Broch, Esch or anarchy | The paper

Although Antonioni, of “I sonnambuli”, had made the reading of choice of Lidia, the solitary girl played in “La Notte” (1961) by Monica Vitti, the novel by the Viennese writer was mostly read, and not only in Italy, with benevolent indifference or discouraged respect. First translated at Einaudi by Carla Bovero, in 1960, and now by Ada Vigliani for Adelphi, which after the first volume, “Pasenow o il romanticimo” which appeared in 2020, has now published the second, “Esch o l’anarchia” ( pp. 274, euro 20), and is soon preparing to complete the triptych with “Huguenau or realism”, the work of the most secluded of the great writers of the decline of the Habsburg myth has been considered the paradigm, not unlike “L ‘man without qualities’ by Musil, of a world unhinged in its hierarchies, but ultimately an incongruous manifesto, because it is still confident in a moral ideal which induces, even in the face of the “disintegration of values”, to still believe in man.

Precisely this feeling of hope, which comes at the end of the depiction of a series of characters who – observed Claudio Magris – live in a self-blunting with which they hide their emptiness, has led us to consider “I sonnambuli” an unfinished novel, and not only for formal reasons, starting with the fact that the different elements of the narration are juxtaposed and not merged into a true “polyphonic” unity, but because Broch did not seem bold enough to give up unity, in a time in which – as he himself points out in a 1936 essay – thought has put an end to any claim to universality. Broch’s ideal seemed to be able to express, “at the same time and as if in a single sentence, all the contrary movements, to keep them in their opposition”, while aiming to keep intact “the immensity of the whole”. Hence also the immeasurable length of his sentences, which each time seem to want to exhaust the world, to pass – wrote Maurice Blanchot – «all the levels of experience, reconciling everything that contrasts: cruelty and goodness, life and death, instant and eternity», but without ever being able to finish, because the continuous pouring of pros and cons always determines new repetitions.

In “Esch or anarchy” the aspiration to unity takes on the traits of sexual attraction, the one that the protagonist nurtures towards mother Hentjen, a figure – noted Ladislao Mittner – “as ridiculous as you like and at times repugnant, but always a great unity”. However, Esch is destined to remain “a stranger in his love for him”: in the real world the fulfillment always fails. Proof of this is provided by the same scene of the embrace, in which Mrs. Hentjen presses her mouth against that of Esch, «who was looking for her like the muzzle of an animal against a glass plate», terms, the latter, which metaphorically return the existential situation of Esch, who even remains in the embrace separated from his lover, unable to take possession of her soul.

It is no coincidence that this is the volume of Brochia’s triptych that, in “Estinzione”, Thomas Bernhard, through the mouth of his alter-ego Franz-Josef Murau, recommends that his pupil Gambetti read, almost as if here more than anywhere else he can grasping the sense of that inescapable failure which seems to be the only possible experience where – according to what we read in György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel – «there are only pure hopes announcing the advent of the new: signs of a future which they are still so weak that they can be crushed at whim, for fun, by the sterile force of what merely is.

But while Bernhard’s characters, obsessed with the pursuit of an unattainable perfection, are inclined to flee before failure and nullification, Broch’s characters plunge into nothingness, without opposing any other resistance than that offered by attachment to atavistic values, by now frustrating like the uniform that Pasenow keeps as the last vestige of an irretrievably lost yesterday’s world, or absorbing, like Huguenau, its destructive charge, not retreating even in the face of crime, or again like Esch, whose rebellion against order constituted ends in a dreamlike delirium in which everything appears a «symbolic substitute». In this sense, rather than representing, according to what Milan Kundera has suggested, the fanaticism of an age without God, Esch seems above all to be the emblem of that “tired culture” of which Broch has never failed to diagnose himself, sniffing out the ” nudity” of its airy element. In the latter – Plato and the Stoics already taught – everything always flows as in an elastic continuum, almost as if the entire cosmos, breathing, made possible the imagination of the air, and this, in turn, made the world possible. perceivable: “as we breathe air and speak air, so – said James Hillman – we bathe in his elemental imagination, necessarily illuminated, resonant, ascending”.

And it is perhaps in the search for an as yet uncompromised «imagination of the air» that Broch engages in when he tries to break down his own breath and that of his characters into those barely perceptible and hoarse sounds that Elias Canetti has called his « respiratory punctuation», capable of granting his Work to «a dry rapidity, to a mechanical fever, to a sterile precipitation», but also to «a hopeless happiness», as it is said in the conversation “Fear” by Hofmannsthal and Broch repeats, however, warning that there is no longer room “for an epic in which yesterday, while hoping for tomorrow, remains in the happiness of today”, but only for an epic – reads in “The Death of Virgil” – devoted to the «immensely new»: which, unhinging every limit, could be produced and announced, or, with a very light step, pass beyond, without being «able to heal in knowledge».