Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📕

convinced believer.4 His religious faith served to investigate the problem of evil, he said. With publishers he could be arrogant, defensive, proud in a self-destructive way. Once, at the offices of Mondadori, he suddenly ducked behind a column. He had spotted Giorgio Mondadori, the publisher and a friend from school days, and felt he would die of shame if the man thought he’d come to ask a favor.

The few photographs of Morselli in the public domain—lean and shy, standing by his car on a muddy country track; dashing in sailing whites, beside a boat—kept me company while I translated the text. It is tempting to read Dissipatio as autobiography, and certainly it presents parallels with Morselli’s existence. But we’d be wise to remember the heroic gesture of empathy the novelist made when he created the figure of Walter Ferranini in The Communist, a true believer who couldn’t have been more different from Morselli himself. Steeped in the sense of failure and melancholy of his last years, informed by the books he read and the events he witnessed, Dissipatio provides a partial portrait—many-faceted and abstract—of its author, but it is also a novel of invention.

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In Italian tardo impero, late empire, and the more loaded synonym basso impero, with its implications of decadence and End Times, refer to the period that begins with the Roman emperor Constantine and his conversion to Christianity in AD 312. At the Greek colony of Chrysopolis (Golden City) across the Bosphorus from Byzantium, Constantine would fight a battle in 324 to establish his new capital, Constantinople, and take control of the Eastern Empire, even as the West was sinking into strife, corruption, and decadence. The novel’s Latin title (seemingly a reference to an ancient author but in fact most likely Morselli’s invention), the litany of Latin phrases scattered through the text, and of course the name Chrysopolis itself, all contribute to the novel’s “late imperial” flavor. The West, Morselli thought, was decadent, first of all intellectually. European thought and philosophy, beginning with Hegel5 and his notion of history, had become arrogantly and misguidedly anthropocentric. And culpably “geocentric”: seeing one of the first photographs from space in 1966, the Earth appearing as a tiny crescent moon, “the first time we’ve seen our human condition from outside ourselves,” Morselli lamented man’s “retrograde geocentrism, hundreds of years behind the science,” and how loath we are to see our correct place in the cosmos. And we’ve also lost “the reverential fear that vast, uncontaminated nature once inspired,” he writes: the metus silvanus (dread of the forest) and the ancient pavor montium (fear of the mountains) our ancestors told of in fables.

Dissipatio hints, too, at the irrelevance of the material powers that be in the last man’s Alpine province, the international banks, and US military. At one point he drives to the Eleventh Army base to make certain that the empire has not collapsed:

America go home: the usual graffiti accompanies me. Thanks to a No Entry sign I recognize the road that leads to the base, which as it winds down becomes a Sunset Boulevard, with mini-skyscrapers, villas and semi-detached dwellings, playgrounds and parks, swimming pools and a bowling alley. Even a few out-of-place palm tufts. The sentry boxes in front of the immense gate contain no sentries (their weapons, yes), probably because of the hour. It’s midday. I walk around the fence, which extends for many kilometers, and find an opening, as expected. Every encampment of every army in the world has its clandestine entry points and the Eleventh’s base has quite a few, including one big enough to admit an automobile. I drive through and explore the village street by street, sundering the deep silence, passing rows of enormous bourgeois Chevrolets neatly lined up by the sidewalks. I coast by office buildings, warehouses, workshops, make a turn—and find other office buildings, other flowerbeds, other warehouses, other Chevrolets, a mirror image that fades into the mist.

But there are no people, no soldiers, no local employees: the base has been abandoned; its elaborate ruins perfectly preserved. He is quite alone.

As his solitude turns bleaker and icier, the last man summons up nostalgic memories of the only friend he thinks he has ever had. Karpinsky was a psychiatrist who treated him years ago, a man for whom he feels something that can only be described as love. The doctor is a figure who turns up in several other Morselli novels: as Dr. Abraham in Past Conditional and Dr. Newcomer in The Communist. They are wise, generous, and emotionally balanced medical men, but also more: faintly branded as saviors, even Christ figures. Karpinsky, whom the last man is “waiting for,” as Beckett would have it, when Dissipatio comes to a close, was murdered, still very young, in a knife fight between two nurses in the violent mental asylum6 where he had volunteered. The love the last man feels for him is not sexual, but his unconscious seems to confess to, if not homoerotic feelings, at least a distinct desire for androgyny.7 In a clearing on the mountain he imagines the trees he loves “penetrating” him to lend him their life force. He begins to wear women’s clothes: a garter belt with pale blue rosettes, lace underpants, stockings. The last man on earth is bored with masculine pretenses and male attire. In the 1960s and early ’70s Morselli turned out volume after volume of his sui generis speculative fiction, novels like Roma senza Papa, Divertimento 1889, The Communist, and Past Conditional. He was inventing the form, or if you will, the genre: a mixture of essay and historical invention with the psychological texture of fictional realism. In Dissipatio, the social criticism we’d expect in a post-apocalyptic novel takes second place to a frank account of the last man’s abject loneliness. In Anglophone speculative/science fiction (John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, to name only a few) social diagnosis