Epilepsy, a Baroque disease.

Some aspects of the epilepsy are sometimes described through the characters of novels; instead more infrequent is the literary represen- tation of the disease itself, as it is the case of Giorgio Manganelli a contemporary Italian novelist and literary critic (1922-1990). Refined prose writer, member of the Gruppo 63, a neo-avantgarde movement, he tends to transform the literature in a sort of domain of the artifici- ality, by utilizing a way of writing based on smart inventions of images and language. In the ???Discorso sull invenzione di una patologia uni- versale??? (Treatise on the invention of a universal pathology), a tale included in the posthumous collection ???La notte??? (The night) (Milan, Adelphi, 1996), the narrator is amisanthropic god who is trying his best ???to make the death an endless and sacred itinerary, through selected troubles to the human body???. Several diseases are therefore described with their most dreadful effects on the body and the mind. Manganelli gives the epilepsy a decadent style (while the cancer is considered sober, the malaria elegiac, the heart failure laconic), because of some aspects of the critic symptomatology (???those rollings and dribblings and twistings of the eyes and shakings of the head???). The epilepsy is ???a baroque moment, warm of figures, or rather shrewdly ceremonial; the body becomes coat of arms or noble emblem, starry sky, three-spike shape, five-line stave inscribed in the circumference of the temporary insanity, ritual slobber, holy horizontal earthquake, bodily explosion, vegetable mimesis of a wide-open flower???, while the epileptic is con- sidered ???thrill of the form, freedom of the lust, violin of the sick universe, sweet-natured unseemly-mannered clown???. It is likely the critic symptomatology, susceptible of such a rich in imagery distortion, may represent the opportunity, for the cultured people too, for the common prejudice in respect of the epilepsy