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language: Italian
country: Italy
year: 1968
form: novel
genre(s): literary, speculative
dates read: 13.3.23-16.3.23
Giorgio De Maria’s I Trasgressionisti is a short, ambiguously-speculative novel about a nameless young man who joins an absurdist-anticapitalist cult in Turin and, in a grand gesture of social refusal, leaves his fiancée at the altar as part of his “Great Leap” into the realm of official Transgressionism.
I can’t tell how seriously I’m supposed to take it. the novel was published in 1968, and it’s entirely possible that it’s unironically Situationist: the early part of the novel is an exercise in a kind of demystification whereby the protagonist — through exercises that echo Shklovsky’s analysis of enstrangement — learns to actually see the world around him (rather than merely recognizing it) and the Institutions (always capitalized, Istituzioni) in which he is caught and to which he has at times without even realizing it acquiesced. this feels in many ways quite earnest and even sympathetic. at times the vibe is almost like Fight Club but without the violence and pre-Globalization™.
the second half of the novel, however, takes a darker turn as he (with the encouragement of the other Transgressionists) turns his back on his social ties, breaking completely with his past and devoting himself to the Transgressionist cause, waiting for the “Ordini” that will tell them when they need to act. ultimately, though:
Fra non molto tutto quanto sarà saturo della nostra Energia Negativa; ma mentre noi nell’Ora della Simultaneità ritroveremo di colpo la scioltezza e l’Elemento Naturale gli altri taceranno si pietrificheranno impazziranno… ma non faremo una mossa per salvarli.
[Before long everything will be saturated with our Negative Energy; but while we, at the Hour of Simultaneity, will find again, all at once, effortlessness and the Natural Element, the others will be silent, will freeze, will go mad…but we will not lift a finger to save them.]
this and the leaving his fiancée — who by his own account he does, or did, love! — at the altar are what make me think that this is, rather, meant to be a satire of a certain vindictive and individualist strain in leftist organizing. the Transgressionists set out — in response to real conditions of oppression and the unlivability of capitalism — to liberate themselves, but only themselves.
moods: challenging, dark, lighthearted, mysterious