Il poeta in esilio. Vampirismo e utopia in Furio Jesi

Poetry, vampirism and utopia have been overlapping in Furio Jesi’s production since La casa incantata (1960), a fairytale written when he was nineteen narrating the nocturnal adventures of Daniele, a young child. His inspiration for the story development comes from the itinerary of Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ending with the transformation of the main character into a poet. At the end of the alchemic trial that is poetry, Heinrich has become the romantic Dichter, priest and shaman who embodies the Third Kingdom of the reconciliation of spirit and nature; in the same way, Daniele’s quest ends with the unveiling of a vampiric identity, who gifts him with the understanding of a magical language. By referring to the romantic utopia but at the same time conferring it monstrous features, Jesi displays the implicit danger of the alterity that German Romanticism had tried to gain back for the spirit: myth, subconscious, matter or nature that men hold within themselves as a faraway trace of their lost childhood, whose call they cannot answer – lest they fall in a pit of regressive and monstrous darkness. The uncertainty of poetry, referred to as an initiatory adventure of reason, oscillating between what is demonic and what is utopian, crosses his whole production of the Sixties and the comparison with Mann, Pavese, Jung and Kerényi, and reaches its apex in the posthumous novel L’ultima notte, where the poetic initiation turns into a relentless war between vampires and humans, metaphor of the impossibility of reuniting the opposites – life and death, past and present – in a harmonious synthesis that is not also contradiction and conflict. After Jesi's discovery of Gershom Scholem and Jewish mysticism, the rift between men and their origin becomes the exile afflicting a world that God created erasing himself, opening up in its being the fatal wound of his remoteness. The possibility of keeping the conscience together with the abyss becomes a matter of divine justice, because only if the poet takes upon himself the split, then will the latter concern the creation, and not God, and will the shadow be sin and absence and not substance. The curse that condemns the vampire to eternally wander is the curse of a humanity that obliterates what is evil by taking upon themselves the guilt of the reason, of losing an Eden which is symbol of eternity and of a fullness of life and knowledge opposed to the profane history and reason. The contradiction between sacred and profane, between time and the eternal, brands the vampires that – albeit incognito – Jesi’s written production of the Seventies: Mann and Rilke, as well as Pascal, Kierkegaard and Rousseau and who, with them, spreads among men the utopia of an elsewhere in the only way it is possible to do so, that is by teaching them its nostalgia. Unresolved and unsettled, this contradiction is enlightened in the last essays: in an extreme – and not naïve no more – rewriting of the romantic Third Kingdom, the damned becomes the chosen, and behind the monster torn between two worlds we can finally see the Mercurius duplex, the philosopher’s stone.