Tabucchi Echoes Lacan: Making an End of "Postmodernism" from the Beginning‪.‬

Piazza d'Italia begins at the story's end, with an epilogo narrating its hero's death, shot through the head on a piazza lined with police (11-12). By the time this is recounted again (143-45), Garibaldo personifies both political practice, and collective memory: Tabucchi's first novel begins at the end of history. Although his second and fourth are likewise set in Italy, the scene moves to India in the third (where Pessoa's name is invoked), and Portugal (where it regularly recurs) thereafter. Given the geographical, generic, thematic, and stylistic diversifications of the two volumes following the second and preceding the third novel, (1) this might savour of exotic diversion, especially since Notturno indiano opens with an epigraph from Blanchot. Yet all seven novels narrate violent deaths, always suffered in the presence of the civil power, always somehow veiled or travestied: this narrative and thematic nucleus constitutes the series as a pivotal axis of the corpus. (2) The end of history brings no end of baffled suffering, dictating an investigation that begins again and again, its terms given by the names Pessoa and Blanchot (although neither can be taken at face value). The theatrical text "Il signor Pirandello e desiderato al telefono" signals Pessoa's significance: an actor impersonates him for around twenty "figure maschili e femminili", the majority "manichini" although "ci sono anche cinque o sei persone che ... come dei pazienti di un manicomio, indossano una sorta di pigiama grigia" (I dialoghi mancati 15). The actor's manager has sold the idea that "parlare di follia sarebbe / terapeutico, dunque se mi state a sentire / stasera dormirete piu tranquilli, / e il vostro direttore c'e cascato, / bisogna capirlo, / e un'anima semplice" (25). "Pessoa" also aspires to relieve his own anguish by establishing communication with Pirandello, in distant Agrigento--but when the telephone rings, the call is from the asylum's direttore, bringing the performance to an inconclusive end. Somewhat as Italian history is beyond reach, so are both the literary tradition which might have been called upon to assist in interpreting it, personified by Pirandello, and the audience for the interpretation: a surrogate, venally counterfeited, is imported to assist in retrieving a collectivity Tabucchi suggests is irretrievable, in view of a conflict between unseen, ineffectual puppet-masters inside and outside an institution the action never leaves.