Friday, June 26, 2015

“The power of the incomprehensible” – Massimo Bontempelli’s "realismo magico"




Invisible presences! My mind began wandering as I regained speed. I remembered that for a while, as a child, the phrase had appealed to me a great deal. It’s a pity they don’t teach even a little demonology in school.  
                       
    – Massimo Bontempelli, “Nitta,” in The Faithful Lover

How perplexing that the initiator of one of the most recognizable 20th century literary movements remains largely unknown outside of Italy. Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960), the Italian writer recognized as the first practitioner of “realismo magico” (magic realism, or, as later translated by a Venezuelan colleague of Bontempelli, the more familiar "magical realism") was in Italy a prominent figure for decades, winner of the country’s top literary award; co-founder, with Curzio Malaparte, of the influential European journal ‘900, the editorial board of which included James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, and André Malraux; and later a leader, with Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, and Alberto Savinio, of a movement aimed at renewing Italian literature following the war, sharing with many of his generation a turn to the left after an early embrace of Fascism. For six decades Bontempelli produced a steady stream of novels, stories, plays and essays.

I took a look at two volumes available in English: Separations: Two Novels of Mothers and Children (Due Storie di Madre é Figlie) then at The Faithful Lover (L’amante fedele), the late collection of stories that won Bontempelli the Strega Prize in 1954.

The Boy With Two Mothers (1929) and The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children (1930) could have been written last week. Though these short novels borrow from surrealism, their freshness both in style and subject resembles little else of the period. A work they do resemble – quite to my astonishment in that I’d never come across anything quite like it – is Jane Bowles’ singular novel Two Serious Ladies. The similarities in atmosphere, meandering narrative structure and depiction of idiosyncratically independent women lead me to believe Bowles must have read Bontempelli. There is also a strong resemblance between a long passage in The Boy With Two Mothers and Leonora Carrington’s charming 1976 novel, The Hearing Trumpet, which contains a notably similar depiction of a rural psychiatric sanitarium for women.

In the first of these works, Bontempelli takes the theme of Solomon’s judgment in deciding the real mother of a child claimed by two women and complicates it by giving the child two mothers in actuality. In the upper class household of the Parigi family in the fashionable Ludovisio Hill quarter of Rome, young Mario, on his 7th birthday, undergoes a transformative experience while playing in a park, suddenly demanding that he be called “Ramiro” and brought home to Trastevere, a neighborhood the boy has never visited. His mother Adrianna, frightened by the boy’s insistence, accedes and has the carriage deliver them across town. A caretaker at the Trastevere apartment indulges Adrianna in letting the boy look around. He appears to know the apartment intimately, even the familiar toys in their familiar hiding places. Turning to a photograph on a dresser, he points out his “real” mother, “Luciana,” and, in the same picture, himself. Adrianna faints.

We learn that Luciana’s son Ramiro died seven years before, at the exact moment Mario was born. The story follows the entwined tales of the two mothers as they attempt, with comic consequences but mutual respect, to negotiate this strange reincarnation that has overturned their lives. As the news spreads across Rome, their efforts to remain level-headed contrast sharply with the responses of those around them, particularly men, who prefer expedient answers. Balancing the magical and comic elements, Bontempelli conveys a moving and profound sense of loss.

In The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children, Adria, a woman of class and beauty, has decided, upon the birth of her second child, that she will devote her life to being the most beautiful woman on earth. To do this, she insists on controlling every moment so as to not suffer any emotional interference that might create a ripple in her beauty, even forbidding her children direct contact. They instead observe Adria once weekly through slits cut into a wall at the height of their eyes, allowing them to gaze in wonder at their mother’s radiance. Bontempelli beautifully captures the strange distances that can exist within families as he traces the children’s growth into independent adults and their relationship with an aloof, headstrong mother.

The Faithful Lover consists of curious, enchanting stories and a novella-length suite entitled “Water.” They call to mind the inventive subjects of the novellas of César Aira, though often turn on a single peculiar event and possess a minimalism that contrasts with Aira’s rapid-fire, baroque piling up of conceits. In one, a cat burglar must decide to flee or save the policeman who, having caught him in the act, has slipped off the roof and is dangling from the eaves. In another, a man goes for a long nighttime walk that seems determined by the paths that appear on his way and the stars he follows, until the stars begin to behave strangely. In “Nitta,” a man driving home hears a strange sound in the backseat and discovers a disheveled young girl. In “Empress,” a child is sent to an asylum after slipping into a delirious fantasy that she is the Empress Theodora. Her mother, after visiting the deranged girl, begs the doctors not to cure her. “Encounter” finds an insomniac alone at night in his apartment when a “diffuse presence” gathers itself by the stove and begins speaking to another. These emanations appear to be two dead lovers finding themselves after two millennia of searching the void, their reunion interrupted when they become of aware of the man observing them. An especially evocative story is “Moonwort,” in which a timid 11-year-old boy travelling home alone on a train curses himself for having neglected his promise to bring his mother a branch of moonwort. Seated across from him is a troubled young woman who happens to pull from a bag a branch exactly like that he seeks – a story that beautifully captures the emotions of youth.  

Massimo Bontempelli (source: Wikipedia Italia)

There’s a light touch to Bontempelli’s stories that stands in contrast to the exploitation of magical elements one finds in Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier or other names associated with magical realism, a gentle tweak to reality, not applied torque. Bontempelli stressed that his realismo magico “has nothing to do with a thousand and one nights. More than fairy tales, we have a thirst for adventure. We want to see the most ordinary daily life as an exciting miracle, an unending risk.” The stories seem both newly-minted and suspended in time. Though some are set in specifically Italian locales – Rome and the seaside town of San Felice Circeo in The Boy With Two Mothers, for example – particularities of place often seem more incidental than integral.

Bontempelli’s narratives are characterized by frequent use of interior monologue; isolated, idiosyncratic individuals usually on some quest; and repetition of images of stars, night, woods, moon, water. This tendency towards romantic elements is checked by the occasional reminder that Bontempelli has a foot on terra firma. In The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children, the oldest child, Tullia, becomes a brave spy working against the Germans in World War I. In others, references are made to Italian politics and issues of class. The Boy With Two Mothers comically treats the collision between the superstitious inhabitants of popular Trastevere with the snooty, dismissively rational close-mindedness of the upper classes. Occasionally, Bontempelli’s narrators become playfully self-referential, as when, during a scene in which the entire city eagerly awaits Adria’s annual appearance at the Society ball, the narrator suddenly asserts his power as narrator:

They’re all impatient and will have to wait two more days. But we don’t have to. It is our prerogative as a writer (and we permit our readers to share in this) to skip those two days and find ourselves walking through the Society’s rooms on Friday evening before midnight, just as Adria is about to appear.

The women in Bontempelli’s work are especially full of character and fiercely independent, embracing their peculiarities and rejecting conformity and any effort to rein in their freedom. In “Octagenarian,” the matriarch of a family, on her deathbed, delivers a speech she has held inside for more than thirty years, lambasting her children for the criminal waste of their conformist, banal lives, stating that “A man who can’t do anything crazy is some kind of dumb animal,” and telling her daughter that she could have been great, “that phenomenon, a woman who breaks barriers, escapes from wells, sets precedents and gives her name to streets.” Chastising her daughter’s bourgeois existence, she tells her,

…just to give you a laugh, I was going to sedate you heavily one night, cut your hair, dress you as  a sailor, and find a way to deposit you on board a departing ship, having timed things so that you wouldn’t wake until you were already on the high seas. I wouldn‘t have left a penny in your pockets. To awaken at sea and have to stay there at least twenty days, disguised and among strangers, then to be put ashore someplace without money or friends, and in some way to have to get yourself out of it! Your life would have been transformed.

In “Water,” the 15 year old Madina, escaping from the house in which she’s been essentially a prisoner her whole young life, revels in discovering the woods, the stars, the water in a stream. She rejects various men obsessed with her innocence, men oblivious to the glories of living. In a casino one night, she repeats aloud the various confidences others have made to her regarding everyone else, then castigates them all when havoc results from her candid revelations:

What I care about is that none of you know what the woods are like when all the leaves are fluttering, how worms live in the ground, the sound that water makes running over stones; how smoke whistles when it sets a tree on fire; and you’re locked up in here, when outside all the stars are blazing. That’s why I was yawning here. I want air, water, earth. I’m in prison when I’m with you.

This fierce appreciation for the “magic” of living shows itself in all of the works in these two volumes. Far from merely injecting mysticism into his work to create a fantasy world, Bontempelli attempts to unveil everyday wonder, rejecting all those who would remain closed off to it. It’s especially intriguing that Bontempelli’s most courageous, vibrant characters are women, who oppose bourgeois conformity and the paternalistic systems that aim at control and order. Between this singular author and his Italian contemporaries who initially seem to differ so radically - Malaparte, Moravia, Morante - there actually may be no small amount of common ground. 



15 comments:

  1. I had heard about Bontempelli but did not know much about him.

    As Magical Realism seems so very popular in many quarters these days it is surprising and a bit of a pity that he is not more widely recognized.

    Based on your descriptions these stories they sound very good.

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    1. I really liked these stories, and found Bontempelli's version of magical realism preferable to many of the other examples of it I've read. He deserves to be better known.

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  2. I'm not that big on magic realism to be honest (thinking magical realism) but I have to say I like the bit about children only being allowed to observe their mother through slits in the wall!

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    1. Guy - I should have indicated something about "magic realism" vs. "magical realism." In fact, I think I'll go back and insert a line. There's little difference in theory or practice; it's just that the term first arose from German critic Franz Roh and was first put into literary practice by Bontempelli as "magic realism," morphing into "magical realism" with the South Americans. I'm not a huge fan of the movement either, but as I hope I conveyed here, I liked Bontempelli's approach to as a gentle tweaking of reality in order to reveal the magic in the ordinary, not as a dumping ground for mystical mumbo-jumbo fantasy. You'd never find that scene of kids watching their mother through slits in a wall in Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende.

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  3. Fascinating. I'm not a huge fan of the Garcia Marquez school of magic/magical realism, but your description of Bontempelli's light-touch approach leads me to believe that I might enjoy this author. It's the sense of wonder and magic in the everyday that appeals to me. I love the sound of the stories in The Faithful Lover, definitely one for the wishlist. (As a slight aside, Silvina Ocampo's collection of stories, Thus Were Their Faces, is sitting in my TBR, and I wonder how her tales might compare with Bontempelli's. I ought to read the Ocampo first, especially as I'm on another round of TBR20, but The Faithful Lover is tempting.) I'm also intrigued by The Boy with Two Mothers. For some reason, I can envisage a Nic Roeg film playing out in my mind...

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    1. Jacqui - I think you would like these works. As I mentioned above in my comment to Guy, they really do aim at something other than providing a veneer of magical elements. It's crazy, the way in which some writers have taken Bontempelli's rather simple concept and run wild with it in ways he himself would probably have disdained.

      I think The Boy With Two Mothers would make a great film - and thought that while reading it.

      Funny you mention Ocampo, as she's a writer I've been considering for Spanish Lit Month.

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    2. Excellent. I do like the sound of this writer, and The Fallen Lover is on my wishlist now.

      Ocampo would be a good choice for Spanish Lit Month. I thought about her too, but I’m thinking of saving Thus Were Their Faces in the hope that Richard may run another Argentine Lit of Doom thing later this year. If it’s of any interest, I reviewed the Bioy Casares/Ocampo joint novella last year, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (you may have been on your travels at the time). It’s a delightful little novel, a sly take on the traditional country-house murder mystery. Have you read it?

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  4. What a history lesson! Never heard of him. And possible ties to Leonora Carrington? How cool!

    But what's with the negative vibes here about magical realism? Has it suddenly become fashionable not to like it?

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    1. Miguel - I'm purely speculating about a connection with Carrington, but this scene of the psychiatric facility could be right out of The Hearing Trumpet. Did you read that? It's a favorite, though I have not written about it.

      Good question about the "negative vibes" - I'd hoped to point out that what I liked about Bontempelli's version of magical realism was his restraint. I did not mean to be particularly disparaging of Garcia Marquez or Carpentier (two novelists I like very much), only to point out that they - and especially some of their imitators - go a bit further into the magical than Bontempelli.

      There is, however, at least in the United States, almost an industry of novels that employ magical realism, and it has created something of a backlash. From the few of these works I've sampled, the authors appear to use the magical elements as a means of escapism, whereas Bontempelli clearly intended to use them to get closer to life, not farther away from it.

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  5. I had not heard of Bontempelli, either.

    I have a lot of doubts about Surrealism as such, but no doubts about former Surrealists, proto-Surrealists, and the various fellow travelers who made such good use of whatever it was the Surrealists thought they were doing. Lots of great writing by semi-Surrealists, Carpentier and Garcia Marquez among them.

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    1. Bonafide Surrealist writing is pretty bad, although I find automatic writing useful sometimes; but Breton and Peret couldn't do prose - I keep remembering that saying by Kundera that while Breton was talking about fusing life and dream, and never actually writing anything of lasting value, an obscure Kafka was quietly doing just that.

      The best Surrealist novels I've read - Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet, and Dorothea Tanning's Chasm, are quite straightforward, just giving reality a dent. Carrington is funny as hell, whereas Tanning transformed her paintings into a story.

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    2. I wish the background material on Bontempelli I've been able to find in English did more to illuminate his influences. There's a clear link to Surrealism, but I suspect that Bontempelli felt about it much the way you do, Tom. One early influence - a friend and mentor - was Luigi Pirandello. The distance between Pirandello and the Surrealists may be a good measure of that between Bontempelli and the Surrealists.

      So glad to hear you're a fan of The Hearing Trumpet, Miguel. The opening of that novel is just incredibly funny. I don't know Tanning's novel, but will look it up.

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  6. The Chilean/French film director Raul Ruiz made a film of The Boy With Two Mothers in 2000. Not one of Ruiz's masterpieces, but an engaging film. The cast is marvelous: Isabelle Huppert & Jeanne Balibar as the mothers, and a smaller part by the great Edith Scob). It's available on a British release DVD (& is perhaps viewable somewhere on line).

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    1. I forgot to mention--the English title of the film is Comedy of Innocence, if you want to seek it out.

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    2. Dear Martin - Many thanks for the comment and for alerting me to this. In fact I discovered the existence of this film just yesterday while reading about one of Bontempelli's followers, Anna Maria Ortese. I'll definitely seek it out. While reading the novel I kept thinking it could be made into a terrific film. I would not, though, have imagined that one already existed, especially one with such a sparkling cast.

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