And not so much because its events can more or less coincide with the strictly personal matters, but because they compel the reader to stand in front of that periclitante and obscure boundary between good and evil, from which we hardly remember to be inhabited, a once silenced the beast under a heap of moral respectability, the petty-bourgeois behavior, the worn and routine mechanisms of thought.
Luna / Carmela, combination of "vulgar" earthiness and metaphysical angelicità, breaking its banks between good and evil: love, from which it is pushed to act, victim and executioner at the same time, gives rise to a sort of mental orgasm , causing the loss of all mental-emotional control, determines, in turn, an unstoppable spiral of events more and more evil, which has as a starting point the self-canceling in the relationship with your partner and as a final consequence of the existence nullification personal and life, in general.
Davinio reveals a surgical precision nell'affondare his scalpel in an already overheated psyche from a self-destructive pathos, in which the most overwhelming emotion is the pleasure of evil, which, in general, constitutes a narrative taboos : few writers will have grappled with such lucidity, especially when it came to telling the pleasure linked to a deviant sexual intercourse, to limit aggression and pornography.
Master of this analysis in literature is certainly Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. Theoretical Freud: "Human nature is much larger, for better or for worse, than most people realize" (in ego and id).
Already Catherine wrote in his note to The Book of opium: "Of certain diseases of body and soul I probably should not mention, conceal, not to upset the sensibilities of those who in the world can so confidently dipartire good and bad, health and distress, heaven and hell. "
And this is the thing that scares the reader: this duplicity, this relationship upside down between good and evil becomes for those who put it in place, like the protagonist of the novel, a sort of norm, even up to claim for itself a beauty entirely autonomous from ethics, in a sort of ideal tragic that some psychoanalysis researcher wanted to see how a back cover of the old and now expelled "guilt."
The protagonist of Sensibilia fails, however, to elude the all this guilt, that Davinio investigates with a fairness and analytical depth, which require a wide knowledge of the mechanisms of the human psyche and, above all, of herself .
To demonstrate the "normality" of the deviation, the Davinio chooses a character not at all striking: Carmela is no longer young, nor particularly beautiful, she lost her mother, sister, the beloved cat, lives his wife provided no joy, without a satisfactory sexuality it is on average educated, loves classical music and especially Mozart. Yet, after the meeting with Mr. X, it is transformed into a sort of "sex machine", chasing the "beast" of his ego, tragically, softly, obsessively, shamelessly, destructively, but without reaching it or never be achieved. Perhaps because of this imbalance of "senses" it seems to escape, along with the monitoring of the spirit, every possible ego entirety.
It is interesting that the novel divides his narrative sequences into seven chapters, seven - you would think - as the seven deadly sins, seven as the set of cardinal and theological virtues, to reiterate the violated relationship between virtue and vice. Maybe. But, even more truthfully, seven as the sum of the five senses: hearing, taste, sight, smell, touch (ie roads traveled in incessant journeys from good to evil, from pleasure to suffering from ' excitement to depression, the body being the only map of the journey of all life), and two sovrasensi, probing the invisible and immaterial. If, then, we resort to a metaphorical reading, the sixth sense is what we perceive anything, in fact, is nothing itself; the seventh is that of the word senseless, and, therefore, in a particular way of poetry.
It is, in fact, surprising as in a pathological and breathless affair, theorizing poetic yet find its space through an abundant use of metaphor: the sense of evil is perceived by the protagonist as "a rodent that squassasse me inside which sguazzasse me in the bowels and chest "; the double name of the main character, as has been said, alluding to the duplicity of human nature; the mouth is "the Great Gate of the City of Kyiv", which gives rise, according to the definition of Hölderlin, the language, "of goods the most dangerous." cherry also representing the taste, it is the figure of Eros, "enigmatic words of a god whose unusual sound you can get out of his mind".
We could go on like this, remembering the suggestiveness of the name (Gouache) of the country where Carmela retires with his father to find his balance, and that "the emerald gleam" of carnivorous flies is the color of death. And move on and find other metaphors to the last page, but without the visionary power that owns the nose, as a character totally extravagant and enigmatic, in a frenzied state of the protagonist, talks with her serving as a symbol of transience of form and life, eternal presence of death, the black abyss to which converge the dark holes of the nostrils through which passes the inconsistency of breath.
And there is a reason why their nostrils speak of poetry, exclaiming: "What will the difference, which reads the impossible! Away! The tooth is removed, the die is cast, the soul is made and the poet ... You cheated! "And again:" So the poem would be an extreme mastery, but also unexpected, surprising submission to the languages of the weather; it remains totally slaves of freedom, only sympathetic to all the meetings, to the occasions. The occasion is a ready ear to the beat; you agree to fulfill the crime and go unpunished. "And, a little later:" Is this art? A sensory confusion structured ...? ".
It seems to me that this very structured sensory confusion, which is the poetry, like any other art form, constitutes the grip by which Catherine is saved from physical death: in fact, during his sleep comatose, is Mozart, with his music to remove it to anything up to bring it to the surface of life in a hospital room in which people and things of the past "bourgeois" become guardians of his "health." Unable, however, to fill that loneliness which remains the only companion after such a fierce crossing of evil territories.
Franca Alaimo