“Writers are a small tribe of a larger village in which there is what we call culture. The first instinct of politics is to somehow control it, direct it, mark it and gratify it with its presence. Every attempt to control this village is stupid. The thing to really do is to defend the village so that it survives, even its inabilities, because it is a precious village.” The Turin writer Alessandro Baricco said this during the panel ‘Between literature and civil commitment’, which saw him as the protagonist on the third day of the Buchmesse in Frankfurt, on the stage of the Piazza Italiana created by the Stefano Boeri Interiors studio. The meeting, introduced by the welcome address of the Extraordinary Commissioner for the participation of Italy as Guest of Honour, Mauro Mazza, had a large audience participation.
“The pair of literature and civil commitment often clashes and in the many years that I have spent writing books, it has periodically presented itself as an open theme. It is a relationship between the gesture of making literature and the gesture of correcting wounds – words by Baricco – The gesture of literature and the gesture of civil commitment are so distant, they have a different posture. The most usual situation that I seem to experience is that in which the gesture of civil commitment is forced onto literature as it would be absurd. the opposite. When we reduce this distance too much, we lose, we redesign the relationship between literature and civil commitment”, he says.
‘Any attempt to intimidate, censor or persecute literature must never happen’
The writer is keen to underline the importance of defending literature. “Any attempt to intimidate, censor or persecute literature must never pass. Literature cannot be touched, by defending it you save your strength and your community. However, we must be careful to understand that the books are not the writers – he specifies – I have always I thought that in the end you can choose to engage in a single story of civil commitment, but that’s a game in which literature can’t shield you much.”
Then a comment on the influence of events on the fate of a writer: “Some writers are very aligned with power, just as some writers acquire visibility to go against power. It has always bothered me because there is a form of doping behind it. I understand that our world is doped. Power is an accelerator. We all dance in this dance of ascending currents, but there is a way. We produce beauty, we cannot kill the sensitivity we have, we must never lose it. I don’t want to forget what beauty, measure and elegance are”, his thoughts.