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Critical death compensation in detail By Domenico Pacitti Invito
alla lettura di Conrad [Invitation to the Reading of Conrad] by
Mario Curreli. Published in 1997 (Rev. ed.) by Mursia, Milan,
Italy, 176 pages, €9.50, ISBN 88 425 1577 9. Mario Curreli’s
book opens with a 17-page tripartite table of notes on the life
and times of Joseph Conrad, followed by a 6-page reprint of an
article on Conrad’s life written in 1959 by Ugo Mursia, the late
owner of the publishing house which has produced Mr Curreli’s
book. This is followed by a 4-page note in which Mr Curreli pays
tribute to Mr Mursia and his article, corrects a previous error,
explains the need for the addition of new bibliographical data and
amendments to the first edition and enters into unnecessary
biographical detail relating to Conrad. This inadequate
presentation and the omission of a proper introduction to the
reader make for a disconcerting opening and reflect poor
organisation. Mr Curreli next
proceeds to run through Conrad’s major works in chronological
order, losing himself in superfluous and badly arranged
biographical, historical and cultural detail. The two remaining
chapters on topics and critical works promise more than they
offer. Futile detail again contributes to rendering Mr Curreli’s
work unreadable and lacking in clarity, not to mention
incisiveness. For some reason
Mr Curreli gives undue emphasis to publications by Italian professori
gravitating around the same Tuscan circuit that he himself
frequents. Those professori already featured in the JUST
Book Reviews “Failing faculties” section include Riccardo
Ambrosini, Francesco Binni, Mario Domenichelli, Francesco Gozzi
and Paola Pugliatti. It is not clear
whether Mr Curreli actually believes that these people have made
substantive contributions to Conrad criticism or whether he is
engaging in customary lip service for unknown ends along
traditional Italian academic lines of spineless obsequiousness. At
any rate, the publications to which Mr Curreli refers may safely
be considered to be – both jointly and severally – critically
worthless except perhaps as further documentation for a correct
understanding of the failures of Italian academia. In fairness to Mr
Curreli, it is perhaps partly in order to compensate for this
flagrant bias that he omits from the “Principle critical and
biographical studies” section of his bibliography not only all
of these professori but indeed all Italians – with the
sole exception of himself. Mr Curreli finds room for everyone,
however, in his “Italian bibliography” section, which contains
an impressive array of third-rate contributions with the exception
of those by Benedetto Croce, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese and
Andrea Zanzotto. Interestingly, Mr
Curreli also lists 20 postgraduate dissertations on Conrad, all of
which were carried out at English-speaking universities outside
Italy. It is rather odd that Mr Curreli fails to cite any of the
myriad Italian dissertations on Conrad, including those which he
has supervised himself. This book, taken
together with Mr Curreli’s other publications on Conrad which
bear the same unmistakeable stamp of mediocrity, implicitly raises
questions as to what exactly Italian academic “literary
critics” are doing, what they should be doing and why they are
otherwise engaged. Critical death
provides the essential answer. Mr Curreli will happily strive to
tell you in customary miniscule detail at what precise time of day
Conrad sat down to write, how many times he interrupted his work
to have something to eat or visit the toilet, what clothes he was
wearing at the time, the quality of paper he used for his writing,
whether or not it was raining that day, where the first editions
of Conrad’s works are to be found, and so on. But if you were
to ask Mr Curreli to express his own reasoned response to
Conrad’s literary virtuosity by referring to appropriate
passages and to indicate some of Conrad’s shortcomings in terms
of other passages, Mr Curreli would no doubt be at a total loss
for an answer. It would be even
worse if you were to ask Mr Curreli to explain why Under
Western Eyes reads like a poor imitation of Dostoevsky in a
Constance Garnett translation or to elucidate the success of Heart
of Darkness in purely aesthetic terms. Such questions clearly
fall beyond the scope of Mr Curreli’s limited capabilities. Lamentably, this
sort of deficiency invariably emerges from even the most cursory
reading of what Italian professori “critics” in the
field have been turning out fairly generally. So it looks very
much as though Mr Curreli’s enslavement to rambling detail
should best be viewed as a sort of psychological compensation
insofar as it offers him a convenient, alternative form of writing
in the acute absence of any genuine critical faculties or the
ability to express them in a non-trivial way. Mr Curreli’s
detail fixation ailment could well be worth studying on its own
account given the large numbers of Italian “literary
specialist” co-sufferers it could help throw light on,
though worthwhile research on the subject might have to be carried
out in a medical sciences context rather than within the
humanities. Mario
Curreli holds a senior post in English literature at the
University of Pisa's faculty of languages and is currently head of
the department of English Studies.
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