Tratti n. 81 - 2009
THE PRACTICE OF LOTUS TAKES NO BREAKS
Review by Vanessa Sorrentino
Gli enervati di Jumièges (The enervated of Jumièges) is a poetry collection by Roberta Bertozzi, published by Pequod in 2007. The text takes its lead from a figurative motif, a 1880 painting by Evariste Vital Luminais that shows two young men lying in a boat with their feet and ankles wrapped in bandages. According to the legend that inspired the painting, the two sons of King Clovis II were found guilty of having conspired against their father, and eventually condemned to have their tendons burned and abandoned on a raft adrift along river Seine.
The poetic narrative comes about in two consecutive days and consists most of all of the imagined dialogue between the two young men, who have been condemned to a paralysis and forced to sail down the river.
The complex structure of the text finds its way within a laconic atmosphere, among fractured and suspended sentences, so that one needs to adopt a multi-levelled reading addressing alternating different registers, such as the low and the sublime, the lyrical and the prosaic. Bertozzi’s text is indeed an eccentric one, because, in spite of its strongly argued thematic unit, the direction of its verbal flux doesn’t focus on just one single objective, yet it constantly moves towards a different centre. All the voices gather together and disappear inside a widespread togetherness that never reaches a lyrical fullness. This is the sign of a destiny characterised by a lack. The poetic self receives the voices and misses the mark of the lyric, therefore it can only fall apart. The pivot of such language turmoil is parricide, the symbolic murder of the father, a motive that has marked Twentieth-century literature, among others. In Gli enervati the impossibility of parricide is confirmed, every possibility of getting over the Oedipus complex is denied from the beginning. By preventing himself from surviving through his children’s flesh, the father relentlessly eliminates every love relationship towards them. In the chapter entitled Lettera al padre (‘Letter to the father’) we read: “you are so dead father /even before you were so /and even before time /you such a stupid seal. /We hanging from your capital /enervated…”. This flesh is torn apart, exhausted, precisely enervated. To enervate literally means someone whose nerves have been taken away, so that he has become apathetic, incapable of all reaction. The father figure, also interpreted by Bertozzi’s work as a status quo, here becomes the butcher of his own children, as he affirms both his untouchable power and his model of reality equal to an irreversible law. In the introduction we read that, in the slaughtering of animals, the enervation is the cutting of the spinal marrow, in order to provoke the animal’s instant death. Is this the same destiny to whom are bound the two brothers, forced to sail down river Seine?
If one admits that the condition for a historical continuity is provided by the passage of a witness, of the heritage passed on from one generation to the next one, here history seems to reel around itself, as it rewinds like a film. The children’s castration operated by the father shows how not even the Oedipus complex can properly take place. The father’s power shows itself in all its ferocious selfishness, while the two brothers, who have been made defenceless by the enervation, are succumbing under the spirit of time. Mankind is adrift, suggests Bertozzi, men do not know what brotherhood means anymore, while the dream of a solidarity among men has definitively been swept away by Twentieth century.
The Expressionist-sounding lines of the first chapter of the volume, entitled Manifattura (‘Manufacture’), show the two unfortunate men’s bodies suffering several surgeries that remind of Rembrandt’s Anatomy lesson or Francis Bacon’s latest paintings: “«Get out of there /so I can see at what degree the suture…» / the bark’s eye of the wound /the cut /to which we do not resist / – a bezel inside the skin.”.
The re-birth of the enervated body coincides with the paralysis of the body, similar to a rewinding time and to a return to the pre-oedipal state, a pre-birth condition of powerlessness and impossibility of action. In Battesimo (‘Christening’) the symbol of water presents itself as a place of confinement, within the analogy between the uterus and the river bed. Christening as the act supposed to represent the initiation into life becomes the beginning of the confinement in a “clinical wait” that seems endless. Thus, through sudden flashes, the web of the text appears to be revealing truths that are too cruel not to be hidden inside the bitter turn of language: “for this slow wintering – dropping on a drip / the adagio of dioxide’s / discharge inside the concrete or into other recreational / drugs of the father on duty and his small /police, bureaucracy, cinematography: // «oh you, come to anaesthesia!»”. The reiterated reference to a bureaucracy, to a power capable of alienating life from itself, expands to the extent of becoming the allegory of a whole century. The consequences of this paralysis are also present in the destiny of fatherlands, of Europe, even of the Western world: “so empty also this non deposited /human bread and to see it /drying up composed/ inside the black of Europe where the streets /have a patronymic /and bone scaffolds”. In the chapter entitled Estranei (‘Strangers’), the tone becomes even more excruciating. No longer brothers but strangers, men are members of the same protocol, they sign formal pacts with each other, yet they have stopped feeling the common membership to the same species. With the father no longer present, seem to suggest some verses, the brothers could forge an alliance based on mutual trust, thus founding their own community; and yet, many forces work against such mutual belonging, feverish competitions and anarchic struggles make the brothers become individuals fighting each other.
In a constant oscillation between universal and particular, the narrative proceeds by fractures and includes facts and fragments of newspaper stories: “in Vieste a mother slips off her son’s life / adagio with scotch-tape/ she then slips off her own / in a conditional silence / and one doesn’t dig into what hunger / one enters the heel of fasting / which incongruence of love may be guiding the hand”. Among the echoes of cultural and political totalitarianism in which the exclusion of the other becomes a routine practice, the civil partnership makes practice of oblivion and removal, like the lotus eaters in the well-known epic: “the practice of lotus takes no breaks. They take shelter / into narcosis, their pupils ready / to receive the whole show”.
Therefore, upon the so-called civilisation falls a somewhat metaphysical night, one which transcends all that is under men’s control, and it becomes a historical necessity passing throughout centuries: “It is a lyric night, late indeed. / All the good bourgeois from Bavaria /keep their placid hand on their members”. The memory of the Holocaust crosses the borders of our century and casts the shadow of a collective madness onto it, something we still haven’t washed off: “And if the madman cries in the ward it is only / to continue his yard – / give some breath to the corpse / of the dear deceased twentieth century”.
Inside such pressing historical necessity there seems to be no idea of an afterwards, but rather one of an eternal present, a mechanic repetition of the same. A present desert, made of sand and debris like the Great Victoria Desert in Australia, is the metaphor of a hollow time, which reminds of the nuances and landscapes of Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Here at 9 on the Great Victoria Desert / where the golden trimmings of the setting / eat away the profile. Here – brilliance / of super-enamel / and cells of photoelectric transparency / detergent powders, Plexiglas, antiseptic…”.
Yet, inside the slow erosion of time, behind the deforming lens of the technological desert, there seems to sparkle a tiny golden particle, a battle cry, a form of resistance maybe: “Here one must smash, one must / miss completely / reality”.
