Stefano Donno

The truth, please, about Isabella Santacroce!
(Orthopraxis of nihilism in Destroy, Luminal and Revolver)

It already happened in poetry, 1976 with The Public of poetry, to the fellows of Lerici (Eros Alesi, Giuseppe Conte, Maurizio Cucchi, Cesare Viviani, Valentino Zeichen), then in 1979 with The Loving Word edited by Antonio Porta for the Feltrinelli fellows, and yet in 1983 with the Ego always burning for Lerici, where we find names like Valerio Magrelli or in 1989’s Poetry of contradiction/The avant-garde of our years, 43 poets for the fellows of Newton Compton. Giorgio Manacorda in his For Poetry, Manifest of the emotional Thought edited by Editori Riuniti in 1993, gives us a cross section of poetic production between the end of the 70s and the end of the 80s, showing a critical path, identifying voices, symmetries and asymmetries of the poetic word, polysemies of explaining and creating Poetry, like a sounding test of individual or collective needs, intended to give possibly the most accurate “spectrum” of the changes and the need to make clear what happened during those years. In the world of Italian fiction, the one closer to our times, and more precisely starting from the second part of the 90s, there seems to have been a frontal attack towards narrating the marginal everyday reality, the fictitious one of the nihilistic guys who live next door, of the urban feeling of being lost, or better of the license to go beyond, of moronic big boys and girls with their leftovers of neuronal fund, groups of neo-radical chic young adults (are they, still at the age of 30?) who belong to the middle or upper-middle class who end up their nights with blood and shit: we’re talking about Cannibal youth edited by Daniele Brolli for those fellows of Einaudi Stile Libero (1996), a collection of contributions written like prose compositions by authors like Caredda, Nove, Ammaniti, Massaron, whose feelings were reduced to a mere trifle, a poor meal seasoned with elementary effects, with the only peculiarity of the shock for the shock. Something that nevertheless set up a fashion, even though not always with satisfactory results, so that we can only refer to similar experiences as for instance, Joe Arden (one who loves Ramones, Jim Thompson, Tim Barton and who hates 70% of the people and loves the rest) in 1997 for the fellows of Sperling & Kupfer in the series Serial, with his Cuts and Tatoos, which we report an extract of: “ I’m stiff, stiff, stiff. The tip of an iceberg; a bass-guitar twist by Johnny Ramone; the Pavlov’s fellow after a cure with lead. Ready now for the worst. Nothing happens. However, it’s matter of any moment. Metal against metal: the pads, all down the drain. Stink of smoke: by God, hope they’re not my heavy-duty boots. Ideas of sparkles. A rain of confetti. A hail of words, confused. Incomprehensible. The skull on the steering wheel. A crack accompanied by a pang at the temple. The pistol against the navel: another pain”. (p. 18, 19).
But like after a series of experiments in the field of literary bio engineering, in most cases unsuccessful, here still starting in 1996, after the mediocre Fluo, shows up on the Italian intelligentsia scenery a writer who’ll stir up a lot of trouble: Isabella Santacroce. In the first edition of “The kangaroos” by Feltrinelli, comes out her Destroy, complete with a theoretical manifest slammed as a monster on the first page, through Ian Curtis, Billy Corgan, Friedrich Nietzsche’s words: 1) I don’t know what’s right or wrong (the vitalistic anarchy inside ethical relativism); 2) The World is a Vampire (awareness of the triadic existence of production, consumption, death of the subject inside the circulation of wide consumption convenience articles); 3) I am the first immoralist: Having said this, I’m the destructor par excellence (the passive nihilism as a war machine). And Destroy represents the test-tube synthesis of an announced death chronicle: the death of a language that’s subject to, whether you like it or not, the hyperconsumistic addiction, from the musical Massive Attack, to the Smashing Pumpkins to the papery Tank Girl and Vampirella, to the schizophrenic hallucinated semantic, to the Manga images and the American comics, of the latex post-atomic clothing, to the spirits that lead to trance: in other words the story of Misty, a twenty-five year old who leaves the Adriatic for London, where she earns her living sliding down to hell between voyeurism, fetish hard-core exhibitionism and aid to crazy and lonely masochists. This work by Santacroce sees the author play impudently with high voltage cables, with that paranoic self-destruction of whom lets himself be devastated just for the devastation itself, being used to breaking sentences in a syncopated manner, slanging the unslangable and transforming dialogues into madhouse monologues: “Love, love, aren’t you home? It’s me love, answer me, I know you’re there little butterfly! Fuck it Mary answer me, you bloody slut, don’t play games. Mary, if you’re not going to answer me, you can bet that when I come home I’ll kill you with beating… you shit… fuck it what do you want? What do you want to prove to me? You loathsome whore, you’ll pay for it! I swear that I’ll kick you, and stuff your head into the toilet and disfigure that shitty face of yours and throw you out of the window, you bloody slut… fuck it, answer me…fuck it!!!!!!!!!”. (p. 18).
Isabella Santacroce continues then with her surgical operation without anesthesia on the body of literature, delivering Luminal for the fellows of Feltrinelli in the series “The Kangaroos”. It’s not enough for her to have seized her readers’ central nervous system with her two previous literary productions. No, she has to obtain an open parietal lobe fracture (primarily through repeated insults the sort of “Lick me you talent-less bastards, lick me”), making the neurons fry with a paraded desire for tantric repetition of the ontological experiences of the protagonists, through this REW (Rewind ) almost on each page, in order that the pain sublimates itself is a sort of ever returning self-congratulation. Luminal is the story of two eighteen year old girl friends, Demon and Davi, drug-addicted for off-limits sex, who vaginally utilize their energy as an abyssal Yes to life, along with existential irradiations that cross like in dream cities such as Zurich, Berlin, Hamburg. “Exposed to their fury, slowly it turns on. In a different way I can see. To dominate the morning. Again upturned, possessed by hysterics we are. Red fish circling upon the water. Look at me with anger. I can’t breath. While blinking I catch fire by radiant blunder. I leave it while it raises through hours that I’ve know by sleeping. Slowing down the consciousness of half being there. I have searched for it in sleep. Fascinated by the magic of essence, I’ve entered the constellations like a star. With Davi beside me. I’ve smelled scents of Moon above. Our sparkling in the dark chased away impotence. To look at each other in anger. Upturned again we can’t breath stabbed by the rays.
We kiss saliva. Eating Luminal we exceed, mitigating violence we exceed”. (p. 100).
Both in Destroy and in Luminal it seems that Santacroce can’t manage a hiatus between her narrative hetero and introdiegesis. The state of being of or inside the facts among the pages of this writer, seem to find a setting like a foreign body inside of her, not metabolizeable, to be expelled either through defecation or urination. Reality must be lived by Santacroce as in a state of self-induced hypnosis, not because there has to be perceived its bestiality, its crudeness, its atrociousness, but most of all because it’s just not possible to control the stream of the events. Choices are arbitrary, no lesson of life can be given, it’s useless, everything happens because it has to happen, even self-destruction. During 2004 Santacroce seems to move a little bit beyond the boundaries of her nihilistic and abandoning self-congratulation, almost taking it as an obligation to observe what’s moving around her, her desire to see clearly, to disperse the smokescreen that poisons the lungs during everyday life. It’s not a Promethean revolution. Santacroce is not able to suggest any alternatives because she knows that no revolts need to be done, that maybe revolutions never have existed. If not by acceptance of defeat and mourning.
Revolver for the series Blue Roads by Mondadori is a masterpiece. Once left behind some meta-pop ravings, good for a fantastic business, Santacroce’s style becomes less paranoic, more fluid, of a delirious intensity that doesn’t know any more boundaries. Revolver is the story of Angelica, a twenty-eight old who, in the middle of her life’s path begins a journey through the circles of loneliness (there she is attaching plastic eyes on dolls) while she’s caring for an aunt affected with paralysis and working in a factory, who knows the possessive nature of her friendship with the other Angelica, one who’s ready to give it to the first one available, one ready to let herself be beat like eggs in a bowl. Two lonelinesses that try the paradigmatic jump into a normal and steadier life, but that comes out as being unbearable, like holy water on the body of a possessed one. There’s no sweetness strong enough, not even the anaesthetic of an everyday life lived together, like the Mulino Bianco sweets advertising, because the perverse mechanism of evil, of hurling imprecations, of the need for attention always ignored are ruling, inside a really infernal life: “You’re strange. I’m not. Yes you are. Why should I be. Because I can feel it. Since when do you feel. You don’t feel. I’m tired. Tired of what. Of us. You never told me you are. You never asked me. You never ask me for anything. Why did you ask me today. Because you’re sick. You’re not fine. I’m very well. No. It’s not true. You’re sick Angelica. No I’m not. Yes you are. We went to the doctor, remember. Sure I remember. I must be patient. Who said it. The psychiatrist said”. (p. 66).
Without any fear for misunderstandings, it must be said that for all of those who have followed Santacroce, they probably haven’t had any chance of escaping the charm of her ability in building intrigues, universes of a high nihilistic consistence, the passive one, the one of destruction just for destruction as we have more or less mentioned above. And this is a quite tested way to exploit peoples’ discontent. In the end all readers pay without distinction their telephone, power and gas bills, go to work, enjoy their well deserved holidays, have their ups and downs, all this trying to put together extremely different events that somehow distract or perversely induce some relief towards the situations depicted by the writer in her pages, letting all feel a bit luckier, not to talk about the tickling induced to all young adults who are shown an alternate way (or not, it doesn’t matter) to normalization, emotional stabilization towards the hospitalizing solicitations that society would use for Mass Control (thinking about Foucault).
What could sometimes turn into something positive as well. The old game of the forbidden fruit! But beyond these slobbish pseudo psychoanalytic room-conversation elucidations, Santacroce has been capable of maintaining, during her editorial existence, a style that has lasted in time, an ability to give, maybe in certain pop or meta-pop style, with well marked colors, her protagonists’ and works’ profiles, studying the pathologically expressive methods even in the structure of dialogues, maintaining in good and evil a solid relationship with the market, not only through a simple enumeration but also by leading into the mystique of consumerism, into capitalistic bioenergetics. But one thing we’re certain of…
You shall not necessarily feel empathy for an author like this, you may hate what she writes or the way she writes it, you could try to index her books, but you won’t avoid buying and reading her works, since in your library, for Her, you’ll of course have to find a place!