Memorize your timetables: The rational world and the power of prediction in Tabucchi’s La Testa Perduta di Damasceno Monteiro
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published 10/07/2008
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SummaryIn Antonio Tabucchi’s La Testa Perduta di Damasceno Monteiro, the reader is pulled into a detective murder-mystery dealing with decapitation, murder suspects named il Grillo Verde, and tripe. Of particular interest, however, is the character of Don Fernando, a lawyer whose mind flies from topic to topic such that he seems to know everything about anything but who nonetheless is weighed down by his obesity. In this paper I plan to argue that Don Fernando’s metaphysical presuppositions about the rationality of the world around him grant him the means by which to control that same world. It follows that I will first need to describe in what exactly Don Fernando’s worldview might be said to consist. More specifically, I will show that he considers the world to be rational insofar as the human experience therein is calculable or predictable. Interestingly enough, his understanding of rationality proves itself to be peculiar on two points: First, while manifestations of rationality in the world are typically viewed positively by the philosophers who posit them, Don Fernando judges the world negatively, concluding that it operates according to an insopportabile logica ; and second, the kinds of human phenomena he takes to be predictable—and thus rational—are those which are depicted in philosophical thought as contributing to the irrationality of the world.
Table of Contents
- Don Fernando can be interpreted as committing himself to a claim.
- Don Fernando - then, l'opinione pubblica can be manipulated in a predictable way.
- The insopportabile human behaviour that Don Fernando considers.
- Whether or not the world is, in fact, 'rational' or 'irrational,'.
- I contend that Don Fernando senses his own existence as a small part of a much larger world.
- Conclusion.
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