Laughter From Realism to Modernism: Misfits and Humorists in Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda 9781909662865

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Laughter from Realism to Modernism Misfits and Humorists in Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda

LEGENDA legenda , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies, the British Comparative Literature Association and the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland.

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ITALIAN PERSPECTIVES Editorial Committee Professor Simon Gilson, University of Warwick (General Editor) Dr Francesca Billiani, University of Manchester Dr Manuele Gragnolati, Somerville College, Oxford Dr Catherine Keen, University College London Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford Founding Editors Professor Zygmunt Baran´ski and Professor Anna Laura Lepschy In the light of growing academic interest in Italy and the reorganization of many university courses in Italian along interdisciplinary lines, this book series, founded now continuing under the Legenda imprint, aims to bring together different scholarly perspectives on Italy and its culture. Italian Perspectives publishes books and collections of essays on any period of Italian literature, language, history, culture, politics, art, and media, as well as studies which take an interdisciplinary approach and are methodologically innovative.

appearing in this series 21. The Printed Media in Fin-de-siècle Italy: Publishers, Writers, and Readers, ed. by Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani, and Jennifer Burns 22. Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature: Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda, by Deborah Amberson 23. Remembering Aldo Moro: The Cultural Legacy of the 1978 Kidnapping and Murder, ed. by Ruth Glynn and Giancarlo Lombardi 24. Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini, by Emma Bond 25. Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfilment, by George Corbett 26. Edoardo Sanguineti: Literature, Ideology and the Avant-Garde, ed. by Paolo Chirumbolo and John Picchione 27. The Tradition of the Actor-Author in Italian Theatre, ed. by Donatella Fischer 28. Leopardi’s Nymphs: Grace, Melancholy, and the Uncanny, by Fabio A. Camilletti 29. Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture, by Katrin Wehling-Giorgi 30. Caravaggio in Film and Literature: Popular Culture’s Appropriation of a Baroque Genius, by Laura Rorato 31. The Italian Academies 1525-1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, ed. by Jane E. Everson, Denis V. Reidy and Lisa Sampson 32. Rome Eternal: The City As Fatherland, by Guy Lanoue 33. The Somali Within: Language, Race and Belonging in ‘Minor’ Italian Literature, by Simone Brioni 34. Laughter from Realism to Modernism: Misfits and Humorists in Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda, by Alberto Godioli 35. Pasolini after Dante: The ‘Divine Mimesis’ and the Politics of Representation, by Emanuela Patti

Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK www.legendabooks.com

Laughter from Realism to Modernism Misfits and Humorists in Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda ❖ Alberto Godioli

Italian Perspectives 34 Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2015

First published 2015 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association Salisbury House, Station Road, Cambridge cb1 2la and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2015 ISBN 978-1-909662-86-5 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Disclaimer: Statements of fact and opinion contained in this book are those of the author and not of the editors, Routledge, or the Modern Humanities Research Association. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, in respect of the accuracy of the material in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made.

CONTENTS ❖

1

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Used Introduction: Laughter, Modernism, and Originality Laughter and Originality: From Sterne to Pirandello Shaftesbury vs Hobbes: Laughter and Tolerance Originality in France Laughter and Violence: From Balzac to Bergson ‘An Unheard-of Event that Occurred’: Irregularity and the Short Story

2

Umorismo and Madness: Pirandello’s Originals

ix x 1 7 7 9 13 19

27

Laughter and Oddity in Novelle per un anno 27 Sternian Misfits: Perazzetti, Marco Leccio, and Spatolino 29 Convicts and Fugitives: Eccentricity and Insanity in Pirandello and Dostoevsky 32 The King’s Moustache: Maupassant and Originality 39 Laughter and the Norm: A Double Bind 44

3

4

Violence, Bad Faith, and Hypocrisy: Truth and Deception in Svevo’s Laughter

53

Irony and the Romantic Lie An Education in Bad Faith: Perfect Hoaxes from Balzac to Svevo Saints and Imposters: Dostoevsky in ‘Corto Viaggio Sentimentale’ Svevo, Ojetti, and the Smile of the Old Man Laughing about Everything: Svevo, Flaubert, and Modernism

53 58 64 67 72

Celebrations of Diversity: Palazzeschi’s Buffi and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition From the Clown to the Buffo: Avant-Garde and Originality Short Stories and ‘Natural Divergences’ The ‘Buffi’ and the Pathetic Grotesque (Maupassant, Hugo) Novelistic Models: Balzac, Flaubert, and Manzoni A Modernist Gallery of Originals: Il palio as a Macro-Text

5

‘The Stupidity of the World’: Satire and Common Nonsense in Gadda’s Fiction Equality as Abstraction The Hardened Individual: Gonzalo and Other Caricatures The Society of Equals: From Balzac to Flaubert Swift or Boccaccio? Gadda’s Short Stories and the Ambiguities of Laughter

Conclusion: Italian Modernism and the Fear of Uniformity Appendix Bibliography Index

81 81 84 88 91 96

103 103 106 113 116

123 127 131 143

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ❖

This study is based on my doctoral thesis, defended at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2012; it has been completed during my Newton International Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (2013–14), which generously supported its publication. I am particularly grateful to my doctoral supervisors, Salvatore Silvano Nigro and Raffaele Donnarumma, and to my postdoctoral mentor, Federica Pedriali, for their constant advice and encouragement over the years. My research is also greatly indebted to the feedback and support of many other people; special mentions are due to Valentino Baldi, Federico Bertoni, Lina Bolzoni, Alberto Casadei, Paola Casella, Mathijs Duyck, Cristina Savettieri, and Francesco Venturi. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Dr Graham Nelson, Managing Editor of Legenda, and to Professor Simon Gilson, for their valuable suggestions and their guidance throughout the making of this book. Several useful comments were provided by my copy editor, Richard Correll, and by the anonymous reader for Legenda, to whom I am also extremely grateful. Special thanks go to my Italian and British friends, with whom I have shared a fair amount of laughter; and to my family — especially my parents, Marina and Claudio, and my sister Beatrice — for being a constant source of inspiration in my work and in my life. Lastly, I am immensely thankful to Giulia, to whose generosity, patience, and conversation this book and its author owe much. a.g., Groningen, August 2015

ABBREVIATIONS USED ❖

Balzac, Honoré de (CH) La Comédie Humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex and others (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) (Préfaces) Préfaces, in La Comédie Humaine, ed. by Marcel Bouteron and Roger Pierrot (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), vol. xi Bergson, Henri (Le Rire) Le Rire: essai sur la signification du comique, ed. by Frédéric Worms (Paris: PUF, 2004) Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Notes) Notes from the Underground; The Gambler, trans. by Jane Kentish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Gadda, Carlo Emilio (RR) Romanzi e Racconti, ed. by Dante Isella, Giorgio Pinotti and others, 2 vols (Milan: Garzanti, 1994) (SGF) Saggi Giornali Favole e altri scritti, ed. by Dante Isella, Giorgio Pinotti and others, 2 vols (Milan: Garzanti, 1991–92) (SVP) Scritti vari e postumi, ed. by Dante Isella, Giorgio Pinotti and others (Milan: Garzanti, 1993) (IF) L’ingegner fantasia. Lettere a Ugo Betti, ed. by Giulio Ungarelli (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984) (Cognizione) La cognizione del dolore, ed. by Emilio Manzotti (Turin: Einaudi, 1987) (DM) Disegni milanesi, ed. by Dante Isella, Paola Italia and Giorgio Pinotti (Pistoia: Can Bianco, 1995) (F220) Un fulmine sul 220, ed. by Dante Isella (Milan: Garzanti, 2000) (‘Manubia’) ‘Il “manubia” di Ramas’, ed. by Dante Isella, I quaderni dell’ingegnere, 5 (2007), 5–25 Gautier, Théophile (De l’Originalité) De l’Originalité en France (Paris: L’Archange Minotaure, 2003) Leopardi, Giacomo (Discorso) Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani, ed. by Augusto Placanica (Venice: Marsilio, 1989) Manzoni, Alessandro (Promessi sposi) I promessi sposi, ed. by Salvatore S. Nigro (Milan: Mondadori, 2002) Maupassant, Guy de (CN) Contes et Nouvelles, ed. by Louis Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 2008) Palazzeschi, Aldo (TN) Tutte le novelle, ed. by Luciano De Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1975) (TP) Tutte le poesie, ed. by Adele Dei (Milan: Mondadori, 2002)

Abbreviations Used

xi

(TR) Tutti i romanzi, ed. by Gino Tellini (Milan: Mondadori, 2004) (RB) Il re bello, ed. by Rita Guerricchio (Milan: La vita felice, 1995) Pirandello, Luigi (NPA) Novelle per un anno, ed. by Mario Costanzo (Milan: Mondadori, 1985–90) (TR) Tutti i romanzi, ed. by Giovanni Macchia (Milan: Mondadori, 1973) (Um.) L’Umorismo, in Saggi e interventi, ed. by Ferdinando Taviani (Milan: Mondadori, 2006) Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper [Earl of] (Letter) ‘A Letter concerning Enthusiasm to Lord Somers’, in Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times (Westmead: Gregg International, 1968), vol. i (Essay) ‘An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour’, in Characteristicks, vol. I Sterne, Laurence (Sent. Journey) A Sentimental Journey and other writings, ed. by Tim Parnell and Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) (Tristram Shandy) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Svevo, Italo (RSA) Racconti e scritti autobiografici, ed. by Clotilde Bertoni (Milan: Mondadori, 2004) (RC) Romanzi e ‘continuazioni’, ed. by Nunzia Palmieri and Fabio Vittorini (Milan: Mondadori, 2004) (TS) Teatro e saggi, ed. by Federico Bertoni (Milan: Mondadori, 2004) Verga, Giovanni (TN) Tutte le novelle, ed. by Carla Riccardi (Milan: Mondadori, 2008) (TR) Tutti i romanzi, ed. by Enrico Ghidetti (Florence: Sansoni, 1983)

INTRODUCTION ❖

Laughter, Modernism, and Originality If laughter (in its various aspects) can be deemed the most distinctive feature of the ‘Italian way’ within early twentieth-century European literature,1 then this is largely due to the works of Luigi Pirandello, Italo Svevo, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Carlo Emilio Gadda. For each of these writers, laughter pertains in the first place to the implied author’s attitude, i.e. his propensity to question the general seriousness of the world. Pirandello’s umorismo observes ‘la compagine dell’esperienza quotidiana’ [the whole of everyday experience] from afar, thus exposing it as ridiculously ‘priva di senso, priva di scopo’ [pointless and aimless] (Um. 939), and acknowledging its serious-tragic elements only in paradoxical and problematic terms; Svevo’s irony implies the subject’s inclination to joke about everything (‘ridere di tutto’, RC 665); Palazzeschi’s controdolore unleashes drives that are usually inhibited by bourgeois seriousness, and converts the most poignant situations into a source of hilarity; lastly, Gadda’s laughter, especially in its satirical forms, is meant to denounce the alleged ‘scemenza del mondo’ [stupidity of the world] (RR I 761). The author’s lack of seriousness can be revealed in various manners — for instance, the facetious tone of the narrator, or the very structure of the plot, can hinder the reader’s emotional involvement in the events represented. This kind of laughter relies on an implicit agreement between the author and the reader, without necessarily surfacing as a theme; lacking a more precise label, it can conveniently be defined as the author’s laughter, in order to distinguish it from the characters’. Even if we focus on this aspect exclusively, it seems appropriate to consider the prominence of laughter in Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda as a unitary albeit heterogeneous phenomenon; and indeed, the obvious differences from one case to the other are counterbalanced by a series of deeper similarities. First of all, in all four cases, the author’s laughter can be explained as a reaction to perceiving an original act of violence within the workings of communal life; the subject variously suffers from the weight of an arbitrary and ubiquitous norm, erasing or excluding individual anomalies. As a consequence, Pirandello celebrates eccentricity to the point of investing it with high philosophical dignity; Svevo builds on the social antithesis between deviance (sickness) and aptitude (health), albeit distorting and corroding it through irony; Palazzeschi’s controdolore stems from the carnivalesque capsizing of a traumatic inadequacy to the norm; and to complete the list, Gadda’s satirical outbursts express the subject’s sense of being marginalised and suffocated by the dictates of a debased bourgeois uniformity. In the first three authors especially,

2

Introduction

the bond between laughter and social anomaly also emerges on a thematic level, through the characters’ laughter — on the one hand, the derision directed towards the matto [fool], the inetto [inept], or the buffo [buffoon, or misfit]; on the other, the laughs and smiles (whether bitter or serene) of the isolated character, whose perspective on events can be more or less congruent to the author’s own.2 Both the laughing stock and the lonely jester can always be considered, in fact, as abnormal or irregular figures, although the meaning of such attributes can vary substantially. In Pirandello, for instance, at least two different character types are confronted with collective laughter. The former is marked by an involuntary deviation from normality, be it due to a physical defect, to a cruel trick of fate, or to unintentionally bizarre behaviour; suffice it to mention the ‘vecchia imbellettata’ [dolled-up old lady] from the essay L’Umorismo, or such emblematic short stories as ‘La patente’ and ‘Musica vecchia’. The latter is the conscious humorist, who chooses to detach himself from social rituals and to face the risk of being laughed at (Perazzetti in ‘Non è una cosa seria’ and Memmo Viola in ‘Quando s’è capito il giuoco’, to mention but a couple of novelle).3 However, the line between those two groups is extremely thin, since the humorist’s awareness often originates from an accidental state of exception; Mattia Pascal, Enrico IV, and Tommasino Unzio (‘Canta l’Epistola’) are all fine cases in point. Svevo’s take on the links between laughter and abnormal characters is different again: as we shall see, deviance is sometimes idealised by his characters as a sign of superiority — which is the case with Alfonso Nitti (Una vita) and Emilio Brentani (Senilità), whose self-righteous Bovarism is punished by communal laughter; but it can also take more subtle forms, as with Zeno, who pretends to respect social rules on a formal level while privately professing an ironical extraneousness to them. Likewise, Palazzeschi’s buffi deviate from the collective nomos in the most varied ways — grotesque deformity, voluntary isolation, or eccentric habits. In summary, the semantic area of irregularity can refer to a wide range of human types, each one requiring to be considered in its peculiarities; it is nonetheless worth noting that, even when it comes to the characters, the handling of laughter is highly reliant on the conf lict between civil conventions and the individual’s resistance to them. The present work aims, therefore, to investigate the clash between social uniformity and personal anomalies as a key to understanding the functions of laughter in four major Italian authors from the early twentieth century. This will ultimately allow us to shed new light on the relations between those authors and the broader framework of European modernism, in that the very label of modernism — however f lexible and unstable — is strictly related to the idea of a shared resistance to the collective standardisation allegedly imposed by modernity. Specificities aside, most commonly accepted definitions of modernism rely on two basic assumptions. The first is that modernism differs visibly from the historical avant-gardes such as Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, both because its attitude towards tradition is not simply one of refusal, and because it tends to be immune to the celebration of modernity often (if ambiguously) pursued by the avant-gardes.4 This latter point leads us to the second recurring assumption, which is the most relevant one in our context. Although Huyssen’s famous claim of a ‘great divide’ between modernism

Introduction

3

and modern mass culture has been generally questioned and toned down in recent times, modernism is still commonly identified by its ‘attempt to interrupt the modernity that we live and understand as a social if not “normal” way of life’;5 and as will be further documented in this book, the hostility to mass society and to its levelling of individualities certainly plays a crucial role in such a problematic relationship with modern times.6 Consequently, examining laughter will, I hope, contribute to further substantiating the notion of Italian modernism, which has recently been the object of growing critical interest;7 this will be achieved not only by underlining the links between Italian and other European modernisms, but also by paying particular attention to some characteristic peculiarities of Italian modernists. As will be demonstrated, the role of laughter — and especially of laughing or derided characters — in Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda is in fact quantitatively and qualitatively different from its role in the classics of European modernism; on the other hand, for reasons that will be clarified later on, Italian modernist laughter seems to be more directly inf luenced by the representation of mockery and originality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. Ever since the birth of the modern novel, depicting laughter as a social gesture has actually been a common way to hint at the f luctuating relationship between a perceived collective norm and individual freedom. In Sterne, for instance, Tristram’s humour and Uncle Toby’s originality appear to be relatively integrated into the social fabric, thus attesting to the author’s optimistic view of civilisation (i.e., society is deemed f lexible enough to let individuals express their innocuous and vital eccentricities). Conversely, in the classics of Romantic realism (from Balzac and Hugo to Dostoevsky), the serious-tragic isolation of the ridiculous man becomes a widespread topos, ref lecting a growing concern for the relentless extinction of originality — what is at stake, in other words, is the preservation of human diversity, in a world ruled by conformism (Girard’s ‘mimetic desire’) and by that ‘repressive equality’ which Adorno and Horkheimer identified as a basic principle of modern enlightened societies.8 This study will argue that the Italian modernists’ emphasis on individual eccentricity (as well as on mockery as a social gesture) should be seen in partial continuity with the nineteenth-century concern for the eradication of originality. After all, in the context in which Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda wrote most of their works — Italy’s transformation into a mass society between the Giolittian Era and World War II — social mimetism and repressive equality were definitely an issue; and to be sure, stories like Palazzeschi’s ‘Il gobbo’ or Pirandello’s ‘C’è qualcuno che ride’ show a deep awareness of laughter’s role in the everyday repression of anthropological diversity. Looked at from this perspective, Italian literature can really be an ideal case study to explore the multifarious links between Romanticism, realism, and modernism. As demonstrated by a long line of studies, famously including Auerbach’s Mimesis, modernism cannot be interpreted as a mere revolt against Romanticism and realism; on the contrary, the key features and topoi of modernism are best understood as part of a longer process, encompassing (with regard to fiction) the development of European realism from Balzac and Stendhal to Dostoevsky and Flaubert.9 In particular, this volume will contend that the modernist

4

Introduction

tension between individuality and standardisation can only be fully comprehended in relation to nineteenth-century realism, and to its framing of originality as being opposed to the levelling forces of communal life; as anticipated, for reasons to be detailed, the importance of such a relation is particularly well exemplified by the handling of laughter in early twentieth-century Italian literature. At the same time, the present study will also highlight some essential differences between traditional realism and modernism — with the latter being characterised by a more disenchanted perspective on human diversity, as well as by a more problematic attitude towards the pathos of originality and, more generally, towards what Auerbach defined as the ‘seriousness of everyday life’. However, before focusing on the transition from nineteenth-century realism to modernism, it might first be useful to take a further step back; already in the time of Hobbes and Locke, humour and ridicule were in fact assigned a crucial part within the philosophical debate about individual freedom, and about the limits imposed on it by the social contract. For this reason, the monographic chapters of this book — dedicated respectively to Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda — will be preceded by a long-term historical overview, aiming to outline the complex (and at times contradictory) development of originality as a central notion in Europe’s modern social imaginary. As digressive as it may seem at first, this preliminary broadening of the scope will in fact prove necessary for a fuller comparative understanding of modernist laughter and its symbolic function. Notes to the Introduction 1. As Alberto Asor Rosa has pointed out with regard to the novels of Pirandello, Svevo, and Gadda, ‘il modo italiano di rimarcare lo scarto perpetuamente esistente tra i dati della realtà e la coscienza [...] è il riso’ [the Italian way to highlight the perpetual gap between reality and consciousness is laughter] (A. Asor Rosa, ‘La storia del “romanzo italiano”? Naturalmente, una storia anomala’, in Il romanzo, ed. by Franco Moretti, 5 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), iii, 255–306 (p. 281); emphasis in original). 2. Gadda’s case is partly different, since in his works laughter mostly belongs to the author’s point of view, without being particularly relevant as a theme. The violence of derision is rather employed as a satirical weapon, while its social uses are not given special attention; the only significant exception is represented by the collective mockery of Gonzalo in La cognizione del dolore (on which see below, Chapter 5). 3. The Italian word novella will be used throughout the book in its broadest meaning (i.e. as a synonym for ‘piece of short fiction of indeterminate length’), as opposed to the more specific meaning of its English derivative. 4. On the fundamental differences between modernism and the avant-garde, see in particular: Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ‘Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde’, in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. vii–xlvii; Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and, with specific regard to Italy, Raffaele Donnarumma, ‘Tracciato del modernismo italiano’, in Sul modernismo italiano, ed. by Romano Luperini and Massimiliano Tortora (Naples: Liguori, 2012), pp. 13–38 (pp. 15–21). 5. Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 6; this passage is also discussed in Deborah Amberson, Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature: Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), pp. 1–13 (p. 6). 6. In addition to Huyssen’s classic study (Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass

Introduction

5

Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)) and to John Carey’s controversial The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), see for instance: Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, pp. 13–94; and Allison Pease, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. by Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 197–211. 7. Cf. Luperini and Tortora, eds, Sul modernismo italiano; Amberson, Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature; Riccardo Castellana, ‘Realismo modernista: un’idea del romanzo italiano (1915–1925)’, Italianistica, 1 (2010), 23–45; Valentino Baldi, Reale invisibile: mimesi e interiorità nella narrativa di Pirandello e Gadda (Venezia: Marsilio, 2010); Raffaele Donnarumma, Gadda modernista (Pisa: ETS, 2006); and also the full section titled ‘Il modernismo in Italia’, Allegoria, 63 (2011), 7–100 (featuring articles by Valentino Baldi, Raffaele Donnarumma, Romano Luperini, Alessandra Nucifora, Cristina Savettieri, Luca Somigli, and Massimiliano Tortora). Another important reference point for the current debate is Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, ed. by Mario Moroni and Luca Somigli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 8. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (New York: Verso, 1997), p. 12. 9. In the last chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach analyses Woolf ’s and Proust’s works as part of the broader history of modern European realism (‘The Brown Stocking’, in Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 525–53). His perspective on modernism has recently been reprised and further developed by several Italian scholars, e.g., Guido Mazzoni, Teoria del romanzo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), esp. chapter 7; Baldi, Reale invisibile; Castellana, ‘Realismo modernista’; and Donnarumma, ‘Tracciato del modernismo italiano’. On the relation between modernist realism and the nineteenth-century paradigm, see also Eysteinsson, ‘Realism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Interruption’, in The Concept of Modernism, pp. 179–241; and Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 37–45.

CHAPTER 1

❖

Laughter and Originality: From Sterne to Pirandello Shaftesbury vs Hobbes: Laughter and Tolerance At the start of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper — third Earl of Shaftesbury, as well as an eminent exponent of Whig liberalism — examined the nature and the social meaning of laughter in two inf luential writings: A Letter concerning Enthusiasm to Lord Somers (1707) and Sensus communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709). The former already promoted a pacific and tolerant use of raillery, whose true aim should consist in protecting society from any sort of fanaticism, and in providing a natural outlet to each one’s eccentricities: ‘It was heretofore the Wisdom of some wise Nations, to let People be Fools as much as they pleas’d, and never to punish seriously what deserv’d only to be laugh’d at [...]. There are certain Humours in Mankind, which of necessity must have vent’ (Letter, 14). Only the ‘Freedom of Raillery’ (Letter, 20) can teach man to accept other people’s oddities; laughter, if employed properly, is therefore the best guarantee of a free society.1 From Shaftesbury onwards, many eighteenth-century British thinkers would glorify the amiable aspects of laughter, interpreting them as an effective demonstration of man’s natural goodness and sociability: Laughter is the most delicious, sweetening, joyous Pleasure of the human Life; but more especially of a Life amicable, friendly, social.2 My inquiries are confined to that species of laughter which is at once natural and innocent. Of this there are two sorts. [...] The former may be called animal laughter: the latter (if it were lawful to adopt a new word which has become very common of late) I should term sentimental. Smiles admit of similar divisions. [...] The one proceeds from the risible emotion, and has a tendency to break out into laughter. The other is the effect of good humour, complacency, and tender affection.3

Laughter, adds Beattie, can express ‘the tender sympathies of our social nature’ to the highest degree.4 Putting such emphasis on those qualities can have a strong political meaning, along with a speculative one; this optimistic attitude actually played a relevant part in the self-fashioning of the modern British middle class, whose predominant views find a philosophical correlative in the writings of Locke (the Letter concerning Toleration was published in 1689, the same year as the Tolerance Act). ‘At length Commerce, and her companion Freedom, ushered into the world

8

Laughter and Originality

their genuine offspring, True Humour’, writes Thomas Davies in 1777;5 but even decades before, as we shall see, the tolerance and f lexibility of British humour were already exalted for patriotic purposes. In order to fully understand the historical significance of such theories, it is in the first place necessary to highlight their argumentative function. As a matter of fact, the liberals’ insistence on the pacific features of laughter is primarily an attempt to contrast two different cultural trends, both adverse to Whig optimism. One of those trends is represented by Swift and the Scriblerians’ conservative satire: far from being tolerant and benevolent, Swiftian laughter punishes the eccentric individual, who is considered rather as the symbol of a less and less reasonable society.6 Apart from Swift’s pessimism,7 the other — and more direct — polemical target of Shaftesbury’s school was Hobbes, whose theories on laughter betray a similar disenchantment. As famously stated in the Treatise, Hobbes attributed laughter to a sudden sense of superiority in front of someone else’s weaknesses: ‘the passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others’.8 In his view, society does not leave much room not only for ‘the infirmities of others’, but also for individual oddities; any deviation from the norm, be it intentional or not, would be punished by collective derision. Hence, raillery becomes a way to exclude the deviant, while giving vent to society’s latent aggressiveness.9 All through the eighteenth century, Hobbes’s theories were criticised by many Whig thinkers — a good case in point are Francis Hutcheson’s Reflections on Laughter (1725), where the ‘sense of the ridiculous’ stands out as a paramount tool to preserve individual differences and improve mutual tolerance: Again, laughter, like other associations, is very contagious: our whole frame is so sociable, that one merry countenance may diffuse cheerfulness to many [...]. We are disposed by laughter to a good opinion of the person that raises it [...] — laughter is none of the smallest bonds to common friendships.10

In summary, the opposition between tolerant and intolerant conceptions of laughter in eighteenth-century Britain is related to a wider debate on the nature of modern societies. To what extent are we allowed to express our originality, without undergoing the pressure exerted by the norm? Shaftesbury’s and Hobbes’s opposite answers to this question both had a lasting inf luence on English literature and philosophy, but the former undoubtedly prevailed during the second half of the eighteenth century; by that time, the ideals of ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘good nature’ had become commonplace, and so had the belief that society is f lexible enough to accept individual anomalies. The literary emblem of this phase is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where the cheerfulness of the main characters allows an ideal synthesis between social integration and the free expression of each one’s hobby horses; Toby Shandy quickly became a proverbial personification of the ‘amiable original’, eccentric yet at the same time perfectly at ease within the social fabric.11 Uncle Toby will have many heirs in nineteenth-century English fiction as well — suffice it to mention Mr Pickwick or David Copperfield’s Mr Dick, whose oddities tend to be warmly received by the environment they live in (as well as by the author himself ). Nonetheless, Dickens’s society looks little like Sterne’s,

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and the ambiguousness of the eccentric’s liberty becomes far more patent. Despite being free to give vent to their peculiarities, Dickens’s humorous characters also seem irreparably detached from the dynamic core of society; while the protagonist often embodies the sober values of common sense, the ‘originals’ are assigned limited space within a rigid (albeit good-humoured) taxonomy.12 More generally, in various European countries, the gradual development of a mass society during the nineteenth century seems to exacerbate the friction between originality and homogenisation. In Dickens’s works, the conf lict is usually solved in a pacific way, in the name of a relative ‘comfort of civilization’ (whereby complying with common sense is the necessary condition for the individual’s fulfilment);13 but other prominent European writers and thinkers, especially after the French Revolution, start conceiving the social norm — along with laughter as a way of punishing diversity — far more problematically. Originality in France In late seventeenth-century Britain, the concept of everybody being distinguished by their particular humour — as it had been defined in Ben Jonson’s and George Chapman’s comedies — took the shape of a patriotic refrain: only in a free and prosperous state can people cultivate their innocuous eccentricities. One of the first relevant appearances of such theories can be found in an essay by William Temple (1690), where the profusion of ‘originals’ in Britain is explicitly linked to the ‘ease of our government’: So there may be amongst us, for this vein of our stage, and a greater variety of humour in the picture, because there is a greater variety in the life. This may proceed from the native plenty of our soil, the unequalness of our climate, as well as the ease of our government, and the liberty of professing opinions and factions. [...] Thus we come to have more originals, and more that appear what they are; we have more humour, because every man follows his own, and takes a pleasure, perhaps a pride, to shew it. On the contrary, where the people are generally poor, and forced to hard labour, their actions and lives are all of a piece; [...] so that some nations look as if they were cast all by one mould, or cut out all by one pattern (at least the common people in one, and the gentlemen in another): they seem all of a sort in their habits, their customs, and even their talk and conversation.14

The ‘greater variety of humour’ in English comedy — as compared to the French tradition — coincides with a ‘greater variety in the life’, which in turn depends on the political situation; where neither freedom nor wealth take root, people ‘look as if they were cast all by one mould, or cut all by one pattern’. A few decades later, Thomas Gordon’s The Humourist (1725) would similarly exalt England’s prosperity along with its anthropological heterogeneity: ‘The pleasing Medley of Characters and Humours particular to Old England, make up together a very fine Scene; and the general Face of Peace and Prosperity that covers all, will well enough excuse a warm Englishman in thinking it the finest Country in the World’.15 But the most inf luential occurrence of the refrain belongs to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey — presumably echoing, by the way, William Temple’s monetary metaphor:

10

Laughter and Originality The English, like ancient medals, kept more apart, and passing but few people’s hands, preserve the first sharpnesses which the fine hand of nature has given them — they are not so pleasant to feel — but, in return, the legend is so visible, that at the first look you see whose image and superscription they bear. — But the French, Monsieur le Comte, added I, wishing to soften what I had said, have so many excellences [...] — if they have a fault — they are too serious. (Sent. Journey, 50)

If the English, as Sterne’s protagonist Yorick had just stated, arrived ‘at the same polish which distinguishes the French’, they would certainly ‘lose that distinct variety and originality of character, which distinguishes them, not only from each other, but from all the world besides’. Originating as a literary comparison regarding comic characters, the opposition between British eccentricity and French uniformity became a widespread topos after 1789, and not in Britain alone. Already in 1790, Edmund Burke claimed that the Revolution would end up erasing ‘the many diversities among men’;16 it comes as no surprise that, in the aftermath of the Jacobin terror, a large number of French thinkers started delving into the concepts of humour and originality, while exposing — not necessarily from a conservative angle — the oppressive aspects of égalité.17 ‘The English are particularly skilful in portraying bizarre characters, because there are many among them’, writes Madame De Staël in 1800;18 on the contrary, as remarked by Alexandre Vinet in his ‘De l’humeur et des écrivains humoristiques’ (1837), the French spirit is adverse to humour, as it is to any accentuation of individual peculiarities.19 More precisely, humour seems to be repelled by what Sterne called polish, i.e. the levelling pressure exerted by a rigid social code — be it the old etiquette of court society or the ubiquitous ‘repressive equality’ imposed by the bourgeois Revolution, or again the alleged triumph of bourgeois conformism that characterised the post-revolutionary era. Tocqueville, for instance, insists on homogenisation being one of the inherent risks in both French and American democracies: In olden society everything was different: unity and uniformity were nowhere to be met with. In modern society everything threatens to become so much alike, that the peculiar characteristics of each individual will soon be entirely lost in the general aspect of the world.20

An extremely similar opinion is expressed, twenty years after La Démocratie en Amérique, in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).21 French culture, however, seems to be the most concerned about the extinction of diversity, and the most interested in individual differences as opposed to bourgeois conformism.22 Théophile Gautier’s De l’Originalité en France (1837) is a remarkable example of this general trend, especially in relation to the social functions of laughter. Gautier’s article begins with a quotation from A Sentimental Journey, precisely from the passage on the ‘ancient medals’: Maître Yorick [...] a dit (et il y a déjà quelque temps de cela), que les Français étaient comme ces vieilles pièces de monnaie qui, à force de passer de main en main, ont perdu leur empreinte et leur millésime. À mon avis, c’est ce qu’on a trouvé de plus juste et de plus fin sur notre caractère national [...]. (De l’Originalité, 13–14)

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[Mr Yorick [...] said, some time ago, that the French were like those ancient medals that, after passing many people’s hands, lose their mark and their seal. I believe this is the truest and most clever statement ever made on our national character.]

Social pressure forces the subject to erase or conceal its personal anomalies, up to the point of losing every trace of individuality: ‘Exposez deux ciselures de haut relief à une action réciproque; l’une usera l’autre, ou même elles s’useront toutes deux. Je crois que tout est là; de là ce qu’on appelle politesse, de là le manque d’originalité’ [Rub two high-relief sculptures one against the other; one of them will be worn down by the other, or they will wear each other down. It’s as simple as that, I think; hence what they call politesse, hence the lack of originality] (De l’Originalité, 14). The increasing lack of originality is therefore explained as a direct consequence of ‘la politesse’, both in the sense of politeness and of mutual polishing. Gautier’s vocabulary evokes, of course, Yorick’s polish, but it bears an even stronger similarity to Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit: ‘All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision’ (Essay, 65). Nonetheless, the difference is quite clear: in Shaftesbury’s view, the social tendency to ‘rub off the corners’ does not obstruct the free expression of each one’s oddities (by ‘Rough Sides’ the author refers to ideological stiffness, rather than to hobby horses); according to Gautier, though, the process is more violent — and its outcomes far more disturbing. The primary tool of this invisible social violence is precisely laughter, threatening the French and causing them to repress their originality. We feel compelled to be like everybody else, because otherwise people would make fun of us: Ce mot seul, ‘c’est un original’, équivaut à un réprobation [...]. L’apophtegme sacramentel est: Il faut être comme tout le monde. [...] L’originalité ne se développe que dans la retraite, et le Français n’a pas de chez lui; [...] dans son intérieur même, à peine il ose se laisser aller à sa nature. S’il ôtait le masque d’uniforme, s’il délaçait un peu ce corset de grande représentation, il courrait risque d’être surpris en f lagrant délit d’individualité [...]; il aurait peur qu’on ne se moquât de lui. (De l’Originalité, 14–16) [To describe someone as an ‘original’ is considered an insult [...]. The sacred motto is: ‘You must be like everybody else’. [...] Originality can only grow in hidden places, and the French do not have any such places; [...] even inside their houses, they hardly let themselves go. If they took off their mask of uniformity, if they unlaced their corset of pretence, they would risk being caught in the act of individuality [...]; they would be terrorised by the idea of being laughed at.]

Not by chance, Gautier anticipates motives that will become recurrent in Italian modernism, such as the idea of social duties as a stif ling corset (Pirandello’s ‘Marsina stretta’ [tight-fitting tailcoat]), or the ‘intérieur’ as the only place left for giving vent to personal inclinations (‘La carriola’). An even more striking prolepsis of twentieth-century themes lies in the immediately following passage: ‘Voilà pourtant où la civilisation nous a menés. Je ne doute pas que d’ici à quelque cent ans on n’en vienne à arranger la vie de façon telle qu’un automate puisse en remplir les fonctions’ [This is where civilisation has lead us to. I am sure that, in

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a hundred years from now, life will be organised in such a way that an automaton will be able to perform all human functions] (De l’Originalité, 16–18). The terror of being laughed at is bound to reduce people to standardised cogs — ‘automates’, indeed. The image of the automaton as a symbol for modernisation is of course a pervasive one in the early twentieth century; and more significantly to us, it will be assigned a paramount function in Bergson’s essay Le Rire (1900). To be sure — as will be detailed shortly — in this last case the roles are reversed, with society being presented as a f lexible environment, and automatism being blamed on the originals instead. It is noteworthy, though, that Gautier perceives the same phenomenon that will later be described (albeit in opposite terms) by Bergson: the collective norm exerts a continuous invisible pressure on individual originality, and the most common outlet for this latent aggressiveness is the social practice of derision. The diffusion of such beliefs is naturally ref lected by a series of changes in the literary functions of laughter, also when it comes to the interpretation of English models. Both Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey can be enthusiastically imitated or openly criticised, but in any case their meaning is frequently altered by a different perspective on the status of irregularity. In the most famous instance of French Sternism, Xavier De Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794), the free expression of personal whims can only take place in a state of abstraction from communal life; due to a military punishment, the narrator is temporarily confined in his room. The symbolic importance of this narrative pretext should not be overlooked — as Gautier would say, the only room left for originality is in the ‘intérieur’; the eccentric is not authentically free, as he can express himself solely in his private fancies. Not by chance, the final page of the book underlines the opposition between the bad infinity of individual oddities and the inevitable constraints of ‘la bienséance’: Charmant pays de l’imagination, toi que l’Être bienfaisant par excellence a livré aux hommes pour les consoler de la réalité, il faut que je te quitte. [...] C’est aujourd’hui donc que je suis libre, ou plutôt que je vais rentrer dans les fers! Le joug des affaires va de nouveau peser sur moi; je ne ferai plus un pas qui ne soit mesuré par la bienséance et le devoir.23 [Enchanting land of imagination, you whom the most benevolent Being bequeathed to men to console them for reality, I must leave you. [...] So, today is the day I am to be free, or rather the day on which I am to be shackled in chains once more! The yoke of business will once more weigh down on me; I will no longer be able to take a single step that is not traced out for me by propriety and duty.]

The natural sociability of the ‘amiable original’, as well as the affable and tolerant environment surrounding Shandy Hall, seems no longer plausible; needless to say, the distance from the world of Tristram Shandy gets even more glaring in less enthusiastic readers.24 In the rest of Europe, under different social and political circumstances, nineteenth-century Sternism follows similar patterns. In Germany, for instance, Tristram Shandy is read in the light of Romantic irony, thus losing its original sociable spirit and becoming a celebration of isolated subjectivity; Jean Paul’s humour, as remarked by Hegel, entails a complete ‘concentration of the ego into

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itself, for which all bonds are snapped and which can live only in the bliss of selfenjoyment’.25 In Italy, too, even the closest followers of Sterne tend to frame the relation between society and the Self in a different way. From the very foreword to his Viaggio sentimentale, Ugo Foscolo underlines the isolated, Quixotic nature of Sterne’s pleasantness;26 Carlo Bini’s Manoscritto di un prigioniero (1833) is, even more notably than De Maistre’s Voyage, an example of confined Sternism; lastly, an openly misanthropic form of humour distinguishes the works of Carlo Dossi, who — with more than a hint of self-projection — interprets the Sternian value of amiability as a mere rhetorical device (‘falso tenerume’ [fake tenderness]).27 A separate, systematic analysis should be undertaken for Manzoni; I promessi sposi do evoke some aspects of Sterne’s humour (especially on a meta-textual level),28 but the author’s overall perspective on communal life, along with the main functions of laughter in the novel, actually point to a more bitter kind of irony.29 Lastly, an even more overtly antisocial interpretation of Sternism is embodied by Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), whose narrator perfectly (if ambiguously) encapsulates the Romantic resistance to social homogenisation: ‘They were all dull-witted and one just like the next, like a f lock of sheep [...] No one else was like me, nor was I like anyone else. “I am alone, and they are everybody” ’ (Notes, 46–47).30 According to the underground man, too, individuality can only manifest itself within the Sternian dimension of caprice (kapriz): Man needs one thing only: independent desire, whatever that independence costs and wherever it may lead. [...] You see, this very foolish thing is your caprice, and in actual fact, gentlemen, it can be more advantageous to us all than anything else on earth [...]; because in any case it preserves the thing that is most important and precious to us, which is our personality and our individuality. (Notes, 27–29)

Once again, however, Shandyism loses its affable traits and becomes a form of solipsistic, radical opposition to communal life — indeed, the life of the underground man is ‘gloomy, disordered, and insanely lonely’ (Notes, 45). In essence, most nineteenth-century readings of Sterne seem to deny the model’s original optimism about civilisation; this trend is particularly widespread in France, where (both for historical and cultural reasons) the conf lict between politeness and individual originality is paid special attention. Instead of being considered as a vehicle for tolerance and benevolence, raillery therefore becomes an instrument of homogenisation. In order to clarify this aspect, we shall have to cross the boundaries of Sternism, and focus on different theories and practices of laughter. Laughter and Violence: From Balzac to Bergson In his foreword to Une fille d’Ève (1839), Balzac gives his personal take on the traditional parallel between Britain and France: Mais aussi notre civilisation est-elle immense de détails [...]. Aujourd’hui, l’égalité produit en France des nuances infinies. Jadis, la caste donnait à chacun une physionomie qui dominait l’individu, aujourd’hui, l’individu ne tient sa physionomie que de lui-même. [...] Cette fécondité n’existe pas en Angleterre, seul pays où les doctrines modernes soient en vigueur comme en France. En

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Laughter and Originality Angleterre, la société courbe la tête sous l’empire du devoir [...]. L’auteur ici ne juge pas [...]; le temps n’est pas loin où la duperie coûteuse du gouvernement constitutionnel sera reconnue. Il est historien, voilà tout. Il s’applaudit de la grandeur, de la variété, de la beauté, de la fécondité de son sujet [...]. (Préfaces, Une Fille d’Ève, 371–73) [Our civilisation is immense in details [...]. Today, equality has produced in France infinite nuances. Previously, social caste gave everyone a physiognomy which dominated the individual; today, the individual can only draw its physiognomy from himself. [...] This richness is nowhere to be found in England, the only other country where modern doctrines have taken root as much as in France. In England, society bows its head under the power of duty [...]. It is not the author’s intention to judge [...]; in a future not too remote, constitutional government will be commonly acknowledged as an expensive mistake. The author is an historian, that’s all. He relishes the grandeur, the variety, the beauty and the fecundity of his subject.]

It is worth noting, to begin with, the clear inversion in the comparison — it is France now that offers the greatest ‘variety of types’, precisely because a radical form of equality is allegedly creating ‘an infinite number of nuances’; the technical enthusiasm of the novelist goes along, incidentally, with the political discontent about constitutional monarchy (‘la duperie coûteuse du gouvernement constitutionnel’). While in England the full expression of individual nature is limited by a rigid social structure, the French seem completely free to second their personal inclinations. The only obstacles to originality appear to lie in the monotony of small-town life, where peculiarities tend to be erased: ‘Il se rencontre au fond des provinces quelques têtes dignes d’une étude sérieuse, des caractères pleins d’originalité [...]; mais les aspérités les plus tranchées des caractères, mais les exaltations les plus passionnées finissent par s’y abolir dans la constante monotonie des mœurs’ [in the depths of the provinces we meet with many heads worthy of serious study, characters full of originality [...] nevertheless the most salient asperities of such natures, the most passionate of their enthusiasms, end by being blunted in the constant monotony of habits and manners] (Préfaces, Eugénie Grandet [1833], 200). Still, Balzac’s point of view on such issues is anything but consistent, and changes substantially within a few years. In the foreword to Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1844), the author complains about the total disappearance of diversity in French society: L’aplatissement, l’effacement de nos mœurs va croissant. Il y a dix ans, l’auteur de ce livre écrivait qu’il n’y avait plus que des nuances; mais aujourd’hui, les nuances disparaissent. [...] La littérature actuelle manque de contrastes, et il n’y a pas de contrastes possibles sans distances. Les distances se suppriment de jour en jour. (Préfaces, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes 416–19) [The process of levelling and eliminating our customs is advancing every day. Ten years ago, the author of this book wrote that nuances were all we had left; but today, even nuances disappear. [...] Today’s literature lacks contrasts, and no contrast is possible without distances. Distances are being erased one after the other.]

Once hailed as an immensely varied nation, France is now defined as drastically homogeneous (‘aujourd’hui, les nuances disparaissent’). Rather than with a gradual

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evolution, we are dealing with an essential ideological ambiguity; as a matter of fact, the concerns about the f lattening of French society were already evident in works that preceded Une Fille d’Ève, such as La Peau de chagrin (1831), ‘L’Illustre Gaudissart’ (1833), and César Birotteau (1837). In the golden age of bourgeoisie everyone looks the same, and a levelling might reduces all kinds of people to ‘des pièces de cent sous’ (once again a money-related metaphor, as in Sterne and Gautier): ‘La conséquence immédiate d’une constitution est l’aplatissement des intelligences’. [...] — ‘Votre einseignement mutuel fabrique des pièces de cent sous en chair humaine!’ (La Peau de chagrin, CH X 57) [The immediate consequence of a Constitution is the levelling of intellects. [...] Your reciprocal instruction will create small change in human f lesh.] Notre siècle reliera le règne de la force isolée, abondante en créations originales, au règne de la force uniforme, mais niveleuse, égalisant les produits, les jetant par masses, et obéissant à une pensée unitaire, dernière expression des sociétés. (‘L’Illustre Gaudissart’, CH IV 561) [Our century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in creative genius, to the realm of levelling might, equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by the principle of unity — the final expression of all societies] Heureux enfant qui, par un temps où tout se nivelle, ou tous les chapeaux se ressemblent, réussissait à créer des distances entre la fille d’un parfumeur et lui, rejeton d’une vieille famille parisienne! (César Birotteau, CH VI 234) [Happy the youth who in these levelling days when all hats look alike, has contrived to create a sense of distance between the daughter of a perfumer and himself, the scion of an old Parisian family!]

The optimistic belief in the preservation of originality alternates, then, with the suspicion that democracy might erase the differences between people. This conf lict is quite pervasive in Balzac — judging only by the functions assigned to laughter, though, his perspective seems far more coherent. To be sure, laughter abounds in the Comédie humaine in all of its aspects, including traces of Rabelais’s most cheerful notes and of Sterne’s amiable humour;31 yet, the ways it is most frequently used by the implied author, along with his manner of representing the ritual of derision, betray Balzac’s pessimism towards the depersonalising violence of social norms. As has been noted, laughter in the Comédie tends to highlight ‘how difficult it is not to be unhappy otherwise than through mediocrity’;32 this attitude is exemplified both by the author’s own satire against growing conformism, and by the representation of mockery as an instrument for social levelling. This latter function is particularly relevant, as it pictures raillery as a sort of ‘wound inf licted by society’, or as ‘the forerunner of brute force’.33 The moqueur and his victim cannot exist outside of communal life, nor can society exist without derision: ‘la Nature n’a fait que des bêtes, nous devons les sots à l’État social’ [Nature is responsible for dullness, but it is to Society that we owe morons] (La Maison Nucingen, CH VI 25); ‘aucune société n’était complète sans une victime, sans un être à plaindre, à railler, à mépriser, à protéger’ [no society is complete without

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a victim — without an object to pity, ridicule, despise, and protect] (Les Paysans, CH IX 695). Although the violence of ridicule was born together with civilisation itself, Balzac sees the age inaugurated by the Revolution as a peak in this regard. A passage from La Peau de chagrin establishes an emblematic comparison between Rabelais’s joyful pranks and the resentful railleries of the ‘enfants de la Révolution’: ‘Entre les tristes plaisanteries dites par ces enfants de la Révolution à la naissance d’un journal, et les propos tenus par de joyeux buveurs à la naissance de Gargantua, se trouvait tout l’abîme qui sépare le dix-neuvième siècle du seizième’ [Between the dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the launch of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua’s birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth century from the sixteenth] (La Peau de chagrin, CH X 39–40). By removing class differences and placing everyone on the same level, the égalité principle ignites a ruthless bellum omnium contra omnes; those who cannot conform to the rules of this struggle are bound to failure and derision. This punitive function of public ridicule is universal, and at the same time typical of the ‘temps où tout se nivelle’; it emerges anywhere equality seems to rule, from college to office: Aussi faut-il avoir hanté les Bureaux pour reconnaître à quel point la vie rapetissée y ressemble à celle des collèges [...]. Tous ces employés, réunis pendant leurs séances de huit heures dans les bureaux, y voyaient une espèce de classe où il y avait des devoirs à faire, [...] où l’on se moquait les uns des autres, où l’on se haïssait et où il existait néanmoins une sorte de camaraderie, mais déjà plus froide que celle du régiment, qui elle-même est moins forte que celle des collèges. (Les Employés, CH VII 220; emphasis added) [You would have had to haunt the bureaus to recognise the degree to which their little world resembled that of the colleges. [...] All of these state employees, brought together for their eight-hour sessions in the bureaus, saw in this a sort of class session where there were lessons to write, [...] where you made fun of others, disliked others, but there nevertheless existed a sort of camaraderie colder than that of a regiment, which itself is less hearty than that of colleges.]

As claimed by Louis Lambert (who was particularly familiar with college violence), bourgeois democracy is only a sophisticated version of the usual ‘contrat entre les forts contre les faibles’ [contract between the strong against the weak] (Louis Lambert, CH XI 165); the lampooning of the original is one of the most common symptoms of this latent unevenness. In more than one way, Balzac’s position is not far from the views expressed by Théophile Gautier in the same years. The differences, however, should not be overlooked either. Gautier interprets the abundance of originals as a sign of social f lexibility, and compares French conformism to the mechanic stiffness of automates; in Balzac, on the contrary, society is represented as f luid and f lexible, while the originals are excluded from it precisely because they are too rigid to give up their ‘idées fixes’. These stiff ideas, in turn, can be either noble and admirable (‘ce dévouement aux grandes choses qui dégénère en duperie’ [an enthusiasm for all things great, which is apt to degenerate into credulity], Le Cousin Pons, CH VII 382), or merely grotesque and morbid: ‘la jalousie formait la base de ce caractère plein d’excentricités, mot trouvé par les Anglais pour les folies non pas des petites

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mais des grandes maisons’ [jealousy was the fundamental passion of this character, marked by eccentricities — a word invented by the English to describe the craziness not of small, but of respectable households] (La Cousine Bette, CH VII 59). Quite significantly, the word excentricité is criticised in this latter passage, as is the traditionally English optimism concerning the social integration of the eccentric; Balzac’s original, instead, is usually marginalised as a lunatic, whether a Quixotic and pathetic one (Pons) or — less often — a despicable one (Bette). The opposition between the stiffness of the irregular individual and the violent dynamism of society anticipates Bergson’s theories (on which we shall focus shortly); in Balzac, however, the sympathy towards the derided character is far stronger, and far more frequent. As Curtius underlined, there is always something magnanimous in his monomaniacs, as their passion is a form of involuntary resistance to the uniformity of the bourgeois age.34 Be they pathetic (and pathological) or not, Balzac’s originals are often victimised through mockery, thus paying the cost of the social tendency to uniformity; among the various functions of laughter in the Comédie humaine, this is the most relevant to us, as it illustrates a major trend in French Romantic realism. Quite similarly (aesthetic and ideological specificities aside), Hugo’s grotesque exposes the collective persecution of the abnormal or deformed individual, who is usually made a target of ruthless derision or morbid curiosity. The clash between the low and the sublime, as prescribed in the ‘Préface’ to Cromwell (1828), finds an ideal expression in the noble pain of the derided monster: suffice it to mention Quasimodo, Triboulet (Le Roi s’amuse), or even more pertinently Gwynplaine (L’Homme qui rit), whose childish innocence contrasts with the sadism of the English aristocracy. To be sure, Hugo’s violent representation of ridicule does not imply a suspicious attitude towards democracy, as it does in Balzac; the mistreatment of the original is usually referred to as a symbol for the unfairness of the ancien régime, rather than for the levelling tendencies of the bourgeois age.35 Therefore, on a merely ideological level, Hugo’s case differs from the trend we are trying to illustrate — but it does confirm the predominance of a Hobbesian tone to the representation of laughter in nineteenthcentury France. Further confirmation is provided by another literary topos, whose development dates back to the 1830s: the comic-pathetic representation of the petit bourgeois being laughed at, on account of his inability to adapt to the norm. This recurring pattern ideally ref lects the standardisation of a society where ‘tout est bourgeois’ [everything is bourgeois], to borrow the words of Henry Monnier’s Monsieur Proudhomme;36 despite deviating from the standard, the derided himself is not exempt from the general bêtise.37 Not by chance, this kind of character is most frequently a copyist: in Balzac’s Les Employés and in Bouvard et Pécuchet, but also in minor novels like Courteline’s Messieurs les ronds-de-cuir (1892), the passiveness of copying becomes a metaphor for collective mimetism. Some of the most important examples of this phenomenon can obviously be found in Flaubert’s works: the opening sequence of Madame Bovary — when Charles is forced to write ridiculus sum on the blackboard — perfectly captures the stubborn, pervasive violence of the bourgeois code (on whose authority, by the way, the victim will never entertain a single doubt).

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Henri Bergson’s Le Rire, published in 1900, is an emblematic theorisation of the link between mockery and violence so clearly portrayed in nineteenth-century French realism. Bergson’s essay delves into the idea of laughter being a ‘geste social’ [social gesture], i.e. an alternative to actual coercion (‘répression matérielle’) in order to punish supposedly antisocial behaviour (Le Rire, 16). The basic concept is not far from Balzac’s opinions, as also suggested by Bergson’s reference to college life (a parallel which we have already found in Les Employés): S’il est permis de comparer aux petites choses les grandes, nous rappellerons ici ce qui se passe à l’entrée de nos Écoles. Quand le candidat a franchi les redoutables épreuves de l’examen, il lui reste à en affronter d’autres, celles que ses camarades plus anciens lui préparent pour le former à la société nouvelle où il pénètre et, comme ils disent, pour lui assouplir le caractère. Toute petite société qui se forme au sein de la grande est portée ainsi, par un vague instinct, à inventer un mode de correction et d’assouplissement [...]. (Le Rire, 60) [If it is permissible to compare important things with trivial ones, we would call to mind what happens when a youth enters one of our academies. After getting through the dreaded ordeal of the examination, he finds he has other ordeals to face, which his seniors have arranged with the object of fitting him for the new life he is entering upon, or, as they say, of ‘softening his manners’. Every small society that forms within the larger is thus impelled, by a vague kind of instinct, to devise some method of discipline.]

Another similarity with the Comédie humaine (except for the decrease in pathos) lies in the antinomy between social elasticity and the rigidity of the ludicrous individual. Communal life requires a certain degree of f lexibility (‘une attention constamment en éveil, [...] une certaine élasticité du corps et de l’esprit’ [a constantly alert attention, a certain elasticity of mind and body], Le Rire, 15); the original, instead, is affected by the ‘raideur de l’idée fixe’ [rigidity of a fixed idea] (Le Rire, 14), thus becoming a ‘pantin’ [puppet] (Le Rire, 20) or an ‘automate’,38 and proving to be unsuitable for society. Bergson’s view on this pattern is ambivalent, as he recognises the inherent cruelty of derision, but at the same time he also suggests that the (involuntary) end can sometimes justify the means. Le Rire intentionally neglects the former aspect, and often underlines the possible social benefits of raillery: [Le rire] a pour fonction d’intimider en humiliant. Il n’y réussirait pas si la nature n’avait laissé à cet effet, dans les meilleurs d’entre les hommes, un petit fonds de méchanceté, ou tout au moins de malice. [...]. Ici, comme ailleurs, la nature a utilisé le mal en vue du bien. C’est le bien surtout qui nous a préoccupé dans toute cette étude. (Le Rire, 84) [Its function is to intimidate by humiliating. Now, it would not succeed in doing this, had not nature implanted for that very purpose, even in the best of men, a spark of spitefulness or, at all events, of mischief. [...]. Here, as elsewhere, nature has utilised evil with a view to good. It is more especially the good that has engaged our attention throughout this work.]

While it would be inaccurate to interpret Le Rire as an unconditional vilification of eccentricity in the name of social conventions,39 Bergson does not show any hostility to standardisation either; in this respect, his attitude is quite far from the prevailing one both in nineteenth-century realism and (as will be illustrated) in

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modernism. Nevertheless, Bergson’s awareness of the ‘méchancheté’ and ‘égoïsme’ of ridicule, and of its levelling social effects, provides us with an ideal connection between the times of Balzac and Hugo and those of Pirandello and Palazzeschi. In summary, nineteenth-century French culture tends to see laughter as a way to isolate and punish individual oddities, on the part of a uniform society; the tradition of the realist novel, from Balzac to Flaubert, provides us with major examples of this trend. A similar perspective can also be found in other coeval European classics, as shown for instance by some emblematic originals in Russian Realism — e.g. Akaky Akakievic (The Overcoat), Marmeladov (Crime and Punishment), and most of all Myshkin (The Idiot). It is worth noting that, in this last case, Dostoevsky’s main literary source is a specimen of benevolent laughter (The Pickwick Papers), whose protagonist is yet interpreted as a Quixotic victim of public derision: The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man. There is nothing more difficult in the world, and especially now. [...] I will only mention that of the good people in Christian literature, the most fully realized is Don Quixote; but he is good solely because he is ludicrous at the same time. Dickens’ Pickwick (an idea infinitely weaker than Don Quixote; but enormous all the same) is also ludicrous and that is just his appeal. There is compassion for the old man who is laughed at and who does not know his own value — and so there appears sympathy in the reader too. This arousing of compassion is the secret of humour.40

In spite of the Dickensian affiliation, the emphasis on the cruelty of mockery is rather evocative of Balzac.41 We will focus later on the peculiarities of Dostoevsky’s originals, also with regard to their modernist reception; for the moment, suffice it to note that the exclusion of the eccentric through laughter is a widespread topos in many highly inf luential nineteenth-century realists — Hugo, Balzac, Gogol, Flaubert, and Dostoevsky, but also (as we shall see) Verga and Maupassant. The following chapters of this volume will aim to investigate how this pattern has been further developed in Italian modernism — from Pirandello’s marginalised uomini soli and Svevo’s inetti to Palazzeschi’s and Gadda’s idiosyncratic laughing stocks. As anticipated, the diffusion of such themes cannot be separated from the centrality of laughter in the author’s perspective on the narrated world; the tension between social and authorial laughter is actually the main difference between the representation of originality in the Italian modernists and the serious-tragic paradigm of nineteenth-century realism. However, in their modernist reframing of the social functions of laughter, all four authors reject the optimism of the SternianShaftesburian tradition, thus detaching themselves from a common trend in early twentieth-century Italian culture.42 But before moving on to the close reading of the authors at issue, it might be helpful to clarify another methodological premise of this work, i.e. the choice of paying particular attention to the short-story form. ‘An Unheard-of Event that Occurred’: Irregularity and the Short Story In an article titled ‘Un Pirandello per ridere nel Quattrocento’ [A humorous Pirandello from the fifteenth century] (1927), the Renaissance scholar Arturo

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Pompeati established a parallel between the freshly rediscovered fifteenth-century Novella del grasso legnaiuolo and Pirandello’s short stories. As the title suggests, the basis for comparison lies in the allegedly similar comical imagery: ‘Ho voluto soltanto accostare certe sue note dominanti alle note, molto simili, che risuonano in una bonaria novella della nostra età più serenamente obliosa’ [I simply meant to compare some of Pirandello’s dominant notes to those of a cheerful novella from Italy’s most carefree era].43 Pompeati’s argument is rather loose, but it is undeniable that the vast display of wits and practical jokes in Novelle per un anno is partly indebted to the Italian tradition of novelle di beffa and di motto, and to Boccaccio especially.44 The same applies to Svevo, whose ‘Una burla riuscita’ openly evokes the beffe of the ‘antichi toscani’ [ancient Tuscans] (RSA 217), and has also been compared to the Novella del grasso legnaiuolo;45 similarly, Palazzeschi himself acknowledges his debts towards the Decameron, by saluting Boccaccio as ‘maestro d’arte e di vita’ [master in art and in life] in the preface to his comprehensive collection Tutte le novelle (TN 966).46 In many respects, indeed, the Italian modernist short story seems to have inherited its fascination with the social uses of laughter from the Boccaccian tradition; however, apart from the inf luence of the fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury novella, deeper structural reasons invite us to choose short fiction as the main source for our analysis. To begin with, the most important definitions of the genre between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries share a special interest in the concept of irregularity, albeit interpreting it in different ways. According to Goethe’s famous statement, the short story is usually built around an ‘unheard-of event that occurred’ (‘eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit’).47 The formula would later be reworked by Lukács in his Theory of the Novel (1911), where short fiction is indicated as the ‘the narrative form which pin-points the strangeness and ambiguity of life’;48 while the novel typically follows events in their gradual development, the novella rather focuses on trauma and paroxysm. Likewise, in his article ‘Romanzo, racconto, novella’ (1897), Pirandello associates the short story to Greek tragedy on account of their common disposition to excess: ‘La novella e la tragedia classica pigliano il fatto, a dir così, per la coda; [...] solo gli ultimi passi, gli eccessi, insomma’ [both the novella and classic tragedy take facts, so to speak, by the tail; [...] that is to say the last steps, the excesses only].49 The structural function of excess is reaffirmed in Boris Eikhenbaum’s seminal ‘How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made’ (1919), with particular attention to the link between the short story and the grotesque, defined as an abnormal expansion of details: ‘The usual correlations and connections (psychological and logical) turn out, in this newly constructed world, to be unreal, and each trif le can grow to colossal proportions’.50 Basing her analysis on other authors (Maupassant, Verga, Chekhov), Florence Goyet has more recently labelled the short story as the genre of ‘caractérisation paroxystique’, in which reality is shaped as abnormal and excessive (even in the irrelevance of everyday bourgeois life, as is usually the case with Maupassant or Chekhov).51 Words like ‘anomaly’, ‘excess’, and ‘paroxysm’ all emerge as leitmotifs in the theory of the novella — the same applies to ‘transgression’, a key term in Todorov’s Grammaire du Décameron (1969). As suggested by one of Palazzeschi’s most

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representative titles, short fiction can be considered as the literary form of the superlative (the ‘Issimo’). But what happens, when irregularity is embodied by a specific character? A convincing answer has been provided by Andreas Gailus, in an essay on the development of the genre in nineteenth-century Germany (2003): [Goethe’s] Unterhaltungen dramatize the disturbance of a system by a foreign body. At issue is the question of how a certain order of discourse and interaction will react to the intrusion of a radically divergent element. [...] More specifically, what short fiction, from Goethe to Musil, repeatedly attempts to represent is a dysfunctional and asymbolic core at the heart of a functioning system, an excessive and traumatic element that threatens the unity of an organized whole from within.52

According to Gailus, the modern Novelle (a term closer to the Italian novella and the French nouvelle, than to the English ‘novella’) usually narrates the ‘disturbance of a system’ when dealing with an ‘excessive and traumatic element’, followed by the reaction of that system (typically resulting in the repression of the excessive element). This remark, of course, does not only apply to a specific era in German literature, but also to short fiction at large: indeed, numberless memorable shortstory characters can be seen as ‘foreign bodies’ disturbing a ‘functioning system’. Some of them, for instance, belong to the category of the lonely maverick: as already pointed out by Frank O’Connor, ‘always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society [...]. As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel — an intense awareness of human loneliness’.53 But even more often, the ‘foreign body’ can take the shape of a jester or a laughing stock, being punitively lampooned by his/her community. Not by chance, Gailus’s terms (‘disturbance of a system’, ‘threat’) are extremely close to those employed by Bergson to describe the reactive function of mockery: ‘toute raideur du caractère, de l’esprit et même du corps, sera donc suspecte à la société’; ‘elle est en présence de quelque chose qui l’inquiète, mais à titre de symptôme seulement, — à peine une menace, tout au plus un geste. C’est donc par un simple geste qu’elle y répondra’ [society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body; It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom — scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply] (Le Rire, 16; emphasis added). Thanks to the structural proneness of the genre to representing the struggle between social systems and individual deviations, the beffa has always been a central theme in the history of the novella; still, if we compare its early modern occurrences to the nineteenth- or twentieth-century reinterpretations, we cannot but remark a substantial paradigmatic shift. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, the classic archetype of the novella di beffa, the most important character (as well as the one the reader is supposed to identify with) is usually the mocker, whose cleverness and initiative coincide with the values of the rising bourgeois ‘system’;54 the victim, on the other hand, tends to be reduced to a static counterpart, the rightfulness of whose punishment is hardly questioned. Romantic, post-Romantic and modernist short fiction, instead, typically focuses on the condition of the laughing stock, whose violent marginalisation ref lects the stif ling, repressive rules of the system.55 In

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Maupassant, for instance, the wickedness of raillery is a major leitmotif, while the fool is often portrayed as a ‘martyr’: J’ai connu un de ces hommes dont la vie fut un des plus cruels martyres qu’on puisse rêver. [...] Il devint un souffre-douleur, une sorte de bouffon-martyr, de proie donnée à la férocité native, à la gaieté sauvage des brutes qui l’entouraient. [...] Puis on se lassa même des plaisanteries; et le beau-frère enrageant de le toujours nourrir, le frappa, le gif la sans cesse, riant des efforts inutiles de l’autre pour parer les coups ou les rendre. (‘L’Aveugle’, CN 453–54) [I knew one of these men whose life was one of the most cruel martyrdoms that could possibly be conceived. [...] He became a laughing stock, a sort of martyrfool, a prey to the inborn ferocity, to the savage gaiety of the brutes who surrounded him. [...] After this they got tired even of these practical jokes, and the brother-in-law, angry at having to support him always, struck him, cuffed him incessantly, laughing at his futile efforts to ward off or return the blows.]

Apart from ‘L’Aveugle’, several other texts linger on the gratuitous harassment against a tragicomic buffoon: e.g., ‘Le Docteur Héraclius Gloss’ (1875), ‘Madame Baptiste’ (1882), ‘Ce Cochon de Morin’ (1882), ‘L’Âne’ (1883), ‘La Ficelle’ (1883), ‘Le Gueux’ (1884). The social practice of laughter, in conclusion, systematically takes the Hobbesian shape of violence,56 while the reader is now totally prevented from sympathising with the mockers. A similar pattern underpins many other paradigmatic pieces of realist short fiction, from Balzac’s ‘Colonel Chabert’ and Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ to Dostoevsky’s ‘Polzunkov’ or ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’. Among the major short-story writers in nineteenth-century Italy, the most careful observer of public derision and its effects is undoubtedly Verga. Mockery is especially ubiquitous in Vita dei campi: when Jeli’s neighbours find out that he is a cocu, ‘gli ridono sul naso’ [they laugh in his face] (‘Jeli il pastore’, TN I 156); Malpelo is ‘ingiuriato e beffato da tutti’ [insulted and lampooned by everybody] (‘Rosso Malpelo’, TN I 169); Gramigna, another cuckold, is the laughing stock of the town (‘la gente si metteva a ridere’ [people laughed at him], ‘L’amante di Gramigna’, TN I 197). Even more effectively, the opening of ‘Pentolaccia’ evokes the scornful attitude of the rural community towards individual oddities:57 Giacché facciamo festa come se fossimo al cosmorama, quando c’è la festa nel paese, che si mette l’occhio al vetro, e si vedono passare ad uno ad uno Garibaldi e Vittorio Emanuele, adesso viene ‘Pentolaccia’ ch’è un bello originale anche lui, e ci fa bella figura fra tanti matti che hanno avuto il giudizio nelle calcagna. (‘Pentolaccia’, TN I 208) [Since we are celebrating like when the cosmorama is in town, and we look at the glass and we see Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele passing by, here comes Pentolaccia who is a remarkable original himself, and stands out quite well among the many lunatics who lost their mind completely.]

Pentolaccia is spitefully singled out as a remarkable eccentric (‘un bell’originale’), a lunatic (‘ci fa bella figura fra tanti matti’), almost a fair attraction (‘come se fossimo al cosmorama’). As usual in Verga, the author does not sympathise with the original, neither does he express an opinion on the rules of communal life; he just displays their cruelty, in the awareness of their being inescapable. To be sure, other mean

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jokes are referred to in Verga’s novels as well58 — it is in his short fiction, however, that this motive becomes most widespread. As suggested by this brief scrutiny of nineteenth-century authors, the recurrence of the derided fool as a topos in the modern short story is by no means accidental. On the contrary, it seems related to what can be called a primary symbolic function of the genre — the celebration of human eccentricities (Gailus’s ‘divergent element’), against the growing uniformity of the system. As we have seen in the previous sections of this chapter, the concern about the extinction of originality seems to occupy a crucial place in the modern social imaginary, at least since the Romantic age; given its formal predisposition to anomaly and excess, the novella is probably the ideal literary form to capture and convey this widespread fear. The modernist authors we will concentrate on — Pirandello, Palazzeschi and Svevo in particular59 — clearly confirm this working hypothesis. As will be documented, the tension between social laughter and private irregularities is represented by these authors in all forms of fiction; nonetheless, while in their novels or dramas we are usually confronted with occasional references, in the short stories this theme tends to be assigned a central role, along with an evident structural function. It seems appropriate, therefore, to base our analysis on short fiction, as this will provide us with a privileged standpoint to analyse modernist laughter and its relations with the nineteenth-century code. Particular attention will also be given, however, to the multi-faceted interactions between the novella and other literary genres. Notes to Chapter 1 1. With regard to Shaftesbury’s idea of laughter as ‘benevola accettazione delle particolarità’ [benevolent acceptance of peculiarities], see Flavio Gregori, Il wit nel ‘Tristram Shandy’: totalità e dialogo (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1987), p. 135. 2. Richard Cumberland, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Laws of Nature (Dublin, 1750), p. 232. This text is actually John Towers’s translation of Cumberland’s De legibus naturae disquisitio (1672): it is nonetheless significant that the diffusion of the essay reached its peak during the eighteenth century, when the philosophical debate on laughter became most intense. Another English version of the Disquisitio had already been provided by John Maxwell in 1727 — see Stuart Tave, The Amiable Humorist (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 56. 3. James Beattie, ‘Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition’, in Essays (Edinburgh, 1776), pp. 587–89. 4. Beattie, ‘Essay on Laughter’, 667. 5. Thomas Davies, A Genuine Narrative of the Life and Theatrical Transactions of Mr. John Henderson (London, 1777), p. 48. 6. See Attilio Brilli, Retorica della satira (Bologna: Il mulino, 1973), pp. 3–126. 7. Shaftesbury himself, in a 1725 letter, deprecated Swift’s ‘obscene’ and ‘profane’ humour (Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 37). 8. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, ed. by John C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. xi, para. 13 (p. 54). 9. It has been remarked that Hobbes did not necessarily rule out the possibility of different, more benevolent kinds of laughter (Robert Edward Ewin, ‘Hobbes on Laughter’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 51 (2001), 29–40). Our focus, however, is not on Hobbes directly, as much as on his long-standing reception in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debate on laughter, where the link between raillery and a pessimistic view of society has constantly been emphasised as the core of Hobbes’s theory. 10. Francis Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter (London, 1750), pp. 35–36.

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11. Tave, The Amiable Humorist, pp. 140–62. 12. F. Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 192–95. Regarding ‘the growing suspicion of eccentricity in Victorian England’, see also Miranda Gill, Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 278–83 (p. 283). 13. Moretti, The Way of the World, pp. 181–95. 14. William Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, in The Works of Sir William Temple (London, 1814), p. 91. 15. Thomas Gordon, The Humourist: Being Essays upon Several Subjects (London, 1725), p. 239. 16. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 538. 17. The most exhaustive study on this subject is Gill, Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination. 18. ‘Ce que les Anglais peignent avec un grand talent, ce sont les caractères bizarres, parce qu’il en existe beaucoup parmi eux’ (Madame De Staël, ‘De la plaisanterie anglaise’, in De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, ed. by Gérard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 228). 19. ‘L’esprit français repousse l’humeur comme repousse toute individualité trop accentuée’ (Alexandre Vinet, ‘De l’humeur et des écrivains humoristiques’, in Mélanges (Paris, 1869), p. 227). 20. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835–40], trans. by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 196. 21. ‘There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle with it. [...] But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences’ ( J. S. Mill, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, ed. by Mary Warnock (London: Fontana-Collins, 1978), pp. 189–90). This passage is also quoted, along with Tocqueville, in Moretti, The Way of the World, pp. 102–03. 22. ‘Interest in individual difference grew across a wide range of cultural discourses and practices in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as bourgeois conformism became the object of increasing scrutiny and satire’ (Gill, Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination, p. 35). 23. Xavier De Maistre, Voyage autour de ma chambre (Paris: Corti, 1984), pp. 105–06. 24. See Anne Bandry, ‘Romantic to Avant-garde: Sterne in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century France’, in The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe, ed. by Peter de Voogd and John Neubauer (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 32–67. 25. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. by Thomas M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), i, 66. Concerning the German reception of Sterne, see Duncan Large, ‘Sterne-Bilder: Sterne in the German-speaking World’, in The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe, ed. by P. de Voogd and J. Neubauer, pp. 68–84; Frederick Garber, ‘Sterne: Arabesques and Fictionality’, in Romantic Irony, ed. by F. Garber (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), pp. 33–40; and Peter Conrad, Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 26. ‘In questo libricciuolo, ch’ei scrisse col presentimento avverato della propria morte, trafuse con più amore il proprio carattere; quasi che nell’abbandonare la terra, volesse lasciarle alcuna memoria perpetua d’un’anima sì diversa dalle altre’ [This book, that he wrote in the awareness of his imminent death, is lovingly infused with his character — as if, on the point of leaving the Earth, he wanted to provide us with an ever-lasting memory of a soul so different from any other] (Ugo Foscolo, Viaggio sentimentale lungo la Francia e l’Italia (Milan: Mondadori, 1970), pp. 11–12). 27. ‘Sterne fa il tenero, ma è un falso tenerume’ (Carlo Dossi, Note azzurre, ed. by Dante Isella (Milan: Adelphi, 2009), p. 80). With regard to the ‘effetto Sterne’ in nineteenth-century Italy, see Giancarlo Mazzacurati, ed., Effetto Sterne: la narrazione umoristica in Italia da Foscolo a Pirandello (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1990); Anna Scannapieco, ‘Lemmi e “dilemmi” dell’umorismo: per una morfologia (e storia) della letteratura umoristica in Italia’, Rivista di Letteratura Italiana, 2 (2002), 67–105; Alberto Zava, ‘Rif lessi e suggestioni nell’universo umoristico pirandelliano tra Laurence Sterne ed Alberto Cantoni’, Levia Gravia, 5 (2003), 1–20; Olivia Santovetti, ‘The Sentimental, the “Inconclusive”, the Digressive: Sterne in Italy’, in The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe, ed. by P. de Voogt and J. Neubauer, pp. 199–220; Roberta Colombi, ‘Umorismo ottocentesco. Un’indagine post-pirandelliana’, Pirandelliana, 2 (2008), 73–87; and Roberto Salsano, ‘Varianti

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dell’umorismo tardo ottocentesco: Carlo Dossi e Alberto Cantoni’, Esperienze Letterarie, 1 (2011), 75–92. 28. Ezio Raimondi, La dissimulazione romanzesca: antropologia manzoniana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); Salvatore Nigro, La tabacchiera di Don Lisander (Turin: Einaudi, 2002); Giovanni Macchia, Manzoni e la via del romanzo (Milan: Adelphi, 1994). 29. ‘L’ironia di un Pascal che ha letto anche Voltaire’ [the irony of Pascal combined with Voltaire] (Raimondi, Il romanzo senza idillio: saggio sui ‘Promessi Sposi’ (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p. 115). 30. Regarding the Sternian element in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, see for instance Lilian Furst, ‘Romantic Irony and Narrative Stance’, in Romantic Irony, ed. by F. Garber, pp. 293–309, and Wladimir Krysinski, ‘Bakhtin and the Evolution of the Post-Dostoevskian Novel’, in Bakhtin and Otherness, ed. by Robert Barsky and Michael Holquist, special issue of Discours Social / Social Discourse, 3 (1990), 109–34. 31. See respectively Maurice Menard, Balzac et le comique dans la ‘Comédie Humaine’ (Paris: PUF, 1983), pp. 58–70, and Bandry, ‘Romantic to Avant-garde’. 32. Menard, Balzac et le comique, p. 409. 33. Menard, Balzac et le comique, pp. 218–19. 34. Ernst Robert Curtius, Balzac, trans. by Henri Jourdan (Paris: Grasset, 1933), pp. 99–100. 35. The ideological implications of Hugo’s handling of laughter are examined by Maxime Prévost, Rictus romantiques: politiques du rire chez Victor Hugo (Montréal: PUM, 2002). 36. Henry Monnier, Mémoires de Monsieur Joseph Proudhomme, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1857), i, 2. 37. An accurate definition of the ‘personaggio ridicolo-patetico’ is provided by Francesco Fiorentino, ‘Raccontare il medio: il personaggio ridicolo-patetico’, in Il personaggio romanzesco, ed. by Francesco Fiorentino and Luciano Carcereri (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), pp. 69–91. 38. Automatism is indeed a key concept in Bergson’s essay. To mention but a few examples: ‘Le comique est ce côté de la personne par lequel elle ressemble [...] le mécanisme pur et simple, l’automatisme, enfin le mouvement sans la vie’ [the comic is that side of a person which [...] conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life] (Le Rire, 41); ‘tout caractère est comique, à la condition d’entendre par caractère [...] ce qui est en nous à l’état de mécanisme une fois monté, capable de fonctionner automatiquement’ [all character is comic, provided we mean by character [...] that mechanical element capable of working automatically] (Le Rire, 65). 39. This point is particularly emphasised by Jan Hokenson, ‘Comedies of Errors: Bergson’s Laughter in Modernist Contexts’, in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, ed. by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 38–53. 40. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pisma, ed. by A. S. Dolinin, 4 vols (Moscow, 1928–59), ii, 71 (letter to S. A. Ivanova, 13 January 1868). Trans. in Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 231. 41. Suffice it to mention Cousin Pons, who is similarly described in Quixotic — albeit more markedly grotesque — terms. The grotesque features of the character are so evident that even mockery is pointless: ‘[Cette face] était commandée par un nez à la Don Quichotte, comme une plaine est dominée par un bloc erratique. [...]. La mélancolie excessive qui débordait par les yeux pâles de ce pauvre homme atteignait le moqueur et lui glaçait la plaisanterie sur les lèvres’ [His face was surmounted by a Don Quixote nose that rose out of it like a monolith above a plain. [...] The exceeding melancholy which found an outlet in the poor man’s faded eyes reached the mocker and froze the gibes on his lips] (Le Cousin Pons, CH VII 382). With regard to Balzac’s inf luence on Dostoevsky, see in particular Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, pp. 28–64, and Priscilla Meyer, How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), pp. 89–151. 42. An indicative example is the publishing activity of Angelo Fortunato Formiggini, who aimed at exalting laughter as a vehicle for ‘human sympathy’ through the successful series I Classici del ridere (1912–38). Regarding Formiggini’s ‘humanitarian’ conception of laughter and its inf luence on Italian culture, see Donata Gaudiuso, ‘La “Filosofia del ridere”, le forme del comico e una collana di Classici’, Problemi, 116 (2000), 138–47; Luigi Guicciardi, ‘Le vicende editoriali dei Classici del ridere’, in Angelo Fortunato Formiggini: un editore del Novecento, ed. by Luigi Balsamo

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and Renzo Cremante (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982), pp. 227–63; and Ezio Raimondi, ‘I Classici del ridere’, in Angelo Fortunato Formiggini: un editore del Novecento, ed. by L. Balsamo and R. Cremante, pp. 207–25. 43. Arturo Pompeati, ‘Un Pirandello per ridere nel Quattrocento’, Rivista d’Italia (15 April 1927), 651–63 (pp. 662–63). 44. Franco Zangrilli, Pirandello e i classici: da Euripide a Verga (Florence: Cadmo, 1995), pp. 9–20. 45. See Ferdinando Pasini’s and (more recently) Clotilde Bertoni’s remarks, respectively in Luciano Nanni, Leggere Svevo (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1974), p. 160 and in RSA 977. A direct reference to Boccaccio’s novella on ‘Maestro Alberto da Bologna’ can be found in La coscienza di Zeno (RC 1069). 46. Boccaccio’s ‘purissima giocondità’ [pure cheerfulness] is also praised at the beginning of Le sorelle Materassi (TR I 513). 47. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1949), p. 178, letter of 29 January 1827. 48. György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. by Anna Bostok (Cambridge: MIT, 1971), p. 51. 49. Luigi Pirandello, ‘Romanzo, racconto, novella’, ed. by Felice Rappazzo, Allegoria 8 (1991), 155–60 (p. 159). 50. Boris Eichenbaum, ‘The Structure of Gogol’s The Overcoat’, trans. by Beth Paul and Muriel Nesbitt, Russian Review, 22 (1963), 377–99 (p. 395). 51. Florence Goyet, La Nouvelle, 1870–1925 (Paris: PUF, 1993). 52. Andreas Gailus, ‘Form and Chance: The German Novella’ [German title: ‘Fall und Form: Die deutsche Novelle im 19. Jahrhundert’], in The Novel, ed. by F. Moretti, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), ii, 739–76 (pp. 739–40). 53. Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice. A Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 18–19. 54. See, for instance, Luigi Surdich, Boccaccio (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 2001), pp. 104–12, 194–218. 55. An increased attention to the victim’s perspective (the beffato) can already be found in some early modern authors (see, for instance, Michel Plaisance, ‘La Structure de la beffa dans les Cene d’Antonfrancesco Grazzini’, Chroniques Italiennes, 63–64 (2000), 209–15); it is evident, however, that between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries this trend became particularly widespread and systematic. 56. On the cruelty of laughter in Maupassant’s short stories, see Emmanuèle Grandadam, Contes et nouvelles de Maupassant: pour une poétique du recueil (Rouen: PURH, 2007), pp. 192–213 and 355–68. 57. A detailed analysis of the characters’ laughter in Verga’s works, with particular regard to Vita dei campi, can be found in Maria Grazia Accorsi, ‘Da “ridere del matto” a “ridere come un matto”: il riso dei personaggi nella narrativa di Pirandello’, in Palazzeschi e i territori del comico, ed. by Matilde Dillon Wanke and Gino Tellini (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2006), pp. 247–83 (pp. 249–54). 58. For instance, the characters of I Malavoglia — from zio Crocifisso to ’Ntoni — are often aggressively laughed at by their fellow villagers: ‘Ora i suoi nemici gli ridevano sotto il naso’ [now his enemies were laughing in their sleeves at him] (I Malavoglia, TR II 478); ‘Per otto giorni ’Ntoni non ebbe il coraggio di metter piede nella strada. Come lo vedevano tutti gli ridevano sul naso’ [for eight days ’Ntoni did not dare go out on the street; everyone laughed when they saw him] (TR II 559). 59. Gadda is a partial exception in this regard; nonetheless, considering his specific case in comparison with Pirandello, Palazzeschi, and Svevo will help us better define some general features of modernist laughter.

CHAPTER 2

❖

Umorismo and Madness: Pirandello’s Originals Laughter and Oddity in Novelle per un anno Emblematically, Luigi Pirandello’s main ref lection on laughter (L’Umorismo, 1908; final version 1920) also contains his most overt apology of human diversity: Noi tutti possiamo notar facilmente come e quanto la fisionomia dell’uno sia diversa da quella d’un altro. [...] Pensiamo a un gran bosco dove fossero parecchie famiglie di piante: querci, aceri, faggi, platani, pini, ecc. Sommariamente, a prima vista, noi distingueremo le varie famiglie [...]. Ma dobbiamo poi pensare che in ognuna di queste famiglie non solo un albero è diverso dall’altro, un tronco dall’altro, un ramo dall’altro, una fronda dall’altra, ma che, fra tutta quella incommensurabile moltitudine di foglie, non ve ne sono due, due sole, identiche tra loro. (Um. 806) [We can easily notice how and to what degree the physiognomy of one person differs from that of all others. [...] Let us imagine a large forest with many families of trees: oaks, maples, beeches, planes, pines, etc. At first glance, we can summarily identify the various families [...]. But then we should consider that, within each family, each tree differs from all the other trees, each trunk, branch or shrub differs from all the other trunks, branches or shrub; indeed, in such an immense foliage, we could not even find two leaves that are identical.]

It is worth noting, incidentally, that Pirandello’s example is strikingly similar to a passage from Balzac’s Séraphita (1834): ‘Vous ne rencontrez nulle part dans la nature deux objets identiques: [...] vous savez qu’il est impossible de trouver deux feuilles semblables sur un même arbre, ni deux sujets semblables dans la même espèce d’arbre’ [you will never find in nature two identical objects: you know that it is impossible to find two identical leaves on the same tree, or two identical examples of the same species of tree] (CH XI 820). Just like Balzac (cf. Chapter 1), Pirandello maintains that nature’s variety is constantly eroded by civilisation in its various forms — be it the automatised monotony of modern life (as depicted, most notably, in Serafino Gubbio), or the pervasive standardisation imposed by the ‘marsina stretta’ [tight tailcoat] of bourgeois conventions. Within such a scenario, humour does appear to Pirandello as the only viable way left to express the unpredictable, individualised, and therefore ‘abnormal’ element of human nature; indeed, the humorist’s privilege is that of ‘esser sempre quasi fuori di chiave, essere a un tempo violino e contrabbasso’ [being constantly out of key, being a violin and a double bass at the same time] — a condition which ‘nella sua anormalità, non può esser che

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amaramente comica’ [in its very abnormality, can only be bitterly comic] (Um. 921). The bitterness of such a position is primarily due to its social costs — Pirandello’s eccentrics are bound to live at the margins of civilisation, attesting to the mutual exclusion between originality and communal life; as ludicrous as it may seem at first, their condition tragically verges on pathology and, most frequently, madness. This chapter will focus on the close link between humour and madness in Pirandello’s works, in relation to the author’s f luctuating attitude towards the very possibility of escaping social standardisation — humour being a fragile optimistic counterpart to the fear that the only room left for originality might in fact be insanity, or even death. In his 1983 essay Pirandello, la follia, Elio Gioanola observed that the whole of Pirandello’s works can be interpreted as a huge protective device built against madness;1 the following pages will analyse umorismo (and, more generally, laughter) both as part of this protective mechanism, and as part of a broader cultural transition from Romanticism to modernism. This comparative standpoint (as opposed to Gioanola’s psychoanalytic focus) will hopefully allow us to better understand the symbolic role of individual irregularity in Pirandello’s fiction, by way of reconsidering the author’s personal obsessions in the light of the common grammar of laughter established by the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury tradition. The Novelle per un anno represent an ideal starting point in this regard,2 as they display the links between laughter and the social exclusion of originality in a particularly effective way — especially on a thematic level. Pirandello’s representation of the characters’ laughter has not received much critical attention so far;3 yet, its importance is undeniable, all the more so with regard to his short-story production. As a matter of fact, the Novelle supply an immense repertoire of variations in this respect, with particular focus on two complementary patterns: on the one hand, the public derision of an odd individual (the intensity of which can vary from the mild tones of ‘Frammento di cronaca’ to the sheer cruelty of ‘Scialle nero’ or ‘Canta l’Epistola’); on the other, the original’s own solipsistic laughter.4 In both cases, laughter is closely connected to the eccentric’s isolation: public ridicule usually reveals the violence underlying social norms, while the isolated characters’ paradoxical hilarity ref lects their total extraneousness to such norms. The traumatic consequences of marginalisation are, therefore, both exhibited (through the punishment inf licted by collective mockery) and partially dispelled (through the characters’, as well as the author’s, state of humoristic suspension). The following sections aim to delve into this ambivalent perspective on the odd man’s solitude, building on Pirandello’s dialogue with three particularly representative models — firstly Sterne and Dostoevsky, who respectively embody the optimistic and the pessimistic extremes in Pirandello’s polarised view of eccentricity; and lastly Maupassant, whose inf luence in the short story ‘Sua Maestà’ relates to Pirandello’s awareness of the ubiquity of social homogenisation. The last section of this chapter will then provide a more general discussion of Pirandello’s double bind with civilisation, and of its connection to the status of originality in modern European culture. Special attention will be given to groups of exemplary texts, where the impact of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction is particularly relevant; at the same time, we will constantly try to connect those specific cases to the whole of Pirandello’s production, and to its chronological development.

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Sternian Misfits: Perazzetti, Marco Leccio, and Spatolino Strangely enough, one of the most important inf luences on Pirandello’s portrayal of the original’s isolation is Laurence Sterne — an emblem of socially inclusive laughter. Although the relevance of Tristram Shandy as a model for Pirandello has been tackled by a large number of studies, most of them focus exclusively on Uno, nessuno e centomila.5 Nonetheless, the Novelle also contain several remarkable (albeit unnoticed) echoes from Sterne’s novel, usually related to a couple of essentially Pirandellian (as much as Sternian) character types — the conscious humorist, refusing to take life too seriously; and the unwitting original, whose involuntary eccentricity tends to provoke sympathy in the reader. Among the many humorists in Pirandello’s short-story repertoire, the most Sternian is probably Perazzetti, the protagonist of ‘Non è una cosa seria’ (1910) as well as narrator of ‘Zuccarello distinto melodista’ (1914). These are his opening lines in the latter text: — Ero, — cominciò a dire, guardandosi al solito le unghie, — ero, amici miei, in uno di quei momenti, purtroppo non rari, in cui la ragione (ne ho, per disgrazia, ancora un poco), sicura d’aver raggiunto alla fine quell’assoluto che tutti affannosamente, senza saperlo, andiamo cercando nella vita... — Io, no, — Io, no, Io interrompemmo a coro. — Io, no, Bestie, se vi dico senza saperlo! (‘Zuccarello distinto melodista’, NPA III 512)

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[‘I was’ he said, while observing his fingernails as usual, ‘I was, dear friends, in one of those moments (which are, alas!, only too frequent) when Reason (unfortunately I still have some), being sure of having reached the Absolute that — without even noticing — we keep searching for in life...’ ‘I don’t | I don’t | I don’t’, we interrupted him simultaneously. ‘I said without even noticing, you animals!’]

A generic Sternian tone is already suggested by the desultory course of the storytelling, which is frequently interrupted by the extradiegetic narrator (‘cominciò a dire, guardandosi al solito le unghie’) and by Perazzetti himself (‘ne ho, per disgrazia, ancora un poco’). But the clearest trace, to be sure, is the use of braces to indicate the overlap of different voices, as in an opera libretto. The same typographical device is actually quite frequent in Tristram Shandy: God bless Duce take

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’em all—said my uncle Toby and my father, each to himself. (Tristram Shandy, 256) What masticators!—— Just heaven! What bread!—— (Tristram Shandy, 440) And accordingly the abbess, giving the pitch note, set off thus: Abbess, Bou – – bou – – bou – – Margarita, ——ger, – – ger, – – ger Abbess, Fou – – fou – – fou – – Margarita, ——ter, – – ter, – – ter. (Tristram Shandy, 459) Is Amandus still alive? Is my Amanda (Tristram Shandy, 463)

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This intertextual link is only the most immediate of the similarities between Perazzetti and Tristram, both as character and narrator. In ‘Zuccarello’, shortly after the passage mentioned above, Pirandello’s character explains his ideas on human happiness, in a way reminiscent of Tristram’s ‘hobby horse’ theory: ‘Tutto è qui. Saper trovare in noi questo punto giusto per inserirvi il piccolo seme divino che è in tutti e che ci farà padroni d’un mondo’ [It’s as simple as that. We only need to find the right spot in ourselves, to sow the tiny godly seed that we all have, and that can make us lords of a whole world] (NPA III 514). Perazzetti’s inner spot, supposedly allowing each individual to become the lord of a private imaginary world, serves the same purpose as Tristram’s hobby horse — but this is also where the differences begin. Humour, according to Sterne, is precisely meant as a way to establish a form of communication between separate worlds, and to integrate them within a shared social framework; it implies an ironical attitude towards one’s own eccentricities, along with a benevolent disposition to accept those of other people.6 Pirandello is undoubtedly far from endorsing this optimistic view: at the end of the story, Perazzetti will have to admit that seeking shelter in a private little world leads to a state of pathologic withdrawal from society (Zuccarello’s ‘tragica, sconsolante solitudine’ [tragic, daunting loneliness], NPA III 517). This extreme aloofness from communal life characterises not only an unwitting original like Zuccarello, but also the conscious humorist himself: in ‘Non è una cosa seria’, Perazzetti’s oddity went as far as getting married to a mentally impaired woman as if it were a joke, ‘per guardarsi dal pericolo di prendere moglie’ [to avoid the danger of having an actual wife] (NPA II 1806) — a paradox quite close to the blatant oddities of certain Dostoevskian characters, rather than to Tristram’s mild eccentricity.7 As we shall see very soon, this shift from Shandy Hall to Dostoevsky’s underground is anything but accidental. The Sternian vein of ‘Zuccarello’ is further developed in ‘Frammento di cronaca di Marco Leccio e della sua guerra sulla carta nel tempo della grande guerra europea’ (1916). The protagonist is a former soldier in Garibaldi’s army, who (like Zuccarello) embodies the archetype of the unwittingly odd man. Despite his old age, Marco Leccio yearns to join his sons at the front of World War I; after offering himself as a volunteer, and after being predictably rejected, he locks himself in his room and fights a paper war on his maps, in the company of another veteran.8 The idea is clearly borrowed from Uncle Toby’s favourite pastime, i.e. the reproduction of famous battles based on military maps, with the help of his faithful assistant Trim;9 the debt towards the paradigms of English humour is confirmed, incidentally, by the Swiftian penname Grildrig, used by Pirandello in an early version of the story.10 It is worth noting that a paper war is also mentioned in ‘Berecche e la guerra’ (1914– 19, final version 1934), a text closely linked to the ‘Frammento’; in the latter story, nonetheless, Sterne’s inf luence is much more pervasive, and results in a whole series of intentional allusions. The protagonist’s ‘sciatica’ (NPA III 1173), for instance, naturally evokes that of Tristram’s father: I was begot in the night betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen. I am positive I was. [...] — But pray, Sir, What was your father doing

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31

all December, January, and February? — Why, Madam, — he was all that time aff licted with a Sciatica. (Tristram Shandy, 8–9)

Further hints are provided by the passage on the conception of Marco Leccio’s first son (patterned on the opening episode of Sterne’s novel), and by the almost identical reproduction of the Sternian anecdote on the ‘ancient Goths of Germany’: Mia moglie, quando concepì quel disgraziato, che fu nel primo anno del nostro matrimonio, piangeva sempre, e piangeva per te che t’eri fatto prete. Perciò quel figliolo lì m’è nato con la chierica. (‘Frammento di cronaca’, NPA III 1170) [When she conceived that poor devil, my wife was always crying — and she was crying because of you, because you became a priest. That’s why my son was born with a tonsure.] I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing. (Tristram Shandy, 5) ‘Si dice, dunque, che gli antichi Goti avevano il saggio costume di discutere due volte ogni impresa da tentare: una prima volta, ubriachi, e la seconda volta a digiuno. Ubriachi, perché ai loro consigli non mancasse ardimento; a digiuno, perché non mancasse prudenza’. (NPA III 1188) The ancient Goths of Germany [...] had all of them a wise custom of debating every thing of importance to their state, twice, that is, — once drunk, and once sober: — Drunk — that their councils might not want vigour; — and sober — that they might not want discretion. (Tristram Shandy, 305)

Marco Leccio, in short, is evidently modelled on Sternian sources; yet, once again, the intertextual similarities are accompanied by some fundamental divergences. Sterne’s amiable originals are never overly grotesque, and the reader can usually relate to them on the basis of a sense of shared sociability; Pirandello, on the contrary, pushes the Sternian paradigm in a grotesque and pathetic direction, as exemplified by the ‘Frammento’. Compared to Uncle Toby, Marco Leccio is actually an isolated and marginalised character: nobody is aware of his distress at his son’s departure for the front, so that people can only perceive the ludicrous surface of his tragedy.11 To be sure, unlike many other stories from Novelle per un anno, the ‘Frammento’ bears no sign of collective brutality against the eccentric individual — Marco Leccio’s naivety is not contrasted by the violence of mockery, as much as it is by the impersonal cruelty of the war. Nonetheless, the irregular character is forced to the margins of social life; in this perspective, too, Marco Leccio is closely related to the protagonist of ‘Berecche e la guerra’ (a victim of even more heartrending misfortunes, who becomes even more radically disconnected from the world around him). Had he enough philosophical insight, the old veteran would easily identify with the famous statement uttered by Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov, as reported in L’Umorismo: ‘oh! signore, forse, come gli altri, voi stimate ridicolo tutto questo; [...] ma per me non è ridicolo, perché io sento tutto ciò...’ [my dear Sir, perhaps all this sounds very funny to you, as indeed it does to other people; [...] but it isn’t funny to me, for I can feel it all] (Um. 912).

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Pirandello’s alteration of the Sternian eccentric in a pathetic direction is even more evident in ‘Il Tabernacolo’ (1903), whose protagonist Spatolino has a habit of whistling whenever something disturbing comes to his mind: ‘si mise a fischiettare, com’era solito ogni qual volta un dubbio o un pensiero lo rodevano dentro: — Fififì... fififì... fififì...’ [He started whistling, as he used to do every time a doubt or a thought tormented him: — Fififi... fififi... fififi...] (NPA I 94). This regressive pattern also leads us back to Uncle Toby, and more precisely to his Argumentum Fistolatorium, i.e. his routine of whistling ‘half a dozen bars of Lillebullero’ when ‘anything shocked or surprised him’: My uncle Toby would never offer to answer this by any other kind of argument, than that of whistling half a dozen bars of Lillebullero. — You must know it was the usual channel thro’ which his passions got vent, when any thing shocked or surprised him: — but especially when any thing, which he deem’d very absurd, was offered [...]. I do, therefore, by these presents, strictly order and command, That it be known and distinguished by the name and title of the Argumentum Fistulatorium, and no other. (Tristram Shandy, 56–57)

As in ‘Frammento di cronaca’, Uncle Toby becomes a model for regressive behaviour as a defence from possible conf licts (such as Spatolino’s struggle to get paid for his tabernacolo); yet the playful and serene features of Sterne’s character are again turned into something grotesque and pathetic at the same time. In the final scene of the story, Spatolino is standing in his shrine, wearing a crown of thorns and being martyrised by collective mockery; nonetheless, he keeps whistling like a child: Spatolino si scosta dalla fronte la corona di spine, a cui già s’è abituato, e — grattandosi lì, dove le spine gli han lasciato il segno — , con gli occhi invagati, si rimette a fischiettare: — Fififì... Fififì... Fififì... (Na I, 106) [Spatolino moves his crown of thorns away from his forehead; he has already grown accustomed to it. He scratches where the thorns left their mark, and resumes whistling with enraptured eyes: — Fififi... fififi... fififi...]

The Sternian paradigm shifts once more towards a Dostoevskian taste for poignant contrasts, thus expressing a growing tension between society and originality.12 Pirandello’s handling of this tension, though, cannot be assimilated to Dostoevsky’s either: as we shall see in the next section, the function of pathos in Novelle per un anno is far more ambiguous and problematic. Convicts and Fugitives: Eccentricity and Insanity in Pirandello and Dostoevsky Several texts in Pirandello’s collection portray isolated characters variously escaping the trap of collective derision. The most disquieting and radical way of escape is suicide, as exemplified by ‘Scialle nero’ (Eleonora is tormented by her neighbours’ dileggio [scoffing], NPA I 70) or by ‘Canta l’Epistola’ (Tommasino Unzio is ‘stanco della baja che tutti gli davano’ [tired of being mocked by everybody], NPA I 450). Elsewhere, the eccentric’s evasion is heralded by his laughter, in reply to the aggressiveness of communal mockery: suffice it to mention Nàzzaro’s ‘riso d’arguta spensieratezza’ [smile of witty light-heartedness] at the end of ‘Fuoco alla

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paglia’ (NPA I 333), Belluca’s ‘sorriso d’impudenza’ [impudent smile] in ‘Il treno ha fischiato...’ (NPA I 589), or Myshkow’s gaiety in the epilogue of ‘La tartaruga’. Other characters simply learn how to pursue their own serenity, while paradoxically benefitting from their laughing-stock status: this is the case with Memmo Viola in ‘Quando s’è capito il giuoco’, Bellavita in ‘L’ombra del rimorso’, but also with Nino Mo, who chooses to live in bigamy despite the lazzi [ jeers] of his fellow villagers (‘La morta e la viva’, NPA III 89). The texts just mentioned belong, in turn, to an even broader category — that of the stories in which the character is (literally or metaphorically) a convict, and tries either to escape or to play along with his/her condition. In many of these texts, laughter is only marginally involved; it will however be helpful to outline a general overview of the whole category, before focusing back on the specific functions of humour and derision. The occurrences of the pattern we are discussing can be classified into six sub-genres: (1) The character f lees the trap of his/her personal dramas, or of social constraints, through humoristic ref lection or epiphany (which, in turn, can be in progress, or already accomplished at the beginning of the story): ‘Se...’ (1894), ‘Marsina stretta’ (1901), ‘Notizie dal mondo’ (1901), ‘Pallottoline!’ (1902), ‘Quand’ero matto’ (1902), ‘Concorso per referendario al Consiglio di Stato’ (1902), ‘Acqua amara’ (1905), ‘Paura d’esser felice’ (1911), ‘La tragedia di un personaggio’ (1911), ‘Leviamoci questo pensiero’ (1912), ‘La trappola’ (1912), ‘Pena di vivere così’ (1920), ‘Rimedio: la Geografia’ (1920), ‘Fuga’ (1923 — as in ‘La trappola’, the title is emblematic). The result may be a state of peaceful ataraxy, but also one of bitterness and disenchantment. Sometimes this process can even lead to a frigid, disturbing indifference, as with Petix in ‘La distruzione dell’uomo’ or Jo Kurtz in ‘Una sfida’ — not by chance both texts were written after 1920 (1921 and 1936 respectively), thus attesting to Pirandello’s growing interest in the eeriest aspects of laughter. In all of these examples, the character’s detachment is accompanied by various kinds of smiles or laughs. (2) On account of his/her radical detachment from life, the suicide victim can be seen as a further disturbing alter ego of the humorist, as exemplified in ‘Sole e ombra’ (1896), ‘E due!’ (1901), ‘L’uccello impagliato’ (1910), ‘L’imbecille’ (1912), ‘Il coppo’ (1912), ‘Da sé’ (1913), ‘Pubertà’ (1926), and ‘Un’idea’ (1934). (3) Another variation on this pattern is represented by dying characters, whose perspective on the life they are escaping from can be either resentful or serene: ‘Il giardinetto lassù’ (1897), ‘Il marito di mia moglie’ (1903), ‘Formalità’ (1904), ‘La mosca’ (1904), ‘Filo d’aria’ (1914), ‘Piuma’ (1916), ‘La morte addosso’ (1918), ‘I piedi sull’erba’ (1934). (4) The character tries to physically — rather than philosophically — escape from a distressing situation: an indicative example is Ciàula exiting the ‘ventre della montagna’, in ‘Ciàula scopre la luna’ (1912). The trap caging the character is often set by family life: this is the case with ‘Capannetta’ (1884, Pirandello’s first known short story), ‘Volare’ (1907), ‘Il lume dell’altra casa’ (1909) and ‘Uno di più’ (1931), while

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a grotesque getaway from someone else’s family is narrated in ‘Un invito a tavola’ (1902). Evasion often proves impossible or vain, as variously illustrated by ‘Lontano’ (1902), ‘Il viaggio’ (1910), ‘Leonora, addio!’ (1910), ‘Notte’ (1912), ‘Rondone e rondinella’ (1913), ‘La maschera dimenticata’ (1918), and ‘Lucilla’ (1932). Sometimes the role of the runaway is interpreted by an animal: ‘Il corvo di Mìzzaro’ (1902), ‘La liberazione del re’ (1914), and ‘Fortuna di essere cavallo’ (1935). (5) Some characters temporarily break away from the constrictions of everyday life through the power of dreams, as in ‘Tu ridi’ (1912) or ‘La realtà del sogno’ (1914). Quite similarly, others find refuge in their subterranean ‘piccolo mondo’ (‘Zuccarello distinto melodista’, 1914), in an obsessive hobby horse (‘Frammento di cronaca di Marco Leccio’, 1915), or in a bizarre private ritual (‘La carriola’, 1917). (6) As we have already noted, some characters cannot (or choose not to) escape from their prisons, but rather convert their status into that of a voluntary prisoner — as a consequence, their conviction becomes a paradoxical guarantee of freedom. This is the strategy followed by Biagio Speranza (‘La Signora Speranza’, 1903) and by Perazzetti (‘Non è una cosa seria’, 1910), who both get married in jest ‘per guardarsi dal pericolo di prendere moglie’ [to avoid the danger of having a wife]; likewise, Chiàrchiaro (‘La patente’, 1911) refuses to deny the rumours accusing him of bringing bad luck, and tries to benefit from them instead. The impossibility of changing one’s material condition is even more evident in other stories: in ‘La toccatina’ (1906), Beniamino Lenzi and Cristoforo Golisch overcome the trauma of their paralysis by laughing at it; Zi’ Dima in ‘La giara’ (1909) is affected by another kind of reclusion, but also ends up exploiting it rather than trying to break away from it. It is worth noting that, in the eponymous volume where it was originally published, ‘La giara’ was immediately followed by ‘La cattura’ (1918), a story based on an identical pattern: after being captured by a group of bandits, Guarnotta humoristically adapts to his captivity, and starts to take advantage of it. Our list includes extremely heterogeneous texts, sharing nonetheless a deep structural affinity, as well as a pronounced insistence on the semantic area of imprisonment — be it a material form of detention (‘Leonora, addio!’, ‘La giara’) or a psychological one (‘La trappola’, ‘Il coppo’, ‘La carriola’, and many others).13 The recurrence of these themes and patterns can partly be explained with their special suitability for the short-story form — a genre whose most typical mechanism can be summarised as the breaking of a general rule,14 and which is therefore particularly predisposed to representing cases of punitive confinement and/or evasion. But this cannot of course be a satisfactory explanation, also because imprisonment — despite reaching its peak in the short stories — recurs as a sort of métaphore obsédante in all of Pirandello’s works. As a consequence, it seems convenient to examine such a ubiquitous element of the author’s imaginary in a wider, non genre-specific perspective. Giovanni Macchia was the first scholar to examine this topos in a systematic way, with particular regard to Pirandello’s plays; in Pirandello o la stanza della tortura (1980), the recurrence of claustrophobic places is analysed not only as a sign of the author’s will to put the character and the reader into a state of emotional distress, but also as a symptom of a typically modernist discontent with social

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constraints (as suggested by Macchia’s reference to Kaf ka and Beckett). Nonetheless, by privileging the sadistic undertones of this refrain, Macchia overlooks one of its most important aspects — namely the fact that many of Pirandello’s convicts eventually succeed in escaping their prison, or at least in making it comfortable.15 Macchia’s observations have then been developed in a different direction by Gioanola,16 who connected a cluster of recurring motifs — reclusion, suicide, death-in-life, paralysis — to a single original obsession: the terror of going insane, of falling prey to folly in its most violent and uncontrollable forms. Looked at in this perspective, evasion or voluntary imprisonment can be considered as sublimated metaphors of mental illness, in that they hint at a state of extraneousness to the laws of normal civilised life. The convict, in short, is often meant to represent the irregular subject in the wider sense, as his status replicates the various forms of reclusion or marginalisation by which society punishes individual irregularity (madness above all). Focusing back on laughter, it is no surprise that its most important functions in Pirandello’s works are closely related to this fundamental pattern; the public derision of the abnormal character, to start with, is the most common and subtle form of social reclusion at the expense of individual deviations. But apart from that, laughter also plays a paramount role in the already mentioned ‘protective device’ against the fear of isolation, by transfiguring and sublimating the condition of the irregular subject. The odd man’s private hilarity diminishes the traumatic quality of isolation, since it suggests that the radical detachment from the forme of civilisation does not necessarily lead to insanity, but to a philosophical superiority of sorts — or maybe even to happiness. Besides, even when humour only pertains to the author’s point of view on events, its consolatory undertone is equally evident: if the whole of social life is reduced to a pantomime, then being excluded from it should not be regarded as a curse, but as a liberation. As has been noted,17 Pirandello’s representation of the derided character usually relies on a three-phase movement: from grotesque exaggeration to pathos, and ultimately to a phase in which pathos is questioned by the author’s humoristic per spective, or by the character’s paradoxical mirth. Why, then, does Pirandello continuously evoke the trauma of the original’s reclusion, only to indicate a possible (if ambiguous) way of escape through humour? Delving into the author’s personal obsessions, as demonstrated by Gioanola, can in fact be of some help — more precisely, this approach has the advantage of clarifying the affinity between Pirandello’s umorismo and Freud’s interpretation of humour, i.e. a protection from possible traumas or from any immoderate expenditure of psychic energy.18 Yet this perspective remains somewhat unsatisfactory, also because (as will be demonstrated) Pirandello’s attitude towards the marginalisation of anomaly is largely similar to that of other Italian modernists; what at first seems to be a personal obsession should therefore be treated as the symptom of a more general trend. In other words, psychoanalysis should be integrated with a broader comparative approach. From this point of view, umorismo stands out as a major peak in the modernist erosion of the pathos of irregularity, which used to represent a paramount element in the imaginary of Romantic realism. The most typical uses of laughter in Pirandello —

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as well as in Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda — mark a crucial difference between modernism and the nineteenth-century tradition; while Balzac and Dostoevsky (or even Maupassant) emphasise the tragic side of the derided character’s isolation, the Italian modernists tend to rework this grotesque-pathetic material as a paradoxically laughable subject. Before developing this general hypothesis, however, we should return to Pirandello’s specific case, and to his dialogue with tradition; many of the recurring themes considered in this chapter (evasion from social constraints, literal or metaphorical escape from reality, voluntary reclusion) actually owe much to the author’s reinterpretation of nineteenth-century models — especially Dostoevsky. It was Gioanola, once again, who first grasped the importance of Dostoevsky’s inf luence on Pirandello, based on their common search for narrative patterns apt to convey the tension between the social logos and the madman’s isolation;19 his hypothesis can in fact be confirmed, and complemented, through intertextual analysis. Quite surprisingly, the Dostoevskian echoes in Pirandello’s works have not been systematically studied yet,20 although the material for comparison would certainly be copious, chief ly in Novelle per un anno. A good starting point is provided by ‘La giara’, one of the most emblematic variations on the theme of voluntary imprisonment. The story centres on Zi’ Dima, who accidentally gets trapped into the jar he was supposed to repair; the owner (don Lollò) understands that the only way to free him would be by breaking the jar, but will not allow that without a full refund from Dima. In response to that, Dima decides to set up home in the container, and to lead a normal life within it. The very same pattern can be found in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Crocodile’ (1865), where Ivan Matveitch is accidentally swallowed alive by a crocodile at an exhibition; the onlookers start giggling at the scene, just like the villagers in ‘La giara’, as soon as they notice that the victim is still safe and sound. The only way to set Ivan free is by cutting the crocodile open, which the owner (referred to as ‘the German’) refuses to do without a full refund. While the protagonist ‘makes himself comfortable’ in the belly of the crocodile, a friend of his even consults a lawyer, as don Lollò does in Pirandello’s text — and in both cases, the attorney’s opinion sounds absurdly pedantic: ‘I think you told me that he made himself fairly comfortable there? [...] As for the German, it’s my personal opinion that he is within his rights, and even more so than the other side, because it was the other party who got into his crocodile without asking permission [...]; and a crocodile is private property, and so it is impossible to slit him open without compensation’.21 L’avvocato allora gli spiegò che erano due casi. Da un canto, lui, Don Lollò, doveva subito liberare il prigioniero per non rispondere di sequestro di persona; dall’altro il conciabrocche doveva rispondere del danno che veniva a cagionare con la sua imperizia o con la sua storditaggine. (Na III, 12) [The lawyer then explained to him that there were two cases. On the one hand, he, Don Lollò, was obliged to release the prisoner at once so as not to be liable to the charge of ‘illegal confinement’; on the other hand, the tinker was answerable for the damage he was causing through his lack of professionalism and his carelessness.]

As also happens in ‘La giara’, incidentally, the main event is defined as a ‘caso

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nuovo’, an unusual accident that even lawyers have trouble solving: ‘It is a very unusual accident in itself [...]. It is a suspicious accident, quite unheard of. Unheard of, above all; there is no precedent for it’ (‘The Crocodile’, pp. 174–76); ‘Caso nuovo, caro mio, che deve risolvere l’avvocato!’ [a completely new case, it will take a lawyer to sort it out] (NPA III 11). But the most significant similarity between the two stories lies in the protagonist’s unusual behaviour: just like Zi’ Dima, Ivan has ‘made himself fairly comfortable’ in the belly of the animal, and uses it as a shelter from the outer world. His choice proves fairly convenient, as he soon becomes a celebrity and a sought-after guest at gala receptions. The general tone of ‘The crocodile’ is certainly different from that of ‘La giara’: Ivan Matveitch is primarily a satirical figure, characterised by an inane detachment from the real world; Zi’ Dima, on the contrary, embodies Pirandello’s ideal of humoristic superiority. Nevertheless, the structure of Dostoevsky’s tale is based on the paradoxical reversion of a state of reclusion — and this is the aspect Pirandello is most interested in (nor is he, by the way, the only Italian modernist to show such an interest).22 The case of ‘La giara’ is actually helpful in revealing Pirandello’s and Dostoevsky’s common engagement with the semantic area of conviction, and more generally with the clash between anomaly and the laws of social life. The facetious register of ‘The crocodile’ represents an exception in this regard; while Pirandello usually interprets these themes in humoristic terms, Dostoevsky’s dominant perspective is rather serious or tragic. This basic difference is evident, for instance, in relation to another pattern shared by both authors: as anticipated, Perazzetti’s (and Biagio Speranza’s) decision to get married as a joke is a farcical equivalent of Stavrogin’s scandalous wedding in Demons. A similar deviation from pathos to farce can be noticed in ‘L’imbecille’, although the narrator introduces the story as a ‘tragedia’ in opposition to its comical counterpart, ‘Sua Maestà’ (NPA I 479). The figure of Luca Fazio, who volunteers to kill a petty politician before committing suicide, is largely drawn from that of Kirillov, who similarly takes charge of Satov’s murder in Demons.23 Fazio’s ‘ghigno frigido’ [frigid snicker] resembles Kirillov’s indifference; nonetheless, the dramatic tension is contrasted in Pirandello by a feeling of general buffoneria, as claimed by the character himself (NPA I 477). Moreover, compared to the model, Pirandello seems much closer to embracing the perspective of the suicidal character — the drastic refusal of life loses its pathological traits, and becomes a sign of philosophical serenity. Some later texts such as ‘La distruzione dell’uomo’, it must be noted, can be characterised by a quasi-Dostoevskian emphasis on the morbid aspects of the character’s detachment from society; Nicola Petix’s homicidal delusions are a disturbing and brutal deformation of Pirandello’s filosofia del lontano [philosophy of distance], as well as being remarkably similar to Raskolnikov’s delirious monologues.24 In most of Pirandello’s stories, though, the escape from social laws is depicted in a humoristic and euphoric — rather than pathological — manner. In Novelle per un anno, Dostoevsky’s works are used primarily as an inventory of weird characters, living outside the boundaries of common sense and civilised society. This is also the case with other areas of Pirandello’s production — in the play All’uscita (1916), for instance, the archetype of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead

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is clearly mediated by Dostoevsky’s ‘Bobok’ (1873).25 In the novel Il turno (1902), instead, Marcantonio’s role in his daughter’s wedding is similar to that of Mar’ja Aleksandrovna in ‘Uncle’s Dream’ (1859): in both cases, a young girl is forced to marry an old man, with the promise that — after the death of her husband — the turn of her original fiancé would finally come.26 Neither Marcantonio nor Maria can be regarded as examples of humoristic wisdom — yet they both convey an eccentric perspective on social rituals, starting from the comedy of marriage.27 An even more indicative intertextual contact, however, brings us back to the short-story form, and to the leitmotif of madness. As many other late works by Pirandello,28 ‘La tartaruga’ (1936) is based on an opposition between two different forms of laughter — a sadistic, resentful one, representing the hidden malice of civilised society; and an innocent one, evoking the candid simplicity of nature. More precisely, the naïve cheerfulness of the protagonist (Myshkow) contrasts with the wicked sneers of his young children ( John and Helen), as exemplified by the episode in which they have fun tormenting their father’s tortoise: Con la punta del piede John la rovescia sulla scaglia, e subito allora si vede la bestiola armeggiar con gli zampini [...]. Helen, a quella vista, senza punto alterare i suoi occhi da vecchia, sghignazza come una carrucola di pozzo arrugginita per la caduta precipitosa d’un secchio impazzito. Non c’è, come si vede, da parte dei ragazzi alcun rispetto della fortuna che le tartarughe sogliono portare. [...] Tutti e due la sopporteranno solo a patto ch’essa si presti a esser considerata da loro come uno stupidissimo giocattolo da trattare così, con la punta del piede. Il che a Mister Myshkow dispiace moltissimo. (NPA III 745; emphasis added) [With the toe of his shoe John turns it over onto its shell [...]. Helen watches all this happen and then, without her eyes becoming any the less old-looking, sniggers. It’s like the noise a rusty pulley makes as the bucket hurtles madly down into the depths of a well. [...] They have made it blindingly clear to us that both of them tolerate its presence only on condition that it allows itself to be considered by them as an extremely stupid toy to be treated thus — that’s to say, kicked about with the toe of your shoe. Mr. Myshkow finds this very saddening.]

The children’s laughter sounds cruel and unnaturally senile, as opposed to the tardy ‘giovanilità’ of the father’s smile: È preso di sgomento per la sua inguaribile giovanilità, in un mondo che accusa con relazioni così lontane e inopinate la sua decrepitezza. [...] Torna ad aprir le labbra al suo vano sorriso, più smorto che mai, e non ha il coraggio di confessare per qual ragione il suo amico gli ha regalato quella tartaruga. Ha una rara ignoranza di vita Mister Myshkow. (NPA III 746; emphasis added) [He’s utterly dismayed because he is so incurably youthful in a world which gives such obvious proof of its decrepitude [...]. Once more his mouth opens in an empty smile — it’s feebler than ever this time — and he hasn’t got the courage to admit why his friend made him a present of that tortoise. Mr. Myshkow enjoys a pretty rare ignorance of life.]

While John and Helen’s frigid derision (‘la derisione sguajatamente fredda di quei due figli’ [the cold, coarse derision of those two children], NPA III 746) is already in league with the violence of society, Myshkow’s ‘sorriso’ ref lects his extraneousness

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to it. The protagonist’s simplicity — more specifically, his childlike benevolence towards the tortoise — will actually save him: unnerved by his immature behaviour, Myshkow’s wife will eventually file for divorce, unwittingly delivering her husband from the clutches of such a monstrous family. Once again, certain features of this isolated, abnormal figure are probably drawn from a Dostoevskian archetype — Myshkow’s meek and childish nature is partly modelled on Myshkin, the protagonist of The Idiot, as confirmed by the strong similarity between their names.29 In this case, too, the main difference between Pirandello and his model lies in their handling of pathos: Myshkin’s puerile and eccentric traits are the most evident symptom of an intermittent mental disorder, by which he will eventually be overcome; in ‘La tartaruga’, on the contrary, insanity is idealised through Myshkow’s ingenuous wisdom. On a general level, the parallel between ‘La tartaruga’ and The Idiot is indicative of Pirandello’s and Dostoevsky’s respective conceptions of psychological abnormality. Dostoevsky’s standpoint is typically Romantic: on the one hand, the reclusion of the madman is represented as an arbitrary act of collective violence;30 on the other, mental illness is not edulcorated, but rather emphasised as a sort of martyrdom, in opposition to the dreariness of the norm.31 Pirandello, instead, endeavours to see madness in a humoristic — or, especially in the late works, vitalistic — light, rather than a univocally pathetic or pathological one; anomaly tends to be transfigured (however ambiguously) into serene superiority, thus redeeming the original’s marginalisation or imprisonment.32 Dostoevsky’s fools are characterised, so to speak, by a bipartite process, from the laughable surface to pathetic emphasis; in Pirandello, as already remarked, this process is followed by a third phase, which is often conveyed by the character’s humoristic or regressive evasion. This tendency to downscale the traumatic effects of exclusion may depend on the author’s own ‘protective devices’, as much as on a general deterioration of the Romantic perspective on individual originality — the latter hypothesis will be developed in the following chapters, also building on the cases of Svevo and Palazzeschi. The King’s Moustache: Maupassant and Originality Before closing our analysis of Pirandello’s convicts and fugitives, it will be useful to delve into one last intertextual inf luence — namely Maupassant, another author who (just like Dostoevsky) was notoriously obsessed by the theme of madness.33 An indicative example, albeit unrelated to laughter, is offered by the story ‘Realtà del sogno’ (1914). The protagonist is an introverted and isolated young woman, who feels harassed by a friend of her husband; one night she dreams about having an affair with him, and the next day — upon meeting him again — she feels guilty to the point of having a nervous breakdown: Ecco: ella lo aveva tradito in sogno. [...] Udendo nella saletta d’ingresso la voce di lui, ella sussultò, d’improvviso scontraffatta. [...] Cacciò un urlo e cadde a terra, in preda a una spaventosa crisi di nervi, a un vero assalto di pazzia. (NPA III 487) [Yes, she had betrayed him in a dream. [...] Hearing his voice in the entrance

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The plot is quite similar to Maupassant’s ‘Réveil’ (1883): Jeanne, Vasseur’s wife, is just as isolated and unexperienced as Pirandello’s character (‘elle n’avait point quitté le val de Ciré’ [she never left the valley of Ciré], CN 831); during a brief vacation away from her husband she is courted by two young men, one of which starts surfacing in her dreams: Bien souvent en ses rêves son visage la hantait: elle le revoyait tel qu’il était dans la vie, doux, délicat, humblement passionné; et elle s’éveillait obsédée du souvenir de ces songes, croyant l’entendre encore, et le sentir près d’elle. Or, une nuit (elle avait la fièvre peut-être), elle se vit seule avec lui, dans un petit bois, assis tous deux sur l’herbe. Il lui disait des choses charmantes en lui pressant les mains et les baisant. [...] Et quand elle le revit, ignorant du trouble qu’il avait produit, elle se sentit rougir; et pendant qu’il lui parlait timidement de son amour, elle se rappelait sans cesse, sans pouvoir rejeter cette pensée, elle se rappelait l’enlacement délicieux de son rêve. (CN 835–36) [Often his face haunted her in her dreams, and she saw him as he really was; gentle, delicate in all his actions, humble, but passionately in love, and she awoke full of those dreams, fancying that she still heard him, and felt him near her, until one night (most likely she was feverish), she saw herself alone with him in a small wood, where they were both of them sitting on the grass. He was saying charming things to her, while he pressed and kissed her hands. [...] When she saw him again, unconscious of the agitation that he had caused her, she felt that she grew red, and while he was telling her of his love, she could not help but recall her dreams.]

As in Pirandello’s text, the woman feels embarrassed when she meets her suitor in person; and in both cases, the evasion from marital life is only provisional. A more generic echo (but one more related to laughter) can be found in ‘La toccatina’ (1906), where the humoristic laughter of the two paralytics (in reply to Death’s sarcastic toccatina) resembles the paradoxical cheerfulness of Maupassant’s ‘Toine’ (1885), another victim of a jest of fate: C’était un de ces êtres énormes sur qui la mort semble s’amuser, avec des ruses, des gaietés et des perfidies bouffonnes, rendant irrésistiblement comique son travail lent de destruction. [...] Il arriva que Toine eut une attaque et tomba paralysé. (CN 480–81) [He was one of those enormous beings with whom Death seems to be amusing himself — playing perfidious tricks and pranks, investing with an irresistibly comic air his slow work of destruction. [...] At last Toine had an apoplectic fit, and was paralysed in consequence.]

Despite his paralysis, Toine does not lose his joyful laugh — ‘ce farceur de Toine, il les amusait encore. Il aurait fait rire le diable, ce malin-là’ [the jovial Toine still provided them with amusement. He would have made the devil himself laugh] (CN 482). Although the affinity is likely to be accidental, it is indicative that Toine’s behaviour anticipates one of Pirandello’s most typical patterns — the humoristic reversion of an objective loss of freedom.

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It would, of course, be possible to mention further clear examples of Maupassant’s inf luence on Novelle per un anno. Four of them have already been noticed by scholars: in ‘La balia’ (1903), the episode in which a giovinastro volunteers to be breast-fed by a woman in her puerperium (NPA II 124) is drawn from ‘Idylle’ (1884); the protagonist of ‘Tutto per bene’ (1906) discovers his wife’s infidelity only after her death, as in Maupassant’s ‘Les bijoux’ (1883); in ‘La morta e la viva’ (1910), the return of a supposedly dead woman follows the pattern of ‘Le Retour’ (1884); lastly, in ‘Il buon cuore’ (1936), the sterile husband’s stratagem in order to have a son — a condition by which he will inherit a large sum of money — is borrowed from ‘L’Héritage’ (1884).34 But the list might well be extended beyond those examples: for instance, the plot of ‘Gioventù’ (1902), in which a man discovers unexpected details about his mother’s love life during her funeral wake, is very similar to that of ‘La Veillée’ (1882);35 ‘Il tabernacolo’ (1903), instead, reverses the basic structure of ‘La Confession de Théodule Sabot’ (1883) — in Maupassant, an atheist carpenter converts to Christianity in order to obtain a commission from the parish priest; in Pirandello, a devout mason reluctantly accepts a commission from an atheist landowner. The most significant episode in Pirandello’s dialogue with Maupassant, however, probably takes place in ‘Sua Maestà’ (1904). As in ‘L’imbecille’ (which was written eight years later, but immediately precedes it in the collection La rallegrata), the story is set in Costanova; the town council has just been disbanded, and Amilcare Zegretti — a commissioner sent by the King — is expected to take charge of the situation. Upon his arrival, a fierce rivalry begins between the commissioner himself and the former mayor, Decenzio Cappadona; they both aspire to look exactly like Vittorio Emanuele II, and neither of them is willing to recognise the other as a better look-alike. Decenzio’s sole ambition had always been that of being a walking portrait of the King: Lo chiamavano a Costanova Sua Maestà, perché era il ritratto spiccicato di Vittorio Emanuele II vestito da cacciatore: la stessa corporatura, gli stessi baffi, lo stesso pizzo, lo stesso naso rincagnato all’insú [...]. Non aveva fatto in vita sua altri studii oltre a quello attentissimo sul ritratto del primo re d’Italia. (NPA I 481) [They called him His Majesty, because he was the exact copy of Vittorio Emanuele II in his hunting clothes; same physique, same moustache, same goatee, same tip-tilted nose [...]. All of his life, he hadn’t studied anything else but the portrait of the first King of Italy.]

The sight of another alter ego — complete with ‘baffoni’ [moustache] and ‘occhi da vitellone’ [bovine-like eyes] (NPA I 486) — cannot but arouse the former mayor’s astonishment and resentment. The problem is immediately captured in its essence by Melchiorino Palì, a council member: ‘O si rade uno o si rade l’altro’ [one of them will have to shave his moustache] (NPA I 484). In the meantime, the villagers debate on who is the best look-alike — Cappadona will eventually prevail, and resume his seat ‘avendo tutto il paese dalla sua’ [with the unanimous support of the population] (NPA I 492). The basic elements of the story — an impersonator of the king, and his competition with a rival — are presumably drawn from Maupassant’s

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‘Les Dimanches d’un bourgeois de Paris’ (1880), whose protagonist Patissot, after a devout and painstaking study of the Emperor’s image, becomes a perfect facsimile of Napoleon the Third: A force de contempler le souverain, il fit comme beaucoup: il l’imita dans la coupe de sa barbe, l’arrangement de ses cheveux, la forme de sa redingote, sa démarche, son geste — combien d’hommes, dans chaque pays, semblent des portraits du prince! — Il avait peut-être une vague ressemblance avec Napoléon III, mais ses cheveux étaient noirs — il les teignit. Alors la similitude fut absolue; et, quand il rencontrait dans la rue un autre monsieur représentant aussi la figure impériale, il en était jaloux et le regardait dédaigneusement. [...] Il devint aussi tellement pareil à son modèle qu’on les aurait confondus [...]; on en parla au ministre, qui manda cet employé devant lui. Mais, à sa vue, il se mit à rire, et répéta deux ou trois fois: ‘C’est drôle, vraiment drôle!’ (CN 137) [From his habit of observing the sovereign he did as many others do: he imitated the way he trimmed his beard or arranged his hair, the cut of his clothes, his walk, his mannerisms. Indeed, how many men in each country seemed to be the living images of the head of the government! Perhaps he vaguely resembled Napoleon III, but his hair was black; therefore he dyed it, and then the likeness was complete; and when he met another gentleman in the street also imitating the imperial countenance he was jealous and looked at him disdainfully. [...] He thus became so much like his model that they might easily have been mistaken for each other [...] the matter was mentioned to the prime minister, who ordered that the employee should appear before him. But at the sight of him he began to laugh and repeated two or three times: ‘That’s funny, really funny!’]

The parallel between the two texts is further validated by Maupassant’s and Pirandello’s identical remarks on the diffusion of this habit: ‘combien d’hommes, dans chaque pays, semblent des portraits du prince!’ [how many men in each country seemed to be the living images of the head of the government!] (CN 137); ‘in ogni città era raro il caso che non ci fosse per lo meno uno che non somigliasse o non si sforzasse di somigliare a Vittorio Emanuele II, o anche a Umberto I’ [in each town you could find at least one man trying his best to look like Vittorio Emanuele II, or Umberto I] (NPA I 481). Even the detail concerning the colour of Napoleon’s hair — ‘ses cheveux étaient noirs; il les teignit’ — resonates in Amilcare’s exclamations: ‘Imbecille! Buffone! Cosí nero? Quando mai Vittorio Emanuele II fu cosí nero? Biondo scuro e con gli occhi cilestri: ecco com’era Vittorio Emanuele II; com’era lui, insomma, il commendator Zegretti’ [Black hair! What an idiot! Vittorio Emanuele’s hair wasn’t black! Dark blonde hair, blue eyes: that’s what he really looked like — just like him, Zegretti] (NPA I 490). A vaguely Maupassantian tone can also be noticed in the mock-heroic representation of smalltown tiffs: the ‘guerra ferocissima tra i due re’ [fierce battle of the two kings] (NPA I 490) resembles Canneville’s ‘extrême agitation’ as depicted in ‘Un coup d’État’ (1883), where — after the fall of Napoleon III — a republican physician tries to depose a loyalist mayor. Besides, the ‘sourire ineffaçable et moqueur’ [indelible, defiant giggle] (CN 1139) of Napoleon’s plaster bust, contrasting with the physician’s rhetorical outbursts, has something in common with the serene attitude displayed by Vittorio Emanuele’s portrait during the quarrel between his alter egos.36

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More importantly, Maupassant’s inf luence on ‘Sua Maestà’ also extends to the functions of laughter — especially in relation to social norms and the extinction of individual divergences. The ludicrous-pathetic protagonist of ‘Les Dimanches’ is the emblem of a widespread idiocy (‘Il était plein de ce bon sens qui confine à la bêtise’ [he was full of that common sense which borders on stupidity], CN 139); in other words, he is by no means an original, although he may look like one — he rather is a defective specimen of the norm, i.e. of the invisible force that tends to erase any sort of originality from the social scene. The main aspects of laughter in ‘Sua Maestà’ serve an identical purpose; the story is not only a Leopardian satire of anthropocentrism,37 but also an apologue on the mutual exclusion between public life and personal authenticity. The grotesque nature of Zegretti and Cappadona’s rivalry can, in fact, be interpreted in two different ways. The former is represented by the Bergsonian perspective of the villagers, whose laughter entails a sense of distance from (and superiority to) the two look-alikes: [Se il Cappadona si fosse raso] tutto il paese sarebbe crepato dalle risa; fin le case di Costanova avrebbero traballato per un sussulto di spaventosa ilarità; fino i ciottoli delle vie sarebbero saltati fuori, scoprendosi come tanti denti, in una convulsione di riso. (NPA I 484) [If Cappadona had shaved, the whole town would have burst into laughter; hilarity would have shaken the buildings; even the pebbles in the street would have looked like a set of teeth in a laughing mouth.]

But the Costanova farce can also be read in a different perspective, building on the assumption that the villagers may not be so different from their laughing stocks. After all, the cause of the general ‘scandalo’ does not lie in anyone’s private ambition to look like the King, but in the parodic overlap between two alter egos; mimicry per se is not deemed as ridiculous, as proved by the fact that the villagers themselves help Cappadona resume his seat, as soon as his rival abandons the scene. Looked at from this angle, the case of the two fake Kings is but a magnified version of a pervasive social habit. As Maupassant did with Patissot, Pirandello uses two ostensibly exceptional characters in order to highlight a general trend. Both texts implicitly assume mimicry as the universal rule of public life, among average people as much as among their grotesque counterparts; authenticity and originality do not seem to be possible, in a world where the individual is inherently counterfeit. To borrow Girard’s vocabulary, desire is always mediated — be it in ludicrous or serious terms — by the social norm: not by chance, Girard defines this mimetic paradigm as a prison,38 involuntarily echoing a typically Pirandellian metaphor. Pirandello, on the other hand, is not totally extraneous to what Girard has called the Romantic lie — authenticity is excluded from communal life, but it may still be possible within the utopic and ambiguous dimension of the oltre. From this point of view, the farsa of ‘Sua Maestà’ is complementary to the humoristic tragedia of ‘L’imbecille’;39 the former exemplifies the inauthenticity of civilised life, while the latter suggests that the only possible shelter for individual originality is a radical escape from life (which might even take the shape of suicide).

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Laughter and the Norm: A Double Bind The present analysis of laughter in Novelle per un anno has tried to combine two separate levels — the depiction of laughing characters on the one hand, and the implied author’s attitude on the other. The former aspect encompasses the derision towards the eccentric subject (ridere del matto), as well as the eccentric’s own isolated hilarity (ridere come un matto);40 in both cases, laughter ref lects the pressure exerted by the communal norm on individual irregularity. The latter aspect is most typically represented by a state of humoristic perplexity (‘perplessità tra il pianto e il riso’, Um. 907), as conveyed primarily by the contamination of grotesque and pathetic elements on a diegetic level. The twain, of course, are bound to meet, as the anormalità of the humoristic author (Um. 921) is akin to that of the eccentric characters trying to escape their personal dramas; the author’s continuous swings between pathos and mirth, emotional participation and distance, reproduce the misfit’s attempts to evade his/her existential trap through humour. The primary functions of laughter, in sum, revolve around a basic opposition, which can more generally be recognised as the core of Pirandello’s poetics: on the one hand, the ubiquitous laws of civilisation and the collective persecution of anomaly; on the other, the subject’s quest for authenticity, which cannot be fulfilled within the boundaries of social life. Focusing on this conf lict allows us to reconsider Pirandello’s specific case as part of a broader phenomenon, whose importance is not limited to the functions of laughter — i.e., as anticipated, the metamorphosis of individual originality as a literary topos in the transition from nineteenth-century realism to modernism. The parallel with Sterne, in the first place, has highlighted Pirandello’s inclination to push the eccentric towards the margins of society: despite often building on Sternian archetypes, the irregular characters of Novelle per un anno also ref lect the Romantic polarisation between subjectivity and social constraints, as confirmed by the intertextual debts towards the classics of Romantic realism (especially Dostoevsky). But Pirandello differs from this latter model as well, precisely because of his f luctuating attitude towards the pathos of marginalisation: although civilisation menaces to erase all forms of originality, the irregular character’s and the author’s hilarity hint at a consolatory (even if utopic and implausible) way of escape. Laughter is therefore related to a profound discontent with civilisation, and deals with it in an ambiguous way; as suggested by the similarities between humour and suicide in Novelle per un anno, the humoristic or vitalistic evasion towards the oltre (just like Freud’s oceanic feeling)41 is also something disturbingly akin to the death drive. In order to fully understand Pirandello’s ambiguity on this point, it would be necessary to delve deeper into his links with Romanticism — that is to say, the first literary movement to codify the paradoxical tension between modern civilisation and the individual’s freedom. During the Romantic age, this crucial issue has been considered from various (and often contradictory) perspectives, that can nonetheless be interpreted as a continuum between two extremes: on the one hand, the solipsistic peak of Schlegelian irony, which celebrates the subject’s limitless expansion and abandons the uniformity of the world to its irrelevance; on the other, the serious-

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tragic pole, focusing on the traumatic clash between society and the individual. The latter pole builds on the same opposition as Romantic irony (the inadequacy of Reality vs the bad infinity of the Soul), only shifting the emphasis to its objective consequences; this is actually one of the basic patterns of Romantic realism, as noticed by Hegel and further highlighted by Lukács.42 Compared to both extremes of the Romantic perspective, Pirandello’s attitude is somewhat hybrid: the traumatic pathos of anomaly is obsessively evoked, but at the same time it is often transcended through the solipsistic evasion offered by laughter. If the possibility of escaping into the oltre determines Pirandello’s divergence from the serious-tragic canon of Romantic realism, the disturbing ambiguousness of such an escape marks his distance from Romantic irony as well. Further evidence in this regard is supplied by a passage from L’Umorismo: Un altro senso, dicevamo, e questo filosofico, fu dato alla parola ironia in Germania. Lo dedussero Federico Schlegel e Ludovico Tieck direttamente dall’idealismo soggettivo del Fichte; ma deriva in fondo da tutto il movimento idealistico e romantico tedesco post-kantiano. L’Io, sola realtà vera, spiegava Hegel, può sorridere della vana parvenza dell’universo: come la pone, può anche annullarla; può non prender sul serio le proprie creazioni. Onde l’ironia: cioè quella forza — secondo il Tieck — che permette al poeta di dominar la materia che tratta; materia che si riduce per essa — secondo Federico Schlegel — a una perpetua parodia, a una farsa trascendentale. Trascendentale più d’un po’, osserveremo noi, questa concezione dell’ironia: né, del resto, se consideriamo per poco donde ci viene, poteva essere altrimenti. Tuttavia essa ha, o può avere, almeno in un certo senso, qualche parentela col vero umorismo. (Um. 785) [Another meaning, we said, a philosophical one, was given to the word ‘irony’ in Germany. Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck derived it from Fichte’s subjective idealism, though it ultimately stems from the whole post-Kantian idealistic and Romantic movement. The Self, the only true reality, Hegel explained, can laugh at the vain appearance of the universe; since it can create this appearance, it can also abolish it. The Self can choose not to take its own creation seriously, hence irony — a force which, according to Tieck, enables the poet to dominate his subject matter and because of which, says Friedrich Schlegel, the subject matters turns into a perpetual parody, a transcendental farce. Transcendental indeed, I should say, is this conception of irony; and after all, considering its source, it could not be otherwise. Yet it does have, or can have, some affinity with true humour.]

Pirandello criticises the transcendental excess of Romantic irony (‘trascendentale più d’un po’’), i.e. its incapacity to come to terms with the limits of objective reality; the point is quite similar to that made by Hegel, who regarded this kind of irony as a hybristic (and Ficthian) overinf lation of the subject.43 Pirandello’s wariness is caused by two different sets of reasons: on an aesthetic level, such a complete denial of the objective world is unacceptable to an author that still conceives narration in realist terms; on the level of ideology (or, more precisely, of the political unconscious), Pirandello ultimately attaches too much importance to civil institutions, to think that the subject can really do without them. As a consequence, the escape prospected by umorismo (or by the other forms of Pirandello’s solipsistic laughter) cannot provide a definitive answer to the crucial

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question — is an authentic life possible, outside the boundaries of society? The notorious polarity between vita and forma is misleading, in this regard; it would be more accurate to say that the forma of civil life — which is, until proven otherwise, the only bearable kind of life44 — is opposed to an indeterminate and utopic ideal of non-vita. Pirandello’s attitude towards the social norm is therefore definable, in psychological terms, as a double bind: the subject feels the need to get away from social constraints, but at the same time it seems impossible to find a serious alternative. Not by chance, this pattern is quite similar to the Waterloo paradox, as defined by Franco Moretti with regard to nineteenth-century realism: in Stendhal as in other classic novelists, social integration is a problematic concept — mainly because on the one hand it seems necessary, while on the other it forces the individual to give up those very ideals of freedom and authenticity by which society should be legitimated.45 According to Moretti, this paradox can explain the ambiguous recurrence of unhappy endings in the realist novel (especially after the crisis of the Bildungsroman): ‘To double business bound’, a certain type of modern individual must therefore rid himself of that which he cannot be rid of. And here we find the great creation of the realistic ending: where there can, and does occur precisely that which should. [...] The Waterloo paradox is thus solved in the only possible way: not by disentangling it, but by fixing it in a double course of existence. The unhappy ending lets the reader continue believing in the professed principles of legitimacy, since no ‘higher’ values have been offered in their stead: they can be ‘kept alive’ — simultaneously, they can be ‘kept from becoming alive’, because the story’s unchangeable ‘reality’ shows that they cannot be realized, as the threat of destiny hangs over them. [...] Better to think we could have lived in a quite different and much bolder way if — at a certain point — an ‘external, hard, gross, unpleasant’ reality had not forced its ‘that’s life’ upon us.46

It is precisely by questioning reality’s that’s life — i.e., by correcting the ‘così è’ with a humoristic ‘se vi pare’ — that Pirandello defuses the pathos usually implied by the suppression of authenticity on the part of civilisation. As this chapter has tried to demonstrate, here lies the main departure from the tragic/pathetic bent of Romantic realism (including its taste for unhappy endings). Yet, as far as the basic aporia of the Waterloo paradox is concerned, the relation to Romanticism is rather one of continuity: Pirandello’s reader can believe in the possibility of a humoristic escape, but at the same time this ideal is kept from becoming alive, as it is suspended in a utopic, remote, and sometimes funereal dimension. This might also be an additional explanation for the popularity (since as early as the Twenties) of such an ostensibly subversive and radical author. Although the discontent with civilisation (as described by Freud) is always to some extent definable as a double bind with civilisation, this is particularly the case with Pirandello; the only Italian modernist to exemplify this in an even more paradigmatic way is probably Gadda, for whom indeed it seems impossible both to comply with a rotten civilisation (as entailed by Svevo’s irony) and to find shelter outside the collective nomos (as ambiguously attempted by umorismo, and more consistently by Palazzeschi’s controdolore). Gadda’s laughter, in fact, does not provide the subject with any escape from social restrictions, but represents at

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most a melancholic and ineffective revenge on society. It is indeed no surprise that Pirandello’s double bind, as is also the case with Gadda, results in ideological ambivalence; as a matter of fact, Pirandello’s case illustrates an attitude typical of the early twentieth-century Italian intellectual, whose subversive individualism can often be explained both as a contestation of bourgeois society and as a radical expression of bourgeois values.47 Beyond its ostensibly anarchist surface, this form of discontent may actually stem from a reactionary intolerance of mass society: Allegri tutti, anzi felici, noi potremmo essere a un sol patto, secondo un avvocatino imperialista che frequenta il mio caffè: a patto d’esser governati da un buon re assoluto. [...] La causa vera di tutti i nostri mali, di questa tristezza nostra, sai qual è? La democrazia, mio caro, la democrazia, cioè il governo della maggioranza. Perché, quando il potere è in mano d’uno solo, quest’uno sa d’esser uno e di dover contentare molti; ma quando i molti governano, pensano soltanto a contentar se stessi, e si ha allora la tirannia più balorda e più odiosa: la tirannia mascherata da libertà. (TR I 448–49) [We could only be happy on one condition, according to an imperialistic lawyer that frequents my favourite café: that is, if we were governed by an absolute ruler. [...] The real cause of all our evils, our sorrow, if you but knew it, is democracy, dear chap, democracy, government by the majority. Because, when power is in the hands of a single man, he knows he is alone and must satisfy everyone; but when everyone has power, each only thinks about satisfying himself and so the most distorted and hateful tyranny is created: tyranny disguised as freedom.]

As documented by Adriano Meis’s words, the Hobbesian quality of Pirandello’s thought is not limited to his perspective on the social functions of laughter, but also extends to a properly political level. Indispensable as it is to human life, the pactum unionis inevitably comes with the constraints of a pactum subiectionis; since democracy is nothing else than the tyranny of the majority, absolute monarchy (‘un buon re assoluto’) seems a more reliable guarantee against the bellum omnium contra omnes. Pirandello’s obsession with such character types as the wise fool, the escapee or the voluntary convict is a literary metaphorisation of this double bind with civil life. The fugitives satisfy the quest for symbolic evasion, while the wilful prisoners reverse the discomfort inf licted by social inhibitions into a state of paradoxical ease; either way, the liberation from society is not free of doubts and shadows. Not by chance, the most frequent form of escape in Novelle per un anno is suicide: just like death, the f light into the oltre can be regarded both as ‘leggerezza, liberazione’ [lightness, deliverance] and as a cause of ‘immobilità fredda’ [frigid immobility].48 Indeed, laughter can be the most f lexible and effective tool to deal with this fundamental ambiguity: firstly, it undermines the Romantic pathos about the clash between society and the individual, without removing its traumatic aspects; secondly, it fulfils a psychological and historical demand for escape from civilisation, without forcing the subject to face the consequences of these fantasies in coherent and responsible terms (as would be required, instead, by the seriousness of everyday logic). This double purpose is served not only by the hilarity of Pirandello’s bizarre characters, but also by the author’s explicit awareness that life itself — when seen from afar — is a sciocchezza:

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UMORISMO and Madness Non ho tristezze io; ma rido, ma rido, ma rido che è un’allegrezza a vedere. Egli è che ho veduto la Terra, in cui tutti siamo, piccoli e grandi uomini, da un punto un po’ troppo alto, e mi è paruta, la salvi chi può!, un limone... A quell’altezza si ride, come matti. Diciamo proprio sul serio? Facciamo proprio sul serio? Oh come tutto è sciocchezza!49 [I don’t feel any sadness; I laugh instead, I laugh so much that it’s a joy to see. The point is that I looked at the Earth, the Earth on which we all live, from too far above — it looked like a lemon, that poor thing! And when you reach those heights, you just can’t help but laugh like a fool. Do we really mean it? Are we really serious? Oh, it’s all so laughable!]

Notes to Chapter 2 1. ‘Un gigantesco sistema di difese eretto contro la paura della follia vera’ (Elio Gioanola, Pirandello, la follia (Genova: Il Melangolo, 1983), p. 119). 2. In referring to Pirandello’s short-story corpus, I will adopt the commonly used title Novelle per un anno — although, as stated in Lucio Lugnani’s introduction to Pirandello, Tutte le novelle (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), pp. 59–62, it does not entirely ref lect the complex history of the macro-text. 3. Romano Luperini has examined the characters’ laughter in two important stories from the last phase of Pirandello’s fiction, ‘La prova’ and ‘C’è qualcuno che ride’ (‘La prova del riso’, in L’isola che ride: teoria, poetiche e retoriche dell’umorismo pirandelliano, ed. by Marina Cantelmo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), pp. 69–88). A similar analysis has been undertaken on a larger scale by Maria Grazia Accorsi, with special reference to two crucial themes — the public derision of the matto, and the latter’s paradoxical laughter (‘Da “ridere del matto” a “ridere come un matto”: il riso dei personaggi nella narrativa di Pirandello’, in Palazzeschi e i territori del comico, ed. by Matilde Dillon Wanke and Gino Tellini (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2006), pp. 247–83). Lastly, Paola Casella has also paid particular attention to the characters’ laughter: see L’umorismo di Pirandello: ragioni intra e intertestuali (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2002), and ‘Modi di funzionamento dell’umorismo in Pirandello’, Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana, 37 (2011), 113–29. 4. Based on a scrutiny of Pirandello’s complete novelliere, it is possible to identify at least forty-two texts in which one or both of these categories play a relevant narrative role (see Appendix). 5. The most systematic works on Pirandello’s Sternism are Alberto Zava, ‘Rif lessi e suggestioni nell’universo umoristico pirandelliano tra Laurence Sterne ed Alberto Cantoni’, Levia Gravia 5 (2003), 1–20; Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Pirandello nel romanzo europeo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995); and Effetto Sterne: la narrazione umoristica in Italia da Foscolo a Pirandello, ed. by G. Mazzacurati (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1990). All of these essays concentrate mostly on the 1926 novel. 6. See especially Gregori, Il wit nel ‘Tristram Shandy’: totalità e dialogo. 7. Perazzetti’s farcical wedding resembles, in fact, a crucial episode from Dostoevsky’s Demons — Stavrogin’s decision to marry a disabled and demented woman, as a sarcastic sign of disdain for his own aristocratic origins. The similarity has already been noticed by Eurialo De Michelis, ‘Dostoevskij nella letteratura italiana’, Lettere italiane, 2 (1972), 177–201 (p. 188). 8. ‘Il 21 luglio, anniversario della battaglia di Bezzecca, Marco Leccio s’era chiuso nello studio [...]. Là nello studio col reduce Tiralli, curvo ora su questa ora su quella carta geografica, irta di bandierine’ [On 21 July, the anniversary of the battle of Bezzecca, Marco Leccio locked himself in his room [...]. There in his study with his old comrade Tiralli, bending here and there over his maps, all of which were covered with small f lags] (NPA III 1173–75). 9. ‘When my uncle Toby got his map of Namur to his mind, he began immediately to apply himself, and with the utmost diligence, to the study of it [...]. In a fortnight’s close and painful application, [...] he was right eloquent upon it, and could make not only the attack of the advanced counterscarp with great order; — but having, by that time, gone much deeper into the art, than what his first motive made necessary, my uncle Toby was able to cross the Maes and Sambre; make diversions as far as Vauban’s line, the abbey of Salsines, &c. and give his visitors as distinct a history of each of their attacks, as of that of the gate of St. Nicolas, where he had the

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honour to receive his wound’ (Tristram Shandy, 73–74). A more recent battle of Namur is also mentioned by Pirandello in ‘Berecche e la guerra’ (NPA III 584). 10. See Casella, Strumenti di filologia pirandelliana (Ravenna: Longo, 1997), pp. 117–26. Quite remarkably, the original version contained a preamble defining the story as a ‘commentario sentimentale’, with obvious reference to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. 11. ‘Staccarsi da questo figlio non sapeva neppure [...]. A chi non lo sapeva (e non lo sapeva nessuno) poteva parer ridicola tutta quella disperazione per non esser stato arruolato volontario a 67 anni’ [He could not bear parting from his son [...]. His despair at being rejected by the draft board at 67 could seem ridiculous to those who weren’t aware of that (and nobody was)] (NPA III 1179). 12. It is worth noting, in this regard, that the plot of the ‘Frammento’ is partly based on the author’s biographical experience: in 1915 Pirandello — just like Marco Leccio — was a convinced interventionist, despite his private suffering for his son’s departure to the front. The choice of evoking (and deforming) the optimistic paradigm of Sterne’s humour in a text focusing on World War I, therefore, can also be connected to ideological and emotional ambivalences. In essence, the echoes from Tristram Shandy confirm Lucio Lugnani’s interpretation of humour in the ‘Frammento’ as a therapy for pathos (‘terapia contro il patetico’, Lugnani, ‘Commento’, in Pirandello, Tutte le novelle, iii, 724). For a detailed analysis of Pirandello’s experience of World War I, see Piero Meli, ‘Il dramma allo specchio: Pirandello, la guerra e la reciprocità dell’illusione’, Otto/Novecento, 1 (2007), 101–06 and Aurelio Benvenuto, ‘Un nuovo epistolario di Pirandello’, Esperienze letterarie, 3 (2006), 95–105. 13. ‘Tutti i suoi doveri [...] stavano come irsute sentinelle a guardia del reclusorio della sua coscienza. Da circa venti anni, egli vi stava carcerato, a scontare un delitto che, in fondo, non aveva recato male se non a lui’ [All his duties stood like irritating sentinels guarding the prison of his conscience. For about twenty years he had been locked up in this prison to pay for a crime that, after all, had harmed no one but himself ] (‘Il coppo’, NPA I 673; emphasis added). ‘Quello che hai fatto resta, come una prigione per te. [...] E come puoi piú liberarti? Come potrei io nella prigione di questa forma non mia [...] accogliere e muovere una vita diversa, una mia vera vita?’ [What you have done remains like a prison for you [...]. How can you then free yourself from it? How can I embrace and initiate a different life, a life truly mine, when I am imprisoned in this form which is not mine?] (‘La carriola’, NPA III 559; emphasis added). 14. On the outlaw as a recurring character type in the modern short story, see in particular O’Connor, The Lonely Voice. The polarity between law and anomaly in the short-story form has been analysed above (Chapter 1). 15. ‘Pirandello intende negare ai suoi personaggi [...] qualsiasi liberazione. Sta qui il senso, ben diverso da quello di Artaud, del suo concetto di crudeltà’ [Pirandello intends to deny his characters [...] any form of liberation. This is the bottom line of his idea of cruelty, which is quite different from Artaud’s] (Giovanni Macchia, Pirandello o la stanza della tortura (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), p. 194). 16. Gioanola, Pirandello, la follia. Another important inf luence on the present analysis of Pirandello’s prisoners is, of course, Mazzacurati, Pirandello nel romanzo europeo, pp. 115–82. 17. Casella, ‘Modi di funzionamento dell’umorismo in Pirandello’. 18. I refer to the theory first proposed in The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and further developed in the 1928 essay Humour. 19. ‘Strutture narrative atte a veicolare la totalità dell’opposizione nevrotica e psicotica’ (Gioanola, Pirandello, la follia, p. 20). 20. The richest account so far is De Michelis, ‘Dostoevskij nella letteratura italiana’. 21. Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘The Crocodile’, in An Honest Thief and Other Stories, trans. by Constance Garnett (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008), pp. 174–76. 22. Theodora Broock, the protagonist of Palazzeschi’s ‘Dagobert’ (1949), lives in the company of a crocodile bearing the same name as her missing husband. According to Theodora’s friends, the most likely hypothesis is that ‘Dagobert n. 1’ has been swallowed alive by ‘Dagobert n. 2’, and has consequently set up home in the belly of the animal. As in Dostoevsky’s text, the crocodile takes part in academic conferences and high-society events (Palazzeschi, TN 339–40). 23. The comparison is already proposed by De Michelis, ‘Dostoevskij nella letteratura italiana’, p. 188.

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24. See Gioanola, Pirandello, la follia, pp. 176–77. 25. De Michelis, ‘Dostoevskij nella letteratura italiana’, p. 188. 26. With these words Maria tries to persuade her daughter to marry her uncle, an old prince: ‘With the prince it is different, you need not deceive him; you cannot be expected to give him your love, not your love — oh no! and he is not in a state to ask it to you! [...] Let me show the matter from my point of view, and you’ll agree with me — you really will! The prince will live a year — two at most; and surely it is better to be a young widow than a decayed old maid! Not to mention the fact that you will be a princess — free, rich, independent! [...] If he has a single particle of commonsense, he [the fiancé] must understand that jealousy of this old man were too absurd — too ridiculous! [...] And lastly, he will understand that — that, — well I simply wish to say that, upon the prince’s death, you will be at liberty to marry whomsoever you please’ (Dostoevsky, Uncle’s Dream, trans. by Hugh Aplin (London: Sovereign, 2012), pp. 42–43). Marcantonio’s ragionamento is almost identical: ‘Ne aveva, a buon conto, settantadue, don Diego! E non c’era dunque da temer pericoli di nessuna sorta. Più che matrimonio, in fondo, sarebbe stata un’adozione. [...] Col tempo e con la mano di Dio avrebbe lei composto in pace il corpo del marito benefattore, e allora, ecco, allora sì il giovanotto!’ [After all, don Diego was seventy-two years old! She had nothing to be afraid of. It wouldn’t be a marriage, as much as an adoption. [...] Then, with God’s help, she would survive her benefactor — and after that, she would be able to marry her boyfriend] (TR I 214–15). 27. Like many Pirandellian characters, Zina (Maria’s daughter) feels as if she is playing a part in a comedy written by someone else: ‘she looked on at the whole comedy with inexpressible loathing’; ‘you worry and annoy me by making me play various mean and odious parts in this comedy of yours’ (Dostoevsky, Uncle’s Dream, pp. 66, 78). 28. A similar structure can be noticed, for instance, in ‘C’è qualcuno che ride’ (1934) and ‘La prova’ (1935), both examined in Luperini, ‘La prova del riso’. 29. Myshkin’s childish features run as a leitmotif throughout the novel. See, for instance, Dr Schneider’s diagnosis, as reported by the protagonist: ‘He told me that he had come to the conclusion that I was a complete child myself, altogether a child; that it was only in face and figure that I was like a grown-up person, but that in development, in soul, in character, and perhaps in intelligence, I was not grown up, and that so I should remain, if I lived to be sixty’ (Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. by Constance Garnett (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), p. 67). The doctor’s opinion is shared by Ivan Petrovich, as he sees Myshkin again for the first time in years (‘You’ve changed very little, indeed, though you were only ten or eleven when I saw you’ — Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 505), and also echoed by the prince himself (‘I’m twenty-seven, but I know that I’m like a child’ — Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 517). With regard to the theme of childhood in ‘La tartaruga’, see Ivan Pupo, ‘Quasi una pietra: per uno studio variantistico de La tartaruga’, Pirandelliana, 1 (2007), 47–78 (pp. 49–56). 30. A good case in point is the opening of ‘Bobok’: ‘I’m a timid man, but all the same, here I’ve been made out to be mad. [...] I remember a Spanish witticism at the time the French built their first mad-house, 250 years ago: “They have shut up all their fools in a special building, in order to make us believe they are wise themselves”. That’s right enough: shutting somebody else up in a lunatic asylum doesn’t prove your own sanity’ (Dostoevsky, The Gambler, Bobok, A Nasty Story, trans. by Jesse Coulson (London: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 165–66). 31. Hauser’s famous definition of disease in romantic art as ‘the negation of the ordinary, the normal, the reasonable’ has been applied to Dostoevsky by Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, p. 201. Dostoevsky’s inclination to pathological excess is also polemically remarked by Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. by Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), pp. 67–90. 32. Even in texts where the function of laughter is marginal, Pirandello often builds on nineteenthcentury representations of madness, and at the same time he distances himself from such models by replacing mental illness with a form of sober detachment from life. In ‘Notte’, for instance, Silvestro Noli temporarily evades from the trap of family life thanks to a long business trip; while he is travelling back home, he hears strange voices amidst the noise of the train: ‘Mai più! mai più! mai più! [...] Mai più, sì, mai più, la vita gaja della sua giovinezza, mai più’ (NPA I 520). The obsessive repetition of mai più! [nevermore] might well be an allusion to the refrain

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of Poe’s The Raven (1844–49): yet, while the protagonist of Poe’s text experiences a gradual and irreversible descent into madness (‘and my soul shall be lifted nevermore’), Noli’s escape from reality is rather a lucid and tranquil one. 33. Some observations on Maupassant’s tales of madness as a possible inf luence for Pirandello can be found in Douglas Radcliffe-Umstead, The Mirror of Our Anguish: A Study of Luigi Pirandello’s Narrative Writings (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1978). 34. These similarities have already been remarked — among other more generic comparisons — by Alfredo Barbina, ‘Gli svaghi della ricerca’, Ariel, 3 (2008), 181–91 (pp. 189–90). 35. The same idea also recurs in the novel Une vie (1883), when Jeanne accidentally finds her mother’s love letters. 36. ‘Se li godeva dall’alto della parete, così ammusati’ [he enjoyed the show from above, looking down on the two contestants] (NPA I 486). 37. This interpretation is suggested in Beatrice Stasi, Apologie della letteratura: Leopardi tra De Roberto e Pirandello (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995), p. 229. Stasi, however, also remarks that this kind of satire is more evident in the other part of the Costanova diptych, ‘L’imbecille’. 38. ‘A basic contention of this essay is that the great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries’ (René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), p. 3). 39. The antinomy between tragedia and farsa is drawn from the opening of ‘Sua Maestà’ (1922 version): ‘Accanto alla tragedia, però, si ebbe anche la farsa a Costanova’ [Along with its tragedy, Costanova also had its farce] (NPA I 479). 40. The distinction between these two kinds of laughter is taken from Accorsi, ‘Da “ridere del matto” a “ridere come un matto” ’. 41. Freud’s oceanic feeling is also evoked in Giorgio Baldi, Pirandello e il romanzo (Naples: Liguori, 2006), p. 251. 42. See in particular György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. by Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1971). 43. ‘This form [of irony], indeed, makes vain the whole ethical content of right, duty, and law, being an evil and in itself a wholly universal evil. Yet to it we must add the subjective vanity of knowing itself as empty of all content, and yet of knowing this empty self as the absolute’ (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. by Samuel W. Dyde (New York: Cosimo, 2008), p. 72). Another reference to Schlegelian irony can be found in an important passage of the Phenomenology: ‘This sort of conceit which understands how to belittle every truth and turn away from it back into itself, and gloats over this its own private understanding, which always knows how to dissipate every possible thought, and to find, instead of all the content, merely the barren Ego — this is a satisfaction which must be left to itself; for it f lees the universal and seeks only an isolated existence on its own account’ (Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by James B. Baillie (New York: Dover, 2003), p. 49). On Hegel’s criticism of Schlegel’s destructive irony, see Marike Finlay, The Romantic Irony of Semiotics: Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Representation (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 142–57. 44. As underlined by Gioanola, Pirandello ultimately seems to conceive life ‘solo nei modi organizzati del vivere civile’ [only in terms of organised and civilised life] (Gioanola, Pirandello, la follia, p. 55). 45. ‘I am thinking of the short circuit between politics and culture that we have often mentioned, and may call the “Waterloo paradox”: in the world of events a Restoration did occur — in the world of symbolic values, never. [...] This discrepancy, which has since then haunted bourgeois consciousness, has resulted in a highly problematic view of “social integration”. Integration must obviously take place, and thus the reality principle [...] will lead, sooner or later, to the repudiation of those values on which society nonetheless claims to base its legitimacy. It is a necessary repudiation: “one has to live”. But it is also unjustifiable’ (Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 126). 46. Moretti, The Way of the World, pp. 126–27. 47. According to Romano Luperini, the sovversivismo of many writers and intellectuals in the early twentieth century oscillates ‘tra l’espressione delle istanze più radicali della classe dominante

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e la polemica contro di questa, sorretta prevalentemente da spinte anarcoidi’ [between a radicalised expression of the dominant ideology, and an anarchist revolt against it] (Luperini, Il Novecento: apparati ideologici, ceto intellettuale, sistemi formali nella letteratura italiana contemporanea (Turin: Loescher, 1981), pp. 49–50). Similarly, Mazzacurati underlines Pirandello’s ‘resistenza disorganica, oscillante alle istituzioni’ [inconsistent, f luctuating resistance to institutions] (Pirandello nel romanzo europeo, p. 193). On Pirandello’s ideological ambiguities, see also Elio Providenti, Pirandello impolitico. Dal radicalismo al fascismo (Rome: Salerno, 2000) and Marco Manotta, Luigi Pirandello (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), pp. 93–97. 48. Lugnani, ‘Introduzione’, in Pirandello, Tutte le novelle, p. 49. 49. Pirandello, Lettere giovanili da Palermo e da Roma, ed. by Elio Providenti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993), p. 238. Letter to his sister Lina, 10 December 1887.

CHAPTER 3

❖

Violence, Bad Faith, and Hypocrisy: Truth and Deception in Svevo’s Laughter Irony and the Romantic Lie The most representative characters in Svevo’s fiction all share a distinguishing feature: they perceive themselves as misfits, engaging in a more or less evident struggle with the collective norm — and usually facing the risk of being laughed at. The list includes such character types as: the aspiring writer, up against a doxa that reduces literature to a ‘ludicrous and detrimental thing’;1 the inetto, supposedly smarter and more ref lective than the common man, but doomed to ridicule when dealing with ordinary life; the old man or vegliardo, still yearning for recognition and self-fulfilment, but constantly threatened by the risk of public derision. This sort of friction can lead to a variety of outcomes, the most obvious one being a traumatic collision between the subject and society; the isolated individual idealises his marginalisation, he sticks to it to the point of becoming a caricature of himself, and is consequently crushed by the nomos. This is the story of Alfonso Nitti (Una vita) and Emilio Brentani (Senilità), who are both guilty of taking themselves too seriously, and therefore incapable of adapting to the ways of the world; but the same applies to the protagonist of ‘La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla’ (1926), who dies abruptly — ‘stecchito’ [stone dead] (RSA 496) — in his stubborn attempt to demonstrate the importance of the aged (that is, his own importance) in society. Yet, especially in his late works, Svevo seems even more interested in another possible outcome, one which implies a formal compliance with the communal norm; this option can result from different kinds of behaviour, often coexisting within the same character. To begin with, the irregular individual can adjust to a set of rules he considers demeaning, while at the same time remaining privately convinced of his own superiority: suffice it to mention Zeno’s ambivalent self-mockery, or the f lexibility with which Mario Samigli (at the end of ‘Una burla riuscita’) learns to combine a bourgeois sense of financial pragmatism with an idealised conception of himself as a noble-minded intellectual. Needless to say, this mix of f lexibility and pride also characterises, to some extent, Svevo’s own oscillations between business and literature — as famously stated in the ‘Profilo autobiografico’ (1928), ‘credette sempre che anche a chi ha il talento di fare dei romanzi spetti una vita degna di essere vissuta; e se per ottenerla bisognava rinunziare all’attività per cui si era nati,

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bisognava rassegnarsi’ [he always believed that even those naturally inclined to literature deserve a life worthy of being lived; and if renouncing literature is the price to pay for that kind of life, than we have to accept that] (RSA 808). We will, of course, have the chance to delve into the similarities between the author and his characters later in the chapter. More importantly, however, Zeno’s and Mario’s behaviours both conform to the notion of bad faith as defined by Sartre, i.e. a state of ‘disintegration’ between social life and a ‘transcendent’, idealised image of the Self. In other words, the subject tends to deny its social identity, and to persuade itself of being something different from what it really is: [‘Judgements’ caused by bad faith] do not constitute new, solidly structured ideas; on the contrary, they are formed so as to remain in perpetual disintegration and so that we may slide at any time from naturalistic present to transcendence and vice versa. We can see the use which bad faith can make of these judgments which all aim at establishing that I am not what I am. If I were only what I am, I could, for example, seriously consider an adverse criticism which someone makes of me, question myself scrupulously, and perhaps be compelled to recognize the truth in it. But thanks to transcendence, I am not subject to all that I am.2

This idea is perfectly encapsulated by the title of a play by Jean Sarment, quoted by Sartre a few lines before this passage: Je suis trop grand pour moi, I am too great for myself. The same formula applies to Zeno’s irony, through which he ‘avoids defining himself too rigidly’, thus escaping ‘the burden of being a limited, stabilised character’;3 but it also applies to the irony of Svevo/Schmitz — ‘Sempre ammirato di quello che potrebbe essere e mai ossequiente a quello che è’ [always in awe of what might be, and never acquiescent to what really is], as already admitted in 1897 (‘Cronaca della famiglia’, RSA 715). And indeed, bad faith and irony can be closely connected to each other: a point already made by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right, where both concepts are classified among the modalities of ‘absolute subjectivity’. According to Hegel, bad faith, or evil conscience (böses Gewissen), is the attitude of those who deliberately persist in their ‘willing of the particular’, while being aware of the ‘true universal’;4 irony or ironic consciousness (ironisches Bewusstsein), especially in its Schlegelian form, is an act of hubris with which the Subject places itself above the Law, while formally respecting it: [Subjectivity] is aware of the objective ethical principle [...]. Although it is in relation to this principle, it holds itself free from it, and is conscious of itself as willing and deciding in a certain way, and as being able quite as well to will and decide otherwise. — You, let us suppose, honestly take a law to be something absolute; as for me, I too have a share in it, but a much grander one than you, for I have gone through and beyond it, and can turn it as I please.5

Not by chance, Zeno’s self-mockery has sometimes been compared to Romantic irony, precisely on account of the implied over-inf lation of the Self — a feature also shared by Freud’s notion of humour, i.e. a temporary emancipation of the subject from the unpleasing aspects of reality.6 Apart from bad faith and irony, another factor can induce the individual to a superficial compliance with common rules, namely the need to hide one’s socially

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inconvenient instincts, for the sake of peace and quiet. While bad faith is a matter of condescending to civilised life from above, in this latter case the irregular subject adjusts to the norm from below, through dissimulation or (more often) hypocrisy. Not surprisingly either, the Philosophy of Right tackles the notion of hypocrisy in the same paragraph as bad faith and irony, defining it as the conduct of an ‘agent’ who ‘represents as good, conscientious and pious an act, which is merely an artifice for the betrayal of others’;7 such artifices are certainly well documented in Svevo’s works, from Zeno’s simulated naivety to the feigned benevolence of the protagonist of ‘Vino generoso’. These preliminary considerations allow us to highlight a crucial point. By representing his abnormal characters as either exceedingly self-righteous (Alfonso Nitti, Emilio Brentani) or cunningly acquiescent (Zeno), Svevo questions one of the fundamental premises of the ‘Romantic lie’8 — that is, the alleged ethical superiority of the original/odd individual, as compared to the homogenised community threatening to marginalise him. Self-righteousness, bad faith, and hypocrisy are all expressions of a distorted will to power: in the first case, this process can lead to delusional behaviour or laughable presumption (‘io merito di più, io merito altro’ [I deserve more, I deserve a different life], says Mario Samigli right before being mocked, RSA 207); in the second case, the subject compensates a disappointing reality by remaining privately convinced of its own superiority; lastly, hypocrisy barely hides the individual’s resentment against the social norm and its representatives. Will to power, ressentiment: indeed, Svevo’s perspective on the eccentric character (and on himself, as we shall see later) can be deemed as Nietzschean, albeit in terms that have nothing to do with early twentieth-century superhumanism. A Nietzschean, as well as Hobbesian, undertone can also be detected in Svevo’s emphasis on the role of dissimulation in civilised life: Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation. But at the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most f lagrant bellum omni contra omnes.9

According to both Nietzsche and Svevo, even irregular individuals have their share in the bellum omnium contra omnes; just like the common man, they are prone to lie and deceit — be it for herd instinct, or to ‘maintain themselves against other individuals’. The closest (and most crucial) precedent for Svevo’s systematic deconstruction of the Romantic lie is, however, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Like Svevo’s antiheroes, the underground man is driven by a resentful feeling of superiority over the ‘f lock’ of ordinary people: ‘I have always considered myself cleverer than the others around me’, which in turn ‘were all dull-witted and one just like the next, like a f lock of sheep’ (Notes, 12 and 46). At the same time, Dostoevsky’s narrator is notoriously aware of his own inauthenticity: ‘is it really possible to be absolutely open with oneself and not be frightened of the whole truth? Incidentally, I note also that Heine asserts that true autobiographies are almost impossible and that a person is bound to lie about himself ’ (Notes, 38–39).10 Such an awareness leads the

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underground man to question his own Romantic pose, and to denounce it as a form of bad faith — by celebrating his alleged uniqueness, and dissociating it from the prosaic truth, he is able to lead an ordinary life without facing the humiliation that is supposed to come with it. Dostoevsky’s definition of this process could easily apply to Svevo’s typical protagonist: He’s a person of breadth, our Romantic, and the greatest of all our swindlers, I assure you of that... indeed, from experience. [...] I, for example, sincerely detested my office job and the only reason I did not spit in disgust was through necessity, because I sat there and got paid for it. The outcome though — note this — I still did not spit. [...] An astonishing versatility! And what a capacity for the most contradictory feelings! [...] That is why we have so many people of ‘breadth’ who, even at the very last fall, never lose sight of their ideal; and even if they wouldn’t lift a finger on behalf of this ideal, even if they are confessed crooks and thieves, they still respect their foremost ideal to the point of tears, and are unusually pure at heart. Yes, sir, it’s only amongst us that a declared rogue can be utterly, and even eminently, pure of heart whilst in no way ceasing to be a rogue. (Notes, 48–49)

As mentioned above, the very same ‘versatility’ is shared by Zeno Cosini, Mario Samigli, and by many other characters in Svevo’s fiction, whose ‘virtù non fu grande, ma il desiderio ne fu eccessivo’ [virtue has not been great, but the desire for it has been excessive] (RC 1147). Such a disenchanted view of the myth of originality is clearly ref lected by the peculiar functions of laughter in Svevo’s works. On the one hand, to be sure, Svevo is not far from Pirandello, Palazzeschi and Gadda in representing group derision as an act of violence: in Una vita, the clerks in Alfonso’s office pass their time laughing ‘alle spalle altrui’ [behind the backs of others] (RC 338), much like Balzac’s employés or Akaky’s colleagues in ‘The Overcoat’; even the protagonist’s high-society debut is traumatically marked by the Mallers’ laughter.11 Similar examples could easily be collected from Svevo’s later fiction as well: suffice it to mention Emilio’s terror of being derided in Senilità, Zeno’s dream of being lampooned by clowns at the beginning of La coscienza (RC 629), or the whole plot of ‘Una burla riuscita’. Yet, on the other hand, Svevo differs significantly from his peers when it comes to picturing the isolated individual’s relationship with laughter. Some of Svevo’s misfits, namely those that are characterised by their ludicrous self-righteousness, are also (quite predictably) incapable of laughter: Alfonso ‘credeva di avere dello spirito’ [thought he was witty], but when dealing with the Mallers he soon realises that he has lost his ability to smile (RC 29, 32); likewise, as already mentioned, Emilio is guilty of ‘prendere la vita troppo sul serio’ [taking life too seriously] (RC 598), and the misfortunes of the ‘buon vecchio’ are caused by his lack of self-mockery.12 Others, instead, have a natural disposition to laughter as much as to bad faith: as pointed out by his father, Zeno has a habit of ‘ridere di tutto’ [laughing about everything] (RC 665) — a trait often evoked with a certain indulgence by the first-person narrator.13 The tendency to turn everything (including himself ) into a joke is precisely what allows Zeno ‘not to be subject to anything he is’, as Sartre would say; even when it takes the shape of self-mockery, the ultimate aim of this strategy is always to affirm the subject’s superiority to its environment.14

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Hypocrisy is equally accompanied by irony, as a way to dissimulate resentment or other inconvenient feelings; this is definitely the case with Aghios in ‘Corto viaggio sentimentale’ (‘era meglio sorriderle ancora una volta e andare via in pace, ma il rancore c’era nell’animo suo ed era male’ [better to smile at her once more and part in peace. But there was rancour in his heart, and that was a bad thing], RSA 514), or with Zeno in Continuazioni. Another indicative specimen can be found in ‘Vino generoso’, when the protagonist’s ‘sorriso benevolo’ [benevolent smile] to his nephew during an argument on political matters can barely conceal the underlying hostility: M’arrabbiai smodatamente: ‘Ti appenderemo’, urlai, ‘non meriti altro. La corda al collo e dei pesi alle gambe’. Mi fermai stupito. Mi pareva di non aver detto esattamente il mio pensiero. Ero proprio fatto così, io? No, certo no. Rif lettei: come ritornare al mio affetto per tutti i viventi, fra i quali doveva pur esserci anche Giovanni? Gli sorrisi subito, esercitando uno sforzo immane per correggermi e scusarlo e amarlo. Ma lui me lo impedì [...]. (RSA 132) [I grew violently angry: ‘We will hang you’, I shouted. ‘You don’t deserve anything else. A rope round your neck and weights on your feet’. I paused in astonishment. It seemed to me that I had failed to express my thoughts clearly. Was I really like that? No, certainly not. I ref lected: How to recover my love for all living creatures, among whom must be included even Giovanni? I smiled at him at once, making a great effort to master myself and excuse and love him. But he prevented me.]

Having touched upon both sides of the characters’ laughter (collective derision vs the isolated individual), we still have to consider the implied author’s own laughter — which has so far been, as with Pirandello, the focus of most critical attention. Svevo’s typical perspective on the events represented is characterised by irony: the author invites the reader not to take his allegedly irregular characters too seriously, with the result of unveiling their self-righteousness, bad faith, or hypocrisy.15 What ensues, though, is an unsettling short-circuit between the characters’ irony and the author’s own: by looking down on social life as a ludicrous pantomime, and by expressing himself mainly through irony, Svevo ends up sharing the same attitude as Zeno, Mario Samigli or Aghios. ‘La mia parola non è altro che ironia’ [my word is nothing but irony], writes Svevo in Diario per la fidanzata, 1896 (RSA 681); in the same passage he claims that indifference is the essence of his intellectual life (‘l’indifferenza per la vita è l’essenza della mia vita intellettuale’), and that he disregards happiness — that is, contentment with bourgeois, ordinary life — as a form of stupidity.16 Such a separation between the author’s social identity and his idealised self-portrait as a detached ironist has much in common with the process already noticed in many of Svevo’s most representative characters. Consequently, by making fun of this attitude as embodied by his characters, the author is also implicitly ironical about himself, i.e. about his own irony — but how is the reader supposed to deal with the author’s self-mockery, if this practice is repeatedly depicted by Svevo himself as subtly deceptive, morally ambiguous, and self-indulgent?17 It is, after all, not crucial to establish if Svevo’s ultimate verdict on the characters’ (and possibly the implied author’s) lack of sincerity is a clement or a harsh one;18

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what is most important is precisely the fact that the characters’ irony is unmasked by an ironical narrator — which cannot but result in a Nietzschean, non-moral perspective on the thin line between truth and lies. This aspect of Svevo’s fiction is largely self-evident, and is clearly related to a couple of unmistakeably Svevian trademarks: the awareness of the innate kinship between writing and lying, and the author’s proneness to ref lect himself in his characters.19 We will limit ourselves to considering these last features only in their relation to Svevo’s handling of irony, which will in turn be analysed as a symptom of how the perception of individual originality has changed from Romantic realism to modernism. Coming back from the author’s irony to the level of contents, it seems evident that Svevo establishes a systematic connection between laughter and the semantic areas of falsehood and violence.20 There are, of course, a few exceptions: for instance, the social environment represented in ‘Cimutti’ and ‘In serenella’ (1900–14) can be defined as a laughter utopia, where the relationship between workmen and employer is distinguished by cheerfulness and good-natured humour; elsewhere, the spontaneity and simplicity of popular buffooneries are also occasionally praised.21 That said, it is undeniable that mockery is usually meant by Svevo as a more or less effective disguise for the will to power; its aggressive and coincidentally mystifying quality is precisely what interests him the most. Such an interest in the cunning language of laughter is abundantly documented in virtually all of his fiction and plays,22 but reaches its peak in the phase from Zeno to Continuazioni — when, by the way, the textual recurrence of the verb ridere and its derivatives becomes simply ubiquitous. In this period of intense meditation on laughter, the short-story form certainly plays a paramount role; which does not come as a surprise, since (as Svevo knows too well) the typical structure and thematic repertoire of the genre are particularly suited for exploring the links between laughter and irregularity. Not by chance, Svevo’s most remarkable novelle are all centred on isolated characters, dealing with an unexpected deviation from the normal course of events — a hoax (‘Una burla riuscita’), a senile infatuation (‘La novella del buon vecchio’), a festive break from convention (‘Vino generoso’), a train trip away from home (‘Corto viaggio sentimentale’); the author’s familiarity with the tradition of the genre is confirmed, incidentally, by a series of direct references to Boccaccio and the earlymodern novella.23 More importantly, the short story also serves as an ideal meeting point between Svevo and the nineteenth-century representations of mockery and individual anomalies; the next sections will concentrate on this particular aspect, building on the analysis of some representative cases. An Education in Bad Faith: Perfect Hoaxes from Balzac to Svevo Mario Samigli, the protagonist of ‘Una burla riuscita’ (1926), is a mediocre clerk (‘impiegatuccio’) and a failed writer. Nonetheless, he still writes fables as a pastime, and more importantly he still cultivates his ambitions; despite the f lop of his novel, he does not give up the idea of being destined to glory (‘continuava a considerarsi destinato alla gloria’ [he still pictured himself to a glorious future], RSA 199). His naivety is shrewdly exploited by his ‘friend’ Enrico Gaia, a travelling salesman with

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a special knack for practical jokes, who dupes Mario into believing that a German publisher would be interested in publishing the novel. The dream, however, will not last long, leaving the victim bruised ‘come in altre età i cornuti e gli scemi, coloro che la burla meritavano’ [as with cuckolds and fools in olden times — those that deserved to be mocked] (RSA 254). But this is not the only consequence of the hoax; a less obvious side effect is what makes it actually perfect [‘riuscita’], although not in the way envisaged by Gaia. At the end of the story, thanks to a fortuitous investment related to the fake publishing contract, Samigli earns a considerable amount of money; as clearly suggested by the narrator, this unexpected income causes his transformation from a naïve and Quixotic inetto to a hybrid creature — half would-be artist, half sensible bourgeois. After a moment of hesitation, Mario eventually accepts the money deriving from Gaia’s prank, thus sacrificing his pride for the sake of pragmatism: Dapprima urlò: ‘io quel sozzo denaro non lo voglio’. [...] I denari furono molto utili ai due fratelli. Data la modestia delle loro abitudini, garantivano loro per lunghissimi anni, se non per sempre, una vita più facile. E la smorfia che Mario aveva abbozzato incassandoli, non la ripeté quando li spese. (RSA 264) [At first Mario protested: ‘I don’t want the filthy money!’ [...] The money was most useful to the two brothers. Given their modest way of living, it ensured them quite a considerable degree of comfort for many years at least, perhaps for the rest of their lives. And when he came to spend it, Mario did not repeat the grimace he had made on receiving it.]

Of course he will keep writing fables, and believing in his superiority to the ordinary man. Only, his overconfidence does not result in explicit self-righteousness anymore, but rather takes on the shape of bad faith; quite emblematically, he sometimes even fools himself into thinking that the money actually came as a reward for his literary works (‘e talora gli parve persino che gli fossero provenuti — premio pregiatissimo — dalla sua opera letteraria’ [sometimes he even felt that it really was the dear reward of his literary activities], RSA 264). The burla, in short, is riuscita primarily because it succeeds in its involuntary, but most important function: as already remarked by Bergson, the ultimate effect of public derision is usually that of assimilating a deviant individual to the social norm — and indeed, in Svevo’s text, Gaia’s unintentional goal is to impose his normality on Mario (‘imporre le sue propensioni e perfino i suoi organi agli altri’ [endowing others with his own qualities and even his own organs], RSA 264). Considering Mario’s final metamorphosis from inetto to business man, the process is perfectly accomplished; as will be demonstrated, this is perhaps the real meaning of the title.24 The implications of Svevo’s parable are actually best clarified by its dialogue with a series of crucial, if unnoticed, nineteenth-century sources. This is how Enrico Gaia is initially introduced by the narrator: Non è mestiere da dilettante quello del commesso viaggiatore. [...] Tutta la sua vita aveva ‘fatte’ le piccole città dell’Istria e della Dalmazia, e poteva vantarsi che quand’egli arrivava in una di quelle città, per una parte della popolazione (i suoi clienti) il ritmo monotono della vita di provincia si accelerava. Egli viaggiava accompagnato da una chiacchiera inesauribile, dall’appetito e dalla

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Svevo begins by mentioning Gaia’s success as a travelling salesman, and his inclination towards ‘social qualities’: he is an Epicurean and a good drinker, and most importantly he is exceptionally garrulous (‘chiacchiera inesauribile’). Besides, Gaia’s rhetorical talent is openly connected to his passion for hoaxes: ‘adorava la burla come gli antichi toscani’. Svevo’s character is in fact quite similar to another jester and travelling salesman, i.e. the protagonist of Balzac’s ‘L’Illustre Gaudissart’ (1833):25 Il existe à Paris un incomparable Voyageur, le parangon de son espèce, un homme qui possède au plus haut degré toutes les conditions inhérentes à la nature de ses succès. Dans sa parole se rencontre à la fois du vitriol et de la glu: de la glu, pour appréhender, entortiller sa victime et se la rendre adhérente; du vitriol, pour en dissoudre les calculs les plus durs. [...] Vous eussiez reconnu en lui l’homme aimable de la grisette [...], qui gouaille les voyageurs timides, dément les gens instruits, règne à table et y gobe les meilleurs morceaux. (CH IV 564–65; emphasis added) [There lives in Paris an incomparable commercial traveller, the paragon of his race, a man who possesses in the highest degree all the qualifications necessary to the nature of his success. His speech is vitriol and likewise glue — glue to catch and entangle his victim and make him sticky and easy to grip; vitriol to dissolve the harshest calculations. [...] He might be recognized at once as the favourite of grisettes, [...] who chaffs the timid traveller, contradicts the knowing one, lords it over a dinner-table and manages to get the best bites for himself.]

The ‘conditions’ of Félix Gaudissart’s success are quite close to Gaia’s ‘qualità sociali’, as they basically consist of his convivial attitude and his natural rhetorical ability — a talent in combining ‘vitriol and glue’, in order to ‘diddle his victim’. In his case, too, such qualities are accompanied by a strong bent for practical jokes, as also suggested by the name of the character: Jamais nom ne fut plus en harmonie avec la tournure, les manières, la physionomie, la voix, le langage d’aucun homme. Tout souriait au voyageur et le voyageur souriait à tout. [...] Calembours, gros rire, figure monacale, teint de cordelier, enveloppe rabelaisienne; vêtement, corps, esprit, figure s’accordaient pour mettre de la gaudisserie, de la gaudriole en toute sa personne. [...]. (CH IV 564–65; emphasis added) [No name was ever so in keeping with the style, the manners, the countenance, the voice, the language, of any man. All things smiled upon our traveller, and

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the traveller smiled back in return. [...] Puns, horse-laugh, monkish face, skin of a friar, true Rabelaisian exterior, clothing, body, mind, and features, all pulled together to put a devil-may-care gaudisserie into every inch of his person.]

The parallel is further reinforced by the fact that Svevo’s salesman has a speaking name as well: Gaia is clearly evocative of Gaiezza, as Gaudissart is related to gaudisserie. Moreover, in Svevo’s novella, the idiomatic use of the verb fare seems modelled on Gaudissart’s faire: Tutta la sua vita aveva ‘fatte’ le piccole città dell’Istria e della Dalmazia [...]. (RSA 217) [He had spent his life ‘doing’ the little towns of Istria and Dalmatia] ‘Je pars demain pour Amboise. Je ferai Amboise en deux jours, et t’écrirai maintenant de Tours’. (CH IV 575; emphasis added) [‘I leave tomorrow for Amboise. I shall do Amboise in two days, and I will write next from Tours’.] ‘Comment, monstre d’homme, tu me parles tranquillement de faire des enfants, et tu crois que je te souffrirai ce genre-là?’ — ‘Ah! çà, deviens-tu bête, ma Jenny?... C’est une manière de parler dans notre commerce’. (CH IV 569; emphasis added) [‘Monster of a man! You talk to me of you making children? Do you suppose I am going to stand that sort of thing?’ ‘Oh, what a goose you are, my Jenny! That’s only a figure of speech in our business’.]

The comparison between the two stories, however, can also be extended to a deeper symbolic level. As already mentioned, while the conscious aim of Gaia’s hoax is nothing more than his personal enjoyment, its ultimate effect is the victim’s assimilation to the norm: ‘imporre le sue propensioni e perfino i suoi organi agli altri’ [imposing one’s inclinations and even one’s organs to others]. Similarly, Gaudissart’s gros rire is the unintentional means of the levelling tendency underlying modern societies; his practical jokes, as well as his activity as a salesman, embody the very essence of a time dominated by uniformity and homogeneity (‘le règne de la force uniforme’ [the realm of levelling might], CH IV 561). In both texts, the representative of social homogenisation is the one who eventually gets mocked — yet, the meaning of this final twist changes significantly from Balzac to Svevo. In the epilogue of Balzac’s tale, Gaudissart ends up being outwitted by a sly countryman from Touraine, who forces him to sign a fraudulent contract; the peasant’s hoax serves as the emblem of good-natured popular cheerfulness,26 as opposed to the salesman’s sophisticated Parisian humour. This anthropologic polarisation between two different kinds of laughter is a crucial aspect of the story, and represents the main difference from Svevo. In the classics of Romantic realism, in fact, the levelling violence of bourgeois derision is usually confronted with a morally superior counterpart — be it a form of light-hearted rural mirth (as in ‘L’Illustre Gaudissart’), or the grotesque and pathetic innocence of the victim (as in Le Père Goriot or Le Cousin Pons, to mention but a couple of examples from the Comédie Humaine). No trace of such dualities can be found in ‘Una burla riuscita’, due to a variety of reasons: first, on a general level,

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the idea that laughter might be an innocent and harmless practice is nearly absent in Svevo (actually, as proved by the play Inferiorità, even the most ingenuous pranks can have disturbing or traumatic effects);27 besides, and more specifically, Mario’s credibility as a morally superior character is constantly put into question. In the first chapter of the novella, to start with, Svevo highlights the protagonist’s ludicrous feelings of persecution: Allo scoppio della guerra italiana, Mario temette che il primo atto di persecuzione che l’I. e R. Polizia avrebbe esercitato a Trieste, sarebbe venuto a colpire lui — uno dei pochi letterati italiani restati in città — con un bel processo che forse l’avrebbe mandato a penzolare dalla forca. Fu un terrore e nello stesso tempo una speranza che lo agitò, facendolo ora esultare ed ora sbiancare dal terrore. Egli si figurava che tutti i suoi giudici, tutto un consiglio di guerra composto dei rappresentanti di tutte le gerarchie militari, dal generale in giù, avrebbe dovuto leggere il suo romanzo, e — se ci doveva essere giustizia — studiarlo. Poi certamente sarebbe giunto un momento un po’ doloroso. (RSA 201–02) [When Italy went into the war, Mario was afraid that the first act of persecution on the part of the Austrian police would be to summon him, one of the few Italian writers left in Trieste, and possibly send him to the gallows. He was alternately in a state of hope and terror, now exultant, now pale with fear. He pictured his novel being read by the judges, a Council of War consisting of representatives of the whole military hierarchy from the General downwards; and in order to do justice to it, naturally they would have to study it carefully. Then would come an anxious moment.]

Mario’s ‘terror’ and ‘hope’ will not, of course, come true, since he will never be honoured with the attention of any censorship board or military council; his vain ambitions will rather be punished by laughter — that is to say a more subtle, and humiliating, form of censorship. The protagonist’s obsessions resemble those of another would-be intellectual, Stepan Trofimovich from Dostoevsky’s Demons:28 He fondly loved, for instance, his position as a ‘persecuted’ man and, so to speak, an ‘exile’. [...] All his life he sincerely believed that in certain spheres he was a constant cause of apprehension, that every step he took was watched and noted, and that each one of the three governors who succeeded one another during twenty years in our province came with special and uneasy ideas concerning him, which had, by higher powers, been impressed upon each before everything else, on receiving the appointment. Had anyone assured the honest man on the most irrefutable grounds that he had nothing to be afraid of, he would certainly have been offended.29

Just like Mario, Stepan compensates his social inferiority by idealising his literary talent, and by thinking of himself as a martyr to intellectual freedom. Svevo, in short, has probably drawn on Dostoevsky’s repertoire to underline his character’s mix of victimism and arrogance towards society. The experience of being mocked, on the other hand, does not make Mario any more humble; on the contrary, his hubris only becomes more f lexible, dissimulated, and ordinary — which stands in glaring contrast to the innocence and the spontaneous oddity of Balzac’s (or Dostoevsky’s) typical laughing stocks.

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As a matter of fact, Svevo’s clerk gradually experiences the three main forms of self-deception as envisaged by modern psychology, from simplest to most sophisticated: Bovarism, disavowal, and bad faith. At the beginning of the story, his frame of mind is a clear example of Bovarism, according to Jules de Gaultier’s definition (Le Bovarysme, 1902):30 Cet angle est l’indice bovaryque: il mesure l’écart qui existe en chaque individu entre l’imaginaire et le réel, entre ce qu’il est et ce qu’il croit être. (Le Bovarysme, 11) [This angle is the Bovarist index: it measures the gap between imagination and reality, between what one is and what one believes] D’ailleurs cette tentative de réformer la réalité collective, selon les exigences du rêve individuel, comporte un principe d’insuccès plus essentiel encore que la disproportion qui éclate entre des deux forces antagonistes qui se heurtent ici. (Le Bovarysme, 18–19) [This attempt at modifying reality according to one’s dreams is bound to failure, which is even more essential than the disproportion between these two antagonist stances]

Both a cause and effect of failure, Bovarism is a form of ‘idéalisme exasperé’ [hyperbolic idealism], leading to a deep ‘haine du réel’ [hatred of reality] (Le Bovarysme, 19); as a matter of fact, Mario blames his failure on society (‘considera[va] il suo insuccesso nella vita come una conseguenza di circostanze che non dipendevano da lui’), and tries to remodel reality according to his dreams. When Gaia’s hoax forces him to come to terms with reality, he moves on to another kind of delusional behaviour, according to which reality is accepted only on a subconscious level: ‘Mai sospettò di essere stato burlato, ma è certo che la parte più fine del suo cervello, quella dedicata all’ispirazione, [...] l’ammise’ [He never suspected that he was the victim of a practical joke, but the subtler, inspirational part of his brain [...] could not but admit the possibility] (RSA 241). This attitude coincides with what Freud has called Verleugnung (‘disavowal’): a partial avoidance of reality, based on such thought processes as ‘I am well aware that... but nonetheless...’.31 This precarious state of half-blindness, however, cannot last long; a few days after signing the fake contract, Mario suddenly realises that he has been cheated, and breaks into tears (RSA 251–53). Quite predictably, what distresses him most is the awareness that he will not be able to persist in his state of Bovarist self-deception: ‘Mai più gli sarebbe stato concesso di ritornare allo stato in cui era vissuto sempre, nutrendosi delle solite porcheriole condite da quel sogno alto che stereotipava il sorriso sulle sua labbra’ [Never again would he be able to go back to his previous happy state, and season the poor scraps he fed on with lofty dreams which left a smile always on his lips] (RSA 254). The law of laughter (‘legge della burla’) forces the character to face the truth, leaving him with two options: complying with reality, or being crushed by it. As anticipated, Mario eventually chooses to give up his pride, and to conform with reality. His adjustment to the norm is first suggested by the fact that — when he finally understands that he has been fooled — he does not question the rightfulness of public derision as a social practice. Fools, in his view, deserve to be

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mocked: ‘era stato burlato come in altre età i cornuti e gli scemi, coloro che la burla meritavano’ (RSA 254, emphasis added). Nonetheless, his feelings of superiority do not really disappear; as mentioned above, at the end of the story he still toys with the idea of his unexpected income being a reward for his literary works (RSA 263–64). What makes this compromise possible is precisely the third form of delusional behaviour, namely bad faith — that is, according to Sartre, ‘a certain art of forming contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea’.32 Not by chance, the three labels that we have just applied to the case of Mario Samigli coincide with those used by Franco Moretti to analyse the behaviour of Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir;33 despite their evident differences, Svevo’s short story and Stendhal’s novel actually share an ironic perspective on the Romantic lie, i.e. on the rigid polarisation between the social norm and the free expression of individual originality. By unveiling Julien’s self-deceptions, Stendhal undermines the typically Romantic duality between juvenile idealism and the prose of the adult world; the author of ‘Una burla riuscita’ deals with another binary topos of Romantic realism — the laughing stock’s purity, as opposed to the malice of derision — , only to reject it as false. Svevo’s irony shows the inherent normality of the eccentric character, thus preventing the reader from any idealised (Romanticised) interpretation of his alleged originality; albeit in different terms from Pirandello’s umorismo, the author’s laughter serves the purpose of defusing the pathos traditionally attached to the representation of irregular individuals. Saints and Imposters: Dostoevsky in ‘Corto Viaggio Sentimentale’ The alleged irregularity of Aghios — the protagonist of ‘Corto viaggio sentimentale’, 1925–28 — is emphasised by comparison with his travel companion Borlini, who supposedly embodies the quintessence of the common man: ‘L’Aghios rimase ammirato. Quest’era la presentazione del vero uomo normale! Non gli era simpatico. L’uomo normale voleva che tutti pensassero a lui [...]. Come era migliore lui, che non domandava niente’ [Aghios listened in wonder. This was the true, normal man! and he did not find him likeable. The normal man wanted everybody to think of him [...]. How much better was he, who did not demand anything] (RSA 549). His attitude remarkably echoes that of the underground man, who also thought of himself as ‘the antithesis of the normal man’, that is, as ‘a man of heightened consciousness’ (Notes, 13); and as was the case with Dostoevsky’s antihero, the subject’s claim of uniqueness goes along with a feeling of superiority (‘come era migliore lui, che non domandava niente’). Contrary to what is suggested by the title of the story, Aghios’s attitude clearly differs from the naiveté and benevolence of Sterne’s sentimental traveller — despite his attempts at seeming generous and kind, Svevo’s character is constantly held back by his own pettiness, and more generally by the common f laws of human nature.34 Benevolence is only achievable to Aghios in generic and hypocritical forms, i.e. when applied to vague collective entities rather than to real human beings: ‘Non si poteva dire ch’egli amasse qualcuno, ma egli amava intensamente tutta la vita, gli uomini le bestie e le piante, tutta roba anonima e perciò tanto amabile’ [he did not really love anyone,

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but he deeply loved life in general, people animals and trees — all anonymous stuff, and therefore all the more loveable] (RSA 529). Incidentally, this leads us back once again to the underground man, and his affected love for humanity in general: How much love, Lord, how much love I experienced, in those dreams of mine, in these escapes into all that is ‘beautiful and sublime’! There was so much of it that, in truth, I never felt the need to project it onto anything. [...] I felt an absolute need to embrace my fellows and the whole of mankind; but for this purpose I needed at least one person, one who really existed. (Notes, 58–59)

In short, the Sternian and Romantic idealisation of the irregular, sentimental character is openly parodied by Svevo. Apart from the telling similarities between Aghios and the underground man, the ironic strategy underlying ‘Corto viaggio sentimentale’ is perhaps best illustrated in the light of another crucial intertextual model. Aghios’s sense of detachment from the ordinary world is captured by a pivotal episode of the novella, in which the protagonist dreams of f lying into space: Insomma il signor Aghios era avviato verso il pianeta Marte, sdraiato su un carrello che si moveva traverso lo spazio come sulle rotaie. Egli vi era sdraiato bocconi e invece di pavimento il carrello aveva delle assi su cui, dolorante, poggiava il suo corpo. Una delle assi passava sul suo petto e rendeva più pesante la tasca che vi era. Sotto a lui c’era lo spazio infinito e al di sopra anche. La terra non si vedeva più e Marte non ancora. [...] Previde quel pianeta. Ebbene, egli lo avrebbe popolato di gente che avrebbe intesa la sua lingua, mentre egli non avrebbe intesa la loro. Così egli avrebbe comunicata loro la propria libertà e indipendenza, mentre loro non avrebbero potuto incatenarlo con le loro storie, che certo non mancavano loro. (RSA 597) [Signor Aghios was bound for the planet Mars, stretched out on a kind of trolley moving through space as though on tracks. He was lying face downward on it, and instead of a f loor the trolley had axles, on which his body was lying painfully. One of the axles cut across his chest, making his breast-pocket feel extra heavy. Below, all was infinite space, and above as well. He could no longer see the earth and could not yet see Mars [...]. He anticipated the planet. He would populate it with people who could understand his language, though he could not understand theirs. By so doing, he would have given them his own freedom and independence, whereas they would not be able to violate his with stories of their own, which no doubt they had plenty of.]

As he lies down on a trolley heading to Mars, Aghios starts picturing his encounter with an alien population, speaking an incomprehensible language. This sequence bears a strong resemblance to a short story by Dostoevsky, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (1877), whose protagonist has very little to do with the underground man, and rather belongs to the same character type as Myshkin — the morally superior individual, cruelly lampooned by the people around him. Dostoevsky’s character expresses his yearning for escape from society through his dream of travelling to another planet: I have mentioned that I dropped asleep unaware and even seemed to be still ref lecting on the same subjects. [...] Suddenly another break and I was being carried in a closed coffin. [...] I was caught up by some dark and unknown

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Violence, Bad Faith, and Hypocrisy being and we found ourselves in space: [...] we were f lying through space far away from the earth.35

As in Svevo’s story, the dreamer describes outer space while lying f lat on his back; further minor details coincide with Aghios’s adventure, such as the quick mention of Mars and the incomprehensible language spoken by the aliens.36 On the other hand, the two dreamers also present some remarkable differences. First of all, Dostoevsky’s ridiculous man is characterised by his innocence and altruism, as shown for instance by his concern for a poor young girl he meets at the beginning of the story.37 Bearing this in mind, Aghios’s sexual fantasies about Anna — an adolescent who had just been mentioned by another traveller — sound like an ironic degradation: E l’Aghios si domandò: ‘Ma perché la mia figliuola ha da giacere così sotto a me? È il sesso? Io non la voglio’. E urlò: ‘Io sono il padre, il buon padre virtuoso’. Subito Anna fu seduta lontano da lui, ad un angolo del carrello, in grande pericolo di scivolarne nell’orrendo spazio e l’Aghios gridò: ‘Ritorna, ritorna, si vede che su quest’ordigno non si può stare altrimenti’. E Anna obbediente ritornò a lui come prima, meglio di prima. (RSA 599) [Signor Aghios wondered: ‘But why does my daughter have to lie under me like this? Is it sex? I don’t want her!’ And he shouted: ‘I am her father, her kind, virtuous father!’ Instantly, Anna was seated some distance away from him, in a corner of the trolley, in great danger of slipping off into the fearsome void. And Aghios called to her: ‘Come back, come back! It’s the only way we can be safe on this machine’. And Anna, obediently, returned underneath him as before, better than before.]

Not by chance, the two characters also have an opposite attitude towards laughter: while the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s story is doomed to ridicule, Aghios is obsessed with the fear of public derision,38 but is also sly enough to avoid it. Besides, unlike his predecessor, Aghios can use laughter as a means of dissimulation, in order to adjust to the social norm and hide his hostile or obscene instincts: ‘Era meglio sorriderle ancora una volta e andare via in pace. Ma il rancore c’era nell’animo suo ed era male’ [Better to smile at her once more and part in peace. But there was rancour in his heart, and that was a bad thing] (RSA 514); ‘Una graziosa giovanetta si fece in disparte, fin dove Aghios la guardò con un sorriso che volle paterno, pensando però che non sarebbe stato male se lo scompiglio in quel breve spazio l’avesse gettato su lei’ [A pretty young girl stepped back as far as the wall would allow to make way for him, and Signor Aghios looked at her with a smile intended to be paternal, though thinking that he would not have minded at all if [...] he was thrown up against her] (RSA 516). On a more private level, hilarity can also serve the purpose of bad faith, by helping the character decline responsibility for what he is. For instance, immediately after accusing himself of being selfish and heartless, Aghios smiles in self-forgiveness: ‘Sorrise, perché non ci fu amarezza. Le cose erano così e ne risultava una situazione comoda come la sua età esigeva’ [He smiled, for he felt no bitterness. Things were the way they were, and had left him in quite tolerable circumstances, as required by his age] (RSA 529). To be sure, Aghios is well aware of being a liar; nonetheless, he is far from feeling

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guilty for that, since he regards falsehood as a general inclination of mankind.39 On the contrary, the conscience of Dostoevsky’s character is ceaselessly tormented by man’s propensity to lie and deceit, to the point that in his dream he accuses himself of contaminating outer space with it: ‘Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all [the aliens]! [...] They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood’.40 In short, while the ‘ridiculous man’ embodies the Romantic idealisation of originality as social martyrdom, Svevo’s character is a parody of that ideal; his name — Aghios, ‘holy’ — is but an antiphrasis. As in ‘Una burla riuscita’, the main target of the author’s irony is the unrealistic Manichaeism of the Romantic imaginary. Svevo, Ojetti, and the Smile of the Old Man Most of Svevo’s works subsequent to La coscienza are centred on old men (vecchi, or vegliardi): the list includes ‘Vino generoso’ (1926–27),41 ‘La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla’ (1926), ‘Corto viaggio sentimentale’ (1925–28), several sketches, and of course Continuazioni (1927–28). This character type is usually distinguished by a parodic kind of irregularity, especially if compared to how individual originality was framed in the Romantic-realist tradition. The most typical representative of originality (as opposed to social uniformity) in the nineteenth-century novel is, in fact, the young man — the dynamic and restless Bildungsroman hero, whose ideal of authenticity cannot but collide with the prose of world.42 Svevo’s vegliardi can also be considered as a comic reversal of this pattern; their exclusion from the dynamic core of society is merely physiologic, instead of being caused by an unjust and repressive authority. Moreover, their quest for self-fulfilment is not triggered by noble ideals, but simply by their narcissism or ill-concealed libido. In sum, Svevo’s representation of senility parodies the Romantic myth of youth, in an even more radical way than with the young protagonists of Una vita and Senilità. Alfonso and Emilio followed the steps of Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau, as their inertia represented the antithesis of Julien Sorel’s and Rastignac’s dynamic energy; yet, despite the author’s irony, their premature withdrawal from life retained some traces of pathos. In comparison, texts like ‘Vino generoso’ or Continuazioni take a further step in the direction of parody, since the Romantic clash between society and the young, isolated protagonist is replaced by a farcical struggle between an attentionseeking old man and the natural succession of generations. Coincidentally, the vegliardo also challenges another typical pattern of Romantic fiction, i.e. the innocent laughing stock being cruelly picked on by society. Contrary to Pirandello’s ‘vecchia imbellettata’, Svevo’s old men are never really persecuted by laughter — their terror of being derided seldom comes true, even when they actually deserve it (as is the case with the ‘buon vecchio’, whose self-confidence is worthy of ‘il riso di Beaumarchais e la musica di Rossini’ [Beaumarchais’s laughter and Rossini’s music], RSA 453). In this respect as well, the nineteenth-century opposition between society and a solitary deviant character is deprived of its serious-tragic quality. Before delving deeper into the parodic nature of Svevo’s old men, it may first be useful to examine another important (and previously unremarked) intertextual

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source. In 1898, the same year as Senilità, Ugo Ojetti published a soon-to-beforgotten novel titled Il vecchio, focusing on the family life of Alessandro Zeno — an old senator haunted by the fear of death, and constantly at war with his own conscience. Despite its evocative title and the name of the protagonist, this work has never been systematically studied in relation to Svevo;43 yet, upon close inspection, its inf luence on Svevo’s fiction from Zeno onwards appears to be quite pervasive. In particular, the present section will focus on two highly representative samples, namely Continuazioni and ‘Vino generoso’, with the aim of highlighting not only the similarities, but also to the main difference between Ojetti’s protagonist and Svevo’s old men: while the former is a serious-tragic (and at times melodramatic) character, the latter are generally represented in ironic terms, and are themselves inclined to laugh about everything. The correspondences between Il vecchio and Svevo’s fourth novel are indeed striking. To start with, the composition of the protagonist’s family is the same in both novels: both Zenos are fathers to a painter (Andrea/Alfio), and they both also have a daughter (Luisa/Antonia), a son-in-law (Giorgio/Valentino) and a nephew (Gino/Umbertino). The problematic relationship between Alessandro Zeno and his son, as well as the latter’s artistic vocation, seem to have exerted a particular inf luence on Svevo. Alessandro’s disapproval of Andrea’s portrait of his mother is echoed by Zeno Cosini’s opinion on Alfio’s sgorbio:44 Il padre andava e veniva per la camera [...]; mai guardava il quadro. Pensava: ‘Egli ritrarrà solo la figura della morta. È giovane: non sa intendere la morte perché non la sente’. (Il vecchio, 47) [The father was pacing back and forth in his room [...]; he didn’t give the portrait a single look. He was thinking: ‘He will only sketch the effigy of his dead mother. He is young: he can’t understand death, because he can’t feel it’.] Al senatore il ritratto cominciato parve un’opera orrenda, irrisoria alla morte per quella crudezza di linee quasi incise. (Il vecchio, 53) [The senator found the portrait awful and disrespectful towards death, with all those coarse, almost engraved lines.]

Just like Svevo’s old man, Alessandro Zeno has always been sceptical about his son’s profession: ‘non aveva mai approvato la professione del figlio, che non dava guadagni stabili’ [he never approved of his son’s occupation, as it did not earn him any stable income] (Il vecchio, 97). Besides, as will happen in Svevo’s novel,45 the father reproaches his son on not pursuing an academic career, with the only result of increasing his hostility: ‘molte volte lo aveva esortato a tentare un concorso per qualche cattedra d’arte, così da poter fidare sopra un salario certo; ma Andrea si era sempre ribellato, perché in ogni occupazione fissata dalla volontà altrui vedeva una mortificazione del proprio ingegno’ [He often exhorted him to apply for a professorship in Arts, in order to secure himself a salary; but Andrea always rebelled against it, since he considered any intrusion in his professional life as a mortification of his genius] (Il vecchio, 98). However, despite his wariness and his ignorance in art both modern and academic (‘incapace di intendere non pur l’arte del figlio ma anche l’antica fungosa arte accademica’), Alessandro resolves not to dissuade Andrea

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from his vocation — which is enough for him to think of himself as a perfect father: ‘avea finito col credersi il più liberale dei padri, poiché lasciava che Andrea a suo piacere vivesse in quel passatempo fastoso’ [he pictured himself as the most generous of fathers, as he let Andrea devote himself to his expensive pastime] (Il vecchio, 100–01). In this respect as well, his behaviour clearly anticipates that of Svevo’s protagonist, who supports Alfio’s art only to demonstrate his moral superiority.46 Alessandro’s extraneousness to his son’s aesthetic views is nonetheless an obstacle to their dialogue, and often originates arguments about the unbridgeable gap between vecchi and giovani (as will also be the case with Continuazioni):47 Avendo il padre osservato che un suo collega pittore celebre non aveva approvato quest’ultima opera di lui quanto altre precedenti, Andrea si era difeso: ‘Quello è un vecchio: non mi capirà mai, anzi più progredirò, più mi condannerà’. E il senatore: ‘I vecchi, i vecchi! Essi vi hanno creati’. ‘Appunto perché ci hanno creati, devono lasciar che anche noi creiamo’. (Il vecchio, 102–03) [When his father remarked that a famous painter had criticised some of his works, Andrea replied: ‘He is old, he will never understand me — actually, he will criticise me more and more as I progress’. To which the senator answered: ‘The old, the old! They created you’. ‘And this is precisely why they should let us create something as well’.] Alla parola vecchio Alessandro Zeno si scosse: ‘Insomma il suo massimo torto è d’esser vecchio? [...]’. ‘Voi, senatore, dite che non lo vogliamo lasciar vivere. Vivere? Me egli deve lasciar vivere noi. Noi, lo lasceremo tranquillamente morire’. (Il vecchio, 144–46) [Upon hearing the word old, Alessandro Zeno got upset: ‘So you think that being old is a crime? [...]’. ‘Senator, you accuse us of not letting him live. But he is the one that should let us live. In exchange, we will let him die peacefully’.]

Aesthetic incomprehension aside, Alessandro is fully aware of the distance separating him from Andrea. Just like Zeno,48 he sees his son’s rebellious nature as something he could not have inherited from the father: ‘Come poteva esser derivato da lui, tutto da lui quel giovane ribelle, irriverente, così dissimile?’ [How could that rebellious, irreverent boy, that boy so different from him, be his son?] (Il vecchio, 167–68). Moreover, Alessandro’s affection for his son is often overshadowed by envy, as the old man gets more and more blinded by his egoism and fear of death. The character is fully aware of his own base resentment towards youth, as stated in lines that might well have belonged to Zeno (were it not for their serious, emphatic tone):49 ‘Non è odio, è un sentimento più gretto, più meschino, più freddoloso: io lo invidio e lo guardo aguzzando gli occhi, mal comprendendolo, soltanto sentendo che è più forte. [...] Ipocrisia e paura, invidia e impotenza: ecco i punti saldi delle nostre prediche e dei nostri insegnamenti’. (Il vecchio, 341–42) [It’s not hate, it’s a lower, colder feeling; I envy him, and however hard I try I can’t understand him — I can only feel that he is stronger than me. [...] Hypocrisy and fear, envy and helplessness; this is the bottom line of our reprimands and our teaching.]

As a matter of fact, Alessandro’s personality is dominated by the conf lict between

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his spontaneous egoism and a bitter awareness of his own f laws, with the latter being often conveyed by passionate, almost melodramatic monologues; not by chance, in his review of the novel, Luigi Capuana criticised Ojetti for his excessive seriousness and deliberate gravity.50 A great part of the novel’s pathos, after all, comes from the protagonist’s serious-tragic perspective on his troubled conscience, and from his inability to see events in an ironic light; quite predictably, the story ends with the old man’s suicide — which is rather emblematic of the main difference between Alessandro and the protagonist of Continuazioni. On the one hand, old Zeno resembles Ojetti’s character, in that he admits to not being a virtuous man (‘da me la virtù non fu grande, ma il desiderio ne fu eccessivo’ [although my own virtue has not been great, my desire for it has been excessive], RC 1147); yet, on the other hand, his humour and self-mockery allow him not to take full responsibility for what he is. Contrary to Alessandro, who is eventually eaten by remorse and self-contempt, Zeno prefers to smile at his own f laws, apart from those f leeting moments in which he suspects that life might be a more serious matter than he thinks: ‘Mi spavento quando talvolta penso che la gente possa essere migliore di quanto io abbia sempre pensato o la vita più seria di quanto mi sia sempre apparsa. Il sangue mi sale alla testa come se stessi per ribaltarmi’ [it frightens me when I think people might after all be better than I have always thought them, or life a more serious affair that it has always seemed to me. I feel faint, the blood rushes to my head at this thought] (RC 1165); ‘Mio padre mi rimproverava di ridere di tutte le cose ed anche mio figlio mi rimprovera la stessa cosa’ [my father used to scold me for laughing at everything, and my son scolds me for the same thing] (RC 1126). While Ojetti’s character is too inherently earnest to indulge in hypocrisy and bad faith, Svevo’s Zeno is perfectly comfortable with lying; humour to him is a means of survival, as well as an escape from the trial of conscience. The author’s irony on the character’s opportunism remains ambiguous: while suggesting that Zeno’s f lexibility — as compared to the stiffness of Ojetti’s vecchio — is a Darwinian mark of superiority, Svevo also tends to present the same feature as morally despicable. Such an attitude on the part of the author is best summarised by Booth’s definition of unstable irony: ‘the truth asserted or implied is that no stable reconstruction can be made out of the ruins revealed through the irony. The author — insofar as we can discover him, and he is often very remote indeed — refuses to declare himself, however subtly, for any stable proposition’.51 Despite reaching its peak in Svevo’s last novel, the characterisation of the old man as a humorous-ironic figure is already evident in the short stories immediately preceding Continuazioni. In these texts too, the intertextual dialogue with Il vecchio is ref lected by a series of similarities and symptomatic differences;52 as anticipated, the most significant case is arguably ‘Vino generoso’. Svevo’s story culminates with the old protagonist’s dream of being lost in a dark cave, in which he finds a dimly lit glass trunk: ‘[mi trovai] in una grotta vastissima, rozza, [...], oscura, nella quale io sedevo su un treppiedi di legno accanto ad una cassa di vetro, debolmente illuminata di una luce che io ritenni fosse una sua qualità’ [It was a huge cave, rugged, [...] and it was dark. There I sat on a three-legged stool beside a glass chest, feebly illuminated by a light which I considered must be a quality of itself ] (RSA

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142). The trunk is soon discovered to be part of a sacrificial rite, as the third person to lie down in it will be sentenced to death. Terrorised at the thought of being the victim, the old man begs her daughter Emma to take his place in the coffin — he eventually wakes up screaming ‘Emma, Emma’, which is misinterpreted by his wife as an expression of fatherly love (something similar also happened, by the way, in Ojetti’s novel).53 Apart from resorting to some typically Freudian symbols,54 this oneiric sequence seems largely modelled on an episode from Il vecchio, immediately preceding the protagonist’s suicide. In this episode, Alessandro Zeno dreams of wandering through a mountain village (‘paese montano’) populated by cheerful boys and girls (‘gruppi di uomini giovani e di amabili donne che giacevano e cantavano’). Soon after that, he finds himself alone in front of a gloomy cave (‘una grotta oscura e paurosa’): Tra gli abeti si intravvedeva una grotta oscura e paurosa come una fauce. [...] Quanto tempo camminò nelle grotte? [...] Vide un chiaror giallo fuor da una largura ed entrò. Steso sopra un letto di roccia era un corpo sotto una coltre lilla, e in fondo sopra un’eminenza ardevano due candele che gocciavano e fumigavano [...]. Dopo un attimo di sorpresa egli si avanzò con brevi gesti recisi, quasi un’altra volontà lo movesse meccanicamente, e alzò la coltre. Allora il vecchio vide il suo stesso cadavere. Egli era a se stesso il nemico più acre! (Il vecchio, 373–74; emphasis in original) [Through the trees he saw a dark, frightening cave. [...] How long did he walk in the caves? [...] He saw a dim light coming from a large gully, and moved closer. A body was lying on a bed of rocks, covered in a lilac blanket; two candles were burning and dripping on a sort of eminence. [...] After a moment of hesitation he moved on, in a stiff and almost mechanical way; he lifted the blanket, and saw his own dead body. He was his own worst enemy!]

In the weak light of two candles, Alessandro — exactly like the protagonist of ‘Vino generoso’ — comes upon a sort of sacrificial altar (‘letto di roccia’), on which he discovers his own dead body. A few paragraphs before, the protagonist openly referred to the semantic area of ritual offering, by claiming that the banquet of youth necessarily requires the sacrifice of the aged: ‘Io morrò per segnare il trionfo e la festa dei sopravvenenti. C’è banchetto senza ecatombe di selvaggina e di erbe e di grani? [...] C’è giovinezza se non sopra i cadaveri?’ [I will die to herald the triumph of those who will come after me. Can there be a banquet without a sacrifice of game, herbs and wheat? [...] Can there be youth without the death of the old?] (Il vecchio, 304). Indeed, the protagonist of ‘Vino generoso’ is tormented by the same weaknesses and fears as Ojetti’s character; yet, unlike Alessandro Zeno, he manages to survive them by questioning their seriousness. As Sartre would say, hypocrisy and bad faith allow Emma’s father to live in a state of ‘disintegration’, i.e. to disassociate himself from his actual selfishness and pettiness: ‘Io quell’onta neppure più sentii [...]; non era la mia la vita del sogno e non ero io colui che scodinzolava e che per salvare se stesso era pronto d’immolare la propria figliuola’ [I ceased to feel the shame any more. The dream-world was not my world, nor was I the man who wagged his tail and who was ready to sacrifice his own daughter to save himself ] (RSA 147; emphasis

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added). Not by chance, in the original version of the story the subject’s ability to remove the unpleasing contents of the dream was explicitly associated to laughter: ‘Ora si può riderne ma allora mi parve ragionevole [...]. Quella vita bisognava tenerla segreta per sfuggirne l’onta. Bisognava poi dimenticarla per saper ancora sorridere o anche solo respirare’ [I can laugh about it now, but I found it reasonable at the time. [...] I had to keep that life hidden in order to avoid humiliation; I had to forget it in order to be able to smile again, or even to breathe] (RSA 176–77, emphasis added). Looked at from this angle, the transformation of the pathetic/melodramatic old man into a smiling (and therefore morally ambiguous) character is a further proof of Svevo’s de-Romanticised view of originality; the character’s inclination to mockery, as well as the author’s ironical perspective on it, reduce the clash between society and the irregular individual to a pantomime. Laughing about Everything: Svevo, Flaubert, and Modernism As already mentioned, by 1896 Svevo had already identified irony as the most quintessential component of his worldview: La mia indifferenza per la vita sussiste sempre: anche quando godo della vita a te da canto, mi resta nell’anima qualche cosa che non gode con me e che m’avverte: bada, non è tutto come a te sembra e tutto resta comedia perché calerà poi il sipario. [...] La mia parola non è altro che ironia ed io ho paura che il giorno in cui a te riuscisse di farmi credere nella vita (è cosa impossibile) io mi troverei grandemente sminuito. [...] Ho un grande timore che essendo felice diverrei stupido. (Diario per la fidanzata, RSA 681) [My indifference to life persists. Even when I find comfort in your company, something inside keeps warning me: ‘beware, it’s not as it seems — everything is a farce, and sooner or later the curtain will fall’. [...] My word is nothing but irony, and I am afraid that if you ever managed to make me believe in life (which is impossible) I would feel humiliated. [...] I am afraid that if I were happy, I would become stupid.]

Svevo’s declared indifference to life, and his conviction that everything is a farce (‘tutto resta comedia’), is basically identical to the attitude of his most typical character type — the individual who tends to laugh about everything (Zeno’s ‘ridere di tutto’, RC 665), often crossing the border between wisdom and bad faith. Among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European authors, Svevo is certainly not the only one whose fiction is shaped by such an attitude; as a matter of fact, the tendency to depict the whole of social life as a farce generally plays a paramount role in the transition from traditional realism to modernism. In order to give an exhaustive account of this escalation of laughter between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we should extend our scope to non-fictional genres: for instance, the idea of life in its entirety being a laughable matter was already envisaged by Schlegel’s interpretation of irony, and later characterised an important current of nineteenth-century aesthetics and thought — from Baudelaire’s comique absolu (De l’essence du rire, 1855) to Nietzsche’s incipit parodia (The Gay Science, 1886). What is most of interest to us, however, is the gradual diffusion of such ideas in the

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literary genres usually devoted to a serious representation of everyday life. According to the classics of early nineteenth-century realism, life can be a succession of ridiculous, tragic and grotesque events, but remains an essentially earnest matter — the main goal of the novel as a literary form is precisely to capture this ‘mélange du grave et du burlesque’ (Manzoni), or ‘alternation of tragic and comic scenes’ (Dickens),55 without letting laughter assume a preponderant role. The first major novelist to undermine this balance between serious and comic/grotesque elements was, of course, Flaubert; his works portray society as the realm of a pervasive bêtise, on which the author exerts his nihilist and corrosive irony. As repeatedly stated in his correspondence, the ultimate subject of Flaubert’s fiction is the ‘inherent ridiculousness of human life’, i.e. the awareness that ‘everything is a farce’: Ce qui m’empêche de me prendre au sérieux, quoique j’aie l’esprit assez grave, c’est que je me trouve très ridicule, non pas de ce ridicule relatif qui est le comique théâtral, mais de ce ridicule intrinsèque à la vie humaine ellemême, et qui ressort de l’action la plus simple ou du geste le plus ordinaire. (Correspondance, I 307; letter to Louise Colet, 21 August 1846) [What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most ordinary gestures.] Autrefois je saisissais assez nettement dans la vie les choses bouffonnes des sérieuses; j’ai perdu cette faculté! [...] Ainsi donc le sens dans lequel tu dis que je me plais aux farces n’est pas vrai; car, ou en trouve-t-on de la Farce, du moment que tout l’est? (Correspondance, I 348–49; letter to Louise Colet, 18 September 1846) [Once I was able to discriminate quite clearly between the comical things in life and the serious ones; I have lost that capacity! [...] Thus the sense in which you say that I enjoy farce is just not true; for where can you find the farcical if everything is farce?]

Flaubert’s assertions clearly anticipate Svevo’s sense of transcendental comedy (‘tutto resta comedia’), which in turn is part of a broader trend involving many European modernists: suffice it to mention Musil’s Neue Ironie and its ‘absolute (religious) lack of respect’ for any ‘moral’ and ‘social’ form of life,56 or Wyndham Lewis’s praise of ‘anarchist’ laughter in his manifesto ‘Inferior Religions’ (1917); or again, among Italian authors, Pirandello’s conception of reality as a ‘pupazzata’ [puppet play], Palazzeschi’s ubiquitous exaltation of laughter as controdolore, and Gadda’s satirical display of the ‘scemenza del mondo’ [stupidity of the world]. In short, the inclination to represent social life through the lenses of satire, humour and irony is a central and distinguishing one in modernist realism.57 The radiation and intensity of modernist laughter is certainly related to the Romantic conf lict between society and the (writing) subject. In Flaubert as in Svevo and Pirandello, the author’s ironic distancing of himself from the outer world is in fact akin to the fundamental mechanism of Romantic irony — the main difference being that, while the latter was originally best exemplified by non-

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narrative genres, modernism extends it to the domain of realist fiction (‘la grande forme serieuse’ [the great serious genre], as famously stated by the Goncourts in the preface to Germinie Lacerteux). If it is true that the gap between the Self and the world — or between the individual’s quest for authenticity and the social need for uniformity — is an essential element of bourgeois consciousness,58 it is also true that the early nineteenth-century novel used to reach a compromise between those two extremes; despite emphasising the arbitrary and violent nature of the collective nomos, Balzac and Stendhal do not deny the basic seriousness of social conventions. In the works of Flaubert, Pirandello, Musil or Svevo, instead, the gap between society and the individual has widened to the point that the former is usually depicted as a pointless masquerade. The historical reasons for this metamorphosis cannot, of course, be discussed at length here, although it is undeniable that the revolutions of 1848 heralded an era of growing political immobility and anthropological homogenisation — an era in which, as summarised by the opening lines of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, history tends to appear as a farce rather than a serious-tragic matter.59 In conclusion, while building on the most radical stances of Romantic irony, modernist laughter subverts the traditional premises of realist fiction, starting with its respect for what Auerbach has called the ‘seriousness of everyday life’; tragedy itself is inevitably contaminated by this feeling of transcendental buffoonery.60 Svevo’s specific position within this framework is characterised by a particularly self-ref lective (and self-critical) attitude. Already in the 1896 passage from Diario per la fidanzata, Svevo incidentally admitted that such an all-encompassing form of irony might only be a gimmick to avoid being diminished by the seriousness of real life: ‘ho paura che il giorno in cui a te riuscisse di farmi credere nella vita (è cosa impossibile) io mi troverei grandemente sminuito’. The same fear occasionally surfaces to the conscience of his characters: ‘mi spavento quando talvolta penso che la gente possa essere migliore di quanto io abbia sempre pensato o la vita più seria di quanto mi sia sempre apparsa’ [sometimes it scares me to think that people may be better than I ever thought, or life more serious than I ever expected], says Zeno (RC 1165). In other words: is laughter really a sign of originality, that is, of superiority over the mediocre monotony of the world? or (as was the case with the Romantic buffoonery of Dostoevsky’s underground man) is it rather instrumental to the subject’s bad faith, solipsism, and inertia, even when it manifests itself as self-mockery? Svevo faces such questions in a more open and articulate way than many other modernists,61 even if his answer remains an ambiguous one — irony is indeed a form of deceit, but also an indispensable survival tool. Adopting a stable perspective on this problem — be it a moralistic or a pragmatic one — would be an inappropriate simplification, as the language of laughter cannot ever be deciphered in any univocal way. An emblematic statement on this point can be found in the first paragraph of ‘Soggiorno londinese’ (1926): Guardatevi in uno specchio ed avrete un’occasione unica di poter studiare come una fisonomia umana s’atteggi per date idee o impressioni [...]. Guarda, guarda, quei grossi mustacchi! Darwin ne attribuiva la nascita al bisogno di certi roditori e molti altri mammiferi di essere avvisati quando i buchi in cui si muovono per

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celarsi o per aggredire si restringono. [...] Io rido all’idea di vedermi munito di un ordigno che m’addobba e non mi serve a niente e rido ancora allo scoprirmi un rudere di bestia che impomata l’ordigno oramai tanto inutile. Sono un museo ambulante. Ride subito anche la mia immagine. Ridiamo insieme. E il riso è un’espressione che cela invece che rivelare il pensiero. Quando si studia non bisogna ridere perché il riso cela troppe cose. (TS 893) [Look at yourself in a mirror and you will have a unique opportunity to observe how a human physiognomy takes on an expression when reacting to certain ideas or impressions [...]. Look, look, what an enormous moustache! Darwin attributed its birth to the need of certain rodents and many other mammals to sense when the holes they move through, to hide or attack, become narrower. [...] I laugh at the idea of seeing myself armed with a tool which is a decoration and no use to me, and I laugh again when I discover I am the ruins of a beast that waxes his now useless tool. I am a walking museum. At once my image also laughs. We laugh together. And laughter is an expression that conceals rather than reveals thought. When you study yourself, you mustn’t laugh, because laughter conceals too much.]

Staring at himself in the mirror while waxing his moustache, the author is hit by the pervasive ridiculousness of human beings. Not surprisingly, an almost identical situation was pictured by Flaubert in one of his letters: ‘Je me trouve très ridicule, non pas de ce ridicule relatif qui est le comique théâtral, mais de ce ridicule intrinsèque à la vie humaine elle-même [...]. Jamais, par exemple, je ne me fais la barbe sans rire, tant ça me paraît bête’ [I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life [...]. For example, I can never shave without starting to laugh; it all seems so stupid!] (Correspondance, I 307; emphasis added). Yet, while Flaubert at least believes that laughing about everything can be a philosophical consolation against the inherent stupidity of life,62 Svevo is far more suspicious about its cognitive value — laughter hides too many things, and it dissimulates the truth instead of revealing it (‘il riso è un’espressione che cela invece che rivelare il pensiero’). What ensues, and it could not be otherwise, is a sort of infinite circular loop. By unveiling the bad faith underlying laughter (both the author’s and the characters’), Svevo’s irony ends up corroding itself; on the other hand, this destructive process cannot be taken too seriously either, as irony is its inescapable sine qua non (‘la mia parola non è altro che ironia’). The truth of laughter can only be an unstable and constantly deferred one, as in the classic paradox in which Epimenides, a Cretan philosopher, declares that all Cretans are liars. Notes to Chapter 3 1. ‘Io, a quest’ora e definitivamente ho eliminato dalla mia vita quella ridicola e dannosa cosa che si chiama letteratura’ [I, here and now and forever, have eliminated that ludicrous and detrimental thing called literature from my life] (RSA 736; December 1902). 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), p. 57. 3. Mario Fusco, Italo Svevo: conscience et réalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 376–77. 4. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 140, p. 64. 5. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 140, pp. 71–72.

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6. With regard to Svevo and Romantic irony, see Brian Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore: lezioni triestine (Gorizia: Libreria Editrice Goriziana, 1998), pp. 39–41. Moloney’s essay also establishes a comparison between the self-mockery of Svevo’s characters and that of the Jewish schlemiel; after all, as has been noted, one of the most typical undertones of Jewish irony lies in the ‘difesa [...] nei riguardi del processo assimilativo’ [defence of diversity against the levelling process] — see Giuseppe Antonio Camerino, Italo Svevo e la crisi della Mitteleuropa (Naples: Liguori, 2002), p. 257. On the characters’ irony (with special regard to Zeno), see also: Giorgio Baldi, Menzogna e verità nella narrativa di Svevo (Naples: Liguori, 2011); Franco Musarra, ‘Un buon osservatore alquanto cieco: alcune considerazioni sull’ironia nella Coscienza di Zeno’, in Italo Svevo scrittore europeo: atti del Convegno Internazionale, ed. by Norberto Cacciaglia and Lia Fava Guzzetta (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 413–31; and Giulio Savelli, ‘Microstrategie dell’ironia e dell’umorismo nella Coscienza di Zeno’, Lingua e Stile, 3 (1991), 393–428. The notion of humour, instead, is variously applied to Svevo in Marialuisa Vianello, ‘Il riso di Svevo’, Italies, 4 (2000), 103–38, and in Silvia Contarini, ‘L’umorismo di Zeno’, Narrativa, 13 (1998), 29–36. 7. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 140, p. 65. 8. Girard’s notions of mensonge romantique and vérité romanesque have already been productively applied to Svevo by Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘Rivalità, risentimento, apocalisse: Svevo e i suoi doppi’, in Identità e desiderio: la teoria mimetica e la letteratura italiana, ed. by Pierpaolo Antonello and Giuseppe Fornari (Massa: Transeuropa, 2009), pp. 143–63. While Antonello concentrates on Svevo’s particular interest in the mimetic nature of desire, I will mainly consider the author’s use of laughter as a way to criticise the Romantic view of individual originality. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. by Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 81. This passage is already quoted in Cristina Benussi, ‘ “Dove la vita può trasmettersi per vie dirette e precise”: il teatro’, in Italo Svevo: il sogno e la vita vera, ed. by Mario Sechi (Rome: Donzelli, 2009), p. 149. With regard to Nietzsche’s inf luence on Svevo, see esp. Maria Anna Mariani, ‘Svevo e Nietzsche’, Allegoria, 59 (2009), 71–91. 10. The same passage from Notes from the Underground is also mentioned, with reference to Svevo, in Giovanna De Angelis and Stefano Giovanardi, Storia della narrativa italiana del Novecento, 4 vols (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004), i, p. 101. More general parallels between Dostoevsky’s Notes and Svevo’s fiction can be found, for instance, in Wladimir Krysinski, ‘I romanzi della coscienza e Zeno’, in Il romanzo e la modernità (Rome: Armando, 2003), pp. 111–27 and in Giulio Savelli, L’ambiguità necessaria: Zeno e il suo lettore (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998), pp. 54–57; cf. also Antonello, ‘Rivalità, risentimento, apocalisse’, pp. 158–59. 11. Ballina is introduced as the ‘buffone della banca’ (RC 15); the same label is later assigned to ‘quel buffone di Alchieri’ (RC 374). White, another colleague of Alfonso’s, is defined as a ‘blagueur’ — the French term is probably not accidental, since this character seems particularly similar to Bixiou from Balzac’s Employés (Nunzia Palmieri, ‘Commento’, RC 1267). As for the Mallers’ laughter, its violent nature is repeatedly mentioned and emphasised through Alfonso’s point of view: ‘Udiva alla destra lo scoppio della voce di Santo a cui rispondevano la voce e le risate di una donna [...]. Santo uscì ridendo sgangheratamente’ [He heard an outburst from Santo answered by a woman’s voice and laughter [...]. Then Santo came out roaring with laughter] (RC 29–30); ‘Francesca rideva sgangheratamente, rideva Macario e non seppe trattenersi neppure la cantatrice stessa [...]; in quanto ad Alfonso non aveva riso che per fare come gli altri’ [Francesca roared with laughter, Macario laughed too and even the singer could not contain herself [...]; Alfonso had only laughed in order to do as the others did] (RC 39). 12. ‘Il mio buon vecchio — tanto intelligente — non rise delle parole pur così poco elaborate della giovinetta’ [My nice old man — so intelligent — did not laugh at the words, simple as they were, of the young girl] (RSA 453; emphasis added); ‘il vecchio tentò di sorridere, ma fu una smorfia’ [the old man also tried to smile, but the effort ended in a grimace] (RSA 489; emphasis added). 13. ‘La mia debolezza trova nel mio vecchio animo maggior indulgenza. Da vecchi si sorride della vita e di ogni suo contenuto’ [As I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses. When one is old one can afford to smile at life and all it contains] (RC 632); ‘a questo mondo v’erano molte cose di cui si poteva e doveva ridere’ [there are many things in this world which one can and ought to laugh at] (RC 665).

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14. ‘Fingendo di abbassarsi [Zeno] dimostra la propria superiorità’ [Zeno shows his superiority by pretending to humble himself ] (Marialuisa Vianello, ‘Il riso di Svevo’, p. 9). 15. On the strategies of irony in Svevo’s fiction, see in particular: Baldi, Menzogna e verità; Vianello, ‘Il riso di Svevo’; Musarra, ‘Un buon osservatore alquanto cieco’; Lene Waage Petersen, Le strutture dell’ironia nella ‘Coscienza di Zeno’ di Italo Svevo (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1979). 16. ‘Ho un grande timore che essendo felice diverrei stupido’ [I am afraid that, if I were happy, I would become stupid] (RSA 681). 17. As openly stated in the short story ‘Orazio Cima’, smiling at oneself is usually a way of not taking responsibility for one’s own f laws: ‘Anche quando si ha il desiderio della metamorfosi, il più vivo, si sorride affettuosamente ai propri difetti’ [even when we really want to change, we smile fondly at our f laws] (RSA 616, emphasis added). 18. Svevo’s indulgence towards his (self-)ironic characters is highlighted, for instance, by Baldi, Menzogna e verità, Vianello, ‘Il riso di Svevo’, and by Maryse Jeuland Meynaud, Zeno e i suoi fratelli: la creazione del personaggio nei romanzi di Italo Svevo (Bologna: Patron, 1985). Cavaglion has rightly remarked that Svevo’s representation of human falsehood should not be attributed a moral or moralistic undertone; on the other hand, one could disagree with his assumption that the implied author’s irony should be considered free of bad faith (‘scherza e, in buona fede, si fa gioco di noi lettori’ [he jokes, and in good faith he teases the reader], Alberto Cavaglion, Italo Svevo (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), pp. 111–12). 19. On both aspects, see in particular Mario Lavagetto, L’impiegato Schmitz e altri saggi su Svevo (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), and La cicatrice di Montaigne: sulla bugia in letteratura (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), pp. 181–99. The circularity created by Svevo’s ironical perspective on irony is closely tied to what Lavagetto has called the ‘circolarità obbligata’ of writing in general: ‘Per guarirsi dal vizio di scrivere, Svevo deve capirsi meglio, trovare la “radice malata”; ma non può farlo che scrivendo’ [To deliver himself from the bad habit of writing, Svevo needs to study himself, to look for the ‘sick root’; but he can only do that through writing] (Lavagetto, L’impiegato Schmitz, p. 9). 20. With regard to the link between laughter and human aggressiveness, suffice it to mention the (Darwinian) representation of a smiling man as an intimidating carnivore: ‘il grosso uomo rise, mostrando i suoi bei denti di carnivoro’ [and the big man smiled, displaying a fine set of carnivorous teeth] (‘Corto viaggio sentimentale’, RSA 303). In Continuazioni, laughter is openly defined as a violent exercise: ‘il riso è un esercizio sano, e fra gli esercizi violenti l’unico che fosse permesso ai vecchi’ [it was a healthy exercise, the only kind of violent exercise that is permitted to the aged] (RC 1143, emphasis added). 21. In the epilogue of ‘Cimutti’, for instance, both the employer (Perini) and his employees (from Bortolo to Cimutti and his wife) are often portrayed while laughing or smiling: ‘Qualche barzelletta di Bortolo [...] costituiva per loro che non erano veneti una fonte di liete risate [...]. [Perini] si fermò, e sorridendo, le chiese: “Credi che Cimutti sarà qui per le quattro?” Ella si confuse, ma subito, sorridendo, disse guardando il cielo: “Chi lo può sapere?” ’ [Bortolo’s jokes made everybody laugh cheerfully [...]. Perini stopped, and asked her: ‘Do you think that Cimutti will be back by 4 pm?’ After a moment of embarrassment, she smiled and said: ‘Who knows?’] (RSA 160–61). Another example of cheerful popular laughter is embodied by the ‘riso abbondante e sincero’ [copious, honest laughter] of the housemaid Renata, in Continuazioni (RC 1192). 22. Laughter is definitely a leitmotif in Svevo’s comedies as well: the best case in point is probably Inferiorità (1921), which will be touched upon brief ly in the next paragraph. On Svevo’s plays, see in particular Cristina Benussi, La forma delle forme: il teatro di Italo Svevo (Trieste: EUT, 2007), and Federico Bertoni, ‘Apparato genetico e commento’, in TS. 23. In ‘Una burla riuscita’, Gaia’s love for pranks is compared to that of fourteenth-century Tuscans (‘Adorava la burla come gli antichi toscani’ [he adored practical jokes like an old Tuscan], RSA 201). Sacchetti’s novella on Fra Michele Porcelli is explicitly mentioned in Una vita (RC 45), while Decameron I, 10 is referred to in La coscienza di Zeno (RC 1069). 24. A different interpretation of the title has been provided by Caterina Verbaro, who pinpoints three senses in which the burla can be considered as riuscita: first of all, Mario does not discover the hoax until it is too late; secondly, Gaia’s prank does not really harm anyone, and it even

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ends up benefiting the victim; lastly, on a meta-literary level, the reader’s quest for a univocal meaning is successfully mocked by the author (Verbaro, ‘Il lettore burlato: rif lessioni in margine a “Una burla riuscita” ’, in I segni e la storia: studi e testimonianze in onore di Giorgio Luti (Florence: Le Lettere, 1996), pp. 207–22). For a general analysis of the story, see also: Paola Pimpinelli, ‘Le “favolette” di Mario Samigli: intorno a uno Svevo minore’, in Italo Svevo scrittore europeo, ed. by Norberto Cacciaglia and Lia Fava Guzzetta, pp. 487–99; Claudio Loda, ‘La nuova dimensione dell’inetto in “Una burla riuscita” di Italo Svevo’, Otto/Novecento, 5 (1982), 93–112; Lavagetto, L’impiegato Schmitz, pp. 109–65; and Paula Robison, ‘ “Una burla riuscita”: Irony as hoax in Svevo’, Modern Fiction Studies, 1 (1972), 65–80. 25. ‘Conobbe molto di Balzac e qualche cosa di Stendhal’, claims Svevo in his Profilo autobiografico (RSA 801); his admiration for the Comédie humaine is confirmed, for instance, by the explicit reference to Louis Lambert in Una vita (RC 106–07). On Svevo’s familiarity with Balzac, see especially: F. Bertoni, ‘Apparato genetico e commento’, pp. 1219–35; Stefano Lazzarin, ‘Alfonso Nitti e la question du costume: note su Una vita e la tradizione del Bildungsroman’, Rivista di letteratura italiana, 2 (2002), 125–52; Mario Sechi, Il giovane Svevo (Rome: Donzelli, 2000); Brian Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore, pp. 60–65; and Nicola D’Antuono, Amore e morte in ‘Senilità’ e altro su Svevo (Salerno: Laveglia, 1986). 26. As underlined by Balzac, the peasant’s hoax is benevolent, and offensive only for its perfection: ‘l’un de ces railleurs indigènes dont les moqueries ne sont offensives que par la perfection même de la moquerie, et avec lequel il eut à soutenir une cruelle lutte’ [one of those indigenous jesters whose jests are offensive solely because of their perfection, and with whom he was going to engage in a cruel fight] (CH IV 576). 27. In the final scene of Inferiorità, Alfredo is accidentally killed by his butler Giovanni, who was persuaded to simulate a robbery by two ‘friends’ of his employer. The tragic prank had been ominously anticipated earlier in the play, when Giovanni told the story of a seemingly innocent rural hoax with a catastrophic ending (TS 447–48). 28. This novel is never openly mentioned by Svevo. However, the author’s familiarity with Dostoevsky’s major works is demonstrated by a significant number of intertextual echoes: see in particular Sergia Adamo, ‘La biblioteca russa di Svevo’, Aghios, 4 (2004), 25–53 (pp. 40–45). 29. Dostoevsky, Devils, trans. by Constance Garnett (London: Wordsworth, 2005), pp. 5–6. 30. For a more general analysis of Bovarism in Svevo’s works, see especially Brian Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore, pp. 63–74. 31. ‘Je sais bien que... mais quand même...’ (Octave Mannoni, Clefs pur l’imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 11–12, 30). The term Verleugnung was already applied to Mario Samigli by Lavagetto, L’impiegato Schmitz, pp. 149–56. 32. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 56. 33. Moretti, The Way of the World, pp. 96–99. 34. Cf. Clotilde Bertoni, ‘Apparato genetico e commento’, pp. 1270–71. The parallel with Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is also discussed by Eduardo Saccone, Ritorni: la seconda lettura (Naples: Liguori, 2012), pp. 191–205. 35. Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, trans. by Constance Garnett (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), p. 7. 36. ‘For instance, a strange ref lection suddenly occurred to me, that if I had lived before on the moon or on Mars and there had committed the most disgraceful and dishonourable action [...], and if, finding myself afterwards on earth, I were able to retain the memory of what I had done on the other planet [...] — should I care or not? Should I feel shame for that action or not?’ (Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 6; emphasis added). ‘Oh, these people did not persist in trying to make me understand them, they loved me without that, but I knew that they would never understand me, and so I hardly spoke to them about our earth’ (Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, p. 11). 37. ‘I remember that I was very sorry for her, so much so that I felt a strange pain, quite incongruous in my position’ (Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, p. 4). 38. ‘Bisognava abbreviare quegli addii ridicoli [...]. Il signor Aghios sentiva costituirsi nell’animo proprio il vicino che ride. Anzi lui stesso diveniva quel vicino’ [Good-byes between elderly married couples were laughable, if prolonged, and had to be cut short. [...] Signor Aghios

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could feel his mocking neighbour as a presence in his own soul. Indeed he was becoming that neighbour himself ] (RSA 501). 39. ‘Bastava indirizzarsi fra uomini una sola parola per correre il rischio di dover dire una menzogna. Si era nella verità fra sconosciuti soltanto’ [One only has to address a single word to a fellowbeing and one risks telling a falsehood. Truth exists only among people who do not know each other] (RSA 526). 40. Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, p. 14. 41. An earlier version of the novella, titled ‘Ombre notturne’, dates back to 1914 (C. Bertoni, ‘Apparato genetico e commento’, pp. 899–907). 42. On the symbolic function of youth in the Romantic-realist novel, see in particular Moretti, The Way of the World, pp. 3–15. 43. Ojetti’s novel has only been brief ly mentioned with reference to Svevo on two occasions: cf. John Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo: A Double Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 159, and Clotilde Bertoni, ‘Apparato genetico e commento’, RSA 1183. A detailed intertextual analysis is now provided in Alberto Godioli, ‘From Alessandro Zeno to Zeno Cosini: Ugo Ojetti’s Il vecchio as a source for Svevo’s late works’, forthcoming. 44. ‘Ritornato al dipinto, pensai: “M’ha truffato. Mi diede il peggiore dei suoi lavori”. [...] Dapprima fu una cosa spiacevole avere dinnanzi agli occhi quello sgorbio’ [Returning to the painting, I thought, ‘He’s swindled me! He’s given me the worst!’ [...] At first, having that daub of his in front of me made me uneasy] (RC 1131). 45. ‘Abbandonò il Ginnasio subito dopo la riforma Gentile che poco gli si confaceva ed io non protestai con una sola parola. Gli dissi solamente che così egli perdeva la possibilità di acquistare un rango accademico, con tono un po’ commosso; perdevo anch’io una speranza. Gli parve un’intromissione inammissibile e disse che fra me e lui c’era non solo una differenza d’età ma molto di più’ [He left the Ginnasio directly after the Gentile Reform, which was not to his liking, and I didn’t say a word. I simply told him with a touch of sadness in my voice that he was losing the chance to make his mark in the academic world; it meant the end of a private hope of mine. He took this as an intolerable interference and told me there was not merely a difference in age between us, but something much more] (RC 1122). 46. ‘Quando mi domandava del denaro gliene davo senza batter ciglio. Gli dicevo solo delle parole dolci. Certo dovevo avere un aspetto strano poco affettuoso. Intanto che l’accarezzavo urlavo dentro di me: “Come son buono, come son buono!”. Il sentimento di essere tanto buono minaccia di portarci ad essere meno buoni’ [When he asked me for money I gave it to him without batting an eyelid. I employed nothing but kind words when I talked to him. My behaviour, of course, must have looked strange and not really affectionate. And meanwhile, as I had my arm around him, a voice cried within me, ‘How good I am, how good!’ The feeling of being so good has a tendency to make us less good] (RC 1145). 47. Just like Andrea, Alfio frequently accuses his father of incompetence: ‘Tentò di attaccarmi: “Sai, quello che tu devi conquistare con tanto sforzo, altri, meglio preparati di te all’arte lo fanno senza sforzo alcuno, guardando, come si guarda la natura stessa”. Io mi arrabbiai e negai che lo sforzo fosse reso necessario dalla mia debolezza. [...] Io che sempre avevo confessato di non intendere nulla di pittura m’arrabbiavo perché mio figlio gridava d’essere del mio stesso parere’ [Alfio tried to attack me: ‘D’you know, what you manage to do with all this effort, others with more training in art do without trying, simply by looking, the way one looks at nature itself ’. I lost my temper and refused to admit that the effort it had taken me sprang from any weakness of mine. [...] I, who always had claimed to know nothing about painting, got furious because my son was shouting the same opinion] (RC 1144). 48. ‘Aveva ereditato da me solo questa parte della sua giornata. Il resto non era mio, ma non era neppure del nonno che gli avevo scelto e neppure della nonna. Dove era andato a fornirsi di quella sua pittura, e di quella sua solitudine? La personalità? Io che avevo invano tentato di somigliare agli altri non ci avevo mai pensato. La ribellione? Quando ne sentii il desiderio me ne pentii subito [...]. Sentire innata la ribellione, come avveniva ad Alfio, è un vero segno di debolezza’ [From me he had inherited only this part of his day. The rest was not mine, nor did it belong to the grandfather I had given him, or the grandmother. Where did he manage to get his itch for painting and for solitude? ‘Personality’? I, who had striven in vain to be like other men,

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had never given it a thought. Rebellion? Whenever I felt like rebellion I repented of it at once [...]. Innate rebelliousness in a person, as with Alfio, is a sure sign of weakness] (RC 1127–28). 49. As Zeno admits in ‘Il mio ozio’, his fear of death makes him envious and resentful towards his own family: ‘La vicinanza della morte non mi rendeva veramente buono perché poco amavo tutti coloro che dal colpo non erano minacciati’ [The presence of death did not make me a kinder and better man, as I disliked everyone who wasn’t threatened by a stroke] (RC 1198). 50. ‘Inopportuna serietà’ [inappropriate seriousness], ‘voluta gravità nella scelta del soggetto e dei mezzi per svolgerlo’ [deliberate gravity in the choice of the subject, and in the way the subject is developed] (Luigi Capuana, Cronache letterarie (Catania: Giannotta, 1899), p. 268). 51. Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1974), pp. 240–41. Booth’s theories on irony have already been applied to Svevo by Vianello (‘Il riso di Svevo’) and G. Baldi (Menzogna e verità nella narrativa di Svevo). 52. Cf. Godioli, ‘From Alessandro Zeno to Zeno Cosini’, with particular regard to ‘Corto viaggio sentimentale’ and ‘La novella del buon vecchio’. 53. ‘Mi domandò: “Hai sognato?”. E poi, commossa: “Invocavi tua figlia. Vedi come l’ami?” ’ [She asked me: ‘Have you been dreaming?’ And then, moved: ‘You were calling for your daughter. You see how you love her’] (RSA 146). Quite similarly, Alessandro’s laments in his sleep are misinterpreted as a sign of mourning for the loss of his wife: ‘Essi si illudono che tutta la notte io abbia sofferto per la morte di Nannetta; non sanno da quale egoismo io sia stato contorto e abbattuto’ [They think that I have been weeping all night for the death of my wife; they don’t know what kind of selfishness has twisted and defeated me] (Il vecchio, 79). 54. The Freudian echoes in ‘Vino generoso’ are analysed by Valentino Baldi, ‘Il sogno come contenuto e come forma in “Vino generoso” e nella “Novella” di Italo Svevo’, Strumenti Critici, 2 (2010), 289–308 (pp. 297–300). 55. See respectively Manzoni, ‘Lettera a Chauvet’, in Scritti di estetica, ed. by Umberto Colombo, vol. vi of Opera omnia (Milan: Edizioni Paoline, 1967), part 1, p. 177, and Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. by Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 127. 56. Robert Musil, Diaries, ed. by Mark Mirsky, trans. by Philip Payne (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 302 (Year 1923). 57. On the role of laughter in modernist fiction, see also Alberto Godioli, ‘La scemenza del mondo’: riso e romanzo nel primo Gadda (Pisa: ETS, 2011), pp. 175–89. 58. Such an hypothesis is shared by a long line of classic theorists, from Hegel to Lukács, and has more recently been developed by various studies on the symbolic function of the modern novel; see in particular Moretti, The Way of the World, and Mazzoni, Teoria del romanzo. 59. ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’ (Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 188). On 1848 as a symbolic watershed, the most important reference is of course Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah Mitchell (London: Merlin, 1964). Around 1848, as pointed out by Luperini, the tendency to perceive history as a ‘congerie farsesca o tragicomica’ [farcical or tragicomic heap of events] started to exert a crucial inf luence on the forms and topoi of the realist novel (Romano Luperini, L’incontro e il caso (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 2007), pp. 3–30). 60. With regard to the contamination between tragedy and the comic in modernist fiction, see in particular Cristina Savettieri, ‘Tragedia, tragico e romanzo nel modernismo’, Allegoria, 63 (2011), 45–65. 61. A heightened awareness of the solipsism inherent in modernist laughter can also be found, however, in other early twentieth-century authors: see, for instance, Sara Crangle’s remarks on laughter in James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, in Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 104–38. 62. ‘Et vous voulez que je ne remarque pas la sottise humaine, et que je me prive du plaisir de la peindre! Mais le comique est la seule consolation de la vertu’ [So you beg me to ignore human idiocy, and to renounce the pleasure of depicting it! But the comic is the only consolation of virtue] (Correspondance, IV 788–89; letter to George Sand, 8 April 1874).

CHAPTER 4

❖

Celebrations of Diversity: Palazzeschi’s Buffi and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition From the Clown to the Buffo: Avant-Garde and Originality Among Italian modernists, Palazzeschi is undoubtedly the one who claims the individual’s right to originality in the most consistent and straightforward way. While Pirandello’s umorismo tends to soften the most disturbing aspects of irregularity, and while Svevo’s irony downplays the Romantic opposition between anomaly and the norm, Palazzeschi emphasises and exaggerates individual diversity, as a cheerful sign of nature’s infinite variety. Originality, in his view, is the very essence of reality, while the social nomos is merely an awkward attempt at neutralising it. The most explicit statement on this point is probably ‘Varietà’, a manifesto published on Lacerba in 1915: Io sono arcisicuro che se avessero detto all’uomo: vai, fai il mondo, esso ci avrebbe dato fuori una piattaforma talmente pari, talmente liscia e tirata a pulimento da non poterci star ritti nemmeno con i gomitoli. [...] Avete mai trovato, voi che faceste il giro del mondo, una creatura uguale a voi? (TR I 1257) [I am sure that if man had been told: go and create the world, he would have created a platform so smooth and polished that we would not be able to stand up straight even if we were pulled by strings [...]. You who travelled around the world, have you ever found a creature that is exactly like you?]

The tension between varietas and uniformity is as universal and pervasive as the one between nature and culture. While the former ‘ci à fatti nudi e differenti’ [made us different from each other], the latter forces man to a relentless process of standardisation, or ‘infezione di uguaglianza’ [epidemic of equality] (TR I 1262). Not by chance, Palazzeschi’s theories on civilisation as a form of ‘pulimento’ (i.e. polishing, but also politeness) remind us of Sterne’s and Shaftesbury’s use of the word ‘polish’,1 and of Théophile Gautier’s politesse: ‘Exposez deux ciselures de haut relief à une action réciproque; l’une usera l’autre, ou même elles s’useront toutes deux. Je crois que tout est là; de là ce qu’on appelle politesse, de là le manque d’originalité’ [Rub two high-relief sculptures one against the other; one of them will be worn down by the other, or they will wear each other down. It’s as simple

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as that, I think; hence what they call politesse, hence the lack of originality] (De l’Originalité, 14). Palazzeschi might well have ignored Gautier’s article, but such similarities clearly show a certain continuity in the framing of the clash between mimetism and originality. At the same time, compared to Gautier, the author’s emphasis shifts from the negative part of the argument (the consequences of social homogenisation) to the celebration of diversity as a positive value. A similar point was already made in Il codice di Perelà (1911): ‘La natura che tutti lodano come maestra di perfezione, mio caro signor Perelà, non è meno manuale del dolciere che fa le ciambelle, e gli uomini per quanto si assomiglino tutti fra loro, portano addosso le più strane varianti’ [Nature, whom everybody praises as a master of perfection, works manually like a baker with his doughnuts, and men — even if they resemble each other — differ by the strangest variants] (TR I 183–84). The metaphor is also reprised in another manifesto, ‘Equilibrio’ (1915): ‘Vi siete lasciati fare come tante ciambelle, colpa vostra’ [You let yourselves be shaped like a batch of doughnuts, it’s your fault] (TR I 1275). Palazzeschi’s distance from the common sense of the time can be highlighted by comparison with a passage from an essay by the popular anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza (Elogio della vecchiaia, 1893), where the differences between human beings are stigmatised as ‘imperfections’: Vi sono debolezze e viltà e iniquità nell’uomo, che non possiamo approvare, né giustificare [...]. Nella gran fabbrica degli uomini, assai più difficile di quella delle ciambelle, vengon fuori dei gobbi, dei nani, degli idioti, tanto nel corpo come nell’anima; e dacché non possiamo ucciderli, dobbiamo accontentarci di tollerarli, studiando intanto di perfezionare quella fabbricazione.2 [There are weaknesses and impurities in man, that we cannot approve of nor justify [...]. The great factory of mankind, which is far more complex than a doughnut factory, sometimes produces hunchbacks, dwarfs, idiots and other physical and mental deformities; and since we cannot kill them all, we have to tolerate them, while trying to perfect their manufacture.]

The fact that people are more diverse than doughnuts is seen by Mantegazza as a problem, as this simple fact contrasts with the normative spirit of the positivist age — an age in which the motto ‘you must be like everybody else’ is even more valid than in Gautier’s times (‘l’apophtegme sacramentel est: Il faut être comme tout le monde’). In Mantegazza’s opinion, human diversity will hopefully be overcome through the ‘perfection’ of progress, a concept not far from the perfectionnement général saluted by Bergson as the ultimate social aim of laughter. Not surprisingly, the same kind of perfection is defined as dreadful in Palazzeschi’s ‘Varietà’: ‘Mi tornò alla mente la voce di mio padre: “La perfezione... neppure con le macchine”. Che cos’è dunque questa atroce perfezione? Che cosa sono mai queste terribili macchine?’ [I remembered what my father used to say: ‘Perfection... not even a machine can achieve that’. What is this dreadful perfection, then? What are these dreadful machines?] (TR I 1256).3 Against the earnest, dreadful uniformity of social life, Palazzeschi resorts to laughter as the most immediate way left to celebrate the natural heterogeneity of man.4 Both in his avant-garde phase and in the properly modernist one, his works are

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based on two complementary leitmotifs: on the one hand, individual irregularities are constantly threatened by the levelling violence of society; on the other, the author’s reaction to this collective pressure is a disturbing, almost inhuman hilarity (which is sometimes echoed, as will be illustrated, by the paradoxical mirth of an abnormal, isolated character). The basic point, as stated in ‘Il controdolore’ (1914), is that human anomalies and deformities are a sign of life’s variety, and that cheerfulness (instead of pathos) is the best answer to the social intolerance of such imperfections. Once again laughter, although differently from Pirandello’s umorismo and Svevo’s irony, undermines the Romantic representation of individual originality as a tragic martyrdom. Palazzeschi’s laughter can of course take various shapes, from the cruel indifference of ‘Il gobbo’ to the light-hearted tone of ‘Il dono’ — invariably, however, the marginalisation of the deviant individual (the buffo) is regarded as a paradoxically exhilarating matter. While being best exemplified by the short-story collection Il palio dei buffi (1937), this fundamental aspect of Palazzeschi’s aesthetics is already evident in his early poetry — especially in L’incendiario (1910), where the collision between oddity and the norm is systematically represented in a farcical manner.5 In verse as much as in prose, laughter is Palazzeschi’s antidote to the Romantic and decadent pathos of irregularity; the self-portrayal of the poet as a turbulent clown, laughing in the face of the crowd that mocks him, clearly contrasts with the serious-tragic aura surrounding the subject’s isolation in the nineteenth-century tradition. An important inf luence in this regard has certainly been exerted by the French proto-avant-gardes of the late nineteenth century, such as fumistes and zutistes — and more precisely by the recurring figure of the so-called ‘red clown’, whose devilish laugh reverses the melancholic attitude of the decadent Pierrot.6 After all, it is not surprising that the subversive, antisocial laughter of the red clown was first codified in France, i.e. the country in which the violence of mockery in modern society first became a literary and cultural topos (as abundantly demonstrated by a long line of authors and thinkers, from Balzac and Hugo to Bergson, cf. Chapter 1). While the inf luence of fumism and zutism on Palazzeschi’s poetry is commonly acknowledged on a generic level, intertextual analysis can help us pinpoint some more specific similarities. The most important one regards an especially representative text from L’incendiario, ‘La passeggiata’, whose structure is probably modelled on a typically zutist pattern — that of the poèmes-reclames, as practiced by such poets and songwriters as Maurice Mac-Nab and Germain Nouveau. Palazzeschi’s poem sounds particularly similar to one of Nouveau’s reclames, from the collective volume Dixains réalistes (1876): Andiamo? | Andiamo pure. | [...] Tutti dai fratelli Bocconi! | Non ve la lasciate scappare! | 29 | 31 | Bar la stella polare. | Assunta Chiodaroli | levatrice, | Parisina Sudori | rammendatrice. | L’arte di non far figlioli. | Gabriele Pagnotta | strumenti musicali. | Narciso Gonfalone | tessuti di seta e di cotone. | Ulderigo Bizzarro | fabbricante di confetti per nozze. (TP 586) [Shall we go? | Let’s go then. | [...] The Bocconi brothers, everybody! | Don’t you miss it! | 29 | 31 | The Northern Star Café. | Assunta Chiodaroli, | midwife; | Parisina Sudori, | seamstress. | The art of not having children. | Gabriele Pagnotta | musical instruments. | Narciso Gonfalone, | silk and cotton. | Ulderigo Bizzarro, | wedding favour supplier.]

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Celebrations of Diversity J’ai du goût pour la f lâne, et j’aime, par les rues, | les réclames des murs fardés de couleurs crues, | la Redingote Grise, et Monsieur Gallopau; | L’Hérissé qui rayonne au-dessous d’un chapeau; | la femme aux cheveux faits de teintes différentes. | [...] l’homme des cinq violons à la fois, | Bornibus, la Maison n’est pas au coin du Bois, | le kiosque japonais et la colonne-affiche...7 [I love strolling around, and I love | the adverts colouring the walls: | the Grey Redingote, and Mr Gallopau; | the Hérissé shining under his hat; | the woman with multi-coloured hair. | [...] The man who plays five violins at a time, | Bornibus, ‘the House is not on the edge of the Woods’, | the Japanese kiosk and the poster pillar...]

As will be the case with ‘La passeggiata’, Nouveau parodies the ubiquitous rhetoric of advertising, which is identified as a symbol of the levelling forces underlying modern society. As confirmed by the similarities with zutist poetry, Palazzeschi’s avantgardism ref lects his intention to radically depart from the Romantic-realist take on social homogenisation: the irregular individual is not a grotesque-pathetic martyr anymore, but rather a disturbingly joyous harlequin. Looked at from this perspective, Palazzeschi is far more anti-Romantic than Svevo or Pirandello, in that he capsizes the pathos of originality in the most drastic way. Yet, at the same time, he is also closer to the Romantic myth of irregularity, given his firm belief in the inherent superiority of the deviant individual — in other words, while Svevo’s ironic disillusionment and Pirandello’s ambiguous philosophy of the oltre exemplify the sceptical, Hamletian quality of modernism, Palazzeschi’s carnivalesque celebration of variety illustrates the assertive spirit typical of all avant-gardes. Such an attitude remains evident in his modernist works as well, where the marginalisation of abnormal characters is punctually saluted as a cheerful event: in the novel Sorelle Materassi (1934), for instance, the disgraced protagonists are eventually redeemed by their sudden, anomalous ‘giocondità’ [hilarity] (TR I 811), in reply to the Bergsonian violence of collective mockery (‘in tutti i modi le avevano beffate e offese’ [they had been derided and insulted in every possible way], TR I 798). However, as anticipated, the best way to explore Palazzeschi’s metaphysics of laughter and diversity is by focusing on his short fiction, rather than his poetry or novels. Short Stories and ‘Natural Divergences’ Palazzeschi’s novelle are extremely rich in allusions to the diversity of nature, and especially to the physiological differences among people — the idea that people are all different, as stated in the 1937 story ‘Il ricordo della moglie’ (‘gli uomini e i casi loro sono tutti differenti [...]; anche i morti, come i viventi, non sono uguali, ma sono diversi tutti’ [people and their cases are all different; the dead, just like the living, are not the same — on the contrary, they differ greatly from each other], TN 611), can actually be considered as the basic principle underlying all of his short stories. Likewise, in ‘Re Pomodoro’ (first published in 1929), the narrator praises the Lord for making us dissimilar from each other:

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È doveroso da parte nostra rendere lode al Signore di un tale fenomeno, che non ci volle tutti uguali come i convolvoli [...]: avendoci insegnato nascere il bello della vita dai contrasti, ed essere nati noi all’unico scopo di vivere contrastando. (TN 352) [We should thank the Lord for not wanting us as unvaried as bindweed [...]; He taught us that contrasts are the best thing in life, and that we were born to be different from each other.]

Similar laudations of diversity can be found in ‘Carburo e Birchio’ and in ‘Bistino e il Signor Marchese’, published respectively in 1932 and 1934 (‘pronti ad acciuffare dalla vita l’infinita varietà delle sue battute’ [ready to grasp the infinite variety of life], TN 110; ‘come è inesauribile la vita, e come è bello vivere’ [how diverse life is, and how good it is to live], TN 430). The particular recurrence of variety as a leitmotif in Palazzeschi’s short stories does not come as a surprise, since the novella — as famously stated by Lukács, among many others — is the narrative form best able to convey the strangeness and unpredictability of life.8 Palazzeschi builds on the prerogatives of the genre to express his enthusiasm for diversity, as confirmed by his emphasis on the novelty/originality of each story: ‘Il dono’ (1937) is presented as a ‘fatto nuovo’ [unprecedented] (TN 715), while the disappearance of Fanfulla in ‘Il punto nero’ (1937) is a ‘caso inusitato’ [strange case] (TN 73); similarly, ‘Legami ignoti’ (1954) is meant as a parable on ‘quanto vi sia di misterioso ed imprevisto nella natura dell’uomo’ [the mysterious and unpredictable element of human nature] (TN 92), and the subject matter of ‘Il giorno e la notte’ (1948) is defined as unusual (‘soggetto d’eccezione’, TN 60). These last three works appear as a sequence in the comprehensive collection Tutte le novelle, and are all based on the same pattern — the discovery of the protagonist’s ‘punto nero’, i.e. his secret and unpredictable eccentricity. As already claimed by Gautier, the levelling pressure of bourgeois society forces the individual to hide originality as a private vice (‘l’originalité ne se développe que dans la retraite’). Palazzeschi is particularly aware that the short story form is meant to represent life in the superlative degree, as suggested by one of the most emblematic titles from Il palio dei buffi (‘Issimo’). Not by chance, when it comes to the social status of his characters, the author seems particularly fascinated with masters and servants (‘La veglia’, ‘La gloria’, ‘Amore’, ‘Bistino e il signor Marchese’, ‘Lupo’, ‘Il dono’), and more generally with what stands above and below bourgeois mediocrity — from kings and other enormously rich characters (‘Il re bello’, ‘L’Angelo’, ‘Industria’, ‘Re Pomodoro’, ‘Perfezione’, ‘Silenzio’, ‘Ricchezza’) to criminals (‘Il ladro’), urchins (‘Carburo e Birchio’), bohemian artists (‘Vita’) and village idiots (‘Lumachino’, ‘Il gobbo’). This refusal of bourgeois uniformity is also evident in the few novelle focusing on middle-class characters, such as ‘Issimo’ (whose protagonist is notable precisely for his being the most anonymous man ever) and ‘Pochini e Tamburini’ (where even two apparently insignificant clerks are depicted as singular and interesting characters). Such a pronounced fascination with social disparities is not devoid of regressive or reactionary ideological undertones, which sometimes emerge in an even more explicit way than with Pirandello.9 A 1914 aphorism, for instance, provocatively defends inequality against all forms of egalitarianism:

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‘Dai malcontenti dei tanti dislivelli sociali ò sentito invocare spesso un diluvio universale, o un terremoto generale. Il primo dovrebbe fare il pari alzando il livello, il secondo abbassandolo. Sarebbero essi per caso degli aspiranti ai secondi piani?’ [The opponents of social inequalities often pray for a great f lood or a big earthquake — the former is supposed to level everything up, the latter to f latten everything down. Could it be that those Levellers are actually just longing for the upper f loors?] (Spazzatura, TR I 1312). From our standpoint, however, the ideological implications of the author’s mythology of diversity are less interesting than its effects on the use of laughter. In the following pages we will, therefore, focus on the various representations of mockery and hilarity in Palazzeschi’s short story collections, with particular regard to Il re bello (1921) and Il palio dei buffi (1937) — both because they belong to the same era as Pirandello’s and Svevo’s novelle, and because they mark a peak in Palazzeschi’s dialogue with nineteenth-century realism. On a thematic level, to begin with, laughter is often the primary symptom of society’s levelling violence; see, for instance, the refrain ‘Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!’ recurring in several short stories (from ‘La bomba’ to ‘La gloria’),10 and usually indicating the choral derision of a marginalised misfit. This pattern also recurs, to be sure, in Palazzeschi’s poems (‘Comare Coletta’, ‘Postille’) and novels (Perelà)11 — only in the short stories, though, does it really stand out as a leitmotif. As in Bergson’s Le Rire, public ridicule is typically directed against individual deviations, and is therefore instrumental to the ‘perfectionnement général’ (Le Rire, 16) — only, much unlike Bergson, Palazzeschi sees perfection as a dreary dystopia. The punitive function of lampooning is best exemplified by two somewhat complementary novelle, ‘Il gobbo’ (1912) and ‘Lumachino’ (1931). The protagonist of the former text, the hunchback Mecheri, is the buffoon of the town; far from accepting his anomalies, the villagers welcome the misfit only as an entertainer, just as popes and emperors did in the past (‘Papi e Imperatori’, TN 227). Most importantly, Mecheri gained his privileged status mainly by making fun of other local hunchbacks — which will eventually be his ruin, as at the end of the story his counterparts will team up to devise a hoax against him. The hunchbacks’ vendetta is a perfect example of the destructive power of derision: Quattro risate insolenti, cattive, velenose gracchiarono nell’aria ad un tempo e Mecheri, volgendosi, scorse quattro gobbi che lo stringevano in quadrato. [...] La beffa corse su tutte le bocche, facendo le spese delle molte ore d’ozio e di noia della città provinciale. (TN 233) [Four mocking caws of laughter split the air at the same time. Whirling all around, Mecheri found himself surrounded by four hunchbacks. [...] The joke ran about on everyone’s lips, supplying substance to fill the interminable hours of idleness and boredom in the provincial town.]

Needless to say, Mecheri is annihilated by the hoax. His attempts to laugh back at his persecutors prove futile, as something is definitively broken inside him: ‘Tentò di ridere ancora, di riattaccare la vena del suo riso prodigioso, ma non vi riuscì; [...] qualche cosa si era rotto, schiantato dentro: la molla della gioia nel congegno della sua anima’ [again Mecheri made an effort to laugh, to summon up his formidable

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laughter, but to no avail; [...] something had snapped within him — the spring of joy in the mechanism of his very soul] (TN 233). Having lost his sense of humour, and consequently his place in society, Mecheri leaves the town to die alone and forgotten. His lack of controdolore, i.e. his inability to laugh at his own disgrace, seems to alienate the narrator himself, judging by the indifference with which he reports on the grotesque discovery of the hunchback’s corpse (TN 234). The protagonist of ‘Lumachino’, on the contrary, is characterised by his childish, light-hearted hilarity, contrasting with his status as the town’s ‘povero zimbello’ [poor laughing stock] (TN 544); his mirth is precisely what enables him to survive the trauma of derision, thus proving his superiority over the pettiness of society. To be sure, the cruelty of public ridicule is as evident here as it was in ‘Il gobbo’ — the local girls, for instance, react to Lumachino’s awkward advances with snickers and ruthless jokes: ‘Le risate delle ragazze scoppiavano, [...] ridevano in modo sconveniente o lo prendevano in giro in modo spietato’ [the girls were bursting into laughter, [...] they laughed impudently and derided him without any pity] (TN 546). Similarly, when taken to trial for stealing somebody else’s love correspondence, he is victimised by collective mockery: ‘ “È qui per via di donne”, disse taluno: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” ’ [‘He must be here because of some f ling’, someone said. ‘Ha! Ha!’] (TN 546). Nonetheless, Lumachino does not lose his ‘riso ebete e beato’ [dumb, blissful smile] (TN 545); ‘le risate insolenti [...] gli riempivano l’animo di felicità’ [being derided filled his heart with joy] (TN 542). Not by chance, contrary to ‘Il gobbo’, the story ends on a merry note — Lumachino loses his job as a post office clerk but is allowed to keep the letters he has stolen, which is enough to make him happy (‘tremava: era felice’, TN 547). Apart from Mecheri and Lumachino, another pair of complementary characters is represented by Onorio (‘Lupo’, 1930) and Telemaco Bollentini (‘Il dono’, 1937). They are in fact both lonely, misanthropic characters, and are both victimised by human cruelty — the former is robbed by a couple of rogues, whereas the latter is the target of a trivial hoax devised by his housemaid Petronilla and her friend Zobeide. At the same time, they have opposite reactions to the wrong suffered. After the robbery, Onorio chooses to avoid human contact for the rest of his life, and dies alone in his dreary castle — his body will be found ‘in un mucchio di stracci’ [wrapped in a bunch of rags] (TN 491), as happened to Mecheri in ‘Il gobbo’. On the contrary, Telemaco is amused rather than shocked by the hoax, much to the disappointment of his persecutors (TN 734). Ideally, Onorio and Telemaco represent two different stages in the misfit’s ascent towards the philosophy of controdolore; the former’s painful withdrawal is the necessary prerequisite to the latter’s joyous indifference. Within the framework of Palazzeschi’s farcical Nietzscheanism, Onorio and Mecheri are the ‘higher men’, whose melancholic decline paves the way for a grotesque superman (Lumachino, Telemaco) — after all, Zarathustra blamed the höheren Menschen precisely for their inability to laugh at themselves (‘Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!’).12 Indeed, the cheerful misfit is the perfect emblem of Palazzeschi’s anti-pathetic view of individual irregularity; as envisaged by the author in an early sketch, the abnormal individual is meant to emerge from the purifying experience of derision with a smile on his lips:

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Celebrations of Diversity Schivare il dolore, fermarsi inorriditi alle sue soglie, è da vili. [...] Pescare il punto luminoso nelle tenebre, la perla, è eroismo grande. Uscirne carbonizzato e guarito, con questo superbo fiore all’occhiello e un garbato sorriso sulle labbra. Sublime filtro: ironia. (Lazzi, frizzi, schizzi, TR 1351) [To avoid pain, to stop at its threshold, is an act of cowardice. [...] To seize the bright spot, the pearl shining in the dark, is heroic. To come out of pain, burnt and purified, with this magnificent buttonhole and a gentle smile on your lips. Irony, what a sublime filter.]

The ‘Buffi’ and the Pathetic Grotesque (Maupassant, Hugo) A good starting point for the analysis of Palazzeschi’s dialogue with the nineteenthcentury tradition is provided by a metaphor recurring in both ‘Il gobbo’ and ‘Lumachino’. At the end of the former text, Mecheri’s inability to laugh is explained as the consequence of a ‘spring’ being broken inside him; in an apparently similar way, Lumachino’s compulsive attraction to young women is compared to a mechanism with a broken spring: Tentò di ridere ancora, di riattaccare la vena del suo riso prodigioso, ma non vi riuscì; si provava, tremava, barcollava, assalito da un tremito convulso che si sforzava di nascondere. Qualche cosa si era rotto, schiantato dentro: la molla della gioia nel congegno della sua anima. (‘Il gobbo’, TN 233) [Again Mecheri made an effort to laugh, to summon up his formidable laughter, but to no avail. Seized by a violent tremor he tried to hide, he staggered. Something had snapped within him — the spring of joy in the mechanism of his very soul] Lumachino voleva l’amore vero, irrompente, che scoppia nella prima gioventù, e che in lui scoppiava a vuoto tutti i giorni, come un meccanismo che abbia la molla rotta. (‘Lumachino’, TN 542) [What Lumachino wanted was true love, the kind that bursts out in one’s prime, and that kept bursting inside him like a mechanism with a broken spring.]

The difference between the two characters should not be overlooked — while Mecheri is scared to death by the cracking of his spring, Lumachino keeps spinning freely and merrily (‘scoppiava a vuoto tutti i giorni’). Nonetheless, in both texts, Palazzeschi uses the same figure of speech in order to emphasise the violence of mockery, and the transformation of its target into a sort of spring-operated puppet. Not by chance, Bergson often refers to the spring (‘ressort’) as a symbol for the basic patterns of comedy;13 apart from that, however, it is possible to identify a closer intertextual source for Palazzeschi’s use of this image. The comparison between the laughing stock and a spring-operated mechanism is actually a refrain in the contes et nouvelles of Maupassant as well: La jeune femme, qui n’avait pas prononcé un seul mot depuis l’insulte, mais qui tremblait comme si tous ses nerfs eussent été mis en danse par un ressort, enjamba tout à coup le parapet du pont sans que son mari ait eu le temps de la retenir, et se jeta dans la rivière. (‘Madame Baptiste’ [1882], CN 735–36; emphasis added)

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[The young woman, who had not uttered a word since the insult, but who was trembling as if all her nerves had been set in motion by springs, suddenly sprang over the parapet of the bridge and threw herself into the river.] C’était une brave créature qui avait une sorte d’âme à ressorts, partant par bonds dans l’enthousiasme. [...] Ses longs cheveux tordus en spirales s’étaient souvent déroulés et pendaient comme si leur ressort eût été cassé. (‘Miss Harriet’ [1883], CN 980–81; emphasis added) [She was a good creature who had a kind of soul on springs, which became enthusiastic at a bound. [...] Her long curls often hung straight down, as if their springs had been broken.] [Ils] s’inclinaient, sautillaient pareils à deux vieilles poupées qu’aurait fait danser une mécanique ancienne, un peu brisée, construite jadis par un ouvrier fort habile, suivant la manière de son temps. (‘Menuet’ [1882], CN 715; emphasis added) [They bowed, skipping about like two automaton dolls moved by some old mechanical contrivance, somewhat damaged, but made by a clever workman according to the fashion of his time.]

After being publicly insulted for having been dishonoured in her youth, Madame Baptiste trembles as if a spring had set her nerves in motion; the soul of Miss Harriet, an old maid despised by everyone, is moved by springs (‘une sorte d’âme à ressorts’), while her long hair looks like a bunch of broken springs; lastly, the old dancers in ‘Menuet’ resemble a couple of puppets, operated by some wornout machinery. They are all irregular (therefore derided) characters, whose story is markedly pathetic — especially in the first two cases, as both Madame Baptiste and Miss Harriett eventually kill themselves. The ressort, in other words, is usually associated by Maupassant to a grotesque-pathetic tone, in which the latter term is at least as important as the former; not by chance, for instance, the author emphasises the emotional reactions generally inspired by the suicides of Baptiste and Harriet.14 Such an emphasis is clearly absent in Il palio dei buffi — as confirmed by this parallel, however, Palazzeschi’s controdolore builds on the nineteenth-century pathos of originality, if only to eventually reverse it. On a general level, Maupassant’s inf luence on Palazzeschi’s representation of individual anomalies is more crucial than usually acknowledged; in a revealing passage of L’interrogatorio della contessa Maria (1926), after all, the Countess mentioned Maupassant as her favourite author (TR II 1175). The most important studies in this regard are a 1935 article by Franco Antonicelli (on the similarities between Une vie and Sorelle Materassi)15 and a 1951 essay by Eurialo De Michelis, hinting among other things at unspecified allusions (‘spunti dal Maupassant’) in the short stories ‘Anima’ and ‘Industria’.16 To be sure, De Michelis’s suggestions are worth further investigation. In ‘Anima’ (1911), the posthumous discovery of a woman’s infidelity is probably modelled on ‘Les Bijoux’ (1883) and ‘La Veillée’ (1882); in ‘Industria’ (1913), instead, the buying and selling of children combines echoes from ‘La Mère aux monstres’ (1883) and ‘Aux champs’ (1882). The plot of Palazzeschi’s latter story is particularly interesting: a rich and infertile married couple from the city buys a child from a peasant family, thus starting a collective frenzy which eventually culminates in a grotesque auction for a hunchback child. Maupassant’s ‘Aux champs’

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is the main source for the initial sequence, in which the bourgeois couple (the wife especially) insists on buying the peasants’ child: — Oh! regarde, Henri, ce tas d’enfants! Sont-ils jolis, comme ça, à grouiller dans la poussière. [...] Oh! comme je voudrais en avoir un, celui-là, le tout petit. (CN 680) [‘Oh, look, Henri, what a swarm of children! Are they not too sweet like that, playing in the dust? [...] Oh, how I should love to have one of them — that darling there, the littlest one!’] Les deux ruraux hochaient la tête en signe de refus; mais quand ils apprirent qu’ils auraient cent francs par mois, ils se considèrent, se consultant de l’œil, très ébranlés. Ils gardèrent longtemps le silence, torturés, hésitants. (CN 682) [The two rustics at first shook their head in token of denial; but when they learned that they would have a hundred francs each month for themselves, they began to reconsider the matter, consulting each other with furtive looks, very much shaken. They were silent a long time, in a state of painful hesitancy.]17

The main similarities with ‘La Mère aux monstres’, instead, lie in the references to the semantic area of industry,18 and in the idea of a deformed child being sold at the fair — more precisely, Maupassant’s mère deliberately gives birth to monstrous children in order to sell them away as rarities (‘les vend aux montreurs de phénomènes’ [she sells them to the freak show], CN 938), sometimes even through auctions (‘des enchères’, CN 943). On the other hand, once again, ‘Industria’ differs from its models in that there is no trace of pathos: while Maupassant lingers on the most poignant details of his stories,19 Palazzeschi relates the selling of the deformed child in a cold, indifferent manner. To be sure, the dominant note of this early story is not controdolore yet — the paradoxical tone employed by the narrator is rather a properly satirical one, as confirmed by the sarcastic allusion to Giolitti in the final paragraph (‘il più straordinario è questo: che il nostro buon Giolitti non abbia ancora pensato di farne un monopolio di Stato’ [the strangest part is that our dear Giolitti has not yet turned this business into a government monopoly], RB 252). However, Palazzeschi’s distance from Maupassant’s emotional emphasis is still quite evident. The author’s dialogue with Maupassant is rather emblematic of his attitude towards the nineteenth-century tradition of the pathetic-grotesque; while using this paradigm as a repertoire of extravagant and disturbing situations, Palazzeschi also erases its pathetic quality through laughter — be it the author’s or the characters’ (as in ‘Lumachino’). Further evidence in this direction is provided by Palazzeschi’s indirect relationship with an even more prototypical exponent of the Romantic pathetic-grotesque, namely Victor Hugo. ‘Industria’, to begin with, is somehow related to Hugo, since its primary source — ‘La Mère aux monstres’ — is clearly inf luenced by the description of the comprachicos (child traders) in L’Homme qui rit (1869); besides, and more importantly, ‘Il gobbo’ echoes the plot of Le Roi s’amuse (1832), probably via Verdi’s Rigoletto.20 Just like Triboulet/Rigoletto, Mecheri is a jester who eventually gets mocked by his former victims. Yet, as already illustrated, the narrator’s perspective on the character’s disgrace is far from being melodramatic;

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while sharing Hugo’s fascination with deformity and buffoonery (‘le difforme et l’horrible [...], le comique et le bouffon’),21 Palazzeschi deviates from such a model by liberating the grotesque element from its pathetic counterweight. Novelistic Models: Balzac, Flaubert, and Manzoni Although Maupassant’s short fiction is probably the most pervasive nineteenthcentury inf luence on Palazzeschi’s novelle, an important (and overlooked) role is also played by the classics of the realist novel. To be sure, however, Palazzeschi’s gaze on the ‘great serious form’ is an extremely peculiar one, as even when dealing with novelistic sources he actually privileges elements that are rather typical of the short-story form — irregularity, excess, and paroxysm. This point will be clarified, as usual, by a series of intertextual remarks; before focusing on the two most relevant models (Flaubert and Manzoni), it might first be helpful to touch upon Palazzeschi’s relatively marginal relationship with Balzac. Apart from a swift allusion to Physiologie du Mariage (RB 162), Balzac’s presence in Il re bello and Il palio dei buffi is in fact rather scarce; on the other hand, a significant number of echoes from La Comédie humaine can be found in Palazzeschi’s main novel, Sorelle Materassi. A generic Balzacian aura, to start with, surrounds the representation of the villagers’ morbid curiosity, i.e. ‘l’accanimento dei luoghi dove la vita langue’ [the frenzy typical of those places where life languishes] (TR I 640) — quite similarly, in the preamble to Eugénie Grandet, Balzac defined the provinces as places where life languishes (‘cette vie qui s’en va, s’adoucissant toujours’) [that life which f lows along, growing ever milder], and where emotions are stif led by monotony: ‘les exaltations les plus passionnées finissent par s’abolir dans la constante monotonie des mœurs’ [the most passionate of enthusiasms end by being blunted in the constant monotony of habits] (Préfaces, 200). Besides, on a more specific level, Palazzeschi’s two sisters have much in common with the eponymous protagonist of La Cousine Bette: they lead a secluded life, they spend their time sewing, and their apparel is ludicrously out of fashion.22 In addition to that, Teresa and Carolina’s resentment towards their better-looking sister is evocative of the rivalry between Balzac’s protagonist and her sister Adeline, while their possessive attitude towards Remo is similar to Bette’s jealousy for the young sculptor Wenceslas. The relationship with Balzac’s novel is further confirmed by a seemingly insignificant passage of Sorelle Materassi: ‘Giudicavano ancora misura di prudenza il non sbandierare troppo, ai parenti poveri, la loro prosperità e le loro ricchezze’ [they still found it better not to display their riches in front of their poor relations] (TR I 570, emphasis added).23 The locution ‘parenti poveri’ might not be accidental, given the similarity with Les Parents pauvres, that is to say the very expression used by Balzac to define the diptych formed by Cousine Bette and Cousin Pons. This example is not of immediate relevance to us, since it does not have a direct link to short fiction; still, it is worth noting Palazzeschi’s particular interest in Cousine Bette, a quintessentially irregular and grotesque character. Not by chance, Palazzeschi also has a clear fascination with such a typically Balzacian character type as the monomaniac; in many novelle from Il Re bello and Il palio dei buffi

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(e.g. ‘L’Angelo’, ‘Amore’, ‘Vita’, ‘Lumachino’, ‘Lo zio e il nipote’, ‘Il ricordo della Moglie’, ‘Il dono’), as in La Comédie humaine, obsessions are portrayed as a form of underestimated magnanimity (‘i sentimenti veri e grandi sono male compresi sempre, e sovente scherniti’ [true, noble feelings are always misunderstood, and often laughed at], ‘Il Ricordo della Moglie’, TN 622).24 Such a preference for abnormal characters emerges even more clearly from Palazzeschi’s dialogue with a far more pervasive model, Flaubert. The most significant — if unnoticed — intertextual link occurs in ‘Perfezione’ (1927): E Chicco ripeteva: ‘girare... girare...’. [...] Conobbe i colori di tutti i cieli e di tutti i mari, della terra, del deserto e dei ghiacciai, oceani, fiordi, laghi e fiumi; e quelli dell’umana pelle. Conobbe gli amori di un’ora e di un giorno; vide come vivono gli elefanti e le balene, gli orsi e le giraffe, come crescono le banane e gli edelweiss. Fece una collezione strepitosa di cartoline illustrate. (TN 525) [And Chicco repeated: ‘travel... travel...’. [...] He learned the colours of every sky and every sea, of the earth, of deserts and glaciers, oceans, fjords, lakes and rivers; and the various colours of the human skin. He experienced the kind of love that lasts one hour, and the one that lasts one day; he learned about the lives of elephants and whales, bears and giraffes; he learned how bananas and edelweiss grow. He came back with a wonderful collection of illustrated postcards.]

The passage reminds us of a famous chapter opening from L’Éducation sentimentale: ‘Il voyagea. Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots, les froids réveils sous la tente, l’étourdissement des paysages et des ruines, l’amertume des sympathies interrompues. Il revint’ [He travelled. He realised the melancholy associated with packet-boats, the chill one feels when waking up under tents, the dizzy effect of landscapes and ruins, and the bitterness of ruptured sympathies. He returned home].25 The reference to the protagonist’s travels (‘girare... girare’ / ‘il voyagea’) and the use of the verb ‘conobbe’ (echoing ‘il connut’), as well as the similarity between ‘gli amori di un’ora’ and Flaubert’s ‘sympathies interrompues’, all attest to Palazzeschi’s deliberate allusion to this specific model. But the differences from the source are just as important. Most notably, Flaubert’s enumeration is meant to emphasise Frédéric’s growing indifference to life, and his drowning in the dull uniformity of the bourgeois world; conversely, Palazzeschi’s juxtaposition of Chicco’s experiences aims to underline the immense variety of life, as well as the character’s peculiar personality. More generally, Flaubert’s works leave little room for the celebration of diversity — individual anomalies are usually either crushed by social homogenisation, or reduced to a grotesque form of inadequateness to the ubiquitous (and equally grotesque) norm. Palazzeschi is of course especially interested in this latter aspect, although he re-evaluates Flaubert’s grotesque prototypes in the light of his own metaphysics of diversity. In ‘Il ricordo della moglie’, for instance, the idea of a gravedigger using the plot surrounding the cemetery for agricultural purposes (thus making the most of its exceptional fertility) is likely to have been inspired by Lestiboudois’s bizarre potato farm in Madame Bovary:

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La sua casetta rustica [...] era circondata da una vite giunonica, che si caricava di grappoli anche negli anni di magra, anzi, era proprio in quelli che formava un solo grappolo intorno alla casa. I contadini passandoci sotto col pensiero a quelle dei loro campi sgombre, pensavano: ‘figlio d’un cane!’ (TN 607) [His country house [...] was surrounded by a Junoesque vine, f lourishing with grape even in years of scarcity — it was actually in those years that the house was encircled by one giant bunch of grapes. When passing by his house, with their minds on their bad crop, the farmers used to think: ‘son of a dog!’] Le gardien, qui est en même temps fossoyeur et bedeau à l’église (tirant ainsi des cadavres de la paroisse un double bénéfice), a profité du terrain vide pour y semer des pommes de terre. D’année en année, cependant, son petit champ se rétrécit, et, lorsqu’il survient une épidémie, il ne sait pas s’il doit se réjouir des décès ou s’aff liger des sépultures. ‘Vous vous nourrissez des morts, Lestiboudois!’ lui dit enfin un jour M. le curé.26 [The groundskeeper, who is also the gravedigger and the church’s verger (thereby making a double profit out of the parish’s corpses), has taken advantage of the empty ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his little field shrinks, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or grieve at the burials. ‘You feed yourself on the dead, Lestiboudois!’ the priest said to him one day.]

However, while Lestiboudois’s originality does not really make him distinguishable against the universal bêtise, Palazzeschi’s character embodies a healthy carnivalesque reversal of bourgeois hypocrisy (‘tanta serenità Napoli aveva saputo diffondere per la terra’ [Napoli managed to fill the land with so much serenity], TN 607); once again, the misfit’s deviation from the norm is saluted as a sign of the joyful diversity of the world. A similar comparison can be established between Bouvard et Pécuchet and another couple of eccentric clerks, ‘Pochini e Tamburini’ (1929). Their accidental meeting at the beginning of the novella is clearly reminiscent of Flaubert’s incipit: ‘In una mattina di dicembre umida e fredda, s’incontrarono nell’anticamera di quegli uffici [...]. Si guardarono insieme: ‘Pochini’. ‘Tamburini’. [...] Venne decretata così la loro amicizia’ [On a cold and damp December morning, they bumped into each other in front of their offices. [...] They exchanged a look: ‘Pochini’ ‘Tamburini’. [...] This was the beginning of their friendship] (TN 528). As in Flaubert’s novel, the two protagonists find themselves in the same place at the same moment, they learn each other’s surname, and immediately start a long-lasting friendship.27 Palazzeschi’s familiarity with Bouvard et Pécuchet, by the way, is confirmed by a passage from another story centred on an odd couple, ‘La porta accanto’ (1955): ‘Vi siete mai chiesti quali sono le ragioni che stabiliscono una corrente di simpatia fra uomini che appena si conoscono o che addirittura si vedono per la prima volta?’ [Have you ever wondered about those sudden streams of sympathy between people that hardly know each other, or even meet each other for the first time?] (TN 288). An identical question was formulated in Flaubert’s novel: D’ailleurs, comment expliquer les sympathies? Pourquoi telle particularité, telle imperfection indifférente ou odieuse dans celui-ci enchante-t-elle dans celuilà? Ce qu’on appelle le coup de foudre est vrai pour toutes les passions. Avant la fin de la semaine, ils se tutoyèrent’.28

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Both in ‘Pochini e Tamburini’ and in ‘La porta accanto’, the paradigm of Bouvard et Pécuchet is used to underline a concept rather foreign to Flaubert’s worldview: even amidst the uniformity of bourgeois life it is possible to find a couple of buffi, i.e. of interesting, extraordinary characters. In sum, Palazzeschi’s reinterpretation of nineteenth-century models is usually oriented by two basic assumptions: first, people are naturally different from each other, despite society’s attempts to impose uniformity; second, such physiological differences (‘naturali divergenze’) are inherently interesting, exhilarating, and full of narrative potential. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the main novelistic inf luence on Il re bello and Il palio dei buffi is Manzoni’s I promessi sposi — a novel set before the age of bourgeois homogenisation, and in which moral and anthropological contrasts play a paramount role. A minor echo, to begin with, can be found in ‘Issimo’, where an expression used to indicate indifference (‘lo guardava con indifferenza e la faccia da me ne impipo’ [he looked at him with a face that said ‘I don’t care’] TN 244; emphasis added) is visibly drawn from I promessi sposi (‘con un’aria, come si dice, di me n’impipo’ [with a face, as the proverb goes, that said ‘I don’t care’] Promessi sposi, 255). A series of more remarkable allusions takes place in ‘Lupo’, starting with the very beginning of the story: ‘Il marchese Onorio era il superstite della famiglia Costantino Pila di P*** in provincia di S***’ [Marquis Onorio was the last descendant of the Constantino Pilas from P***, in the district of S***] (TN 478). The use of three asterisks to hide place names is, in fact, a common typographic device, but in this case it might be a preliminary hint at the Manzonian intertext29 — which, however, will become far more visible in a crucial episode of the story, when Onorio is robbed by two criminals: Accadde una sera in uno di quei ritorni, che nelle gole della montagna fiancheggiando il burrone, giunto alla svolta vi scorse in fondo due figure di dubbio aspetto, giovinastri nell’atteggiamento di chi aspetta qualcuno con cattivo proposito. All’apparire di Lupo si fecero nel mezzo del viottolo. Senza rallentare, seguitò il cammino, anzi, avvicinandosi a quelli rinfrancando il passo sicuro, e sempre meglio accorgendosi che l’aspettato poteva essere lui senz’altro. [...] Lupo si guardava intorno. ‘Non c’è nessuno e nessuno può venire in vostro soccorso, siete solo con noi, statene certo’. [...] ‘Galantuomini’, ripeteva prendendo tempo per rif lettere al caso suo: ‘sì, galantuomini’. (TN 488–89) [One evening, during one of those walks back home on the mountain path that ran along the slope, he saw two menacing figures just around the bend; they looked like a couple of prowlers waiting for someone. As soon as they saw Lupo, they moved to the middle of the path. Lupo did not slow down; he quickened his pace instead, even though he understood that he was the one they were waiting for. [...] Lupo looked around. ‘Nobody is here to help you, you are alone with us here, you can be sure’. [...] ‘Dear Gentlemen’, he tried to buy himself some time to ponder the situation; ‘dear Gentlemen’.]

While walking back home on a mountain path, Onorio bumps into a couple of

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menacing figures, who look as if they were waiting for someone; the scene is of course a plain, and yet unremarked, rewriting of Don Abbondio’s meeting with the bravi (‘che i due descritti di sopra stessero ad aspettar qualcheduno, era cosa troppo evidente’ [it appeared evident that the two men above mentioned were waiting for someone], Promessi sposi, 16). Just like Don Abbondio, Onorio immediately understands that the couple is waiting for him (‘l’aspettato poteva essere lui’, TN 488; ‘l’aspettato era lui’, Promessi sposi, 16); the similarity is then reinforced by other details, such as the character’s attempt to speed up the pace (‘rinfrancando il passo’, Palazzeschi; ‘affrettò il passo’, Manzoni), his looking around in search of help, and lastly by his addressing the two criminals as ‘galantuomini’. Palazzeschi’s faithful reprise of Manzoni’s passage serves at least two different purposes. On the one hand, by alluding to one of the best-known abuses of power in the history of Italian literature, it emphasises the polarity between social violence and the harmless misfit; after all, a buffo is always — as Manzoni famously wrote of Don Abbondio — ‘un vaso di terra cotta, costretto a viaggiar in compagnia di molti vasi di ferro’ [a lonely earthen vase travelling among vases of iron]. On the other hand, by comparing Lupo to the comic figure of Don Abbondio, the author casts a ludicrous shadow on his character’s tragedy, as required by the philosophy of controdolore. Further significant references to I promessi sposi can be noticed in ‘L’Angelo’ (1912), where the main dialogue between Don Pasquale and his chatty housemaid Drusilla parodies the sequence in which Don Abbondio tells Perpetua about the bravi.30 Before sharing his secret with Drusilla, the priest recommends her to be discreet (‘se parli t’ammazzo!’ [one single word about this and I will kill you!], RB 108–09), as Don Abbondio does with Perpetua; Drusilla’s vocabulary, in turn, is even more unmistakably Manzonian, from the exclamation ‘è la provvidenza divina’ [it’s the work of divine providence] (RB 109) to the use of the word baggiano.31 Other characters from Manzoni’s novel are evoked, instead, in ‘Perfezione’. First of all, when Chicco’s parents force their submissive son into becoming a lawyer, they use such terms as pasticci e imbrogli (‘pasticci e imbrogli ce ne saranno sempre a questo mondo’, TN 523), with clear reference to Azzeccagarbugli’s jargon.32 Soon after that, the arrogance of Chicco’s friends is defined as an inclination to place themselves higher than God, which obviously echoes Manzoni’s description of the Innominato: L’uomo, benedetto, per quanto si prostri e inchini ai piedi dell’Altissimo finisce sempre col sentirsi un po’ più in su, lo fa e non se ne accorge poverino. (TN 526) [Man, that poor thing! no matter how much he bows and kneels to the Lord, he always ends up placing himself a little higher than Him; he does so without even noticing.] Il selvaggio signore dominava all’intorno tutto lo spazio dove piede d’uomo potesse posarsi, e non vedeva mai nessuno al di sopra di sé, né più in alto. (Promessi sposi, 378) [The lawless man dominated everything around there, and he saw no one above him, nor higher]

Not by chance, Palazzeschi’s most remarkable allusions to I promessi sposi seem to

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focus on the disparities created by power — the act of violence perpetrated against Onorio is modelled on Don Abbondio’s meeting with the bravi, while Chicco’s parents and friends are as arrogant as Azzeccagarbugli and the Innominato before his conversion. Indeed, as Italo Calvino underlined in a well-known essay,33 I promessi sposi is a novel in which (social) contrasts play a paramount role. Palazzeschi certainly reads Manzoni’s classic in a similar perspective; at the same time, once again, he reverses the traumatic potential of inequality into a liberating, subversive laughter. A Modernist Gallery of Originals: Il palio as a Macro-Text From its very title, Il palio dei buffi suggests how the short-story collection can be the ideal literary form to represent the destiny of originality in modern social life. The possible link between the genre and this specific theme is in fact two-sided — on the one hand, the serial juxtaposition of short isolated texts can hint at the marginalised and secluded life of the eccentric individual in modern society;34 on the other, precisely by placing a variety of misfits one next to the other, the short-story cycle lends itself to a celebration of human diversity, and of its struggle to survive in an era when (as Balzac once put it) ‘all hats look alike’. Palazzeschi’s Palio embodies both possibilities, thus fulfilling an ambition shared by many nineteenth- and twentieth-century short-fiction writers (cf. above, Chapter 1): that of assembling a gallery of originals (Verga), of ‘bouffons-martyrs’ (Maupassant), or of ‘matti’ (Pirandello). In its celebratory juxtaposition of marginalised misfits and derided eccentrics, the realist and modernist short-story cycle inevitably collides with another typically modern narrative genre, i.e. the daily news. To be sure, the massive growth of the newspaper industry over the nineteenth century played a crucial role in the development of both the short story and the short-story collection as we know it.35 Yet, compared to the daily press, the short-story cycle usually takes an opposite perspective on eccentricity: while the former piles up a virtually endless series of ‘curious cases’ within a standardised and simplifying framework, with the result of trivialising their individual significance, the latter’s gallery effect aims to enhance the specific meaning of each single story. In this case, juxtaposition does not lead to oversaturation — on the contrary, it creates a general sense of variety, thus reinforcing and amplifying the peculiar anomalies represented in each text. In Walter Benjamin’s terminology, the short-story cycle can be an attempt to remove originality from the realm of mere ‘information’, and make it a subject of ‘narration’;36 and indeed, Il palio is a clear example of this process. In this respect, it is particularly telling that two stories from Palazzeschi’s collection feature ironic references to the trivialisation of individual originality on the part of the press. The first relevant occurrence is in the epilogue of ‘La gloria’, where the suicide of the buffo (a painter who used f lies instead of brush and colours) is reported through the sensationalist titles of the ‘giornali locali’ [local newspapers]: [La serva] vi trovò quello che [...] tutti i giornali cittadini descrissero il dì seguente: il suo padrone ‘sgretolatocadavere’. [...] I giornali cittadini ebbero

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esauriti i loro pittoreschi commenti: ‘Filantropo o tiranno? Attila delle mosche. L’uomo e la mosca. La mosca è entrata nell’arte. Osanna mosche, il moschicida è morto. Dies irae!... Cupo rimorso? La vendetta di un insetto...’. (TN 193–94) [The housemaid found what the local newspapers would report the following day: her employer’s ‘wreckedcorpse’. [...] The local newspapers used up all their picturesque comments: ‘Philanthropist or tyrant?’. ‘The Attila of the f lies’. ‘The man and the f ly’. ‘Flies belong to art now’. ‘Rejoice f lies, the f lykiller is dead’. ‘Dies irae!’... ‘Dark regrets?’. ‘The revenge of an insect’.]

Similarly, ‘Issimo’ — the final text of the collection — also ends with a reference to the character’s obituary on the papers, where the name of Palazzeschi’s last ‘buffo’ (paradoxically defined by the narrator as a ‘champion’ of anonymity) is mistyped and ultimately buried in a jumbled heap of events: Si leggeva quel giorno sul giornale dell’attentato a un Re, era scoppiata una rivoluzione, quattro erano in corso e una lì per lì per scoppiare, due terremoti e un nubifragio avevano prodotto migliaia di vittime: una moglie per vendetta aveva accecato il marito con le cesoie [...]. Non uno di quei tanti lettori, vedi prodigio, lesse nel necrologio del nuovo campione il nome sbagliato. (TN 246–47) [That day they wrote about an assassination attempt on a King, a revolution had just started, four revolutions were in progress and another one was about to start, two earthquakes and a cloudburst had claimed thousands of victims; a woman had blinded her husband with a pair of shears [...]. Not a single reader, what a surprise!, read the mistyped name in the obituary of our new champion.]

The endless variety of human affairs is, in essence, the common thread underlying Il palio as a macrotext.37 This can be further confirmed by a closer examination of the recurring motifs, character types, and narrative patterns in the collection (or agrafes, as René Audet has defined them)38 — each of which represents a variation on the book’s main theme. More precisely, based on Palazzeschi’s various interpretations of the notion of originality in Il palio, it is possible to identify twelve different elements occurring in at least two texts: (1). The euphoric misfit, echoing the author’s amazement at life’s variety (2). The misfit’s misanthropic isolation (3). A sudden, unpredictable metamorphosis in the protagonist’s behaviour (further attesting to the natural originality of human beings) (4). Comic contrasts in the characters’ physical appearance (5). Odd couples, or bizarre/asymmetrical love relationships (6). The rigidity of the law, as opposed to the variety of human affairs (7). Dysfunctional use of money (extreme avarice or squandering) (8). Youth as a state of freedom, as opposed to the standardisation of adult life (9). ‘Punti neri’ [black marks], i.e. sudden whims or unexplainable actions on the part of the character (10). Social contrasts, usually embodied by a servant–master relationship

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(11). Unexpected eccentricity of seemingly ordinary characters (12). The buffo attracts the curiosity (and the derision) of the community The distribution of those agrafes throughout the collection seems rather aleatory, as shown by the following chart: ‘Lo zio e il nipote’ ‘Carburo e Birchio’ ‘Il ladro’ ‘Il gobbo’ ‘La gloria’ ‘Pochini e Tamburini’ ‘Il dono’ ‘Gedeone e la sua Stella’ ‘Vita’ ‘Il punto nero’ ‘Amore’ ‘Bistino e il Signor Marchese’ ‘Lumachino’ ‘24 Agosto’ ‘Il ricordo della moglie’ ‘Lupo’ ‘Perfezione’ ‘Issimo’

1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12 4, 8 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 2, 3, 4, 12 9, 10, 12 4, 5, 11 2, 3, 7, 10, 12 4, 5, 12 1, 5, 10 9, 11, 12 1, 3, 5, 12 1, 4, 5, 7, 10 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12 6, 9 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12 2, 7, 10, 12 1, 11 11

Although the overall structure of the book does not seem to be governed by any specific rule, Palazzeschi’s choices for the first and the last two slots are far from being accidental. With regard to the opening text, it is worth noting that ‘Lo zio e il nipote’ features the highest number of agrafes — as if the author tried to provide the reader with an extensive preliminary catalogue of the different aspects of human originality to be reprised and developed in the rest of the collection. Conversely, the final stories are characterised by an extremely low number of agrafes, with an almost exclusive focus on a motif that had occurred only twice in the previous texts: the discovery of unexpected eccentricities in ostensibly meaningless characters. ‘Perfezione’ tells the story of Chicco, a hyperbolically submissive man, whose actions are entirely subject to the will of his friends and family; in this lies his specific, and indeed original, form of ‘perfection’. The protagonist of ‘Issimo’, instead, is a lonely and nameless individual (his name is actually never mentioned in the text), lacking any distinctive quality; as a consequence, he decides to stand out in the only way he can — i.e., by becoming the most anonymous person in history (‘l’uomo di cui fu meno pronunziato il nome e non fu scritto una volta soltanto’ [the man whose name was pronounced least often, and never ever written], TN 244). To sum up, it is towards the end of Il palio that Palazzeschi’s celebration of diversity becomes most radical and paradoxical; as illustrated by both ‘Perfezione’ and ‘Issimo’, the unpredictable uniqueness of human beings can manifest itself even where inertia and mediocrity seem to rule. It is not by chance, in fact, that the former story contains a direct reference to Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale — the whole final section of Il palio seems to be centred on a quintessentially Flaubertian theme, such as the extinction of originality in bourgeois society. Crucially,

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however, this idea is ultimately disproved and reversed in the light of Palazzeschi’s peculiar metaphysics of diversity. As will be discussed in the conclusion, Flaubert’s pessimism over the survival of originality will later become a common trait in European modernism, from Joyce to Musil; nonetheless, for reasons that remain to be detailed, Italian modernists like Pirandello and Palazzeschi seem to conceive human variety as something that still exists, despite being continuously supressed, ridiculed, and marginalised by civilisation. As exemplified by Il palio (even more clearly than by Novelle per un anno), the short-story cycle is the perfect narrative tool for developing this relatively optimistic perspective on originality, and for substantiating the claim that ‘people and their cases are all different’. Notes to Chapter 4 1. ‘Should it ever be the case of the English [...] to arrive at the same polish which distinguishes the French, [...] we should at least lose that distinct variety and originality of character, which distinguishes them not only from each other, but from all the world besides’ (Sterne, Sent. Journey, 49–50, emphasis added); ‘All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision’ (Shaftesbury, Essay, 65, emphasis added). 2. Paolo Mantegazza, Elogio della vecchiaia (Padova: Muzzio, 1993), p. 47; emphasis added. 3. Palazzeschi is not the only modernist or avant-gardist to condemn the bourgeois idea of perfection as a synonym of boredom and mediocrity. As declared by Tristan Tzara in the 1918 Dada manifesto, ‘all constructions converge on perfection which is boring, the stagnant idea of a gilded swamp’ (Modernism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 480). Quite similarly, in the early Twenties, Wyndham Lewis set out to praise the natural diversity of human beings in two unfinished essays, ‘The Anonymity of Perfection’ and ‘A Theory of Divine Imperfection’; see Paul Edwards and Thomas R. Smith, eds, ‘Four Essays by Wyndham Lewis’, Modernism/Modernity, 4.2 (1997). 4. Among the numerous essays on Palazzeschi’s use of laughter, see in particular: Pasquale Guaragnella, ‘Filosofie del ridere nel tempo del moderno: note ed appunti’, in Palazzeschi europeo, ed. by Gino Tellini and Will Jung (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2007), pp. 111–24; Gino Tellini, ‘Sul comico palazzeschiano’, in Palazzeschi e i territori del comico, ed. by G. Tellini and Matilde Dillon Wanke (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2006), pp. 9–28; Piero Pieri, Ritratto del saltimbanco da giovane: Palazzeschi, 1905–1914 (Bologna: Patron, 1980); and Guido Guglielmi, L’udienza del poeta: saggi su Palazzeschi e il futurismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1979). 5. As has been noted, the humorous representation of individual anomalies — ‘estraneità all’ordine normale degli uomini’ [extraneousness to normality] — stands out as a crucial theme in Palazzeschi’s verse production, at least from L’incendiario onwards (Marta Barbaro, I poetisaltimbanchi e le maschere di Aldo Palazzeschi (Pisa: ETS, 2008), p. 10). 6. The late nineteenth-century topos of the red clown is examined in Barbaro, I poeti-saltimbanchi, pp. 13–65. For a general overview of French proto-avant-gardes, see Daniel Grojnowski, Aux commencements du rire moderne: l’esprit fumiste (Paris: Corti, 1997). 7. Dixains réalistes, ed. by Germain Nouveau (Paris: Librairie de l’Eau-Forte, 1876), poem xix (p. 23). According to Andrea Cortellessa, the primary source of ‘La passeggiata’ should be identified with Laforgue’s Grande complainte de la ville de Paris (1886) — see Cortellessa, ‘I piedi di Leopardi’, in Palazzeschi e i territori del comico, ed. by M. Dillon-Wanke and G. Tellini, p. 88. Cortellessa’s hypothesis is certainly plausible, although the similarity with Noveau’s text seems even stronger; besides, Laforgue’s Complainte is in prose, and bears no explicit mention of the poet’s flânerie. 8. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 51. 9. Palazzeschi’s political views have not received much critical attention so far. The most exhaustive study in this regard is Franco Contorbia, ‘Su Palazzeschi “politico” ’, in L’opera di Aldo Palazzeschi, ed. by Gino Tellini (Florence: Olschki, 2002), pp. 177–205 — which, however,

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does not consider the aspect that I am trying to underline in this chapter. Quite remarkably, in his reading of Due imperi... mancati, Guido Guglielmi has defined the ideological connotations of Palazzeschi’s text in terms of egalitarian utopism (L’udienza del poeta, p. 128) — yet, judging by Palazzeschi’s constant interest in social disparities, such an hypothesis seems hardly applicable to the whole of his works. 10. ‘ “Io ho rischiato la pelle” “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” [...]. “Sicuro, ho rischiato la pelle” “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” ’ (‘La bomba’, TN 457–58); ‘ “Ah! Ah! Ah!” “Cara! Cara!” “Adorabile!” “Un tesoro”. La sua voce venne sepolta dalle risate’ [her voice was buried in laughter] (‘La gloria’, TN 197). 11. See, for instance, the loud, obscene jeering directed at Perelà towards the end of the novel: ‘Le grida, le risa gli ferivano il cuore. [...] Tutti ridevano sconciamente, fino a smascellarsi’ [Their shouts and their laughter broke his heart. [...] Everybody was laughing their heads off ] (TR I 308). 12. ‘You higher men here, haven’t all of you — failed? Be of good cheer, what does it matter! How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!’ (Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, ed. by Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 238). Regarding Nietzsche’s inf luence on Palazzeschi’s philosophy of controdolore, see in particular Fausto Curi, ‘Palazzeschi e Nietzsche’, in Palazzeschi europeo, ed. by G. Tellini and W. Jung, pp. 39–64. 13. The ‘ressort’ metaphor recurs, for instance, in Bergson’s analyses of the comic effects achieved by the movements of a puppet, by the obsessive repetition of an idea, and lastly by a scene from Moliere’s Malade imaginaire: ‘Sur le rythme uniforme du ressort qui se tend et se détend, le commissaire s’abat et se relève’ [up and down the constable f lops and hops with the uniform rythm of the bending and release of a spring]; ‘imaginons maintenant un ressort plutôt moral’ [let us think of a spring that is rather of a moral type]; ‘nous voyons Argan s’éclipser un instant, puis, comme mû par un ressort, remonter sur la scène avec une malédiction nouvelle’ [we see Argan thrust back into the wings; then, as though impelled by a spring, he rebounds onto the stage with a fresh curse on his lips] (Le Rire, 35–36; emphasis added). On the similarities between Palazzeschi’s and Bergson’s ideas of laughter, see also Raffaele Donnarumma, ‘Maschere della violenza: teorie e pratiche dell’umorismo fra modernismo e avanguardia’, in Modi di ridere: forme spiritose e umoristiche della narrazione, ed. by Francesco Fiorentino and Paolo Amalfitano, forthcoming. 14. In ‘Madame Baptiste’, the story is originally reported by a friend of the protagonist, who eventually bursts into tears: ‘Il me regarda avec surprise à travers ses larmes’ [he gave me a look of surprise, his eyes filled with tears] (CN 736). A similar kind of distress is shown by the friends of the narrator, after hearing the story of Miss Harriet: ‘Léon Chenal se tut. Les femmes pleuraient’ [Léon Chenal fell silent. The ladies were crying] (CN 996). 15. Franco Antonicelli, ‘Secondo tempo di Palazzeschi’, in Scritti letterari, 1934–1974 (Pisa: Giardini, 1985), pp. 9–18 (p. 17). 16. De Michelis, Narratori antinarratori (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1952), p. 274. A generic similarity between Maupassant’s ‘Un cas de divorce’ and Palazzeschi’s ‘Principe bianco’ is noticed, instead, by Paolo Febbraro, La tradizione di Palazzeschi (Rome: Gaffi, 2007), p. 280. 17. In Palazzeschi’s text, the rich woman has the same words of admiration for the peasant child: ‘ “Ma che bel bambino! Bello bello bello! Ce ne sono molti ve’ di belli quassù, ma questo è il più bello di tutti [...] Vuoi venire con me?” ’ [‘What a nice baby! So nice! There are many beautiful children around here, but this one is the best [...]. Would you like to come with me?’] (‘Industria’, RB 235). 18. Palazzeschi’s references to industry start from the very title of the story, while Maupassant repeatedly uses terms like industriel and fabriquer: ‘Ces affreux industriels’ (CN 938), ‘une fabrique de monstres’ (CN 939), ‘fabriquer ses phénomènes’ (CN 943), ‘ces monstres-là sont fabriqués au corset’ (CN 944). 19. In ‘Aux champs’, the narrator’s emphasis on the peasants’ tears highlights the pathetic quality of the story: ‘La bonne femme pleurait dans son assiette [...] Les deux vieux se taisaient, atterrés, larmoyants’ [The good woman cried on her dish. [...] Both of them fell silent, terrified, crying] (CN 685). Likewise, in the epilogue of ‘La Mère aux monstres’, the reader is invited to share the narrator’s deep sympathy for the disgraced children: ‘Une pitié profonde pour elle et pour

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eux m’entra dans l’âme’ [an immense pity for them and their mother pervaded my soul] (CN 943–44). 20. Hugo’s inf luence on ‘La Mère aux monstres’ is underlined by Marcel Spada, Érotiques du merveilleux (Paris: Corti, 1983), p. 244. The similarity between ‘Il gobbo’ and ‘Rigoletto’ is already noticed, instead, by Corrado Pestelli, ‘Il palio dei savi e dei normali’, Studi italiani, 11 (2000), 175–212 (pp. 196–97). 21. ‘Dans la pensée des modernes, au contraire, le grotesque a un rôle immense. Il y est partout; d’une part, il crée le difforme et l’horrible; de l’autre, le comique et le bouffon’ [In modern thought, instead, the grotesque plays an enormous part. It is found everywhere; on the one hand it creates the abnormal and the horrible, on the other the comic and the burlesque] (Victor Hugo, Cromwell, in Théâtre complèt, ed. by Jean–Jacques Thierry and Josette Mélèze (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 418). The same passage is quoted, with reference to Palazzeschi’s use of the grotesque, in Denis Ferraris, ‘Il motivo del buffo nella novellistica palazzeschiana’, in L’opera di Aldo Palazzeschi, ed. by G. Tellini, p. 335n. 22. ‘Oggetti che nessuno al mondo avrebbe osato portare [...], se ne abbellivano come di cose preziose e di attualità, capaci di mandare in estasi la gente. Ciò che lascia capire con chiarezza ch’erano fuori dalla vita, non solo, ma del tempo direttamente’ [Things that no one else in the world would have dared to wear, [...] they embellished themselves with them as though they were in the latest fashion, capable of sending anyone into ecstasies. All of which made it perfectly clear that they were outside normal life — and outside time as well] (Sorelle Materassi, TR I 544). Bette’s apparel is described as an identical mix of pretension and obsoleteness: ‘Elle voulait, au lieu d’obéir à la mode, que la mode s’appliquât à ses habitudes et se pliât à ses fantaisies toujours arriérées. [...] Le chapeau de trente francs devenait une loque, et la robe un haillon. La Bette était, à cet égard, d’un entêtement de mule; elle voulait se plaire à elle seule et se croyait charmante ainsi’ [Instead of following the fashions, she expected the fashion to accept her ways and yield to her always out-of-date notions [...]. A thirty-franc bonnet came out a rag, and the gown a disgrace. On this point, Lisbeth was as obstinate as a mule; she would please no one but herself and believed herself charming] (Cousine Bette, CH VII 64). 23. The same expression recurs in another short story, ‘Il giorno e la notte’: ‘La salutavano con una certa fretta, come si saluta il cugino di campagna o il caro parente povero’ (TN 58; emphasis added). 24. A celebration of monomania can also be found in Perelà: ‘Qui sono i grandi signori, i miliardari delle teste umane che spesero per un solo capriccio tutto il loro denaro’ [here are the great gentlemen, the billionaires of the human brain, who squandered all their riches for one single passion] (TR I 264). On Balzac’s conception of monomania as a sign of magnanimity, see in particular Alexandre Astruc, ‘Balzac et l’idée fixe’, Le Magazine littéraire, 373 (1999), 23, and of course Ernst Robert Curtius, Balzac (Paris: Grasset, 1933). 25. Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale, in Œuvres, ed. by Albert Thibaudet and René Dumesnil (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), ii, 448. 26. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, in Œuvres, i, 391. 27. ‘Ils s’assirent à la même minute, sur le même banc. [...] Le petit homme aperçut écrit dans le chapeau de son voisin: Bouvard; pendant que celui-ci distinguait aisément dans la casquette du particulier en redingote le mot: Pécuchet’ [They both sat down, at the same moment, on the same bench. [...] The short man noticed ‘Bouvard’ written in his neighbour’s hat, while the latter made out the word ‘Pécuchet’ in the cap belonging to the person in the coat] (Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet, in Œuvres, ii, 669). 28. Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet, p. 677; emphasis added. 29. The three asterisks are first used by Manzoni in the fourth chapter of the novel: ‘Il padre Cristoforo da *** era un uomo più vicino ai sessanta che ai cinquant’anni. [...] Era figliuolo d’un mercante di *** (questi asterischi vengon tutti dalla circospezione del mio anonimo)’ [Father Cristoforo from *** was closer to his sixties than to his fifties. He was the son of a merchant from *** (these asterisks are due to the discretion of my anonymous source)] (Promessi sposi, 67). On Manzoni’s use of asteronyms, see in particular Leonardo Terrusi, ‘Silenzi, nomi, asterischi: gli asteronimi manzoniani’, Il Nome nel Testo, 12 (2010), 269–76. 30. This similarity is already noticed by Rita Guerricchio, ‘Introduzione’, in TB 20.

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31. ‘Ci chiamano baggiani’ (Promessi sposi, 341). The term baggianate already occurred in the dialogue between Perpetua and Don Abbondio: ‘è tempo ora di dir codeste baggianate?’ (Promessi sposi, 29). 32. ‘Ho cavato altri da peggio imbrogli’ [I have extricated others from tangles worse than that] (Promessi sposi, 56); ‘Che pasticci mi fate?’ [what a mess you have made!] (Promessi sposi, 56). 33. Calvino, ‘I promessi sposi: il romanzo dei rapporti di forza’, in Saggi, 1945–1985, ed. by Mario Barenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), pp. 328–41. 34. On the symbolic link between the short-story collection and the isolation of the individual in modern society, see in particular Dieter Meintl, ‘Der Kurzgeschichtenzyklus als modernistisches Genre’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 64 (1983), 216–28, and Susan Garland Mann, The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989). 35. Cf. J. Gerald Kennedy, ‘Towards a Poetics of the Short-Story Cycle’, The Journal of the Short Story in English, 11 (1988), 9–24. 36. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Ref lections on the Works of Nikolaj Leskov’, in Selected Writings, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), iii, 143–66. 37. On the notion of macrotesto in relation to the short-story collection, see in particular Maria Corti, ‘Testi o macrotesto? I racconti di Marcovaldo’, Strumenti critici, 9 (1975), 182–97, and Giovanni Cappello, La dimensione macrotestuale: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca (Ravenna: Longo, 1998). 38. Cf. René Audet, Le Recueil: enjeux poétiques et génériques (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Laval, 2003); and Audet, Des textes à l’œuvre: la lecture du recueil de nouvelles (Quebec: Nota Bene, 2000).

CHAPTER 5

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‘The Stupidity of the World’: Satire and Common Nonsense in Gadda’s Fiction Equality as Abstraction As famously stated by Leibniz, ‘there is no such thing as two individuals indiscernible from each other’; ‘two drops of water, or milk, viewed with a microscope, will appear distinguishable from each other’.1 We have already encountered a few twentieth-century reprises of Leibniz’s theory: in L’Umorismo (1908), for instance, Pirandello illustrated the concept by describing a large forest and its ‘incommensurabile moltitudine di foglie’ [immense foliage], where ‘non ve ne sono due, due sole, identiche tra loro’ [there are not two identical leaves] (Um. 806); in Palazzeschi’s Il codice di Perelà (1911), Donna Giacomina compares Nature to a baker, whose doughnuts are always distinguishable from each other (TR I 184) — a point further developed in ‘Varietà’ (1917), where the author clearly states that it is impossible to find two identical creatures (‘avete mai trovato, voi che faceste il giro del mondo, una creatura simile a voi?’ [have you ever found a creature that is exactly like you?], TR I 1257). An even more direct allusion to the same law, however, can be found in the philosophical manifesto of another Italian modernist — who was, among other things, an avid reader of Leibniz. The infinite variety of the world is actually one of the most recurrent themes of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Meditazione Milanese (1928); in the chapter ‘La materia e la molteplicità’, the Author replies to his imaginary ‘Critic’ with a reference to the identity-of-indiscernibles principle: Il critico: ‘Quando Ford compone diecimila e centomila automobili eguali, sosterrete ancora che la materia serve per la differenziazione? [...]’. Rispondo: ‘[...] Osservo anzitutto che quelle macchine non sono, a rigor di forma, eguali, ché, già Leibniz lo disse, non vi è nulla di eguale: in una certo bullone sarà più serrato, e meno, nell’altra: ed esaminandole, per così dire, con il microscopio, vi si distinguerebbero differenze infinite. Pesandole, si reperirebbe che l’una è grave per 999 kili e l’altra per 1001’. (SVP 655) [The Critic: ‘How can you still say that all matter tends to differentiation, when Ford produces 10,000 or 100,000 identical cars?’

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‘The Stupidity of the World’ My Reply: ‘[...] First of all, those cars are not really identical, since (as stated by Leibniz), there are no two identical things. One will come out with a fastened bolt, the other with a slightly looser one; and if we observed them with a microscope, so to speak, we would spot infinite differences. If we weighed them, we would find that one weighs 999 kg, the other 1001 kg’.]

‘As stated by Leibniz, there are no two identical things’. Even the mention of a microscope can be seen as a homage to the eighteenth-century philosopher — only, the ‘two drops of water or milk’ are replaced here by seemingly indistinguishable Ford cars. But what is most important is Gadda’s emphasis on the inherent heterogeneity of the world, or rather ‘la mania di differenziazione da cui è affetto l’universo, vera idea fissa dell’universo che vuol provare ogni esperienza’ [the compulsion to diversification affecting the universe, or the universe’s obsession with trying all possible experiences] (SVP 694). Gadda’s particular attention to diversity and his refusal of uniformity as an unrealistic abstraction are apparent in every aspect of his aesthetics and worldview. In a late article, for instance, he criticises the ‘unitarian-egalitarian’ claim for the standardisation of the Italian language, on account of the numberless differences between local, professional, and even personal jargons: Il ‘tipo unico’ o ‘mediamente corretto’ di lingua italiana, auspicato da molti su basi unitaristico-egualitarie [...], è piuttosto una generosa utopia che una possibile realtà. [...] Massimi e frequentatissimi gli ostacoli inerenti alle diverse condizioni del vivere da luogo a luogo, da clima a clima, [...] in conclusione da individuo a individuo. (‘Processo alla lingua italiana’ [1962], SGF I 1190–91) [The ‘standard’ or ‘average’ type of the Italian language, the one many wish for based on unitary-egalitarian grounds [...], is a generous utopia rather than a possibility. [...] Its obstacles are many and notorious, and include the differences from place to place, from climate to climate, [...] and ultimately from individual to individual.]

In opposition to this form of egalitarianism, Gadda has often exalted the beauty of lexical variations. As stated in the essay ‘Lingua letteraria e lingua dell’uso’ (1942), there are no identical synonyms: ‘i doppioni li voglio, tutti [...]: e voglio anche i triploni, e i quadruploni [...]: e tutti i sinonimi, usati nelle loro variegate accezioni’ [Duplicates, I want them all [...]: and I also want triplicates and quadruplicates [...]: and all the synonyms, used in their variegated meanings] (SGF I 490). Applying a similar principle to the art of storytelling, he praises Balzac’s ability to ref lect the world’s multiplicity, and to make each character distinguishable from all others: ‘[Balzac] si appoggia proprio sulla diversità, si abbandona al molteplice [...]. Il lettore ha davanti a sé una folla, [...] anche se in questa folla si conosce e si distingue gli individui, uno per uno’ [Balzac relies on diversity, he loses himself in multiplicity [...]. Readers have a whole crowd in front of them, [...] but they can recognise the individuals in it, one by one] (‘Creatures chez Balzac’ [1931], SGF I 724). The respect for diversity becomes all the more essential when the uniqueness of actual human beings is at stake. In Gadda’s view, to begin with, no abstract ethical norm can be deemed as universally valid. Moral judgement should instead adjust to the peculiarities of each single individual: ‘Il mio “De Officiis” contiene

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tanti paragrafi quanti sono gli uomini’ [my personal ‘De Officiis’ features as many paragraphs as people] (Meditazione milanese, SVP 684). The importance of this precept is particularly evident in the earliest application of ethics, i.e. the moral education of the youth; the damages caused by abstraction in pedagogy are, in fact, a leitmotif of Gadda’s fiction (from ‘San Giorgio in casa Brocchi’ to La cognizione del dolore), as well as of his autobiographical writings. Good pedagogy, on the contrary, is supposed to approach its subjects one by one: ‘deve fare i conti, sempre, col meccanismo narcissico e studiarlo particolarmente, nell’un per uno, non procedere a stolte generalizzazioni e standardizzazioni’ [it has to deal with narcissism by examining its cases individually, one by one, without jumping to silly generalisations or standardisations] (Eros e Priapo, SGF II 331). An even more dangerous form of generalisation is represented by political egalitarianism: not by chance, anarchism and socialism are among the major targets of Gadda’s polemics — in tones ranging from relatively mild irony (the last Ripamonti marquis in ‘La Madonna dei Filosofi’, RR I 73–74, or the philanthropic association ‘L’Umanitaria’ in La meccanica) to ruthless satire (the ‘anarchico rivoluzionario’ Eligio Pesautti in Dejanira Classis). But the most notable statement of Gadda’s anti-socialism is definitely La cognizione del dolore, as illustrated by Gonzalo’s frequent outbursts against the égalité principle (‘la idea fissa d’una equalità morale dei bipedi’ [the fixed idea of an alleged moral equality between bipeds], RR I 617), and even against universal suffrage (‘tutte persone fisiche e giuridiche aventi voto pari al suo’ [all those people were physical and juridical persons, whose vote counted as much as his], RR I 762). At a closer look, though, what Gadda perceives as the main threat to human diversity is not a specific mind-set or political orientation as much as bourgeois society as a whole. No other Italian modernist, in fact, has ever attacked the mimetism of the average man, the absurdity of commonplaces, as well as the standardising power of mass media and mass politics, in such a vehement and relentless manner. As stated in the 1931 manifesto ‘Tendo al mio fine’, the author feels caged and suffocated primarily by the ‘Law’, that is to say the demeaning, dull version of equality imposed by the bourgeois ‘tribe’: ‘Legge = sistema delle inibizioni che costituiscono eredità normativa della tribù. Nel caso del Ns., la tribù è il ceto mercativo-politecnico di Milano e dintorni’ [The Law = a system of inhibitions, representing the normative legacy of the tribe. In the Author’s case, the tribe is Milan’s trading-polytechnic class] (RR I 122). This does not lead, as was the case with Palazzeschi, to a euphoric celebration of diversity and eccentricity per se; as will be demonstrated, Gadda rather represents individual whims as a pathological reaction to an even more whimsical and unreasonable society, in which common sense has been replaced by standard nonsense. Once again, this point is best exemplified by La cognizione del dolore, and especially by the protagonist’s fury against the dullness of an over-ritualised and bureaucratised society (‘baggianate della ritualistica borghese’ [the nonsense of bourgeois rituals], RR I 764; ‘i sei milioni di burocrati maradagalesi’ [Maradagal’s six million bureaucrats], RR I 706). However, the majority of Gadda’s most representative works is actually based on the opposition between an isolated misfit and a herd-like mass, variously labelled as ‘la folla’, ‘tutti’, ‘la gente’ [the crowd, everybody, the people]. Laughter, of course,

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plays a paramount role in the handling of this opposition; although mockery and humour are not as pervasive on a thematic level as they are in Pirandello, Svevo or Palazzeschi, both the odd individual and the bourgeois crowd are typically depicted by Gadda in ridiculous terms. The next sections will therefore address the Self and Society as the opposite extremes in Gadda’s polarised use of ridicule. Unlike previous chapters, the main focus will be on the author’s novelistic production; the last part of this chapter, however, will be specifically dedicated to Gadda’s short fiction. The Hardened Individual: Gonzalo and Other Caricatures It is not surprising that Gadda’s first novelistic project, the unaccomplished Racconto italiano di ignoto del Novecento (1924–25), was meant to tell the story of an exceptional individual being stif led by the general inadequacy of his environment: ‘Vorrei quindi rappresentare nel romanzo la tragedia di una persona forte che si perverte per l’insufficienza dell’ambiente sociale’ [I would like to represent the tragedy of a strong person tainted by the deficiency of his social ambience] (SVP 397). This ‘tragedy’ is partly inspired by the author’s own ‘annegamento nella palude brianza’ [drowning in Lombardy’s swamp] (SVP 396); at the same time, Gadda feels compelled to set a limit to the autobiographic aspect of the novel. Despite representing the author’s tragedy, the hero will not ref lect Gadda’s personal f laws, as they would cast a grotesque shadow on his character: ‘È questa anche la mia tragedia. Il tipo che deve gestire questo pensiero non deve però assomigliare a me, avendo io anche caratteri involutivi miei personali indipendenti dall’ambiente’ [This is my tragedy too. Yet, the character embodying this concept should not resemble me, since I also have some regressive personal traits unrelated to my environment] (SVP 397). On the contrary, the hero will have to be ‘un buon tipo di razza’ [a good representative of the species] (SVP 397). What remains of the novel is actually faithful to this initial resolution, as the main storyline builds on a stiff polarisation between a highly idealised protagonist (Grifonetto) and the surrounding mediocrity; the result is quite reminiscent of late nineteenth-century Decadentismo clichés, and especially of the typical Dannunzian opposition between a f lawless hero and the ‘grigio diluvio democratico’ [grey democratic f lood]. Not by chance, D’Annunzio’s Trionfo della morte and Il piacere are openly mentioned by Gadda among the main literary sources for the novel.2 Alongside D’Annunzio, another indicative model for Grifonetto’s characterisation is Stendhal, as confirmed by a series of direct references in the preparatory notes for the novel. Gadda’s ‘Elenco delle letture da fare’ [List of books to be read], dated 26 March 1924, includes ‘Rouge et Noir: (Stendhal)’ (SVP 573), while a note written on the same day clearly indicates Stendhal’s novel as a reference point for Grifonetto’s personality, as well as for the tragic epilogue of Racconto: ‘[Grifonetto] è un ipervolitivo (Gatti, Rouge et Noir) [...] (Inserire forse qualche cosa del Rouge et Noir) (Forse no, perché l’epilogo potrebbe essere tale da far credere a una copia di Rouge et Noir)’ [Grifonetto is the overambitious type (Gatti, Rouge et Noir) [...] (I could maybe borrow some ideas from Rouge et Noir) (Maybe not, as the epilogue

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might look like a facsimile of Rouge et Noir)] (SVP 398). Gadda’s protagonist is indeed, in many ways, similar to Julien Sorel, and more generally to Stendhal’s young heroes — i.e., characters who ‘think and feel in opposition to their time’ (Auerbach), and whose ‘inevitable defeat in the struggle against the dominating forces of their age’ leads to a state of ‘withdrawal from life’ (Lukács).3 Nonetheless, the Stendhalian paradigm is fundamentally simplified by Gadda, as he yields to the Manichaeism typical of the Romantic lie; in this respect, the novel’s rigid separation between an idealised protagonist and a mediocre society rather reminds us of what Stendhal defined as ‘romans de femmes de chambre’ [housemaid novels].4 Very little remains of Stendhal’s peculiar irony towards his hero, a faint echo of which can only be perceived when the narrator of Racconto seems to dissociate himself from Grifonetto’s proto-Fascist monologues: ‘E quando sarà deputato potrà sputarci addosso quel che vorrà e cantare le lodi del liberalismo... fin che vorrà, del liberalismo che ha fatto l’Italia, che ha governato l’Italia... da Minghetti a... Orlando’. Non vogliano i nostri lettori far nostre le parole ed i pensieri dei concitati. (SVP 583) [‘And when he becomes a member of parliament, he will be welcome to spit on us everything he wants, and to sing us the praises of liberalism... which supposedly created Italy, and ruled it... from Minghetti... to Orlando.’ I beg my readers not to hold me responsible for the words and thoughts of a fanatic.]

Gadda’s caveat to the reader can hardly conceal his sympathy for the character, but it does have something in common with Stendhal’s facetious footnotes to Julien’s and Fabrice’s boldest utterances: ‘Mais quant à moi’, pensait-il, ‘je serais bien dupe de vivre encore deux mois dans ce séjour dégoûtant, en butte à tout ce que la faction patricienne peut inventer d’infâme et d’humiliant’* [...]. [*footnote: C’est un jacobin qui parle]5 [‘As for me, I would be a fool to live two more months in this filthy place, subject to every kind of infamy and humiliation that a patrician mind can devise’. Footnote: These are the words of a Jacobin.] ‘J’ai vu cette grande image de l’Italie se relever de la fange où les Allemands la retiennent plongée’* [...]. [*footnote: C’est un personnage passionné qui parle, il traduit en prose quelques vers du célèbre Monti]6 [‘I had a great vision of Italy rising from the mud where she had been plunged into by the Germans’. Footnote: These are the words of a passionate man; he is just translating some verses by the famous Monti.]

Aside from this exception, however, Grifonetto is completely immune to Stendhalian irony. Gadda himself was not particularly happy with such a stiff and unrealistic characterisation, and more generally with the melodramatic tone of the novel (‘non cascare nell’esagerato’ [try not to overdo it], SVP 400) — which, of course, must have been a major factor in the eventual dismissal of the project. In the works following Racconto italiano, the polarisation between society and one isolated character is taken in a radically different direction — the latter being anything but f lawless, and his peculiar traits being stressed to a grotesque extent. This is certainly the case with the short story ‘Cinema’, whose original version

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dates back to the same years as Racconto, and was later reworked to be included into Gadda’s first published volume (La Madonna dei Filosofi, 1931). The story mainly consists in the mock-heroic account of the narrator’s Sunday walk down a crowded Milanese avenue; particular emphasis is put on the protagonist’s disconnection from the people around him (the word folla recurs several times in the text), but also on his personal whims and oddities — his gluttony (‘un folle impulso’ [a crazy impulse], RR I 59; ‘tre caramelle sono una delizia tre volte più buona’ [three candies are three times the delight], RR I 63), his olfactory phobias (‘quell’odorino era una cosa naturalissima’ [that smell must have been a very natural thing], RR I 62), and his superstitious rituals (‘ero un po’ impressionabile’ [I was a little oversensitive], RR I 64). Something similar occurs in the eponymous story of Gadda’s first book, ‘La Madonna dei Filosofi’, as the misfit status of the main character (a neurasthenic engineer named Baronfo) is confirmed by a wide range of ridiculous idiosyncrasies — from his quasi-hysterical reactions to rationalist architecture to his awkward outbursts against the loud music of gramophones (RR I 87). Personal quirks and phobias are also a leitmotif in Gadda’s second book, Il castello di Udine (1934). Baronfo’s hyperbolic aversion to loud music, for instance, is reprised in two autobiographical reports, ‘La festa dell’uva a Marino’ and ‘Della musica milanese’. More generally, the whole collection builds an image of the author as an odd, idiosyncratic figure, whose peculiarities are often emphasised in ironic terms — suffice it to mention the fictional endnote apparatus attributed to ‘Feo Averrois’, containing various references to Gadda’s moody and misanthropic nature (‘istato di perenne malumore’ [state of constant bad mood], RR I 166; ‘uno de’ consueti attacchi di misantropìa’ [one of his usual fits of misanthropy], RR I 212). In other words, the author portrays himself as an original character, whose temper tantrums are a ludicrous reaction to the differently ludicrous ‘swamps’ of social life. Individual whims or bizze are actually the main focus of a whole subgenre within Gadda’s short fiction,7 as exemplified by the unaccomplished series ‘I viaggi del Gulliver cioè del Gaddus’ (1932–33) and most notably by the short story ‘La casa’ (c. 1935), in which a caricature-like ‘Ing. C.E. Gadda’ gives free vent to his weirdest gastronomic and architectural fancies. In summary, between 1925 and 1935, Gadda keeps working on one of his favourite narrative patterns (the antithesis between social mediocrity and an ‘exceptional’ individual), and gradually turns the f lawless hero into a bizarre misfit. Once again, laughter contrasts with the Romantic pathos of originality — the result can be a uniformly farcical-satirical one (as in ‘La casa’), or a more complex mixture between tragic and grotesque elements. This latter option is best exemplified, of course, by Gadda’s first major novel, La cognizione del dolore (1938–41). Gonzalo Pirobutirro is definitely an abnormal individual — i.e., as openly stated by the narrator, one that does not meet social ‘standards’ (‘fuori da ogni standard’, RR I 600); his anomaly is emphasised by a series of idiosyncratic traits or ‘caratteri involutivi’, which are further amplified by the urban legends concerning his hyperbolic gluttony, his greed and his choleric nature (RR I 596–98). As a consequence, Gonzalo is generally regarded by his fellow citizens as a despicable and ludicrous figure; not by chance, common people like doctor Higueroa have an habit of laughing at him (‘il dottore

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ridacchiò di Gonzalo, e della sua goffaggine’ [the doctor giggled at Gonzalo, and at his awkwardness], RR I 604) — a reaction which is also hinted at when the character’s description as a Quixotic ‘hidalgo’ is followed by the impersonal echo of public ridicule (‘Ha! Ha!’, RR I 605). Gadda’s reference to the social ritual of derision is instrumental in highlighting the distance between the isolated misfit and the crowd. Indeed, Gonzalo is ‘one’, up against a multitude or ‘association’ (‘s’era veduto cacciare, come fosse una belva, dalla loro carità inferocita, di uomini: di consorzio, di mille. Egli era uno’ [he had seen himself hounded, as if he were an animal, by their infuriated charity, of men: of association, of a thousand. He was one], RR I 728), much like Dostoevsky’s man of the underground: ‘I am alone, and they are everybody’.8 The consorzio of mass society is often designated in the novel by the indefinite pronoun ‘tutti’,9 as in the emblematic satirical description of a crowded bourgeois restaurant: Tutti, tutti: e più che mai quei signori attavolati. Tutti erano consideratissimi! [...] Ecco, ecco, tutti eran certi che un loro impreveduto decreto avrebbe lasciato scoccare sicuramente la importantissima scintilla. [...] Così rimanevano. A guardare. Chi? Che cosa? Le donne? Ma neanche. Forse rimirare se stessi nello specchio delle pupille altrui. In piena valorizzazione dei loro polsini, e dei loro gemelli da polso. E della loro faccia di manichini ossibuchivori. (RR I 700–01; emphasis added) [All, all: and more than ever those gentlemen at table. All were highly esteemed! [...] There, they all were certain that an unforeseen decree of theirs would have struck the important spark [...]. So they remained. Looking. At whom? What? Women? Not even. Perhaps gazing at themselves in the mirror of the others’ pupils. In full exploitation of their cuffs, and of their cuff links. And of their faces like ossibuchivore dummies.]

Gadda depicts his hollow men as meat-eating ‘dummies’ — a lexical choice quite reminiscent of Gautier’s ‘automates’, one of the earliest literary representations of the levelling effects of social life in the bourgeois age. More generally, the clients’ dignified and pretentious tone makes them perfect examples of señoritos satisfechos, to borrow the expression used by Ortega y Gasset in another exemplary manifesto of the modernist resistance to the stolid monotony of mass society.10 Gonzalo’s bizarre quirks — just like those of his predecessors in Gadda’s fiction — should therefore be considered not only as a compensation to the pains and constrictions he endured in his youth (‘le lunghe esclusioni’ [prolonged exclusions], Cognizione, 513), but also as a pathological reaction to such a standardised and automatised environment. Looked at from this perspective, Gonzalo’s personality bears a striking correspondence to Adorno and Horkheimer’s definition of the ‘hardened individual’, i.e. the individual who develops highly idiosyncratic features in opposition to a highly uniformed society: The radically individual, unassimilated features of a human being are always both at once: residues not fully encompassed by the prevailing system and still happily surviving, and marks of the mutilation inf licted on its members by that system. In these traits, basic determinants of the system are repeated in exaggerated form: miserliness, for example, magnifies the principle of fixed property, hypochondria that of unref lecting self-preservation. Because the

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Quite significantly, Molière’s originals — the literary example chosen by Adorno and Horkheimer — are also explicitly compared to Gonzalo in La cognizione: ‘Plauto, in lui, non troverebbe il suo personaggio, forse Molière. La povera madre, non volendolo, rivide le lontane figure del Misanthrope e dell’Avare’ [Plautus would not have him as a character in his comedies — maybe Molière. His poor mother inadvertently recalled the distant figures of Le Misanthrope and L’Avare] (RR I 682). Further variations on this type take place in Gadda’s second novelistic masterpiece, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. In this case, too, particular attention is given to the contrast between individual anomalies and social standards — with the latter being represented, this time, by the coercive ‘normality’ of Fascist Rome in 1927. ‘Tutti’ is significantly chosen as the opening word of the novel, providing the background for the detective to stand out as a deviant figure (‘Tutti oramai lo chiamavano don Ciccio’ [everybody called him Don Ciccio], RR II 15); the word ‘standard’ is also assigned a primary symbolic role, since Giuliano Valdarena — a major representative of the bourgeois norm in Quer pasticciaccio — works as a salesman for Standard Oil.12 Unlike in La cognizione, the misfit status does not pertain to a single protagonist, but rather to three variously irregular characters: Ingravallo (a bachelor, at a time when not being married was a matter of public stigmatisation), Liliana Balducci (an infertile woman, when procreation was regarded as woman’s primary task), and lastly a seemingly minor character, commendatore Angeloni, whose gluttony, melancholy and celibacy (not to mention his probable homosexuality) are all evident marks of originality.13 Among these three mavericks, the one who best fits the notion of ‘hardened individual’ is definitely Angeloni — not by chance, the most openly autobiographical character of Quer pasticciaccio. As was the case with Gonzalo, Gadda puts particular emphasis on the grotesque, idiosyncratic features of the commendatore; his representation as a ludicrous misfit is underpinned by a series of intertextual inf luences, starting with such a classic archetype as Manzoni’s Don Abbondio.14 Even more notably, as further proof of a common grammar of originality within Italian modernism, Angeloni displays a strong resemblance to one of Palazzeschi’s most paradigmatic buffi — namely Telemaco Bollentini, the protagonist of ‘Il dono’ (1937). In the original version of the novel, the portrait of the commendatore was accompanied by a long footnote in praise of celibacy, which is probably modelled on the digressive incipit of Palazzeschi’s story:15 Fu allora proprio che disfrenò quella santa crociata addosso ai celibi! Poarini! [...] Noto che Beethoven, Cartesio, Catullo, Francesco di Sales patrono degli

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scrittori, Federico II di Hohenzollern elettore di Brandeburgo e re vegetariano di Prussia detto il Grande, Francesco Petrarca, Numa Pompilio, Luciano Manara, Giuseppe Giusti, Torquato Tasso, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Camillo Benso conte di Cavour, Carlo e Federico Borromeo, Gogol, Orazio, Virgilio, Sant’Agostino, fra’ Girolamo Savonarola, Stendhal, Francesco Massimiliano Giuseppe Robespierre, Leonardo, Leibniz, Pascal, Enea Silvio, Kant, Vincenzo Bellini, Benvenuto Cellini, Origene (et pour cause), Baudelaire, Eugenio von Savoy, Luigi Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta duca degli Abruzzi, Benedetto Spinoza, Gaetano Casati e il raro gobbetto Leopardi e’ furon celibi, vissero e morirono foglie secche. (RR II 306–07) [And then he [Mussolini] started that Holy War against celibates! those poor devils! [...] I remind you that Beethoven, Descartes, Catullus, Francis of Sales patron saint of writers, Friedrich II von Hohenzollern elector of Brandenburg and vegetarian king of Prussia also known as The Great, Petrarch, Numa Pompilius, Luciano Manara, Giuseppe Giusti, Torquato Tasso, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Camillo Benso Count of Cavour, Carlo and Federico Borromeo, Gogol, Horace, Virgil, Saint Augustine, Girolamo Savonarola, Stendhal, Robespierre, Leonardo, Leibnitz, Pascal, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Kant, Vincenzo Bellini, Benvenuto Cellini, Origen (of course), Baudelaire, Eugene of Savoy, Luigi Amedeo Duke of Abruzzi, Baruch Spinoza, Gaetano Casati and Giacomo Leopardi (that little hunchback) were all celibates, they lived and died like dry leaves.] Parlando dei celibi intendo rivolgermi a quelli del presente, ben inteso, non a quelli del passato, giacché il movimento di protesta riguarda il tempo nostro in modo preciso, altrimenti qualcheduno mi potrebbe insinuare che furono celibi Mazzini e Cavour e, siamo giusti, chi di voi sarebbe capace di muover loro un rimprovero per tale ragione, o sotto nessun riguardo a dirne male? Furono celibi il Petrarca che tanto amò e d’amore sospirò finché ebbe fiato. Leonardo e il Buonarroti, e noi dobbiamo rallegrarci che non gli abbiamo fatti fuori prima di compiere le loro faccende. Celibe fu ‘il poverel di Dio’, e chi oserebbe alzar la voce su questo prodigio di purità, d’innocenza e di sublime amore? E celibi furono sempre i grandi Padri di nostra Santa Romana Chiesa con tutti i loro seguaci, ma questi lo furono soltanto per rimanere immuni dal guazzabuglio della carne. (‘Il dono’, TN 709) [In speaking of celibates, I intend to deal with those of our own time, of course, not with those of the past, because the ill will against them concerns our times in a specific way. Otherwise someone might counter that Mazzini and Cavour were celibates; and let’s be honest, who among you would be willing to reproach them on such grounds or to speak ill of them under any circumstances? Celibates include Petrarch, who loved deeply and sighed for love until his last breath. And what of Leonardo or Michelangelo? We can congratulate ourselves on not having got rid of them before they completed their work. Another celibate was ‘il poverel di Dio’, San Francesco; and who would dare say a word against such a miracle of purity, innocence, and sublime love? And so too the great Fathers of our Holy Roman Church, celibates all, as were their followers, although they were celibate only in order to remain immune from the muddle of f lesh.]

Just like Palazzeschi, Gadda criticises the Fascist stigmatisation of bachelors by enumerating a list of illustrious unmarried men; quite significantly, many names occur in both texts (Petrarch, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Cavour, even the Fathers

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of the Church). Moreover, Angeloni and Telemaco are equally gluttonous, and have the same habit of sending gift baskets of food to themselves: ‘Doveva essere un bongustaio: a giudicare almeno dai pacchetti, dai tartufetti... Pacchetti che per solito li inoltrava lui a se stesso’ [he must have been a gourmet, judging at least by the little packages, the truff les... packages which, as a rule, he delivered to himself ] (Quer pasticciaccio, RR II 41); ‘Con tutta la sua avarizia era ghiotto, gli facevano gola quelle delizie, i dolci e la frutta [...]. Come sarebbe piaciuto anche a lui ricevere degli omaggi’ [those delicacies and exquisite objects sorely tempted Signor Telemaco; [...] how he too would have liked to receive gifts!] (‘Il dono’, TN, 711–12). At the same time, Gadda’s perspective on individual oddities is rather different from Palazzeschi’s, since it does not result in an exaltation of eccentricity as such; in his view (at least on a conscious level), rules and standards are not necessarily an obnoxious constriction, as long as they are supported by reason and by an awareness of the world’s complexity and diversity. Not by chance, the utopic idea of the perfect Army or perfect State, i.e. an Army or State that is worth the sacrifice of the Self, is a constant motif in Gadda’s writings — emblematically, Gonzalo himself is a fond reader of such ‘normative’ texts as Plato’s Laws (RR I 727) and Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (RR I 605). Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the rules and standards of bourgeois mass society are despised by Gadda as a dull, debasing restraint, against which the (rational, moral) individual is entitled to claim and exhibit his originality. ‘Only in relation to hardened society, and not absolutely, does the hardened individual represent something better’: Gadda would certainly agree with Adorno on this point. On a more general level, this conditional celebration of idiosyncrasies is closely related to Gadda’s ambivalent perspective on the Self: on the one hand, egoism and individualism are a constant object of philosophical and satirical confutation in his works; on the other, the over-inf lation of the subject’s quirks and peculiarities is regarded as a legitimate (albeit grotesque) reaction to the levelling violence of mass civilisation. In short, the ludicrous aura surrounding Gadda’s hardened individuals is primarily meant to highlight the pressure exerted by social compulsions. The same could be affirmed, to be sure, with regard to the symbolic function of the risible/derided misfit in Romantic realism; and indeed, at least in La cognizione, the combination of grotesque and tragic elements in the portrayal of individual originality is quite close to the standards of Balzac and Dostoevsky.16 As a matter of fact, Gadda is quite far from Svevo’s and Palazzeschi’s thorough denial of the Romantic dramatisation of irregularity. Once more, as is also the case with Pirandello, his perspective on it is rather an ambiguous one: the clash between society and the individual can intermittently be seen in a tragic light, but at the same time its pathos is undermined by the idea that social life as a whole should not be taken seriously. Be it in the form of sceptical umorismo (Pirandello) or of cantankerous satire (Gadda), the author’s laughter serves as a counterbalance to the traumatic aspects of social homogenisation.

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The Society of Equals: From Balzac to Flaubert Despite their ludicrous traits, Gadda’s hardened individuals are clearly the object of the author’s sympathy; on the other hand, the hardened society is touched by a different kind of ridicule — one that does not leave any room for pity or comprehension. Already in Racconto italiano, Gadda’s intolerance of the monotonous ‘swamp’ of bourgeois life takes the shape of pitiless satire and grotesque characterisation; this aspect, however, is even more evident in his second novelistic attempt, Un fulmine sul 220 (1932–36). Collective mimetism is embodied here by the Caviggioli family, as well as by other clans of the Milanese upper-middle-class — society is in fact represented a tribe (‘tribù’, a recurring term in the novel), in which people are ‘coniugati fra loro, imparentati fra loro, associati fra loro’ [married to each other, related to each other, associated to each other] (F220 246), graduate from the same technical university (the Politecnico), and share the exact same habits (‘ “le mie care abitudini” erano il bozzolo prediletto dove s’imbozzolavano tutti della famiglia’ [‘my dear habits’ were the cocoon in which everyone in the family used to dwell], F220 150). Gadda’s satire of the Milanese swamp is actually indebted, to some extent, to a number of early nineteenth-century models. An important detail, in this respect, lies in the Caviggiolis’ habit of buttoning their coats up to their neck as a sign of alleged gravitas. Valerio — the young, handsome heir — is generally regarded as a serious and reliable person precisely due to his buttoned-up coat or paltò (‘paltò scuro rigorosamente abbottonato’ [a tightly buttoned-up dark coat], F220 45; ‘lo dicevano tutti un ragazzo serissimo: difatti aveva sempre il paltò rigorosamente abbottonato’ [he was considered a very serious boy, since he was always buttoned up in his coat], F220 99); more generally, his clan is often referred to as a bunch of fastened black coats (‘quei paltò neri [...], neri e lustri tutti i bottoni’ [those dark coats, with all their dark and shiny buttons], F220 34), that only zephyrs could unfasten (‘zefiri ch’erano i soli a saper disbottonare il paltò a un Cavigioli’, F220 46). Quite identically, in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, the distinctive sign of the Barnacles’ respectability was nothing but a buttoned-up coat: But Mr Tite Barnacle was a buttoned-up man, and consequently a weighty one. All buttoned-up men are weighty. All buttoned-up men are believed in. Whether or no the reserved and never-exercised power of unbuttoning, fascinates mankind; whether or no wisdom is supposed to condense and augment when buttoned up, and to evaporate when unbuttoned; it is certain that the man to whom importance is accorded is the buttoned-up man. Mr Tite Barnacle never would have passed for half his current value, unless his coat had been always buttoned-up to his white cravat.17

Just like Valerio, Tite Junior inherits the same mannerism from his father: ‘Even this youth, if his jacket could have been unbuttoned and his heart laid bare, would have been seen, as a distant adherent of the Barnacle family, already to aspire to a situation under Government’.18 Further evidence of Dickens’s inf luence is provided by Valerio’s ‘piccolo e civettuolo regolo calcolatore’ [fancy measuring rod] sticking out of ‘il taschino della giacca’ [the pocket of his coat] (F220 106) — a custom he

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shares not only with his fellow engineers graduating from the Politecnico, but also with Thomas Gradgrind from Hard Times, an emblem of society’s standardising compulsions (‘with a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to’).19 An even more remarkable source for Gadda’s representation of social levelling has to be identified with Balzac. One of the most memorable allegories of bourgeois uniformity in Un fulmine is the episode in which the librarian of Milan’s Circolo Filologico gets entangled in the web of homonymies and kinships intertwining his clients, and making them virtually unrecognisable from each other: Il valente bibliotecario si irretisce ne’ diversi indirizzi degli omonimi: il Perego di via Giulio Cesare si chiama Filippo e il Perego di via Filippo Carcano si chiama Giulio. [...] Invano! Ché la esavalente famiglia è imparentata con altre famiglie esavalenti della vecchia Milano, tanto che ne è venuta un’arnia: e le api di quest’arnia, di sabato, mellificano al Filologico. Cognati dei Pèrego, cugini dei Maldifassi, nipoti dei Lattuada e pronipoti dei Corbetta, legati in seconde nozze coi Rusconi, in seconda cognazione coi Ghiringhelli, e in terza con altra casata di cui mi sfugge il patronimico, d’altronde notissimo, facile è il pensare cosa sia per i Cavigioli, il gomitolo degli zii e delle zie. (F220 98) [The valiant librarian gets entangled in the addresses of the namesakes: the Perego from via Giulio Cesare is named Filippo, the Perego from via Filippo Carcano is named Giulio. [...] All for nothing! The hexavalent family is related with other hexavalent families from the old town, so much so that they have formed a beehive; and on Saturday, the bees of this hive make their honey at the Filologico. In-laws with the Peregos, cousins with the Maldifassis, nephews with the Lattuadas and grand-nephews with the Corbettas, remarried with the Rosconis, second-degree relations with the Giringhellis and third-degree with another illustrious family whose name I do not remember — it’s easy to picture the tangle created by the aunts and uncles of the Cavigiolis.]

Milan’s middle class is depicted as a tangle (‘gomitolo’) or beehive (‘alveare’) in which each family, like a hexavalent compound (‘esavalenti famiglie’), is linked to the others by the bonds of uncleship or cousinship. As stated by Balzac in Ursule Mirouët, ‘tout bourgeois est cousin d’un bourgeois’ [‘every bourgeois is cousin to another bourgeois’] (CH III 783). More precisely, a passage from Balzac’s novel stands out as a major source for the Circolo Filologico episode: Sous Louis XI, [...] la bourgeoisie de Nemours se composait de Minoret, de Massin, de Levrault et de Crémière. Sous Louis XIII, ces quatre familles produisaient déjà des Massin-Crémière, des Levrault-Massin, des MassinMinoret, des Minoret-Minoret, des Crémière-Levrault, des Levrault-MinoretMassin, des Massin-Levrault, des Minoret-Massin, des Massin-Massin, des Crémière-Massin [...]. Les variations de ce kaléidoscope domestique à quatre éléments se compliquaient tellement par les naissances et par les mariages, que l’arbre généalogique des bourgeois de Nemours eût embarrassé les Bénédictins de l’Almanach de Gotha eux-mêmes, malgré la science atomistique avec laquelle ils disposent les zigzags des alliances allemandes [...]. Diverses sont les destinées de ces abeilles sorties de la ruche-mère. [...] Pleines du même sang et appelées du même nom pour toute similitude, ces quatre navettes avaient tissé sans relâche

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une toile humaine. [...] Une famille peut devenir une nation, et malheureusement une nation peut redevenir une seule et simple famille. (CH III 782; emphasis added) [Under Louis XI, [...] the bourgeoisie of Nemours was made up of Minorets, Massins, Levraults and Cremieres. Under Louis XIII these four families had already produced the Massin-Cremieres, the Levrault-Massins, the MassinMinorets, the Minoret-Minorets, the Cremiere-Levraults, the LevraultMinoret-Massins, Massin-Levraults, Minoret-Massins, Massin-Massins, and Cremiere-Massins. [...] The variations of this family kaleidoscope of four branches was now so complicated by births and marriages that the genealogical tree of the bourgeoisie of Nemours would have puzzled the Benedictines of the Almanach of Gotha, in spite of the atomic science with which they arrange those zigzags of German alliances. [...] Diverse are the destinies of these bees from the parent hive. [...] Full of the same blood and called by the same name (for sole likeness), these four roots had ceaselessly woven a human network [...]. One family may become a nation; and unfortunately, a nation may become one family.]

Just as Gadda does with Milan, Balzac describes Nemours’s bourgeoisie as a human web (‘une toile humaine’), or a beehive (‘ruche-mère’) built by a limited number of families, where each element is so interlaced with the others that not even atomism (‘la science atomistique’) could shed any light on it. His ironical conclusion, too, is undoubtedly in line with Gadda’s perspective on the Caviggiolis: ‘a family can become a nation — and, unfortunately, a nation can become one single family’. However, despite building on Romantic-realist sources, Gadda’s satire of middleclass mimetism is essentially different from such models. In Dickens and Balzac, social life is often satirised for its uniformity, but its fundamental seriousness and dramatic potential are never really questioned. In Gadda, instead, society and its dramas are so contaminated by bêtise that it has become far more difficult to take them seriously. Not by chance, Flaubert is another relevant (if less visible) source for Gadda: in Un fulmine sul 220 and especially in the Adalgisa version, for instance, the description of the pompous Milanese businessmen (and wives) at the Opera is indebted to Madame Bovary’s Lucia di Lammermoor chapter;20 an explicit reference to Emma’s wedding is made in ‘Invito a pranzo’, a satirical sketch from the early Thirties.21 More generally, Gadda and Flaubert share a (modernist) inclination to ‘laugh about everything’ — i.e. to consider bourgeois civilisation at large as a ridiculous pantomime. As a consequence, while Balzac still represents the extinction of originality in a predominantly serious-tragic tone, Gadda’s pervasive satire makes pathos either impossible, or only conceivable in paradoxical and highly unstable terms. The former option is suitably represented by the unaccomplished Fulmine (an essentially satirical work, despite the author’s attempt to interpose laughter with Bruno and Elsa’s pitiful love story), whereas the latter is best embodied by La cognizione del dolore — a novel in which a grotesque, hardened individual is set against the stiff stupidity of the world (‘la imbecillaggine generale del mondo’, RR I 764).

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Swift or Boccaccio? Gadda’s Short Stories and the Ambiguities of Laughter The modernist reduction of bourgeois common sense to common nonsense has not always been pursued by Gadda in a linear, consistent way. On the contrary, his early works (up until Cognizione) are characterised by an ambiguous handling of laughter: on the one hand, his satire tends to reveal the author’s perception of bourgeois society as the realm of stupidity; on the other, this attitude is sometimes contradicted by the attempt to establish a dialogue with the most trivial standards of middleclass humour. The latter inclination is already apparent in the notes for Racconto italiano, where Gadda praises popular humorous magazines (such as Il Travaso delle idee) for their ability to capture the attention of the average reader by referring to ‘rappresentazioni comuni’ [common ideas] and ‘argomenti del giorno’ [topics of the day]: ‘Su questo poggia il lirismo-commento dei giornali umoristici. Avvenimenti del giorno. E quanto sia efficace lo prova il fatto che si lascia l’umorismo sbavato di certi raccontatori non interessanti, ma non si lascia il “Travaso” ’ [This is the principle underlying the humour of popular magazines. Topics of the day. And its effectiveness is proved by the fact that people do not care about the faint humour of some boring storytellers, but nobody forgets to read Il Travaso] (SVP 479). Between the Twenties and the Thirties, Gadda is still heavily inf luenced by the idea of humour conveyed by such nineteenth-century classics as Manzoni and Dickens especially (both mentioned as paradigms of ‘maniera umoristica’ in the Cahier, SVP 396); i.e., he is still persuaded that laughter should rely on a mutual understanding between the author and the public. Looked at from this angle, papers like Il Travaso or Guerin meschino — another magazine Gadda was well acquainted with 22 — can really be an effective, albeit prosaic, model. This point is all the more manifest in Gadda’s early short fiction, as the genre is peculiarly suitable for dealing with the ‘topics of the day’ — this is, after all, what the very term novella stands for. Of particular interest is the unfinished story ‘Il “manubia” di Ramas’ (1932), whose protagonist is an eccentric architect — and amateur Etruscologist — named Ponzoni: L’architetto Ponzoni continua a costruir case a Milano ma è nel contempo (si sa che tutti abbiamo il nostro tic) uno de’ rari etruscòlogi della pochissimo etrusca città. Dovendo un giorno scrivere per il mio giornale un articolo contro alcuni architetti milanesi, e cioè parlar male del Pertegati, del Ravanna e del Ludrio, pensai di rivolgermi al loro collega Ponzoni [...]. Volò improvvisamente di là dai millenni, nei regni misteriosi della saggezza e delle indecifrabili cose. Come Etruscòlogo, a Milano, il Ponzoni è indiscusso, ma del resto, anche l’Etruria non vi è molto più discussa del Ponzoni: gli etruscòlogi tedeschi lo discutono, e gli inglesi lo ignorano. (‘Manubia’, 14) [Mr Ponzoni keeps building houses in Milan, but (everybody has his hobbyhorse) he is also one of the few Etruscologists in this hardly Etruscan city. One day I was asked to write an article against some Milanese architects (that is to say, I had to speak ill of Pertegati, Ravanna and Ludro); so I thought I’d better have a talk with their colleague Ponzoni. [...] He suddenly f lew away from the present time, to the mysterious realms of Wisdom and Obscure Knowledge. As an Etruscologist, in Milan, Ponzoni remains undisputed; but, after all, Etruria

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itself is not really disputed about here. German Etruscologists, instead, dispute him quite a lot, while the English simply ignore him.]

Despite looking like a typical creation of Gadda’s satirical imagery, the character is modelled on a real-life Milanese architect; and more importantly, Gadda is likely to have borrowed that model from a popular ‘giornale umoristico’. In January 1926, Guerin meschino featured a satirical text on the architect/Etruscologist Antonio Cavallazzi (see Fig. 1). The magazine makes fun of the architect, in a vein quite similar to ‘Il “manubia” di Ramas’. Gadda’s debt towards this cheap kind of humour has never been properly established, but it would certainly deserve further consideration; for instance, even the author’s idiosyncratic satire of rationalist architecture (‘La casa’, c. 1935) or of Novecento artists (‘San Giorgio in casa Brocchi’, c. 1930) seems to have been largely inspired by Guerin meschino.23 Further evidence is provided by the original sketches (1931) of ‘L’incendio di via Keplero’, and more precisely by the grotesque portrait of the fortune-teller Myriam: ‘Sono li mistere dell’anema’ rispondeva grave la Myriam: ‘che noi chiromante leggiamo, come le bambini leggeno in tel sillabario...’. ‘L’anima della veggente è un mistere, signora Teresa, e nessune mai poitrà far luce in questa notte, che si perde nella... notte dei tempe’. (La notte dei tempi era un suo tic, che otteneva un grande effetto sulla clientela milanese: le dieci lire di tariffa diventavano in grazia della notte dei tempi, dòdece e perfin quindece...). (‘L’incendio di via Keplero’, DM 260) [‘These are the mysteries of the soul’, answered Myriam: ‘we can read them, like children do with their spelling-books’. ‘The soul of the fortune-teller is a mystery, Mrs. Teresa, and nobody will ever shed light on this dark night, which gets lost in the Night of Time’. (The Night of Time was an obsession of hers, and it used to impress her Milanese clients; thanks to the Night of Time, the ten-liras fee used to become a twelve or even fifteen-liras fee...).]

In Gadda’s notebook, the word ‘fortune-teller’ (‘veggente’) is f lanked by the variant ‘Pythoness’ (‘pitonessa’, DM 270) — which is the name of a grotesque clairvoyant from Southern Italy, appearing between 1923 and 1925 in a regular section of Il Travaso delle idee. Gadda’s familiarity with the character is confirmed by a letter written to Ugo Betti in 1926: ‘Mi sentii uno scapaccione sull’ala del cappello: “Cappello, giovinotte”. [...] Mi volsi e capii finalmente che non la pitonessa del Travaso ma un fiancheggiatore di un manipolo di camicie nere, mi aveva rivolto la allocuzione’ [Somebody was touching my hat: ‘Cappello, giovinotte’. [...] I turned over, and what I saw was not the Pythoness of Il travaso, but the supporter of a gang of Blackshirts] (IF 105; emphasis added). And indeed, Myriam’s language in ‘L’incendio di via Keplero’ is extremely close to the Southern dialect spoken by the Pythoness (also known as ‘Sonnambula’): Venghino, venghino signori, qui sta la vera sonnambula che legge nel pensiere, illumina il futuro e scopre il preterito [...]. — Dimmi, o Pitonessa, chi è questo signore che tengo per il colle? — Le vete con le mie occhie bendate che queste giovinotte è uno giovinotte, la qualo paro di essero une che vuolo discendere e une che vuole discendere non è. (‘La Sonnambula’, in Il Travaso delle idee, 21 June 1925, p. 4)

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Fig. 1. ‘Etruscologia’, Guerin meschino, 31 January 1926, p. 1 (reproduced from microfiche)

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[Come here, gentlemen, here is the real Sleepwalker, reading your mind, reveal ing the future, discovering the past. [...] — Tell me, o Pythoness, who is this man that I am holding by the neck? — I see him with my blind-folded eyes, this boy looks like a boy who wants to descend, but in fact is not a boy who wants to descend.]

The choice of following such trivial models is mainly due to the fact that Gadda must have found the antisocial and nihilistic edges of his own satire both politically and aesthetically disturbing. On the former level, Gadda’s initial support of Fascism contrasted with his bleak view of society, in a time when pessimism was officially banned by Mussolini’s propaganda;24 on the latter, the implied elitism of modernist irony stood in glaring contrast with the author’s nineteenth-century novelistic paradigms (such as Dickens and Manzoni). As a consequence, Gadda’s borrowings from the likes of Guerin meschino and Il Travaso can be seen as a way to compensate the extremes of modernist satire with a milder, more acceptable form of humour. This oscillation between two virtually opposite kinds of laughter is best summarised by a note from the original manuscript of ‘San Giorgio in casa Brocchi’: La retorica dell’‘Ohibò’ è semplicemente motivo di riso e di staffile. Soltanto lo Swift e il Boccaccio dovrebbero venire incaricati ufficialmente di occuparsi di siffatto ‘Ohibò!’ (DM 148) [The rhetoric of ‘Ohibò’ [i.e. moralism] can only be a subject for laughter and satire. Only Swift and Boccaccio should be officially allowed to write about that ‘Ohibò’.]

Swift and Boccaccio are mentioned by Gadda as the main models for his antibourgeois satire; yet they stand for two extremely different, almost contradictory paradigms. In fact, while Boccaccio’s laughter typically relies on a dialogue between the writer and his public in the name of a shared common sense,25 Swift’s irony is of a notoriously misanthropic sort — as remarked by Frank Leavis, its ‘implied solidarity with the reader is itself ironical, a means to betrayal’.26 In several later texts, such as La cognizione del dolore or the final version of ‘L’incendio di via Keplero’ (1940), Gadda’s modernist (Swiftian) satire of the hardened society will clearly prevail; the same applies for Quer pasticciaccio, although satire is less openly universal in this case (its main target being the Standard of a past society, i.e. Fascist Italy). Over the largest part of the Ventennio, nonetheless, laughter plays an ambivalent role in Gadda’s works: in its most radical forms, it is instrumental to the author’s sarcastic detachment from the obtuse uniformity of bourgeois civilisation; in its milder ones, it is meant to provide a basis for the author’s unstable dialogue with the average reader. What ensues is in many ways akin to Pirandello’s double bind with civilisation, whereby the pull of social conventions occasionally interferes with the individual’s claim for originality. Most importantly, however, the ultimately modernist core of Gadda’s laughter — as ref lected by his perspective on the collective standard as well as on the misfit’s isolation — follows the pattern already observed in the works of Pirandello, Svevo, and Palazzeschi: it evokes the Romantic antinomy between individual uniqueness and social uniformity, while at the same time undermining its serious-tragic potential.

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Notes to Chapter 5 1. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, The Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence, ed. by Henry G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), p. 36. 2. ‘Vedere eventualmente il Trionfo della Morte del D’Annunzio’ (SVP 400); ‘come per es. il “Piacere” del D’Annunzio’ (SVP 462). 3. See respectively Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 482, and Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 82. 4. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, ed. by Yves Ansel and Philippe Berthier (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), i, 830. 5. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 787. 6. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, in Romans et nouvelles, ed. by Henri Martineau (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), ii, 49–50. 7. For a detailed description of this subgenre, see in particular Giuliano Cenati, Disegni, bizze e fulmini: i racconti di Carlo Emilio Gadda (Pisa: ETS, 2010). 8. Dostoevsky, Notes, p. 41. This passage from Dostoevsky’s novel is also quoted in Gloria Bonaguidi and Stefano Brugnolo, ‘Popolo’, in Enciclopedia Gaddiana, dir. by Federica Pedriali (Pisa–Rome: Serra, forthcoming). 9. On the importance of tutti in Gadda’s fiction, see in particular Pedriali, ‘Indefiniti (veri e falsi)’, The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, 2 (2002), Supplement 1. 10. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses [1930] (London: Allen & Unwin Books, 1961), pp. 97–99. 11. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 200–01. 12. The evocative function of the company’s name has already been remarked in Pedriali, Altre carceri d’invenzione: studi gaddiani (Ravenna: Longo, 2007), pp. 67–84. 13. In his essay ‘Il pasticciaccio’ (1957), Gadda particularly insists on Angeloni’s deviance from the standards of Fascist society: the Commendatore is a ‘ghiottone solitario, celibe e malinconico’, living in ‘un’epoca ove il celibe era schedato a spregio’ and ‘era proibito essere malinconici’ [a lonely, unmarried and gloomy gourmet, in a time when celibacy was stigmatised, and in which it was forbidden to be melancholy] (SGF I 507). 14. On the similarities between Angeloni and Don Abbondio, see Mauro Bignamini, Mettere in ordine il mondo? Cinque studi sul ‘Pasticciaccio’ (Bologna: CLUEB, 2012), pp. 225–36. 15. This intertextual contact has first been noticed by Donnarumma, ‘Maschere della violenza’. Gadda’s familiarity with Palazzeschi’s works is further confirmed by his 1946 review of Tre imperi... mancati (SGF I 933–42). 16. Not surprisingly, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is another major inf luence on the characterisation of Gadda’s anti-hero in La cognizione. In the preparatory notes for the novel, Myshkin is openly mentioned as a model for the description of Gonzalo’s personality: ‘Puerilità psichica e bambocceria esteriore (anche idiota di Dostoiewski)’ [Inner puerility and outward immaturity (see also Dostoevsky’s Idiot)] (Cognizione, 546). 17. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. by Harvey P. Sucksmith and Dennis Walder (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 565–66. 18. Dickens, Little Dorrit, p. 313. 19. Dickens, Hard Times, ed. by Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 2. 20. Just like Flaubert, Gadda ironically refers to the concert as a ritual purification from the anxieties of business: ‘ils venaient se délasser dans les beaux-arts des inquiétudes de la vente’ [they came to seek relaxation in the fine arts after the anxieties of business] (Flaubert, Madame Bovary, p. 494); ‘dal tumulto efimero del Conservatorio [...] il loro spirito “positivo” si sarebbe ripreso al più presto, salpando verso le incombenze e gli incassi del lunedì’ [their ‘positive’ spirit would soon recover from the chaos of the Conservatorio, and set out to Monday’s errands and incomes] (RR I 471). Besides, Gadda’s insistence on the viewers’ ‘lorgnoni’ or ‘lorgnons’ (RR I 454, 458) is a probable echo from Flaubert (‘on tirait les lorgnettes de leurs étuis’ [opera-glasses were taken from their cases], Madame Bovary, p. 494). 21. ‘Uno aveva citato un romanzo francese “Madame Bovary”, che parla di cent’anni fa, roba come si vede completamente giù di moda. Il romanziere, che è un certo Flaubert se ben ricordo,

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descrive il pranzo di nozze di un dottore di campagna’ [Somebody mentioned a French novel, ‘Madame Bovary’, a story from a hundred years ago, now completely obsolete. The author, one Flaubert if I’m not wrong, describes the wedding lunch of a country doctor] (‘Invito a pranzo’, pp. 25–26). 22. The trivial humour of Guerin meschino, a popular weekly magazine printed in Milan, is openly referred to by Gadda on various occasions, and most notably in Un fulmine sul 220 (F220 95–96, 243–44). 23. An analysis of Gadda’s debts towards the popular press of his times can be found in Godioli, La scemenza del mondo, pp. 147–73 (on rationalism and Novecento, see in particular pp. 150–53 and 156–62). 24. As stated in Gadda’s essay ‘Il Pasticciaccio’, ‘in un mondo in cui bisognava “credere” per forza era proibito essere malinconici’ [melancholy was forbidden in the age of coercive optimism] (SGF I 507). 25. On the debate concerning the links between the Decameron and the notion of bourgeois common sense, see Luigi Surdich, Boccaccio, pp. 104–12 and 194–218. 26. Frank Raymond Leavis, ‘The Irony of Swift’, in The Common Pursuit (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 75.

CONCLUSION ❖

Italian Modernism and the Fear of Uniformity The extinction of individuality as triggered by mass society is certainly a leitmotif in early twentieth-century European culture. ‘The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organisation of things’, writes Georg Simmel in The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903); ‘metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows all personal life’.1 Likewise, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) depicts bourgeois democracy as the age of impersonality, dominated by the ubiquitous ‘they’ (man): ‘this averageness [...] watches over every exception which thrusts itself to the fore. Every priority is noiselessly squashed’.2 The masses have taken over, while the individual has been transformed into its shadow — the shapeless, anonymous average man (Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 1930). Not surprisingly, such an emphasis on social homogenisation is extensively documented by modernist literature:3 Eliot’s portrayal of the hollow man, Proust’s analysis of the snob as an emblem of society’s widespread mimetism, the accumulation of commonplaces in Leopold Bloom’s stream of consciousness, Lewis’s opposition to the ‘uniform humanity’ creating ‘a little host as like as ninepins’,4 or Ulrich’s dismay at the ‘statistical disenchantment of his person’5 all point to the same central idea. In 1919, Virginia Woolf (surely not a radical opponent of democracy per se) defined the ‘Man in the Street’ as an ‘anonymous monster’, ‘a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff ’ — a point she would later develop in the short essay ‘This is the House of Commons’ (1932), where the ‘plain, featureless, impersonal’ aspect of mass society is held responsible for the annihilation of ‘the abnormal, the particular, the splendid human being’.6 As this book has tried to demonstrate, the functions of laughter in the works of Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda have much to do with the modernist emphasis on the eradication of originality — an emphasis which, in turn, is best understood as part of a wider trend concerning the development of European fiction since at least Romantic realism. In the context of early twentieth-century European literature, however, the framing of originality in Italian modernism occupies a rather peculiar position. In Joyce, Musil, Kaf ka, or even Eliot, the homogenisation of society is usually represented as already accomplished; it is not by chance that, compared to the classics of Romantic realism, eccentricity plays a less prominent role — in the opposition between diversity and uniformity, the latter element is now largely prevailing. ‘Messrs Bouvard and Pécuchet are the basis of democracy’, wrote Ezra Pound in his 1922 essay on Ulysses; just like Bloom,

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they represent ‘the man in the street, the next man, the public’.7 And indeed, the triumph of mediocrity and idées reçues in Flaubert’s novels can be regarded as the first paradigmatic expression of the modernist idea that human diversity has already been irreparably lost. Italian modernism is a partial exception to this picture: while Flaubert or Musil seem to write after the definitive expulsion of originality from the social scene, Pirandello or Palazzeschi still envisage it in the process of being attacked by collective mimetism. In this respect, the Italian modernists are closer to Balzac and Dostoevsky than they are to Bouvard et Pécuchet — as shown, for instance, by their constant dialogue with the Romantic-realist topos of the derided misfit. Italian modernism, in sum, is characterised by a relatively backward perspective on social homogenisation, whereby the collective war on diversity is still perceived as an ongoing process. In order to understand the reasons for this phase lag, we can benefit from taking a significant step back to an early nineteenth-century source: Giacomo Leopardi’s Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’Italiani [Discourse on the current state of Italian customs], 1824–27. Leopardi’s comparative analysis of national habits in various European countries builds on the quasi-Girardian assumption that ‘l’uomo è animale imitativo e d’esempio. Questa è cosa provata’ [man, as has been proved, is an imitative and emulative animal] (Discorso, 135) — which, according to the author, is all the more true within so-called ‘società strette’ [tight societies], i.e. those forms of civilisation where ‘l’opinione pubblica’ [public opinion] is held in the highest esteem (Discorso, 156). The notion of tight society in the Discorso is actually a rather striking anticipation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘hardened society’, that is the kind of community in which in which individual traits are replaced by collective mimetism; and just as in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, where this concept is illustrated through the works of Molière and Daumier,8 Leopardi also chooses France as the best possible example: ‘dal tempo della origine della società francese fino al presente, [nessun francese] ha mai potuto impetrar da se stesso, non solo di non curar l’opinione pubblica, ma neppure di non metterla [...] nella cima de’ suoi pensieri’ [from the origin of French society to the present day, the French have never been able not to have public opinion as their foremost preoccupation, let alone not to care about it] (Discorso, 128–29). While France is mentioned by Leopardi as the perfect specimen of tight (i.e. imitative) society, Italy in the 1820s distinguishes itself for its total lack of civil cohesion, and therefore for the variety of its characters: A differenza delle dette nazioni, ella è priva ancora di quel genere di stretta società definito di sopra. Molte ragioni concorrono a privarnela, che ora non voglio cercare. [...] Conseguenza necessaria di questo è che gl’italiani non temono e non curano per conto alcuno di essere o parer diversi l’uno dall’altro [...]. Ciascuna città italiana non solo, ma ciascuno italiano fa tuono e maniera da sé. (Discorso, 131–32) [Unlike the countries mentioned above, Italy is still lacking that kind of tight society; this depends on a variety of reasons, which I do not want to dwell on now. [...] Consequently, the Italians do not mind being or looking all different from each other [...]. Not only every Italian city, but also every single Italian, retains their own peculiar habits and manners.]

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A similar point was made in an 1819 note from Zibaldone: ‘la [nostra] natura resta più varia, e non così obbligata e avvezzata alla continua uniformità, come succede per lo spirito di società e d’eccessivo incivilimento in Francia’ [our nature is more diverse, and not as forced to continuous uniformity as it is in France, due to their social spirit and their excessive politeness].9 As suggested by Leopardi, early nineteenth-century Italy was nowhere as ‘tight’ as France or even Britain — the two countries in which, as Balzac put it, the ‘modern doctrines’ of the bourgeois era first took root (Préfaces, Une Fille d’Ève, 372). As a matter of fact, although Leopardi does not dwell on this aspect, there is an obvious link between a country’s mimetic tendencies and its economic and social standardisation; Bouvard and Pécuchet, with their mirror-like behaviour and their idées reçues, may not be the ‘basis of democracy’, but they certainly would not be conceivable without it. Quite significantly, only in the so-called Giolittian Era — following a remarkable wave of democratisation10 — does the marginalisation of individual originality become an actual leitmotif in Italian literature; to some extent, Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda were among the first national interpreters of a social process that had already been described elsewhere by Balzac, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and Maupassant. It is no surprise, then, that the Romanticrealist representation of the ludicrous original is such a crucial paradigm for Italian modernism. As variously remarked by a long line of theorists and authors (from Gautier to Bergson), the derision of eccentricity is a perfect encapsulation of society’s tendency to erase individual differences; and of course, the classics of nineteenthcentury realist fiction stood out as an ideal basis for the further development of this pattern. Looked at in this perspective, the Italian modernists stand at the crossroads between the realist tradition and their European contemporaries. On the one hand, their depiction of individual oddities and collective uniformity is still particularly indebted to such models as Balzac and Dostoevsky; on the other, their sabotage of the Romantic-realist dramatisation of originality ref lects an essentially modernist bent to laugh about everything, and to highlight the intrinsic ridiculousness of human life. In each of the authors discussed in this volume, this inclination takes different forms and serves different functions: Pirandello’s umorismo can be seen as an ambiguous sublimation of more violent (and pathological) escapes from social constraints; Svevo’s irony questions the alleged ontological gap between normal and abnormal characters; Palazzeschi’s controdolore is the clown’s paradoxical reaction to the jeers of the anonymous crowd; lastly, Gadda’s use of satire and the grotesque emphasises society’s pervasive bêtise, and its detrimental effects on the individual. In all of these cases, however, the author’s laughter is the sign of a problematic (modernist) attitude towards the outworn formulas of nineteenthcentury pathos, and more generally towards the traditionally realist belief in the seriousness of everyday life. It is precisely the blending of Romantic-realist patterns and modernist subversion that makes our early twentieth-century Italian corpus a particularly indicative one. Its comparative analysis can be instrumental in better understanding the conf lict between diversity and mimetism as a central thread in the history of modern European fiction; besides, it can help us reconsider both

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realist and modernist topoi as parts of a common (and ever-evolving) grammar of originality — a grammar in which laughter, both the author’s and the characters’, plays a crucial role. Notes to the Conclusion 1. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. by Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), p. 422. 2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. and ed. by Dennis Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 123. 3. On the mass man as modernist topos, see in particular Huyssen, After the Great Divide, and Pease, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture’. 4. Wyndham Lewis, The Wild Body (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1982), p. 237. On Proust’s framing of snobbism in relation to the pervasive mimetism of bourgeois society, see of course René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, pp. 193–228; as regards the structural function of commonplaces in Joyce’s stream of consciousness, cf. Moretti, Modern Epic (New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 160–63. 5. ‘He felt as though he had got up in a machine, which was splitting him up into impersonal, general component parts [...]. He had the feeling that his eyes were grey eyes, belonging to one of the four officially recognised kinds of eyes in existence of which there were millions of specimens. [...] And so even at this moment he could also appreciate the statistical disenchantment of his person’ (Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, 4 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953–60), i, 185–86). 6. See respectively Virginia Woolf, ‘The War from the Street’, in The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Andrew McNeillie, 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1986–92), iii, 3; and ‘This is the House of Commons’, in The London Scene (London: Hogarth, 1982), pp. 42, 44. 7. Ezra Pound, ‘Ulysses’, in Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. by Forrest Read (London: Faber, 1968), p. 194. 8. ‘Within its innermost cell, the [hardened] individual encounters the same power from which it has f led within itself. This makes its f light a hopeless chimera. Molière’s comedies show awareness of this curse no less than Daumier’s caricatures’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 201). 9. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, ed. by Francesco Flora, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1961), i, 104. 10. The suffrage expansion for the 1882 general election — famously alluded to in the opening of d’Annunzio’s Il piacere, 1889 — is indeed an emblematic event in this respect. While betraying a similar discontent with the ‘grigio diluvio democratico’ [dull democratic f lood], Italian modernism departs radically from the typical structure of d’Annunzio’s novels, as the exception to the norm is not embodied by idealised aristocratic heroes, but rather by derided misfits. On the growing politicisation of the masses during the Giolittian era, see for instance Arcangelo W. Salomone, Italy in the Giolittian Era: Italian Democracy in the Making, 1900–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), and Alexander De Grand, The Hunchback’s Tailor: Giovanni Giolitti and Liberal Italy from the Challenge of Mass Politics to the Rise of Fascism, 1882–1922 (Westport: Praeger, 2001).

APPENDIX ❖

What follows is a list of the texts from Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno in which the characters’ laughter plays any kind of significant role — whether in the epilogue or in any other crucial moment of the story. On a diachronic level, it is worth noting the peaks in laughter’s frequency as a theme: 1903–05, the times of Mattia Pascal and of the essay ‘L’umorismo di Cervantes’ (later included in L’Umorismo); 1910–12, a phase of intense ref lection on humoristic and comic-pathetic characters, as also documented by a number of short stories where laughter does not surface as a theme (‘La patente’, ‘La tragedia di un personaggio’, ‘ “Ho tante cose da dirvi...” ’); 1934–36, years in which Pirandello seems particularly interested in the most violent and disturbing forms of laughter. Throughout Pirandello’s production, however, two motives constantly prevail: the public derision of an odd individual on the one hand, and the original’s solipsistic laughter on the other (see Chapter 2). The occurrences related to the former type are set in bold type, while those related to the latter are underlined. The stories in which at least one of those two typologies prevails amount to 42; the full list features 61 stories, out of a total of 256. 1895 1896

‘“In corpore vili”’ ‘Sole e ombra’

1897

‘Acqua e lì’

1900

‘Scialle nero’

1900

‘La maestrina Boccarmè’

1901

‘Il vitalizio’

1901

‘Il vecchio Dio’

1902

‘Lontano’

1902

‘Pallottoline!’

People laugh at Cosimino’s fight with la Sgriscia ‘Estro comico’ [comic vein] of the suicidal protagonist Emphasis on Calajo’s ‘fragorosa risata’ [loud laughter], and on his ‘ridere come un matto’ [laughing like a mad man] Eleonora is unjustly accused of immodesty and mocked by her fellow countrymen; her brother punishes her ‘per prevenir le beffe’ [in order to avoid ridicule] ‘Stridula risata’ [shrieking cackle] of the protagonist’s former schoolmate Cheerfulness of the countrymen on Maràbito’s 100th birthday Aurelio is the victim of frequent jokes (‘lazzi’, ‘risatine’) A Norwegian castaway is derided by the town’s ‘monellacci’ [rascals] Jacopo Maraventano considers life a laughable matter (‘roba da ridere’)

128

Appendix

1902

‘La berretta di Padova’

1902

‘Al valor civile’

1902 1902

‘Tanino e Tanotto’ ‘Il corvo di Mìzzaro’

1903 1903

‘Il marito di mia moglie’ ‘Il tabernacolo’

1903

‘La signora Speranza’

1904

‘Sua Maestà’

1904

‘La buon’anima’

1904

‘La mosca’

1904

‘Formalità’

1905

‘Fuoco alla paglia’

1905

‘L’eresia catara’

1905

‘Lo scaldino’

1905 1905 1905

‘Una novella che non farò’ [‘Un matrimonio ideale’] ‘La casa del Granella’ ‘Va bene’

1906

‘La toccatina’

1907 1909

‘La cassa riposta’ ‘Mondo di carta’

1909

‘La giara’

Cirlinciò is ‘lo zimbello di tutta Girgenti’ [Girgenti’s laughingstock] Bruno Celesia is the ‘bersaglio di tutte le frecce’ [target of all jokes]; he is ‘deriso, anziché compianto, per le sue domestiche sventure’ [derided, instead of being pitied, for his domestic misadventures] Cheerful, innocent mirth of the two children The shepherds have fun tormenting the crow (‘si spassano a tormentare’) Bitter laughter of the protagonist, a dying man Spatolino’s bad luck triggers the ‘beffe dei nemici (e anche degli amici)’ [laughter of both his enemies and friends] Pranks between rest-home residents; ‘scherno’ [mockery] directed at Biagio Speranza e Carolina The whole town laughs at the two lookalikes of the King The protagonist is haunted by the defiant grin of the late Cosimo, his wife’s first husband Zarù’s ‘sorriso mostruoso’ [monstrous grin] while lying on his deathbed A dying man’s final prank at the expense of an insurance agent Simone is the laugh of the town: ‘far ridere il paese’, ‘tutti ridevano di lui’. Nàzzaro’s ‘riso d’arguta spensieratezza’ [carefree and witty laughter] strikes him as a sign of serene detachment from social life The students burst into a ‘clamorosa irrefrenabile risata’ [loud unstoppable laughter], as Professor Lamis delivers his lecture in an empty classroom Papa-re’s misadventures are accompanied by the ‘gran risata della gente’ A dwarf and a giantess get married; their cheerful laughter contrasts with ‘le beffe della gente’ [people’s laughter] A house is haunted by laughing spirits Cosmo Amidei is ‘sbeffeggiato da tutti i monelli’ [mocked by every rascal] Final liberating laughter of the two protagonists (both paralysed by a stroke) Piccarone’s hoax at the expense of the innkeeper Balicci, an obsessive bibliophile, is lampooned by everyone Both the protagonist and the onlookers laugh repeatedly

Appendix 1910

‘Non è una cosa seria’

1910

‘L’uccello impagliato’

1910 1910

‘Musica vecchia’ ‘Pensaci, Giacomino!’

1910

‘La morta e la viva’

1911

‘Canta l’Epistola’

1912 1912 1912 1912 1912 1912 1913 1913 1914

‘I nostri ricordi’ ‘Certi obblighi’ ‘La verità’ ‘Il coppo’ ‘L’imbecille’ ‘Tu ridi’ ‘Quando s’è capito il guoco’ ‘Nel gorgo’ ‘L’ombra del rimorso’

1914

‘Il treno ha fischiato…’

1916

‘Frammento di cronaca di Marco Leccio’

1916 1916

‘Piuma’ ‘Un “goj”’

1917 1917

‘Candelora’ ‘Donna Mimma’

1920 1923

‘Pena di vivere così’ ‘Fuga’

1923 1931 1931

‘Ritorno’ ‘Uno di più’ ‘Soffio’

1934 1935

‘C’è qualcuno che ride’ ‘La prova’

1935

‘Fortuna d’esser cavallo’

129

Perazzetti’s humoristic (and apparently gratuitous) hilarity Defiant smile of the protagonist, just before committing suicide Collective jeering directed at the old music teacher The professor is made an object of gossips and jokes Jokes of the crowd, as they find out that Nino Mo is living in bigamy The protagonist is ‘stanco della baja che tutti gli davano’ [tired of being mocked by everybody] The narrator plays a cruel prank on a stranger The cuckold is punished with collective derision The audience laughs coarsely at Tararà’s confession The protagonist laughs at the thought of suicide Fazio’s suicidal ‘ghigno frigido’ [frigid grin] Anselmo mysteriously laughs in his sleep Memmo Viola’s detached smile in the epilogue of the story Daddi’s ‘sorriso vano’ [vacuous smile] Bellavita is the laughingstock of the town (‘tutti ridevano di lui’), due to his wife’s infidelity The colleagues’ cruel jokes on Belluca are counterbalanced by Belluca’s own innocent laughter after being hospitalised Marco Leccio’s son is afraid that his father might be publicly derided; the doctor smiles compassionately while visiting the protagonist Amina laughs bitterly on her deathbed Daniele Catellani giggles as he plays a prank on his brother in law Nane Papa’s humoristic smile The villagers’ jests follow the protagonist’s marginalisation Leuca’s crazy laughter (‘come una matta’) Liberating, uncontrollable laugh of the protagonist as he f lees home The villagers’ grotesque and disturbing jokes Devilish laugh of Abele Nono’s wife Fiendish grin of the protagonist, as he embodies Death in his dream Opposition between the peasants’ innocent laughter and the cruel jokes of the ‘maggiorenti’ The friars’ laughter changes from innocent to aggressive during the story A horse is victimised by cruel jokes

130

Appendix

1936

‘Una sfida’

1936

‘La tartaruga’

Schwarb’s grin ref lects his resentment towards the warden, while the latter smiles frigidly at Schwarb’s suicide attempt Myshkow’s puerile smile, as opposed to his children’s senile snickers

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Translations When possible, translations from French and Italian have been taken — with some minimal changes — from existing English editions (cf. list below); in all other cases, they are my own. Balzac, Honoré de, The Bureaucrats, trans. by Charles Foulkes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993) —— La Comédie Humaine, trans. by Katherine Prescott Wormeley, 40 vols (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1883–97) (‘The Illustrious Gaudissart’, Ursula, The Firm of Nucingen, Cousin Betty, Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau, The Magic Skin) Bergson, Henri, On Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1911) De Maistre, Xavier, A Journey around my Room, trans. by Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus, 2004)

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Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, trans. by Raymond N. Mackenzie (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2009) —— Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005) Gadda, Carlo Emilio, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, trans. by William Weaver (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007) —— Acquainted with Grief, trans. by W. Weaver (London: Owen, 1969) Manzoni, Alessandro, The Betrothed, trans. by Archibald Colquhoun (London: Dent, 1956) Maupassant, Guy de, The Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories, trans. by Albert McMaster and others (Project Gutenberg) [accessed 26 June 2014] Palazzeschi, Aldo, A Tournament of Misfits, trans. by Nicolas Perella (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) (‘The Hunchback’, ‘The Gift’) —— Materassi Sisters, trans. by Angus Davidson (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953) Pirandello, Luigi, Tales of Madness, trans. by Giovanni Bussino (Brookline Village, MA: Dante University of America Press, 1984) (‘The Reality of the Dream’, ‘The Wheelbarrow’) —— Tales of Suicide, trans. by G. Bussino (Brookline Village, MA: Dante University of America Press, 1988) (‘The Fish Trap’) —— Short Stories, trans. by Frederick May (London: Oxford University Press, 1965) (‘The Tortoise’, ‘The Jar’) —— The Late Mattia Pascal, trans. by Nicoletta Simborowski (Sawtry: Dedalus, 1987) Svevo, Italo, A Life, trans. by Archibald Colquhoun (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963) —— Short Sentimental Journey and Other Stories, trans. by Beryl de Zoete, Lacy Collison– Morley and Ben Johnson (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967) (‘Short Sentimental Journey’, ‘The Hoax’, ‘Generous Wine’, ‘The Story of the Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl’) —— Confessions of Zeno, trans. by Beryl de Zoete (London: Putnam, 1930) —— Further Confessions of Zeno, trans. by Ben Johnson and Nicholas Furbank (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969) —— Italo Svevo’s London Writings, ed. by John Gatt-Rutter and Brian Moloney (Leicester: Troubador, 2003) (‘My Life in London’)

INDEX ❖ Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max 9, 109–12, 124 agrafes 97–98 ‘ah! ah!’ (refrain) 86–87, 109 Antonicelli, Franco 89 Audet, René, see agrafes Auerbach, Erich 3–4, 74, 107 automaton/automate 11–12, 16, 18, 25 n. 38, 88–89, 109 bad faith (as defined by Sartre) 54–56, 63–64, 71–72 Balzac, Honoré de 3, 13–19, 22, 27, 36, 56, 60–62, 74, 83, 91–92, 96, 104, 112, 114–15, 124–25 César Birotteau 15 Colonel Chabert 22 Cousin Pons 16, 91 Cousine Bette 17, 91 Les Employés 17–18, 56, 76 n. 11 Eugénie Grandet 14, 91 Une fille d’Ève 13 ‘L’illustre Gaudissart’ 15, 60–61 Louis Lambert 16 La peau de chagrin 15, 16 La physiologie du marriage 91 Séraphita 27 Splendeurs et misères 14 Ursule Mirouët 114–15 Baudelaire, Charles 72 Beattie, James 7 Beckett, Samuel 35 Benjamin, Walter 96 Bergson, Henri 12, 17, 18–19, 21, 43, 59, 82–84, 86, 88, 100 n. 13, 125 Bini, Carlo 13 Boccaccio, Giovanni 20–21, 58, 119 Booth, Wayne 70 Bovarism 2, 63–64 Britain (originality in): 7–10 Burke, Edmund 10 Calvino, Italo 96 Cavallazzi, Antonio 117 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de see Don Quixote Chapman, George 9 Chekhov, Anton 20 Courteline, Georges 17 d’Annunzio, Gabriele 106, 126 n. 10 Daumier, Honoré 110, 124

Davies, Thomas 7–8 De Gaultier, Jules, see Bovarism De Maistre, Xavier 12–13 De Michelis, Eurialo 89 democracy (discontent with) 10–11, 46–47, 85–86, 105, 123–26 see also equality Dickens, Charles 8–9, 19, 73, 113–15, 116, 119 diversity (celebration of): 9, 14, 27–28, 81–88, 96–99, 103–06 Don Quixote 13, 17, 19, 59, 109 Dossi, Carlo 13 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 3, 13, 19, 22, 28, 30–39, 44, 55–56, 62, 64–67, 74, 109, 112, 124–25 ‘Bobok’ 38 Crime and Punishment 19, 31, 37 ‘The Crocodile’ 36–37 Demons 30, 37, 62 ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ 22, 65–67 The Idiot 19, 38–39, 120 n. 16 Notes from the Underground 13, 55–56, 64–65, 109 ‘Polzunkov’ 22 ‘Uncle’s Dream’ 38 double bind 46–47, 119 Eikhenbaum, Boris 20 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 123 Epimenides 75 equality/égalité 3, 9–10, 13–14, 16, 81, 85–86, 105; see also democracy Flaubert, Gustave 3, 17, 19, 67, 73–75, 91–94, 98–99, 114–15, 123–26 Bouvard et Pécuchet 93–94, 123–25 Corréspondance 73–75 L’Éducation sentimentale 92, 98 Madame Bovary 92–93, 115; see also Bovarism Formiggini, Angelo Fortunato 25 n. 42 Foscolo, Ugo 13 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 44 France (originality in): 9–19 Freud, Sigmund 35, 44, 46, 54, 63, 71 definition of humour 35, 54 Gadda, Carlo Emilio 1–5, 19, 36, 46–47, 56, 73, 103–21, 123–26 ‘La casa’ 108, 117 Il castello di Udine 105, 108 La cognizione del dolore 105, 108–10, 112

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Eros e Priapo 105 Un fulmine sul 220 113–15 ‘L’incendio di via Keplero’ 117–19 ‘Invito a pranzo’ 115 La Madonna dei Filosofi: ‘Cinema’ 107–08; ‘La Madonna dei Filosofi’ 108 ‘Il “manubia” di Ramas’ 116–17 Meditazione milanese 103–05 Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana 110–12 Racconto italiano d’ignoto del Novecento 106–07, 113 ‘San Giorgio in casa Brocchi’ 117–19 short essays: ‘Creatures chez Balzac’ 104; ‘Lingua letteraria e lingua dell’uso’ 104; ‘Processo alla lingua italiana’ 104; Gautier, Théophile 10–16, 81–82, 85, 109, 125 Gioanola, Elio 28, 35–36 Giolitti, Giovanni 3, 90, 125 Girard, René 3, 43, 53–58, 64, 67, 107, 124 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 20–21 Gogol, Nikolai 19–20, 22, 56 Gordon, Thomas 9 Goyet, Florence 20 Guerin Meschino (Milanese periodical) 116–19 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 12–13, 45, 54–55 Heidegger, Martin 123 Heine, Heinrich 55 Hobbes, Thomas 4, 8, 17, 22, 23 n. 9, 47, 55 Horkheimer, Max, see Adorno, Theodor W. Hugo, Victor 19, 83, 90–91, 125 Hutcheson, Francis 8 Huyssen, Andreas 2–3 imprisonment 12–13, 32–39 Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) 12–13 Jonson, Ben 9 Joyce, James 99, 123–24 Kafka, Franz 35, 123 Kant, Immanuel 112 Leavis, Frank 119 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 103–04 Leopardi, Giacomo 124–25 Lewis, Wyndham 73, 123 Locke, John 4, 7 Lukács, György 20, 45, 85, 107 Macchia, Giovanni 34–35 Mac–Nab, Maurice 83 Mantegazza, Paolo 82 Manzoni, Alessandro 13, 73, 91, 94–96, 110, 116, 119 Maupassant, Guy de 19–22, 28, 36, 39–43, 88–91, 96, 125 Contes et Nouvelles: ‘L’Aveugle’ 22; ‘Aux champs’ 89–90; ‘Les bijoux’ 41, 89; ‘La confession de

Théodule Sabot’ 41; ‘Un coup d’État’ 42; ‘Les Dimanches d’un bourgeois de Paris’ 42–43; ‘L’héritage’ 41; ‘Idylle’ 41; ‘Madame Baptiste’ 88–89; ‘Menuet’ 89; ‘La Mère aux monstres’ 89–90; ‘Miss Harriet’ 89; ‘Le retour’ 41; ‘Réveil’ 40; ‘Toine’ 40; ‘La veillée’ 41, 89 Mill, John Stuart 10 modernism 1–4, 72–75, 84, 96–99, 115, 123–26 Molière (Jean-Baptist Poquelin) 100 n. 13, 110, 124 Monnier, Henry 17 monomania 17, 91–92, 107–08 Moretti, Franco 46, 64 Musil, Robert 73–74, 99, 123–24 Nietzsche, Friedrich 55, 58, 72, 87 Nouveau, Germain 83–84 novella, see short story O’Connor, Frank 21 Ojetti, Ugo 67–72 Ortega y Gasset, José 109, 123 Palazzeschi, Aldo 1–5, 19–23, 36, 39, 46, 49 n. 22, 56, 73, 81–102, 103, 105–06, 110–12, 119, 123–26 Il codice di Perelà 82, 103 ‘Il controdolore’ 83 ‘Equilibrio’ 82 Il palio dei buffi (as a macro-text) 96–99 ‘La passeggiata’ 84 Sorelle Materassi 84, 91 Spazzatura 86 Tutte le novelle: ‘L’Angelo’ 95; ‘Anima’ 89; ‘Bistino e il Signor Marchese’ 85; ‘Carburo e Birchio’ 85; ‘Dagobert’ 49 n. 22; ‘Il dono’ 85, 87, 110–12; ‘Il giorno e la notte’ 85; ‘Il gobbo’ 86–89; ‘Industria’ 89–90; ‘Issimo’ 21, 85, 94; ‘Legami ignoti’ 85; ‘Lumachino’ 87–89; ‘Lupo’ 87, 94–95; ‘Perfezione’ 92, 95–96, 98; ‘Pochini e Tamburini’ 93; ‘La porta accanto’ 93; ‘Il punto nero’ 85; ‘Re Pomodoro’ 84–85; ‘Il ricordo della moglie’ 84, 92–93; ‘Lo zio e il nipote’ 98 ‘Varietà’ 81–82, 103 pathetic grotesque 17, 88–91 Pirandello, Luigi 1–5, 11, 19–23, 27–52, 56–57, 64, 67, 73–74, 81, 83–85, 86, 96, 99, 103, 106, 112, 119, 123–26 All’uscita 37–38 Il fu Mattia Pascal 47 Novelle per un anno: ‘La balia’ 41; ‘Berecche e la guerra’ 30–31; ‘Il buon cuore’ 41; ‘Canta l’Epistola’ 32; ‘La cattura’ 34; ‘Frammento di cronaca di Marco Leccio’ 30–31; ‘Fuoco alla paglia’ 32; ‘La giara’ 34, 36–37; ‘Gioventù’ 41; ‘L’imbecille’ 37, 41, 43; ‘Marsina stretta’ 11; ‘La morta e la viva’ 33, 41; ‘Non è una cosa seria’ 29–30, 34; ‘Notte’ 50–51 n. 32; ‘L’ombra del rimorso’ 33; ‘La patente’ 34; ‘Quando s’è

Index capito il giuoco’ 33; ‘La realtà del sogno’ 39–40; ‘Scialle nero’ 32; ‘La Signora Speranza’ 34; ‘Sua Maestà’ 37, 41–43; ‘Il tabernacolo’ 32, 41; ‘La tartaruga’ 33, 38–39; ‘La toccatina’ 34, 40; ‘Il treno ha fischiato’ 33; ‘Tutto per bene’ 41; ‘Zuccarello distinto melodista’ 29–30 Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore 27 Il turno 38 L’umorismo 2, 27, 31, 44–45, 103 Plato 112 Plautus 110 Poe, Edgar Allan 50–51 n. 32 polish/politesse 11–13, 81–82, 125 Pompeati, Arturo 19–20 Pound, Ezra 123 Proust, Marcel 123 Rabelais, François 15–16, 60–61 Romantic irony 44–45, 51 n. 43, 54–55, 72–74 Romantic lie see Girard, René Sacchetti, Franco 77 n. 23 Sarment, Jean 54 Sartre, Jean-Paul, see bad faith Schlegel, Friedrich see Romantic irony Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of) 7–9, 11, 19, 81 short story 19–23, 34, 58, 84–88, 96–99, 116 short story collection (macro-text) 96–99 Simmel, Georg 123 [Madame de] Staël, Anne-Louise Germaine Necker 10 Stendhal 3, 46, 64, 74, 106–07 Sterne, Laurence 3, 8–13, 15, 28, 29–32, 44, 64, 81

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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 3, 8, 29–32 A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 9, 10, 11 Sternism (nineteenth century) 12–13 Svevo, Italo 1–5, 19, 20, 23, 36, 39, 46, 53–80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 106, 112, 119, 123–26 Continuazioni 67–70, 74 La coscienza di Zeno 2, 53–56, 58, 72 Inferiorità 62 Racconti e scritti autobiografici: ‘Una burla riuscita’ 53, 55, 56, 58–64; ‘Cimutti’ 77 n. 21; ‘Corto viaggio sentimentale’ 57, 64–67; ‘Cronaca della famiglia’ 54; Diario per la fidanzata, 72–74; ‘La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla’ 53, 58, 67; ‘Profilo autobiografico’ 53; ‘Vino generoso’ 55, 57, 67 Senilità 53, 56 ‘Soggiorno londinese’ 74–75 Una vita 53, 56 Swift, Jonathan 8, 30, 119 Temple, William 9 Tocqueville, Alexis de 10 Todorov, Tzvetan 20 Il Travaso delle idee 116–19 Verdi, Giuseppe 90 Verga, Giovanni 19, 20, 22–23, 96 Vinet, Alexandre 10 Woolf, Virginia 123