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The Manichean Abstraction. The Reality of Desire
Good and evil. Good guys and bad guys. In contemporary literature, the representation of reality is often limited to this dichotomy. But in some cases, this scheme cannot be applied. A writer has found some examples of this, foreshadowing a positive answer

by Luca Doninelli

The Manichean principle does not offer us the image of a drama, nor does it have the rhythm of progression of a drama. In Manichaeism, good and evil are two eternal principles in opposition to each other, and neither one can ever defeat the other. The drama, in this sense, is already eliminated; it is not real, but survives only as a ghost.
However, we do not understand these things in the abstract. If we stop at the explicit statement of this principle, the field of application is, when all is said and done, quite limited. Cowboys and Indians. Us and them. Bush and Saddam. Matrix (one of the most moralistic movies I know). If, though, we pay attention not to its formulation, but to its survival as a reason for living and acting (maybe disguised as something else), we discover that the times in which we are living are almost completely pervaded by this Manichean treacle.
Literature comes to our aid in this sense, because it offers us, if nothing else, a good case history of the problem. For example, there is a whole current of literature–with variants on both sides of the Atlantic–that equates restlessness (ie, instability, always having to go away, never being able to reach the goal) with meaning, or even purpose. This is the philosophy we find, for instance, in the work of a cult writer of our time like Bruce Chatwin–who, by the way, is a great writer–or in show business writers and figures, according to whom man is excluded from the Promised Land (his destiny), and the meaning of his life lies in his journey toward it, even if he will never reach it.
Others bank on art as entertainment, distraction from a Fate that has already delivered its sentences, already closed the betting. A writer who is also a good friend of mine, Alessandro Baricco, focuses all his work, which is often ingenious, on this basic equivocation. Desire, here, is a sort of dirty trick played by nature, an illness or alteration, or perhaps a mystery which we already know will never be solved.
But, as Giacomo Contri said in the last issue of Traces, desire is not a hole to be filled, but something that happens. When we are “down,” it is because we are lacking something, but what we lack is precisely desire. The companionship of friends makes desire happen again through the mysterious presence of its initial fulfillment.
In short, the Manichean position is the position of non-fulfillment in the sense of non-satisfaction, and this is the exact opposite of infinity, both because everything has already been decided and because something is always left out.
Therefore, I want to point to Cesare Pavese. He may be full of faults as a writer, but the problem he raises in all his books is this very one. In his most emblematic text, La casa in collina (The House on the Hill), his refusal (or, to put it better, his inability) to take part in the Italian Resistance was born out of a bond with reality so strong (it would be enough to count how many times the word “hills” recurs in his work) that it kept him from adopting any abstract solution to the problem of good and justice.
Desire is desire for what? For everything. As the great Freddie Mercury sang, “Who wants to live forever?”
Finding current examples of this completeness of desire is not very easy. Fr Giussani’s words from 1987, which appeared in last month’s Traces, are forever. We are all subjected to the consequences of power, including writers. It may be because I am 47 by now and perhaps a bit nearsighted, but the tons of books I buy or receive compliments of publishing houses show me, more than anything, this intellectual torpor that uses more or less everything to further its own purposes. Just as an example, you have no idea how many books have a certain form, a certain style and even a certain content only because they were written on a computer.
You ask me for current “positive” examples of writers who have climbed back up the slippery slope to reaffirm human desire, what we have always called “elementary experience.” Two come to mind, but first I would like to point something out, which is that the definition of the gravity of the problem is already a manifestation of desire. Saying that our “I” is under the Chernobyl effect is not a negative judgment, but a true judgment. My best-known novel, La nuova era (The New Age) is devoted to the Chernobyl effect. It is a dramatic book, but not a negative one. Hope does not come “after” judgment, but is within it. To my mind, those who maintain on principle that everything is positive, that everything is going fine, are much more desperate. On the contrary, reality is positive even when things are going badly.
Of the two books I mentioned above, one is Italian and one is American. The American one–excellent especially in the first half–came out three years ago and is called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by the writer Dave Eggers, who is under 30 years old. It is the story of a 22-year-old boy who, because of the death of both his parents in the space of a few months, finds himself in the position of being a father to his 8-year-old brother. The thrust that this pain, united with this task, produces in the protagonist gives rise to some of the most beautiful and original pages I have read in recent years. He feels overwhelmingly that his responsibility toward his little brother can be carried out only by desiring everything for him–either you try to give him everything, or you do not exist.
The other, very beautiful novel, just published in Italy by Rizzoli, is Sacrocuore (Sacred Heart) by Aurelio Picca. It is the chronicle of the dying and death of the writer’s mother after an unsuccessful heart operation. In the anguish of this heart, subjected to every sort of humiliation–including the usual sad, unresolved life of her three children–we find a powerful and effective metaphor for the anguish against which we fight, every day, to reaffirm our real need. In the final pages, this is lifted up as a kind of astonished prayer.
In both cases, we see a great real pain (both books are largely autobiographical) that breaks the chain of abstraction and makes us understand that the real meaning of our anguish can be entrusted not to a taking of sides, but to something that has to happen, like forgiveness, for everyone.