giosuè calaciura – sgobbo
by natale tedesco
Even though he is very tied to themes which are much written about in the new, in his essays and in his first novel, Malacarne (1998, Baldini e Castoldi), Giosuè Calaciura aims at giving back to literature its inventive quality thanks to a visionary writing style. Even though he starts from a very urgent present, he happily puts a distance between himself and every easy and repetitive realistic referentiality without fanciful bursts; we note however, chapter after chapter, incessant anaphoric beginnings.
Sgobbo, his second novel, is once again written in the first person but, apart from it not being the author’s autobiography, it is not even a simple summary of the adventures of the main character. By mixing me, us, the others, the concerted nature which incarnates the protagonist, the concerted nature of the spectators and the readers, the novel about Fiona ends up being the autobiography of a particular kind of extra communitarian inhabitant: women obliged to prostitution. Even their habitat is of a particular kind: the degraded neighbourhoods in the old part of Palermo.
The first impression is that, due to the thematic choice, a crude language is used, almost too realistic. The reader is, however, immediately put on guard by the dilation of the phrase into multi-form suggestions, a drift of lists, a glossary of names, like ever more inflated, dilated nursery rhymes. The song-like repetition “boccafica ventimila” (pp.49-56) with its ballad-like rhythm makes one think of a paradoxical overturning of De André in Bocca di Rosa.
However, all is guided toward a concentrated representation in which the particular concreteness becomes a symbol and seems lyrical, it is put into a prospective of absoluteness which recalls the progress of a poem.
The approach to things and people is visionary and it is, therefore, about a visionary realism, and one also finds a bond with the literary heterodoxy of certain Sicilian authors like Beniamino Joppolo who, however, seems to cohabit with the other face of the writings of the Sicilians: that which recently refers to the Bufalinini-style, with the searched for lexical choices of a high literary rate.
On the one hand the stylistic ends elaborate a prose which features a strenuous hyper-literary tension, on the other they almost absolve the function of hushing the scandal redeeming, on the linguistic front, the irrefutable crudeness of the narrative facts. One tends to think of the old, yet always precise, considerations of Gianfranco Folena who used to observe how a person from Tuscany aims at a formal balance and a person from Sicily tends toward expressiveness. Calaciura stands between the Baroque tradition and contemporaneous expressionism:
Above that noise I listened to the fast waters of the boat and the cry of the whales which were at the prow, and I pleaded with them to sink the boat with their great tails, to eliminate the boat in a whirlpool. I heard the cry of the dolphins who were gathering so as to jump on the wave with a natural joy without an aim, and that of the creatures from the depths of the sea who were following the enormous black form of the ship and its wake of rubbish. I felt the shiver of the starfish and the rigidity of the octopus which was anchored to the rocks, and the mad shark, the stabbed flying mantra, the fish who had lost their way, and all the animals in the sea, in reality so absent and neutral, so separated and indifferent, I felt them all tremble for my pain. (p.8)
From the beginning of the narration, it is not a generic iteration but more precisely the stylistic form of the anaphora (“I was already a whore and I didn’t know it”, p.5), which conducts the concrete and objective facts into another prospective. An apparent obscenity is transformed into painful metaphysics. If we look carefully, if it is the narrative organisms that give rise to such metaphysics, and the pursuit of this is obtained with pertinent stylistic forms, the result is that the event, rather than being placed in time, is dislocated and distributed in space.
The novel, as opposed to being divided into chapters, is made up of sequences that happen in space; in other words, there are stories inside the stories, various narrative units that follow each other like stations of a strange via crucis. Each narrative unit, a bead on a rosary.
Whilst the adventure takes place in a determined time lapse, the protagonist navigates towards other places. Precisely, whilst she carries out her job, Fiona always puts herself in another place, in an acquired, more complex psychology. This increased humanity allows the derelict prostitute to have pity on her unfortunate clients and, paradoxically, to be moved by their misadventures.
This other place allows Fiona to totally conserve her native humanity. She is a woman who undergoes violence, who carries out the oldest job in the world; yet even the final episode confirms and strengthens her identity, humiliated by the act carried out. It is not by chance that the sexual act is carried out in an animal-like way, with the woman taken from behind, obviously without any participation on her part. The erotic position definitely unveils the existential condition of violent submission. (Erotic situations are always important so as to make the consistency of the ideal positions of the characters emerge. Even if in another context, the figure of the maid who possesses Totò Merumeni whilst he lays on his back – “blissful and supine” – illustrates the inertia of the male character of Gozzano).
The quality of invention lies in the presence of reality and dreams, where the sea is utopia, the earth is reality, even though they are both changeable, even though they are both corruptible: in the end the sea smells and one can live with the only certainty “that redemption does not exist”. However, the originality of the character of Fiona, prostitute, lies in the duality of her position between the sufferance of her being here and now, and the possibility of projecting herself immediately into another place, hence her story is told between dreams and reality, right to the splendid finale where Fiona, rather than doubling herself, lives two lives, both of which are dreams.
He is raping me from behind, with his elbow on my back, in front of me there is the sea and a suspended light, it is the redeemed boat which has silently upped its anchors and navigates clandestinely towards the ocean. I’m the one on the prow, I can see myself, I recognize my camel-like bottom, the sticks in my corset looking like quarter-moons. The ship is transporting me in the candid blackness of my beginnings, to another place, according to the second route of my destiny, guided by the cardinal point of another compass. My companions are all the animals of the nursery rhymes, on the Noah’s ark, without a destination, saved. Whilst he fills his condom, from the ship I wave with my hand, and from the bonnet of the car, I wave back. (pp.103-104)
It is true that the correspondence between her as she leaves, free, and the utopia of the ship that raises its anchors and goes towards the sea, is in opposition with the awareness that her life has anchored her to the bonnet of a car where she carries out her job; but in the imaginary utopia of being in another place, Fiona manages to live that which should have been her real destiny. By cultivating her humanity, she defends her most intimate integrity. Hence, Fiona can always imagine herself as the girl from the marsh who is going to get some water.
It is evident that the force of Calaciura’s novel lies in his capacity of telling a crude and “real” story, without chronicle references. The social contents emerge together with the urgency of condemnable themes through the use of an abnormal language, rich in excess, efficacy, exemplary oxymoron’s (the “candid black of the origins”), striped with poetry.
May 2004