BRUNO POMPILI, STRABISMI 2. LEGGERE E SCRIVERE

Review par Lucrezia Mazzei

This work in Italian, which has the same editorial conception as the first volume, collects essays and articles published by the author, professor at the University of Bari, between 1970 and 2004, in journals whose issues are sometimes difficult to locate.

Alongside several problems in relation to the avant-gardes and more famous personalities who marked the history of surrealism in particular (Aragon, Breton), we find authors who long remained "secret" writers, for whom the author has always had the greatest esteem and affection (Duprey, Savinio, Courtot) and who have been the subject of a courageous, passionate and original quest on his part.

The literary consecration they achieve today in monographic and anthological works, while confirming the acuity of his reflections, is not sufficient by itself to account for the current value of Bruno Pompili's writings. It is in the double articulation of writing and reading that the most fruitful contribution of his work resides.

Convinced, as Breton was, that the mediocrity of our universe depends on the weakness of our power of enunciation, the writing he loves and detects is not that which limits itself to expressing a core of common thoughts and feelings, to reflecting the system of values and the organization of a society: under this frozen form, speech is the worst of conventions. Writing, for Bruno Pompili, must aim high and undertake a large-scale operation bearing on language, on its secret prestiges and its powers of revelation. As Marc Eigeldinger notes, this operation presents numerous affinities with esoteric practices. Just as the alchemist pursues his research from the original matter, corresponding to the state of dissolution of substances, the poet is in quest of the prime matter. Like the magus, he devotes himself to "procuring the definitive emancipation of the Word of humanity," as Éliphas Lévi says. Through the magnetism of metaphors and symbols, imagination always calls into question the expressive modalities and the data of the concrete world, for creating new relationships between words is to suggest new relationships between things (1).

If writing is magical, reading must become so too: it must consist in inventing paths, repeating them until exhausting their possibilities of discovery. Generous reader, Bruno Pompili always seeks not to be unworthy of an author's confidence toward one who accepts or chooses to read. Available to the often complicated variables of styles, he tries to fill the blanks behind the words, he lends understanding to abrupt turns of syntax.

To initiate oneself into true poetry is an experience that involves risks: it is the objectivation of a desire and a dream. Its value resides in its capacity to communicate the magic by which it was itself generated. Reading unleashes a slow process of interior modification, whose repercussions on the exterior world are inevitable, given the principle of continuity existing between interior life and exterior life, a principle that Surrealism has always made its own.

Bruno Pompili goes so far as to consider the relationship between writing and reading as a utopian project, as projection over a long time, of an organic project assimilable to the rhythms and models of development of the biological being, whose fundamental relationships it adopts, those that preside over its evolution.

Reading and writing are for the author two contiguous actions and one who, like him, exercises both, hesitates, often loses focus: words, rhythmic syntaxes, like alternating passions, then become strabismic; but it is precisely the adoption of a strabismic gaze that allows opening broad perspectives to exegesis.

(1) Cf. Marc Eigeldinger, "Poésie et langage alchimique chez Breton," Lumières du mythe, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1983, p. 181.