Taking Stock: On Ferdinando Camon

In “crying out in his vindictive disarray, proclaiming that he has been, if not wayward, at least unassimilable,” Ferdinando Camon has given writers like Patrick Autréaux some hope for finding a “cure for the human disease.” Here, Autréaux traces some of those inoculants.

For a long time, all I knew of Ferdinando Camon (b. 1935) was La malattia chiamata uomo (1981; Eng. The Sickness Called Man, 1992), an account of his psychoanalysis—or rather, of several experiences of analysis, alone and in groups, which had him shuffling back and forth between Rome, Venice, and Padua, where he lived. The book appeared during an era when psychoanalysis was a powerful institution, another Church with its own schools and heretics. When the consultations began, the man had recently lost his mother and was soon to lose both his brother and father. Things were going badly for him. He was suffering from nosebleeds, reeling between his wife and children. From those wrenching personal circumstances, Camon drew a kind of polyptych. In it, we follow a chronicler from the plains of Po who has been marked by the fascism of his youth, by the Nazis’ abuses, and by the loss of a farming culture that had previously seemed eternal; an itinerant investigator of an Italy that was going from bad to worse in the final years of the 1960s. 

When I discovered the text, a generation after its publication, my grandfather had just died. I was suffering to an inexplicable extent and was thinking about taking a consultation. A friend suggested the book, remembering the humor. I annotated it extensively and carried traces of it, but—either due to negligence or not having the bandwidth—I abandoned Camon on my bookshelf and began psychoanalysis. It was not the circus of drole situations described in La malattia chiamata uomo that led me to that adventure but, instead, perhaps, the book’s title that did it, rekindling a phrase I often think about: Man is a sickness, and there is no cure for the human disease. Did I recognize this incurable illness—man himself, that intruder, as another great invalid and philosopher would later say? Is that what had derailed me? A profound, unanticipated storm had burst with the death of my grandfather. His living corpse loomed in my nightmares. Was it simply a terror of oblivion that had suddenly yawned open with his death? 

Perhaps the book’s title did it, rekindling a phrase I often think about: Man is a sickness, and there is no cure for the human disease.

A few years passed. The inner turmoil had been eased on the couch. I had written an autobiographical cycle on my illness. My analysis was fraying; I interrupted it. I had felt it necessary to retrace my progress in writing, which had led to the genesis of my first stories. I therefore reread a number of texts that had meant a lot to me. 

It was the conversations Camon had had with Primo Levi that took me back to him. I discovered how the experiences of a partisan Jew (a second-rate fighter, Levi himself said), arrested by the militia and deported to Auschwitz, might find an echo in Camon’s memories of childhood. An intimate bond was forged between the two men, around a scene that inspired me to undertake an exploration of Camon’s oeuvre. 

In the last chapters of La malattia, Camon outlines the sense of shock he felt witnessing the execution of a partisan for the first time in the flesh. It wasn’t a swaggering hero who was taken from the truck and put up against the wall, but an already dead man who had been condemned, for whom no escape was left. He was like the heroes of the Iliad, as described by Simone Weil—man become object, without even the interiority that Blanchot had granted the young man “prevented from dying by death itself” in L’Instant de ma mort.[i] This vanquished thing seemed to have made a violent impression on Camon—to the point of erasing within him, he wrote, what was most terrifying: “that vision, that man who died like a heap of rags, without complaint, without reaction, without flinching.”

Those rediscovered words revived the terror that seized me when I was diagnosed with a cancer  thought incurable. I was young, like the partisans. Labeled gravely ill—which is to say an object under care, and often treated only as an object—I was rendered abruptly ageless. All throughout the course of my illness of uncertain origin, a terrifying will arose in me. Whatever happened, I wanted to die living and, for as long as possible, live with the lucidity of what was occurring. Obviously, I wasn’t subjected to persecution. But the desire that kept me on my feet had brought on a tide of words and awoken the demand for what Shalamov called a “new prose.” He, who had overcome personal catastrophe and sought fraternal support in the experiences of others, no matter how much they differed, was demanding of me that I become who I am. I could no longer read anything other than what was offered by those who wrote with their own blood. 

I could no longer read anything other than what was offered by those who wrote with their own blood. 

In rereading Camon, it seemed to me that such a shudder had pumped blood into his writing. I thus discovered his main works chronologically, above all his “cycle of the lowliest,” first published in the 1970s and completed in the mid-1990s with Mai visti sole e luna. In an afterword, he wrote that the book was dedicated to an ancestral peasantry, pre-electricity, pre-television, being “added as a definitive epilogue in order to relate the impossibility of justice, forgetting even its flaws. That world is dead, it was killed and has been buried. Denunciations, accusations, and trials in its name have been rendered impossible. We may never speak of it again.” He had defined that world, the one in which he had grown up, as one of paleo-Catholicism, the final relics of a rural civilization.

As the anthropologist Daniel Fabre has remarked, Camon was witness to “an unresolved crisis, a hiatus in history that saw his people pass from years of silence to a cry that was quickly stifled before death.” But with him there is no fluttering nostalgia for a better or healthier society, only the intention of defending a tradition. He confined himself to chronicling a world whose bearers were dead or forgotten—and with them their beliefs and rites, language and dialect. The background of his books is the utter extinction of a sonorous land—human and animal noises, a language growing scarce and then dying. His background was a silence in which the traces of an irredeemable loss, like a troubling taste, were left to discreetly vibrate. 

Unlike other authors who had written about the transition from one social class to another, what Camon discerns in his “cycle of the lowliest” seems to evoke more of an anthropological exile than one of class. And I cannot read certain sentences, almost elegies, without thinking of an essay by Theodora Kroeber, Ishi, on the so-called archive-man, the last wild American Indian. 

Camon’s 1980s texts, his conjugal novel Il Super-Baby and his work on Italy during the Biennio Rosso, Occidente, stem from this rupture, with La malattia chiamata uomo, perhaps, forming a bridge between the lost world and the personal, historical, and anthropological consequences of its mutation.

If his plains cycle struck me, it was not because I saw in it the lost world of my childhood but rather the world of the stories told by my grandfather and the old, provincial peasants around whom I had grown up. They had also experienced the war and were keeping their roots alive, though they had already been uprooted. They had always seemed like walking, human trees. However, between my first encounter with Camon and my discovery of his works, I had also become a writer. In paying closer attention to a remark that concludes one of his books—“strange, he wrote, that we still continue to ask ‘why’ we write. We should also be asking ourselves ‘against whom?’”—I was surprised not to feel an urgent need to bear witness to that lost world. No doubt it had already become stories in the mouths of those who raised me. I could give a voice to the storytellers of my childhood. And what would I have written, if not a tale of the tale of a loss, according to the rabbinic parable evoked by Agamben in The Fire and the Tale: “Each tale—all of literature—is, in this sense, a memory of the loss of the fire.”[ii]

And what would I have written, if not a tale of the tale of a loss.

Something else had moved me however, another fire perhaps, those words that I had heard innumerable times throughout my medical practice: inner experience, that oft-neglected thing we go through with every illness. What had overwhelmed me—me, the invalid; me, the doctor; me, the sickly child—was the violence that turns you into an object or wet blanket. I thus recognized, in Camon’s retelling of the partisan’s execution, not a desire to write against the murderer or to render justice, not to avenge myself or someone else, but to provide a structure for those at risk of losing their backbone when confronted by death. It was that standing man I wanted to write, and in doing so to transmit the power that exists within the condemned to live right to the bitter end. 

Several stories later, I have, in part, achieved that.

One day during my revisiting of his works, I came across these words from Camon. When faced with an umpteenth “Why do you write?”, he answered: “Ever since, I’ve thought of writing as an ‘instrument of power,’ and I’ve always dreamed of passing to the other side, of seizing writing, but to use it in favor of those who know nothing of it to extract vengeance for them. But they never really wanted revenge, and, as a result, they never felt represented by me. And those who were looking for revenge considered me—and justly so—an enemy. Consequently, I was isolated; I hadn’t managed to bond with anyone. Everywhere I went I was an unknown, an outcast, unacceptable: family, country, the literary world, that of the Church, the Communist Party, psychoanalysis.” There is something dizzying and perhaps prideful in this response; there is also something desperate in his perspective. One could believe that this text is the result of a man and a character—of an era, maybe—but beneath the singularities of the author, something like fatality emerges, which is to say the results of psychological and sociological laws are forming a knot that coils around their victim’s name. 

Those words detonated a wave of violent anger in me as well as a keen sympathy for Camon. Pushing open the doors of the literary milieu had been difficult for me, and the illusion of freedom that had come with my first books was quickly stamped out. I felt that I, like Camon, had been caught in a pincer, conscious and involuntarily. Since childhood, I have always struggled when slotting into hierarchies, and though I may have always seemed docile, I have always found ways to escape. I have held to the imperatives and inevitabilities that we are always complaining about. I have not wanted to climb the social ladder, though everything seems to encourage it. I have vertigo and—like all those who suffer from it—can’t bear endless heights. No, I don’t want to climb; I want to fly. Becoming a writer was the best way, as far as I could tell. Very quickly, however, the literary world caught up to me, its logic and preoccupations turning me away from something in which I once had profound faith. As Deleuze puts it: “To write is also to become something other than a writer.”[iii] And what can we become through the power of writing, if not one of the obstinate who endeavor to escape social injunctions in whatever way they can? A mystic, maybe. An outsider, surely. If that’s not why one seeks to become a man of letters, then what’s the point?

Camon’s words bear witness to the tendency for those intransigents to exceed the garments in which they have been decked, whether suits or cassocks. Those words came from someone who, despite gaining recognition, seems to have resisted institutionalization—an unyielding writer. Because of that, I have felt him at work within me. Sharply, sorrowfully. Neither as a pose nor a failure, but as a kind of immiscibility. Everywhere I have been, I was—or was put—to one side: medicine, psychoanalysis, university, letters. I have partaken in this fatality myself, without wanting to—and sometimes wanting the opposite, seeking out community. I don’t want to say, like he did, that I have actively been suppressed. Of course it was more subtle, a process of eviction that pushes one into isolation despite oneself. And if the dominant caste has established a respectable category for its class exiles, rare are those who have chosen it in order to serve others—whomever they defend—more so than to change their own lives.

Camon’s words bear witness to the tendency for those intransigent to exceed the garments in which they have been decked, whether suits or cassocks.

Camon has never really benefited from the advantages of this reassuring knighting. He cries out in his vindictive disarray, proclaiming that he has been, if not wayward, at least unassimilable. And his anger perhaps affirms the resistance of a lost memory—one of the motors of his writing: that force which ghosts breathe into life before they disappear, unquestionably making it impossible to assimilate. 

Camon has invited me to accept the discomforting surge that mistreated me, that reaction against the prevailing powers which often hampered me. This opposition has not only been metaphorical—such as I experienced when ill, then in convalescence—but real and set against the social Moloch that insidiously transforms those who submit to its rules into powerless rags, guns ceaselessly trained on them. 

And that anger can’t but maintain the fire of what had unconsciously pushed me and pushes me still: to write, and in doing so, to shatter the moorings of all docility. 

Translation from the French