Allied Encounters by Escolar Marisa;

Author:Escolar, Marisa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 12. Captain Malaparte’s sleight of hand is stripped of its racial connotations and metatextual symbolism in Liliana Cavani’s 1981 film.

However, the episode also works on a further level as it cordons off the ignorant French officers from those in the know (the reader and Jack). After they leave the group, Jack applauds Captain Malaparte’s artistry, in a marked departure from previous scenes: Whereas no one in “General Cork’s Banquet” determines whether the meal is a fish or a girl, in “The Flag,” Malaparte congratulates himself: “Did you see how skillfully I arranged those little ram’s bones on my plate? They looked just like the bones of a hand!”99 Abandoning the ambivalence that characterizes so many episodes, the novel affirms the officers’ inability to distinguish; after all, they take animal for human bones, an artist for a cannibal. More than transforming Guillaume into a sultan, La pelle depicts him as the most banal of colonialists—and the least reliable of witnesses. Showing how racist beliefs color interpretation, the severed hand helps reframe the ubiquitous stories in soldiers’ memoirs about the goumiers’ penchant for dismembering enemies and friends: extracting gold teeth, castrating, severing limbs and heads, and selling jars of brandy-pickled fingers.100

However, for those who take their cue from Jack, the potential for reading this episode as a critique has been dampened. For instance, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti parses it into a “joke,” a metaphor of the horrors of war, and a metatextual meditation about truth and literature, his concerns about the hand of the artist surpassing his interest in the goumier’s.101 Similarly, Raffaele La Capria denounces Malaparte’s “art of the prestidigitator,” and Emilio Cecchi criticizes his “profane hands.”102 Tahar Ben Jelloun is a rare scholar who takes Malaparte’s representation of the goumier seriously, yet he, too, uses similar rhetoric: as he laments Malaparte’s racist representation, notes that “he forced his hand, as one does in literature.”103 Here, the rhetorical overlap points to a shared blind spot in these opposite approaches. Unmistakably, the depiction of the hypersexual goumier is racist. Unquestionably, the episode is metaliterary. Yet it is in the tension produced by their superimposition that the episode’s power lies. Captain Malaparte’s literary authority depends upon constructing the non-Western other out of animal bones, and yet, as he gloats about his artistry, he signals its fictionality. Might, then, it not suggest we read with suspicion the other black fingers and figures, within the pages of La pelle and beyond?

As La pelle stages an act of misreading on the part of the colonial masters and undermines their myths, it takes a distance from the cultural representations of the goumier I survey above. Insisting on the ambivalence of the Allied-Italian encounter, it opens the door to a reading of the goumier that problematizes his intertwined roles as rapist and symbol of absolute depravity. At the same time, “The Flag” points to the novel’s other black finger as it suggests that, if all conquerors are men of “color” and conquest is figured as penetration, the belief

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