Paolo Volponi explains the restlessness of factory work

It is difficult to think that the transition from the civilisation of the earth to the civilisation of machines, which took place in Italy between the 1940s and 1960s, did not provoke backlash in those who experienced it or a sort of unease, a sense of disorientation. Beyond the covers of the magazines that portrayed a population happy to run around riding Vespas or driving utilitarian cars, beyond the black and white photographs of a nation that had finally democratically arrived at the goal of well-being, there must have been a price to pay in the name of that feeling of loss that mistakenly took on the hues of nostalgia and instead manifested the signs of a malaise unknown to most: the ancient ache of living that had originated with the 20th century and then, with the expansion of industrialisation, took on the name of alienation (or loneliness).

This is the starting point for Paolo Volponi's Memoriale, the most restless and problematic of the novels inspired by factory work, a real must for those who want to understand what the irreversible farewell to the pre-modern world, to what was sacred and liturgical about it, was, without this detachment necessarily being tinged with Pasolinian and anti-modern streaks. Albino Saluggia, the protagonist, is a former peasant who has returned from captivity in Germany and is employed by a mechanical engineering company located in the Canavese region, north of Piedmont: a beautiful factory - he confesses with almost boyish enthusiasm - as big as a church or a courthouse, under which Olivetti of Ivrea is hidden without ever being mentioned. This introverted and mumbling man deeply feels the bond with his roots, but knows that he cannot go back because modernity, once it has conquered its space, cannot be erased. Mixed feelings animate his days: on the one hand confidence and expectation, on the other worry and anxiety. However, as soon as he realises that, in contact with machines, his sense of time is lost, the changing of the seasons no longer influences the rhythm of his work as before, because his work is marked by an artificial order, a regret for everything that has been lost - voices, smells, sounds, tastes - begins to grow in him, to the point of developing a feeling of incomprehension and hostility.

The adventure of modernity, in Saluggia's eyes, turns into an ambiguous misunderstanding. Not only does the process of integration with the role assigned to him by the factory struggle to take place, but the suspicion of a hostile environment grows, of which, from a certain point onwards, he cannot help but feel like the predestined victim, the scapegoat to be sacrificed on the altar of the new religion that is mass production. "The factory with all its organisation had set itself in motion against me" will confess at a certain point this doubtful narrating ego, sensing that his destiny will have to be inscribed in the typology of a via crucis rewritten with the rules of progress. "I was betrayed and handed over to the guards," we read when he presents himself before the doctors in the sanatorium. "Then I am condemned. It was enough for one of the twelve to betray".

In the eyes of the reader, the choice of a title so strongly steeped in religious matrices is clarified once and for all: memorial, in fact, comes from a liturgical context, expressing something solemn and archaic like the memory of a civilisation in decline. Instead of becoming the interpreter and singer of progress, Saluggia shows how fragile his certainties are as a man poised between countryside and factory, so much so that he will be forced to convince himself, as time goes by, that he has ended up in a prison, in a lager, a place of torture. Fortunately, this is not the only image of the factory. Alongside the dissent towards the new, there continues to be an approach that, under the veneer of naivety, contains a sapiential key that will make him say: 'The machine screeched softly and leaked an oil, a milk, into a basin, and it seemed to be suffering like a wounded animal. Apart from man, the machine also suffers pain. But if the devices of the assembly line whine like suffering animals, then we must consider them not only in their cold condition as tools born to replace the work of workers, but instruments to which the process of humanisation is not extraneous, something not perfect, subject to the laws of wear and tear. They are like us, Saluggia seems to want to point out: they get tired, they get sleepy, they eventually grow old and die.

A strange elegy arises from the gaze of this character when he stops to contemplate the factory during the night hours, while all is silent, and it is a sign that something archaic still resists the march of progress, that a wind of hope is blowing on the destiny of a humanity that will not be able to do without industry and, even if the outcomes lead to the expulsion of Saluggia to avoid the damage that its presence would cause to the productive reality, it will be necessary to at least preserve the memory of what there was before the factory, in yesterday's time, the oldest time ever, whose end - Charles Péguy once said - was the most important event in history after the birth of Christ.