•
Rating: In this complex era of economic-financial crisis, of liquid and virtual capital that evaporates in a nanosecond, of masses of petty bourgeois pseudo-shareholders with the drop of saline sweat running down their rough foreheads every time the spread soars and stock market returns drearily fall, the collective imagination of the transformation from a wealthy industrialist to a bankrupt/poor fellow with the destination of Caritas soup kitchens and squalid taverns for outcasts from society is still vivid and widespread: dazed by Hollywood-like productions that illustrate the climb to success and the descent into hell after the Wall Street crash, exasperated by the media that, in an absolutely Manichean manner, highlight only the black and white of post-industrial reality, we fear a grim apocalyptic panorama made of acid rains, shacks, homeless people, abandoned cities, deceased spirits.
Yet, reading the voluminous pages of Bukowski, the above-mentioned filth is there, it can be seen and enjoyed: in a world that seems like an immense latrine of debauched, U.S. metropolises that seem to be only residences of drunks and "fallen men," the "old scoundrel" par excellence wallows in it wonderfully. Nonconformist, yet without politically aligning with the red threat, counter-capitalist yet a lover of waste (when possible), Bukowski self-inserts within a context of sex, depravity, psycho-mental deviations, rivers of alcohol, and extreme misery, a reality that in some ways recalls the malevolent nemesis in the man-wolf of De Sade's work, The 120 Days of Sodom, revisited by Pasolini in the scandalous Salò. But, unlike De Sade and Pasolini, Bukowski absolutely does not intend to implement a disastrous metamorphosis from human to guinea pig, from rational being to a more savage, murderous, and wicked beast: the sexual act, even though devoid of love, feeling, hyperuranic-transcendental passion, is certainly reduced to a base, coarse, rough, low-carnal, even psychotic dimension, but the component of death and the nullification of limbs operated by the sadistic/pasolinian priest-tormentor is almost completely rejected in favor of regular pleasure, of normal satisfaction that becomes a consolidated practice in the philosophy of the Bukowskian "pig."
Tales of Ordinary Madness is a long collection of semi-autobiographical narratives which can be used as a useful compendium for understanding significantly more compact and unambiguous works, primarily Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Ham on Rye and Pulp. Within these mini stories, Bukowski is simultaneously present and absent, is,comes and goes but without causing the reader annoyance, astonishment, or anguish for such a condition. The stories furthermore represent the ascending/descending parable of the author: a man of letters, writer, and poet famous for his extravagance and excesses, who instead of rationally enjoying the status of fame and celebrity conferred by the public, prefers to abandon himself to misery, alcohol, and the eternal wandering in search of a permanent or occasional job that he rarely maintains. But it is precisely Bukowski, little inclined to imitate the artists of his generation (except for the respect he has for the conformist-reactionary companion, although politically aligned, Ernest Hemingway), who wants to lead such a dull existence, never accepting to stabilize himself in a protective shell made of a happy family - stable profession - loads of money. A bit of an incurable dandy, a bit of a confused rebel, a bit of a decadent-skeptic-fake existentialist disenchanted by luxury and prospects of serenity and magnificence, Bukowski remains himself, retains the innate, congenital creative madness that enables him to publish both refined works and to immerse himself passionately in writing articles for alternative-independent magazines like the infamous Open Pussy.
Ruling imperishly in Tales of Ordinary Madness is the eternal triad of alcohol-sex-writing, contexts moreover functional to each other: the excessive drinking of beer and spirits in the USA's most infamous taverns or in the filthy apartments/hotels where he occasionally resides almost always precedes an active sexual-erotic lifestyle (the so-called "screwing") conducted with women of the worst kind, depraved and sadistic, zoophilic and masculine, inflatable dolls even before their time, and "sex machines" which in reality are prostitutes emptied of any moral-rational component by pro-Nazi tormentor fathers. And this "infamous" mixture of beer and "pussy" leads the author to the magnum opus of the poetic, to a Joyce-like narrative style where punctuation is absent, the objectivity of the narration alternates irregularly with broken thoughts, insults, words without an immediate meaning, a postmodernist stream of consciousness perfectly adapted to the most hidden evils of puritanical, conformist, and moralist America, which nevertheless yearns to be torn from this crazy nymphomaniac editorials, poems, verses, dirty stories. And Bukowski, as a shrewd opportunist, often manages to save himself from certain physical decay (see hospitalizations, hemorrhages from excessive alcohol, various ailments) by beguiling high-class ladies and gentlemen who put aside their resumes of plastic hypocrisy and welcome a sort of new Siddhartha, a filthy prophet, hardly talkative, drunkard and antihero who nonetheless is capable of completing the highly faceted Rubik's cube of the new Western contemporaneity.
Loading comments slowly
