Little Misunderstandings of No Importance
by Antonio Tabucchi, Translated by Frances Frenaye
Original title: Piccoli equivoci senza importanza
Original language: Italian
| Published by Vintage | | Pub. Date: 1991 | | Pub. Place: UK | | Format: Paperback | | List Price: £4.99 | | Not available for ordering |
| Published by Chatto | | Pub. Place: UK | | Format: Hardcover, 139 pages | | List Price: £12.00 | | Not available for ordering |
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Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943. His first work of fiction appeared in 1975 and since then he has published over a dozen novels, collections of short stories and theatrical dialogues in a career that has made him one of the most representative of contemporary Italian writers. He is Professor of Portugese language and literature at the University of Genoa and recognised as the leading Italian scholar in this field. He is a specialist on the work of Fernando Pessoa, who he has translated into Italian. His most recent novel, Requiem, was published in 1992.
Tabucchi is a post-Kafkanian writer. His protagonists share with Kafka’s a pervasive sense of anxiety and guilt. But there
is a crucial difference: Kafka has bequeathed to us a world in which the mind is constrained, not just imprisoned but, as Milan Kundera has suggested, self-imprisoning, unable to think about anything other than the one obsessive topic: the trial, the surveyor’s job...Tabucchi’s characters, on the other hand, carry their horizon with them. That is the sense of the ‘filo dell’orizzonte’, the vanishing point, the horizon that is neither waiting to be crossed nor crowding in upon you, but always there at the same distance, always unreachable.
Tabucchi, moreover, is assailed by an anxiety that engenders a different hell from Kafka’s, not the doubt as to how one’s action will be judged but the uncertainty as to whether it matters, as to what matters and how it matters. This seems a peculiarly postmodern condition. It is a semiotic anxiety. The world is full of signs and we do not know how to interpret them, even the ones we have put there ourselves. One could say that we suffer from ‘a haunted imagination’. Things may appear to have more meaning than they really do; the seagull that appears on two ‘significant’ occasions in Vanishing Point may be such a case. Other things we may choose not to give meaning to, either because the really have none or because they have so much that we cannot cope with it. Both types creep into the title of Little Misunderstandings of No Importance. ‘Of no importance’ here can mean two things: either that it really doesn’t matter or that it matters so much that it’s beyond repair, ‘senza rimedio’. ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ one says to the friend who has just smashed a priceless ornament — and perhaps, if the event is so cataclysmic that the world is changed as a result of it, it really doesn’t matter, nothing matters anymore.
The question of how much weight to attribute to events and to their interpretations is the very condition of the haunted imagination. The haunted imagination’s first preoccupation is a desire for something or someone else which, or who, will answer a need or a question. This search for an other invariably turns into a discovery, or partial discovery, of the self. This is a theme which Tabucchi foregrounds both in Indian Nocturne (in which an archivist unknowingly pursues his —alter-ego across the sub-continent) and in Vanishing Point. The latter has more than a hint of the Sciascia school of detective fiction about it, beginning as a detective story of sorts, although what is mysterious is not the motive for the murder but the motive for the investigation. It gradually dawns on the investigator, Spino, (some time after it has dawned on the reader) that in trying to find out about the anonymous victim he is trying to discover something about himself. And characteristically, he articulates this point by addressing it to another, the doctor-turned-jazz-pianist Harpo:
‘Who are you to yourself? Do you realise that if you wanted to find that out one day you’d have to look for yourself all over the place, reconstruct yourself, rummage in old drawers, get hold of evidence from other people, clues scattered here and there and lost? You’d be completely in the dark you’d have to feel your way.’
The search represented by the pseudo-detective story of Vanishing Point takes another form in Woman of Porto Pim, a sort of travel book about the Azores. Near the beginning the author summarises the strange experience of some
English travellers in the 1840s:
‘The houses, however, seemed to have bizarre shapes. When they got to the village they realised why. The fronts of all the houses had been made with the prows of sailing ships; they had a triangular floor plan, some were made with good hard woods, and the only stone wall was the one that closed the three sides of the triangle. Some of the houses were quite beautiful, the amazed Englishman tells us, their interiors scarcely looking like houses at all since almost all the furnishings — lanterns, seats, tables and even beds — had been taken from the sea. Many had portholes for windows and since they looked out over the precipice and the sea below they gave the impression of being in a sailing ship which has landed on top of a mountain.’ p110
These houses ‘made of the sea’ are like a figure of the book itself. The archipelago is represented by a variety of means: the memory of the narrator and the inhabitants, stories,
legends, documents, biography, a map, historical description, dreams and a bibliography of earlier writers’ impressions, those ‘honest travel books’ whose value Tabucchi extols in his
prologue. From none of these can the reader derive any
composite picture of the Azores, and what is interesting about this and The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico is Tabucchi’s refusal to pull the fragments together (as Calvino, for example, might have tried to do with some linking device, however rudimentary)
The haunted imagination’s second preoccupation is with what we have done and where it is taking us, our collective past and future, what we may call ‘history’. The anxieties of history are particularly evident in Tabucchi’s most recent
collection of stories, L’Angelo Nero (The Black Angel), so far published only in Italian. In these black stories, Tabucchi’s characteristic world-weariness gives way to a more bitter
despair, as the collapse of the older generation’s rationalist culture allows something that has ben repressed to emerge. With themes that include the behaviour of colonial troops in Angola, Céline and the new Right and the 1943-45 Italian civil war seen from the perspective of the fascist Republic of Salò, Tabucchi contemplates the horror of a history which will not go away and which triumphantly resists the efforts of enlightened culture to move beyond it.
The third preoccupation of the haunted imagination has to do with this anxiety over history as well, because it highlights the insistence of the Unconscious in our culture. There is a chilling phrase near the beginning of Vanishing Point:
‘...he knows that Sara dreams of their impossible departure. He knows because it isn’t difficult to get close to her dreams.’
It’s not unusual for an artist to try to get in touch with the creative imagination of another artist. Tabucchi has done it with Fra Angelico, as Elsa Morante had done twenty years before. He has gone further, and in Sogni di Sogni (Dream of Dreams) imagines the dreams of artists whom he admires. There is, however, something disturbing in the realisation that in Tabucchi the imagination is not a private world, nor is it entirely innocent. The way that people get close to other people’s dreams in Vanishing Point is through an
intermediate body of images, which in that novel is the cinema, but which could be any other language or system of images. The
essential point is that it does not belong to us individually but does very considerably determine how we imagine.
Haunted by the search for the other, haunted by the
memories of history, haunted by its own promiscuity, the imagination in Tabucchi is the site of a troubled writing that captures well the anxieties of this fin de siècle.
