Dissipatio H.G. (1977)

by Guido Morselli

Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H.G. has intrigue but lacks follow-through.

Let’s first demystify the title. Dissipatio Humani Generis, Latin for the Dissipation of the Human Race. That’s “dissipation not in the moral sense” (pg. 60), but in the physical: everybody, from overcoat to marrow, gone, poof, overnight.

It’s a thought experiment on the missing “third way” forward, the course of action when you can’t go on like this but lack the will to go out like that. A defeated man returns from a fruitless suicide attempt to find his implicit wish for this third option has been granted. He returns to a world from which his tormentor, humanity in the aggregate, has simply vanished, leaving him sole stewardship of man’s legacy.

I am, on and off, an Anthropophobe, I’m afraid of people, as I am of rats and mosquitoes, afraid of the nuisance and the harm of which they are untiring agents. This is not the only reason, but it’s one of them, why I seek solitude, a solitude (in the modest limits of the possible) that is genuine, i.e., extensive and abiding. But now that they are playing hard to get, or are trying to, anyway, I’m beginning to reevaluate their importance. (pg. 31)

A literary take on the post-apocalyptic novel. An erudite outcast getting the last laugh in a cerebral counterpoint to George R. Stewart’s practical Earth Abides. What’s not to like? Well, the execution.

Our man claims, “it wasn’t philosophy that interested me (it never has interested me much)” (pg. 36), then proceeds to wax philosophical. It comes across, probably, as Morselli intended — like the over-intellectualized diary of an unwell-turned-unhinged man writing for no audience in particular. It has its moments, but they are diffused in a sea of abstruse, neurotic ramblings.

Morselli wrote Dissipatio H.G. mere months before taking his own life with the Browning 7.65 that makes an appearance here as the black-eyed girl. “I went to get her, my black-eyed girl, and lay back on the bed with her. I pressed my mouth to hers at length” (pg. 16). The result is a sort of eulogy for the world he was to depart from soon, and a reflection on his place in it. As with most diary pages chosen at random, however, the end product is not particularly accessible and seems to serve its author first, reader second.

Gauloises cigarettes, a recurring symbol of idiosyncrasy in Dissipatio H.G.

(Attribution: Igor Maynaud, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons)