Performative reading, from southern Italy to post-apocalyptic futures

Whenever one happens to delve into the Imaginary World of the Average Italian Storyteller, one always resurfaces in the same way: feeling somewhat stifled by stereotypes served up in pretentious guises, but above all astonished by the persistence of certain clichés. As I have no interest in criticising individual authors – not least because these are, after all, constant and ‘anonymous’ traits – I shall highlight a few of them through a series of invented examples that are, however, truer than truth itself.

To begin with, my latest foray into a sample of around fifty recent novels has confirmed that reading this sort of thing induces an immediate case of ‘Southern Nausea’. Had you already booked a holiday in Salento or Cilento? Cancel them straight away, and instead book two weeks on a Norwegian fjord famous for the laconic nature and Ibsenian gloom of its few inhabitants. Because you’ve had enough of ‘pane e pummitoru’, of ‘janare’ with stigmata on your nipples, and of stentorian dialogue ending with a stab wound. Even if you’re in a shady room, whilst reading you feel all clammy, your head spinning from the screams, forced to gorge yourself, threatened with death for reasons you don’t understand. If this sort of tourist-brochure-style fiction shows no sign of running out, it is because it has a remarkable capacity to adapt: today, for example, its clichés are interwoven with anti-patriarchy rhetoric or therapeutic autofiction.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, however, lies a genre that, right from the graphics, loudly proclaims its ‘niche’ pride: that of lyrical-splatter dystopias. Time and place are usually unknown; the characters’ names are too, given that they are called Scabbia, Admeto or Voltrix. The curtain rises on an abandoned sports club or government ministry, its rooms littered with old, humming computers, the droppings of children and foxes, or spaceships belonging to a great-grandson of Musk that crashed several generations earlier and have been the protagonists of an epic spanning centuries. Outside, a group of youngsters and elderly people wander across a scorched plain, amidst the severed heads of enemies hanging from wind turbines and rival gangs armed with iron bars or sparkling lasers. Whilst in Southern Italian fiction italics are used at the beginning of a chapter, or interspersed throughout the plot chapters using a flashback technique reminiscent of Rai TV dramas, here they occupy almost every page. The story proceeds in fits and starts, through ecphrases that try in vain to blend into the narrative flow; the chapters are as short as little prose poems, and the style is an unwitting poeticism: ‘The glint of semen beneath that blood-red sky’, ‘God was a dog barking around the pixels’, and so on. The tone is blasé: no one is ever surprised by anything, not even by tripping over the metallic torso of the comrade with whom, just a moment earlier, they were amiably exchanging philosophical views.

Despite their differences, the two strands described above have something in common: in both, at a certain point, the inevitable ‘1970s’ make an appearance, and in both the style emphasises a blend of emotionality and anatomical detail (such as: ‘I could feel all his fury in the cells of my iliac crest’). A compromise between these subgenres is the novel that mimics a regional dialect as an Italianist might: ‘Cerro hadn’t warned me at all that he’d have to put up with all that nonsense just to drag himself out of his cot and go and act like an idiot at the former Caffè Burdèl, on the Thursday when the landlord of the Casa del Lissssio got the shits whilst he was having his way with a Romanian woman…’. Nothing is sadder, however, than fiction as a form of vain and forced performativity: I’m thinking of those thirty-somethings who mistake brilliance for intelligence, who bury the reader under a barrage of name-dropping, who convey a constant anxiety to crack a joke, who turn their PhD into a student prank, who brandish gigantic dildos left, right and centre whilst imitating Walter Siti just as Emma Bovary might imitate Flaubert, and who have each chapter set in a different typeface, convinced that this hyper-ironic collage in itself produces a ‘world-work’.

And speaking of characters, or paratexts: perhaps the real innovation in recent Italian fiction lies in the title pages and Acknowledgements. At the start of a book, more and more often, we do not find a simple – indeed, exotic – series title, but a small manifesto: “LE SCANNEDDE are an ancient way of holding newborns. That is what this series aims to do: not to imprison the new offspring of poetry, but to embrace them and give them a public form. To hear them wail, and together to recognise the fine timber of traditions reaching out towards the future. For from timber comes paper, and paper is the mother of experimental publishing. A mother who no longer wishes to submit to power but to go free, barefoot, with her child through the world”. As for the Acknowledgements, they are now as long as a chapter and written in the style of a mythomaniac: “The first time Vincenzo Consolo spoke to me in a dream was at my sister Menuzza’s house…”. Perhaps that is where the theme of the real novel lies: a Chance who imagines himself a writer ‘beyond the garden’ – and nobody notices.