The emigrations of Manga | The paper

Manganelli became ekphrastic for pleasure or, at most, for sedulity, as evidenced by the texts, later collected in Salons, commissioned by Franco Maria Ricci. He never laid to connoisseurs or as a lover only of those artists who could induce him to tremble into the regions of delirious and depressive oneirism contiguous to his interests as an anglist, and capable of fueling specious fantasies, useful in recognizing, for example, certain affinities between Füssli and Poe. He was simply happy to “go wandering to eye canvases and drawings”, especially since his being literate often allowed him to “go beyond the image”, but also to “abandon it, deny it, crumple it” without too much shyness.

Like Mallarmé, Manganelli has always believed that the “too exact meaning” can only obscure the “rough and labyrinthine path” that is taking shape in our conversation with words, whatever the subject. So that even where “the magical, hallucinated, symbolic machine, summed up in the tortuous and stubborn imagination” of a work of art is in action, what would impose itself would be only the narration of words. Which is confirmed by what Andrea Cortellessa claims in the margin of Manganelli’s art writings (Giorgio Manganelli, Dream Emigrations, Adelphi, pp. 348, euro 24) collated by him: often his prose owes similarities borrowed from the iconographic idiolect.

As a demonstration of how much art, like music (as witnessed by the conversations collected in A profound envy for music), act as a large lexical reserve to draw upon in order to nourish a linguistic freedom that makes Manganellian prose a glossolalia: not a utterance of inarticulate sounds, but a “speaking in glosses,” that is, in words that always await an explanation again.

To name, to name, to rename according to a continuous approximation: thus they come to compose epexegeses of fluctuating, feeble architectures; ecfrasis of corusca and blood pictures or evanescent and «splintered with aphasia»; hypotypes of sculptures «crouched in tenebrous chapels», which, contra materiam, prove to be elusive, elusive. The mundane as well as dreamlike congestion of art objects is of a degree, hardly measurable, other than nothing: it is a ghost, «a mood of the air and of things» which challenges the word to become an accomplice; better, conniving. In fact, connivance – Manganelli points out – is nothing but “a taciturn understanding with the ghost”. In other words, with language itself, «place of deposit and creation of all ghosts», and, among these, those which, born of exhausted invention or hallucinated refinement, docile and pleased participate «in the dance, the transit, the escape, of the erratic trasvolare» of an écriture artiste.