La freccia e il cerchio
anno 5, numero 5, 2014
pp. 29-32
Giuseppe Montesano, Matteo Palumbo
Absences with in voices
I. White Hell
PALUMBO
I believe that absence is linked first of all to places. I am thinking of the imaginary of crepuscular poets, according to whom cemeteries would celebrate the essence of life, by emphasising its absence. Also, I think of attics, a tank of relics where all the objects go once they have lost their use.
MONTESANO
Cemeteries and attics as store places?
PALUMBO
They store things. Bodies, in the first case; in the second, obsolete objects, to use Francesco Orlando’s formula. In both cases, we are talking of presences, which have lost their raison d’etre.
MONTESANO
I am thinking of places of absence as being mostly internal. When you were speaking, I was pondering over the fact that I am unable to visualise absence as absence in space. For me space is always full, present: even a desert, the horizon, or a physical void …they are full. I tend to think of places of absence as internal: holes, voids, absences that open in life. It’s like a metaphor operating for real, digging deep in our consciousness.
PALUMBO
Physical places are also symbolic. If you translate into consciousness the two places I was talking about, the cemetery and the attic, these spaces could serve as significant metaphors to describe what is deep within us.
MONTESANO
This reminds me of Vladimir Holan, the Czech poet, the chanter of Prague. He talks about death a great deal, and of cemeteries employed as metaphors. However, when he really wants to refer to absence, he always makes use of abstractions. He does not talk about physical absence, but rather about a deletion on a written sheet: this he calls absence. He thus moves from the cemetery, most likely the strongest of metaphors, to interiorised metaphors: the deleted page, the void opening in between two moments of existence, the void as negative disappearance of time; the void of memory, which is absence and deletion. Just as on a manuscript of which we have no trace left: this is evil to him. Then I think of Manganelli, his hell, the tragedy in the shape of a white page. This is not the white page on which one can write, but the page on which one can no longer write, because hell is, in fact, white, empty, absent.
PALUMBO
I believe that the correlation you establish is more than legitimate, because you are giving an internal content to what used to be a spatial object, located in the here and now. The issue of the blank page, the page which is not connected with the black mark left by the pen, is interesting, because the white page containing on itself a written line is, on the contrary, an element of tension compared to what is said. It is, I’d say, a constitutive part of what is said.
MONTESANO
I am thinking of Mallarmé and his famous white spaces. They certainly represent pauses, music, the space that allows breathing. But I think that there is also an element of despair here: the white page is unwritable, perhaps even unutterable. This is how I see it. It’s not a sheet of paper that will be filled with writing, or that is beautiful in itself. The white page is a little scary. And, yes, it is also beautiful, because it marks a beginning. You can draw a sign on it and go on with the metaphor. But I think that the voids around the poem by Mallarmé cannot be filled. When he says “the wing that threatens”, that word, threat, is all around, is inside this absence that tends to swallow us.
PALUMBO
There is a further problem, which might be the most disturbing element. If things stay opposite, as you were saying, absence is the white that, somehow, one must not violate. If we get out of this perspective of radical opposition, however, then the invisible will never turn visible, but, at least, one will be able to say it.
MONTESANO
Look, my rationality agrees, but this is not how I feel. I am thinking of the white in Poe’s Gordon Pym: it’s absolute terror, one that neither the author nor anyone else can mention; noone will return from that white. I am thinking of the white in Moby Dick, a white on which nothing can be written, a white that is not tension, but absence. A white that is, indeed, the limit.
PALUMBO
The limit, the extreme element, I get it: but we inhabit the limit, this is the point.
MONTESANO
You see this white as tension, I see it, rather, as something around which events revolve, but still I don’t provide it with a body, a fullness, a reality…
PALUMBO
So the whale would never be as threatening and present as in the discourses of others?
MONTESANO
The threat comes from the ghost of the whale. It is this ghost that scares. Let’s consider Beckett: Godot is not only the waiting, he is also a ghost, something threatening. This is how I would read it: Godot is no longer the one who has to come and solve problems. This is a first-level reading, but there could also be a deeper one: Godot is a threat. I don’t mean to say that he is only a threat, but the waiting is by no means relative. Characters are overcome by something that looms over and, in Beckett’s case, it is possible that such a threat will push towards action. It is as if absence were a sort of undertow, a thing, a void, an unmoving engine that first pushes towards action and then to inaction.
PALUMBO
Our hypotheses are not opposite. Let me choose a Biblical literary example in order to make myself clear: ours is the same difference between Moses and Aaron. Moses states that one cannot talk of God; Moses’ language is silence. Aaron instead objects: you must say something to others, so you build idols. What is the point? Who is right, who is wrong? They are both right and wrong. This is why I talk of tension. The solution is that of talking anyway, knowing that you never say God, you never manage to say it. If we reason in these terms, the issue of the white becomes clear: white is around what we are and what we can say. Our attempt relates to our talking around this white, within it, because in the moment when there is white, soon after there is silence. Beckett’s theatre pieces, as well as his other writings, are somehow attempts on talking within this white. The white gets to the end, when the tension stops, when this sort of attempt, which is ad infinitum and aims to say the unsayable, wears out. Then, one surrenders and the only thing left is the blank page. In this sense I was talking about tension. It is like trying to make a journey, while knowing that you will be shipwrecked. Still, you choose to leave anyway.
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