A CARNIVALESQUE FUNERAL: MARIO AZZOPARDI’S MOST RECENT WORK

In hallucinations involving a grotesque sexuality, mental instability and intimations of death, once again Mario Azzopardi produces a disturbing anthology where ugliness is counterbalanced by eroticism as IMMANUEL MIFSUD asserts.

Azzopardi, Mario (2010), Skizzi tal-Karnival, Malta, Horizons.

It is said that Gustav Klimt painted Hoffnung I soon after the death of his son Otto when he was just a few months old, most probably in 1903 (Partsch 199: 66).

A pregnant and nude woman with auburn hair set with colourful flowers gazes directly at the viewers. She is offset by a background teeming with bizarre figures that instil a sense of horror. Of particular significance is a skull with a gaping jaw seemingly intent on giving the woman the fatal bite.

Klimt (like Egon Schiele) is synonymous with the manner in which he eroticizes the female form by means of suggestive poses (such as masturbating young girls) as well as the use of both light and gold to evoke a shimmery glitziness in many of his paintings.

Similar to other works, Hoffnung I reaches beyond the eroticisation of the female form in that it proposes the time-old dichotomy between beauty and ugliness, the horrible and the sublime, eros and thanatos.

A detail from this painting is depicted on the cover of Skizzi tal-Karnival (Carnival Sketches), Mario Azzopardi’s most recent work. Like many other artists’ work, from its earliest phases Mario Azzopardi’s poetry has also explored this dichotomy.

Azzopardi’s writing constantly seeks to catalogue imperfect bodies susceptible to terminal illnesses (cancer, heart disease), distorted in pain, moribund, monstrous, as well as spent.

The nastiness of illness however is counterpointed with images of alluring women and descriptions of erotic figures and sexual acts. Clinic Blues (1972) offers a typical example of the fusion of the horrid with the sublime: a young man is attracted to a woman of indeterminate age whose husband is dying of cancer and decides to seduce her. The woman, of pale complexion but still erotically curious, responds to the young man’s advances with a steely display of will – she will only submit when her husband dies.

This is only one poem out of the many Azzopardi has written embedded in a medical context, if not a terminal one, where death and desire come together, an encounter which Georges Bataille’s work is renowned for, particularly L’Erotisme ou la muse en question de l’être and the novels Histoire de l’Oeil and Le Bleu du Ciel.

However Skizzi tal-Karnival deviates markedly from this stance because these ‘prose poems’ present ugliness almost totally denuded of the multifarious forms of beauty. Azzopardi’s latest work focuses on different forms of ugliness, thus denying readers glimpses of the beauty earlier collections sought to represent.

L-Ittra ta’ Svieta (Svieta’s Letter) contrasts sharply with Clinic Blues. Here Svieta discloses her erotic desire for the author who, in turn, remains coolly detached as he is taken up with other matters:

Bqajt ma ħaristx lejja u jien ħsibtek stramb u mingħajr istinti, imma issa naf li għandek ħwejjeġ gravi fuq moħħok, ħwejjeġ aktar essenzjali min-nudita’ dekadenti tiegħi.

You refrained from looking at me and I thought you were weird and lacking in instinctive responses. However, now, I know that your mind is taken up with grave matters, issues that are far more crucial than my decadent nudity.

The ’grave matters’ Svieta takes note of are intimately bound to the terminality of life; to the crude reality that not only the poet’s body but also that of the people around him are traversing a natural course towards finality.

Skizzi tal-Karnival is replete with these ’grave matters’, it abounds with the poet’s preoccupations about how his friends and acquaintances are dying off one by one. Miriana’s father (Komunikat lil Oskar dwar l-eks Martu / A Communique to Oscar about his Ex-wife) is fatally afflicted with lung cancer contracted while working as a nuclear researcher; Angele’s mother (L-Ittra dwar Angele / The Letter about Angele) also dies of cancer; the man sitting on a bench together with his wife (Raġel u Mara fuq Bank / A Man and a Woman on a Bench) is suffering from prostate cancer while his wife is losing her eyesight; The Loser (Rendevous) has had a testicle removed because an „aggressive tumour” had assailed it; the residents at the Virgo Fidelis care home (Sala numru M-K 13 / Ward Number M-K 13) have all reached the end of life and are suffering from various ailments.

There are characters who still seem to have it in them to resist the scythe’s mow but the way there are depicted induces a sense of pity rather than soliciting admiration precisely because their resistance is pathetically staged.

Szuszanna Szirtes is one of these characters: she’s grown old and can’t live independently anymore. Someone is encouraging her to downgrade to a one-storey residence as it will be more comfortable for her. Szirtes echoes the elderly nude woman with shrivelled breasts leaning on a walking stick in Andres Serrano’s photograph entitled Budapest. Devoid of make-up and smoking a cigarette, Serrano’s old woman is posed as a seductive model.

If anything, Serrano’s photograph highlights the woman’s pathetic state whose physical repulsiveness is juxtaposed against the conventional posing models are asked to adopt. This only delineates her grotesqueness, pathos and absurdity.

Szusanna Szirtes, like Serrano’s elderly model „għadha tipprova tiżbogħ difrejha ħomor skuri, anki jekk għaddietha puplesija u sammritilha drigħ wieħed, u anki jekk is-swaba’ ta’ saqajha bdew jikħalu biz-zokkor.” (is still trying to paint her nails a dark red, even if she’s suffered a stroke that paralyzed one arm, and even if her toes are turning blue ’cos of diabetes.)

The sight of this elderly and ailing body, with nails painted red is definitely unalluring and only elicits disgust; repugnance rather than enticement constitutes the overall effect.

In Skizzi tal-Karnival erotic elements do not act as a counterweight to ugliness as earlier poems, such as Clinic Blues, manifestly show. Rather, they have the opposite effect: they intensify the hideousness. This characterstic can also be observed in another similarly pathetic character – that of Santer del Fiore (L-Ittra dwar Santer del Fiore / The letter about Santer del Fiore) who is confined to a solitary cell in the St. Dismas Sanatorium and is suffering from an obsession with sex.

This character’s libidinal energy does not originate with the human instict for beauty, life and procreation but is a direct consequence of mental illness.

What is more, the energy that consumes him is „abnormal” as it is nuanced by a variety of fetishes and sexual aberrations, such as masochism and a fetish with disabled bodies.

In a similar prose poem, K., another man in solitary confinement, (Skizzi tal-Karnival/ Carnival Sketches) writes messages to a woman called Roxana; messages awash with grotesque sexual images that hark back to Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin’s study on the carnivalesque and the grotesque.

Sexuality assumes grotesque forms, such as the image of a man with a cucumber visible from the fly of his trousers having sex with a hunchbacked woman, who then murders her at the moment of orgasm. Or Roxana, dressed as a dominatrix „b’sider falz imqabbeż u mikxuf.” (with false breasts, pert and exposed).

This grotesque eroticism completely negates the sublime quality of the eroticism in Azzopardi’s early poetry, even if the grotesque has never been absent from his work.

When one considers that these images are connected to or projected by ill people, moribund or overcome with madness, as they are, the reaction they elicit is one of perplexilty. This bewilderment surfaces in the prose poem Komunikat lil Oskar dwar l-Eks-Martu ( A Communique to Oscar about his Ex-wife), where Miriana, a forty-five year old woman, tries to forget her grief at her father’s death and the break-up of her marriage by undergoing vaginal reconstruction to experience more intense orgasms.

Here Marius, the person who is communicating by means of a letter, expresses his disquiet at segueing seemlessly from talk about mourning to a surgically-enhanced vagina.

It seems that Skizzi tal-Karnival follows the long-established tradition in which even ugliness arouses libidinal inquisitiveness. It can be read as a trangression, or even perversity, because normalcy demands that beauty induces pleasure while ugliness incites repugnance.

However, the history of humanity, especially that of sexuality, shows otherwise. This writing has a dislocating and disturbing effect because in all the illnessess and madness that it catalogues; in all the morbid images of the most despicable deaths, there is a flagrant and extravagant eroticism that is totally devoid of the sublime.

The question one is compelled to ask does not seek to understand why a deranged mind and a faulty body comprise a range of erotic images. Rather it tries to establish why an artist feels the need (or is compelled) to air all these aberrations: why do private obsessions so often end up in the public sphere? What effect does this strategy have on the readers?

If Serrano exhibited photographs depicting elderly nude women whose bodies are repulsive, or old people ingulging in oral sex to be captured by the camera, or works ’painted’ with his own blood; if photographers such as Karl Grimes exhibited a series of photographs of dead babies preserved in jars of formaldehyde it comes as no surprise if writers also explore ugliness and parade it.

Like the painter Jenny Saville, who spent countless hours in plastic surgery operating theatres watching bodies being opened up and ’fixed’ so that she could paint them in shocking detail, Mario Azzopardi shuts himself in his cell to observe, unmask and receive information to present it in an unembellished form.

Hence, there are two levels of transgression: that of the characters’ narrative and the poet’s narrative style.

Skizzi tal-Karnival is unsettling because it blurs the boundaries between normalcy and transgression. However this fine line is also fuzzy in everyday life: the pornography inundating the internet knows no limits, in this regard it is similar to the perversity documented in De Sade’s and Bataille’s works.

Statistics bear out the fact that pornographic sites are the most accessed in the virtual world. The plastic reconstruction of breasts, genitals and even faces is advertised in a large number of television documentaries.

The fascination with blood and horror is also evident in tv news bulletins, in the ’play’ factor in computer games, in films. As Elisabeth Roudinesco argues in Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion (Polity, 2009) every historical period had its perversions and transgressions, which date back to the Middle Ages when the concept of perversion was introduced in the West.

Evolving in leaps and bounds in the nineteenth century, the discourse on sexuality, especially that of scientific discourse, led to the classification of transgression which, in time has undergone several modifications. The simple fact that one can discuss a disturbing subject, however, suggests a fascination with subverting accepted norms.

So, even if characters like Santer del Fiore, K., Miriana and Szuszanna Szirtes can elicit pity, their narratives are also interesting: they evoke loathing, compassion, disgust but they also garner attention and pity.

In these characters’ detestable narratives runs a common thread: sexuality and eroticism. This factor leads readers to be attracted when they would normally feel repulsed, and therein lies confusion and dislocation.

The absence of the sublime marks the most obvious difference between this anthology and Azzopardi’s previous ones. But there is another difference that should arouse interest. Skizzi tal-Karnival teems with accidentally found letters, emails and documents in hospital rubbish bins.

News – invariably bad because it concerns mental or fatal illness, and deaths – reaches the poet through another person. One imagines the person who is writing in solitary confinement in front of a computer getting emails or waiting for mail to drop through the post box. What he might wait for the most is a telephone call, which fails to materialise.

Solitude becomes all-encompassing, in that the solitude Szuszanna Szirtes, Miriana and the other characters experience merges with the poet’s, who receives news or gives it through the convention of letter writing. Readers might form the impression of a solitary individual, who although maintains a certain distance is in contact with everybody due to his interest in the other.

On examining these writings one forms the initial impression that the author’s gaze stretches further than the poetic self. The author receives and distributes news about this list of damaged individuals, he enquires after them and replies to whoever might evince an interest in them.

If the poet has written about the sick – especially those who are terminally ill – throughout his poetic journey, this means he has always been interested, that he has been engaged in their narratives. Here, however, his interest takes on a different nuance: the author is also confined, enclosed in a deserted place after he had intentionally distanced himself from others.

Skizzi tal-Karnival endows readers with this insistence, an obsessive one, if you will, of someone who delves into the deepest recesses of individuals who could have lived the most normal life imaginable.

This is the poetry of someone who in the stillness of his room is preoccupied with all that is happening in other rooms, with other people who have lost direction and are also losing their body.

References:

Azzopardi, Mario; Friggieri Joe, Oliver; Mahoney Raymond & Sciberras, Philip (1972) Dwal fil-Persjani, (Lights Through Window Shutters) Malta: Lux Press.

Partsch, Susanna (1999) Gustav Klimt: Painter of Women, Munich: Prestel-Verlag.

Trans: Patricia Gatt