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

is usually the purpose of the exercise. But Morselli disliked sociology; he called it sociologismo, as if it were an ideology. He didn’t read contemporary science fiction, but Jules Verne was a favorite, and he may have read M. P. Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud, which is more like his own novel than later examples of the genre. The only literary clue relevant to apocalypses in Dissipatio is a fleeting reference to Robinson Crusoe. Among his contemporaries he felt closest to Italo Calvino and craved his approval.

Ironic, contemplative, psychologically astute, Dissipatio is sometimes wry and even funny, but also quite a tragic portrait of a man so solitary that even when the others were alive he behaved like the last man on earth. At the end of the book he’s no longer living in time (history), but Nature is, which consoles him:

So here I sit here on a bench on the boulevard, looking at the life that’s unfolding before my eyes in this strange eternity. The air shines with a dense humidity. Rainwater runs off in rivulets (the sewers in the old city must be blocked) that flow together onto the street and deposit, day by day, a thin layer of soil on the asphalt. It’s not much more than a veil of earth, and yet something green is growing on it, not the usual city grass, but wild plants. The market of markets will one day be countryside. With buttercups and chicory in flower.

The stony palaces and dry asphalt of Chrysopolis will disappear as plants and trees grow. In this strange eternity, life is abundant.

•

In 1974, just a year after Morselli died, the Milanese publishing house Adelphi began to issue his novels, one by one, to considerable acclaim. His friend Maria Bruna Bassi was instrumental in getting them considered, and Giuseppe Pontiggia, the reader for Adelphi, recommended they be published. What could have changed, that novels of no interest in 1973 were suddenly hailed by critics as fresh and exciting in 1974?

Perhaps it’s worth considering that, with hindsight, 1973 is often seen as the end of an era: the end of the broad prosperity and expansion across the West that followed World War II. It was the year OPEC oil prices skyrocketed. The gold / dollar standard had recently come to an end. The American war in Vietnam ceased with the Paris Peace Accords but the accumulated costs, moral and monetary, were just beginning to be felt. The US intervention had sowed anger, discredit, and disillusion, and not just at home, but around the world.

Morselli, who followed current affairs and “futurist” thinkers among many other things, and who belonged to the environmental and cultural heritage association Italia Nostra, had been brooding about the damage done to the human soul and the natural environment by runaway economic growth and lack of care for the planet. He also seemed to perceive that history was moving on, and may have sensed that the expansive, hopeful mood that had followed the war in Europe and across the Atlantic had run its course.

A new era was beginning, as yet only dimly perceived. It was one of those times when new voices can be heard, and Morselli’s magnificent speculative histories at last found their moment to emerge. The years have if anything rendered Dissipatio H.G.’s melancholy assessment of human achievement on this earth more haunting.

—FREDERIKA RANDALL

DISSIPATIO H.G.

1

THE AUDIO-visual debris keeps me company. It’s the most immediate remains of what has been left to me of them. Two dispatches are purely verbal, from radio broadcasts I suppose. One reports the failed hijacking and consummated rape of a girl on an Olympic Airways flight, and the other, in English, might be from the not very trustworthy Voice of Europe: “Here’s a favorite Polish joke: ‘The state pretends to pay us, we pretend to work.’” And two images: a bottle with a crown and red letters in the foreground spelling out Seagram’s Canadian Whisky, and through the lens of my binoculars, the white-lined quadrant of the tennis court behind the Hôtel Belvedere. My automatic memory contains no more. These recollections float by, nebulous, insistent.

It’s debris that amounts to little. Relics, by now. Half a month has passed since that night; half a century, I could equally say. First reaction, an extended panic. And then, but quickly brushed away, incredulity, and then fear again. Now, habituation. Resignation? I’d say acquiescence, actually. With intervals of lofty hilarity and fierce solace.

I’m leaving the offices of the newspaper. I worked there when I was younger, and today I returned and walked all around, to check on something. And I was right; the linotype machines were still going through their crazy motions, the skeletal arms somehow continuing to rise and fall. When they disappeared (at two in the morning) this was where production stood: linotypists composing in the print room, editors finishing off the last stories upstairs, press not yet rolling. The wire service flashes, frozen on the teletype machines. I didn’t bother to read them but I could see they were interrupted. Transmission had broken off at the other end, while here everything was normal. In its special stall, the IBM with its red lights lit. In fact, all the lights are still burning in the office, and in the secretary’s room—that would be Miss Manàas as always—a little fan continues to hum on her desk. She’d been writing and the pen lies across the page, as if fallen from her hand. But the chair remains upright. It hasn’t even been pushed back from the desk. As if she had vaporized; how did she manage that?

My properly secular newspaper has its offices (had) across from the Lutheran bishop’s seat. In my day the bishop was Burg, a little fellow I knew only by sight but who, whenever we crossed paths, always took the trouble to say hello first. The episcopal seat, in an Austrian rococo palace, is empty today. In a small niche on the corner of the building, I see