BRUNO POMPILI, STRABISMI 1. LETTURE SENZA SCALA

Review par Francesco Cornacchia

Strabismi1 by Bruno Pompili appeared in bookstores in the spring of this year, but the texts (in Italian) of this collection already saw the light of day in the period 1966-1975 approximately in journals whose issues have sometimes become difficult to locate.

This is the first volume and Strabismi2, which will have the same editorial conception, will soon be in bookstores. No doubt, the author would not have decided to republish these texts if he had not recognized in them a current value. In fact, these writings which have surrealism as their object, several problems and writers in relation to the avant-gardes, have lost nothing of their original force.

What does it consist of? In the adoption of this strabismic gaze that the author—professor at the University of Bari, in Italy—evokes from the title and which he specifies in the introduction. For ultimately, it is this sort of counterpoint characterizing his critical activity—instinctive as much as organized, according to his words—that would have convinced him to republish these texts. By recognizing the complexity of literary reality, at the same time as that of Being, Pompili does not try to resolve the contrasts singularizing the personalities and facts he analyzes. By putting punctum contra punctum, by constantly opposing data, works, choices and opinions that may have marked an epoch and minds, he opens broad perspectives to exegesis.

Pompili does not judge, he engages in rigorous analysis. He detects, in the work, the mental and literary mechanism, examines the relationships that unite or oppose writers. This is what he does regarding Drieu La Rochelle whose evolution of his relationships with the surrealists he traces and specifies.

Throughout the pages, one feels Pompili's interest in surrealism which he tries to discover and understand ever better through the variation of perspectives: Drieu La Rochelle whom we just mentioned, but also Aragon, Jacques Baron and finally René Nelli. Without forgetting Lautréamont, this poet recognized by the surrealists themselves as one of the precursors of their movement.