In the customary and deeply-rooted division of Italian
writers into those from the north and those from the south, the iconoclastic
writer Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919-1978) might best count as one from the west. Wilcock
is that rare figure who led two literary careers in two different languages,
the first in Buenos Aires as a member of the group that included Jorge Luis
Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo; then second, after fleeing the
Perón dictatorship, in and around Rome where he wrote exclusively in Italian
and moved within the eminent circle that included Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante,
and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the screenshot above shows Wilcock playing Caiaphas in
Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St. Matthew). Thus the timely
republication of Wilcock’s 1977 book, The Temple of Iconoclasts (Sinagoga degli iconoclasti), makes for
an ideal bridge between my current explorations of Italian literature and the
annual Caravana de Recuerdos “Argentine Literature of Doom” reading event. Though I’d been curious to read the book after learning of it in an interview
with translator Lawrence Venuti years ago, it had proven maddeningly impossible
to find. I now know why. Venuti, in a new preface, explains that all but some
500 copies of the original edition of his translation were accidentally pulped.
In this new edition, Venuti expands on Wilcock’s improbable
life. I won’t repeat the details (far richer than Wilcock’s current Wikipedia
entry), but suffice to say that Venuti’s choice to title his preface simply “J.
Rudolfo Wilcock,” thus appearing to slot the writer democratically among the 35
names that follow it in the table of contents, is an apt and clever one. The Temple of Iconoclasts
consists of brief fictional and semi-fictional biographies, from 5 lines to 25
pages, of equally improbable inventors, metaphysicians, biologists, artists, sociologists,
clerics, anthropologists, engineers, chemists, and others who, despite day jobs
ranging from clockmaker to gravedigger, pursued fantastic theories, created unusual
inventions, or simply asserted their existence in some idiosyncratic way. In Wilcock’s
melding of fact, fiction and whimsicality, he subversively lances intellectual
pretense and arrogance. His pieces inhabit that murky zone between human intellectual
endeavor and madness, a line further muddied by Wilcock’s tossing in actual persons
whose names pop into these sketches from time to time, including Thomas Edison,
Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, Wilhelm Reich, and even Wilcock’s own
great-grandfather.
Nearly all of Wilcock’s brainiacs also write. If only as a
source for additions to The Invisible Library, The Temple of
Iconoclasts would still provide abundant amusement. There’s hack vulcanologist’s
Klaus Nachtknecht’s The Salubrious Magma; philosopher Absalon Amet and
his wife Plaisance’s Select Thoughts and Words from the Universal Mechanical
Philosophy; Antonine Amédée Bélouin’s The Bélouin Network: Initial
Project for an Underwater Railroad;” Franz Piet Vredjuik’s Universal
Sin, or A Discourse on the Identity between Sound and Light; and Aaron
Rosenblum’s beguiling utopian failure, Back
to Happiness, or Joyride to Hell, proposing a return to the
purportedly rosiest period of human history, identified by Rosenblum as England
under the reign of Elizabeth 1. Like César Aira’s Dr. Aira, with his
proliferating screens aimed at excluding everything in the universe incompatible
with his miracle cures, Rosenblum attempts to subtract from the present
everything incompatible with life in the year 1580. The narrator’s extensive
list of the glories and afflictions lost and regained through this mercifully unrealized
project is both one of the book’s highlights and an almost irremediable
skewering of utopian thought.
In another sketch, Jules Flamart, a lexicologist bored with
the typical dictionary, creates a dictionary-novel, La Langue en action,
which pairs each word with a narrative connection to the next word. Wilcock creates
three entire pages of excerpts that had me wishing he’d gone on to complete the
entire 850 page work. This is one of several texts Wilcock creates for his “iconoclasts.”
The longest of these, in a piece on radical theater director Llorenz Riber,
includes four theater reviews and an entire three-act screenplay, all of which
reveal that a neurotic obsession with rabbits, born in Riber’s childhood, has
burrowed its way into everything the director has created, including
adaptations of Sartre’s No Exit and a Georges Feydeau-inspired,
everyone-in-the-closet farce in which Riber has replaced the main characters’
family names with those of Nazi concentration camps. The cringe-worthy
critical assessments of Riber's productions, worth the price of the book by themselves, are so
are gloriously over the top that they could scare off anyone from creative or
critical effort, yet simultaneously create an almost desperate desire to see
Riber’s pieces produced on stage (or at the very least, some of Wilcock’s own criticism translated into English). Wilcock’s
prodigious imagination is perhaps most amply revealed in a lengthy list of inventions
created by Jesús Pica Planas, which echoes Kenji Kawakami’s useless Japanese inventions, and each item of which might well have served as a seed for helping populate an additional volume of Wilcock’s eccentrics.
The Temple of Iconoclasts is strikingly reminiscent
of the weird, wild stories of Wilcock’s fellow Argentinian, Leopoldo Lugones, an evident influence even to the point of some of Wilcock’s examples
seeming to riff on Lugones’ own extravagant conceits (Roger Babson’s
nutty experiments with gravity, for instance, or John O. Kinnaman’s
unsuccessful attempt to locate Lot’s wife in mounds of salt near ancient
Sodom). In some sketches, the patient and detailed elaboration of Wilcock’s creations
echoes those of Raymond Roussel. Venuti also notes as a precursor to The
Temple of Iconoclasts Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, and as a
descendent Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. Bolaño acknowledged
Wilcock’s book as the key influence on his own, and the handful of references
to Nazism in The Temple of Iconoclasts seems even to provide the
thematic spark for Bolaño’s homage. But Wilcock’s language possesses a density
and expressiveness (no knock on Venuti, but one can scarcely imagine how
delightful this book must sound in the original Italian); an affection for his
subjects; and above all a fat streak of hilarity that rivals and even surpasses
those of these other writers. This is one funny book, filled with glacial
understatement, pointed one-liners, and a wit that ranges from tender to withering.
Given Wilcock’s great funds of whimsy and waggery, his work also calls to mind Los
Angeles artist David Wilson’s enchanting and stupefying Museum of Jurassic
Technology, where the visitor is seduced by what appears to be a natural
science museum until he or she pauses to reflect on the exhibits on display,
which, in a moment of epiphany like a quick intake of nitrous oxide, produce a
giddy euphoria. To read Wilcock’s book is to enter the paradise of
both the mad dreamer and the wry skeptic, to marvel at the varieties of the
human pursuit of knowledge, to feel chastened and humbled in one’s most insignificant mental
efforts, and to have an exceedingly good time.
