«QThis isn’t a tragedy, it’s a joke. Life is very stingy with tragedies, and instead gives us a flourish of jokes.” Valerio Binasco is on stage, he takes on the role of a husband and faces those family intimacies that wander like ghosts in the house. Marriage, fidelity, motherhood, all victims of time and grudges, are just shadows of ineptitude and indifference. It happens in Love diariesan opera inspired by two plays by Natalia Ginzburg, which marks the Nanni Moretti’s debut as a theater director (until 26/11 at the Grassi theater in Milan and then on tour) and which takes us exactly there, in the line that marks every domestic bet: win or lose, heads or tails. This applies to couples but also with children.
What the fathers were like
And if sometimes this boundary evaporates, other times it moves like a zigzag between tragedy and joke. Success and failure. Confirmation comes from the true story of Christopher Robin, the little co-protagonist of the Winnie the Pooh bear saga conceived by his father, Alan Milne, a man who, between the two world wars, exploited his son’s face and little voice to achieve global success. To the point that the more attention for that bear grows, the more attention for the child is lacking. The more the father welcomes the children’s dreams into fantasy Winnie’s Hundred Acre Woods, between a mother kangaroo, a clumsy pig and a donkey, the more his classmates bully Christopher (“You’re the one with the stupid bear”) and he, who will live a tormented adolescence, will become the perfect victim of a family of unresolved adults: father traumatized by his experience as a soldier in the First World War and mother blind to her son’s emotional needs. The result is that in the search for an existential solution, parents transform the child into the solution.
The paper child
How much dysfunctionality there is in all this, you decide. How engaging this story is told in The paper child (Solferino) by Marina Marazza is another story: the novel, while giving an account of events dating back a hundred years ago, also talks about today’s fathers. «I discovered the genesis of this series when I worked for Disney and I believe that the relational issues of this family concern us. I think about it “sharenting”, the phenomenon by which children are exposed to social media today with the photos published by the parents” specifies Marazza who in the title summarized the transformation of her son into a literary creature, as fragile as tissue paper. Today the risk would be to make it a virtual creature stuffed with the same parental ego. Many fathers, like Fabio Volo, proudly point out that they put little hearts on their children’s faces in photos on social media, but the truth is that father-child relationships today are different. «If in Robin’s London the father “had” to appear more distant and less expressive, today it is the opposite. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s going to get any better. Affectionate, almost friends, but always condemned to imperfection » she explains.
The writer and illustrator Christopher Robin as a child with his father Alan Milne, creator of the very popular “Winnie The Pooh” bear inspired by his son’s face and voice.
Geniuses in career, absent in the family
Christopher was a child prodigy applauded at every reading, he moved everyone. It was “using” it a cultured and talented father in everything except realizing he had ruined a son: so brilliant in his career, in short, so absent from his family. «Rousseau also sends the five children he had with a never-married seamstress to an orphanage. Let’s talk about the author of Emilio, one of the pedagogical theories that have marked history. Galileo Galilei was so capable of seeing the stars, so incapable of loving the two daughters he had with his lover. Not only does he not recognize them (the male child does) but he locks them up in a convent, and of the two, one of them will even send him sweets when the father becomes blind. Einstein, on the other hand, had a forgotten schizophrenic son in the institute and said: my son is a problem that cannot be solved” says Marazza.
The remaining drops of affection for their children
«I could continue only to say that people of genius who are so committed to their projects seem to have no room in the emotional sphere for anything else» he continues. «So they become affectionless spouses, as well as fathers with residual drops of affection for their children. Christopher is an example of a child who was never loved in an era when it was more difficult as a father to express love for his children. His fragility emerges from the memoirs that he will write in which he talks about the little girl’s clothes he wore because his mother wanted a daughter, about the university he left to go to war against Nazism and about the two women who save him in the end. The nanny who made him feel loved despite his jealous mother, and the cousin who, against the families, will marry him. He will make peace with his father, open a bookshop and start writing» he concludes.
Themed books and films
Loving career and children is a very widespread obsession and which sometimes finds form outside the home. In the titles, for example: in literature the trend is proven and what Massimo Cotto does when he turns to his sixteen-year-old son in Rock from father to son it is one of many examples, that is, it is a book for all ages but in the meantime the son is right there. Same thing on TV: it will air on Prime Video on December 21st Accidental gigoloa series in which a son discovers his father’s true profession (with whom he had a conflictual relationship) and decides to follow in his footsteps, becoming a gigolo and discovering an unexpected version of himself.
On how to make your children happy – knowing that a lot depends on the happiness with which we were children before parents – the psychotherapist Philippa Perry deals with The book you wish your parents had read (Corbaccio), a bestseller that precedes the last one The book you would like the people you love to read and which refers to a title by Massimiliano Pappalardo, What happened to you, dad? (Feltrinelli) where educating, we read, is «the act through which the male gives birth to himself as a father, generating his own children every day, educating them, that is, drawing out of them, between negative normativeness and positive affectivity, the authentic face ». It is therefore impossible not to educate, as the “resigned father” would like to do today. Also because, what we do will become what our children will be. Above all, what we do during their youth marks them: sI call it “reminiscence bump”.that is, the tendency to remember what we experienced as young people better than in other periods and fix them in our personality.
The cover of “The Paper Child” (Solferino), the new book by Marina Marazza.
Imperfect and insecure fathers
The titles follow one another with question marks: What remains of the father? It is that of Recalcati’s essay for which, in hypermodern society, there remains a father who is no longer ideal and authoritative with a severe gaze, but a real and vital one, who knows how to testify to how life can be desired until the end. A father who gambles everything on the security level: hiding them or sharing them. Imperfect fathers, therefore, but also insecure. And it’s also true on the other side of the planet. «In Japan I notice in the fathers of my children’s classmates the attempt to propose their own educational model even if in the end it is always the maternal one that wins. Here, more authority is given to women because culturally they have always managed education, and this generates insecurity » says Laura Imai Messina, a writer of Italian origin who has lived near Tokyo for twenty years.
The (paternal) colors of Japan
«In this new generation of fathers, however, I do not perceive the arrogance that I had seen in the past among those who are now grandfathers. In general, I then see a trend and a series of policies implemented that would like fathers to be increasingly present in their children’s lives or at least push both parents to be so. Confirmation comes from another aspect of the question. Fewer and fewer women are willing to sacrifice everything for motherhood, and the demographic decline is the proof” adds Messina, mother of two children. «In my house I actually work more than my husband, and he takes care of the family more. He is a Japanese man and I see that he makes a very great effort in trying to understand what our children need. He is a man who asks himself many questions and is ready to change “color” to accommodate the evolution of children »adds Messina, author of Japan in colour (Einaudi), a novel that talks about Japanese society through unthinkable chromatic nuances. «I would associate paternal figures with the greenery of parks, where they always take their children. To the blue of the aquariums which are among the most popular destinations for the Japanese. To the orange of the baseball glove with which they catch the ball » she concludes. Yes, because throwing the ball between fathers and sons (and daughters) is a typical game in those parts. And perhaps it is a little everywhere, in a metaphorical sense: it is a dribbling that marks the rhythm of a timid and perfectible dialogue.
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