MY PERSONAL LIBRARY 100

A few weeks ago, I wrote that the hundredth would be the last. And that day has come.

I want to close this little half-ludic, half-serious interaction with readers with a reflection on a book, itself also half-ludic, half-serious, I believe I‘ve already discussed. I‘ve recently watched an old TV show on YouTube that dealt with this book, and I want to convey what I heard.

During this 1974 show, called “Si rilassi“(“Relax“) and presented by Enzo Tortura, a psychoanalyst would psychoanalyse a guest.

In this particular episode, the analysand was Paolo Villaggio (1932-2017) whose book Fantozzi, rag. Ugo had just met with huge success and was about to be made into a movie (every writer’s dream since the first cinematographic transposition of 1896).

Villaggio’s immortal creation, Ugo Fantozzi, is an employee who hates his job, wants only to skive work, and is always on the receiving end of abuse hurled at him by his superiors. Fantozzi can be read in the light of Jordan Peterson‘s teachings on meaningless work and psychopathology in organisations.

Fantozzi is a surreal, exquisitely ironic paean to the “salaried slave”. The very Italian mixture of Catholic symbolism and Marxist imagery is breath-taking. Just think of that scene when Fantozzi throws a stone at the huge building of his employer, the multinational that has been throwing stones at him, and security officers escort him up to the ascetic office of the St-Francis-like “Megagalactic Director” for a reprimand. Instead, the Director, whose office boasts an aquarium with employees diving and dolphin-kicking in, convinces Fantozzi of his goodness and that he’s ready to engage in mature conversation with him.

When a short while earlier he‘d been in the lift on his way up to the Director’s office, Fantozzi had had a vision: he had seen himself being crucified in the canteen (“crocifisso in sala mensa“) for his throwing the stone. The vision isn‘t religious; the reference isn’t to Christ but to Spartacus, the slave the Romans crucified on the Via Appia for rising up against the masters.

Let’s not digress. In that 1974 programme, Si rilassi, in which Villaggio-Fantozzi is psychoanalysed by Fausto Antonini (1932-1996), a professor of philosophical anthropology at La Sapienza University and psychoanalyst, who said:

“Paolo Villaggio’s principal deep psychological issue is his struggle against something that overpowers him and passivises him. Fantozzi’s, and Villaggio’s, success stems from his having rebelled against this passivisation, which, in reality, is a problem we all have. It is an expression of the sadomasochism – that is, being passivised or passivising others – described by Fascist or sadomasochist theory: being kicked by those above and kicking those below. VillaggioFantozzi tackles this problem with irony, but he makes use of irony to defend himself from having to recognise the problem that weighs upon him. The problem of passivisation is a universal problem. There is the grand human tragedy – death, ending, destruction, passivisation – and the tragedy on a smaller scale of the employee who is passive to an authority that oppresses him in an irrational, not functional, way.”

Perhaps psychoanalysis is a powerful killjoy; perhaps by explaining it, the analyst kills the joke. A book that casts light on jokes is Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), but nowadays Freud is no longer fashionable, even though I can’t figure out why. I mean, he was fixated on sex, made liberal use of cocaine, and, in his quest to analyse manifestations of quirkiness in his patients, applied the Greek myth of a son who killed his father and married his mother. Why such a thinker should fall out of favour in our ultra-liberal times beats me.