J. Rodolfo Wilcock | La singogaga degli iconoclasti (The Temple of the Iconoclasts) / 1972, 2000

the marvelously loony imagination of man

by Douglas Messerli

 

J. Rodolfo Wilcock La singogaga degli iconoclasti (Milano: Adelphi, 1972), translated from the Italian with an Introduction by Lawrence Venuti as The Temple of the Iconoclasts (San Francisco: Mercury House, 2000)

 

Born and raised in Argentina, Rudolfo Wilcock, the son of an Englishman and an Italian mother, was involved in the 1940s with the innovative writers of Argentina, including Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. He contributed to their anthologies of fantastic literature and wrote poetry.

 

    His Argentine writer friends affectionately called him "Johnny." But in the late 1940s, Wilcock increasingly grew repulsed by the Perón dictatorship, and in 1954 traveled to England, working as a commentator for the BBC and as a translator. He returned briefly to Argentina, but in 1957 left the country for Italy.

      There, in Rome, he began to publish works in Italian; in 1962 he moved to Lubriano, north of Rome, and over the next decade produced fifteen books in Italian of all genres, including the 1973 homoerotic novel, I due allegri indiani (A Couple of Gay Indians). His name, now associated with Alberto Moravio, Elsa Morante, Tommaso Landolf, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, was made famous in Italy, in part, by the 1972 publication of The Temple of Iconoclasts.

     This book consists of numerous histories of basically unknown crackpots, theorists, scientists, inventors, and philosophers whose ideas were either absurd or ridiculously out of sync with rational science. These include figures such as André Lebran, the inventor of the pentacycle, or the five-wheeled bicycle; Charles Piazzi-Smyth, who was convinced threat the Egyptian pyramids were originally encased in white limestone blocks, "cut so finely as to be virtually seamless," and that the base of the great pyramid, divided by the width of a casing stone, equaled exactly the number of days in a year; or Klaus Nachtknecht, who believing in the healing powers of radium, encouraged the sale of radioactive soap and planned luxury spas to treat his customers to thermal waters and mud baths that were radioactive. John Cleves Symmes, Cyrus Reed Teed, and Marshall B. Gardner all believed, in different ways, that the core of the earth was hollow and not only effected the surface of the earth but internally consisted of beings and plants such as the mammoths discovered in Siberia and The Eskimos, who came from the interior. The book is filled with such ludicrous ideas that one can only marvel at Wilcock's imagination and—when one discovers that some of his figures were based on real beings (Piazzi-Smyth and the Hollow Earth theorists, for example, truly existed)—the marvelously loony imagination of man.

 

Los Angeles, 2000