Consuming Texts: Creation and Self-effacement in Kafka and Palazzeschi

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Cesaretti, Enrico

I find even more interesting, however, those passages in the novel that contain specific references to eating and food: Perelà's comments on the war, for example, which he sees "come un'enorme minestra grigia, scodellata con stridulo crocrolo sciulo frastuono, e rimasta lì... immangiabile" (19; "like an enormous gray soup, dished up with a strident. . . noise, [which] remained there . . . inedible") ; or the Contessa Cloe Pizzardini Ba's sexual allusions: "Io mangio di buonissimo appedto almeno quattro volte al giorno ed il resto ... mi capita? E come non potrei pensare di rimanere una intera giornata senza prender cibo, non potrei pensare di rimaner senza ... mi capite?" (51-52; "I eat with a very good appetite at least four times a day and the rest. . . you understand me, don't you? And as I could not imagine remaining a whole day without taking food, I could not imagine remaining without. . . you understand me, don't you?"); or the description of a typical (and dysfunctional) royal lunch: "Al pranzo di corte il Re non mangia mai, preferisce intrattenere il gentiluomo di destra, e Io manda via colla fame in corpo, cosï lui à mangiato prima, l'altro, povero diavolo, va a mangiare dopo, e questo è il pranzo di corte" (91; "The King never eats at the court lunch; he prefers to entertain the gentleman at his right, and he [the king] lets him go with hunger [still] in his body, as he has eaten before, the other one, poor devil, goes to eat afterwards, and this is the court lunch"). All of these passages corroborate the presence of an alimentary motif in the novel.

Two other passages are even more significant for our discussion:

[Perelà] abbassò ancora gli occhi giù sull'ammasso enorme scomposto di giallastro, rossastro verdastro ehe formava il panorama delia città e si sentì in quell momento di disprezzarla corne preso da una nausea naturale, quell'ammasso gli appariva una vomitatura del padre eterno, dopo un suo pranzo . . . da padre eterno ....

Gli uomini . . . quando vogliono esprimere il loro disprezzo, quando vogliono gettare in faccia ad un essere odiato l'insulto più atroce, si servono di ciò che di più intimo eustodisca il loro seno. (Il codice 159/195)

("He lowered his eyes again down ou the enormous decomposed mass [made] of yellowish, reddish, greenish [colors] which formed the panorama of the city, and in that instant when he felt he despised it as if he were affected by a natural nausea that mass appeared to him as a vomit of the Eternal Father, after one of his meals... fit for the gods. . . .

Men . . . when they want to express their contempt, when they want to throw onto the face of a hated being the most atrocious insult, they use the innermost thing that their heart preserves.")

The anorexic logic we have adopted as a key to these texts re-emerges here in two potentially related variations. In the first "sacrilegious" excerpt it is God's gluttony that initiates the creative process (see Camporesi 73). Here, to be precise, bulimia takes the place of anorexia as the metaphorical means of creation: "il panorama delia città" is the result of a divine "binge-purge" cycle, as if to imply that even God, in order to "create," had to make himself "lighter." The "divine" regurgitation of food is a form of creation and, as such, it may constitute a first allusion to the parallel process performed by the "god-like" writer, the one who is actually "throwing out" and "regurgitating" his words over the page.