Massimiliano Parente
L'inumano

It is always difficult to recognize the greatness of a contemporary, especially if they are Italian. Especially if it’s Massimiliano Parente, known primarily for his scathing reviews in the Giornale which often compel the distracted reader to accuse him of envy and bias, simply because he is perceived upfront as a troublemaker, someone so boldly beyond any rank and lacking protection that he becomes terribly inconvenient, and thus disarming, incorruptible. The fact is that alongside his cultural satire in articles, Parente has always produced works of undeniable importance, monumental novels with a dense, extreme flavor, incredibly different from the vast majority of paper productions that fill the supermarkets of our poor little country.

L’inumano, his latest and perhaps greatest novel, is the definitive proof. Everything here is played out in the agony of a life strapped to a bed, in darkness, in the conscious nightmare of a body continually processing an individual and species past against the backdrop of cosmic nothingness, absolute, which is non-life, or life devoid of consciousness. The truth does not arrive in fragments, with salvific circumlocutions and poignant soothing vignettes: on the contrary, it is hurled at the reader without ever offering any mystical or even political anchor, without the loophole of a "now" as an escape from "always" and "never," not even the mirror of a duplicitous, undefined, misinterpretable language: "the word life is deceptive because it sounds positive, conceived in the biological ignorance of what life truly means. Thus, today, when you say life, it seems like a good thing, life is beautiful, it’s life, as long as there's life there's hope, and all this makes sense if you ignore what life really is, the terrible blind and ruthless and senseless machine of nature, another word that sounds senselessly positive...” There is no peak, no climb from whose summit one might reveal an archimedean-kafkian point, a lever to lift the world and oneself even just to use them to our disadvantage and detriment: here the word gushes from the mucus and feces of our foundations, from the rubble and wares of the biological body, from cosmic debris, and from the mouths of desires regurgitated by entropy. There is a hole, just a hole, and a mouth that speaks to us and to you from within, from inside. “Our bones, the first formation of our bones starts from a mouth […] But deep down the hole of the bottom precedes everything by hundreds of millions of years, mouths and bottoms initially indistinguishable. How many debates on the first multicellular fossils, in the attempt to distinguish mouths from anal orifices.” But then the two orifices separate, live the fracture of a distinction, a cut. It is one of the many traumas deducible from the blind mechanism of evolution, wisely recapped in the chapters of imprisonment of the author-Parente, imprisonment that is both an experiment on the body and on the past of every body, ontogeny, and phylogeny entirely relived as an immense, unredeemed psychoanalytic session of life and non-life on Earth. There is a separation, indeed more than one, and there is the gain of an individual, decisive, enclosed, and irreparably lonely space. Yet, the mouth speaks. To the extreme, consciousness expresses the physiological attempt to declare itself a body, to declare itself branched into a skeleton and a bundle of nerves, into a mass of organs and impulses, consciousness is in the man who regurgitates it into the hole, in the man who crawls and drags his sludges without even having arms and legs to lift himself: everything is clear, terrestrial, the rest has been forgotten or literally razed to the ground, as after all “the upright position is a way to delude oneself into escaping the earth, the dragging toward the inorganic. Everything tends downward, the earth waiting to swallow us, without even knowing it, expecting nothing.”

Parente's word is fluid like few, now hypnotic, seductive, now consequential and chained to its and our evidence ("the evidence of the terrible thing," for those who have understood Proust), like everything necessary because it is true. The character reflecting his name, features, and thoughts is bipolar only if elected to the state of depressed, only if read in the perspective of a possible, ultimate life, otherwise it is the quintessence of the consequent; there is no "scandal of contradiction" in him, no conflict between intellectual engagement and private interest, there is no "little saint" in a Pasolini way to draw inspiration from: “nobody understood his obsession, least of all Pasolini himself, so imbued with civil ideology that he had to mount a whole very provincial structure of civil struggle over his erotic torment to justify it civilly, lacking the courage, fundamental in a writer, to extract himself alone and go straight to the center of sexual obsession, without the sociopolitical excess typical of Italian writers.” One laughs, in this work, and a lot: at ourselves, at Italy, at our now mummified culture; but it's an exhausted, impossible laughter. Needless to say, there is no respect for the Nation here, respect for History, respect for Works, and respect for Respect: Parente destroys and vomits everything, vomits above and below and inside everything so that he might be the first and last to remain, the first and last to be vomited, the only one, in reality, because only thus can he truly place himself beyond everything else — and place the reader with and thus into himself, at the end of everything, a reader rarely so perversely forced to mirror himself in what he habitually abhors, to mirror himself in the inhuman, to unpack his neurons in the darwinianly sympathetic effort, to be that something extreme which reaches, in the last thirty pages, to be the horror that has always been, the horror that is L’inumano.

Parente does not host euthanasia, does not lay blame nor lay down rational arms in favor of a “merely” blind rage: his “I love you” repeated into the ears of strangers he calls at night just like those of his beautiful and terrible tormentors is rather the disarmament of every teleguided hostility, it's the admission of an evil that knows no winners, but only losers. No freedom, no refuge, just the courage of thought without purpose or corolla and therefore dares to declare itself and saying itself reveals the obscene, continuously pushing beyond, beyond the scene, beyond nature and society and art, even beyond our life/cowardice of species, where no one had ever ventured before – not so ferociously, at least, not with such a despairing presumption of absolute, with a similar annihilated determination. It is the thought that dares to draft the flaying of the object to which it is intrinsically tied and by which, not far off, it will be negated. The exact opposite of any theophany, but also the only possible opposite of the Cartesian cogito, the centuries-old removal that wants consciousness – the mind – independent from the carcass that encloses its perceptive cells, and which alone has enabled this absurd, definitive realization of surrender. There is no soul, no before, no after to rely on. Telling life is to declare its inability to surpass itself, or even just to self-justify, and the writer is precisely this impossible attempt, counter-nature, to explicate the inexplicable and say the unspeakable, the paradoxical fifth limb that “severs the other four while maintaining sufficient leverage to sever itself and leave nothing behind or in front.” Under these conditions, one cannot even try to organize some defense, a bell jar as the intellectual bulwark of life and sponsor of some value, of some glazed recipe of sophisticated revenge. There isn’t even the difficult superhuman poetry, the moralistic and/or nihilistic elevation tracing a path, a way, alternative to others, nor is there even the technocratic myth of social anticipation that places science at the center of everything, the genetic or simply engineering manipulation of bare life, as any transcendence of the species will never stop being a tool of some reproduction, of some mental convolution authorizing the repetition of horror, while, if truth be told, “the voluntary annihilation of all life on earth would be […] the greatest work of art and thought of humanity.”

Definitive, ultimate, the man-Parente is now far from the perversions that had been the spirit and the wedge-investigator of previous works: here the trampling, the coprophagy, the pornography, and even the fetishism resonate like blurred battles, reduced to a sulphurous background, and finally breached: “I am capable of following a girl and her feet for kilometers without her noticing, until I get tired and look for another one to follow that takes me back, so as not to retrace the way back without any obsession, only that now I start already tired, feeling all the uselessness of my obsessions.” It is the end of desire even for the fetishist, who is by nature obsessed and thus everlasting, infantile to the utmost degree. Then, the novel has its flaws, as happens even to the great ones. It is too short and far too smooth, especially compared to the two monumental novels that preceded it, La macinatrice and Contronatura; it skims over names and facts and situations without bothering to tie the narrative knots; and furthermore, as often with unreachable or just too self-aware authors, it presents itself first and foremost as a manifesto, as a discourse — the difference between the work that literally creates itself before the reader's eyes, like the Canti del caos by Antonio Moresco, and one that existed already a priori, somehow contained and already entirely pre-seen in its author's conscious or unconscious mind.

Busi, Moresco, Roth, Houellebecq, and again Kafka, Proust, Leopardi, Sade: the comparisons come as easily as they are misleading. Truly great works are not interchangeable, and every comparison is biased because it generates the idea, false, that masterpieces can overlap and not only penetrate each other, as it is natural since no work can ever, by itself, draw a truly definitive balance on existence. Yet L’inumano attempts this climb, immerses into the mud and does not resurface because it knows that the closer a work comes to touching the nothingness that is life, the more it has the right to be called art, and not just a shopping list, or sentient idolatry. "A revolt against the very genes, an ultimate work arising from a fatal error of thought that is unbearable to both the author and the reader, a fatal form of thought already dead at birth": this is L’inumano, for those who will have the courage to read it, and to let themselves be pierced by its word.