BRUNO POMPILI, STRABISMS 3. DINO CAMPANA

Review par Lucrezia Mazzei

Strabisms 3. Dino Campana (Crav – B.A. Graphis, Bari 2008, pp. 148) by Bruno Pompili, professor at the University of Bari, appeared in bookstores in November 2008. In this work, the author collects six essays in Italian, devoted to Dino Campana, whose seductive biography, writing and internal relationships to texts, agreements and differences with the cultural occasions of his time compose today a still vivid and recognizable tableau of the man and his work. Bruno Pompili has the merit (the illusion, in his words) of having brought a contribution to the poet's bibliography; but the major interest of this work lies in the strabismic gaze that its author exercises repeatedly and at several levels on the texts and that this analysis aims to detect.

With the exception of the first and last essay, expressly written to complete the framework of this collection, all the others were written between 1966 and 1970, while remaining unpublished until now. In the first, written as an introduction in 2008, the author explains the reasons that decided him to publish research partly well dated, partly revisited or written late, which poses, of course, a problem of obsolescence. In coherence with this conscious obsolescence, Bruno Pompili's strabismic gaze is exercised on time and not only on space, on reality and on passions. This divergent gaze has for him a profound meaning, because it sheds light on a phase of his life that involved work and finally friendships.

If a form of strabismus determined the decision of this "late" publication, another had presided, at the end of the sixties, over the choice of subject to treat and that of critical procedures to use. Bruno Pompili was part of a generation of young researchers, curious and sensitive, who, while bearing sincere and profound admiration for the works of their masters, sensed that their way of questioning texts was henceforth inadequate. Attentive to international echoes, linked to new research perspectives, they had been able to seize the offer that came from an unusual editorial gamble and especially from research centers in the process of asserting themselves, which unexpectedly solicited interest in linguistics, in sign systems, considered as the support structures of each communication, for the formal aspect of each literary or more generally verbal organization.

Suddenly, the critical and interpretative scene had been vivified, a new orientation in understanding, deriving from the intersection of competences difficult to acquire, seemed capable of totally directing attention toward reading. The formal aspect of complex writings, the fascination of a linguistic system hitherto ignored, had given a significant impulse to break away from procedures consolidated by tradition. The global offer of structuralism had finally assumed, for those who asked questions concerning critical method, a character of necessity.

To question Dino Campana represented a significant passage for those who wanted to study a particular manifestation of Italian poetry of the 20th century: he was rightly considered as an anomalous and marginal example of poetry, in rupture with the past. Some critics still study this poet today as collateral to Futurism, because he often adopted its rhetorical forms and revolts, without however ever being part, officially and integrally, of this movement.

His work moreover offered non-negligible guarantees of experimental interest, because many critics had brought to the Campana dossier a point of view where the taste for affirmation was more evident than that of research through reading.

Bruno Pompili has submitted in these essays certain texts that compose the Canti Orfici, particularly La Notte and La Verna, to some reactions, with a laboratory spirit. Through a scientific approach, he aimed to represent with rigor what until then found justification only at the level of intuition and sensitivity.

First of all, the author concentrated his attention on the function of memory in the Canti orfici, which allows to detect and underline the weight of the poet's conscious intervention in the transcription of his animus.

He then replaced this filter with that of narration, to analyze the morphological tissue that contains the complex schema of the story: the duplication of a character, the presence of mediating figures or those resolving difficulties, the reiterations of words or actions, with a delaying function, the "brooch" narrative, the use of the letter-confession, useful for organizing memory and a different reconstruction of the past.

He applied to La Notte a rhetorical procedure inspired by structural semantics, particularly the mythical actantial model that Greimas draws from the comparison of syntactic categories, inventories of Propp's functions and catalogues of Souriau's dramatic functions.

Starting from the affirmation that travel constitutes the constant framework of Campana's poetic discourse, he analyzed in La Verna the alternation of the visual and internal responses to different solicitations, until memory surges in a secret counterpoint, in relation to phases of different times and places that impose themselves on the present.

The last essay, written in 2008, analyzes the distance between the poet, his voice and the observed objects: the one who prepares to record images or events, to fix an experience through words, chooses a spatial position that makes an observation point. This specific place does not lose its centrality in Campana, even when the recorded world derives from memory. The signs ordered in spatial and temporal distances save and protect from truth, even if it always presses to emerge, whatever the distance where it has been relegated.

Bruno Pompili therefore uses analytical grids: what is caught in them becomes significant and indisputable material of his study, but the strabismic sensitivity that always characterizes him already leads him to cast a glance at everything that on the contrary resists, remains outside these grids and that he judges interpretable during a new research.

This kind of criticism, where the examiner's subjectivity must not intervene, could, wrongly, seem little fascinating: the author succeeds in demonstrating, on the contrary, that it can help the reader understand the constants on which Campana's poetry is founded. This broader understanding will then allow him to be the holder of the second half of the key, capable of keeping intact the possibilities of suggestion and profound and personal action of the poetic message. He will thus obtain a valid and non-arbitrary subjective interpretation, will discover the Campana that his time demands, while leaving intact the mystery of his poetry.

The obsolescence of this work is only apparent, it is in reality an added value and a challenge that Bruno Pompili throws to young researchers. If the choice of structuralism answered for him to historical requirements and precise cultural solicitations, if it represented a form of positive strabismus against the fixed and reassuring system of traditional criticism, because it aimed to combat both each form of generic impressionism and the prevalence of the reader's reasons over those of the author, to reduce the network of added words by underlining those that are stable in the text, the author observes with concern a different form of strabismus, which is dangerous and affects the new generations.

They seem to cling to old stylemes: they speak modern and write ancient, pursue their research with the help of the most advanced technologies but "still compose with a quill pen." The author wishes for a return of passion, increasingly rare, which gives back the courage to research the multiple and intertwined relationships between saying and living in writing or at least in its surroundings, to know how to detect what is hidden in the text, without altering it to one's advantage, but also without fearing to seek new keys of interpretation, to transform critical attention into competitive writing with a craft that seems to lose its color day after day.

Paraphrasing Octavio Paz one could conclude that:

"To write about [poetry] in a language that is not that of passion is impossible. And it would be unworthy (1)."

We finally advise handling Bruno Pompili's work with caution: its reading could provoke some strabisms.

(1) Cf. Octavio Paz, "André Breton or the Search for the Beginning," La Nouvelle Revue Française, n° 172, 1967, p. 306.