The new mythologies of the capital can be observed at work in every aesthetic element of our life, which acquires the function of an entry point to our epoch’s consciousness. There are books, for example, that become manuals of neoliberal ideology. Dies Irae by Giuseppe Genna (2006) is one of them.
Dies Irae is one of the masterpieces of the New Italian Epic nebula. It opens with the story of Alfredino Rampi, the young victim of the Vermicino incident in 1981. The book’s incipit transforms the tragic accident into a mysterious occurrences at the centre of a whirlwind of events from Italy’s Second Republic: the arrest of Licio Gelli, the puppeteer of P2 (a deviant Masonic Lodge that had gained enormous external influence over the country); the assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II; the ENI-Petromin scandal; the charismatic role of the country’s President and former partisan Sandro Pertini; the rising fortune of Silvio Berlusconi, among others. This glimpse of recent Italian history is attributed to a shady character observing in the background, a CIA collaborator named Aberdeen, who embodies the turbid ‘other side of the story’.
In the book’s unfolding, Alfredino’s body in the well will reveal itself as a trope of catabasis: a descent into the underworld that precedes a rebirth, performed by a sacrificial hyper-protagonist who never takes part in the story in first person. One particular interpretation of this twofold symbolic movement (descent and rebirth) is authorized by the text: Alfredino is a world-soul operator that marks the end of an epoch and the beginning of a new one. The epoch that comes to an end is Western postmodernism; the one that springs up, a planetary age that Genna seems to regard as yet to fully surface.
According to an established understanding, postmodernism is characterized by Genna as the age of paranoia. The postmodern world is a paranoid world, as the saturation of planetary space is infinitely redoubled by the emerging society of spectacle. American postmodernist literature, as well as thriller as a consumer genre, mimic the new devices of political control, refined during the McCarthy era. Writes Genna (2006, p. 698):
Thriller served to interpret a state of society: the generalized and popularized state of paranoia. […] An advanced society of information provides the individual with fragments of reality that trigger a first-level interpretive game: the mystery that arises from joining news distant from each other. And a saturation of the white noise of prevailing communication imposes to the same individual a consolidated and undiscussed, mysteriosophical and secularly orphic belief: I wonder what’s behind it, they are not telling the truth, there’s another truth behind. How nice it would be to find out.
In the words of Thomas Pynchon, a postmodernist story stands on “nothing else than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected” (Pynchon, 1973, p. 703). In highbrow and lowbrow fiction undistinguishably, “the reader, stunned, lost, overwhelmed, battered, and mired in a crazed array of characters, plots, various conspiracies, and alliances, gropes for clues and connections, and is thus forces to try and make sense of what she is reading. The novel seems to beg to be allegorized, fit into some massive blueprint or game plan as the reader becomes her own conspirator […]. Conspiracy becomes a lived experience, an attempted gathering of correspondences, hidden web of networks and zones” (Coale, 2019, p. 213). The literary spirit of the postmodern epoch reveals a pathological reconstitution of magical thinking that determines and distributes life as an enclosed domain of sovereignty.
The fringes of post-War Italian intellectuals that were closest to postmodernism expressed a distinctively humanist declension of the psychopolitics of paranoia, epitomized by Italo Calvino’s Sfida al labirinto (“challenge to the labyrinth,” as reads the title of Il menabò 5 from 1962). This stance ultimately died out together with the social and political struggles of the 1970s. At the time of the Vermicino incident, Italy was on the brink of a new “epoch of enjoyment,” as Genna makes Aberdeen say (Genna, 2006, p. 31); Alfredino’s tragic catabasis both fulfils and overcomes the paranoid world of postmodernism.
As one of the first mediatic cases in Italian history, Vermicino indeed was the manifestation of the new theology of spectacle, or the new constitution of a collective gaze and its related symbolic economy. Alfredino’s sacrificial claustrophobia stood for everyone’s paranoia, dictating the porous and labyrinthic structure of narration of Dies Irae. On the other hand, Vermicino was also an event of transformation that—as Aberdeen comments—stood at the beginning of a new phase of Italian history, the so-called epoca del riflusso (“reflow age”). Genna imagines that Alfredino, turned into the removed object of desire of millions of spectators, morphs into something else: stuck in the artesian well (which is more similar to a narrow and convoluted cave than to a vertical corridor), his body loses sight and motility; he experiences a regression into the inorganic (he “falls into the crystal,” like the protagonist of Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot).
Towards the end of the book, the reader finds again Alfredino in the guise of a cosmic infant encountered by a space mission in the distant future. It is the second part of the catabasis, rebirth. We can use a geontological vocabulary (see Povinelli 2016) to conceptualize this movement as symbolic of a new repartition of life and non-life. Despite its global projection, postmodernism was still an epoch of paralysis of the bios within the geos, a stage in the history of life on the planet. After postmodernism, the repartition between bios and geos no longer stands: now a planetary bios–geos is opposed to another absolute otherness, a non-planetary dimension associated with the dead recesses of space and time. A new great Inside—the planetarized human species—is placed against a new great Outside, embodied by the figures of outer space and extinction.
Alfredino’s transformation into an infinitized being through the well, then, symbolizes the advent of the planetary age, defined by a new transcendental configuration of the government of life. Genna explicitly indicates outer space, extinction and planetary speciation as the mythological accesses to this new epoch, resulting from the “great politics” of “planetary geomorphism” (Genna, 2006, p. 320). The other face of Alfredino as a sacrificial hyper-protagonist is “us, the species” (Genna, 2006, p. 10), a hyper-subject built through years of cultural paranoia and finally ready to spring out with an evolutionary jump. As Genna will clarify years later, the “species jump” is “an innate movement of the planet” (Genna & Tripodi, 2021, p. 226). Outer space (the spatial non-planet) and extinction (the temporal non-planet) are the new figural limits that allow to define this movement and regulate its evolutive orientation.
The anthropological reprogramming and the restructuring of experiential coordinates characterizing the planetary age entail also a different role of literature. In the postmodern age, literature is a device of attention, a psychopolitical management technique (either unconsciously participating in the epoch’s ideology or consciously mimicking it). Writing is one with the paranoid construction of the world.
Literature is suspense. But a suspense that does not depend from the events, as well as one could say that only acute attention constitutes the perception of trauma. In fact, suspense is attention. It means remaining in a state of potentiality, anything can happen (Genna, 2006, p. 697).
As a post-postmodern author, Genna declares: “I know the trick with which this secular epoch translates messianism, which is the religion of waiting without the waited arriving, in a form of collective control” (Genna, 2006, p. 697).” We are no postmodernists anymore.
This is not the microera of paranoia. The truth is that that threshold too is saturated. It is not only the macroevents of heterogeneous and nonetheless historical nature to determine it: above all, the collapse of the Twin Towers with the attack to the Pentagon and, precisely in Italy, the vortex of movement (with lots of victim, be it sacrificial or not) at the G8 in Genoa (Genna, 2006, p. 699).
Not only has history created internal fissures to the planetary paralysis; people are now culturally in need of and ready for brand-new mythologies. The task is then to craft “a mythological literature, delusive on a first level and sapiential on a second, mythology for this immense population that struggles to set itself in motion as it is deprived of narration of mythological stories.” This new mythology, Genna concludes, “is outer space. It is the future of the species” (Genna, 2006, p. 700). Elsewhere in the book the references to extinction go in the exact same direction. The writer can now become a mythological machine again – not a romantic subject of mythopoïesis, but a cybernetic story-telling device.
According to this new-found mythological task, the writer Genna manipulates the fetishes of neoliberal aesthetics and TESCREAL with masterful ambiguity. It is hard to tell how critical his operation is, especially at the time of Dies Irae. His position as an artisan of literary tricks at the service of his epoch has in fact been criticized by Antonio Moresco, whose literary work shows a less ambiguous political inspiration. Genna’s posture is surely very relevant when it aspires to take part in the construction of the epoch’s totality, to use Jameson’s terms (1992): Dies Irae is an astonishingly prophetical thermometer of the planetary operation of social totalization with its defining structures of representation and imagination. Naturally, once identified and fuelled the epoch’s mythological a priori, the option is still open for the writer to “stab the species in the back” (Genna, 2006, p. 65).
Pynchon, T. (1973), Gravity’s Rainbow. Viking Press.
Coale, S.C. (2019), Conspiracy and Paranoia. In I.H. Dalsgaard (ed.), Thomas Pynchon in Context (pp. 211–216). Cambridge University Press.
Genna, G. (2006), Dies Irae. Mondadori.
Genna, G., Tripodi, P. (2021), Pianetica. Giuseppe Genna and Pino Tripodi.
Jameson, F. (1992), The Geopolitical Aesthetics. Cinema and Space in the World System. Indiana University Press.
