by Bruno Pischedda

Buio, Paolo Mauri, Einaudil, Torino 2007 (pp. 118, € 10,00)

In his latest investigation entitled Buio, the literary critic and prose writer Paolo Mauri apparently draws on French sources. These notably include the history of the mind from Lucien Febvre onwards and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space and The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Roland Barthes is also concealed in the pages, with his work A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Together they help to create a lively but unusual pamphlet that focuses not on the physical-perceptive state of darkness, the absence of reflecting bodies, but on the sum of rituals and beliefs that tends towards the metaphysical. The night as a “domain”, the darkness of the origins, causal ignorance and the cosmic black that envelops us. Because “The darkness is immense,” warns the author, “and indescribably total.”

The utterly romantic tone of this statement is truly striking but, although prone to lapidary fragmentation, Mauri has no intention of yielding to the allure of the absolute. His purpose, rather, is to state every aspect of the theme in order to convey its vastness and wealth of associations. The reasoning varies, therefore, from the naturalistic to the metaphorical plane; it turns willingly from psychology to anthropology and the history of religions. Indeed, on the terrain of darkness in the religious sense, he proposes a true counter-Genesis aimed at overturning current perspectives: “At a certain point, the authors of the Bible put forward the creation of light and hence the defeat of darkness. It is day ‘One’ of the universe. They do not even consider the reverse hypothesis: a world eternally illuminated by God that is ‘saved’ by the invention-creation of darkness.” The matter can be formulated differently, says the author. Without altering the Light/Darkness dichotomy, the results of their incessant balancing-out are by no means a foregone conclusion. The darkness of blindness brings both the prophesy of the soothsayer and the skill of the bard.

On the one hand, the night itself, that den of iniquity, favours satanic orgy and illicit encounters but, on the other, it has for centuries been the preferred time of preachers and celebrants, well aware of the specific atmosphere it invokes. His is therefore a double-edged nature; it prompts ritual and provides shelter for Evil but, at the same time, is conducive to refreshing sleep and dreams. However negative the prejudices passed down, it is up to us to distribute the values. Time may be a “trap imprisoning us”, but darkness, which is determined by it, is “above all a thought”; it is dependent on our mental attitude. It is hard to conceive it as a fixed entity, unaltered through the ages. Nor can we naively think it will gradually withdraw from the modern scenario. The unknown, the unexplored, with which it very frequently coincides, is by no means a permanently defined “zone”. On the contrary, it moves with us and is simply “shifted” by new acquisitions. This is Mauri’s problem and readers will enjoy following its developments, partly thanks to a terse and elegantly concise style, i.e. that Enlightenment clarity which is constantly criticised as inadequate but which should really not be relinquished. Having shown the chaos and the indistinct, they must be challenged and differentiated. “No one ever thinks too long about the darkness of the universe,” says the author in a typically analytical move, “but darkness should also be divided into small human-scale darkness and immense, almost inconceivable darkness.”

Bruno Pischedda Literary critic