 39, 77, 81,
Muzzioli, Francesco, 11, 37,181, 144; fall of, 82; Italian, 4, 272; jour-
185-6 nals of, 185
mysticism, 51, 54, 89, 93, 247 neoexperimentalism, 34
neorealism, 34, 78-9,141; cinema,
narration: feminine, 166; natural, 197 100
narrative: for Celati, 89; contempo- Neri, Guido, 79,149
rary Italian, 32-9; ethics, 195-6; The New Italian Novel (Baranski and
historical, 121; linear, 121; of Fertile [eds.]), 11
Melville, 42; participatory, 189; Newton, Adam Zachary, 195
spoken, 189 The New Yorker, 12, 22
narrative friendship, of writers, New York Review of Books, 12
160-1 New York Times Book Review, 62, 64
334 Index
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 194-5; philoso- 'Origine dei Gamuna' [Origin of the

phy, 83 Gamuna] (Celati), 234-5
Nights at the Circus (Carter), 161 Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 198,200
Notes for an African Orestes (Pasolini Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 31, 89,
[film]), 250 97,182-3,189,245,258; prose ver-
Nove, Aldo, 209 sion, 14,197-207
'The Novella and the New Italian L'Orlando innamorato raccontato in
Landscape' (Lumley), 148,169, prosa (Celati), 197-207
173 Ortese, Anna Maria, 174
Novellino, 88 Other, in storytelling, 86-7,194-5
'Novissimi' group, 35 Otherness, Italian adventures into,
Nuova Corrente, 11,146-7,225 248-69
Others, into Otherness, 249-57
O'Brien, Flann, 140,175-7
October Ferry to Gabriola (Lowry), 104 Pagliarani, Elio, 34-5
'L'Odore dell'India [The Odor of India] Palermo convention (1984), 96
(Pasolini), 251-2, 254 palimpsest: Celati's work, 182; medi-
'Oggetti soffici' [Soft objects] (Celati), tations, 181
82-5, 93-4 Palomar (Calvino), 3,142,144-8,
old age: and the body, 244-7; and 151-2
storytelling talents, 208; voice of, Panorama, 120
208-20 Papotti, Davide, 206-7, 251
Oldenburg, Claes Thure, 83, 85 'Parabola del paralitico nel deserto'
Olivier, Laurence, 214 [Parable of the paralytic in the
'On Beckett, interpolation and the desert] (Celati), 276
gag.' See 'Su Beckett, 1'interpolazi- paradigm of observation, 103
one e il gag' (Celati) 'II paralitico del deserto' (Celati),
'On Being Wrong: Convicted Mini- 276
malist Spills Bean' (Barthelme), 64 'parents,' of Celati's writings, 139
The one who remains in place, the Parise, Goffredo, 62
one who walks. See 'Quello che sta Parlamenti buffi (Celati), 76-8
fermo, quello che cammina' 'Parlato come spettacolo' [Spoken
(Gabellone) language as spectacle] (Celati),
'On the Tram' (in Meditation [Kafka]), 184-6
50-1 La parola innamorata (Pontiggia and
Oppressive enchantment. See 'L'in- Di Mauro [eds.]), 82-3
canto greve' (Celati) Pascal, Blaise, 230
oral culture, 259 Pascoli, Giovanni, 200,210
orality: role of, 12,186; and voice, Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 66, 93,249-52,
139, 208 254,256
Index 335
The path of reading. See // cammino Plangman, Jay Bernard, 166

della lettura (Corti) // poema dei lunatici (Cavazzoni), 175
Pavese, Cesare, 143 Toesia Innamorata' [Enamored
Penna, Sandro, 210 poetry], 82
People of Ireland. See 'Gente Poesie della fine del mondo [Poems of
d'Irlanda' (Benati) the end of the world] (Delfini), 56,
Perec, Georges, 18,146-7,158-9 220
Performance of the actor Vecchiatto poetics: of antimonumentalism, 76;
in the theater of Rio Saliceto. See of Celati, 13,67,71,76,88-9; of the
Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro contingent, 127,136-7; of grace,
di Rio Saliceto (Celati) 258-64,272; of modesty, 84
performance art: of John Cage, 187; The Poetics of Space (Bachelard), 117
Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 189. political activism, 82
See also Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto political Left, 35
nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Celati) politicization, language of, 82
permeability: of Celati, 94,104,137, The Politics of Postmodernism (Hutch-
142-3,172-3, 227; in Pasolini's eon), 124
text, 254 Polo, Marco, 198, 251
Perosa, Sergio, 62 Pontiggia, Giancarlo, 82-3
Pertile, Lino, 11, 60-2 The Poor Mouth (O'Brien [tr. Benati]),
Petrarch, Francesco, 33,114 175
phallic order, 271-2 Popeye, character, 19
photography: and language, 92-3; Porta, Antonio, 35
pictoralist, 100; 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all'
postcard, 100; realist, 100. See also altro' [Narrative positions in re-
Luigi Ghirri spect to the other] (Celati [essay]),
The Piazza Tales (Melville), 18 183-4,191, 208
'La piazza universale di tutti i mes- post-colonialism, 79
tieri' [The universal square of all postmodernism, 39, 41, 79,122,137,
professions] (Celati), 155-9 190; of Celati, 4-5,8,93,137,271-2;
La piazza universale ... (Garzoni), 156, and contemporary existence, 242;
158-9, 223^ as critical term, 63-4; and map-
Picchione, John, 82-3 ping, 124-6; and space, 257
pictorialism, 100 Postmodernism and Performance
Pierre (Melville), 47,274 (Kaye), 187
The pillow. See 'II guanciale' postneoavant-garde writing, 272
(Calvino) post-neo era, 61
Pinketts, Andrea, 209, 211 post-war period, 78-9
Pinocchio (Collodi), 193, 223 'potenza' (potency), 47, 52-4, 236-7
Pirandello, Luigi, 33, 271 Po valley: culture, 198-9,232; exter-
336 Index
nal world of, 195; and Gamuna Queneau, Raymond, 147

story, 236-7,247; landscapes of, 99, Quindi, 66,86
101-2,110,113,206-7; post-Po val- Quindici, 35,185
ley work, 181; storytelling, 263; Quintavalle, Arturo Carlo, 99-101
travels of Celati and Ghirri, 95-7, quotidian themes, 88, 111, 121,191,
99,129 211; in art, 85; of Ghirri, 97-8; in
Pozzi, Antonia, 173 Highsmith, 169-70. See also every-
Pratt, Mary Louise, 252 day
preference: for Celati, 19; term, 13
preferring not to, 36,58-9, 284; of Rabelais, Francois, 186
Bartleby, 12,18-19,24,32,42-3,56; 'Racconto che non scrivero' [A story
of Celati, 39 I shall not write] (in Delfini's
preferring to, 276-85 Diari), 56-7
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 'Ragazza giapponese' [Japanese girl]
(Goffman), 191 (Celati), 122
Presley, Elvis, 85 RAI3,129
II profile delle nuvole: immagini di im Rasmussen, Knud, 229
paesaggio italiano [The profile of Rauschenberg, Robert, 83
clouds: Images of an Italian land- realism: Fascist photography, 100; of
scape] (Celati), 106 Pasolini, 93; Western novels, 183
Propp, Vladimir, 185 Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di
The Prose of the World (Merleau- Rio Saliceto (Celati), 31, 75, 77,89,
Ponty), 195 140,182-3,220; theatrical mode in,
Proust, Marcel, 54 190
Provincial road of souls. See Strada referent, 3; illusion of, 145-6
provinciale delle anime (Celati and La Repubblica, 36, 213
Ghirri [video]) 'Resolutions' (in Meditation [Kafka]),
Pulci, Luigi, 200 50
Pulp Fiction (Tarantino [film]), 209 Richardson, Beverly, 188, 213
Purdue University, 14 Riga, 149-50,152
Purgatorio (Dante), 91 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 113
Rimbaud, Arthur, 81
Quattro novelle sulle apparenze 'Rituali di racconto' [Rituals of the
[Appearances] (Celati), 24-32, 50, tale] (Celati [essay]), 224-5, 229,
75,87,106,129; Marcoaldi review, 257-8
20 Robinson Crusoe, 229
'Quello che sta fermo, quello che Robinson, Mary, 65
cammina' [The one who remains Romano, Egidio, 223
in place, the one who walks] Romans 7, 53, 55
(Gabellone), 225-9 Le rose imperiali (Malerba), 252
Index 337
Rossellini, Roberto, 250 'Lo sguardo archeologico' [The arche-

Rovatti, Pier Aldo, 26, 39 ological glance] (Calvino), 72, 78-
Rumble, Patrick, 252,254,256 9, 93,149
Rushdie, Salman, 165 Shakespeare, William, 31, 213, 221
Russo, Mary, 161 'siblings,' of Celati's writings, 139-40,
Ruzante, 76-7 160-74
Siddhartha (Hesse), 254-5
Salernitano, Masuccio, 76 Siena, Calvino's death in, 152-3
'Salvazione e silenzio dei significati' The Silence ofBartleby (McCall), 18-19
[Salvation and silence of signifies] Silenzio in Emilia (Benati), 175
(Celati), 185 Six Memosfor the Next Millennium.
Samsa, Gregor (character in 'The See Lezioni americane (Calvino)
Metamorphosis'), 48-9 Sklovski, Victor, 185
Sandola, Celati's mother's birth- sociolinguistics, 87
place, 102,105 Soft objects. See 'Oggetti soffici'
Sanguineti, Edoardo, 34, 37,144, (Celati)
185 'Solitudine ed erranza dei letterati'
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 87,183 [Solitude and errancy of literati]
Savater, Fernando, 203-4 (Asor Rosa), 231
Scandiano, 96 Sondrio, 96
'La scarpa da donna' [The lady's Sontag, Susan, 40,140,160, 215-16
shoe] (Calvino), 148 Sotto i 25 Anni anthology (Tondelli
Scarpa, Tiziano, 209 [ed.]), 62
Schiller, Friedrich von, 258 'A Souvenir of Japan' (Carter), 162-3
Sciascia, Leonardo, 10 space, 122; and externality, 117
Science of Logic (Hegel), 55 Spackman, Barbara, 271
Lo scrittore e il potere [The writer and Spark, Debra, 62
power] (Ajello), 37 spatial elements: in Celati's fiction,
Segal, George, 85 94-6, 99; in Narratori delle pianure
// Semplice: Almanacco della prosa (Celati), 117-22
[Almanac of Prose, // Semplice], 14, 'Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiz-
140-1,149,175,182,198, 215, 232, iario' [Spies: roots of a presump-
272 tive paradigm] (Ginzburg), 149
The Sense of Sight (Berger), 170 Spinoza, Baruch, 41, 44
Sentences for narrators. See Frasi per Spoken language as spectacle. See
narratori (Celati) 'Parlato come spettacolo' (Celati)
Sereni, Vittorio, 252 La Stampa, 210
Se una notte d'inverno (Calvino), 147 Stendhal, 140
sexuality, 244-5; in Baratto's story, Sterne, Laurence, 177,188
25, 28; as male preoccupation, 244 'Stile Libero' (Free Style) series, 209
338 Index
Store Days (Oldenburg), 85 Le tentazioni di Girolamo (Cavazzoni),

'Storia di un apprendistato' [Story of 175
an apprenticeship] (Celati), 102, Teodorani, Alda, 209
122-3 Teoria e critica della letteratura delle
A story I shall not write. See 'Racco- avanguardie italiane degli anni ses-
nto che non scrivero' (in Delfini's santa [Theory and criticism of the
Diari) literature of the Italian avant-
storytelling, 86-90,259, 263; of gardes of the '60s] (Muzzioli), 37
Carter, 165; Celati's public read- terrorism, 82; literal, 36
ings, 200-6; of Highsmith, 170; thereness: of externality, 147; Laurel
oral nature of, 182 and Hardy gags, 21
La strada di San Giovanni (Calvino), Thing: Lacanian concept of, 55; and
142 the Law, 55
Strada provinciale delle anime [Provin- Third World, values, 254
cial road of souls] (Celati [video]), Those Who Walk Away (Highsmith),
31, 89, 95,101,106,114,124, 167
128-35; old people in, 208 The Threepenny Review, 171
Strangers on a Train (Highsmith), Tondelli, Pier Vittorio, 61-2,210,251
166-7 tourists, 266; concentration camp for,
structuralism, 38,185-6 264-5; as ethnic group, 261-2,
Studi d'affezione (Celati), 41 264
'Studi sui Gamuna' [Studies on the 'Toward a Small Theory of the Visi-
Gamuna] (Celati), 238-40 ble' (Berger), 171
'Su Beckett, 1'interpolazione e il gag' 'Towards the river mouth: Reportage,
[On Beckett, interpolation and the for a photographer friend' (Celati).
gag] (Celati), 20 See 'Verso la foce: Reportage, per
Surrealists, 81 un amico fotografo' (Celati)
Svevo, Italo, 271 Towards the river mouth. See Verso la
Swift, Jonathan, 33,66,140,177 foce (Celati)
Symons, Julian, 166-7 trace, idea of, 173
travel: about, 221; and writing, 249,
Tabucchi, Antonio, 11,62, 82 259
Talon, Jean, 248,261-2 travel book, Celati's version, 257
Tamaro, Susanna, 209 'The Trees' (in Meditation [Kafka]),
Tamburri, Anthony, 13 50
Tani, Stefano, 11,61-3 Treno di panna (De Carlo), 61-2
Tarantino, Quentin, 209 The Trial (Kafka), 48
Tasso, Torquato, 223 Twain, Mark, 64
Teatini, Manuela, 101,128,130-1 20 Under 30 anthology (Spark [ed.]),
television, influence of, 63 62
Index 339
The Two Faces of January (Highsmith), Verdi's theater (Busseto), 112

167 'II Verri/ 34-5,184-6
Tylor, Sir Edward, 229 'Verso la foce: Reportage, per un
amico fotografo' (Celati), 96,99,
Ulysses, 257 106-7,134; in Viaggio in Italia,
Ulysses (Joyce), 158 102-3
Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura Verso la foce [Towards the river
e societa [Bygones: Discourses on mouth] (Celati), 75, 87,105-6,
literature and society] (Calvino), 128-9, 212,249,258
78-81,142 Viaggio in Italia (Ceronetti), 251
Under 25. See Sotto i 25 Anni anthol- Viaggio in Italia [Voyage in Italy]
ogy (Tondelli [ed.]) (Celati), 96, 99,102
United States: Celati in, 101-2; Italian Viaggio nel '900 [Voyage in the Twen-
connection, 62; minimalism in, tieth Century] (Corti), 257
60-2 Vico, Giambattista, 33,129-30
The universal square of all profes- Vidal, Gore, 167
sions. See 'La piazza universale di video maker, Celati as, 123-37
tutti i mestieri' (Celati) videos. See 'II mondo di Luigi Ghirri'
University of Bologna, 33, 66,171 (Celati [video]); Strada provinciate
University of Massachusetts, 175 delle anime (Celati [video])
L'Uomo (Man), as Subject, 79-80 La vie, mode d'emploi (Perec), 158
Updike, John, 274 Visconti, Luchino, 100
Urbino convention (1968), 150 'visibile parlare' (visible speech), 91-
2,109
Va' dove ti porta il clito [Go where visible, and the external, 182
your clit takes you] (Luttazzi), 209 visible truth, of Melville, 45, 47
Va' dove ti porta il cuore [Go where visual media: role of, 12,31, 93. See
your heart takes you] (Tamaro), also 'II mondo di Luigi Ghirri'
209 (Celati [video]); Strada provinciate
'vaghezza,' concept of, 114 delle anime (Celati [video])
Valesio, Paolo, 129,150 visual and the verbal, 91, 93,175
'The Value of Narrativity' (White), 'La vita naturale, cosa sarebbe:
73 Modernitat und Identitat in
Vassalli, Sebastiano, 36 Gianni Celatis Narratori delle
Vattimo, Gianni, 39, 71 painure' [Natural life, what would
Vecchiatto, 182; against the canni- it be: Modernity and Identity]
bals, 208-20; hoax, 214-15 (Kuon), 242
Vecchiatto. See Recita dell'attore Vecchi- Vita nuova (Dante), 15
atto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Celati) Vite brevi di idioti (Cavazzoni), 175-6
verbal and the visual, 91,93,175 Vittorini, Elio, 10,143,150
340 Index
Viva Voce (Out Loud) project, 198 'What is an Author' (Foucault), 3-4
voice: of Carter, 165; of old age, White, Hayden, 10, 71-3
208-20; and orality, 139, 208; role Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31,195-6
of, 12; of the visible and invisible, working-class speakers, 192
170-4 Works and Lives (Geertz), 229
Voices from the Plains, 11. See also writers: Anglo-American, 140; femi-
Narratori delle pianure nist, 161,197; French, 140; indus-
Voyage in Italy. See Viaggio in Italia trialized, 193; Irish, 177; Italian, 3,
Voyage in the Twentieth Century. See 11-12,32-3, 209,249-57; narrative
Viaggio ml '900 (Corti) friendship of, 160-1; as narrator,
184; women, 140
Wahl, Francois, 153 writing, home as metaphor for, 174
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 20
Walser, Robert, 113,140,258 Young humans in flight. See 'Giovani
Warhol, Andy, 85 umani in fuga' (Celati)
Waugh, Auberon, 167
Ways of Seeing (Berger), 170 Zanichelli, Dizionario etimologico, 223
weak thought, 31; philosophers of, 'Zerografie' [Zerowritings]
13,146; postmodern, 39,41, 70-1 (Fachinelli), 54
Un weekend postmoderno (Tondelli), zigzagging: adventures, 258; in
251 Africa, 249, 262; journeys, 104; of
Wells, H.G., 104-5 the Piazza, 159; public readings as,
Wenders, Wim, 168 201; through Celati's work, 13, 32,
West Africa, 248-9 39-41, 56, 76,182; through the
Western fictions. See Finzioni occiden- middle, 90
tali (Celati) Zola, Emile, 183
Western world, 267

Rebecca West Gianni Celati

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Rebecca West Gianni Celati

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GIANNI CELATI:

THE CRAFT OF EVERYDAY STORYTELLING

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000

Printed on acid-free paper

Toronto Italian Studies

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

West, Rebecca }., 1946-

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

Introduction: Meeting Gianni Celati 3

2 The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 60

3 The Permeable Gaze 91

My thanks to all those who gave me inspiration; moral, intellectual,

Gianni Celati is owed an enormous debt of gratitude for his diffi-

Gianni Celati was born in Sondrio, in northern Italy, in 1937. He stud-

ogy made up of 'racconti comuni/ or everyday tales, these three books

From the heyday of the neoavant-garde, in the early and mid-1960s, to

Rome, Spring 1979

I am a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where I am writing a

I heard in response a soft, hesitant voice: 'Pronto, sono Gianni

Several years after that meeting in Rome, I entered into a phase of

underlying much of Celati's writing, especially that of the last decade.

refinement are artisanal activities, carried out in a long apprenticeship

famous Umberto Eco, Celati is not, however, known to a broad Ameri-

with a provisional assessment of Celati's overall contribution to Italian

Errancy and modesty are qualities characteristic of Celati's style, both

now fully divested of any theological or transcendental resonances -

dedication to the powerful potential of carefully crafted words: a

Chicago, Summer 1997

In order to get closer to some possible answers, it is useful, I think,

between two individuals, and those rooted in the expulsion of a char-

instead of showing the same 'grande comprensione [di] spirito' (great

comic and compellingly mysterious, especially for those whose lives

In 1987, more than a decade after the publication of Finzioni occidental!

to standing silently and looking at a brick wall, Baratto also begins to

his motorcycle without any apparent direction. Unlike his predecessor

a theatrical piece. This palimpsestic quality of 'Baratto' is evidence, I

and the enduring reality of local, regional, and, precisely, provincial

by a second phase, represented most clearly by the work of the 'Novis-

Giuliani, who, unlike Calvino, were active participants in the Gruppo,

appearance in the late sixties Calvino so lamented. This is not to sug-

he came of age, yet thoroughly de-provincialized in both his poetics

In my Introduction, I referred to a 'zigzagging' approach to my analy-

push: a push onward, a progressing, a programizing, a projecting ...

Celati's preference for zigzagging spatialization, as are the following:

Celati's reading of Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener' reveals signs of

Melville's fictional scrivener Bartleby, employed by a Wall Street

this 'absolute anteriority' in our given individuality, our faces that we

never possess (because there is no secret). In Celati's view, Melville saw

Celati's introduction to 'Bartleby' is an attempt to avoid yet another

Samsa, while admittedly much more 'internally' recounted, so that we

gious contextualization' (195). I think it possible to say that Bartleby is

My zigzagging journey through some of the writers and thinkers of

games of intentionality and mastery that condition our world of

Celati disliked having the term 'minimalist' applied to his writing of

called into question the very foundations of contemporary literary his-

panna had in 1981' (140-1; my translation). Nonetheless, young Italian

minimalists. More than shared thematic or genre-related elements (the

Twain put it, to 'eschew surplusage.' A dictionary definition of the

move towards a more detailed and specific redefinition of what in

damentally antagonistic. Celati has consistently refused the role of

adolescence and love-befuddled early maturity in La banda and Luna-

ation I now want to attempt, an operation not of applying the

headed up by Gianni Vattimo. That Celati explored these concepts in