Boris Groys has defined avant-garde art as striving towards a “demiurgic” total control: there are too few analyses to take authority as the crucial issue in modernism, but Papini’s Un Uomo Finito would make an excellent place to start: Few authors display such unabashed level of hubris as Papini does, and those who did never expressed it with his heartfelt, naive grandiloquence.
Papini grew up into dedicated nihilism, thanks, he says, to a solitude he owed to his ugliness and his poverty. Probably the same disconnection led him to pursue a large number of grandiose if completely unrealistic goals (ex: compiling all the encyclopedias in the world into a single one, aged 15) which gave him a taste for rhetorical excess and a tolerance for failure. As he finds at last a welcoming home in the Florentine boheme of the early XXth century, he sets out with a few friends to build Leonardo, a (mainly) philosophical magazine that was to leave a worldwide mark. But of course Papini wants more: at first he wants to die, not alone, but to convince the whole of humanity to follow him in a total suicide. He also doubt humanity exists at all, extending Stirnerian individualism into fully-fledged solipsism. Later still he comes to combine William James with a kind of luciferian delerium, coining it “magical pragmatism” and promising (to James’ acclaim) his hotel corridor will lead to godmanhood. Leonardo folds, then comes La Voce, another staple of the European intellectual scene, and as his friends for the most part seem to outgrow their promethean wet-dreams Papini finds himself, I think, more and more isolated. Armed with only his unflinching conviction of the superiority of the mind (actually, his mind) over matter, he leaves for a retreat in the mountains, deciding not to come back until his will can outweigh the burden of the real.
It is upon his return he sets out to write, at thirty, his autobiography: Un Uomo Finito.
Sometimes I experience what has be called vertigo, for wants of a better term, in front of the sheer outsized megalomania of a project: think of Alexander Scriabin for example. This outrageousness, this blasphemous disregard for both the real and the human, is probably what most appeal to me in the modernist project. Here we have a limit case, treading the narrow path between egotic insanity and prophetic grandeur, surviving only thanks to his sharp wit and unforgiving introspection.
Papini later encountered international success with his Life of Christ, but he largely, and unduly slid into oblivion, despite the best efforts of the likes Borges or Eliade to resurrect his early, odd and unique writing. It is a quick read and if you have any interest in XXth century art or culture, or any interest in the extremes of thought, you owe to give it a try!