After the Anarchists, the Conformists
The conformists of conformity, the conformists of anti-conformity.
Which, in terms of the finite and the infinite, boils down to the same
thing, which time (or, as Mallarmé had it, eternity) changes into
itself; that which gives life its form and adjusts us to it.
The anarchist was captured in the act of murder, the act encapsulating
his own life and his own death; small, slight and pathetic — his
insignificance out of proportion with the tragedy he was creating
through his action. Pathetic, bordering on the comical, he bursts all
of a sudden into what Machiavelli describes as “high places”. The high
places of tragedy; and, after several centuries when it had fallen into
disuse, he breathes new life into them. Unlike the writer, the
conformist, he is consistent with himself. Not the act, but the things,
the objects are the symbols of his unlived but recorded life (as
Pirandello puts it “One either lives life or writes about it.”) A very
few things are enough to establish his identity. Sometimes one is
enough. In Kafka’s case, it is the cockroach (49). The seashell in
Virginia Wolf’s. The double bed and Alice Toklas’s picture in Gertrude
Stein’s. The rose in the case of Emily Dickinson. Another, phonier rose
out of the Sgaravatti catalogue, for Oscar Wilde. Flavio Costantini
sees a writer as a veritable rebus. Which is to say, a rebus, not in
the figurative sense of obscure individual or discourse, but in terms
of an enigmatic game hard to fathom. Rebus — the ablative plural of
res, by or through things; a sort of conundrum incorporating figures,
objects, signs, letters and musical notations, the juxtaposition of
which hints at a meaning that must be deciphered. And the writers’
faces are also part of these rebuses of Constantini’s and assist in the
resolution. In short, in all of these portraits — and in every single
one of them (38) (39) (40) (41) (42) (43) (44) (45) (46) (47 (48) (49)
(50) — there is one that is discreetly mocking rather than amusing;
life is mocked. In a Pirandellian sense, the mockery is of form, of
that most indestructible of all forms, literature.