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Article Excerpt
Luigi Malerba has often expressed hostility to psychoanalysis, most notably in the prologue to his collection of dreams, Diario di un sognatore (1981). Here, in this most sustained of attacks, Malerba denounces the Freudian project for its attempt to provide a totalizing and definitive explanation of a world resistant to order and certainty (5-6). (1) However, as Rebecca West has noted, "Malerba has long practiced an ironic and subversive art" so that his words are to be approached with a certain caution (West 204). In fact, the corpus of his literary fiction indicates that Malerba's relationship with psychoanalysis is much more complex, nuanced, and ambiguous than such explicit dismissals would suggest. Not only are his novels, in particular, primarily concerned with the basic human drives, desires, and states of mind that form the object of psychoanalytical enquiry; they also have frequent recourse to psychoanalytical--especially Freudian--topoi. (2)
This is certainly the case with Malerba's second novel, Il serpente (1966), which provides ample material for a psychoanalytical reading of the text. The title of the novel is highly symbolic, alluding in the first instance to the trio of sex, food and self-knowledge which are associated with the figure of the serpent in The Book of Genesis and which also figure prominently in Freudian psychoanalysis. However, the title might also be understood as an allusion to the unnamed protagonist who attests to poisoning his lover and consuming her body in the novel's cannibalistic climax. The serpent is an equally apposite figure for the protagonist's function as narrator and sole focalizer of the text; he sheds one narrative skin after another by providing contradictory accounts of his lover's physical appearance and of all events narrated, by admitting to having lied, and by retracting emphatic assertions made earlier in the text, so that the status of his narration is extremely precarious. (3)
The novel's narrative style and structure similarly support a psychoanalytical reading. As Francesco Muzzioli has noted, it is not only the thematic concerns of Il serpente but also the employment of certain kinds of linguistic structures and gaps which lend it most readily to psychoanalytical exploration:
l'intero racconto de Il serpente cosi pieno di lacune, di reticenze, di ammissioni a denti stretti, in una parola cosi obliquo, potrebbe essere preso nel suo insieme come una lunga allusione.... Non per niente ... il testo malerbiano va a individuare--con quale debito verso la cultura psicoanalitica non c'e bisogno di spiegare--le basi istintuali del rapporto intersoggettivo. Il sesso, la fame. (15)
Psychoanalytical content and style are supported by a structural edifice of 14 italicized interstices that stand in relation to the 15 chapters of the main narrative as the unconscious might stand vis-a-vis the conscious: they flood the textual space with potentially significant references of uncertain currency and, as Marilyn Schneider has noted with explicitly Lacanian overtones, they structure the narrative according to a metonymic chain of displaced meaning (Schneider 75). (4)
However, neither the trajectory of the protagonist's development over the course of the text nor the narrative construction of Il serpente suggests that the novel functions as an exercise in psychoanalytical exploration per se. Rather, the parallel development of the psychoanalytical concerns of the novel alongside the protagonist's relationship with his urban context provides an insight into Malerba's employment of psychoanalytical frames of reference while expressing overt hostility to psychoanalytical theory. In brief, Malerba rejects psychoanalysis' claims to epistemological certainty or totality, but remains alert to its philosophical eloquence and its hermeneutic and imaginative potential. Psychoanalysis co-exists, then, alongside all other interpretative models and knowledge systems, from geometry to architecture to symbolism, on the level terrain of Malerba's conceptual landscape. In the particular case of Il serpente, the fusion of psychoanalysis with concerns relating to the protagonist's sense of space and place forefronts the relationship between the human mind and its external environment. It is on the particular relationship between the self and the city that I focus my reading of the novel, taking as my point of departure Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City."
This rich and evocative essay posits a dialectical relationship between the city understood as a geometrical or geographical space (a "theoretical simulacrum" of visual, panoptic constructions), and the city understood as the site of practices carried out by the "ordinary practitioners" who live and walk their urban environment below the threshold of panoptic vision (91-110). The former demands a distanced perspective from the life of the city; the latter, involved investment. The soundness of de Certeau's dialectical approach has been widely debated by urban theorists, but rather less critical attention has been paid to the underlying psychoanalytical framework that affords important insights into the relationship between the individual and the urban space she inhabits. In establishing that the experiences of viewing and walking the city replicate the dynamics of the early relationship between child and mother during the formation of self-identity, "Walking in the City" provides a valuable interpretative key for what Gaston Bachelard termed "topoanalysis." (5) The association between self-city and mother-child relationships is implicitly made throughout de Certeau's essay in the employment of the shared language of linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but it is also explicitly expressed in the essay's final section entitled "Childhood and metaphors of places." (6) It is here that de Certeau draws on both Freud's Fort/Da game and Lacan's mirror stage, before concluding that place is the:
repetition of a decisive and originary experience, that of the child's differentiation from the mother's body. It is through that experience that the possibility of space and of localization of the subject is inaugurated.... The childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a "metaphorical" or mobile city.... (109-10)
De Certeau's closing statement invites the critic to engage in a psychoanalytical reading of the city as metropolis understood in its literal meaning of "mother city"; a space where the childhood trauma of the loss of the mother is played out.
Screen Memory: Parma and the Symbolic
Such a reading of the metropolis as a mother city is readily applied to Il serpente, in regard to the psychological journey undertaken by its protagonist. The opening chapter provides an introduction to the protagonist's childhood and youth in an urban space that is unnamed but mapped precisely enough for it to be identified as Parma, Malerba's own childhood city. In his most recent book of essays, Citta e dintorni (2001), Malerba acknowledges that the unnamed city is Parma and provides a very illuminating account of his vision of his native city, both in relation to Il serpente, and more generally:
Anche una parte del mio libro Il serpente e per cosi dire ambientata a Parma. Ma e una Parma deformata dal sogno o dalla lontananza fantastica, quindi non realistica anche se i luoghi vengono nominati con il loro nome e corrispondono a quelli reali. Del resto, questa e l'immagine che ho della mia citta.... Piu che una citta concreta, Parma e per me un emblema, un luogo mentale, una immagine sfuggente. (60)
The representation of Parma as a conceptual, rather than a "real," space is one readily recognizable in Il serpente, where the opening page provides a scene that might best be interpreted in Freudian terms as a "screen memory," that is, an imagined memory of a childhood experience unconsciously used to repress recollection of an associated but distressing event through a process of displacement (Freud, Early Psycho-Analytic Publications 321-32). This screen memory, which underscores the protagonist's relationship with space and place, presents him as a child walking in the city in the company of his mother:
Agli angoli delle strade comparvero carretti carichi di banane che mia madre non comprava per paura delle infezioni (sulla punta del banana c'e il cadavere di un insetto). "Le banane sono pericolosissime," diceva mia madre a suo figlio e lo portava a vedere i bambini che mangiavano il gelato. (33) (7)
The grammatical dislocation or transposition of the subject from the first- to the third-person singular in the highly evocative phrase, "diceva mia madre a suo figlio e lo portava a vedere i bambini ...," would appear to replay the Lacanian paradigm of the process through which the child accedes to language and enters into the Symbolic Order predicated upon lack and desire. It is in the Mirror Stage that the child recognizes his image as "other," both to his mother and to himself. He furthermore recognizes himself as a whole and unified being separate and distinct from his mother and, through an act of primal repression of his desire for her, enters into the Symbolic Order (Lacan 93-100). Entry into the Symbolic Order demands that the relationship between self and (m)other is mediated by a symbol so that the child's desire for his mother is transferred onto a symbolic object...
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