The Unseen Read online

  Praise for The Unseen

  ‘What [Balestrini] narrates is not a fairy tale, but a terrifying experience. Not just his own, but also that of a lost generation who thought possible another world beside the world, who dreamt of workers’ power, of autonomy, who revolted against everything, school, family, clergy, political parties, “historical compromise”, State, police, boredom . . . The Unseen is, perhaps, the first true novel of the European Left.’ Libération

  ‘Balestrini offers a very lucid document, which is both the memory and the assessment of a disoriented generation. The Left now has its novel.’ L’Événement du jeudi

  ‘The Unseen isn’t documentary writing, but it tells us far more than any documentary about a troubled phase in our history; how it was experienced, and most of all how it was lived in the imagination.’ Corriere della Sera

  ‘We should be grateful to Nanni Balestrini for having engaged his writing with this cruel sentimental education of a young man living in the seventies.’ Rossana Rossanda, il manifesto

  ‘The political passion of the rebel Balestrini is equalled by his literary vocation . . . the finale is not unworthy of Bontempelli or Calvino.’ Il Giornale

  ‘A work of high literary quality. Among many novels and elegantly crafted pieces of fiction . . . The Unseen has the courage to face an incandescent matter of reality, rich in implications that involve not only the literati but also a wider public.’ L’Unità

  ‘Not just a beautiful novel . . . it is the story of part of a generation in our country, who dreamed a different future and believed in it, believed in the possibility of making it real.’ Linus

  NANNI BALESTRINI was born in Milan in 1935 and was a member of the influential avant-garde Gruppo 63, along with Umberto Eco and Eduardo Sanguineti. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Blackout and Ipocalisse, and novels such as Tristano, Vogliamo Tutto, and La Violenza Illustrata.

  During the notorious mass arrests of writers and activists associated with Autonomy, which began in 1979, Balestrini was charged with membership of an armed organization and with subversive association. He went underground to avoid arrest and fled to France. As in so many other cases, no evidence was provided and he was acquitted of all the charges.

  He currently lives in Rome, where he runs the monthly magazine of cultural intervention Alfabeta2 with Umberto Eco and others.

  The Unseen

  Nanni Balestrini

  TRANSLATED BY LIZ HERON

  WITH A FOREWORD BY ANTONIO NEGRI

  First published in English by Verso 1989

  This updated paperback edition published by Verso 2011

  This updated edition © Nanni Balestrini and Derive Approdi, Rome 2005

  Translation © Liz Heron 1989, 2011

  Foreword © Antonio Negri 2011

  First published as Gli Invisibili

  © Bompiani, Milan 1987

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  Epub ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-837-2

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Janson MT by Hewer UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the US by Maple Vail

  for Sergio

  Contents

  Begin reading.

  Foreword

  Nanni Balestrini’s book, now republished here, tells of unseen actors in the class struggle between the 1970s and ’80s, particularly in northern Italy, and inside the jails of the Realm. These subjects are invisible because they are elusive, mutating beings in the act of metamorphosis. But what can we say about them today (and also about this novel) if not that rather than being an old, outdated story this is now very much of the present moment, one caught sight of at that time and followed in the course of its unfolding? The republication of The Unseen therefore has the advantage today of telling us about proletarian subjects whose class nature has finally been revealed: the unseen individual of yesterday is the proletarian of today, the immaterial worker, the cognitive precariat, the new figure of the worker as social labour power in the movements of the multitude. Those poor wretches did it, they managed to get through a revolution in the composition of labour and a ferocious political repression and to struggle on from the factories to society and (still productive) from society to the jail (still fighting back). And now where will they go? The elite of the working-class movement who betrayed and dragged the unseen into prison now look around, fearful and unable to build a politics, afraid of losing out if they do not resume contact with that age-old movement of transformation; but that elite will never win! Indeed, regardless of this betrayal by the working-class movement (which has been so serious, especially in Italy), the unseen have gone forward. In the ’80s, they were organizing prison revolts and the first autonomous social centres in the cities; in the ’90s they organized the Panther movement; in the late ’90s they turned into Zapatistas and tute bianche, the anti-globalization movement and everything else that has happened and will happen.

  It is interesting to note that each one of these movements always sought to give itself ambiguous, hard-to-pin-down names that could have been white but also dark in the shadow that the white produced, that could have been soft like the tread of a feline, that could moreover position itself as tireless resistance precisely in the name of the singular ambiguity of its disobedient behaviour. Since the ’70s, these movements have all understood that starting all over again doesn’t mean turning back but rather expanding, reaching into new spaces and new times, being coordinated and coordinating, seeking confrontation in the measure of consensus and consensus in the measure of confrontation. The fact is that, in contrast to the parties and the survivors from the ancien régime, the unseen place themselves in the here and now. Balestrini’s unseen, right from the early ’80s, were beginning to give shape to a multitudinous, singular, transversal subject that wanted never to be reduced to a mass but wanted in every case to be a whole. And even when ideological reminiscences drew them inside names and terminologies that sounded out of date, at that same moment this subject was able to invent itself anew. Think of the scene where the prisoners in the Trani revolt are locked up in their cells after the bloodbath and shed with their flaming torches a light that illuminates the night of every proletarian prison of the decade. This is the language of the multitude. But if it were no more than this, this reality in its biting descriptions, Balestrini’s book might only be a piece of historical or sociological documentation. What is great about this novel is that the unseen individual becomes a literary subject. Larvatus prodeo – the proletarian advances masked by his invisibility. And with this transformation in those years of the ’70s – which the bosses and their servants within the working-class movement failed sufficiently to curse – he represents the invisible yet powerful transformation from material work to immaterial work, from revolt against the boss to revolt against the patriarchy, along with the metamorphosis of bodies brought about within this movement, and the imagination that this new historical condition (social and political to be precise) brings to speech.

  Balestrini’s book is a great new experiment (the first
was Vogliamo tutto [We Want Everything]) that shows us the body of the exploited as an actor in the revolutionary process. And we can add: in the passage from modern to post-modern, from the era when socialism dreamed of itself to the era when communism is beginning to be lived. Without a doubt this is a didactic novel; but who learns from whom? The novel of the Real or – this seems the mark of revolutionary literature – the reality of the novel? It pleases me to bet on the second hypothesis and ask the anatomist/physiologist of the language in question (Balestrini) to agree with me: in its ambiguity, in the difficulty it registers, this book has nonetheless anticipated reality and transformed the Real. In this case the ambiguity is between the real actor and the author of the narrative, a key connected to a mechanism of political and constituent potency, one poor in its genesis and yet of great richness in the series of effects it produces.

  An act of love? This book is dual in character; it is a biopolitical tissue of postmodernity, another of the great concepts of contemporary revolutionary thought that Balestrini intuits and invents, along with the idea of the multitude. One could discuss this at even greater length and most of all one could insist on the question of the function, the vocation, the joy of the writer! How frequently lumpen proletarians reproach writers or intellectuals for describing phenomena they have not endured. This time there is great satisfaction in being able to acknowledge that Balestrini too has been invisible, that he has suffered the transformation to trace long years of poverty and love.

  Antonio Negri, 2011

  Translator’s Note

  The Unseen is anchored in the social movements of Italy in the second half of the 1970s and, especially, in the rise of Autonomy, a widespread network of extra-parliamentary alliances involving school and university students, the young unemployed and various groupings of the socially marginalized and economically disenfranchized (the emarginati).

  Autonomy’s political origins can be traced back to the factory strikes and occupations of 1969’s ‘Hot Autumn’, but a number of immediate issues spurred its growth: price rises and cuts in public spending, a series of neo-fascist shootings and bomb attacks, rising unemployment, dissatisfaction with the education system. This was also the time of the Communist Party’s attempted ‘historic compromise’, the move towards a hoped-for partnership with the ruling Christian Democracts. The party’s tacit support for the government’s economic policies and refusal to oppose legislation drastically extending police powers were the object of fierce criticism from the left.

  Protests reached their height in 1977, when street demonstrations and violent, often armed, clashes with the police occurred almost daily in some Italian cities. It was also a year of explosive cultural opposition – through alternative radio stations and magazines, and through the theatrically staged actions of the ‘Metropolitan Indians’. An outbreak of posters and slogans re-invoked the surreal challenges of 1968.

  As divisions and tensions multiplied within Autonomy, especially over the question of organized violence, terrorism escalated. The wave of repression which followed made few distinctions. Mass arrests, guilt-by-association and the imprisonment, frequently without trial, of hundreds of people, had profound consequences for an entire generation.

  Of the many prison revolts during this period, the one whose events are most closely paralleled in the novel took place at Trani, near Bari, in December 1980.

  Translation of the protagonists’ names in the text would have resulted in excessive artificiality. So that their literal meanings are not altogether lost, I offer the following glossary:

  Aglio

  Garlic

  China

  Quinine

  Cocco

  Coconut

  Cotogno

  Quince

  Donnola

  Weasel

  Gelso

  Mulberry

  Lauro

  Bay

  Lince

  Lynx

  Lupino

  Lupin

  Malva

  Mallow

  Mastino

  Mastiff

  Menta

  Mint

  Mora

  Bramble

  Nocciola

  Hazelnut

  Ortica

  Nettle

  Pepe

  Pepper

  Scilla

  Squill

  Spinone

  Griffon

  Talpac

  Mole

  Valeriana

  Valerian

  Verbena

  Vervain

  Part One

  1

  The cellars are a maze of passageways lit every twenty or thirty yards by dusty fluorescent strip-lights swinging from long ragged electric wires that hang from the ceiling its rough cement fissured by long deep cracks it seems to go on for ever and here and there bulges downwards as if pushed by some enormous weight up there crushing buckling breaking through and every four or five yards props made from great beams hold it up the wood rotten mouldy the ground covered in a film of putrid water the cloying sickening stench of putrefaction mingling with the stench of mould every so often at a turn-off or the junction of two passageways are little piles of sand of cement sodden collapsed trampled shovels and other rusty tools left lying there the air is damp and from our mouths come little puffs of vapour as we breathe that nauseating air

  the irregular shuffling of the small silent procession merges with the continuous jangling of the chains the sound echoes whenever the gangways of rotting wood are crossed the shadows lengthen behind each step whenever it gets close to the sections lit by strip-lights they disappear and all of a sudden reappear ahead and the steps lengthen they move forward slowly paying attention to where they tread and to the chains so that they don’t drag too much in front or behind trying always to leave the same distance between the one in front and the one behind taking care not to brush the right shoulder against the slimy wet wall and on the left keeping clear of the sub-machine-gun barrels levelled straight as the small procession turns repeatedly to the right and the left to the left and the right until all sense of direction is lost

  then we climb a narrow stairway semi-darkness suffocating with long flights high steps aching tugs at the chains hurting the wrists and at the end of the last flight the light of a small door and we come out high up at the top of a stairway tiers spreading into an enormous room brightly lit full of people moving down there beneath us all of a sudden against my leg I feel an animal muzzle that growls threateningly the black pupils dilated the large eyes protruding two long very white teeth bared by the tight red mouth a huge massive dog the smooth black fur on end on its back arching its ears pointing up quivering all the time the carabiniere holding its leash is impassive in his bullet-proof overalls the latest in anti-terrorist style

  from where we are the tiers fall away steeply to the floor of the room and from there rising all around up to the ceiling thick cylindrical iron bars varnished in gun-metal grey the enormous cage is full of officers in bullet-proof overalls in gun-metal grey everywhere we turn with
more big black dogs growling and nervous one after the other the carabinieri remove our chains take the handcuffs off the sore red wrists the photographers’ blinding flashlights flare on our faces they too are dogs no jackals and they writhe they bend they stretch up on tiptoe an anxious ballet arms raised straining higher and higher with the sleeves of their jackets slipping back to the elbows higher and higher

  we rub our red wrists we light cigarettes we walk up and down the steps a bit we wave to relatives we sit down together in twos and threes talking quietly the photographers below us get on their knees they jerk their torsos to right and left like contortionists in the circus they lean towards the animals inside the cage they try to get their heads sideways through the bars sliding their long lenses between the legs the arms of the carabinieri who form a motionless barrier their fingers twitch in a frenzy they jiggle the cameras up and down they shoot pictures and let off dazzling flashlights at the faces inside the cage then in a faraway corner an even more dazzling light goes on and the whirr of the television cameras starts up

  I sit down on the highest step of all and far beneath me I can see the lawyers with their black gowns thrown carelessly back on their shoulders chatting calmly among themselves in small groups behind the tables of peeling wood on the right parallel to the cage the court is assembled with the investigating judge dour lost in thought sitting in the middle on a high-backed chair so high it rises well above his head then the assisting judge perched sideways on another great high chair and to the right and left the jurors men and women nearly all with their faces hidden behind wide dark glasses the broad tricolour sashes across the pale pullovers the puffed blouses with their starched collars the double breasted jackets in various shades of grey the ties greenish blueish yellowish and at the far end on the right there’s the public prosecutor’s solitary little stand