Antonio Moresco
interview by Anne Greeott
To begin, most US readers aren't familiar with your novels, with the possible exception of Distant Light, which was translated by Richard Dixon and published in English by Archipelago in 2016. To give those readers a bit more context, would you please describe your trilogy, which you dedicated 35 years to writing and which also received much well-deserved attention? What did you most want to express in that work?
It’s not easy to answer this, because it is almost three thousand pages written over 35 years and so it's impossible to sum it up in a few lines. And so I will limit myself to describing it from the outside, telling you simply what it is made up of. The title is Giochi dell'eternitá (Games of Eternity) and it unfolds throughout three big novels (Gli esordi, Canti del caos, Gli increati—The Beginnings, Songs of Chaos, The Uncreated). It’s a book pervaded by the idea of literature as irreducibility, risk, invention, adventure, discovery, as a supreme challenge of the emotions, of foretelling, and of awareness. Of a kind of literature that doesn't limit itself to showing what you see in the mirror but that breaks the mirror in order to go beyond it. When it came out in Italy it was met with astonishment and discord. More than a trilogy, it is in my view a single vertical book that unfolds little by little as it brings itself into being, not through horizontal recognition but in a concentrated, atomic way which culminates in the staggering dimension of uncreation, something vast that lies right under our noses but which we are so close to that we are either unable or unwilling to see. But I realize that it is easier to read it and to discover things step by step while reading rather than trying to summarize them. And Distant Light is a short, intimate novel written during an interval between drafts of two of the volumes of Giochi dell'eternità. It's like a little meteorite that broke off that larger body. It tells about a close encounter of the third kind between an adult and a child, between a man who is alone and the dead child he carries inside himself, which we all carry inside ourselves.
Since this issue of the magazine is focused on speculative literature, could you say something about the value of writing that goes beyond the bounds of reality as we know it? What does it offer that more conventional narrative doesn't?
In this era, an idea has been established of literature as a mirror of reality or rather as a small part of reality in exchange for the whole, and the term “realism” has also been coined, as if this type of horizontal gaze over the world were the only possible one, as if it included all of existence. And so sometimes I happen to find a deeper, more penetrating, more battle hardened, even more prophetic way of seeing in so-called genre fiction, like for example in science fiction. At any rate, even physics is telling us that what we know is only a tiny part of the material the universe is made of, maybe four or five percent. All the rest is dark matter, dark energy, that emits no radiation, and which we have no way to relate to. And so we could say that even so-called realism is only a realism of about four or five percent.
A few years ago in an interview you said, “What has been thought has brought us to where we are now. We need to go toward the unthought in order to open up new possibilities for life.” Could you describe this “unthought” and how we can move toward this new way of being, either in everyday life or in the practice of writing?
From the past, we’ve inherited mental, religious, and philosophical structures that tend toward abstract simplifications and separations. On the very first page of the Bible there is God who with a wave of the hand divides the light from the darkness, as if that were possible, as if the light weren't in the darkness and the darkness in the light. Then metaphysical philosophy repeated the same gesture in another form, with the idea or the illusion that we can separate the truth from everything else, seen in a simplified way as untruth. And so it goes from one antimony to another, from one dualism to another, from one contradiction to another, the whole structure of our culture, our psyche, our perceptions and our sense of the world developed. One of these abstract separations is that of man from the rest of nature, which his sense of superiority springs from, as well as his idea of intelligence as endowed only to humans. This has gradually caused his rapport with the environment to collapse, and now he's paying the price. If thought has brought us to the point where we are, then what we need is unthought. It looks to me like no kind of horizontal revolution could be enough anymore. We're facing a need for a vertical transformation, a metamorphosis, in order to survive and reinvent ourselves as a species. How exactly this will come into being is difficult and maybe impossible to know in advance.
For the past year we have been living through a unique crisis with the pandemic. How has this year of increased isolation and less contact with others affected your writing?
It has been an unusual and pivotal year, for both general and personal reasons. But for me it has been also a fervid year with upheavals in my life and during which I've written (in the first lockdown, which surprised me in Mantova, the city where I was born) a book called Canto degli alberi (Song of the Trees), where there are walled-in trees, overturned trees, musical trees ... Getting very close to things, even in great upheaval, touching with your own hands the raw data of existence, of life and death intertwined, can be not only a tragedy but also an opportunity for a writer, just as it is for any other human being.
In an interview about the future of books you once said, “... I think that what is indestructible won't be destroyed ...” and to me that seems quite a hopeful statement. When so much now is in upheaval, where do you find hope and courage to go forward in literature and in life?
I don't know if what we read today on paper or on a screen will be read in the same form by who knows who after us, or if it might find other forms, or maybe it will move on a beam of light. After all, maybe Beethoven could have imagined that his music would be listened to and loved by people in the future not only via big orchestras but in any moment of the day, pouring out of little devices you carry along even when you go running in shorts in a park. Sometimes, despite my state of either desperation or clarity, I feel a feeling of invincibility and this secret strength that I believe is always present within us if we don't let ourselves get crushed by everything around us in this human world, which for so long has been (in the words of Freud) at the mercy of its death drive.
Antonio Moresco was born in 1947 in Mantova, Italy and published his first novel Clandestinità at the age of forty-five. He has since published many novels and has become one of Italy’s most important contemporary writers. His novel Distant Light was published in English (Archipelago, 2016). He is best known for his trilogy Giochi dell’eternità, a three-volume work written over a period of thirty-five years.
Anne Greeott has published work in Bitter Oleander, Italian Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Gradiva, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She has received Fulbright grants to Italy and Peru, as well as a Travel Fellowship from ALTA.