Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Memory and Nostalgia in Antonio Tabucchi's Last Two Books

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10848770.2012.728801

1470-1316

Joseph Francese,

Travel Writing and Literature

Abstract In Il tempo invecchia in fretta, a collection of short stories (2009), and in Viaggi e altri viaggi, a travel book (2010), the Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012) investigates the conflict between interior time, or duration, and social, or historical time. Il tempo invecchia interrogates the dialectic between individual lives and grand historical processes. Viaggi—Tabucchi's intellectual autobiography—retrieves the past, which exists in the present as memory, so as to counter the “eternal present” of media time and its humus, consumerism, and provide a sense, or direction, to future decision making. Both volumes demonstrate a form of social commitment that is not Sartrean—that interrogates the present while abstaining from proposing solutions—but is well suited to our times: by bringing together narrative remnants of the past in the present of memory, Tabucchi attempts to give the present a sense and a direction to the future. These altrove altrui (the elsewheres of others) provoke a feeling of “nostalgia for the future,” a yearning for what never was, but still might be: a new social and moral order. Notes 1. After a brief bout with cancer Tabucchi died in Lisbon on March 25, 2012, three days before this article was accepted for publication. The works that are at the focus of this essay are: Antonio Tabucchi, Il tempo invecchia in fretta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2009), and Viaggi e altri viaggi, ed. Paolo Di Paolo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2010). 2. Bruno Corty, “La machine à démonter le temps,” Le Figaro, 28 May 2009. 3. For an analysis of “The Self as Other” in earlier works by Tabucchi, particularly L’Angelo nero (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991), see Joseph Francese, “Tabucchi: The Angel of History,” in Narrating Postmodern Time and Space (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 138–54. 4. Antonio Tabucchi, Requiem: Un’allucinazione, trans. Sergio Vecchio (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1992); Sostiene Pereira: Una testimonianza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994); La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997); and Tristano muore (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004). In the stream-of-consciousness narration of Tristano—perhaps Tabucchi's masterpiece—subjective, interior time supersedes collective time. 5. Tabucchi, “Come nasce una storia,” 185. All translations herein are my own. 6. Edgar Allan Poe, Review of Twice Told Tales, in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 60. See also B. M. Éjxenbaum, “O. Henry and the Short Story,” in The New Short Story Theories, 87. 7. Fabio Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: minacce alla libertà di stampa? L’abbiamo persa da tanto tempo,” Il venerdì di Repubblica, 25 September 2009. 8. Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: minacce alla libertà di stampa?” 9. Norman Manea, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (New York: Grove Press, 1992), x. 10. Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: minacce alla libertà di stampa?” 11. Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: minacce alla libertà di stampa?” 12. Antonio Tabucchi, L’oca al passo: Notizie dal buio che stiamo attraversando (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006). For the uninitiated, Il gioco dell’oca resembles the U.S. board game Chutes and Ladders. Players of Il gioco dell’oca advance their marker along a path of sixty-three squares in numbers corresponding to throws of the dice. Those who land on the ‘lucky’ squares (one of the thirteen squares marked by a goose) may jump forward a number of squares double those shown by their roll of the dice: the first player to reach the final, central square wins. 13. As Karl-Heinz Stierle argues, “the chronically arraigned whole of the ‘action’ can be a whole only if one has a complete view of it. And this means that the story has to be in the past. The preterite here, as in all narrative texts, is the tense denoting completeness of action, its state of being past.” Karl-Heinz Stierle, “Story as Exemplum—Exemplum as Story: On the Pragmatics and Poetics of Narrative Texts,” in New Short Story Theories, 22. 14. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 84, 86. 15. Antonio Tabucchi, “Un fiammifero Minerva,” MicroMega (1997): 2. See chap. 4 of Joseph Francese, Socially Symbolic Acts: The Historizing Fictions of Umberto Eco, Vincenzo Consolo, and Antonio Tabucchi (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), for an analysis of Tabucchi's equation of writing and social commitment, particularly in works of his maturity, such as Requiem, Sogni di sogni [Palermo: Sellerio, 1992], Si sta facendo sempre più tardi. Romanzo in forma di lettere [Milan: Feltrinelli 2001], Autobiografie altrui Poetiche a posteriori [Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003], and Tristano muore [Milano: Feltrinelli, 2004]). 16. Benjamin Illuminations, 91, 100. 17. Charles Berryman, “Critical Mirrors: Theories of Autobiography,” Mosaic 32.1 (March 1999): 76–77. 18. Tonya Blowers, “The Textual Contract: Distinguishing Autobiography from the Novel,” in Representing Lives: Woman and Auto/Biography, ed. Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey (New York: MacMillan, 2000), 106. 19. See Tabucchi, “Come nasce una storia”: “Perhaps I am one of those writers who is incapable of writing a journal intime, a diary; so I prefer writing other people's diaries” (182). 20. Blowers, “The Textual Contract,” 106. 21. Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), 3. 22. Roland Barthes, Barthes di Roland Barthes, trans. Gianni Celati (Torino: Einaudi, 2007). 23. Antonio Tabucchi and Bernard Comment, in Pour Tabucchi: Le Rencontres de Fontevraud (Saint-Nazaire: Meet 2009), 276. 24. Anna Dolfi, Gli oggetti e il tempo della saudade: Le storie inafferrabili di Antonio Tabucchi (Florence: Le Lettere, 2010), 17. 25. Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 107, 91. 26. J. T. Fraser, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Redmond, WA: Tempus Books, 1987), xv, 188 and ff. 27. D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 103. 28. Tabucchi, L’oca al passo, 17. 29. Maria Cristina Carratù, “Antonio Tabucchi: Il tempo non è più quello di una volta,” Repubblica, 16 October 2009. 30. Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: minacce alla libertà di stampa?” 31. Andrea Bajani, “Il fascismo globale che ci gira intorno: Incontro con Tabucchi,” Unità, 29 November 2005. 32. Tabucchi and Comment, Pour Tabucchi: Le Rencontres de Fontevraud, 276. 33. Fabio Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: Le jeux de l’écriteur e de l’hazard,” Magazine litteraire 436 (November 2004): 92–97. (http://www.feltrinellieditore.it/SchedaTesti?id_testo=1468&id_int=1384: accessed 23 February 2011). 34. Concita De Gregorio, “La letteratura non è il luogo della militanza: Intervista ad Antonio Tabucchi,” Repubblica, 3 December 2005. 35. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 632–38. 36. Tabucchi and Comment, Pour Tabucchi: Le Rencontres de Fontevraud, 276–77. 37. The first work of this trilogy is another collection of short stories, Si sta facendo sempre più tardi: Romanzo in forma di lettere (2001. Milan: Feltrinelli). His grouping of a novel, Tristano, with two collections of short stories, Si sta facendo sempre più tardi and Il tempo invecchia in fretta (Feltrinelli, 2009) into a “time trilogy” demonstrates that theme, and not narrative form, may provide the starting point for analyses of his fictional works, and further justifies reading Il tempo invecchia together with Viaggi. 38. Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: Le jeux de l’écriteur e de l’hazard.” Silvia Santirosi, “La nostalgia del peggio,” Il mattino, 30 September 2009. 39. “Lo Statuto Albertino” is the constitution King Charles Albert granted to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1848; it became the Constitution of the Kingdom of Italy upon Unification and remained in force until 1948. 40. Santirosi, “La nostalgia del peggio.” 41. Chiara Dino, “Sostiene Tabucchi ‘Gli italiani senza memoria’,” Corriere fiorentino, 13 October 2009. 42. Antonio Tabucchi, “Promesse escono anche in Italia: i racconti di Bernard Comment,” Corriere della sera, 26 April 1995, 31. 43. Antonio Tabucchi and Edouardo Lourenço, “Les lunettes renversées: les pays vus d’ailleurs, la culture et ce qu’elle deviant,” in Antonio Tabucchi, Pour Tabucchi: Le Rencontres de Fontevraud (Saint-Nazaire: Meet, 2009), 137. 44. Dino, “Sostiene Tabucchi ‘Gli italiani senza memoria’.” 45. Tabucchi and Lourenço, “Les lunettes renversées,” 137. However, Tabucchi seems to neglect the fact that such xenophobia and racism greeted Southern Italians who migrated to those same Northern Italian regions, particularly in the decades following World War II. In this regard, see Enrica Capussotti, “Nordisti contro Sudisti: Internal Migration and Racism in Turin, Italy: 1950s and 1960s,” Italian Culture 28.2 (2010): 121–38. 46. Francesco Mannoni, “Tabucchi dentro il cuore del tempo,” Giornale di Brescia, 17 October 2009. 47. Severino Colombo, “Tabucchi: ‘L’Italia?’ Sempre prima, nel bene e nel male … ” La Provincia di Como, 13 October 2009. 48. Tabucchi and Comment, Pour Tabucchi: Le Rencontres de Fontevraud, 276. 49. Colombo, “Tabucchi: ‘L’Italia?’ Sempre prima, nel bene e nel male.” 50. Carratù, “Antonio Tabucchi: Il tempo non è più quello di una volta.” 51. Santirosi, “La nostalgia del peggio.” 52. Mannoni, “Tabucchi dentro il cuore del tempo.” 53. Antonio Tabucchi, La nostalgie, l’automobile et l’infini: Lectures de Pessoa (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 54. Antonio Tabucchi, “Some Reflections on Translations,” Italian Culture 21 (2003): 171. 55. Antonio Tabucchi, “Sostiene Tabucchi: Intervista di Albero Scarponi,” in Raccontano se stessi, ed. Alberto Scarponi (Rome: Gargemi, 2002), 119. 56. L’oca al passo, 131. Such Möbius-strip morphing back and forth, between Self and Other is at the core of Autobiografie altrui. 57. Tabucchi, “Sostiene Tabucchi,” 119. 58. Antonio Tabucchi, Notturno indiano (Palermo: Sellerio, 1984). For an analysis of the “plural personality” that animates Tabucchi's early works, see Joseph Francese, “L’eteronimia di Antonio Tabucchi,” Stanford Italian Review (1992): 123–38. 59. Antonio Tabucchi, “Language as Homeland and the Exile of the Writer,” Autodafé: The Journal of the International Parliament of Writers (New York: Seven Stories Press. 2000): 82. 60. Antonio Tabucchi, “Norman Manea, el eterno extranjero,” Letras libre 7.82 (October 2005): 74. 61. Antonio Tabucchi, “Berlusconi a abaissé le niveau esthétique. Le Monde, 10 October. 62. Tabucchi, “Un fiammifero Minerva.” 63. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 83. 64. Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: Le jeux de l’écriteur e de l’hazard.” Jennifer Burns, Fragments of Impegno (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2001), 62–80, and Elizabeth Wren-Owens, Postmodern Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 79–100, also provide analyses of engagement in Tabucchi's writings. 65. Tabucchi,"Un fiammifero Minerva,” 6. 66. Tabucchi, Sostiene Tabucchi, 125. 67. Tabucchi, “Un fiammifero Minerva,” 6. 68. Tabucchi, “Norman Manea, el eterno extranjero,” 74. 69. Antonio Tabucchi, “La maggioranza pericolosa,” l’Unità, 15 January 2005, 23. 70. See Antonio Tabucchi, Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento: Vivere da Rom a Firenze (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999). 71. Roy Palmer Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943–1948 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 146. 72. Michele Battini, The Missing Italian Nuremburg, trans. Noor Giovanni Mazhar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 19. 73. Simonetta Fiori, “Tabucchi: così l’Italia è diventata il mio grande rimorso,” Repubblica, 27 January 2010, 57. 74. Benjamin Kilborne, Disappearing Persons: Shame and Appearance (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 5. 75. De Gregorio, “La letteratura non è il luogo della militanza: Intervista ad Antonio Tabucchi.” 76. Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: minacce alla libertà di stampa?” 77. Santirosi, “La nostalgia del peggio.” 78. Antonio Tabucchi, “Il padrone della tabaccheria,” Repubblica, 31 January 2007, 50. 79. Antonio Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2001). 80. The Book of Disquietude, a “Factless Autobiography,” tells of “vagheggiamenti, di sogni, di viaggi mai fatti” (Viaggi, 172). The fundamental difference, of course, is that Soares never leaves his room; this is why Pessoa can write of having “travelled without living” and of “the weariness of having had a past, the disquiet of living the present, and the tedium of having to have a future” (The Book of Disquietude, 463). 81. Gambaro, “Antonio Tabucchi: Le jeux de l’écriteur e de l’hazard.” 82. Romana Petri, “Uno scrittore pieno di gente,” Leggere 61 (June 1994): 72. In this way Tabucchi supersedes his most important, perhaps, literary model, Pessoa, whose writings are characterized (as Dolfi synthesizes) by the “nostalgia of the past,” a paradoxical “nostalgia of the present” (the immobile present of a life that is thought and written about but not lived), and the “metaphysical nostalgia” (of living not the historical fact but its abstraction or spiritual essence), and by the “nostalgia of the possible” (the desire for what might have been) (Dolfi, 23–24). 83. As Gramsci defines it, catharsis indicates “the passage from the merely economic (or egoistic-passionate) to the ethical-political, that is, the superior elaboration of the structure in superstructure in the consciousness of individuals.” Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1244. 84. Carlos Gumpert, “La letteratura come enigma ed inquietudine. Una conversazione con Antonio Tabucchi,” in Dedica a Antonio Tabucchi (Pordenone: Associazione Provinciale Per La Prose, 2001), 122, 104. 85. Gumpert, Gumpert, “La letteratura come enigma ed inquietudine,” 104. 86. Antonio Tabucchi, “Cambi di stagione della letteratura: Queneau e Calvino, due grandi giocolierei del secolo al tramonto,” Corriere della sera, 15 January 1998. 87. Tabucchi, Sostiene Pereira, 78. 88. Tabucchi, Sostiene Tabucchi, 114–15. 89. Tabucchi, Il padrone della tabaccheria. 90. Antonio Prete, “L’assedio della lontananza,” in Nostalgia: Storia di un sentimento (Milan: Cortina, 1992), 21.