Alberto Savinio
Hermaphrodito

Alberto Savinio is not an easy writer to tackle. First of all, it must be clarified that he was not just a writer, rather he should be treated as a true artist. He graduated from the conservatory and in May 1914, at the age of 23, he made his debut with a piano concert held at the premises of "Les Soirées De Paris" (a literary magazine founded by Apollinaire, Savinio's friend) with "Les Chants de la Mi-mort", a composition of distinctly avant-garde mold. Savinio was fully immersed in the environment of the Parisian avant-garde and was a full-fledged part of it, frequenting Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Cocteau, and other exponents of the movement. His musical debut is important because with the title "Les Chants de la Mi-mort" he also opens the first section of the "Hermaphrodito", thus giving it a sense of strong experimentalism and an altogether original and exotic taste.

But our author, besides being a musician and writer, was also a painter, particularly from the mid-twenties; and then also a music critic, film critic, and essayist. And here emerges the great difficulty in grasping his profile. Savinio was many things and it is possible to approach his figure from many, perhaps too many, points of view which also seem to collide with each other. For this reason, a quick glance at his works is not enough, a first judgment is not sufficient and a first impression cannot satisfy. Ideas and opinions need to be allowed to settle; it is necessary to set them aside and then take them up again to better understand many facets that initially escape; to grasp the small signals that make his work much more cohesive and coherent than it appears.

Another element linked to his multiplicity is inherent to his identity: Alberto Savinio is a pseudonym. His registered name is Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico, the younger brother of the famous Giorgio de Chirico. Also due to the overwhelming figure of his brother, Alberto wanted to create a fictitious identity, but his persona does not stop at two manifestations of himself, as indeed during his (literary) existence he was also Nivasio Dolcemare, Mr. Dido, Mr. Münster, and others. Thus we are dealing with a true poetic program; it's not just a matter of existential self-assertion. The multiplicity of Savinio must be read on several different levels: artistic, personal, poetic, and existential.

"Hermaphrodito", the author's first book publication, is an exact manifestation of this polyhedral, schizophrenic, and eclectic drive: it is a collection of texts that are difficult to categorize given the heterogeneity offered by the author. Perhaps only the label of pastiche can somehow be adequate. Here, properly narrative writings alternate with more expressionistic and vivid ones; we find different languages (Italian, French, Greek, and Latin), often also within the same text; the section of "Chants", as the subtitle states, is a collection of scenes taken from a drama called "Risorgimento", perhaps an unfinished project or perhaps a simple narrative device used by Savinio to embellish his "strange collection". The second section takes its name from the title of the work and contains within itself the "Canti della mezza morte", a continuation of the "Chants". In the subtitle "Microscopio-Telescopio" there is no lack of a reference to Voltaire and relativism, another cue to understand Savinio's cultural horizon. And then, still in the second part, we find the true corpus of the work, composed of the most disparate episodes.

The reading of the different "stories" can be metaphorically described as a visit to a museum or as an exploration journey through Savinio's universe. It ranges from a very peculiar "city song about Ferrara" with "Frara città del Worbas" to anti-clerical reflections with "Il papa in guerra". It jumps from an eulogy of the figure of Mazzini in "Epoca Risorgimento" to an interventionist apostrophe with "La Guerra", and finally describes at the end of the work the sufferings, moments of joy, and the overall experience, lived firsthand, of the First World War with "Partenza - Ferrara", "Isabella Hasson" (where the figures of the ballerina and the city of Thessaloniki overlap), and "La Partenza dell'Argonauta", a true short novel in four chapters plus an epilogue.

The reference to Greek mythology is a constitutive part of Savinio's poetics, being born in Athens he will always feel this dual nature as his own; and it is with this key of reading that we can understand the otherwise incomprehensible "Dio-routalibera", a true avant-garde writing exercise almost without comparisons in our literary landscape. But the oddities do not end here, we also find a small prosimetrum, "La Festa Muratoria", and stories centered on ironic language games like "Il Rocchetto di Venere". In summary: Savinio is Mazzinian (patriot but Europeanist), Greek but also a bit French, interventionist, atheist, avant-garde, narrator and "writer of images", autobiographical (in all writings there is an autobiographical basis), metaphorical and ironic.

You well understand how such complexity can easily be interpreted as mere ornament, as baroque taste for its own sake; and you are not wrong to think so, Savinio is certainly full of himself excessively and takes infinite pleasure in flaunting his abilities through excess and bizarreness, but this is part of the historical and cultural context in which he was formed as well as a natural inclination of his, which often ends up overshadowing his talent. We can talk about a raw work, a symptom of youthful exuberance; of expressionistic autobiography; of multilingual and multistylistic exercise (it seems like a joke but as will be discovered much later from his youth notes this was also a reinterpretation of Dante's style); of literary pastiche or even a tremendous slip-up.

I believe it is one of the most interesting experiments of our early twentieth-century literature and beyond. Our critics at the time were too busy demolishing the Scapigliatura and discussing the primacy of Manzoni, Verga, or D'Annunzio, but also praising the "vociani" Jahier, Slapater, Soffici, Papini, etc... of whom also our Savinio was a part yet evidently wasn't convincing. Perhaps, as often happens to us Italians, we only treated with a hint of contempt and detachment an author who embraced the cause of a European-breathing literature and thought, who did not hesitate to dive into other environments and situations compared to our age-old and perhaps even heavy classical culture (and if Savinio -who painted almost exclusively Greek mythology, who was born and fought in Greece, who dedicated pages upon pages to mnemosyne, who wrote "Achille Innamorato"- is not infused with classical culture, then who is?). In the little consideration of his works I see a healthy "all-Italian provincialism", the same that saw us discussing Croce for decades while elsewhere in Europe Nietzsche and Marx were bursting forth; the same provincialism that made us discover psychoanalysis and structuralism only in the sixties.

I only have left to explain the title of the work: "Hermaphrodito" wants to be a metaphor of the famous Greek myth in an artistic key. The man and the woman, divided parts of the mythical Platonic hermaphrodite, are replaced by the artist and the concept of art. So the rebirth of the hermaphrodite can only happen through the creation of the work of art; true synthesis of the artist and the concept of art.

Throughout the twentieth century, figures of the caliber of Sanguineti, Sciascia, Arbasino, and Bréton, who even described Savinio as a true precursor and inspirer of Surrealist poetics, worked to weave the praises of our author; his philosophical-artistic essays published in "Valori Plastici" towards the end of the nineteen-tens have been recognized as the full completion of Metaphysical poetics, of which Giorgio was a pictorial exponent as much as Alberto was a literary one. By reading "Hermaphrodito" we can find the typical metaphysical atmospheres: the deserted squares, the mannequins, a "great noon" light, etc... The fact remains that to this day Savinio has not yet obtained the artistic dignity that in my opinion he deserves. But time is always a gentleman.