Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity 9783030393663, 9783030393670, 1169321902

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ITALIAN AND ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film Boundaries and Identity Edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara

Italian and Italian American Studies Series Editor Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA

This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another. Editorial Board Rebecca West, University of Chicago Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY Phillip V. Cannistraro†, Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY Alessandro Portelli, Università di Roma “La Sapienza” William J. Connell, Seton Hall University More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14835

Enrica Maria Ferrara Editor

Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film Boundaries and Identity

Editor Enrica Maria Ferrara University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

Italian and Italian American Studies ISBN 978-3-030-39366-3    ISBN 978-3-030-39367-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © peepo /Getty Images, Image ID: 1169321902 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my family

Acknowledgements

This book grew out of a double panel titled “Posthuman impegno in Italian literature and film” which I organized and co-chaired with Eugenio Bolongaro at the 2016 Themed Conference of the Society for Italian Studies in the UK and Ireland, held at Trinity College Dublin. I am very grateful to the conference organizers Daragh O’Connell, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin and Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, who welcomed my initiative. Some of the papers delivered on that occasion are now included in this volume, which has been growing steadily and organically over the past three years as further contributors and topics were added to the original set of papers. My deepest appreciation goes to Stanislao Pugliese, Director of the Italian and Italian American Studies series, and Lina Aboujieb, Editorial Director at Palgrave Macmillan, for their wonderful support. I am particularly grateful to Joseph Francese and Grace Russo Bullaro for their encouragement and advice during the initial stages of the editorial project. I am also in debt to a number of friends and colleagues who helped me define my field of enquiry or otherwise gave me inspiration through scholarly conversations, discussions, e-mail exchanges and relaxed chats around dinner tables. Among them, in addition to my brilliant contributors, I would like to mention: Giancarlo Alfano, Marcello Barbato, the late Roberto Bertoni, Clodagh Brook, Chiara De Caprio, Emma Del Vecchio, Tiziana De Rogatis, Ursula Fanning, Kevin Foskin, Anne Fuchs, Stiliana Milkova, John Sheil and Maria Tirelli. My heartfelt thanks go to my colleagues of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at University College Dublin, and Head of School Bettina Migge, who have provided a welcoming environment for my research. For her meticulous vii

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work, I would like to acknowledge my professional indexer, Grainne Farren, who has provided a precious consultation tool for this volume. Her indispensable work has been funded through a research grant awarded to me by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities in the academic year 2019–2020. High praises should go to the editorial staff in Palgrave, particularly Rebecca Hinsley, and to the anonymous peer reviewers whose advice has been instrumental to enhance the appearance and content of this volume. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the distinguished scholars who have taken the time to read, review and endorse this book ahead of its publication: Pierpaolo Antonello, Michael Cronin, Serenella Iovino, Roberto Marchesini, and Charlotte Ross. My interest in posthumanism was born out of my research on Italo Calvino, whose important role in the development of posthumanism in Italian literature I have acknowledged in my introduction. However, my passion for the topic peaked around the early 2010s, thanks to a number of films I watched, and passionately discussed, with my husband Paul Coffey. While none of those films (mostly non-Italian productions) are analysed in this book, the passion of our daily conversations—as well as our love for each other and for our children, Dylan, Nina and Seánpaolo— constitute a steady source of inspiration for me.

Praise for Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film “This very welcome book adds new voices and compelling critical perspectives to the burgeoning interest in philosophical posthumanism and the representation of the post-human within Italian Studies. A captivating assembly of analysis which justifies the editor’s claim that Italy is ‘the nest of post-humanist culture.’” —Pierpaolo Antonello, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge, UK “This volume of essays makes a powerful argument for the distinctiveness of the Italian contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. The contributors to Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity show how the culture that gave the world modern European humanism has also produced some of the most radical and searching critiques of what it is to be human in the modern and late modern age.” —Michael Cronin, Professor of French, author of Eco-translation, Trinity College Dublin “Brilliantly edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film expands the canon of posthumanist literary studies, enriching it with unexpected topics and voices. In a dazzling sequence of chapters on Leopardi, Pirandello, Elena Ferrante, Gianni Celati, Michelangelo Antonioni, and a number of contemporary storytellers and filmmakers, the authors of this fascinating book follow the human as it emerges from a tangle of organic and inorganic substances, DNA and energy sources, mobile phones and microbes, technology and politics. An engaging read, it is yet another testimony to the established presence of Italian culture on the scene of posthumanities.” —Serenella Iovino, Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Electing continuity and hybridization with alterities as the main cradle of existentiality, posthumanist thought may well be considered as a distinctive feature in the Italian culture of the last few decades. The re-evaluation of Giacomo Leopardi’s work, with the underlying legacy of Giordano Bruno’s panpsychism, inspires a new fascinating literature, more extrovert and emphatic than traditional intimist narratives, and in many ways more welcoming towards relationships and otherness. In

this context, the present volume has the merit to offer a punctual panoramic view of Italian literary posthumanism.” —Roberto Marchesini, Philosopher and Ethologist, author of Over the Human: Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany “This wide-ranging volume seeks to expand our knowledge and understanding of the varied and intriguing ways in which Italian literature and film have engaged with the complex relationships between humans, technology, animals and non-­ human phenomena. The essays, which are located productively in relation to existing scholarly debates, draw effectively on recent and more classic theoretical reflections to explore a range of issues relating to posthuman embodiment, social alienation, and existential and ethical concerns. They offer original and compelling contributions to scholarship that enrich and expand ongoing debates about this increasingly crucial topic.” —Charlotte Ross, Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, UK

Contents

1 Introduction: How Italians Became Posthuman  1 Enrica Maria Ferrara Part I Becoming Posthuman  29 2 Giacomo Leopardi’s Book of the Future: The Zibaldone as an Encyclopedia for the Ecosophical Posthuman 31 Gianna Conrad 3 Thresholds and Tortoises: Modernist Animality in Pirandello’s Fiction 51 Alberto Godioli, Monica Jansen, and Carmen Van den Bergh 4 Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives in Laura Pugno’s Narrative 73 Marco Amici 5 Posthumanism and Identity in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 93 Enrica Maria Ferrara

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Part II Technology and Identity 117 6 The Stuff We Are Made Out Of: Contemporary Poetry in Italy and Our World Model in the Era of Digital Reproduction119 Giancarlo Alfano 7 “Ancora non raggiungibile”: Mobile Phones and the Fragmented Subject in Italian Fiction141 Kristina Varade 8 Mechanized Women and Sentient Machines: Language, Gendered Technology, and the Female Body in Luciano Bianciardi and Tiziano Scarpa163 Eleonora Lima 9 (Technologically) Fallen from Grace: Abjection and Android Motherhood in Viola Di Grado’s Novel Bambini di ferro (2016)185 Anna Lisa Somma and Serena Todesco Part III Boundaries of the Human 209 10 Unbearable Proximity: Cognition, Ethics and Subjectivity at the Borders of the Human in La vita oscena by Aldo Nove211 Eugenio Bolongaro 11 Lose Your Self: Gianni Celati and the Art of Being One with the World233 Enrico Vettore

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12 The Living Dead and the Dying Living: Zombies, Politics, and the ‘Reflux’ in Italian Culture, 1977–1983255 Fabio Camilletti 13 New Materialism, Female Bodies and Ethics in Antonioni’s L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse275 Paolo Saporito Index295

Notes on Contributors

Giancarlo  Alfano is Professor of Italian at the University of Naples ‘Federico II.’ His recent books include La cleptomane derubata. Psicoanalisi, letteratura e storia culturale tra Otto e Novecento (2012); Introduzione alla lettura del “Decameron” (2014); Ciò che ritorna. Gli effetti della guerra nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (2014); and L’umorismo letterario. Una lunga storia europea (2016). He contributed to the annotated editions of the Decameron and I promessi sposi for the ADI-BUR editions (2013 and 2014). He coordinated a four-volume history of the Italian novel for the publisher Carocci (2018). Marco  Amici is a Lecturer at the Italian Department of University College Cork, where he teaches Italian culture and language courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level. He graduated at “La Sapienza” University of Rome, and completed a PhD funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences at University College Cork. His research interests include Italian genre literature, dystopian narratives, and posthuman theory; he has published several articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes on Italian noir and crime fiction. His current research focuses on the representation of the future in contemporary Italian literature. Eugenio  Bolongaro is Associate Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University in Montreal. A native of Italy, he was trained at the University of British Columbia and then at McGill University where he has taught since 2003. His book Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature was published by the xv

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University of Toronto Press in 2003. In 2009, he co-­edited the volume Creative Interventions: The Role of Intellectuals in Contemporary Italy. His literary contributions include several articles on Italo Calvino, post–WWII Italian cinema, and contemporary Italian fiction. Fabio  Camilletti is Associate Professor and Reader at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick. He is the author, among others, of Italia Lunare. Gli anni Sessanta e l’occulto (2018) and Guida alla letteratura gotica (2018). Gianna Conrad  is a PhD student and Research and Teaching assistant to Professor Tatiana Crivelli Speciale for Italian Literature at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of Zurich. Her research interests include Italian and English literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary approaches to texts (gender studies; psychoanalysis; ecocriticism; cultural theory). She has published and presented on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Igino Ugo Tarchetti and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. Enrica  Maria  Ferrara is Assistant Professor of Italian at University College Dublin where she lectures in Italian literature and film. She is the author of Calvino e il teatro (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011) and Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Calvino, Pasolini (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014). Recently, she has co-edited the volume Staged Narratives/Narrative Stages. Essays on Italian Prose Narrative and Theatre (Florence: Cesati, 2017) on the intersection of theatre and narrative in Italian literature. Alberto  Godioli is Assistant Professor in European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen, and Programme Director of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL). His main research areas include humour and satire across media, modernism, posthumanism, and Law and Literature. He has authored the books Laughter from Realism to Modernism (MHRA, 2015) and La scemenza del mondo (ETS, 2011; Edinburgh Gadda First Prize), as well as several articles and book chapters on humour from the eighteenth century to the present. He is currently co-editing a volume on modernist posthumanism (with Carmen Van den Bergh; 2020, under review). Monica Jansen  is Assistant Professor in Italian at Utrecht University. Her main research interests are contemporary Italian literature and culture,

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modernism and postmodernism, cultural memory studies and precarity studies. Publications include Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia (2002); co-edited volumes such as The History of Futurism (2012), Le culture del precariato (2015), Televisionismo (2015) and Narrazioni della crisi. Proposte italiane per il nuovo millennio (2016). She co-directs the book series “Mobile Texts/Testi mobili” for PIE Peter Lang. She is coordinator of the ‘Italian Bookshelf’ for Annali d’Italianistica and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. Eleonora Lima  is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Italian Department at Trinity College Dublin. Her research investigates the interconnections between Italian literature and electronic media from the mid-1950s up to the present day. Previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, she holds a PhD in Italian and Media Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she investigated the impact of information technologies on the work of Italo Calvino and Paolo Volponi. Her research interests include literature and science, the impact of cybernetics on the Italian culture of the mid-twentieth century, and film and media studies. Paolo Saporito  has recently completed a PhD in Italian Studies at McGill University. His research focuses on posthumanist theories, especially in relation to the manifestation of nonhuman subjectivities and agencies in contemporary literature and cinema. He is also interested in transmediality, innovative forms of political activism in digital media, and memory studies. He has presented his work at several conferences and his articles have been published in Modern Italy, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Forum Italicum. Anna  Lisa  Somma is completing her PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). She holds an M.A. in Modern Philology from “La Sapienza” University of Rome. Her research interests include Gender Studies, Lesbian and Queer Studies, Italian Literature, and Comparative Literature. She has penned several articles on the cultural and literary relationships between Italy and Japan from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Serena Todesco  is an Independent Scholar and a Literary Translator. She completed a PhD in Italian Studies at University College Cork in 2013. She has published several articles on contemporary Italian women writers and the South, analysing texts by Cutrufelli, Attanasio, Ferrante,

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Ortese, and Murgia. She has also authored Tracce a margine (2017), a monograph on genre and gender in Sicilian contemporary feminine historical fiction. Her research interests include feminist literary theory, Meridione and issues of gender and identity, narratives on motherhood, and Kristeva’s abjection theory. Carmen Van den Bergh  is Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at the Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society (LUCAS) in the Netherlands, where she is director of the Italian Language and Culture Department. Simultaneously she works in Belgium at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) as a postdoctoral researcher for the Flemish Council for Scientific Research (FWO) with a project on the role of writers in newspapers and magazines of the Italian Novecento. Her specializations include Italian modernism, prose writings during the Italian interwar, (neo)realism in film and literature, the literary canon and the function of anthologies. Kristina  Varade is an Associate Professor of Italian at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York. Her research interests include contemporary fiction from Italy and Ireland, Anglo-Irish travel writing concerning Italy, and Cultural Studies. She has published in Annali d’Italianistica, Forum Italicum, Irish Studies Review, and New Hibernia Review, among other journals, and has been awarded numerous grants for her interdisciplinary research. Among Varade’s most recent publication is a book chapter regarding consumer culture and the fragmented subject in Patrick McCabe’s Ireland: The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood with Jennifer Keating, Ed. (Brill/Rodopi, 2018). Enrico  Vettore is Professor of Italian Studies at California State University, Long Beach. He has published articles on Petrarch and Schopenhauer, Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Sciascia and Manzoni, and Schopenhauer’s concept of “eternal justice” in Borges and Sciascia. His most recent output are a book chapter on an alchemical and Jungian reading of Pasolini’s Medea, and a Zen rendering of Pirandello’s One, No One and One Hundred Thousand. He is currently working on Emmanuel Lévinas’ concepts of Otherness in Gianni Amelio’s The Stolen Children.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: How Italians Became Posthuman Enrica Maria Ferrara

In 1945, one of the most influential intellectuals in twentieth-century Italian culture, Elio Vittorini, published a novel entitled Men and not Men [Uomini e no] which was an account of the partisan struggle in the city of Milan occupied by the German troops before its liberation by the Allies in June 1945. The protagonist of the novel is an intellectual named Enne 2 whose philosophical reflections on the nature of humans and nonhuman others, good and evil, love and betrayal, singular and collective identity, and other antinomic couples, are central to the development of the story. Vittorini explores key themes which had already been introduced in his cult novel Conversation in Sicily [Conversazione in Sicilia] (1938–1939); this time, however, he seems to be particularly troubled by what he regards as the fluid boundaries between human and animal behaviour. This is why, along with Enne 2, his partisan accolades and his beloved partner Berta, three dogs feature among the main characters of the novel. These are Greta, Gudrun and Kaptän Blut who are trained by their German

E. M. Ferrara (*) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_1

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commander to attack and kill human prisoners. In particular, when the dog Greta becomes one of the casualties during a fight between partisans and German military forces, the man responsible for killing the dog is fed to the other two, Gudrun and Kaptän Blut. Notwithstanding the horrific cruelty of the whole scene, Vittorini goes to great lengths to underline the humanity of the dogs who are even described, in a brief and slightly surreal passage, as speaking to one another. It is a very short exchange, consistent with the experimental nature of the novel and one of its main, albeit possibly not very effective, innovative features (Bonsaver 2000, 111). However, what this expedient of the speaking dogs achieves is to emphasize, even if just on a subliminal level, the dissolving margins between human and nonhuman animals. If language has always been considered a distinctive feature of the humans and a cornerstone of “human exceptionalism” in its “fetishization of difference” (Cronin 2017, 68), Vittorini feels that it is important to highlight this aspect for the purpose of what he is ultimately trying to demonstrate: namely that “otherness,” the nonhuman, is consubstantial with human beings. In a crucial passage, after the dog Kaptän Blut has killed and eaten the prisoner, the narrator wonders whether the killing instinct is shared by humans and nonhumans alike, a feature which could be considered intrinsic to animality and therefore part of the human essence. While there is definitely an attempt to define the nature of human beings from an essentialist perspective—through a relentless dialogue with an implied reader to whom the narrator’s italicized commentaries are addressed—Vittorini distributes this essence equally between human and nonhuman animals and seems to reject the idea of a definitive difference between the two species. What he is ultimately concerned with is that “we, men, can also be ‘not men’ … there are, in each man, many inhuman possibilities,” but he does not aim to “divide humanity in two blocks: one of which is all human while the other is inhuman” (Vittorini 1977, 124).1 This approach seems to confirm the hypothesis, advanced by Amberson and Past and based on Esposito’s argument, that “Italian thought stands as a tradition that, unlike much of Western philosophy from Descartes to Heidegger, does not seek to suppress the biological or ‘animal’ part of man in its construction of human identity” (4). Problematic as it may be, Vittorini’s representation is groundbreaking in its provocative dissection of what constitutes human and nonhuman behaviour, pushing the boundaries further ahead compared to the conclusion he had reached in his previous novel. In Conversation in Sicily he had

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advanced the hypothesis that grief and vulnerability (“the woes of the outraged world”) as well as the humans’ ability to transcend and perform these emotions through language are key aspects of humanity; in Men and not Men, less than ten years later, a first-hand experience of war and destruction led him to extend this concept of vulnerability, and the articulation of language as an expressive medium, to other nonhuman species. However, his question as to whether the ability to kill and hate, to be a Fascist and a National Socialist, a perpetrator, an assassin, is partly or exclusively a prerogative of the human remained open as he intended it to be: “We have Hitler today. What is he? Is he not a man? We have those Germans of his. We have the fascists. And what is all this? Can we say that this is not, even this, inside the man? Does this not belong to the man? … We have Gudrun, the bitch. What is this bitch? We have the dog Kaptän Blut. … What are they? Are they not a part of man? Don’t they belong to the man?” (Vittorini 2005, 876–877).2 In the context of the present book exploring the theme of posthumanism in Italian literature and film, Vittorini’s novel is exemplary for a few different reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates that the need to reconsider the place of the human vis-à-vis the nonhuman other, not only in terms of ontological and epistemological hierarchies but also, more specifically, from an ethical perspective, was accelerated by the devastating encounter with the merciless face of humanity during World War I and, even more so, World War II. I am not suggesting that posthumanism originated at this time; indeed, one of the theses of this volume—in agreement with recent scholarly work on this topic3—is that the second half of the nineteenth-­century and the first two decades of the twentieth-century, the period widely known as modernism, was the time in which the premises for a decentring of the anthropos were laid out. However, the two world conflicts, which were unprecedented for their scale and deployment of technologically advanced weapons and machinery, provided the concrete opportunity during which, as illustrated by Vittorini, humans could come face to face with the human and nonhuman other (environment, animals and technological artefacts) in traumatic circumstances which forced them to re-think their identity. Secondly, I find Men and not Men particularly interesting as an early contribution to a theory of the posthuman subject in Italian literature because the identity of the intellectual Enne 2 is negotiated through a performative dialogue between the narrator and the character which is confined to a particular locus of the text, the so-called corsivi [sections in

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italics]. This means that, on the one hand, identity is staged as relational, that is dependent on dialogue and on the account of oneself (Enne 2) given by another (the narrator) (Cavarero 2000). Thus, the “we” of the dialogic subject becomes a precondition for the birth of the “I.” As Judith Butler sums it up: “I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you,’ … You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know” (Butler 2004, 49). Such identity-­ building practice has a crucial role in literature at times of massive social changes, when storytelling is used for the creation of new social interactions that emerge from the debris of old communities. One classic example in Italian literature is offered by Boccaccio’s The Decameron in which the ten young men and women escaping the Black Death of 1348 resort to interactive storytelling not only as a cathartic medium—to kill time and defy the threat of catastrophe—but also, and more importantly, as a powerful performative tool which enables them to rescue aspects of the society they left behind and build a new identity for themselves and their community. Here, like in other texts that emerge in times of natural and manmade disasters, language captures—through dialogic interaction—the very nature of human identity, its relational element. This in turn underlines the interdependency and vulnerability of the humans, exposed to the “gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence” in our precarious lives (Butler 2004, 26). On the other hand, in Vittorini’s novel, as the character Enne 2 inhabits the metanarrative dimension of the text and comes to life in the corsivi written by the autodiegetic narrator, we witness the entanglement of writing with a “theory of the human subject” (Alfano 2016, 45), which in Italian literature can be traced all the way back to Petrarch. In Petrarch, subject identity becomes the object of an extensive reflection that has the expression of self-in-time through writing as its privileged focus. From Petrarch through to Montaigne and all the way to Descartes, written language articulates a discourse on the human subject which brings into focus how the uniqueness of each individual existence is inextricably linked to the fluctuation of inner feelings and thoughts as developed over the course of a lifetime through the powerful expressive and “stylized” medium of language (Alfano 2016, 35–100). Let us then pause for a moment to ask a couple of research questions which inform some of the chapters included in this volume, allowing us to

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capitalize on the discussion conducted so far on the basis of Vittorini’s introductory example. If human language, especially in its written form, grants us a privileged access point to understand and perform identity, from Petrarch to Vittorini and beyond, is it possible to channel through it the voice of nonhuman others? If so, how can this be achieved without the paradoxical representation of dogs parroting human language? Assuming that identity is indeed relational and therefore shaped and performed in dialogue with other humans but also with nonhuman animals and other entities, is it morally and ethically sustainable to continue expressing such identity through the linguistic medium? Is it not true, instead, to paraphrase a famous provocative statement by Karen Barad (2003, 2007) that language has been granted too much power? * * * Cogito ergo sum: the very root of the Cartesian humanistic conceit of human primacy that has shaped Western consciousness has also been the crux around which the concept of human identity has been revolving and expressing itself as power discourse in the humanist era. The Cartesian cogito posits the centrality and the omnipotence of the human, his or her ability to rule the irrational and chaotic ontology of passive matter, and give it a shape and a voice through linguistic articulation. Thus the Cartesian cogito validates man’s4 centrality and his superiority over other beings in light of his ability to reflect upon the self and express identity through language. If we think about the influence that Descartes’s philosophy had on the rise of the English novel, a genre that placed the representation of the modern individual at its core, we will be able to grasp the enormous impact that the presumed dichotomy between the individual and its consciousness must have had on how humans thought of themselves and described their own identity over the next subsequent centuries. Indeed, the process of self-examination that splits the self into a written subject— whose interiority becomes the object of the tale—and a writing subject (the conscious cogito) is central in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) as well as in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). Giving a written account of one’s thoughts, emotions and reflections—as they develop over the course of a given time span—is a founding moment in the definition of the modern

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individual as “the identity of a self is based in the consciousness of being the same thinking subject as someone in the past, i.e. in the memory of his successive conscious states” (Descombes 2016, 84). Additionally, the act of writing about the self succeeds in joining together the “two rival philosophies of subjectivity”: that which defines the subject based on “mental interiority”—with its solipsistic attitude—and the other which, instead, focuses on “personal expressivity” (Descombes 2016, 72–73), accessible to others and therefore objective. In Italian literature, which is the primary field of investigation chosen by the editor of this book—albeit from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective—the rise of the novel will not happen until about a century after the publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, the first edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed [I promessi sposi] was published in 1827.5 Thus, it may be appropriate to say that the privileged means of expression selected by Italian artists and intellectuals to represent human identity after Descartes’ revolutionary theorization about the self were still the theatre—which emphasized the relational aspect of identity through dialogue—and poetry. It is not surprising then if the first shakes and blows to the Cartesian method underpinning the image of a human self separated from language and consciousness, a body separated from its mind, and therefore a human separated from other living forms and inanimate beings by virtue of his or her reflective and linguistic abilities, emerged in Italian literature from the world of poetry—with Leopardi in the nineteenth-century—and from the world of theatre, with Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) at the turn of the twentieth-century. Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), who, on the one hand, can be seen as the classic Romantic poet filtering landscape aesthetics through his interiority and giving voice to the exceptional identity of the artist and his sensitivity, on the other hand, was a ground-breaking thinker who challenged the idea of a neat separation between human and nonhuman forms, and believed in the ontological continuity and porosity of matter/nature and culture/ language as illustrated in his monumental diary Zibaldone. As noted by Gianna Conrad in her chapter on Leopardi which opens the first part of the present volume, Leopardi’s humanity is “no longer closed in upon itself but open and in ontological continuity with animals and nature. This concept, while reducing all species to the same degree of vulnerability, simultaneously focuses on the ‘continuum between nature and culture,’ pointing to a form of egalitarianism of species which is both contiguous and reciprocal in nature.” It is remarkable that Leopardi’s journal, written

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between 1817 and 1832, persuasively described by Conrad as anticipating posthuman concerns, predates by a few decades Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859 and unanimously seen as the work that undermined the following cornerstones of anthropocentrism: “(1) disjunctive essentialism … (2) the idea of scala naturae or hierarchy of living beings … (3) the oppositional dialectics of nature and culture, and especially the dualistic ontology” (Marchesini 2016, 54).6 As humans feel threatened by having to share the same genealogical line with other species, they also perceive that central concepts of humanism such as freedom, self-determination, autopoiesis, interiority, may be eroded by proximity with other beings whose behaviour, until then, has been considered mechanically determined. As a result, the immediate human reaction is “to objectify the non-human … and let man emerge as protagonist” (Marchesini 2016, 56). This entails “to reduce the animal content of human beings and confine them nearly exclusively to a cultural dimension”; to underplay the extent of such proximity by depicting the animal as radical alterity; and, finally, “to re-launch the model of animal as machine”: an entity “so immersed in the world that can no longer contemplate the world” (2016, 56–57). As we enter the modernist arena, we can witness a destabilizing and de-­centring of the humans as well as their attempt to hold on to their place in the “here and now” of a cultural–natural sphere dominated by a hyper-­ virilized version of the Nietzschean Übermensch. I am referring to the Futurist movement by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) which simultaneously incarnates what have been termed as the “two modes of the modernist posthuman formulated as a series of linked antitheses: heroic versus anti-heroic, egotistic versus post-anthropocentric, conflictual versus peaceful, loud versus quiet” (Wallace 2016, 43). It is as if only in the tension of the binary, which has however lost its ontological value, can the individual be re-born and regain their place in nature by eradicating the “I” as it used to be, with aggression and determination. Despite their loss of a privileged place in the hierarchy of species, the new Futurist humans will still dominate nature and the environment; they will do so by severing their ties with the old humanist humans and their academic culture whose museums, “absurd slaughterhouses for painters and sculptors,” are compared to graveyards (Marinetti 2009b, 52).7 Aside from the bombastic and propagandistic tone of Marinetti’s manifestos, a posthumanist programme is certainly visible in his commitment to modify the human language so that it can express its interaction with matter and

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technology without the filter of human feelings.8 What the leader of Futurism aims to achieve is to “substitute for human psychology … the lyrical obsession with matter” (Marinetti 2009d, 122).9 As if in anticipation of Barad’s disempowerment of language as a human-centred, egotistic and subjective tool, Marinetti launches his poetry of “word-in-freedom” which bans the use of adjectives, adverbs, tenses other than the infinitive, punctuation. And yet, despite this destructive force—or possibly because of it—the individual reinvents itself and “let man emerge as protagonist” (Marchesini 2016, 56). We have to wait for Pirandello to develop, also in modernist times, a critique of anthropocentrism. His theory of humour in literature and his adoption of a digressive and “intransitive” style (Mazzacurati 1987) of writing served to question the centrality and stability of the human already in his narrative work, which pre-dates his major plays. In fact, Pirandello’s concern with the nonhuman other, which can be gleaned through his narrative, is a feature that permits to align his work with that of other Italian modernists such as Tozzi, Svevo, Gadda and Palazzeschi, and European artists such as Joyce, Woolf and Eliot. Godioli, Jansen and Van den Bergh make this central argument in their chapter that “by questioning the anthropocentrism underlying novelistic clichés and conventions … Pirandello reframes human events within a much broader biological continuum, where the hierarchical relation between human calamities and the ‘lives of worms’ cannot be taken for granted anymore.” Thus the human species is contemplated from a cosmic distance, by way of a methodology termed as “long-range aesthetics” that leads to a relativization of its centrality. It is in Pirandello’s theatre, however, that the so-­ called “epic I” (Szondi 1987, 6)—the solid and unitary self of the traditional storytelling human, and the omniscient author of the nineteenth century (and eighteenth century) novelistic tradition—comes explicitly under attack. The author sought by the Six Characters in Search of an Author [Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore] (1921) disintegrates under the siege of his own ghosts, figments of his imagination produced by the power of language. The human “other,” with whom the traditional theatre interfaced the human in a constant dialogue, has become a linguistic “other.” The characters are fictional and therefore reveal the linguistic (i.e. fictional) nature of all aspects of reality, including and especially that of the human. These modernist premises of posthumanism, discussed in the first part of this book, are an important threshold from which it is possible to contemplate the process of becoming posthuman at its inception whereas, on

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the one hand, Leopardi’s philosophy paves the way to a bio-egalitarian understanding of species, involving creation of hybrid human–nonhuman identities; on the other hand, Pirandello’s critique brings to the forefront the struggle between nature and culture, ontology and language, taking us back to those central questions which we have previously formulated. If human language is the main tool for the (literary) representation of human identity, what happens when the meaning of that identity is altered by interaction with other agents that become central in the posthuman era, including nonhuman animals, inert matter and technological artefacts? Is it true, as recently argued, that literature is inherently posthuman, as “it gives access to the essence of things, the stoniness of stones, because it bypasses conceptual thought and operates directly on and via sensation?” (Askin 2016, 172). Conversely, can it not be argued that the realms of posthumanism and literature “might be mutually exclusive” if we consider the literary as a “cultures of the letter as distinct from increasingly dominant cultures of code and the digital?”(Callus and Aquilina 2016, 122). * * * One of the first Italian intellectuals to address these or similar questions in his non-fictional and fictional work was Italo Calvino who began to theorize about the combinatory nature of literature in the mid to late 1950s. Calvino’s understanding of the repetitive and formulaic nature of storytelling during his classification, transcription and re-writing of the Italian fairy tales for the publisher Einaudi (1954–1956), and his concurrent exposure to structural and post-structural linguistics (particularly the work of Lévi-Strauss and Barthes), led him to reflect upon literature as repetitive “becoming”: a device powered by functions, structures and linguistic units that might not even need a human to operate. In 1966, when he first delivered the talk titled Cybernetics and Ghosts ([Cibernetica e fantasmi] published one year later, in 1967) Calvino seems to anticipate (or comment upon) some of the main concepts which underpin the critical re-­examination of humanism by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. As he humorously proclaims the imminent death of the human author whose storytelling performance will soon be carried out by computer devices, Calvino simultaneously explores the idea of the performative nature of language and reality, and of reality as a linguistic construct. Having reached the conclusion that literature is a combinatory machine which could be run by

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artificial intelligence, Calvino proceeds to wonder about the role of the human in the new epistemic process. His conclusion is that repetition of linguistic formulas and narrative functions is vital in literature to disclose what he calls “a language vacuum” (Calvino 1987, 19), an untold area of reality which is unexplored because we have no words to define it yet. Calvino describes this process as a tension or aspiration displayed by the human to thread the margins between what is real and what is not, between conscious and subconscious, natural and supernatural, human and nonhuman. We may argue that it is precisely in this “language vacuum” hypotesized by Calvino that the new posthuman human is born in Italian literature.10 In fact, over the 1960s and 1970s, Calvino will attempt to narrow the gap between human and nonhuman by widening the language and filling that “vacuum” through the Cosmicomics stories [Le cosmicomiche] (1965) of the humanized mollusc Qfwfq, or the stones and paths of that hybrid culture–nature formation that are his cities in The Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili] (1972). By exploring the boundaries of language and its ability to re-negotiate the borders between the humans and various other forms of life, either through creation of hybrid figurations or through stylistic experiments of repetition (The Invisible Cities and The Castle of Crossed Destinies [Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1973]) aiming to make identity surface through a sort of epiphany of “differentials” (Deleuze 2014), Calvino opens the way to a different form of intellectual engagement. Though, Calvino was not alone in his quest. After the failed experiment of the Gramscian “organic intellectuals” who were expected to bridge the gap between privileged middle-class with underprivileged working-class humans during the enthusiastic period of post-war reconstruction dominated by left-wing cultural politics, many Italian (and European) intellectuals lost faith in organized Communism in the late 1950s and were made to confront the painful realization of the discursive self-regenerating nature of political power. Based on these views, art was one of the instruments that political power had been using to re-create itself under different guises and shapes throughout the centuries: neorealism, which was the cultural reification of the work undertaken by organic intellectuals, was just one example of the multifaceted incarnation of power discourse. Pier Paolo Pasolini vehemently denounces this state of affair between the 1960s and the 1970s, through films such as The Hawks and the Sparrows [Uccellacci e uccellini] (1966)—whose protagonist is famously a talking raven, zoomorphic representation of the author as engaged

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intellectual—and even more so through his largely neglected plays. For example, the play Calderón (drafted in 1966 and published in 1973) is partly set within Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas, the artwork which, in Foucault’s view, serves to visualize the de-centring of the human subject by unveiling the dualistic logics ruling representational realism: “We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lustreless back. The other side of a psyche” (Foucault 1994, 6). Impegno then becomes, in Pasolini’s mission, a call to unmask and challenge the inherent dualism that rules Western thought, and its representation in literature and film, by pursuing a crusade against capitalism and its commodification of the body. Capitalism, as argued by Pasolini, is a self-­ regenerating power discourse, one which has taken several shapes and forms in the history of humanity, a manifestation of “rational” thought able to turn against its own human (and animal) body by victimizing individuals perceived as “others” based on their race, gender, species and social status. However, with Pasolini we are largely still in a phase of antithesis during which intellectuals were grappling with the traditional meaning of human identity from an oppositional perspective. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the anti-humanist posture adopted by anti-hegemonic groups such as the Feminist and Queer movements, the Anti-racial and Post-colonial movements, the Environmentalist and Animal Rights movements, contributed to undermining the traditional human subject—Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, symbol of Western humanism—through a systematic rejection of its dominant place in society and its normativity. This also entailed a rejection of the dialectical scheme of thought which perpetuates the dichotomy between Same and Other. Based on this scheme, of Marxist descent, identity (and knowledge) would be generated through the opposition of otherness (antithesis) to sameness (thesis) and this would cause entire categories of beings to fall into the broad negative categories of the “sexualized others (woman), the racialized other (native) and the naturalized other (animals, the environment, the earth)” (Braidotti 2013, 27). For these beings, identity would be a mark of difference; their subjectivity would exist and acquire a meaning only in opposition to the dominant subject (male, heterosexual, white). As Plumwood has recently illustrated, the iteration of a rationalist culture grounded on human/nature dualism is definitely the big culprit in Western

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society as it links supremacy of reason to the human via an “identification of humanity with active mind … and non-humans with passive, tradeable bodies” (2002, 4). The effect of such “otherization of nature” are fully apparent in our contemporary “ecological crisis” which is “the crisis of a cultural ‘mind’ that cannot acknowledge and adapt itself properly to its material ‘body’” (2002, 15). And it is precisely through the announcement of a “crisis of reason” that Italian philosophers gave a decisive impulse to the struggle against oppositional binarism with the publication of the anthology Crisi della ragione [Crisis of Reason] by Aldo Gargani in 1979. As illustrated by Peter Carravetta, this volume, which contained “position papers” by the most distinguished thinkers at the time, clearly demonstrates that reason, and its methodological certainties, are no longer trustworthy. This sets the premises for breaking the dominant methodology-driven paradigm, which had gained favour for nearly two decades. Thinkers show that the claims of reason and the procedures of various disciplines (anthropology, linguistics, epistemology, political science) are metaphysically and rhetorically flawed, and must be questioned anew. (2015, 125)

Over the next subsequent decades, representatives of the posthuman turn, at least from the 1980s onwards, have proposed a number of philosophical solutions reflective of this blurring of the boundaries between human and nonhuman which reshapes the ever-widening category of that which is perceived to be human. The inevitable reference is first and foremost to Gianni Vattimo’s (1936–) “weak thought,” grounded on Heidegger’s existentialism (that first undermined Cartesian dualism through a notion of the human being as “Dasein” or “becoming”) and on Nietzsche’s nihilism; Vattimo’s anthology Il pensiero debole [Weak Thought] published in 1983, “brings to the foreground the limits and dilemmas of ontology and of Western metaphysical thinking in general” while, at the same time, “is devoted to rethinking and reshaping the question of mankind’s essential being” (Carravetta 1988, 22). Despite their nihilistic approach, the philosophers of “weak thought” attempt to salvage the human subject (notwithstanding its “weakness”) by representing its experience of suspension over a threshold beyond which there might be nothingness, or else just an

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“imperceptible becoming, establishing contact with itself [the subject] as it dissolves” (Rovatti 2012, 71). And it is precisely this notion of “suspension” that allows us to bring together the philosophy of Vattimo and Giorgio Agamben (1942–), both reflecting upon the concept of “renunciation,” inherited from Heidegger, as an affirmative rather than destructive principle. In Agamben’s biopolitics, “suspension and destruction do not mean unlearning … and forgetting how to be human” (Bartoloni 2009). Conversely, “moments of suspension are precisely the moments when humans and animals become suspended in indistinction, and when animality and humanity are momentarily reconciled … on the threshold that the anthropological machine … comes to a halt” (Bartoloni 2009). Other important alternatives to male-centric, heteronormative, logocentric humanism emerged within the area of feminist thought with Luisa Muraro’s (1940–) “feminist thought of difference,” stemming from Luce Irigaray’s philosophy, and her invention of the new symbolic order of the mother. As illustrated by Ferrando, during the second wave of Feminism, “the theoretical contribution of Feminism to Posthumanism is crucial. The fact that Feminism brought into question male symbolism as universal has been fundamental to the posthuman effort of decentring the human and its anthropocentric logos from the centre of the discourse” (2016, 5). In other words, the crisis of reason stemming from the death of Man brought along the deconstruction of Woman (Braidotti 2013, 28–30) and her impulse “to destabilize this unitary vision of the subject and open up instead to internal alterity” (Braidotti 2015, V),11 as observed by Kristeva (1991). The critique of humanism—centred around the traditional notion of human as man, which we have discussed—would lead to a progressive erosion of the boundaries with the technological, animal and environmental other: “Thus if the decline of humanism ushers in posthumanism by encouraging sexualized and racialized humans to emancipate themselves from the master-slave dialectic, the crisis of anthropos paves the way to a sudden irruption of the evil force of the naturalized others. Animal, insects, plants and the environment—even the planet and cosmos as a whole—now come into play” (Braidotti 2015, XV).12 One of the first constructive proposals to negotiate the transition to a postanthropocentric posthumanism comes precisely from the feminist arena with Donna Haraway’s powerful theory that provocatively posits the image of the cyborg as an ontological and epistemological tool to explore new alterities, capable of “building and destroying machines, identities,

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categories, relationships, space[s,] stories” (Haraway 1991, 181). It is not surprising if Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) constitutes an important point of reference for several of the chapters included in this volume which take inspiration from its anti-dogmatic and playful deconstruction of the binary associated with traditional humanism. Haraway’s influence on posthuman thought has been crucial for many philosophers from the 1990s onwards; to remain within the Italian domain, which is the one we are principally exploring for the purpose of this volume, I would like to mention Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic and bioegalitarian philosophy (2013), aiming to re-negotiate the boundaries between human, nonhuman animals and inert matter by challenging the dualistic articulation of sameotherness in what is perceived to be human identity; Iovino’s non-anthropocentric humanism, recognizing worth and dignity to all forms of human and nonhuman life (2016; Iovino et al. 2018), linked to Katherine Hayles’s “cognitive embodiment” (1999) and Barad’s performative or agential realism (2003, 2007). Already mentioned over the course of this chapter are Adriana Cavarero’s relational ontology (2000) inspired by Irigaray and Hannah Arendt, and Roberto Marchesini’s reflections on mimesis as a dialogical hybridizing process of two entities (human and nonhuman), that generate new knowledge through temporary ontological aggregations (2016, 2017). All these theoretical approaches to re-thinking the human in its relatedness to alterity are ultimately grounded onto what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls a “co-ontology” or “plural ontology”: human identity as the oxymoron of “being singular plural,” where the “essence of singularity … is not individuality” but rather “the punctuality of a ‘with’ that establishes a certain origin of meaning and connects it to an infinity of other possible origins” (2000, 85). It should not come as a surprise that many of these philosophers who have been attempting to grapple with the definition of posthuman identity, from an ontological, sociological and epistemological perspective, are Italian; as “Italian philosophy has been thinking the human and, more specifically, the living or embodied human with marked intensity for many centuries” (Amberson and Past 2014, 3). Thus, it has been argued that Italian philosophers, such as Muraro and Agamben (followed by Cassano and Iovino), were among the first to re-think the human condition within the new posthuman framework, so much so that we can argue for Italy as the nest of posthumanist culture. One does not have to espouse a nation-­ centred belief to acknowledge that “humanism was, by definition, marked by the contexts in which it found a voice” (Callus et al. 2014, 104). One

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such context was Italy which, as recently argued, because of its “exposure to vast, intersecting migratory movements” and its peripheral position within Europe, provides an ideal hybrid “‘in-between space,’ capable of ‘queering’ fixed notions of a national sovereignty and cultural hegemony” (Brook et al. 2017, 387–388). During the transition between the anti-humanist times of the 1960s and 1970s and what is commonly agreed as the start of posthumanism in literature (Ihab Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer,” 1977) a crucial role has been played by transhuman representations of technologically enhanced and augmented humans in Science Fiction. This is a statement which is valid not only for the Italian context, of course, and it will be worth noting here that reflections on bio-engineered beings that explore the limitations and potential hyper-human abilities of the human body date back as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In Italy, despite being dignified by several literary embodiments of the genre—in the work of Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Dino Buzzati and Paolo Volponi, for example—Science Fiction continued to be seen largely as a sub-genre, mainly due to the overwhelming influence of Croce’s idealism in Italian culture and “its lack of interest towards anything concerning the world of science … that is, anything alien to the logic and perspective of humanism” (Antonello 2015, 8); but also as a result of a rejection by highbrow left-­ wing intellectuals for cultural objects of mass consumption “largely indebted with anglo-american models” (Iannuzzi 2015, 96). Indeed, the dismissal of techno-science by representatives of the humanities was the consequence of that divorce between nature and culture resulting from the reaction to evolutionism which has been highlighted earlier on in this introduction. In a sense, then, we have to agree with Antonello that such dismissal is “an epistemic product of modernity” as it perpetuates and fosters a dualistic mentality in which science and nonhuman nature are opposed to culture and humans: … Confining nature to a quintessentially contemplative dimension, regarding it as a datum external to the human, in its abstract otherness, typical of the idealistic and Cartesian division imposed by modern thought that has acted as a screen to all those mechanisms of hybridization between nature and culture which modernity, on a factual level, was in fact continuing to build. (Antonello 2012, xxiii)13

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Thus, Science Fiction’s attempts to engage with the representation of a posthuman subject endowed with new forms of agency and ultimately expressing the need to re-engage with socio-political entities on new-­ found racial, ethnical, gender and environmental grounds, have largely been neglected by academic criticism. While this volume is not proposing to address that gap which is gradually being filled through a number of studies that have appeared over the past few years (Antonello 2008, 2015; Bertoni 1979, 2015; Brioni and Comberiati 2019; Iannuzzi 2015), it shows however some fertile directions of posthuman fiction in its creation of hybrid techno-human and animal–human identities that certainly put to good use the legacy of Science Fiction and some of its central tenets, such as Darko Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement (1979). Akin to mass fascination with the “exoterical paradigm” and “occulture” in the 1960s and 1970s—pointing towards disorientation of the individual when confronted with the opacity of political powers— (Camilletti 2018) the attention to the topos of the zombie, widespread and nearly ubiquitous in 1980s films and popular literature, highlights how, in a period of political hedonism and alleged pacification following the end of 1970s terrorism, people’s concern and fear re-surface in this quintessential representation of the posthuman subject. From the 1990s onwards, exploration of the boundaries between humans, technology, nonhuman animals and the environment, has enabled writers to articulate a political discourse around the humanness of humans, resulting in the representation of techno-dependent/technologically enhanced subjects, zoomorphic or hybrid human–animal figurations, and in the creation of complex humans that refuse a neat separation between nature and culture or any essentialist classifications of gender, race, ethnicity, etc. One of the landmarks of such posthuman turn in Italian literature may be identified in the anthology Gioventù cannibale [Young Cannibals] (Brolli 1996) which was the launching pad of writers such as Niccolò Ammaniti, Aldo Nove, Tiziano Scarpa whose work is analysed in some of the chapters included in this volume. The Cannibali initiated a “radical evolution in the form and the very ethics of modern Italian literature,” as they promoted a “narrative where the notion of ‘borderline’ has been perforce obliterated, ‘mixed’ in a powerful cocktail with blood” (Lucamante 2001, 13–17). * * *

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So far, I have referred briefly to some of the contributors’ chapters. At this point, I would like to focus more specifically on the three parts in which this volume is subdivided: Becoming Posthuman, Technology and Identity and Boundaries of the Human. My aim is to tackle the issue of the posthuman from different angles and through several theoretical frameworks, exploring a number of scenarios that have been imagined by Italian authors in literature and film in an attempt to give voice to the new posthuman human, with a particular attention to the repositioning of the intellectuals as creators of knowledge. The first part, Becoming Posthuman, aims to investigate the reflective process anticipating and underlying the transformation of consciousness in the posthuman era. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the fractured self of the Cartesian cogito became self-conscious and attempted to overcome the fracture between reflective and reflected subjectivities. Contributions included in this part not only elaborate on this process from a historical angle (through analysis of Leopardi and Pirandello’s work, for instance) but also propose two case studies taken from contemporary literature in which authors aim to bridge the gap between the human and the posthuman subject by consciously writing the process of “becoming” posthuman. Conrad’s chapter explores Giacomo Leopardi’s universe as described in the Zibaldone: an ecological system of infinite possibility and multiplicity of absolutes, swarming with hybrid identities generated by interactions of human and nonhuman entities. Leopardi reflects upon the existential relationship, the social organization, the evolution and the history of all species, simultaneously meditating upon the political structures that accompany them. Based on Conrad’s argument, Leopardi’s model functions as a tool of collective and performative politics that reduces all living matter to the same degree of vulnerability, bringing to light a new form of egalitarianism of species which is both of contiguity and mutual influence. The next chapter by Alberto Godioli, Monica Jansen and Carmen Van den Bergh takes us into the early twentieth century, with a specific focus on Pirandello’s understanding of animality. The texts analysed highlight Pirandello’s awareness of a zoological continuum encompassing human and nonhuman beings, with particular emphasis on his posthumanist gaze that conveys a sense of “cosmic” detachment from human events. As happens in Leopardi’s case, Pirandello’s posthumanism is expressed via the creation of human–animal hybrid figurations charged with displacing

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potential and capable of putting in question, on a political and ethical level, the overpowering role of the human. This attitude to hybridization reaches its full potential in twentieth and twenty-first century literature: here, the exploitative and colonialist attitude of the human vis-à-vis the animal world and the environment is unmasked as a capitalist process of commodification (Plumwood 2002, 143–166). Exemplary in this respect is the narrative of Laura Pugno analysed by Marco Amici in the third chapter of this section. Focusing on recurring elements identified in novels such as Sirene [Mermaids] (2007), La caccia [The Hunt] (2012) and La ragazza selvaggia [The Wild Girl] (2016), Amici demonstrates how Pugno’s hybrid form of realism can be related to a discourse on anthropocentrism and its polarity, non-anthropocentrism. The tension between entangled human and nonhuman identities is also central in the following chapter written by Ferrara who illustrates how dualism is overcome by means of an active process of “becoming posthuman” in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Drawing on Barad’s notion of the world of phenomena as “intra-acting agency,” Ferrara describes the emergence of the interconnected plural identity of the characters of Elena and Lina as they confront their fear of merging with the environmental and technological “other” precisely by losing their singularity. The act of writing in Ferrante may be seen as the enactment of that “agential cut” (Barad) which enables the individual to maintain a sense of identity whilst embracing their enmeshment with human and nonhuman alterities. Thus human language, the cornerstone of human exceptionalism as pointed out by Leopardi, Pirandello (and also by Pugno), becomes the means by which the posthuman subject may successfully become “singular plural” (Nancy 2000) and bridge the gap with the world of phenomena. The second part of this volume titled Technology and Identity considers the impact that techno-science and technological innovations have had on the construction of subject identities in the posthuman era. In particular, it explores the work of Italian authors who have explicitly dwelled upon the interaction between machines, digital and technical devices (such as computers, mobile phones, smartphones, videogames, etc.) and the human. Topical questions addressed in this section concern the transition from singular to relational identity of the new posthuman subject shaped by media and digital devices. Has the new web-enabled, constantly connected individual of the posthuman era abdicated his/her own agency in favour of a collective agency determined via the interaction of many interconnected consciousnesses? Also, what type of knowledge is produced

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through enmeshment with technological artefacts? Since the decisive decade of the 1980s in which the “communications revolution” may be located, have humanity and their knowledge been driven by “technological determinism” or is it the case that antideterministic positions still “leave scope for human intention, freedom, and rational calculation”? (Russo 2005, 8). In the first chapter of this part, Giancarlo Alfano sets the historical scene in which the epistemic turn is located by launching an investigation about Italian contemporary poetry, its circulation on the web and the new processes of dissemination and self-canonization. Alfano argues that the web posits with renewed strength the issue of the canon while, in the meantime, the widespread use of electronic tools, and their attendant practices and cultural conceits, demand us to question the traditional concept of “originality.” Some very intriguing research questions emerge from this chapter’s discussion: has the web changed our traditional perception of what constitutes poetic work? In the world of quick response, has the lyrical language undergone a profound change? The major shift which Alfano underlines, however, regards the transition from the era of “mechanical reproduction” of the work of art (Benjamin) to the era of digital reproduction of its author whose identity is not unique and unrepeatable any longer because the new posthuman individual is not perceived as embodied, rooted in flesh, incarnated. This is a critical aspect of the relationships between humans and technology, amply discussed by Hayles in her seminal work How We Became Posthuman where she states that “the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (1999, 2). And yet, the constant connectedness with other identities via the digital media and smartphone technology produce both a sense of fragmentation and of deeper embeddedness of the posthuman human. This is one of the points made by Kristina Varade in her chapter examining the relationship between mobile phones and fragmented subjects in narrative texts by Aldo Nove, Andrea De Carlo and Giuseppe Culicchia. In Nove’s short story “Vibravoll” (1996), the mobile phone succeeds in providing a false sense of sexual emancipation and gendered power to the woman narrator; in De Carlo’s Pura vita [Pure Life] (2001) all human relationships are expressed/ negotiated through the means of SMS and mobile phone conversation; finally, Culicchia’s Brucia la città [Burning City] (2009) shows how the cellphone provides an impermanent sense of self, specifically through

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consumer culture. Varade concludes that contemporary Italian fiction reveals “how technology and narratives encompassing technology act as primary elements in the contemporary quotidian.” Furthermore, the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones in literature contributes to reshape and reimagine traditional literary forms producing “narrative expression appropriate to post-millennium society.” The next two chapters in this section are a primary example of how Haraway’s theory of the cyborg still functions as a subversive tool to question traditional gender norms, patterns of sexuality and reproduction, binary oppositions of cultural versus natural behaviours. Eleonora Lima’s study investigates how Luciano Bianciardi in La vita agra [It’s a Hard Life] (1962) and Tiziano Scarpa in “Madrigale” [Madrigal] (1998) frame their discourse about the impact of technologies on the naturalness of the female body. Despite sharing a similar expressionist language and a taste for the grotesque and bodily humour, the two texts nevertheless attribute opposite roles to technology: Bianciardi sees it as an alienating and anti-­ feminine force, whereas Scarpa, believing in the discursive nature of gender, rejects any substantial difference between natural and mechanical essence. Lima’s chapter aims to examine the negotiation process taking place in each text, which ultimately demonstrates how literature actively shapes the social meaning and cultural role of technologies rather than merely reflecting—either by welcoming or contesting it—the posthuman shift. The following chapter by Anna Lisa Somma and Serena Todesco focuses on the novel Bambini di ferro [Iron Children] (2016) written by multi-awarded writer Viola Di Grado, whose work is little investigated by scholars. Set in Nepal between the sixth and the fifth centuries BC and in a futuristic Japan, Bambini di ferro provides a stimulating insight into a posthuman world where maternity has been reduced to an android process, its “loving gestures are no longer spontaneous, yet need to be artificially recreated.” By adopting a critical framework inspired by Kristeva’s abjection theory and Braidotti’s thoughts on maternity, monstrosity and machines, this chapter aims at reading Bambini di ferro’s representation of an android maternity able to challenge the biological one. The third and final part of this volume titled Boundaries of the Human deals with texts exploring the re-definition of boundaries between the human subject and the other beings or entities endowed with agency in the posthuman era: animals, inanimate entities and technological artefacts. These are subjects that were traditionally labelled as “others” within the confines of a Cartesian logic which functioned on the premises of

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binarism. By replacing the dualistic philosophy of humanism with a monistic ontology which can be traced back to Spinoza, the posthumanist thought posits an interconnection of all life (Braidotti’s zoe) in which the human subject is constantly united with the traditional “others” in uninterrupted autopoietic flow of energy. Questions posed in this section concern the ability of the human to adjust to his/her shifting position vis-à-vis all remaining matter. Ethical questions are also addressed as issues of impegno and ideological commitment come more prominently into focus. For example, in the first chapter, Bolongaro argues that at the root of contemporary posthumanist theories lies an ethical and cognitive imperative which cautions us against presupposing the sovereignty of the human as the necessary condition for the articulation of meaning and value. Through a close reading of Aldo Nove’s La vita oscena [The obscene life] (2010), Bolongaro seeks to demonstrate how this fictional text compellingly explores the limitations of the human perspective and broaches a posthumanist horizon which, however, remains tantalizingly beyond the reach of the narrator. This cognitive impasse is interpreted as an ethical failure which sheds light on the steep challenges faced by the posthumanist project. Next, Enrico Vettore blends Zen Buddhism and Ecopsychology to explore the intertwined topics of identity and the environment in Gianni Celati’s 1980s fiction. Ecopsychology blurs the boundaries between human subject and the environment and illuminates the innate emotional bonds between person and planet; Zen Buddhism claims that the self and the world are coextensive, impermanent and non-substantial. Through a close reading of Celati’s narratives, Vettore shows that many of Celati’s characters exhibit a posthuman, impermanent “identity” inextricably interlaced with that of the environment. Celati seems to posit that humans and environment are not only interdependent but profoundly enmeshed, and therefore his texts may be suggesting that to heal humans means to heal the environment, and vice versa. The following chapter by Fabio Camilletti takes us into the realm of cinema and other media, which offers me the opportunity to specify that, notwithstanding the existence of important films anticipating aspects of posthumanism in Italian culture—from Pasolini’s Porcile [Pigsty] (1969) to Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) or Gabriele Salvatores’s Nirvana (1997), and so on—the purpose of this volume is to propose some exemplary case studies which provide the readers with an initial understanding of the complexity that the vast and mostly unexplored

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subject matter of posthumanism in Italian literature and film entails. From this perspective, I am hoping that the last two chapters by Fabio Camilletti and Paolo Saporito will contribute to open up a debate around some key questions waiting to be researched and on which some fascinating work is being published as I am writing the current introduction (Past 2019). For instance, what was the role of Italian popular films traditionally classified as belonging to the horror or science-fiction genre in the reinvention of the human? How far did these movies push the boundaries of their spectatorship’s perception, enabling them to catch on screen a glimpse of the future posthuman human? On the other hand, is it true that “there is a congruence between the posthuman and the post-literary” (Clarke and Rossini 2016, xix), so that audiovisual techniques and digital art would be better equipped to capture representations of the posthuman? Fabio Camilletti’s chapter, in this respect, is exemplary as it uses several typologies of texts—songs, films and novels by Gianfranco Manfredi, Pupi Avati and Tiziano Sclavi—to analyse the figure of the zombie, which may be considered a quintessentially posthuman icon. As previously mentioned, in Italy zombies enter the imaginary between the end of the years of political terrorism and the beginning of the so-called age of “reflux.” In his chapter, Camilletti explores the multifaceted presence of zombies in Italian pop culture of the 1980s arguing that the theme of the “living dead” obliquely metaphorizes the disappearance/persistence of social conflict in the decade of “hedonism” and post-modern disimpegno. The final chapter by Paolo Saporito discusses the relationship between the female body, the material environment and the camera in Antonioni’s famous trilogy of alienation (1960–1962), drawing on Barad’s theory of agential realism. Anna’s disappearance in L’avventura [The Adventure] (1960) establishes both the camera and the environment as agential subjects, calling for a posthumanist reading of their relationship with the female body in later films. Lidia and Valentina, in La notte [The Night] (1961), enter trans-corporeal time-spaces that open their bodies to vibrant matter. However, this opening is still affected by a logocentric approach. L’eclisse [The Eclipse] (1962) problematizes the material–discursive divide, opposing Vittoria’s open-ended attitude toward matter to financial discursive practices. In the ending of L’eclisse, the camera enacts the female characters’ embodied ethical sensibility, investigating the material environment from a posthumanist perspective. The above three parts have been designed with a view to trace a progression, both from a diachronic–historical and from a synchronic

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perspective: from the proto-notion of a doubled or fractured self which is tentatively rebuilt through a process of storytelling to the concept of a relational subject whose sense of singularity has been shattered mainly through the impact of technology, web-enabled devices and social media, and, finally, to the full emersion of a posthuman identity that is constructively re-negotiating its boundaries with other concurrent agencies. It might not be superfluous to mention that some of the chapters, if not all of them, could have been placed in other parts whose boundaries, in keeping with the nature of the subject-matter, are inherently porous and flexible.

Notes 1. “vi sono, nell’uomo, molte possibilità inumane. Ma non divide l’umanità in due parti: una delle quali sia tutta umana e l’altra tutta inumana.” My translation. 2. “Noi abbiamo Hitler oggi. E che cos’è? Non è uomo? Abbiamo i tedeschi suoi. Abbiamo i fascisti. E che cos’è tutto questo? Possiamo dire che non è, questo anche, nell’uomo? Che non appartenga all’uomo? Abbiamo Gudrun, la cagna. Che cos’è questa cagna? Abbiamo il cane Kaptän Blut. … Ma che cosa sono? Non dell’uomo? Non appartengono all’uomo?” My translation. 3. See the chapter by Godioli, Jansen and Van den Bergh in this volume. 4. The use of the sexist word “man” in this paper, to denote “human”, merely acknowledges its traditional use in the study of Humanities. 5. This is not to say that Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis by Ugo Foscolo, completed in 1798 may not be considered a novel. However, given its distinctive epistolary form, it did not function as an archetypical model in Italian literature, unlike Manzoni’s work which, however, was published almost three decades later. 6. All translations from Roberto Marchesini’s Italian texts are my own. 7. “assurdi macelli di pittori e scultori” (Marinetti 2009a). 8. According to Ferrando, if Futurism may definitely be considered in the genealogy of posthumanism, along with Dadaism and Surrealism, there are two aspects by which the two philosophical trends diverge; firstly Futurism wished to break with the past while posthumanism “does not disregard the past … in an academic attempt of inclusiveness that opens to other species and hypothetical life forms” (3); secondly, Futurism’s fascination with machines and technology, as well as its celebration of war, does not align with posthumanist concerns towards the environment and all forms of human and nonhuman life.

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9. “Sostituire la psicologia dell’uomo … con L’OSSESSIONE LIRICA DELLA MATERIA” (Marinetti 2009c). 10. On Calvino’s contribution to mapping posthuman ontologies via his narrative, see Iovino 2014a, b, among her other studies on Calvino and ecocriticism. 11. “destabilizzare questa visione unitaria del soggetto e di aprirsi all’alterità interna.” My translation. 12. “Così se il declino dell’umanesimo inaugura il postumano esortando gli umani sessualizzati e razzializzati a emanciparsi dalla relazione dialettica schiavo-padrone, la crisi dell’anthropos spiana la strada all’irruzione delle forze demoniache degli altri naturalizzati. Animali, insetti, piante e ambiente, addirittura pianeta e cosmo nel suo insieme, vengono ora chiamati in gioco.” My translation. 13. My translation.

Works Cited Alfano, Giancarlo. 2016. L’umorismo letterario. Una lunga storia europea (secoli XIV–XX). Rome: Carocci editore. Amberson, Deborah, and Elena Past, eds. 2014. Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Antonello, Pierpaolo. 2008. La nascita della fantascienza in Italia: il caso «Urania». In Le origini dell’americanismo in Italia, ed. Jeffrey Schnapp and Emanuela Scarpellini, 99–123. Milan: Il Saggiatore. ———. 2012. Contro il materialismo. Le “due culture” in Italia: bilancio di un secolo. Turin: Nino Aragno. ———. 2015. “Prefazione. Archeologie del futuro.” In Distopie, viaggi spaziali, allucinazioni. Fantascienza italiana contemporanea, by Giulia Iannuzzi, 7–16. Milan: Mimesis. Askin, Ridvan. 2016. 13 – Objects. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, 170–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs (University of Chicago Press) 28 (3): 801–831. ———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Bartoloni, Paolo. 2009. Renunciation: Heidegger, Agamben, Blanchot, Vattimo. Comparative Critical Studies 6 (1): 67–92. https://aran.library.nuigalway.ie/ handle/10379/1474.

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Bertoni, Roberto. 1979. Alcune tendenze della fantascienza italiana. Trimestre 12 (1/2): 111–146. ———, ed. 2015. Aspects of Science Fiction since the 1980s: China, Italy, Japan, Korea. Dublin and Turin: Trinity College and Trauben. Bonsaver, Guido. 2000. Elio Vittorini: The Writer and the Written. Leeds: Northern Universities Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2015. Quattro tesi sul femminismo. In Gender and Posthuman, ed. Francesca Ferrando and Simonetta Marino, Special Issue, La camera blu. Journal of Gender Studies 11, n° 12: I–XXX. Brioni, Simone, and Daniele Comberiati. 2019. Italian Science Fiction. The Other in Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brolli, Daniele, ed. 1996. Gioventù cannibale. Turin: Einaudi. Brook, Clodagh, Florian Mussgnug, and Giuliana Pieri. 2017. Italian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Italian Studies 72 (4): 380–392. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Callus, Ivan, and Mario Aquilina. 2016. 10  – E-Literature. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, 121–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callus, Ivan, Stefan Herbrechter, and Manuela Rossini. 2014. Introduction: Dis/ Locating Posthumanism in European Literary and Critical Traditions. In European Posthumanism, Special Issue. European Journal of English Studies 18: 103–120. Calvino, Italo. [1967] 1987. Cybernetics and Ghosts. In The Literature Machine, trans. Patrick Creagh, 3–27. London: Secker and Warburg. Camilletti, Fabio. 2018. Italia Lunare. Gli anni Sessanta e l’occulto. Oxford: Peter Lang. Carravetta, Peter. 1988. Repositioning Interpretive Discourse from ‘Crisis of Reason’ to ‘Weak Thought’. Differentia: Review of Italian Thought 2: 83–126. http://www.petercarravetta.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Crisis-ofReason-to-Weak-Thought.pdf. ———. 2015. After Thought: From Method to Discourse. RSA Journal (Rivista di Studi Americani; Journal of the Italian Association of North American Studies) 26: 121–140. Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London: Routledge. Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini. 2016. Preface: Literature, Posthumanism, and the Posthuman. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, xi-xxii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation. Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. [1968] 2014. Difference and Repetition. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Descombes, Vincent. 2016. Puzzling Identities. Trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Ferrando, Francesca. 2016. A Feminist Genealogy of Posthuman Aesthetics in the Visual Arts. Palgrave Communications 2. https://doi.org/10.1057/ palcomms.2016.11. Foucault, Michel. [1966] 1994. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hassan, Ihab. 1977. Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture? The Georgia Review 31 (4): 830–850. Hayles, Nancy K. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Iannuzzi, Giulia. 2015. Distopie, viaggi spaziali, allucinazioni. Fantascienza italiana contemporanea. Milan: Mimesis. Iovino, Serenella. 2014a. HybridiTales: Posthumanizing Calvino. In Thinking Italian Animals: Animals and the Posthuman in Italian Literature and Film, ed. Deborah Amberson and Elena M.  Past, 215–232. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014b. Storie dell’altro mondo: Calvino post-umano. Modern Language Notes MLN 129 (1, Italian Issue): 118–138. ———. 2016. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation. London: Bloomsbury. Iovino, Serenella, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena M. Past, eds. 2018. Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Colombia University Press. Lucamante, Stefania. 2001. Introduction: ‘Pulp,’ Splutter and More: The New Italian Narrative of the Giovani Cannibali Writers. In Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovani Cannibali Writers, ed. and trans. Stefania Lucamante, 13–37. Madison Teaneck and London: Farleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses. Marchesini, Roberto. 2016. Etologia filosofica. Alla ricerca della soggettività animale. Milan, Udine: Mimesis. ———. 2017. Over the Human: Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany. Trans. Sarah De Sanctis. Cham: Springer. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 2009a. Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo. In I manifesti del futurismo. Reprint of the 1909 edition, Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28144/28144-h/28144-h.htm.

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———. 2009b. The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909). In Futurism. An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 49–53. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. ———. 2009c. Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista. In I manifesti del futurismo. Reprint of the 1912 edition, Project Gutenberg. https://www. gutenberg.org/files/28144/28144-h/28144-h.htm. ———. 2009d. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912). In Futurism. An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 119–125. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo. 1987. Pirandello nel romanzo europeo. Bologna: Il Mulino. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Past, Elena. 2019. Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Rovatti, Pier Aldo. 2012. Transformations in the Course of Experience. In Weak Thought, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, translated and with an introduction by Peter Carravetta, 53–73. New York: Suny Press. Russo, John Paul. 2005. The Future without a Past. The Humanities in a Technological Society. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of the Modern Drama. Ed. and Trans. Michael Hays. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vittorini, Elio. 1977. Gli anni del Politecnico: Lettere 1945–1951. Ed. Carlo Minoia. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 2005. Uomini e no. In Le opere narrative, ed. Maria Corti, vol. I, 711–920. Milan: Mondadori. Wallace, Jeff. 2016. 4 – Modern. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, 41–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Becoming Posthuman

CHAPTER 2

Giacomo Leopardi’s Book of the Future: The Zibaldone as an Encyclopedia for the Ecosophical Posthuman Gianna Conrad

Giacomo Leopardi’s literary imagination—characterized by the rhetorical gesture of combining opposites and blurring the demarcation line between several meanings—is a highly fluid and radically different form of nineteenth-­century modernity. Not only does it stand in sharp contrast with the dominant philosophical ideals of systematicity and organicity building upon the models of German Idealism, and praised by other Italian authors and thinkers at the time, but it is also perfectly in line with the fragmentary structure and the zigzag progression of his “poem that has no name at all and cannot be given one from the known genres” (Z 40)1: the Zibaldone. Indeed, this work represents a “huge secret manuscript,” written by Leopardi between 1817 and 1832, which was published posthumously by the Italian poet Giosuè Carducci in 1898–1900 (Caesar and D’Intino xiv). In the Zibaldone, Leopardi invites the reader to

G. Conrad (*) University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_2

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join him on a journey through a literary text that wriggles like a snake and to adopt a certain comprehension of “the reticular structure of [his] thought” bringing together various fields of knowledge and culminating in what Caesar and D’Intino call a “modern, fluid, questioning encyclopedism” (xiv–xvi). A similar point is made by Fabiana Cacciapuoti who observes that the Zibaldone experiments with its textual chronology and abandons any linear order in terms of both the semantic and the semiotic level of the text. As a result, Leopardi’s book turns into a text, Cacciapuoti argues, composed of “hundreds and hundreds of cross-references that cause an effect of differentiation of signifiers which then extends the field of denotation ad infinitum” (VII). These unorthodox patterns, of course, vividly exemplify Leopardi’s everlasting ambiguous and troubling role within the Italian literary canon. For example, Benedetto Croce (1927) writes in this regard that Leopardi’s momenti poetici generate an endless and infinitely open narrative space that is “neither here, nor there, nor in that other place” (87). The fact that a final meaning can never be present in Leopardi’s writing as it keeps moving in an open referral context and, as such, constitutes a neutral, composite and oblique space, is an argument which will arise later on in this chapter when discussing Leopardi’s text in more detail. In so far during my analysis I will recurrently return to examples that illustrate how Leopardi’s thought in the Zibaldone escapes predefined schemes and frames and thus shows the profound intellectual flexibility and freedom that characterizes the spirit of Leopardi’s philosophical and literary thinking. Accordingly, as will be seen, the various entries of the Zibaldone not only give space to a network of external differences in that they refer to other textual and cultural discourses, but they are also marked by internal differences and plurality. Actually, a prime example of such internal difference is the potentially infinite number of relationships that Leopardi’s writing creates between the multiple layers of signification of a text which develops around numerous colliding and overlapping subject areas, such as Ethics, Metaphysics, Ontology, Anthropology, Philosophy, Science, Philology and Linguistics. This blurring of boundaries subsequently transforms the Zibaldone into a product that points to a continuous tension between two poles of opposition: on the one hand, the explicit dichotomous relationship between abstract and concrete data, systematization and individual experience; on the other hand, the prevalent binary of synchrony and diachrony that dominates the entire work.

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Given this context, nowadays many scholars generally agree that the Zibaldone should be considered as a literary sort of fragment—in the very Romantic sense—of infinite productivity. The fragmentary nature attributed to Leopardi’s text ultimately gives rise to a form of rational inquiry originating in a ‘different’ kind of Enlightenment (Cacciapuoti 2010; Camilletti and Cori 2015; Prete 2016): embedded in the nineteenth century’s emergence of cultural relativism, it presents itself as a literary work that puts forward an extremely modern and powerful philosophical system. Thus, it both utilizes non-linearity as a method (“another system evolved from the various and discordant ideas” (Z 265)) and intermingles notions of cultural diversity (“differences in habit and circumstances” (Z 3197)) with the critique of the absolutism of Western humanism as a future ethical and moral project (“we have no choice in this pitiful century of reason and enlightenment but to flee from ourselves” (Z 17)).2 For this purpose, Leopardi’s emphasis throughout the Zibaldone falls on what he calls “the love of system” (Z 948) which he attempts to define along these lines: “particulars are considered only in that aspect which favors the system, in short, you have things serving the system and not the system serving things” (Z 948).3 By dispersing the system—and consequently in a narrower sense the truth—into splintered particulars, Leopardi not only displays a particular form of sensitivity towards difference and sameness that recognizes diversity and the relativism of innate ideas, but he also problematizes fixed concepts of personal and social identity along with the power dynamics that have affected society over time. This vision transpires very prominently in Z 327 where Leopardi highlights that “perfection consists of happiness where the individual is concerned and in the right balance with the order of things in every other regard.”4 If considered more closely, the human condition foregrounded by Leopardi is a rather ambiguous one, inasmuch as “the supreme conformability and organization of man” (Z 2902) at the heart of Leopardi’s analysis within the Zibaldone brings along two decisive consequences: “the development of some qualities [in man that nature] did not wish” (Z 178) and the potential “to change things and make them exist in a different way” (Z 1562).5 The reason for this outcome is that, as Leopardi evinces shortly before, “man, in the state he calls perfection, finds nature to be reluctant, repugnant, ill-suited to his interests, his pleasures, his desires, and his ends, and therefore he has to refashion it” (Z 1561).6 That being the case, for Leopardi, a major, universal source of error among human beings is their failure to recognize and acknowledge social and bodily

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diversity and the relativistic perspective of their being: “[W]e must always remind ourselves of the different ways of life, different capacities for understanding, for communicating, for being affected, etc., that we need to take into account when making comparisons between man and other animals, or between one man and another” (Z 157).7 Eventually he also specifies that “[a]nimals, too, have a greater or lesser degree of society, depending on their respective natures, and apes more than others, because they are closer to our system of organization[.] This phenomenon can be explained naturally by the different kinds of bodily organization” (Z 417).8 The idea that Leopardi suggests, which the passage above implies, is one of a humanity no longer closed in upon itself but open and in ontological continuity with animals and nature. This concept, while reducing all species to the same degree of vulnerability, simultaneously focuses on the “continuum between nature and culture,” pointing to a form of egalitarianism of species which is both contiguous and reciprocal in nature (Haraway 2008; Braidotti 2013). The search for an ontology based on a dynamic conception of the human being, distinguished by a non-unitary, transversal and collective form of subjectivity that develops and defines itself in relation to and through its interaction with other human and nonhuman beings, is an interest of Leopardi that anticipates concerns of posthumanist theorists such as Rosi Braidotti, Serenella Iovino and Roberto Marchesini. For these authors, the critical prism of posthumanism introduces a qualitative shift in contemporary ways of thinking and rejecting nature–culture dualism—grounded on the binary of the given (nature) and the constructed (culture)—by asserting the ‘autopoetic’ self-­ organization of all living matter (Braidotti 2013; Iovino and Oppermann 2014; Marchesini 2017b). More precisely, as Iovino and Oppermann note in their introduction to Material Ecocriticism, at the core of the debate is the ‘theory of distributive agency’, which is, in fact, “not to be necessarily and exclusively associated with human beings and with human intentionality, but it is a pervasive and inbuilt property of matter, as part and parcel of its generative dynamism” (3). In a posthuman world, the boundaries between the natural and cultural, which traditionally and explicitly propagate both the notion of species hierarchy and the exceptionalism of the ‘Human’ as the measure of all things, have been displaced and to a large extent blurred. The objective is to leave the floor to “a material-semiotic network of human and nonhuman agents incessantly generating the world’s embodiments and events” (3). In view of the above, the human being undoubtedly reveals itself by way of hybridization.

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To that effect, in Over the Human Roberto Marchesini offers a new hybrid ontological vision of the human as a species determined by an intertwining with other animals, giving rise to a dialogical situation he defines as “animal epiphany”: “It is the moment in which the encounter with the nonhuman animal begins to interrupt the human being’s closure, making it an evolving system” (2017b, 9). Through this statement, Marchesini opens the field to two interlocking topics: the hybridization and decentralization of the human being from his anthropocentric kernel and the reality of a nonhuman presence within human culture. In a similar vein to Marchesini, who believes in a human dimension that is always dialogic, as it is the effect of hybridization with the nonhuman, Leopardi’s remarks in the Zibaldone are seminal in contextualizing this shift in paradigm. For instance, he discards the opposition between human and nonhuman identities in favor of what he names “the great alliance of intelligent beings” (Z 4280), namely a general system that includes “all the beings of nature” (Z 44).9 Overall, Leopardi propagates a vision of a universal system capable of realizing “a perfect society” (Z 3774), in particular “a form of society whose individual members, by reason of the very society, do not harm each other, or if they do, it is by chance, and not inevitably” (Z 3774).10 Seen in this light, Leopardi conceives society as a space for the construction of novel relationships and subjectivities in order to recognize human as well as nonhuman entities as active embodied subjects. In terms that resonate with a relational ontology based on a mutual relationship between biologically diverse subjects, what enters the picture here is a form of collective society that embraces a way of life that is typically “not only [of] all men but all living beings and, as much as possible, all that exists” (Z 895).11 Leopardi is well conscious of the fact that, just like other species, the human being is the result of an evolutionary process that has shaped its anatomical-functional connotations and its expressive inclinations. In addition, he is aware that this existential condition also impedes to catalogue or trace the various expressions of human culture, as we are facing a continuum of materials and styles which is far from being pure and confined within secure margins: This is something that everybody knows. The essential qualities have not altered, nor are they alterable, from the beginning of nature onward, in any creature. But accidental qualities are alterable, by virtue of the different disposition of the essential qualities, which produces a diversity that [870] is

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truly significant and, as much as anything can be, worthy of note in those things which can only vary naturally. (Z 869/70)12

For this very reason, Leopardi comes to locate humankind in a materially and historically pervious zone of forms and matters, precarious in its destiny of unpredictable becomings. He remarks: “Different viewpoints see the same object in very different perspectives …, but since they experience the same difference in seeing the perspectives, any sense of difference disappears, and it is impossible to detect and define it” (Z 1707).13 Certainly, the verb ‘experience’ quite evidently tells us how Leopardi reflects more deeply on human life from a standpoint that favors a materialist view of existence, because, as he convincingly observes later on: That matter thinks is a fact. It is a fact because we ourselves think; and we do not know, we are not aware of being, we are not capable of knowing, of perceiving, anything but matter. It is a fact because we see that the modifications of thought depend entirely upon sensations, upon our physical state, and that our mind fully corresponds to the changes and variations in our body. It is a fact, because we feel our thought corporally. (Z 4288)14

In the paragraphs that follow, I will trace the path according to which Leopardi’s Zibaldone gives voice to a form of posthuman ecosophical thinking that comes to rest between the ‘oneness of living matter’ and the non-unitary, transversal composition of subjectivity based on a mutual relationship between human and nonhuman entities (Braidotti 2013; Iovino and Oppermann 2014). Firstly, I will highlight how Leopardi’s text aims to problematize the traditional anthropocentric view that advanced the centrality of human subjectivity over others, which was the core and foundation of humanistic thought over centuries. To continue, a closer look at the Zibaldone will be taken into consideration, with Judith Butler, Serenella Iovino and Roberto Marchesini’s theories, among others, as a background. In this context, it will be analysed how Leopardi inserts into the complexity of his materialistic worldview the ethical and political urge to transform and translate individual performative acts and subjectivity into shared and permissible actions and agency, including human and nonhuman entities. In this sense, Leopardi’s remarks in the Zibaldone are crucial when discussing how he challenges accepted notions of human identity both by foregrounding our animality and by drawing attention to the agency of nonhuman animals. The goal throughout this

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chapter is to demonstrate how Leopardi’s thought runs in parallel with what could be conceived as the essence of the shadowy borderland between nature and culture in general, and the nonhuman and human in particular, extending far beyond the facts at hand. So it should not come as a surprise that an attentive re-reading of the Zibaldone results in a new paradigm of interpretation which, as already anticipated in the opening lines of this chapter, reveals the difference inside the text as well as allowing the reader to perceive the text’s infinite plurality which stretches across “posthumanist and ecocritical forms of engagement with matter and life” (Oppermann 2016: 24). In effect, in the Zibaldone Leopardi introduces changes in the way materiality, agency and nature are conceived and thereby discloses central contentions of the new thinking about human and nonhuman animals which then (re-)emerge during the posthuman era. The singularity Leopardi discusses challenges accepted notions of human identity by delegitimizing the central position of the anthropos among other species (“certain fine qualities of the human character” (Z 67)).15 Thus he sheds light on the radical incompleteness of the human being, as he affirms: “But if man rightly claimed supremacy and would also have done so in what we regard as the primitive state of nature, he did not on this account have to place himself in a different order, and think of himself as belonging to another category” (Z 328).16 Earlier on in the Zibaldone there is another passage that is central to Leopardi’s discourse on the crisis of human supremacy (and so of knowledge) when the writer implicitly mocks the anthropocentric view which “dispels illusion and fosters egoism” (Z 161).17 He emphasizes that “human reason, which we make such a show of over the other animals and in whose perfecting we believe the perfecting of man consists, is wretchedly incapable of making us, I will not say happy, but less unhappy” (Z 103).18 This thereupon leads him to conclude as follows: “But reason is so barbarous that wherever it gains the upper hand and becomes the absolute rule, whatever premise it starts from, and on whatever basis it is established, everything else will become barbarous” (Z 356).19 Similarly, his criticism is based on the assumption that “reason, by making [humans] naturally inclined to pursue [their] own advantage and removing the illusions that bind [them] to one another, dissolves society absolutely and turns people to savagery” (Z 23).20 Hence, Leopardi supremely and fundamentally unsettles and rearranges the question of the knowing subject alongside the traditional anthropocentric paradigms that take for granted its form and infinitely reproduce it: “all the ideas or beliefs that determine or do not determine,

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that is, relative to action, stem simply from experience, and are therefore no more than consequences drawn by way of reasoning and a syllogistic operation, from a major premise, etc.” (Z 443).21 There is surely no doubt that Leopardi is fundamentally skeptical about the social organization devised by human beings, especially about the constructed social and cultural norms that have impinged on society over time and inhibited the very possibility of ‘performing’ new individual acts. In this regard, two further entries of the Zibaldone on the topic of “habit” are interesting for our discourse: “The majority of people live according to habit” (Z 273) and over the course of time—Leopardi continues elsewhere—“we have formed a bad habit through reading, writing, discourse …, we believe that that is nature …. And we claim we have to follow that habit” (Z 46).22 In concrete terms, even if human beings were not originally predestined to step in one direction or another (“these utterly unnatural practices or deeds—which in the absence of society would never have taken place” (Z 3883)), they gradually degenerated, because they were deprived of their traditional natural attributes (“man is denatured, and every denatured people is barbarous” (Z 22)) and, under these circumstances, Leopardi says, “things can no longer run as the system of the world requires” (Z 22).23 Nevertheless, given that reality and identity are constructions built on habituation and norms (“Ideas that are innate in the strict sense do not exist in any living being and were the fantasies of old schools of thought” (Z 442)), Leopardi considers ways in which identity can be deconstructed and transgressed.24 He strengthens his argument through a critique of the idea of personal and social identity as stable and fixed concepts and problematizes these cultural codes through performativity. On an analogous track as Judith Butler—who considers (gendered) identity as a performative act similar to a theatrical performance, Leopardi thinks of identity as being an effect not of what one is but of what one does, or rather, a condition one enacts: “a greater or lesser facility to become habituated or dishabituated” (Z 1553).25 This resonates with Butler’s (1990) conception that identity is constituted performatively, through a continual as well as an “artificial” process: “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being” (45). As clearly underpinned also, and, above all, by using verbs such as “dishabituating” (“dissuefare”) and “undoing” (“disfare”) throughout the entire Zibaldone, Leopardi confirms the importance of Butler’s notions of ‘act’ (“azione”) and ‘repetition’ (“assuefazione”), as means to unveil and

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displace normative mechanisms of society, when he expresses the following: “To be able to contract a habit with ease is an essential quality and effect of great minds and carries with it, as a natural consequence and effect, a facility to undo already contracted habits with the help of new, easily acquired, contrary habits” (Z 1254).26 Through Leopardi’s lens, not only must identity be constructed (“to pass from one habituation to another, different or contrary one” (Z 1824)), but it also requires to be constantly challenged through performative acts (“in my easily dishabituating myself from them by means of a new habituation” (Z 1312)), other than lived in pre-reflective awareness (“to undo the past habit” (Z 1319)).27 In keeping with Leopardi, experiencing one’s body therefore turns into the favored and ruling point of access to knowledge (“that residue of existence, and of living, material force” (Z 617)).28 Furthermore, he speaks of external and internal capabilities, both of which are functions of the organization of the body. In so doing, he offers a particular reading of corporeal sensibility, which becomes admittedly more and more antimetaphysical and antisubjective (“things have body without much spirit” (Z 103)).29 As an alternative to treating humans as ‘essential’ mind-body units (“the question of separation” (Z 281)), Leopardi privileges a non-hierarchical way of looking, knowing and experiencing the human body and preferably focuses on its materiality and function (“[i]f we chose to regard the soul as material” (Z 281)) as well as acknowledging its contiguity with other natures and agents (“[the] susceptibility and the capacity to become habituated to things that are not natural” (Z 1630)).30 The scale of human existence for Leopardi is therefore participatory and relational (“a continuous relation of things” (Z 103)), given that “the evolutionary subject,” as Marchesini also maintains, needs to be considered as “a dialogic entity that builds its identity using innate characteristics as evolutionary material and the milieu as mould, or as the ground on which to plant its innate characteristics” (2017b, 75).31 With this in mind, for Leopardi, life may be defined to the degree that it signifies “a greater or lesser degree of adaptability, a number and value of dispositions prevailing in some way (more or less) over the number and value of innate qualities” (Z 3381).32 The consequence of this metonymic process is that Leopardi differentiates between two solid points: first, that “[n]atural dispositions providing the potential to be, and dispositions to be, do not differ from each other individually, but individually are the same” (Z 3375); and, second, that “one and the same disposition” (Z 3375) is providing simultaneously the potential “to be something” (Z 3375) and “to

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become something” (Z 3375).33 The latter markedly has implications, too, that directly relate to Leopardi’s subsequent discussion around the distinction between life (lived and formed by civilization) and existence (nature). Indeed, he claims, firmly convinced in Z 3936: “Civilization increases excessively in man the totality of life (meaning internal life) by diminishing in proportion his existence (meaning external life).”34 Thus in this respect, as Leopardi points out, “[n]ature is not life, but existence, and tends to the latter, not the former” (Z 3936).35 Leopardi’s insights further indicate the contiguity across species in the sense that both humans and nonhumans are described as more or less complex organisms, as matter that thinks and feels: “because you see things in the world that think and feel, and you do not know anything that is not matter” (Z 4253).36 Identically, as already seen in another place, the development of all species depends on the organization of the body (“to see and feel them as if they were living and bodily presences” (Z 109)) and the alleged superiority of human over nonhuman beings is solely a function of their more developed bodily complexion (“the development of the human body” (Z 1599)).37 In the same way, the susceptibility and capacity to acclimatize and acculturate to specific surroundings then is not something that is “proper exclusively to man” (Z 1630), but rather forms an essential part of Leopardi’s relational ontology, as “[i]t is so only to a degree—generally speaking, since there will be some men less capable of being habituated and trained than a monkey” (Z 1630).38 In a nutshell, Leopardi significantly conceptualizes the cultural and ecological layers encoded in material agencies bringing to light new forms of performativity based primarily on the ability to stage hybrid functions that recognize the pluralism of otherness as well as, supremely, become open and available towards new organic structures, whose outcome is “a morphopoesis that is not only functional architecture, but also a dimension of presence and expressiveness” (Marchesini 2017a, 60). Leopardi’s novelty, in fact, lies not only in recognizing different forms of subjectivity and their ecological interconnectedness, but in realizing that the relations between them bear political imprints. In Western thought, the question of who is allowed to think, and hence counts as subject, is intimately linked to the interrogatory of what is commonly defined as ‘culture.’ Strictly speaking, we are dealing with the staging of a political scene, or an exercise of power, that expresses itself in an ambivalent and manipulative way, where (drawing once again on Butler’s thought and political agency) “[o]ntology is, thus, not a foundation, but a

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normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political discourse as its necessary ground” (203). By contrast, Leopardi’s acknowledgment in the Zibaldone is, on the one side, to problematize an understanding of nature and human contingency that does not account for the permeable boundaries of species in the complementary ‘nature– culture continuum’ and, on the other, to critically disengage these mechanisms through performativity in order to uncover that “matter is one, driven by a desire for self-expression and ontologically free” (Braidotti 2013, 65). For the successful realization of what Iovino calls a ‘participatory ideal’ likewise are called into action not only singular individuals, but also those voices of subjects that hitherto generally have been considered as bearers of a ‘lower culture,’ such as nonhuman animals, together with whom the former establish “not any longer a preordained succession but a relationship of complementarity” (2015, 39). Leopardi outlines this hybridizing, dialogical process between humans and animals within the Zibaldone, for example, in the following way: “Certainly there is a great affinity and resemblance between the life of animals and ours, between their passions (basically speaking) and ours, etc.” (Z 2433).39 There are nonetheless several other significant examples that underline how eloquently Leopardi creates a space for a kind of mindset, I suggest, which we can authentically define as ‘post-anthropocentric speciesism.’ It is as if, all at once, other species come knocking at Leopardi’s door. The first interesting textual place for our consideration concerns Leopardi’s description of what Iovino would interpret as “a maternal ethics of care,” specifically the creation of a horizontal dialectic between human and nonhuman worlds based on a redistributive policy with clear relational, natural, political and social characteristics (2015, 35). Actually, in Z 3924, we read that one has to consider “each species of living creature with respect to the others, each individual with respect to its fellows, each nation with respect to the others, each state of the individual, whether it is natural, or habitual, or of the moment and transitory, with respect to its other states.”40 This passage unfolds how Leopardi determinedly distances himself from a privileged ontological condition characterized by the property ‘being human,’ and from a social world solely and exclusively constructed by and for humankind. Leopardi’s solution, henceforth, is to propose a change from this narcissistic ontology towards an evolution of humanism, which frees itself from some of the anthropocentric frames, explicitly from those “essential ingredients in the system of human nature” (Z 51) devoid of “any known relationship to the rest of the system” (Z

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53).41 Conversely, Leopardi’s system comes to rest on the edges of contact between human and nonhuman civilizations, where hybrid identities and cultures are being modelled, equally casting an eye over “the whole system of nature and the astonishing balance and relationship between the different effects by which it achieves this purpose or that” (Z 175).42 A close reading of another textual passage taken from the Zibaldone reveals that the already previously accentuated existence of a similar natural disposition in human and nonhuman matter develops alongside the uncanny resemblance between certain animal and human physiological traits (“Several animal physiognomies resemble the human” (Z 1578)), in that, as Leopardi distinctly specifies at another point in the text: “Strictly speaking, no faculty develops in man or the animals. Rather, it is men’s and animals’ organs that develop, and with the organs, naturally, their [1803] natural dispositions or qualities” (Z 1802/03).43 It is striking that in this second episode belonging to the series of significant examples human and nonhuman entities find synthesis in a dialogical identity, which swiftly renders the relation between the two terms unstable and complicated, due to the fact that they enter into a mimetic relationship with one another. As a consequence, the boundaries between human and nonhuman nature(s) collapse, because what initially seems to be one part of an opposition presents itself to inhabit the other: ‘nonhuman’ is therefore not a simple opposition of ‘human’ marked by the prefix ‘non-’, since there exists a meaning of ‘human’ only when it finally coincides with its counterpart. In other words, and on the wave of Donna Haraway in When Species Meet, Leopardi writes of the “mortal world-making entanglements” of the human and nonhuman universe, arguing that human beings are part of a community of animals (4). Indeed, Leopardi challenges the common understanding of human identity by foregrounding our animality, on the one hand, and drawing attention to the agency of animals on the other, simultaneously and immediately turning nonhuman communities into models of social organization par excellence: Nature has destined many species of animal to act as food and sustenance one to another, but that an animal should feed on its fellow, and not because of extraordinary extremes of hunger, but regularly, and should enjoy it, and prefer it to other foods, this incredible absurdity is found in no other species than the human. (Z 3797)44

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As opposed to human beings, animals—pursuant to Leopardi—are neither capable “of fighting between two parties of the same species” (Z 3794), nor are they able of exercising violent acts of cruelty towards other species, a point which, however, is not valid for humans (“except in men” (Z 3794)).45 This dissolution of semantic boundaries gets yet intensified when, following Leopardi’s words in the Zibaldone, the nonhuman suddenly takes over a position of superiority or ascendancy: “[T]he animal order is the foremost in our world and probably in the whole of nature, that is, in all worlds, and that he is manifestly the highest rung of this order” (Z 56).46 Conforming to Leopardi, animals, especially birds have reached a state of perfection (“But it must give great delight to birds, since we can tell that they sing for [159] pleasure, and their voice is not intended for some other purpose, like that of other animals” (Z 158/59)) that is frequently denied to humans (“that is, harmony, which we cannot hear because we do not have the same idea of the concordance of tones” (Z 159)).47 In Z 3650 Leopardi, in similar fashion, casts doubt on traditional notions of distinctiveness and uniqueness of human beings as a species by destabilizing common hegemonic understandings of humans’ relationship with nonhuman animals and nature, a topic which he investigates in great detail: And it should be noted that the spread of many species of animals, plants, etc., is in large part due not to nature but to humanity itself …. Many species which by nature were destined for one country only or for only one quality of country … were transported by man to several countries …. This is contrary to nature, as is the establishment of the human species itself in those places which are not suitable for it. Plants, animals, etc., transported and established by man in countries unsuited to them either do not endure there, or do not flourish, or degenerate or suffer there. (Z 3650)48

Humans acting “contrary to nature” (Z 3650)—and in a narrower sense their non-belonging to the animal condition—“make[s] man unhappy” (Z 178), Leopardi adds.49 This principle of exclusion produces a human/ animal dualism, which, at once, turns animality into a dimension that scares human beings, as a result of it representing a loss they have experienced or a part of themselves they have forgotten or repressed. Animality, however, returns very subtly in the form of “suffer” and “unhappiness” and haunts the subjects (“there are people just like us, who clearly (and with good reason) suffer” (Z 4276)).50 It is quite revealing that humans’

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repression of their nonhuman existence leads to—as we read in the Zibaldone—“this unhappiness, great, universal and enduring and even irremediable though it may be” (Z 1080), since “they are at odds with the way of proceeding that nature had prescribed and originally laid down for things” (Z 1080).51 Nonetheless, in order for humankind to be happy in this world, Leopardi underscores the need “to embrace the whole sensation of the great and numerous diversities that it sees, feels, etc., at one and the same time” (Z 1827), which can be accomplished, once more, “by breaking up the sensation into little pieces, and attaching it to the particulars” (Z 1827).52 This position of inclusion produces “the pleasure of [1827] variety” (Z 1826/27), which corresponds also to this “vast and indefinite sensation” (Z 1827), and utterly levels all social and cultural hierarchies.53 From this perspective, and against the backdrop of Marchesini’s concept of ‘animal epiphany’ (mentioned earlier), the boundaries between the human and nonhuman are gradually elided and their stories and natures all of a sudden intersect. This process of human hybridization with the nonhuman moreover activates “the awareness of a common belonging to animal-being,” and thereby also proves, in contrast, a new celebration of humanity which is aware of those new existential perspectives to their identity and the difference there is between them and their effects (2017b, 9). In describing posthuman theory and subjectivity, Rosi Braidotti famously observed that it represents an empirical project that “displaces the dialectical scheme of opposition, replacing well-established dualisms with the recognition of deep zoe-egalitarianism between humans and animals,” that is to say a postanthropocentric model which provides “a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life” (71/60). For Leopardi, yet, cultural practices are precisely this: hybrid forms that are proper to humans and nonhuman animals, because living for him means sharing a universe, a single great ecological system (“the universal system of beings” (Z 1834)) which “diminishes the idea of man, and elevates it, uncovers new mysteries about creation, the destiny of nature, the essence of things, our being” (Z 84).54 This vital interconnectedness, which stands at the forefront in Leopardi’s argument, posits a qualitative shift of the relationship away from “the humanist schema of the knowing subject” towards a model of collective politics that reduces all living matter to the same degree of vulnerability (“the purpose of created things” (Z 84)) (Wolfe 2009, 596).55 Hence, through a close reading of some of the passages of

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the Zibaldone, this chapter has shown that Leopardi—by both staging and challenging the defining forces of dominant ideologies—is very much attentive to the need to broaden the philosophical and methodological horizon when confronting the closely intertwined questions of humans, animals and ecosystems. In this sense, I argue, his thoughts in the Zibaldone certainly mirror or maybe even anticipate the reflective process and sensibility that attracts attention in the contemporary philosophical debate on and around the posthuman. In fact, and in tune with the posthuman perspective, Leopardi’s text blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman in a logic of overcoming the traditional dichotomy between nature and culture, which, as demonstrated, dislodges seemingly secure and stable categories of identity and agency. Conclusively, on the one hand, the Zibaldone records Leopardi’s desire to review humanism in the direction of an openness and understanding of not just the metaphysical but the physical and structural interdependence between living beings; on the other, the text can be read as a literary universe in which the boundaries between here and there, now and then, you and I, finally fall together, as there exists neither temporal, nor spatial, nor ideological difference.

Notes 1. “una nuova poesia senza nome affatto e che non possa avere dai generi conosciuti” (Zib. 40). 2. “un nuovo sistema cavato dalle varie e discordanti idee acquistate” (Zib. 265); “diversità di assuefazioni e di circostanze” (Zib. 3197); “è forza in questo tristissimo secolo di ragione e di lume, che fuggiamo da noi stessi” (Zib. 17). 3. “l’amor di sistema” (Zib. 948); “si considerano i particolari in quell’aspetto solo che favorisce il sistema, in somma le cose servono al sistema, e non il sistema alle cose, come dovrebb’essere” (Zib. 948). 4. “E la perfezione consiste nella felicità quanto all’individuo, e nella retta corrispondenza all’ordine delle cose, quanto al rimanente” (Zib. 327). 5. “la somma conformabilità e organizzazione dell’uomo” (Zib. 2902); “diverse qualità delle quali altre si sviluppano [nell’uomo che la natura] non voleva” (Zib. 178); “cambiar le cose, e farle essere diversamente” (Zib. 1562). 6. “l’uomo in quello stato ch’egli chiama di perfezione, trova la natura renitente, ripugnante, mal disposta a’ suoi vantaggi, a’ suoi piaceri, a’ suoi desiderii, a’ suoi fini, e gli conviene rifabbricarla” (Zib. 1561).

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7. “[B]isogna sempre ricordarsi della differente maniera di esistere, differente capacità di comprendere, di rapportare, di esser commossi ec. e così regolarsi nell’istituire il paragone tra l’uomo e gli altri animali, e anche tra un uomo e un altr’uomo” (Zib. 157). 8. “Anche gli animali hanno più o meno società, proporzionatam. alla natura rispettiva, e le scimie più degli altri, perché più si accostano alla nostra organizzazione[.] Questo fenomeno si può naturalmente spiegare colla diversità dell’organizzazione” (Zib. 417). 9. “alla grande alleanza degli esseri intelligenti” (Zib. 4280); “tutti gli esseri della natura” (Zib. 44). 10. “una forma di società perfetta” (Zib. 3774); “una forma di società, in cui gl’individui che la compongono, per cagione della stessa società, non nocciano gli uni agli altri, o se nocciono, ciò sia accidentalmente, e non immancabilmente” (Zib. 3774). 11. “non solo di tutti gli uomini, ma di tutti i viventi, e quanto si possa, di tutto l’esistente” (Zib. 895). 12. “Cosa che tutti sanno. Le qualità essenziali non sono mutate, nè mutabili, dal principio della natura in poi, in nessuna creatura, bensì le accidentali, e queste per la diversa disposizione delle essenziali, che partorisce una diversità [870] rilevantissima, e quanto possa esser, notabile, in quelle cose, che sole naturalmente, possono variare” (Zib. 869/70). 13. “Le diverse viste vedono uno stesso oggetto in diversissime misure [,] ma siccome anche nel veder la misura esse provano la stessa differenza, così il senso della differenza sparisce, ed ella è impossibile a ravvisarsi e determinarsi” (Zib. 1707). 14. “Che la materia pensi, è un fatto. Un fatto, perché noi pensiamo; e noi non sappiamo, non conosciamo di essere, non possiamo conoscere, concepire, altro che materia. Un fatto, perché noi veggiamo che le modificazioni del pensiero dipendono totalm. dalle sensazioni, dallo stato del nostro fisico; che l’animo nostro corrisponde in tutto alle varietà ed alle variazioni del nostro corpo. Un fatto, perché noi sentiamo corporalm. il pensiero” (Zib. 4288). 15. “certe fine qualità del carattere umano” (Zib. 67). 16. “Ma l’uomo dovea ben tenere il primo rango, e lo terrebbe anche in quello stato naturale che noi consideriamo come brutale; non però dovea mettersi in un altr’ordine di cose, e considerarsi come appartenente ad un’altra categoria” (Zib. 328). 17. “dissipa le illus. e conduce per mano l’egoismo” (Zib. 161). 18. “la ragione umana di cui facciamo tanta pompa sopra gli altri animali, e nel di cui perfezionamento facciamo consistere quello dell’uomo, sia miserabile e incapace di farci non dico felici ma meno infelici” (Zib. 103).

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19. “Ma la ragione è così barbara che dovunque ella occupa il primo posto, e diventa regola assoluta, da qualunque principio ella parta, e sopra qualunque base ella sia fondata, tutto diventa barbaro” (Zib. 356). 20. “E la ragione facendo naturalmente amici dell’utile proprio, e togliendo le illusioni che ci legano gli uni agli altri, scoglie assolutamente la società, e inferocisce le persone” (Zib. 23). 21. “tutte le idee o credenze determinanti o non determinanti, cioè relative o no all’azione, non vengono altro che dall’esperienza, e quindi non sono se non tante conseguenze tirate col mezzo di un raziocinio e di un’operazione sillogistica, da una maggiore ec.” (Zib. 443). 22. “La maggior parte degli uomini vive per abito” (Zib. 273); “Quando colla lettura col tratto col discorso coi trattenimenti o letterari o di qualunque genere … ci siamo formati un abito cattivo, crediamo che quello sia natura …; e pretendiamo di dover seguire quell’abito” (Zib. 46). 23. “tali costumi o fatti snaturatissimi che senza la società non avrebbero mai avuto luogo” (Zib. 3883); “l’uomo è snaturato; ogni popolo snaturato è barbaro” (Zib. 22); “non potendo più correre le cose come vuole il sistema del mondo” (Zib. 22). 24. “Idee precisamente innante non esistono in alcun vivente, e sono un sogno delle antiche scuole” (Zib. 442). 25. “maggiore o minor facilità d’assuefarsi e dissuefarsi” (Zib. 1553). 26. “La facilita di contrarre abitudine, qualità ed effetto essenziale de’ grandi ingegni, porta seco per naturale conseguenza ed effetto la facilità di disfare le abitudini già contratte, mediante nuove abitudini opposte che facilmente si contraggono” (Zib. 1254). 27. “il passare da una assuefaz. ad altra diversa o contraria” (Zib. 1824); “nel dissuefarmene agevolmente mediante una nuova assuefazione ec. ec.” (Zib. 1312); “disfare l’assuefazione passata” (Zib. 1319). 28. “quell’avanzo di esistenza, e di forza viva e materiale” (Zib. 617). 29. “le cose hanno corpo senza aver molto spirito” (Zib. 103). 30. “la separazione dell’anima dal corpo” (Zib. 281); “Se volessimo considerar l’anima come materiale” (Zib. 281); “la suscettibilità ed assuefabilità a cose non naturali” (Zib. 1630). 31. “un rapporto continuo delle cose” (Zib. 103). 32. “una maggiore o minore conformabilità, un numero e valore di disposizioni naturali prevalente in certo modo (più o meno) a quello delle ingenite qualità” (Zib. 3381). 33. “Le disposizioni naturali a poter essere e quelle ad essere, non sono diverse individualmente l’une dall’altre, ma sono individualmente le medesime” (Zib. 3375); “Una stessa disposizione è ad essere e a poter essere” (Zib. 3375)

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34. “La civiltà aumenta a dismisura nell’uomo la somma della vita (s’intende l’interna) scemando a proporzione l’esistenza (s’intende la vita esterna)” (Zib. 3936). 35. “La natura non è vita, ma esistenza, e a questa tende, non a quella” (Zib. 3936). 36. “perché tu vedi al mondo cose che pensano e sentono, e tu non conosci cose che non sieno materia” (Zib. 4253). 37. “vederle e sentirle come cose vive e corporee e presenti” (Zib. 109); “lo sviluppo del corpo umano” (Zib. 1599). 38. “non è propria dell’uomo” (Zib. 1630); “ma solo in maggior grado, generalmente parlando: perchè vi sarà qualche uomo meno assuefabile, ed ammaestrabile di una scimia” (Zib. 1630). 39. “Certo è poi che grandissima affinità e somiglianza passa tra la vita degli animali e la nostra, tra le loro passioni (radicalmente parlando) e fra le nostre ec.” (Zib. 2433). 40. “Insomma ciascuna specie di viventi rispetto all’altre, ciascuno individuo rispetto a’ suoi simili, ciascuna nazione rispetto all’altre, ciascuno stato dell’individuo sia naturale, sia abituale, sia attuale e passeggero, rispetto agli altri suoi stati” (Zib. 3924). 41. “ingredienti essenziali del sistema della natura umana” (Zib. 51); “senza rapporto conosciuto al resto del sistema” (Zib. 53). 42. “il sistema della natura in genere, e la mirabile armonia e corrispondenza di diversi effetti a questo o quello scopo” (Zib. 175). 43. “Parecchie fisonomie di animali somigliano all’umana” (Zib. 1578); “Non si sviluppa propriamente nell’uomo o nell’animale veruna facoltà. Bensì si sviluppano gli organi dell’uomo e dell’animale, e cogli organi, naturalmente, le loro [1803] naturali disposizioni o qualità” (Zib. 1802/03). 44. “La natura ha destinato molte specie di animali a servir di cibo e sostentamento l’une all’altre, ma che un animale si pasca del suo simile, e ciò non per eccesso straordinario di fame, ma regolarmente, e che lo appetisca, e lo preferisca agli altri cibi; questa incredibile assurdità non si trova in altra specie che nell’umana” (Zib. 3797). 45. “Del combattere in due partiti d’una stessa specie” (Zib. 3794); “non si troverà credo altro esempio che negli uomini” (Zib. 3794). 46. “è chiaro ch’essendo l’ordine animale il primo in questo globo e probabilmente in tutta la natura cioè in tutti i globi, ed egli essendo evidentemente il sommo grado di quest’ordine, viene a essere il primo di tutti gli essere nel nostro globo” (Zib. 56). 47. “Grandissimo però dev’essere il diletto che cagiona negli uccelli, giacchè si vede che questi cantano per diletto, [159] e che la loro voce non è diretta ad altro fine come quella degli altri animali” (Zib. 158/59); “cioè armonia,

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che noi non possiamo sentire non avendo la stessa idea della convenienza de’ tuoni” (Zib. 159). 48. “E notisi che la propagazione di molte specie di animali, di piante ec. devesi in gran parte non alla natura, ma all’uomo stesso …. Molte specie che per natura non erano destinate se non se a un solo paese, o a una sola qualità di paesi, … sono state dagli uomini trasportate e stabilite in più paesi …. Ciò è contro natura, come lo è lo stabilimento della specie umana medesima in quei luoghi che a lei non convengono. Le piante, gli animali ec. trasportate e stabilite dall’uomo in paesi a loro non convenienti, o non ci durano, o non prosperano, o ci degenerano, ci si trovano male ec.” (Zib. 3650). 49. “contro natura” (Zib. 3650); “rendono l’uomo infelice” (Zib. 178). 50. “persone uguali a noi, che manifestamente (e con tutta ragione) soffrono” (Zib. 4276). 51. “allora essa infelicità per grande, e universale, e durevole ed anche irrimediabile ch’ella sia” (Zib. 1080); “si oppongono all’andamento prescritto e ordinato primitivamente dalla natura alle cose” (Zib. 1080). 52. “abbracciar tutta la sensazione delle grandi e numerose diversità che vede, sente, ec. in un medesimo tempo” (Zib. 1827); “sminuzzando la sensazione, e trattenendola sui particolari” (Zib. 1827). 53. “il piacere della [1827] varietà” (Zib. 1826/27); “una sensa. vasta e indefinita” (Zib. 1827). 54. “del sistema universale degli esseri” (Zib. 1834); “abbassa l’idea dell’uomo, e la sublima, scuopre nuovi misteri della creazione, del destino della natura, della essenza delle cose, dell’esser nostro” (Zib. 84). 55. “dei fini del creato” (Zib. 84).

Works Cited Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York/London: Routledge. Cacciapuoti, Fabiana. 2010. Dentro lo Zibaldone: il tempo circolare della scrittura di Leopardi. Rome: Donzelli. Camilletti, Fabio A., and Paola Cori, eds. 2015. Ten Steps. Critical Inquiries on Leopardi. Bern: Peter Lang. Croce, Benedetto. 1927. Poeti e scrittori d’Italia. Vol. 2 vols. Bari: Laterza. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Iovino, Serenella. 2015 [2006]. Ecologia letteraria. Una strategia di sopravvivenza. Milan: Edizioni Ambiente.

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Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds. 2014. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Leopardi, Giacomo. 1997. Zibaldone. Ed. Rolando Damiani. 3 vols. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2013. Zibaldone. Trans. K. Baldwin et al. Ed. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Marchesini, Roberto. 2017a. What Is Philosophical Ethology? Humanimalia 9 (1): 46–68. ———. 2017b. Over the Human: Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany. Cham: Springer. Oppermann, Serpil. 2016. From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocriticism. Relations 4 (1): 23–37. Prete, Antonio. 2016. Contro gli stereotipi. Leopardi e il pessimismo. Doppiozero, 1–6. Wolfe, Cary. 2009. Human, All too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities. PMLA 124 (4): 546–573.

CHAPTER 3

Thresholds and Tortoises: Modernist Animality in Pirandello’s Fiction Alberto Godioli, Monica Jansen, and Carmen Van den Bergh

1   Introduction Over the last decade, a growing number of studies investigated modernist literature in a posthumanist perspective (see for instance Wallace 2005; Alt 2010; Scott 2012; Rohman 2012; Ryan and West 2015). As is often pointed out, the modernist questioning of the humanistic paradigm is strongly related to the influence exerted by Darwinism between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. As Carrie Rohman writes in

A. Godioli (*) University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Jansen Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] C. Van den Bergh University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_3

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Stalking the Subject, literary modernism cannot be understood without considering animality as the fundamental place in which the construction and complication of identity happen. The spectre of the animal deeply threatens the sovereignty of Western consciousness, thus interfering with the ideological discourse of psychoanalysis—that is Freud’s unitary model of the unconscious, as opposed to the multiplicity of “becoming animal” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980)—but also with that of imperialism, both of which are based on the rejection of animality. In other words, through the animal, modernist writers are not only confronted with the post-Darwinist crisis of anthropocentrism, but can also critically reflect on the creation of imperialistic “otherness” and on arbitrariness of linguistic and cultural norms. Nonetheless, the posthumanist dimension of Italian modernism still remains virtually unexplored, with the exception of a few recent studies on Federigo Tozzi (Amberson 2014) and Luigi Pirandello (Driscoll 2017).1 By focusing on the role of animality in Pirandello’s fiction, the present contribution aims to set the basis for a broader systematic analysis of early twentieth-century Italian literature from a posthumanist standpoint. In order to achieve this, we will combine two complementary perspectives: on a diachronic level, Pirandello’s framing of animality will be compared to Realist and Decadent precedents (i.e. Balzac and d’Annunzio respectively), with a view to highlighting Pirandello’s modernist distortion of nineteenth-century conventions; on a synchronic level, we will point out a series of significant convergences between Pirandello and other major representatives of Italian and international modernism, from Gadda and Tozzi to Musil and Woolf. Particular attention will be paid to two aspects: (1) the first half of this chapter (Sects. 2 and 3) will investigate Pirandello’s awareness of animality as a continuum encompassing both the human and the nonhuman, which in turn determines a drastic rethinking of conventional narrative forms; (2) the second half (Sects. 4, 5, and 6) will be centred on the analysis of one particular case study, namely Pirandello’s representation of “becoming-tortoise” in the short stories “Paura d’esser felice” [Fear of being happy] (1925) and “La tartaruga” [The tortoise] (1936). In both cases, we aim to demonstrate that a posthumanist reading of Pirandello can be doubly productive: on the one hand, focusing on the relation between human and nonhuman beings can shed new light on previously undetected aspects of Pirandello’s modernism; on the other, a closer look at Pirandello’s specific case can help us better understand some key features of modernist posthumanism at large.

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2   Posthuman Comedy: Pirandello, Balzac, and the Continuum of Nature The near-total absence of posthumanist readings of Pirandello’s work (with the sole exception of Driscoll 2017) is indeed quite striking, especially considering the ubiquitous presence of nonhuman animals in his fiction. Zangrilli’s Bestiario pirandelliano (2001), the only systematic study on the topic, provides an exhaustive and extremely useful inventory of animal occurrences, but does not really engage in an organic critical reflection on the author’s framing of animality. In the following pages we will therefore aim to bridge this gap by setting the basis for a systematic analysis of Pirandello’s fiction in the light of posthumanism. Pirandello’s “Avvertenza sugli scrupoli della fantasia” [A Warning on the Scruples of the Imagination], first published as a postscript to the 1921 edition of Il fu Mattia Pascal [The Late Mattia Pascal], provides an ideal starting point for our analysis: “In Natural History there is a Kingdom which is studied by Zoology, since it is inhabited by animals. Among the animals inhabiting it, man is also included. And the zoologist may well talk of man and say, for example, that he is not a quadruped but a biped, and that he does not have a tail like the monkey, the donkey, or the peacock” (Pirandello 1973, I, 580).2 Pirandello’s reference to zoology is most likely derived from Balzac’s famous preface to La Comédie Humaine [The Human Comedy] (1842): The idea originated in a comparison between Humanity and Animality … The Animal takes its external form, or the differences in its form, from the environment in which it is obliged to develop. Zoological species are the result of these differences…. I perceived that in this respect society resembled nature. For does not society modify Man, according to the conditions in which he lives and acts, into men as manifold as the species in Zoology? (Balzac 2008, xli)

Even though Pirandello’s strong admiration for Balzac was openly confirmed by his son Stefano, the intertextual relationship between the two is still largely unexplored, with most critical attention focusing on Il Fu Mattia Pascal in relation to Balzac’s “Colonel Chabert.”3 However, moving back to the parallel between Balzac’s preface and Pirandello’s postscript, it is worth noting that the latter also introduces a significant variation. Balzac simply established a “comparison” between “Humanity”

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and “Animality,” and subsumed them under the categories of “society” and “nature” respectively; in his “Avvertenza,” instead, Pirandello explicitly places “man” among the many animal species that can be scrutinized by Zoology. Humanity is not compared to animality anymore; it is fully embedded within the latter. To be entirely fair to Balzac, the idea of humankind being part of an animal continuum is not entirely absent from the Comédie either: “There is but one Animal. The Creator works on a single model for every organized being,” including human beings of course (Balzac 2008, xlii). Although Balzac’s preface explicitly mentions Leibniz, this is actually a good example of Spinozian monism—that is the idea of a fundamental unity of nature, identified by Rosi Braidotti as a defining feature of the posthumanist gaze (Braidotti 2013, 59–60). Nevertheless, as will be argued in the present study, Pirandello develops this idea in a more consistent way, thereby promoting a modernist rethinking of the anthropocentrism inherent to traditional narrative forms. Balzac’s influence is particularly visible in one of the most typical manifestations of Pirandello’s critique of anthropocentrism—namely his euphoric celebration of the infinite variety of nature, as opposed to the levelling “tight waistcoat”4 of social conventions. This awareness of the physiological diversity of all living creatures is well exemplified by a passage from Pirandello’s programmatic essay L’Umorismo (1908): 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 other trees, each trunk, branch or shrub differs from all other trunks, branches or shrubs; indeed, in such an immense foliage, we could not even find two leaves that are identical. (Pirandello 2006, 806)5

Notably, a very similar image can be found in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, and more precisely in Séraphita (1834): “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” (Balzac 1976, XI, 820).6 Pirandello’s interest in the posthuman potential underlying Balzac’s fiction is further confirmed by another example of euphoric immersion into nature’s variety, namely the final pages of Uno, nessuno e centomila [One,

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No One and One Hundred Thousand], published in 1921: “I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow, book or breeze; the book I read, the breeze I drink in. Living wholly without, a vagabond …. I am dying every instant, and being born anew and without memories: alive and whole, not in myself anymore, but in everything outside” (Pirandello 1973, II, 901–902; o.t.).7 Vitangelo Moscarda’s abandonment to nature’s fluid continuum is remarkably similar to an episode from Balzac’s La peau de chagrin [The Magic Skin] (1831), when protagonist Raphaël de Valentin decides to pursue an ascetic life in the bucolic landscape of Auvergne: “[Raphaël] would spend whole days in this way, like a plant in the sun, or a hare in its form. He minutely noted the progress of everything working around him in the water, on the earth, or in the air. He had fancifully blended his life with the life of the crags; he had deliberately planted himself there” (Balzac 2008, 264–265). It should be stressed, though, that while Raphaël’s escape is just an episode within an ultimately anthropocentric narrative, Vitangelo’s fusion with nature coincides with what Greimas would call the “sanction” phase—the epilogue, which plays of course a crucial role when it comes to reconstructing the axiological or ideological hierarchies underlying the story.8 As already suggested with regard to “Avvertenza,” Pirandello seems to be directly influenced by Balzac’s latent posthumanism, while at the same time developing it into a more radical awareness of humankind’s “enmeshment” with nature (Morton 2010). In the following section, the focus will shift from Pirandello’s dialogue with nineteenth-century realism to a more typically modernist feature of his posthumanism, namely the narrator’s cosmic detachment from human life at large.

3   Cosmic Irony and Its Thresholds Opposite to Vitangelo’s ecstatic immersion into nature, Pirandello’s posthumanism can also take an entirely different shape, which could be defined as “cosmic irony”—that is an absolute detachment from all things human, in compliance with the “filosofia del lontano” [philosophy of distance] underpinning his notion of umorismo. Not by chance, this attitude is particularly frequent in the works belonging to the properly “humoristic” phase of Pirandello’s fiction, roughly spanning from 1904 to 1915 (Luperini 1999, 6). The most evident example of it is arguably the protagonist’s monologue in the “Premessa seconda” [Second foreword] of Il fu Mattia Pascal:

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“The Count woke up early, at 8:30 precisely” … “the Countess wore a lilac dress, richly decorated with lace at the throat” … “Teresina was starving to death” … “Lucretia suffered for love” … Good God! What do I care? Are we or are we not on an invisible spinning-top, whipped by a thread of sunlight, on a grain of crazed sand which turns and turns without ever knowing why? … Copernicus, Don Eligio, Copernicus has ruined mankind beyond repair. By now we have all gradually adapted to the new idea of our infinite smallness, to considering ourselves less than nothing in the universe, with all our nice discoveries and inventions. What value then, can you expect any information to have, not only regarding our individual miseries but even regarding general calamities? Our stories, by now, are the stories of worms. (Pirandello 1973, I, 324)9

By questioning the anthropocentrism underlying novelistic clichés and conventions (“the Count woke up at 8:30 precisely”), Pascal/Pirandello reframes human events within a much broader biological continuum, where the hierarchical relation between human calamities and the “lives of worms” cannot be taken for granted anymore. As prescribed by the “filosofia del lontano,” centrality of the human species is reconsidered from the scales of cosmic (Copernican) time and space. In this respect, Pirandello is a perfect example of a phenomenon that has already been described with regard to Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot—that is modernism’s “long-range aesthetics,” its “attempts to picture human life from an estranging distance” (Tung 2016, 518). Significantly, both key passages from Pirandello’s fiction that have been discussed so far come from the thresholds of the text—the epilogue of Uno, nessuno e centomila, and the foreword of Il fu Mattia Pascal. Pirandello tends indeed to assign a special role to the liminal areas of his narrative, thus providing an emblematic illustration of Clark’s idea of the Anthropocene as a “cultural threshold” that “blurs and even scrambles some crucial categories by which people have made sense of the world and their lives” (Clark 2015, 9). Human stories are thereby placed within a defamiliarizing posthuman frame, which can only be temporarily overlooked while reading the story by virtue of a “providential distraction” (Pirandello 1973, I, 324).10 This process is even more visible in the epilogues of Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno [Short stories for a year], which are often characterized by a cosmic detachment from the human events narrated in the story. 13 texts out of 225 end with a reference to the moon or the stars, witnessing

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human affairs with sidereal indifference.11 Notably, 12 out of 13 occurrences date between 1900 and 1920, that is within the extended range of Pirandello’s “humoristic” phase. The same applies to a similar kind of epilogue, where the final close-up on a nonhuman animal invites us to reframe the story from a non-anthropocentric perspective: the larks in “Il vitalizio” [The Life Annuity] (1901), the fly in “La mosca” [The Fly] (1904) and “La mano del malato povero” [The Poor Sick Man’s Hand] (1917), the spider in “Dal naso al cielo” [From the Nose to the Sky] (1907), the cat in “Il gatto, un cardellino e le stelle” [The Cat, a Finch and the Stars] (1917), and the crow in “Il corvo di Mìzzaro” [The Crow of Mìzzaro] (1919). Pirandello’s strategic use of narrative thresholds is also part of a broader phenomenon within international modernism; the “long-range aesthetics” typical of modernist fiction is, in fact, particularly evident when it comes to openings and endings. See, for instance, the meteorological incipit of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1921–1942): A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-­ pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should …. The rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: it was a fine day in August 1913. (Musil 1995, 3)

Just like in Pirandello’s foreword, the reference to nonhuman spatial scales projects a sense of cosmic irony onto conventional, anthropocentric novelistic formulas, such as Musil’s “It was a fine day in August 1913.” Similarly, Italian modernist Carlo Emilio Gadda uses the incipit as a way to locate human events within the framework of “eternity” (Savettieri 2001) or “natural history” (Benedetti 1995). With regard to endings, the best parallel is probably with the final page of Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno [Zeno’s Conscience] (1923), with its memorable apocalyptic fantasy: “There will be a tremendous explosion, but no one will hear it, causing the earth to return to its nebulous state and go wandering through the heavens, free at last from parasites and disease” (Svevo 2003, 436–437).12

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This does not mean, however, that the role of nonhuman agencies is confined by Pirandello to the thresholds of the text; as will be shown in the following pages, nonhuman animals are often assigned a central narrative function in Pirandello’s fiction.

4   Pirandello’s Modernist Tortoise The following sections will focus on the tortoise as a recurring presence in Pirandello’s fiction, with particular regard to the short stories “Paura d’esser felice” [Fear of Being Happy] (1925) and “La tartaruga” [The Tortoise] (1936). In order to fully understand the role assigned to this animal in Pirandello’s specific case, it is first of all necessary to reflect on the broader significance of the tortoise in European culture between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In this panorama, in which the animal begins to embody the post-Darwinian crisis of anthropocentrism, the tortoise and the turtle are in fact often seen in modern literature as a “salvific” antithesis to technological advancement (Gasparotto 2012, 28). This idea is best exemplified by the famous flânerie described by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Baudelaire: Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace. But this attitude did not prevail; Taylor, who popularised the watchword “Down with dawdling!” carried the day. (Benjamin 1983, 850)

According to Caroline Pollentier, the physical slowness of the animal together with its “urban status … as a commodified good and social signifier,” made Benjamin describe “tortoise-walking as a characteristic habit of the flâneur” and as a “dandy display of elegance” (Pollentier 2010, 21). Starting from Benjamin’s “symbiotic, rhythmical representation of tortoise-­walking” (Pollentier 2010, 22), which presents the tortoise as still operating on a “human-centered, figurative level” (Pollentier 2010, 24), Pollentier imagines Virginia Woolf’s scenario of the flânerie as transforming into “a more radical experience of deterritorialization, destabilizing the very distinction between thinking subject and commodified animal” (Pollentier 2010, 24). Emphasizing the “ambivalence of the tortoise figure” (Pollentier 2010, 24), Woolf’s aesthetic experience of the flânerie can be rethought as an “anti-essentialist experience of ‘becoming animal”’

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(Pollentier 2010, 20–21). Pollentier analyses the tortoise as represented by Virginia Woolf in her London essays: in her 1927 essay “Street-­ Haunting: A London Adventure” Woolf focuses on the image of the tortoise’s shell as representing the “self-withdrawn human subject” to conclude that “flânerie metaphorically begins when the shell cracks open” (Pollentier 2010, 23); in “Oxford Street Tide” (1932) the tortoise becomes a “‘material-semiotic’ actor” with both its referential status of domestic animal and its figurative presence (Pollentier 2010, 20), thus opening flânerie to its utopian potential. Deleuze and Guattari, on whose work Pollentier bases her discussion of the utopian potential of the tortoise, borrow their anti-dialectical concept of “becoming-animal” from a cycle of poems on the tortoise written in 1921 by D. H. Lawrence, in which the author does not refer to “becoming-­ tortoise” as a sentimental or domestic relationship, but rather as the “anomalous”13—something that cannot be identified with a species or an individual but “contains only affects, and includes neither familiar feelings nor subjectivities, specific nor significant characteristics,” since “tender feelings are as foreign to it as human classifications” (Deleuze and Guattari quoted in Bryden 2007, 77).14 In other words, Lawrence’s poetic tortoises “agglomerate on the page as intensities of movement, stasis, or desire” (Bryden 2007, 77). Thus, the anomalous embodied by the tortoise also becomes the “contemplative” perspective par excellence, through which Woolf observes the modernism of the metropolis of London; as a result, the animal gaze defamiliarizes and relativizes the anthropocentric paradigm, and transforms the city from consumeristic into utopian (Pollentier 2010, 25–27). In the Italian context, the “becoming-tortoise” envisioned by Woolf and Lawrence is preceded by (or runs parallel to) imperialist forms of literary representation, which reject animality in order to reinstall the sovereignty of humanity—Gabriele d’Annunzio’s fetish tortoise is arguably the most famous example. The poet gave gold miniatures of his tortoise to friends and public figures such as Tazio Nuvolari and Benito Mussolini; it served the poet as a social badge, playing into d’Annunzio’s idea of human and male superiority as opposed to the inherent animality of the feminine being (Gasparotto 2012, 22). From this perspective, the solitary “contemplativeness” attributed to the animal does not open up to the ontological experience of the anomalous in the Deleuzian sense of the word. Its image is rather used by the poet for self-fashioning purposes, including for instance the legitimization of his own withdrawal from political life: the

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Latin motto “intra me maneo” [I remain within myself], together with the image of a tortoise inside its shell, are on an engraved plate that the Vate sent to Mussolini in 1935. The same applies to the embalmed domestic turtle in the dining room of the Vittoriale, donated to d’Annunzio by Marquise Luisa Casati who had brought her home from one of her frequent trips to exotic countries (Castagnola 2014, 209). The animal allegedly died of indigestion, and was then used as a warning against greed (Panté 2009, 145–146). In contrast to d’Annunzio, the tortoise fulfils a very different role in Italian modernism; in particular, several works by Tozzi and Pirandello feature a process of “becoming-tortoise” both as threshold of the anomalous (Deleuze and Guattari) and of relational mimesis (Marchesini 2014). In Tozzi, the animal is predominantly seen as a sacrificial victim of the human violence pervading the Tuscan countryside; at the same time, in a typically modernist fashion, the animal is also an alienating and uncanny presence triggering various unpredictable responses (Amberson 2014, 21–22). The tortoise that appears at the end of a fragment in the 1917 collection Bestie [Beasts] establishes an ethical equivalence between human and nonhuman animals, based on their shared capacity for suffering: Why, then, was I suffering there [in Siena]? Why hadn’t my soul ever wanted to stay there? Perhaps who knew it was that tortoise of mine, which I managed to keep inside the house one night and I couldn’t find any more the morning after. (Tozzi 1993, 601)15

By leaving, the tortoise is seemingly released from its domestic dimension and opens up to the transformative experience of the anomalous; however, this interpretation is undermined by the blurred boundaries between real animal and metaphorical one. Laying bare how ontology escapes meaning, Tozzi’s tortoise is a perfect example of the “exorbitant potential” of the animal “which is not exhausted by—and more often than not escapes— the philosophical and conceptual gestures that accompany it” (Driscoll 2017, 286). The “act of becoming an animal,” or “zoomimesis,” is taken instead to an extreme level in two short stories from Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno—“Paura d’esser felice” from the collection Donna Mimma, and “La tartaruga” from Una giornata. In both stories the tortoise is introduced in the act of climbing the steps—a threshold in Deleuzian terms—while being scrutinized by the human gaze. In “Paura

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d’esser felice,” the animal’s stubborn efforts are ascribed by the observer to a desire or “ontological intentionality” (Marchesini 2014, xix) attributed to the animal itself: “I wonder what great delights it imagines it can find in that [dining] room, since it has persisted in these efforts for so many years” (Pirandello 1984, 69).16 In “La tartaruga,” instead, the animal’s movements are interpreted in a superstitious (anthropocentric) light by a friend of the protagonist’s: Strange as it may seem, there are people in the United States who believe that tortoises bring luck, although even in the United States no tortoise has been found to be aware of its magic power. Mr Myshkow—for instance— has a friend who firmly believes in tortoises as soothsayers. His friend speculates on the Exchange and every morning—before giving his orders—he places a tortoise on the carpet of his drawing-room and watches: if the animal begins to move he is convinced that there will be a rally on the Exchange; if—on the other hand—the animal hides its head and refuses to move, he is equally convinced that a slump is in sight. Incredible: but even more incredible is that he has always been right. (Pirandello 1975, 214)17

In “Paura d’esser felice,” the tortoise’s stubborn resistance to human help is interpreted as an ethical act of prudence. In “La tartaruga,” the animal is considered as a mere lucky charm with no autonomous existence; this assumption, however, is ironically questioned by the narrator at the beginning of the quotation, highlighting the non-coincidence between human superstition and nonhuman “exorbitance” of the animal (who is of course unaware of being invested with this alleged “power”). In the following sections we will further investigate how Pirandello undermines the anthropocentric gaze on the tortoise, by contrasting it with a process of “zoomimesis” that pertains to human characters.

5   The Tortoise and the Grasshopper: “Paura d’esser felice” Before getting married, Fabio Feroni—the protagonist of “Paura d’esser felice”—used to take a vivid and loving interest in the natural life around him. One of his favourite pastimes consisted in observing an old tortoise struggling to climb the three steps leading from the terrace to the dining room, while at the same time refusing any human assistance; whenever Feroni tried to help the tortoise by lifting it and placing it on the first step,

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the animal would withdraw in its shell like a stone and slowly turn around, as if begging to descend the steps once again (Pirandello 1994, II, 1489). The animal’s resistance inspires Feroni’s metalinguistic reflection on the expression “Che bestia!” [What an animal!] when referring to an animal instead than a man: What followed from this observation? That in calling a man an animal, you do animals a very great injustice, because you take for stupidity what instead is their integrity or instinctual prudence. You call a man who doesn’t accept help, an animal, because it doesn’t seem right to praise a man for what is appropriate in animals. (Pirandello 1984, 70)18

From this moment on, Feroni becomes aware of the relativity of the animal–human dichotomy, thus opening up to the possibility of “becoming-­ tortoise.” He seems to be influenced by the anomalous behaviour of the tortoise, and replicates it in his defence strategy against the whims of fate. Notably, Feroni refers to the unpredictability of fate through an animal metaphor: unexpected events are like “the sudden spring of a grasshopper” (Pirandello 1984, 72),19 repeatedly leaving the protagonist “belly up—just like that tortoise there” (70).20 In other words, Feroni sets out to become a tortoise, in order to shield himself from the sudden springs of the grasshopper. At the same time, Feroni is overwhelmed by the affective nature of the anomalous, as described by Deleuze and Guattari in their analysis of the “becoming-tortoise.” He is incapable to dominate the process of mimesis in which he is captured, and he resorts to what can be called with Derrida a final act of “carnophallogocentrism” (Derrida 2008, 104) by swallowing the grasshopper: All of a sudden, whether it was because of a mouse, or a small current of air, or a cockroach on his bare feet, the fact is that Fabio Feroni let out a cry, jumped up, and bucked, and then took hold of his belly with both hands, shouting that the grasshopper was there; it was there, there inside his stomach! He began sashing about dashing about throughout the house, dressed only in his nightshirt. Then he ran down the stairs and outside through the deserted street into the night, screaming and laughing, while a dishevelled Dreetta shouted for help from the window. (Pirandello 1984, 75)21

The epilogue is deeply ambivalent: does Feroni’s euphoric madness result from the suspension of post-Darwinist anxiety, with the grasshopper finally

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being subordinated to human supremacy? Or on the contrary, does the human body’s literal assimilation of otherness result in an ecstatic, truly posthuman epiphany? The ultimate outcome of Feroni’s zoomimesis remains uncertain, and open to interpretation.

6   “I’m in luck! I’m in luck!”: Myshkow and the Tortoise In “La tartaruga,” the role of the animal gradually changes from being a material lucky charm into an exorbitant presence transforming the protagonist’s mindset. The deep affinity between Mr Myshkow and the tortoise is already suggested at the beginning of the story, when he seems to be the only one sympathizing with the animal while his children (John and Helen) have fun torturing it: With the toe of his shoe John turns it over onto its shell and immediately we see the little creature lash out with its little paws and painfully thrust about with its head in an attempt to get itself back into its natural position. 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. As you’ll have observed, there’s no respect on the part of the children for the good luck that tortoises are supposed to bring you. On the contrary, 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. (Pirandello 1975, 216)22

While John and Helen’s sadism is already in league with the violence of society (“the cold, coarse derision of those two children,” Pirandello 1975, 219),23 Myshkow’s sympathetic attitude reflects his extraneousness to it. The children reject the animal’s otherness by violently targeting it, and Mrs Myshkow uses the animal as a pretext to get rid of her husband. Myshkow, instead, gets prepared for the process of “becoming-tortoise” in three stages—firstly through bodily experience, secondly through flânerie, and thirdly through the epiphany of zoomimesis. When Myshkow holds the tortoise in his hand for the first time, “his sturdy, full-blooded springy little body is trembling all over. Maybe it’s pleasure he’s shuddering with; maybe there’s a touch of horror too”

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(Pirandello 1975, 221).24 This mixed feeling of alienation and recognition marks the start of the hybridizing process with the nonhuman other. One morning, while staring at his own body as he takes a bath, Myshkow wonders “why his own body must necessarily be that one and not another quite different one” (217)25; upon reflecting on his improbable relationship with the cold and unaffectionate Mrs Myshkow, he even asks himself whether his children would have been different if he had carried them in his womb (Pirandello 1994, III, 2349). His profound kinship with the tortoise becomes a way for Myshkow to interrogate the borders of the human as well as those between genders, as is often the case with posthumanist narratives (cf. Amberson and Past 2014, 8). The second stage of Myshkow’s “becoming-tortoise,” instead, coincides with his inconclusive flânerie around New York, punctuated by the intermittent physical presence of the tortoise in his hand: “As he walks along he forgets that he’s got the tortoise in his hand. Then he remembers” (Pirandello 1975, 220).26 Following his wife’s threats to leave the house if the tortoise stayed, Myshkow’s original intention was to bring the pet back to the shop where he bought it. He then considers abandoning it on the back seat of a taxi, but at the end he suddenly changes his mind—he decides to keep the tortoise in his house, thus causing Mrs Myshkow to leave. As soon as she disappears uttering her contempt towards the animal, the tortoise “suddenly unsheathes its four little paws, its tail and its head, and, swaying from side to side—you’d almost swear it was dancing—moves about the drawing room” (Pirandello 1975, 222).27 At this point, roles are reversed. The tortoise is no longer a lucky charm at the service of anthropocentric superstition, as it was at the beginning of the story; on the contrary, it drastically changes Myshkow’s very idea of luck as part of a posthumanist epiphany: “Mr. Myshkow can scarcely refrain from rejoicing—but only rather half-heartedly. He applauds very quietly. He gets the feeling, as he looks at the tortoise, that it’s telling him something. Only he’s … well, he’s not really convinced that … ‘I’m in luck! I’m in luck!’” (Pirandello 1975, 222).28 The final close-up on a nonhuman animal invites the reader to adopt a non-anthropocentric perspective on the very meaning of luck, which is now liberated from its exchange value. As Marchesini puts it: “Postulating a dialogic role for the heterospecific, we recognize its epiphanic significance, an inescapable property to go beyond the phenomenal, becoming the herald of new existential dimensions” (Marchesini 2014, xxviii). Even more clearly than in “Paura d’esser felice,” the process of

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“becoming-tortoise” is used in “La tartaruga” to illustrate the “exorbitant potential” of animality; in this respect, both of Pirandello’s stories show a significant similarity to other modernist representations of the tortoise, from Woolf to D.H. Lawrence.

7   Conclusion In the first half of this chapter, we aimed to provide a general introduction to Pirandello’s modernist gaze on animality. Building on a series of intertextual parallels with Balzac, we demonstrated how Pirandello deviates from the conventions of realism by emphasizing the idea of a zoological continuum encompassing both human and nonhuman animals. This awareness has far-reaching narrative and thematic implications, ranging from the protagonist’s ecstatic fusion with nature (Uno, nessuno e centomila) to a sense of cosmic detachment from all things human (mostly achieved at the beginning or at the end of the narrative); especially the latter outcome points to the instrumental role played by animality in the “philosophy of distance” underlying Pirandello’s umorismo. Sections 4, 5, and 6, instead, focused on the tortoise as a recurring figure in Pirandello’s short fiction, exemplifying the author’s reversal of the anthropocentric paradigm by way of representing forms of zoomimesis, or the act of “becoming animal.” In a diachronic perspective, both the introductory overview and the close-up on the tortoise attest to Pirandello’s innovative dialogue with the nineteenth-century tradition: just like Balzac’s anthropocentric comparison between “Humanity” and “Animality” in The Human Comedy, d’Annunzio’s Decadent fascination with the tortoise can be seen as a significant precedent, which is at the same time overcome by Pirandello’s modernist posthumanism. At the same time, in a synchronic perspective, we have set out to foreground a series of revealing similarities between Pirandello and other classics of Italian and European modernism—including, for instance, the systematic appearance of the posthumanist gaze in the narrative thresholds of the text (Sect. 3), the use of cosmic imagery in compliance with a typically modernist “long-range aesthetics” (Sect. 3), as well as the “becoming-tortoise” as a recurring example of modernist zoomimesis (Sects. 4, 5, and 6). As illustrated via the analysis of Pirandello’s specific case, the lens of posthumanism can be instrumental in reconsidering early twentieth-century Italian literature in the broader context of European modernism, thereby favouring a deeper understanding of modernism itself as a transnational phenomenon.

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Notes 1. On the notion of modernism with regard to early twentieth-century Italian literature, cf. for instance Donnarumma 2006, Baldi 2010, and Luperini and Tortora 2012. 2. Our translation; italics added. All quotations from Pirandello have been translated by us, with the exception of those from the short stories “Paura d’esser felice” and “La tartaruga.” Original text: “C’è nella storia naturale un regno studiato dalla zoologia, perché popolato dagli animali. Tra i tanti animali che lo popolano è compreso anche l’uomo. E lo zoologo sì, può parlare dell’uomo e dire, per esempio, che non è un quadrupede ma un bipede, e che non ha la coda, vuoi come la scimmia, vuoi come l’asino, vuoi come il pavone.” 3. For a discussion of Balzac’s influence on Pirandello, cf. Nobili 2004, 13–16 and Dashwood 2009. 4. “Marsina stretta” [Tight waistcoat] is the title of a novella published in 1901, anticipating reflections of Pirandello’essay on humorism. 5. “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.” 6. Our translation. 7. “Sono quest’albero. Albero, nuvola; domani libro o vento: il libro che leggo, il vento che bevo. Tutto fuori, vagabondo. … Muoio ogni attimo, io, e rinasco nuovo e senza ricordi: vivo e intero, non piú in me, ma in ogni cosa fuori.” 8. We are referring to Greimas’s “Canonical Narrative Schema,” as presented in Greimas and Courtés 1982. 9. “—E va bene! Il signor conte si levò per tempo, alle ore otto e mezzo precise… La signora contessa indossò un abito lilla con una ricca fioritura di merletti alla gola… Teresina si moriva di fame… Lucrezia spasimava d’amore… Oh, santo Dio! e che volete che me n’importi? Siamo o non siamo su un’invisibile trottolina, cui fa da ferza un fil di sole, su un granellino di sabbia impazzito che gira e gira e gira, senza saper perché …? Copernico, Copernico, don Eligio mio, ha rovinato l’umanità, irrimediabilmente. Ormai noi tutti ci siamo a poco a poco adattati alla nuova concezione dell’infinita nostra piccolezza, a considerarci anzi men che niente nell’Universo, con tutte le nostre belle scoperte e invenzioni; e che valore dunque volete che abbiano le

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notizie, non dico delle nostre miserie particolari, ma anche delle generali calamità? Storie di vermucci, ormai, le nostre.” 10. “distrazione provvidenziale.” 11. “Sole e ombra” [Sun and Shade] (1896), “Scialle nero” [The Black Shawl] (1900), “Prima notte” [The First Night] (1900), “Il fumo” [Smoke] (1904), “Il coppo” [The Fish Trap] (1912), “Ciàula scopre la luna” [Ciàula Discovers the Moon] (1912), “Notte” [Night] (1912), “Male di luna” [Moon Sickness] (1913), “Da sé” [By Itself] (1913),“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine!” (1915), “Il gatto, un cardellino e le stelle” [The Cat, a Finch and the Stars] (1917), “Un cavallo nella luna” [Horse in the Moon] (1918), “Cinci” [Cinci] (1932). 12. “Ci sarà un’esplosione enorme che nessuno udrà e la Terra ritornata alla forma di nebulosa errerà nei cieli priva di parassiti e di malattie” (Svevo 2004, 1085). 13. The becoming-animal should not be understood as imitation or identification, but as an “alliance with the anomalous” (Vignola 2013, 122). 14. Both the Deleuzian and posthumanist perspectives state that it is not possible to conceive a pure, let alone immutable, essence of the human being, as man is always caught in processes of trespassing and hybridization with animal “othernesses.” It is precisely in this sense that the becoming-­animal transcends twentieth-century philosophical anthropology and allows us to think about how ethics can be made to take into account nonhuman entities, from animals to the environment and technology (Vignola 2013, 117–18). 15. Our translation. “Perché, dunque io vi [a Siena] soffrivo? Perché la mia anima non vi è mai voluta stare? Lo sapeva, forse, quella mia tartaruga che riuscii a tener chiusa in casa una sera, e la mattina dopo non la trovai più.” 16. “‘Chi sa’, aveva pensato più volte il Feroni, ‘chi sa quali delizie s’immagina di trovare in quella saletta [da pranzo], se da tant’anni dura questa sua ostinazione’” (Pirandello 1994, II, 1488). 17. “Parrà strano, ma anche in America c’è chi crede che le tartarughe portino fortuna. Da che sia nata una tale credenza, non si sa. È certo però che loro, le tartarughe, non mostrano d’averne il minimo sospetto. Mister Myshkow ha un amico che ne è convintissimo. Giuoca in borsa ogni mattina, prima d’andare a giocare, mette la sua tartaruga davanti a uno scalino: se la tartaruga accenna di voler salire, è sicuro che i titoli che lui vuol giocare, saliranno; se ritira la testa e le zampe, resteranno fermi; se si volta e fa per  andarsene, lui giuoca senz’altro a ribasso. E non ha mai sbagliato” (Pirandello 1994, III, 2346). 18. “Che seguiva da questa riflessione? Che, dicendo in questo senso bestia a un uomo, si viene a fare alle bestie una gravissima ingiuria, perché si viene a scambiare per stupidità quella che invece è probità in loro o prudenza

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istintiva. Bestia, si dice a un uomo che non accetta l’ajuto, perché non par lecito pregiare in un uomo quella che nelle bestie è probità” (Pirandello 1994, II, 1489). 19. “Scatto improvviso d’un saltamartino” (Pirandello 1994, II, 1490). 20. “Riverso a pancia all’aria—proprio come quella tartaruga lì” (Pirandello 1994, II, 1490). 21. “Tutt’a un tratto, o fosse un topo, o un soffio d’aria, o uno scarafaggio sui piedi nudi, il fatto è che Fabio Feroni diede un urlo, un balzo, un salto da montone, e s’afferrò con le due mani il ventre gridando che lo aveva lì, lì, il saltamartino, lì dentro, lì dentro lo stomaco! E dalli a springare, a springare in camicia per tutta la casa, poi giù per le scale e poi fuori, per la via deserta, nella notte, urlando, ridendo, mentre Dreetta scarmigliata gridava ajuto dalla finestra” (Pirandello 1994, II, 1495). 22. “Con la punta del piede John la rovescia sulla scaglia, e subito allora si vede la bestiola armeggiar congli zampini e spinger col capo penosamente per tentar di rimettersi nella sua posizione naturale. 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. C’è al contrario la più lampante dimostrazione che 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” (Pirandello 1994, III, 2347). 23. “La derisione sguajatamente fredda di quei due figli” (Pirandello 1994, III, 2349). 24. “Freme in tutta l’elastica personcina pienotta e sanguigna per brividi, che sono forse di piacere, ma anche di ribrezzo un po’” (Pirandello 1994, III, 2346). 25. Our own translation. “Perché il proprio corpo debba essere necessariamente quello che è, e non un altro diverso” (Pirandello 1994, III, 2348). 26. “Camminando, si dimenticava d’avere in mano la tartaruga, ma poi se ne sovviene” (Pirandello 1994, III, 2351). 27. “Sfodera di scatto i quattro zampini, la coda e la testa e dondolando, quasi ballando, si muove per il salotto” (Pirandello 1994, III, 2352). 28. “Mister Myshkow non può fare a meno di rallegrarsene, ma timidamente; batte le mani piano piano, e gli pare, guardandola, di dover riconoscere, ma senza esserne proprio convinto: —La fortuna! La fortuna!” (Pirandello 1994, III, 2353).

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Works Cited Alt, Christina. 2010. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amberson, Deborah. 2014. Confronting the Specter of Animality. Tozzi and the Uncanny Animal of Modernism. In Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film, ed. Deborah Amberson and Elena Past, 21–38. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Amberson, Deborah, and Elena Past. 2014. Introduction. Thinking Italian Animals. In Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film, ed. Deborah Amberson and Elena Past, 1–17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baldi, Valentino. 2010. Reale invisibile: mimesi e interiorità nella narrativa di Pirandello e Gadda. Venice: Marsilio. de Balzac, Honoré. 1976. La Comédie Humaine. Ed. Pierre-Georges Castex and others. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2008. The Wild Ass’ Skin and Other Stories. Trans. Ellen Marriage. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Benedetti, Carla. 1995. La storia naturale nell’opera di Gadda. In Carlo Emilio Gadda, ed. Marie-Hélène Caspar. Italies – Narrativa 7. Paris: Université Paris X – Nanterre. Benjamin, Walter. 1983. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bryden, Mary. 2007. Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Castagnola, Raffaella. 2014. Inafferrabile come un’ombra dell’Ade. In La divina Marchesa. Arte e vita di Luisa Casati dalla Belle époque agli anni folli, ed. Fabio Benzi and Gioia Mori, 195–209. Milan: Istituzione Biblioteca Malatestiana. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury. Dashwood, Julie. 2009. Detecting Pirandello’s Balzac: Le Colonel Chabert and Il Fu Mattia Pascal. Pirandello Studies 29: 97–110. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Mille plateaux. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Luise Mallet. New York: Fordham. Donnarumma, Raffaele. 2006. Gadda modernista. Pisa: ETS. Driscoll, Kári. 2017. Fearful Symmetries: Pirandello’s Tiger and the Resistance to Metaphor. In Beyond the Human-Animal Divide, ed. Dominik Ohrem and Roman Bartosch, 283–305. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gasparotto, Lisa. 2012. Sentieri Animali, Sconfinamenti Umani. In forma di Parole 32 (3): 15–44.

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Greimas, Algirdas Julien, and Joseph Courtés. 1982. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Luperini, Romano. 1999. Pirandello. Bari-Roma: Laterza. Luperini, Romano, and Massimiliano Tortora, eds. 2012. Sul modernismo italiano. Naples: Liguori. Marchesini, Roberto. 2014. Mimesis. The Heterospecific as Ontopoietic Epiphany. In Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film, ed. Deborah Amberson and Elena Past, xiii–xxxvi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Musil, Robert. 1995. The Man without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins, editorial consultant Burton Pike. New York: Alfred Knopf. Nobili, Claudia Sebastiana. 2004. Pirandello: guida al Fu Mattia Pascal. Rome: Carocci. Panté, Maria Rosa. 2009. Lepri e tartarughe. In Animali della letteratura italiana, ed. Gian Mario Anselmi and Gino Ruozzi, 141–152. Rome: Carocci. Pirandello, Luigi. 1973. Tutti i romanzi. Ed. Giovanni Macchia. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 1975. Short Stories. Trans. Frederick May. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1984. Tales of Madness: A Selection from Luigi Pirandello’s Short Stories for a Year. Trans. Giovanni R. Bussino. Wellesley, MA: Branden Books. ———. 1994. Novelle per un anno. Ed. Pietro Gibellini. Florence: Giunti. ———. 2006. L’umorismo e altri saggi. Ed. Ferdinando Taviani. Milan: Mondadori. Pollentier, Caroline. 2010. Imagining Flânerie Beyond Anthropocentrism. Virginia Woolf, the London Archipelago, and City Tortoises. In Woolf and the City. Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Elizabeth F.  Evans and Sarah E.  Cornish, 20–30. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press. Rohman, Carrie. 2012. Stalking the Subject. Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press. Ryan, Derek, and Mark West, eds. 2015. Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism. Special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature, 61 (3). Savettieri, Cristina. 2001. Incipit sub specie aeternitatis. The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, 1. Accessed May 1, 2018. https://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/ Pages/journal/issue1/articles/savettieriincipit.php Scott, Bonnie Kime. 2012. In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Svevo, Italo. 2003. Zeno’s Conscience. Trans. William Weaver. New  York: Vintage Books. ———. 2004. Romanzi e ‘continuazioni’. Ed. Nunzia Palmieri. Milan: Mondadori. Tozzi, Federigo. 1993. Opere: romanzi, prose, novelle, saggi.  Ed. Marco Marchi. Milan: Mondadori.

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Tung, Charles M. 2016. Baddest Modernism: The Scales and Lines of Inhuman Time. Modernism/Modernity 23: 515–538. Vignola, Paolo. 2013. Divenire animale. La teoria degli affetti di Gilles Deleuze tra etica ed etologia. In Emotività animali. Ricerche e discipline a confronto, ed. Matteo Andreozzi and Silvana Castignone, 117–124. Alma Massaro: LED. Wallace, Jeff. 2005. D.H.  Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zangrilli, Franco. 2001. Il bestiario di Pirandello. Fossombrone: Metauro.

CHAPTER 4

Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives in Laura Pugno’s Narrative Marco Amici

1   Introduction The short stories of Sleepwalking and the poems collected in Tennis, written together with Giulio Mozzi, inaugurate Laura Pugno’s literary endeavour (Pugno 2002; Pugno and Mozzi 2002). These two books, published in 2002, marked from the very beginning Pugno’s commitment to both prose and poetry, which has become a constant feature in her production as a writer. It is worth mentioning that several of the themes and tropes featured in her novels had also—or already—appeared in her poems. Roberta Tabanelli has underlined how the violent, dystopian and dystrophic universe of Sirene [Mermaids] (2007), for example, is already outlined in some of the poems collected in Il colore oro [The Colour Gold], published the same year as Pugno’s debut novel (Pugno 2007a). The visionary images evoked by texts such as “Estremo oriente” [Far East] or “Lady marmalade,” according to Tabanelli, refer to a posthuman and

M. Amici (*) University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_4

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post-organic notion of corporeality and landscape which substantiates the imaginary of a book like Sirene (Tabanelli 2010, 8–10). The exploration of these particular topics does not represent a radical novelty in the field of science fiction, with which Pugno’s debut novel can be associated. Sci-fi writers have often examined humans’ relationship with their environment and explored the limits of identity in relation to technological development since the 1960s, when New Wave science fiction emerged thanks to authors such as Michael Moorcock and James G.  Ballard. In more recent years Donna Haraway, in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” highlighted how “contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted” (1991, 149). Nevertheless, Sirene cannot be strictly and exclusively associated to the literary field of science fiction. The novel, as pointed out by Valentina Fulginiti, can be more correctly contextualized within a recent trend of Italian dystopian narrative, including works by authors who are not strict practitioners of the sci-fi genre, such as Tullio Avoledo, Alessandro Bertante, Tommaso Pincio, Davide Longo, Paolo Zanotti and the Wu Ming collective. Fulginiti highlights how, during the early 2000s, a specific form of literature commonly linked to science fiction has become “a minor but persistent vein of Italian narrative, with a growing number of works published every year” (2014, 159). As mentioned above, what these authors seem to share is not the commitment to a specific form of narrative and its conventions but an interest in producing future-centred literature characterized by a hybrid mode, made up of both realistic and speculative elements. If one examines the content of the novels associated with this tendency, books like Longo’s L’uomo verticale [The Vertical Man] (2010) or Bertante’s Nina dei lupi [Nina’s Wolves] (2011), the authors’ intention to play out social fears and anxieties to their extremes stands out, blending present and future in subtle ways. It is from this perspective that themes such as the worsening of environmental issues and the awareness and perceived necessity of re-­ calibrating the relationship between human and nature play a crucial role. An attempt at exploring this latter relationship can be easily recognized in Pugno’s debut novel but, at the same time, can also be interpreted as a presence—at times latent, at times manifest—which also characterizes her subsequent works. In keeping with the idea that “the author is a seismograph of his/her time, and nowadays we receive from everywhere, and mostly from nature, signs from the End of Time” (Taccogna n.d.), Pugno has often problematized the notion of humankind as measure of all things.

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Though this attitude cannot be considered as an explicit and politically committed form of criticism or ecocriticism, it is nevertheless evident that the conflicting relationship between different biotic factors of the ecosystem constitutes one of the most distinguishing characteristics of her writing; in addition, she focuses on the necessity of de-centring the human within our worldview in order to re-calibrate our impact on the environment. In the following pages, I will investigate precisely this aspect, proposing an analysis focused on the mutual interaction of anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric elements in Pugno’s novels, in particular in Sirene, La caccia [The hunt] (2012), Antartide [Antarctica] (2011) and La ragazza selvaggia [The wild girl] (2016). Given that, as stated by Braidotti and Hlavajova, post-anthropocentrism “criticises species hierarchy and advances bio-centred egalitarianism” (2018, 1), I will investigate how Pugno thematizes, questions or reflects on anthropocentrism and the possibility of its overcoming.

2   A Hybrid Form of Realism As previously mentioned, Pugno is not the kind of writer who systematically adopts a specific literary genre and programmatically relies on its conventions and tropes. Pugno, in addition, is not a writer who is exclusively committed to realism. If Sirene can be considered a sci-fi work in all respects, her subsequent novel, Quando verrai [When You Will Come] (2009) is characterized by few but essential fantasy elements, while the dystopian narrative of La caccia progressively takes the shape of a supernatural narrative. Even in novels such as Antartide and La ragazza selvaggia that do not contain elements of fantasy, it seems possible to identify factors—haunting presences, one might say—undermining the realism of the narrative. Being a writer who often stretches and transgresses the boundaries of reality, Pugno considers realism as a modality of writing which places more emphasis on the coherence of literary representation than on referentiality or correspondence to a “real” state of things. She clarified her relationship with the tradition of realism in her contribution to a special issue of the journal Allegoria, published in 2006 and focused on the “return to reality” in contemporary Italian literature: My realism is based on the cohesiveness of a literary text and on the coherence of the fictional world depicted. So far I have written realistic books and books which could be associated to fantasy or speculative fiction.

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Nevertheless, they were all deeply grounded in the present. This is what realism is for me: being in our present (and in our future). Reality is not independent from the organization of our senses and mind. We should be aware of this. We cannot believe in an absolute reality. Because of its scientific and epistemological implications, this is a form of awareness that cannot be taken for granted anymore. (2008, 22)1

Thus, the writer claims to use a form of fictional writing which is able to both represent and alter the world around us. In Pugno’s work we can find a fluctuation between what is real—or commonly associated with the functioning of our reality—and what is not. My proposal is to situate this dynamic between Italo Calvino’s conception of the fantastic tale as a narrative “whose best effects reside in an oscillation between irreconcilable levels of reality” (2015, vii)2; and the notion of “impossible realism” proposed by Walter Siti as a sort of anti-habit: “it is the light tear, the unusual detail opening a breach through our mental stereotypes … and let us catch a glimpse of the thing itself, the infinite, formless, unpredictable reality” (2013, 8). Furthermore, it seems possible to relate the purpose of this anti-habit or oscillation to the idea of literary estrangement that plays a key role in fantasy and science fiction narratives, as they are usually set in fictional worlds to some degree different from our own. This latter difference, as pointed out by Michael Adams, allows readers to examine fundamental human problems of knowing and acting on what one knows, or thinks one knows, and “to examine the epistemological basis of their experience” (2017, 329). The notion of literary estrangement is specifically linked to science fiction thanks to Darko Suvin, who provided an influential but quite exclusive definition of the genre stressing its cognitive and rational components.3 From the perspective of our analysis, it seems fruitful to look at the genealogy of Suvin’s idea of “cognitive estrangement” (1979) and focus on the notion of “defamiliarization” introduced by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky. In “Art as Technique” Shklovsky stresses that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make form difficult” (1912, 12). Despite the formalist’s emphasis on technical matters and poetry to make things strange, defamiliarization constitutes a central aspect in Pugno’s writing: the necessity to represent a reality whose fabric, without being weakened, can be woven with supernatural or sci-fi elements in order to produce estrangement. Again, it should be stressed that defamiliarization here is not

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intended as a formal device, but as thematic deviation from what is perceived as a commonly accepted representation of reality. As previously mentioned, this aspect is ingrained in Pugno’s hybrid form of realism which concerns the cohesion and coherence of fictional landscapes which deviate from the familiar contents of our empirical environment. In some of Pugno’s novels, as I will attempt to demonstrate, this specific aspect is particularly relevant when we consider how a discourse on anthropocentrism and its polarity, non-anthropocentrism, can be articulated.

3   Posthuman Mermaids Sirene is set in a future afflicted by an epidemic of skin cancer known as cancro nero [black cancer]. Since the outbreak of the plague the world is divided between those who can afford to live in protected sub-oceanic resorts—wealthy members of what remains of society and the Yakuza criminal elite—and those who survive in bunkers on dry land and live in constant fear of contagion. Twenty years before the diffusion of the black cancer, a team of scientists discovered the existence of mermaids. Progressively, the new species—which is thought to be the product of a genetic mutation, or of the evolution of an animal form that was believed to be extinct—had been brought by humanity to the verge of extinction. On the one hand, mermaid meat is considered a delicacy, the new Beluga caviar (6) and represents a lucrative business; on the other hand, their bodies are sold in the brothels of the city of Underwater, as mermaids are the new sexual sport (5). The double nature of their exploitation reflects the ambivalence with which mermaids are described by Pugno. They possess anthropomorphic traits that make them look just like women but, at the same time, they are characterized by marked nonhuman elements. Consequently, their defamiliarized identity allows the author to explore and problematize what Dinesh Wadiwel defines as the erasure of “the gap through which humanity posited the distance between itself and animal” (2015, 95): The females were beasts for milk and meat and, at the same time, they were women, without speech, without legs, with the tail muscle able to snap a man’s back in two and their smooth vagina protected from sea water abrasion by a pearly smegma … their faces were barely more than snouts—cow’s snouts, Samuel thought—to complicate matters there was that long hair, if one could call it hair, a single blue or green-blue elastic mass which fluttered

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on the water like the braids of the most beautiful among teenage girls. (Pugno 2007b, 6)4

Being at the same time ornitomorphous and ichthyomorphous figures, amphibian and hybrid creatures, sexual slaves and animals for slaughter, Laura Pugno’s mermaids exemplify the post-anthropocentric connotation of bio-genetic capitalism which Rosi Braidotti describes in her book, The Posthuman (2013). According to Braidotti, a perverse form of the posthuman is already in place, determined by global economy and its overarching imperative of productivity which implies “if not the actual erasure, at least the blurring of the distinction between the human and other species when it comes to profiting from them” (63). The double nature of the mermaids’ commodification in Sirene is also clearly linked with the notion of necropolitics, theorized by Achille Mbembe to account for the creation of death-worlds, “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (2003, 40). The necropolitical context of Sirene relates to management of both the mermaids’ living and dying: they are simultaneously put to work as sexual labourers and condemned to death. Such a form of exploitation seems to conjugate the two notions of nonhuman and inhuman that Braidotti and Hlavajova relate to a residual form of humanism that characterizes our time. Pugno’s mermaids are stigmatized as nonhuman “‘others’ whose existence has been cast outside the realm of anthropocentric thought” (2018, 2) and, at the same time, they are subjects who suffer the inhumane and “dehumanizing effects of structural injustice and exclusions” (2018, 2) on the basis of their difference. In other words, the erosion or blurring of the human–animal divide embodied by the mermaids does not invalidate the anthropocentric principle that human life should never be subjected to the systemic violence to which animals may be subjected. The necropolitical logic of the economy represented in Sirene reflects that posthuman form of exploitation in which, at the level of raw materials and final products, all species are involved: “Seeds, plants, animals and bacteria fit into this logic of insatiable consumption alongside various specimens of humanity” (Braidotti 2013, 63). The main character of Sirene is a young man named Samuel, who works in a mermaids’ farm. One day he decides to get into the pool where the mermaids are kept and have sexual intercourse with a mezzoalbina, a half-­ albino siren. Samuel’s behaviour is not motivated by any specific reason or by sexual appetite, but can be easily associated to a latent death drive

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linked to the premature death of his partner Sadako. In one of the very few physical descriptions of the character, Pugno specifies that, since Sadako’s death, Samuel has shaved his head, an aesthetic element which identifies those who have been infected with the cancro nero and therefore it signals proximity to death. More generally, we can state that the whole narrative of Sirene seems to be characterized by a mortiferous aura. Pugno represents, in fact, a dystopian future in which, after humanity has deprived the planet’s atmosphere of its ozone layer, it seems that the sun wants to “devour humanity like an evil god” and death is everywhere (10).5 If, on the one hand, this aspect is naturally connected with the use of topoi and tropes from the tradition of science fiction’s apocalyptic narratives, on the other hand, it seems that the author deliberately forces the issue. In a context in which the whole of humanity is dying, the tormented main character of the novel, Samuel, represents a different form of “living dead”: consumed by the memory of Sadako, he “survives” in a sort of limbo between life and death. Samuel inhabits this condition even in recurring nightmares, where the “world was the hell of black cancer” and the beaches of Underwater were covered with piles of dead bodies (27).6 In these nightmares Samuel and Sadako walk freely without fear of contagion: “They wandered the streets or sunbathed on the terrace, as if they were immune and destined to live forever. It is so, Sadako told him in the dream, because we are already dead” (27).7 Carla Benedetti links Sirene’s mortiferous aura to a critique of patriarchal anthropocentrism. Pugno’s mermaids, because of their very nature, challenge “the dialectics of otherness” which is at the core of “humanist Man’s power” (Braidotti 2013, 68). Benedetti’s reading of Pugno’s novel points out at the same barbaric power exercised by masculine society that Horkheimer and Adorno read in the myth of Odysseus and the sirens: “Sirene is rooted in the same ‘virile domination’ over nature, women and animals which is taken to the extreme until it deflagrates producing in men a sort of extreme final voracity” (Benedetti 2007). However, there is one characteristic that Pugno’s mermaids possess which men cannot consume or exploit: they are immune to the black cancer thanks to the pearly humor secreted by their skin, and every human attempt to synthesize a cure from it has resulted in failure.

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4   Animal Irreducibility Unexpectedly, the half-albino mermaid with whom Samuel had sexual intercourse conceives, and the resulting mezzoumana, a half-human female, is a hybrid with human-like eyelids, lips and vocal apparatus. The birth of Mia—this is the name Samuel gave to his half-human daughter— represents a crucial possibility in the fictional world of Sirene: Mia, who is immune to the cancro nero, embodies hope and expectation of survival for a new, hybrid form of the human. What would happen, Samuel thought, if the Yakuza were to cross Mia’s DNA, again and again, with that of a human being? Samuel knew he didn’t have the knowledge or the mental resources to fully understand, but maybe the Yakuza and its scientists, if any of them were still alive, could. (133)8

It is Samuel himself, though, who decides to deny the Yakuza an opportunity to study and use Mia’s DNA to engineer a cure for the cancro nero. In an extreme gesture of rebellion, the young man, now infected with the plague and close to death, is able to free the mezzoumana and release it into the ocean. Any attempt or hypothesis of further hybridization between humans and mermaids seem to be denied at the end of the novel. In the last pages of Sirene Mia is swimming free at the head of her flock and the human element in her is less than residual. Robert Rushing has underlined how the ending of the novel neutralizes the inherent contradiction which usually characterizes apocalyptic, post-anthropocentric narratives: the use of a human perspective to represent a future without humanity, imagining “our own human gaze, masochistically lonely, surviving the apocalypse” (Rushing 2011). Rushing draws on Paul De Man’s notion of prosopopeia as a “fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the grave,” a narrative device which allows a dialogue with a mute entity and “posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech” (De Man 1979, 926–927). Building on De Man’s reflections, Rushing stresses how post-­ apocalyptic accounts can be considered as necessarily ideologically oriented: neither they produce any real de-centring perspective nor they have a real external and impartial ecocritical value: After all, the Earth could care less what abuses we perpetrate upon it, unless we fantasize our own consciousness in it, personify her (and give her a sex and a gender), place a mask on her face (was it a face at all, before we personified it?) that suspiciously resembles our own features. (Rushing 2011)

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In the context of Sirene, Pugno’s gaze on the future does not go as far as to explore the landscape of post-humanity; in the conclusive lines of the novel, Mia is described as forgetful not only of her human father but of humanity in general. She is only able to vocalize Samuel’s name from time to time—“When she was very tired, or far away from the flock, that cry resurfaced in her throat” (145)9—not as a word but as a call, an animal sound. An aspect, the latter, which can be related to irreducibility of the animal element in the half-human mermaid, or even interpreted as a form of resistance against a specific form of human aggression. Language, in fact, is traditionally associated with human uniqueness compared to other living beings. This is a long-established view which reinforces the otherness of the nonhuman as a form of inferiority and promotes what John Harris indicated as a sort of “human chauvinism,” “celebrating our own kind as we do in a different sense when we talk of ‘Britishness,’ ‘European Culture,’ or ‘Western Civilization’” (Harris 2016, 41). As pointed out by Michael Cronin, though, “one of the recurrent features of studies on animal cognition is that attributes that are seen as uniquely human are constantly being redefined” (2017, 75). Cronin indicates the necessity of decentralizing language as a mark of human significance in favour of interspecies relatedness and communication across difference (2017, 5). From this perspective, Samuel’s attempts at teaching Mia how to use her vocal apparatus in order to produce human language is a form of colonization of the animal mind based on the anthropocentric misconception that animals are “mute.” Samuel embodies human incapacity of thinking beyond a man/animal dialectic. The kind of binary opposition which Jacques Derrida deconstructed in The Animal that Therefore I Am, where he states, for example, that “it would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation.” (2008, 48) Moreover, throughout the whole novel, Pugno deliberately links language with power imposition or, more precisely, with patriarchal power imposition: the character of Sadako is particularly relevant from this point of view. She was the illegitimate daughter of a powerful member of the Yakuza who, eventually, entrusted her to the care of her uncle, a child molester. Before doing that, Sadako’s father decided to have his name burnt onto his natural daughter’s back: “He branded her just like a mermaid for slaughter” (63).10 Samuel clearly replicates this form of patriarchal ownership exerted through language when he calls the mezzoumana

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“Mia,” which means “mine” in Italian. Language, from this perspective, is a tool to colonize and assert ownership on the non-standard other, assuming the standard “to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognized polity” (Braidotti, 65). As we already mentioned, though, the last image of Sirene is of Mia swimming free in the ocean: when she breathes out the call “Samuel” she does not know anymore what that means because her mind at that point is like a blank slate or tabula rasa. The last events narrated in Sirene suggest that humanity is going to face not only its downfall as alpha species, but also its extinction. The interaction between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric elements as thematized in Sirene does not produce much more than destruction and death. The practice of destroying, after all, is inherently human. As pointed out by Sun and Zhang, “the only thing that can be destroyed is the surrounding human environment or even human beings themselves as there exists no destruction in nature” (2015, 200).

5   La ragazza selvaggia: Returning to Nature Laura Pugno, presenting La ragazza selvaggia, has pointed out that there is a fil rouge linking her latest novel to Sirene: a common strand concerning the impossibility of obliterating completely the culture–nature divide and the presence of a “secret territory—the wood, the ocean?—surrounding the boundaries of the human” (Pugno 2017). If we consider the character of Dasha, the ragazza selvaggia [wild girl] in Pugno’s last novel, undoubtedly, we recognize an element of alterity which relates back to the mezzoumana mermaid Mia. In creating the character of Dasha, the author drew on accounts and descriptions of feral children such as Peter the wild Boy, who was found in 1725 in a wood near the German city of Hamelin, and Victor of Aveyron, the enfant sauvage who was discovered living wild in the woods near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance. Peter, Victor and the fictional Dasha are children who, deprived of all social contact, have “become so stunted in their solitude that their behaviour comes to resemble that of the lower animals” (Malson 1964, 10). Dasha reappears, severely wounded and naked, after ten years living in the wilderness of the Stellaria nature reserve, where she must have survived on roots, eggs and the small animals she was able to scavenge and hunt. When Tessa, a biologist working in the reserve and the main character in the novel, found her, she could easily picture Dasha “crouched on the ground, her face deep into the

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entrails of a fox with her lips and teeth stained with blood” (25).11 However, prior to becoming a radical and feral “other” living alone in Stellaria, Dasha had experienced a milder form of otherness, being a very introverted and possibly autistic child who was unable to speak. Her feral state is the product of extreme isolation beyond the limits of society but, at the same time, her previous condition between social integration and isolation did not produce a real sense of belonging. In fact, it is not even certain if she got lost in the woods of Stellaria or she actually decided to escape. When the industrialist Giorgio Held, Dasha’s adoptive father, brought her back to his villa on the outskirts of Rome and tried to gradually re-introduce her to civil life with the professional assistance of doctors, Dasha did not show any form of progress. Her senses were anesthetized, her eyes were wandering from one object to the other as if unable to catch sight of the outline of things, the skin of her fingertips and hands—of her whole body, in fact—was insensitive to heat or cold, her hearing was indifferent to human voice, noise or music, or any sound which wasn’t associated with searching for food: a walnut that falls and cracks, the sound of a bird; and her apathy, her prolonged immobility that broke into a sudden jump or a race in the attempt to attack one living thing, like a small animal or a bird that Dasha, if let free, would pluck with her teeth and contracted fingers. (123)12

In Dasha we read the same irreducible animality that characterizes Mia. At the core of this otherness, again, seems to be the absence of language. Nevertheless, if Mia’s hybridity is inscribed within a body in which humanity and animality coexist and potentially represent the hope for a new species, Dasha’s difference is deeply rooted in her brain and in her instinctual processes. It is a difference which, as previously mentioned, pre-exists her disappearance in the woods. When Giorgio Held meets the child for the first time, she is already locked in that wild shyness [timidezza selvatica] which she will never lose. As a consequence, Dasha is naturally a more complex and enigmatic character than the mezzoumana mermaid: her otherness is a mystery that her adoptive family cannot solve. While her twin sister Nina—a not less enigmatic character—rapidly learns Italian, Dasha remains obstinately mute both in Italian and in her mother tongue, producing only groans, raucous cries and laughter. In addition, she always seems to be alert waiting for something to happen, a common characteristic in observed cases of feral children. Through a character like Dasha,

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Pugno is able not only to explore the boundaries between animality and humanity but also to blur those boundaries and to challenge the notion of a “natural” humanity. Rebecca Bishop has pointed out that agency—both human and animal—“is a quality that lies not simply in an ontological being, but in a politics of attribution” (2009, 218). According to this perspective, feral children—but also human-like animals—are thought to possess the conscious experience of being someone on the basis of their ability to fit in, mainly through bodily actions and communications, “with existing conceptions of what constitutes a human-like presence in the world” (Bishop 2009, 219). Throughout La ragazza selvaggia Dasha embodies a resistance to such a notion of “agentive selfhood” linked to the anthropocentric idea of a natural humanity: her sense of belonging to the woods of Stellaria is more real than her attachment to her adoptive family, her feral identity is stronger than her human one. In spite of this, La ragazza selvaggia is also a novel which critiques the notion of nature as a protective mother or the nostalgic environmental idea of “returning to nature.” At the beginning of the novel Dasha is forced to seek help outside the “protected” space of the woods because of her injuries and when, in conclusion, she is released again into the wild of Stellaria, Tessa wonders if she would be able to hunt again and survive alone in that environment as she used to. It is interesting to notice, from this perspective, the importance of space in Pugno’s narrative, an importance which can be fruitfully associated to the interaction of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric elements not only in La ragazza selvaggia, but in her entire narrative production. As pointed out by Paulo Tavares in the Posthuman Glossary, forests and woods in Western thought often identify a heterogeneous space “material and imagined; concrete, symbolic and metaphysical” demarcating at the same time a “threshold […] against which civilization is defined, being considered both its primeval pre-condition and its antithesis or negation” (quoted in Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018, 162). In Pugno’s last novel, Dasha’s entire history is marked by the presence of forests where human and nonhuman, culture and nature, conflict and react to each other producing new dynamics. She and her sister Nina come originally from the area of Pripyat-Chernobyl where, decades after the world’s worst nuclear accident, nature has taken over a ghost territory abandoned by the population. Since 1995, years later, Dasha would have spent her time alone in the woods of Stellaria, a fictional integral nature reserve, a protected space “destined to grow wild again until reaching a hypothetical, imaginary state of nature, if such a thing were even possible” (14).13

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Nonetheless, the experiment of Stellaria is bound to fail because nature’s timing cannot be accelerated for human use. If Anthropocene is the time in which, “it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be” (Walsh 2002), as pointed out by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the space of the woods in La ragazza selvaggia defines grey areas where humanity is not in control and where culture and technology do not have power over living beings.

6   Beyond the Thin Film of Civilization Pugno’s third novel, La caccia, is characterized by a bleak, dystopian setting. After a civil war, the imaginary city of Leijla is controlled by a militia which conducts an invasive and paranoid surveillance over the population. At the beginning of La caccia, Nord, an ex-militiaman, disappears after the corpse of a woman is found in his apartment. The only person that seems able to track Nord’s last movements is his brother Mattias, who shares with his sibling the telepathic faculty of reading past events or memories through bodies and objects. The various clues collected by Mattias lead him to the Gora, the wild mountain where he used to go hunting with his father. The Gora, as has been pointed out by Cortellessa, is not merely a physical place but “a metaphysical boundary which divides the thin film of civilization from the fluid, obscure, and violent nature of the world” (2012). The rocks and woods of the mountain, which are described both as a terrible and wonderful space, are inhabited by supernatural entities most likely drawn from Japanese and European folklore. Rousse, the woman found dead at the beginning of the story, is in fact a fox-spirit of the mountain that can manifest in human form, a magical being that resembles closely the kitsune [fox] of Japanese mythology. The Gora represents a space in which natural and supernatural, magic and mundane, blend together. Considering the polarities of anthropocentrism and post-­ anthropocentrism, the sequence of events narrated in La caccia produces an interesting dynamic which culminates when Mattias, who has ventured on the mountain in an attempt to find his brother, is about to cross a boundary from which there is no return. It’s the sunset. The light becomes uncertain or it’s just my blurred eyesight. …

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They are close, I don’t have much time before their dogs start looking for me in the brush. They will hunt me down, this is certain, but they won’t find me because I won’t be here. … My father disappeared on the Gora, my mother, Nord, and now myself. I am the last one. It’s my turn now. I close my eyes, I open them, one, two, three times until I see her, in a red glow—with the red dominating the white. Still alive, the fox. (130–131)14

What is waiting beyond the threshold of the Gora is not revealed by the author. Like many of La caccia’s characters, Mattias is ultimately defined by his own disappearance. The wild and mysterious space of the mountain identifies not only a territory outside the realm of urban civilization but a sort of “other” dimension which plays to its extreme the theological notion that “forests were the realm of anarchy, shadows and the inhuman, the frontier space of the ordained social-religious world of the city” (Tavares quoted in Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018, 163). Focusing on the dysfunctional relationship between natural and anthropic landscapes that characterizes modernity and postmodernity, Fredric Jameson has pointed out that nature is no longer “the other of our society […] as it was in precapitalist societies” (2005, 35). From this perspective, the inhospitable landscape of the Gora symbolizes the regaining of a natural alterity which is not simply non-anthropocentric but also supernatural. According to this perspective, nature becomes again the “other” that has been “irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital, by the green revolution, by neocolonialism and the megalopolis” (Jameson 2005, 35). As in La caccia and La ragazza selvaggia, in Antartide, too, the wilderness around the House of Miriam identifies a territory marked by radical alterity: a place where one goes to disappear and put an end to one’s life. In addition to officially being an isolated hospice near the border between France and Italy, The House of Miriam is, in fact, a destination for terminally ill individuals who have chosen to die. More specifically, some of them decide to die in the woods and have their bodies cremated, while others leave precise instructions to have their bodies left as fodder for animals. From this perspective, in Antartide, we see materializing that posthuman notion of death which Braidotti describes as “the inhuman within us, which frees us into life” (2013, 134), that last step which allows us to be cleansed of our anthropocentric ego:

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Death, the inhuman within, marks the becoming-imperceptible of the subject as the furthest frontier of the processes of intensive transformation or becoming. This is no transcendence, but radical empirical immanence, that is to say a reversal of all that lives into the roar of the “chaosmic” echoing chamber of becoming. It marks the generative force of zoe, the great animal-­ machine of the universe, beyond personal individual death. (2013, 136)

The terminally ill but still self-sufficient men and women that live in the House of Miriam seem to act in consonance with the above idea. Gabriel, the French guide who walks them to their destiny—and into the woods— believes that whoever decides to die in the forest and feed his or her own corpse to the animals has a different, better death, “the death experienced by all animals in the cycle of nature” (84).15 The character of Gabriel himself is described by the protagonist of the novel as if coming “from another world, a world in which human beings do not belong to themselves, but simply to the woods” (107).16 From this perspective, we can state that the natural space surrounding the House of Miriam is characterized by a post-­ anthropocentric polarity which attracts those who decide to become imperceptible and “to disappear by merging into this generative flow of becoming” (Braidotti 2013, 136). In La ragazza selvaggia, La caccia and Antartide the woods identify a relational space between anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric elements, not a barrier but a threshold. Nevertheless, in representing this specific kind of space, Pugno does not provide a generic posthuman embrace between human and nonhuman, based on the perceived necessity of overcoming anthropocentrism. The relationship between Pugno’s characters and the natural environment undergoes transformations, conflicts, fear, inexplicable mysteries. It is the same problematic relational process which can be observed in hybrid characters such as Mia in Sirene or Dasha in La ragazza selvaggia, with their ungraspable mixture of human and animal elements that does not neutralize the irreducible otherness deeply rooted in them. Pugno, from this point of view, seems more interested in articulating the posthuman as a complex, unresolved process which is destined to remain unsolved. Nevertheless, the interaction between anthropocentrism and post-anthropocentrism, human and nonhuman, nature and culture constitutes a polarity that cannot help but be manifest in Pugno’s narrative.

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Notes 1. “Il mio realismo lo vado a verificare nella tenuta del testo, nella coerenza di un mondo narrativo credibile. Per il resto, ho scritto testi più o meno “realistici,” e altri di letteratura fantastica, o d’anticipazione. Che comunque sono radicati fortemente nel presente: per me il realismo è questo, essere nel nostro presente (e nel futuro). La realtà non è indipendente dall’organizzazione della nostra mente e dei nostri sensi. Dobbiamo averne consapevolezza, non possiamo credere a una realtà assoluta. Questa non consapevolezza—scientifica, epistemologica—non ci è più concessa.” All translations in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, are my own. 2. “The problem with the reality of what we see—extraordinary things that are perhaps hallucinations projected by our minds, or common things that perhaps hide a second, disturbing nature, mysterious and terrible, beneath the most banal appearances—is the essence of fantastic literature, whose best effects reside in an oscillation between irreconcilable levels of reality” (Calvino 2015, vii). 3. The idea of “cognitive estrangement,” according to which science fiction as a literary discourse is “built on certain logical principles that avoids self-­ contradiction; that is rational rather than emotional or instinctual” (Roberts 2006, 9), seems to be too restrictive if applied to Pugno’s work. 4. “Le femmine erano bestie da latte e da carne e insieme erano donne, prive di parola, prive di gambe, il muscolo unico della coda capace di spezzare in due la schiena di un uomo, la vagina liscia, protetta dall’abrasione dell’acqua di mare da uno smegma madreperlaceo … i visi poco più che musi—di vacca, pensò Samuel—ma a complicare il loro aspetto c’erano quei capelli lunghi, se poi si potevano dire capelli, un’unica massa elastica verdeazzurra o azzurro vivo che scendeva sulla schiena, che ondeggiava nell’acqua come le trecce della più splendida delle adolescenti.” 5. “divorare l’umanità come un dio maligno.” 6. “Il mondo era l’inferno del cancro nero.” 7. “Loro due uscivano nelle strade, o si bagnavano al sole sul terrazzo, come se fossero immuni e destinati a vivere per sempre. È così, gli diceva nel sogno Sadako, perché noi siamo già morti.” 8. “Che cosa sarebbe successo, rifletté Samuel, se gli yakuza avessero incrociato il dna di Mia, ancora e ancora, con quello di un essere umano? … Samuel sapeva di non avere i mezzi mentali, le conoscenze per capire fino in fondo, ma la yakuza e i suoi scienziati, se ce n’erano di ancora vivi sì.” 9. “Quando era molto stanca, o lontana dal branco, le tornava in gola quel verso.” 10. “Le aveva imposto il branding come a una sirena da macello.”

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11. “accovacciata a terra, col viso affondato nelle interiora di una volpe, le labbra e i denti sporchi di sangue.” 12. “I suoi sensi come anestetizzati, gli occhi che vagavano da un oggetto all’altro come se non ne scorgessero i contorni, la pelle dei polpastrelli e delle mani, di tutto il corpo anzi, insensibile al caldo come al freddo, l’udito indifferente alla voce umana, al rumore o alla musica, a qualsiasi suono che in natura non fosse connesso alla ricerca del cibo, una noce che cade e s’incrina, un verso d’uccello; e l’apatia, l’immobilità prolungata che si rompeva di colpo in una corsa, un balzo, un tentativo di aggredire qualcosa di vivo, piccoli animali, uccelli che Dasha, se veniva lasciata libera, spennava con i denti e le dita contratte…” 13. “destinato a rinselvatichire fino a un ipotetico, immaginario stato di natura, ammesso che mai fosse possibile.” 14. “È il crepuscolo. La luce sta diventando incerta, o forse è la mia vista offuscata. … Sono qui intorno, ho ancora poco tempo, prima che i loro cani cerchino di stanarmi nella boscaglia. Mi daranno la caccia, questo è certo, ma non mi troveranno, perché io non sarò qui. … Mio padre è scomparso sul Gora, mia madre, Nord, e ora anch’io. Sono l’unico rimasto, l’ultimo. Tocca a me, adesso. Chiudo gli occhi, li riapro, una, due, tre volte, finché la vedo, in un bagliore di rosso, il rosso che domina il bianco. Ancora viva, la volpe.” 15. “la morte a cui vanno incontro tutti gli animali, nel ciclo della natura.” 16. “da un altro mondo, un mondo in cui gli esseri umani non appartenevano gli uni agli altri, ma tutti e semplicemente al bosco.”

Works Cited Adams, Michael. 2017. The Pragmatics of Estrangement in Fantasy and Science Fiction. In Pragmatics of Fiction, ed. Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker, 329–364. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Benedetti, Carla. 2007. “Sirene d’allevamento.” Il primo amore. Accessed February 7, 2020. http://www.ilprimoamore.com/blogNEW/blogDATA/spip. php?article1406. Bertante, Alessandro. 2011. Nina dei lupi. Venice: Marsilio. Bishop, Rebecca. 2009. Forms of Life: The Search for the Simian Self in Ape Language. In Animals and Agency, ed. Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, 207–228. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.

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Braidotti, Rosi, and Maria Hlavajova, eds. 2018. Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Calvino, Italo. 2015. Introduction. In Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday, ed. Italo Calvino, vol. 1. Boston: Mariner Books. First published in 1983 as Racconti Fantastici dell’Ottocento: Volume Primo, Il Fantastico Visionario and Volume Secondo, Il Fantastico Quotidiano. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Cortellessa, Andrea. 2012. “Stazione di posta #4: Laura Pugno, Mariano Bàino, Eugenio Baroncelli.” L’associazione premio Gorky. Accessed February 7, 2020. http://premiogorky.com/it/books/navigator-new-books/andreacortelessa/42. Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation. Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge. De Man, Paul. 1979. Autobiography as De-Facement. MLN Comparative Literature 94 (5): 919–930. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press. Fulginiti, Valentina. 2014. The Postapocaliptic Cookbook. Animality, Posthumanism, and Meat in Laura Pugno and Wu Ming. In Thinking Italian Animals. Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film, ed. Deborah Amberson and Elena Past, 159–178. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge. Harris, John. 2016. How to be Good. The Possibility of Moral Enhancement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fiction Stories. London and New York: Verso Books. Longo, Davide. 2010. L’uomo verticale. Rome: Fandango libri. Malson, Lucien. 1964. Les enfants sauvages: mythe et réalité. Paris: 10/18. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Pugno, Laura. 2002. Sleepwalking. Milan: Sironi. ———. 2007a. Il colore oro. Florence: Le Lettere. ———. 2007b. Sirene. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 2008. Ritorno alla realtà? Otto interviste a narratori italiani. Allegoria 57: 9–25. ———. 2009. Quando verrai. Rome: Minimum Fax. ———. 2011. Antartide. Rome: Minimum Fax. ———. 2012. La caccia. Milan: Ponte alle Grazie. ———. 2016. La ragazza selvaggia. Venice: Marsilio.

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———. 2017. “Laura Pugno racconta ‘La ragazza selvaggia.’” Letteratitudine di Massimo Maugeri. Accessed February 7, 2020. https://letteratitudinenews. wordpress.com/2017/06/24/laura-pugno-racconta-la-ragazza-selvaggia/. Pugno, Laura, and Giulio Mozzi. 2002. Tennis. Varese: Nuova editrice Magenta. Roberts, Adam. 2006. Science Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. Rushing, Robert. 2011. Sirens Without Us: The Future After Humanity. California Italian Studies 2 (1). Accessed February 7, 2020. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cc3b56b. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1912. Art as Technique. In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 5–24. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Siti, Walter. 2013. Il realismo è l’impossibile. Rome: nottetempo. Sun, Weiping, and Mingcang Zhang. 2015. The New Culture: From a Modern Perspective. Heidelberg: Springer. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Tabanelli, Roberta. 2010. Al di là del corpo: la narrativa (postumana) di Laura Pugno. Italian Culture 28 (1): 3–20. Taccogna, Mariangela. n.d. “Intervista a Laura Pugno.” Mangialibri. Accessed February 7, 2020. http://www.mangialibri.com/interviste/intervista-laurapugno. Wadiwel, Dinesh. 2015. The War Against Animals. Boston: Brill. Walsh, Brian. 2002. Nature Is Over. Time, March 12.

CHAPTER 5

Posthumanism and Identity in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels Enrica Maria Ferrara

Whether it is the theme of her novels or the metadiscourse around her writing “ghost,” the construction of relational subject identities is central in the work of Elena Ferrante, the Neapolitan writer whose books have reached cult status over the past decade and whose biography and physical appearance have been the object of considerable speculation. While Ferrante is mostly concerned with representing a “new form of female identity” (De Rogatis 2019, 15) which gets patiently dismantled and rebuilt over the course of her narratives, male subjects and nonhuman others are the entangled counterparts in the process of becoming “I” enacted by the female characters. The end result is a new posthuman subject in which traditional boundaries established through oppositional binary categories, such as male/female, inside/outside, presence/absence, singular/plural, human/nonhuman, are constantly challenged. The protagonists of Ferrante’s first three novels—Delia in Troubling Love [L’amore molesto (1992)], Olga in The Days of Abandonment [I

E. M. Ferrara (*) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_5

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giorni dell’abbandono (2002)] and Leda in The Lost Daughter [La figlia oscura (2006)]1—engage with the human and nonhuman “other” in order to shed light onto aspects of their lives or personalities which, due to traumatic events, had so far remained in the shadow. Ghosts of dead people (Amalia in Troubling Love and “la poverella” in The Days), dogs and doors (in The Days), dolls (in The Lost Daughter), and even technological artefacts (computers and telephones in The Days), act like a sort of cognitive springboard which force the protagonists to acquire a better sense of self through a close interaction with the organic or inorganic materiality of these entities. Elsewhere (Ferrara 2016), I have suggested that Ferrante’s concept of identity is grounded in a posthumanist worldview which rejects the traditional concept of representational realism to embrace the notion of performative or agential realism formulated by Barad (2003, 2007). Rather than believing in a real world (with all its human beings, ghosts, dogs, dolls, doors, technological artefacts, organic and inorganic matter!) existing separately from its image which the subject perceives and reproduces in their discourse, Ferrante would conceive reality as a conglomerate of living things in which human and nonhuman animals, matter, cultural and technological artefacts, cohabit and generate knowledge through constant “intra-action.” This process entails that subjectivities immersed in a constant flow of becoming are potentially always entangled with one another, and separation of different identities—human and nonhuman, subjects and objects—happen as a result of what Barad calls an “agential cut.” In this world of phenomena which consists in “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” (2003, 815), once “a specific intra-action […] enacts an agential cut” (2003, 815), subjects and objects become two separate entities. Further on, I will explain this concept more in-depth. For the moment it suffices to say that the four-volume saga of the Neapolitan novels, which has gained the author enormous success and has now also been turned into a television series, stages such entanglement of identities through the story of the two protagonists Elena and Lina. The argument I will develop in this chapter therefore has Ferrante’s conception of reality as posthuman “intra-action” as a starting point. The interconnected identity of the two characters is almost a natural corollary of such vision. Indeed, I contend that the two “brilliant friends,” Elena and Lina, are the written expression of the posthuman relational subject which emerged in post-modernity following the de-centring of the human (Nancy 2000). In addition, I will argue that the friends’ enmeshment with one another and their environment helps

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illustrating Ferrante’s struggle with an embodied notion of singular authorship as opposed to a dispersed, collaborative, “polyphonic” (Doueihi 2011) idea of cultural production rooted in digital culture.

1   Writing the Posthuman Subject With their complex plot spanning fifty years, numerous characters and locations, the four volumes of Ferrante’s tetralogy—My Brilliant Friend [L’amica geniale (2011)], The Story of a New Name [Storia del nuovo cognome (2012)], Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay [Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (2013)], The Story of the Lost Child [Storia della bambina perduta (2014)]2—seem to follow the conventions of the classic realistic novel, blending its dual coming-of-age story with melodramatic aspects of the nineteenth-century family saga and the modern noir. The readers accompany the protagonists, Elena and Lina, from childhood to maturity through education, marriage, childbirth, love affairs, career failures and successes, bereavements, and so on. The main setting of the novel is a Neapolitan neighbourhood, il rione, fraught with violence, corruption, petty crime and dynamics of power in which “camorra” mobsters are in charge as opposed to the legal state. Attracted to one another but also in competition for their teacher’s praises and their schoolmates’ admiration, the two friends share the same perception of the world as an unstable, magmatic pulp of organic and inorganic matter, which the first person narrator Elena presents as a cognitive ailment, nearly a neurosis of Lina, referring to it with the neologism “smarginatura.” Elena places great emphasis on her account of Lina’s first experience—she even sets a precise date for its occurrence, the 31st December 1958 (MBF, 89)—and therefore diverts her readers’ attention from a previous detailed description of a similar phenomenon that had occurred to herself rather than to her friend: I was overcome by a kind of tactile dysfunction; sometimes I had the impression that … solid surfaces turned soft under my fingers or swelled up, leaving empty spaces between their internal mass and the surface skin. … I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people … as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream. (MBF, 57)3

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This is not, we learn, an isolated occurrence as we are advised that this malaise ended up “lasting perhaps years, beyond early adolescence” (MBF, 57).4 Thus it is all the more bizarre that the narrator decides not to make any reference to her own episodes of “smarginatura” when she reports the horrific incident of December 1958 in which Lina was the sole protagonist. During that ominous night, Elena’s friend had seen human shapes breaking their boundaries and merging with other living forms. She had felt as if the fireworks flashing around her could travel through her bodily matter and muddle up her features. Later Lina had explained to Elena that this was not the first instance: “she had often had the sensation of moving for a few fractions of a second into a person or a thing or a number or a syllable, violating its edges” (MBF, 90–91).5 In fact, it was not just a case of the sentient human subject losing control over the boundaries between herself and the world; there were also other entities, human and nonhuman, that seemed to become enmeshed with one another, as she saw “friendly reddish animals” that seemed to be “dissolving the composition of the street, transforming it into a smooth, soft material” (MBF, 91).6 Lina is overwhelmed by fear of disintegrating and surrender to liquid identity, one in which the boundaries between subject and object (or same and other) are not clearly defined, and reality is not an object of knowledge external to the human subject but rather a “doing” or “becoming” in which subject and object are radically enmeshed and entangled with one another. Interestingly enough, margins are erased not only between human beings and things but also between the formers and their cultural products: “a thing or a number or a syllable.” What Ferrante is alluding to here is a vision of the world as nature–culture continuum in which “landscapes are texts, and so are bodies” (Iovino 2016, 3); the notion of text widens and expands to encompass anything that can be read, “the encounter of actions, discourses, imagination, and physical forces that congeal in a material form” (Iovino 2016, 3). The privileged function of the human as a subject of knowledge is therefore undermined only if one attempts to abide by the traditional logics that consider the individual as external in relation to their object of knowledge. This is what Lina does and such behaviour produces in her a paralyzing fear of being swallowed whole by the porous landscape which is coextensive to, and enmeshed with, human forms and cultural objects. As a matter of fact, after the first episode of “smarginatura,” Lina, whose father Fernando is a cobbler, stops working in her father’s shop; besides, while she had previously been an avid reader

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and won the prize for the most assiduous user of the library, she gives up reading altogether. In other words, fear of dissolving in the nature–culture continuum prevents her from engaging with reality as usual. Her temporary solution will be to find a source of protection against the material-­ discursive flood of the world around her in another human being, her husband-to-be Stefano Carracci, rather than developing the epistemological tools to confront the posthuman change. Conversely, Elena seems to be able to react to the similar, but secret, horror she feels in the face of a crumbling and ever-changing reality by internalizing the dyad Elena-Lina which she invests with the task of giving the world a stable and organized shape. On the day she is accompanied by her father to visit the new school located outside the reassuring boundaries of the rione, Elena is in awe before the vast expanse of the city with its colours, streets, deafening noise and extraordinary lights. In particular, the sights of the sea and Mount Vesuvius are breathtaking in their beauty but also in their fury and, subsequently, she feels the danger that “many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them” (MBF, 138).7 An immediate solution to the fear of being crushed by “the mutable fury of things” (MBF, 138)8 is found in the narrator and her friend’s ability to narrativize reality by stripping off its disastrous potential: “I, I and Lila, we two with that capacity that together—only together—we had to seize the mass of colors, sounds, things and people, and express it and give it power” (MBF, 138).9 The position taken by Elena is consistent both with Barad’s theory and with Ferrante’s own notion that the fragmentation of reality may be only harnessed through the power of linguistic discourse. As illustrated earlier on, in Barad’s posthuman world, subjects and objects are not ontologically separate but are enmeshed in a flow of intra-­acting becoming. Singularities, that is individual identities, emerge by means of an “agential cut” through which “matter comes to matter,” that is human and nonhuman bodies emerge as “component parts” of the phenomenon. What is important to grasp—and one may only achieve this by leaving the traditional cause-effect logics behind—is that no concept of absolute interiority or absolute exteriority may be accommodated within Barad’s new ontology and epistemology. Given that all objects (including the subjects) are constantly intra-acting with one another, “agential separability is a matter of exteriority within (material-discursive) phenomena” (Barad 2003, 825). To accept the new frightening configuration of the world, Elena makes space for Lina within herself

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(MBF, 97), a concept which she reiterates several times throughout the hundreds of pages that account for her and her friend’s interconnected stories. In other words, Elena decides that in order to contain the furious siege of material-­discursive formations pressing against the boundaries of her own self, she needs to accept that there are no boundaries. The first act of this determination is that Lina gets “inscribed,” so to say, within Elena: she turns into a separate identity endowed with her own agency—and so does her friend—as she becomes an “exteriority within” Elena. This is the first “agential cut” which Elena enacts. The second one is pursued through language. The interconnected posthuman subject of Elena and Lina will perform the textual material component of the world within which they are inscribed and will therefore bring it to matter. The awfully frightening mass of bodies, words, flesh and matter will thus become an “exteriority within” Elena and Lina’s language. This is particularly crucial if we consider that the four-volume saga of the Neapolitan Novels is portrayed to be a story written by Elena Greco, now in her sixties, after the sudden disappearance of her friend Lina. Despite being a first-person narration, the account is said to be partly based on Lina’s notebooks, which were handed over to Elena during the spring of 1966 and had helped the narrator fill in the gaps of those years the two friends had spent apart from one another. The narrative text is therefore an actual attempt to channel that posthuman, “polyphonic” identity which enables Elena to exorcize her fears of a world with no margins through a “very fluid focus” in which “Elena’s story is, actually, also narrated by Lila” (De Rogatis 2019, 44).10 As I mentioned above, the notion that only through language is it possible to discipline the “vortex-like fracturing of material living and dead” (Ferrante 2016, 100)11 which constitutes the identity of self and world, is dominant in Elena Ferrante’s reflections around identity and writing. Storytelling gives a time, a shape, and a meaning to an otherwise unstable and fragmented landscape which elsewhere she calls “frantumaglia,” a concept that overlaps with “smarginatura”: “The frantumaglia is an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self. The frantumaglia is the storehouse of time without the orderliness of a history, of a story” (Ferrante 2016, 100).12 In the Neapolitan novels, Elena Greco seems to remain stable and centred thanks to her faith in the absolute power of written language over shapeless matter. She literally overwrites the latent fragmentation of herself as a subject and therefore she is: “in me fear could not put down roots,

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and even the lava … and the fear it provoked in me, settled in my mind in orderly sentences, in harmonious images, became a pavement of black stones like the streets of Naples, a pavement where I was always and no matter what the centre” (SLC, 179).13 Through an act of self-­determination which is grounded in the power of linguistic performativity (Austin 1962), Elena Greco appears to turn the Cartesian cogito—I think therefore I am—into the performative statement, I write therefore I am. This is true at the level of the plot only if one looks at the development of the character in a superficial way. In fact, what first enables Elena to gain individual identity—and seemingly set her apart from Lina, at last—is the publication of her first book: “In the spring the book came out which, much more than my degree, gave me a new identity” (SNN, 468).14 However, this statement does not sound very convincing to a reader who has just been shocked by the revelation that Elena’s coming-of-age novel, containing the account of her true episode of sexual violence, incorporates and plagiarizes the short-story The Blue Fairy which Lina wrote at the age of 10. Both on the level of the plot and of narrative discourse, singular identity threads its place with the plural identity of the dyad Elena-Lina who perform an eco-transcription of that “vortex-like fracturing of material living and dead” in which both characters are inscribed.

2   Lina’s Nonhuman Gaze: The Written and the Visual From the very beginning of the novel, Lina is seen to possess a particularly deep and peculiar gaze that Elena describes as having nonhuman qualities: “Her large, bright eyes could become cracks behind which, before every brilliant response, there was a gaze that appeared not very childlike and perhaps not even human” (MBF, 48).15 In this respect, Lina does not differ greatly from don Achille, the corrupt camorra mobster who is keeping all inhabitants of the rione as his subjects through racket, shady trades and money lending. Don Achille is the most abhorred individual throughout the whole tetralogy, and his evil nature will not be surpassed by anyone. Indeed, Elena and Lina, as children, fantasize of a time when the man’s nonhuman nature, that of “an evil being of uncertain animal-mineral physiognomy” (MBF, 37),16 was visible to everyone. The similarity between Lina and don Achille, which might seem somewhat far-fetched given the hatred that the former keeps demonstrating

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to him and those who have been in charge of the criminal network since don Achille’s murder—the Solara brothers—is underlined through the wickedness that Elena attributes to her friend. Lina is mean, deceitful, vindictive, and capable of expressing her feelings to the people who, in her opinion, are deserving of them, without giving it a second thought. Thus the nonhuman is tinged with a certain evil quality that accentuates the sense of “otherness” and also explains why, despite being a malnourished skinny little girl, Lina is able to fight off gangs of schoolboys and, later in life, the powerful Solara brothers themselves. However, notwithstanding such wickedness, the cobbler’s daughter is unable to control the horror that a world devoid of margins generates in her. While her ability to see past the conventional outline of things underlines her potential to change the status quo, intervene in the power dynamics that shape the social hierarchy of the rione, and replace the old societal norms with new ones, Lina fails to accomplish this task—at least initially— because she succumbs to fear. It is true that she attempts to keep herself centred by writing a detailed journal of her experiences—we learn this from Elena—but she refuses to use this self-reflection as a tool for subjectivization after her education is curtailed by her father at the end of primary school. Indeed, as Fanning argues, “considerable numbers of real women … continue to write about themselves … to construct … a number of subject positions that they choose to inhabit” (2017, xi). Thus, in pursuing the autobiographical mode, women are able to present themselves simultaneously as subject and object of their own discourse—an empowering dimension which can lead to successfully perform one’s own identity. This is something that Elena passionately engages with as she continues her education and eventually is awarded a scholarship to attend the prestigious “Normale” University of Pisa. Conversely, Lina undertakes systematically her own “self-erasing” by hiding behind her brother, her husband Stefano and later her lover Nino (SLC, 177). In fact, Lina’s desire is consistent with the role that she has chosen for herself, a role that society and her family impose upon her: a wife, lover, mother, who has no other purpose than fulfil her husband’s expectations under his objectifying gaze. In a sense, it may be said that the onset of Lina’s ambition to become invisible is concurrent with her discovery that the men whom she has chosen to protect her, for example her brother Rino, have no gaze. She confides this to Elena: “‘Have you seen that when people wake up they’re ugly, all disfigured, can’t see?’ Rino in her view had become like that” (MBF, 191).17

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It is not a coincidence, in my opinion, that the person who is first identified as possessing no ability to see is Rino, who is also the protagonist of the first episode of “smarginatura.” As her brother becomes associated with a world that has no shape, margins or boundaries, he turns into a thing among other things and loses his ability to discern and discriminate, that is to see the “other.” As the object of her brother’s love and protection, and therefore entangled in that relationship, Lina wishes to turn into the target of Rino’s gaze by erasing herself and becoming invisible. Something similar happens when Lina turns to Stefano Carracci for protection. Initially, the bride-to-be enjoys her change of status: the beautiful clothes, hairdos and shoes she can afford through Stefano’s wealth. However, this happiness is short-lived as Lina discovers, soon after their marriage, who her husband truly is: a mercenary only interested in material gains, ready to sacrifice his wife’s principles to his own financial interest when he donates the shoes made by Rino and his sister to the man Lina abhors more than anyone else in the world, Marcello Solara. The shock generated by the discovery of her husband’s true identity, combined with the ensuing trauma of the sexual violence to which Stefano subjects her on their wedding night, determines another violent episode of “smarginatura” during which the man whom she had been in love with appears enmeshed with the horrific intra-acting mess of human and nonhuman matter in which we are all immersed. Not only is Stefano’s outline fractured but, worse of all, the physiognomy pressing behind his facial features and slowly emerging before Lina’s terrified gaze is that of the nonhuman archetypical monster Don Achille, that is Stefano’s father: “the father was cracking his skin, changing his gaze, exploding out of his body” (SNN, 41).18 This representation of a genetically determined identity which stands in contrast to a performatively generated one is an aspect upon which I will return later. For the moment, we will observe that Lina’s second episode of “smarginatura,” which transforms her husband’s violent body into the image and site of her most powerful fears, is also the turning point leading to Lina’s first conscious act of self-erasure during which she pursues, albeit provisionally, the construction of an interconnected, posthuman identity. I am referring to the creative disfigurement of the panel displaying Lina’s wedding photograph which Stefano Carracci decides to hang as advertisement in the Solara’s shoe-shop, a decision which marks one of the lowest points in the commodification of Lina’s body. Notwithstanding her disdain and disgust in seeing herself reduced to an image for the objectifying

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male gaze, Lina reacts by laying down her own law and agreeing to have her picture displayed only after it has been properly modified. From then on, she engages in the systematic cancellation of her image by gluing strips of black paper and applying bright paint onto the canvas. All that is left of her original picture at the end of this creative process is one big eye: “All you could see, at the top, was a very vivid eye, encircled by midnight blue and red” (SNN, 124).19 As acutely observed, in Ferrante’s novels “ekphrasis, therefore, at first reflects and reinforces the patriarchal paradigm” but “also allows an exit out of patriarchy and posits woman as an autonomous artist figure … who can resist and even sidestep the dominant order” (Milkova 2016, 160). What must be noted is that Lina is able to pursue this act of self-erasure thanks to Elena’s presence and contribution to it. As Elena was able to face the overwhelming horror of the world by accepting Lina as an “exteriority within” herself who will help giving a narrative shape to what appears fragmented, similarly Lina will enlist Elena’s support to enact the “agential cut” which enables her to bring her new body to matter, replacing “her seductive body with an all-seeing eye, the locus of subjectivity” (Milkova 2016, 176). The annihilation of Lina’s body under the androcentric gaze of the patriarchy is illustrated through her famous account of how Stefano Carracci’s surname had managed to “dissolve” not only her own maiden name Cerullo but also her body by replacing Lina’s flesh with a new life, the baby she carries: a “living thing determined by Stefano” (SNN, 124).20 Even the unborn child is seen as an extension of her husband’s identity which is crushing her from within so that when Lina eventually miscarries her baby, Stefano blames her for “her inability, or unwillingness, to keep a baby inside her” (SNN, 129).21 Eventually, Lina’s marriage fails despite her apparent efforts to keep it afloat. During a holiday in Ischia, which she has been prescribed by the doctor to restore her health and conceive another baby, Lina—accompanied by Elena and Stefano’s sister Pinuccia—falls in love with the boy who has secretly been the object of Elena’s desires for a decade, Nino Sarratore. A relationship between the two ensues, causing terrible heartaches to Elena, Lina’s flight from the rione to a new apartment in Campi Flegrei, and another breakup which is essentially due to Lina’s inability to determine her own identity. According to Elena, the affair with Nino was just another opportunity for self-erasure: “She was again fascinated, I think, by erasing herself” (SNN, 357).22 But Nino is not happy to lend his own identity to his lover. The more passionate Lina gets about his studies and

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intellectual work, devoting all her time to improve his articles for the newspaper Il Mattino, the more oppressed her partner feels, until eventually Nino asks her to stop trying to be someone she is not: “Lina, let’s be very clear: choose something of your own that you like, go back to selling shoes, go back to selling salami, but don’t desire to be something you’re not by ruining me” (SNN, 360).23 Nino’s remark, which sets in motion the chain of events leading to their separation, may sound harsh and unfair if one accepts the narrator’s point of view that there might be other reasons behind his rejection of Lina’s attention. In fact, whoever has read the full tetralogy will also be aware of Nino’s narcissism and his general inability to love only one woman. However, in my opinion, one has to take the boy’s statement about Lina’s identity quite literally, on the one hand, but also keep in mind that when he first declared his love to Elena as a child, what he was hoping to achieve was essentially a ménage à trois: “I thought we would become engaged and we would all three be together forever, you, me, and your friend” (MBF, 219).24 Despite the passion that drives him towards Lina, Nino sees her as devoid of her own identity and this is possibly linked to the fact that the dyad Elena-Lina had to be separated for the purpose of the love affair; their plural interconnected subjectivity had been severed for the time being and Lina, overwhelmed by fear, attempted her own self-erasure by wearing Nino’s identity. The solution identified during the manipulation of the panel displaying Lina’s wedding picture, that is the achievement of subjectivization and agency through the combined creative effort of the posthuman subject Elena-Lina, will in fact be delayed due to two main factors: the publication of Elena’s novel which contains the original story written by Lina, The Blue Fairy; Lina’s discovery of computer language which will pave the way to the construction of her new hybrid posthuman identity in which the interconnected “other” will be the world of technological artefacts. These two events are concurrent but unrelated: Elena writes her novel as a cathartic exercise in an attempt to bring clarity to her feelings towards men in general and especially towards Pietro Airota, the young scholar whom she has met in Pisa; Lina starts learning programming languages as she leaves her husband and the rione, after the birth of her child Gennaro, and she moves to San Giovanni a Teduccio with her friend Enzo. As Elena realizes that she has in fact plagiarized Lina’s youthful short-story in her novel, she is assailed by the need to confess what she has done to her friend, almost as penance; therefore she pays a visit to Lina in San Giovanni.

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As the two friends meet in the courtyard of the sausage factory where— unbeknown to everyone—Lina gets abused every day, verbally or otherwise, by her fellow workers and by the owner Bruno Soccavo, Elena admits that she was inspired by The Blue Fairy when she wrote her novel. Lina’s reaction is quite dismissive as if she were too removed from the reality described by Elena. However, her enthusiasm is revived when she talks about Enzo and the new computer language they are both learning. In fact, the two languages, the literary and the technological, are set in contrast with one another: “‘Not languages for writing novels,’ she said, and the dismissive tone in which she uttered the word ‘novels’ disturbed me … ‘Programming languages’” (SNN, 465).25 Just as Elena has been able to harness the fear of “smarginatura” by providing “the orderliness of a story” to her world, Lina raises the post and tells her friend of the sleepless nights during which Enzo and her “did exercises with the flow charts, they practiced cleaning the world of the superfluous, they charted the actions of the day according to only two values of truth: zero and one” (SNN, 466).26 A flow chart is used in information technology to provide a visual representation of all the steps to perform in order to execute an algorithm, the latter being a procedure that aims to solve a problem by means of a number of clear measurable passages. What Lina finds attractive in this exercise which, as mentioned later on in the novel, is crucial for Enzo to acquire the skills that will secure him his first job as a computer engineer, is its ability to produce a visual representation of the world, rid it of chaos and block out the miserable outline of the reality that surrounds them (TWLTWS, 114). Working with flow charts and programming languages becomes an alternative way to fight off the fear engendered by the “smarginatura,” one in which visualization of a graphic image of the world replaces the narrativization process pursued by Elena through her writing. This is where Lina’s nonhuman gaze has led her: from her proud achievements in school to the creation of the exclusive models of shoes produced by her family and sold by the Solara brother; from the intuition that subjectivization will entail the erasure of her own body, intended as an object of the male gaze, to acquisition of agency through the discovery of a new way of visualizing reality by means of computer languages. The issue is, however, that fear of violence and abuse will not subside, not until Lina’s body will return under the protection of another man, the gentle green-grocer-turned-computer-programmer Enzo. This, in a sense, is another act of surrender to the patriarchy made necessary by the feeling

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of disembodiment experienced by Lina, caused both by the humiliating abuse to which she is subjected in the Soccavo factory and by the abstract linearity of the work flows that she uses to reduce the world to a map. In fact, as suggested by Hayles in her critique of the chasm between information and materiality produced by the idealization of a posthuman technological world, “if we can capture the Form of ones and zeros in a nonbiological medium—say, on a computer disk—why do we need the body’s superfluous flesh?” (Hayles 1999, 13).

3   Genetically Determined and Performed Identities: Lina’s Vanishing and the Digital World The immaterial and dynamic form that knowledge takes in information technology explains what Hayles defines as a “challenge to physicality” (1999, 35), namely the notion that, in cyberspace “physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space” (1999, 36). While an embodied observer who contemplates the world from a specific location has their vision limited by the constraints which place and body impose upon them, in cyberspace “consciousness moves through the screen to become the point of view [pov], leaving behind the body as an unoccupied shell” (Hayles 1999, 38). While it is true that, during her first introduction to computer language, Lina has not even seen a screen yet, it is also fair to say that her constant exercises with diagrams and work flows enable her to explore the boundaries between physicality and abstraction, material and immaterial world. In fact, according to the narrator, these exercises become the substitution for a sexual contact which she simultaneously fears and desires (TWLTWS, 114). It is no wonder, then, that one of her most violent episodes of “smarginatura” occurs at a time when she has completely lost connection with her body due to the frantic attempt to “diagram daily life” (TWLTWS, 113)27 by means of work flows, on the one hand, and to evade the objectifying male gaze, on the other. However, erasing the body is not a phenomenon circumscribed to Lina’s deconstructive understanding of subjectivity. In the Neapolitan Novels, bodies are erased when they are swallowed by the outlines of other bodies which incorporate them. This happens specifically to married women whose physical appearance, pace and demeanour are somewhat

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slowly modified and eventually devoured by those of their family relations. Significantly, it is not only a matter of the wives being “dissolved” under the objectifying male gaze, as we mentioned previously in relation to Lina feeling wiped out by her husband’s surname. Elena looks at the women of the rione and observes that “had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness” (SNN, 102).28 It is not clear when this process begins and one is tempted to invoke some sort of affective mimesis of alterity (Marchesini 2017) to understand its specificity. However, it is Elena yet again who gives us some clues as to where this fluidity of boundaries come from when she tells us of her fear that one day her body will undo itself letting the outline of her mother and father’s body emerge: Would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself? (SNN, 102–103)29

The undifferentiated matter alluded to by Elena is the nature–culture continuum which seems to implode, urged by some sort of centripetal force, and converge towards the source of that blind darkness which is the rione and the whole city of Naples. As embodied individuals, harnessed to a specific place fraught by violence, ignorance, crime and gender discrimination, the inhabitants of Elena and Lina’s neighbourhood cannot develop the tools to perform their identities and enact those “agential cuts” which will enable them to stand before one another as interconnected beings but also singular identities endowed with own agency. The point of departure, Ferrante seems to suggest, is a process of identity formation in which individuals are heavily dependent on their parents and environmental resources not only for the type of education that is imparted to them but also for their genetic makeup. Stefano’s violent behaviour is partly attributed to the fact that he is Don Achille’s son. Equally, Antonio’s nervous disposition is frequently traced back to his mother Melina’s crazy behaviour after she is abandoned by Donato Sarratore. Pietro Airota, the young academic whom Elena ends up marrying, is compared to his father Giorgio in his methodical behaviour and

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aristocratic demeanour. Indeed, these similarities are always signalled by some physical resemblance, a sudden appearance of the ancestor’s face, gaze, stride, pose and voice in their descendants’ body. To contrast this genetic determinism, the characters of Ferrante’s novels have the option to pursue the development of their own identities based on a notion of performativity reminiscent of Butler’s conception that “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 1999, 33). Based on this idea, which is very much in line with what both Elena Greco and Elena Ferrante posit, no “I” precedes language because the subject is the effect of signifying practices and cultural discourse. When Elena goes to Pisa, she realizes that controlling her gestures, habits, tone of voice, Neapolitan pronunciation, is crucial to be accepted in the new environment and gain her classmates’ and professors’ esteem (SNN, 332–333). Performing her new identity entails an unlearning of habitual behaviours and repetition of new ones: this is a general rule which Elena assimilates and will be applying throughout her career as a writer. However, this constructive practice carries with it the risk of producing a personality that might be perceived as fake: a counterfeit identity akin to a theatrical disguise. Elena feels, at one point, as if she were competing for the best disguise, a “mask worn so well that it was almost a face” (SNN, 402).30 The other person who has managed to escape determinism by moving over the boundaries of the rione, rejecting the relationship with his own father Donato and performing his new self within a carefully controlled, educated, Italian-speaking identity, is Nino Sarratore. This is Elena’s sweetheart, the young academic and writer who will cause the end of Lina and Stefano’s marriage in the second book, and will then proceed to break Elena and Pietro’s union in the third novel of the series. Not only will he persuade the narrator to leave her husband, he will also get her to move back to Naples and have a child with him whilst keeping his own family in a separate household. A real womanizer and charming individual, Nino is the son of the man who caused Melina’s insanity, molested Elena and took her virginity (unbeknown to Nino). If Elena had never seen a connection between Nino and his own father, the situation dramatically changes when she catches Nino red-handed while having sexual intercourse with their child-minder. At that point, the narrator experiences a moment of truth similar to that described in The Days by the protagonist Olga, whose husband had also been unfaithful to her. In both episodes, identity is revealed through a mirror’s reflection. In The Days, Olga’s dilemma lies in

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her inability to hold a firm grip onto her own image whose asymmetrical parts were united in a coherent whole through the subjective gaze of her husband Mario. Olga’s final acceptance that her own reflection might not coincide with the image of her that Mario portrayed to himself and the world underlines, in my opinion, Ferrante’s disavowal of an epistemology grounded in representational realism in favour of Barad’s performative realism (Ferrara 2016). Similarly, in the fourth book of the Neapolitan Novels, Elena tries to make sense of Nino’s image as she has just seen his eyes staring at his own mirror reflection whilst having intercourse with another woman. She attempts to reconcile the outline of the “alien creature” (SLC, 239)31 she has seen in her bathroom with all other embodiments of Nino’s identity she has come across over the years (her own sweetheart, Lina’s lover, Eleonora’s wife, her own lover, and so on) until she realizes that there is one essence to Nino which constitutes the core of his identity despite his repeated rejections of it: “There was no split … Nino was only one, and the expression he had on his face while he was inside Silvana was the proof. It was the expression of his father, Donato … when he touched me between the legs … Nothing alien, then, but much that was ugly. Nino was what he wouldn’t have wanted to be and yet always had been” (SLC, 239).32 It is as if Ferrante’s notion of identity were centred around some kind of genetic essentialism; and genes definitely have a role to play insofar as Nino, a phenomenon in the intra-acting nature–culture continuum, is made out of the same matter (DNA, etc.) as his father Donato. However, the genetic makeup is only part of the equation. It is Lina who points out the flaw in the mechanistic process to Elena as she shows her friend and the reader how a genetically determined identity may be performatively turned into another by the force of a desire that is so strong to produce incorporation or embodiment. We are now at the very end of the Neapolitan tetralogy: Elena has returned to the rione and lives next door to Lina who, in turn, has lost her four-year old child Tina, who vanished into thin air almost in front of her eyes. Firmly convinced that her daughter is still alive, and obviously distraught by a grief that has no real object, one day Lina drags Elena into the bathroom and the two of them stand in front of the mirror. As Lina arranges her hair in two plaits as she would do for her lost daughter, she speaks about resemblance and— in her usual iconoclastic manner—challenges Elena’s and possibly her own beliefs about genes. Indeed, she argues that her own son Gennaro, as a child, was Nino’s son in flesh and blood, even though later his appearance

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confirmed, beyond any doubt, that he had Stefano’s genes. When Elena enquires with her whether she believes that a desire may be so strong as to “seem” as if it had come true, Lina swiftly replies: “No, I mean that for a few years Gennaro was truly Nino’s child” (SLC, 369).33 Lina’s remark is meaningful insofar as she clarifies that identity is, in fact, a congealment of different discursive and material intra-actions which are real at the time they happen. Something cannot appear real without being real; this is what Lina seems to say, which ties in with Olga’s rejection of representational realism to embrace Barad’s performative realism. But how is it then that Lina’s process of “becoming” will materialize into a subjectivity that is neither genetically determined nor linguistically performed? How will she overcome the fear of dissolving into the world without boundaries that she can glean through her powerful nonhuman gaze? As previously anticipated, she will do that by performing a new hybrid identity in which she will become interconnected with the technological artefacts she works with and eventually merge with the cyberspace that will cause her to vanish. Lina’s “becoming-machine” (Braidotti 2013, 89–95) intended as a new form of “autopoietic subjectivation” (Braidotti 2013, 94), in turn will enable Elena to write the four-volume story of the interconnected posthuman subject which is the dyad Elena-Lina. As observed at the end of the previous section, Lina’s exercises with algorithms and work-flows become a tool to translate the messy outline of the world into sequences of coded computer language which will help her overcome her fears and become a subject endowed with agency, able to dominate the flow of intra-acting becoming. Computers will help her not only to map out the unknown but also to obtain a proper job as a technician, alongside her partner Enzo, and then as manager of her own company which, possibly in homage to Lina’s magical gaze, is called Basic Sight. Slowly but surely, Lina’s expertise grows to the point that she becomes a real pillar of the company, in all administrative and technical matters. The interaction between the two friends is fascinating when it comes to the mysterious mechanisms of the technological artefacts described by Lina, from the first IBM Systems to the Personal Computers. In fact, while Elena was dragged into Lina’s previous passions almost despite herself, this time she confesses her inability to follow her friend’s reasoning mainly because she lacks the basic concepts to understand the new technology. She takes notes, however, presumably for one of her future books, when Lina gives her detailed “enthusiastic” accounts about

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her job as “punch-card operator” (TWLTWS, 263).34 It is interesting, in my view, that this particular area of Lina’s life, which will endow her with agency, is the one that remains alien to Elena. In fact, computers will be the realm of Lina and Enzo’s interconnected identity: by interacting with the technological “other,” from the playful days of the work flows to the complex operations performed through the IBM System 3, Lina will be able to accept her relationship with Enzo without feeling the threat of being erased by his name or objectified by his gaze. In fact, when Enzo describes the new computer venture to Elena, he keeps using the pronoun “we”: “We are responsible, he explained—and from then on he used ‘we’—for a System 3 Model 10” (TWLTWS, 296).35 And yet, notwithstanding the admiration and respect Enzo—and all the inhabitants of the rione—demonstrates to her, Lina’s desire is still that which Rosi Braidotti has so clearly defined as an “ascetic dissolution of the subject,” a yearn “to disappear by merging into this generative flow of becoming, the precondition for which is the loss, disappearance and disruption of the atomized, individual self” (2013, 136). Through this annihilation of boundaries which enables the individual to experience a condition of “radical immanence,” that is to lose their sense of finitude which the idea of death brings along, humans can enact their posthuman condition by living in a sort of “life–death continuum,” a dimension in which death is conceived as a past condition, or a pre-requisite of life itself. The loss of corporeality that the relationship with computers brings about enhances the desire of vanishing which Lina has nurtured all along; it also defines said desire as a tool to acquire real freedom and subjectivization, similar to what Lina experienced when she creatively performed the erasure of her own wedding picture. It is Lina herself who establishes the connection between the two manners of disappearing: “You remember what we did with my wedding picture? I want to continue on that path. The day will come when I reduce myself to diagrams, I’ll become a perforated tape and you won’t find me anymore” (TWLTWS, 345).36 In particular, it is her exposure to the digital world that will eventually push her over the edge when she realizes that the World Wide Web forces her to leave traces of her identity everywhere, something that renders overtly difficult to maintain a sense of singularity: “electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself

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continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favourite key is the one that deletes” (SLC, 455).37 This fear of abjection (Kristeva 1982; Wehling-Giorgi 2017) is consistent with the other greater fear that the whole world will not keep within its boundaries, causing spillages of matter and sense everywhere. While Elena maintains her faith in the organizing and harmonizing power of language which alleviates her anxiety by composing “orderly sentences … harmonious images … where I was always and no matter what the centre” (SLC, 179),38 Lina ends up expressing again and again her contempt for Elena’s writing which she sees devoid of sense: “that line of black markings that look like insect shit” (SLC, 431).39 Instead, after losing her child and breaking up with Enzo, Lina spends hours and hours on the Internet losing contact with her body, presumably leaving too many traces of herself in the cyberspace, performing time and time again that dispersed and polyphonic (Doueihi 2011) identity which is associated with the digital world. Lina’s final disappearance may be likened to an admission of human vulnerability that goes hand in hand with her construction of a posthuman identity. Indeed, by vanishing within the nature–culture continuum, leaving no traces of herself, Lina embraces her own mortality and achieves a point of “radical immanence.” Instead of letting herself be erased, objectified by the male gaze, devoured by a horrid black hole of violence and inhumanity, she chooses to embody her desire to disappear and accepts the nonhuman otherness within herself. This entails an acceptance of her own nonhuman animality as “a desiring-body … hanging in the balance between being absorbed by the world and absorbing the world” (Marchesini 2016, 18),40 and also her nonhuman digital plurality, a “polyphonic identity” pointing to a “displacement of the human” (Doueihi 2011, 7). Lina’s self-erasure, in sum, is the embodiment of an identity she had longed for and desired to the point that it becomes real, as explained to Elena during the scene in which she braids her own hair in front of the mirror, trying to imitate the hairdo of her lost daughter. However, it would be wrong to assume that Lina is opting for some kind of “non-­ being” which is the result of a narcissistic inability to interact with otherness. On the contrary, it is through her disappearance that she accepts her interconnectedness with Elena: in disappearing she challenges her friend to write her story, which enables Elena to enact her agential cut and make space for Lina within her writing. On the other hand she asserts her

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vulnerability, or precarity, and her “right to appear” (Butler 2015) in linguistic form.

4   Conclusion: A Note on Ferrante’s Identity Has Lina died? What does it mean that she has disappeared? As Elena receives, at the very end of volume four, a packet containing the two long-­ lost dolls that had been pushed by the two friends into Don Achille’s cellar at the beginning of volume one, readers are led to believe that Lina is still alive: she has actively erased herself from the physical world in order to re-appear in the written one, the Neapolitan novels, in which her plural identity is linguistically enacted. As illustrated in my premises to this chapter, Lina becomes an “exteriority within” Elena as their identities are forever enmeshed through that creative act which is the four-volume saga of My Brilliant Friend containing a trace of Lina’s five notebooks. Acceptance of this posthuman subjectivity needed to go through the rejection of a binary understanding of reality (the male gaze) on which patriarchal structures are grounded, and through subsequent emancipation by means of exploring the hybrid condition of a human–digital interconnected identity during the years of the Basic Sight. Might we be able to argue that by means of the dual character of Elena and Lina, Ferrante is indeed alluding to a digital notion of authorship— dispersed, polyphonic and collaborative—as the only way forward within our contemporary culture in which the artist has to accept the demise of singular identity and embrace the “life–death continuum”? Is Ferrante herself the enactment of such disembodied author who had to accept her own death as ontological singularity in order to be re-born as a posthuman, interconnected, collaborative identity?

Notes 1. I will refer to Ferrante’s novels with their English titles from now on. 2. The titles of the Neapolitan novels, in Italian and English, will be abbreviated as follows: L’amica geniale (AG), My Brilliant Friend (MBF); Storia del nuovo cognome (SNC), The Story of a New Name (SNN); Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (SFR), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (TWLTWS); Storia della bambina perduta (SBP), The Story of the Lost Child (SLC).

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3. “Fui presa da una sorta di disfunzione tattile, certe volte avevo l’impressione che … le superfici solide mi diventassero molli sotto le dita o si gonfiassero lasciando spazi vuoti tra la loro massa interna e la sfoglia di superficie. … Mi sentivo stretta dentro quella morsa di cose e di persone ogni giorno … come se il tutto, così compresso, sempre più stretto, mi macinasse riducendomi a una crema ripugnante” (AG, 53). 4. “forse durò per anni, fin oltre la prima adolescenza” (AG, 53). 5. “aveva già avuto la sensazione di trasferirsi per poche frazioni di secondo in una persona o una cosa un numero o una sillaba, violandone i contorni” (AG, 86–87). 6. “piccoli animali rossastri … la composizione della strada trasformandola in una materia liscia e morbida” (AG, 87). 7. “moltissime cose, troppe si spampanassero intorno senza lasciarsi afferrare” (AG, 134). 8. “la furia mobile delle cose” (AG, 134). 9. “io, io e Lila, noi due con quella capacità che insieme—solo insieme— avevamo di prendere la massa di colori, di rumori, di cose e persone, e raccontarcela e darle forza” (AG, 134). 10. This also leads, as De Rogatis acutely observes, to the consequence that “the ‘oscillation’ between their two points of view makes Elena an unreliable narrator and Lila a mystery” (2019, 45). 11. “uno sfaldamento a vortice di materia viva e materia morta” (Ferrante 2014a, 95). 12. “La frantumaglia è un paesaggio instabile, una massa aerea o acquatica di rottami all’infinito che si mostra all’io, brutalmente, come la sua vera e unica interiorità. La frantumaglia è il deposito del tempo, senza l’ordine di una storia, di un racconto” (Ferrante 2014a, 95). 13. “in me lo spavento non riusciva a mettere radici, e perfino la lava … tutta la paura che mi metteva, si sistemavano nella mente in frasi ordinate, in immagini armoniche, diventava un lastricato di pietre nere come per le strade di Napoli, un lastricato di cui io ero sempre e comunque il centro” (SBP, 165). 14. “A primavera uscì il libro, che molto più della laurea mi diede una nuova identità” (SNC, 467). 15. “Gli occhi grandi e vivissimi sapevano diventare fessure dietro cui, prima di ogni risposta brillante, c’era uno sguardo che pareva non solo poco infantile, ma forse non umano” (AG, 44). 16. “un essere diabolico di incerta fisionomia animal-minerale” (AG, 32). 17. “‘Hai visto che la gente quando si sveglia è brutta, tutta deformata, non ha sguardo?’. Rino secondo lei era diventato così” (AG, 186). 18. “Il padre gli stava crepando la pelle, ne stava modificando lo sguardo, gli stava esplodendo dal corpo” (SNC, 41).

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19. “Lì in cima spiccava solo un suo occhio vivissimo, circondato di blu notturno e di rosso” (SNC, 124). 20. “una cosa viva voluta da Stefano” (SNC, 124). 21. “non aver saputo o voluto trattenere il bambino dentro di sè” (SNC, 129). 22. “Subì, credo, ancora una volta il fascino di autocancellarsi” (SNC, 356). 23. “Lina, parliamoci chiaro: scegliti una cosa tua che ti piace, torna a vendere scarpe, torna a vendere salame, ma non voler essere quello che non sei rovinando me” (SNC, 360). 24. “Pensavo che ci saremmo fidanzati e saremmo stati sempre tutti e tre insieme, io, tu, e la tua amica” (SNC, 214). 25. “‘Non linguaggi per scrivere romanzi’ disse e mi turbò il tono svalutativo con cui pronunciò la parola romanzi … ‘Sono linguaggi di programmazione’” (SNC, 463). 26. “facevano esercizi coi diagrammi a blocchi, si allenavano a ripulire il mondo dal superfluo, schematizzavano le azioni d’ogni giorno secondo due soli valori di verità: zero e uno” (SNC, 464). 27. “schematizzare la quotidianità” (SFR, 99). 28. “erano state mangiate dal corpo dei mariti, dei padri, dei fratelli, a cui finivano sempre più per assomigliare, o per le fatiche o per l’arrivo della vecchiaia, della malattia” (SNC, 102). 29. “Il rione sarebbe tornato a prevalere, le cadenze, i modi, tutto si sarebbe confuso in una mota nerastra, Anassimandro e mio padre, Folgóre e Don Achille, le valenze e gli stagni, gli aoristi, Esiodo e la sboccatezza proterva dei Solara, come del resto era accaduto nei millenni alla città, sempre più scomposta, sempre più degradata?” (SNC, 102). 30. “maschera portata così bene che era quasi faccia” (SNC, 401). 31. “creatura aliena” (SBP, 225). 32. “Non c’era nessuna scissione … Nino era uno solo e lo testimoniava l’espressione che aveva in viso mentre stava dentro Silvana. Era l’espressione assunta da suo padre Donato … quando mi aveva toccata tra le gambe … Niente di alieno, dunque, molto invece di laido. Nino era ciò che non avrebbe voluto essere e che tuttavia era sempre stato” (SBP, 224). My italics. 33. “No, voglio dire che per qualche anno Gennaro è stato veramente il figlio di Nino” (SBP, 350). 34. “perforatrice” (SFR, 237–238). 35. “Siamo responsabili, ci spiegò usando da quel momento sempre il noi, di un Sistema 3 modello 10” (SFR, 269). 36. “Ti ricordi quello che facemmo con la mia foto di sposa? Voglio continuare per quella strada. Viene il giorno che mi riduco tutta a diagrammi, divento un nastro bucherellato e non mi trovi più” (SFR, 315). 37. “l’elettronica sembra così pulita e invece sporca, sporca moltissimo, e ti obbliga a lasciare te stessa dappertutto come se ti cacassi e ti pisciassi

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addosso di continuo: io invece di me non voglio lasciare niente, il tasto che preferisco è quello che serve a cancellare” (SBP, 433). 38. “frasi ordinate … immagini armoniche … di cui io ero sempre e comunque il centro” (SBP, 165). 39. “quel filo a segmenti neri come la merda di un insetto” (SBP, 411). 40. “un corpo-che-desidera … in bilico tra l’essere assorbito dal mondo e l’assorbire il mondo.” My translation.

Works Cited Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs 28 (3): 801–831. ———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Gender Politics and the Right to Appear. In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 24–65. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. De Rogatis, Tiziana. 2019. Elena Ferrante’s Key Words. Trans. Will Schutt. London: Europa Editions. Doueihi, Milad. 2011. Digital Cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fanning, Ursula. 2017. Italian Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Twentieth Century. Constructing Subjects. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Ferrante, Elena. 1992. L’amore molesto. Rome: E/O. ———. 2002. I giorni dell’abbandono. Rome: E/O. ———. 2005. The Days of Abandonment. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New  York: Europa Editions. ———. 2006a. La figlia oscura. Rome: E/O. ———. 2006b. Troubling Love. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions. ———. 2008. The Lost Daughter. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions. ———. 2011. L’amica geniale. Rome: E/O. ———. 2012a. My Brilliant Friend. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New  York: Europa Editions. ———. 2012b. Storia del nuovo cognome. Rome: E/O. ———. 2013a. Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta. Rome: E/O. ———. 2013b. The Story of a New Name. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New  York: Europa Editions. ———. 2014a. La frantumaglia. Rome: E/O.

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———. 2014b. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions. ———. 2014c. Storia della bambina perduta. Rome: E/O. ———. 2015. The Story of the Lost Child. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New  York: Europa Editions. ———. 2016. Fragments. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions. Ferrara, Enrica Maria. 2016. Performative Realism and Post-Humanism in The Days of Abandonment. In The Works of Elena Ferrante. Reconfiguring the Margins, ed. Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie Love, 129–158. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. Elena Ferrante e la questione dell’identità. Oblio 26–27: 47–55. Hayles, Nancy K. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Iovino, Serenella. 2016. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance and Liberation. London: Bloomsbury Academics. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Marchesini, Roberto. 2016. Etologia filosofica. Alla ricerca della soggettività animale. Milan, Udine: Mimesis. ———. 2017. Over the Human:  Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany. Trans. Sarah De Sanctis. Cham: Springer. Milkova, Stiliana. 2016. Elena Ferrante’s Visual Poetics: Ekphrasis in Troubling Love, My Brilliant Friend, and The Story of a New Name. In The Works of Elena Ferrante. Reconfiguring the Margins, ed. Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie V. Love, 159–182. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin. 2017. Playing with the Maternal Body: Violence, Mutilation, and the Emergence of the Female Subject in Ferrante’s Novels. California Italian Studies 7 (1): 1–15.

PART II

Technology and Identity

CHAPTER 6

The Stuff We Are Made Out Of: Contemporary Poetry in Italy and Our World Model in the Era of Digital Reproduction Giancarlo Alfano

1   The Paradox of the Canon What happened in the last decade of the twentieth century could be described as a paradox: as it was becoming impossible to define a new valid canon, the focus of the literary discussion became precisely the notion of canon. This paradoxical situation was the consequence of a new cultural condition: since modernity caused the impossibility of establishing a new canon, the debate centred precisely on this impossibility. There have been several attempts to identify the reasons behind such a deep change and the most insightful explanations are perhaps those that trace the origin of the current situation to the following set of causes, among others: (1) a widening of the aesthetic debate to a global dimension; (2) an extension of the same generalized rules to the literary market

G. Alfano (*) “Federico II” University of Naples, Naples, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_6

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worldwide; (3) a progressive consolidation of the new modes of digital communication since the birth of the Web 2.0 around 2004–2005 (Benvenuti and Ceserani 2012; Bibbò 2014). While the latter is the aspect that mostly affects the discussion developed in the present chapter about the multiple shapes of digitally generated hybrid human-technological identity that have emerged within the “posthuman space” of E-Literature over the past two decades (Callus and Aquilina 2018), it is useful to start our reflection by considering all the three points highlighted above. The first refers to the need, which has especially been emphasized in the American sphere, of expanding our vision beyond the traditional European borders, towards the Indian, Far-­ Eastern, South-American and African cultures. The numerous positions that surfaced from the wide ensuing debate on post-colonial studies have often been of great relevance, and one cannot and should not shrug them off so easily. Indeed, those who work from a Euro-Mediterranean perspective, cannot ignore the effective warning pronounced by Edward Said: “None of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography” (1993, 6). The second point encourages us to reflect upon three different but deeply intertwined elements, the first of which is the literary industry. Globalization means, in fact, having the opportunity to establish a production site where it is more convenient, in relation to the rules imposed by the labour market. It also means the ability to distribute products on a global scale. Works of literature are subject to the same fate as cars, nylon tights and sporting equipment: they are placed in direct and open competition with products coming from the most diverse cultural areas. Of course, even if all goods participate in the same routines of production and distribution, it is worth remembering that artistic products retain a surplus of value that consists in their aesthetic strength, that is the pleasure offered to their audience. It is also true, however, that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological reflection (1979), on the one hand, and the findings of anthropology, on the other, taught us that said strength and pleasure interact with other aspects of cultural consumption such as the changes in taste and the hierarchies of values. In connection with this point, it is important to note a crucial shift in the role of the critics during the transition from the modern era to our contemporary times. Indeed, from the eighteenth century onwards, the western world had assigned the responsibility for the selection process to jointly agreed criteria of taste and shared hierarchies of

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values on which, however, the critics had effectively a monopoly within the public sphere (Habermas 1962). Nowadays, though, we have a system in which the same rules have become generalized on a global level (at least as a general trend) and therefore the role of the critics has lost its relevance: it is not the critics who establish selection criteria or create hierarchies. The market is self-regulated, as in the most classic dream of economic liberalism. This is where the third aspect, related to the authors and their aesthetic decisions, comes into play. In a “global market”, authors have quite obviously the opportunity to access the “centre” even if they come from the periphery. However, reaching the centre is possible only if the distribution chain is accessed, which implies the acceptance of a high level of interlinguistic and intercultural translatability. Finally, I should move on to the topic of the new modes of communication, the so-called Web 2.0, which enables the interaction of every user with the whole system. Whatever is the position taken within the debate concerning democracy and the World Wide Web, the matter is crucial. Not only is the “global market” made out of the web, too, and the system of digital communication is an important place for financial transactions, the Internet is also one of the main venues in which public consensus is organized, aesthetic “values” are produced and the dominant “taste” is defined. We are then back to our discussion on the canon and to our initial paradox. Talking about a body of works that lays the foundations of our cultural identity and moulds our emotional, cognitive and aesthetic behaviour means (and always has meant) reasoning upon the organization of power discourses and the modalities of symbolic mediation. It seems therefore meaningful to me that in his recent article Quanto vale e quanto dura un canone? [What is a canon worth and how long does it last?] Segre explains that in an “era of multimedia” such as ours the borders between “artistic ‘genres’” vanish because their constitutive elements trade places with one another through a “continuous magmatic movement” (2012, 151). The eminent critic deduces that “as authors and cultural institutions are not in charge of literature any longer, such movements will be guided only by anonymous entrepreneurs” (Segre [2007] 2012, 151); this is all the more a cause for concern given that “nobody has ever demanded collective ownership of the means of communication, as it was once the case for the means of production” (Segre [2007] 2012, 151).

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2   Becoming Anthology Segre’s observations of Marxian inspiration highlight the importance, within the literary-aesthetic field, of the relationship between the three elements described earlier on: the market (namely, the production system), the critical function and the author’s function. The latter is intended as a hybrid between the “brand” stamped on the goods by a producer and the authorization which the employee working on the production line receives by the system in which he or she is immersed. Thus the market ends up becoming effectively the place where the author’s function is produced, that is, the place where the authorization to turn a writer into an author is negotiated. After all, readers inhabit the same agon (within the market) as the writers, and therefore the other function, the critical one, is gradually but increasingly developed outside the traditional channels. The consequence is that a growing number of non-specialized personnel pose as critics, and the critical function appears less and less “independent” from the market. It is true that intellectuals have always been in direct dialogue with the means of production and, therefore, the power structures. But this was justified by their role as mediators between “author” and “public”, a role which was crucial to an effective functioning of the market. Nowadays, the latter has become itself the mediator: those who are in control of the means of production also manage the means of distribution, that is the means of communication. This is demonstrated by the existence of the new reading electronic devices, from Kindle to the Ipad, through which the big distribution chains influence the very act of reading, thus leading to that notion of “publishing with no publishers” discussed by André Schiffrin (2000). In a recent book, Milad Doueihi talks in favour of a digital humanism, and dwells on the “culture anthologique” of the web (2011, 105–138). Historically, the anthology is intrinsically linked to the notion of canon; in fact, creating a canon implies the decision to keep certain stories and poems and join them together within one or more volumes from which other stories and poems are excluded. Once they have been selected and stored in this way, stories and poems become the “flower” (anthos) of what has been achieved by a given civilization (which is considered exemplary). This is the reason why they are collected in an anthology. Usually, these cultural endeavours did not express the “taste” or dislikes of a single intellectual, but aimed to represent a community. Anthologies were strongly “oriented”, either in an ideological or in a formal sense.

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According to Doueihi, an anthology would be the “dominant form of a new economy, an economy of the abundance” (2011, 124). In an environment such as this, what constitute a reference model are not the single anthologized fragments. These are instead “conceived and structured to be circulated and disseminated in a milieu that values new ways to read and write” (2011, 124). The enormous availability of online texts enables every user to become a sort of perpetual anthologist who navigates the great digital sea and “catches” what he or she considers more interesting or suitable to the creation of new configurations. “The digital culture, in its anthological dimension, celebrates the resurrection of the reader” (2011, 124), in compliance with the ontological status of a digital reality in which even identities are the object of continuous negotiation and change: “identity itself is produced through an assembly of “fragments of personality” (Doueihi 2011, 124).

3   From Invention to “Re-shuffling” Anthologies are also discussed by Kenneth Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing (2011), a book which defends a type of writing made out of borrowings, citations, re-writings, word-by-word transcriptions, re-shuffling of already published fictional or non-fictional texts. In this regard, the author has presented the case of an English language anthology of 3785 pages titled Issue 1, in which three anonymous editors have collected texts by a healthy 3164 authors. This monumental endeavour prompts us to reflect upon the meaning of such an impressive “anthology” which appears to have no intention of anthologizing anything. Instead, it offers a catalogue, nearly a list of poets who are active within a certain area over a given period of time. However, the project turns out to be even more challenging than anticipated when authors get attributed texts they have never written. Such texts are in fact assembled by means of casual computer-­ generated aggregation. Once the various groupings of texts were completed, the editors saved Issue 1 as a pdf file and distributed it via the web during one weekend only. From many points of view, the gesture of the three anonymous editors could be considered a more or less accomplished joke. If it had been put together in Italy, however, Issue 1 would have been welcomed as a development of the observations made by Berardinelli and Cordelli in the mid70s (1975, 2004). Back in the days, the two critics highlighted an imbalance between the high number of poets and the low number of

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poetry readers, and they maintained that these two figures might potentially overlap one day. In his book, instead, Goldsmith chooses to discuss this topic in order to introduce the concrete shifting of communication aesthetics “from content to context” (Goldsmith 2011, 123): it is not the manufacturing of the text that counts but the actual conditions for the text’s existence, that is its transferability. In Roman Jacobson’s words (1960), that pdf file provocatively causes a shifting of the literary reflection from the poetic function to the phatic function. It underlines how, in our digital era, “not only are the text themselves appropriated, but that is compounded by the appropriation of names and reputations” (Goldsmith 2011, 123).1 We have moved from the age of mechanical reproduction of the work of art (Benjamin [1936] 1991) to the age of mechanical reproduction of its author: this is precisely what Bauman (2009) claims when he states that we no longer live in a society of producers but rather in one of consumers. Furthermore, our society seems to impose a model of consumer that partakes in the production (also called a prosumer by American sociologists), and therefore “consumes” even the symbolic pleasure of producing. Even then, it can be observed that we are not moving too far from the traditional formulas of narrative composition, if we consider that the ancient discipline of inventio, that is the art of composing a discourse used to set the rules for selection of arguments based on the key principle of re-use (Lausberg 1998; Barthes 1972). However, Goldsmith’s anecdote illustrates the peculiar modern status of literary authority and, in general, of attribution in the artistic field. Indeed, if the twentieth century featured countless examples of poetry based on pre-existing texts or generated through mechanical techniques ruled by causality, the final product used to be either a printed text bound as a book (destined to permanency) or a live performance (destined to immediate consumption). Either way, it was an act that was directly attributable to a subject endowed with “artistic intention”, that is an Author. In digital practices such as the cutup or similar techniques developed by the twentieth-century’s Avant-gardes, the traditional role attributed to the Author, considered for a long time as the safest means for certification of aesthetic value, is threatened by the close relationship between production and distribution, and by the new centrality of consumers. From invention, which guided individuals in their research aimed at production of a public discourse, we are moving towards re-shuffle, that is the free activity of a user unbound by rules and mandatory standard procedures.

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4   Emphasis on the I “You don’t make art; you find it”; David Shields stated in aphorism 341 of Reality Hunger (2011). In fact, it was Charles Simic who wrote it in Dime-Store Alchemy. The Art of Joseph Cornell (1992) and Shields proceeded to plagiarize it. Not only appropriation and plagiarism are the main themes of Shields’s book; they are also the techniques he used to make the book itself. The author’s argument is rather interesting. He maintains, in fact, that after the great transition from the single copy (i.e. the manuscript) to multiple copies (Gutenberg’s printing press), the modern world has transitioned to a “regime of superabundant free copies” (think, for example of the various forms of download, some of which illegal, and file sharing that are common practice for every environment and age group). In a similar regime, ownership of a copy does not constitute an element of wealth which is instead provided by “relationships, links, connection, and sharing” (Shields 2011, 29). Contemporary art is grounded on these new conditions which are the raw material of reality and of its own feasibility. Since “Reality can’t be copyrighted”, and entails the existence of free copies, it follows that a surplus of aesthetic value will be provided by the modalities “in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library” (2011, 30). The undeniable consonance with Goldsmith’s thesis is all the more remarkable if one considers the centrality of autobiographical writing. If Shields maintains that readers have an increased hunger for reality (hence the title of his book) which makes them inclined to quit fiction and support instead nonfictional types of narrative, including consolidated literary forms of Memoir (2011, 42), Goldsmith warns us that “uncreative writing allows for a new type of writing about ourselves: call it oblique autobiography” (2011, 188; see also Doueihi 2011). On the one hand, Goldsmith believes that “by inventoring the mundane” we abandon the traditional diaristic approach “leaving room enough for the reader to connect the dots and construct narratives in a plethora of ways” (2011, 188–189). On the other hand, through peremptory aphorisms such as “‘Essay’ is a verb, not just a noun; “‘essaying’ is a process”, or “And I shall essay to be” (2011, 131 and 158), Shields goes back to the origins of the essayistic form intended as digression and process in the way practised by Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century. What we

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witness, then, is not “reality hunger”, but a penchant for re-shuffling, an undifferentiated exchange of elements that an “I” takes from the web and subsequently re-introduces in it, realizing a game of fluid and composite identities. Let us then try to summarize the first results of our analysis. First of all, we have observed that re-shuffling and emphatic construction of the subject appear to be central aspects of today’s culture. In addition, cultural products need to be abundant and accessible, and also have a truly “global” image, that is inclusive and encompassing the whole planet. The primacy of distribution over production is matched by emphasis on the active role of the user / consumer whom our distribution system pressurizes to become co-producer (prosumer) of the cultural product. Underneath all these layers is the arch-metaphor of the World Wide Web, implying connectedness and constant accessibility for its users. But the web is in turn a name (that is, a metaphor) of our current technological development, based on which every aspect of reality—from the physical form of the outside world (bodies and space) to the unstable and immaterial realities of our emotions and knowledge—is reduced to images. These may be static or in motion but they are always reproduced and reproducible. In addition, they are equivalent to such an extent that they can be swapped, assembled, associated and variously connected to one another, regardless of any status of reality which concerns their referent instead. This is the level of analysis that, in my opinion, we have to choose as a starting point to describe today’s cultural model in which phenomena, with their uncertain ontological status, are reduced to images that may be reproduced indefinitely. As André Bazin had anticipated when he reflected upon the ontological statute of film (2004), it is inevitable that the world of universal mechanical reproduction be centred around a cultural model that is grounded on the mystery of bodies’ unstable nature.

5   “Cinematic” Poetry Italian poetry has been ruminating this topic for quite a while. This is clearly illustrated by two interesting articles by Edoardo Sanguineti and Andrea Zanzotto published at the beginning of the century. Their concurrence on the topic of media models in contemporary poetry is all the more interesting if one considers that each of them has underlined opposite aspects. Whereas for Sanguineti “the century of cinema equals to the

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century of montage” (2003, 256), what matters for Zanzotto instead is the evolution “from mute, to sound, to colour […] up to the recent ‘special effects in the siege of sound’” (2003, 260). If both perspectives may be integrated, what is remarkable, though, is the different emphasis: disassembling / reassembling of the syntax in one case and dynamics of the audiovision in the other; conceptual alienation (Verfremdung) as opposed to sensorial engagement. Around this polarization, we can attempt to organize those contemporary poetic discourses that have been engaging more intensely with the media system either to analyse how hierarchies are affected by media or, conversely, to study the perceptual or even biological roots of the same media. These two lines of enquiry, however, do not stand in radical opposition within the different poetics and collective trends that have followed one another during the second half of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first century. In fact, in an era of mechanical reproduction of the work of art, “creative” subjects have given up their role of assemblers of historical languages to let themselves be influenced and impressed by the world of things. The result is a writing that “favours the present tense in order to line up phenomena observed in all their unpleasentness”; a writing that ends up savaging the “body-word” already “torn to pieces by society” and then “exhibited through a gestual rendering made of concrete, physical matter” (Lorenzini 2003, 146 and 151).

6   What Happens with the TV The influence of television has also been important. After all, those poets whose work appeared for the first time at the end of the 1970s were born in the same decade as the first broadcasts of RAI, the national television company. Thus we need to think of a far more complex relationship with the media, particularly the “electric” ones, with whose “oral” and “aural” organization the cinema enters in contraddiction, as explained by McLuhan (1964). In Italy, television became popular between the end of the 1950s and the 1960s causing a deep transformation of the dominant communication model, not only in terms of the information available or the individual and collective rituals of entertainment, but also as regards the quality of information and the organization of behaviours and perception. It will be worth remembering here that, according to Meyrovitz (1985), the television medium modifies structurally the notion of social roles by erasing the

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traditional dichotomy between front stage and back stage, engagement with an audience and solidarity with work colleagues (Goffman [1956] 1969), as well as the traditional anthropological dualism man / woman or adult / child. This, in turn, contributes to develop conflating aspects between outer and inner world, domestic milieu and public space, intimacy and publicity of the events. The era of television marked the disappearance of two other important milestones of the communication process: the difference between true and false and the clear anthitesis between live and pre-recorded programmes. What took off with the advent of television gets further developed with the enhancement of electric media, especially the so-called new media (Manovich 2001), through which we move from “a logic of representation of the real to its production.” This happens by virtue of a system of protocols which turns “bodies, things, facts into structures of data”: the medium itself, which used to be the “message” according to McLuhan’s classic framing, thus becomes “the environment” (Boccia Artieri 2004, 184–185). Contemporary poetry has been affected more and more by such changes for a number of reasons. Firstly, the television and, more in general, the world of media, have become objects and themes of poetic discourse considered worthy of representation: talking about the contemporary condition equals, in fact, to talking about the media. This is the case, for example, of Magrelli’s diptych Computer e dintorni [The Computer and its Surroundings] (1999), D’Elia’s Etere [Ether] and A tutto schermo [At Full Screen] (1996); or else some of De Signoribus’ poems (1996) that thematize the constant dozing of television audiences; or even Fo’s work Archibugio [Arquebus] (2004), playfully paraphrasing the name of a famous Italian television presenter.

7   Alternative Platforms Another case to consider is that of those authors who decide to engage with digital distribution of their text and promote them online via email (for example, Lorenzo Durante), creation of websites (see the case of Massimo Sannelli, Marco Giovenale or Vincenzo Ostuni), or else through publication within electronic books or journals. Similarly, there are authors who decide to put themselves to the test also from a manufacturing point of view, namely from the perspective of producing no longer or not only books but complex (often musical) products usually in the shape of CDs or DVDs (formerly, CD-ROM). At this level, they are confronted with the

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inevitable problem of distribution within a market that is uncommon for the poetic product, with the attendant difficulties to access the traditional distribution chains. Among the success stories, I would like to mention the good outcome of Comedia (1998) by Rosaria Lo Russo and the twenty years of work by Lello Voce, ever since Farfalle da combattimento (1999) [Butterflies in fight]. There is, however, another level in the relationship between poetry and media which we ought to consider, that is the relationship of formal analogy among languages. One of its aspects concerns directly what we said previously about the organization of the palimpsest, with the subsequent cognitive and ontological indeterminacy of narrative zones and levels of reality. It happens in such cases that formal exploitation of the medium is pursued “by analogy”, that is by recovering certain structural clichés or, at least, a generally homologous formal dimension. Examples of this trend are movie by Frixione (in Diottrie [Dioptres], 1991) with its adaptation of the American dark movie genre, and Trailers by Marco Berisso (in Annali [Annals], 2002) mimicking the compact narrative of advertisement. If this procedure brings to mind those particular fragments of image that are the holograms in which “every single fragment contains the totality of information held in the whole” (Boccia Artieri 2004, 144),2 in the same category we can also include fenomeni in fiera [Fair of Phenomena] by Gabriele Frasca (Rive [Shores], 2001) which was then reworked within the CD by ResiDante titled Il fronte interno [The Internal Front] (2003). The latter includes an array of characters who only exist in the world of media, if not explicitly of television, as if reduced to a broadcasting programme. In conclusion, such trend appears to confirm what was observed by Testa in relation to the late twentieth century which would have predominantly seen the emergence of lyrical works that “seem to oppose forerunning ones like ruins do with monuments, fragments with totality, dissonance with melody” (2003, 118). Seemingly, what is in question is the centrality of the “Book” as a superior entity which brings to unity every single poetic composition (Frasca 2015). This does not exclude, however, “the preservation of an enigmatic text status” or the “prospect of a recovery or research of further meaning” (Testa 2003, 119), as shown in the remarkable lyrical-musical work Elegia Sanremese [Sanremo Elegy] (1998) by Tommaso Ottonieri. This recasts the artistic and existential itinerary of singer-songwriter Tenco in a kind of all-encompassing out-of-time palimpsest realized through a complex as well as rigorous balance between written page, CD and overall layout of

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the book. The latter does not limit itself to imitate “by analogy” the disconnectedness of materials scattered in the media as per our current technological experience, but attempts to represent that new form of experience which makes every moment of our lives liable to be duplicated or deferred (indeed, the mechanical reproduction of the author which we mentioned above). The inhumanity of the music and television industry ends up creating the strange myth of a Tenco who is still alive, frozen in a standard still life that rehearses the tragedy of the singer-songwriter during every edition of the Sanremo music festival.

8   Stirring Still This example taken from Ottonieri’s work enables us to make a further observation. Firstly, we need to note that the functional divergence between the option of montage as manipulation of syntactic hierarchies and the interest towards audiovision seems to disappear once the media system is transformed into an environment that intersects and surrounds the overall experience of the everyday. This is shown in the incipit of Ottonieri’s text: “you know as you know as you know / why I like you / is ’cause of the 24 and four thousand kisses.”3 The quotation of Tenco’s popular song causes a shock by juxtaposing a fragment of popular culture with a pensive if not dramatic reflection; furthermore, it produces a sort of perceptual shock when the simple (thus, easy to memorize) rhythm is re-­ actualized within a complex communicative context. The relationship with the media and mass culture is not always playful, but the parodic nature of much contemporary poetry noted by Cortellessa (2001) may be explained also as a refusal of hierarchic separation between highbrow and lowbrow culture, which goes hand in hand with an ever more pronounced encounter with the overall digital reality. Paolo Giovannetti has proposed the following summary: Poetry meets the digital world because 1. it accepts to express itself through the specific tools offered by the world of information technology […]; 2. it is read and discussed within an environment such as the Internet […] different from the one in which it originated; 3. it is about the digital world […]; 4. it expresses in its own complex structure some of the changes introduced by the PCs and the World Wide Web. (2017, 99)

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Leaving aside the first two points, for which we can consider valid our previous observations, we may note that a discourse on the digital world is similar to that on any other media, given that every poetic discourse on a given medium implies dealing with its specific language. For this reason, it is interesting to follow the two-pronged approach by Sanguineti and Zanzotto who have demonstrated that a generation of poets nurtured by the cinema (its code, imaginary, technological aspect) cannot but appropriate its overall structure (as in point #4 by Giovannetti). If Elegia Sanremese imitates a system of media production in which the mechanical reproduction of a work of art entails the mechanical reproduction of the same human subject who stands at the opposite poles of a communication system, different is the case of fax giallo [yellow fax] by Mariano Bàino. A text that is brief but notable because of the results it yielded, fax giallo goes as far as to propose a sort of autonomy in the communication system; in fact, the twenty laisses included in the collection are similar to twenty different fax sheets, namely twenty written messages sent via the telephone. If fax technology is completely obsolete today (and Bàino’s text was written only 25 years ago), the same cannot be said about Bàino’s artistic procedure. Indeed, in the Neapolitan poet’s work, a tool which used to be a means of communication between two human subjects (the fax machine) becomes self-determined to the point that all communicative intention is attributed directly to it: “the fax machine fables about the fact”, “the fax machine tells fables”, “the fax machine gives birth to a tiny sheet”(Bàino 2001, 5).4 Therefore, in Bàino’s text the machine ends up usurping the place of the subject—we could define it as a process of “lyrical subjectification of the object”—while the only role left to the human subject is that of “servomechanism” of the medium described by McLuhan (1964), namely an auxiliary component whose purpose is to allow the machine to function. If contemporary subjects are then intersected by media within which, in turn, they settle,5 this leads to that sex appeal of the inorganic which has been variously discussed by Perniola (1994) and Žižek (1997) when they insisted upon the convergence between an organic world intended as sentient system and an inorganic world to which a degree of consciousness is also attributed. The weaker separation between inside and outside space as well as the progressive formation of an intermediate space ensure that the classic polarity of subject and object is toned down, without ever disappearing; it is reduced to a position in which a new hybrid intermediate stage is achieved. Here we have another media “model” in contemporary

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Italian poetry such as, for example, Contatto [Contact] by Ottonieri (2002) which records this becoming an intermediate stage, as the confusion between outside and inside dimensions merged into a sort of simultaneous space; therefore, if a trembling of the outside world has an effect on the body, a movement of the inner world is hosted “in the hollow space” (32)6 of the outside. In this manner, Ottonieri manages to provide a true experience of our age in which our body is stretched to limits that had never been previously imagined, having undergone a sort of evisceration, namely a reduction to its skin and outer tissues, and a simultaneous extension towards the outside. A further or last stage of this gradual merging is the “compound subject” by Gabriele Frasca, namely the subject that has become an intermediate stage “in the age of its mechanical reproduction.” Examples are provided by the sonnet Ora che mi diranco [Now that I Derange], in which the “I” observes its “cells crushed onto the keys” (175);7 or the initial verses of triti [mince] (Rive, 2001) where the subject is reduced to “this very flesh that is my life / made out of all these matters, flesh on my fingers / feeling the keys” and turning towards “your gaze” that is intersected “(if you watch I watch) through the screen where foam rises / like the sea against a rock is / dead” (41).8 From contact to overlapping in the intermediate and virtual space of the screen, the static flows of the two worlds blend into a finished existence such as the already mentioned fenomeni in fiera [fair of phenomena] whose “trans-telegenic” aspect entails taking on a subjectivity which is fixated through absolutely typical gestures and, for this very reason, torn apart by its declaration of “oneness,” its hunger of being “precisely that one”9 and therefore anyone. This is what happens in la signora V [Mrs V] where the invoked “device that imitates the voice / in order to repeat ever so quickly / that what is said is what makes it alive” turns into a certainty that “the joy which doesn’t end,” namely the never-ending love, is only the movement of the “inanimate which will re-live us” (Frasca 2001, 166).10 We could then uphold the paradox that the structural distance implied by communication via the media, indeed telecommunication, turns into its opposite: an excessive proximity that is nearly an overlapping. The technological skin embracing the contemporary human body, rather than functioning as protective barrier, becomes a place of confusion between separate poles. Thus, the sonnet-song by Valerio Magrelli Ecce Video (in Poesie, 1996) puts itself forward as a true moral emblem, with a human corpse and a television set facing each other while the phonetic space is

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saturated by the “chirping” of equitonal monosyllables (“goal, quiz, clip, news, spot, film, blob, flash, scoop, E. T.” [295]).11 Flux of images and pure quantity of sound thus become a sort of threshold in the relationship of poetry with multimedia technology, an aspect which seems to characterize even extremely erudite experiments attempted by Marco Giovenale, Andrea Inglese, Calandrone or Laura Pugno. Indeed, the form of writing proposed by these poets, “despite being complex … preserves memory of the voice” (Zinelli 2005b, 802), thus emphasizing their critical, if not antagonistic, attitude towards the media system. Such critique is not addressed to the level of content (despite some examples in the work of D’Elia or Cepollaro) but rather to a comeback of the “voice” as biological and truly corporeal rooting of the subject (see Cortellessa 2005). In Villalta, for instance, “a sequence of landscape’s snapshots practically illustrates the effects of running on the perception and production of images” (Zinelli 2005a, 885); similarly, Ottonieri’s “contact” or Frasca’s “stirring still” are a mark of “corporeal resistance” that doesn’t avoid confrontation with the information systems.

9   Digital Flow and Book Format As seen in the first two paragraphs, the web culture puts forward the issue of the canon, namely a group of “canonical” texts that provide a shared code (of values, stylistic and linguistic customs, beliefs, etc.) with which communities can identify. At the same time, the widespread availability of electronic devices, with their attendant cultural practice and ideologies, deeply question the concept of “originality.” If the option of cut-andpaste paves the way to the great challenge of the copy-left and creative commons, it is also true that it radically alters the idea of a text as the autonomous creative production of an individual. The relocation of intellectual activities to the online space creates new problems, starting from the processes of distribution and (self) canonization of aesthetic products (music, arts, poetry), which also include the cultural debate and, more specifically, one of its peculiar sub-genres, that is the literary polemic or controversy (Policastro 2012). This is mainly a phenomenon related to the sphere of communication; however, it has acquired a more pronounced significance within the wider community of Italian poets who, over the last decade, have been huddling around the electronic world of blogs, specialized websites and online journals.

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Even if it dates back to a few years ago, the survey by Guglieri and Sisto (2011) on the organization (and re-organization) of the editorial (and cultural) visibility of the web 2.0 remains very informative, in my opinion; it gives a good insight into the forms of co-optation, assimilation and differentiation, namely the mutual positioning within a given “field” (Bourdieu 1996) which, despite its scant size, preserves its high symbolic potential. It is true, in fact, that everyone aspires to have their own “literary” book published, especially a poetry book (Cortellessa and Archibugi 2011). However, we need to reiterate that the web has changed the way in which a work of poetry is conceived: among the new generations, the book does not take centre stage for Italian poets (Ostuni 2010; Giovannetti 2017). This is a decisive aspect if it is true that the book format has provided the conceptual and even operational framework to all poetic writing for thousands of years. Notwithstanding the continuous relevance of an aesthetics of the voice (Zumthor 1990; Bologna 1992) as well as the emphasis that has been placed on poetic performance throughout history (especially since the beat and pop generation of the 1960s and 1970s) the creation of a book has remained the founding moment of an author’s identity. After all, there wasn’t a big difference between Catullo’s liber (first century BC), the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta by Petrarch (fourteenth century), or even Le occasioni by Montale and Four Quartets by Eliot (first half of the twentieth century) compared to the books authored by Neo-vanguard’s poets, Pasolini or Zanzotto. In all these cases, the book was an object conceived by its author in every detail, sometimes even adapted to the typographic matrix in order to obtain the desired effects of “blank space” between single words or single verses or even groups of verses. Digital technology and, above all, the typical production/distribution system of the World Wide Web are deeply affecting the idea of a possible correspondence between an object and a literary project. The crucial point is precisely the relationship between production and distribution that can affect, for example, the visual distribution of verses that are not necessarily conceived for the physical space of the printed page any longer but rather for the screen of a computer, a tablet or even a mobile phone. In addition, there can be consequences on the rhythmic aspect of poems; for example, the relationship between length of verse and extension of syntax, which was undoubtedly still a fundamental characteristic of poetic language for the Russian Formalists, may be thought of in different terms nowadays.

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However, the important change brought about by the web may be seen first and foremost in the possibility of imagining new shapes for the book format. Indeed, contemporary poets are able to make their texts known by publishing them on social networks, thus reinforcing the fact that they are “messages” in a process of warm and shared communication. Poets can also set up their own websites where they can combine words, music and images in various ways or even allow their complete collected work to interact, based on the typical strategies of auto-anthology, as mentioned previously. In addition, poets may attempt to exploit new methods of digital archiving in order to renew the typology of the “poetry book” which had a particularly meaningful history in the twentieth century (Testa 1983; Scaffai 2005). This is the case of Vincenzo Ostuni who has endeavoured to update the habitual procedures of the “collections of poetry” taking into account the current dynamics of production and distribution of cultural goods. The result is a textual system which challenges the unavoidable static nature of the book format and gives value to the poetic process instigated by an author. After all, the concept of “folder” [faldone] suggested by the name of Ostuni’s website www.faldone.it links back to the notion of file and, in doing so, underlines some peculiar aspects such as the centrality of “changes,” namely the textual variants that permanently erase the previous version of a file, and the “unmovable nature of ‘documents’,”12 that is the possibility to delete previous files, insert new ones, or move them and therefore re-functionalize them. The consequence is that a work so conceived contains “the history of its changes” which turns it into a “work in progress” that holds in itself another work in progress (Ostuni 2012, 255–256).13 The book-system created by Ostuni has equivalent examples in other products of the e-literature. Think, for example, of Poesie elettroniche [Electronic Poems] by Fabrizio Venerandi that his website promotes in the following way: “Six different ways to interpret electronic poetry; an original ebook in which verses change over time, respond to the reader’s touch, change in front of his very eyes, generate other verses in turn, move around the page by getting closer to and further from one another” (www. quintadicopertina.com). Venerandi’s project, which has much in common with other products launched by international websites such as eliterature. org and elmcip.net,14 clearly establishes a playful relationship with aspects of digital usage such as the animation and, in general, interactivity of the

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web page. What is mostly interesting for us, though, is a statement by the same author who explains in his introduction that the texts published in digital format are “poems that don’t want to be completed as they believe that what they talk about is still mutating.”15 Aside from the evaluation of their aesthetic quality or the degree of formal innovation they introduce, the two publication projects by Ostuni and Venerandi are interesting because they show two potential future facets of the book format. In Ostuni’s case there is a predominant attention to the possibilities offered by digital archiving, as expressed in the title Faldoni [folders]. The book witnesses its own progressive and mobile structure which even incorporates textual variants, afterthoughts, progressive adjustments or, in one word, what Gianfranco Contini named as “implications” (1970).16 Even if he doesn’t explicitly declare his intention to preserve the previous stages of his text, the author once emphasized that variants are not to be interpreted as a “change of mind” of the poet but as an element of the work’s structural dynamism (which can therefore also include “static” solutions that had provisionally been reached). In Venerandi’s case, instead, what appears remarkable is the interaction between different visual solutions offered by the World Wide Web, starting from the simultaneous presence of static writing and visual animation, with the option to insert sound files or hypertextual links. In this way, the performative aspect of poetic action is enhanced, even when it relies on that vocation of contemporary poetry to the installation recently mentioned by Paolo Giovannetti (2017). Indeed, as we reconcile the two poles of performativity (that is ongoing dynamics) and installation (that is ongoing statics), we may conclude our argument by reiterating that the lyrical production of recent years in Italy is coming to terms with the great economic, social and formal issues posed by the web: first and foremost, the challenge to the endurance and resilience of structures of non-genetic information, namely the same identity of our world’s cultural tradition.

Notes 1. On this topic, see now also De Francesco 2017. 2. Ologrammi [Holograms] is precisely the title of Frixione’s second collection, published in 2001. 3. “sai per sai per sai per / ché mi piaci / è per i 24 / e quattro mila baci.” 4. “il fax fabula il fatto,” “il fax favella,” “figlia il fax un fogliolino.”

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5. “The software we use are none else than computer programmes that re-­ programme the user” (Boccia Artieri 2004, 145). 6. “nello spazio cavo.” 7. “cellule pestate sopra i tasti.” 8. “questa carne qua, che è la mia vita. / questa fatta di tutte ’ste faccende,” “carne sulle dita / che sente i tasti … il tuo sguardo … se tu guardi guardo … attraverso lo schermo dove schiuma / come contro uno scoglio questo mare / morto.” 9. “proprio quello.” 10. “meccanismo che imiti la voce / perché ripeta sempre più veloce / che è ciò che dice che lo dice vivo … gioia che non fina … inanimato che ci rivivrà.” 11. “frinire … goal, quiz, clip, news, spot, film, blob, flash, scoop, E. T.” 12. “amovibilità dei ‘documenti’.” 13. “la storia dei suoi mutamenti … un quadratico work in progress.” 14. I would like to thank Roberta Iadevaia who is now working on a PhD thesis on this topic. 15. “sono poesie che non vogliono essere finite, ma che credono che la cosa di cui parlano sia ancora una cosa in mutazione.” 16. “implicazioni.”

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Bologna, Corrado. 1992. Flatus vocis. Metafisica e antropologia della voce. Bologna: il Mulino. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1996. The Rules of Art. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity Press. Callus, Ivan, and Mario Aquilina. 2018. E-Literature. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, 121–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contini, Gianfranco. 1970 [1947]. Implicazioni leopardiane. In Varianti e altra linguistica, 41–52. Turin: Einaudi. Cortellessa, Andrea. 2001. “Explicit parodia”. Modi parodici presso alcuni poeti di ultimo Novecento. In Genealogie della poesia nel secondo Novecento : Giornate di studio, Siena, Certosa di Pontignano, 23-24-25 marzo 2001, ed. Maria Antonietta Grignani, special Issue, Moderna III (2001): 93–115. ———. 2005. Io è un corpo. In Parola plurale. Sessantaquattro poeti italiani fra due secoli, ed. Giancarlo Alfano, 33–51. Rome: Sossella editore. Cortellessa, Andrea, and Luca Archibugi. 2011. Senza scrittori. DVD: RaiCinema. D’Elia, Gianni. 1996. Congedo della vecchia Olivetti. Turin: Einaudi. De Francesco, Francesco. 2017. Problemi dell’ ‘Uncreative Writing’ di Kenneth Goldsmith. Semicerchio. Rivista di Poesia comparata LVII (2): 4–8. De Signoribus, Eugenio. 1996. Istmi e chiuse. Venice: Marsilio. Doueihi, Milad. 2011. Pour un humanisme numérique. Paris: Seuil. Fo, Alessandro. 2004. Corpuscolo. Turin: Einaudi. Frasca, Gabriele. 2001. Rive. Turin: Einaudi ———. 2015. La «letteratura» nel reticolo mediale. La lettera che muore. Rome: Sossella. Frixione, Marcello. 1991. Diottrie. Lecce: Piero Manni editore. Giovannetti, Paolo. 2017. La poesia italiana degli anni Duemila. Rome: Carocci. Goffman, Erwin. [1956] 1969. La vita quotidiana come rappresentazione. Trans. Margherita Ciacci. Bologna: Il Mulino. Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2011. Uncreative Writing. New  York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. Guglieri, Francesco, and Michele Sisto. 2011. Verifica dei poteri 2.0. Critica e militanza letteraria in Internet (1999–2009). Allegoria XXII (61): 153–174. Habermas, Jürgen. 1962. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Habil.). Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lausberg, Heinrich. 1998. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: a Foundation for Literary Study. Trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton. Ed. David E. Orton, and R. Dean Anderson. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Lo Russo, Rosaria. 1998. Comedia. Milan: Bompiani. Lorenzini, Niva. 2003. La poesia. Tecniche di ascolto. Lecce: Piero Manni.

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Magrelli, Valerio. 1999. Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale. Turin: Einaudi. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill. Meyrovitz, Joshua. 1985. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ostuni, Vincenzo. 2010. Poeti degli anni Zero. Rome: Ponte Sisto. ———. 2012. Faldone zero-venti: poesie 1992–2006. Rome: Ponte Sisto. Ottonieri, Tommaso. 2002. Contatto. Naples: Cronopio. Perniola, Mario. 1994. Il sex appeal dell’inorganico. Turin: Einaudi. Policastro, Gilda. 2012. Polemiche letterarie. Dai Novissimi al lit-blog. Rome: Carocci. ResiDante. 2003. Il fronte interno. Compact disc and book. Rome: Sossella editore. Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture & Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Sanguineti, Edoardo. 2003. Il secolo del Montaggio. In La poesia italiana del Novecento. Modi e tecniche, ed. Marco A. Bazzocchi and Fausto Curi, 251–257. Bologna: Pendragon. Scaffai, Niccolò. 2005. Il poeta e il suo libro. Retorica e storia del libro di poesia nel Novecento. Firenze: Le Monnier. Schiffrin, André. 2000. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso. Segre, Cesare. [2007] 2012. Quanto vale e quanto dura un canone? In Critica e critici, 143–152. Turin: Einaudi. Shields, David. [2010] 2011. Reality Hunger. London: Penguin Books. Simic, Charles. [1992] 2011. The Dime-Store Alchemy. The Art of Joseph Cornell. New York: The New York Review of Books. Testa, Enrico. 1983. Il libro della poesia. Tipologie e analisi macrotestuali. Genova: il Melangolo. ———. 2003. L’esigenza del Libro. In La poesia italiana del Novecento. Modi e tecniche, ed. Marco A.  Bazzocchi and Fausto Curi, 97–119. Bologna: Pendragon. Voce, Lello. 1999. Farfalle da combattimento. Milan: Bompiani. Zanzotto, Andrea. 2003. Intervento. In La poesia italiana del Novecento. Modi e tecniche, ed. Marco A.  Bazzocchi and Fausto Curi, 259–263. Bologna: Pendragon. Zinelli, Fabio. 2005a. Dialetto e post-dialetto. In Parola plurale. Sessantaquattro poeti italiani fra due secoli, 799–811. Rome: Sossella editore. ———. 2005b. Gian Mario Villalta. In Parola plurale. Sessantaquattro poeti italiani fra due secoli, 883–896. Rome: Sossella editore. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Zumthor, Paul. 1990. Oral Poetry: An Introduction. Trans. Kathryn Murphy-­ Judy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 7

“Ancora non raggiungibile”: Mobile Phones and the Fragmented Subject in Italian Fiction Kristina Varade

“A new age has begun.” This phrase, uttered in so many contexts and across the boundaries of space and time, intrinsically embodies the concept of progress. Considering the development of science, technology, and human achievement on a global scale, one is encouraged to simultaneously ponder the past and the future. But where are we at present? And how do we fit ourselves into the framework of historical progress? In order to answer these questions, it is important to consider the impact that global technology has had on both human subjectivity and consciousness. I am drawn to the philosophical inquiries of Marshall McLuhan because of his work on mass media and popular culture from the 1960s and 1970s. McLuhan is also noted for having popularized the catchphrases “the global village” and “the medium is the message” (Powers 2010, 194–195). In Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers explains how McLuhan came to be preoccupied with the possibility that he, along with the rest of

K. Varade (*) Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_7

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humanity, was being replaced by machines. Powers goes on to explain how McLuhan later theorized that few people failed to consider technology outside of its own realm, and he argues that technologies themselves have more of an impact on humans than their content, for “our tools are really extensions of our bodies” (197). McLuhan is not the only theorist to focus on the ways in which technology and the body coalesce. In the 1991 treatise “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway, the author examines the ways in which humans, both male and female, have developed so far as to construct social reality according to their shared status as “cyborgs,” or fabricated hybrids “of machine and organism”(2000, 291). Haraway demonstrates how machines of various natures exemplify the notion of freedom for humankind; the best machines are all “made of sunshine” and “light and clean,” providing idealistic models for humans who are both materialistic and “opaque” (294). More recently, in How We Became Posthuman, Hayles defines the posthuman as a shifting understanding of subjectivity and of the liberal self; she asserts the posthuman as the following: First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals. (2–3)

Published just prior to the new millennium, Hayles’s understanding of the posthuman foreshadows the major issues of cellular and computer-based technology which we confront today, more than twenty years later. Society privileges the transmission of information and the functioning of networks, rather than material embodiment; moreover, human bodies are regularly challenged, aided, and informed by machines. Contemporary

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fiction on a global scale is keenly aware of these facts, and as such, valiantly attempts to articulate the rapid changes which technology bears on human society in real time. But there is much more to consider in a critical analysis of the current crisis of socio-political and cultural definition. Neoliberalism, transhumanism, technocapitalism, cyborg theory, postmodernism, posthumanism, psychopolitics: which terms are the most fitting in defining the contemporary moment? Furthermore, where do humans fall within this spectrum? Finally, how does the relationship between the cellphone and humankind support or refute these perspectives of society? Indeed, it is a puzzling conundrum, one that is both multifaceted and unfaithful to any singular critical perspective.1 Naturally, as Hayles has expressed above, discussions regarding the connection between technology and the body began well before any of these terms were even blips on the contemporary literary radar. Cellular technologies of ever-increasing speed and optimization, such as iPhones, smartwatches, and even “RoboPhones,” force our minds to function systematically in a less linear and individualistic and in a more group-oriented manner (Hongo 2015). In this way, we as postmodern, posthuman fragmented “selves,” strive to understand the contemporary quotidian to the best of our ability, all the while creating new points of contact and new representations of how we can lessen the disparity between the inward self and the outward world. The posthuman is an extension of the body itself, where all the key signs, functions, and symbols point to this current emphasis upon group-orientation and finding points of connection, no matter how insignificant, capricious, or artificial they may be. In examining the link between technology and the fragmented subject in Italian contemporary fiction, technological discourse questions existing connections and establishes new relationships among narratives, their characteristics, and their voices. Posthuman relationships between the mobile phone and the fragmented subject abound in the fiction of Aldo Nove, Andrea De Carlo, and Giuseppe Culicchia.2 In Nove’s short story “Vibravoll” from Woobinda e altre storie senza lieto fine [Woobinda and Other Stories Without a Happy Ending] and Superwoobinda, the mobile phone provides a false sense of sexual emancipation and feminist power to the narrator. De Carlo incorporates cellular technology in Pura vita [Pure Life], in this case to demonstrate how human relationships now express themselves primarily through the means of SMS and mobile phone

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conversation. Finally, Culicchia’s Brucia la città [Burning City] illustrates how the mobile phone provides an impermanent sense of self, specifically through the means of consumer culture. Chronologically, it is fitting to begin an analysis of contemporary Italian fiction in relation to the posthuman fragmented human subject and cellular technology with Aldo Nove’s short story “Vibravoll” (1996). Nove (the pseudonym of writer Antonello Satta Centanin) is a poet and author of popular short stories and novels originally from Viggiù, Italy. While he received critical acclaim for Addio mio novecento [Goodbye to My Twentieth Century] (2014), his fourth collection of poetry was awarded the Premio Cesare Pavese in 2015. Nove is likely most known for his cult collections of short stories such as Woobinda and the republished Superwoobinda. These two collections, along with the works of other Italian writers such as Rossana Campo and Niccolò Ammaniti, were characteristic of the Italian cannibale novelistic style.3 Later works, however, such as Amore mio infinito [My Infinite Love] (2000), stylistically and thematically distance Nove from the cannibale literary tradition. Nove’s collection of stories in Woobinda emphasizes the importance of technology in contemporary society and how it fosters posthuman allegiance, or impegno, with the fragmented subject. Written prior to the turn of the millennium, “Vibravoll” sets an early, striking standard for the ways in which technology begins to permeate post-millennial Italian fiction. In “Vibravoll,” Stefania, the main character and first-person narrator, enthusiastically explains the place of primacy which her mobile phone holds within her marital relationship to Gianni, her husband. Not only is she proud of the model, a “Sharp TQ-G400,” and its availability of options which interest her, but she also eventually receives what she considers to be the most exciting present of all: the gift of “Vibravoll,” or “the silent cellphone vibrator that my husband inserted into my ass on our wedding anniversary” (18).4 These are early examples of cellular technology and the consumer cachet that goes along with it. We have since come a long way from the Nokias that Stefania covets; so far, in fact, people are now turning back to flip phones and small, simplified pocket mobile phones, and away from technologically sophisticated smartphones. At this early stage of cellular technology, however, it is made clear that Stefania is well-versed in the language of her device. She has an exaggerated ability to memorize and convey the minute details of her mobile phone: “130 by 49 by 24 millimetres with a weight of 225 grams. Standard battery” (17).5 Stefania conveys

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an obsession with technology which is historically associated with men; her no-nonsense, masculine tone is juxtaposed with that of her day job: “I’m a poet and journalist for a woman’s magazine, where I edit the ‘Letters to the Editor’. Typically, the column covers insufferable sentimental issues. Always corny and banal” (17).6 Stefania’s clear disdain for her work, which centres around stereotypically feminine concerns such as poetry and copy editing for an “insufferable” and “sentimental” women’s magazine, can be escaped through both her mobile phone and her car, again two typically masculine examples of technology. Later, she states that “Then, when I leave the office, I take long car rides which relax me even more since I bought my cellphone” (17).7 As such, the mobile phone, in addition to the car as machine, acts as a false emancipator for Stefania; these two machines complement each other and allow her to escape the mundane, so-called female aspects of her daily existence working at a women’s magazine. The true sense of Stefania’s position as irrevocably powerless to the force of technology comes to full fruition when she chooses to have her mobile phone surgically implanted in her body. At the risk of sounding trite, she is the ultimate example of ‘attachment’ to her technological instrument, for she has made the machinery a part of her body. “Wo(man) as machine,” however, is far from a new concept. From early mythology onward, humans have attempted to improve, or ‘optimize’ themselves through nonhuman, external means. Indeed, Hobbes’s mid-seventeenth century Leviathan is regularly quoted for being an early example of a human subject’s subjugation to both his or her machine-like qualities (such as feeling, sense, etc.), as well as the need to regulate these according to the concepts of Appetite/Desire and Aversion.8 Likewise, Descartes’s Discourse on Method questions the feasibility of machines walking among us, pretending to be humans.9 Appearance is deceiving, in his view, and one must be wary of its seemingly indisputable reality. Descartes’s observation is unusual, and perhaps even brazen, for a man of his time, as he infers that there could be some life form beyond that which is purely of the human, made in the image of God. In Stefania’s case, her desire to surgically alter her body in order to increase principles of pleasure and happiness is a textbook example of both Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory,10 in which the technological mechanism is fused with the human body, as well as N. Katherine Hayles’s posthuman theory that disembodies the body by putting it into question. In order to

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exemplify the joy Stefania experiences from her new ‘body part,’ she exclaims the following: Suddenly Vibravoll began to vibrate, signalling a call arriving and that really intense stimulation that I never felt before in my life that I never experienced before made me go crazy I discovered how the technology of these happy times could change and improve sex so much for the better I moaned like crazy with that device in my ass. (19)11

Nove evidently seeks to exaggerate the lengths to which humans will go in order to remain attached to their various forms of technology. It is interesting that Stefania only finds pleasure through her mobile phone, and not through other erotic tools of pleasure such as a vibrator; in fact, the mechanical erotic toys which she purchases and attempts to use fail to provide the same pleasure as her mobile phone, even though they are specifically made for the type of sexual activity that Stefania and her husband engage in. While the above scenario could be understood as pure shock value, pulp-style fiction, on a deeper level Nove suggests more complex realities of the present through a Lyotardian postmodern lens. On the one hand, Nove supports Jean François Lyotard’s understanding of technology’s emphasis on “efficiency” and “maximum output.”12 Stefania is a sexually demanding and driven woman, where great pleasure results from the intense orgasms which she is only able to achieve with her cellular implement. On the other hand, the author demonstrates that contemporary machines such as the mobile phone impede established forms of social bonding.13 While one could argue that the mobile phone, in Stefania’s case, is a cyborg-style addition to her body which is meant only to provide greater pleasure and efficiency, it is clearly impeding on more human and/ or ‘natural’ forms of sexual intercourse. Throughout the dialogue, there is no mention of penetration; moreover, in the final scene, Stefania causes her husband to have an orgasm while holding his penis in her hand; she successfully does this with his own mobile phone, an Ericsson EH237, thereby excluding any chance of procreation (23). Through these examples, Nove encourages us to consider how technology has completely broken traditional social bonds by reinventing the way in which humans engage in sexual behaviour. Furthermore, the author calls into question larger concerns of human existence by posing the possibility that technology could replace all forms of natural human connection and

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procreation; in doing so, he acknowledges humanity’s willing fall into the posthuman. Following in Nove’s footsteps, Italian author, musician, and film director Andrea De Carlo has traditionally incorporated technology and media from his earliest fictional works and weaves individual narratives around these aspects of the contemporary quotidian: three of his most famous technological works are Macno (1984), Pura vita (2001), and Giro di vento [Windshift] (2004). Born and raised in Milan yet having travelled extensively across the globe, De Carlo is a popular author of commercial fiction with nineteen novels translated in twenty-six countries; his work often expresses the tensions associated with both local and global, as well as urban versus rural, societies. De Carlo’s writing is distinctive for the ways in which it expresses playful narrative form and, at times, for its embodiment of the language of technology and communication.14 Indeed, what is consistent in these works is the pervasive presence of technology and the multiple ways in which it refutes traditional pre-technological human relationships, all the while simultaneously fostering a sort of posthuman impegno with the fragmented subject. In De Carlo’s fiction, technology often acts as both a self-sustaining narrative element and as an enabler of meta-narrative. These two traits are most apparent in the novel Pura vita, in which technology, and particularly mobile technology, strongly evidences realities associated with the contemporary quotidian. First published by Mondadori in 2001, Pura vita recounts the tale of a man and his teenage companion on a road trip to the Camargue. Giovanni, a historian, seeks to escape both the pressures of reality and of daily life. His travelling companion, whose name is never revealed and who is known simply as “Lei,” loves to read, longs for a dog of her own, and lives by her CDs and mobile phone. At the same time, Giovanni is paralysed by his passionate yet troubled love affair with a woman who, in the story, is indicated with the single initial of “M.” Travelling along on their road journey, Giovanni and Lei speak randomly; it is Giovanni, however, who valiantly attempts to continually force superficial conversation with his companion out of a sense of guilt. In intensive, almost obsessive dialogue constantly interrupted by text message, e-mail, and mobile phone rings, the two travellers attempt to connect over discussions of male/female relationships, family dichotomy, and other relevant problems of the contemporary quotidian in a father/daughter-like communicative discourse.15

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Pura vita, which has been praised by Sergio Pent as indicative of De Carlo’s proficiency in “taking on the role of a psychoanalyst of our present,”16 is heavily composed of the language of technology; SMS (text messaging), e-mail, and the mobile phone are used interchangeably on a consistent basis throughout the novel. While cellular and computer technology is often currently blamed for alienating individuals, De Carlo instead incorporates a variety of technological description in order to question and/or replace traditional depictions of human contact and conversation. The centrality of the mobile phone is the driving force of the various narratives which are recounted. One need only peruse the chapter index, for example, to verify this statement. Out of sixty-two chapters, approximately twenty-five refer directly to various forms of technology in both title and chapter content. Examples of chapter titles include “Two Text Messages”; “A Phone Call”; “Five Text Messages”; “One E-Mail (Unsent),” or “The Cellphone Vibrates in the Pocket Like an Animal in Hiding” (325–326).17 From a brief glance at these titles, it is not only evident that the mobile phone acts as a driving force in the narratives, but that the human subject again assumes a secondary position to the mobile phone and must find ways in which to engage with these new, by now obligatory, technological forms. But how does a text like Pura vita demonstrate that cellular technology is crucial to a refutation of traditional human connection that instead embraces posthuman relationships? A critical look at the nature of the conversation between Giovanni and M. in “Due SMS” is particularly revealing: FROM: GIOVANNI TIME: 1.15 ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, NO ONE HAS EVER GIVEN ME BETTER ADVICE THAN YOU HAVE. REALLY. I JUST WANTED TO TELL YOU. FROM: GIOVANNI TIME: 1.29 STILL UNAVAILABLE. OH WELL … GOOD NIGHT. (157)18

In this concise SMS message, relevant concerns associated with the crisis of contemporary human connection begin to surface. On the one hand, the brevity of the dialogue demonstrates the way in which speed is now

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privileged in daily discourse. Due to the nature of SMS, which emphasizes the ability to communicate “on the run,” messages need to convey the most amount of information in the shortest time possible. Furthermore, the fragmented nature of the text which emphasizes disparate ideas, emotions, and sentiments, again forces the reader to place greater value on every word.19 As such, a lack of excessive detail and cohesiveness de-­ emphasizes continuities and modes of narration which were valued in traditional spoken discourse. Giovanni and both unnamed characters of “Lei” and “M.” have pronounced difficulties in communication.20 From an analysis of Pura vita’s text messages, new forms of technology, e-mail included, not only act as further enablers in the control of human contact and communication, but they also become the more frequently chosen forms of communication for this same reason. Instead of an SMS, at present we might choose to leave a Whatsapp or Facebook voice message. Or, we may choose to refuse response altogether. The outcome is still the same, or perhaps even worse, in that deliberate self-control of human dialogue and connection is increasingly exerted. In the language of SMS and e-mail, Giovanni and M. utilize the brevity of technological language to convey their feelings; as such, technology functions in the contemporary quotidian by providing a strong posthuman connection between human emotion and the convenience and brevity of the mobile phone. The necessity for brevity when expressing desire and emotion becomes clear in the chapter, “Una telefonata,” when Giovanni and M. are finally able to verbally communicate: M. Hey? You sleeping? G. Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. M. I only called you because I got your messages. G. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me back? M. Didn’t we say we weren’t going to hear from each other anymore? G. When? M. You never pay attention to what we say. (159)21

In the above passage the telephone, as a technological aspect of early modernity, shows a markedly different level of control that text messaging and e-mail generally provide. While the telephone can control communication in part through the ability to hang up or to put aside face-to-face contact, it still provides a space for flexible dialogue and an immediate answer. A lack of direct dialogue or response from the listener in a

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telephone conversation arouses immediate suspicion on the part of the interlocutor. M. and Giovanni express this tension in their inability to communicate effectively over the telephone, as their dialogue exposes discrepancies in their thoughts and their contradictory tone toward one another. This is especially obvious in M.’s accusation that Giovanni always “cancels,” or ignores, everything they say to each other. This action of negation can be literal, such as in the erasure of a text message, or psychological, in the sense that Giovanni disregards or discounts the value of M’s words. The inability to communicate via the mobile phone is also proven through Giovanni and his young travel companion’s ironic incapacity for communication with one another, exactly at the same moment that they lament the loss of universal communication between people in contemporary life. Upon approaching the border between France and Italy, the two begin a discussion about the lost “filo,” or thread, that keeps two humans together. “What do you mean by ‘thread?’” asks Lei.22 He replies, “Because it’s both really thin and really resistant, right? You might never see it, yet it can increase in length almost indefinitely, through time and distance, as well as through crowds of people that occupy space and cross it in every direction” (18).23 Here, Giovanni expresses a nostalgic longing for some sort of mythical thread which ties humanity together. However, the “filo,” as Giovanni envisions it, is now obsolete. Instead, the filo of connection falls to the pressure of the contemporary network, one which supports the rise of technocapitalism and which subsumes normal, or ordinary organizations and sectors of capitalist structures.24 Indeed, according to Luis Suarez-Villa, networks are key defining factors in the development of twenty-first century capitalist aesthetics: Networks are the means through which some of the vital processes of technocapitalism are articulated. Phenomena related to creativity, its reproduction, and its value rely on social mediation provided through networks.… Networks are vehicles for social mediation and agents of change. The most important networks of technocapitalism are those that help reproduce creativity. They are usually external to organizations and are greatly influenced by social mediation in their modes of control, hierarchy, and relations of power. (Suarez-Villa 2009)

Suarez-Villa reinvents McLuhan’s understanding of “the medium is the message” in positing a post-millennial interpretation of twenty-first

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century technocapitalism. “The medium” is no longer the “message”; in its place, the network is now the message.25 Giovanni’s reliance upon the network of communication with the “filo” of his cellphone has now primary place in his understanding of communicative relationships among people.26 Despite his apparent belief in the power of the filo, or the network to connect humans to one another, Giovanni instead proves to be a hypocrite; he becomes as guilty as his young companion in succumbing to pressure to answer his mobile phone, deflecting attention away from the human physically beside him. It is ironic that Giovanni fruitlessly searches for the human filo of communication, all the while fully embracing the cordless cellphone which is both a tool of communication and which lacks any physical filo. After expressing a strong belief in a human connection which Giovanni still believes to exist without the influence of technology, his and Lei’s subsequent actions instead prove that this filo is indeed a myth in contemporary society: She was about to say something, but the cellphone rings, with its silly, childish syncopated music-out of all the possible ringtones, she chose that one. Soon after, his phone rings. They both begin to speak, craning their necks away from each other toward their own windows in order to escape each other’s voices. (19)27

Giovanni is guilty of breaking the idealized bond of face-to-face communication, as he interrupts his discussion with his teenage companion and instead prioritizes the call which he receives from the mobile phone. What is particularly disturbing is that in the midst of their conversation, when Giovanni and Lei begin to have intelligent, respectful discourse with one another, the so-called filo is broken by the kitschy ringtone of the mobile phone. Furthermore, the dialogue takes place within the confines of the automobile, which, due to space constriction, should force the two to communicate. Even within the limited amount of space, however, the mobile phone is the dominating mode of communication which distracts Giovanni and Lei from a lack of quality discussion and connection. Technology, which on the surface aims to connect the two protagonists to one another, proves instead to keep them distanced. Aside from the demonstration of posthuman relationships between the mobile phone and the subject as exhibited through technological self definition, as in Nove, or in posthuman relationship, as in De Carlo, Giuseppe

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Culicchia’s 2009 novel Brucia la città proves that mobile phone’s brands and branding are inexplicably tied to the definition of the fragmented self. Considered to be one of the cannibali writers along with Nove early in his career, Turin-based Culicchia is famous as an author, translator, and essayist. His first novel, Tutti giù per terra [We All Fall Down] (2014) was awarded several notable Italian literary prizes, including the 1995 “Premio Grinzane Cavour Esordienti.” The city of Turin informs much of Culicchia’s works, as does the daily reality of an increasingly alienated and fragmented Italian youth culture. As a practice, Culicchia’s protagonist Iaio in Brucia la città lives only for the technological brands which he consumes; in Culicchia’s novel, technology subsequently reflects and upholds the social equation which Jean François Lyotard has theorized between wealth, efficiency, and, ultimately, truth: “(t)he games of scientific language become the games of the rich,” Lyotard states, “in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established” (45). Due to these considerations, fragmented subjects are required to continually struggle to keep up with these technological trends for survival; they are forced into posthuman relationships which are not content to rely upon the limitations of humanness. Furthermore, Iaio describes and defines himself based upon the brand of mobile phone he carries: his Nokia (198). His friends present themselves almost in the exact manner; for this reason, Iaio tries to distinguish himself from others by the ringtone of his Nokia. Once, when out with his friends, he remarks that suddenly, “a cellphone rang. The ringtone was that of a vintage phone, therefore it had to have been mine. I just decided to use that ringtone so I could separate myself from the masses” (19).28 This statement focuses upon the centrality of the particular ringtone of his mobile phone and alludes to the present condition of society. In considering the past within the present, the old-style telephone ringtone recalls nostalgic symbols and sounds, demonstrating how even in the contemporary quotidian, there is still an appreciation for the antique and a longing for times gone by; as the saying goes, “everything old is new again.” Also, Iaio’s situation is by now universally relatable, for as anyone who has a mobile phone knows, it is often difficult to distinguish one person’s receipt of a call from another; all iPhones come with the same ringtones, all Nokias come with the same ringtones, and so on. In order to sort out the chaos, then, one must rely upon choosing a less common sound; in this case, it is ironically the nostalgic jangle of an old-style telephone which stands out from the masses.

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Iaio’s emphasis upon distinction, which exists on a minute level through his ringtone choice, defines his identity and creates a functioning dialogue between the fragmented subject and the technological object. Furthermore, the mobile phone embodies a created, forced sense of both self and self-definition; Iaio seeks internal validation by obsessively fetishizing mobile phones and, in doing so, he renounces the possibility of ever achieving true individuality without them. Iaio recites the names of the phones almost with a religious sense of precision, noting, for instance, that in the ringtone competition previously mentioned, “Zombi’s Blackberry, the one with the extra-large format, won” (19).29 This fetishization, which seeks to individualize but instead renders the owner another commodity of the masses, is not new; Marx, in an 1842 paper on fetishism, already determined the connection between desire and commodity obsession. In this paper, it is stated that, “the material object that the fetishist worships does not possess magical powers. It cannot gratify his desires. It cannot protect him from danger. In fact, by endowing the material object with magical, life-giving properties, the fetishist deprives himself of the real powers of his own living desires” (Kaplan 2006, 133). In this sense, material objects take the place of living, “real” objects. However, by attributing so much power to commodities such as mobile phones, fetishists like Iaio ultimately alienate themselves as much from their “selves” as from the rest of society. Iaio’s fetishization and worship of the phone further supports technology’s ability to dehumanize the fragmented subject through both compliance and a false sense of power. As Byung-Chul Han has posited, the neoliberal crisis of freedom, in which technology plays an integral figure through a perceived excess of it, is manifested through the worship of technology. In a Lyotardian exercise of the false emancipation myth, technology, for Byung-Chun Han, becomes the friendly Big Brother, the enabler of auto-exploitation through compliance, positivity and a transparency which marginalizes deviant behaviour and causes people to self-­ destruct. With respect to Big Data, free will doesn’t fare much better in Han’s reasoning of technology and the human subject (in his word, human subjects as “projects”)30; today’s cellphones, harnessing the power of the internet, transform people into subjugated objects, or “things”: Indeed, persons are being positivized into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered. Needless to say, no thing can be free. But at the same

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time, things are more transparent than persons. Big Data has announced the end of the person who possesses free will. (12)

In the grand scheme of Big Data, the cellphone becomes the object which acts as the subjugator of humankind. Removed of its moral and ethical qualities, the individual subject becomes subsumed by the system as a thing. The transition is smooth, however, given that subjects fail to engage in deviant behaviour and are rendered unable to be anything more than unwitting, willing participants. Indeed, as this willingness is transferred into quasi-religious language and subject engagement: Every dispositive—every technology or technique of domination—brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects materialize and stabilize dominion. Devotion and related words mean “submission,” or “obedience.” Smartphones represent digital devotion—indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. (12)

In the above, Byung-Chul Han creates a clever parallel between the devotion to technology and that of the rosary; while the rosary acts a form of surveillance and control in life which supposedly acts as a guide leading toward the way for eternal happiness in death, the cellphone likewise leads the subject toward a false sense of emancipation and freedom. Iaio, as well as his friends, are no longer persons, but are instead relegated to things; the more they participate in, and rely upon cellphones to provide happiness, the more intensely they become enslaved to the same technology (literally) at hand. Brucia la città almost simplistically offers humans a warning, in that no matter how consumer-centric society becomes, technology still can’t buy happiness and will continue to put the human body and mind into question. The mobile phone proves this, for Iaio’s insatiable desire for the most advanced Nokia or Blackberry (or for us today, perhaps the next iPhone or Samsung Galaxy) leads to an interminable quest for that which cannot be found. The phone serves as a posthuman, contemporary apparatus which indicates the natural, pre-human need to continually search

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for greater happiness and personal satisfaction. Indeed, at the end of the novel, Iaio embodies the sense of grand disillusionment and depression which permeates urban Torino and, as an extension, the contemporary condition: What should I do? Where should I go? There’s too many people, and everyone’s looking at me. And I see myself in their eyes. Alone. I’m alone. Alone. Alone. I see her at Pistola’s table. But who the fuck cares? She’s only … a pathetic person? I search around my pocket. I grab my cellphone, pretending to answer another call (397)31

Iaio is paralysed in his sense of loss and meaninglessness, and there is no sense of any redemption or change; this, Culicchia suggests, is the tragic aspect of the contemporary condition. Indeed, Iaio remains surrounded by masses of people, and yet he continues his mantra of loneliness while seeking solace from the cellphone. This is self-destruction to which Byung-­ Chul Han refers when he states that, “(n)ow, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This self-aggression means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution in so much as depression” (7). There is a sense of deep sadness when Iaio continues to rely upon the cellphone which will never ring: “I bring the cellphone to my ear again, even if, exactly as before, no one is calling me and I’m not calling anyone. Who would call me? And who should I call?” (398).32 Over the course of his self-questioning and self-­ doubt, the answer is the same: while the cellphone as a false emancipator can provide solace in that it offers a lonely subject the feeling of never being truly “alone,” it instead reinforces the same subject’s sense of contemporary isolation and alienation. And yet, in Culicchia’s refined understanding of this same condition, Iaio continues to chant the refrain, “Fine. I’m really fine. Never been better in my life. I swear” (399).33 “The animal life is over now. The machine life has begun” (43). While O’Connell’s affirmation aims to clarify what being human “means” when navigating the chaos of the twenty-first century, it also succinctly ties with aspects of the posthuman present in contemporary Italian fiction. “Vibravoll,” Pura vita, and Brucia la città are only three of the many Italian contemporary works which exemplify both the frequent literary presence of the mobile phone and the ways in which cellular technology is manipulated, discussed, and appropriated. They particularly succeed in

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providing an apt lens which reflects how technology fosters a sense of posthuman impegno with the fragmented subject. The presence of technology in literature, including representations of physical machines such as the cellphone, emphasizes a posthuman condition often characterized by altered forms of embodiment and alienation. Simultaneously, however, literary representations of technology contribute to the breakdown, reconfiguration, and/or reimagining of traditional forms of narration through novel forms of literary experimentation which, in turn, generate new modes of narrative expression appropriate to post-­ millennium society. In Italian fiction, these new modes are particularly evident in the recent emphasis on transmedia storytelling. Wu Ming’s novels, for example, often reflect experimental fiction in the guise of the historical novel; likewise, the literature of digital nomadism, Italian literary blogs and widely disseminated graphic novels, such as unastoria by Gipi and Simone Sarasso and Daniele Rudoni’s United We Stand, altogether push the boundaries and widen the range of forms which current fiction embraces (Brook and Patti 2015). In doing so, Italian writers prove to be responding to, as well as successfully articulating, the challenges of posthuman contemporary life in “real-time.”

Notes 1. Peter Carravetta eloquently articulates this multifaceted perspective in Prefaces to the Diaphora: “In The End of Modernity, significantly subtitled ‘Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture,’” (Vattimo-ed.) acknowledges that in our times, with the perfectioning and tempestuous distribution of the means of knowledge-gathering and transmission made possible by the mass media and technology in general (including, I might add, and above all, electronic capitalism), it should be made possible to realize a universal history, the very (mad) dream of the Modern Age. But that is precisely what has become unrealizable: too many ‘centers’ dislocated along an immense planetary network, too many ‘objects’—albeit now conceived as ‘bits’ of information—to account for, indeed, a unitary conception is really unthinkable” (232). 2. I ascribe to a definition of the fragmented subject according to a Lyotardian understanding of the “death of the subject” in The Postmodern Condition, in which, “(e)ach individual is referred to himself. And each of us knows that our self does not amount to much” (15). Also, my understanding of the term “posthuman” is rooted in the critical theory of Haraway and Hayles. Finally, I refer to contemporary Italian fiction by embracing an

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American understanding of the genre, in which “contemporary” can be equated with “current” and does not refer to post-Risorgimento literature. For my ­purposes in analysing these three authors, I have deliberately limited myself to examining posthuman relationships between fragmented subjects in novels and short stories just prior to and just post-millennium, although, as we can tell by picking up current bestsellers in Feltrinelli or Mondadori, we can extend the discourse to our present condition. 3. According to Stefania Lucamante, however, the cannibali authors are a step removed from Italian pulp fiction writers in general: this is because the term pulp “does not connote the essence of their narrative approach as precisely as the term cannibalism, which conveys more accurately, they argue, the intrinsic notion of appropriation, with the subsequent mutation of previous literary approaches and tradition that lies at the core of this new narrative trend” (15). 4. “l’avvisatore silenzioso dei telefoni cellulari che mio marito mi ha messo nel culo il giorno dell’anniversario del nostro matrimonio.” I have taken liberty in translations from Italian to English throughout this article, and translations are all my own. I seek to approach the closest meaning of the author given the natural constraints of language translation. 5. “Misura 130 per 49 per 24 millimetri e pesa 225 grammi con la batteria standard.” 6. “Io sono poetessa e redattrice di un giornale femminile, dove mi occupo della rubrica della corrispondenza. Per la maggior parte si tratta di questioni sentimentali insopportabili. Trite e ritrite.” Again, I took liberty in the translation of this passage in order to convey the sentiment to the best extent in English. 7. “(a)llora, quando esco dall’ufficio faccio delle lunghe corse in macchina, che mi rilassano ancora di piú da quando ho comperato il mio telefono cellulare.” 8. “These small beginnings of Motion, within the body of Man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called ENDEAVOUR … This Endeavour, when it is toward something which causes it, is called APPETITE, or DESIRE; the later, being the generall name; and the other, oftentimes restrayned to signifie the Desire of Food, namely Hunger and Thirst. And when the Endeavour is fromward something, it is generally called AVERSION.  These words Appetite, and Aversion we have from the Latines; and they both of them signifie the motions, one of approaching, the other of retiring” (Hobbes, 1,6). 9. “Descartes,” O’Connell writes, “was also subject to what you’d imagine to be a peculiarly modern, or postmodern, preoccupation: the anxious imagination of actual machines that might pass themselves off as human. In his

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Discourse on Method, the famously rigorous austerity of his doubt is brought to bear on the contemporary vogue for automata, and its epistemological implications” (125). For further information, see both Descartes’ Treatise of Man and Discourse on Method. 10. For a more in-depth discussion of the cyborg, please see Haraway 2000. 11. “Subito Vibravoll ha incominciato a vibrare, segnalando la chiamata in arrivo e quella stimolazione cosí intensa che non avevo mai provato non avevo mai vissuto mi ha fatto impazzire ho scoperto come la tecnica di questi nostri giorni felici possa cambiare e migliorare un rapporto sessuale mugolavo pazzescamente con quell’apparecchio nel culo” (19). 12. “Technical devices originated as prosthetic aids for the human organs or as physiological systems whose function it is to receive data or condition the context. They follow a principle, and it is the principle of optimal performance: maximizing output (the information or modifications obtained) and minimizing the input (the energy expanded in the process)” (Lyotard 1984, 44). 13. For more on the sociological effects of the relationship between power, efficiency, and technology, see the chapter “Research and Its Legitimation through Performativity” (Lyotard 1984). 14. http://www.andreadecarlo.com/www.andreadecarlo.com/Bio.html. 15. De Carlo remains deliberately vague about the true nature of the relationship between the two travelling companions. 16. “Un De Carlo quasi perfetto nel suo ruolo di psicanalista del nostro presente … Un romanzo compiuto, quasi necessariamente ‘filosofico,’ in cui ognuno può confrontarsi, nei dilemmi quotidiani della propria insoddisfatta normalità” (Pent 2001). 17. “Due SMS”; “Una telefonata”; “Cinque SMS”; “Una e-mail (non inviata),” or “Il telefono cellulare gli vibra nella tasca come un animale da tana.” 18. “DA: GIOVANNI ORE: 1.15 SE CI PENSO, NESSUNO MI HA MAI DATO CONSIGLI  MIGLIORI DEI TUOI. DAVVERO. VOLEVO DIRTELO. DA: GIOVANNI ORE: 1.29 ANCORA NON RAGGIUNGIBILE. PAZIENZA. BUONANOTTE.” 19. McLuhan and Powers identified the connection between telecommunication, speed and the development of social patterns, in which communication media become extensions of ourselves: “Communication media of the future,” McLuhan and Powers write, “will accentuate the extensions of our nervous systems, which can be made disembodied and made totally collective. … For example, the new telecommunication multi-carrier cor-

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poration, dedicated solely to moving all kinds of data at the speed of light, will continually generate tailor-made products and services for individual consumers” (1984, k1013). Even though McLuhan and Powers were not specifically focused upon cellular technology per se, they foresaw how current cellular technology and video-related matter connect telecommunication and its emphasis on speed with the individual self. For a more recent reading of the cellphone, the nature of SMS and the cellphone’s emphasis on society, see also Ling 2004. 20. Two characters whose abbreviated names further indicate how technology is favoured over the “individuality” of the character. 21. “M. Pronto? Stavi dormendo? G. Si, ma non importa. M. Ti ho chiamato solo perché ho trovato i tuoi messaggi. G. Altrimenti non mi avresti chiamato? M. Non avevamo detto che non ci saremmo più sentiti? G. Quando? M. Cancelli sempre tutto quello che diciamo.” An alternate translation for “negate” could be “delete” or “erase,” both translations of the Italian word cancellare. 22. “Perché dici il filo?” 23. “Perché è una cosa molto sottile e molto resistente, no? Che puoi anche non vedere, ed è estensibile quasi senza limiti attraverso la distanza e il tempo e l’affollamento delle altre persone che occupano lo spazio e lo attraversano in ogni direzione.” 24. “The information society is part and in many ways a product of a larger phenomenon that can be referred to as technocapitalism. Technocapitalism is an evolution of market capitalism that is rooted in rapid technological innovation. Technocapitalism has harnessed science and technology to market processes to an extent never seen before in human history” (SuarezVilla n.d., 1). 25. For Suarez-Villa, the network is fundamentally connected to creativity and knowledge in an interpretation of contemporary society: “In many respects networks have become, along with such intangibles as creativity and knowledge, the lifeblood of the new organizational structures that are emerging. … Creativity and knowledge are by far the most important resources of this new era, much as raw materials, physical capital or labor power were the fundamental resources of industrial capitalism and early industrialization” (Suarez-Villa n.d., 1). 26. The reality (or illusion, depending upon your perspective) of connectedness is now a defining characteristic of the contemporary quotidian. Indeed, Rose posits network theory, and its emphasis upon hyper-connectedness, even more powerful than the human brain: “The growing profu-

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sion of links makes the brain analogy not only fashionable but inevitable. Neurons and synapses, nodes and links-figuratively speaking, the electrochemical jelly within the skull is being replicated on a far vaster scale by billions of brains connecting electronically. If each node on a network has only one connection, the distance from one node to another can be great, Barabási points out. ‘But as we add more links, the distance between the nodes suddenly collapses.’ Evan (Evan Williams, the creator of Blogger and Twitter-n.b.) is helping to collapse the world” (2012, 218). 27. “Lei fa per dire qualcosa, ma il suo cellulare suona, con la buffa musichetta sincopata che ha scelto tra le tante suonerie possibili. Subito dopo suona quello di lui. Si mettono a parlare tutti e due, ognuno inclinato verso il proprio finestrino per schemarsi dalla voce dell’altro.” 28. “Si sente un cellulare. Il trillo è in stile vecchio telefono, quindi deve essere il mio: ho appena deciso di usare questa suoneria per distinguermi dalla massa.” 29. “ … vince il Blackberry formato extralarge di Zombi.” 30. “Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves. A sense of freedom attends passing from the state of subject to that of project. All the same, this projection amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization” (Han 2017, 1). 31. “Che faccio? Dove vado? C’è troppa gente, troppa. E tutti mi guardano. E io mi vedo nei loro occhi. Solo. Sono solo. Solo. Solo. A un tavolino del Pistola avvisto lei … Ma chi cazzo se ne frega. È solo una … poverina? Mi frugo in tasca. Afferro il cellulare, fingendo di rispondere a un’altra chiamata.” 32. “Porto di nuovo all’orecchio il cellulare, anche se esattamente come prima nessuno mi sta chiamando e non sto chiamando nessuno. Chi dovrebbe chiamarmi? Chi dovrei chiamare?” 33. “Benissimo. Sto davvero benissimo. Mai stato così bene in vita mia. Giuro.”

Works Cited Brook, Clodagh, and Emanuela Patti, eds. 2015. Transmedia: Storia, memoria e narrazioni attraverso i media. Milan: Mimesis. Carravetta, Peter. 1991. Prefaces to the Diaphora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity. Indiana: Purdue University Press. Culicchia, Giuseppe. 2009. Brucia la città. Milan: Mondadori. De Carlo, Andrea. 1984. Macno. Bompiani: Milan.

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———. 2001. Pura vita. Milan: Bompiani. ———. 2004. Giro di vento. Milan: Bompiani. ———. n.d. Official Website. http://www.andreadecarlo.com/www. andreadecarlo.com/Bio.html. Descartes, René. 2003. Treatise of Man. Trans. Thomas Steele Hall. Amherst: Prometheus. ———. 2008. A Discourse on Method. Online e-Text Project Gutenberg Edition. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59/59-h/59-h.htm. Erol, Alkim. 2017. Will the Internet Be the Death of Metaphysics? Public Seminar. http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/08/will-the-internet-be-the-death-ofmetaphysics/#_ftn2. Han, Byung-Chul. 2017. Politics: Neoliberalism and the New Technologies of Power. Trans. Erik Butler. London: Verso. Haraway, Donna. 2000. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth-Century. In Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 291–324. New York: Routledge. Hayles, N.  Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. Leviathan. Vol. 1. Online e-Text Penguin Classics Edition. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm. Hongo, Jun. 2015. RoboPhone: Sharp to Sell Real Android Phones in Japan. The Wall Street Journal, October 6. https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/10/06/robophone-sharp-to-sell-real-android-phones-in-japan/. Horn, Dara. 2018. The Men Who Want to Live Forever. The New York Times, January 25. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-immortality.html. Kaplan, Louise J. 2006. Cultures of Fetishism. New York: Palgrave. Ling, Richard. 2004. The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufman Publishers. Lucamante, Stefania, ed. 2001. Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovani Cannibali Writers. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacKenzie, Donald. 1984. Marx and the Machine. Technology and Culture 25 (3, July): 473–502. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital. Vol. 1, Chapter 15. London: Penguin Books. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. 2001. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Berkeley: Gingko Press. McLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce R. Power. 1984. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Nove, Aldo. 1996. Woobinda e altre storie senza lieto fine. Rome: Castelvecchi.

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———. 1998. Superwoobinda. Turin: Einaudi. O’Connell, Mark. 2001. To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. New  York: Anchor Books. Pent, Sergio. 2001. Recensione: Pura vita. La Stampa, no. 1281. October 13. Powers, William. 2010. Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. New York: Harper Collins. Rose, Frank. 2012. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Age Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. New  York: W.W. Norton & Co. Suarez-Villa, Luis. n.d. Technocapitalism and the Information Society. The World Summit in Reflection. https://cyber.harvard.edu/wsis/Suarez-Villa.html. ———. 2009. Technocapitalism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 1998. The End of Modernity. Trans. Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Mechanized Women and Sentient Machines: Language, Gendered Technology, and the Female Body in Luciano Bianciardi and Tiziano Scarpa Eleonora Lima

“My mother was a computer” is the unsettling opening remark of one of the chapters in  Anne Balsamo’s book Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (1995, 133), dedicated to the investigation of the relationship between gender, the female body, and technologies.1 The statement is, at the same time, intentionally disconcerting and historically accurate: back at the dawn of electronics, people in charge of making elaborate calculations with the help of the first rudimental technologies were in fact called computers. Balsamo’s mother was one of these computers who happened to be predominantly women, as the job was considered mechanical rather than intellectual, and therefore in line with the kind of tasks typically assigned to women working with technologies back in the days (Abbate 2012).

E. Lima (*) Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_8

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Balsamo’s declaration is thus only confusing because of a shift in the meaning of the word computer, which passed from indicating a profession to defining a technological object. Nevertheless, the statement succeeds in questioning a number of assumptions: first, it muddles the boundaries between human and technological essence, as the sentence seems to suggest Balsamo’s mechanical origins. Second, it associates a technology generally perceived as masculine like the computer (Abbate 2003; Gill and Grint 1995, 1–28) to the maternal body, thus subverting the opposition between nature and femininity on one side, and technology and masculinity on the other. Lastly, Balsamo situates in the language the process of negotiating gender roles as well as of defining human versus technological identity, as she plays with the semantic shift of the word computer to suggest an authentic rather than a metaphorical identification between women and machines. The same convergence between language, technology, and gender emerging in Balsamo’s elaboration is the focus of the comparative analysis proposed in this chapter. Luciano Bianciardi’s novel La vita agra [It’s a Hard Life] (1962), in which the stereotypical unfeminine character of the secretary is associated with the telephone she uses—and abuses—as well as with her formulaic business-like language, is read vis-à-vis Tiziano Scarpa’s short story “Madrigale” [Madrigal] (1998). In the latter, the narrator attributes a motherly role to the first family-owned washing machine, which is responsible for his conception as well as for teaching him how to overcome his stutter. There is a twofold reason for focusing on these texts to investigate the impact of technologies on the naturalness of the female body and the materiality of language: these works propose a similar literary aesthetics and conception of the body, at least at a first reading. They indeed share a similar exuberant literary style, an expressionist usage of language, a taste for the grotesque and bodily humour, and an interpretation of sex as a positive, incoercible force. Nevertheless, the two authors attribute opposite roles to technology: Bianciardi sees it as an alienating and dangerously reifying force, whereas Scarpa rejects any substantial difference between natural and mechanical selves. Published over thirty years apart from each other, Bianciardi’s and Scarpa’s texts are both set in the same historical period, the rapid and unprecedented transformation that Italy underwent during the so-called economic boom (Cardini 2006; Castronovo 2010), a moment during which gender roles and hierarchies were profoundly reshaped, often in conjunction with technological changes (Asquer 2007; Dau Novelli 2010;

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Paris 2016). Appliances such as the telephone and the washing machine, commonly perceived as inherently feminine technologies (Berg and Lie 1995)—at least in the decade in which the texts are set—therefore became the physical objects and the metaphorical lieu around which the negotiation between women’s domestic and public selves took place. The washing machine, belonging to the category of white-goods, is immediately linked to house chores and therefore to the feminine realm, especially when considering gender division of labour in the 1960s (Asquer 2006). Similarly, the telephone is characterized as a feminine technology, both in the private and public spheres, as it is linked to the professions of secretary and telephone operator—whose essential virtues of affability and courtesy are perceived as inherently female—as well as to the stereotypical image of the talkative and gossipy woman (Martin 1991; Rakow 1992; Frissen 1995). Bianciardi and Scarpa hence chose to analyse technologies not simply perceived as feminine, but also able to reshape what femininity should look like, since both the telephone and the washing machine granted women more independence in the form of more time for themselves, easier access to communication, but also new expectations and rules of conduct, at home and in the workspace. This chapter  aims at analysing the ideological premises guiding Bianciardi and Scarpa respectively in their definitions of feminine corporeality and the role of language in relation to technological advances. The goal is hence to illustrate how these connections, rather than being cogent, are determined by each author’s peculiar elaboration. Through close reading of the negotiation process taking place in the two texts, this analysis ultimately aims at demonstrating how literature actively shapes the social meaning and cultural role of technologies rather than merely reflecting— either by welcoming or contesting it—the posthuman shift towards a non-­ binary understanding of the relationship between subject and object, humans and technology.

1   The Milanese Secretary, Her Telephone, and the Loss of Femininity in Bianciardi’s La vita agra

When considering Bianciardi’s entire production, the parodic and grotesque persona of the secretary emerges as a recursive character, who made her  first appearance in the newspaper article “Segretaria milanese,”

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published in l’Unità in 1957, then in the autobiographical novel L’integrazione in 1960, and at last in La vita agra, two years later (Soldateschi 2010, 202–203). According to Bianciardi, stiffness, lack of sensual curves, and comically authoritarian ways are the peculiar features that any secretary needs to possess in order to adapt to the new productive urban life. However, in La vita agra unfeminine appearance and domineering behaviours are pushed to the limit as these women are depicted as no more than larger-than-life caricatures, who have lost their individuality and authenticity. This type of “female spoiler” (Bianciardi 1965, 108), or intasatrice aziendale (Bianciardi 1962, 124) as Bianciardi calls her, displays two main traits: one concerning her physical appearance, the other her way of speaking. The narrator illustrates how the female body, innately sensual and curvaceous, or fertile and maternal, and therefore prepared to take on the reproductive duties assigned to women by Nature, is degraded into an emaciated and asexual version of femininity, which the secretary-type embodies to the fullest. Her formulaic description emerges in many passages of the novel and the narrator even warns the reader about this dreadful type of women infesting modern companies: But you do see those little typists, who are the real back-bone of the import-­ export trade, of commerce and of the tertiary and quaternary occupations. With their skinny legs and flat behinds and chests, they trip about all day long on their stiletto heels on the shining, polished office floors, and then along the strip of pavement as far as the tram stop. (Bianciardi 1965, 102–103)2

The modern ethos that recognizes productivity and efficiency as core values has been introjected by these women to the point that their physical features reflect the moral perversions of the system. Significantly, Bianciardi’s descriptions focus on their inexpressive faces, a sign of their lack of humanity and liveliness, and their skinny legs, breasts, and bottoms, all signs of an unhealthy and degraded femininity. In contrast with these scrawny bodies is the image of the narrator’s partner, Anna, the Roman girl, whose florid beauty is to be interpreted as yet another sign of her superior otherness compared to the consumerism-prone and workaholic people of Milan. A further example of positive femininity is embodied by the women living in the protagonist’s hometown in Tuscany, whom he longingly reminisces. If the secretaries embody the alienating

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artificiality of modern life, these women, instead, like fertility goddesses, stand for the protagonist’s heimat, as well as for an idyllic, pre-consumeristic world, in which women’s attractiveness depends on their fertility and closeness to nature, rather than on standards imposed by the beauty industry. Already deprived of their femininity, the secretaries of La vita agra have also acquired a nonsensical language, full of corporate jargon and stereotypical expressions, as well as a ridiculously artificial diction that Bianciardi parodies: “Your name please,” they would say, with the same slurring of vowels, before consenting to put you through. You had to tell her your name and your business, otherwise she would get on her high horse and say: “I see, so you don’t wish to co-operate with me,” and that is as far as you would get with your call. Just let one of these little girls with her skinny legs and earthy complexion gain control of an insignificant piece of apparatus and she will make the whole firm completely subordinated to her. (1965, 107)3

Bianciardi’s comical rendition of the secretaries’ elocution, unfortunately lost in the English translation,  beside caricaturizing an already derided character, aims at showing the dehumanizing effects of technology, as the secretaries have been turned into robot-like figures who repeat the same formula in loop and have lost the human ability to interact and adapt to the conversation. Although both secretaries and telephones are expected to connect people and make communication easier, they end up being a hindrance to the whole process. The telephone, even when not analysed in relation to the persona of the secretary, functions in the novel as the technological emissary at the service of capitalism. A telling example of this is the recurrent scenes in which Anna and the protagonist literally barricade themselves inside their bedroom in order to escape the pressing phones calls. In La vita agra, the telephone is hence charged with isolating people who feel less inclined to meet friends in person when they can reach them via the new machine. Furthermore, people live in constant fear of messages coming through the telephones, since the callers are usually creditors or persistent vendors: the capitalist imperative of buying and consuming has found a way of intruding the private space by way of technological means. Thus, the very tool created to enhance communication serves the opposite end and that is precisely what happens to the secretaries too, as

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they are completely assimilated to the telephone and, transitively, to the philosophy of tertiary and quaternary companies for which they work. Their job, their stereotypical language, and the technology they use have a symmetrical function: they all deny any possible connection between signs and meanings, since their communication is devoid of any content, and they all work to sever the link between means and purposes, as both the secretary and the phone distort, when not obstruct, the communication. The secretary’s body bears no sign of positive womanhood, her language does not communicate, but repeats confusing, nonsensical formulas, and the telephone does not serve its intended purpose, but quite the opposite. Likewise, sterility also marks the new economic model, whose abomination the narrator often decries, as it does not support the production of goods or even services, but merely perpetuates the power relationships of which the secretaries want to become a part.4 The telephone is their only weapon, as it allows them to slide into the gears of company life by acquiring the power of impeding any form of communication. Significantly, Bianciardi does not see women’s acquisition of agency in the workplace— a space perceived as quintessentially masculine—as a form of emancipation, but rather as the origin of the deeply worrisome degradation of femininity. Following the passage describing their job and role within the company is a long description regarding the sexual and marital life of the typical secretary. Not unexpectedly, she is said to be a frigid, insensitive deceiver, who marries only for economic convenience, has sex with her husband briefly and once a week, is intolerably aggressive and demanding when menstruating, and lacks any maternal instinct, to the point that, as the narrator explains, it is not uncommon that pregnant secretaries give birth in their office because they are literally incapable of letting the telephone go: an extreme attempt to domesticate bodily functions and to pervert even the most natural cycles in the hope of adapting human biology to the frenetic work rhythms, which effectively summarizes the abyss reached by neo-capitalist society. Reluctantly maternal when not asexual, workaholic, and enslaved to the machine to which they eerily resemble—such are the Milanese secretaries of La vita agra. What emerges is an essentialist vision that relies on a dichotomy between nature, fertility, and femininity on the one hand, and technology, aridity, and masculinity on the other, as the secretaries aspire to be equated with men and therefore absorb their features. Indeed, Bianciardi’s protagonist believes in the ontological proximity between

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women and nature to the point that, in the description of the utopic world based on an “anti-agitative and copulatory neo-Christianity” (Bianciardi 1965, 158),5 women take on the role of fertile and sexually ready animals, while men are in charge of children’s education: Women will grow fatter still because of their frequent pregnancies, and their children will be the children of everyone and will perfume the earth. We shall watch them growing up strong and sturdy, and we shall teach them the arts of singing, conversation, friendship, love and sexual intercourse as soon as they reach the appropriate age. (Bianciardi 1965, 157–158)6

This exact same identification between masculinity and culture on the one hand and femininity and nature on the other is also the reason why, while secretaries are transformed and deformed by the telephone, working men are instead alienated and exploited, but without ever losing the core of their natural selves. Technology might enslave men, but does not denature them. The deep connection between femininity and nature also emerges from the language used to describe women in the novel: whether the narrator is praising the lush beauty of the girls from his hometown, or ridiculing the appearances and manners of the Milanese ladies, his words belong to the semantic field of animals. The secretaries, with their pale faces, are compared to hairy worms and they keep their “paws” on the switchboards. The housewives at the supermarket resemble chickens—“picking like a lot of chickens in a model poultry yard” (Bianciardi 1965, 166)7—while the female cashiers are like little tortoises, with fingers like grasshoppers (ibid.). Zoomorphism also occurs when describing women who have retained their natural traits but are reminiscent of cattle as they are said to be mansuete, grasse, feconde, and fecondate. This linguistic tendency, rather than being peculiar to Bianciardi, has been identified by some ecofeminists (Griffin 1978, 67; Dunayer 1995) as one of the revealing signs of the double exploitation perpetrated by men. The contempt for both groups, animals and women, is evident when the latter are compared to the former with a clear degrading intent. Additionally, recourse to adjectives and verbs connected to the animal realm in order to compliment women is a way of reinforcing gender hierarchies, given that animals in Western culture are always considered inferior to humans, even when loved and praised.

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What matters here is not to prove Bianciardi’s chauvinism—which is quite evident and beyond the point—but rather to reflect on how his use of animal-based metaphors, in order to describe both natural and distorted ways of embodying femininity, reveals a discursive conception of naturalness, emerging in spite of the narrator’s declared beliefs. The same contradiction arises from the paragraph dedicated to the high-heeled shoes worn by secretaries, as another of their recurring and peculiar features. High-heeled shoes represent a sort of vestigial and degraded femininity which render the secretaries’ aspect even more grotesque. Bianciardi dedicates an entire passage to explaining the history of the heels and how they were originally invented in order to give women “a sexy and captivating carriage” (Bianciardi 1965, 103)8 by moving their body’s barycentre in order to obtain the same result of the foot-binding practice in ancient China. A sensual walk, though, is incompatible with the rhythm of a hyperactive urban life; therefore the Milanese secretaries’ desire to combine a feminine look with efficiency creates a monstrum. Instead of the sinuous stride usually associated with high-heeled shoes, what the secretaries manage to perform is a hasty and stiff walk which provokes “an ungraceful, jerky movement that ends up in [their] cheeks and makes them vibrate in a grotesque and ugly manner” (Bianciardi 1965, 103).9 As first theorized by Marshal McLuhan, clothes are indeed an extension of the human body not unlike any other technological tool (1964, 119–122). Hence, considering the protagonist’s condemnation of the perverting power of the telephone, it is quite interesting that he does not see any wrong in the use of high-heeled shoes, which is also a very invasive technology transforming the naturalness of the female body. What makes a technology acceptable is clearly its conformity not with the natural essence of womanhood—supposing it exists—but rather with the narrator’s personal idea of what a natural woman should be. Therefore, when a technology like the heels help enhancing femininity, such technology becomes empowering rather than perverting. Similarly, while the telephone has the power to dehumanize women working with it, Anna’s typewriter, instead, cannot affect her true self: no matter that she spends hours typing without pause, she will never be turned into a machine, only into a tired, exploited worker. It is thus evident that, behind the essentialist position displayed by the autobiographical internal narrator, a more discursive approach towards the relationship between female body and technology emerges, hence revealing the negotiating role of language in a process that otherwise might have seemed naturally inescapable.

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2   My Mother Is a Washing Machine: Muddling with Identities in Scarpa’s “Madrigale” The identical short-circuit between biological and mechanical identities created by Balsamo in the remark about her computer mother also opens “Madrigale,” as the first-person narrator states: “I am the son of a brand-­ new Rex washing machine, dragged up the stairs by two porters with the only force of their profanities” (Scarpa 1998, 52).10 As in Balsamo’s case, though, logic is soon restored when the character further explains that, excited by the purchase of the new appliance, his parents decided to celebrate by having sex on the washing machine and ended up conceiving him. If this logical explanation proves that the narrator is not really a cyborg, it nevertheless succeeds in lending an artificial quality to his birth, as his conception does not come from an act of love or from the desire to form a family, but rather is the direct consequence of the economic boom frenzy. It  would be inaccurate to attribute to Scarpa the same disdain Bianciardi felt towards the new economic course and its consequent social changes. Nonetheless, the protagonist’s techno-economic genealogy undoubtedly functions as a badge of infamy, at least in the eyes of the father who keeps reminding his son of it, in order to mortify him: “Before the throat surgery left him voiceless, Attilio always said that I am the son of a pay rise. You shut up, you son of a pay rise” (ibid.).11 The arrival of the washing machine in the family undoubtedly taints the protagonist’s origins as it causes what he calls his “maculate conception” (Scarpa 1998, 54).12 However, contrary to what happens in La vita agra, the new technology does not generate alienation or perversion to the naturalness of the mother’s womanhood, but rather boosts and liberates her sexual vitality. The washing machine is in fact the bearer of fertility and pleasure, as it functions—in line with a common sexual fantasy—as a sex toy, which therefore enhances corporeality rather than constituting a dehumanizing tool. Before mistaking Scarpa for a cyberfeminist, it is worth pointing out that the washing machine–assisted intercourse is clearly the result of his Rabelaisian style and taste for paradox, which often results in exaggerated bodily and sexual images (Bazzocchi 2005, 197–202). Nevertheless, elements of vitality and positive corporeality are definitively  emerging from this depiction, which visually combines and symbolically harmonizes feminine and technological bodies, rather than putting them in contrast:

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October 1962. … Attilio (say it in your own words) put my mother over the Rex washing machine, as naked as my grandma made her. Attilio then slipped into her, while she was riding the spin-cycle of the Rex washing machine as one would ride a mechanical rodeo bull. (Scarpa 1998, 53)13

Beside the author’s undeniable pleasure in creating larger-than-life images, like the washing machine turned into a mechanical rodeo bull, technology in “Madrigale” is indeed regarded as a benign presence and a much-­ needed help in fulfilling the needs of a modern family, be it laundry or procreation: the brand-new washing machine releases the woman from the effort of having to wash clothes by hand—“Since October ’62, my mother didn’t have to work hard anymore to wash by hand the bedsheets in the laundry basin” (Scarpa 1998, 54)14—and the man from the labour of sex: “It takes two minutes of spin-cycle for Attilio’s pipe to give in to a nervous collapse” (ibid.).15 While the traditional division of gendered labour is left unchallenged, what is instead put into question is the association of the washing machine with femininity, since the technological aid seems to be needed more by the otherwise sexually deficient husband rather than by an eager and frisky wife. Alongside procreation, the machine accomplishes a second and equally important function, as it teaches the protagonist to overcome his stutter. Having trouble enunciating words, the child follows a self-invented therapy in which he sits resting his back against the washing machine and, when the spin cycle starts, he begins talking, as the rhythmic bumps allow him to articulate words otherwise impossible to utter. Having started with easy words he then moves on to more complex, longer ones: At first, I trained myself at endlessly repeating simple and mononuclear words, “mum mum mum mum mum mum.” Then, I dealt with by-syllabic words, made of soft and pliable consonants, “ma rine ma rine ma rine,” “mo ther mo ther mo ther”; at last, thanks to all the punches, I managed to put together complex words that I used to collect in my personal dictionary without definitions, “mo ther of pearl mo ther of pearl,” “ma dri gal ma dri gal.” (Scarpa 1998, 59)16

In the context of our analysis of the impact of technologies over language, it is important to observe how the perfectly mimetic rendition of the narrator’s unnatural parlance—which continues for several paragraphs—takes on a completely different meaning compared to Bianciardi’s comic

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reproduction of the secretaries’ typical way of talking. The washing machine, like the telephone, alters the speaker’s pronunciation, but here the mechanical tool is essential for the communication to happen, rather than being an impediment. Likewise, the faithful rendition of the child’s utterance is neither a grotesque parody nor a satire of the dehumanizing power of technology. Moreover, the washing machine does not simply teach the narrator to express himself, but, through the free association of random words, it enables the protagonist to create poetic images, which emerge in all their beauty in contrast with, but also as a result of, the child’s stutter. In what might resemble a Mallarméan experiment, the narrator creates chains of words, all having to do with the semantic field of maternity, and it is precisely this machine-propelled poetic utterance that treats him. The washing machine, responsible for the gift of life and speech, clearly fulfils a motherly function as it does not merely teach her stuttering stepson how to speak, but it also does so by having him repeat his natural mother’s words: more specifically, the expressions she uses while having sex on the washing machine  and that the child overhears. The washing machine works as an intermediary between mother and son and it therefore functions as the Lacanian mirror, being the external object that enables the child to recognize himself in his mother, a process which will consequently lead him to acquire his own identity through language (Lacan 1977, 1–7). Indeed, the entire text can be read as a psychoanalytic narration of the protagonist’s journey from his conception to the just mentioned mirror stage—a preverbal phase of full identification between son and Mother—to the concluding moment when the protagonist enters the Symbolic Order, or, in his words, “the headache world” (Scarpa 1998, 69),17 by accepting the law and the name of the Father. The washing machine plays a central role in each of these stages, but its identification with the maternal or paternal figure is constantly put into question and reversed. The relationship between father and son is marked by antagonism and competitiveness: the protagonist stubbornly calls his father by his first name, as if he did not want to recognize his paternal authority, and Attilio repeatedly reminds him of his conception using a crude narrative that amounts to boasting about his manliness. Furthermore, Attilio is pure corporeality, a functioning body excluding any form of intellectual creation—“Attilio does not think, he only conceives” (Scarpa 1998, 54)18— in sheer contrast with his son’s inability to express himself either verbally

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or sexually. In fact, the protagonist is incapable of declaring his love to his classmate, Margherita Mardegàn, a love confession which is rendered even more arduous by the difficult pronunciation of the girl’s name. However, the child finally succeeds in conquering both language and girl, hence taking the place of his father, whose metaphorical defeat is achieved when he loses his voice following the already mentioned throat surgery. Referring back to the possible psychoanalytic reading, one could interpret the character of Margherita Mardegàn, the protagonist’s sweetheart, through Julia Kristeva’s definition of “abject body.” Kristeva defines as “abject” anything that upsets the Symbolic Order by letting emerge a primordial chaos that incites both repulsion and attraction because of its forbidden nature. In Kristeva’s theorization, the types of body bearing the signs of this abjection—the sick body, the cadaver, and the female body— repel us because they disturb identity, system, and order, and thus do not respect borders, position, and rules (1982, 4). Furthermore, abjection is connected with defilement and this proceeds from certain bodily fluids that the “unruly” bodies secrete, especially menstrual blood and excrement, which upset the boundaries between inside and outside that an orderly body should respect. Margherita Mardegàn is clearly depicted as the quintessential abject body theorized by Kristeva: the first time her character is introduced in the story she has just urinated all over herself in front of the entire classroom in reaction to the teacher shouting at her to “blow that disgusting nose,”19 an order she obeys by blowing her nose in the now pee-soaked smock. If this episode corresponds to the highest degree of degradation reached by Margherita, her character is also characterized by a more general lack of conformity with the standards defining an ordered and harmonious body. Both her eyes and her limbs are incapable of control, as she is cross-eyed and unable to behave properly while in class. Her unruly body, though, rather than being a handicap, is perceived as a resource, as it shields her from the aggressive authority of her teacher. Accordingly, while the protagonist sees his stutter as an impediment and works hard to correct it, Margherita, instead, displays a constant defiance for standards of appearance and behaviour, and this insubordination seems to be at the origin of the protagonist’s fascination with her. While the inadequacy felt by the protagonist is alien to Margherita, they nevertheless are both outcasts, as they do not conform to the norm. It is in this respect that the washing machine plays a crucial role in normalizing both the boy and the girl. Thanks to some intensive therapeutic sessions

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with the machine, the protagonist is finally able to utter his love message to Margherita. After an initial lack of responsiveness, Margherita decides to show her benevolence by donating him her snotty handkerchief, which he welcomes with the utmost accepting love: “I stare in her lenses that make her look like an orphan baby elephant and I smother her dirty handkerchief with kisses, from side to side” (Scarpa 1998, 67).20 After this initial reaction, though, the protagonist is challenged with a decision: he can fully embrace Margherita’s abjection or he can normalize her the same way he taught himself to overcome his stutter. To follow the first option, though, would equal to the disruption of every norm, a total subversion of the order, and he finally lacks the courage to take such a path: “the entire world would have exploded if only I had sucked the fabric of the handkerchief in front of her” (Scarpa 1998, 68).21 The boy is therefore left with his second option: bringing the dirty tissue home, putting it in the washing machine, ironing it, and bringing it back to his beloved the day after. This gallant gesture, which puts into question the gendered labour associated with the washing machine, brings along some unexpected consequences: by providing Margherita with a clean and ironed handkerchief every day, the protagonist succeeds in domesticating her unruly body, which consequently loses its attractiveness. The washing machine, once embodying the maternal role as it generated the boy and taught him how to speak, is finally transformed into the paternal figure which restores the order by imposing the Law and therefore determining the boy’s entrance into the Symbolic Order. Following the description of Margherita’s new, proper self, the protagonist also reveals his novel identity, which he assumes in consequence of the girl’s transformation: “from that day on, I started signing my school assignments as Romolo Rex and, at the same time … I entered forever into the headache world” (Scarpa 1998, 69).22 The Name of the Father that the protagonist appropriates, Rex, is the brand name of the washing machine, whose maternal role is nevertheless still evoked via the name Romolo: like Rome’s mythical founding father, the boy was raised by a non-human mother, here a machine rather than a she-wolf. Until the very end, the gendering process of the washing machine is thus put into question, as the technology is at the same time a fatherly and a motherly figure, a tool that restores order, both in the house and in the body, but also liberates exuberant corporeality. Similarly, language is creative and imaginative, but also prescriptive and castrating, revealing how discursivity is not an endlessly malleable tool, but rather constructed and constantly renegotiated just as much as hard technologies and fluid gender roles.

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3   What Language for Goddesses and Cyborgs? The sterile and robotic secretary, made so by her compulsive use of the telephone, and the maternal washing machine, which gives life and speech at least until it turns into a father-like figure, undeniably present two very distant attempts of gendering technology and naturalizing corporeality— either biological or mechanical—through literary discourse. In denouncing the perverting and dehumanizing influence of the machine, Bianciardi displays an essentialist view of gender and a materialistic concept of nature, while Scarpa, challenging the boundaries between human and mechanical identities, as well as between gender roles and different ways of embodying corporeality, embraces a discursive approach. In line with their respective positions, the two authors also hold different visions about the role and nature of language. The two texts, as emerged from the passages discussed earlier, present similar stylistic features, as they both develop around the autobiographical account of a first-person narrator, who shares many details with the real author, and whose language can be described as a linguistic pastiche (Guerricchio 1992; Sinisbaldi 1997, 74ff. Laporta 2001, 62ff. Castaldi 2007). Both La vita agra and “Madrigale” indeed recur to a constant overlapping of high and low registers, to quotations and references from pop culture, as well as from famous literary masterpieces, and to terms in different Italian dialects. This chaotic combination, which obviously derives from the two authors’ common predilection for an expressive language and a comic-realistic style, also serves a second purpose, which is nevertheless antithetical as it mirrors Bianciardi’s and Scarpa’s diverging attitude towards technology. In La vita agra, as already established, technology is responsible for the process of dematerialization, which affects healthy corporeality. Likewise, the proliferation of languages and registers creates a Tower of Babel effect, which renders communication impossible and deprives language of real meaning. One of Bianciardi’s most pressing preoccupations, as often observed by his critics (Terrosi and Gessani 1985, 49ff.; Grignani 1992, 89–108), was indeed the deteriorating effect that sociocultural changes, in conjunction with the rapid economic growth of the late 1950s, was having on the Italian language. A preoccupation which he shared with, among others, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the harshest critic of the “cultural genocide,” and Italo Calvino, who dedicated a famous article to the analysis of what he called “anti-language,” the more devoid of any

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communicative power, the more taxonomic and prescriptive they were (1964). In La vita agra, however, Bianciardi extends more generally his suspicion towards any form of language, considered a corrupting force in itself as it distances people from Nature by over-intellectualizing through discursiveness what instead should be immediate and authentic. A very significant example of the clash between language and corporeality is to be found in the very last passage of the novel, when the protagonist, a professional translator, is about to have sex with Anna, but gets distracted and starts wondering about how to resolve a difficult passage: Yes, that’s right, that “plop” is just the word I needed. It occurs again a few pages further on. Shall I be able to use it again? The soft blob of light plopped and burst on the open page. That’s when the General Gragnon is reading Gil Blas. I remember. The soft blob of light plopped and burst on the open page. Like the light that Anna puts out before coming into my bed. And I too shall soon plop and burst. So the word’s all right, isn’t it? Then comes the sleep, and for six hours I’m not there any more. (Bianciardi 1965, 119)23

The two acts of sex and translation are here compared because of their mechanized rituality, as the protagonist performs both as part of his daily routine. The lines from William Faulkner’s A Fable (1954), which Bianciardi actually translated in 1971, undergo quite a drastic lowering of the register as they come to describe the protagonist’s ejaculation. In this case, though, superimposition of bodily functions and great literature does not liberate any subversive, Rabelaisian energy, but quite the opposite. Sex, once considered by the protagonist as quintessentially natural, antieconomic, and dissipative—thus the most rebellious act against the commodification of life—is now one with the act of translation, which is symbolic of a double degeneration. First, it represents the commodification of literature and culture in general, as the protagonist’s job resembles factory work rather than a creative activity (Ferretti 2000, 60–61). Second, it comes to epitomize the progressive loss of language’s communicative power, expressed through the doubts about the right translation hunting the narrator. What Bianciardi denounces, then, is what Marcuse calls “repressive sublimination,” meaning the way in which the new capitalist society pretends to democratize access to culture and to liberate sex from traditional restrictions through the recourse to technology and mass media, when instead the goal is to empty both art and corporeality of their subversive and erotic power (Marcuse 1964, 59–86), a perversion even

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more evident when acted upon women’s bodies as they are considered by Bianciardi closer to nature. If eroding the ontological links defining discourse and corporeality leads to dehumanized characters and language failure in La vita agra, the opposite can be said about Scarpa’s short story, which celebrates the instability of the correspondence between signs and meanings. For Scarpa, linguistic pastiche does not symbolize the worrisome hypertrophic growth of empty terminologies and jargons, but rather the protean nature of life. More exactly, the exuberance of language does not simply translate the experience of the subject, but rather defines it and shapes it. Such a discursive nature of identity, postulated by Scarpa in his work well beyond “Madrigale” (Lago 2009), unequivocally echoes Donna Haraway’s definition of the cyborg, the hybrid human and mechanical subject representing “a move away from self-contained, embodied, speaking human” (Miller 2014, 322). In her famous Manifesto, Haraway defines the essence of a new posthuman approach in the “reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world” (1991, 150). Similarly, in his novel Occhi sulla graticola, Scarpa’s female protagonist defines herself as a cyborg, not because of any mechanical prosthesis, but because of the discourses populating her identity: My soul is a cyborg, an organism full of stories imagined by someone else and then transplanted into my identity like some prosthesis, some synthetic organs: from jokes to poems, from telenovelas to advertisements. (Scarpa 1996, 59)24

It is interesting to note how Scarpa’s character leads a similar professional life to the protagonist of La vita agra, as she too works for a demanding publishing house—in her case specialized in Japanese pornographic comics—and, as a result of being overworked, her identity too ends up conflating with the texts assigned to her. What is more, she is tasked with redrawing the characters’ previously censored genitals, thus shaping sexuality through the artifice of art. Language, in its broadest sense, rather than dehumanizing Scarpa’s characters, is what instead shapes and allows embodiment: in “Madrigale” the child develops his identity through the acquisition of his mothers’ words, uttered by his biological mother and transmitted and taught by his mechanical one. Furthermore, in Attilio’s case, opposite to what happens in La vita agra, sexual generation and

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discursiveness are indistinguishable, as for each thought he conceives he is said to produce a sperm. Therefore in “Madrigale”, not differently than in La vita agra, language needs to be embodied in order to communicate, and so does gender. The crucial difference is, however, that if Bianciardi restricts the possibility of gender embodiment and discourse to those whom he recognizes as their “natural” subjects—respectively women and humans—Scarpa, instead, postulates the possibility for discourse and gender to be a prerogative of mechanical subjects too. In this context the washing machine, capable of embodying different parental roles and gendered functions, as well as of producing communication, brings to mind the computer described by Alan Turing in his famous test “The Imitation Game.” As Katherine Hayles acutely points out, what Turing’s thought experiment put into question was not simply the distinction between human and mechanical nature—challenged by the still open question “Can machine think?” (Turing 1950, 433)—but, more radically, what gender has to do with embodiment. Turing imagined three players for his test, a man, a woman and a computer: each of the human subjects had to guess the identity of the player on the opposite side only by posing questions and evaluating responses. Although the goal of the test is to question humans’ monopoly over rational thought and expression, since the player could incorrectly assign human identity to the machine or vice versa, the same mistake could also happen in relation to gender. The Turing test, in Hayles’s interpretation, therefore succeeds in disconnecting gender identity and embodiment as it proves that “the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural inevitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject” (1999, xiii). The impossibility to detach technological and human self is also what happens in “Madrigale,” in which the protagonist seems to be playing his own version of the Imitation Game in order to assign the maternal and paternal roles to his biological parents and to the washing machine, a process in which the discursiveness of gender, and of identities more in general, is expressed both infra-diegetically and through Scarpa’s stylistic choices. An irreconcilable difference therefore lies at the bottom of La vita agra’s and “Madrigale”’s common investigation of the relationship between female bodies and technologies through the recourse of linguistic pastiche and chaotic language. The two authors’ conception of

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womanhood can in fact be subsumed under Haraway’s dualism between the traditional female archetype of the goddess and the new identity of the cyborg (1991, 181). The image of the goddess, embraced by ecofeminist thinkers, evokes “the integrity of an imagined realm of unadulterated nature,” in which women “are regarded as the springs of authentic and redemptive experience” (Graham 2007, 312). As this is perfectly in line with Bianciardi’s vision, the model of the cyborg, instead, capable of “building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space[s,] stories” (Haraway 1991, 181), perfectly captures Scarpa’s position, even though neither of the two authors is interested in the feminist implications of these theorizations. Their stances on the issues surrounding language, female embodiment, and gendered technology could not be more divergent; nevertheless, both texts display a specular negotiating process in which literature does not simply portray the current situation, but rather plays an active role in assigning meanings and roles to the different actors in play. As it emerges from the two texts analysed here, every time that literature reflects on the sociocultural role of technology it does not simply offer an artistic portrayal of the actual situation, but rather it actively shapes and defines the nature of the technological actor. Although reaching opposite conclusions, this is precisely the process of signification that both La vita agra and “Madrigale” enact.

Notes 1. Interestingly, Katherine Hayles used Balsamo’s striking statement as the title of her book dedicated to digital culture and literature My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005). 2. “Incontrerai queste dattilografette, invece, che sono la vera spina dorsale dell’import-export, del commercio, delle attività terziarie e quartarie. Secche di gambe, piatte di sedere, sfornite di petto, picchiettano dalla mattina alla sera, coi tacchi a spillo, sugli impiantiti lucidati a cera, e poi su un pezzetto di marciapiede, fino alla fermata del tram” (Bianciardi 1962, 118). 3. “‘Il suo nome per favàre’ dicono slabbrando la vocale, oppure, strizzandola: ‘Il suo nome prigo’. Devi dirgli il nome e il motivo della comunicazione altrimenti quella si impunta, ti dice: ‘Lei non vuol callaborare con me’ e non ti fa parlare, né comunicare col cammendatore. Basta che una di queste segretariette, con le sue gambette secche e il visino terreo, si impadronisca d’un pezzo di tubatura aziendale, e lo intasi, perché poi tutto si subordini a lei” (Bianciardi 1962, 123).

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4. The reference here is to the famous tirade against the “attività quartarie,” often considered the apex of the anarchist attitude of the autobiographical character of the narrator and also one of the first and most lucid analysis of post-Fordism in Italy, as maintained by the Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno (2002, 34). 5. “neocristianesimo a sfondo disattivistico e copulatorio” (Bianciardi 1962, 182). 6. “Le donne spesso fecondate ingrasseranno ancora, e i bambini da loro nati saranno figli di tutti e profumeranno la terra. Noi li vedremo venire su forti e chiari, e li educheremo alle arti canore e vocali, alla conversazione, all’amicizia, all’amore e all’intercorso sessuale, non appena siano in età a ciò idonea” (Bianciardi 1962, 182). 7. “chine come tanti polli a beccare in un pollaio modello” (Bianciardi 1962, 191). 8. “un portamento sessuato e cattivante” (Bianciardi 1962, 118). 9. “una scossa sgraziata che si scarica sulle gote e le fa sconciamente vibrare” (Bianciardi 1962, 118). 10. All English translations from “Madrigale” are mine. “Io sono figlio di una lavatrice Rex nuova fiammante, trascinata su per le scale da due facchini a forza di bestemmie.” 11. “Prima che l’operazione alla gola gli togliesse la voce, Attilio l’ha sempre detto che sono figlio di un aumento di stipendio. Taci tu, che sei figlio di un aumento di stipendio.” 12. “maculata concezione.” 13. “Ottobre 1962. […] sopra la lavatrice Rex, Attilio ci ha sistemato (dillo con parole tue) mia madre, nuda come mia nonna l’ha fatta. Attilio si è intromesso dentro di lei, mentre mia madre montava la centrifuga della lavatrice Rex come si monta un toro meccanico da rodeo.” 14. “Dall’ottobre del ’62 in poi, mia madre non ha più avuto bisogno di sbattere a viva forza di braccia le lenzuola matrimoniali nel catino del bucato.” 15. “Due minuti di centrifuga, e la tubatura di Attilio si arrende al collasso nervoso” (Scarpa 1998, 54). 16. “In un primo tempo mi sono allenato a ripetere all’infinito parole semplici e mononucleari, ‘ma ma ma ma ma ma ma.’ In un secondo tempo ho affrontato parole bisillabe impastate di consonanti tenere e cedevoli ‘ma re ma re ma re,’ ‘ma dre ma dre ma dre,’ finché, a forza di scossoni, sono riuscito a mettere insieme parole complesse che collezionavo in un mio ­personale dizionario senza definizioni, ‘ma dre po ra ma dre po ra ma dre po ra’, ‘ma dri ga le ma dri ga le ma dri ga le’” (Scarpa 1998, 59). 17. “nel mondo del mal di testa” (Scarpa 1998, 69). 18. “Attilio non pensa, concepisce” (Scarpa 1998, 54). 19. “soffiarsi quello schifo di naso” (Scarpa 1998, 66).

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20. “Le pianto gli occhi su quelle lenti da elefantino orfano e sbaciucchio da un orlo all’altro il suo fazzoletto sporco” (Scarpa 1998, 67). 21. “tutto il mondo sarebbe esploso se solo io avessi succhiato la stoffa del suo fazzoletto davanti a lei” (Scarpa 1998, 68). 22. “da quel giorno ho iniziato a firmare i miei compitini in classe con il nome di Romolo Rex e, allo stesso tempo … sono entrato per sempre nel mondo del mal di testa” (Scarpa 1998, 69). 23. “Dev’essere così: quel plopped è uno sbottò. Ma più avanti come la metto? È lo stesso plopped, no? Dice: the soft blob of light plopped and burst on the open page. È quando Gragnon sta leggendo Gil Blas, lo ricordo. La morbida bolla di luce gocciò e si ruppe sulla pagina aperta. Come quella che spenge Anna prima di venire nel mio letto. E anch’io, tra poco, sbotto e goccio. Dunque quel plopped va bene così, no? Poi il sonno è già arrivato e per sei ore io non ci sono più” (Bianciardi 1962, 218). 24. The translation is mine. “La mia anima è un cyborg, un organismo pieno di storie immaginate da qualcun altro e trapiantate nella mia identità come delle protesi, degli organi sintetici: dalla barzelletta al poema, dalla telenovela allo spot” (Scarpa 1996, 59).

Works Cited Abbate, Janet. 2003. Women and Gender in the History of Computing. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25 (October): 4–8. ———. 2012. Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Asquer, Enrica. 2006. La ‘Signora Candy’ e la sua lavatrice. Storia di un’intesa perfetta nell’Italia degli anni Sessanta. Genesis 5 (1): 97–118. ———. 2007. La rivoluzione candida. Storia sociale della lavatrice in Italia (1945–1970). Rome: Carocci. Balsamo, Anne M. 1995. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bazzocchi, Marco Antonio. 2005. Corpi che parlano. Il nudo nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Milan: Mondadori. Berg, Anne-Jorunn, and Merete Lie. 1995. Feminism and Constructivism: Do Artefacts Have Gender? Science, Technology, & Human Values 20 (3): 332–351. Bianciardi, Luciano. 1957. Segretaria milanese. l’Unità. ———. 1960. L’integrazione. Milan: Bompiani. ———. 1962. La vita agra. Milan: Rizzoli. ———. 1965. It’s a Hard Life. Trans. Eric Mosbacher. New York: The Viking Press. Calvino, Italo. 1965. Per ora sommersi dall’antilingua. Il Giorno, February 3. Now in: Calvino, Italo. 1980. Una pietra sopra, 122–126. Turin: Einaudi. Cardini, Antonio, ed. 2006. Il miracolo economico italiano. Bologna: il Mulino.

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Castaldi, Simone. 2007. Tra pulp e avanguardia: realismo nella narrativa italiana degli anni Novanta. Italica 84 (2/3, Summer–Autumn): 368–381. Castronovo, Valerio. 2010. L’Italia del miracolo economico. Bari: Laterza. Dau Novelli, Cecilia. 2010. Le miracolate del benessere. In Il miracolo economico italiano, ed. Antonio Cardini, 207–224. Bologna: il Mulino. Dunayer, Joan. 1995. Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots. In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, 11–27. Durham: Duke University Press Books. Faulkner, William. 1954. A Fable. New York: Random House. ———. 1971. Una favola. Trans. Luciano Bianciardi. Milan: Mondadori. Ferretti, Giancarlo. 2000. La morte irridente. Ritratto critico di Luciano Bianciardi uomo giornalista traduttore e scrittore. Lecce: Manni. Frissen, Valerie. 1995. Gender Is Calling: Some Reflections on Past, Present and Future Uses of the Telephone. In The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research, ed. Rosalind Gill and Keith Grint, 79–94. London: Taylor & Francis. Gill, Rosalind, and Keith Grint, eds. 1995. The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research. London: Taylor & Francis. Graham, Elaine. 2007. Cyborgs or Goddesses? Becoming Divine in a Cyberfeminist Age. In Virtual Gender: Technology, Consumption, and Identity, ed. Eileen Green and Alison Adam, 302–322. London: Routledge. Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New  York: Harper & Row. Grignani, Maria Antonietta. 1992. La lingua agra. In Luciano Bianciardi tra neocapitalismo e contestazione, ed. Velio Abati, Nedo Bianchi, Arnaldo Bruni, and Adolfo Turbanti, 89–108. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Guerricchio, Rita. 1992. La vita agra. In Luciano Bianciardi tra neocapitalismo e contestazione, ed. Velio Abati, Nedo Bianchi, Arnaldo Bruni, and Adolfo Turbanti, 69–88. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudinez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sherindan. New  York-­ London: W.W. Norton & Company. Lago, Paolo. 2009. Una satira menippea a Venezia: una lettura di Occhi sulla graticola di Tiziano Scarpa. Studi Novecenteschi 36 (78, July–December): 419–430. Laporta, Filippo. 2001. The Horror Picture Show and the Very Real Horrors: About the Italian Pulp. In Italian Pulp Fiction: The Narrative of the “Giovani Cannibali” Writers, ed. Stefania Lucamante, 57–75. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

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Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. London: Beacon Press. Martin, Michèle. 1991. “Hello, Central?”: Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Miller, Ruth A. 2014. Posthuman. In Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, ed. Catharine R.  Stimpson and Gilbert Herdt, 320–334. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Paris, Ivan. 2016. Domestic Appliances and Industrial Design: The Italian White-­ Goods Industry During the 1950s and 1960s. Technology and Culture 57 (3, July): 612–648. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1964. Nuove questioni linguistiche. Rinascita, December 26. Now in: Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1972. Empirismo eretico, 5–24. Milan: Garzanti. Rakow, Lana F. 1992. Gender on the Line: Women, the Telephone, and Community Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Scarpa, Tiziano. 1996. Occhi sulla graticola: Breve saggio sulla penultima storia d’amore vissuta dalla donnna alla quale desidererei unirmi in duraturo vincolo affettivo. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 1998. Amore®. Turin: Einaudi. Sinisbaldi, Marino. 1997. Pulp. La letteratura nell’era della simultaneità. Rome: Donizelli. Soldateschi, Jole. 2010. Non si vive di sola zuppa: sui racconti di Luciano Bianciardi. In Il tragico quotidiano. Papini, Palazzeschi, Cassola e Bianciardi, 193–226. Florence: Edizione Polistampa. Terrosi, Mario, and Alberto Gessani. 1985. L’intellettuale disintegrato: Luciano Bianciardi. Rome: Ianua. Turing, Alan M. 1950. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 59 (236, October): 433–460. Virno, Paolo. 2002. Grammatica della moltitudine: Per una analisi delle forme di vita contemporanee. Rome: DeriveApprodi.

CHAPTER 9

(Technologically) Fallen from Grace: Abjection and Android Motherhood in Viola Di Grado’s Novel Bambini di ferro (2016) Anna Lisa Somma and Serena Todesco

1   Introduction From the very beginning, the sci-fi short film The iMom (2013), written and directed by Ariel Martin, looks astonishingly creepy, but one cannot immediately understand why. In the video, the iMom is “the world’s first full-functioning mother substitute,” an android designed to help parents. Unfortunately, one night, after a storm that has affected the electrical system in the house, the android nanny living with little Sam, baby Grace and their mother Katherine seems to be different. Indeed, as the viewer finds

The authors would like to thank Salvatore Anzalone, Anna Specchio, Angela Verdini and Stiliana Milkova for their suggestions. A. L. Somma (*) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK S. Todesco Independent Scholar, Zagreb, Croatia © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_9

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out in the last scene, during the shutdown, the iMom has put the ready-­ to-­roast chicken in the cradle and, presumably, Grace in the heated oven. Undoubtedly, this short film evokes one of the most widespread fears: the threat of machines over humans. As the first frame of the film eloquently reads, “[i]t has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity,” a sentence commonly attributed to Albert Einstein. Hence, the director seems to suggest that where biology and technology meet and mix up with strong human feelings such as love and trust, something horrible is likely to happen. A similar interaction between technology and humanity takes place in Bambini di ferro [Iron Children] (2016) by Viola Di Grado, a prolific and multi-awarded writer whose work is yet to be studied in more depth (Rosa 2012; Daniele 2014a, b; Popović 2014). Set in both India and Nepal during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. and in an undefined futuristic Japan, the novel provides a fascinating and stimulating insight into a posthuman world where motherhood has been reduced to an android process, and electronic Maternal Units rear children, since, as the author states, “loving gestures are no longer spontaneous, yet need to be artificially recreated” (Di Grado 2016b). The book articulates the posthuman in an original way and prompts us to muse upon a variety of topics such as maternity, technocracy and the relations between humans and pseudo-humans. Indeed, as Patricia McCormack recalls, posthuman theory multiply interrogates the meaning of being human “in a time where philosophy has become suspicious of claims about human subjectivity” (2012, 1). Di Grado’s Japanese futuristic society, in which artificial wombs are replacing human mothers in order to make childcare as homogeneous as possible, is a posthuman world where practices of power are being exerted upon human bodies and minds, and eventually the lack of preoccupation about possible psychological consequences causes the failure of what had seemed an efficient shortcut to rewrite the interaction between human and machine. Bambini di ferro, therefore, raises several issues such as: can a technological device be a better mother than a human? What are the consequences of a blind faith in technology in relation to a methodical annihilation of maternity? Similar questions are widely featured in well-­ known feminist sci-fi literary classics, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Joanna Russ’s When it

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Changed (1972) and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), as well as in scholarship (Haraway 1985; Braidotti 1994; Faulkner 2001).1 Our contribution examines the different kinds of symbolic, biological and artificial motherhood featured in the novel, along with the notion of abjection engaging with the complexities entailed by the posthuman (possibly dystopian) society described by Di Grado. By adopting a critical framework inspired by Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory (1980), and Rosi Braidotti’s thoughts on maternity, monstrosity and machines (1994), we aim at investigating Bambini di ferro’s representation of an android motherhood that challenges the biological one and, by doing so, allows for a more fluid and autonomous subjectivity. As we will examine the process of abjection underlying the relationship between an artificial mother and the psyche of a protagonist who was once in her care, we will attempt to demonstrate how the novel’s peculiar perspective provides the readers with a double reading of the same concept of posthuman. Posthuman itself here hints at the inherent ambivalence of the maternal trope in relation to its capacity to reconfigure individual subjectivity. Indeed, in Bambini di ferro the posthuman causes a productive destabilization that exceeds biological, material and spiritual boundaries of the human, as shown through the entwined stories of the three protagonists.

2   Exceeding Human Boundaries: Monsters, Abjected Mothers and Buddhist Perspectives Divided into three sections, Bambini di ferro is built around a crescendo of short chapters as it constructs the affinity between a mysterious little orphan girl called Sumiko, whose identity is intentionally left unsolved throughout the text, and Yuki, a twenty-eight-year-old woman working as an educator at the Gokuraku Institute in Kyō to (a centre specialized in children’s rehabilitation therapies). The novel is set in a Japanese posthuman society, where an invisible yet pervasively Foucauldian national government wishes to create a perfect generation of humans, and parents have been requested to allow their children to be raised by a team of educators, monks and androids in dedicated institutes. In order to reach this goal, scientists have constructed special androids called Maternal Units that can perfectly imitate women’s bodies, wombs, physical appearance and voice.2

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A couple of decades earlier, a group of rebel Buddhist monks had started to believe that they were living in the last kalpa (“world period”), when the Earth is expected to be filled with “deceitful figures” and “monsters incapable of true feelings unable to take care of children” (Di Grado 2016a, 62).3 Consequently, the monks had sabotaged the entire Artificial Rearing plan by injecting viruses in the electronic mothers’ software, thus infecting an entire generation of children (including little Yuki) with a plague that compromised their mental health forever. After being forced to undergo a replacement therapy that has left strong traces in their psyche, these children have become issendai, botched “iron children,” who can no longer manage standard emotional needs and responses, yet need to be kept under medical control. This finds a correspondence in the Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhism, where the term “issendai” (originally “icchantika” in Sanskrit) refers to a class of “incorrigible” individuals “who have lost all potential to achieve enlightenment or buddhahood” (Buswell Jr. and Lopez Jr. 2013, 370). Instead of providing any substantial psychological support to the victims, the government has chosen to cover up the disastrous effects of this hazardous experiment. The issendai have thus been isolated and left alone with their permanent traumas, auditory hallucinations and lack of emotional coordination, and treated by members of the educational system such as Sada (director of the Gokuraku Institute) with the sole help of chemical therapies. Both Yuki and Sumiko share a condition of isolation from the world surrounding them, though the latter appears to live in her own nirvana, intentionally detached from any mundane worry and human contact. With the arrival of Sumiko, Yuki’s defective personality receives a shock: the child’s very presence pushes Yuki to challenge her frail certainties in order to tear her own “veil of Maya”4 and look for the truth about her own identity as an issendai. As she enters a painful psychological process in search of the lost memory of her android mother, Yuki goes through a complex process of nostalgia, abjection and self-acceptation, and is eventually able to confront a dimension of human authenticity, individual autonomy and consciousness, as we will further illustrate. With a clear reference to her knowledge of Asian cultures and philosophies (Di Grado has, indeed, an educational background in Japanese studies and Asian philosophies), the writer weaves together the story of Yuki and Sumiko with an account on Buddha Śākyamuni,5 that can be read also as a fantasy produced by Yuki’s troubled mind. In the novel, Buddha is not depicted according to the well-known, popularized image of a demigod

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living in a perfect state of peace. Rather, he appears as a tormented individual, strongly attached to his mother (who died when he was still a baby) and to his cousin Ananda. In spite of Buddha’s wish not to die (just like any other mortal human being), he miserably ends his days “fallen back in his own flesh” (Di Grado 2016a, 224).6 The two narrative threads connect at the end of the book: whereas the character of Buddha dies and thus enters a new spiritual dimension, the ordeal suffered by Yuki comes to an unexpected conclusion, as she attempts to deactivate her conscience by ingesting an overdose of pills, and eventually wakes up in a hospital with a cautious Sada who, after all, seems to have accepted that her ex-pupil and protégée has ultimately gained an individuality of her own. At the same time, in spite of her silent and cryptic behaviour, Sumiko has shown gestures of trust and affection towards Yuki, who seems to be the only person capable of understanding her. Nonetheless, the child escapes the institute and disappears. Thus, the novel ends with an obscure hint at the possibility that Sumiko may have entered a new dimension, as a reincarnated Buddha and lost her unitary, homogeneous self. Bambini di ferro combines an exploration of the biological nature of maternity with a wider and interspersed interrogation of otherness, the mythos of the human–machine bond, and the relativity of human boundaries vis-à-vis technological progress. In particular, Di Grado’s peculiar figuration of android motherhood stands out in the Italian literary context, where the alignment of women and maternity has historically played a key role in shaping a national cultural identity, at least since the post-­ unification era (Taylor Allen 2005, 210–212; Landy 2017, 22). As also witnessed by the volume Motherhood in Literature and Culture (Rye et al. 2017), the numerous representations of motherhood in twentieth-century Italian literature confirm the cultural centrality of the topic and attest to its decisive role in the long-lasting tradition of feminist emancipatory writings (see also Miceli Jeffries 1997, 213; Benedetti 2007; Delogu 2015, 7–8). Just as it is important to stress the growing relevance of this area of study on a global level, one should take into consideration the “peculiarity of the Italian situation, where women find themselves torn between strong traditions and contemporary expectations” (Lazzari and Charnley 2016, 2), thus provoking reactions such as distress, aggressiveness, guilt, frustration and despair.7 Whereas one can generally connect Di Grado’s novel to a wider trend that sees several contemporary Italian women writers problematize the encounter between dystopian and/or technologized bodies and feminine

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subjectivities (e.g. Laura Pugno, Chiara Palazzolo, Nicoletta Vallorani, Roberta Rambelli, Veronica Raimo), her perspective significantly differs from any automatic insertion into a national context, due to the multilayered and intentional reference to Japanese culture. The current interest around the topic of motherhood is certainly a contributing factor to the appeal of Di Grado’s novel. When asked whether her latest novel Bambini di ferro intentionally alluded to the ongoing debate on surrogate motherhood, Di Grado openly admitted that the thought had never crossed her mind. However, she added, a connection may be easily made, since the novel describes android mothers who have become “imperfect” following a software contamination. In the same interview she further stated: All children are the test animals of an experiment that is maternal love. One that always causes damages. There is no perfect way to be a mother. Children choose whom to love, and this has nothing to do with who delivered them, but with whoever raises them. (Di Grado 2016e)8

The author’s positioning thus defies the idea of a “natural” maternal instinct solely based on biological premises. Meaningfully, all of Di Grado’s novels (including Settanta acrilico trenta lana [70% Acrylic 30% Wool], 2011, and Cuore cavo [Hollow Heart], 2013) feature a problematic mother–child bond, often set in contemporary societies haunted by unsettling dystopias, bodily obsession, manifestations of technological bulimia or individual emotional misbalances. Moreover, their young female protagonists struggle with psychological issues and suffer the lack of a real father, whilst they aim at achieving a perfect, totalizing union with their mothers. Hence, in Di Grado’s works, the mother–child bond is at the centre of an exploration of subjectivity, as it provides a space of biological and psychological renegotiation from which stems a multiplicity of issues, such as personal loss, institutionalized violence, tension towards stereotypical representations, exclusion or belonging to given social groups and/or hierarchies, and conflicting relationships with the body. However, none of Di Grado’s novels is constructed as an open text à clef analysing issues of motherhood or the ambivalent feelings connected to it.9 We further observe that the stereotypical images of the Italian mamma as a self-­ sacrificing figure have already been widely challenged by antecedent writers publishing between the mid-1990s and the mid-­2000s, such as Valeria Parrella, Michela Murgia and, more recently, Elena Ferrante and Donatella Di Pietrantonio.10

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Several critics (such as Sorrentino 2003, and Talamo 2010) have noticed that, especially from the mid-1990s onwards, a number of authors are becoming increasingly interested in science and technology debates. As far as contemporary Italian women writers are concerned, the thematization of a posthuman body that problematizes a traditionally humanist approach becomes crucial, as it encourages a critical investigation of the connections between issues of gender difference and a specific reconfiguration of female subjectivity, while also providing a philosophical ground that may contradict any assumptions on the fixed nature of feminine identity and experience. As it emphasizes the dynamic and fluid interaction between the world and the individual, the posthuman standpoint grants “a passionate engagement in the recognition of the theoretical and discursive implications of sexual difference” (Braidotti 1994, 76). The theoretical implications of posthumanism in redefining women seem clear: when confronted with science and technology, a reconfiguration of given “female” functions (such as childbirth, gestation and motherhood) provides the possibility for a change in the discursive field, as it opposes limits imposed from a superior, patriarchal force. Although, unlike other authors, such as Simona Vinci and Laura Pugno (Tabanelli 2008, 387; 2010, 6), Di Grado does not openly advocate a redefinition of gender identity, Bambini di ferro does entertain a prolific relationship with the ethical, psychological and social implications of posthumanism also vis-à-vis patriarchal-­driven dichotomies. If Bambini di ferro is indeed external to any possible “feminist” label, its uniqueness relies on the original development of a widely discussed feminist topic, such as the biological nature of motherhood confronted with an interrogation on the mythos of the human–machine bond, as well as on the relativity of human boundaries vis-à-vis technological progress. In Di Grado’s novel the creation of android Maternal Units is originally aimed at perfecting the organization of Japanese social education on a wide scale. What prompts the desire to medically control the raising of infants is a desire to avoid the potential dangers of unbalanced human behaviours and the limitations in the educational process conducted by human parents, along with a need to make such a process increasingly homogeneous and hassle-free. The systematic concealment of the “imperfections” of a biological approach to childcare thus implies the will to create a new type of subject that, by being “posthuman” in surpassing the human aspect of reproduction/childcare, wishes to mask the flaws caused by biological mothering.

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A useful key to read Di Grado’s meditation on the posthuman subject of Bambini di ferro is provided by what Kristeva calls the subjet-en-procès (Kristeva 1984), rendered in English with a double formulation of “subject in process” and “subject on trial” (McAfee 2000, 69). According to Kristeva’s theoretical meditation, inaugurated in 1974 with The Revolution of Poetic Language, individuals develop their subjecthood by going through two distinct, interdependent dimensions: the semiotic and the symbolic. The first one precedes the second one, and corresponds to a capacity of existing within a set of processes and relations that are still undefined by an ordered linguistic system. In following Lacan, Kristeva identifies the passage from the first to the second dimension with the crossing of a threshold, which corresponds to the moment when the subject separates from the semiotic and accesses the symbolic order of language (Kristeva 1984, 90–105). Such exchange is, however, not a linear one. Kristeva asserts that the process/trial each subject undergoes would then correspond to an incompatible set of forces involved in a constant psychological, as well as social, transformation. If, on the one hand, the Bulgarian-born philosopher concedes that the semiotic dimension frees the subject from such permanency and “gives us a vision of the human venture as a venture of innovation, of creation, of opening, of renewal” (Lipkowitz and Loselle 1996, 26), its breakthroughs can both create and destruct, because the symbolic—being that aspect of language that allows a structured and referenced configuration of the world—plays simultaneously a repressive and a protective role. The growing awareness of the “subject in process/on trial” is crucially attached to the tension inherently present in the mother–child bond. The transformation undergone by Yuki in her struggle to redefine herself in relation to the memory of her robot mother can be read through Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980), in which it is suggested that Lacan’s mirror stage is but a secondary repression, one in which every human being “becomes homologous to another in order to become himself” (Kristeva 1982, 13). On the other hand, another preceding repression of the undifferentiated, that is the semiotic chora (trans. “receptacle”), allows one to shift the focus to a preverbal stage in which differentiation from the mother is still blurry. Kristeva asserts that the child experiences itself as the receptacle of all being: only until he or she represses the chora does a dichotomy between subject and object take place. In order to repress the chora, the child expels part of itself from itself. Defined by Kristeva as “abjection,” this process stems from very early feelings of separation from

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the mother’s body, eventually repressed, and marks the latter as the primary receptacle of both uncanniness and familiarity. The term “abjection” (etymologically derived from Latin abjectus, “thrown away”) encompasses the multiple processes of psychological defence against the horror of separation itself. Kristeva’s powerfully metaphoric proposal interprets abjection both as a distinct category of mental disorder and as what ultimately marks the initiating act of a subjectivity that is able to give birth to itself. Di Grado’s novel inserts a meditation on an abjected posthuman motherhood within the context of a palpable tension between a “human” and a “posthuman” perspective. In line with Kristeva’s abjection theory, the novel splits the figure of the mother into two distinct parts and, as a consequence, complicates the constitution of Yuki’s subjectivity vis-à-vis the memory of her android Maternal Unit. If, on the one hand, mothers are depicted as the prototypes of subsequent objects that the subject will desire or hate, on the other hand, they also represent the despised ground of the child’s dependency and bodily needs. Within such a scenario, Yuki’s struggle to make sense of her past connection with a non-human mother coincides with a movement towards a twofold state of abjection. On one level, it refers to Yuki’s own ostracized condition as an issendai, an irremediably botched human mind, incapable of emotions and condemned to live under medical therapies. On a second level, the abjection encompasses the state in which society has relegated the androids after they have been sabotaged and subsequently failed to fulfil their purpose of a flawless Artificial Rearing (Di Grado 2016a, 54). Once the government aborts the Maternal Units project and throws them in dumpsters, these android mothers become a relic of an embarrassing past, and yet represent a form of unsolved conflict between human ambitions of technological perfection and the incapacity to come to terms with the ethical consequences of a tight interaction with posthuman entities. Consistently with the backwards structure of chapters,11 Yuki’s story increasingly digs up in her past, revealing that she has always desired to be reunited with her Maternal Unit. While going backwards may provide a metaphor of an ideal return to a desired maternal womb—which, for Yuki, coincided with the android body taking care of her between the age of three and six—it is also a movement that marks the return towards a forbidden dimension opposed by a normative system that denies the experiments involving the android mothers:

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Down there, in secret, she was still keeping the index of her Maternal Unit. Every day after school, since the demolition of the Unit, Yuki would go and dig in the filth of the dump. Looking for pieces of her. (Di Grado 2016a, 94–95)12

The dominant power responsible for Yuki’s coercion has nonetheless provided her with a safe and emotionless environment, now destined to collapse once Sumiko enters the scene and drags Yuki into a dangerous zone where both her rationality and mental health seemingly collapse, whilst her desire to join her mother never fades. Di Grado translates issendai as “desideranti,” that is “yearning beings,” due to their flawed and needy minds, which make them “frozen inside, impossible to rescue” (65).13 By being inextricably associated with the botched Maternal Unit project, the issendai are considered lunatics at the bottom of the social ladder. As they are in desperate search of their ancient Maternal Units, they look for fragments of their android mother in the dumps and often assume lysergic drugs that are aimed at enhancing a regained experience of emotional closeness with the androids themselves. In the absence of bodily processes shaped by a semiotic relationship with the biological mother (who, in line with the Kristevan perspective, is rejected so that the child may regain a bond with the symbolic), the Maternal Units, even when broken into pieces, provide a point of constant renegotiation between human and posthuman. The android mothers appear indeed abjected, and far from being reducible to a mass of electrical circuits and sophisticated technologies controlled by a superior human force; having surpassed their original purpose of technological perfection, they are entities able to trigger both terror and affection, insomuch as they problematize any smooth break from or identification with the social norm that has rejected them. This becomes particularly clear in a climactic scene where Yuki joins other issendai in the dumpster where she hopes to find more pieces of her Maternal Unit. Although she refuses to share any drugs with her miserable companions, her mind is constantly divided between the horror of plunging into the memory of her artificial mother and the desire to recreate an emotional bond with her: “The truth was that the healthy parts of herself were precisely those that were constantly delivering to her mind its own horrors, clean and packed” (156).14 Another significant passage suggests how, for Yuki as well as for other “iron children” like her, no clean break may be possible between what has

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come before (the human) and what has been attempted with the creation of the posthuman Maternal Units: She realized that everything that has been thought keeps being thought somewhere else; everything that has been loved keeps being loved somewhere else; everything that has been suffered cannot be disposed of, but only recycled into other forms. (95–96)15

Opposite to the recurring idea of an unwelcoming, cold and non-maternal natural environment, the Maternal Unit and her interactions with little Yuki provoke a positive identification: in one of the many memories evoked, Yuki feels as artificial as the Unit itself, while the latter reassures her with a striking statement such as “I was created by you” (48).16 This suggests a form of ambivalent hybridization, in which the clear-cut promises of an efficient artificial technology are complicated by the suggested presence of an emotional bond. Yuki’s android mother exists on a border between nature and technological culture; furthermore, rather than her mere role as “mother,” what expands Yuki’s consciousness and blurs any defined boundary between human and posthuman is her memory-fantasy of a gratifying, fusional relationship with the Maternal Unit. This partly echoes Kristeva’s definition of the cultural meaning of the “maternal,” as she famously writes in Stabat Mater: “[T]he ambivalent principle that is bound to the species, on the one hand, and on the other stems from an identity catastrophe that cause[s] the Name to topple over into the unnameable that one imagines as femininity, non-language or body” (Kristeva 1987, 234–235). Unlike the common stereotypical Western imagery of a warm, reassuring maternal body, the novel insists on an equally powerful representation of motherhood that no longer relies on fantasies of fusion and immediate gratification. Images of eeriness and degradation abound as Yuki’s traumatic memories cross paths with references to the natural world. For instance, the sudden arrival of the auditory hallucinations resembles a crowd of termites infesting the foundations of a house (Di Grado 2016a, 105) or, still earlier, the desolate landscape inhabited by masses of metal android relics is made even more spectral as a swarm of butterflies chooses to die inside the metal chest of an abandoned Maternal Unit (67). As the novel progresses and the flashbacks intermingle with Yuki’s current reality, her daily life is fraught by emblematic images of cracked objects (36), inexplicable and clumsy gestures (50–51), nausea and alienation (98–99)

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and mysterious voices that creep out of the spaces around her in order to enter her mind (107). These symbolic moments characterize Yuki’s diversity as a “pathetic issendai” (35) who is considered different by everyone else because of her incapacity to adjust to human instincts and codes. At the same time, these fractures signal the fragmentation of Yuki’s mind (107) and, indirectly, mirror a specific Buddhist conception of a Self that is never, nor can ever be, a stable entity within a compact whole. The subversive nature of Yuki’s attachment to her Maternal Unit implies that the Japanese society has failed in imposing artificial motherhood over a biological one, as they both appear interrelated and in a constant flux. The care received by her Maternal Unit had indeed helped the young woman to heal her emotions, though the sudden insertion of the virus has made them porous and unpredictable against a “frozen life of the mind” (160),17 coerced by that same society that has rejected the android mothers. Therefore, if during the three years of Artificial Rearing Yuki had learned to comply with the norm, since the contamination her memories have resurfaced, retrieving the obscure dimension of what had seemed to be a technology fully controllable by human hands. Hence, with her progressive freedom of thought, Yuki also experiences an increasingly painful rejection of her (previous) self. The presence of an abject that returns in spite of society’s attempts further reconnects to the idea of a “posthuman” that has tried to “go past” the human condition. However, the movement does not automatically eliminate what precedes this status, yet it actually suggests that the preceding human biology may return, under a variety of forms. The social environment described in the novel stresses how the contrast between two opposite approaches to subjecthood and motherhood lies in the different results achieved. Whereas a human mother–child bond would produce individuals that are vulnerable because their consciousness bears the consequences of an imperfect breaking through the symbolic, a robot mother–child bond allows for a proper separation between parent and child by means of a clear, aseptic and (not so subtly) repressive form of behavioural education. Thus, the dystopian Japanese society refuses the identification with the imperfections of human—and therefore uncontrollable—motherhood, replaced by the identification with a supposedly carefree technology. In doing this, Di Grado’s novel imagines a society whose body preserves its fixed and solid nature by rejecting any unexpected intruder. The most representative “alien” factor is exemplified by human motherhood, with all its unpredictable and vulnerable risks. From this

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perspective, the narrative explores a series of issues underlying our contemporary society, which appears to be obsessively concerned by role models of motherhood that regularly fail to cover the entirety of human behavioural and social patterns. In Di Grado’s novel, there is an unexpected intrusion achieved by the rebel monks and their successful sabotage of an entire batch of android mothers. The intrusion is, however, ultimately signified by the fact that the same Maternal Units proved to be an in-between anomaly—an entity between corporeal physicality and technological prowess—that fascinates the same children they have been taking care of. The Maternal Units described by Di Grado represent what Braidotti refers to as figures of “devalued difference” (Braidotti 1994, 80), monstrous female creatures originally conceived to feed the production of a normative discourse, but ultimately able to escape the control of a dualistic logic. Outside of such logic—exercising a powerful control over people—the only possible alternative (that is, to fully delegate the androids with child-rearing processes, while accepting that they, as well, may develop emotional bonds with their “offspring”) is not deemed acceptable, and becomes a target for elimination. Thus, in the eyes of governmental authorities, the abolition of anomalies—the destruction of the Maternal Units—becomes as necessary as it eventually proves useless, since the already existing emotional bonds between androids and humans have proven stronger and more troublesome. By exiting their usual normative boundaries, these anomalies have penetrated the tissues of society well before the virus attacks conducted by the rebellious monks, because the abnormal presence of technologically perfect mothers had already embodied a form of pre-symbolic identity that this overly organized Japanese society cannot cope with. Once it makes its entrance in the public sphere and affects its youngest individuals, the anomaly becomes an abjected entity, something that cannot be easily forgotten or deleted from the collective social structure in which Yuki is forced to live. It is also interesting to stress how, in Di Grado’s text, the horror caused by the Maternal Units is inversely proportional to the positive desire and affection they inspire in some of their former children, such as Yuki. As a matter of fact, the movement towards the abject and backwards into a deeper and more aware self primarily involves a young woman who becomes able to channel her instinctive need for a mother–child bond into a wider urgency to learn why this very special android mother (and not the forgotten, ghost-like biological one) occupies such a particular place in

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her psyche. Yuki’s fascination for her Maternal Unit goes hand in hand with the growing affection towards Sumiko, with whom she shares several life path traits. However, while Yuki has somehow masked her identity as an outsider, Sumiko seems to have created a space for her own, unique difference. She embodies the second, complementary aspect related to Di Grado’s imagined posthumanism, that is the one related to transcendence and Buddhism. We suggest that, on the one hand, Yuki’s subjectivity progressively establishes itself by being triggered to regain the precedent bond with her Maternal Unit, in which there is a trace of who Yuki herself was as a little child. In this respect, the deep and emotional need to recreate a memory of that relationship embodies, in line with Kristeva, a return to a “semiotic” dimension. On the other hand, Yuki’s fragmented mind resists the medical control imposed by Sada, and with the invasive presence of Sumiko attains a form of transcendence, as we are going to further illustrate. As a matter of fact, in Bambini di ferro Buddhism plays a relevant role on several levels. For instance, it allows Di Grado to establish a fascinating and exotic narrative setting, spanning from ancient Nepal to futuristic Japan. It informs the language of the book as well, since it abounds with words (such as issendai, nirvana, sutra) originating in the Buddhist tradition. A Buddhist perspective may also be implied by the featured dichotomy between a sterile and emotionless education (as the one provided by the Maternal Units), and the malicious software codes, not unintentionally called vāsanā (a term referring to the Buddhist concept of “behavioural inclinations”). Buddhism is further present on an intertextual level, because several excerpts from ancient sacred texts obsessively invade Yuki’s mind and haunt her with auditory hallucinations that trigger increasingly painful memories of her android mother. Finally, and most importantly, Buddhism offers the chance to introduce a spiritual and mystic dimension within the posthuman perspective of the novel, particularly because it enriches its dystopian standpoint. Both identifiable as enlightened beings, Buddha and Sumiko are literally able to go beyond their human condition and, at the same time, come back to their real nature. For Buddha, the body is a “cage filled with rules, messages, and needs” (Di Grado 2016a, 15).18 He also knows how to travel across the universe, as he is capable of living through all kinds of material states, but he always comes back to his frail flesh; unfortunately “his soul can perform things that his body cannot bear” (247).19 For her part, as she spends her days standing still, silent and seemingly

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unperturbed, Sumiko acts like one of those hidden Buddhas, who “would economize their power in total solitude […] they did not need any care, nor prayers, nor beseeching glances” (87).20 Nobody is aware of her potential; in fact, children at the Gokaraku institute make fun of her, and even adults like Sada tend to treat her with impatient hostility, believing that she is a mentally retarded and aboulic child. It is relevant to add that Sumiko comes from the Ainu population, an ancient community in Japan living on the island of Hō kkaido (the northernmost Japanese prefecture); the Ainu were discriminated for a long time by the rest of the Japanese population because of their own peculiar language, religion, culture and physical appearance (Siddle 2012, 73–94). Quite significantly, the term “Ainu” in the same language means “human”; in light of this, Sumiko may embody a sort of ur-human who pacifically blends with the surrounding environment and surpasses any unidimensional sphere of existence. In doing so, she appears to embrace a posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject; as described by Rosi Braidotti, such ethics “proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism” (2013, 49–50). Buddhism advocates an analogous necessity for change, interdependence and non-­ attachment: in its view, “[b]ecause [things] are impermanent and in some sense painful … they are to be seen as anattā, non-Self” (Harvey 2013, 58). In our opinion, these words convincingly resonate with the considerations of philosopher Francesca Ferrando about posthumanism: “Posthumanism deconstructs any fixity, dualism or polarity for a nomadic trans-subjective, inter-dependent perception of the human” (2016, 244). As we have attempted to demonstrate so far, Di Grado’s novel maintains two distinct yet interwoven discourses on posthumanism. On the one hand, she provides the reader with a typical posthuman scenario where, in a world dominated by technology, maternal androids represent both a resource for and a threat to human safety. On the other hand, drawing on her intellectual expertise, the author adopts Buddhism in order to offer an original and openly mystical interpretation of posthumanism, here conceived as a means to exceed human boundaries, especially as far as the (supposedly) Western idea of identity is concerned. Di Grado herself has stated that “[i]dentity is a Western myth. The self is a biological limitation to practical life” (Di Grado 2016d). To this traditional notion, she opposes the Buddhist configuration of an identity

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“consisting of heterogeneous fragments that only illusorily organizes itself in a unity, which for convenience’s sake we call ‘self’” (Di Grado 2016c).

3   Conclusions As we have argued, Bambini di ferro provides an original, stimulating insight into the relationship between posthuman, motherhood-related and identity-related issues. Moreover, it combines a psychoanalytical interpretation (Kristeva) with the peculiar vision of a posthumanist subject embedded in “a nature-culture continuum” (Braidotti 1994, 2) challenging the deceptive unity of Self from a Buddhism-related perspective. In line with the palimpsest of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which may be considered a model for any subsequent literary thematizations of the posthuman), Di Grado’s novel also suggests that the fascination inspired by the Maternal Units for its creators gets turned into an unredeemable level of horror. However, the return of the abject, as Kristeva proposes, is not a unidirectional one; yet it opens up for a more complex process of subjectivization: both the Maternal Units and the children who have been in touch with them now tend to resist the coercive separation between androids and humans, bringing back into the body of society that monstrous factor that institutions had been trying to remove. As Braidotti argues, the loss of fascination towards the anomaly that regularly enters society is the price we pay for the advantage given to rational theory over human understanding (1994, 90). Meaningfully, like Buddha, Yuki lost her mother and desperately longed for her; since that event occurred, as Buddha had done centuries earlier, she has suddenly been confronted with a reality filled with harm, loneliness and bereavement. In order to find the real meaning of their life, they both have undergone a deep path of initiation that culminates with the destruction of the old, monolithic self. This suggests that Yuki has finally embraced those feelings she has been trying to reject for a long time. Thanks to Sumiko’s mediation, Yuki has managed to come to terms with the memory of her abjected mother, thus gaining a new subjectivity, as well as a new voice. Although it may not do so explicitly, Bambini di ferro lends itself to a gender-based approach as well as to a dystopian metaphor of contemporary society. Nevertheless, our reading suggests that the novel does not commit to a single conception of maternity. Yuki’s ordeal shows how there is no univocal way to conceive maternity (thus Di Grado well deconstructs

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any preconception of Western ideas on motherhood—and on humanity— as being warm, reassuring or “natural”). Similarly, there is no univocal way to conceive identity, since its formation relies on a multitude of social, cultural, religious and psychological factors. Di Grado interrogates the boundaries of culture and nature, accepting the numerous ways in which they may contaminate each other. A similar wish to avoid being limited by defined borders is also articulated by Di Grado as a writer: as shown in Bambini di ferro as well as in the plots of her previous works, the young Sicilian writer is always keen to experiment with different styles and themes. Accordingly, she believes that “[t]o move is the only way one can exist deeply. Fixity nullifies us” (Di Grado 2016c), thus evoking Braidotti’s insightful statement: “The posthuman condition urges us to think critically and creatively about who and what we are actually in the process of becoming” (2013, 12). As a matter of fact, Bambini di ferro offers a compelling example of experimental narrative that blends juxtaposition, assemblage and hybridization. To conclude, the posthuman notion of motherhood elaborated in Bambini di ferro, also enriched by the further interconnections with the otherness of a Japanese setting, provides a unique and stimulating example of posthuman narrative within the Italian literary context. By looking at the ambivalence of motherhood within a technologized and futuristic perspective, Di Grado’s novel persistently interrogates a series of borders, such as those between biology and technology, emotions and rationality, or consciousness and oblivion, thus pushing the readers to question their own certainties, in order to get a complex—yet sometimes uncomfortable—gaze upon reality.

Notes 1. The interactions between technology, maternity and reproduction have been explored in a number of works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), P.D. James’ The Children of Men (1992) and, more recently, Katsuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Moreover, Italian literary scholarship shows a growing interest in women’s sci-fi and dystopic literature, with special regard to Northern American authors (such as the aforementioned Atwood and LeGuin). See, for instance, Federici (2015), Iannuzzi (2018) or the monographic number of the feminist cultural journal Leggendaria (2017) “Pensando il futuro.”

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2. It is useful to recall that a robot is “any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner” (Moravec n.d.), whereas an android is a robot that acts and looks like a human. Finally, a cyborg literally blends together cybernetic and organism. Indeed, the word “cyborg” was originally coined in 1960 to indicate “a human being whose physiological functions are aided or enhanced by artificial means such as biochemical or electronic modifications to the body” (Heckathorne n.d.). In Bambini di ferro we are dealing with androids. 3. “[F]igure ingannevoli” and “mostri incapaci di veri sentimenti.” 4. Drawing on Indian philosophy, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer calls the barrier between Truth and Appearance “the veil of Maya.” The expression comes from the Sanskrit word ‘māyā’ that can be translated as “magic,” “deceit,” alluding to the illusory appearance of the phenomenal world. 5. Buddhism includes several schools, each one characterized by distinct aims and doctrinal approaches. For the sake of our analysis, we will refer to general Buddhist concepts, without examining any specific point of view. It is also obviously impossible to provide an exhaustive account of the figure of the Buddha, which would deserve a more in-depth analysis per se. 6. This Buddha is “sprofondato nella sua carne.” Di Grado meaningfully declared in an interview that she wished to tell the story of a real, human Buddha who suffered, loved and even hated, and eventually died in a vulnerable and frightened state, just like anybody else. She further added how she carefully avoided evoking the iconic and plastic-like mythology of a Westernised Buddha, one that usually symbolizes a religion of peace and compassion (Di Grado 2016b). 7. Whilst the links between technology, reproduction and motherhood seem to be generally neglected by Italian writers (with the recent exception of Eleonora Mazzoni’s Le difettose [2012], a novel on medically assisted procreation), there is an increasing popularity of contemporary texts usually written by women where a mother (frequently suffering from some forms of post-partum depression) expresses her rage and her sense of inability of being a “buona madre” (good mother): see, for example Grazia Verasani’s From Medea: atto unico (2004), Rossella Milone’s Cattiva (2018) and Sara Ranfagni’s Corpo a corpo (2019). 8. “Tutti i figli sono cavie di quell’esperimento che è l’amore materno. Che porta sempre danni. Non c’è un modo perfetto per essere madri. I bambini scelgono chi amare e non ha niente a che fare con chi li ha partoriti, semmai con chi li cresce.” 9. On different occasions, Di Grado has underlined her will to use literature to demolish beliefs and commonplaces. For instance, in an interview for

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the Revista de Letras (2018), she has declared: “Creo que las palabras tienen el don de mostrarnos el mundo tal como es y esto es una de las cosas que más me interesan. Mis palabras expresan esa búsqueda. Por ejemplo, a través del cambio de los sentidos, intento poner en evidencia los lugares comunes y las convenciones en el acto, y por lo tanto, expresar su falsedad, construyendo una realidad alternativa mucho más vinculada a la actual.” Nonetheless, her works show no explicit lesson; nor do they intend to provide the reader with moralistic contents. [“I believe that words have the ability of showing us the world as it is and this (is) one of the things I am most interested in. My words express this pursuit. For example, through the change of feelings, I intend to highlight the on-going commonplaces and the ongoing conventions and, consequently, to reveal their fallacy, thus building up an alternative reality more bound to the actual one.”] 10. Since at least the early 1990s, several female-authored Italian novels have openly challenged traditional visions of motherhood, particularly by exploring the representation of the maternal body, the mother–daughter trope or specific issues such as conception, delivery, abortion or post-partum depression. See Valeria Parrella, Lo spazio bianco (Turin, Einaudi 2008); Michela Murgia, Accabbadora (Turin, Einaudi 2009); Donatella Di Pietrantonio, L’arminuta (Turin, Einaudi 2017); Elena Ferrante, L’amore molesto (Rome, e/o 1992). Motherhood is also a key topic in Ferrante’s world-renowned quadrilogy, L’amica geniale (Rome, e/o 2011–2014), known in the English-speaking world as the “Neapolitan Novels” and published by Europa Editions between 2012 and 2015 in Ann Goldstein’s translation. 11. The chapters are unusually numbered from “−27” to “+5,” when each character seems to have finally accepted and embraced their true nature. 12. “Lì sotto, in segreto, conservava ancora il dito indice dell’Unità Materna. Ogni giorno, da quando era stata demolita, Yuki dopo la scuola era andata a scavare nella lordura della discarica. In cerca di pezzi di lei.” 13. “[G]elidi dentro, impossibili da salvare.” 14. “La verità era che erano proprio le sue parti sane a consegnare costantemente alla sua mente, puliti e impacchettati, i suoi orrori.” 15. “Capì che tutto ciò che è stato pensato continua a essere pensato da qualche parte; tutto ciò che è stato amato continua a essere amato da qualche parte; tutto ciò che è stato sofferto non può essere smaltito ma solo riciclato in altre forme.” 16. “Sono stata creata da te.” 17. “[V]ita gelida della mente.” 18. “[G]abbia piena di regole, messaggi e necessità.” 19. “La sua anima sa fare cose che il suo organismo non sa reggere.”

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20. “Economizzavano il loro potere in solitudine assoluta … non avevano bisogno di cure e di preghiere, di sguardi supplici.”

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PART III

Boundaries of the Human

CHAPTER 10

Unbearable Proximity: Cognition, Ethics and Subjectivity at the Borders of the Human in La vita oscena by Aldo Nove Eugenio Bolongaro

In recent years, the philosophical questioning of the human has become a central theoretical concern in a wide range of disciplines, including cultural and literary studies. In Italian studies, more specifically, the posthuman perspective has been embraced as an invaluable tool for a more energetic engagement with contemporary Italian fiction. In this context the work of Aldo Nove provides an ideal test case for what a posthuman reading can yield. Since the mid-1990s, the writer from Viggiù has devoted his work to contemporaneity: registering and negotiating the preoccupations, tensions and contradictions that mark today’s Italy. Published in 2010, La vita oscena [The Obscene Life] represents one of the most interesting moments in Nove’s trajectory to date insofar as it discloses a barrier against which his narrative continues to struggle. This barrier, I will argue, is the barrier of the posthuman. Nove’s predicament is an imaginative

E. Bolongaro (*) McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_10

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impasse which is cognitive, affective and ultimately ethical. The great merit of La vita oscena is to allow this impasse to emerge clearly but also to adumbrate the possibilities that lie beyond it. Nove’s narrative evokes a posthuman horizon beyond which new posthuman ethics and politics become imaginable. The terrain covered by theories of the posthuman is vast and complex. My standpoint in this landscape is based on four key positions which inform my analysis of La vita oscena and thus warrant some elaboration.1 The first commitment of posthuman theory is overcoming anthropocentrism. In this instance, the term “overcoming” must be taken in its most radical meaning. The posthuman is anti-anthropocentric: the goal is to fight resolutely against any approach which grants priority to the perspective of the anthropos. The overcoming of this perspective is essential to the project of being responsive and hospitable to alterity and especially to marginal and peripheral subjects which make ethical claims on us and whose experiences disclose otherwise unimaginable cognitive and affective possibilities. Posthuman thought is also committed to overcoming humanism. In this case, however, the term “overcoming” has a more complex meaning. The project is not to eliminate humanism but rather to recognize and remain sensitive to the failures of historical humanism (patriarchy, eurocentrism, colonialism, etc.) while at the same time recognizing the positive contribution of an intellectual tradition that encompasses concepts and values which remain pertinent in contemporary politics (democracy), ethics (freedom and autonomy) and epistemology (science and truth). Is posthuman thinking also committed to overcoming the human as a form of species being or Gattungswesen (Marx and Engels 1989, 243–45) so that the distinctive character of humanity is itself put into question? Against anthropocentrism and after humanism, the posthuman raises this question but does not answer it unequivocally. The paradox is clear: how can the human become anything else than another form of itself? The posthuman can only be an evolution of the human, and therefore still human, albeit possibly a form of life very different from the one we are today. Indeed, the posthuman horizon reaches out not only to other biological beings but also to the inorganic and to the intersection/mediation of organic with inorganic beings. This is the most ambitious and dangerous step in posthuman theory (and practice). The risk is encouraging the superhuman hubris—the illusion of an infinite plasticity of the human which surreptitiously reinstalls the centrality of the anthropos. The best

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antidote to such hubris is the consideration that a posthuman evolution could also lead to the ending of the species, either because it will prove unable to overcome its current limitations or because, having fulfilled all its possibilities, the human will have no more reasons to be. While we may leave these conjectures to science fiction writers, the contemporary meaning of the overcoming of the species can be usefully conceptualized as the human effort to approach the endlessly receding line of a different horizon, a necessary but mobile limit, open-ended and negotiable. The final position that to my mind defines the posthuman is the commitment to a new ethical project which impels our discourses and imaginaries to explore different cognitive and affective practices and experiences. Ethics is here understood as the Aristotelian pursuit of “the good life,” which, however, must fully confront contemporaneity, its material conditions and ideological predicaments. My reading of La vita oscena will explore the contribution that literature can make in understanding this ethical positioning.

1   The Challenge of the Posthuman in La vita oscena

My father died suddenly, from a stroke. He was survived by my mother, who had been ill with cancer for years. She should have died first. Everyone expected my mother to die. Every day, for four years. It wasn’t something you talked about. It was something we knew, everybody knew. A living death. My mother’s death. (3)2

The opening passage from La vita oscena merits close examination because it provides the key to the entire text. The prose well exemplifies Nove’s predilection for laconic, lapidary simplicity which combines a lyrical tone (difficult to preserve in the English translation) with documentary realism as well as sudden irruptions of the fantastic (adumbrated in the citation by the “living death” image). However, what distinguishes this opening is an unusual density of meaning.

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The passage is a carefully constructed unit. The first and last sentences echo each other: the shock delivered by the announcement of the death of the father is compounded by the long-postponed death of the mother. The loss of both parents immediately strikes the reader as the tragedy that defines the protagonist’s predicament and drives his narrative. However, once the shock of these two deaths is absorbed something else begins to emerge. The passage is all about the incongruity of the situation: the father’s death contradicts all expectations, while the mother continues absurdly to live on. Indeed, it is her “living death” that destroyed the family; but then the real tragedy which confronts the narrator and from which the story moves is neither the death of the father nor the looming death of the mother but rather the discovery of the cancer in the latter (the “bad illness” which cannot be talked about), and the ghostly life in which all members of the family are precipitated by that diagnosis. In fact, then, the tragedy is not death, as the narrator seems to insist, but rather life, that is a life (un)lived/livable in the shadow of death. Stylistic devices play a key role in making the reader aware of a dissonance between what the narrator says and what his discourse speaks about. For example, we may notice how form and content are perfectly aligned in the first sentence: the announcement is as sudden as the death of the father, and a comma interrupts the text just as the stroke interrupted the father’s life. By contrast, the last sentence refers to a paradoxical “living death,” a long-awaited and still unrealized event as if discourse (expectations) and reality (fact) struggled to coincide. The crisis of discourse and in particular of its semantic and referential functions is underscored by the mantle of silence (“It wasn’t something you talked about”) that falls over the family: the tragedy cannot be put into words, no one is able/knows how/is permitted to put it into words. What finally breaks the silence is the literary narrative we are reading, and yet the dissonances which we have canvassed force the reader to wonder to what degree this narrative succeeds in redeeming the silence from which it emerges. The laconic style is at odds with the tensions (cognitive and affective) in the discourse of a narrator whose candour is paradoxically seductive and suspect: his voice communicates intense emotions but also delivers few and ambiguous explanations about the sources and significance of these affective states. This remarkable opening instructs the reader to be attentive to the gap between what the text speaks about and what it says with such apparent simplicity and bluntness. The issue is not so much that the narrator is

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unreliable, but rather that there are meanings beyond the reach of his voice, meanings his voice can speak about only by saying something else.3 Tension between the said and the unsaid is central to La vita oscena and initiates the reader into a demanding practice: the constant struggle to reopen the meaning of a story and challenge a storyteller who above all desires closure. This struggle is analogous to the “reading against the grain” that Benjamin recommended in relation to historiography (1969, 256–57): in this context the vanquished are not the defeated but rather non-human presences which the narrator confronts but whose ethical claims are beyond his capacity to encompass. This borderline between engagement and withdrawal is the posthuman horizon that Nove’s fictional world powerfully evokes.

2   Beyond Suffering In the first eight chapters of La vita oscena, the narrator describes his increasingly unbearable existence. Initially, this theme is developed through the contrast between life before and after his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Two flashbacks to happy childhood moments are especially noteworthy insofar as a chasm between the explicit intentions of the narrator and the significance of his discourse becomes apparent. The first memory relates to the narrator’s father. In this episode, the attention is rather unexpectedly drawn to the objects that populate the world which father and son share. They are in the car, the father at the wheel, and they sing together the tunes of Carosello.4 Father and son are having fun and sharing their toys: the car “vibrates like a spaceship” (8).5 The happy and carefree image is juxtaposed with the later picture of the father who, locked in a panicked silence by the looming death of his wife, cannot keep driving and has to stop and get out of the car. Yet the contrast between the two vignettes is not as clear-cut as it might at first appear. The narrator observes that the father’s behaviour was a harbinger of death “because life like a television program keeps running, does not freeze in a panic, continues program after program” (8–9).6 Is life, then, like Carosello in the happy memory? So it would seem, given how the narrator describes the role of the commodities celebrated in Carosello: “In daily life we all need things. I was little, but I knew already [when? before and/or after the mother’s cancer?] that filling our surroundings with things is one way we have to feel as far away as possible from nothingness. This is why homes are full of appliances and chandeliers” (9).7 The narrator insists that only

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the most banal acts of housekeeping and consumerism keep us from falling into the abyss. But then wasn’t the happy life before the mother’s illness a Carosello happiness, the banal normal life in late capitalism? Before the mother’s illness declared itself, the world of things provided a shelter from the insignificance of such an existence. What changed after the diagnosis is that death, or the shadow of death, subverted normality and shattered the illusion, forcing everyone to look into the abyss. What may be encountered in the abyss is revealed when, after visiting the mother at the hospital, father and son go fishing together: The fish’s lip was torn through. It had escaped capture once already. I was looking in its eyes that were about to die and I thought they were my own that looked back at me transplanted into another body, lost. At one point, without speaking, my father and I also looked each other in the eye asking ourselves the reason for such horror. (10)8

The shadow of death awakens in the character’s empathy with, and responsibility for, another form of life. This is an opportunity to stop being children with their toys and become adults in a world in which life and death are part of a continuum of being. An opportunity missed by father and son who throw the fish back into the stream to escape its gaze, shutting themselves off into puzzlement and ignorance: “What did it mean. To be there, fishing. We were like actors without a play. Not that play, not there” (11).9 Cognitively and affectively debilitated by the spectacle of commodities (Carosello), father and son cannot imagine a different story, a different world: “It was as if we were in the wrong film. … We went back home like petty wizards. Incapable of magic” (11).10 The second flashback is devoted to the protagonist’s mother and the magical world her stories evoked: a natural environment populated by animals, plants and inorganic presences (e.g., water, earth) all imbued with life and with which humans live in harmony. This holistic vision is most strikingly articulated in an episode from which, surprisingly, the mother is absent. The narrator remembers (imagines?) getting lost in a field of daisies: I felt that the daisies were my friends. […] They were looking at me and I at them. We were friends. Friends even though it was the first time that we had seen each other. And we had been friends forever. […] We were the only ones there, and that “us” was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.

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High above, the sun looked down upon us his children and smiled on us and embraced us, father sun. (16–17)11

This image of perfect bliss is remarkably static and silent: “the silence was absolute” (16).12 It is a moment of solitude, and even the fatherly embrace from above paradoxically emphasizes the sun’s distance. However intense they might be, these relations are frozen in a timeless moment that does not produce any new insights and does not change the subject who experiences it. It is not surprising, therefore, that the narrator will reject the attempt by his dying mother to revive this image of harmony and continuity with the cosmos: Death, she said, doesn’t exist. Because everything changes, she said, and nothing dies. But I knew that she would die of cancer. She would become a corpse and I did not want to know it. … Staring outside the window, I understood always and only this, that she would die. (17)13

As in the fishing episode, the narrator refuses to understand and remains trapped in his incapacity to move beyond suffering. These flashbacks reiterate and amplify the theme introduced in the opening paragraph of the novel: the discovery of his mother’s illness is a turning point in the life of the narrator and his family. However, what distinguishes the time before from the time after this turning point is not the radical discontinuity between life and death (as the narrator keeps insisting) but rather the difference between childhood and maturity, naïve feeling and adult understanding. This difference calls for a change in the subject, a becoming which the narrator rejects. Neither he nor his father possesses the affective and cognitive resources necessary to confront death’s shadow and work through the suffering that such a confrontation entails. The mother, on the other hand, is too weakened by her struggle with cancer to be a convincing source of strength for her son. To whom, then, can the narrator turn? In the childhood episodes that we have examined, while the narrator seems intent on focusing on his parents, the most striking presences are not human: things, animals, plants. The role of these presences becomes even more salient when, after the death of his parents, the narrator finds himself deprived of any meaningful human bond. The third chapter of La

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vita oscena is devoted entirely to the encounter with a spider. The narrator senses the common life force which he and the other share but is unable to elaborate beyond the mere sensation and build on his insight: [T]wo forms of life so different, and yet still life … Me and the spider. We were prisoners. Prisoners of the limits which nature had imposed on us. Prisoners of a story. The story of a spider and the story of a boy. (13–14)14

This passage bears witness to the effort made by the narrator to grasp another life form, an effort which, nonetheless, fails. This time, the obstacle to understanding is clear. The narrator recognizes the spider’s life, recognizes the discontinuity but also the continuity between two forms of life (his and the spider’s), and yet the “story” that they share doesn’t change. The life of the spider doesn’t change the life of the boy because the boy, although troubled by his proximity with the other, cannot imagine a way to interact with that alterity, welcome it and, using Deleuzian terminology, become spider: “Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-­ imperceptible” (1980, 285–324). This is an ethical failure: beyond death, beyond the human or, better still, beyond death-obsessed man,15 there are other presences that interpellate the human subject but whose claims the narrator cannot answer because he keeps asking them to become human rather than asking himself to become like them, to become posthuman. The narrator rejects this transition and can only conceptualize the movement beyond the human subject as a violent and disgusting death: “I fantasized about being devoured like a fly and that was the end of it, all broken up in little bitter pieces in the spider’s bowels” (18).16 As a result, every time the narrator comes up against the dead ends of the human, his struggle to overcome the impasse takes the form of an escape—a retreat into ignorance, degradation and ultimately suicide. The narrator’s trajectory in the first part of La vita oscena reaches its first evident impasse in the episode in which the protagonist’s body takes centre stage. One night, I was drunk and took all my clothes off. …

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Naked, I walked through the streets across town. I slithered on the ground. I was a snake. Nobody saw me. I got to the mountain trails. Walking among the trees I reached a cave. I made my way through the brushwood and entered. I was a thing of the universe. A tree. A rock. … I imagined all forms of living being, I identified with them. There I vomited and slept on the leaves. (24–25)17

In this passage, the narrator’s obsession with death is revealed to be in fact a desire to live differently which leads the narrator to seek physical contact with the non-human presences around him. However, this effort remains within the confines of the suffering self: “I had imagined myself as a bird, a hunted animal. Something waiting for death” (25).18 The narrator still cannot welcome difference (“bird” becomes a metaphor for “man”) and embrace vulnerability and finitude. The experience therefore fails: “I waited the entire day for the night to come again and I went home covered in cuts and bruises” (25).19 Bodily contact cannot by itself negotiate proximity: it is just another mediation, which raises again the issue of imagination and language. Indeed, in the remainder of the chapter the narrator himself rails against the degraded language of the “society of spectacle” (Debord 1992): words “cover the world” like “an immense babble” about “families,” “cars,” “televisions,” “everything becomes discourse, and […] is made of angry voices talking over each other, each voice trying to dominate the others” (Nove 2010, 25–26).20 Nonetheless, a glimmer of hope remains in the counterfactual horizon against which the critique of language is presented: words of joy rather than anger, of solidarity and harmony rather than discord and dissonance, of listening rather than prevarication—these are the potentialities of language preserved in their negation. For the moment, the narrator does not seem aware of this paradox and once again stubbornly clings to despair and ignorance: No, this was not life. Something else lives in us, a monster, that is not of us. Suffering teaches. Suffering teaches that it is useless. Suffering shows that it is ugly and evil. That there is no escape from illusion, from distraction. Suffering nails you to things. Suffering is the only teacher. …

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Do not think. Do not think. Do not think. (33)21

Placed strategically near the end of the first part of the novel, this passage manifests the narrator’s ambivalence, and the possibility/necessity of a Benjaminian brushing of the text against the grain. The narrator reiterates his suffering but then also registers the surprising life force that remains within him, a life force that he stigmatizes as monstrous. But who or what is responsible for this stigmatization? Suffering. It is suffering that imprisons life and nails the narrator to his despair. But then, suffering is a terrible teacher and everything it teaches is an error, an injury and an insult to life and therefore also to thought (indeed, an injunction against thought). Once again, the obsessive negation of any positive possibility paradoxically preserves hope: a “monstrous” hope beyond the human.

3   Beyond Pleasure The second part of the novel begins with an explosion that destroys the family home, forcing the narrator to abandon definitively the past and reinvent a life for himself. Continuities remain however, and once again the narrator’s most positive experiences while in hospital revolve around encounters with animals and things, rather than people. Among these encounters two stand out: the one with the soda bottle and the one with the bat. Commodities moved me to the point of suffering, almost to the point of making me forget my condition, commodities and the humble commercial happiness they brought. … That bottle [of cheap soda] seemed to me like the life of most people, people who do not make it (so many!), it moved me to tears. … It was my bottle on the night table at the hospital. I felt I had to take good care of it. I felt that it would take good care of me. (42–43)22

The soda bottle is different from the merchandise we have seen so far, though it shares with those goods the fact of being a commodity in the capitalist system of exploitation. But as a second-rate item that will never

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appear in Carosello, the soda bottle is not draped in the glamour of brands made famous by multimillion-dollar global advertising campaigns. It is a humble thing, a character in a modest story that operates at the margins of the media spectacle. This poverty and marginality are the qualities which paradoxically allow something else to emerge, something more, a presence that cannot be reduced to the system that produced it. The soda bottle demands to be recognized as a being and a subject in a network of complex relations, material and immaterial, cognitive and affective. The narrator’s sensitivity to this suggestion indicates that perhaps at last he is ready for change. Shortly before his discharge from hospital, the narrator runs into a stray bat in a hospital corridor. The experience expresses an intense emotional involvement with a being that, however, remains fundamentally other and imperfectly approachable: “that place [the corridor] was my soul haunted by the bat, by its nature, its will … and I thought that I was the bat … something of me that inhabited the night and my emotions, something that, melting into the night, took the frozen and graceless shape of the hospital” (44–45).23 On this occasion, the narrator seems on the threshold of an epiphany, of a “becoming bat” that could propel him in a new direction. However, the experience is contained and neutralized as the narrator withdraws melancholically into “the frozen and graceless shape” of the hospital and the human. When the narrator leaves the hospital, the devastating explosion with which the central part of the novel begins seems to have had little impact since the narrator’s despair and loneliness are undiminished. And yet something essential has taken place: But I no longer knew what it was, normality. I had forgotten it. I had lost it altogether in the explosion of the tank. (51)24

The explosion destroyed the past and with it the narrator’s most heart-­ wrenching memories. He has now become aware that he suffers because he is lost and confused: bereft of any points of reference he cannot find a reason to live. “Suffering nails you,” he had said before the explosion and now that his grief for the loss of his parents is gone, he feels liberated but empty. Only the most basic sensual desire can move him to action, and sexuality and the consumption of drugs are the easiest pursuits. The narrator’s second and most frenetic descent into the abyss will then be driven

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by the obsessive search for sensory stimulation, not so much erotic pleasure (which in fact seems rather peripheral) but rather an escalation of sensual intensity through which the narrator becomes the observer of himself and someone/something within himself that is not himself. The splitting of the narrator’s subjectivity is a direct manifestation of the widening gap between what the narrating voice says and what the narrative discourse speaks. The stakes in the narrator’s sexual vicissitudes emerge most clearly in the sadomasochistic experience in chapter seventeen: At that moment I lost any notion of life or death. It was as if I had crossed the thin boundary between my earlier condition … and a beyond that I imagined populated by ghosts, by medieval clanging of chains and vague lights and shadows of souls suffering at the hands of diabolical entities. … I was in another realm, another world. (70–71)25

While the narrator’s imagination paints this other world in childishly infernal colours, what takes place there is an adult game played by strangely inarticulate participants: For a moment we, the three males, were in the room alone. Naked. Nobody said a word. What ancient sins brought us there. The other side of things … was pure animal energy, low, grazing other worlds. … My thoughts went for a second to Jesus Christ on the cross. … After all, passion is nothing else than the highest humiliation of the flesh and the spirit … up to death and resurrection. But we wouldn’t know resurrection. (71)26

The passage is typically ambivalent. We are confronted once again with solitude and silence, the incapacity to speak not only of the characters but also of a narrative discourse that clearly struggles to find appropriate words. To fill the void, discourse resorts to conventional morality which attempts to contain what happened within the framework of sin and perversion. Yet the irrepressible thought of alterity emerges (“grazing other worlds”) and requires a redoubling of conventionality: the facile equation of pain with pleasure, the religious discourse, the predictable lapidary envoi (“we wouldn’t know resurrection”). In the end, much energy is expended in saying virtually nothing, in a confusion of thought that bears witness to the imaginative and cognitive poverty of the narrator who

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remains utterly insensitive to the potential of the experience he has just lived. The progress made in the hospital through the encounter with non-­ human presences seems to be completely forgotten. Yet, something in fact has moved, something happened that the conventional discourse was unable to capture and in the next chapter bursts through the narrative discourse. Through the poetry of Walt Whitman’s “I sing my body electric,” of which the entire chapter is a reinvention in Italian, the second self of the protagonist, the “monster” first encountered at the end of chapter eight, now suddenly takes possession of the narrating voice. The resulting prose is a disordered burgeoning of words and images to express the interpenetration of bodies with extreme precision and crudeness but without any trace of regret or despair, and rather reaching for the possibility of joy: [L]ight floods the room at the moment of orgasm, the frenzied waiting for orgasm, the chairs, something unutterable, the breath breaking and then coming back, the success of the event, its obscenity, its purity. Something close to paradise, silence, night, the crossing of the world. (77)27

The passage is especially remarkable insofar as it expresses the welcoming of marginal other presences which confer on the experience its singular character. The most important words in the quotation are the most unexpected and paradoxical: “chairs, something unutterable.” With these details that interrupt the flow, cut the breath, and introduce a kind of syncopation in the rhythm of the prose, the monstrous self demonstrates the ability to grasp and communicate the “purity” of the moment, its unutterable singularity (unutterable, clearly, except through allusive poetic language). This text is no longer a representation of hell but opens the door to a possible paradise that lies beyond that hell. But we are not there yet; the narrator needs to find the energy for the ethical and cognitive leap that could organize a new imaginary, a new pattern, a new story. This experience will not suffice, however, and the “monster” will not be able to break his chains. In subsequent chapters, the “normal” protagonist returns to his agonizing life until, during a single manic night of drug abuse and repeated sexual encounters, he collapses into a hallucinatory state. The vision that takes shape in his imagination involves a new violent birth: a baby covered in blood emerges among the screams of his mother whose body he

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devastates. The final moment in this sinister nativity is a direct confrontation between the new born and the narrator: “[W]e were left alone, me and myself, the other, me newly born, … and in his gaze I saw all the sweetness all the despair all the anguish all the horror all the hope all the love all the rage all the impatience all the desire that over the course of years my heart had experienced” (107).28 The opportunity to come out of hell arises again, but the answer remains the same: He reached out to me. He wanted to touch me. Wanted to take my hand. I knew why. I knew. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. Be reborn. (107–8)29

The narrator denies himself a physical contact that offers and seeks empathy, shared feeling and reciprocal understanding. He chooses not to cross the threshold that separates him from that other world that demands an imagination beyond the protagonist’s powers. In the brief chapter that follows, he consigns the experience to nothingness, albeit with the usual tantalizing ambivalence: “My life. After all that. After nothing at all” (109).30 This is the outcome of a search for contact which, since his discharge from hospital, focused obsessively on the human (all other presences are eliminated) and systematically pulled back from any exploration of meaning beyond the scripted obscenity dictated by a conventional anthropocentric perspective.

4   Beyond the nostos … The epilogue of La vita oscena begins with a surprising leap forward: The years went by. I went to university and studied philosophy. … I worked during the day and studied at night. I graduated. (110)31

Suddenly, normality returns. The narrator has found a place in the world that prevailed before the tragedies that befell him.

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I did everything I could to forget my hell. Still it was there. It was inside me. It was my cure. (110)32

These lines are puzzling. It is unclear what the cure was and what was the condition from which the narrator was cured. The grammar suggests that the “it” in the last sentence stands for “hell” and this would mean that hell is the cure and not the condition for which a cure was needed. However, in the context of a return to normality, it would seem that the narrator was cured of his “hell” and in this case the last sentence would be asphyxiatingly tautological: hell cured hell. What he experienced during his fall into the abyss cured him of the abyss—a rather facile formulation insofar as it begs the fundamental question: how did unremitting despair suddenly turn into “happy” normality? However, the last sentence could have another and more intriguing meaning, namely that the “cure” is itself hell. The return to normality is a continuation of the abyss and the cure is simply resignation to it. The tension between these different interpretations explodes in the conclusion of the novel: How one comes out of the fire. How one comes through the flames. How beyond the fire there is another light. How behind each loss there is a rebirth. How the world still seems to us beautiful and utterly incomprehensible. While I write these words. While someone reads them. (111)33

The entire passage is exceedingly problematic but the final appeal to the reader is nothing less than a provocation. The narrator resorts to conventional rhetorical figures (coming out of the fire, coming through the flames, “behind each loss […] a rebirth”; “the world … so beautiful and utterly incomprehensible”) in a last-ditch attempt to persuade us that his story is a triumph rather than a tragic defeat! The reader’s imagination cannot but revolt against these empty words that seem precisely like those “that cover the world and fill up mouths and thoughts”34 against which the narrator himself railed in chapter six. Now, the utter, almost jubilant, surrender to normality hits the reader like a slap in the face. The gesture is

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so disconcerting that it forces us to retrace our steps and patiently reconstruct the other world, the one beyond Carosello, which La vita oscena invites us to imagine against and beyond the narrator and the pathetic incantations of a petty wizard “incapable of magic” (11).35

5   … the Posthuman Horizon Far from resolving the narrator’s crisis, the ending of La vita oscena represents the return to that normality which the events described in the novel had radically challenged. Nove presents us with a nostos, the negative and tragic significance of which emerges against what we may call a counterfactual horizon: the threshold of an alternative world that provides the standpoint from which to judge the world presented in the diegesis (Habermas 1980, 89–91). The elaboration of this alternative perspective begins with the observation that the protagonist’s predicament in the novel is first and foremost an ethical one. The narrator’s suffering and despair are ultimately rooted in the hollowness of late capitalist normality and the cognitive and affective devastations that are its consequence. However, in his confusion, the narrator fails to confront the cognitive and affective paralysis to which stubbornly clinging to despair condemns him. The ultimate cost of this paralysis is ethical: he cannot conceive a “good life” (following Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, 2014) and berates his own living force (conatus in Spinoza’s Ethics, 2000) rather than rejoicing in it. The encounter with other than human and marginal presences (animals, plants, even inorganic objects) brings the narrator to thresholds of new possibilities. Potential lines of flight emerge which the narrator attempts to pursue: the night venture in nature is the most explicit effort in this direction. However, suffering intervenes to bar his way. He projects his pain on the animal world and his loneliness and inability to communicate on plants and inanimate beings. In the last part of the novel, the pursuit of intense experiences through drugs and sexuality seeks to sideline these other presences and reinstall the centrality of the anthropos. But the centre cannot hold; it implodes, and a centripetal vortex causes the body and psyche of the all too human subject to collapse: “a fragmentation of the body” (75) and “an explosion of the self into fragments” (92).36 This second blast (after the literal one of the gas tank) provides a new challenge to normality and therefore contains the creative possibilities that suddenly and briefly burst through the narrative discourse in the reworking of Whitman’s poem in chapter eighteen. Free

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desire transforms the body and the subject into a field of positive intensities beyond any conventional limits—an image of the body without organs theorised by Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 185–205).37 This body encompasses and exceeds the binarisms of human and animal, male and female, organic and inorganic, and is experienced as a process in constant evolution, a constant becoming other than itself. But the narrator cannot sustain the intensities that this process generates, and immediately falls back on conventional categories of domesticated transgression: the nice homosexual trio; the two maternal housewives; the nonchalant Brazilian transsexual. The ending of his last sexual encounter is telling: She was washing up in the bidet [the Brazilian transsexual], and she told me as she soaped up her cock that Madonna was the best even though Whitney Houston … I answered that yes, I liked Madonna and she was one of the greats. In a few minutes I was downstairs. In the street. (100)38

The problem in this case is not so much the banal vulgarity of the vignette, but the ostentatious superficiality of the exchange. The reader is meant to realize that nothing of significance has taken place between the two characters. This is distressing enough, but more distressing is the way in which this nothingness is exhibited as if it were inevitable. The truly tragic element, the bitterness of the scene, lies in the fact that the narrator is unwilling and unable to live this modest and ordinary experience as a moment of growth, understanding and gratitude for what he has given and received, even though it was nothing momentous. Nothing remains of Whitman’s lesson: the celebration of an ordinary body traversed by extraordinary energy, a body lit up by constant curiosity, attentive to and enthusiastically receptive of what every experience has to offer, a “monstrous” body which, in joyfully embracing plenitude, posits itself as the bearer of ethical agency. The tragedy of the human subject in La vita oscena is the result of the narrator’s imprisonment in his suffering, which inexorably emerges as a form of self-punishment: negative passions turn against the subject, manifesting unacknowledged guilt and the final acceptance of conventional morality. From this perspective, the obscenity of the narrator’s life is not to be found in his struggle for contact and pleasure, but rather in the normality to which he finally surrenders. That is the work of the anthropos

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that chains the narrator to a radically inadequate standpoint and dooms him to fail in spite of the many opportunities he encounters. One of the great merits of Nove’s work is to show how negativity/negation is one of the most powerful weapons of the anthropos, which continues to think itself precisely when it refuses to think. The lines of flight are in the positive, in the active engagement with those marginal presences whose claims on us challenge conventional experiences and meanings. The life which the narrator finally accepts, and which, with false modesty, he asks the reader to accept as well, is the opposite of the good life—the life of agency and plenitude that can be imagined beyond the anthropos on the terrain of the posthuman.

6   Conclusion: Beyond La vita oscena The indictment of the anthropos that this reading educes from La vita oscena raises the question of how posthuman theory addresses suffering. The narrator’s failure and his provocative attempt to enlist in extremis the support of the reader deserve more than a straightforward rejection. There is much to be learned from this negative parable. The power of physical and psychic suffering to nail the subject to accepted knowledge and conventional morality is a cognitive, affective, ethical and political issue of great significance in posthuman thinking.39 Whether the response to suffering is a resigned passivity or a desperate, ineffectual rebelliousness, the vulnerability and fragility of the subject when faced with profound grief needs to be addressed. We need to imagine how suffering which is immanent to the human condition (perhaps immanent to the anthropos’ increasing obsolescence) may become a resource, an active and productive force, that can be mobilized to foster solidarity and the surpassing of the anthropos rather than a means to his entrenchment. A critical role in the development of this reflection can be played by a literature that, building on La vita oscena, also dares to move beyond it in order to enter that counterfactual world to the threshold of which Nove has led us.

Notes 1. My principal points of reference for these positions are Hayles (1999), Braidotti (2013) and Marchesini (2017).

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2. “Mio padre morì all’improvviso, di ictus. Gli sopravvisse mia madre, malata da anni di cancro. Sarebbe dovuta morire prima lei. Tutti aspettavamo la morte di mia madre. Ogni giorno, da quattro anni. Non se ne parlava. Lo si sapeva, tutti lo sapevano. Quello era vivere la morte. La morte di mia madre.” La vita oscena has not yet been translated into English and therefore all translations are my own. 3. The situation does not fit the classic model of Freudian repression; rather the issue is an imaginative limit, a cognitive and affective barrier to understanding. 4. A famous programme in early Italian TV, Carosello was a series of short comedy sketches ending with an ad. It aired daily between 8:50 and 9:00 pm and was extremely popular. 5. “Vibra come una nave spaziale.” 6. “Perché la vita come una trasmissione televisiva continua a scorrere, non s’incanta lì spaventata, programma dopo programma avanza.” 7. “Nella vita quotidiana abbiamo tutti bisogno di cose. Ero piccolo [prima e/o dopo?] ma già sapevo che riempirsi di cose è un modo che usiamo per sentirci il più lontano possibile dal nulla. Per questo le case si riempiono di elettrodomestici e di lampadari.” 8. “Era un pesce con il labbro lacerato per intero. Scampato ad un’altra cattura. Io guardavo i suoi occhi che stavano per morire e mi sembravano i miei che mi guardavano trapiantati in un altro corpo smarriti. A un certo punto senza parlare anche io e mio padre ci siamo guardati negli occhi chiedendoci il perché di quell’orrore.” 9. “Cosa voleva dire. Stare lì, pescare. Eravamo, come dire, attori senza più un dramma. Non quello, non lì.” 10. “Era come se avessimo sbagliato film. … Siamo tornati a casa come maghi piccoli. Incapaci di fare magie.” 11. “Io sentivo che le margherite erano mie amiche … Loro mi guardavano e io guardavo loro. Eravamo amici, amici anche se era la prima volta che ci vedevamo, amici da sempre. … C’eravamo solo noi e quel noi era quanto di più bello avessi conosciuto. E il sole dall’alto ci guardava suoi figli, e ci sorrideva ci abbracciava padre sole.” 12. “C’era un silenzio assoluto.” 13. “La morte, diceva [la madre], non esiste. Perché tutto si trasforma, mi diceva, e nulla muore. Ma io sapevo che lei sarebbe morta di cancro. Sarebbe diventata un cadavere e non lo volevo sapere … Io guardavo fuori dalla finestra e capivo soltanto e sempre quello, che doveva morire.” 14. “[D]ue forme di vita così diverse, ma pur sempre vita … Io e il ragno. Eravamo prigionieri. Prigionieri dei limiti che la natura ci aveva imposto. Prigionieri di una storia. La vita di un ragno e la storia di un ragazzo.”

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15. The women characters in La vita oscena require a separate treatment that is beyond the scope of this discussion. 16. “[S]ognavo di essere una mosca che veniva divorata e così basta, ero fatto tutto a pezzettini acidi nel ventre del ragno.” 17. “Una notte, ubriaco, mi spogliai completamente. … Nudo, attraversai le strade del paese. Strisciando a terra. Ero un serpente. Non mi vide nessuno. Andai verso i sentieri di montagna. Camminando tra le piante arrivai a una grotta. Mi feci spazio tra gli sterpi e ci entrai. Ero una cosa dell’universo. Una pianta. Un sasso. … Mi immaginavo qualunque forma di essere vivente, mi ci identificavo. Lì vomitai e mi addormentai sulle foglie.” 18. “Avevo immaginato di essere un uccello ferito, un animale braccato. Qualcosa che attende la morte.” 19. “Attesi per l’intera giornata che diventasse un’altra volta notte e tornai a casa pieno di ferite e lividi.” 20. “[Le parole] coprono il mondo,” “un immenso blaterare,” “famiglie,” “automobili,” “televisioni,” “[T]utto è diventato discorso, e quel discorso … è fatto di voci che si accavallano con rabbia, ogni voce cerca di sovrastare le altre.” 21. “No, non era questo vivere. Qualcosa d’altro vive che non è di noi, mostruoso, in noi. Il dolore insegna. Il dolore insegna che è inutile. Il dolore dimostra che è brutto e cattivo. Che non c’è scampo fuori dall’illusione, dalla distrazione. Il dolore ti inchioda alle cose. Il dolore è l’unico maestro. … Non pensare. Non pensare. Non pensare.” 22. “Le merci mi intenerivano fino a farmi soffrire, fino a quasi strapparmi dalla mia condizione, le merci e il loro portato povero di felicità mercantile … Quella bottiglia [di bibita discount] mi sembrava simile alla vita dei più, di quelli che non ce la fanno, oh quanti, mi portava alla commozione e piansi. … Era la mia bottiglia su comodino dell’ospedale. Sentivo che dovevo prendermene cura. Sentivo che lei si sarebbe presa cura di me.” 23. “quel posto [il corridoio] era la mia anima infestata di lui, di lui natura, di lui volontà … e pensavo di essere io quel pipistrello … qualcosa di me che abitava la notte e le mie emozioni e quanto di loro si scioglieva nella notte, ne assumeva la forma algida e senza poesia dell’ospedale, tra i respiri di quanti dormono per passare da un giorno all’altro di cure.” 24. “Ma io non sapevo più cosa fosse, la normalità. L’avevo dimenticata. L’avevo perduta del tutto nell’esplosione della bomba.” 25. “Fu in quell’istante che persi qualunque nozione della vita e della morte. È come se avessi superato quel diaframma così sottile tra la mia condizione di prima … e un oltre che immaginavo popolato da fantasmi, da clangori medioevali di catene da chiaroscuri indefiniti di anime in pena in mano a entità diaboliche. … Ero in un altro regno, in un altro mondo.”

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26. “Per un istante rimanemmo tutti e tre i maschi nella stanza, da soli. Nudi. Nessuno disse una parola. Quali antiche colpe ci avevano portato lì. L’altro lato delle cose … era pura energia animale, bassa, radente altri mondi. … Pensai per un attimo a Gesù Cristo sulla croce … In fondo la passione altro non era che la massima umiliazione della carne e dello spirito … fino alla morte e alla resurrezione. Ma noi non saremmo risorti.” 27. “[L]a luce che inonda la stanza nel momento dell’orgasmo, l’attesa frenetica dell’orgasmo, le sedie, qualcosa di inenarrabile, lo spezzarsi del respiro, la sua ripresa, la riuscita dell’evento, la sua oscenità, la sua purezza. Qualcosa attorno al paradiso, il silenzio, la notte, l’attraversamento del mondo.” 28. “[R]imanemmo solo io e me stesso, quell’altro, io nato, … e nel suo sguardo vidi tutta la dolcezza tutta la disperazione tutta l’ansia tutto l’orrore tutta la speranza tutto l’amore tutta la rabbia tutta l’impazienza tutto il desiderio che nel corso degli anni avevano attraversato il mio cuore.” 29. “Tese una mano verso di me. Voleva toccarmi. Voleva darmi la mano. Io lo so perché. Lo sapevo. Ma io non. Potevo. Rinascere.” 30. “La mia. Vita. Dopo di tutto. Dopo di niente.” 31. “Passarono gli anni. Mi iscrissi a filosofia. … Lavoravo di giorno e studiavo di notte. Mi laureai.” 32. “Feci di tutto per dimenticare il mio inferno. Pure c’era. Era dentro di me. Era la mia guarigione.” 33. “Come si esce dal fuoco. Come si attraversano le fiamme. Come oltre il fuoco ci sia un’altra luce. Come dietro ogni perdita ci sia una rinascita. Come il mondo continui ad apparirci bello e completamente incomprensibile. Mentre scrivo queste parole. Mentre qualcuno le legge.” 34. “[Parole] che coprono il mondo e riempiono le bocche e i pensieri.” 35. “[Piccolo mago] incapac[e] di fare magie.” 36. “[F]rammentazione del corpo”; “un’esplosione di sé in frammenti.” 37. Deleuze and Guattari are central figures in the genealogy of posthuman thought and sensibility. While the most evident connection is the theory of becoming outlined in Milles plateaux, Deleuze’s lifelong engagement with Spinoza and Guattari’s ecophilosophy or “ecosophy” are fundamental contributions to the development of contemporary posthumanism (see Braidotti 2011). 38. “Stava facendosi il bidet [il transessuale brasiliano] e mi disse passandosi la schiuma del sapone sulla cappella che Madonna era la migliore anche se Whitney Houston … Le risposi che sì, che mi piaceva Madonna e che era una grande. Nel giro di pochi minuti ero giù. In strada.” 39. In August 2018 a seminar on this issue was organized at Utrecht University by Rosi Braidotti, one of the leading theorists of the posthuman.

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Works Cited Aristotle. 2014. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Debord, Guy. 1992. La société du spectacle. Paris: Gallimard. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit. Habermas, Jurgen. 1980. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hayles, N.  Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marchesini, Roberto. 2017. Over the Human: Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany. New York: Springer. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1989. Theses on Feuerbach. In Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer, 243–245. New York: Doubleday. Nove, Aldo. 2010. La vita oscena. Turin: Einaudi. Spinoza, Benedict. 2000. Ethics. Trans. G.  H. R.  Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Lose Your Self: Gianni Celati and the Art of Being One with the World Enrico Vettore

After a period of silence that followed his rather avant-garde beginnings, Gianni Celati1 returned to fiction in the mid-1980s with Voices from the Plains (henceforth Voices…) [Narratori delle pianure] (1985) and Appearances [Quattro novelle sulle apparenze] (1987). The philosophical stories of these two collections are often set in desolate, anonymous and sometimes post-apocalyptic landscapes inhabited by peculiar and frequently nameless characters. A Zen and ecopsychological reading of these narratives, I contend, reveals that Celati wants to call attention to the fact that the self and the landscape/world are coextensive. As a result, the idea of a solid and defined self is weakened, as it is the ensuing feeling of the self’s discontinuity with the external world. Two more ethical consequences are worth noticing: a sense of heightened responsibility towards the outer world (inseparable, we’ll see, from the self); and perhaps an invitation to dispense with the very idea of duality and identity, a

E. Vettore (*) California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_11

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suggestion particularly evident in the last story of Appearances, “Disappearance of a Praiseworthy Man.” A Zen and ecopsychological reading of Celati’s fictions is also pertinent for our purpose because both approaches exhibit strong non-­ anthropocentric and posthuman features. Furthermore, they can be also applied to Celati’s more recent works, thus revealing coherence and consistency in his approach to writing and ethics through the years. A decade and a half after completing the stories analysed here, Celati wrote “The Paralytic in the Desert” (2001), a story that could well be a modern Zen parable. It explores the perils of the extremes of both hedonistic and ascetic lifestyles through the path of an egocentric character who first seems to understand the inanity of a life devoted to (sexual) pleasure, and then, to make amends, devotes himself to extreme humility but, ironically, just to gain admiration and love. A bizarre encounter brings him to his senses, and he finally finds equilibrium in his new, ordinary life. A word of caution before I proceed: although a close reading of Celati’s work will demonstrate, I hope, how Zen philosophy deeply pervades it, we must clarify that there are no explicit mentions of Zen texts in the stories I am going to analyse here. It is not impossible that Celati stumbled upon the ubiquitous 101 storie zen (1973) or that he might have read the original 101 Zen Stories (first published in London in 1939 and included in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones in 1957) when he was in London in the early 1970s, but this is just a conjecture.2 Ferrara’s introduction and the chapters of the volume’s first section have provided ample information on how posthuman concepts developed in Italian culture since Leopardi’s bioegalitarian and anti-anthropocentric formulation, and through modernism and postmodernism until Celati’s time. In addition, I would like to briefly mention here three specific cases, geographically and philosophically related to Celati’s writings, that can help us better situate his posthumanist thought. I will start with the most recent, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), and proceed backwards with Pirandello’s One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (1926, but started as early as 1909), and the “August 1821” entry in Leopardi’s Zibaldone that Celati mentions in Towards the River’s Mouth (Celati 2016, 1024). In a telling scene of Red Desert, set in the same polluted industrial area where Celati’s stories take place, Giuliana’s son Valerio (age 5 or 6) dispenses on a microscope slide two drops of blue liquid, one after the other, in order to demonstrate to his mother that one plus one equals one,

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for the outcome of his action is one larger drop of liquid, not two. This scene explains, and expands on, Giuliana’s tale of a restaurant guest who had been complaining because the eel he had ordered tasted like petroleum. Industrial progress, environmental decay and personal neurosis have shown their interconnectedness through the blurring of boundaries between human and nonhuman, I and not-I. One, No One and One Hundred Thousand’s last chapter illustrates the second step of Celati’s trajectory. Here, the protagonist Vitangelo Moscarda, who has given away his possessions and abandoned the notion of a fixed self, describes his every morning twofold experiential realization: of being reborn every moment and of being one with the clouds, the trees and literally everything around him. As we shall see later, in “From the Airports,” written in 1984, Celati reworks the scene of the daily rebirth and sets the protagonist’s feeling to be one with the uninterrupted weft of everything on the Po’s riverbank. This location brings us to the chronological starting point of the trajectory. The riverbank had appeared in the 1983 section of Celati’s travelogue Towards the River’s Mouth. Here, Celati notices how that particular landscape’s emptiness spurs him to write, as if words followed something outside of himself; he also mentions that he can understand space only confusedly (1024). Celati states that his thoughts owe to an August 1821 entry in Leopardi’s Zibaldone (1024). The entry is probably the one Leopardi wrote on August 1 (Zibaldone 1429–1430) about the sublime sensations caused by infinite and/or indefinite spaces, like when we can see the unlimited vastness of a landscape’s horizon. Celati expands on Leopardi’s observation on the indefinite and vague to establish the external space’s pre-eminence over interiority; in doing so, he undermines the subject’s centrality and stability and weakens its independence and separation from the external world. Even though it is a hypothesis that needs to be corroborated, it is not impossible that Celati’s belief that animals, plants and the environment in general feel as much as humans do, clearly spelled in Appearances and Towards the River’s Mouth, might also have Leopardi’s early writings, Operette morali and Zibaldone, among its sources. The connection between Celati and philosophical postmodern thought has been highlighted by Rebecca J. West and by Thomas Harrison. After investigating the links between Celati and thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Agamben and Gianni Vattimo’s pensiero debole [weak thought], West has summarized her findings by defining Celati’s oeuvre as a path of recovery towards a new approach to the beauty and ineffability of existence after

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modernity’s grand narratives. Interestingly, but also revealingly, to make her point more clear, through most of her “Provisional Conclusions” West analyses “The Paralytic in the Desert,” albeit not from a Zen perspective. On the other hand, by linking Vattimo’s pensiero debole and some concepts by Heidegger to Celati’s Appearances, Harrison draws the conclusion that Celati’s “fabulation-as-a-process” (Harrison 2011, 286) reflects on how our experiences are mortal and evanescent while showing “caritas toward what merely exists” (285). As we will see, these scholars’ insights and my analysis partially overlap, especially on the overall topic of Celati’s ethics. I hope nonetheless to be able to add to the current discussion on Celati through a two-pronged theoretical perspective that allows me to focus both on Celati’s take on identity and on the environment: the Zen Buddhist idea that all phenomena (among which the self and the world) are coextensive and marked by impermanence and non-substantiality, and the intersection between James Hillman’s post-Jungian notion of world’s soul—anima mundi—and Theodore Roszak’s concept of ecopsychology. The conclusion of my analysis is that Celati proposes a subject whose posthuman “identity” is inextricably intertwined with that of the world, and therefore dwells in this world, a world that we traverse as wanderers to find meaning, open to the revelation of the absence of limits between what we consider “I” and what we think is, illusorily perhaps, “not-I.”3 Before starting my analysis of a few of Celati’s key texts of the 1980s, it is necessary to briefly illustrate my theoretical framework, starting from Hillman’s concept of anima mundi. The connection between Hillman and Celati has been explored by Anna Maria Chierici who has focused mostly on the melancholia that pervades some of Celati’s texts. For Chierici, Celati’s characters use places in order to find the meaning of their own existence (Chierici 2007, 165); on the other hand, by making visible the world’s melancholy, places can alleviate the characters’ own sense of subjectivity and melancholy (170). My reading starts somewhat from the same premises as Chierici’s but develops in a different direction. American psychologist James Hillman, reworking the thought of Heraclitus, of the fifteenth-century Florentine Neo-Platonists, and of C. G. Jung, proposes a psychology in which the human soul’s boundaries are limitless and the world itself is endowed with a soul that resides in all things (Hillman 1992, 93,102; 1980, §5). Hillman refuses the literality of depth (as in a movement towards lower layers) in favour of understanding the soul of all things as their interiority “reveals itself … in the horizontal

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world” (Hillman 1980, §6 in finem). Hillman’s ideas strongly resonate with Theodore Roszak’s ecopsychology, a practice that focuses on illuminating the innate emotional bonds between “person and planet” (Roszak 2001, 19). Hillman’s foreword to Roszak’s book Ecopsychology further expands on this concept. According to Hillman, Roszak has taken Freud’s notion of id and Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and concluded that what these terms imply is “the world” (Hillman 1995, xix). Therefore, “if psychology is the study of the subject, and if the limits of the subject cannot be set, then psychology merges willy-nilly with ecology” (xx). To achieve balance, then, we need “a harmonizing with the environmental world” (xix), while “to understand the ills of the soul today we turn to the ills of the world, to its suffering” (xxi). One important consequence of Hillman’s argument is that the classic Cartesian dichotomy between I and not-I, between a subject endowed with a soul and a soulless world, ceases to exist. The soul of the world and the soul of the individual are indistinguishable. For this reason, “inside” and “out there” are problematic concepts: the individual’s psychological problems are also the world’s (“psycho-ecological”) problems; in similar fashion, the world’s problems cannot help being connected to the individual as well: psychology and ecology are interconnected. Even more importantly for our purpose is to notice here that the ideas proposed by Hillman and ecopsychology seem to suggest a shift from a human-centred model of the world towards a non-anthropocentric and posthuman one. The centrality of the human being (as subject and knower of a world-object) is being abandoned in favour of an epistemological model where the boundaries between—and the roles of—knower and known, subject and object, are blurred. Some of the features of the aforementioned theoretical approaches, including a non-anthropocentric vision of the world, can be found, in a different form and mainly for the purpose of achieving personhood, in Zen Buddhism, a very practical, realistic and materialistic form of Buddhism, as it evolved when it expanded from India to Japan via China where it blended with Taoism. The most important philosopher of Zen Buddhism, Eihei Dogen (1200–1253), stressed “the gradual attainment of enlightenment” through “sitting crossed-legged in meditation” (Reese 1996, 849). Dogen also boldly claimed that all beings (both sentient and non-sentient, i.e. animals, plants, rocks) can achieve enlightenment with their body and in this world. Enlightenment brings about the experiential realization that all phenomena (including human beings) are empty (sunyata) because impermanent and lacking an unchangeable essence. Zen

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Buddhism holds that phenomena arise from a never-changing combination of interdependent factors ([inter]dependent origination). Phenomena are therefore marked by impermanence (anicca) and non-essence (anatta). Consequently, names and words cannot render the true nature of things, their constant state of flux, of becoming. Moreover, if emptiness and impermanence are the markings of all things, our attachment to them, our liking or disliking them as if they had a solid essence, is unjustified. In fact, fear of losing what we like and of coming into contact with what we dislike is the ultimate cause of suffering (dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness). The Buddhist answer to this impasse is non-attachment, equanimity and non-­ duality. Zen strongly distrusts pure rational intellect and the power of words. According to American neurologist and long-time Zen practitioner James H. Austin, it is this distrust that favours instead meditation to achieve the insight attained by the historical Buddha. The ensuing “insightful awakening … implies an increasingly selfless … affirmation of life” (Austin 1998, 15) “with increasing compassion, in each present moment of this world” (Austin 2011, 4), which is “ordinary, incredible” (Austin 2014, xiii). Epistemologically, Zen refuses an oppositional and representational mode of thinking/knowing by holding a “positionless position” model (Nagatomo 2015, §4, §5.2) that refuses to grant a privileged position to the subject/knower, since knower and known are really not two. Despite this necessarily cursory exposition, it is clear how closely Zen’s main philosophical tenets resonate with some recent theoretical writings on posthumanism, namely Ferrando’s genealogy of Eastern spirituality’s posthuman features and Karen Barad’s notion of intra-agency between phenomena that have no essence until they manifest themselves— as phenomena. Ferrando does not specifically focus on Zen but more generally on Eastern spiritual traditions, including Buddhism. However, within these traditions she traces the genealogy and prominence of posthuman and non-anthropocentric features, emphasizing their post-dualistic approach to the world. On a different but complementary plane, Barad’s notion of intra-agency, informed by quantum physics and Niels Bohr’s theory, seems to confirm and reinforce from a scientific standpoint Zen’s cornerstone concepts of emptiness and interdependence. Zen’s main tenets and Hillman’s and ecopsychology’s concepts are useful to read Celati’s stories differently, as we shall see, but they can also help with “Finzioni a cui credere” (usually translated as “Fictions to Believe In”), a text that can be read as a programmatic introduction to both Voices… and Appearances, and that needs to be briefly analysed here before moving to Celati’s short stories.

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1   “Fictions to Believe In” (“Finzioni a cui credere”) “Finzioni a cui credere,” now in Marco Sironi’s Geografie del narrare, appeared originally in the December 1984 issue of the journal Alfabeta (no. 67), where Celati had also published a very important text for our purposes, the short story “From the Airports” (September 1984, no. 64) that will be included in Voices…. “Finzioni…” tries to answer Celati’s question on how a writer can craft fictions that are possible, that anyone can believe (Celati 2004, 175). Interestingly, Celati chooses the phrase “credere a” (to believe something/someone) over “credere in” (to believe in something’s/somebody’s existence or value; to have faith in somebody). The full significance of this choice will become apparent, as we shall see, in the last paragraphs of the text. For now, suffice it to say that Celati seems to suggest that it is possible to write stories readers can and should believe, but not necessarily believe in. Since Celati claims that Italian intellectuals have been trying to unmask any believable fiction and to offer instead totalizing explanations of the world (Celati 2004, 175), he shifts his attention to the latest works of his collaborator and friend, Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri. For Celati, Ghirri has been able to tell the present state of affairs and the fissità (stillness) of a particular kind of empty space no one can understand because it is impossible to use it (175). Ghirri has been able to unveil the fact that everything can be interesting because it belongs to the “esistente” (what exists). In virtue of his detached and equanimous gaze, Ghirri has been able to find an example of “cultura del vuoto” (culture of nothingness/emptiness 176). Following Ghirri’s example, Celati aims to a deceptively more modest goal: to stitch together the appearances of these empty spaces and craft fictions set in this kind of empty scenarios that punctuate the Po valley and can provide relief (177). Interestingly, people in their everyday life also try to create a possible narrative of the external world: this is a fiction, too, but a fiction that is necessary to believe. The ever-changing appearances, Celati concludes, require new stories, and the craft of the storyteller calls for a way to think-imagine in order to avoid the paralysis caused by the contempt for what surrounds us (177). The Zen undertones of the entire text are strong: Celati suggests that both types of fictions (those professionally written and those crafted by non-writers) are useful because they provide relief despite the fact that what they uncover is the emptiness underlying all phenomena, that is, the fact that under these appearances there might be nothing: that what we see is everything there is. Ghirri’s detached gaze,

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too, can be characterized as Zen, for it shows the non-dualistic and non-­ discriminating approach that refuses to distinguish between high and low, beautiful and ugly, accepting instead phenomena as they are, in their non-­ substantiality. Celati’s conflation of the two types of fiction suggests that what he does in writing is what his characters (and his readers) do by exploring and/or observing their world. That explains the real meaning of the original title of Voices…, Narratori delle pianure: characters who create stories to understand the world, despite the repeated instances of emptiness they meet in their lives. Such emptiness, however, should not drive us to despair. In order to avoid the nihilism, chaos and anarchy that could ensue from such a radical worldview, Buddhism’s Mahayana tradition, to which Zen belongs, proposes a middle way: the theory of the two truths. Zen recognizes that, while at the ultimate level everything is emptiness and all is interconnected, from the everyday standpoint we should accept the concepts of essence, dualism and permanence because they are useful fictions that help to live a normal life, but we should not believe in them (Thien-An, 89). When Celati claims that the stories written by writers and those created every day by non-writers are worth producing and believing even though they are about the emptiness of certain spaces (and life, perhaps), his modus operandi follows closely Zen’s middle way, or at least achieves a very similar goal: the realization of emptiness and the acceptance of stories we can believe, but not quite believe in. In “Finzioni…” Celati’s concern for the well-being of the environment is rather muted, albeit quite pervasive. However, Celati’s (and Zen’s) invitation to equanimity should not be mistaken for quietism but rather as a way of critiquing the traditional negative attitude for what is perceived as ugly. Such a judgment would perpetuate a subject–object way of perceiving/knowing, de facto preventing the possibility of feeling empathy for it. Instead, Celati invites us to be attentive, open and empathetic, preparing us to better live in this world, to be one with it and to care for it as we care for ourselves, or vice versa, since the boundaries of the soul cannot be found, and the world also has a soul. Very similarly, in Zen, ethics (i.e. compassion and care for the other and nature) are a direct consequence of the practice of meditation that gradually enlightens us on the true nature of things, their emptiness and overall interdependence, which includes us as well. The strong non-anthropocentric features of Zen thought have become more and more important for practitioners and thinkers alike in

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the establishment of a robust theoretical framework that has worked against the repeated accusations of being amoral, quietist and otherworldly in order to show how Zen ideas work well in the field of ecology. For example, Graham Parkes made a case for the pairing of Buddhism and ecology defending (among other things) Dogen from the accusation of quietism, while Simon P. James refuted (among others) the claim that Zen is anthropocentric and quietist and stated instead that Zen is a perfect fit for deep ecology. In Voices… we will see at work a combination of the ideas I presented in this section of the chapter.

2   Zen and Ecopsychology in Voices from the Plains and Appearances In Voices… Celati chooses—and invites us—to observe attentively the landscape of the Po Valley. The cause for Celati’s intense observation is a thinly veiled concern for this area and its inhabitants, for they seem to mirror each other in many stories. The Po Valley carries the signs of the quick progress and richness that Northern Italy enjoyed in the mid-1980s, a period of time marked by a strong hedonistic trend among Italians, encouraged by the power (and corruption) of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and by Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire, heavy on American content and formats. Celati describes this area as what a place would look like “in a post-war era, after a disaster nobody had heard about” (Celati 2016, 827–828),4 where the asphalt covers everything, “as if human beings should forget forever how the earth’s surface is shaped” (828).5 Despite the presence of some precise geographic details, what stands out are mainly anonymous suburbs, nondescript buildings, small villages without memories or tradition, a countryside that can be defined negatively, perhaps only as “not yet a city.” They are generally inhabited by people that seem either dead inside or incapable of seeing what is around, hiding in modern anonymous houses, lost in empty conversations or in aimless monologues. Among them there are a few peculiar souls who show curiosity and are therefore willing to interrogate themselves, other people and the space they inhabit. Voices… is also a reflection on the distance between landscape and humans, and between human beings. The more evident consequences of this pervasive distance are the pollution and destruction of the environment operated by humans, a generalized numbness exhibited by

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characters who live in this environment, and the overconfidence placed in language and words that are used to objectify the world under the guise of understanding it. Some of Celati’s characters are able, through a sort of awakening to achieve a sense of oneness with the world. Others, somehow anticipating Hillman’s call to a responsive environmentalism (“Ten Core Ideas,” written in 2000) are able to overcome the numbness of their psyche through an attuning of their senses, a heightening of their observation skill, an alertness (mindfulness) to their surroundings. A quick look at the sequence of stories confirms that the emptiness under the surface of things, the environment and the interdependence of things and characters are central to the collection. The first, thirteenth, fourteenth and thirtieth short story of the collection (beginning, almost middle and end) are, we could say, programmatically emblematic. While they do not achieve the complexity of Appearances’ longer stories like “Disappearance…,” they are nonetheless powerful in undermining the idea of separation between I and not-I and therefore suggesting the possibility of oneness with the world. To achieve this, we need to be selfless, and drop the first indication of our identity: our name. Many of the characters of Voices… are nameless. By leaving out first and last names, the very mark of individuality, Celati undermines the importance of the individuals and their ego. “Island in the Middle of the Atlantic,” the first story of Voices,… corroborates and expands on this theme while at the same time linking it to the concept of attention and care for the outside world that comes from an equanimous observation of it. The protagonist of “Island…” uncharacteristically does have a first name, but it is the same as that of his best friend, and learns an important lesson from his being numb to—and contemptuous of—a particular area of his city. “Island…” tells the story of Archie, a former policeman who accidentally killed a youngster in Glasgow. Archie realized that this had happened because he had been careless, because he felt disdain for that sordid part of the city and therefore did not pay attention to his surroundings (Celati 2016, 740).6 He then asked his colleague and friend Archie to help him so that he could move to an island off the coast of Scotland in order to learn how to observe his surroundings and “make his gestures and thoughts mindful” (740),7 before returning to Glasgow to face trial. On the island, he learned how to observe and appreciate every detail of his surroundings that he shared with an Italian amateur radio practitioner over periodical radio conversations. In the end, Archie was found not guilty and returned to the island with his wife to live with his friend Archie and his wife.

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Celati had observed that the contempt we show for those parts of the landscape judged on the basis of a traditional aesthetics can cause a paralysis (Celati 2004, 177). In “Island…,” however, the contempt and distance between the subject and a landscape perceived as ugly and soulless generates violence and death. The only solution Archie finds is to isolate himself (literally) and start training his mindfulness, as Laura Sewall suggests, in order to get reacquainted with the world (Sewall 1995). Such training would make him attentive, alert (mindful) but also purposeful in his thoughts and actions; it would be a way to overcome the disdain and/or numbness caused by the perceived (but illusory) dualism between human and not human, between self and not-self; it would also help to implement that equanimous gaze à la Ghirri that marks the end of attraction and repulsion, fear and desire and prompts oneness and moral behaviour as a result. “From the Airports,” situated towards the centre of the collection, displays Zen and ecopsychology’s themes even more prominently and clearly than other stories. In this story, a nameless man, who considers his professional career (never explained in the text) a fraud because it is the result of his skills in manipulating technical language, returns to his little provincial town in Italy. Here, he discovers that he enjoys looking at things at dawn, when the rhythm of the stars regulates his own breathing and when things are still fresh and alive (Celati 2016, 790). In a key moment of the text, when he sits on the river bank in a cloud of mist, he is able to imagine that the intricacy of everything that exists is the result of processes finely organized by thought and stories in the planet’s void (791–792), and feels that being there “was like being everywhere; the uninterrupted weft, of which he was also part, was always with him, simply in his body and his thought” (792).8 In the final paragraph, somehow anticlimactically, we learn that he had felt at home mainly in the airports, where he and other passengers had accepted their destiny of perpetual travellers or tourists (794). The protagonist’s morning experience with perception of things and his time on the river bank are informed by impermanence and nonentity, coextensiveness of self and the world and time as uji (time-being, being as time), that is beginningless and endless, constantly renewing as a living– dying experience. When on the river bank, the protagonist has been able to find himself by looking outside of himself, realizing experientially that everything is interconnected and that he, too, is part of this

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interconnectedness (or perhaps, in Barad’s language, of intra-agency). Moreover, in line with Zen’s interpretation of the emptiness and nonsubstantiality of the world, he chooses the word “vuoto” (void, emptiness) to qualify both the nature of space in which this uninterrupted fabric of interconnectedness happens and the quality of the elements that constitute the planet itself. The equivalence of here–there, in–out seems to confirm Hillman’s version of the boundless soul and debunks the idea of separateness. The last paragraph of the short story reinforces these concepts through the image of the anonymous, selfless wanderer, who is at home in any part of the world, since being in an airport, or on a river bank, feels like being anywhere else, that is, exactly the same. The last story of Voices…, “Young Humans on the Run,” is set in a nameless area where a famous dancing club attracts young people from all over Italy. Here, the illegal security members of the club kill a young man and the owner of the establishment tricks his friends into believing that the police are looking for them. They run away carrying the body of the dead friend against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic environment, nightmarish, un-mappable, at times desert-like and at times like a swamp, with no knowable streets, ways or paths, in a babel of unknown dialects. Cold, trembling and crying, the four friends move from place to place while stopping at times to observe the pollution of the big river, the devastation of the uninhabited countryside, the proliferation of enormous new buildings. Awakening after a night near the coast, they realize that they don’t feel cold anymore, and that they have stopped crying. They find a boat and decide to row away in it, thinking that, by rowing in a direction, they would arrive somewhere. This last image, while somehow hopeful for the future of the young men on the run, now unafraid and unshaken, works nevertheless as a strong warning about the tragic state of the environment and of the human beings who inhabit it. The collection of short stories has come to its catastrophic yet muted climax, a sort of dark, quiet apocalypse that invites us to go back and consider the previous stories as a series of stages that prepared this final step, perhaps a cautionary string of tales that has provided a possible way to address the situation: consider humans and the environment a continuum (as Hillman and Zen would say), and act consequently, that is, ethically. Celati will end his next collection of stories, Appearances, with a somewhat similar image: an unnamed man who has left his city and his son behind him, this time escaping the illusoriness of the world towards a possible awakening.

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3   Appearances (1987) In this last section of the chapter, because of space limitations, I will focus only on two stories of Appearances: “Baratto” and “Disappearance of a Praiseworthy Man.” In his Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen (sitting meditation), Dogen says this about the mental process: “Think of not thinking. Not thinking—what kind of thinking is that? Nonthinking. This in itself is the essential art of zazen” (Davis 2016, 196). I will explain in detail what is meant by nonthinking during my analysis of “Baratto,” the story of a well-respected high school Physical Education teacher who realizes that he is left without thoughts and stops speaking for seven months. For now, the similarity between the nonthinking required by zazen and Baratto’s story might suggest that the short story could be read as a long zazen session, while the repeated instances in which Baratto is able to think everyone’s thoughts, and at least one instance in which another character is able to think Baratto’s thoughts, reaffirms once again the idea that the boundaries between I and not-I are blurred at least, and that interiority is not so important, it is not the only repository of thoughts. The story starts when Baratto refuses to play a rugby match because he feels that the match does not concern him; once in the locker room, he feels that he can hold his breath as long as he wants without waiting for anything, including the thought of being there. Once at home, he realizes that he has been left without any thoughts. From that moment on, Baratto stops talking, stops having his own thoughts, falls asleep frequently during the day, and moves in for seven months, uninvited but welcomed, with an old couple who lives upstairs. One of the consequences of not having thoughts is that now Baratto can think other people’s thoughts. He can survive in society because, although he does not have thoughts of his own, those of other people are enough for everyday social interactions. Baratto’s porosity regarding the accessibility to others’ thoughts appears to be contagious: one of his neighbours realizes that he is thinking Baratto’s thoughts (Celati 2016, 893). The same neighbour asks himself (and Baratto) whether everything is a gigantic sham, a comedy of appearances that delude us while in fact nothing is real (892).9 One afternoon, all the people (including a medium) who have met thanks to Baratto’s strange condition, gather in the neighbour’s apartment and decide to have a séance. During the séance, Baratto, who had fallen asleep and now answers the medium’s questions, explains that in his head there is nothing, that

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everything happens outside, in the air, where sentences move around so that we all can say something—everything takes place outdoors (897). After that Baratto wakes up and starts speaking again. For many months, Baratto is mute and without thoughts (almost nonthinking). He can think the thoughts of others and even understand the Japanese language, which he does not know, during a motorcycle trip. His human boundaries have clearly expanded to a point of embracing the world, and his general attitude towards people is receptive and balanced, albeit not passive: he actively joins his friend for a road trip and he routinely dismisses the advances of a woman who seems to be interested in him for very superficial reasons. This openness is a positive sign: the very fact that he is thinking somebody else’s thoughts is qualified in the narrative as a sign that he is healing (899). If we read Baratto’s path from the standpoint of Zen, we might claim that the period of time spent in silence but with his eyes open and nonthinking (a sort of very long zazen) brought him on the verge of a kensho, the “first flash of enlightenment or satori” (Thien-An 1975, 176), which is the first step of seeing into one’s nature (i.e. empty, impermanent, non-dual and coextensive). Nonthinking is “neither thinking nor the mere absence or the suppression of thinking” (Davis 2016, 218) and Baratto’s spontaneous, equanimous and selfless actions could well be the result of the activity of nonthinking. Such a detail seems confirmed by the principal of Baratto’s school, who offers a revealing interpretation of his employee’s status by claiming: “He looks like a shadow that passes by without worrying that he is a shadow. An appearance that is already disappearing” (Celati 2016, 885).10 It looks like the school principal has described an enlightened human being who has chosen to dwell on earth, but, as if the Zen overtones were not enough, he wonders if Baratto is really “free from the buzzing of his interior monologues, free from the constant delirium that we all carry within us” (885).11 It is possible to answer the principal’s question in the positive: nonthinking is Dogen’s main instruction to calm the constant chatter that taints our mind. The core of zazen is “becoming this clear, empty, open untainted mind” (Davis 2016, 218). Baratto’s trajectory could therefore be assimilated to a seven-month zazen session, during which he has achieved an empty, untainted mind, equanimity and a level of oneness with the world that is symbolized by his explanations of the outside thoughts, his preference for open doors and his openness to complete strangers. What will be of him now that he is speaking again is anyone’s guess, but perhaps his

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future can be found in other stories of the collection, possibly in the main protagonist’s final peregrination of “Disappearance of a Praiseworthy Man.” “Disappearance…” is mainly a first-person memorial written by its nameless protagonist, a widowed father in his forties who tries to understand the illusory essence of life and the link illusion–death also through his relationship with his son. The protagonist seems to be able to come to terms with the play of appearances that life is by way of mindful observation, writing and reasoning first, and then by abandoning the city and wandering in the world towards a possible “awakening” (risveglio). Indeed, it is not completely useless here to mention that Buddha, the title given to Siddhartha Gautama, literally means “the awakened one.” The protagonist and narrator of the story has a well-paid job in a company that produces containers, but rather than with the objects they produce, his role makes him deal mainly with catalogues, labels and codes representing those containers whose essence is a mystery (Celati 2016, 958). The suggestion to a solution to this impasse seems to come from a couple of Swiss cows in a meadow that look at the protagonist as though they were saying, “hey, there is something over there, in the world” (959).12 They seem to be able, says the narrator utilizing Zen’s language and ideas, to see “something indistinct and without an acronym, label, logo, perhaps they were seeing the essence of the great nothingness” (959).13 But it is just an illusion: “the ultimate truth,” as Mark Siderits explains, “is that there is no ultimate truth” (qtd. in Garfield 1995, 91). At this point of the narration, therefore, the protagonist’s idea of what lies behind the shimmering surface of phenomena does not go much beyond his initial awareness, which is however enough to make him feel different, separated from (and better than) the mass of unaware people who go around aimlessly in the city (Celati 2016, 960). Little by little, however, his perception changes: the realization that labels can apply to human beings startles him. “How easy it is after all to explain a situation and then declare ‘I am that.’ A man immediately becomes this ‘that’ he points at, and until he dies he will point at this ‘that’ that represents him” (964).14 “That” is like the labels and acronyms of the containers he sells: not only do they hide the fact that there is nothing under the label, but also they hinder the vision of the great emptiness and of the impermanence that a label would pretend to hide by freezing a phenomenon in time once and for all. After many clues revealing that the protagonist has been living an inauthentic life (defined by work, father role, national and personal identity) in a sudden, partially understood realization he yells at his son: “I feel

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free! do you understand?” (970). This is a turning point. One day at the office, while the protagonist gets closer to the window in order to better see the clouds (971), a common image for impermanence in Zen Buddhism, he sees in the building facing his own another man, who uncannily resembles him and for a moment he suspects that he could be the person who “writes my memoir, or at least a very similar one, based on the script that brings together and makes us so similar to each other” (971).15 The protagonist’s awareness had inflated his ego, but pride and uniqueness disintegrated the moment in which he realized that he could be the other, and vice versa. More events accelerate his development. Upon overhearing a neighbour repeating many times the first-person pronoun while complaining with his son-in-law, the protagonist realizes how hypertrophic is the human ego: “but so many I’s are there in the world, the sidewalks, all are full of them” (973).16 He stops writing his memorial and the short story shifts to a third-person narrative, a shift perfectly in agreement with the character’s evolution: now that his identity is in peril, crumbling under the pressure of the latest revelations, the first-person narrative makes no sense. The choice of stopping the writing of the memorial can also be explained through Zen’s preference for a direct experience of things, since “intellectual understanding is only second-hand knowledge” (Thien-An 1975, 154), “not an actual experience or true realization of Zen” (155). Wearing his chequered cap, sunglasses and his son’s Walkman, “feeling finally for some reason like anybody else and, like anybody else, he will be on a path to an unknown future of innocence” (Celati 2016, 983).17 Innocence is a recurrent term in the story (as a noun or a Parisian toponym) that hints at a possible renewal, at the ability to look at the world in a new way. The last part of the story describes the protagonist’s possible future actions. He will leave his job and the labels, codes and acronyms it utilizes. He and the not so young co-worker with whom he is in love will probably leave Paris for the Swiss Alps, knowing only that we “must go on like world’s pilgrims, until the awakening, if the awakening will come” (984).18 This awakening, as the text made abundantly clear, might take place not in the city but in nature, the place where Buddha-nature shines effortlessly. This awakening will possibly bring to completion the path our protagonist has started: from awareness of the emptiness behind phenomena to intellectual speculation about it to a final direct experience of the emptiness that will bring about the ineffable realization that everything is nothingness, to which just mental constructions, explanations, definitions and

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labels give a sense of reality. With no substance behind the surface of appearances, with only interdependent origination giving us the illusion of a tangible reality, the world we live in must be intensely observed in order to tame the ego, to perfect personhood, to realize that there is an essential unity of self and other. Once the main character will have realized that, he will be able to live in the same way in the city, or anywhere in the world, as a selfless, posthuman being. The self and the ego will be abandoned, the shift from anthropocentric to non-anthropocentric, from human to posthuman, will take place, ethics will ensue, ecology will follow.

4   Conclusion I hope to have demonstrated that a Zen and Hillman–ecopsychological reading of Celati’s fiction is a viable way to better understand one of the most original Italian writers within the context of posthumanism. Some of the ideas and practices of Zen and ecopsychology, as we have seen, overlap, but the main goal of both is the promotion of interconnectedness between humans, and between humans and the environment. Zen Buddhism is a philosophy that can be safely defined as experiential and anti-intellectual, like most of Celati’s characters, and its main philosophical tenets align perfectly with Celati’s concern about appearances and with identity (or lack thereof). Also, Zen’s idea of the coextensiveness and interdependence of human and world subverts the accepted and illusory categories of (human) subject and (world) object, and the role of human agency as led by greed rather than feelings of compassion. It thus works very well with many of Celati’s texts (especially “Baratto” and “From the Airports”): Zen shifts the centre of attention from the human as subject and agent to a relationship between interdependent equals (human and environment). Ecopsychology encourages shifting our focus from the inside to the outside and from the world of illusory separation to that of oneness with the world. Such a shift from the ego-self to the external world mirrors the mindfulness that Zen students are asked to constantly practise on themselves in order to eventually bring about that selflessness that is considered the base for the improvement of personhood. The by-products of this process are empathy, compassion, and a simpler and more authentic way of life. What ensues encompasses not isolated entities, but the ever-changing interconnectedness (intra-agency) between posthumans, and between posthumans and nature, whereby taking care of one of the members is

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beneficial to the other and vice versa, but also a lack of care can precipitate the whole system. Accepting that nature and humans are coextensive helps us look at the environment in a different way and care for it, knowing that by doing that we also care for ourselves. Seen from this standpoint, Celati’s fictions are perhaps stories we can—finally—believe in.

Notes 1. Gianni Celati (1937–) is an Italian writer, translator and essayist who graduated from the University of Bologna with a thesis on James Joyce. The author of avant-garde novels, collections of short stories, travel narratives, “observational stories,” essays and documentaries, he has also taught Anglo-­American Literature at the University of Bologna and at Cornell University. He presently lives in Brighton (UK). 2. It is also possible that Celati’s knowledge of German philosopher Martin Heidegger contributed to the Zen overtones in his own writings. For a history and discussion of the link existing between Heidegger and Zen, see Storey (2012); Reinhard (1996); Parkes (1987). 3. In addition to Rosi Braidotti, Francesca Ferrando and Karen Barad, whose works are listed in the bibliography, Serenella Iovino, Elena Past and Serpil Oppermann are just a few scholars whose work explores the boundaries of human within ecocriticism, while Rinda West’s interdisciplinary Out of the Shadow. Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land (2007) applies the Jungian concept of Shadow and ecopsychological insights to connect individual and planetary psychological well-being. 4. “in un dopoguerra, dopo un disastro di cui nessuno aveva sentito parlare.” 5. “come se gli uomini dovessero dimenticare per sempre com’è fatta la superficie della terra.” 6. “Archie si considerava colpevole di sciatteria nei propri gesti, per poca attenzione a ciò che gli stava attorno, per disprezzo di ciò che vedeva in quegli infami quartieri.” 7. “rendere attenti i propri gesti e pensieri.” 8. “fosse come essere dovunque; la trama ininterrotta di cui anche lui faceva parte era sempre con lui, semplicemente nel suo corpo e nel suo pensiero.” 9. “una grandissima messinscena … tutta una commedia delle apparenze che ci fanno credere chissà cosa e invece non è vero niente.” 10. “Sembra un’ombra che passa senza darsi il pensiero d’essere un’ombra. Un apparire che è già uno scomparire.” 11. “senza il ronzio delle frasi interiori, libero da questa farneticazione continua che ognuno porta dentro di sé.” 12. “Oh, là c’è qualcosa nel mondo.”

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13. “qualcosa di indistinto e senza sigla, vedevano forse l’essenza della grande nullità.” 14. “Com’è facile in fondo raccontare una situazione e poi dire: ‘Io sono questo.’ Un uomo diventa subito il questo del suo indicare, e finché muore non farà che indicare il questo che lo rappresenta.” 15. “a scrivere il mio memoriale, o quanto meno un memoriale in tutto simile, basato sul copione che ci accomuna e ci rende così simili.” 16. “ma di io ce ne sono tanti in giro per il mondo, pieni i marciapiedi.” 17. “sentendosi finalmente per qualche motivo simile agli altri, e come gli altri sulla rotta d’un ignoto avvenire dell’innocenza.” 18. “bisogna continuare, continuare come pellegrini del mondo, fino al risveglio, se il risve-glio verrà.”

Works Cited Austin, James H. 1998. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2011. Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2014. Zen-Brain Horizons: Toward a Living Zen. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Barad, Karen. 2008. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 120–154. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2016. Posthuman Critical Theory. In Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, ed. Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, 13–32. New Delhi: Springer India. Celati, Gianni. 2004. Finzioni a cui credere. In Geografie del narrare: Insistenze sui luoghi di Luigi Ghirri e Gianni Celati, ed. Marco Sironi, 175–177. Parma: Diabasis. ———. 2016. Narratori delle pianure, Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, Verso la foce. In Romanzi, cronache e racconti, ed. Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri, 733–866; 867–984; 985–1098. Milan: Mondadori. Chierici, Anna Maria. 2007. Spazio emozionale: Celati e Hillman. Rivista di Studi Italiani 22 (2, December): 164–172. Davis, Kanpu Bret W. 2016. The Enlightening Practice of Nonthinking. In Engaging Dogen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening, ed. Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Shudo Brian Schroeder, and Kanpu Bret W. Davis, 199–224. Somerville: Wisdom Publications.

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Ferrando, Francesca. 2016. Humans Have Always Been Posthuman: A Spiritual Genealogy of Posthumanism. In Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, ed. Debashish Banerji and Makarand R.  Paranjape, 243–256. New Delhi: Springer India. Garfield, Jay, ed. 1995. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika. Trans. Jay Garfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Thomas. 2011. A Tale of Two Giannis: Writing as Rememoration. Annali d’Italianistica 29: 269–289. Hillman, James. 1980. Psicologia Archetipica. In Enciclopedia del Novecento. http:// www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/psicologia-archetipica_%28Enciclopedia-delNovecento%29/. Accessed 29 March 2019. ———. 1992. Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World. In The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, ed. James Hillman, 90–130. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. ———. 1995. A Psyche the Size of the Earth: A Psychological Foreword. In Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, ed. Theodore Roszak, Mary E.  Gomes, and Allen D.  Kanner, xvii–xxiii. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. ———. 2000. Ten Core Ideas. In City and Soul (2006), ed. James Hillman, 331–336. Thompson, CT: Spring Publications. Iovino, Serenella, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past, eds. 2018. Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. James, Simon P. 2004. Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Nagatomo, Shigenori. 2006, 2015. Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/. Parkes, Graham. 1987. Thoughts on the Way: Being and Time via Lao-Chuang. In Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. G.  Parkes. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ———. 1997. Voices of Mountains, Trees and Rivers: Kukai, Dogen and a Deeper Ecology. In Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnectedness of Dharma and Deeds, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryunken Williams, 111–128. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Reese, William L. 1996. Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Reinhard, May. 1996. Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work. New York: Routledge. Roszak, Theodore. 2001. The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology. Grand Rapids: Phanes Press. Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, eds. 1995. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Hearth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

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Sewall, Laura. 1995. The Skill of Ecological Perception. In Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, ed. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, 201–215. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Storey, David. 2012. Zen in Heidegger’s Way. Journal of East-West Thought 4 (2): 113–137. Thien-An, Thich. 1975. Zen Philosophy, Zen Practice. Emeryville, CA: Dharma Publishing. West, Rebecca J. 2000. Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wirth, Tetsuzen Jason M., Shudo Brian Schroeder, and Kanpu Bret W. Davis, eds. 2016. Engaging Dogen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening. Somerville: Wisdom Publications.

CHAPTER 12

The Living Dead and the Dying Living: Zombies, Politics, and the ‘Reflux’ in Italian Culture, 1977–1983 Fabio Camilletti

Between 1977 and 1978, mathematician Teo Mora published his groundbreaking volume Storia del cinema dell’orrore, the most authoritative and complete history of horror cinema to appear in Italy since the boom of horror films in the late 1950s and early 1960s.1 In the third and last volume, devoted to the previous twenty years, Mora attempted to distinguish between different typologies of cinematographic revenants, each witnessing its peaks in popularity in conjunction with different and specific forms of political anxiety. The “zombie,” Mora argued, is “the dead deprived of their soul through voodoo practices, and enslaved to their master’s will,”2 and should not be confused with the “body snatcher,” meaning the “entity, which, by annihilating the individual personality of the inhabited body, enables it to partake of a broader, stereotyped organism,” and, most of all, with the “living dead,” that is “the dead returning from their grave,

F. Camilletti (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_12

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endowed with autonomous impulses and will, although not necessarily with memory of their past” (Mora 1977–1978, II, i, 262 n. 17).3 Mora was doubtlessly arguing against the Italian trend to superimpose the term “zombie” on George Romero’s “living dead.” From this perspective, 1978 may be considered a watershed year, one that witnesses the import of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead retitled for the Italian audiences as Zombi, which—alongside introducing the term “zombie” or “zombie” in Italian common use4—would cement this equation for decades to come. At the same time, following Romero’s film—which, incidentally, had been edited for the international market by Italian filmmaker Dario Argento, so that Dawn of the Dead can be seen in many ways as a half-Italian horror film5— Italy would witness a long-lasting vogue of autochthonous zombie productions, often hybridized with other popular genres such as post-apocalyptic science fiction, cannibal movies, or war cinema: Lucio Fulci’s celebrated Zombi 2 (1979), popularizing the equivalence of zombie/living dead in the English-speaking countries; Bruno Mattei (under the pseudonym of Vincent Dawn) and Claudio Fragasso’s Virus [Hell of the Living Dead] (1980); Antonio Margheriti’s Apocalypse domani [Cannibal Apocalypse] (1980), signed under the pen name of Anthony M. Dawson; Umberto Lenzi’s Incubo sulla città contaminata [Nightmare City] (1980); Marino Girolami’s Zombi Holocaust [Zombie Holocaust] (1980); and Fulci’s Paura nella città dei morti viventi [City of the Living Dead] (1980), not to mention his later …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà [The Beyond] (1981), including zombie-related sequences.6 Although Mora’s categorization has been left unused, it remains nonetheless interesting in that it explicitly provides a political reading of the metamorphoses of the undead in popular fiction. As Mora writes, the shifting interest of the cinema industry from one figure to the other is probably enough to provide a periodization of American fantasy and of the country’s unconscious anxieties: in the 1940s zombies raged, with their masters being either Creole aristocrats or, more often, Nazi fifth columns; body snatchers triumphed in the science fiction of the 1950s and the Cold War; the living dead rose from their graves precisely in May 1968. (1977–1978, 262 n. 17)

This last point is particularly revealing, if we consider how the zombie theme, in Italian culture, is largely a post-Romerian—and, therefore, post-1968—one, capturing anxieties and demands of protest movements.

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In particular, whereas existing criticism has largely focused on works such as Fulci’s Zombi 2, employing the zombie as the emblem of a peculiar form of postcolonial haunting (Brioni 2013; Zani and Meaux 2011), I will focus here on a sub-cluster of works, witnessing the zombie as the posthuman icon of contemporary alienation. If it is true that the zombie operates as a quintessential icon of posthumanism in that, from its nature as a being that is “both … dead and alive”, it interrogates “what the human is by that which it supposes itself to be beyond” (Christie and Lauro 2011, 2), these texts—all produced between 1977 and 1992—challenge the definition of humanity in the context of late capitalism and throughout the movement of “reflux” giving way, after the political struggles of the 1970s, to the hedonistic consumerism of the 1980s. I will, therefore, move from the use of the zombie theme by writer/ songwriter Gianfranco Manfredi between 1977 and 1978 in order to show how the zombie embodies the tensions pervading the protest movements of 1977 and the fading of political engagement; I will then analyse Manfredi’s novel Magia Rossa [Red Magic] (1983) as an attempt to negotiate the memory of the years of lead in the early 1980s; and I will conclude with Pupi Avati’s film Zeder (1983) and Tiziano Sclavi’s novel Dellamorte Dellamore [Of Death Of Love] (1983, but published in 1991), seeing them as postmodern reuses of Romero’s themes, giving birth to the subgenre known as Gotico Padano. For all variations of Romero’s figure of the “living dead,” these texts move, therefore, between different media— literature, music, theatre, and comics—in order to employ the zombie as a polyvalent icon of postmodern impegno (Antonello and Mussgnug 2009).

1   “Our life has become a thing” In his song Autobiografia industriale [Industrial Autobiography] (1977), composer Claudio Lolli recalled his deluding experience with the label EMI, which had produced his 1976 masterpiece Ho visto anche degli zingari felici [I Also Saw Happy Gypsies] (1976): for an engaged intellectual, he argued, participating in cultural industry was not a way of reaching a broader audience, but rather giving a helping hand to preserve existing relationships of power. Autobiografia industriale appeared in the album Disoccupate le strade dai sogni [De-occupy Streets From Dreams], arguably Lolli’s most political work, deeply inspired by the recent facts of March 1977, when left-wing extremist groups had engaged in guerrilla fighting with the police, resulting in the death of student Francesco

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Lorusso. In order to preserve his artistic integrity, Lolli looked for a different label, finding it in Ultima Spiaggia, created in 1974 by producer Nanni Ricordi and songwriter Ricky Gianco. Although Ultima Spiaggia would only last five years, it proved to be a veritable cradle for the transition from the engaged songwriting style of the 1970s, widely influenced by progressive rock, to punk, the new wave, and rock’n’roll revival of the late 1970s and early 1980s: one of the last albums produced by Ultima Spiaggia was Ivan Cattaneo’s Superivan, one of the milestones of Italian glam rock-­ inspired New Romantic pop. Among the artists recruited by Ricordi and Gianco, one of the most promising was Gianfranco Manfredi: after a collaborative album with Ricky Gianco and others, in 1975, Manfredi went on to publish three albums with this label. The second one, of 1977, bore the title of Zombie di tutto il mondo unitevi! [Zombies of the World Unite!]. Manfredi was thirty-one at the time: he had graduated in Philosophy— with a final dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau—and had started writing songs in the early 1970s, within the environment of that Milan counterculture gathering around the magazine Re Nudo, which arguably contributed to the surrealistic and ironic atmosphere of his songwriting style. Zombie di tutto il mondo unitevi! is a turning point in Manfredi’s career: not only is it his last politically engaged work, but it also preludes his later detachment from musical composition in order to turn towards cinema. First and foremost, this album is Manfredi’s first attempt to play with popular culture, and principally with horror-related themes: as such, it anticipates the author’s later horror novels7 (and comic books).8 Zombie di tutto il mondo unitevi is an all-encompassing reflection on the trending themes of 1977: the students’ protest movement, terrorism and urban guerrilla, sex and desire, alienation and mental disease. The title ironically reworks the motto concluding Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto, and the cover adopts a collage technique to jumble together monstrous beings, punks, and stereotyped native Americans as emblems of marginalization: the latter, in particular, allude to the protest group known as Indiani metropolitani, the most libertarian, non-violent, and creative wing of the 1977 movement. The most innovative element, however, is the use of a theme such as that of the zombies, not belonging to the traditional repertoire of the Italian left. As Manfredi would recall after almost thirty years, the album

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showed from its very title my penchant for a kind of irony that wasn’t merely aimed at making people smile, but also at creating certain unease, at least for mixing up two traditions that, at first glance, did not have much in common, such as Marxism and horror. … We were coming, after all, from years—those after 1968—when slogans such as this could be heard: “O you, the dead of Reggio Emilia, come out of your graves, and come singing Bandiera Rossa with us” (this is a famous anthem by Fausto Amodei). That was music to my ears, and my instinctive, bohemian sarcasm took these words literally, since (precisely) in 1968 I had been dazzled by Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead. (Manfredi 2006, 213)9

Manfredi’s explicit intentions could be “sarcastic”: still, Amodei’s anthem—Per i morti di Reggio Emilia, harshly written in 1960 after the killing of five Communist workers by the police—did nothing but reiterate a persistent image of Italy’s national discourse, that is the sacrifice and return/resurrection of its heroes. As Alberto Mario Banti points out, the model of heroism nurtured over the course of the Risorgimento is rooted in a Christological paradigm: Just like Christ and the martyrs, heroes have a testimonial function, because of their tragic death. … Whereas, in Christology, sacrifice testifies to an ethical “scandal” (the fall into sin), in the case of national narratives it testifies to both an ethical and a political “scandal” (the dishonour and division of the nation). And, just as for Christ and his saints, but on a different level, the death of the hero is the greatest sacrificial suffering, albeit a kind of suffering that may free the entire national community from the state of dishonour and disunion in which it fell. (Banti 2011, 125–26)

As a consequence, sacrifice of the heroes is a necessary premise to the resurrection of the nation in a fully Christological sense: “risorgimento is not only the reawakening of conscience on the part of a self-forgetting collective subject, but is rather a veritable resurrection, the erasure of original sin, the rescue from the political and ethical fall” (128). This “resurrection” takes often, in the morphology of Italy’s national discourse, the shape of an idealized representation of the nation as an imagined community, gathering together the living and the dead. As Morena Corradi (2016) has shown, such an ideal of “Italianness” as a bond connecting individuals beyond the borders of death, heralded in poems such as Ugo Foscolo’s Dei sepolcri [Of the Sepulchres] (1807), is constantly present throughout the long nineteenth century, incorporating

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images, themes, and concerns explored by the literary Gothic, as well as by Spiritualism and parapsychology; and would later enter the mythology of Labour movements, through the meticulous—and largely unexplored from the point of view of cultural history—creation of modalities of remembrance and symbolic return, particularly nourishing the celebrative rites of the Antifascist Resistance (Schwartz 2010). The arrival of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968–1969 thus offers intellectuals such as Manfredi the opportunity to employ the posthuman icon of the living dead in order to metaphorize the conflicts of a moment of political turmoil. Danilo Arona, two years younger than Manfredi, recalls how Romero’s first zombie film was an atypical case of horror: “that horror film—which was unique at the time—was, or at least looked like, a ‘lefty’ movie. It challenged family and society, and denounced the Vietnam war, the warlike soul of America, as well as racism. Its cannibalism was, principally, of a cultural kind” (Arona 2011, 48–49). Romero’s film was a challenge to societal norms inasmuch as it confronted the rules and clichés of horror as a genre (55). In particular, the zombie theme enables Manfredi to articulate the problems of corporeality and liberation of the body within a social context that is dominated by consumerism. The zombie is an emblem of the working class—Manfredi speaks openly of “proletarian zombies” (stanza 1, l. 6)10—whose “desire” is channelled in different directions: the lost dream of recomposing the various strains of workers’ and students’ movements (ll. 9–10), as well as the suicidal dream and the terrorist option, and the dream of bypassing ideologies that heralds the post-ideological age. Thus, the zombie is made into a figure of the disenchantment following the stagnation of the protest movements, and, at the same time, it alludes to the state of alienation in which the community of the marginalized may find a common terrain for reciprocal contact: “through refusal, through many refusals, we found asylum in separate worlds” (stanza 2, ll. 1–4).11 Being a “zombie” corresponds to the process of alienation by which the subject is reduced to the mere sphere of corporeality: “zombies” are characterized by the “wish to know nothing, while experiencing even our mind as something bodily” (ll. 18–21).12 The same concept is explored in the song Un tranquillo festival pop di paura [A Quiet Pop Festival of Fear], denouncing the impoverishment of protest movements and their appropriation by the market. The song’s setting is a music festival, in which, however, the narrator experiences some “strange vibration,”

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deriving from the fact that life and experience themselves have died and have become “a thing”: You want to look at the young working class in the face—after all, it was the guest that was expected—but you feel some strange vibration in the air, emanating from the fetishes disguised as people. This is all crap, and whose fault is it? The State, reformism, groups, a certain something? Commodities enlace the people’s feast, entering bodies betwixt the piss and the flags. Everything is collapsing, even Theory, as it seems that there is no such thing as the New Subject, and if expropriation means anything at all, it means that our life has become a thing. (stanzas 5–7)13

Precisely this reification of the spiritual, however, is the means by which the “zombie” can acquire a truly materialistic perspective enabling one to reach revolutionary consciousness, as the last stanza of Zombie di tutto il mondo unitevi announces: [W]e do not conceal these broken bodies of ours, bodies one looks through and far away, total transparency one can touch by the hand, transparency announcing that, beyond this history, there’s a more beautiful one: the parallel history, where our winter becomes spring. (stanza 4, lines 7–15 and 22–24)14

By so doing, Manfredi challenges the dualism between life and the inorganic state of “thing” or matter, the constitutive antinomy on which the Freudian theorization of a death drive is grounded and which could lead to a devaluation of the latter in favour of the former. On the contrary, Marxist dialectic enables a rethinking of binary oppositions in terms of synthesis, and therefore a consideration of the reification of life as a possibility for action. From this viewpoint, Manfredi’s operation anticipates and echoes Slavoj Žižek’s re-elaboration of the dialectic tension between “life drive” and “death drive.” As Žižek argues, one must avoid the trap of considering the “pure life drive as a substantial entity subsisting prior to its being captured in the Symbolic network” as is defined by Jacques Lacan: if life drive does not exist as a kind of substance outside the Symbolic realm, it is precisely the Symbolic order—that is, the sphere of language and social relations—that “transforms the organic ‘instinct’ into an unquenchable longing” (Žižek 2005, 145). As a consequence, the kind of life threatened by the Freudian death drive is not the “biological cycle of generation and corruption, but rather the symbolic order, the order of the

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symbolic pact that regulates social exchange and sustains debts, honours, obligations,” so that the death drive itself comes to correspond with the “‘nightly’ obverse” of life, “an immortal, indestructible passion that threatens to dissolve this network of symbolic obligations” (Žižek 1999, 190). The “desire” of the “proletarian zombies” seems, therefore, particularly an apt metaphor for grasping the intrinsic duality of the revolutionary subjects—namely, those who are exploited within a Symbolic system of social relations and, at the same time, those who break the “symbolic pact,” heralding a reconfiguration of society and its values. In Manfredi’s songs, in other words, the death drive corresponds to the revolutionary drive, and the posthuman icon of the zombie anticipates the new “spring” of revolution: in dissolving the boundaries between “body” and “mind,” the zombie questions dual understandings of “humanity,” so that posthuman and revolutionary coexist.

2   Spectres of the Revolution In 1983, Gianfranco Manfredi published his first novel Magia Rossa. La rivolta degli spettri [Red Magic. The Revolt of Spectres] with Milanese publisher Feltrinelli. Criticism welcomed it warmly,15 and the novel itself had new editions in 1992 (with Mondadori) and 2005 (with Gargoyle, whence I cite here). A watershed work, as per Manfredi’s words, in his own authorial parabola, from songwriting and screenplaying to novel and graphic-novel writing, Magia Rossa was born out of certain underlying spirits (umori) that were peculiar to the historical time: I remember that one night we had a fascinating, freewheeling chat with Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi at Salvatore Samperi’s place. I guess Argento must have just watched the premiere of David Cronenberg’s Scanners, because I remember him enthusiastically walking up and down the room, as if he couldn’t rest, and saying: “That’s crazy! They make heads explode!” Then the conversation moved to apparently different topics. He and Nicolodi had also watched a film interview to Pol Pot, the horrible tyrant of Cambodia. While still walking up and down, Argento exclaimed jubilantly: “Would you believe it? He executed all the over 35!” To be honest, I acknowledged that both he and Samperi were now over 35, but well … I didn’t take the political argument seriously, it was clear that we were still talking about cinema. I knew I was right when Nicolodi, who was sitting all stiff and pale, regally fragile like a female portrait by Piero della Francesca, said—whether to integrate or correct her husband’s words I couldn’t tell—

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that, in his interview, Pol Pot was smiling with incredible sweetness and irony, and commented: “A man who smiles cannot be bad”. (Manfredi 2006, 214–15, my emphases)16

In other words, Manfredi confirms that political violence, in 1981 Italy, is part of a quintessentially postmodern paradigm, in which reality is indistinguishable from its representation: the atrocities of the Pol Pot’s regime and the enthusiasm they arouse in the Italian Marxist intelligentsia are not different from the horrors staged by Cronenberg or Argento, so that—if horror can, and indeed has to be read politically—politics can equally be horrorized, that is read through the lens of horror cinema. This concept underlines Magia Rossa, a novel outlining a counter-history of Italy from 1860 when occultist Tommaso Reiner was born (Magia Rossa, 124 and 180) to 1983, when the main events take place; therefore, the text intends to bridge the workers’ movement in 1890s Milan—with particular emphasis on the barricades and violent repression of 1898—and the protests of the 1970s, in which the novel’s protagonists actively participated. Alberto and Mario met for the first time during a demonstration (34); although he has never used it, Alberto owns a P38, the kind of gun that became popular within the armed wing of the students’ movement throughout the 1970s (169). Interestingly, all the references to the 1970s, in the novel, remark how that age belongs to the past: indeed, Magia Rossa is both a novel of and on “reflux” [riflusso], a keyword becoming increasingly present in the late 1970s and early 1980s Italian press, and signalling the recession from political engagement, communitarian ideals, and activism, to the private sphere, hedonism, individualism, and escapism.17 At the same time, however, the past can be forgotten, but not completely buried: in Magia Rossa, everything returns,18 as if in a spectral re-proposition of Hegel’s dialectic triad of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis.19 The “return” metaphor intimately pervades Manfredi’s novel: Alberto and Marisa rediscover their ancient love; at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnica, Mario attempts to reproduce the way machines could appear to the spectators of the 1881 National Exhibition; Alberto finds his long-forgotten gun. And, of course, the dead return—principally Tommaso Reiner, the late-nineteenth-­ century anarco-socialist and occultist who had put his powers at the service of the workers’ movements and had plotted to awake an army of living dead Luddites.

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The blending of Marxism and horror, already heralded in Zombie di tutto il mondo unitevi!, is further elaborated in Magia Rossa, by making the living dead an emblem of what capitalism and history have erased. In his speeches, Reiner hinted at horrible metamorphoses, at beings that already inhabited the realm of mythology, at non-human men who had been changed into trees, rocks, wild beasts, hideous monsters not belonging to any realm of nature and eventually, he said, had turned into machines. “These creatures are around us,” he went on all excited, “and are waiting to be acknowledged and reawakened: in the flumes, in the mines, in the factories, on the rails, in the telegraph … they are beating, blindly, waiting to enslave us or to be subjugated by us.” (Manfredi 2006, 125)20

Alberto claims that this is a wild discourse, but Marisa objects: “Well … still, here he speaks of production forces. In the end, Marx too…” … Without getting flustered, Marisa went to the bookshelf and started searching. After a while she took … The Communist Manifesto. She searched through the pages, found the spot she was interested in and read aloud: “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? Modern bourgeois society, that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” (126–27)21

The living dead, in Magia Rossa, are the embodiment of the truly monstrous and inhuman force inhabiting the revolutionary discourse, notwithstanding the attempts at channelling it into “reformist” or progressive political praxes or the illusion that the revolution may undergo a “reflux” of sort. Not incidentally, towards the end of the novel, Alberto retrieves his gun—which he had bought as he waited for the revolution to come— in order to fight against the zombies reanimated by Reiner, and, as a former revolutionary, turns to his old enemy, the police: against the true,

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almost lovecraftian reawakening of the forces of labour, Manfredi argues, we would not react much differently than Romero’s characters.

3   “La Morte! La Morte!” After the peak of Italian zombie films of 1980–1981, two more works of 1983 explore the theme of the living dead. The first one is Pupi Avati’s film Zeder, screened in Italy at the end of August 1983 and distributed in the USA over the following May, with the title Revenge of the Dead. The second one is Tiziano Sclavi’s novel (although this label, as we will see, is somewhat problematic) Dellamorte Dellamore, which remained unpublished until 1991. Eventually, Dellamorte Dellamore was launched as the novel that inspired Dylan Dog, Sclavi’s eponymous comic book first published in 1986 which, in the early 1990s, became a veritable mass phenomenon. Avati’s film and Sclavi’s novel have many elements in common, the most important of which is their setting: while explicitly echoing the aesthetics of Romero’s zombies, they nonetheless locate phenomena in the deepest provinces of Northern Italy such as the countryside of Emilia Romagna (Avati) and a small city in the hinterland of Brescia (Sclavi), thereby creating the mixture that Avati would later label as Gotico Padano (Adamovit and Bartolini 2010). By moving on the threshold between folklore and the postmodern pastiche, both Zeder and Dellamorte Dellamore outline an “Italian way” to the zombie theme, expanding on Romero’s understanding of the zombie as “anyman”: Romero’s zombies are not controlled by anyone, and their relationship of reciprocity with the “others” is almost pure idiocy. They do not have superpowers, they do not disappear within unworldly vapours, they aren’t metamorphic beings, and equipped soldiers tear them to pieces. How can they conquer the world, then? They can because they are the mob, the normal people. They are us. They first attack their family members, their friends, their neighbours. (Arona 2011, 89)

In Avati’s words, Zeder expands on the ancestral terrors connected to a specifically rural understanding of death. Whereas urban communities expel death from everyday life, in peasant culture (cultura contadina) death is ubiquitous (Adamovit and Bartolini 2010, 49). The return of the dead is not, therefore, an exception, but a possibility that is intrinsic to the rural frame of mind. What matters, however, is that such a return

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was not understood as resurrection, and this is a remarkable difference. The dead who came back stayed dead, and this is an indefeasible element for generating fear. The dead do not resurrect, but are scary in that, while still looking dead, they move and open their eyes! They are not like Lazarus, who comes out of the grave in the sunlight of the miraculous event. It is something scarier and more serious, and the fact of coming back from death without being completely alive is an aggravating circumstance. The K-zone of Zeder, whence one returns, does not bring back to life. It is the return of creatures that are dead, and nonetheless they live. (43)22

In Zeder, Avati systematically avoids gore effects, while nonetheless showing how the supernatural increasingly overcomes reason, and the dead sweep to their victory. As Adamovit and Bartolini point out, the film ends in a deliberately evasive way; spectators do not eyewitness the cannibalistic atrocities of the dead, and are therefore left to imagine how the world of rationality progressively collapses (180–81). One after the other, all characters die, as in a sort of danse macabre that culminates in the triumph of death. Sclavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore too plays with the idea of the danse macabre—a medieval theme that was particularly popular in Northern Italy,23 and which had enjoyed new attention in the1950s thanks to the studies of Jurgis Baltrušaitis (Le Moyen Âge fantastique, 1955) and films such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957).24 Each of the twelve chapters is preceded by the stanza of a ballad, as to compose an ideal Totentanz: Dellamorte Dellamore is a deeply intermedial text, insofar as it incorporates songs and illustrations (by Angelo Stano), but most of all in that it is constructed like the screenplay for a film, providing instructions for directing and keeping a detached, descriptive register. This aspect is particularly evident in the last chapter and epilogue to the whole work, which is Sclavi’s very personal approach to the theme of the final victory of the dead: While closing credits appear, very slowly, we see Buffalora from above, from the same helicopter in which we were flying at page 89. Image descends hesitantly, as if it did not know where to go, in which house; after all, houses look all the same. Then it chooses one of them and enters from the window into the dining room. It stops: it is a family made up of mother, father, and a child. They are eating, and avidly help themselves to pieces of food from a large dish in the centre of the table. Zoom in: on the dish now in focus is human flesh, raw chunks of legs and arms, of flanks and buttocks, lungs and

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heart, liver and kidneys, surrounding, in the middle, the penis and testicles. Closing credits: Tiziano Sclavi, OF DEATH, OF LOVE. (Sclavi 1991, 169)25

Dellamorte Dellamore begins like a zombie movie: in a graveyard in Northern Italy, corpses reawaken; those who are bitten by the living dead (called “ritornanti”, and by no means dissimilar to those popularized by Romero) become revenants in turn, and the only means to eliminate a revenant is to destroy their head. Still, the novel starts progressively differing from its cinematographic models, by outlining a series of scenes from provincial life in which the borders of life and death show themselves to be peculiarly tenuous, and the living dead find their counterpart in the monotonous and meaningless life of the living inhabitants, in turn assimilated to death. Whereas, in Avati’s Zeder, the factor enabling corpses to return was the so-called K-zone, namely a certain kind of soil that made the dead return, Sclavi sees all provincial towns as potential “K-zones.” In such communities, no firm distinction between the dead and the living can be drawn, as all are trapped, eternally, within their monotonous habits, as if provincial life itself was a liminal zone that incessantly oscillates between life and death: Around viale della Resistenza, but we don’t know where exactly, there’s the beating of a heart. THUD, and everything stops, THUD, and everything lives again, THUD, and everything stops again, THUD, and everything, again, lives, THUD, and everything again dies. (Sclavi 1991, 130, my emphasis)26

4   Conclusion Substantially unknown to Italian culture before the import of George Romero’s films, and particularly of Dawn of the Dead, zombies witness a peculiar afterlife in Italian culture, especially in the years marking the transition from the politically engaged 1970s to the 1980s of “reflux” and disimpegno. By crossing different media, from music to cinema, and from literature to comic books, zombies interrogate the transformations of a changing country, alternatingly metaphorizing the alienation of the revolutionary subject and the return to order after the turmoil of the 1970s (Manfredi’s Zombie di tutto il mondo unitevi!), the gruesomeness inhabiting the very idea of revolution, the traumatic memory of the years of lead,

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the inhuman marriage between man and the machine (Manfredi’s Magia Rossa), and the horrors of provincial life (Avati’s Zeder and Sclavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore). Far from being a univocal emblem, therefore, endowed with any univocal political significance, the zombie-living dead appears as a polyvalent icon catalyzing the tensions of a dense and fluid historical moment.

Notes 1. Italy’s renewed interest in horror cinema had been triggered by the import of Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958): see Camilletti (2018), 27–69. 2. Here and throughout the text, translations are mine. 3. Mora’s distinction largely foreshadows the more detailed taxonomy outlined in recent years by Kevin Boom: Boom’s “zombie drone,” “tech zombie,” “bio zombie,” “cultural zombie,” and “psychological zombie” are all variants of Mora’s zombie as a corpse reanimated and deprived of their will; the “zombie channel,” defined as “a person who has been resurrected and some other entity has possessed his or her form” is a variant of the body snatcher; the “zombie ghoul” is, fundamentally, Romero’s living dead (“And the Dead Shall Rise,” 8). For more detail, see Boom (2011a, b). Examples of the recent revival of zombies in contemporary criticism include contributions by Boluk and Lenz (2011); Hubner et al. (2015); Browning et al. (2016). 4. In 1961, journalist Emilio De Rossignoli wrote that “dictionaries ignore the term ‘zombie’,” and present zombies merely as figures of Haitian folklore (214). De Rossignoli lists several films related to the matter, only a very few of which were available in Italy (and certainly not Victor Halperin’s White Zombie, of 1933, and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, of 1943). Four years later, in 1965, the magazine Pianeta presents the translation of a piece by François Derrey, providing a succinct albeit complete overview of the zombie in Haitian culture. 5. Through his brother’s co-production, Argento heavily manipulates Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, by involving Italian progressive rock band Goblin in the creation of the soundtrack, by acting as a script consultant, and by editing a shorter, more direct version than Romero’s director’s cut (117 minutes against 139) (Arona 2011, 71). 6. See Arona (2011), 72. 7. Magia Rossa [Red Magic] (1983); Cromantica (1985); Ultimi Vampiri [The Last Vampires] (1987); Ho Freddo [I Feel Cold] (2008); Tecniche di Resurrezione [Techniques of Resurrection] (2010). 8. Gordon Link, 1991–1993; Magico Vento, 1997–2010 [Magic Wind].

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9. “Già dal titolo segnalava il mio orientamento verso un genere di ironia che non fosse puramente indirizzato a far sorridere, ma anche a suscitare qualche disagio, se non altro per l’accostamento tra tradizioni che a prima vista non avevano molto in comune, nel caso: il marxismo e l’horror. … Si veniva del resto da anni (il post Sessantotto) in cui echeggiavano versi come questo: ‘Morti di Reggio Emilia uscite dalla fossa, tutti con noi a cantar Bandiera Rossa’ (celebre inno di Fausto Amodei). Quella era musica per le mie orecchie e il mio istintivo sarcasmo ‘scapigliato’ prendeva i versi alla lettera, dato che nel Sessantotto (appunto) ero stato fulminato dal film di Romero La notte dei morti viventi.” 10. “Zombie proletari.” 11. “E attraverso il rifiuto / attraverso i rifiuti / abbiamo trovato asilo / su mondi separati.” 12. “Voglia / di non capire niente / vivendo come corpo / anche la nostra mente.” 13. “E vuoi vedere in faccia / il proletariato giovanile / perché è lui l’invitato che doveva venire / ma senti già nell’aria / una strana vibrazione / che nasce dai feticci vestiti da persone. // È tutta una gran merda, la colpa di chi è / lo Stato, il riformismo, i gruppi, il non so che / la merce sta abbracciando la festa popolare / ed entra dentro i corpi tra il piscio e le bandiere. // Si sta sfasciando tutto persino la Teoria / perché il Nuovo Soggetto pare che non ci sia / e se l’espropriazione significa qualcosa / è che la nostra vita è diventata cosa.” 14. “Non li nascondiamo / questi corpi spezzati / ci si vede attraverso / ci si vede lontano / trasparenza assoluta / che si tocca con mano / trasparenza che dice / che oltre questa storia / ce n’è una più bella … / la storia parallela / là dove il nostro inverno / diventa primavera.” 15. An overview of critical evaluations can be found in Manfredi, “Quello che non si è mai saputo su Magia Rossa,” 216–17: Oreste Del Buono saw the novel as a “a peculiar, curious, and somewhat touching encounter between Milan’s culture of 1968 and another cultural phenomenon of old Milan, the Scapigliatura”; Ernesto Ferrero, as a “postmodern novel … a fairy-tale for the grown-ups … a pop-rock philosophical tale”; and Antonio Franchini, as the novel epitomizing “the continuity from the 1970s to the 1980s, as it includes all the elements of the previous decade, but all in a new tonality, all refashioned in order to embody the trends of the coming decade.” 16. “Ricordo una sera, a casa di Salvatore Samperi, un’affascinante chiacchie­ rata a ruota libera con Dario Argento e Daria Nicolodi. Argento suppongo che avesse appena visto in anteprima assoluta Scanners di David Cronenberg perché ricordo il suo entusiasmo mentre, passeggiando avanti e indietro per la stanza come se non riuscisse a star fermo, ci riferiva: ‘Cose pazzesche!

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Quelli fanno esplodere le teste!’. Poi la conversazione scivolò apparentemente su altri temi. Lui e la Nicolodi avevano anche visto un’intervista filmata a Pol Pot, il terribile tiranno cambogiano. Argento, continuando a deambulare, esclamò raggiante: ‘Ma vi rendete conto? Ha giustiziato tutti quelli sopra i 35 anni!’. Io, per la verità, mi rendevo conto che sia lui che Samperi erano ormai oltre i 35, ma insomma… non è che prendessi sul serio l’argomento politico, era evidente che si parlava sempre di cinema. Ne ebbi conferma quando la Nicolodi, che sedeva rigida e bianca, con la fragile regalità di un ritratto femminile di Piero della Francesca, non so se a integrazione o a correzione delle parole del marito, disse che nell’intervista Pol Pot sorrideva, con incredibile dolcezza e ironia, e commentò: ‘un uomo che sorride non può essere cattivo’.” 17. See Morando (2009, 141–214) for a complete overview of how the notion of riflusso becomes omnipresent in the Italian press between 1978 and 1979. Among the symptoms of riflusso, Morando also includes the return to mysticism and the “irrational”: it seems, however, that such return to the “irrational” has not to be considered a new phenomenon of the late 1970s, but rather the manifestation of a broader revival of the 1960s as is manifest, for example, in music (Camilletti 2018). 18. A textual clue to this recurring theme of “return” is the quotations from D.H. Lawrence’s poem The Triumph of the Machine (Magia Rossa, 49–50), prophesizing the end of the mechanical civilization and the return of “man.” 19. As Manfredi acknowledges, “[t]he novel is divided in three parts. Each of them is named after a ‘triangle’. There are thirty-three chapters. Such division was not due to convenience, and even less to an obsession for the number three. I had just completed my studies in philosophy. After 1968, even in the assemblies of the students’ movement, we had knocked ourselves out through discussions on dialectic and Hegel’s triads. In my novel, I had turned all that fretting into Cabbalism. (But was it really a turn? or was it an ironic way of emphasizing some underlying trace?” [“Il romanzo è diviso in tre parti. Ciascuna intitolata a un ‘triangolo’. I capitoli sono trentatré. Non si trattava di una suddivisione di comodo, né tantomeno di un’ossessione per il tre. Ero fresco di studi di filosofia … Nel dopo Sessantotto ci eravamo sfiancati in discussioni (persino nelle assemblee del movimento studentesco) sulla dialettica e sulle triadi hegeliane. Nel mio romanzo avevo ribaltato in cabala tutto quell’arrovellarsi su Tesi/Antitesi/ Sintesi. (Ma era poi un ribaltamento o l’ironica evidenziatura di una sottotraccia?)] (“Quello che non si è mai saputo su Magia Rossa,” 218). 20. “Accennava a orrende trasformazioni, a esseri che già popolavano il regno della mitologia, uomini non-umani che eran cambiati in alberi, in sassi, in animali feroci, in mostri spaventevoli, che non appartenevano a nessun

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regno della natura e infine, egli diceva, mutate in macchine. ‘Queste creature sono a noi d’attorno,’ proseguiva accalorato, ‘e attendono d’essere riconosciute e risvegliate: nei canali, nelle miniere, nelle fabbriche, sulle rotaie, nel telegrafo … esse pulsano cieche, in attesa di renderci sudditi o d’essere da noi soggiogate…’. 21. “‘Insomma … però qui si parla delle forze produttive. In fondo anche Marx…’ … Marisa senza scomporsi andò alla libreria e cominciò a cercare. Dopo poco tirò fuori … Il Manifesto del partito comunista. Cercò tra le pagine, poi trovò il punto che le interessava e lesse ad alta voce: ‘Durante il suo dominio di classe appena secolare la borghesia ha creato forze produttive in massa molto maggiore e più colossali che non avessero mai fatto tutte insieme le altre generazioni del passato. Il soggiogamento delle forze naturali, le macchine, l’applicazione della chimica all’industria e all’agricoltura, la navigazione a vapore, le ferrovie, i telegrafi elettrici, il dissodamento di interi continenti, la navigabilità dei fiumi, popolazioni intere sorte quasi per incanto dal suolo: quale dei secoli antecedenti immaginava che nel grembo del lavoro sociale stessero sopite tali forze produttive? La società borghese moderna, che ha creato per incanto mezzi di produzione e di scambio così potenti, rassomiglia al mago che non riesce più a dominare le potenze degl’inferi da lui evocate.’ English translation of Marx and Engels. 22. “Non era concepito come resurrezione e questa è una differenza importante. I morti che tornavano restavano morti e questo era un elemento irrinunciabile per generare la paura. I morti non resuscitano, ma fanno paura perché, pur mantenendo l’aspetto dei morti, si muovono, aprono gli occhi! Non come Lazzaro, che esce dalla tomba nella solarità del miracolo. Si tratta di qualcosa di più spaventoso e grave e il fatto di ritornare dalla morte non completamente da viventi è un’aggravante. Il terreno K di Zeder, da cui si riemerge, non restituisce alla vita. Si tratta del ritorno di creature che sono morte, eppure vivono.” 23. Adamovit and Bartolini (2010, 80–86) examine the ubiquitous presence of medieval Totentanz and the theme of the “triumph of death” in the folklore of the Po valley, the setting of Gotico Padano narratives. 24. In Italy, the scholar Arsenio Frugoni (1957) had showed the widespread presence of this theme in the late Middle Ages, by paying new critical attention to works such as the frescoes of the Oratorio dei Disciplini in Clusone, near Bergamo. 25. “Mentre appare, lentissimamente, il titolo di coda, vediamo Buffalora dall’alto, dallo stesso elicottero sul quale volavamo a pagina 89. L’immagine scende incerta, come se non sapesse dove andare, in quale casa, tanto le case sono tutte uguali. Poi ne sceglie una e penetra dalla finestra nella sala da pranzo. Si ferma: è una famiglia composta da una madre, da un padre e

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da un bambino. Stanno mangiando e prendono con avidità pezzi di qualcosa di un grande piatto al centro della tavola. Zoom avanti, e sul piatto ecco ora a fuoco la carne umana, tranci crudi di gambe e braccia, di fianchi e glutei, polmoni e cuore, fegato e reni, e al centro, circondato, il pene, con i suoi testicoli. Titolo di coda: Tiziano Sclavi / DELLA MORTE / DELL’AMORE.” 26. “Dalle parti di viale della Resistenza, ma non si sa con precisione dove esattamente, c’è il battito di un cuore. TUM, e tutto si ferma, TUM, e tutto ancora vive, TUM, e tutto si ferma ancora, TUM, e tutto vive ancora, TUM e tutto ancora muore.”

Works Cited Adamovit, Ruggero, and Claudio Bartolini. 2010. Il gotico padano. Dialogo con Pupi Avati. Recco: Le Mani. Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Florian Mussgnug, eds. 2009. Postmodern Impegno. Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang. Arona, Danilo. 2011. Il calendario dei morti viventi. In L’alba degli zombie. Voci dall’Apocalisse: il Cinema di George Romero, ed. Danilo Arona, Selene Pascarella, and Giuliano Santoro, 43–118. Rome: Gargoyle. Banti, Alberto M. 2011. La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita. Turin: Einaudi. Boluk, Stephanie, and Wylie Lenz, eds. 2011. Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Boom, Kevin. 2011a. And the Dead Shall Rise. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 5–8. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2011b. The Zombie as Other: Mortality and the Monstrous in the Post-­ Nuclear Age. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 50–60. New  York: Fordham University Press. Brioni, Simone. 2013. Zombies and the Post-Colonial Italian Unconscious. Cinergie. Il Cinema e le altre arti 4: 166–182. Browning, John Edgar, David R.  Castillo, David A.  Reilly, and David Schmid. 2016. Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Camilletti, Fabio. 2018. Italia lunare. Gli anni Sessanta e l’occulto. Oxford: Peter Lang. Christie, Deborah, and Sarah Juliet Lauro. 2011. Introduction. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 1–4. New York: Fordham University Press. Corradi, Morena. 2016. Spettri d’Italia. Scenari del fantastico nella pubblicistica postunitaria milanese. Ravenna: Longo.

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De Rossignoli, Emilio. 2009. Io credo nei vampiri. Rome: Gargoyle. Derrey, François. 1965. Dobbiamo credere agli Zombi? Pianeta 7: 15–23. Frugoni, Arsenio. 1957. I temi della Morte nell’affresco della Chiesa dei disciplini a Clusone. Bollettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano LXIX: 175–212. Hubner, Laura, Marcus Leaning, and Paul Manning, eds. 2015. The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Manfredi, Gianfranco. 2006. Magia Rossa. La rivolta degli spettri. Rome: Gargoyle. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1848. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore with Friedrich Engels. Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm. Mora, Teo. 1977–1978. Storia del cinema dell’orrore. Rome: Fanucci. Morando, Paolo. 2009. Dancing Days 1978–1979. I due anni che hanno cambiato l’Italia. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Schwartz, Guri. 2010. Tu mi devi seppellir. Riti funebri e culto nazionale alle origini della Repubblica. Turin: Utet. Sclavi, Tiziano. 1991. Dellamorte Dellamore. Milan: Camunia. Zani, Steven, and Kevin Meaux. 2011. Lucio Fulci and the Decaying Definition of Zombie Narratives. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-­ Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 98–115. New  York: Fordham University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. There Is No Sexual Relationship. In The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, 174–205. London: Blackwell. ———. 2005. A Hair of the Dog That Bit You. In Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler, 126–154. London: Continuum.

CHAPTER 13

New Materialism, Female Bodies and Ethics in Antonioni’s L’avventura, La notte and  L’eclisse Paolo Saporito

1   Introduction In Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece L’avventura [The Adventure] (1960), Anna, one of the protagonists, disappears during a boat trip around the Aeolian Islands in Italy. Her travelling companions, particularly her friend Claudia and her boyfriend Sandro, will look for her on the island Lisca Bianca and throughout Sicily unsuccessfully. Anna will never appear in the film again. What does this disappearance mean? Critics have interpreted this moment in various ways, as Anna’s need to escape from her relationship with Sandro (Chatman 1985), or as mere sentimental breakaway provoking a “sense of loss” (D’Acierno 1993–1994, 253). Only recently has this passage been reframed through the reading of Anna’s relationship with the environment (Marcus 2015) or as her positive move towards a new engagement with it (Moore 1995). This essay

P. Saporito (*) McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_13

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challenges the first set of readings and, elaborating on the second set, rises to consider Anna’s disappearance as the disappearance of the human, which becomes the trigger for my proposed posthumanist analysis of Antonioni’s three films: L’avventura, La notte [The Night] (1961) and L’eclisse [The Eclipse] (1962). Anna’s disappearance, seen as a potential merging of the female body with the material dimension of the landscape, allows for an exploration of a new form of relationality, which the protagonists of the later films push even further. This exploration and the progressive emergence of an agency of matter entangled with female bodies call for a posthumanist analysis of the relationship between materiality and Antonioni’s female characters. The main references for my posthumanist theoretical framework will be Rosi Braidotti’s definition of the posthuman subject, Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, Jane Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter and Karen Barad’s performative theory of agential realism. In particular, Barad’s approach (2007) is crucial to frame my analysis based on her critique of representationalism and the matter–discourse divide. According to this scholar, the power that post-structuralism has granted to language must be challenged by a performative understanding of material-discursive practices, where the material and the discursive are conjoined and mutually determined factors. The complex agential intra-­ actions of these practices produce ontological entanglement of intra-­acting agencies that Barad calls phenomena (2007, 139). Entanglements, for her, are not simple interactions between independent entities pre-existing their relation, but intra-active processes through which “the boundaries and properties of the components of phenomena become determinate and particular … material articulations of the world become meaningful” (139). Indeed, in Barad’s account, matter has an agential dimension and is not a fixed and transcendental essence. Agency, performatively meant as a doing, an enactment, and not an attribute, is among the properties determined within intra-actions and manifests itself in the ongoing reconfiguring of the world. Provided that “the space of agency is not restricted to the possibilities for human action” (178), any material-discursive component of phenomena may become an agential subject or object, depending on the agential cut enacted by each specific material configuration of the world. These “boundary-making practices” (148) are meaningful from an ethical perspective because they determine what matters and what is excluded from mattering. Taking into account these considerations, my posthumanist approach aims to underline the ethical relevance of the films

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under analysis in the context of the posthuman turn and contribute to the recently noted need to deal with Antonioni’s films from a new perspective (Rascaroli and Rhodes 2011, 4). In order to carry out this analysis, I first discuss how critics have been interpreting the role of the female characters in Antonioni’s films. Then, I move into the investigation of the relationship between Anna, Lidia, Valentina and Vittoria, the four female protagonists of the films, and the materiality of the urban and natural environment. These characters, who criticize and reject the bourgeois condition in which they are embedded, try to escape it by opening themselves up to sensorial stimuli coming from the environment and its matter, no longer merely an object of perception, but an agential subject that performs its existence in the entanglement with the female body. Elements of the environment, intra-acting with the cinematic apparatus, enact this entanglement progressively from L’avventura to L’eclisse, alongside the women’s exploration of its material dimension, which can be broken down into two moments. Firstly, there is a search for alternative time-spaces, which move the female characters from the core of their urban environment to its periphery. During this search, the characters’ bodies enter a “trans-corporeal” time-space in which their “human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’” (Alaimo 2008, 238). Secondly, in these time-spaces, the characters open themselves up to sensorial perceptions without any ambitions of mastering or controlling these stimuli. They assume an “open-ended comportment” (Bennett 2010, xv) that takes into account “material vibrancy” as the “capacity for activity and responsiveness” of things (xii-xiii). Both these moments bring up ethical concerns that I will discuss in the last part of this chapter.

2   Antonioni’s Female Characters: The Embodiment of Difference Critics have described the female protagonists of L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse, and of Antonioni’s works in general, in various ways, often underlining their display of “fragile femininity” (Cottino-Jones 2010, 119). According to Brunetta (1993), these characters flee from themselves, burdened by anguish and loneliness (341–342), while Arrowsmith (1995) maintains instead that, although alienation suffocates them, they still hold some talent for survival in modern society (56). Other scholars

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endow them with a singular sensibility, but limited to their “capacity to acknowledge feelings” (Chatman 1985, 56) or silenced by their inability to communicate (60). For Brunette (1998), women in Antonioni’s films are “better exemplars” of the alienation that all human beings share in contemporary society (8), while Cottino-Jones (2010) argues that the three films analysed in this essay “show the traditional female lack of control over her own life and a total dependency on male guidance and attention” (119). These readings, more recently taken up by Kovács (2007), Orban (2001) and Vighi (2009), are superficial or, in the case of Chatman and Brunette, incomplete, for two reasons: first of all, they insist on an exclusively negative conceptualization of alienation, which sees this phenomenon as producing only weaknesses, distance and separation; secondly, when they deal with the relationship between characters and landscape (Orban 2001; Kovács 2007; Di Méo 2014), they naively describe the latter as a reflection of the characters’ states of mind. In order to fully understand the ethical tension that stems from these characters’ stories (Rascaroli and Rhodes 2011, 77), one needs to think of these female protagonists otherwise. The effects of their alienation may be isolation and detachment, but it never becomes a complete retreat from the material world (Nowell-Smith 1963–1964, 17). Certainly, all these characters are embedded in a bourgeois, consumerist and individualist society with which they have a problematic relationship. However, the alienation that stems from it can be read positively, as Moore (1995) does, as a trigger, an encouragement to explore the environment in search of alternative relations. These female characters’ distancing from a consumerist society equals a form of separation that increases their level of relationality with those elements of the material environment that the same patriarchal society marginalizes. Seen in this perspective, their femininity constitutes “radical and irreducible difference” (De Lauretis 1984, 5), whose ethical alternative condition and generative powers must be reassessed beyond the gender dualism that would make women simply other-­ than-­men (Braidotti 2013, 98). In other words, Lidia, Valentina and Vittoria, the characters that take the baton handed by Anna, embody an alternative standpoint to the humanism of patriarchal modern society, represented by male characters, and valorize the performative agential dimension of the environment with which they are, and feel, constantly entangled. A close reading of the cinematic enactment of this entanglement within a posthumanist theoretical framework is necessary both to avoid superficial associations of femininity with nature based on any form of

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transcendental sensibility, and to move beyond reductive interpretations of the role of the landscape, still biased by an anthropocentric perspective. My analysis, strongly influenced by Barad’s terminology, will reveal the performative agential dimension of the female entanglements with the environment, the role of materiality within it, and their ethical potential. In my reading of Barad’s theory, I conceive of films, and the parts into which they can be divided (sequences, shots, stills) as phenomena. Cinematic cuts, the positioning of the camera, the length and angle of shots, among other techniques, are boundary-making practices that enact specific entanglements. These entanglements materialize through intra-­ actions of different agential entities: the body of a character, the material environment or objects and the camera too. These entities perform their being, and their bodies are not simply situated in a specific environment but are intra-actively co-constituted within phenomena (Barad 2007, 170), that is the sequence of shots recorded on film whose material flow produces moving images. My analysis aims to account for the material reconfiguring of these phenomena throughout the films without the ambition of being conclusive, but rather opening these phenomena to new and meaningful contributions.

3   Anna: The Disappearance of the Human, the Emergence of the Environment The present analysis starts with L’avventura, “the true matrix of all Antonionian enquiries into femininity” (Vighi 2009, 201). The film, shot between Rome and Sicily, is the story of the relationship between Anna, her boyfriend Sandro and her friend Claudia, who will have an affair with the man after her friend’s disappearance. Anna disappears on the island Lisca Bianca after an argument with Sandro, during which the woman clearly states her intention to leave him and be alone. In the last shot showing the character, one sees the back of her head turned to Sandro, who is lying on the rocks. Then, through a dissolve that seems to convey her disappearance (Chatman 1985, 127), one sees rocks on the left, without any human presence, and the sea and the sky on the right. The island’s cliff and the horizon divide the image into three parts on which the camera lingers, and that, for a few seconds during the dissolve, are superimposed over Anna’s head and Sandro’s body. The image of the latter coincides with the section where the rocks will appear, whereas Anna’s

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head merges with the sky, the sea and the horizon. The synergy between the technology of the cinematic medium and the material dimension of the landscape, through the dissolve, performs and enacts the decisive cut that separates Anna from the rest of the group and visually merges her body with the environment. Reading this passage through Barad, the cut enacted by the cinematic medium and the materiality of the landscape works as an exclusion that determines the boundaries of a phenomenon: Anna’s body merges with the environment, and the agential dimensions of all material entities that participate in this entanglement, camera included, emerge. In other words, Anna’s disappearance signals the emergence of the cinematic medium and matter as agential subjects, which must be taken into account in the analysis of the relationship between female characters and the material environment. Furthermore, these agential subjects progressively emerge throughout the “absurdly long” sequence on the island that follows Anna’s disappearance (Chatman 1985, 76). The search for the girl is not only a pretext, as Chatman argues, to give Antonioni the time he needs to achieve an effect of realism. The neo-realistic extreme long shots do not merely place human figures in their surroundings, but merge the former with the latter, made of rocks, water, gusts, the rumbling of water between ravines and the incessant blowing of the wind. These shots acknowledge the entangled existence of human bodies and matter. Moreover, the positioning of the camera, which often does not match the expected identification with a character’s point of view or follow human characters leaving the frame, makes its gaze constantly felt, becoming “the gaze of the Other” (Restivo 2002, 117). As Angelo Restivo writes, “Antonioni detaches the gaze from its (misrecognized) source in the [human] subject, and locates it back on the side of the [material] object” (117). This use of the camera’s gaze, which embodies an unclear “presence,” calls for the acknowledgement of the agential dimension of this instrument in the entanglement between characters and environment. The camera has an interest in portraying not only what is consistent with the narrative of the search, but also material phenomena, like the formation of a typhoon in the sky or the falling down of a rock along the cliffs. In the latter shot, Claudia, initially out of the frame, is then included in it while the gaze of the camera follows the rock and leaves the female figure completely out of focus. Yet, the camera does not erase the human figure from the images. It “preserves its own identity and distance” (Chatman 1985, 114), but only to establish itself as a relational element

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that has to be taken into account in order to fully grasp the dynamics of the relationship between characters and the environment. Meaningfully, the last two shots that precede the definitive departure of all the characters from the island impose the presence of this gaze further. In the first case, the camera is on the boat, floating with it, moved by the sea, while, in the second, it goes back to an extreme long shot, as if the island itself was watching the ships, which reinstates the exclusively entangled existence of human figures, objects and the natural environment. In light of these considerations, it would be reductive to consider Anna’s disappearance merely as the demonstration of her “voluntary exile from the human community” (Marcus 2015, 266). Marcus has brilliantly pointed out “the girl’s slow but progressive identification with the various spaces of the island … her metamorphosis in a sort of immanence” (266). This acknowledgement, however, does not yet carry out a post-­ anthropocentric shift, and is not framed in a geocentric perspective, which takes into account the agential role of the environment in its relationship with the female character. Anna’s disappearance, as the disappearance of the centre of anthropocentrism, initiates a search for and an exploration of a renovated bodily material reconfiguration, a different form of relationality that goes towards what Braidotti calls “becoming-earth” (2013, 82). However, L’avventura does not investigate this form of relationality further and does not carry out a critical analysis of the entanglement between female characters and materiality, which only La notte and L’eclisse will continue. Anna’s disappearance remains unexplained, as Chatman remarks (1985, 76), and her call unanswered.

4   Lidia, Valentina: The Exploration of the Material Vibrancy of the Environment After the disappearance of the human and the emergence of an entanglement between camera and environment, La notte portrays the reaction of Lidia and Valentina to their alienated condition, characterized by boredom, anguish and incommunicability. The two protagonists react to this condition through a search for a renovated form of relationality in alternative time-spaces, entering a trans-corporeal status, and a partial acknowledgement of the material vibrancy of matter. The film recounts the story of a night in the life of a couple, the writer Giovanni Pontano and his partner Lidia; after visiting their dying friend

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Tommaso at a private clinic and attending the launch of Giovanni’s latest book, Giovanni and Lidia spend the night at the industrialist Gherardini’s villa. During the book launch, Lidia decides to leave and go for a walk, opening one of the most famous sequences of this film. She moves from downtown Milan to the outskirts of the city, in Sesto San Giovanni, and her walk ends in a courtyard where she and Giovanni used to date. At the beginning of the sequence, when Lidia leaves the venue of the launch, the camera visually encloses her body into a cage as it looks at her from behind a gate, so as to convey her constricted feeling. Lidia “escapes,” as Chatman notes (1985, 61), but does not simply wander or become an aimless flâneur, as Haaland argues (2013). Her walk has a more or less unconscious aim, as suggested by the numbers 2 and 1, which appear on two light poles in two different shots. Although the passage from 2 to 1 also indicates that she is going somehow backwards, the direction does not have to hinder her purpose of developing “new ways of seeing” and, I would add, touching, hearing, smelling and tasting—in one word, perceiving, “to reposition herself in marital as well as social life” (Haaland 2013, 599). Therefore, this repositioning, Lidia’s relating to her surroundings “as a nomad, as a transversal subject deterritorialized and reterritorialized in the in-between” (612), must be described by taking into account all the forms of intra-­ action between Lidia’s body and the material dimension of the environment. In the latter, human beings are included, but do not constitute the main figures. Through the lively Milan of the Italian economic boom, human laughter and the sound of Lidia’s steps merge with the noises of cars, trucks, airplanes and scooters. During her walk, she stares, contemplates, listens to and touches human beings and objects, while the camera portrays all these sensorial experiences from different perspectives, at times furtively, making her presence felt and stating its part in the entanglement between Lidia and matter. The camera often reduces the relevance of the human character, shooting her from afar, as when she is entering the courtyard of a destroyed building, or leaving her at the margins of the frame, as in a high-angle extreme long shot where Lidia’s figure is tiny in comparison with the massive concrete wall of a building that occupies most of the frame. In the former sequence, after the aforementioned long shot, the camera follows her into the courtyard, remaining behind the character. It changes position, to show her face, only when she kneels to caress a crying baby. When Lidia stands again, the camera remains still, looking at her from a low-­ angle shot that does not show her full body. The camera looks at Lidia’s

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body from behind, while she turns and gets closer to a wall on the opposite side of the courtyard. Then, a cut shifts to the image of an old broken clock on the ground, and one does not know where Lidia is, until her right hand and part of her right leg enter the frame from the left. The camera lingers on this clock, suggesting the importance of time in Lidia’s exploration, the relevance of which will become clear only later. The position of the camera neither coincides with Lidia’s eyes nor associates the observed object with Lidia, the supposed observer, using a shot/reverse-shot sequence. The image enacts the intra-action between the material object and the mechanical eye of the camera, acknowledging the presence of a human being but disregarding it or, better, establishing an entanglement where she is an agential subject as much as the camera and the materiality of the clock. The next shot reinforces this entanglement. A cut leads to the image of a portion of a gate whose surface, covered by a layer of rust, is evidently ruined and, together with a more protruding part of a door, casts some shadow on the gate. After a few instants, Lidia’s left hand enters the frame from below and starts breaking parts of the rusted layer. The position of the camera still does not coincide with Lidia’s eyes (it is beside her, on her left) and looks even closer to the gate than she is (one sees only her hand and part of her wrist). The camera’s point of view, its proximity to the gate, the roughness of the latter and the shadow cast on it give the shots a three-dimensionality that seems to transform the eye of the camera into a tactile eye interested in synergically embodying both a tactile and haptic sensibility (Barker 2009). As I will argue in more detail regarding the ending of L’eclisse, in this shot, Antonioni’s camera aims to enact not only the experience of sight, but also that of touch, resonant with what Lidia’s hand is experiencing, in order to underline the material dimension of the entanglement between the two. The mechanical eye of the camera, the crumbling rust and Lidia’s hand are all agential parts of the haptic phenomenon performed and impressed on film, which reconfigure Lidia’s exploration as fundamentally sensorial and merged with matter. Lidia’s exploration of alternative time-spaces reaches its climax later in the film, when Giovanni finds her waiting for him in a courtyard close to an old building and a church in Sesto San Giovanni. While he walks towards the gate of the courtyard, the camera looks at him from above and pans right, following his movement. When, beyond the gate, he stops and turns right, facing a tree trunk, a high-angle shot does not show the woman to whom he starts talking. Instead, it hides her behind the tree, as if the trunk and her body were a single entity. The entanglement between

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Lidia and the tree, on which she and Giovanni had carved their initials in the past, is also underlined by the next shot, which shows the woman in proximity to the bark with her eyes closed, as if listening to it or smelling it. The material dimension of the tree and the bark embodies both a spatial and temporal dimension, to which Lidia returns physically as well as with her memory. The entanglement between her body and the bark enacts a “fusion of times” (Haaland 2013, 612), the coexistence of past, present and future possibilities of development which rely on what one may call a posthuman time, a “complex and non-linear system” where clocks are broken (I refer to the shot previously analysed) and several time-sequences overlap (Braidotti 2013, 167). Lidia tries to reinvent herself through an active search that brings her to reconsider her relationship to matter and its temporal dimension through sensorial experiences and memory. The courtyard, where she finally arrives, does not constitute only a space, but a time-space, where the position of the camera makes Lidia’s temporarily reinvented corporeality “in all its material fleshiness” inseparable from the environment, an inhabitant of the time-space that Stacy Alaimo defines as “trans-corporeality” (2008, 238). In this time-space, as Alaimo explains, totally unpredictable exchanges between different bodily natures, in this case Lidia’s body, the body of the tree or the bark, take place. “By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures” (Alaimo 2010, 2) and the open possibilities of development that the entanglement between Lidia and the tree may unfold. Going back to the bark, Lidia aims to reinvent her entanglement not only with the environment, but with any form of corporeality, including that of her husband and other human beings. Unfortunately, Lidia’s attempts to refuse the negative soul of her alienation and her efforts to react to it through the embodiment of an alternative relationality do not imply her success. As the violent sexual act between Lidia and Giovanni shows at the end of the film, his body overcoming hers in a sand bunker, Lidia will not manage to get out from the constrained and possessive control that the consumerist patriarchal society imposes on her. Nevertheless, the two characters, Valentina, in La notte, and Vittoria, in L’eclisse, will take over Lidia’s exploration and will bring her attempt to reinvent herself to a deeper level, towards an ethical opening to sensorial perceptions coming from their entanglement with matter. Valentina Gherardini is the young daughter of the industrialist who owns the villa where the night party takes place. During the party, she is seduced by Giovanni, who kisses her while Lidia is watching them from a

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terrace. However, the kiss does not interfere with the relationship between the two women whose differences and complementarity, over the course of the night, emerge. If Lidia holds on to her memories, but at the same time feels they are a burden because of the boring repetition of her actions, Valentina has a forgetful attitude that relies on the close sensorial sensations of the present. She creatively plays with material objects, which may also constitute a defence, something to hold on to, like the glass that she tries to grip after she tells Giovanni about her poor memory. The launch-­ the-­compact game she plays with him and the metal wire she handles, shaping and reshaping it while she talks to Giovanni in her room are examples of how she feels the constant need to touch and act creatively. As one learns from the sequence in which Valentina and Giovanni listen to her recording sitting on the floor, she is a writer, but it is meaningful that she asks Giovanni to listen to her words, rather than reading them, and emphasizes the importance of aural stimuli. As her recorded voice says, she is tired of words, of the verbal language of television or human voices, and prefers silence above all things. However, for Valentina, silence does not correspond to the total absence of sound or vibrations, but to the moment in which aural stimuli emerge from the environment, provided that one is open to welcome them (“silence came, and I was very happy with it. The park is full of silence made of sounds. If you put an ear against the bark of a tree and stay that way for a while, you’ll hear a noise. Maybe it depends on us, but I prefer to think it’s the tree”).1 Valentina’s intra-action with the material dimension of the bark is key to understanding that Lidia’s intimacy with the tree should not simply be framed within her personal relationship with Giovanni, but has to be thought of as a more relevant attempt to merge into a new material relationality, which the two girls share as a reaction to alienation. However, unlike the other woman, Valentina assumes an “open-ended comportment” (Bennett 2010, xv) ready to creatively imagine and acknowledge the capacity of matter “for activity and responsiveness.” According to Bennett, vibrant matter holds a power that does not coincide with a spiritual vitalism, but consists of the “agency of the things that produce … effects in human and other bodies” (xii). What is sound if not vibrations that travel through the air and affect the organs of hearing? The “material vibrancy” (xiii) of the tree produces a vibration that Valentina calls “sound,” but that may stand for any form of material entanglement that the girl enacts, together with the agential dimension of the matter that composes the garden and the tree. Yet, the enactment of

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Valentina’s entanglement with the tree through a verbal account still grants language too much power. If the girl acknowledges the material vibrancy of the bark, the camera portrays only its discursive representation and does not directly engage with it. The matter–discourse divide will be problematized only in the next film, where Vittoria will be the one to face it.

5   Vittoria: The Material-Discursive Continuum Beyond Anthropocentrism The third film under analysis problematizes the matter–discourse divide, and turns the relationship between Vittoria and the material dimension of the environment into a form of resistance to the supremacy of discourse over matter. The protagonist of L’eclisse is a young woman who lives on her own and works as a translator. At the beginning of the film, she breaks off her relationship with Riccardo, who wanted to marry her, and meets Piero, a young broker who works at the Rome Stock Exchange, with whom she will start a new and apparently happier relationship. However, quite enigmatically, the film ends up showing the lovers’ absence from the crossroad where they were supposed to meet, suggesting that their relationship is not going to continue on. The film begins at dawn, after a long night during which Vittoria and Riccardo argued extensively, as if L’eclisse was a continuation of La notte, born from its ashes. Moreover, the character of Vittoria recalls both Lidia’s rapport with the past and Valentina’s creativity. She senses the depth of the history of nature and matter, as suggested by the way she touches and investigates a fossil, which she keeps in her room, while in the first sequence, shot in Riccardo’s apartment, she keeps touching small objects and rearranges them inside a small frame. She does not do this to embody the will to master those objects, as Di Méo has argued (2014, 620), but to seek alternatives, creative and sensorial forms of escape from the suffocating atmosphere of that time-space. However, Vittoria’s positive embodiment of creativity, and the way she uses it to place herself in both her social and material relations to the environment, human beings included, distances her from the female protagonists of La notte. She constantly plays with her body—think of the sequence where she and Piero mimic and mock other lovers’ gestures or their own— and the materiality of the environment. For instance, during the flight to Verona, she wants to fly right into the clouds, as if it was possible to feel

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them through the airplane. She consciously refuses her role in an empty relationship and engages with different cultures and languages (she knows German, English and Spanish, at least) in a continuous “quest for difference” and alterity (Moore 1995, 29). In order to fully understand the ethical potential of Vittoria’s quest, one has to frame it within the posthumanist need to go beyond the nature–culture dualism, and explore the way this is problematized through the representation of the chaotic activity of investors and brokers at the Rome Stock Exchange. During the two long sequences shot at this location, the financial discourse, meant to represent a set of practices and power relations embodied by all the figures portrayed, imposes itself as the new language capable of mastering and controlling matter and its reconfigurations. Money is the “material” configuration of this language, which determines the value of any entity, time included, commodifying it. The ambition of the financial discourse, as represented in L’eclisse, is not to give a representation of reality and matter, as if money was a tool to interpret that reality, but to embody what consumerist society should conceive as the “real” reality. In other words, the material-discursive reconfigurations at work in the Stock Exchange and their effects on (human) bodies presume to be the only matter that matters, the only configurations that human beings should take into account in their relationship with the environment. Vittoria is the character that indirectly criticizes these configurations, embodying alternative performative practices that deny the separation between matter and discourse and reveal an intuitive knowledge of the “conjoined material-discursive nature of constrain[t]s, conditions and practices” (Barad 2007, 152). This knowledge emerges during Vittoria and Anita’s visit to Marta’s apartment, a friend of theirs who was born in Kenya by European parents with a deep colonialist perspective (for her native Kenyans are “monkeys”). While Marta talks to Anita, Vittoria explores the apartment on her own, touching hunting trophies and lingering on photographs. The camera follows Vittoria and the voices of the friends sound very far and unexpectedly low, as if cut off from her relationship with the surroundings. The camera, embodying Vittoria’s point of view, gazes at pictures of Kilimanjaro, lions in the savannah, and members of a Kenyan tribe, giving the frame over to these images and not showing their boundaries. These shots create a continuum between natural material entities and the discursive practices that represent them—the photographs—and associate this continuum with Vittoria’s point of view. For Vittoria, discursive practices are to be understood as material-discursive

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reconfigurations of matter, without any essential distinction between the “material” and the “discursive” or primacy of the latter on the former, an absence for which posthumanist scholars have argued. Vittoria is aware that material-discursive practices make selections, cuts, so that the frame will always leave something out. When Marta tells Vittoria about her family farm in the country, located on the left of one of the landscapes portrayed in the pictures, Vittoria points at the position of the farm with her finger going outside the picture, acknowledging the partiality and fallacy of any discourse or language that presumes to contain and master matter. Moreover, after contemplating three pictures of Kenyan natives, while she listens to tribal music, Vittoria creatively tries to explore what is “outside the frame” and performs an African dance, disguised as a native portrayed in a picture that Anita puts beside her at the beginning of the dance. For the purpose of this chapter, it is not my interest to discuss this sequence in a postcolonialist perspective, but to stress how Vittoria challenges Marta and the photographic representation of Kenya through a “performative understanding of discursive practices” (Barad 2003, 802). Vittoria’s “performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language”—Marta’s words and the pictures—“to determine what is real” (802), but also an exploration, through her dance, of alternative ways of relating to and engaging with the material-discursive environment. The tribal music played by a turntable, the pictures, Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro (that Vittoria quotes before dancing), the dark paste she uses to cover her skin, the costume, earrings and necklaces are all components that express the influence of exoticism on Vittoria’s material-discursive approach to this culture. However, the merging of her gaze and the pictures, through the cinematic entanglement between her and the camera, and the involvement of her material body in performing her entanglement with a different set of material-discursive practices is an attempt to engage with it and explore it without any ambition. Vittoria is not trying to master Kenyan natives’ culture or relationship with the environment and does not embody Marta’s imperialist standpoint. As the later discussion between the two women reveals, Vittoria sees Kenya as a time-­ space where material-discursive practices of matter reconfigurations constitute alternatives to the consumerist attempt to shape bodies, affects and the matter that matters. In Kenya, as Vittoria says, “perhaps … one thinks less of happiness”2 and feelings, affects and things “have to move forward a little bit on their own. … But here it is all a great effort, even love.”3 The Western world commodifies bodies, feelings and the idea of happiness

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itself, producing discursive labels and practices that do not take into account the material dimension of these phenomena or, even worse, presume to master and control it. Vittoria indirectly reacts to the commodification of matter, also embodying an alternative form of relationality that opens her body to matter and finds in it a responsive and agential entity. L’eclisse deepens the cinematic investigation of the material vibrancy of matter (Valentina’s recording in La notte was a first example) and translates it directly into a cinematic enactment of the entanglement between the camera, Vittoria’s body and the material dimension in which they are both embedded. Unlike the scene about Valentina’s recording, this cinematic enactment does not use any mediation of verbal language. Instead, it consists of a performative use of cinematic material-discursive practices, in the form of sequences of point-of-view shots, which involve Vittoria and an objectual observer. In other words, the film enacts the agential dimension of the material world, and its participation in the entanglement with the human body, endowing the former with the gaze and the ability to respond to the other. An example of this dynamic is the sequence that starts when, after following Marta’s dog in a park, Vittoria is captured by a weird sound whose origin—the contact between metal wires and some flagpoles, caused by the wind—she does not understand at first. The camera, slightly above eye level, looks at Vittoria from behind and the length of the shot makes her body small in comparison with the height of the flagpoles. At this point in the scene it is not yet clear where the noise is coming from. One sees the flagpoles moving without noticing any contact between them and the wires, and it is as if their movement alone produces the sound. Vittoria moves backward, towards the low angle on the left of the frame, and leaves space to the material vibrancy of the flagpoles. At this moment, the point-­ of-­view sequence starts and one sees Vittoria’s face gazing at the flagpoles, the flagpoles on their own with the wires moving and then again Vittoria, but now from a higher angle that takes her full body and reveals that, somehow, the flagpoles are looking at her. In fact, the flagpoles are not looking at her, but the camera has an agential part in enacting the intra-­ action between the flagpoles’ gaze and Vittoria’s body. In other words, the phenomenon portrayed in this sequence is the result of the entanglement between the material dimension of the camera, the flagpoles and Vittoria’s body. The same dynamic of point-of-view shots enacts a similar entanglement at a later point of the film, where, after a slow panoramic of some bricks, the camera “lends” its gaze to the building under construction at

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the corner where Vittoria and Piero are about to meet. In this second example, the gaze of the building is the one that initiates the sequence, taking on the role that, in the first example, was held by Vittoria’s human gaze. Inevitably, as Restivo argues through Gilles Deleuze, these images “open up to an indeterminacy which initiates a process of thinking” (2002, 120) and require a reflection that is primarily ethical. As Barad (2007) argues, “a humanist ethics won’t suffice when the ‘face’ of the other that is ‘looking’ back at me is all eyes, or has no eyes, or is otherwise unrecognizable in human terms. What is needed is a posthumanist ethics,” an ethics that would take into account the agential dimension and continuous reconfiguring of the material world (392). The ending of L’eclisse focuses on this reconfiguring, finally acknowledging the agential dimension of matter in its full potentiality, and reinstates the human being as part of the world, but not at its centre. In this last sequence, as already mentioned, the camera portrays the corner at which Piero and Vittoria are supposed to meet, but will not show up. The characters disappear from the film, inevitably recalling Anna’s departure in L’avventura. However, this disappearance is not followed by any human search for the characters. Their centrality slowly dissolves, shot after shot, and the human beings portrayed in this sequence, pedestrians, children, drivers, the passengers of a bus, are only marginal figures that, nevertheless, are not completely erased. In other words, this disappearance allows the ending of the film to assume a posthumanist perspective, where the entanglement between the camera and matter is finally free from the centrality of human protagonists that were inevitably unbalancing the film in favour of the anthropos. In this sequence, the camera investigates the surroundings of the crossroads where, during the film, Piero and Vittoria had met. Extreme long shots alternate with close shots of urban and natural elements: shadows on the asphalt, a crack in it, a bark and the ants that walk through it, flowing water, wet leaves and two objects, a piece of wood and a matchbox, which Vittoria and Piero dropped in a barrel in a previous scene. These entities, on which the exploratory camera returns more than once, are fully releasing their “thing-power” (Bennett 2010, 3), becoming “vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them” and have their moment of independence (5). Moreover, the closeness of the camera to these vibrating items, equivalents to extreme close-ups usually used for human faces, pushes the possibility of this instrument to its limits. The camera fully embodies its tactile eye and aims to register haptic stimuli, beside the visual and aural ones, both

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acknowledging the agency of matter in its reconfigurations and claiming its agential space in the enacted material entanglement. The synergy between cinematic language and the material world “contests and reworks what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (Barad 2007, 178), opening spaces of possibilities for further intra-action between all the material entities that live in this world.

6   Conclusions: Towards a Cinematic Ethics of Mattering As the analysis of L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse shows, the characters of Anna, Lidia, Valentina and Vittoria constitute an “embodied sensibility, which responds to its proximal relationship to the other through a mode of wonderment that is antecedent to consciousness” (Barad 2007, 391). Their exploration of the environment is never translated into a conscious rational explanation that presumes to master their entanglement with matter, but is aware of the limits of their own consciousness and, rather, assumes an open-ended attitude towards matter and the materiality of their own bodies. The ethical significance of their bodies “is crystallized in the figure of touch and sensibility, in ‘the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other’” (Ziarek 2001, 56), where to feel shall include, besides touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell. It is fundamental to always regard these characters’ return to matter as an attempt, a search and an exploration that is never complete. They are always reconfiguring according to an ethics of openness and not-knowing, where not-knowing must be read as the refusal to presume to control and master matter through discursive practices. After Anna’s disappearance, Lidia, Valentina and Vittoria embody a vital materialist ethics that, through alienation, starts from a critical dealing with the past, a self-criticism that is more emotional than intellectual, and tries to reinvent the self through sensory attentiveness to the environment, imagination, creativity and a playful attitude (Bennett 2010, 14–17). These embodiments must be always read in a trans-corporeal perspective that would focus more on the material-discursive practices in which the characters’ bodies are involved, rather than “disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals” (Alaimo 2008, 253). The focus on material-­ discursive practices has led this analysis to take the material agential dimension of the camera into account and engage with the entanglements that it

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enacts and in which it participates. Considering the material agency of the camera and its entanglement with the material world is a further form of acknowledgement of the material consistency of cinematic language and its limits, which Antonioni openly discusses in his films. The analysed entanglements between the female protagonists’ bodies, the material world and the tactile eye of the camera reveal the search that these films perform and the exploration that the director himself was carrying out, in the attempt to shape a new form of relationality with the environment. For Antonioni, a creatively reinvented relationality, far from totally erasing the human from the scene, would constitute a sustainable form of living alternative to the bourgeois, patriarchal and consumerist society that his films problematize and criticize.

Notes 1. “venne il silenzio, ed io ne ero molto contenta. Il parco è pieno di silenzio fatto di rumori. Se metti un orecchio contro la corteccia di un albero e rimani così per un po’ alla fine senti un rumore. Forse dipende da noi, ma io preferisco pensare che sia l’albero.” 2. “forse … si pensa meno alla felicità.” 3. “devono andare avanti un po’ per conto loro … Qui invece è tutto una gran fatica, anche l’amore.”

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. Trans-Corporeal Feminism and the Ethical Space of Nature. In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan J.  Hekman, 237–264. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Antonioni, Michelangelo (director). 1960. L’avventura. Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2001. DVD. ———. 1961. La Notte. New York: Fox Lorber Films, 2001. DVD. ———. 1962. L’eclisse. Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2005. DVD. Arrowsmith, William. 1995. Antonioni: The Poet of Images. New  York: Oxford University Press. Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831.

13  NEW MATERIALISM, FEMALE BODIES AND ETHICS IN ANTONIONI’S… 

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———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK; Maiden, USA: Polity Press. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1993. Storia del cinema italiano: dal miracolo economico agli anni novanta. Rome: Editori riuniti. Brunette, Peter. 1998. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1985. Antonioni or the Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cottino-Jones, Marga. 2010. Women, Desire and Power in Italian Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. D’Acierno, Fosca. 1993–1994. Empty Desires: The Problem of Woman in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. La Fusta 10: 251–264. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Di Méo, Guy. 2014. Espace acteur et ‘drame paysager’: le cinéma de Michelangelo Antonioni. Annales De Géographie 695–696: 605–625. Haaland, Torunn. 2013. ‘Flânerie,’ Spatial Practices and Nomadic Thought in Antonioni’s La Notte. Italica 90 (4): 596–619. Kovács, András B. 2007. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, Millicent. 2015. Trinacria: la forma del desiderio in L’avventura. In Michelangelo Antonioni: Prospettive, culture, politiche, spazi, ed. Alberto Boschi and Francesco di Chiara, 260–269. Milan: Il castoro. Moore, Kevin Z. 1995. Eclipsing the Commonplace: the Logic of Alienation in Antonioni. Film Quarterly 48 (4): 22–34. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 1963–1964. “Shape Around a Black Point.” Sight and Sound 33: 16–20. Orban, Clara. 2001. Antonioni’s Women, Lost in the City.  Modern Language Studies 31 (2): 11–27. Rascaroli, Laura, and John David Rhodes, eds. 2011. Antonioni: Centenary Essays. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Restivo, Angelo. 2002. The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vighi, Fabio. 2009. Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Ziarek, Ewa P. 2001. An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Index

A Abbate, Janet, 163, 164 Abjection, 20, 174–175, 185–201 Adamovit, Ruggero, 265 Adorno, Theodor W., 79 Aesthetics, 6, 119–122, 124–125, 133, 134, 150, 243, 265 long-range, 8, 55–57, 65 Agamben, Giorgio, 13, 14, 235 Agency, 16, 34, 36, 37, 40, 45, 227, 228, 276, 285 human and animal, 83–85 intra-acting, 17–21 of matter, 276, 291 in the workplace, 168 Agential cut, 18, 94, 97, 98, 102, 106, 111, 276 Agential realism, 14, 22, 276 Alaimo, Stacy, 276, 277, 284, 291 Alienation, 22, 64, 127, 166, 171, 195, 257, 258, 260, 267

in Antonioni films, 277–279, 284, 285 and technology, 148, 153, 155, 156 Alt, Christina, 51 Alterity, 7, 13, 14, 82, 86, 212, 218, 222, 287 See also Otherness Amberson, Deborah, 2, 14, 52, 60, 64 Ammaniti, Niccolò, 16, 144 Amodei, Fausto, 259 Androids, 20, 185–201 Animality, 17, 36, 41–44, 51–65, 83, 84 Animals, 33–37, 40–44, 86, 87, 169, 170, 216, 220–222, 226, 227, 235 animal epiphany, 35, 44 animal irreducibility, 80–81 animal rights, 11 in Balzac’s fiction, 53, 54 in Pirandello’s fiction, 51–65

© The Author(s) 2020 E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0

295

296 

INDEX

Anthropocentrism, 6–8, 18, 35–37, 41, 53–56, 59, 75–87, 212 and anti-anthropocentrism, 212, 234 and Antonioni’s films, 279 and non-anthropocentrism, 74–77, 82, 84, 234, 237, 238, 249 patriarchal, 79 and post-anthropocentrism, 85–87, 281 post-Darwinian crisis of, 52, 58 and superstition, 64 Anthropos, 212, 226–228, 290 Antonello, Pierpaolo, 15, 16, 257 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 22, 234, 275–292 Aquilina, Mario, 9 Archibugi, Luca, 134 Arendt, Hannah, 14 Argento, Dario, 21, 256, 262, 263 Aristotle, 226 Arona, Danilo, 260 Arrowsmith, William, 277 Askin, Ridvan, 9 Atwood, Margaret, 186 Austin, James H., 238 Authorship, 112, 120–123, 128 Autobiography, 100, 125, 166, 170, 257 Autopoiesis, 7, 21 Avati, Pupi, 22, 257, 265–267 Avoledo, Tullio, 74 B Bàino, Mariano, 131 Ballard, James G., 74 Balsamo, Anne, 171 Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, 266 Balzac, Honoré de, 52–55, 65 Banti, Alberto Mario, 259 Barad, Karen, 5, 8, 14, 18, 94, 97, 108, 238, 244

and Antonioni’s films, 275–280, 287, 288, 290, 291 Barker, Jennifer, 283 Barthes, Roland, 9, 124 Bartolini, Claudio, 265, 266 Bartoloni, Paolo, 13 Baudelaire, Charles, 58 Bauman, Zygmunt, 124 Bazin, André, 126 Bazzocchi, Marco Antonio, 171 Becoming-machine, 109 Benedetti, Carla, 57, 79, 189 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 58, 124, 215 Bennett, Jane, 276, 277, 285, 290, 291 Benvenuti, Giuliana, 120 Berardinelli, Alfonso, 123 Berg, Anne-Jorunn, 165 Bergman, Ingmar, 266 Berisso, Marco, 129 Berlusconi, Silvio, 241 Bertante, Alessandro, 74 Bianciardi, Luciano, 20, 164–170, 176–178 Binarism, 12, 21, 81, 93, 112, 227, 261 Bioegalitarianism, 234 Biopolitics, 13 Bishop, Rebecca, 83 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 4 Boccia Artieri, Giovanni, 129 Bohr, Niels, 238 Bologna, Corrado, 134 Bonsaver, Guido, 2 Bourdieu, Pierre, 120, 134 Braidotti, Rosi, 13, 20, 21, 34, 36, 41, 44, 54, 75, 78, 84, 86, 87, 187 and Antonioni's films, 276, 278, 281, 284 nomadic and bioegalitarian philosophy, 14 quoted, 78, 79, 191, 197–200

 INDEX 

Brioni, Simone, 16, 257 Brook, Clodagh, 15, 156 Brunetta, Gian Piero, 277 Brunette, Peter, 278 Bryden, Mary, 59 Buddhism, 188–200 See also Zen Buddhism Buswell, Robert E. Jr., 188 Butler, Judith, 4, 36, 38, 107 Buzzati, Dino, 15 C Cacciapuoti, Fabiana, 32, 33 Caesar, Michael, 31, 32 Calandrone, Maria Grazia, 133 Callus, Ivan, 9, 14 Calvino, Italo, 9, 10, 15, 76 Camilletti, Fabio A., 33 Campo, Rossana, 144 Canon, 119–126 Capitalism, 11, 167, 177, 216, 226 Cardini, Antonio, 164 Carducci, Giosuè, 31 Carosello, 215–216, 221 Carravetta, Peter, 12 Carter, Angela, 187 Cartesian philosophy, 5, 6, 12, 15, 17, 20, 99, 237 See also Descartes, René Casati, Marquise Luisa, 60 Cassano, Franco, 14 Castagnola, Raffaella, 60 Castaldi, Simone, 176 Castronovo, Valerio, 164 Cattaneo, Ivan, 258 Catullus, Gaius Valerius, 134 Cavarero, Adriana, 14 Celati, Gianni, 21, 233–250 Cellphone, see Mobile phones Centanin, Antonello, 144 Cepollaro, Biagio, 133 Ceserani, Remo, 120

297

Charnley, Joy, 189 Chatman, Seymour, 275, 278–282 Chierici, Anna Maria, 236 Christie, Deborah, 257 Clark, Timothy, 56 Cognition, 76, 80–81, 93–95, 211–228 Cognitive embodiment, 14 Comberiati, Daniele, 16 Commodification, 11, 18, 78, 101, 177, 287, 289 Communism, 10, 258, 264 Consciousness, 5, 6, 17, 18, 52, 80, 105, 131, 141–142, 261, 291 and android motherhood, 195–197, 201 Contini, Gianfranco, 136 Continuum, nature-culture, 34, 41, 53, 96, 97, 106, 108, 111, 200 Cordelli, Franco, 123 Cori, Paola, 33 Corradi, Morena, 259 Cortellessa, Andrea, 130, 133, 134 Cottino-Jones, Marga, 277, 278 Crisis, 37, 52, 143, 148, 153, 214 ecological, 11–14 Croce, Benedetto, 15, 32 Cronenberg, David, 262, 263 Cronin, Michael, 2, 81 Crutzen, Paul, 85 Culicchia, Giuseppe, 19, 143, 144, 152, 155 Cyborgs, 13, 20, 74, 142, 143, 176, 178–180 D Da Vinci, Leonardo, 11 D’Acierno, Fosca, 275 Daniele, Antonio R., 186 d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 52, 59, 60, 65 Darwin, Charles, 7, 51, 52, 58 Davis, Kanpu Bret W., 245

298 

INDEX

Dawn, Vincent, 256 Dawson, Anthony M., 256 De Carlo, Andrea, 19, 143, 147, 151 De Lauretis, Teresa, 278 De Man, Paul, 80 De Rogatis, Tiziana, 93 Death, 213–216, 261 D’Elia, Gianni, 133 Defoe, Daniel, 5, 6 Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 52, 59, 60, 62, 227, 235, 290 Delogu, Lucy, 189 Derrida, Jacques, 62, 81, 235 Descartes, René, 4, 142, 145 See also Cartesian philosophy Descombes, Vincent, 6 Desire, 108–110, 221, 227 Di Grado, Viola, 20, 185–201 Di Méo, Guy, 278, 286 Di Pietrantonio, Donatella, 190 Dialectics, 7, 11, 13, 79, 261 Digital media, 19, 119–136 D’Intino, Franco, 31, 32 Dogen, Eihei, 237, 241, 245, 246 Doueihi, Milad, 122, 123, 125 Driscoll, Kári, 52, 53 Dualism, 11–15, 43, 128, 240, 243, 261, 278, 287 Durante, Lorenzo, 128 Dystopia, 75, 79, 85–87, 187, 189, 190, 200 E Ecocriticism, 34, 75 Ecofeminism, 169, 180 See also Feminism Ecology, 40, 44, 237, 241 Ecopsychology, 21, 234, 236–238, 241–244, 249 Egalitarianism, 6, 17, 34, 44, 75 Einstein, Albert, 186 Eliot, T.S., 8, 56, 134

E-literature, 120 Embodiment, 13–15, 19, 34, 107–109, 111, 142–143, 147, 156, 178, 179, 264 in Antonioni’s films, 277–279, 283, 286, 292 Engels, Friedrich, 258 Entanglement, 94, 275–286, 288–292 Environment, 11, 18, 21, 22, 75, 128, 216, 235, 236, 240–242, 244, 249, 250 in Antonioni’s films, 275–292 social, 196 Epistemology, 12, 212 Esposito, Roberto, 2 Essentialism, 7, 168–170, 176 Ethics, 211–228, 275–292 Exceptionalism, 18 Existentialism, 12, 35 Extinction, 77, 82 F Fanning, Ursula, 100 Fascism, 3 Faulkner, Wendy, 187 Faulkner, William, 177 Feminism, 11, 13–14, 180, 186–191 See also Ecofeminism Ferrando, Francesca, 13, 199, 238 Ferrante, Elena, 18, 93–112, 190 Foscolo, Ugo, 259 Foucault, Michel, 9, 11 Fragasso, Claudio, 256 Francesca, Piero della, 262 Frasca, Gabriele, 129, 132, 133 Freud, Sigmund, 52, 237 Frissen, Valerie, 165 Frixione, Marcello, 129 Fulci, Lucio, 256, 257 Fulginiti, Valentina, 74 Futurism, 8

 INDEX 

G Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 8, 52, 57 Garfield, Jay, 247 Gargani, Aldo, 12 Gasparotto, Lisa, 59 Gautama, Siddhartha, 247 Gender, 19–21, 38, 64, 80, 106, 191, 200, 278 and gendered technology, 163–182 Gessani, Alberto, 176 Ghirri, Luigi, 239 Gianco, Ricky, 258 Gill, Rosalind, 164 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 186 Giovannetti, Paolo, 130, 131, 134, 136 Giovenale, Marco, 128, 133 Girolami, Marino, 256 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 123–125 Graham, Elaine, 180 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 55 Grignani, Maria Antonietta, 176 Grint, Keith, 164 Guattari, Félix, 52, 59, 60, 62, 227 Guerricchio, Rita, 176 Guglieri, Francesco, 134 Gutenberg, 125 H Haaland, Torunn, 282, 284 Habermas, Jürgen, 121 Han, Byung-Chul, 153–155 Haraway, Donna, 13, 14, 20, 42, 74, 142, 145, 178, 180, 187 Harris, John, 81 Harrison, Thomas, 235, 236 Hassan, Ihab, 15 Hayles, Katherine, 14, 19, 105, 142, 143, 179 Hegel, Friedrich, 263 Hegemony, cultural, 15 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 12, 13, 236

299

Hemingway, Ernest, 288 Heraclitus, 236 Hillman, James, 236–238, 242, 244, 249 Hitler, Adolf, 3 Hlavajova, Maria, 75, 78, 84, 86 Hobbes, Thomas, 145 Horkheimer, Max, 79 Houston, Whitney, 227 Humanism, 7, 13–15, 21, 41, 45, 78, 122, 212, 278, 290 I Iannuzzi, Giulia, 15, 16 Immanence, 110–111, 281 Impegno, 21, 144, 147 Individualism, 263 Information technology, 104, 105, 130 Inglese, Andrea, 133 Intra-action, 93–95, 97, 101, 109, 276, 279, 282, 283, 285, 289, 291 Intra-agency, 238, 244, 249 Iovino, Serenella, 14, 34, 36, 41 Irigaray, Luce, 13, 14 Irony, 55–58, 259, 263 J Jacobson, Roman, 124 James, Simon P., 241 Jameson, Fredric, 86 Jeffries, Miceli, 189 Joyce, James, 8, 56 Jung, C.G., 236, 237 K Kovács, András B., 278 Kristeva, Julia, 13, 20, 111, 174, 187, 192–195, 198, 200

300 

INDEX

L Lacan, Jacques, 173, 192, 261 Landy, Marcia, 189 Laporta, Filippo, 176 Lauro, Sarah Juliet, 257 Lausberg, Heinrich, 124 Lawrence, D.H., 59, 65 Lazzari, Laura, 189 Le Guin, Ursula K., 186 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 54 Lenzi, Umberto, 256 Leopardi, Giacomo, 6, 9, 17, 18, 31–45, 234, 235 Levi, Primo, 15 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 9 Lie, Merete, 165 Lipkowitz, Ina, 192 Lo Russo, Rosaria, 129 Lolli, Claudio, 257 Longo, Davide, 74 Long-range aesthetics, 8, 55–57, 65 Lopez, Donald S. Jr., 188 Lorenzini, Niva, 127 Lorusso, Francesco, 258 Loselle, Andrea, 192 Lucamante, Stefania, 16 Lyotard, Jean François, 146, 152 M Madonna, 227 Magrelli, Valerio, 128, 132 Malson, Lucien, 82 Manfredi, Gianfranco, 22, 257, 260–265, 267 Manovich, Lev, 128 Manzoni, Alessandro, 6 Marchesini, Roberto, 7, 8, 14, 34–36, 39, 40, 44, 60, 61, 64, 106 Marcus, Millicent, 275, 281 Marcuse, Herbert, 177 Margheriti, Antonio, 256 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 7, 8

Martin, Ariel, 185 Martin, Michèle, 165 Marx, Karl, 153, 212, 258, 264 Materialism, 36, 261, 275–292 Maternity, see Motherhood Mattei, Bruno, 256 Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, 8 Mbembe, Achille, 78 McAfee, Noëlle, 192 McCormack, Patricia, 186 McLuhan, Marshall, 127, 128, 131, 141, 142, 150, 170 Meaux, Kevin, 257 Meyrovitz, Joshua, 127 Miller, Ruth A., 178 Mobile phones, 141–156 Modernism, 7, 51–65, 234 Montaigne, Michel de, 4, 125 Montale, Eugenio, 134 Moorcock, Michael, 74 Moore, Kevin Z., 275, 278, 287 Mora, Teo, 255, 256 Morton, Timothy, 55 Moscarda, Vitangelo, 55 Motherhood, 171–173 android, 20, 185–201 Mozzi, Giulio, 73 Muraro, Luisa, 13, 14 Murgia, Michela, 190 Musil, Robert, 52, 57 Mussgnug, Florian, 257 Mussolini, Benito, 59, 60 N Nagatomo, Shigenori, 238 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 14 Nature-culture continuum, 41, 53, 96, 97, 106, 108, 111, 200 Nature-culture divide, 45, 82, 287 Nazism, 3, 256 Neo-materialism, 275–292 Nicolodi, Daria, 262

 INDEX 

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 12 Nomadism, 14, 156, 199, 282 Non-anthropocentrism, 74–77, 82, 84, 234, 237, 240, 249 Nonhuman gaze, 99–105 Nostos, 224–226 Nove, Aldo, 16, 19, 143, 144, 147, 151, 152, 211–228 Nuvolari, Tazio, 59 O Ontology, 5–9, 12–14, 21, 33–37, 39–42, 59–61, 123, 126, 178 Oppermann, Serpil, 34, 36 Orban, Clara, 278 Ostuni, Vincenzo, 134–136 Otherness, 40, 52, 63, 78–81, 83, 100, 111, 189 See also Alterity Ottonieri, Tommaso, 129, 130, 132, 133 P Palazzeschi, Aldo, 8 Palazzolo, Chiara, 190 Panté, Maria Rosa, 60 Parkes, Graham, 241 Parrella, Valeria, 190 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 10, 11, 21, 134, 176 Past, Elena, 2, 14, 22, 64 Patti, Emanuela, 156 Pent, Sergio, 148 Performativity, 38, 40, 41, 99, 101, 107, 136, 276, 278, 287, 288 Perniola, Mario, 131 Petrarch, Francesco, 4, 5, 134 Pincio, Tommaso, 74 Pirandello, Luigi, 6, 8, 9, 17, 18, 51–65, 234 Pirandello, Stefano, 52–55

301

Plumwood, Val, 11, 18 Poetry, 119–136 Pol Pot, 262, 263 Policastro, Gilda, 133 Pollentier, Caroline, 58–59 Post-anthropocentrism, 44, 73–87, 281 Post-colonialism, 120 Posthuman, 1–23, 31–45, 56, 63, 73, 83–87, 142–147, 211–213, 262 Posthumanism, 8, 9, 13–23, 34, 52–53, 120, 211–228, 257 and Antonioni’s films, 275–279, 284, 290 in fiction, 3, 53–56, 63–65, 141–156, 185–201, 234–238, 249, 256 and identity, 93–112 and modernism, 51–65 and technology, 105, 141–156, 164, 165, 185–201 Posthuman mermaids, 77–79 Postmodernism, 143, 234, 263 Post-structuralism, 276 Powers, William, 141, 142 Prete, Antonio, 33 Pugno, Laura, 18, 73–87, 133, 190, 191 Q Queer movement, 11 R Raimo, Veronica, 190 Rakow, Lana F., 165 Rambelli, Roberta, 190 Rascaroli, Laura, 277, 278 Realism, 10–12, 18, 52, 55, 65, 74–77, 94, 213, 276, 280 agential, 14, 22, 276 performative, 107–108

302 

INDEX

Reese, William L., 237 Reiner, Tommaso, 263, 264 Restivo, Angelo, 280, 290 Rhodes, John David, 277, 278 Richardson, Samuel, 5 Ricordi, Nanni, 258 Rohman, Carrie, 51 Romero, George, 256, 257, 259, 260, 265, 267 Rosa, Giovanna, 186 Roszak, Theodore, 236, 237 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 258 Rovatti, Pier Aldo, 13 Rushing, Robert, 80 Russ, Joanna, 186 Ryan, Derek, 51 S Said, Edward, 120 Salvatores, Gabriele, 21 Samperi, Salvatore, 262 Sanguineti, Edoardo, 126, 131 Sannelli, Massimo, 128 Sarasso, Gipi, 156 Sarasso, Simone, 156 Savettieri, Cristina, 57 Scaffai, Niccolò, 135 Scarpa, Tiziano, 16, 20, 171–176, 178, 179 Schiffrin, André, 122 Science fiction, 15–17, 22, 73–87, 185–201, 213 androids, 20, 185–201 cyborgs, 13, 20, 74, 142, 145, 176, 178–180 posthuman mermaids, 77–79 Sclavi, Tiziano, 22, 257, 265–268 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 51 Segre, Cesare, 121, 122

Self, 7, 94, 144, 151–153, 219 fragmented, 143, 152, 200, 226 losing, 233–250 self-centred individualism, 199 and selflessness, 241–250 Sewall, Laura, 243 Shelley, Mary, 15, 200 Shields, David, 125 Shklovsky, Viktor, 76 Siderits, Mark, 247 Simic, Charles, 125 Sinisbaldi, Marino, 176 Sironi, Marco, 239 Sisto, Michele, 134 Siti, Walter, 76 Social media, 23 Sorrentino, Piero, 191 Spinoza, Baruch, 21, 54 Stano, Angelo, 266 Sterne, Laurence, 5 Suarez-Villa, Luis, 150 Subject, 10–23, 35, 87, 131–133, 227–228, 237, 238, 240, 243, 249, 259, 260, 262, 267 and Antonioni’s films, 275–292 fragmented, 141–156 human and mechanical, 177–180, 193, 199 posthuman, 3 relational, 23 Subjectivity, 35–38, 102, 112, 141, 142, 190, 191, 211–228 Sun, Weiping, 82 Suvin, Darko, 16, 76 Svevo, Italo, 8, 57 Szondi, Peter, 8 T Tabanelli, Roberta, 73, 74, 191 Taccogna, Mariangela, 74 Talamo, Liliana, 191

 INDEX 

Tavares, Paolo, 84 Tenco, Luigi, 129, 130 Terrosi, Mario, 176 Testa, Enrico, 129, 135 Thien-An, Thich, 246, 248 Tozzi, Federigo, 8, 52, 60 Trans-corporeality, 276, 277, 281, 284, 291 Transhumanism, 15 Turing, Alan, 179

Weak thought, 235 Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin, 111 West, Mark, 51 West, Rebecca J., 235, 236 Whitman, Walt, 223, 226, 227 Wolfe, Cary, 44 Woolf, Virginia, 8, 52, 56, 58, 59, 65 Wu Ming, 74, 156

V Vallorani, Nicoletta, 190 Vattimo, Gianni, 12, 13, 235, 236 Velázquez, Diego, 11 Venerandi, Fabrizio, 135, 136 Vibrant matter, 276, 285 Vighi, Fabio, 278, 279 Villalta, Gian Mario, 133 Vinci, Simona, 191 Vittorini, Elio, 1–5 Voce, Lello, 129 Volponi, Paolo, 15 Vulnerability, 111, 112, 228

Z Zangrilli, Franco, 53 Zani, Steven, 257 Zanotti, Paolo, 74 Zanzotto, Andrea, 126, 127, 131, 134 Zen Buddhism, 21–23, 237–238, 240, 248, 249 See also Buddhism Zhang, Mingcang, 82 Ziarek, Ewa P., 291 Zinelli, Fabio, 133 Žižek, Slavoj, 131, 261 Zombies, 16, 22, 255–268 Zoomimesis, 60, 61, 63, 65 Zumthor, Paul, 134

W Wadiwel, Dinesh, 77 Wallace, Jeff, 7, 51 Walsh, Brian, 85

303