The whole, as-yet-unformed modern myth rests at its origins on two bodies of work that are almost indistinguishable in spirit – by Alberto Savinio and his brother, Giorgio de Chirico – and that reached their culminating point just before the war of 1914. They simultaneously call upon visual and auditory possibilities so as to create a symbolic, concrete, universally intelligible language, one that claims to account fully for the specific reality of the age (the artist offering himself up as victim of his times) as well as for the metaphysical interrogation endemic to that age: the relation between the new objects that we are forced to use and old objects (abandoned or not) is extremely disturbing in that it heightens the sentiment of fatality. ‘The path that is currently liable to predominate,’ Savinio wrote in 1914, ‘is especially characterized by its dark, austere form and by the rigid, well-materialized aspect of its metaphysics … Unlike the days in which abstraction reigned supreme, our age tries to draw the complete metaphysical elements out of matter itself (things). The metaphysical idea would pass from the state of abstraction to that of the senses. The elements that inform1 the thoughtful and sensitive type of man would thus be highlighted.’
We are here at the very heart of the symbolic sexual world, as Volkelt and Schemer described it before Freud. Just as in Chirico’s early paintings, the arrangement of towers and arcades – the first justifying the titles that revolve around nostalgia, the second those that stress enigma – express the relations between the male and female sexes, in Savinio’s Songs of Half-Death (1914) we witness the ‘bald man,’ in the father’s image, as Chirico painted him in The Child’s Brain, his face vaguely reminiscent of ‘certain photos of Napoleon III and of Anatole France at the time of Red Lily: this gentleman who gazes at you while laughing up his sleeve is always the demon of temptation’; the ‘yellow man,’ pushed by an invisible love-god (quite probably the ego itself under the crossed beams of its lamps); ‘Daisyssina,’ the Eternal Feminine, the ‘mother of stone’ beneath whose mask it is impossible not to recognize the very haughty and severe Baroness de Chirico, in whose shadow her son Giorgio painted and ruined himself so many times (the yellow man ‘kills his mother, then kisses her; he throws her up to the ceiling and catches her; he tosses her aside and tramples her. Great bursts of laughter’); the ‘cast-iron man,’ who constitutes the decorative fence around society; ‘two angels, a mad king, the target-man,’ not to mention ‘the little boy,’ whose entrance is rather symptomatic: ‘in a nightshirt, holding a candle. With the bottom of his slipper, he squashes a daddy-long-legs that was crawling up the wall; then, trembling, he watches the flattened insect wave an antenna,’ singlehandedly placing the action within the mysterious confines of the ego and the superego. The latter is represented in all its power, as it is in Chirico’s work, by statues that ‘crop up here and there,’ most of them equestrian – in some cases, they start to gallop.
In these two brothers, humour surges from their intermittent but very acute awareness of their own repression. In this way, both of them keep alive the primitive belief that the properties of something eaten are transmitted to the person who absorbs them and that they form his character, whence all kinds of prohibitions. Hebdomeros, the hero of a book by Chirico, divides dishes into ‘moral and immoral.’ He absolutely frowns upon the consumption of shellfish and crustaceans. ‘He also found very immoral the habit of eating ice cream in cafés, and the whole idea of putting cubes of ice in drinks … He considered strawberries and figs the most immoral of fruits.’ Freud has stressed the relation that exists between the persistence of this belief – namely, that oral absorption can have serious consequences – and anxiety at the moment of choosing the sexual object.
For The Songs of Half-Death, Alberto Savinio had scored an unusual accompaniment. On this subject, the critic for Les Soirées de Paris wrote: ‘We mustn’t neglect to mention the way in which M. Savinio interprets his works at the piano. Playing with incomparable mastery and strength, this young composer, who refuses to wear a jacket, stands before his keyboard in shirtsleeves. It is remarkable to see him thrash about, howl, shatter the pedals, describe dizzying windmills, throw punches in the grip of passion, of despair, of unabashed joy … After each piece, they wiped off the blood that smeared the keys.’ Three months later, the war broke out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: The Lives of the Gods.
To facilitate the circulation of ships of large displacement as well as to encourage home-delivery, the Casa Rana was encumbered by neither steps nor perron. Still, the whistling steamship pushed the door open with its arrogant prow and penetrated as far as the middle of the hall, where it was met with the most complete indifference.
The Rana family was out in full force, along with Roberto Danesi, the tragic postulant.
After the customary insults, the master of the house amicably invited the two guests to let themselves be kicked in the rear. The Ranas were of the bluest blood, and they maintained a cult of good manners.
Madame Giulia Rana, the mistress of the house, wore a magnificent evening dress with a large green floral design – it was very becoming.
Mr Pard, drawing close so he could spit in her face, discovered that the dress was just an illusion.
A daughter of batrachians and herself a frog, Mme Giulia Rana retained on her skin the identical ornamentation that had decorated the epidermis of her father, the amphibian. It is unnecessary to add that Mme Giulia was completely naked under her congenital floral patterns. Her belly, which was entirely white, plump, and sensitive to the point of irritation, was crushed like a child’s balloon against the table edge.
Disgusted by this new evidence of the instability of the human character, the consul sat in a corner and, crossing his legs, began playing with the end of his tail, which protruded from his metallic trouser leg.
Monsieur Luigi Rana, Mme Giulia’s husband and Honorary President of the Society for the Encouragement of Pederasty in the Family, mixed an ammonia and excrement cocktail in a douche bag.
As for Capt. Tullio Rana, a badly disabled veteran and M. Luigi’s brother, he was hopping about the room like a silhouette target because, as a result of his valiant resistance to the onslaught of the Sturmtruppen, his body had been reduced to the thickness of a pill.
Some big, wheezy, worn-out stars were lined up against the walls. There was nothing left of their former splendour save for a vague, pallid gleam flickering at the ends of their once-so-radiant points. The town, white and round in its ramparts like a charlotte russe bathed in cream, was visible through the window.
The séance was about to open like a flower. Everyone surrounded the beautiful Mme Rana, who by dint of her unique talent served as a relief valve for occult revelations.
Although the Casa Rana was devoid of chairs, everyone attending this memorable séance was quietly seated around the table, with hands resting lightly on the carpet, torso well arched, and butt in the air.
Roberto Danesi took the floor. Ever since his famous attempt at suicide by strychnine poisoning he had been catoblepharic; so he had become accustomed to addressing his listeners with his back turned.
He said: ‘In November 1918 we decided to leave Switzerland and return to Europe. We booked a passage, Mme Danesi, my son Themistocles, and I, on a laundry barge. The war was over, and I was eager to lend my country a hand. But that’s only a detail. Outside 24 Rue Jacob in Paris our ship was accidentally torpedoed by some of the dynamite-wielding fishermen who worked that area. Clasping my son Themistocles in my arms, I managed to hold onto the ship’s strongbox that, because it was completely empty, floated on the sea like a colocynth. It carried us without misadventure to the local house of ill-repute. Ever since that tragic night, I’ve had no news of my wife – until yesterday, 11 September, when an accordionist in Tel Aviv was kind enough to announce by radio that Mme Danesi is no more dead than you or I, and that she is at this moment hospitalized in a big frozen meat plant in London, where the best specialists have begun removing her tattoos.
‘Gentlemen,’ the tragic postulant continued in even graver tones, ‘this is the reason we’ve come together this evening. I want to hear from the mouth of that slut Mme Giulia Rana, gracious representative of the beyond, and in the presence of that filth Mr Pard, British Consul, whether my dear Themistocles, flesh and blood of my adored wife’s twenty-third lover, can still pronounce his mother’s sweet name.’
Following Roberto Danesi’s statement, Mme Rana, in a deep trance, puffed out her immense belly and said in a creamy voice: ‘Spirit! Is it true that Mme Danesi is at present hospitalized in a big frozen meat plant in London, where they are proceeding to remove her tattoos? Answer without delay, I command you!’
A few seconds after the ecstatic silence had absorbed the echo of this umbilical exhortation, terrible spasms shook Mme Rana’s belly and a voice no longer her own shouted: ‘Jammed. Slitting child’s throat. Call back later!’
– first published in Bifur
(translated by James Brook)
1. My emphasis.