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Home in Novecento (Baricco 1994): Between Mobility and Permanence
by E.M. Colazingari
Home in Novecento (Baricco 1994): Between Mobility and Permanence
The transatlantic passage for many European migrants of the 20th century was seen as a dynamic act of radical change in their identity, lifestyle, and, at times, social status. As these changing elements require an act of physical and psychological passage, these migrants can be deemed to be engaging with the concept of mobility in both (desired) social verticality and horizontal mobility towards the East. The Italian novella Novecento (Baricco 1994) engages with both mobilities, but adds a third possibility: permanence in mobility. The character Novecento is named after the year he was born aboard the transatlantic liner, the Virginian. Indeed, the ship acts like a settlement and unconventional home for Novecento, as he refuses to ever set foot on land. This seals his fate as he dies with the demolished ship after the Second World War. In this essay, I examine how Novecento’s relationship to the concept of home is portrayed as a site of both permanence and mobility. To do so, I employ symptomatic close reading and draw on previous academic research on the novella, treating the text as symptomatic of the sea’s natural musicality and circularity. All translations of the Italian work and these Italian sources are by me. This ambiguity in the novella also serves as a social commentary on the migrant’s experience of passage between shores and the struggles in finding a new home abroad.
The novella depicts the life of Novecento throughout the 20th century (or, in Italian, “Novecento”) in a monologue narrated by a fellow band member aboard the ship, Tim Tooney, a trumpeter who worked alongside Novecento as he became a pianist prodigy. This talent and choice of lifestyle sparked his popularity as he became a legend passengers would seek out. Throughout the monologue, fragmented poetic interludes convey Novecento’s feelings on home, music, and touching land. These passages already associate the musicality grounding Novecento’s identity with his peculiar presence on board. This also reveals a musical relationship between Novecento and the sea, as well as between the sea and music itself. The article “La voce del mare: Da Oceano mare di Baricco a La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano di Tornatore” (Bini 2002) argues that in the novella the sea is symbolic for both music and ‘for the real that is becoming and change’ (“del reale che è divenire e cambiamento,” 45), in which music is the only language capable of transposing this reality. Baricco also expresses a similar intersection between sea, music, and the meaning of life in his novel Oceano Mare (1993), which should be understood as foregrounding the novella’s epistemology as well. This means that the relationship between sea and man is innately musical, yet only Novecento is able to communicate it through his music. It can be inferred from this that the poetic interludes are meant to be rhythmic in the musical sense.
The first page opens by describing the monumental proportions of the voyagers across the Ocean, but one traveler each route always was the first to glimpse the equally monumental sight awaiting “(…) and yelled (carefully and slowly): America. (…) With the face of someone who had created America himself.” (“e gridava (piano e lentamente): l’America. (…) Con la faccia di uno che l’aveva fatta lui, l’America.” 11), where the italics indicate stage directions. The monologue then focuses on the auditory impact of the yell and its power in the throat (12), pointing once again towards the connection between mobility and musicality. Announcement of the migrant’s arrival, in this case, very literally impacts the voice. The tone of the narrative results hopeful yet disproportionate and titanic, between the loud announcement that materializes the migrants’ future, the cosmic proportions of America, and the crowd on board gathering towards it. By juxtaposing the volume of the voice to its slowness, the scene emulates a “slow motion” cinematic moment, and the dramatic entrances the technique allows for. The space after the ship already feels megalophobic, allowing for Novecento’s entrance into the narrative to appear as its ideological and spatial opposite. In the expansive and crowded places beyond the sea, Novecento, in contrast, is initially spotlighted as a firm refusal of the outside world’s chaos, which proves harmfully insular only later in the narrative.
Right when the impact of sound is mentioned in the opening scene, Novecento is first introduced by his fellow crew member. Tim Tooney then recalls Novecento saying how he already sees America in the eyes of each migrant on the ship, as from the eyes one can read the future, not the past. This first entrance of his character foreshadows the psychological dilemma of his life as both immutable boarding and fluid travel, stemming from his concept of home being forever sailing without port. Seeing the future during its required travel, without having to experience the destination in itself, justifies Novecento’s anchorage to the sea by allowing him to live elsewhere through his imaginings of other passengers. As discussed, his life experience has been shown to be necessarily filtered through musicality. For this reason, Novecento’s philosophical justification through story-making is expressed in his music, acting as the artistic manifestation of reality as “becoming” (“divenire”) (Bini). Novecento’s musical compositions each idealize the lives of the passengers in exploits around the world. However, what is glimpsed of his musical prodigiousness comes from his interludes of autodiegesis, poetical instances which emulate the sea and his interiority at once.
The first and last interjection from Novecento together help discern his concept of home as a fragmented whole, a permanent sense of instability, which turns back into musical harmony. A similar perspective is argued by Horvath in “Questioni di Tempo, Narrativa e Identità Nei Romanzi di Alessandro Baricco Novecento e Seta” (2008), in which Novecento’s interludes are “autopoetic representation of Bariccoean time” (“rappresentazione autopoetica della temporalità baricchiana” 69) that materializes the circularity of time into autopoetic fragments. If his diegesis is consigned to a circular movement, its interruption (by destroying the ship) results in the termination of his narrative, as his mode of rhythmic storytelling is removed. This musical yet entrapping circularity overall can be seen as the framework for considering Novecento’s focalized interludes through symptomatic close reading.
The first interlude (25-26) begins after the British police storm the ship, trying, and failing, to take Novecento off board, to which he reacts by saying: “Damn the rules.” (“In culo il regolamento” 25). A relevant stage direction then interrupts the narration and sets up the first interlude: “(In audio the sound of a storm)” (“In audio rumore di burrasca” 25). Novecento’s voice, once again, seems to be filtered through the rhythm and musicality of the sea. This coincidence when expressing his own interiority, as in these cases, strengthens his concept of home to the sea for eternity. Indeed, the first rhyme (A/A) of the first paragraph (divided more by theme and scheme than spatial paragraphing) of the interlude begins with “The sea has awakened/ The sea has derailed” (“Il mare si è svegliato/ Il mare ha deragliato/” 25), opposing the “rules” with the sound of the sea playing behind him, implying its role in giving him ideological freedom. The first paragraph’s rhyme scheme goes A/A/B/C/C/C, the rhyme is then broken by free verse to then resume again with the same pattern, D/D/E/F/F/F. When reading this out loud, the rhythm between rhyme and free verse pauses between lines gives the impression of the sea’s waves pushing forward, then retreating at a slower pace. As seen, he begins by describing the sea in its power of movement, but then shifts to the migrants’ perspective of waiting for the sea to end. Interestingly, he uses the verb “to shipwreck” (“naufragare” 26) instead of “to land” (“approdare”) to refer to the migrant’s docking at their destination. Where the in-between space of the sea means life, rhyme, and movement, the docking is not a destination but a destruction, a wreck of his home, the ship. The first interlude, in this way, foreshadows the last interlude by anticipating the terrestrial limits of his lifestyle as the agent of his demise.
Novecento’s death indeed comes with the destruction of the ship after its decommissioning in the aftermath of World War Two, when it acted as a floating hospital. His personal reasoning for this act of suicide comes in the final interlude (55-62), which oscillates between poetic and prosaic segments. This interlude is anticipated by the narrator’s only poetic interlude, which dissolves naturally into poetry (54) as he searches for the Virginian’s wreckage along Plymouth’s seaside port in the hope of uncovering Novecento’s fate years later. The conclusion to p.57’s prosaic paragraph aptly summarizes his ambiguous concept of home: “The ground, that is a ship too big for me.” (“La terra, quella è una nave troppo grande per me.” 57), entirely subverting the claustrophobia felt on a ship by crowded migrants with Novecento’s megalophobia and connection with the sea.
In conclusion, the poetic musicality throughout the novella’s interludes puts Novecento in rhythm with a reality without a definitive ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ route. Such a journey is instead compared to the linear voyage of migrants on the Virginian between Europe (A) and the United States (B). The mobility characteristic of their journey cannot be found in Novecento’s experience, as he sees either point as the end of becoming, a site of shipwreck, hence death. However, his home has been discussed not entirely within the bounds of the sea itself, but also the confining walls and deck of the ship alongside its population. This spatial boundary and his psychological refusal to debark elsewhere suggest the static nature of his philosophy amid apparent constant change, and ultimately, foreshadow his death. Overall, the flow that imitates the rhythm of music and the sea emerges as a closed circle when analyzing Novecento’s autopoetic interiority, charged with a paradoxically mobile and immobile meaning of home.
Bibliography
Baricco, Alessandro. Novecento: Un monologo. Feltrinelli, 1994.
Bini, Daniela. “La Voce Del Mare: Da Oceano Mare Di Baricco a La Leggenda Del Pianista Sull’oceano Di Tornatore.” Italica, vol. 79, no. 1, 2002, pp. 44–61. JSTOR, https://doi-org.utrechtuniversity.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/3655971.
Horváth, Kornélia. “Questioni di tempo, narrativa e identità nei romanzi di Alessandro Baricco novecento e seta.” Verbum 10.1 (2008): 67-75.