Ottieri's disenchantment with the factory world

Little or nothing is known about Antonio Donnarumma, the protagonist of Ottiero Ottieri's book. From what transpires in the pages, he must be a strong-willed and stubborn young man of humble origins, born between Irpinia and Casertano (that's where the Campania surname comes from), a little clumsy and impetuous in his manners, but determined to solve the problem of unemployment, even if not too willing to convince himself that in the post-World War II period the meaning of the word 'worker' was changing rapidly and that it was necessary to acquire sophisticated skills even for simple manual tasks. On this subject, his temperament gets harder, his voice gets louder and the aggressiveness that is in his character increases. For him, it is all about earning a living through daily toil (he does not say work, he says work, which is a cruder and more primitive expression, fit for a slave not a free man). His goal is to find a comfortable occupation that will prevent him from emigrating to northern Italy, as was the case for so many of his peers, who landed in the Milan or Turin of the economic boom according to the most stereotypical choreography of the cardboard suitcase, and he would not scruple, He would have no qualms, in defiance of all moral qualms, about appealing to some powerful person on duty, a 'big shot' as they say in the South - a politician, a monsignor - in order to obtain special treatment during the job interview that he will have to undergo if he wants to enter the new, futuristic mechanical factory.

Broadly speaking, this is the portrait of the aspiring worker that Ottieri extracts from an anthropological imagery he encountered first-hand, during the months in which he happened to be involved in personnel selection for Olivetti in Pozzuoli. The book takes shape precisely from this experience, but it is not autobiographical and, above all, it soon makes it clear that it has what it takes to become a paradigm in the debate on southern civilisation and technological development. We are in a backward region and in the mid-1950s a visionary entrepreneur like Adriano Olivetti decides to open an elegant factory on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea, destined to produce computing machines. That the entire industrial area was something of an anomaly compared to the panorama of factories scattered almost everywhere in Italy was not difficult to guess. Even before it went into operation, people were already talking about the originality of the project, which bore the signature of Luigi Cosenza, a Neapolitan town planner who was, however, inextricably linked with Milanese rationalism. 'It is not a shed,' Ottieri points out, 'the architect designed one of the most beautiful factories in Europe, colourful, surrounded by a garden; and around it the infirmary, the library, the canteen'.

This description alone would be enough to give this place the name of a paradise where one could earn a place and straighten out a destiny of subordination. Yet it was enough. Something else aroused the attention (and perhaps concern) of the unemployed on the waiting list, and it was not only the surprising presence of a pond between the hedges of the avenues and the maritime pines framing the horizon, but the complexity of the co-optation criteria that are the novel's main subject. In front of the recruiter transits a colourful sampler of young and old with curious names (apart from our Donnarumma, also Dattilo, Chiodo, Accettura), all eager to join the ranks of this factory that was too far ahead of its surroundings, ready to invent any stratagem in order to be chosen, a lie, a threat, a promise, a recommendation, and yet unable to fill out a banal job application because they were illiterate or inadequate in the face of the psycho-technical tests that Olivetti had imported from the United States and which constituted a real bogeyman for the naive labour mentality that Donnarumma and his handyman friends obeyed. "There would be a desire to stand next to the candidate and live with him for a long time, to give the assurance of knowing him and answering in good conscience the question: "Shall I hire him?"," confesses the recruiter when he realises the insurmountable difficulty faced by the people in front of him. "In contrast, psychotechnics is the opposite of this communal life; it is condensed knowledge, made necessary by numbers and haste".

Going beyond the factory gate becomes a truly unbearable task, and it is from this feeling of impassability that the book's title takes on meaning: the assault is the desperate and final action, even violent, attempted by Donnarumma and his unemployed colleagues, after realising that their future will not be there, not in that factory so avant-garde as to be repulsive, futuristic and exclusive as only the mechanisms of a scientific organisation can be. The novel does not say what will become of this desperate humanity. We do know, however, that on this subject Ottieri's gaze chooses the perspective of disenchantment and, in the face of the visionary and dreamy speech that the company president addresses to the workers on the day of the inauguration, he does not seem to fully believe what he hears. "The factory was therefore conceived on the measure of man..." it is Adriano Olivetti who is speaking on the balcony. "On the measure of man, so that he would find in his well-ordered workplace an instrument of redemption and not a device of suffering'. While everyone listens in amazement, the recruiter perhaps thinks: will the day ever come when assembly-line work will bring redemption instead of suffering? In Pozzuoli and Campania, in Italy, in Europe, hardly another company will be able to compete in beauty with the one inaugurating that day, but there is a shadow casting itself over the plebs of the unemployed. The modern that cannot be more modern has arrived in the Mezzogiorno, but the Mezzogiorno has not been ready.