From Murder — to the Good Tidings? Some Verges of the Ontological Meanings and the Realization of the Latter in Tommaso Landolfi’s ‘On the Train’

Tommaso Landolfi’s short story ‘On the Train’ (from the collection Impossible Stories, 1966) is a graphic manifestation of the ontology of indeterminacy. By his censuring the cruelty of human nature and fate, the author, who followed the Bible, Kant, Pirandello, and Goya (to whose Saturn Devouring His Own Children he referred to directly, to our mind), put into question, if not emphatically, the being of the good God and the presence in the world of His Divine Providence. That messenger of the other worlds who had been talking to the hero-narrator Gabriele turned out to be ontologically closer to hell, than to Paradise, this closeness being traditional both for our epoch, suffering seriously, according to Unamuno, and for the Italian culture with its brilliant description of hell in Dante. The messenger confessed to Gabriele that, despite his knowing all, he, nevertheless, was aware of nothing, this being tantamount to the possible lack of answering ultimate questions in the world of the work. There could have been no answering these indeed in the universe of extreme cruelty, with the sheep seen by Gabriele from the car window being its symbol of the human fate (cf. Is. 53: 6–7). In its turn, the image of the angelic messenger in the story is reminiscent of the fallen spirits from the Bible (Jud. 9; et al.), whereas his lack of knowledge concerning the universe is expressed by the author in a language which seems to be similar to Graham Priest’s paraconsistent logic. We adduce an example in the defence of Priest’s line of reasoning in the course of polemics with its opponents J. R. B. Arenhart and E. S. Melo. In its turn, Landolfi’s story, with its expressiveness and the spirit of anti-utopia, as well as due to the very situation of a hero’s dreaming in a narrow space, seems to have exerted certain influence upon Fellini’s City of Women (1980). The article is accompanied with the Russian translation of Landolfi’s essay.