by Florian Mussgnug
When the members of Gruppo 63 assembled for the third time, in 1965, to discuss the fate of the experimental novel, Gillo Dorfles agreed to open the debate with a series of brief considerations. Effortlessly erudite and playful as usual, the Triestine art critic reminded his peers of the importance of being “tentative†– he used the English word – and not overly didactic (“didascalicoâ€): a term which for Dorfles denoted one of the greatest ills of traditional academia but also of Italy’s self-proclaimed and insufficiently self-ironic “new†avant-garde. Renato Barilli and Angelo Guglielmi’s position papers about the alleged death of the novel, quipped Dorfles, were “undoubtedly brilliantâ€, but also rather predictable, especially since they described the need for a radically different literature in terms of a new canon: Raymond Roussel, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Günter Grass, Alberto Arbasino, Adriano Spatola, and so on. Inevitably, this entailed new exclusions, as Dorfles explained, citing the cases of Uwe Johnson and Arno Schmidt: two influential German experimental writers, whose significance had not been acknowledged by the members of Gruppo 63. Much more importantly, the real delight of radical, speculative inquiry, for Dorfles, consisted in rejecting the very idea of a single, aesthetic model – any model – in favour of open-ended, inventive and endlessly transformative creative-critical trajectories. Why would we lament, or indeed celebrate, the “death of the novelâ€, asks Dorfles, when some of the most interesting artists and thinkers of the present – he gives the example of Louis Mumford – were happy to combine the rhetorical and imaginative wealth of literary tradition with the urgency and excitement of political writing? And, incidentally, why not pursue the force of creative invention across artistic media, including painting, sculpture, performance and music?
For Dorfles – who had recently published his sixth, influential volume on contemporary art and society, Nuovi riti, nuovi miti (1965) and was working on L’estetica del mito (1967) – mythopoeia, the invention and re-invention of myth, was perhaps the most important way of framing his peculiar practice of open-ended, creative and speculative inquiry. The role of the critic and intellectual, he emphasized in 1965, consisted in “extending not only to the novel but to all the arts the challenge of a renewed mythopoeia. This could be much more effective than trying to fret over bunched-up categorizations (“estendere non soltanto al romanzo ma a tutte le arti, il problema di una rinnovata mitopoiesi. Il che potrebbe essere molto più efficace che cercare di spulciare delle categorizzazioni estremamente parcellariâ€).
Dorfles passed away on 2 March 2018, and many of the numerous obituaries that have appeared evoke the image of a man who became a myth during his own, more than centennial lifetime. Born a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Dorfles counted among his personal friends many of the greatest artists and thinkers of modern Italy: Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba, Arturo Toscanini, Dino Buzzati, Eugenio Montale, Lucio Fontana, are only a few names on a long, vertiginous list. Dorfles’ achievements, similarly, have gained mythical proportions, as he lived long enough to see several of his most original and eccentric positions embraced by subsequent generations, who celebrated him for his extraordinary prescience. His “discovery†of Kitsch, long before Postmodernism; his fascination with the Baroque; his enthusiastic attention to every new and innovative artistic movement, over the course of nearly eleven decades, and so on. It is easy, and all too tempting to see Dorfles, from the dubious vantage point of our own, troubled century, as an ideal embodiment of the Twentieth Century, which he witnessed almost in its entirety. But maybe a sincere homage to Dorfles should avoid such facile etiquettes, and simply acknowledge the sheer vital force of an artist and intellectual who, like myth itself, never tired of re-inventing himself, and whose sense of history was always, enthusiastically, projected into the future.
