It has already been said: 1922 was the Annus mirabilis of modern literature and, one hundred years later, it was the turn of this 2022 that ends to reinterpret his stainless works, from the Ulises (appeared in February of a century ago) to the wasteland (appeared in December).
Among the books of that 1922 there is, against everything, one that appears relegated and reflects like few others the discomforts of that time and of the one that would follow: The Enormous Room. signs it e.e. Cummings (1894-1962), a poet addicted to lower case, who also experimented with neologisms, syntactic oddities and typographical games. Woody Allen made him known to a wider audience when he included one of his poems in Hannah and her sistersthe one that ends: “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”
“Cummings presents dehumanization as an absurdity and combats it with the sharp genius of the jester”
the huge room –that’s how he translated it– reminds little, however, of his ethereal and flexible modernist verses: it is an autobiographical novel about his experience as a prisoner. The young Cummings, educated at Harvard, found that the First World War in Europe could be a good catalyst to conjure up family plans (although they did not get along, his father vetoed his vocation, which included drawing in addition to literature). . He then signed up with his friend William Slater Brown (B., in the book) as a volunteer with an American Red Cross ambulance service. It is possible that it was nothing more than a subterfuge to get to know Paris and its bohemia. It took the two of them five lazy weeks to join their posts. Soon, some letters from B. (speaking ill of the French and the Americans, showing alleged sympathies for the German enemy) were intercepted by the censorship and led to their being considered spies. He then began his ordeal. Each on their own, the friends ended up in La Ferté-Macé, a detention camp in Normandy.
the huge room It anticipates future concentration camp literature due to its claustrophobia and detailed description of the cruelties to which men reduced to that immense and crowded room from which they are barely allowed to leave are subjected. In a separate unit, behind a fence that seeks to prevent contact, there are women in the same condition. The perspective of the story, however, contradicts commonplaces. Cummings is a overwhelmed and bewildered recluse, but also a new-age artist willing to optimize the calamity to which he is subjected. The prose seeks a colloquial and buzzing phrasing, with an eminently American sound. In the description of the cruelty of the jailers there is astonishment, but above all irony. The portraits of various companions in misfortune – there are no great criminals, just curious characters – unite the monotony of confinement as a chorus. All of them and their activities produce a strange hum, rhythmic by the babelic presence of other nationalities and the music of the many phrases quoted in French.
As an attentive contemporary of Joyce, Cummings also proposes a literary parallel: instead of the Odysseyit is worth The Pilgrim Progress, John Bunyan’s Christian allegory, whose sign is changed. His pilgrimage is immobile, but dispossession is a way of access to the ethics of the future artist.
the big room it is still so original that, read today, it is uncomfortable and paradoxical. Humiliations, overcrowding, food are the evils closest at hand. The most extreme can be pain secthe lowest cabinot of punishment or the threat of transfer to a much more brutal prison. Cummings presents dehumanization as an absurdity and combats it with the sharp genius of the jester. In the following world war, in the gulags, in Primo Levi, in Solzhenitsyn, there would be no room, of course, for such humor in the wrong direction.