"A journey into the Matamonia of Esagro Noroi βby Lucio Besana, contained in the collection "Stories of the crimson series" (Edizioni Hypnos 2021), accompanies the reader through a pilgrimage with uchronic connotations, showing the limits and tensions of the symbol, both given by its dependence on the processes of natural and sacral reification. The story takes the destructive symptomatology of the present to an extreme, an Enlightenment residue that tends to demystify the cultural power of a given object, thus resizing the value and potential of the human being.
di Stephen Celant
Round trip: a brief analysis
A journey into Esagro Noroi's Matamonia is the first story that opens the collection of Stories from the Crimson series di Lucio Besana (Hypnos 2021 Editions). To be sure, the text is anticipated by Prelude. The film from the red room, a liminal poem, of a few pages, which prepares the reader for leitmotiv present in most of the stories: the shadowing of reality, understood by Lacanian psychology as an objective existent, following itinerant processes, which narrate a reality, that is, the subjective perception of the existing, different and far from the truth.
In A journey into Esagro Noroi's Matamonia the narrating voice is that of an anonymous self, of which we know little or nothing: probably a factory employee, who following the decision to add a new color to his life, he decides to embark on a journey to the homeland of I exagro Noroi. The first lines fleetingly highlight a Kafkaesque world, where the "bundle of photocopies and forms" [1] implement to have all the credentials for the trip, remember the infinite bureaucracy de The process; while the fleeting reference to the use of a magnetic card used to buy both the ticket and toothpaste e toilet paper, wants to give us back the image of a world very close to ours, and dystopically close. The excursion to Matamonia, from the very first pages, is presented to us as an exceptional event, which only a select few are allowed to undertake:
When I told my neighbor where I was going, he immediately boasted that he had visited there Itinerant city, of having attended a matinee of Theater of the Red Scene and to have been to Museum of Black Craters of Subotica before it disappeared; but when I asked him if he had ever visited there Matamonia his face darkened. After a tense silence he said that his permission had been refused. "I didn't know it could happen," I said. [2]
Il Crimson group, in fact, it is a closed ecosystem, which does not mix with the magma of tourists traveling to other destinations, as evidenced by the inability of the bony-faced woman to interact with a young boy: "the woman had to realize that the words of the boy, to our nerves lulled by the ever stronger spell of Esagro Noroi's Matamonia, they resound like the dry and abrasive noise of bone joints without cartilage. Then the woman abruptly withdrew from the conversation and returned to occupy her position in the group, aloof as an appendage or a tail " [3]. The guide awaits them Meredro Nicoa, an enigmatic character, blind in one eye, who immediately makes clear the status of the newcomers:
βYour condition is peculiar, one was ambiguous. You don't really exist here; you did not exist before you arrived, cease to exist when you leave. Not just in the sense that we will forget you; rather, we will remember you as a possibility, as unrealized ideas, and as such we will treat you in the next few days. I assure you that we have great respect for unrealized ideas. " [4]
Meredro summarizes the condition that unites every person visiting an external culture: the Crimson group represents some possibility in the sense that it designates a different way of being; it is the bearer of another culture derived from their country of origin, of another nuance of what Matamonia could have been without the presence of Esagro Noroi. Meredro, like the community of Matamonia, respects human otherness represented by the group, but it is not scrupulous to highlight how it cannot be assimilated within their own region during their short stay, of how, in short, their presence is only passing through.
Matamonia is represented as the dream by Esagro Noroi, where everything, down to the smallest detail, is pervaded Β«by sense of purpose, of completeness " [5]: the narrator is amazed by the diversity of the environment in which he is immersed, where despite the greyness and monotony of the places, ("in the following days I would have found that motel on every street corner, in every locked door, in every pile of garbage " [6]), the view of a new meaning it would continue to intrigue him, keeping his mind awake at each stage of the journey. This is divided into different places of worship, or the stages that led Esagro Noroi from the region of his birth, of which he takes the toponym Noroi, to the government palace following the deposition of the old rulers of the nation.
And the government building is the first stop of the tour, a gray building with stairways cut in two by a mysterious red bloom of the ground: we are immediately presented with the Path of the Red Flowers, grown following the passage of Esagro, which will accompany the tourists until the end of their stay, and from which, under Meredro's warning, they will keep at a safe distance. Here appears the first clue about the real revolution carried out by the regent, because more than a political uprising, the work of Esagro Noroi had made it possible to find "the true meaning of Matamonia of all time, attributing proportion and meaning to each of its elementsΒ» [7]. And the sense the pivot of the revolution: having unhinged the emptiness of an aseptic urban structure, exasperated by gray and colorless grids, expanses of houses and buildings that are always the same as themselves, giving them an order and a value that would subtract them from their original emptiness.
The narrator can only compare thatotherness filled with meaning from Esagro to his own culture of origin, and in front of this reality in which he finds himself immersed he is caught by one shock because of which he can see his culture only as "a world of fluid and scattered meanings, which at times seemed to me created by a monkey beating on a typewriter" [8], but which nevertheless, in that moment acts as a safe haven: a lifeline that allows him to do not lose the own identity in the face of a possible depersonalization of the ego that could lead him to madness.
Yet, what happens to the husband of the only couple in the party is not a descent into madness, a frustrated duet in which the wife is looking for a carnal pleasure that her male counterpart cannot provide, but a destiny that she cannot bring. we will have knowledge. In this situation the man is attacked by a crowd of invisible insects, later revealed as being the severed fingers of the farmer who had hosted the group overnight, despite their guide's ban on leaving the bus. Curious is the shade of horror that strikes the narrator at that juncture: "it was not an aesthetic feeling caused by what I was seeing, nor an automatic reflection of man's agony on my spirit, but a violent repulsion for myself: it was as if I were found a urinate on my mother's grave oa defecate on my office desk " [9].
It is the sight of a sacred act, of a taboo that shouldn't be seen. The man in the throes of agony was as if he were "subjecting himself to the torture deliberately" [10], elected as the only way to escape from a life of deprivation due to his wife and be reborn in another; in fact, Meredro's words, having learned what happened, are peremptory: Β«he is part of Matamonia now. You will have to change its meaning and this will produce waves of revisions and replacements that may be too violent for you " [11]. Here it is shown how the Esagro's dream, in fact, it is extremely fragile to changes: a new act, a man who comes into direct contact with the culture he created, who becomes part of the meaning he brings, unleashes a series of mechanics by which his insertion, in order to be accepted, reshapes the whole system.
The peak of the journey, and of the anonymous traveler's interest, is reached during the visit of the City of Dolls. A huge cathedral city denoted as the biggest failure by Esagro Noroi. The topography of the metropolis reflects an idea of ββartificiality too high to be assimilated by the original inhabitants of Matamonia: it represented a construction "without codifications and translations" [12], elusive and uninhabitable. kill, this was his native name, "was the expression of such flagrant arrogance" [13] because it was the project of an individuality that wanted to substitute its own meaning, its own meanings with divine connotations, for a collectivity that, due to intellectual lack, could not incorporate it within its own cognitive sphere. Omora represents the fulcrum of the regent's dream, his greatest work and aspiration, together with his greatest failure. This is why, in the eyes of the narrator, the last stage of the journey, the village of Esagro's birth, no longer takes on a significant value, instead he begins to glimpse the whole artificiality of the regent's project, thus revealing the convention. The ticket distributed by the guide makes the last breath of charm vanish:
One happened to me that said: THIS BILLET REMEMBER YOU WHO LIVED IN MY TRERRA.
The characters appeared to be written by the hand of a child led by an adult. [14]
Perhaps this is exactly the face of Esagro, an omnipotent, almost divine being, but from infantile lapel, because it has imposed its own fantasy of meanings on objects that previously did not have any. And this implies a harsh judgment: "that sense of wonder that had accompanied me upon arrival seemed to me now the result of a handlingΒ» [15]. A second character also arrives at the same result, a reporter who throughout the journey had attacked every detail of Matamonia with his camera, in search of meaning, of a concrete project, behind what he saw, only to then repent that Β«The Matamonia of his photographs is a composition of lines and angles and bodies that reflects a mind without taste; a mask that falls revealing the empty spirit of the artistΒ» [16] because the aseptic mechanism of the camera reproduces images that extrapolated from the context, and from the aura of meaning and meanings that had engulfed tourists since their arrival, returns them as they are: naked, hollow and intricate artifacts. And it is interesting the fate of the region shortly after the departure of the crimson group:
From some university matamonide has arisen a realist movement, or positivist, or empiricist, who with a strategic and obsessive use of half truths, personal exchanges, double and triple games and linguistic paradoxes managed to infiltrate the organization of Esagro Noroi everywhere and convinced the population that a reality of things inert is preferable to the deception of meanings. [17]
It is up to no less than a realist movement, which sees the object for what it is, to dismantle the machine of cultural meanings orchestrated by the regent to give a purpose to a life that previously could only appear empty and abysmal. The same that the protagonist finds himself living once he returns home, where he is alone il new color of the red flower stolen from Esagro's garden it gives him a different perspective than the nothingness in which he is immersed. But it is a transitory vision, because once the convention of meanings, or rather their manipulation, is revealed, the only remaining effect is a "mute footprintOn his conscience.
Esagro Noroi: the nature / progress conflict
I believe, at the risk of misunderstandings, it is possible to attribute to the name Esagro Noroi a precise authorial will underlying the nature of this particular character. It is therefore good to break down the name into two parts, Es + Agro, and analyze both. L'Es in Freudian psychology it represents the voice of man's nature, the primordial instinct that cannot be assimilated by the laws of society. Represents the primitive core, which in the case of the Regent is synonymous with his almost divine being, capable of representing a primordial fury in contrast with the rationality, represented by the advanced technology, of the old Matamonia: "Terrified at the idea of ββlosing privilege and life, the regents of the time had sent their war machines in a vain attempt to prevent its advance " [18].
The contrast nature / progress is also synthesized in the second compound, agro, derived from Latin, and of which there can be numerous translations: field, land, farm, land, territory. The surname Noroi, toponymic taken from the village of birth, corresponds to the equivalent of mud in the Romanian language, excellent material for the construction of primitive villages. And indeed that's what the Regent is, a constructor of meaning. Finally, the natural connotation is inherent in the very name of Matamonia which refers, for a game of alliteration, to our real Patagonia, immediately instilling in the reader the expectation of an exotic journey, perhaps using narrative chronotopes similar to those of The Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft, to insert a horror / weird frame. Instead, from the moment of arrival, it looks like a city of uniform and ghostly skyscrapers, where the only imprint of nature, left by the regent himself, is the Path of the Red Flowers.
Lie on the bottom
We have already highlighted, during the brief analysis of the story, the conflicting links between the work of meaning promoted by Esagro Noroi and the cynical observation of the protagonist and the photographer once they return to their homeland. Now is the time to introduce some elementary notions of anthropology to give an intensive rereading of what Matamonia actually is compared to the country from which the protagonist comes, and to verify what social criticism can be glimpsed between the lines of the story.
First of all, if we took that long essay with the title We, primitives, Published by Francis Remotti, published for the first time in 1990 and then, in a second capacity in 2009, for sure we would find some useful notions [19] to better understand some parts of the story. We have already seen the result of the protagonist's attraction and disorientation at the beginning of his journey in Matamonia which leads him to tie himself to his trinkets to find a little comfort; behold, the journey to the region unconsciously threatens the members of the Crimson Group a out of their customs, that is, an expropriation of the set of social customs, norms, traditions, to replace them with other types of customs. Remotti reminds us that Β«The idea of ββan exchange of costumes is something that arouses repulsion in men; and the crisis or the threat of a change in this sphere causes dismay, rebellion, rejection " [20].
In fact, it is a profound "upsetΒ» [21] to shake the tourists, and the price to enter the whole of the Matamonid culture is very high, as evidenced by the fate of the man tortured by the thousands of fingers that penetrate his body. The disturbance is however dismantled when the protagonist realizes the limitation of the Matamonia costumes: that is, of being a manipulation, a thickening of meanings dictated by a single person, represented by Esagro Noroi, guilty of having imposed a constellation of individual meaningswhen instead, at a normal level, they are established level collective. But the arbitrariness of meanings it is a procedure that is inherent in every culture: Β«arbitrariness in fact means that an objective foundation is unthinkable, that is, a secure foothold in things; and the external character, in turn, excludes that a precise indication can come from the organism or from the organic basis of the human psyche. Although things and environmental circumstances on the one hand and the psychic and organic conformation of man on the other provide suggestions and impose limitations, it is forever in the interorganic space, that is to say social, that the contents and functions of the symbols " [22].
These symbols are precarious, because the state of man is precarious, so that this sharing, over time can be misunderstood, altered, changed, can be replaced. And it is precisely a series of substitutions with deadly effects that is prophesied by the guide Meredro following the assimilation of an element external to the Matamonid culture, this is because Esagro's dream is weak, too fragile, and waterproofed by an almost infantile substratum; it did not meet those processes of reification that allow you to "remove symbols from their own precariousness" [23], Namely the naturalization, that is the acceptance of a cultural fact as natural, and the sacralization, through the sanction of their inviolability. An example of sacralization is sought in relation to the Path of the Red Flowers, but it is an attempt that fails, following the action of the protagonist to pick one of these flowers.
Furthermore, let us not forget that the narrator, before leaving for Matamonia, passed a special test that considered him suitable for departure, a process that remembers as much as ever the criteria promoted for the appointment of ethnological observers described in it La Repubblica of Plato, who "must be less than fifty years old and no more than sixty, [...], must be illustrious citizens, [...] must present themselves immediately upon their return to the Council of Magistrates, which will evaluate the usefulness of reported news and will decide whether the observer has been "corrupted" by foreign customs " [24]; all these precepts in the protagonist's country have been replaced by a single test, which does not seem to work even that well, since it is an unspecified number of people missing "in some ambiguous corner of Esagro Noroi's Matamonia" [25]. This is because the elusive test probably selected two types of people: those destined to die / disappear due to the corruption and exit of their customs, or those who would return without further problems to their homeland because they were too immersed in their own customs and habits. In this case, her husband's fate is a pure exception dictated by a much more compelling private life than her culture of origin.
Now we come to the last fundamental question: what kind is the culture of belonging of the narrator? IS aucronia, in which the germ that has revitalized the anthropological system of our Western modernity has undergone a sudden acceleration, causing an alienating reality, which deprives the person of his individuality, and inserts him into a capitalist circuit whose aim is that of pure productivity [26]. This system is clearly highlighted in the last lines of the story when the protagonist briefly mentions his occupation: "For the rest of the time I can do it, I will carry out my narrow and obvious tasks by counting, moving and manipulating with consummate cunning the finished and deaf objects that they are the object of my work " [27]. Objects that are empty, you act only to produce.
Quoting Ornament e horkheimer we could say that the world of the narrator, just like ours, has seen a period of its history capable of to dissolve The myths need free the world from magic so that reality appears naked in its rationality and usefulness. Of course, here the tensions are brought to the limit: on the one hand we have the Dream of a semi-divine child who has tried to re-semantize a bare world attributing its own meaning imposed through a system of laws and substitutions; on the other the object world of the protagonist, stripped of further meanings to their physicality. This emptiness of soul, nourished by the dystopian society where he lives, prevents him from seeing there beauty of red flower, caught only to indirectly challenge the system of signs imposed by Esagro Noroi.
We said earlier that when the reporter returns home and sees the photos of the Matamonia, he finds only "lines and angles and bodies that reflecttone a mind without taste; a mask that falls revealing the empty spirit of the artist Β», the fault of the camera, which returns the aseptic image that captures, of course; but the photos to ensure that any meaning is attributed to them must be read through the interpretation of a subject. The reporter finds himself seeing and commenting on those images in that way, because, having returned to his country, he reads them through the filter of his own culture. Let's think better: the Matamonia built from lines and angles, from streets all the same, and gray and dull motels, has always existed, since before the coming of Esagro Noroi. The empty spirit it is then to be referred to what Matamonia had been up to that moment, which is probably the same condition in which the country from which the narrator and the reporter comes. So the photographer finds himself to unknowingly denounce himself, his culture of belonging. Furthermore, the attitude taken towards the photographs is synonymous with a precise cultural will aimed at stripping anything of meaning:
Now imagine a man who, together with loved ones, are taken away from his house, his habits, his clothes, everything finally, literally everything he possesses: it will be an empty man, reduced to suffering and need, forgetful of dignity and discernment, since it easily happens, to those who have lost everything, to lose themselves: so that it will be possible to read with the heart to decide on his life or death without any sense of human affinity; in the case of a lucky person, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. The double meaning of the term will then be understood "Camp of annihilation", and it will be clear what we intend to express with this sentence: to lie on the bottom [28]. They are words of Primo Levi about the extermination practices carried out by the Germans against the Jews. Here, this attitude of annihilationin A journey into Esagro Noroi's Matamonia it is aimed at every type of culture, and that of Esagro will be just one of the many disintegrated by this excess of realism that strips everything of meaning; where, in the end, piled up, like a finite and deaf object, "humanity is not found, but its debrisΒ» [29].
Note:
[1] L. Besana, Stories from the crimson series, Hypnos Editions, Milan 2021, p. 21.
[2] Ivi, p. 23.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ivi, p. 26.
[5] Ivi, p. 28.
[6] Ivi, p. 29.
[7] Ivi, p. 31.
[8] Ivi, p. 32.
[9] Ivi, p. 38.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ivi, p. 32.
[12] Ivi, p. 45.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ivi, p. 48.
[15] Ivi, p. 49.
[16] Ivi, p. 50.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ivi, p. 41.
[19] In particular, I refer to the paragraphs: 6. Implicit anthropologies in action; 11. The exit from the costumes; 27. Precariousness and reification; 38. Critique of modernity, in F. Remotti, We, primitives. The mirror of anthropology, Bollate Boringhieri, Turin 2009.
[20] Ivi, p. 61.
[21] Besana, op. cit., p. 34.
[22] remotti, op. cit., p. 159.
[23] Ivi, p. 162.
[24] Ivi, p. 79.
[25] Besana, op. cit., p. 49.
[26] The problem of work it appears in subsequent stories as an obsessive problem of the protagonists.
[27] Ivi, p. 51.
[28] P. Levi, If this is a man, Einaudi 2014.
[29] Remotti, op. cit., p. 47.
A comment on "For an anthropological reading of the "Journey into the Matamonia of Esagro Noroi", by Lucio Besana"