Farewell, British Summer Time
This past Sunday we moved the clock back in the UK. I enjoyed the extra hour in bed a lot, but I must confess that I’m one of those who often rant about these biannual changes. Why mess with the clock? Does it make any difference at all? It’s not like I need to feed farm animals or work in the fields, right? And yet, this year it was different. I mean, it was the same as every year — the sun was coming up a little bit later every day, it was getting colder — but I certainly noticed this slide into eternal nights more than previously. Since at least the second week of October I found it very hard to get up in the morning, and would hit the bed round nine, nine-thirty, on evenings I wasn’t working late. I was exhausted, and I wasn’t necessarily working more, or doing anything out of the ordinary. I attributed my state — without any science to back me up, but without any doubts — to those dark mornings.1
Last week, at the peak of my tiredness, I found myself saying to a friend “I don’t feel quite myself”, while complaining about the season. I don’t think I had ever used that expression before. And for this reason I metaphorically set it aside in my mouth, and started to chew on it. What does it mean to not feel oneself? Does it mean you feel like something or someone else, say a misplaced sock, or Gisele Bündchen? Of course, it’s clear that it means you don’t feel like you normally do, that there is something amiss, but I think there is some poetic beauty in presenting such a typical shift in mood as if you had gone through a deep ontological unmooring.
The English language, for all its simplicity and pragmatism, is prone to these flights of fancy. Because I approach this borrowed language from an angle, I’m perhaps rather attuned to these flourishes. What’s more, it’s details like these that make me feel lucky for not being at home in this language, with all that this linguistic homelessness implies
Pirandello, Cascella, and the fragmentation of the self
Ah, finalmente! Eccolo là! Chi era? Niente era. Nessuno. Un povero corpo mortificato, in attesa che qualcuno se lo prendesse2 — Pirandello
Coincidentally, talking about not feeling oneself, these past few weeks I have been reading two books that deal with unstable selfhood, both written by Italian authors.
I’m re-reading Luigi Pirandello’s 1926 novel, Uno, nessuno e centomila.3 If you don’t know this classic of Italian modernism, the book explores the process of self-defamiliarisation that the main character, one Vitangelo Moscarda, undergoes after his wife comments that his nose is slightly angled to one side. This trivial observation triggers a deep awareness in Moscarda that he has never truly “seen” himself as others do. He starts to obsessively examine his face in the mirror, realising that he doesn’t own a single cohesive image of himself, that his identity is composed of disparate fragments, that he’s fractured into manifold personas — what he calls the “centomila”, or one-hundred-thousand selves. The mirror, then, turns for him into a symbol of estrangement, which no longer reflects a stable identity. Anyone who’s ever looked into a mirror and held their own gaze under the influence of a hallucinogenic will be familiar with Moscarda’s journey.4
The other book is Daniela Cascella’s Nothing as We Need It (Punctum Books, 2022).5 This one is a frisky exploration of what she terms “chimeric writing” — a writerly mode that defies conventional scholarship through hybrid, polyphonic and ludic approaches. The book is structured around conversations between Cascella’s many voices — her literary centomila? — and emphasises resonance and hearing over academic and over-intellectual analysis. I was particularly interested in the possibilities opened by her invitation to explore connections in writing and reading, and to do this understanding these links as deeply personal and intuitive,6 since these connections — as described by Cascella — are haunted by the unspoken or untranslatable, and many times point to a sense of loss. Anyone who writes in a second language, will be familiar with this feeling of incompleteness: that untranslated canon that we keep referring to, but that we can’t ever fully transport to the new language; the things that we can say in our mother tongue but that have no equivalent in our adopted one.7 In a way, all writing across languages is “chimeric”, in that if not outright impossible, it is at least incomplete.
An image comes to mind here, a cliché which can nevertheless illuminate what I’m trying to say. Imagine an iceberg; the tip of the iceberg is my writing and the books I’ve read in English; whatever exists under the surface are the books I’ve read in Spanish, those books that turned me into the writer I am — books we’ll never be able to discuss as equals, unless you’ve read them in Spanish too. What I have written in Spanish might rest even deeper, somewhere on the seabed, like a linguistic shipwreck, since there’s every chance that particular body of work will never find its way into English. There’s a writerly my/self that exists above the surface, and there’s another one (or several ones?) under the water. And perhaps there are a hundred thousand others.
And of course, there’s another possibility: there’s nessuno, none.
Contemporary unhomes
In his 1917 essay ‘Art as Technique’, Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky defines defamiliarisation (ostranenie) as the artistic strategy of presenting familiar objects or situations in an unusual way, with the objective of de-automatising the audience’s perception. Shklovsky saw in ostranenie the antidote to the numbness of perceptual automatism.8 Two years later, Sigmund Freud writes of the uncanny (unheimlich), in an essay titled ‘Das Unheimliche’. For Freud, the uncanny describes a sensation of discomfort, or eery un/familiarity; he locates it in situations in which fears or repressed desires come back to the surface, something that happens when the boundary between familiar and unfamiliar blurs. It is remarkable that these ideas seem to be up in the air, at the time Pirandello writes about Moscarda’s existential enquiry. And as we are making connections, a great part of Kafka’s work uses defamiliarisation as a technique, or deals with the uncanniness of everyday life. And then there’s Rilke, and Woolf, and Breton, and Musil, and Traki, and Pessoa, and Valery, and, and, and… Did humanity stop feeling existentially at home in the 1910s-1920s? Why did so many writers become aware of this? And what might the equivalent be a hundred years later?
I feel that in our time, any sense of not being at home in our/selves is tangled with technology. Particularly thanks to social media, we’re all Moscarda: unable to see ourselves as others do, and split across countless versions. But whereas the mirror for Moscarda was a simple glass reflection, we are instead faced with an endless digital loop of profiles and possible identitarian performances — mirrors facing mirrors. Today, Moscarda’s moment of self-ostranenie might be triggered when he finds a fake social media profile of himself; when he begins to wonder which Moscarda is the real one; when he realises that he’s unable to answer. Whether he’ll come to realise that selfhood is always chimeric, or whether he’ll start writing in a foreign language to make sense of it all — I can’t say.
Instead of attributing it to the fact that I’m a year older.
“Ah, finally! There it was! Who was it? It was nothing. Nobody. A poor, humiliated body, waiting for someone to take it.” Translated by Vitangelo Moscarda.
We will be discussing this novel during the next Reading Clinic event on November 30.
I’m not. I’m just mentioning what I heard some drug people say.
We discussed this book during this month’s Reading Clinic meeting. A disclaimer in the interest of clarity: I’m in good terms with Daniela — what’s more, even if we meet infrequently, I would consider her a friend. In any case, I have long admired her exploration of the spaces in-between languages, and many of the things she writes resonate with my/selves. Also, I’m at the stage of my life when I care more about what my friends are writing, than about who wins the Nobel or some other prize. I won’t apologise for this conflict of interest.
“I never read for erudition but for connections, even when most unlikely, or unhinged” (55). “I do not read but hear it, whisper it back to you, whisper the sense of being enmeshed in what came before in the history of my reading, those black ties, connections, states of voice, states of mind, states of mine, and the mine is deep, some of it unmapped, some of it dark, some of it with precious stones, some of it with dull rock and moss and useless damp slippery surfaces” (71). “My “true form / an image of Echo and Chimera,” moving across texts through their whispers and resounding connections, is the true form of this writing” (84). Among others.
And let’s not even mention what is culturally untranslatable!
One of the examples discussed by Shklovsky is Tolstoy’s ‘Kohlstomer’, in which the story is narrated from the point of view of a horse. Check it out — it is very good.