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.47) In “Story of a Non-Existent Story” (from Tabucchi’s volume The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico), we are told about one of those phantom books so highly valued by Bardebys, by writers of the No.“I have a non-existent novel whose story I wish to tell,” explains the narrator.This novel was originally called letters to Captain Nemo and later its tide was changed to No-One Behind the Door.It came about in the spring of 1977, during a fortnight of rural existence and bliss in a small town near Siena.Having finished the novel, the narrator says he sent it to an editor, who rejected it because he considered it not easily accessible and hard to decipher.So the narrator decided to keep it in a drawer to allow it to settle (“darkness and oblivion are good for stories, I think”).A few years later, the novel turns up in the narrator’s hands again by chance, the discovery giving him a strange sensation, because in fact he had forgotten all about it: “It suddenly appeared in the darkness of a drawer, beneath a mass of papers, like a submarine emerging from dark depths.”The narrator sees in this almost a message (the novel also made mention of a submarine) and feels the need to add a concluding note to his old text, adjusts one or two sentences and sends it to a different editor from the one who, years before, had considered the text hard to decipher.The new editor agrees to publish it, and the narrator promises to deliver the definitive version on his return from a trip to Portugal.He takes the manuscript to an old house on the Atlantic coast, to a house called, he tells us, Sao Jose da Guia, where he lives alone, in the company of the manuscript, and at night is visited by ghosts, not his ghosts, but real ghosts.September arrives with heavy swells, the narrator remains in the old house, remains with his manuscript, remains alone - opposite the house is a cliff - at night being visited by the ghosts, who seek to make contact and with whom at times he has impossible conversations: “these presences were eager to talk, and I would listen to their stories, trying to make sense of what were frequently dark, unconnected, angry messages; they were sad stories, most of them, 1 could tell this quite clearly.”The autumnal equinox arrives amid silent conversations.That day a squall descends over the sea, he hears it moaning from dawn; in the afternoon, a strong force grips his entrails; at nightfall, thick clouds gather along the horizon and communication with the ghosts is broken, perhaps because the manuscript or phantom book appears with its submarine and everything.The ocean roars unbearably, as if it were full of voices and dirges.The narrator positions himself before the cliff, taking the submarine novel with him, and tells us - in a masterly line of the Bartlebyan art of phantom books - that he delivers it to the wind, page by page.★ ★ ★ 10348) Wakefield and Bartleby are two reclusive characters who are intimately linked.At the same time the first is linked, also intimately, with Walser, and the second with Kafka.Wakefield - that man invented by Hawthorne, that husband who suddenly and without reason abandons his wife and home and for twenty years (in the next street, unbeknown to all, since they think he is dead) leads a solitary existence, stripped of meaning - is a clear forerunner of many of Walser’s characters, all those splendid walking nobodies who wish to disappear, simply disappear, to hide in an anonymous unreality.As for Bartleby, he is a clear forerunner of Kafka’s characters - “Bartleby,” Borges has written, “defines a genre which in around 1919 Kafka would reinvent and develop: the genre of fantasies of conduct and feeling” - and also a predecessor of Kafka himself, that reclusive writer who saw that his workplace signified life, namely his own death; that recluse “in the middle of a deserted office”, that man who walked through all of Prague, resembling a bat, in his overcoat and black bowler hat.To talk - both Wakefield and Bardeby seem to suggest -is to make a pact with the nonsense of existing.Both display a profound denial of the world.They are like that Kafkan Odradek of no fixed abode who lives on the staircase of a paterfamilias or in any other hole.Not everyone knows, or wishes to accept, that Herman Melville, the creator of Bartleby, had dark moments more often than is desirable.Let us see what Julian Hawthorne, the son of Wakefield’s creator, says about him: “There was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever came into our circle.Through all his wild and reckless adventures, of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience [.].He was restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of insanity.”Hawthorne and Melville, unwitting founders of the dark hours of the art of the No, knew each other, they were friends, and expressed mutual admiration.Hawthorne was also a Puritan, even in his violent reaction to certain aspects of Puritanism.He was also restless.He was never one to go to church, but we know that during his years as a recluse he would approach his window and watch those making their way to church, and his look is said to have contained the brief history of the Dark Side in the art of the No.His vision was clouded by the terrible Calvinist doctrine of predestination.This is the side to Hawthorne that so fascinated Melville, who to praise him spoke of the great power of blackness, that nocturnal side that we find in Melville as well [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]