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We Want Everything Notes

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41 views

We Want Everything Notes

Uploaded by

Daniella Razzouk
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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We Want Everything 221

Nanni Balestrini

The explosive novel of Italy’s revolutionary 1969


It was 1969, and temperatures were rising across the factories of the north as workers
demanded better pay and conditions. Soon, discontent would erupt in what became known as
Italy’s Hot Autumn. A young worker from the impoverished south arrives at Fiat’s Mirafiori
factory in Turin, where his darker complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour
workdays in sweltering industrial heat. His bosses try to withhold his wages. Our cynical,
dry-witted narrator will not bend to their will. “I want everything, everything that’s owed to
me,” he tells them. “Nothing more and nothing less, because you don’t mess with me.”

Around him, students are holding secret meetings and union workers begin halting work on
the assembly lines, crippling the Mirafiori factory with months of continuous strikes. Before
long, barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan “We Want
Everything” is ringing through the streets.

Wrought in spare and measured prose, Balestrini’s novel depicts an explosive uprising.
Introduced by Rachel Kushner, the author of the best-selling The Flamethrowers, We Want
Everything is the incendiary fictional account of events that led to a decade of revolt.

With more time, fewer workers are needed.

Fewer people wanted to work in the first place.

Authority comes from people wanting to be ruled.

Authorities are needed as well in order to organize and rule.

Chapman, here, stands for the intellectual class and for modernity, he serves as a mediator to
reach the wild surmise to help break down the older order. He wants to translate Homer for
his own pleasure. He does as he pleases, but it gets into the capitalistic idea as well.

The wild surmise is put to work: People planning to take down the authority. It is about going
beyond that submission.

Individualistic: exploitation by capitalist

In the 50s, the capitalists were making a great deal of money, especially the car industries.

The North underdeveloped the South in Italy.

The workers get paid based on how much they produce, and they did not like that. They
simply wanted to get paid. The North got developed, not the South.

The North wants the deskilled worker, a mass worker. People used to pursue education to
avoid working. No one wanted to work.
There are more workers than is needed and that keeps the price low. “Fewer people working
but they are producing more.”

Because people demanded to work less to enjoy themselves, capitalists responded by


replacing people with machines. The capitalists don’t care about those that get unemployed
due to this. (they’re meant to just disappear”). The workers that remained are the “hardest
working”.

Products were made in the North and sold in the South.

“We Want Everything” refers to the idea that since the South workers create everything, they
deserve everything.

“I want everything” “I am owed everything”

Second Chapter: Work

He looks back at his personal experience with capitalism. He made more money than his
parents, and he wore jeans (fancy, free, seen in movies).

The most comfortable life is working as little as possible.

The devil is in working.

Chapter 4: Fiat:

He is now in the North. The students have more leisure time, so they want to use it for
political activism.

He had to go through many tests before he got to Fiat.

War is a great way of overcoming class differences.

On the Fiat line, your body becomes a part of capitalism. Your body movements are
calculated to maximize productivity. The movements become robotic. People were getting
injured in the factories all the time.

Stream of Consciousness Novel is internal, it becomes a puzzle, this novel is NOT a stream
of consciousness.

This novel is directed towards the common reader, and it is immediate, uses many curse
words. The writer wants you to piece together how this society works.

The working class becomes aware of themselves. They must resist by striking, sabotaging,
slowing down, by organizing…

The rise of the middle-class novel is doubled by the working class becoming aware of itself.

Bildung novel is the novel on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from
childhood to adulthood, in which character change is important.
His lack of use of quotations is due to the emphasis on affect rather than on specificity. He
wanted to immerse the readers into this world, not focusing on the words verbatim.

“We can’t just be stuff too” The workers wanted to fight because the boss and work exist.

To not be told what to do is a desire for power.

There is no limit to luxury. Needs have been separated from the organic, capitalism creates
new needs “the sizzle not the steak”.

Let us do less work and more pay.

Deconstruction undermines the manifest of the story.

Foucault: Factory, military service, the hospital within the factory. They want their bosses
feel their Vietnam.

Post Colonialism: Orientalism that lacks any relation to the Middle East when he compares
the hoorah to Arab tribes.

“Free Indirect Discourse” the separation of author and narrator.

He often repeats himself throughout the novel.

This novel is very romantic because it represents the desire for everything. Desire is haunted
by the death drive.

the point of the novel is to provide to the working class the same thing novels have presented
to the middle class, awareness of their existence as a class

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