The Nameless

Article by Jacopo Guerriero in GQ (Italian edition), n.91, April 2007
It all began with Luther Blissett. Then came Wu Ming. Behind that signature a group of authors who changed the way writing is done. And who now return with Manituana.

by Jacopo Guerriero

This revolution is faceless! No photographs, no authors. The author is a commonplace of consumerist perversion invented to make you read happily, but with your pockets empty and your brain fogged by romantic inventions. Step back: western Europe in the early 1990s, was the time of the appearance of the web, of the ‘no-copyright’ movements, the start of a new transformation of the culture industry. You found a mysterious signature that appeared everywhere, in station toilets, in graffiti on the walls, on the tables of a pub or, as was written at the time, ‘on the sea walls, on the pole of the American flag, on the moon, on the Wailing Wall and plenty of others’: LUTHER BLISSETT.
Yes, like the English footballer of Afro-Caribbean origin, who played in the Italian championship for while in the Milan jersey. A sesquipedalian washout. Even today no one knows the reasons for the coincidence: Luther Blissett – as a signature – didn’t represent anyone. It was the collective name of anyone who wanted to opt for guerrilla warfare, lies and subversive falsification. Everyone was free to use the multiple name as they saw fit. The story starts there: with para-sciences and borrowed philosophies.
It was in 1999 that the first novel signed Luther Blissett appeared. It was called ‘Q’. ‘In an age devastated by the wars of religion, a student of theology chooses the cause of the heretics and the disinherited.’ That was what it said on the cover of the most gripping story that had been told hereabouts for twenty years. The narrative of the mortal struggle between the many-named Survivor, the heretical captain Gert and his mortal enemy Q, busy playing a cruel game on the chessboard of Europe. Q was, altogether, a thriller, a spy story, a historical novel, a political pamphlet. To quote Bakhtin: it created new neighbourhoods between things and ideas. It was a publishing cause, a scandal. In the pure style of Luther Blissett, obviously. Metropolitan legends circulated about the identity of the author. Then it was discovered that there were several authors, disciples of Eco, certainly, or perhaps not, it was Eco who had written it. Things like that…
Lots of people are still confused, so I fear I will have to tell a well-known story once again. Keep these names in mind: Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Luca Di Meo, Federico Guglielmi. The names aren’t important, they would say: the writers aren’t important, what’s important is the stories they tell. But they were the four components of the ‘band of novelists’ who conceived and wrote Q. They were joined, at the start of the third millennium, by Riccardo Pedrini, the ex-guitarist of Nabat, a cult band on the Italian punk-skin scene, already the author of impure essays on the martial arts and revolution, on street styles, of a portentous novel, Free Baku Now, constructed with a sci-fi modus operandi.
In parentheses: I remember meeting Riccardo months later, in a bar near Bologna station. He had very few of the clichés of home-grown intellectuals. No typewriter or thoughtful black-and-white photographs, so you know what we’re talking about. It was the hottest summer of the century, with the air of a preacher he talked about James Ellroy, African music, narrative to be reconfigured ‘like the parts of a cow before they are eaten’. They were years full of squabbles and unfamiliar reactions. To take one example, in 2001, when Pedrini’s new solo novel was published, he was incomprehensibly accused of plagiarism by another writer, Giuseppe Genna. The other members of the band, according to Roberto Bui, expressed their wish that Genna should end up being treated by Professor Veronesi [a celebrated oncologist – Translator’s note]. Then mutual apologies and peacemaking followed. The group, however, remained t the centre, playing with myth and identity was at the time the real mainstream literature, polemics and positions rained down, an urban legend circulated about a photographer being beaten up by our fellows. These were the first years of the Berlusconi government, the left was craven, these people were demonstrating optimist, avoiding the litanies of defeat, rejoicing and talking about copyleft and bookcrossing. They were rebuked by more moderate colleagues, they wore their partisanship as ostentatious banners. Very unliterary things. At any rate, with the arrival of the fifth element, the group that had assumed the open formation of Luther Blissett became the narrative studio Wu Ming. ‘Wu Ming’, you can read on the five men’s site, ‘is a Chinese expression: it means “no name", or “five names2, it depends how you pronounce the first syllable. The name of the band is understood either as a tribute to dissidence (Wu Ming is a very common name among Chinese citizens asking for democracy and freedom of expression), or as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine, on whose mountain ranges the author becomes a star.’ That’s why there are no photograph. That’s why, every time a journalist tries to take one, they come up with the legend of the beaten photographer. The first work by the extended collective was 54. The more difficult novel to support, the second choral work that couldn’t be outdone by the rhizomatic capillarity of the first. On 14 May 2005, after its Italian triumphs and reprints, the London Times spoke of it in these terms: ‘Like Q, it is a sprawling epic, although the setting is modern. With the exception of a brief prologue, the action takes place entirely in 1954. The plot is a formidable feat of imagination that moves restlessly between Bologna, Naples, California, Moscow, Dubrovnik and Marseilles.’ Among the thousand stories told, ‘the most daring […] imagines Cary Grant in retreat in Palm Springs, sick of the movies and considering retirement, but being persuaded to undertake a secret mission to Yugoslavia to talk to Marshal Tito about making a film of his life — all with the aim of buttering up the dictator and drawing him away from the Soviet Union.’ And again: ‘The new novel is a more accomplished piece of work. In Q the characters often seemed dwarfed by the huge historical events going on around them. 54’s scope is no less ambitious, but has a refreshing lightness of touch.’ A consecration, in short.
Today, after three different solo novels by various members of the collective, we hav reached the third episode, the third fresco written by five pairs of hands. For a few days Manituana (Einaudi), the latest work by the Wu Ming writers’ collective, has been in bookshops. This time the protagonists are handsome and wild, they come from the land of forests. Call them heroes. And before approaching them, scour your memory. You remember La Longue Carabine and Cerf Agile? They were the protagonists of the legendary novel by James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans. Lucky the ones who approach those pages for the first time. Lucky the ones who, still as adolescents, set off on the trail of Indians and love stories, if they pass through the gate of childhood, the elementary nature of myth and adventure last for ever. Now, a century and a half after Cooper, five writers have taken it into their head to write the impossible sequel to the story of the Mohawk people, to resume that tale of violence and passion where Cooper himself had abandoned it, after the end of the civil war in the Iroquois lands between the French allied with the Hurons and the English flanked by the Mohican tribes.
Manituana. The name indicates both a physical place and a place of the mind. The final destination of the family and the people of Warraghiyagey (Sir William Johnson is his name as a white man and an Irishman), father of the Six Nations, the eastern Indian land, to the south of Canada, loyal to the United Kingdom. The novel begins his death, with the vicissitudes of his descendants and allies.
A tale of original injustice, and hence a political story. The continentals, under the command of George Washington – at the end of the 18th century – bore the words ‘civilisation or death’ on their banners. Manituana is the tale of the birth of the united States of America, the revelation of the violent roots of the American nation. And, by contrast, it is the story of the resistance of Chief Joseph Brant, the most hated Mohawk Indian, who didn’t like war but became cruel while fighting against the German-American Jonas Klug. Of Philip Lacroix, ‘Le Grand Diable’, an invincible warrior who, in the forests of the north, stared into the eyes of death in solitude.
It is a story of women with the gift of the ‘shining’ – in the spark of dreams they can predict the crossing of destinies. Molly Brant, Sir William’s Indian wife, immediately knows the beginning and the end of each event, and is the key character, capable of looking straight to the place of final destination, Manituana. Still a future storehouse of legends because the Indians who survived, as Stan Steiner says, have created a way of saving the earth, through the simple fact of their existence. Even if that existence is a hard, very hard life…

11.04.07 · on recensioni