Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination

1. Creatures of Difference: Myths of Monstrosity in Savinio's La nostra anima

CHAPTER X Creatures ofDifference: Myths ofMonstrosity in Savinio's La nostra anima KEALA JEWELL The soul is apolitical matter. Alberto Savinio, New Encyclopedia Monsters and the Refiguration of Myth Alberto Savinio's short novel La nostra anima (Our Soul) (1944) is a modern version of the tale of Eros and Psyche that recasts a long-lived, culturally authoritative story of the love between a mortal and an immortal being. Following illustrious predecessors, the modern author brings to the Greek myth the notion that Psyche's story of union with a deity is an allegory of the soul, of "la nostra anima." Post-classical texts using the Psyche myth have largely been Christian allegories; yet Savinio's twentieth-century tale cannot be read in this way. It utterly reverses the original story: Psyche does not gain immortality from Olympus at all. Savinio writes a pastiche boldly recalling the power in the Western cultural imagination of mythic tales of love that illustrate the "continuity" between humans and immortals, yet rejecting that tie as it has been conceived in the past. Drawing from the Greeks, Apuleius, Firenzuola, and in general on the strategy of the allegorization of Psyche, Savinio converts her story into a sacrilegious tale of domination and rupture when his Psyche learns that Eros is a devious monster. The god appears in Savinio's revised representation as, indeed, a cross between a monstrous, metamorphic phallus and a bird (a play on the Italian "uccello" for "prick" and on ancient iconographies). Extensively citing the tradition, the author effects a blasphemous demythologizing , setting his work apart from that of others who also "reread" the myth in modern terms, such as SirJames George Frazer and Otto Weininger.1 In Savinio's view, human cultures appear tirelessly to create new imaginary "architectures" to represent particular ways of being, and these are eternally pressed into the service of those who wield power. Whether they appear in 27 Savinio's lithograph "Amore" [Eros], from the first edition of La nostra anima (printed by Roberto Bullo, Documento Editore, Rome, 1944). CREATURES OF DIFFERENCE literature, myth, or propaganda, spatial representations evolve in which the present, physical world and the immortal "after world" can be imagined to be contiguous. Plots are articulated that can actively shape the conception of commerce between these topoi. Savinio has his Psyche savagely wrench mythic architectures and narratives into new shapes: instead ofa marriage story between a mortal and an immortal in a celestial palace, Psyche narrates her great disgust with a grotesque deity. In a shocking new "divorce" myth, she will dump a god. Given the challenge in secular modernity to the idea of the immortal soul, it will come as no surprise that Psyche and her immortal spouse will, in Savinio s tale, inhabit a singularly modern and dislocated space. The astounding story is told by a phantom Psyche, who appears to a select set of interlocutors in an updated wax museum in 1917 in Salonika.2 Savinio s modern myth unfolds in a bizarre "new Musee Grevin,"3 visited by a soldier named Nivasio Dolcemare during the First World War. Nivasio and Perdita, his mistress, are accompanied on their tour of the establishment by the museum director, a localJewish doctor named Sayas ("israelita di razza e medico chirurgo" [of the Israelite race and a medical surgeon]).4 In what is called a "fleshworks," Nivasio hears a tale of disillusioned love from an electrically embalmed Psyche—a being of pure appearance. Savinio s heroine appears—in this illusion of a soul—as a woman with a pelican's head and beak, and thus as a traditional monster. Yet when Savinio makes her shocked horror at her husband's nature the climax of his tale, he provides his readers with a blatantly post-metaphysical, antitraditional rendition of the relation of mortals and immortals. What happens to Western myth when human "knowledge" of the unknown is challenged and "God is dead"? To signal the difference between what human knowledge of the "unknown " can be in modernity, Savinio draws on a tradition of representation that, like spatial symbols such as the celestial palace or sacred mount, has always been associated with metaphysics and epistemology: that of the monstrous. Monsters in this tradition articulate a discourse about the nature of enigma, the unknown, and reality in mythologemes depicting sirens, sphinxes, minotaurs, and their kin. In rewriting the myth of Eros and Psyche, and thus the...