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

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Cesaretti, Enrico

This "act of disappearance" presents itself in many shapes and guises in Palazzeschi, from other essentially "anorexic" gestures such as stripping off one's clothes to stretching the limits of the same logic, becoming transparent:

La cosa più difficile alia quale possa un uomo arrivare è liberarsi di lutti i cenci, vestiti e vestitini, mantelli e mantellini, scarpe coccarde fiocchi, gale nappette e nastri, di cui gli altri lo avranno abbellito e coperto da quando era uovo nell'uovo dell'uovo. Curiosa faccenda, non è vero? Come si nasce vestiti. Parrebbe tutto il contrario. E ehe po' po' di lavoro, per quelli ehe ci riescono, potersi un pochino con grandissimo scandalo spogliare. (Palazzeschi qtd. in Tamburri, Of saltimbanchi 28)

(The most difficult thing a man can achieve is to free himself of all the rags, suits and jackets, caps and shawls, shoes cockades bows, frills tassels and ribbons, of which others will have embellished and covered him since he was an egg in the egg of the egg . . . A curious matter, isn't it? How one is born dressed. It would seem the contrary. And what a hard task, for those who succeed, to be able to, with the greatest of scandal, undress.)

It is a "hard task" ("ehe po' po' di lavoro") and a heroic act, especially in a society that, in Florence as well as in Prague, tends to privilege conformity and suffocate any form of real diversity. Whoever manages to succeed in such an effort, however, may achieve a status that is, again, a sort of "degree zero" from which it is possible to start over. One can even dream of stripping until nothing remains, achieving an almost incorporeal stage where it is impossible to say if someone exists or not-a point where, as in "A Hunger Artist," people may need to " [poke] into the straw with sticks" to check. It is only natural, then, to find transparency as a central theme in Palazzeschi's poem "Una casina di cristallo": "lo sogno una casinadi cristallo/. . ./mache sia tutta trasparente,/. . ./L'antico solitario nascosto/non nasconderà più niente/alla gente./Mi vedrete mangiare,/mi potrete vedere/quando sono a dormire,/sorprendere i miei sogni;/mi vedrete quando sono a fare i miei bisogni. . . ." ("I dream of a little crystal house/. . ./but it [needs to] be all transparent,/. . ./The old hidden loner/shall not hide anything anymore/to the people./You will see me eat,/you will be able to see me/when I am asleep,/[you will be able to] surprise my dreams;/you will see me when I relieve myself . . ."). Such a situation lets the crowd see and judge every aspect of the "live show" the poet puts on-a life, we may observe, whose arc significantly spans from "full" (eating) to "void" (evacuating), and it is evident that such a concept also implies the inherent possibility of invisibility (and thus absence): seeing through something that is transparent and not seeing it at all are two faces of the same coin. The cuteness of the "casina di cristallo" and the jocose tone of the poem, moreover, cannot hide the fact that we are actually facing another kind of cage, another voyeuristic experience and, with all likelihood, another imminent instance of self-effacement for the sake of art, as the exclamation "Buon lavoro, poeta!" ("Good job, poet!") at the end of the poem seems to suggest.