An expanded edition of Works, which the Venetian writer who committed suicide a month ago published in 2016, is released on Tuesday 8 February for Einaudi Stile libero. Works-non-works
I have no nostalgia for the past. Never had it, not even as a young man. I’m so quick to forget things, procedures, people. As if I had a switch in my head. In another sense, I forget nothing, and my head is a warehouse full of useful news. My territory, of which I have experienced the transformation, is now unrecognizable. I cannot say that I am confused; on the contrary: a transformation that I have experienced, to which, living and working here, I have actively contributed, which is, moreover, inevitable. The fact that the first lasted too short to be fixed as a parameter definitive. So for those born in the period of the so-called economic boom, regardless of their social class. Rural Veneto for me is the memory of a memory, something that passed through my parents, but which I never really experienced. I believe it applies to my entire generation. Big difference, compared to those born before or during the war. The first American tank with the star, and then the after, the long after, until today – I quote from memory the Parise dei Syllabaries. I, we, are those of the long after until today. And for all after the mixer it never stops. Political brands have changed, exploded, scrapped and sold off like everything else.
Even the Work, written with the l capital letter as a concept, at the time exploded and fragmented: no longer large factories, but small and medium-sized warehouses, with housing included, but often also houses with workshops on the ground floor, and house on the first. The phase of my childhood, when the goldsmiths’ houses, with a workshop on the ground floor, arose randomly, punctuating the new residential expansion areas, camouflaged among the residential houses, but easily recognizable: taller fences, heavy gratings on the windows, armored doors, caged terraces, guard dogs trained in the garden, real forts; then the phase of condominiums, terraced houses and artisan areas, that of adolescence and early youth. And finally maturity, that is the age of shopping centers, roundabouts, cycle paths, etc., a phase still in progress but which, thanks to the crisis, has slowed down, but far from being exhausted, since, at present, new ring roads and highways loom, while the portions of the countryside, inexorably fragmented and reduced to more or less large islands, do not seem to be waiting for anything other than to be suitably exploited. The pressure of urbanization is felt just as physically as the atmospheric pressure. The constant and inexorable erosion.
The political vacuum has always been a constant, but instead of being filled, as in the beginning, by the initiative of a family of more or less enlightened industrialists, it is invaded by a new breed of pseudo-technicians who, in the respectable role of schemers, support the blind and brutal and crude vitalism, which has now become a stable myth which many undertake to keep alive, preparing urban plans which, already upstream lacking any real urban wisdom, are then periodically integrated, and further debased, by the inevitable variations. In the meantime, the original plant of the town, which in its artificiality, however, was held around the work, slowly decays, almost inadvertently, following the decay of the factory. It is curious how this decay follows in such an evident way, and with perfect timing, dynamics corresponding to precise historical epochs and not at all localistic. First, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the owner, a natural person, who with resourcefulness and personal risk, sets up and manages the factory, determining and directing the development of the country at the same time; then a group of managers who, representing an abstract employer, limit themselves to parasitically managing the work of others, but in any case remain in some way linked to the territory on which the factory insists, a territory on which they exercise their power by selecting the workforce, but on they no longer act directly, that is: no more workers’ houses, condominiums for employees, kindergartens, schools and less than ever theaters; finally, with the acquisition of Sivi by the large American multinational General Electric, and consequent decentralization of power, which is totally detached from the physical place, the inexorable shutdown, through the progressive delocalization of every production activity, subsequent transformation of the factory into logistic center, and finally total dismissal of every activity; all within about ten years.
The final closure was a trauma for many. Not for the writer, on the contrary, I must admit that I was even happy with it. Maybe too happy, but I can’t deny a certain subtle, internal satisfaction. That kind of big fucking family, who had rejected me at the time, closed their doors and left all those workers and employees I met every day in the village, and partly knew personally, always ready to complain about this or that. , but at the same time so sure of their job, of the fact that it would never fail, as if working in that fucking factory were equivalent to government work. I always had the impression that they looked at me and talked to me with a certain condescension, as if I were a strange animal, since I did not have a secure job, and indeed I kept changing one after the other, without ever being able to keep it. nobody. Thinking about it, it was not my impression at all, but simply a natural attitude, however unconscious, of men and women who belong entirely, without realizing it, to an industrial company, a cooperative, a trade union or the apparatus. state, and they are therefore inside to all intents and purposes, and therefore in a certain way at peace, safe from conflicts, when they come into contact with us, who are neither inside nor outside, because, although we do not want to be inside , however, it is not possible for us to be completely outside, since an outside does not exist, but belonging to an idea – in our case to an idea of literature, in which now, after having circumnavigated us in the meantime, we obviously no longer believe, even while continuing to pursue it with blind obstinacy – and not to any working group, we are doomed to be perpetually at odds, and consequently perpetually prey to neurosis and conflict, in a society that fully legitimizes only those who adapt and abandon themselves to the inevitable inertia, as it is configured in an industrial country that produces well-being, a condition that ends up absorbing, or drying out, every possible source of change , both general and individual. Completely incomprehensible to the writer, accustomed to constantly changing jobs, the stupid inertia with which a so-called hard core of a few hundred workers and clerks clung, against all evidence, to the idea that the factory, despite everything, would continue his business. The smart ones were long gone. That the Americans, that is, General Electric, had bought to close, and that it was only a matter of time, was actually clear to everyone from the start.
Each subsequent move by the company confirmed the evidence. Yet, furon many to hold on until the end and, thanks to layoffs, even beyond the end. It seems like a syndrome common to most humans who work in factories large enough to give the idea of being eternal. And then there is the habit: every day the same road, the same schedules, the same rotation of schedules, the same cars, the same gestures, the same people, the same vacation periods, for years, even for decades. A perspective that, personally, has always made my skin crawl; but, putting myself in their shoes, certainly reassuring. But if you don’t get to the end of the cycle, that is to retire, if the factory, that organism that you take for granted, as if it were a product of nature, ends its cycle, and you realize you are too young to be retired early, and it feels, and often does too old to start over somewhere else, even inertia becomes understandable.
The book
Works. Expanded edition
by Vitaliano Trevisan is published on Tuesday 8 February, for Einaudi Stile libero (pp. 696, e 22). The new version of the book, which appeared in 2016, contains the unpublished
Where everything started. Works-non-works, published at the end of the new edition by express wish of the author.
The writer (Sandrigo, Vicenza, 12 December 1960 – Crespadoro, Vicenza, 7 January 2022), discharged from a psychiatric ward, took his own life after a few months. Between 2006 and 2009 he had made 4 theatrical directions and had been an actor in 14 productions, including cinema films and television series. In Works
Trevisan retraces his professions: tinsmith, acid dealer, night porter. Among his books:
A wonderful world
(Theoria, 1997, then Einaudi Stile libero), Trio without piano (Theoria, 1998), Shorts (Einaudi Freestyle, 2004, Chiara Award),
Worsdstar(s)
(Sironi, 2004),
The bridge, a collapse
(Einaudi Freestyle, 2007),
Two monologues
(Einaudi),
Very sad gardens
(Laterza, 2010),
One night in Tunisia
(Einaudi, 2011),
The delirium of the particular
(Oligo, 2020)
February 6, 2022 (change February 6, 2022 | 11:10)
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