[New readers demand new forms - and if the Italian writer Tosca Calbirro has anything to offer, one can at least expect attention to form. In his hands the book is a dated medium. The future of the printed word lies elsewhere, as Jinpes Terenk reveals...]
As has been recently revealed by a diarrhoeic spew of critical studies, the utilization of lavatorial substance and imagery in modern culture has a rich, if not pungent, history. Marcel Duchamp is the figure that rises, like the abominable turd, to the surface of most people’s minds, but there are others, sadly flushed from our memories. One of these is Curzio Calbirro, an Italian immigrant painter who lived in Paris at the same time as Duchamp and who quaintly readdressed the gap left by the French prankster’s 1917 artwork Fountain. As Duchamp brought the toilet into the gallery, so Calbirro brought the gallery into the toilet – his parent’s downstairs toilet, to be precise, where (in conjunction with the ‘Petit Garcons Chambre pour l’art’), he held frequent, albeit small exhibitions. Visitors to these exhibitions were invited – expected even – to use the toilet as they viewed the paintings in the room. According to Calbirro this was ‘the only real way to view art’. Many people agreed with him, finding the experience extremely rewarding, whilst others were less impressed, thanks in no small part to the so-called ‘floater man’ who arrived early every morning to view the paintings, never failing to leave behind a rather horrible smell, which even the strongest detergents could not irradiate (there have been claims that this was none other than Duchamp himself). Unfortunately Calbirro’s fragrant enterprise never got off the ground. And so, as Duchamp came to be credited with the changing the course of art history, Calbirro was merely fined by the French authorities for the ‘unlawful use of a lavatory’, an insult which he never quite overcame (let alone understood). Indeed, it wasn’t until around seventy years later that Corzio Calbirro’s name and work resurfaced at last (though the man had long since died) when his grandson, the Italian novelist Tosca Calbirro, choose to honour the memory of his grandfather by returning to the subject of lavatorially inspired artwork, with the first of what was to be a whole series of novels printed in loo-roll form – the best of which is undoubtedly 1998’s Under An Unquiet Sun (available from most good Italian supermarkets).
There is a lot of jabber these days about ‘serialisation’. The disembodied voices of the press increasingly hearken back to the Victorian era, in which many novels were published in serial form, painting a picture of desperate and crazed readers queuing up to get their grubby hands on a copy on the next portion of prose, as if it were a precious hunk of bread. Those days, of course, have gone: these days the reader is rarely crazed: he or she is a calm creature, a gentle beast that doth step lightly into air conditioned bookshops and plucks entire novels from the shelves like plump apples from public orchards. There is no rush to read the work, no worry over cliff-hangers; the whole plot is contained within a single package. For this reason, some have argued, novelists have become lazy. Tight plots have been discarded: diversions are frequent; emotions restrained, plots devoid of devices designed to keep the reader hooked. We are not fish, after all. We read when we want to, in indeterminable chunks. There is no rigid order to anything, thank god, no collective experience: all of that has been taken away from us by other mediums, most especially television. Reading belongs once again to the lonely.
Why do I tell you this? I tell you this because I sense that the way in which Tosca Calbirro’s novels are read (and, indeed, written) goes some way to reminding us of these ancient days, if not because they have been serialised – for they haven’t – then for the fact that they are read whilst surrounded by the smell of shit (it is after all well known that the only real difference between the modern and the ancient world it is that nowadays the delicate scent of human waste is largely enjoyed in a lavatory alone). All the same, Calbirro’s loo-roll novels are in some ways designed to be read in chunks; though the size of these chunks seems to be very much up to the reader, even if the author has made attempts to create a template that will suit the majority (based, it so happens, on very interesting market research revealing the average time that a literary-mined human being will spend on the toilet and how many pages they are likely to be able to read during that time).
Of course, there are some people – philistines, all of them – who do not choose to follow Calbirro’s formative directive, which is to say, they either do not take his novels into the lavatory area in the first place or, if they do, they do not allow their reading time to be restricted to the period of excretion. Having finished discharging their waste, they move onto the next page, unravelling the roll to a position which will not be satisfied by the apposite function. At the very worst, I have heard of people who still own Calbirro novels that they have read. This is really quite distasteful. If one is really to read Under An Unquiet Son, one is also to destroy it as one reads it, so that when one is finished, the book will be no more. If one wishes to read it again, one must buy it again. Such are the high-class demands of disposable literature.
There are some people who will not stand for this expense. But surely they are forgetting that though you lose the price of a Calbirro novel by reading it, you gain the price of a full toilet roll, which the novel doubles up as. This is for me one of the most intriguing aspects of Calbirro’s project. There is a certain lyrical beauty to the corporeal practicality of his invention. As you sit upon the lavatory trying to liberate the stubborn coprolith within your posterior, you unroll the pages of a Calbirro novel in your hands. When the offending article has at last left your body, you stop reading, tear off the roll at the place where you finished and use the pages you have just read to clear up the mess down under. Bearing in mind the speed in which you have read and the various complications that may or may not be surrounding that day’s defecation, you will no doubt still find that the amount of loo paper you are left with is almost always exactly the right amount for the job. This is one of the incredible quirks of Calbirro’s writing: an achievement that is best praised without further investigation. I ought also to add at this point, to the benefit of those who are interested in such details that the quality of the paper on which these novels are printed is in no way detrimental to the epidermic health of the buttocks, nor have there been any cases in which the print has rubbed off, leaving the reader with excerpts of Italian prose visible across their backside (though I must admit that the potentiality of such a ‘disaster’ interests me greatly).
Concerning the prose, I have already hinted at how it may have been written to suit the eccentric medium on which it is printed, with respect to the tradition of ‘serialisation’. Unless the reader is cursed with either constipation or diarrhoea, it is fair to say that the time they will have to devote to Under An Unquiet Sun will be consigned to relatively short bursts at generally regular intervals – which is not, in my case at least, the usual way in which novels are consumed. Though lavatory practice differs from person to person, when the speed of reading is added to the mix, it is interesting to note how often Calbirro readers get through the same amount of text a day as each other. For all of these reasons, Under An Unquiet Sun is not a novel that lingers; though it is designed to be read whilst in the process of excreting, it does not imitate this process. Indeed, it moves along at a fair pace, rarely getting stuck in a rut, employing such postmodern devices as it does with consummate ease. If I have not already intimated as such, I ought now to say it outright: this book ought to be prescribed by doctors to release those with defecatory problems – which is, in my opinion, probably the greatest compliment that I (or anyone for that matter) have ever given a book. All of which is to say that Calbirro’s prose loosens the bowels; a day in the toilet with Under An Unquiet Sun is – so I have been informed – not unlike a day at colonic irrigation unit.
It is too late in this review to begin to bore you with plotlines and the like. Let me simply fire off a series of abstract compliments which, considering the fact that I cannot refer to a copy of the book (I have owned six copies, the last of one I finished flushing down the lavatory this time last week) suits me much better. You must also consider that, were I to quote any lines from the work, I would in some way be contravening the unwritten rules of the novel that state that it must be read only by people sitting on the toilet (which I somehow doubt that you, the reader, presently are). As for the abstract compliments: Under An Unquiet Sun is calmly comforting, captivating, devastating, allegorical, Parnassian, ingenious, highly unnerving, expressionist, delirious, salubrious, soothing, beguiling, benumbing, Arcadian, grotesque and really rather funny. Of course, all of these adjectives have been connected with a novel before: they are coughed up weekly like so many germs in the pages of our country’s worst and even worse literary journals. I ought to have desisted from employing them, but I fear that otherwise I might be tempted to overemphasize the less inviting yet no less important aspects of Calbirro’s work. We academics are, of course, far too studious and intellectual to be embarrassed by a excess of references to coarse bodily functions – but we must appreciate that other, more tender souls, might be distracted by my constant recourse to the subject of defecation. In this spirit, I ought to remind the reader that Under An Unquiet Sun is not in itself a coarse novel. Though the author is keen to remind readers of its relationship to the lavatorial process in the first pages, he steers clear of the dung pile in all of those that follow. Primarily his book exists to help us better spend our time on the toilet; not by drawing attention to what is going on below the waist, but by taking us into a different world altogether, albeit one that must be closed to us once sub-waist activities have ceased.
Let me now offer a word or two to Calbirro’s critics who, typically, have dismissed novels such as Under An Unquiet Sun as ‘gimmicky’. I must say that I have very little time for their complaints. To argue that these novels would not be valued were they not printed on toilet paper seems to me to be opening up a recklessly futile debate: to be placing a bare foot right into the centre of the proverbial pile of dog poo. I do not doubt that Under An Unquiet Sun would lose much of its gravity if printed like a regular novel, but this is because it has not been written like a regular novel. Calbirro is not a novelist in the universal sense: he belongs to a sub-species, a group that have moulded the novel into a new form and worked successfully within that form. The fact that the tricks that work in one form do not work so well in another is both obvious and meaningless. The only manner in which to criticise Calbirro therefore is to treat him on his own terms. Unfortunately, these sad critics are too busy trying to remove their heads from between their buttocks to find time to utilize that part of the body for its usual task. Were they to do so, and read Calbirro’s work properly, they would no doubt change their tune.
Let me conclude. It is not often one credits a novelist with changing the experience of going to the toilet, but then it is not often that you come across a novelist such as Tosca Calbirro. If only he were to gain a larger readership, his approach to modern literature might well shake up the whole system in the way that Duchamps’s urinal did almost ninety years ago. And since we are on that subject, we must remember that some of this ‘credit’ must go to Calbirro’s late grandfather, the pioneering Curzio Calbirro, the man who first realised the true potential of the toilet as a space for cultural exchange. The same newspapers that mumble on about serialisation and the like are similarly fond of calling time on time: arguing that there is simply not enough of it. They are possibly right, in which case it is comforting to reflect that however little time we have we shall always have to give ourselves a little toilet time. And so long as Under An Unquiet Sun hangs on the loo-roll holder, rest assured that this will be time very well spent.
Review by Jinpes Terenk
Further Reading:
Calbirro followed Under An Unquiet Sun (one of four ‘loo-roll novels’) with at least three novels printed on various types of curtain and, most recently, a dress (for more on the latter, see here and here).
