CRASSH

This paper investigates the relations between history, counter-history, and chance in Guido Morselli’s 1973 novel, Dissipatio H.G., in which the narrator emerges from the mouth of an underground lake to find himself the sole survivor of a mysterious (super-) natural disaster that caused the “evaporation” of the rest of humankind. The narrator’s lonely perambulations occasion lengthy meditations on life and death, on nature and culture, and on the vicissitudes of chance, grafted onto a specifically Swiss body politic. This re-dimensioning of the world—Zurich and its environs are all the narrator can access in this post-apocalyptic scene—parallels the elevation (or reduction, depending on his vantage point) of his own stature from anonymous individual to the One. In my reading, the novel functions as an exercise in negotiating a hermeneutics of suicide in a universe whose operating principles conform more closely to Todorov’s description of the fantastic than they do to those dear to the pious and law-abiding denizens of the Confœderatio Helvetica. Specifically, taking as an initial premise the conclusions about the arbitrary nature of history and of natural life in the works of philosopher Giuseppe Rensi and biologist Jacques Monod, this paper argues that Morselli’s depiction of the equivocal apocalypse—who is dead, them or me?—turns on a notion of history as the contemporaneous presence and absence of what for Derrida is a culture of “properly dying.” The conflict between the protagonist’s experience of being-in-the-abstract and being-in-the-concrete stands as ambivalent testament to the privilege and the curse of existence.