The Fire Within : Desire in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature [1 ed.] 9781443859400, 9781443854702

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The Fire Within

The Fire Within: Desire in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature

Edited by

Elena Borelli

The Fire Within: Desire in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature Edited by Elena Borelli This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Elena Borelli and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5470-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5470-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................. viii “The Fire Within”: Desire in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature Elena Borelli Part I: The Phenomenology of Desire: Eros, Thanatos and Transcendence Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Manifestations of Desire in Giovanni Verga’s Storia di una Capinera Jessica Greenfield Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 18 Laide and the Old Tower: For a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Desire in Dino Buzzati’s Un Amore Marco Salvioli Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 43 Desiderium Lucis: Traces and Flashes of Desire in Mario Luzi’s Late Poetry Gianni Festa Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 59 Heart-Ache in Amelia Rosselli’s Poetry: “Rounding the Point of Belligerency” Silvia Mondardini Part II: Desire and Politics Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 80 Desiring Dissent: The Function(s) of Desire in Nessuno Torna Indietro Kathleen Gaudet Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 96 Mediated Desire and Modern Masculinities: Constructing the Male Self and Other in I Due Amici Emma Keane

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Part III: Oedipus and the Desire for Knowledge Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 110 Censorship and Desire in Matilde Serao’s La Mano Tagliata and Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi Marisa Escolar Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 128 Oedipal Desire in Alberto Moravia’s L’uomo Che Guarda (The Voyeur) Mariarita Martino Part IV: Desire as Lack, Loss and Gaze Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 150 The Voice of Helena: The Representation of Desire in Giovanni Pascoli’s “Anticlo” Elena Borelli Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 166 The Symptoms of Desire: Psychoanalytic Echoes in Calvino’s Short Stories Alessandra Diazzi Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 190 “Il Mondo Delle Madri”: Pre-Oedipal Desire and the Decentred Self in Elsa Morante’s La Storia and Aracoeli Katrin Wehling-Giorgi Part V: Desire and the Birth of Literature Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 212 When Gender Matters: The Language of Desire in Antonia Pozzi’s Erotic Poetry Enrico Minardi Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 229 Desire and its Political Significance: For a Psychoanalytic Reading of Giorgio Bassani’s Imagery Between Lida Mantovani and Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti Alessandro Giardino

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Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 247 Desire and the Birth of Literature: Roberto Calasso’s Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia Lara Fiorani List of Contributors ................................................................................ 264

INTRODUCTION “THE FIRE WITHIN”: DESIRE IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN LITERATURE ELENA BORELLI CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

This book of essays, devoted to the theme of desire in the context of modern and contemporary Italian literature, seeks to extend and complement a growing body of studies on the relationship between desire and literary production. Desire sits at the nexus of many discursive fields including psychoanalysis, literary theory, and gender studies. It occupies a prominent place in contemporary works in the critical social sciences, such as René Girard’s reflection on mimetic desire, and in psychoanalytical theories such as that of Jacques Lacan. Unveiling desires embedded in literary works provides invaluable insights into individual and collective consciousness. The sublimation of desire into the creation of literary works is a prominent feature of European literature. According to Denis de Rougemont, the exaltation of desire, especially in the form of erotic love, is a major aspect of Western mentality, as opposed to the doctrines of ataraxia and suppression of desire characterising Eastern religions. In his influential book Love and the Western World, de Rougemont recognised a thread connecting Plato’s philosophy, troubadour poetry, Romanticism and the popularisation of romantic love in contemporary movies and novels, all of which glorify love as unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire. With love as unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire, the object of desire is desire itself: the goal of the courtly lover or the Romantic poet is not to fulfil his or her desire but to perpetuate it, even if this desire engenders suffering and melancholic longing. The pain that desire inflicts on the subject puts him or her onto a quest for understanding, which leads to selfknowledge and self-improvement, as symbolically represented by the

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quête of the knight in medieval courtly literature. Desire is associated with knowledge and the search for one’s identity. As Jacques Lacan observed, patients often cling to their desires because they give a sense of purpose in life and shape their identity. The pain of unfulfilled desire is also a powerful source of creativity and fuels literary and artistic production. Most narratives end with the happy couple that lives “happily ever after,” and the vast majority of literary texts cover instead the parable of desire and its painful longing. Both Plato’s theory of eros and Lacanian psychoanalysis explain this fact: it is the poverty of Eros and its very desirousness for knowledge that lead to intellectual discoveries and creations that are immortal. Furthermore, according to Lacan, desire feeds on a lack, and such a lack needs to be articulated through language: demands and needs push the subject into the realm of the Symbolic, as desire cannot exist without a linguistic representation, whereas the wholeness characterising the primeval unity between mother and child is wordless. The quintessential nature of desire is “lack.” Thus, desire constitutes a “negative” moment in the history of the desiring subject. At the same time, desire is a powerful force instigating not only artistic creativity but also the quest for knowledge and self-knowledge: desire is energy. The ambiguous status of desire – both painful lack and positive force – explains the various and contrasting attitudes that have been expressed towards it. On the one hand, the Western literary tradition celebrates desire and glorifies the delightful torments of passionate love. On the other, currents of thoughts deriving from Plato’s Symposium have insisted on the notion of desire as a “manque d’être,” and discussed the ethical and psychological consequences of experiencing this lack. The most influential thinker to engage with the negative notion of desire in modern Europe is Arthur Schopenhauer, for whom desire is the expression of the relentless drive of the Will – a force that impels us to want more and engenders in us a painful need. Tranquillity comes only through suppression of the Will. Schopenhauer’s philosophy was widely known and discussed in fin de siècle Europe, and his ideas strongly influenced the works of many other important figures, such Eduard Hartmann and his Philosophie des Unbewussten, a major text in the culture of the European irrationalism. For Hartmann, relief from the pain of existence lies exclusively in ataraxia, which is possible once the suffering subject becomes conscious of the illusory nature of desire. The idea of desire as lack figures prominently in Freudian psychoanalysis, inasmuch as for Freud desire is always the desire for a lost object. Finally, the theory of desire as an unfulfillable wish finds its most complete theorisation in the works of Jacques Lacan. Lacan

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makes it clear that desire’s raison d’être is not to extinguish itself with the acquisition of the desired object, but to perpetuate itself as desire, because it feeds on a demand for infinite love directed to the Other. Parallel to this genealogy of thinkers who view desire as a lack and a source of unhappiness, there is also a current of thought praising the creative and productive aspects of desire. In Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, desire is nothing but appetite with consciousness thereof: it is a natural instinct that brings humans to seek out and procure what is good for them, which is also the measure of virtue. Desire, or conatus, is the actual essence of man, insofar as it promotes man’s survival and betterment. The procuring of a desired object brings the desiring subject to a greater state of perfection. Following Spinoza, and deliberately subverting the morality of “the teachers of design,” in his Gay Science Nietzsche deems good whatever preserves the species. Within this context, desires, even evil ones, are good, as they are useful to the species and should not be repressed for life-denying reasons. This line of thought is well present in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which explicitly oppose theories conceiving desire as a lack. For these two French thinkers, desire equals productivity: desire is a machine and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. Desire is a productive force, whose root is not a lack in the subject, but rather a passion, a natural and sensuous object that is not bolstered by needs but that produces needs and coincides with the social field of human relations. The notion of desire explored in this collection of essays engages with the two currents of thoughts discussed above as they have found resonance in the context of Italian literature and culture of the last two centuries. The ambiguousness of desire – conceived alternately as a source of unhappiness or as a springboard for knowledge, creativity and productivity – is played out within Italy’s unique response to the influences of European culture. Since its very inception, desire has been a central theme in Italian literature. The Sicilian poets at the Swabian court and the poets of Stilnovo reinterpreted the modes of courtly love and the phenomenology and effects of erotic desire. The masterpiece of the Italian Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, is centred on desire – desire as the trait d’union between man and God as well as the vast spectrum of individual desires and passions driving the sinners away from God. In the fourteenth century, Francesco Petrarca, considered the forerunner of the introspective mode in literature, analysed in great detail the nature of erotic tension and desire in his love poetry. Another great work of Italian literature, the chivalric poem Orlando Furioso puts into play a mechanism of desire that

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is reflected in Jacques Lacan’s theory- not surprisingly, as the ideals and the tropes of courtly love are still current even today – popularised by books and movies. Orlando Furioso also shows that desire can be the origin of narrative. The whole poem is generated by the movements of the knights incessantly seeking Angelica, who keeps eluding them, her beauty being the objet petit triggering the men’s passions. Furthermore, the poem fleshes out an important aspect of desire: desire is mimetic, as we desire whatever the Other desires and teaches us to desire. In the modern era, desire has become the quintessential path towards self-knowledge, as every quest for one’s identity passes through the awareness of one’s desire. The advent of psychoanalysis has sanctioned WKLV DFFRUGLQJ WR 6ODYRM äLåHN to know what you want is to know who you are. Thus, modernity inaugurates an “obsession” with desire, which informs the discourse of philosophy and the social sciences and continues to permeate artistic imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century, Italy was a particularly fertile setting for the emergence of the notion of desire. Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation began to be widely read and discussed, and his idea of contemplation as a way of suppressing desire entered not only the moral and philosophical discourse, but also the aesthetic theory of fin de siècle Italian writers and artists. More importantly, the concept of the Will as the force driving the human species and the whole of nature towards survival and manifesting itself in impulses and desires intersected with a very popular scientific paradigm dominating the Positivistic culture of nineteenth-century Europe, that of evolutionism. This paradigm was imbued with the Positivistic faith in the perfectibility of the human race, which was seen as evolving towards a greater perfection. However, such a paradigm did not exclude the possibility of certain individuals or groups regressing to more primitive stages of evolution, which were characterised as a return to the predominance of animal instinct over reason. Interestingly, the groups embodying this regression were depicted as being more prone to uncontrolled desires and less gifted with rationality: not only the “savage,” the underdeveloped races, but also the criminal, the woman and the child. It was precisely this anthropological Weltanschauung, as both Michel David and Vittorio Roda have observed, that created a background for the advent of the Freudian Unconscious: between Freud’s concept of libido and the nineteenth-century description of the “beast within,” which needs to be repressed and fit into a paradigm of normality, there is only a fine line. The biological discourse paved the way for the psychoanalytical one.

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In the context of the Italian fin de siècle, the equation of instinct with desire is made explicit in the writings of Giovanni Pascoli, who was imbued with the culture of evolutionism but also conversant with Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In works such as L’Era Nuova and his peculiar exegesis of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pascoli envisions the advent of homo humanus, the human species evolved to the point of mastery over desire and subdual of the “beast within.” In Freudian terms, Pascoli wished for a total predominance of the Superego over the Id (desire), which he sees as the cause of all evil in the world. In Gabriele D’Annunzio, the discourse on desire covers both sides of the spectrum: on the one hand the Abruzzese author manipulates Nietzsche’s philosophy to plunge into the exaltation of the will and the celebration of the feeling of wholeness that comes from giving in to instinct; on the other, his literary production stretches out to protofuturistic images of the body-machine, a body that has overcome all its desires, and to the protofascist idea of war as a way of channelling all deviant drives. Indeed, Fascism inaugurated a model of repression of individual desire into the social model of nationalistic society. However, as Deleuze and Guattari warn us, there is no such thing as absence of desire, as even a society that represses desire is the product of the collective desire to be repressed. Surprisingly, the diffusion of psychoanalysis in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century did not contribute to the formation of a new language to consolidate the preexisting anthropological discourse. Italian writers manifested a widespread resistance to explicitly incorporating psychoanalytic influences into their works. Even where Freudian themes are most evident, such as in the case of Luigi Pirandello, the authors themselves refuse to acknowledge their acquaintance with Freud and his works. A special case is the situation of Trieste – a city, which, because of its proximity to Austria and its large Jewish population, was more inclined to take an interest in the new discipline of psychoanalysis, as shown by authors such as Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba. Interestingly, the only elements of Freudian psychoanalysis that penetrated Italian culture, either as the objects of criticism or as fruitful intuitions, were the concept of libido and the all-pervasiveness of sexual desire. Therefore, any discourse or representation of desire in literary works of the twentieth century cannot be prescinded from a relationship with Freud’s theory of the Unconscious. Michel David, in his La psicoanalisi in Italia, explains the rejection of psychoanalysis by Italian intellectuals partially in terms of the predominance of the myth of the Latin “healthy and solar soul,” which does not like to delve into the meanders of the psyche, and partially in

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terms of the preexistence of a solid scientific and medical discourse, rooted in nineteenth-century Positivism, preventing the psychoanalytical one from gaining traction. Furthermore, after the Second World War, the predominance within the literary canon of the Neorealistic school and its programmatic avoidance of psychological introspection resulted in a more “factual” and political literature. For authors such as Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg and partially Cesare Pavese, the homo politicus takes the place of the homo sensualis; the social critique replaces the analysis of the troublesome individuality. The purposeful exclusion of psychological introspection from postWWII Italian literature does not entail the absence of desire in the works of those authors. Pavese’s diary Il mestiere di vivere represents the perfect counterpart to his Neorealistic literary production, as it is centred on the detailed analysis of his troubled psyche and dominated by the theme of erotic desire. Elsa Morante’s novels engage with the complex relationship between mothers and children, exploring the mechanism of Oedipal desire. However, even in the absence of an explicit reference, desire is present – deterritorialised a` la Deleuze – inasmuch as the analysis of class conflict puts into play another kind of desire: the fight for political and economic predominance. In fact, it was Alberto Moravia, an author who dealt intensely with psychoanalysis and in whose works the analysis of desire plays a pivotal role, who first recognised the parallels between Freud’s notion of libido and Karl Marx’s account of materialistic greed. Furthermore, in many works of modern and contemporary literature, desire operates within the text as a literary device moving the narrative forward. This collection of essays is an exploration of the theme of desire in Italy from the second half of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, with the last essay making a foray into postmodernity. Set against the background of Italy’s specific history and culture, this collection is organised by thematic groups, each of which deals with an aspect of desire, either as a theme of the texts or as a tension generating the narrative. The texts are examined through the lens of various psychoanalytical approaches. The first group of essays looks at the representation of desire as a twofold phenomenon: as an erotic and lively impulse on the part of the subject, which, however, also gestures towards the annihilation of the self. In the twentieth century, the coexistence of Eros and Death constituted a central concept in Freudian psychoanalysis. In addition, in Romantic literature, desire is also portrayed as the longing for a reality beyond the here and now, either in a Christian sense or as embedded in

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nondenominational mysticism. In this part of the book, the authors examine the coexistence of love, death and transcendence in the notion of desire from the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Jessica Greenfield shows how, in the novel Storia di una capinera (1869), by Giovanni Verga, desire is portrayed as an overwhelming force, either reviving the protagonists’ lives or consuming them. Libido, repressed by social conventions, is transformed into a symptom of the disease that leads to the protagonist’s death. Marco Salvioli interprets the phenomenology of erotic desire in Dino Buzzati’s Un amore (1963) as a wish for wholeness and death. Love is seen as a rupture of the ego and as a pharmakon, that is, as a brief intoxication or fleeting ecstasy that reveals the masochistic tendencies within the subject and temporarily annuls his or her fear of death. Gianni Festa reads Mario Luzi’s poetic collection Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini (1994) as the poet’s last journey towards death fuelled by the desire for transcendence and reunion with God. Silvia Mondardini’s essay illustrates the interlacing of eroticism and mysticism in the poetry of Amelia Rosselli. The second section deals with desire as a force operating at the social and political level, in the Marxian and Deleuzian sense. The mechanism of individual desires can often reflect the relationship between the subject and the society in which he or she lives. In particular, erotic desire, as the desire to possess another person, reveals dynamics of power between social groups. It leads one to infringe upon the prohibitions that society creates. For instance, for women in early twentieth-century Italy, the expression of romantic and sexual desire serves as a means of dissent against the gender norms imposed by Fascism, as Kathleen Gaudet shows in her paper on Alba de Céspedes’ Nessuno torna indietro (1938). Through erotic desire, the women of this book explore the possibility of another identity besides that of “wife and mother” imposed by Fascism. Emma Keane’s essay on Alberto Moravia’s novel I due amici (1951-52) illustrates the conflicting ideologies of wartime and postwar Italy through the opposing ideas of desire and masculinity embodied by the two male protagonists of the book. The third part of the book explores the relationship between desire and the quest for knowledge. The Greek myth of Oedipus, the man who set out to unveil the tragic secret of his birth, unifies Marisa Escolar’s and Mariarita Martino’s essays, which examine the “desire to know.” The Oedipal desire displayed by the texts in this section sets the characters on a path towards self-discovery and exploration of the “Other.” In Escolar’s essay, which focuses on Matilde Serao’s La mano tagliata (1912), desire is gendered, and male desire is represented as a quest for identity that

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passes through the woman as an obstacle and a mystery. Martino’s analysis of Moravia’s L’uomo che guarda (1985) reconstructs the protagonist’s search for the roots of his existential malaise as a metaphorical journey of self-knowledge. The essays in the fourth section enlist psychoanalysis in order to unveil the mechanism of desire hidden in literary texts. In Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory, desire is often set in motion by a particular element in the desired object, which comes to metonymically represent the object as a whole. Often this element is in the “gaze” of the other, the look in a person’s eyes that inspires desire and love. Furthermore, in Julia Kristeva’s discourse on the central role of the mother in the articulation of the child’s subjectivity, desire is framed as the nostalgia for the original unity between mother and child that is lost as the child grows into adulthood. The papers in this section engage with the notion of desire from the perspective of Lacan’s and Kristeva’s reflections on lack, loss and gaze. In my essay, I illustrate the mechanism of desire in Giovanni Pascoli’s poem Anticlo (1915) through a Lacanian perspective and by showing the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer on the author. Alessandra Diazzi’s essay on Italo Calvino’s Gli amori difficili (1970) shows the influence of Lacan’s theory of desire on this Italian author, in whose texts desire plays a pivotal role in shaping the narrative. Katrin Wehling-Giorgi analyses Elsa Morante’s novels La Storia (1974) and Aracoeli (1982) from a Kristevan perspective, focusing on the function of motherhood in these texts. Indeed, the male characters of Elsa Morante manifest a desire to reconstitute the lost wholeness of the union between mother and child. The three essays in the fifth and last section depict desire as the origin of narrative and analyse the modes in which desire can be inscribed into a text. Enrico Minardi illustrates the formation of a “code of desire” in the poetry of Antonia Pozzi, which is based on the influence of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Alessandro Giardino’s essay focuses on Giorgio Bassani’s Cinque storie ferraresi (1956) and sheds light on the connection between the protagonists’ desire to be part of the Symbolic, in a Lacanian sense, and the quasi-pictorial style employed in the text. The mechanism of fascination with the “Other,” which constitutes desire, informs literary creation since the origin of storytelling, as Roberto Calasso tells us in his post-modern rewriting of Greek myths Le nozze di Cadmo and Armonia (1984), which is the subject of Lara Fiorani’s essay.

PART I THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF DESIRE: EROS, THANATOS AND TRANSCENDENCE

CHAPTER ONE MANIFESTATIONS OF DESIRE IN GIOVANNI VERGA’S STORIA DI UNA CAPINERA JESSICA GREENFIELD UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS

I. Introduction Giovanni Verga is most well known for establishing the foundation of Italian Verismo,1 and certainly most remembered for his portrayal of the Sicilian working class, in novels such as I Malavoglia and his Sicilian short story collections Vita dei campi and Novelle rusticane. The entirety of Verga’s works, however, is as vast as it is diverse. His numerous publications vary in style, theme, and setting and can be divided into two categories, his early writings and the novels and stories of his maturity. As a young writer, inspired by the Romantics who frequented the salons of Florence and Milan, Verga focused on themes of patriotism, celebrations of nature, and tortured love. In his epistolary novel, Storia di una capinera (1869), Verga deals with love and desire in their many forms. He portrays romantic love as a sickness and describes the plurality of desires that stem from it, manifesting themselves as symptoms.

1

The Verismo movement in Italy grew out of French Naturalism. While the two movements share many characteristics, Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana established a new approach to literature wherein the author sought out genuine representatives of the human condition and acted as a passive observer, recording the lives of those that he observed. Verismo allows the reader a glimpse into the life of a class with which he is not familiar and, at the same time, expresses the struggles and hardships from the viewpoint of those who suffer them. Verga’s “manifesto del Verismo” can be found in a letter to his editor, Salvatore Farina, at the beginning of “L’amante di Gramigna.”

Manifestations of Desire in Giovanni Verga’s Storia di una Capinera

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Storia di una capinera is the story of Maria, a Sicilian girl who, having been forced into the nunnery at age six following the death of her mother, dedicates her life to serving the Church and God. Following an outbreak of cholera, Maria is sent to her family, who is living outside of the city to avoid contracting the illness. There, she finds herself as an outsider to the life of her father, stepmother, stepsister, and stepbrother, causing her to reevaluate her own life and her place in the world. Although the love she and her father share is true, his life no longer parallels hers and therefore this increases the sense of marginalisation that Maria is experiencing. Maria’s family is friendly with the Valentini family, which has also sought safety in the hills outside of Catania during the cholera outbreak. Although Maria is in the final stages before taking her vows to become a nun, she develops romantic feelings for Antonio Valentini, whom she lovingly refers to as Nino. This creates such an intense conflict inside of Maria that she eventually retreats from him, turning into herself, seeking answers and solace. The desire she feels for Nino is not only confusing and mysterious, but for a girl whose entire life has been sheltered by the walls of a convent, it is also as sinful and torturous. Her only outlet is to share her feelings with her friend Marianna, while simultaneously attempting to deny, hide, and overpower those same feelings. For Maria, her upcoming vows represent the point at which all her personal desires must be extinguished, and thus the event carries with it a sense of impending doom, the convent becoming her own personal prison. As her time “on the outside” dwindles, her desire to be with Nino begins to physically manifest itself and her attempts to negate that desire wreak havoc on Maria’s health. Maria’s desire is further incited by the engagement and eventual marriage of her own stepsister, Giuditta, to Nino. Adding injury to insult, the marriage of Giuditta and Nino takes place in the very church to which Maria is confined. Desire takes many forms in this novel: erotic desire makes way for the personal desire to control her own feelings and eventually leads to the desire to rid herself of the suffering that consumes her body, mind, and soul. The multitude of ways in which desire is manifested in this story culminates in Maria’s insanity and eventual death from a broken heart and mind. Although the exact span of time in which the story takes place is impossible to know, as many of the later letters are not dated, one can assume that about three years elapse from the time when Maria is a carefree young nun in training to when she succumbs to the insanity that eventually leads to her demise. Desire is a multifaceted emotion that is manifested in a variety of ways. The demonstration of desire in literature is as various as it is

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common. Each and every period of Italian literature has showcased desire in its many aspects. It is, perhaps, the most prominent and common element in Italian literature – from Dante Alighieri to Niccoló Machiavelli to Ugo Foscolo to Leonardo Sciascia, desire is often present in the works of the great Italian writers. The manifestations of desire can appear in many forms, from carnal desire to greed, from religious fervour to the hunger for power. Less commonly considered, perhaps, is how one may attempt to suppress desire – what does that mean, how does it look, what are the results of its suppression? This article will explore Giovanni Verga’s representation of desire and its symptomatic manifestations in the epistolary novel, Storia di una capinera, looking particularly at how the main character attempts to suppress her desire and the physical consequences that result. Following a brief survey of the theory of desire and the politics that surround it, and with a focus on Adrian Parr’s reading of Gilles Deleuze, this article will then analyse Verga’s short novel looking at the different ways in which desire is manifested in the main character and paying particular attention to how memory, trauma, and symptoms spur these desires.

II. Theory and politics of desire Memory is an important element that can shape how one confronts events in one’s life. In his book, Deleuze and Memorial Culture, Adrian Parr maintains that memory is so powerful that it can shape how one deals with social situations. He states: How we remember also affirms how we live our lives today and tomorrow: defensively or joyfully. Memory is dynamic and its movement is largely ungraspable. It can open new linguistic, economic, historical, and energetic combinations that either normalize or reinvent how the social field organizes itself.2

Parr goes on to explain the difference between memory and remembrance. Remembrance is attached to time and space, whereas memory is independent from it. Remembrance is concrete while memory is abstract: Memory, unlike remembrance itself, is not in time and space, although it can be said to produce space-times. Memory does not happen to a body, it subsists throughout it. A body does not remember a defined slice of time,

2 Adrian Parr, Deleuze and Memorial Culture: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008), 1.

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for memory is in excess of the chronological compartmentalizing of discrete temporal units.3

This distinction between memory and remembrance will become important in the discussion of desire in Storia di una capinera, because memory and remembrance will produce distinctly different manifestations of desire in the main character. Just as memory and remembrance are important factors influencing the manner in which desire is dealt with and manifested, so is trauma. Parr argues that the emotions produced by a trauma must find a means of escape, for if they do not, those emotions begin to mutate, forming a symptom. 4 “Symptoms are therefore the physical result of intensive emotional disturbances that have found no means of escape.”5 While the term trauma is in itself quite problematic (because how can an outsider define what level of emotional disturbance constitutes a trauma?), emotional disturbance is a common theme in late Romantic literature, the genre to which Storia di una capinera belongs. Memory and past trauma are central to Deleuze’s philosophy of desire, as is evident in his co-authored works with Guattari, explains Philip Goodchild in Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire. Goodchild emphasises that desire appears as a main focus of Deleuze and Guattari for a brief five-year period, beginning in 1972. He notes, “[desire] functions neither as a universal principle governing the whole of existence, nor as an underlying ground determining the nature of all existence – instead, desire lies outside or alongside existence.” 6 Therefore, while desire may not contribute directly to existence, it is a constant that plays alongside it; they are mutually exclusive everyone who exists experiences some kind of desire. 3

Parr, Deleuze and Memorial Culture, 1. Sigmund Freud, who presented a different approach, also dealt with symptom, the result of unreleased emotions from some disturbance. In introducing the idea of repression, Freud was able to argue that trauma can be eliminated from consciousness. Parr explains: “Once unconscious, trauma simmers away. When this repressed and now magnified affect returns, it does so as a symptom. As noted, symptoms are cured by making their cause conscious, implying the cure lies upon the premise that what is represented is somehow immune to repression” (Parr, Deleuze and Memorial Culture, 20). Repressible and irrepressible traumas present an interesting approach to Romantic literature, especially when juxtaposed with desire and its manifestations. 5 Parr, Deleuze and Memorial Culture, 18. 6 Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 11. 4

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Another important idea for Deleuze in the evolution of his philosophy of desire is the idea of a deterritorialisation of desire. That is, Deleuze removes the term desire from the territory in which it is most commonly used, erotic encounters, allowing for a more general use of the term. Goodchild explains: Desire is a deterritorialized concept in that it does not derive its meaning from the territory in which it is first located, in this case, sexual relations. Desire is a ‘sexuality,’ which extends beyond gender relations, because it can relate entirely heterogeneous terms and territories, a multiplicity of sexes.7

Therefore, desire may apply to sexual relations, but can also be applied in other situations. This essay will examine Maria’s desires: to be loved, to feel part of a family, to love and be loved, and to be with Nino. As will be explored below, Maria’s desires pull her in several directions at once. While one part of her wants to dedicate herself to the Church, becoming a faithful and dutiful servant of God, another part of her cannot fathom being away from Nino, a man who makes her cheeks flush and her hands tremble. The variety of desires exhibited by Maria in Verga’s novel provides the basis for the discussion to follow.

III. Manifestations of desire in Storia di una capinera Giovanni Verga’s Storia di una capinera is the fictional account of Maria, who is eventually driven mad by her desire to love and to repent, while simultaneously struggling with her inability to express those emotions, resulting in physical symptoms. Due to limitations of space, I will focus solely on Maria’s struggles with her desires and not discuss those of other characters in the novel. As noted above, memory is regarded as an element that shapes how one lives his or her life. In the case of Maria, the memories of her mother and their life together as a family are the driving factors behind her approach to relationships, both inside and outside of the convent where she is obliged to live since the age of seven. Early on, Maria says that the death of her mother makes her the most desperate amongst the girls preparing to enter the nunnery. Furthermore, as a result of the lack of physical contact and love, Maria tends to romanticise her relationship with her father and relishes the hug she receives from him when she is sent home to wait out the cholera outbreak in the city. 7

Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari, 41.

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I’m the unluckiest of all of us novices, that’s definite, since I lost my mother! You know that I was confined to the convent when I wasn’t even seven years old, soon after my poor mother died! … You can’t imagine how I feel inside when my father says good morning to me and hugs me. Nobody ever hugged us down there at the convent; you know that Marianna! The rules forbid it. Yet it doesn’t seem wrong to feel so well loved …8

Having spent more than thirteen years in the convent, which becomes more and more of a prison as she moves toward her final vows, Maria is disheartened upon her realisation that family life is quite different from what she imagined. Writing to her friend Marianna, Maria describes the new family that her father has formed by remarrying after the death of his wife. While she is thrilled with her stepbrother and in awe of her stepsister, Maria finds it quite difficult to address her stepmother as mamma. She writes: Mother … (Marianna, if you only knew how difficult it is for me to call my stepmother by this sweet name! It’s as if I were betraying the memory of my own poor parent … And yet I have to call her Mother!)9

Compounding the difficulty of finding her place among this established family unit is the fact that they are much wealthier than Maria and her father ever were (in fact, one of the reasons she was sent to the convent in the first place was her father’s lack of money to raise a daughter on his own). Maria’s desire to fit into this new family unit compels her to dote on her younger stepbrother and almost act as a housemaid to her stepsister, Giuditta, feeling ashamed of her own station in life, while simultaneously admiring Giuditta’s beauty and wealth.

8

Giovanni Verga, Sparrow, trans. Lucy Gordan and Frances Frenaye (New York: Italica Press, 1997), 3; “Io sono la più disgraziata di tutte le educande, è vero, perché ho perso la mamma! … Tu sai che io fui chiusa in convento quando non toccavo ancora i sette anni, allorché la mia povera mamma mi lasciò sola! … Tu non puoi immaginarti quello che io provo dentro di me allorché il mio babbo mi dà il buon giorno e mi abbraccia! Nessuno ci abbracciava mai laggiù, tu lo sai, Marianna! … la regola lo proibisce … Eppure non mi pare che ci sia male a sentirsi così amate.” Giovanni Verga, Storia di una capinera (Palermo: Selino’s S.R.L., 1869), 15. 9 Verga, Sparrow, 8; “e la mamma … (Marianna, se sapessi come mi vien difficile dare questo dolce nome alla matrigna! Mi pare di fare un torto alla memoria della mia povera madre … Ma pure bisogna chiamarla così!)” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 19.

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Maria explains to Marianna that she brushes Giuditta’s hair and admires her dresses and fine fabrics and ribbons while feeling her cheeks redden at her own clothing, issued by the convent. The discrepancy between Maria and Giuditta is emphasised on Father’s day when Maria is unable to present her father with an elegant gift as Giuditta can. She writes: Judith had given Father a lovely silk beret, which she had embroidered in secret so it would be a surprise. I couldn’t give him anything but a bunch of wild flowers, which I’d picked at dawn. They were still dewy. My dear father appreciated my present as much as my sister’s and hugged us both with tears in his eyes.10

Although her father treats the girls equally and is thankful for the gifts that each one presents him with, Maria cannot help but feel inadequate when confronted with her stepsister’s seeming perfection. Following her return to the city, memory plays an important part in Maria’s growing hatred for the convent. Having been placed there at such a young age, her entire life is lived in a controlled environment and it is only as a result of the cholera outbreak that she is able to experience the freedom and pleasure of nature in the countryside. While she may lack the lifetime of childhood memories one who has grown up in the family home would have, she creates new memories during her time at home during the cholera outbreak. She tells Marianna: I do nothing but run in the meadows, gather wild flowers, and listen to the song of little birds … At my age! I’m almost twenty … you understand! I’m ashamed of myself too, but my dear father doesn’t have the heart to scold me. He doesn’t know how to do anything except hug me and say: ‘Poor little thing! Let her enjoy these few days of freedom!’11

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Verga, Sparrow, 20; “Giuditta avea regalato al babbo un bel berretto di seta, che aveva ricamato di nascosto per fargliene una sorpresa; io non potei far altro che recargli un bel mazzo di fiori di campo, che avevo raccolti all’alba ed erano ancora umidi di rugiada. Era un povero mazzolino mio; ma il buon padre gradì il mio regalo quanto quello di mia sorella e ci abbracciò entrambe colle lagrime agli occhi.” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 28. 11 Verga, Sparrow, 8; “Non faccio altro che correre pei campi, raccogliere i fiorellini, e ascoltare il canto degli uccelletti … alla mia età! Ho quasi venti anni … capisci? Ne arrossisco io stessa; ma il mio caro babbo non ha cuore di sgridarmi; egli non sa far altro che accarezzarmi e dire: ‘Povera piccina! lasciatele godere questi giorni di libertà!” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 19.

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She continues to explain to Marianna her assumptions on why she enjoys the expanse of nature so much more than her stepsiblings: Our world was so restricted: the little altar, the poor flowers withered in airless vases, the belvedere from which we could see rooftops and, then away in the distance, as in a magic lantern, the countryside, the sea, and all of God’s beautiful creations. The cloister walls around our little garden must have been built higher than the trees on purpose. It took only a hundred steps to cross the whole garden. We were allowed to walk there for an hour a day under the supervision of our mother superior, but we weren’t allowed to run around and have a good time … such was our whole world!12

Following her time with the family in the countryside, the remembrance of that freedom and the ability to run freely throughout the fields without restrictions hinder Maria’s ability to return willingly to the strict rules of the convent. While she does not fault the convent for the restrictions put upon her and her fellow nuns, her desire to break out of those constraints grows exponentially as she nears her final vows. The bars that once kept her safe from the outside world now trap her in a concrete prison with no grass, nowhere to run, and trees that can only be seen from a small belvedere, but that do not cross the walls of the convent itself. As her desire to run in the fields and climb trees and stroll through the forests grows, so does her contempt for the small room to which she is bound: “I only want to be like everybody else, nothing more, and to enjoy all these blessings that the Lord has given to everybody: fresh air, light, freedom!”13 Eventually, in the most desperate throws of her sickness, the convent is nothing more than a sepulchre that awaits her death. Maria meets Nino, the son of a neighbour family, also temporarily residing in the countryside to avoid the cholera outbreak, during one of her family’s many social outings with his family. While Maria is initially 12

Verga, Sparrow, 20; “Il nostro mondo [il convento] era ben ristretto: l’altarino, quei poveri fiori che intristivano nei vasi pieni d’aria, il belvedere dal quale vedevasi un mucchio di tetti, e poi da lontano, come in una lanterna magica, la campagna, il mare e tutte le belle cose create da Dio, il nostro piccolo giardino, che par fatto a posto per lasciar scorgere i muri claustrali al di sopra degli albri, e che si percorre tutto in cento passi, ove ci si permetteva di passeggiare per un’ora sotto la sorveglianza della Direttrice, ma senza poter correre e trastullarci … ecco tutto!” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 28. 13 Verga, Sparrow, 3-4; “… vorrei esser soltanto come tutti gli altri, nulla piú, e godere coteste benedizioni che il Signore ha date a tutti: l’aria, la luce, la libertà!” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 23.

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friendly with the Valentini’s daughter, who is roughly her same age, she is almost immediately drawn to Nino, just as he is drawn to her. Initially Maria is unaware of the implications of Nino’s actions toward her, as a result of her sheltered religious upbringing, and thinks he is trying to anger her. For example, she laments Nino’s offer of his arm while they stroll in the woods, noting that he does not offer help to her stepsister, Giuditta: Nino offered me his arm twenty times. As if I needed it! He must have done it on purpose to get a rise out of me. Otherwise why didn’t he offer it to my sister? After all, she’s the one who kept complaining about the climb, who needed his support, not me.14

However, their relationship grows as the families spend more and more time together. From family walks in the woods to dancing together in the evening, the relationship between Nino and Maria progresses to the point at which she finally recognises her desire to be near him. While normally the desire to be near someone would produce feelings of happiness and joy, for Maria those feelings create a sense of dread within her, and encourage her to question whether or not she is being faithful to her upcoming vows. She tries to explain to Marianna: Because he is a very well mannered young man and extremely kind to me … But I wouldn’t know how to describe the affect he has on me … It’s not dislike or aversion … and yet I’m scared of him. Every time I run into him I blush, turn pale, tremble, and want to run away. Then he talks to me. I listen, stand beside him … and I think of Father Anselmo, when he preached about the fascination of evil, and I’m scared.15

The initial symptom of this suffering for Maria is fear and the flight response, but when her stepmother begins to notice her reaction to Nino, Maria is forbidden from attending any outing at which he is present. Being 14

Verga, Sparrow, 14; “Il signor Nino mi ha offerto venti volte il braccio, come se ne avessi bisogno, io! L’avrà fatto apposta per farmi arrabbiare! Perché dunque non l’ha offerto a mia sorella che si lagnava della salita e che ne aveva bisogno lei? non io!” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 32. 15 Verga, Sparrow, 25-26; “… colui è un buonissimo giovane, ed anche pieno di attenzioni per me … Ma io non saprei spiegarti l’impressione che egli produce in me … Non è antipatia, non è avversione … eppure lo temo … eppure ogni volta che lo incontro arrossisco, impallidisco, tremo, e vorrei fuggirmene. Ma poi egli mi parla, lo ascolto, rimango a lui vicina … non so perché … mi pare che non potrei staccarmene … e penso al Padre Anselmo, allorché ci parlava dal pulpito del fascino dello spirito del male, ed ho paura …” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 38.

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banned from Nino’s presence only intensifies Maria’s desire to be near him, and creates the same response in Nino: at one point he tries to speak to her through the window of her room before leaving for the city at the end of the cholera outbreak. The impact of Maria’s pain only becomes evident to the reader when she explains the all-consuming passion that has taken hold of her. She writes: I love him! It’s a dreadful thing to say, a sin, a crime! But there’s no use denying it. This sin has me overwhelmed. I’ve tried to run away, but it grabs me, holds me down with my chest against my knees, my face in the mud. My whole being: head, heart, and blood, is full of this man. He’s before my eyes now as a write to you, in my dreams, and in my prayers. I can’t think of anything else. Every word I utter turns into his name. Whenever I hear his voice, I’m happy. When he looks at me, I tremble. I’d like to be with him all the time and yet I run away from him. I’d die for him. Everything I feel about the man is new, strange, terrifying; it’s more passionate than the love I feel for my father, more intense than my love for God! This is what they call “Love” in the outside world; I’ve experienced it. It’s horrible, horrible! It’s God’s punishment, my ruin, my curse. Marianna, I’m damned! Marianna, pray for me.16

Although this soon to be confirmed nun sees her love as a sin, it is only with this revelation that the reader is able to understand the all-consuming emotion and struggle that she faces. Maria wants nothing more than to banish these feelings and to focus on her upcoming confirmation and her devotion to God, but her love for Nino proves overpowering. Maria’s desire to be close to her family grows ever more difficult as Maria discovers her feelings for Nino. As her emotions cripple her, Maria 16 Verga, Sparrow, 31-32; “L’amo! È un’orribile parola! è un peccato! è un delitto! ma è inutile dissimularlo a me stessa. Il peccato è più forte di me. Ho tentato di sfuggirgli, esso mi ha abbrancato, mi tiene in ginocchio sul petto, mi calpesta la faccia nel fango. Tutto il mio essere è pieno di quell’uomo: la mia testa, il mio cuore, il mio sangue. L’ho dinanzi agli occhi in questo momento che ti scrivo, nei sogni, nella preghiera. Non posso pensare ad altro; mi pare che ad ogni istante il suo nome mi venga sulle labbra, che ogni parola che profferisco si trasformi nel nome di lui; allorché lo ascolto son felice; quando mi guarda tremo; vorrei stargli vicina ad ogni momento e lo fuggo; vorrei morire per lui. Tutto ciò che sento per quell’uomo è nuovo, è strano, è spaventoso … è più ardente dell’amore che porto a mio padre; è più forte di quello che porto al mio Dio! … Questo è quello che al mondo chiamano amore … l’ho conosciuto; lo veggo … È orribile! è orribile! … È il castigo di Dio, la perdizione, la bestemmia! Marianna, io son perduta! Marianna, prega per me!” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 42.

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discovers in herself a growing sense of envy toward her stepsister, Giuditta, who not only has nicer things than she has, but also feels completely at ease around Nino and his family. Recounting one evening when Maria’s family is socialising with the Valentini’s she exclaims: How beautiful Judith was in her lovely sky-blue dress, leaning on his arm, laughing and chatting with him! Oh! … My God, how envious I am! How wretched I am! I had to think about him to keep from sobbing. In order not to envy them, I had to remind myself of the way Nino had been staring at me …17

While her desire to be close with Giuditta was originally complicated by their differing financial situations, the relationship between the two sisters becomes increasingly strained as Giuditta spends more time with Nino. Following Maria’s return to the convent, which by this time is turning into her own personal prison, Maria’s desire to see her family grows – until they come to share the news that Nino and Giuditta will be wed. The turmoil that erupts inside of Maria – her desire to be happy for her stepsister, while battling her envy of Giuditta and her frustration with her own station in life – finds no means of escape and contributes to the undiagnosable illness that leads to her eventual death. Another element that complicates Maria’s life is the desire to be loved. As noted above, Maria lost her mother and was committed to the convent before she reached the age of seven, lamenting to her friend Marianna that there was a marked lack of affection during her upbringing. Upon her return to her family, she basks in the affection that her father shows her and cherishes each embraces that she receives. The abstract memory of the love of her mother and the concrete remembrance of her father’s love lead her to be the one to give love and to desire it from those around her. Unfortunately, one of these types of love comes from an unwanted source: Nino. Following the discovery of her feelings for Nino, Maria is left confused and in search of security, wanting nothing more than to return to the sheltered life of the convent. She writes to Marianna, unable to share her feelings with anyone else, imploring her friend to love her in her time of need. She writes: “I’ve been writing to you, but my eyes are so misty with tears that I don’t even know what I’ve written. Forgive me and love 17 Verga, Sparrow, 38; “Come era bella Giuditta col suo bell’abito cilestre, appoggiata al braccio di lui, ridendo, chiacchierando con lui! … Oh! Dio mio! come sono invidiosa! come sono cattiva … ! Ho dovuto pensare a lui per non singhiozzare; ho dovuto ricordarmi dello sguardo che fissava su di me per non invidiarli …” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 36.

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me because I desperately need to be loved.”18 The love that she craves in this instance is the love that a mother would give to a daughter, but since Maria is unable to seek solace from her stepmother, she looks elsewhere for someone to fill that void. During the cholera outbreak, Marianna reveals to Maria that she will not be returning to the convent and will instead remain with her family. Maria is envious of Marianna’s freedom and the love that her family clearly feels for her, allowing her to remain with them and saving her from a life of chastity and devotion to God. Shortly thereafter, Marianna reveals that not only will she remain with her family instead of returning to the convent, but she will also marry. Seeking a way to reconcile her desire for Nino and her desire to be happy for Giuditta, who will marry him, Maria once again desires the happiness that the rest of the world seems to enjoy and that evades her at every turn. She writes: Since you are a happy bride-to-be too, please describe the joy, the excitement, the delight my sister must be feeling. Tell me what her innermost sentiments must be now that she can always be by the side of her beloved without self-consciousness, guilt, or fear. She is so lucky to be the centre of attention and pampered by everyone. Tell me how happy she must be to think that she’ll be his and he’ll be hers, that she’ll see him every day, at all hours, hear him speak, lean on his arm, whisper in his ear whatever passes through her head, take his name, and one day rock his children on her knee and teach them to love and pray to God for him … To think that everything will be a joy and that this joy will never end! How kind the Lord is to grant so much happiness!19

Mixed with her desire to love and be loved, is her desire to feel the joy that others receive. 18 Verga, Sparrow, 30; “Ti ho scritto cogli occhi velati di lagrime; e non so nemmeno quello che ho scritto. Perdonami e amami, ché ho molto bisogno di essere amata.” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 66. 19 Verga, Sparrow, 66; “Tu che sei sposa, tu che sei felice, dimmi com’è fatta quella gioia, quella festa, quel gaudio che deve provar mia sorella; dimmi che cosa ci deve essere nel suo cuore vedendosi sempre accanto la persona amata senza scrupoli, senza rimorsi, senza paure, benedetta, festeggiata, accarezzata da tutti; dimmi come deve essere fatta la felicità di pensare che ella sarà di lui, ch’egli le apparterrà, che lo vedrà tutti i giorni, tutte le ore, che l’udrà parlare, che si appoggerà al braccio di lui, che gli dirà all’orecchio tutto quello che le passerà per la mente, che si chiamerà col nome di lui, che verrà il giorno in cui si cullerà sulle ginocchia i suoi figli e insegnerà loro ad amarlo, a pregare il buon Dio per lui … Pensare che tutto sarà una festa, e che questa festa non avrà mai fine! Com’è buono il Signore a concedere tanta felicità!” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 76.

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As Maria falls deeper into her illness and nears her death, her letters to Marianna evolve into a disparity that seems to grow with every letter. As her weakness grows, Maria is segregated and bedridden, and she writes to Marianna, pleading with her to love her: “I need so much to be loved, to love … to love very deeply since my life is slipping away!”20 As the life of Maria drifts away and she nears her death, all of Maria’s desires seem to come to the surface. She begs Marianna to help her be faithful to God, to tell her how to stop loving Nino and forgive Giuditta for marrying the man she cannot live without, to remember the love and devotion she felt towards God before she met Nino. Even to her last moment she is torn, riddled by the symptoms of her desire and love for Nino, and wastes away without ever reaching a compromise between her guilt and her desires.

IV. Symptoms of desire Desire can involve positive emotions, but, as is evident in the various examples of desire in Verga’s epistolary novel, it can also conjure up negative and even physically debilitating reactions. Desire can have a transformative effect on emotions. While originally Maria feels a sense of elation in Nino’s presence, that joy is transformed into dread and finally into physical symptoms so strongly debilitating that they eventually lead to her death. In her book devoted to Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire, Karen Coates discusses the different faces of love and the effects on its victims. While initially the love that Maria feels for Nino engenders happiness and joy, those feelings evolve into melancholy and misery. Coates notes that “the love involved in melancholy is regressive, consuming …” 21 and, as is evident in Storia di una capinera, a step along the path toward utter desperation. Melancholy is one of the symptoms arising from the lack of emotional release of the psychological disturbance that is Maria’s love for Nino. As Maria tries to reconcile with her destiny as a nun and with her separation from Nino, her health briefly stabilises and she expresses her gratitude to God for allowing her health to improve. However, just as Maria seems to accept her future without Nino, she discovers that her stepsister will soon wed him and this revelation absolutely destroys her, pushing her so far to the edge of insanity that she cannot control herself. 20

Verga, Sparrow, 66; “Ho tanto bisogno di essere amata, di amare … di amare assai poiché la vita mi sfugge!” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 73. 21 Karen Coats, Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 37.

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Nino is going to marry my sister … Can you believe it? … They came to tell me the joyous news … It’s such a good match … They’re both rich … Judith is content, radiant … I didn’t have the courage to ask them please to spare me the customary pre-nuptial visit … because he will come too … I don’t think I’ll have the strength for still another renunciation … It’ll kill me.22

Her only means of coping with the development is to avoid all contact with him and attempt to keep herself busy with her upcoming vows, and reveal her true feelings to the only person she can confide in, Marianna. Although her upcoming vows offer a distraction from the impending nuptials of Nino and Giuditta, the convent has become increasingly inhospitable for Maria and feels ever more like a prison. The celebration of Maria’s vows is juxtaposed to the marriage of Nino and Giuditta – just as Giuditta prepares her white dress and her veil, Maria graduates from her white dress to her black habit. Although Maria does not attend Nino and Giuditta’s wedding, the entire event is played out in her own vow ceremony, reminding her of the life she will never be able to have. While it should be a celebration, the entire ceremony seems to Maria like a funeral and rather than seeing herself as reborn as a bride to God, she feels as if she is attending the event that marks the end of her life. She writes: I’m dead! Your poor Maria is dead. They laid me on a bier, covered me with a funeral shroud, and sang a requiem for me. The bells tolled … Something mournful seems to be weighing on my soul and my limbs feel lifeless. Something heavier than a tombstone, more silent than the grave stands between me and the world, nature, and life.23

The day that she had been brought up to look forward to for her whole life finally arrived, and it felt to her as the day marking her death.

22 Verga, Sparrow, 64; “Il signor Nino sposerà mia sorella … intendi? … Son senza pieta! … la lieta novella! … E un buon matrimonio … ambedue sono ricchi … Giuditta è contenta, felice … Non ho avuto il coraggio di domandar loro in grazia di risparmiarmi la prova della visita d’uso … perché anch’egli verrà … Sento che non avrò la forza di quest’altro sacrifizio … mi ucciderà …” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 69. 23 Verga, Sparrow, 69; “Son morta! La tua povera Maria è morta. M’hanno disteso sul cataletto, m’hanno coperto del drappo morturario, hanno recitato il requiem, le campane hanno suonato … Mi pare che qualche cosa di funereo mi pesi sull’anima, e che le mie membra sieno inerti. Fra me e il mondo, la natura, la vita, c’è qualche cosa di più pesante di una lapide, di più muto di una tomba.” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 73.

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Chapter One

Although the day of her death would arrive later, Maria sinks further into insanity and despair following her own vow celebration. She views her confirmation as a nun as her funeral – and in some ways it is. She is no longer permitted to see her family face to face, but only through a metal grate and she can no longer go outside to smell the flowers or appreciate the view from the small belvedere of the convent, let alone run in the fields or walk in the woods. In any case, she wouldn’t be able to complete these tasks even if she wanted to because her health and mental state deteriorate to the point that she is confined to her bed in a room deep inside the convent with no one to tend to her. However, her desire to love and feel loved is as strong as ever and she writes to Marianna: Why have you all abandoned me, Marianna? Even my father and you too! I’m here suffering all by myself in this long corridor where the sun never smiles and there are no loving faces. My condition would arouse pity in a stone. I’m going to dye, my Marianna. Your poor dear friend will die here and won’t see you or her father ever again!24

Her statements are eerie because they are prophetic, and it is shortly after this letter to her dearest friend that she succumbs to her broken heart and dies, alone, in her cell in the convent.

V. Conclusion Maria’s meeting Nino and her subsequent feelings for him create a rupture in the life lay before her. While an outbreak of cholera allows Maria to return to her family home and create the memories that she lacked as a child, that time also leads to the complete destruction of her life. Her attempts to reconcile the desire she feels for Nino and the desire to be a true servant to God and a loving sister are futile, and manifest themselves in physical symptoms eventually leading to her death. The idea of trauma and its symptomatic manifestations, as illustrated by Parr’s reading of Deleuze, can be applied to many different aspects of this novel and can help clarify Maria’s reaction to her contrasting desires.

24 Verga, Sparrow, 74; “Perché tutti mi avete abbandonato, Marianna? anche mio padre! anche tu! Son qui, tutta sola, a soffrire, in questo vasto corridoio dove non c’è sorriso di sole né di volti amorevoli; sono in uno stato da far compassione alle pietre. Morirò, Marianna mia; la tua povera amica morirà qui e non ti vedrà più … e non vedrà più suo padre!” Verga, Storia di una capinera, 73.

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Bibliography Coats, Karen. Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Diamond, Lisa. “Emerging perspectives on Distinctions between Romantic Love and Sexual Desire.” Current Directions in Psychological Science. 13, n. 3 (June 2004), 116-19. Goodchild, Philip. Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire. London: Sage Publications, 1996. Parr, Adrian. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Verga, Giovanni. Storia di una capinera. Palermo: Selino’s S.R.L., 1869 —. Sparrow. Translated by Lucy Gordan and Frances Frenaye. New York: Italica Press, 1997. .

CHAPTER TWO LAIDE AND THE OLD TOWER: FOR A HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF DESIRE IN DINO BUZZATI’S UN AMORE MARCO SALVIOLI STUDIO FILOSOFICO DOMENICANO (BOLOGNA)

“tradidit illos Deus in desideria cordis eorum …”1

To paraphrase what Paul Ricoeur authoritatively maintains about the symbol, it may be said that the novel makes you think – not only because this literary genre, at once so noble and so popular, has offered pages of great philosophical depth. I believe it is a case of something quite prodigious that the literary work achieves, through the act of reading: the unfolding of that dynamic of the intelligence that Aquinas called conversio ad phantasmata. 2 Hence it is not the literary critic’s eye, bent on the mechanisms of writing, on its intertextuality, or on the inventions of rhetoric, that will be cast here on Dino Buzzati’s last novel Un amore (1963),3 but – perhaps unusually – the eye of the philosopher, enchanted by the beauty of the text, but still more by that implacable art of the narrator which here, as Eugenio Montale put it, “is also a clinician and a vivisectionist of the heart.”4 1

Rom.1:24. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 89, a. 1. 3 Dino Buzzati, Un amore (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1999); Dino Buzzati, Love Affair, trans. Joseph Green (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1987). 4 Eugenio Montale, “L’artista dal cuore buono,” in Il secondo mestiere. Prose 1920-1979 (Milano: Mondadori, 1996), 2993. Montale’s reading is shared, with the specification of a moral intention, by Giovanna Ioli, Dino Buzzati (Milano: Mursia, 1988), 102. On Montale “reader” of Buzzati, cf. John Butcher, “L’artista 2

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I am convinced that in taking on just such a role, Buzzati produced a text that is not only indisputably readable, but that encounters philosophical research, intent on interpreting that “mystery” that is Man.5 It is no mere chance that critics use a noun, mystery, that is so significant in Buzzati’s whole poetics: in Un amore Buzzati brilliantly rediscovers at the heart of an erotic relationship that depth of “magical” fathomlessness typical of the more usual works.6 No longer do monsters, fantastic scenes, deserts and talking animals depict the dream world that emerges from daily life, but all this is within a story, incidentally taken for granted, between Antonio Dorigo, a successful 49-year-old architect, and a youthful prostitute, Laide, in the context of a feverish Milan, at the beginning of the 1960s. The monstrum now is the human being, or rather the woman. 7 In masterly style, Buzzati tells of a singular relationship, layered, enlivened by tensions that the author himself describes as “a real mental disease,” 8 “love-passion,” 9 “story of a clinical case.” 10 We craftsmen of concept have to make the interpretation, hoping to bring out the analytical subtlety of Buzzati the “vivisectionist,” whose last novel lies, again in Montale’s words, “at the heart of the liveliest realism or psychologism, in the almost anatomical dissection of an amorous emotion that many will define as pathological, but which in reality everyone whose

dal cuore buono: Montale on Buzzati,” Studi buzzatiani 7 (2002): 101-113 and Fabrice De Poli, “Des affinités spirituelles. Montale lecteur de Buzzati,” in Dino Buzzati d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. À la mémoire de Nella Giannetto, Actes du Colloque international (Besançon, octobre 2006), ed. Angelo Colombo and Delphine Bahuet Gachet (Besançon: PUF-Comté, 2008), 147-162. 5 Ioli, Dino Buzzati, 112-113. Among those who have written on the cypher of the mystery, cf. Pietro Biaggi, Buzzati. I luoghi del mistero (Padova: EMP, 2001), Stefano Mecenate, ed., La saggezza del mistero. Saggi su Dino Buzzati (Empoli: Ibiskos Editrice, 2006) and Ferdinando Castelli, “Dino Buzzati. Alla ricerca del mistero,” in Nel grembo dell’Ignoto. La letteratura moderna come ricerca dell’Assoluto, vol. II (Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 2006), 341-361. 6 Eugenio Montale, “Un amore,” in Il secondo mestiere. Prose 1920-1979, 2569. Cf. also Fausto Gianfranceschi, Dino Buzzati (Torino: Borla, 1967), 151. 7 Gino Nogara, “Lo scrittore, la donna, un amore sbagliato,” in Dino Buzzati, Alvise Fontanella, ed. (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1982), 209-218: 215 and Marie-Hélène Caspar, “Tératologie buzzatienne,” Studi buzzatiani 2 (1997): 5-33. 8 Dino Buzzati and Yves Panafieu, Dino Buzzati: un autoritratto. Dialoghi con Y. Panafieu (luglio-settembre 1971) (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1973), 135. 9 Dino Buzzati and Yves Panafieu, Dino Buzzati: un autoritratto, 140. 10 Dino Buzzati and Yves Panafieu, Dino Buzzati: un autoritratto, 141.

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eyes and heart are not covered by a thick layer of rind have experienced, at least virtually.”11 A love affair, certainly, but capable of leading to self-questioning on the meaning of this tangle of pleasure and suffering, desire and repulsion, which is a real possibility in every human love. It is within this open space between the singularity of the story and its potentially universal reading regarding the problem of meaning and of the “thing” or “word” of the text, that I find it fruitful to approach Buzzati’s text from a hermeneutic phenomenological point of view. Maturing in the school of Paul Ricoeur who in several ways and contexts dealt with the relationship between word and desire, and between meaning and narration, this manner of interpretation seems the most appropriate to bring out the dynamic of lovedesire, the 20th-century figure of eros, as expressed within Un amore.12 Every time, always within the frame offered by hermeneutic phenomenology, I shall have recourse to suggestions from authors such as Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan and Jean-Luc Marion, who – though they put forward differing, not always compatible theories – will permit me to underline certain links that constitute the world of Buzzati’s text, where the meaning of the narrated desire proves to be beyond any attempt to give it a univocal definition. It is above all this excess that demands and justifies a theoretical setup that is phenomenological and hermeneutic: one that not only accepts the mediation of the text, but renounces the possession of the essence sought clearly and distinctly in a Cartesian manner. In a word, reading Buzzati’s last novel: what happens to the “thing” of the text that we call “lovedesire”? Or, in other words, how is love-desire written?13

I. The Fire Within It is the title of this collection that suggests the procedure for an initial thematic exploration. Fire, from this standpoint, emerges as an eloquent symbol of that love-desire that drives Buzzati’s narration. This is confirmed in the work of Gaston Bachelard, a thinker who is difficult to 11

Montale, “Un amore,” 2567. The realism and psychologism marked by are echoed by Gianfranceschi, Dino Buzzati, 72. 12 For hermeneutic phenomenology, see Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). 13 To answer those tempted to raise the objection of incongruence between Buzzati’s writing and any philosophical interpretation, see the comment of a careful reader of Buzzati: Ioli, Dino Buzzati, 10.

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situate. Love, death, desire, passion, the hearth: fire is the dialectic matrix of images, it is capable of expressing human reality in the union of the spectre of contraries: fire glows in Paradise and burns in Hell.14 The protagonist of Un amore is tormented by fire, evoked in terms of its effects of suffering – an intimate burning, unreasonable in the sense that it is anti-economical, not ascribable to the ratio of giving and having, disproportionate to the market value of a service that can be bought on the prostitution market. It is an inner burning that in the course of the novel expresses desire from the viewpoint of the lack which cannot be immediately satisfied and hence involves the imperceptible passing of time; a fire that burns in step with anticipation, a painful, desperate anticipation, a theme characteristic of Buzzati’s writings. 15 Antonio Dorigo waits and, waiting for the paradoxical object of his desire, the prostitute Laide, in herself insignificant, burns at her absence: ‘She certainly won’t come now.’ (He looked at his watch for about the twentieth time. How is absurd it was. It wasn’t as though he was waiting for someone he loved; after all she was only an ordinary call girl, to be had by anybody who felt like spending twenty thousand lire, probably less. It was possible that in some other house Laide did her work for less, it was even probable. With those kids the more they earned the more they spent, they never had enough money, another five thousand lire are always a help, or four thousand, or even three. At this thought Dorigo felt some emotion deep inside him, annoyance, anguish, it was like being on fire, it made no sense to him. He looked at his watch again, it was one-seventeen.16

14 Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). 15 On time and expectation, see Antonia Arslan, Invito alla lettura di Buzzati (Mursia: Milano, 1993), 116-119. In particular, the subject of expectation is at the centre of the comparison with Buzzati’s best-known work Il deserto dei tartari, cf. Giuliano Gramigna, “Prefazione,” in Dino Buzzati, Romanzi e racconti (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1975), xxxii-xxxiv and Giorgio Pullini, “Il deserto dei tartari e Un amore: due romanzi in rapporto speculare fra metafora e realtà,” in Fontanella, Dino Buzzati, 169-193: 178. 16 Buzzati, Love Affair, 60; “‘Oramai, non viene più.’(Sarà stata la ventesima volta che guardava l’orologio, che cosa ridicola, neanche se fosse stato aspettando il suo amore, dopo tutto non si trattava che di una squillo qualsiasi, a disposizione di chiunque avesse avuto ventimila lire da spendere e probabilmente anche meno, non era escluso che in separata sede Laide si desse anche per meno, anzi probabile, queste ragazzette più ne guadagnano più ne spendono, non hanno mai soldi abbastanza, cinquemila lire in più fanno sempre comodo, anche quattromila, anche tremila, al pensiero Dorigo si sentiva una cosa dentro, un dispetto, un tormento, un

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Burning gives form to another figure of lack. A subtler symptom of a more sophisticated desire, in which possession becomes revelation and knowledge of the other without reserves, jealousy flames within with the burning effects of fire in the face of small revelations about Laide’s life which Dorigo could neither know nor control: So now more than ever the few things Laide has told him about herself crowd about him and torture him, some of them quite terrible things that filled him with a kind of fiery feeling difficult to explain, in which pity was mixed with jealousy, anger, and lust, and which rekindled his love.17

A further recurrence of the symbol of fire to indicate inner suffering produced by desire as lack and anticipation is found when Dorigo experiences the tragedy of suspicion, fed by a wounding, uncontrollable jealousy. The image appears in the context of a fragment, inspired by the Joycean stream of consciousness, a technique Buzzati often adopts in Un amore. This style here is used to reproduce the uncontrollable mounting of pain in the protagonist’s soul, faced with his frustration in the compulsive attempt to know, to dominate Laide’s life, beyond the unconvincing versions she offers.18 It is a suffering that aims at the depths of the soul: Now a damnable thing inside his breast: palpitation, breathlessness, devastation, fiery spades digging into him. By God he had been right to be suspicious.19

Still regarding desire, fire is explicitly invoked to symbolise Dorigo’s sexual yearning faced with the young prostitute’s offensive, hateful indifference, perhaps because she is tired of being at the centre of his bruciore irragionevole, guardò ancora l’orologio, sarà l’una e diciassette.) Buzzati, Un amore, 67. 17 Buzzati, Love Affair, 153; “così ancora più di prima si affollano e contorcono le poche cose che Laide ha raccontato di se stessa, cose anche terribili che gli mettevano dentro un bruciore difficile a spiegare in cui c’era insieme pietà, gelosia, ira, lussuria, e che gli riattizzavano l’amore.” Buzzati, Un amore, 149-150. 18 On the influence of Joyce see Arslan, Invito alla lettura di Buzzati, 98 and Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo, eds., The Reception of James Joyce in Europe. Volume I: Germany, Northern and East Central Europe (London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 350. There is a fitting comment by Luciano Parisi and Alessandra Guariglia, “Sulle innovazioni stilistiche del romanzo Un amore,” Studi buzzatiani 9 (2004): 47-55. 19 Buzzati, Love Affair, 220-221; “Quella cosa infernale dentro nel petto, batticuore affanno devastazione vanghe infuocate che scavano. Perdio se aveva ragione di sospettare.” Buzzati, Un amore, 204.

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vortex of obsessions, which are calmed only when he is close to her body. Here fire, described as divine, takes on the features of the overflowing fullness of desire, an oneiric wave, fated to shatter on Laide’s insensitive stubbornness: Only after great insistence did Antonio succeed in extracting her promise to let him stay with her the night of the mid-August holiday. When the night came, she kept her promise, but before they went in, she warned him that that night she couldn’t bear the thought of even being touched. The whole night through she slept on her side of the bed, her back turned to him. Was this love then? Against that wall of indifference broke the wave of dreams, the divine fire!20

Why does the divine fire of desire come to the writer’s pen as another name for the wave of dreams? Without forcing the text too much, I think this may bear an intuition developed and studied by Lacanian psychoanalysis: human sexual desire is never mere compulsion, but always emerges as worked, interpreted, linguistically and imaginatively animated by the Unconscious – which, indeed, may be intelligently signified by the resurgence of dreams.21 This is certainly not “love,” as Dorigo doubts, but the very human sexual desire that – blazing like fire, the furnace of “divine” expectations – is at last frustrated, clashing with Laide’s disinterest. The last reference is as explicit and definitive as the conclusion of the novel it proposes: fire unveils the vital force of desire precisely in its being tension and torment, the scorching symbol of a youth that is extinguished at the very moment of achievement: It was anger fury frenzy burning speed life, it was youth too, but now, that very night, the very moment that she spoke, that she came out of her sleep for an instant to speak, at that one moment his youth ended, that last patch the last shred of youth so strangely even unwillingly prolonged to the age of fifty. A fire burns no longer, a cloud that’s dissolved into rain, a piece of

20

Buzzati, Love Affair, 208-209; “Antonio riuscì a strapparle la promessa di farlo dormire con lei la sera di ferragosto. Quando venne ferragosto, la Laide tenne la parola, ma prima che entrassero in casa lo avvertì che quella sera non voleva essere toccata, non ne aveva proprio voglia. E per tutta notte dormì sull’altro bordo del letto voltandogli la schiena. E questo era l’amore? Contro questo fuoco d’indifferenza si rompeva l’onda dei sogni, il divino fuoco!” Buzzati, Un amore,195. 21 Massimo Recalcati, Ritratti del desiderio (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2012), 133.

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Chapter Two music that’s sounded its last note and will sound no more, fatigue emptiness solitude.22

From this brief taste there already emerge the coordinates in which desire is to be inserted as the narration develops. The fruit of Western culture, even Buzzati’s concept cannot readily be freed from the genealogy of Eros narrated by the priestess Diotima and told of by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium: Love the son of Poros, who lives on the wealth of expedients, and of Penia, poverty, which is the synonym of lack, and who takes the initiative of being joined carnally with Poros, at this point inebriated, almost as if the thrust of desire was all inherent in the restless, paradoxical dedication of lack.23 In my view, in Un amore Buzzati is moving within this tradition unpredictably, passing from text to biography, in an operation not without queries – judging from what Buzzati himself affirmed almost a year before his death: “What is that you desire? You desire what you do not have, and what you do not know. When you have something and you know it perfectly, the desire decreases automatically.”24 This is certainly a significant suggestion, but it is not yet decisive to illustrate the parable of desire that constitutes the dynamism of Un amore.

II. Antonio Dorigo and prostitutes: Taming desire Milan, February 1960: the story begins with Antonio Dorigo calling a certain Ermelina, who will shortly turn out to be the madam of a brothel 22 Buzzati, Love Affair, 294; “Furore rabbia frenesia ma insieme fiammeggiamento vita era, giovinezza era anche, e adesso esattamente questa notte nel preciso momento che lei ha parlato, che lei è uscita un attimo dal sonno per parlare, nel momento preciso la giovinezza è terminata l’ultimo lembo l’ultima striscia della giovinezza stranamente prolungatasi senza volerlo fino ai cinquant’anni. Fuoco che ha finito di bruciare, nuvola che ha fatto pioggia e la nuvola adesso non c’è più, musica giunta all’ultima sua nota e dopo altre note non verranno, stanchezza vuoto e solitudine.” Buzzati, Un amore, 266. 23 Plato, Symposium, 203 B-203 E. A careful reconstruction reveals at least two main currents of thought in the history of the Western reflection on desire: the first, and by far the more popular, proceeds from the primacy of lack affirmed by Plato, passes through Christianity and reaches Hegel, only to emerge in Freudian psychoanalysis, whereas the second, exploiting Aristotle’s intuition according to which desire is energy, is radicalised – with and against Aristotle – by Spinoza and by Hobbes, to emerge in Nietzsche and then in Deleuze and Guattari, Cf. Camille Dumoulié, Il desiderio. Storia e analisi di un concetto (Torino: Einaudi, 2002). 24 Cf. Dino Buzzati and Yves Panafieu, Dino Buzzati: un autoritratto, 86.

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for the well-off bourgeoisie. The background for the story is a grey, feverish city, “with that unreadable sort of sky,” all “cement, asphalt and passion.” 25 This is the Milan of the boom, the financial capital of a workers’ Italy, involved in the vortex of a delayed, forced industrialisation, “an infinity of frantic ants intent on their own wellbeing,” traversed by a perhaps unknown spread of styles far from the traditional Catholic faith, which seems “transfigured into strange, blazing vices.”26 The Milan in which Dorigo walks, more slowly, detached, though not entirely extraneous, is a sensual, hyperactive animal, moved by the impulse to possess and to dominate, with a voracity that tends towards the infinite: All around him, in the rain, the great city is still silent but soon it will wake and begin to heave struggle writhe gallop up and down fearfully, to do, undo, sell, make money, seize, dominate, and all this on account of an infinity of mysterious desires and prejudices, things both mean and lofty, work, sacrifice and endless affliction, impulses, the will to destroy, possession and dominion, on, on!27

Dorigo is brought before the reader through the mention of his sexual desire: though not subject to an excessive animosity, he suffers from a compulsion to make love that hinders his work, moving his imagination almost beyond control. His lack of interest in his work, and in the objects of a rising consumerism (the portable radio that Giorgina wants), forms a contrast with the expectation of the organised sexual relationship: “a charge of tremendous power, not at all animal or blind – on the contrary, poetic, full of dark obscenities.” As for his professional environment, Dorigo seems to be self-assured: “nearly famous,” “internationally 25

Buzzati, Love Affair, 4; “un cielo incomprensibile,” “cemento, asfalto e rabbia” Buzzati, Un amore, 20. 26 Buzzati, Love Affair, 7-8; “transumanata in vizi strani e brucianti” Buzzati, Un amore, 22. “Brucianti” here applies to the vices of a now “trasumanata” Milan, in a sense that makes sarcastic reference to Dante’s expression. See Giovanna Finocchiaro Chimirri, “Rileggere Un amore,” in Nella Giannetto, ed., Il pianeta Buzzati. Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Feltre e Belluno, 12-15 October 1989) (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1992), 507-519. In the same volume see also Alessandro Scarsella, “Buzzati e il mito della città,” 415-429. 27 Buzzati, Love Affair, 116; “la grande città che fra poco si sveglierà cominciando ad ansimare a lottare a contorcersi a galoppare su è giù, per fare, disfare, vendere, guadagnare, impossessarsi, dominare, per una infinità di voglie e accanimenti misteriosi, di cose meschine e grandi, lavoro, sacrifici e afflizioni infiniti e impeti, e volontà che rompono, muscoli e scatti mentali, possessione e dominio, avanti, avanti!” Buzzati, Un amore, 117.

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known,” “clever scene-designer, envied and easily liked,” within an “intellectual superiority,” “closed off and proud, which prevented his giving himself openly.”28The image of the successful man, integrated in the Milan of productivity, “Dorigo felt calm, things were going well,” “everything safe and propitious for a bourgeois in the bloom of life, intelligent, corrupt, rich, successful.”29 How can we fail to read in Antonio Dorigo one of the many embodiments of the modern subject (self-referential, economically efficient, proud and tending to independence)? From the viewpoint of the narration, the architect seems to be complete in himself, if it were not for that “desire to make love,” that sexual desire that affects his autarchy, placing before it the existence of the other, of the woman: “because of the kind of childhood he’d had, women had always seemed to him like foreign creatures; he’d never been able to give a woman the confidence he gave his friends.”30 The woman is the other, although she can be domesticated by money by which, in the form of prostitution, she can be bought, consumed and forgotten, together with the pleasant suffering of expectation and the spasm of the flesh that the erotic practice anyhow involves. But sexual desire, still too close to the need to be satisfied, does not allow the armour of egoity to be shattered further: desire is satisfied immediately by paid-for consummation: “What a wonderful thing, thought Dorigo, prostitution is! … A dream comes true, with the wave of a magic wand, for twenty thousand lire.”31 This satisfaction works as a reduction of the other to the same, while maintaining an illusion of otherness in the shiver of transgression experienced in the face of a morality that is only recollected, even able to cast on the sexual act a fairy-tale colour, the

28

Buzzati, Love Affair, 5-6; “quasi celebre,” “geniale,” “citato internazionalmente,” “personalità invidiata,” “immediatamente simpatico,” “superiorità intellettuale, chiusa e orgogliosa, che non riusciva a concedersi apertamente,” Buzzati, Un amore, 21-22. 29 Buzzati, Love Affair, 8; “Dorigo era tranquillo, le cose gli andavano”, “tutto sicuro e propizio per un borghese nel pieno della vita, intelligente, corrotto, ricco e fortunato.” Buzzati, Un amore, 23. 30 Buzzati, Love Affair, 11; “La donna, forse a motivo dell’educazione familiare, gli era parsa sempre una creatura straniera, con una donna non era mai riuscito ad avere la confidenza che aveva con gli amici. La donna era sempre per lui la creatura di un altro mondo, vagamente superiore e indecifrabile.” Buzzati, Un amore, 25. 31 Buzzati, Love Affair, 10; “Che cosa meravigliosa la prostituzione, pensava Dorigo … Il sogno realizzato, a un colpo di bacchetta magica, per ventimila lire.” Buzzati, Un amore, 25.

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flavour of “miracle,” and of “mystery.” 32 Faced by the protests of conscience, from the perception that recourse to the services offered by a prostitute is unjust, Dorigo rather feels desire coming to light: Yet out of this bitter, even painful thought, this inability to accept the situation as it was, there was born desire. A respectable woman who went to bed with him unselfishly, out of love, would have given him infinitely less pleasure. Sadism? The perverse enjoyment of watching something young, clean, beautiful submit slavishly to the most degraded practices?33

The reification of the woman and the power to transform the subjectivity of the other into an object that can be manipulated and controlled answer the need for domination imposed by an excessive Ego and in itself carried out: thus the woman is exorcised in her otherness, by the thought that, at base, “prostitution was an activity normal to all women.”34 Certainly, in the hours of anticipation, Dorigo, who had never been satisfied with his own appearance, “went so far as to forget his own face … and deceived himself into believing he might even be attractive,” to the point where he had the sensation of taking away “all his self-confidence” and realising that in the face of the woman’s otherness “he turned into nobody.”35 But having money involves the possibility of obtaining what one desires in the controlled form of the exchange of equivalents. The female prostitute allows Dorigo to have the experience of enjoyment, disarming that hidden “inferiority complex,”36 of which he is well aware, and granting him access to that touch of mystery and life that is enough for him to avoid, for a moment and without risk, the feverish grey of work. Following a suggestion from Vittorio Caratozzolo, I accept the hypothesis of the influence of Georges Bataille’s L’érotisme (1957) in the 32

Buzzati, Love Affair, 12 and 18; “miracolo,” Buzzati, Un amore, 27 e “mistero,” ibidem, 31. Cf. also Sharon Wood, “Love and Death in the Later Work of Dino Buzzati,” Forum Italicum 26 (1992): 333-343, here, 339. 33 Buzzati, Love Affair, 11; “Da questo pensiero aspro e dolente, da questa incapacità di ammettere, nasceva però il desiderio. Una donna per bene, che fosse andata in letto con lui per amore disinteressato, gli sarebbe piaciuta infinitamente meno. Sadismo forse? Il perverso compiacimento di vedere una cosa bella, giovane e pulita, assoggettarsi come schiava alle pratiche più sconce?” Buzzati, Un amore, 26. 34 Buzzati, Love Affair, 13; “la prostituzione fosse un atteggiamento normale di tutte le donne” Buzzati, Un amore, 27. 35 Buzzati, Love Affair, 5-6; “dimenticava perfino la propria faccia che gli era sempre dispiaciuta … e si illudeva di poter essere perfino desiderato,” “smarrire ogni sicurezza di sé,” “egli diventava uno qualunque” Buzzati, Un amore, 21. 36 Buzzati, Love Affair, 24; “complesso d’inferiorità” Buzzati, Un amore, 36.

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genesis of the novel, precisely relating to Bataille’s interpretation of prostitution as “object of desire” or “erotic object.” 37 For Bataille, this object has a paradoxical, negative function: the erotic object – a lovely naked woman – signifies a negative moment in a dialectic of desire through which the object is deprived of the limits that characterise it, expressing that fusion that, overcoming every limit, is the purpose of eroticism. It is through this signification that, for Bataille, prostitution is a consequence of the female attitude, just as nudity – ever-present in Dorigo’s reflections on his visits to Ermelina’s – becomes an announcement of fusion, a sign of the negation of limits. In this sense, prostitution becomes for Bataille a form of consecration: if the profane time of work, reason and production forms a system with the veto that allows resources to be accumulated, sacred time, the festival, is rather characterised by a controlled transgression against the veto and so breaks through the safeguarding of production, being expressed as consumption, waste, destruction. The payment given becomes gift, escaping the logic of market exchange and allowing the woman to become a motive for the waste of wealth. 38 This sacral modality, which allows the woman to preserve modesty even as she offers herself, is lacking only in low prostitution which, caused by poverty, becomes a symbol of decadence and abjection, in being – merely by surviving – altogether without rituality and modesty. Yet each time, instead, the miracle happened. A magnificent girl – not always, unfortunately, a magnificent girl but at Signora Ermelina’s his chances were quite good – a stupendous creature, the kind that makes every man’s head turn as she walks down the street, got undressed right in from of him ten minutes after meeting him and let him hug her and hold 37

Vittorio Caratozzolo, “L’‘inverecondia categorica’ di Un amore, tra prostituzione testuale e necessità,” in Stefano Mecenate, La saggezza del mistero, 97-140, here, 137. For what follows see the considerations on the prostitution as the object of desire in Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1986) 129-139. 38 Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, 132-133: “But if the prostitute received sums of money or precious articles, these were originally gifts, gifts which she would use for extravagant expenditure and ornaments that made her more desirable. Thus she increased the power she had had from the first to attract gifts from the richest men. This exchange of gifts was not a commercial transaction. What a woman can give outside marriage cannot be put to any productive use, and similarly with the gifts that dedicate her to the luxurious life of eroticism. This sort of exchange led to all sorts of extravagance rather than to the regularity of commerce. Desire was a fiery thing; it could burn out the life of man in whom it was aroused.”

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her and enjoy every part of her body. All for a miserable twenty thousand lire. … the girls behaved as though what they were doing was the easiest and most natural thing in the world. Sometimes, it was true, they didn’t take the trouble to hide their desire to get it over as soon as possible, but never did they betray the slightest sign of sacrifice or distaste.39

If the influence of Bataille has been so great, it cannot be thought of in terms of an improbable theoretical mimesis within the narration. It is rather an emphasis on how the identification of the mystery and the miracle in day-to-day prostitution, the driving role of nudity, the function of suspension of working time represented by visiting Ermelina’s girls in Dorigo’s bourgeois world recall significant passages of L’érotisme. In this sense, and slightly forcing the reading, we may well ask: in the figure of Laide, synthesis and surmounting of Bataille’s categories of “sacred” and “low” prostitution, can we not read a contemporary figure of antieconomic waste moved and consecrated by acquiescence to authentic desire? Is not Laide perhaps the breaking of the contract between Dorigo and the world of the young prostitutes, composed of domesticated desires and quantifiable services? Let us see.

III. The appearance of desire in Antonio Dorigo’s life: The rupture of the Ego The real story arises from a rupture in the Ego, a wound inflicted on the proud independence of the successful bachelor businessman. I interpret this with the irruption of a genuine desire, excited by the meeting with Laide, which disrupts Dorigo’s grey, unsatisfied existence; Buzzati leaves a proleptic, eloquent trace of this in the rhetorical figure of anadiplosis, which opens a gash in the text and also in the protagonist’s compact Ego: Dorigo felt calm, things were going well. He wore a grey suite, white shirt, VROLGUHGPDJHQWDWLHUHGVRFNVEODFNVKRHVDVWKRXJKʊ

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Buzzati, Love Affair, 12-13; “E invece ogni volta il miracolo si avverava. Una ragazza magnifica – non sempre purtroppo ma dalla signora Ermelina di racchie era difficile trovarne – una stupenda creatura, una di quelle che fanno voltare tutti per la strada, si spogliava dinanzi a lui dieci minuti dopo la presentazione e lui poteva baciarla e stringerla e goderne ogni risorsa carnale. Tutto per misere ventimila lire … Le ragazze agivano come se fosse la cosa più semplice e naturale di questo mondo. Magari col non abbastanza dissimulato desiderio di far presto. Ma senza mai il più vago sintomo di sacrificio o avversione.” Buzzati, Un amore, 27.

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Chapter Two As though everything would go on as it had gone on until then, until that February day, which was a Tuesday and bore the number 9.40

In the form of anticipation, the traumatic encounter with the object of desire is here brought to light – an object that in the moment of his yielding brings exhaustion and decentralisation, which are one with the experience of feeling overcome. Recognising that he is gripped by desire, Dorigo clearly feels that he has lost control of himself and that he is involved by a force that humiliates the illusory autarchy of the Ego. There appears what – with special reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on the modern subject – Ricoeur defines as the “broken cogito.”41 The experience of the encounter is precisely placed in time and this, in an expression Buzzati likes, introduces the sense of what I have called the “gash” caused by desire: At that moment he felt in the deepest part of him a shock, a kind of mysterious knell, as when in a vast and empty countryside one hears a faroff voice calling. He had absolutely no idea what had happened to him nor could he possibly have suspected the importance of it.42

Presentiment, reminiscence, the feeling of being guided by a destiny: this is the phenomenological reflection of the “incredible power of love”43 in Dorigo’s life: It was as though something about Laide had touched him deep inside. As though she were different from the others. As though between him and her a lot of other things were still to happen. As though he would come away from their relationship changed. As though Laide was the whole perfect incarnation of the forbidden world or adventure. As though there was some 40

Buzzati, Love Affair, 8; “Vestito di un completo di grisaille, camicia bianca, cravatta in tinta unita rosso magenta, calze pure rosse, scarpe nere lavorate, quasi che. Quasi che tutto dovesse continuare come era continuato fino allora, fino a quel giorno di febbraio, che era un martedì e portava il numero 9.” Buzzati, Un amore, 23. 41 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 42 Buzzati, Love Affair, 20; “Ma in quel preciso momento ci fu nelle profondità di lui uno scatto, una specie di misterioso rintocco, come quando in una grande solitaria campagna si sente una voce lontanissima che chiama. Egli certo non poteva assolutamente capire cosa stava accadendo in quell’attimo, non poteva sospettarne l’importanza.” Buzzati, Un amore, 33. Cf. also Dino Buzzati, In quel preciso momento (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2006). 43 Buzzati, Love Affair, 26; “incredibile potenza dell’amore,” Buzzati, Un amore, 38.

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kind of inevitability about it. As when a person, without any special symptoms, feels he’s about to be ill yet knows neither the why not the wherefore. As when you hear from below the squeak of the outside gate and though the building is enormous, though hundreds of families live in it and there’s a continuous coming and going, nevertheless you know at once when the gate opens that someone is coming for you.44

Six attempts at comparison aiming to illustrate the situation where desire genuinely unfolds as desire of the Other, according to Jacques Lacan:45 the other whom Dorigo desires and by whom he wants to be personally desired as precisely something that changes, makes different, sees him in his most intimate singularity and through which he feels questioned. Dorigo inevitably tries to defend himself against this experience of decentralisation, denying or belittling the effective resonance of the encounter. Predestination, catching a disease, a call: these metaphors show the traces of ungovernability in desire. Dorigo too begins to have the stinging experience of the fact that desire goes beyond the dominion exercised by the Ego: from this point of view, desire shows its ability to decentralise the subject through the irruption of the other, shattering the tendency to narcissistic, self-referential closure.46 This function of desire, brought to light by psychoanalysis, finds its more specifically philosophical parallel in the phenomenological desire for entry in the experience of passion, which Jean-Luc Marion has defined as “erotic reduction,” taking up Husserl’s notion of reduction which, on the analogy of religious conversion, sets up its own field of pure phenomena.47 In fact, according to Marion, falling in love sets up a fundamental resignification of the coordinates of consciousness in which to perceive 44

Buzzati, Love Affair, 44; “l’incontro con la Laide gli aveva lasciato uno strano turbamento … Come se qualcosa avesse toccato dentro. Come se quella ragazza fosse diversa dalle solite. Come se fra loro due dovessero succedere molte altre cose. Come se lui ne fosse uscito differente. Come se Laide incarnasse nel modo più perfetto e intenso il mondo avventuroso e proibito. Come se ci fosse stata una predestinazione. Come quando uno, senza alcun particolare sintomo, ha la sensazione di stare per ammalarsi, ma non sa di cosa né il motivo. Come quando si ode dabbasso il cigolio del cancello e la casa è immensa, ci abitano centinaia di famiglie e all’ingresso è un continuo andirivieni eppure all’improvviso si sa che ad aprire il cancello è stata una persona la quale viene a cercarci.” Buzzati, Un amore, 52. 45 6ODYRMäLåHNHow to Read Lacan (London: Granta Publications, 2006). 46 Recalcati, Ritratti del desiderio, 25-33: 28. 47 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 137.

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and love together constitute the horizon of the experience. Desire, in this context, reflecting precisely what the subject lacks, becomes the agent of the identification of the lover. Desire is thus essentially personal, resistant to any undue universalisation. By recognising whom s/he desires, the subject attains to him/herself, accepting that in the nucleus of the self dwells the lack of the other and not of any other, but of the other who is for me. Phenomenologically, the recognition of desire takes on the features of an instant at which there is a decisive realisation: I am given to myself, when desire opens me to the other.48 By different routes, sharing the object of their investigation – just like Buzzati’s poetics governing Un amore49 – psychoanalysis and phenomenology arrive at compatible results: desire is the code of the rupture of the subject.

IV. Obsession with and jealousy of Laide: The development of desire Un amore is not a novel about reciprocity. The “thing” of the text has to do not with unrequited love, but rather with the development of Antonio Dorigo’s desire, expressed in a painful, pathological manner: the rupture of the beginning develops into a wound, obsession, curse: “it was a far profounder enchantment … Awaiting him could only be humiliation and anger, jealousy and sorrow unending.” 50 This desire is narrated from a point of view that shatters customary characterisation: consistently with the discoveries of Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud that shook the 20th century, the object of desire, the child-prostitute Laide, does not coincide with a manifestation of the bonum, but paradoxically with a pathogenic, ambiguous agent, unsatisfying in itself, but capable of an unconquerable attraction. The question the reader asks, as s/he pursues the development of Dorigo’s desire, echoes painfully from page to page: why persevere in desiring someone who hurts us? Why desire someone who simply makes us suffer?

48

Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 108-109. 49 A poetics so close to experience that it is deficient from the strictly literary point of view, cf. Mario Ricciardi, “Buzzati, il romanzo e la ricerca d’identità,” in Fontanella, Dino Buzzati, 204-205. A “deficiency,” if it may be so called, that nevertheless meets Ricciardi’s sensitivity. 50 Buzzati, Love Affair, 93-94; “era impossibile che lei corrispondesse al suo amore”, “era una stregoneria più profonda … Non potevano attenderlo che rabbie umiliazioni gelosie e affanni a non finire”, Buzzati, Un amore, 96.

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And the more he wanted her, though she had belonged to other men, unknown men, innumerable other men whom he hated at he now forced himself to picture them.51 … Dorigo never stopped inventing scenes that could only increase his misery: he worked at them pitilessly, down to the most minute and obscene detail.52

Did he desire her although she was not his or because she was not his? The development of the desire that torments Dorigo does not reveal its secret, the hidden motivation, how to interpret it. Yet the text betrays an inconsistency that can only be solved by a clue: why trouble to imagine someone we hate? Why this scrupulousness in describing what hurts us? Buzzati the vivisectionist of the soul as yet offers no answer, but allows the narration gradually to reveal the phenomenology of what is ever more clearly a pathological condition. In this sense, Chapter XIV is emblematic when Dorigo realises that he is prey to a sick love: From the moment of revelation he feels himself being carried down into darkness never conceived of save for others, and every second the speed of his descent accelerates.53 It wasn’t an infatuation merely of the body, it was a far profounder enchantment, as thought, had called out to him and now, with everincreasing and irresistible force, was carrying him off to a dark unknown tomorrow. Looked at from any point of view, there seemed to be no way out.54

Correlatively, the figure of Laide is seen, in delirium, with the monstrous features of the “vampire-woman”: “He’d been taken prisoner by a false 51

Buzzati, Love Affair, 68; “E sempre più Dorigo la desiderava benché non fosse sua, benché fosse di altri uomini ignoti, di moltissimi altri uomini ch’egli odiava sforzandosi di immaginarli,” Buzzati, Un amore, 73. 52 Buzzati, Love Affair, 94; “l’immaginazione di Dorigo non cessava di fantasticare scene ipotetiche ma verosimili col solo risultato di moltiplicare l’affanno: e senza pietà ne perfezionava i particolari nelle minuzie più oscene,” Buzzati, Un amore, 97. 53 Buzzati, Love Affair, 87; “dall’istante della rivelazione egli si sente trascinare giù verso un buio mai immaginato se non per gli altri e d’ora in ora va precipitando” Buzzati, Un amore, 91. 54 Buzzati, Love Affair, 93; “non era una infatuazione carnale, era una stregoneria più profonda, come se un nuovo destino, a cui non avesse mai pensato, chiamasse lui, Antonio, trascinandolo progressivamente, con violenza irresistibile, verso un domani ignoto e tenebroso. E la situazione, considerata da qualsiasi parte, non lasciava intravedere via d’uscita. Non potevano attenderlo che rabbie umiliazioni gelosie e affanni a non finire.” Buzzati, Un amore, 96.

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mistaken love, his mind was no longer his own, Laide had got into it and now she occupied it entirely.”55 Between these two fires that trap, there are the states of mind and feelings illustrating that confused accumulation of humanity that constitutes Dorigo’s experience: feelings of persecution, inner burning, widespread painful tension, the shock, anguish, anxiety, humiliation, hopeless need, weakness, desire, his illness included them all and the suffering that resulted was total and complete … Restlessness, longing, fear, dismay, jealousy, impatience, despair. Love!56

All that life that Dorigo, in the tacit asceticism of success, lacks, together with “his” Milan, is symbolised by the brazen beauty of the young prostitute, in whose existence, fathomless for he bourgeois lover, emerges a different Milan, all alleys and hovels and vital density.57 Laide becomes a symbol, with all its multiplicity of meaning. He loved her for herself and for what she symbolised – femininity, inconstancy, youth, plebeian honesty, mischievousness, wantonness, daring, liberty, mystery. She was the symbol of a world that was common and nocturnal, gay and vicious, fearlessly wicked and sure of itself, a world that teemed with life insatiable, surrounded by the boredom and respectability of the middle class. She was the unknown, the adventurous, she was the flower of the old city that had sprung up in the courtyard of some unsavoury old house, among the memories and the legends, the poverty, the sins, the shadows and the secrets of Milan. And though so many had trampled her down, she was still fresh, lovely, and sweetsmelling.58

55 Buzzati, Love Affair, 90; “prigioniero di un amore falso e sbagliato, il cervello non più suo, c’era entrata la Laide e lo succhiava.” The link to the image of the vampire-woman is justified by the Italian verb “succhiare.” This connotation disappears in the English translation. Buzzati, Un amore, 93. 56 Buzzati, Love Affair, 89-90; “spasimo, l’angoscia, l’ansia, l’umiliazione, il disperato bisogno, la debolezza, il desiderio, la malattia mescolati tutti insieme a formare un blocco, un patimento totale e compatto … L’inquietudine, la sete, la paura, lo sbigottimento, la gelosia, l’impazienza, la disperazione. L’amore!” Buzzati, Un amore, 93. 57 Cf. Pullini, “Il deserto dei tartari e Un amore: due romanzi in rapporto speculare fra metafora e realtà,” 177. 58 Buzzati, Love Affair, 92; “Lui l’amava per se stessa, per quello che rappresentava di femmina, di capriccio, di giovinezza, di genuinità popolana, di malizia, di inverecondia, di sfrontatezza, di libertà, di mistero. Era il simbolo di un

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I shall not dwell on the incidents narrated and on the spiral of humiliations revealed by Dorigo’s thoughts: a game of lies, projections, services, inconclusive investigations, until the final test at the guesthouse “Asilo Elena.”59 Among the many descriptions of this phase, there stands out, in skill and fascination, the masterly reading by Bàrberi Squarotti who takes the standpoint of Dorigo’s wish to dominate, expressed as the wish to know. Those brilliant pages illustrate Dorigo’s search, which, on the edge of paranoid delirium, shades into a true epistemological drama. 60 What I shall do here is to attempt to interpret the sense of the selfdestructive jealousy into which the development of Dorigo’s desire plunges. Several interpreters claim that the most appropriate category for Dorigo’s attitude is “masochism,” 61 which inverts the “sadism” that characterises his relationship with Laide. Using these categories, and even more overturning them, challenges Freud’s teaching in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and still more in The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924).62 From time to time Antonio felt astonished at himself. How could he put up with so much? Once it would have seemed impossible. Luckily, one can get used to hard knocks, too. Luckily or unluckily? Was it anything but a

mondo plebeo, gaio, vizioso, scelleratamente intrepido e sicuro di sé che fermentava di insaziabile vita intorno alla noia e allal rispettabilità dei borghesi. Era l’ignoto, l’avventura, il fiore dell’antica città spuntato nel cortile di una cecchia casa malfamata fra i ricordi, le leggende, le miserie, i peccati, le ombre e i segreti di Milano. E benché molti ci avvessero camminato sopra, era ancora fresco, gentile e profumato.” Buzzati, Un amore, 95. 59 Buzzati, Love Affair, 254-262; Buzzati, Un amore, 233. 60 Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, “L’ora dell’alba e la città”, in Giannetto, Il pianeta Buzzati, 151-174. 61 Marilyn Schneider, “Beyond the Eroticism of Dino Buzzati’s Un amore,” Italica 46 (1969): 292-299; Nogara, “Lo scrittore, la donna, un amore sbagliato”: 217; and especially Wood, “Love and Death in the Later Work of Dino Buzzati”: 341. 62 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey; in collaboration with Anna Freud assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953-1974), 3-64 and “The Economic Problem of Masochism” in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, 159-170. I am grateful to my friend Dr. Pierpaolo Ascari for discussing this aspect with me.

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Chapter Two symbol of moral decay? Rebellion, however, was unthinkable. The idea of losing Laide filled him with the usual dread.63

Without carrying out an unlikely psychoanalysis of Dorigo, in the overturning of his sadism towards many prostitutes we can recognise an expression of the narcissistic libido that aims to protect the Ego from the death wish, which from the start, according to Freud, humans endure. Since the desire for Laide has ruptured the self-referentiality of this successful man, who can domesticate sexual desire towards a sadistic enjoyment of the commercialised woman by means of mediation of the paltry “twenty thousand lire,”64 the death wish returns and is expressed in the masochistic attachment to one he experiences as “vampire-woman,” who weakens his effective rationality, as is clear from his highly antieconomic behaviour, and leads him through a whole series of humiliations that have a flavour of destiny, of a curse, and are symptoms of a regression to the initial masochism freed from the curbing of eros, declined narcissistically, witness to the initial phase in which Eros and Thanatos were fused and expressed in adult life as a web, a mutual overrun.65 In short, Dorigo lives the development of desire investing his libido in the pursuit of an object, Laide, that allows him to experience the pleasure of living in the form of suffering and humiliation, beyond the good received or the evil undergone. In this sense, Un amore can be set alongside the great tales of jealousy: Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love, Lev Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Eternal Husband, Italo Svevo’s Senility.66 For Dumolié, Dorigo stages a drama of jealousy as a “technique of frustration”: in attributing to Laide an enjoyment proportional to her many imagined lovers, he gives substance to the desire for infinite enjoyment, if only in the form of his own exclusion. The intensity of suffering, anger and the humiliation he undergoes are negative forms of the other’s enjoyment, which is taken upon himself, and thus of an enjoyment that cannot be consummated. As Dumolié concludes, in a way 63

Buzzati, Love Affair, 209; “Da quando in quando Antonio si meravigliava di se stesso. Come era possibile che tollerasse tanto? Una volta gli sarebbe parso inconcepibile. Per fortuna anche agli schiaffi si fa l’assuefazione. Per fortuna purtroppo? Non era il segno di una degradazione? Ma ribellarsi era impossibile. L’idea di perdere la Laide gli metteva addosso il solito sgomento” Buzzati, Un amore, 195. 64 Buzzati, Love Affair, 60; “misere ventimila lire” Buzzati, Un amore, 27. 65 For the psychoanalytic relation between Eros and Thanatos, cf. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 66 Dumoulié, Il desiderio, 223.

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applicable to Buzzati’s protagonist, “the crisis of jealous rage is proof that you can enjoy the frustration.”67

V. Fragments for a metaphysics of eros The interweaving of Eros and Thanatos is reinforced, in the course of the novel, by Dorigo’s failed attempts to free himself of his need for Laide, but even more by a series of five epiphanies which show the loveliness of the child-prostitute and the power of love, understood here as the youthful energy that this mature man experiences, an unforeseeable “something rather foolish, unselfish, crazy.”68 The descending spiral of obsession is accompanied by a series of platonic intermezzos where Laide shows a splendour that momentarily takes her away from the dark world of lies, mere survival and prostitution. “I’m a delightful little girl,” 69 “this unselfish act of beauty,”70 “in frenzied desolation, a kind of flower,”71 “a moving purity,” 72 and “now for this one second she is greater than everything, she is the most beautiful, precious, and important thing in the world.”73 These are traces of an idea of love that can transfigure, which becomes possible within Dorigo’s attitude of adoration when there appears a gratuitousness, a meaning, a good, beautiful, authentically desirable ground of reality seen through his love for Laide. That this state of grace will last is not guaranteed: in certain circumstances it reaches Dorigo from within, without obviously belonging to the ego and its economic dynamics. Dorigo reaches the peak of this way of living love in his journey to Modena, following one of Laide’s ambiguous occupations.74 67 Buzzati, Love Affair, 189; “cosa un po’ stupida disinteressata e pazza” Buzzati, Un amore, 179. 68 Buzzati, Love Affair, 86; “Io sono una bambina deliziosa” Buzzati, Un amore 90. 69 Buzzati, Love Affair 103; “disinteressato gesto di bellezza” Buzzati, Un amore, 105. 70 Buzzati, Love Affair, 167; “nella frenetica desolazione, una specie di fiore” Buzzati, Un amore, 160. 71 Buzzati, Love Affair 187; “una purezza commovente” Buzzati, Un amore, 176. 72 Buzzati, Love Affair, 299; “lei per un attimo sta al di sopra di tutti, è la cosa più bella, preziosa e importante della terra” Buzzati, Un amore, 270. 73 Buzzati, Love Affair, 124-128; Buzzati, Un amore, 123-127. 74 Buzzati, Love Affair, 127; “Le torri antiche, le nuvole, le cateratte, le enigmatiche tombe, il singhiozzo della risacca sullo scoglio, il piegarsi dei rami nella tempesta, la solitudine dei greti nel pomeriggio, tutto è un’indicazione precisa a lei, la donna nostra, che ci incenerirà. Ogni cosa del mondo congiurando con le altre cose del mondo in complotto sapientissimo per promuovere la perpetuazione

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“Natural enchantment,” secret of all nature, of landscapes between sky and stone, of the city, everything acquires a “different meaning” through the amorous impulse that surreptitiously animates all the soul perceives. The power of erotic reduction! But the state of contemplation hardly lasts: far from being a platonic, able to recognise in Eros the unifying strength of the soul, Dorigo expresses his decidedly Schopenhauerian view of the world, in this respect close to Freud: Ancient towers, clouds, cataracts, mysterious tombs, sobbing of surf on rocks, bending of branches to the storm, loneliness of gravel banks in the afternoon, it was all a clear statement made to her, to the woman we love, the one who has the power to burn us to ashes. Everything in the world plots with everything else in the world in the wisest conspiracy of all, to bring us to the one we love.75

IV. Satisfaction and death: Desire as pharmakon The novel ends in the embrace of night, a night of surrender and new awareness. Laide, who would never have agreed to sleep beside Antonio, lies at his side, a symbolic gesture of total commitment – “the only thing I can give you is myself, if it doesn’t disgust you”76 – in the name of the desire that now dominates her as she approaches motherhood. Dorigo is security. That is what Laide needs now, for herself and her child. As for him, his desire no longer need exist. Laide, “concentration into one person of all those desires that expanded and multiplied without ever being satisfied,” 77 sleeps by him, needing him at last. Dorigo, “small smooth stone tied to a string and made to swing faster and ever faster” and “jousting horse,”78 has stopped and become what he once was. His desire for Laide, that mad turmoil, has been extinguished. della specie.” Buzzati, Un amore,127. The observation on Schopenhauer is justified by the original version that mentions the motivation of reproduction. 75 Buzzati, Love Affair, 288-289; “l’unica cosa che posso darti è questa mia persona, se non ti fa schifo.” Buzzati, Un amore, 261. 76 Buzzati, Love Affair, 294; “concentrazione in una persona sola dei desideri cresciuti e fermentati per tanti anni e soddisfatti mai.” Buzzati, Un amore, 266. 77 Buzzati, Love Affair, 297; “pietra legata a una corda e fatta girare” e “cavallo di giostra.” Buzzati, Un amore, 269. 78 Buzzati, Love Affair, 298; “Dio Dio che cos’è quella torre grande e nera che sovrasta? La vecchia torre che gli era sempre rimasta sprofondata nell’animo da quando era ragazzo. Della terribile torre però poco fa, nel turbine, si era completamente dimenticato, la velocità il precipizio gli avevano fatto dimenticare l’esistenza della grande torre inesorabile nera. Sì l’amore gli aveva fatto

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God God what is that high dark tower that hangs over him? The old tower that had always been hidden deep in his soul since he was a boy. A little while ago, when he was in the whirlwind, he completely forgot that terrible tower, the speed with which he whirled had made him forget that great inexorable black tower. … Love had made him forget entirely the existence of death … Such was the power of love.79

According to a somewhat pictorial inclusion, the black modern tissue – according to the code used between Dorigo and Ermelina – is echoed in the old, equally black tower that appears at the end of the novel. His desire satisfied, as the inner fire is extinguished, the anguish of death, a stable balance that absorbs all tensions, becomes clear to Dorigo’s consciousness. What becomes of desire, then? Pharmakon of existence, at once remedy and poison, desire reflects the flow of life as fleeting ecstasy and pounding torment that remains as long as it is open to the future, and as a rupture of the ego and the present that conceals the inescapable completion of every living being. 80 What, at last, is the sense of the impossibility of fulfilling desire? Is it perhaps the triumph of death, cipher of finiteness? Though powerful, desire-love cannot definitively remove the looming black tower. Faced with death, the modern subject has only the pharmakon of desire, the last opening before the seal of its finiteness in the time in which “God” resonates only as a rhetorical vocative. In the era of the death of God, death is the port of life, beyond any medicine: of desire as taken by Dorigo, of writing as taken by Buzzati.

Bibliography Arslan, Antonia. Invito alla lettura di Buzzati. Mursia: Milano, 1993. Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Translated by Alan C. M. Ross. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio. “L’ora dell’alba e la città,” in Il pianeta Buzzati. Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Feltre e Belluno, 12-15 October 1989), Nella Giannetto, ed., 151-174. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1992. Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1986. completamente dimenticare che esisteva la morte … Tanta era la forza dell’amore.” Buzzati, Un amore, 269-270. 79 Bataille, Erotism, 140-146, according to which – together with awareness that the desire cannot be fulfilled – the ultimate meaning of eroticism is death. 80 Gianfranceschi, Dino Buzzati, 77.

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Biaggi, Pietro. Buzzati. I luoghi del mistero. Padova: EMP, 2001. Butcher, John. “L’artista dal cuore buono: Montale on Buzzati.” Studi buzzatiani 7 (2002): 101-113. Buzzati, Dino. Romanzi e racconti. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1975. —. Un amore. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1999. —. Love Affair, trans. Joseph Green, Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1987. —. In quel preciso momento. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2006. Buzzati, Dino and Panafieu, Yves. Dino Buzzati: un autoritratto. Dialoghi con Y. Panafieu (luglio-settembre 1971). Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1973. Caratozzolo, Vittorio. “L’‘inverecondia categorica’ di Un amore, tra prostituzione testuale e necessità,’ in La saggezza del mistero, Mecenate, ed., 97-140. Empoli: Ibiskos Editrice, 2006. Caspar Marie-Hélène. “Tératologie buzzatienne.” Studi buzzatiani 2 (1997): 5-33. Castelli, Ferdinando. “Dino Buzzati. Alla ricerca del mistero,” in Nel grembo dell’Ignoto. La letteratura moderna come ricerca dell’Assoluto, vol. II, 341-361. Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 2006. De Poli, Fabrice. “Des affinités spirituelles. Montale lecteur de Buzzati,” in Dino Buzzati d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. À la mémoire de Nella Giannetto, Actes du Colloque international (Besançon, octobre 2006), ed. Angelo Colombo and Delphine Bahuet Gachet, 147-162. Besançon: PUF-Comté, 2008. Dumoulié, Camille. Il desiderio. Storia e analisi di un concetto. Torino: Einaudi, 2002. Finocchiaro Chimirri, Giovanna. “Rileggere Un amore,” in Il pianeta Buzzati. Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Feltre e Belluno, 12-15 October 1989), Nella Giannetto, ed., 507-519. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey; in collaboration with Anna Freud assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 3-64. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953-1974. —. “The Economic Problem of Masochism” in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, 159170. London: The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953-1974.

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Gianfranceschi, Fausto. Dino Buzzati. Torino: Borla, 1967. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Ioli, Giovanna. Dino Buzzati. Milano: Mursia, 1988. Lernout, Geert, and Van Wim Mierlo, eds. The Reception of James Joyce in Europe. Volume I: Germany, Northern and East Central Europe. London – New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Mecenate, Stefano, ed. La saggezza del mistero. Saggi su Dino Buzzati. Empoli: Ibiskos Editrice, 2006. Montale, Eugenio. Il secondo mestiere. Prose 1920-1979. Milano: Mondadori, 1996. Nogara, Gino. “Lo scrittore, la donna, un amore sbagliato,” in Dino Buzzati, Alvise Fontanella, ed., 209-218. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1982. Parisi, Luciano, and Alessandra Guariglia. “Sulle innovazioni stilistiche del romanzo Un amore.” Studi buzzatiani 9 (2004): 47-55. Pullini, Giorgio. “Il deserto dei tartari e Un amore: due romanzi in rapporto speculare fra metafora e realtà,” in Alvise Fontanella,ed., Dino Buzzati, 169-193. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1982. Recalcati, Massimo. Ritratti del desiderio. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2012. Ricciardi, Mario “Buzzati, il romanzo e la ricerca d’identità,” in Alvise Fontanella, ed., Dino Buzzati, 204-205. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1982. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. —. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. —. Onesefl as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chiacago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Scarsella, Alessandro. “Buzzati e il mito della città”, Il pianeta Buzzati. Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Feltre e Belluno, 12-15 October 1989), in Nella Giannetto, ed., 415-429. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1992. Schneider, Marilyn. “Beyond the Eroticism of Dino Buzzati’s Un amore.” Italica 46 (1969): 292-299.

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Wood, Sharon. “Love and Death in the Later Work of Dino Buzzati.” Forum Italicum 26 (1992): 333-343. äLåHN6ODYRM How to Read Lacan. London: Granta Publications, 2006.

CHAPTER THREE DESIDERIUM LUCIS: TRACES AND FLASHES OF DESIRE IN MARIO LUZI’S LATE POETRY GIANNI FESTA UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA

I. Desire for light Light in Mario Luzi’s poetry is always a motif of profound, widespread resonance: a longing for light is to be found above all in the late works of this great Florentine poet. In the last movements of Luzi’s lyrics, in fact, the element of light takes on an ever-increasing importance: I dealt with light much more in the last few years than at the beginning, when light was associated with colour, it gave substance to colour. Then I realised that light is a world in itself, autonomous. A world creating the other. There is a kind of radiance or brightness perceived as such, or perceived as mystery.1

Earlier, in Battesimo dei nostri frammenti it might seem that the opacity of the “years of lead” is dominant, whereas throughout Luzi’s later works light operates in such a way that the question asked of it at its withdrawal from the world is overturned in the hope that the light may split that darkness, showing the way to a recovery of matter and of nature. This redemption is promptly fulfilled in the very last works by Luzi, in which the theme of light, to which the poetic discourse tends, is greatly 1 “La luce mi ha occupato molto di più negli ultimi anni rispetto ai miei inizi dove la luce è associata al colore, dà sostanza ai colori. Poi mi sono reso conto che la luce è un mondo a sé, autonomo che crea l’altro. C’è una specie di radiosità o fulgore avvertito come tale e avvertito come mistero.” Mario Luzi, Colloquio. Un dialogo con Mario Specchio (Milano: Garzanti, 1999), 33. Translation is my own.

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expanded, as is clear from the extensive use of terms belonging to the semantic area of brightness, such as “light” (luce) or “brightness” (lucentezza) as well as epiphanies in which light rules supreme, pervading the air and the other elements that occupy the writing field. However, it is above all in Viaggio Celeste e Terrestre di Simone Martini that Luzi develops to the highest degree the poetry of luminosity, sailing away towards a dawn point that contributes to the connotation of his extreme artistic phase in a paradisiacal sense: “We all await/ the advent of the light/ that unites us and absolves us.”2 Because of its progress – though discontinuous – as a narrative poem, this work offers a considerable amount of structural novelty as compared with his preceding works; however, the cohesion and the continuity of Luzi’s discourse seem clear above all in the sense in which the Viaggio is offered as a poetic metaphor of the path towards reunion with the Word, a path that arises from the auscultation of a wholly interior desire, according to the epigraph from Augustine that introduces the collection: “You too, listen: it is the Word/ itself that calls you back.”3 As the title indicates, the itinerary of the nostos goes from a concrete spatial plane to the intangible spiritual plane: the 14th-century painter Simone Martini is caught in a last, imaginary journey that takes him from Avignon to Siena, his native city.4 From Provence to Tuscany, the return comes about with a caravan composed of his close family: his wife Giovanna, his brother Donato, his sister-in-law and his daughters, who are joined by a young theology student, “witness, interpreter and chronicler” of the adventure; Luzi, at the age of eighty, clearly identifies with the painter at the end of his days, but also with the figure of the student: He enters and exits the tale astonished at being a part of it

2

Mario Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini, trans. Luigi Bonaffini (Koebenhavn and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003), 303; “Tutti noi attendiamo/l’avvento della luce/ che ci unifica e ci assolve.” Mario Luzi, Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini, in L’opera poetica, ed. Stefano Verdino (Milano: Mondadori, 1994), 973-1183. 3 The quotation is from Confessiones, IV, 11. Translation is my own. 4 Little is known for certain about the life of Simone Martini (1284-1344); it appears, however, that the artist, in the various wanderings of his life, finally reached Avignon, at that time seat of the papacy, and died there. Luzi subsequently explained why he had chosen this particular artist from Siena, see Luzi, Colloquio, 253-254.

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like everyone else in the group, real person, consort, simulacrum.5

In my article I analyse Simone’s journey as a farewell to earth and a desirous tension towards a heavenly sign, that is, as a human pilgrimage that signals another way, the interior way of purification of the soul, and the return to the self: a redire ad se that coincides in Augustinian fashion with the light-Word. Thus the painter’s path is revealed as initiatory and sapiential, because it arises from the experientia of existence, an experience connoted by a desire that tends upwards, towards the sources, a desire for reunion with the Other Origin, and proceeds like a series of ascetical practices, like a reappropriation of an inborn integrity that the poet identifies with the places of his adolescence. Simone neither possesses nor any longer seeks things or temporality: after experiencing life in the multiplicity of its articulations, he decides to free himself of his waste matter (glory and corruption, the fleeting, ephemeral desires that are unrealisable), and like his Guidoriccio da Fogliano, he now draws away from the rotation of time to reunite with the other sky of the sphere untouched by creation, inhabited not by thought but by its power.6

Luzi, identified in his double Simone, becomes as much a viator as Dante, attempting to return to his homeland, intent on the recovery of both the creatural value of our humanity and the divine in its immanent forms. In fact, if the true destination of Dante’s iter through otherworldly realms is the vision of the “pale rose” of the Empyrean, similarly the aim of the Viaggio terrestre e celeste lies in redeeming, in an upward movement towards a Beginning in which physicality and transcendence, mystical and aesthetic experience of reality collude:

5

Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 51; “Entra ed esce dal racconto/ stupito/d’esserne, lui, parte/al pari di ogni altro,” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 997. 6 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 31; “altro cielo della sfera/non toccato dalla creazione /non abitato dal pensiero/ma dalla sua potenza.”Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 987. The figure of Guidoriccio da Fogliano exercised considerable fascination on the imagination of the young Luzi, who made his acquaintance, in fact, through the “pictorial mediation” of Simone Martini.

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Chapter Three In which point is separation placed? in which does it quiver? of me from my colours, of the art that was mine from me, my problems? Joyous freedom that might await us artists beyond the observed rules, and our work as well. It returns utterly fresh in mente Dei, we into vagueness.7

In a very Dante-like struggle to prepare himself for the Viaggio, Simone leaves gaudy, opulent Avignon to return to naked, mystical Siena. Everything in his long, hard journey of expiation is purified memory, so that the places passed through and experienced take on eschatological meanings: the towns, rediscovered with the new eyes of the exile, throw out further symbols and become metaphysical territories. Every stage alludes symbolically to an aspect of existence: Genoa is sketched as a border town, suspended between high and low because of its topographical “ups and downs,” while Florence is a frenzied, competitive city, at once alluring and seditious, because it promises glory but in its swirling it threatens defeat: She is there, the Great City, teeming and swarming. There are many who know him, some of the Masters value his art, but he is afraid of theirs, he avoids the comparison, does not want the matchup.8

7

Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 327; “In quale punto/la separazione è posta?/ in quale freme?/di me dai miei colori,/dell’arte che fu mia/ da me, dai miei problemi?/ Gioiosa libertà che aspetti/di là dalle regole osservate/noi artisti, e anche la nostra opera./Freschissima ritorna in mente Dei/ essa, noi nel vago.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1141. 8 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 249-51; “È là, lei, la Gran Villa/ che brulica e formicola. / … In molti lo conoscono, alcuni tra i Maestri/ pregiano la sua arte,/ ma lui teme la loro,/ evita il paragone, non desidera il confronto.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1101-1102.

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Simone wishes and seeks for the “seed,” (semenza) the primordial nucleus from which his shoot sprang: this is what Siena is for Luzi’s poetic imagination, the city of God and of man. Siena is where his family comes from, monument of a primeval, undivided condition; it is the achievement rediscovered at last, after being longed for during the iter, after the shipwreck and the estrangement: Siena looks at me, she always looks at me from her fair high ground or from the one in memory as a castaway?9

Battered by a wind that reminds the poet of Saint Catherine, Siena is also a mystical desert, and its rediscovery is for Simone the definitive contact with the matter that precedes its transformation into light, the viaticum for the indescribable fusion with Being: We are still, I and she, she and I alone, deserted. For a more ultimate love? Certainly.10

In becoming the objective of the earthly pilgrimage and the point of interchange of an ethereal and spiritual trajectory the city takes on a transfigured outline, becomes evanescent, almost as though it were qualified as the non-place towards which the protagonists peregrinations tend from the beginning: I lose you, I track you down, I lose you again, my place, I do not reach you.11

9

Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 289; “Mi guarda Siena,/ mi guarda sempre/ dalla sua lontana altura/ o da quella del ricordo-/ come naufrago?-/ come transfuga?” Viaggio, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1123. 10 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 289; “Siamo ancora/ io e lei, lei e io/ soli, deserti/ per un più estremo amore? Certo.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1123. Luzi very early encountered the mystical thinking of St Catherine of Siena, whose works were assiduously read by Luzi’s mother (see Mario Luzi, La porta del cielo. Conversazioni sul Cristianesimo, ed. Stefano Verdino (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1997), 16.

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Again and again, in fact, the query already present in Avvento notturno is renewed: “towards where?” But now the destination of the human adventure seems to be specified from the eve of the journey: Towards where? There was no “where.” No place existed. In that point of light and fusion time failed with every threshold between loss and gain between calculation and expenditure.12

Siena becomes the earthly equivalent of the ontological divide between creature and creator, between being and becoming, and its towered profile melts as though gazed on from starry heights. The target has been reached, the wish has finally come true, fulfilled, satisfied, the reunion with what exists and its mysterious beginnings is guaranteed, and so Simone can climb to the geometry of the sign pure and simple: Siena disappears in the sky-blue of her distance, she withdraws from her name, she buries herself in the idea of herself, she burns in her own essence And I with her equally, lost to her history and mine … Oh sole supreme purity … Oh beatitudo.13

11 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 329; “Ti perdo, ti rintraccio,/ ti perdo ancora, mio luogo,/ non arrivo a te.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1142. 12 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 55; “Verso dove? ‘Dove’/non ce n’era. Luogo non esisteva./ In quel punto di luce e di fusione/veniva meno il tempo/e ogni frontiera/tra perdita ed acquisto,/ era calcolo e dispendio.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1001. 13 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 329; “Vanisce/ nel celeste/ della sua distanza/Siena, si ritira/ nel suo nome,/ s’interna nell’idea di sé, si brucia/nella propria essenza/ e io con lei in equità,/perduto/alla sua e alla mia storia … / Oh unica/suprema purità … Oh beatitudo.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1142.

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The curse of the journey also calls into question the nature and the aim of art itself. Simone questions himself and, at the same time, the poet; the question feeds powerful lyrical tension that stretches as far as the reflection on the functionality of artistic creation to illustrate the mystery of life: Art, what does your gaze illuminate for me? life or memory of life? its flashes, its continuity? the bed and flow of the eternal river?14

From these questions there emerges a view of art as a vocation that goes beyond the individual and her/his expressive skills, inasmuch as it is a visitation or a prophetic flash: Mine? this art is not mine I practice it, I refine it, I open the human reserves of pain to it, it readies divine ones of ardour and contemplation for me in the skies in which I advance …15

Entirely intent on a horizon of purification of the ego, Luzi makes of his art a received concession and hopes that it is open to being, while remaining aware of how the limitations connatural to the human condition and to its expression hinder a full leap. Simone Martini is the mirror image of every artist and, in the end, of every human being who fully experiences the drama of his or her creatural state, in the two dimensions of “desire” and of “gap.” At the end of the long journey that has brought him back to Siena, Simone knows that his art, trusting and ready to obey, will be a kind of revealing nativity:

14

Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 285; “Arte, cosa m’illumina il tuo sguardo?/ la vita o la memoria/della vita? I suoi lampi,/la sua continuità?/del sempiterno fiume l’alveo o il flusso?” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1126. 15 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 285; “Mia? non è mia quest’arte,/la pratico, la affino,/ le apro le riserve/umane di dolore,/ divine me ne appresta/lei di ardore/e di contemplazione/ nei cieli in cui mi inoltro.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1121.

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Chapter Three things go into the thought that thinks them, they go into the name that names them, the miraculous coincidence blazes.16

In Viaggio terrestre e celeste, the passing of time and the dizzying sense of transcendence culminate in a harmonious integration, as do torment and grace, flesh and spirit, because “everything plays with everything/ in the universal dance.”17 A new Simone Martini, Luzi interrogates himself with the tools of his art regarding the meaning of this journey balanced between the earthly and the otherworldly, and questions the meaning of a journey that arises from an interior thrust and from a wish to return to his origins. The journey thus takes on the guise of a song of life in its curve, in its coming to pass to return in the end to its origins. It is the extraordinary cycle of a nature that bears the seal of the vital seed, dead to itself but ready for a new blossoming, an idea which we find in the Gospels: Readable as life and equally as death: equally the two, the only ones, life and death, death and life cross their cross in him.18

In the natural antinomy of destruction and budding there reverberates the sacrifice of Christ and the new life in Him, precisely like in the Christian paradox of the transitivity between sepulchre and resurrection, thanks to which the finite, particular existence of the single “fragment,” once it has been baptised in the Word, becomes a “phrase” of the universal poem.19 It is from here that the creatural chorality, which informs Luzi’s late works, 16

Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 317; “entrano le cose/ nel pensiero che le pensa, entrano/nel nome/che le nomina,/ sfolgora la miracolosa coincidenza.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1136. 17 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 295; “tutto gioca con tutto/ nell’universale danza.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1124-25. 18 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 343; “Leggibile, esso, come vita/e parimente come morte:/ pari/incrociano in lui la loro croce /le due, le sole: vita e morte, morte e vita.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1147-1150. 19 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 151; “è minima la parte/ di ciascuno e splendido il poema.” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1049.

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comes down, turning into an immense prayer of praise in which every wish to contemplate the mystery of the concord that has been found is resolved: And when the beginning starts again and bud and decay set out again, then times reunite, they all drip into a lymph, they rise up in one, spiked multitude, that runs windy towards you, man, it offers itself warm to you. Oh grace, O gratitude!20

However, the distinctive sign that pervades the whole collection, and is the driving force of the poetic inspiration, lies in the constant contrast between the grindstone of the world, the “open wound” of a human life pierced, and the trembling desire and entirely Christian expectation of a joy that must come to pass, whose coming is prayed for, and of a dawn on the point of breaking, which is longed for: Dawn, how difficult is your birth! … Or I am not ready yet for your miraculous appearance …21

The wish for light involves not only the subject and his spirit, but likewise regards the physical universe: Waiting for you with meI feel it – are the outlines of the mountains, the peaks, the chasms and the birds that fidget and can’t keep their cry inside their gullet.22 20

Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 387; “E quando il principio ricomincia/ e s’avvinghiano germoglio e sfacimento,/ ecco i tempi si ricongiungono,/ colano tutti in una linfa,/ svettano in una sola/ spigata moltitudine,/ che a te corre ventosa, uomo,/ a te calda si offre./ Che grazia,/ o gratitudine!” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1174. 21 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 183; “Alba, quanto fatichi a nascere!/ … O sono io non pronto/ ancora/al tuo miracoloso avvento … .” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1065-1066.

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as St. Paul put it (Rom.8:19). And it is precisely in the light of this expectation that man, though suffering and tested by his own weakness, continues to fight, in order to codify the meaning of his days: Is this paradise perhaps? or luminous trap, a smile of ours never conquered, dark ab origine?23

II. Desire for the universe While the Viaggio ends with the affirmation of the full ontological reality of life, Luzi’s poetic course is taken up again as he repeats the importance of knowing that we are, as human beings, immersed in this vital flow. It is, indeed, starting from this conceptual nucleus that the lyrical discourse of Sotto specie umana is developed. In the form of the text, the crucial points of multiplicity in fieri and of synchrony are detectable from the first compositions of the collection, and the theme of the insertion of humans in the fundamental events of the cosmos emerges even earlier: World, I am not confined within myself, you wanted that each of us was a project of life in the universal project.24

Considering this, and after rereading certain critical evaluations that Luzi had formulated some years earlier, the exegetes of late Luzi have often come upon the presence, in the substratum of the collection, of a “Lucretian” cipher, if one may so define “the unitary and universal sense of life, in particular the shiver of bursting energy that one sees in the depths of all living things,” for “especially in this latter meaning it is

22

Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 183-85; “Ti aspettano con me / lo sento – i profili montuosi, / le cime, i precipizi», just as the waters «e gli uccelli / che smaniano e non tengono / nella gorga il loro verso” Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini, in Luzi, L’opera poetica, 1065-1066. 23 Luzi, Earthly and Heavenly Journey, 407; “È forse il paradiso/ questo? oppure luminosa insidia,/un nostro oscuro/ab origine, mai vinto sorriso? Viaggio celeste e terrestre di Simone Martini,in Luzi, L’opera poetica,1183. 24 Mario Luzi, Sotto specie umana (Milano: Garzanti, 1999), 9. Translation is my own.

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probable that the great poetry of the future will be increasingly Lucretian.”25 A “cosmological” poem, then, in which the distinctive themes of Luzi’s matured conception of the world and of life are recovered, under the mark of “continuity” and of perpetual “regeneration,” in order to celebrate its miraculous self-sufficiency: Life -isn’t that miracle ? it is! -it feeds on itself the prodigal fountain.26

Thus the collection continues the earlier inspiration, although we find here a more mediated astonishment at life being the source of the reality that prompts outbursts of a desire driving the human creature to connect and make her/himself a participant of every fragment of creation; but what is specific to the new book is the adoption of a frankly human perspective. Luzi once more vibrates the most characteristic string of his late artistic work, that of creaturality, of enchantment in the face of a creature that aspires and desires to reach the essence of its own existence, since the primary task of poetry, on a par with literary language, lies in “arising in people their humanness and creativity.”27 This fleshly condition is fatally lacking, since the awareness of its fragility may be an obstacle in the path of its complete reception of the cosmic message, and of its complete enjoyment of the gift of life. Here, one notices an influence from Saint Augustine: beauty is tainted by the perception of its misery and is made infinite by the perception of its limit. Nevertheless, Luzi also considers humanity in its pertaining to a global design that concerns the human being in her/his being creature, and hence repeats his conviction that man, despite his punctiform consistency in the unlimited field of being and although he is “hazardous” and “his history precarious,” nonetheless plays an indispensable role in the universe:

25

“il senso unitario e universo della vita, più in particolare il fremito di erompente energia che si coglie nella profondità del vivente … soprattutto in questo ultimo significato è probabile che una possibile grande poesia del futuro sia destinata ad essere sempre più lucreziana.” Mario Luzi, Naturalezza del poeta. Saggi critici (Milano: Garzanti, 1995), 185-89. Translation is my own. 26 “La vita- non è questo/ miracolo? Lo è! – di se stessa si alimenta,/ allunga il suo getto/ la prodigalissima fontana.” Mario Luzi, Sotto specie umana, 43. 27 “suscitare nell’uomo la sua umanità e la sua creatività.” Luzi, Naturalezza del poeta, 295.

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Chapter Three I know that you and I have to mutually grow together it was written in stone of your extreme mile and well inside itself. Amen.28

The danger of our annihilation or our nullification “in the continual multiplicity/ of appearances” is driven away by the awareness of nonetheless residing “inside of life, inside/ the marvellous instant.” 29 Nature in its variegated symphony is called to reveal its unitary essence and to overflow, going beyond the boundaries of the ego, which prove to be a hindrance for man. Thus, among the fine threads of consistency that weave the volume, among time and eternity, air and light, subject and world, desire and fulfilment of desire, once more what is imposed on all is the thread of life and its perpetual waxing, even beyond the extreme margin represented by death: So life goes down, it seems its decay also goes down indisputed only to regenerate itself in death for later, for its beginning.30

In Sotto specie umana, the human being, oscillating with the divine, is almost extorted and suspended: it is a matter of tiny chunks, or of unexpected epiphanies, which in their gleaming suddenly throw light on the rest, and contribute to the articulation of an ascetic path that puts man into the condition of recognising the hidden signs of transcendence.

III. Desire for simplicity On the threshold of his nineties, Luzi said that he was an absolute beginner in a doctrine, like his, which is as human as it is metaphysical: Dottrina dell’estremo principiante, in fact, seals the poet’s long curriculum with the mark of that “incessant noviciate,” with which the volume Sotto specie

28

“So bene che dobbiamo mutuamente/tu ed io crescere insieme – / era scritto nella pietra/del tuo estremo/ miglio/ e ben dentro di sé. Amen.” Luzi, Sotto specie umana, 9. 29 Luzi, Sotto specie umana, 88-89. 30 “Così scende/la vita, scende incontrastato,/ pare, il suo sfacelo/ a rigenerarsi nella morte/per il dopo, per il principio.” Luzi, Sotto specie umana, 20.

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umana had opened.31 Rather than drawing up a summary or a summa of his poetics, the author himself admitted that the new collection rather aspired to represent the desire of and the tension towards the conquest of simplicity. In this case too, then, the author proposes a sort of lyric diary, which tends to become his spiritual testament: the dictum is the insatiable search for the meaning of life and the unbridled desire to understand it, and although we find ourselves at the limits of darkness, at the boundary of the unutterable, a new harmony is imposed, despite chaos and disorder, and the perfection of creation comes to be perceived. Desire and search for a point of contact between matter and the divine, even when the shadows of human and personal history seem to suggest meaninglessness, is a constant in Luzi’s poetry from the 1930s on. This determination in going beyond matter to the source of life is not limited to the single human subject, but pertains to the living organism in all its manifestations. Luzi’s last book is inserted within this frame without denying the conceptual edifice, yet marking a significant waste as compared with the earlier epistemological order, since in Dottrina the clarification of the “enigma,” to which Luzi’s heuristic tends, is no longer identified with the intuition by mystical means of the perfect insertion of the Word in the forms of history (the “universal co-presence”). At the moment of the epiphany, in fact, a sense of dissatisfaction and of further incongruity prevails, and the prodigious circumstance of illumination ends by revealing paradoxically the true distance of the divine, instead of its immanence. In agreement with the altered reception of the moment of manifestation, the gnoseological status of Luzi’s late poetry is also modified: it is no longer a question of attempting to recompose the apparent discord between existence and being, since the eufunctionality – if so it may be called – of the real has by now been definitively established, and the presence of Christ even in the most hostile depths of the world is an acquired datum at least since the time of Frasi e incisi. The new sense of extraneousness from the divine has inverted the “direction” of the yearning, now arising from the desire to correspond with the pervasive entry of the divine in the human with an equally complete melding of the human in the divine. As has pertinently been pointed out, the effectively central motif of the last book is not the joyful accord of all the components of creation, but – once this natural Concordia has been repeated above all in the first two divisions – the true hinge of the 31

Mario Luzi, Dottrina dell’estremo principiante (Milano: Garzanti, 2004). The quotation is from the author’s note prefaced to the collection Sotto specie umana, 7.

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collection becomes the theme of the “disincarnation” of the creature, of its liberation from form and matter. Starting from Battesimo dei nostri frammenti Luzi’s work is increasingly configured as an ascetic path, a path ever more innervated on the canvas of the desire to arrive at the completion of the journey of a life. It is perhaps not altogether mistaken to assert that here Luzi prepares to attain ecstasy, in the etymological sense of “escape from the self,” emancipation from his own matter. At the level of expressive strategy, this insistent drive towards the liberation of carnality, towards what we may call “transhumanation,” is shown in the polarisation of the writing field in two thematic and figurative areas, one belonging to the motif of segregation: “ghetto,” “cells” (celle), “prison” (prigione), “limit” (limite), the other to that of escape: “to go further” (allontanarsi), “to go out” (uscire), “to cross the border” (sconfinare). However, it soon emerges how this structural tension and this continually reintroduced desire could only lead to an elegiac commiseration; and it is then that Luzi develops a further elaboration. In his view, the unfulfillable nature of the spirit’s desire to hover above the limits of its divided fate cannot be a condemnation inscribed ab origine in the genetic code of man, but must have a legitimisation, an intrinsic rightness with a view to the absolute. Hence the creatural form is not resolved sic et simpliciter in a limit to man’s ambitions of transcendence, but is reevaluated as the criterion of the person’s belonging to the vital organism, the perimeter within which the autonomy and the freedom of the individual to fulfil her/his entelechy are guaranteed. This is a solution that converts the suffering of abandonment into gratitude, at the same time demanding an understanding and an indulgence for the human condition corresponding to an enormous exercise of humility. A practice of unconditional love for life and its fragility unites Luzi’s ultimate work with the Franciscan lesson, whose influence had already fertilised the feeling of workaday reality at the time of Barca and which now is recovered with all the awareness that seventy years of human and poetic experience had won for the author. If the aporia regarding the natural form finds its composition in this state of rightness and necessity, in this “creatural metaphysics,” what is more terrestrial is the impact of the instance of liberation from form on the poetic structure of the collection, which calls into question the prerogatives underlying the very institute of poetry. It has already been noted that until Simone Martini the value and the vocation of art were shown in their ability to display the link of identity of matter with the divine substance from which it descends; but a similar status cannot satisfy Luzi’s most recent demands, where his urge

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seems rather to be to desire or long for formlessness, the silentium that comes before the articulation of the word. Thus there begins to emerge the confidence in the gnoseological range of the poetic construction, in the validity of its contribution of ontological excavation, and this is followed by the collapse of the discourse: In the end discourse collapses it breaks into a mixture of noises, a murmur …32

In Luzi’s late works we observe a sort of abdication of the ability of human language to determine and verbalise the indefinable. The right to citizenship of poetic creation thus lies not in its metaphysical finality, but in its possibility of nonetheless leaving a “trace” marked in the “permanence” of the being, for nothing, not even the most ephemeral event, is wasted in time. Precisely when the course seems to be heading towards nullification an unexpected chink nevertheless opens, the rising germ of a new song, the song of the dazzling human dawn that coincides with the Paschal Christ proposed again and again throughout Luzi’s work. “T” is the letter that falls silent, not the spirit, and in the end is a new beginning: “in my end is my beginning,” to quote Eliot in Four Quartets, a poet Luzi loved al least as much as Teilhard de Chardin. The only possible point de repère for man is thus the deference to the Spirit: an unutterable spirit, but one that beyond the laceration of time raises a guarantee against the terrible impression that man’s life is vain, that his desire for completion and satisfaction is frustrated and unfulfilled, infusing it with the idea of a perpetual impetus, of an inexhaustible universe that stretches in the whirling existential magma, only to end by arranging the lips in the smile with which the paradigmatic journey of every human being comes to a close; a gesture in which silence has become excess of language, and Luzi’s poetry has become, once again, a deeper ontological cipher.

32 “Infine crolla/su se medesimo il discorso, /si sbriciola tutto in un miscuglio/ di suoni, in un brusio …” Luzi, Dottrina dell’estremo principiante, 184.

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Bibliography Cavallini, Giorgio. La vita nasce alla vita. Saggio sulla poesia di Mario Luzi. Roma: Studium, 2000. Givone, Sergio. “Poesia e metafisica in Luzi”. Studi Italiani XVI, 2XVII,1 (2004-2005): 15-19. Luzi, Mario. Trame. Milano: Rizzoli, 1982. —. L’opera poetica. Edited by Stefano Verdino. Milano: Mondadori, 1994. —. La porta del cielo. Conversazioni sul Cristianesimo. Edited by Stefano Verdino.Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1997. —. Colloquio. Un dialogo con Mario Specchio. Milano: Garzanti, 1999. —. Sotto specie umana. Milano: Garzanti, 1999. —. Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini. Translated by Luigi Bonaffni. Koebenhavn and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003. —. Dottrina dell’estremo principiante. Milano: Garzanti, 2004. Mariani, Gaetano. Il lungo viaggio verso la luce. Itinerario poetico di Mario Luzi. Padova: Liviana, 1982. Mazzanti, Giovanni Maria. Dalla metamorfosi alla ‘trasmutazione’. Destino umano e fede cristiana nell’ultima poesia di Mario Luzi. Rima: Bulzoni, 1993. Rogante, Guglielmina. La frontiera della parola. Poesie e ricerca di senso: da Pascoli a Zanzotto. Roma: Studium, 2003.

CHAPTER FOUR HEART-ACHE IN AMELIA ROSSELLI’S POETRY: “ROUNDING THE POINT OF BELLIGERENCY” SILVIA MONDARDINI UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA

Non bisogna estinguere la passione colla ragione, ma convertire la ragione in passione. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, October 22, 1820.

I. Rosselli’s desiderium: The unsatisfied desire On the shelves of Amelia Rosselli’s (Paris 1930 – Rome 1996) personal library, now housed at the “Biblioteca di Lingue” of the Università della Tuscia in Viterbo, we find Controcanto al chiuso, a book by Biancamaria Frabotta. The initial epigraph of the book, which Rosselli circled in pencil, quotes Georges Bataille: “eroticism can be seen as the acceptance of life into death.” This line sums up Rosselli’s personal life quite well. She craved love, filling her life with multiple love affairs. 1 She committed suicide in February 1996 by jumping from the window of her apartment in Rome. Love and Death were prominent figures in the earthly parable of Amelia Rosselli. María Zambrano, in her Nacer por sí mismo (1995),2 maintains that in Plato’s Symposium Diotima sees love as an intermediary demon between 1

According to Gabriella Palli Baroni, Rosselli “had an affairs, known to everybody, with painter Renato Guttuso, who soon began to escape from her, with Mario Tobino and many others, all father figures: Melina was craving for love relationships.” See Gabriella Palli Baroni, “Amelia Rosselli assetata d’amore: colloquio con Aldo Rosselli,” Trasparenze, 17-19 (2003): 59-64. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise. 2 Marìa Zambrano, All’ombra del dio sconosciuto: Antigone, Eloisa, Diotima, ed. Elena Laurenzi (Parma: Pratiche, 1997).

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the earthly and the heavenly worlds, torn between human and divine, mortal and immortal, confusion and truth. Quoting from Luce Irigaray’s analysis of Symposium, Zambrano emphasises how Diotima disagrees with Plato in believing that the act of loving is more than a mere “love of beauty.” For Diotima, the act of loving is also a desire to “procreate and give birth in beauty … according to the body and the soul.” 3 In Zambrano’s opinion, Diotima denies the separation of body and soul, assimilating them in the fecundity of the love relationship that embraces them both. By contrast, Plato rejects the notion of love as a revolutionary and subversive cosmic power that redeems the flesh, a power housed in the body, in the bowels.4 In Subjects of Desire,5 Judith Butler compares and contrasts Georg Friedrich Hegel’s and Jacques Lacan’s ideas of desire, both of which derive from Plato’s concept of Eros. For Hegel, “desire signifies the reflexivity of consciousness, the need to become other to itself in order to know itself.”6 Desire for knowledge is gained through a dialectical relationship between the negativity and the otherness. By contrast, for Lacan, “desire can no longer be said to reveal, express, or thematise the reflexive structure of consciousness, but it is, rather, the precise moment of consciousness’ opacity.” 7 In other words, for Lacan desire does not lead to greater awareness, but is instead a passive emotion, derived from the repressed maternal connection. Rosselli reads and reflects upon these authors, as the underlined volumes in her personal library evince.8 Rosselli’s desire and love move along this complex path, often resulting in mysticism, which is modified eroticism, transfigured sexuality, a sublimated sexual impulse. Octavio Paz, in his essay on love and eroticism, considers the religious hermit and the libertine as two emblematic figures, opposite characters united by the same attitude. They both deny reproduction, seeking 3 Platone, Simposio, in Platone, Opere complete, volume III (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1985), 186. 4 Marìa Zambrano, El hombre y lo divino (1953), trans. Giovanni Ferraro, L’uomo e il divino (Roma: Edizioni Lavoro, 2001). 5 Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Human Reflections in 20th Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 6 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 7. 7 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 186. 8 The books found at Rosselli’s last Roman residence are kept at “Fondo della Facoltà di Lingue dell’Università della Tuscia” in Viterbo. Among them, I would like to mention Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) and several books and essays by Hegel: Esthétique (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1965), Filosofia della storia: antologia (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1975), Arte e morte dell’arte, eds. Paolo Gambazzi e Gabriele Scaramazza (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1979).

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individual salvation or liberation before a fallen, perverse, inconsistent or unreal world. They are both “asocial individuals facing or fighting society.” 9 Religious and erotic visions overlap, divine thrill and erotic ecstasy are as one. We are reminded of the Song of Solomon, which is a collection of poems allegorically celebrating the relationship between Christ and the Church while literally exalting profane love. We are also reminded of the Cántico espiritual by San Juan de la Cruz, which mingles religion and eroticism to such an extent that W. H. Auden described it as something poised dangerously between the carnal and the spiritual spheres. Interviewed about her English language book Sleep, Amelia Rosselli referred to its content as “metaphysical poetry,” commenting that “even when love exists, relationships are imaginary.” 10 Love remains uncompleted, frozen in a never fulfilled desire, both on this earth and elsewhere. Rosselli’s love-oriented and mysticism-oriented poems are simply two different ways in which her permanently unsatisfied desire is expressed: oh my breath who run along the shore where the infinite sea joins a stretch of land to a hollow beach, look at the sad peninsula longing: look at the heart’s motion turning to tufa, and the blunt stones wearing out in the waves.11

II. Eroticism: In Diotima’s kingdom (Part I) For Rosselli love poetry is the poetry of desire. In the corpus of her English poems the word “heart” appears as many as 63 times and the 9

Octavio Paz, La duplice fiamma. Amore ed erotismo (Milano: Garzanti, 1994). Paolo Di Stefano, “Amelia Rosselli sulle palafitte,” La Repubblica, February 22, 1992. 11 Amelia Rosselli, War Variations, trans. Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005), 57; “o mio fiato che corri lungo le sponde / dove l’infinito mare congiunge braccio di terra / a concava marina, guarda la triste penisola / anelare: guarda il moto del cuore / farsi tufo, e le pietre spuntate / sfinirsi / al flutto.” Amelia Rosselli, Variazioni belliche, in Le poesie, ed. Emmanuela Tandello (Milano: Garzanti, 1997), 250. The poems are not centered following Amelia Rosselli’s express will. Rosselli wrote: “When writing the first line of the poem I was also setting the width of the temporal and spatial square: the following lines had to adapt to the same measure, to the same formulation.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 340. Translation is my own. 10

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related word “love” occurs on 57 lines. As we look for Rosselli’s articulation of desire, we find poems speaking of love as associated with the heart. Love is the core of Amelia’s poetry and her masterpiece, Variazioni belliche, features a perpetual love chase, a useless effort to repel treacherous attacks and betrayals, a restless yearning and a permanent fight that mercilessly reveals the self, turns it against itself, tears it apart, bringing all the hidden pain to the surface. According to Lucia Re, “the organ most persistently mentioned by Rosselli is apparently the most faded and obsolete one: the heart.”12 I am convinced – as Isabella Vicentini was in the first monograph dedicated to this poet that “Rosselli’s poetry can fill the page with soul, heart and love because it does not know weakness, sugariness, sentimentality, or vagueness, because it is hard, fierce, brusque, strong and passionate, loving and lyric, high and mighty with no mid-tones, never muffled or muted, cloudy or modest … her poetry is the song accompanying the march of a soldier, is a heart of steel dissected by the botany teacher and mercilessly immolated in the name of writing.”13 Through some of Amelia’s English love poems, we can see a lost woman’s heart. In Sleep she writes: “as he climbed upon her, / thank less of a smile.”14 She describes a “rough / river” that divides the hearts of a man and a woman, and speaks of a heart “that cannot stand the turn of life.”15 She writes of a queen who understands “to have beloved all the world with too much / intensity,” so much that – for practical purposes – “the hangar closed down.”16 We find a “heart fundamentally cold,” even though previously it was a “stone of heat,” we see a person “on the run,” which tries to separate herself from others to avoid ever finding the other “helpless in my grasp.”17 The love fulfilment is missing and the poet is ceaselessly driven by her unsatisfied desire. Rosselli sometimes conceives love as a form of usury. She writes: “To call to love is but to make the name of usury!”18 This aspect of love – 12 Lucia Re, “Frammenti di un discorso amoroso” in «Se / dalle tue labbra uscisse la verità». Amelia Rosselli a dieci anni dalla scomparsa, Quaderni del Circolo Rosselli, XXVII, no. 98 (3/2007): 54. 13 Isabella Vicentini, “Un passo cavalleresco in una poesia da batticuore,” Galleria, 1-2, no. 48 (1997): 89-90. 14 Amelia Rosselli, Sleep. Poesie in inglese, ed. Emmanuella Tardello (Milano: Garzanti, 1992), 98. 15 Rosselli, Sleep, 104. 16 Rosselli, Sleep, 42. 17 Rosselli, Sleep, 42. 18 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Direction, 1996), 230. It was Pound, one of her beloved authors, in the fifth decade of the Cantos, at the

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which is the perturbing aspect of the disenchanted desire – often recurs associated with the economic aspect of a profitable exchange. Relationships are always depicted as necessarily implying a return, as violating spontaneity and as being violent. The only thing that counts is a bill at the table, all terminating which sets free – and your laughter an insult to my mind’s eyes or jabs, the knife drawn at times into your heart which severely does project its shaft of dust and light, into my bones.19

Rosselli writes: “tentacles of passion run rose-wise / like flaming strands of opaque red lava … our soul / tears with passion, its chimney.”20 Love is depicted as a power game that does not hide its abusing and beastly side: Undefeatable it rested on its lover’s arms unrested but withholding all triumph while nodded the beast. Slip in manifold, into

bottom of Canto XLV, who wrote: “N.B. Usury: a charge for the using of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production.” We find the same note in preface to his Lavoro e Usura, a very rare collection of three booklets dated 1944 and published in 1954 by the publisher All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro of Milan, included in one of 1000 numbered copies in the Amelia’s library: here usury is seen as a sin against nature which, through interests, demands a private tax for the enjoyment of collective property, more specifically the purchasing power of money, prostituting and perverting the natural ties between people. I do believe that Rosselli cannot use such a strong term, which is typical of an author she used to read so assiduously in those years, without critical awareness: love is nothing but usury and a form of exploitation that demands disproportionate benefits in return for sexual or love performances. Love is usury in the Latin sense of “enjoyment,” but also “use.” In the closure of Sleep, however, Rosselli denounces the reification and alienation in the love relationship, intended both as carnal relationship between a man and a woman and a metaphysical one between man and God, thereby echoing Pound’s moral and political fight against usury and capitalism. 19 Unpublished Manuscript, December 2012, n. 13. I report all the texts still unpublished today kept at “Fondo autori moderni e contemporanei” of the University of Pavia as Unpublished followed by the number relative to their position in the unpublished works archive. 20 Rosselli, Sleep, 13.

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this green racket which denies not its folds to the attentive.21

The hearts are cold from hibernation, and mechanicity is portrayed as the regulatory law of love relationships. We trade love because we are not able to cope with the harshness of reality. If the agents of the universe could watch coldly the hibernating coldness of our hearts or contacts as you please they’re called, these rocketing meetings at the eating table when, when the cold has too deeply set into the heart, we draw our hearts out through the eyes which pointedly fix the image we can no longer retain of friendship or even love, then there is a chasm, in all due intercourse, for we cannot see, in our dire travail, that human bondage has no springs behind its rasping hold.22

Love and hate lie at the core of every poem: … I am his sister in the navel, he is my prince in the heart, you are his king in the juice; I am his row of dominion.23

As a rule, reality is a “court game,” where relationships are conflictual: the sacrifice still remains on the part of the woman, since it is her head that lies somewhere beside the throne ready for the King “lest he / lose his Grace on the matrimonial day … which / was granted by the Divinity on her losing / her socket which joined the bones of man / and women.”24 It is the woman who bites the “old pine-tree,” while she cries for her original sin, it is the woman who undergoes a “travail … to / save her Master’s soul.”25 As Lady Macbeth, troubled by the thought of the murders, dreams of walking in her sleep and tries to wash away the imaginary spot of blood from her hands, in a mix of fear and pleasure and comes to what is most likely a suicide, so here “the Queen,” “weeping / for her primordial sin,” 21

Unpublished, 22. Unpublished, 13. 23 Unpublished, 25. 24 Rosselli, Sleep, 70-71. 25 Rosselli, Sleep, 70-71. 22

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“fell,” wearing a “death / grinned smile of a face, courtly notwithstanding / all.”26 The references to Shakespeare in Rosselli’s poetry help us identify her portrayal of desire. Desdemona is the most pathetic of all Shakesperean characters, suffering the most passive love, quite different from Juliet’s “active love.” In Rosselli’s Sleep we find “Otello,”27 who “has taken the wheel in hand” on page 18 of the Garzanti edition, but only on page 66 do we find Desdemona, with her “fright.” This poem opens with the verse “Hell, loomed out with perfect hands,” which, deliberately positioned at the overture, reveals the infernal plot of Rosselli’s “sleep.” I believe this verse can be useful in order to understand the tragedy of love in Rosselli, condemned to a perpetual, dramatic lack of understanding, and destined to be a relation of pure possession, pervaded by selfishness. Jealousy holds the “wheel” and fear is so consubstantial to Amelia’s nature, that she manages to play with it, calling it a “petticure,” with a wordplay formulated on a distortion of the word “pedicure,” 28 in a dramatic divertissement triggered by the oxymoronic expression that calls “terror” something that worries us just like “pedicure.” Another key text of Sleep describes court life as love game and ends with a finale that echoes Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory: Sleep … The intricacies of court life is the danger. I am the danger of a court massacre, exclaimed the virgin on the tree top as the tree fell, swarmed down to putritude. Sleep fell on, the reason went, and the host remembered he had forgotten the power and the glory.29

The title The Power and the Glory is in turn an allusion to the biblical doxology: “For thine is the kingdom, (and) the power, and the glory, now and forever (or forever and ever), amen.” 30 In Rosselli’s text there is neither power nor glory: a virgin, a “male” downed tree and merely “filth.” Another text of Sleep puts into play a sacrifice-demanding love through a series of allusions to George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss: 26

Rosselli, Sleep, 70-73. Rosselli uses the Italian spelling of this name. 28 See Marisa Di Iorio, “Il sospetto,” Galleria, 1-2, no. 48 (1997): 142. 29 Rosselli, Sleep, 96-97. 30 T. E. and J. Clontz, The Comprehensive New Testament (Cornerstone Publications, 2008), 8. 27

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the floss on the mill, she thinks she can read his will, regardless, and terrify those terrible scarecrows, they’re her eyes. Though peering at his sight, it is impossible that you really meant it! Or else sacrifice to those benefices which round point endlessly to such things as march, read, cough take your time. In your hands really, since marching seems to make you go crazy. Nevertheless there is a point to the story: it ends at its will’s power, circumflexed -strengthened by arbitration of the will, and a cuckold for all good will.31

The opening line “the floss on the mill” reverses Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. This novel recounts the story of Maggie Tulliver, an ardent soul in need of affection, who was forced to leave home and who later returns to her nest, trying to rescue her brother from a flooding river. Unfortunately, both are drowned by piles of timber carried by the rushing water. Here Rosselli seems to gloss: “Nevertheless there is a point to the story: it ends / at its will’s power, circumflexed – strengthened / by arbitration of the will … .”32 Maggie, alias George, alias Amelia, states the need to limit herself and maintain control over a force that can destroy one’s own life. Desiderium, the lack that forces one to search for the Other, must be knowingly guided and clearly supported by reason: we should not forget ourselves while seeking the other’s touch.

III. Mysticism: In Diotima’s kingdom (Part II) The intertextual references reveal Rosselli’s desire, a slave to the law of power, far from being an ennobling feeling and supported by a clear and rational mind. Nevertheless, a desiderative regime is often imposed, as we can read in one of Rosselli’s unpublished poems: “we shall our better half one day recognize to be our /true god, oh would that spring /come.”33 The love-adept woman seems to hope that the flesh of a partner could be a viaticum to the fullness of God.

31

Rosselli, Sleep, 170-171. Rosselli, Sleep, 170-171. 33 Unpublished, 3. 32

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Rosselli strives for the “Beyond,” not only in a religious sense, but also in secular sense: Love is the mystery. “You were ready to exchange all / your land for deity … We saw the King … but finding no approval, swam back home”34 and “You don’t come here to solve the mystery of / your non-presence … I don’t / have any other sip from your dried lips than / this impious mystery of mine, boredom of the day / broken into a thousand splinters.”35 Rosselli’s love poetry is linked with the author’s mystical vein. The poetess herself speaks of mysticism36 and Lucia Re identified a mystical vein in the English works collected in Primi Scritti and Sleep. Re connects Rosselli’s mysticism to the maternal sphere, which overlaps with the Lacanian concept of the Imaginary. Indeed, according to Julia Kristeva, the Imaginary is the space of femininity, as opposed to the Symbolic, a fatherly and masculine dimension. Lucia Re affirms: “mysticism is the most radical form of desire directed towards an ideal representation of fullness that always remains beyond the subject.”37 In this sense we must read the matrix of Rosselli’s love poetry in the “if,” a nostalgic dubitative or maybe a hesitant optative “utinam.”38 “If in love I drawled out words maybe terribly / bitter,”39 “If in divine love there’s someone who pays the way it isn’t for nothing / that I sing.”40 But if in love I glimpsed a glimmer of joy; if in the night suddenly rising I saw the sky was all a brawl of angels; if from your happiness I sucked mine; if from our eyes coming together I foresaw the disaster if in the melancholy I fought the hard dragon 34

Rosselli, Sleep, 106. “Tu non appari a chiarire il mistero della / tua non-presenza … Non / ho altro sorso dalle tue arse labbra che / questo mio empio mistero, noia del giorno / spaccato in mille schegge.” Amelia Rosselli, Serie ospedaliera, in Le poesie, 427. 36 Rosselli herself discusses mysticism in an interview with Sandra Petrignani, giving contradictory answers. “Are you religious? When I was young I was even mystical. Now I am not religious. However, can a poet be non-mystical? You’re right. Actually he/she is.” S. Petrignani, “Non mi chiedete troppo, mi sono perduta in un bosco,” in Francesca Caputo, Una scrittura plurale. Saggi e interventi critici (Novara: Interlinea, 2004), 291. 37 Lucia Re, “Variazioni su Amelia Rosselli,” Il Verri, 3-4 (1993): 132. 38 Giulio Ferroni, “Un’‘altra’ vita perduta,” Galleria, numero speciale, a.48, n.1-2 (1997): 15-24. 39 Amelia Rosselli, War Variations, 219; “se nell’amore strascicavo parole forse / amarissime.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 256. 40 Rosselli, War Variations, 265; “se nel divino amore vi è chi paga la strada non è per niente / ch’io canto.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 277. 35

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In one poem in Primi Scritti we read: I gummed up to the tube-station and killed the imbecile amour, which anyway had never been an amour, but a pin, a fastener, a substitute for the empty city and the empty mother and the sniggling brother and the toady maid. Biscuit-makers all, and I a crumb who’d not coagulate.42

We see here debris created by corrosion, a thing consumed and destined to drift, excluded from both circuits of Love and love, which has become blasphemous. The “Elizabethan” Amelia43 prays to God that her soul could still hear “the beat / of Thy hammer,”44 and fears discovering that His Throne was only a “too Greate aridity.”45 However, she ends up spitting on Him46 and decides that she has to get rid of “Strong Set High Prison Walls.”47 The origin of Rosselli’s sense of herself as a blasphemer is in her disbelief, which is conceived of as estrangement from God and her realisation that God is a deus absconditus whom she seeks but cannot find: “The love which so / few believe possible was in fact impossible. / Woe to the donor of the blood that surges!”48 Again in the verses of an unpublished poem, the poetess, mystical in her carnal – albeit determined by mechanical practices – relationship with God, keeps her virginity: love walks away, always mortal and always meant to end. He surges wicked by the wicket table, a-syringed by mechanical practice. Love on the doorstep 41 Rosselli, War Variations, 210; “Ma se nell’amore io intravedevo un barlume di gioia; se nella / notte improvvisamente levandomi vedevo che il cielo era / tutta una rissa di angioli: se dalla tua felicità risucchiavo / la mia; se dai nostri occhi incontrandosi prevedevo il / disastro se nella malinconia combattevo il forte drago del / desiderio; se per l’amore facevo salti mortali se per le / tue canzoni rimanevo illusa: era per meglio nascondere il / premio di bontà tu non desti. …” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 252. 42 Rosselli, “My Clothes to the Wind,” Le Poesie, 5. 43 See “October Elizabethans,” Le Poesie, 55-67. 44 Rosselli, Le Poesie, 60. 45 Rosselli, Le Poesie, 58. 46 Rosselli, Le Poesie, 61. 47 Rosselli, Sleep, 62. 48 Unpublished, 12.

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waited a-while, then left, pale of mortal pallor which never flew off the rose of Christianity, Christ’s blood bathed in water. … Away on a new battle she fell down her seat of love and went to eat. The smart waiter tenderly brought out plates and plates of covetous meats arrayed for her splendour.49

After Love is gone, the flesh remains: “we drag on, earth bound, in our enchanting / spheres of half-knowledge, bewildered even / as love laughs through the clouds.”50 Amelia’s passionate nature, disillusioned by l/Love, cannot find her own epos in religion, but only in mysticism divested of any specific religious denomination. This kind of mysticism can be seen as the most radical form of desire, as it longs for a plenitude that is always beyond the subject. Rosselli’s Love is therefore strongly carnal, extremely frustrated, “farcical”: “I am in love with thee but for the farce!/ exclaims the giant pea dropping its flower / daintily over the moist earth.”51 However, besides the usual sexual symbols like “giant pea” and the “flower,” we also find the image of the flow generated by the joint sighs of the two lovers, “sighing into the clouds.”52 Rosselli becomes mystical as she shows an inclination to abandon the rational state of mind in order to perceive the “numinous.” In her poems Rosselli disseminates images of flight, angels and birds, which express her desire to escape from herself. However, these aerial beings are not messengers of peace: “the sky was all / a brawl of angels,”53 “from the mouths of archangels bitter words fell,”54 and she wonders “why is anxiety / not denied why are birds flying away constantly / migrating in a long roll-call, though in silence?”55 And in Sleep: “You seem to hear angels mocking you, / you seem to cry out look the stars!”; 56 “Soul 49

Unpublished, 12. Rosselli, Sleep, 64-65. 51 Rosselli, Sleep, 76-77. 52 Rosselli, Sleep, 76-77. 53 Rosselli, War Variations, 211; “il cielo era / tutta una rissa di angioli.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 252. 54 Rosselli, War Variations, 227; “dalla bocca degli arcangioli cadevano parole amare.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 260. 55 Rosselli, War Variations, 221; “perché l’ansia / non è negata perché gli uccelli volano trasmigratori / di continuo in un lungo appello, ma nel silenzio?.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 257. 56 Rosselli, Sleep, 41. 50

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discomposed / watched from afar but no regard of angels enwrapped / his studious regard with love.”57 Rosselli shares with the mystics the erotic tension, the need for signification and the urge to signify the unspeakable, which, if it does not coincide with God, is nonetheless the fullness, the squaring of the circle. The mystic word tries to cover the huge distance between nameable and nameless, looks into the mirror of metaphysical suicide, of the annihilation in God, the mystery of otherness and divine distance, attempting to identify a presence in that absence. Images and motives of the mystics can be also found in Rosselli’s texts:58 the poetess often describes her life as an empty well and as a cavity.59 The mystic’s path implies a self-emptying, which leads to a complete passivity that allows God to work within the soul, in search of the unio mystica. Rosselli describes it in these terms: “Extinguish the yearning passion! / Distinguish the passion from the true longing for the extinguished desire / extinguish all that is … Might I castrate / my desires, pure unlace them into the river flow” 60 and then “everything / may make do by itself, even in agonizing silence,”61 so that at the end it is “grace instead that stammered / disconnected words: outside the language of abandoned / senses.”62 You would sink quietly, ring bells with beards and beard mice through to not-shadow, not-willingness, to testify that you were born.63

Rosselli is mystical because in her poems she describes an ascending path to God, which is also a search of the self: I was, I flew, I fell trembling into the arms of God, and may this last sigh 57

Rosselli, Sleep, 67. Giovanni Pozzi, Claudio Leonardi, Scrittrici mistiche italiane (Torino: Marietti, 1988), 32. 59 All of these images can be especially found in Diario ottuso (1954-1968) (Roma: Empiria, 1996). 60 “Estinguere la passione bramosa! / Distinguere la passione dal vero bramare la passione estinta / estinguere tutto quel che è …”; “Poter castrare / i desideri, slacciarli puri nel fiume.” Amelia Rosselli, Documento, in Le poesie, 653. 61 Rosselli, War Variations, 84; “che tutto / si faccia da sé, anche nell’agonizzante silenzio.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 190. 62 Rosselli, War Variations, 117; “la grazia che balbettava parole sconnesse: fuori del linguaggio dei sensi abbandonati.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 207. 63 Rosselli, Sleep, 200. 58

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be my whole being, and may the wave reward, held in difficult union, my blood, and from that supreme deceit may death become vermillion be given back to me, and I who from the passionate brawls of my comrades plucked that longing for death will enjoy, finally – the age of reason; and may all the white flowers along the shore, and all the weight of God beat upon my prisons.64

For Rosselli human eros paves the way towards God, because it expresses an aspiration for unity, as symbolised by sexual embrace. Eros can elevate the soul to the silent contemplation of the absolute, and to an ecstatic experience of happiness. … O sing we, with one short glance into the Arabic grammar, sing we, then ‘(I say), sing we uplifted from the ground and as yet not quite at the heavens, but static in our own innumerable undescribable tension of love fear and all that god has replenished the world with, time merrily chirping at the great wide interlaced gates opening finally at our demonish will but now is it god’s!65

In this poem Rosselli suggests that we “take a look at Arabic grammar” and then speaks of an ascent towards the heavens through our emotions, until we reach a goal, “diabolically” pursued by our own will that, in the end, coincides with God’s. We can see a clear reference to the ArabIslamic philosophy (which Rosselli probably knew through Plotinus), in particular to the doctrine of ecstasy as the culmination of all spiritual life. Such a path towards ecstasy is organized in three steps: first the 64

Rosselli, War Variations, 45; “Fui, volai, caddi tremante, nelle / braccia di Dio, e che quest’ultimo sospiro / sia tutt’il mio essere, e che l’onda premi, / stretti in difficile unione, il mio sangue, / e da quell’inganno supremo mi si renda / la morte divenuta vermiglia, ed io / che dalle commosse risse dai miei compagni staccavo / quell’ansia di morire / godrò, infine, – l’era della ragione; / e che tutti i fiori bianchi della riviera, e / che tutto il peso di Dio /battano sulle mie prigioni.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 170. 65 Rosselli, Sleep, 24.

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abandonment of the physical world; then the separation from our sensorial perceptions and finally the separation from the ideal world. The result is a great emptiness of the soul, devoid of any thought, desire and aspiration. Ecstasy, or unio mystica, is not a state of unconsciousness, but hyperconsciousness, it is not something irrational, but hyper-rational, because the soul sees itself deified and filled by the One. In another poem we read: … Decide against every even spent understanding that three are the scales: preparation morality and turpitude. When the descent to the foaming steps revealed unnecessary error you were ready to exchange all your land for deity.66

Driven by the desire to find a meaning in what she sees, Rosselli longs to find God who is the Beyond, hoping to solve the mystery of life. As an atheist, the only way in which she can experience the Beyond is to experience whatever love she can get, whether it is sexual or platonic. “Sex violent like an object (cavy of marble blanched) / amphora of crooked clay”67 – any love, however carnal, is a means to the achievement of wholeness. In Serie Ospedaliera we find a “whorish” Rosselli that “sleeps” with gods and becomes almost divine, so that her feet must be “washed,” a probable allusion to the episode of Magdalene washing Jesus’ feet in the Gospels.68 Corporeity is still an essential viaticum to the truth, announces the “pussy-cat,” a kind of sexual object who, although full of pride and prejudice, is perfectly aware of the body and its potential: Again the road to heaven is not in the delicacies of the spirit, but in our bodies’ firm will, announced pussy-cat, bloated with pride of prejudice.69

Along this “road to heaven,”70 “religion, the relationship with God”71 is merged with erotica. Both of these themes frequently recur in Amelia’s poetry. Within this context, ecstasy is not a grace granted by God, but is 66

Rosselli, Sleep,107. “Il sesso [è] violento come un oggetto (cava di marmo imbiancata) / (anfora di creta ricurva).” Locomotrix, 85, in Rosselli, Serie ospedaliera, Le poesie, 353. 68 Rosselli, Serie ospedaliera, in Le poesie, 186. 69 Unpublished, 9. 70 Unpublished, 9. 71 See Emmanuela Tandello, “Postfazione,” Rosselli, Sleep, 211. 67

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achievable by human means. In fact the Arab philosophers, in particular Avicenna and Averroes, place great emphasis on one of the last emanations, the closest to the earthly world, which was identified with the intellectus activus: “fiercely ready for action,” as Rosselli would say, because the rational part inside any human being can lead to the achievement of supreme peace. Rosselli, “anchorite and amorous” in her path of spiritual askesis, writes: “Belonging to a race of saints the / upshot of this long separation which / we ourselves must set to our pleasures.”72 Plinio Perilli depicts Rosselli as a “stilnovista and a fedele d’Amore,”73 referring to the medieval brotherhood of Holy Love, which counted among its members Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia and Dante.74 Within this context, the power of the woman was identified with the intellectus activus. 75 Amelia may be associated with this sect with respect to her veneration of love and her conscious adoption of eros as viaticum to spiritual fullness. “Turmoil in my blood and the thought of god / hidden in the folds of all impatience.”76 The will of a mighty mind never fails: if “the science of love” was her “weakness,” she manages to be a heroine thanks to the “science of numbers,” that is her “fortitude.” 77 Actually “love was like a chess game”78: after all, “in the nights passing like white / sheets we find an urgency devouring us / despite so many premises to a life / entirely dedicated to the reason.”79 This is nothing more than the certainty expressed in Sleep: “No love be granted to he who / hates all love save life / writ on paper there goes my seed wild into / death.” Torn between Passion and Reason, she opts for an 72

Rosselli, Sleep, 90-93. Plinio Perilli, “Anacoreta e amorosa. La poesia e l’anima di Amelia Rosselli,” La Scrittura, Estate/Autunno (1996): 27. 74 See the studies on Faithful of Love and their language peculiarity, by Luigi Valli and Alfonso Ricolfi: Luigi Valli, Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei «Fedeli d’Amore» (Milano: Luni Editrice, 1994), Alfonso Ricolfi, Studi sui «Fedeli d’Amore» (Milano: Luni Editrice, 2006). 75 For an alternative identification of “Amorous woman”-“Intellectus activus,” see Francesco Perez, La Beatrice svelata: preparazione all’intelligenza di tutte le opere di Dante Alighieri, ed. Ernesto Perez (Molfetta: Scuola Tip. per Sordomuti dell’Ist. Prov. Apicella) 1935. 76 Rosselli, Sleep, 48. 77 Amelia Rosselli, War Variations, 113; “La scienza dei / numeri era la mia fortitudine.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 205. 78 “l’amore era un gioco di scacchi.” Rosselli, Serie ospedaliera, Le Poesie, 536. 79 “Nelle notti che passano come bianchi / lenzuoli vi è un’urgenza che ci divora / malgrado le molte premesse ad una vita / intieramente dedicata alla ragione.” Rosselli, Documento, Le Poesie, 459. 73

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auto-imposed spinsterhood to dedicate herself to her own journey: “Once I had poetry. I chose not to marry because I did not want to be distracted from it.”80

IV. In Demetra’s kingdom The pain of life merges into the desire for Love and Death, both experiences that can produce a Sense. “Would it were death” is a text which is emblematic of Rosselli’s perturbing poetry: a poetess waiting for “death’s fine flame” preventing her being “eaten by the very life which so /appealingly does call out,”81 and associated with something sneering, like the wind, a natural element enticing her to a misleading life. However, in her copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Pensieri, Rosselli underlined some verses: “let them make our life with their own death”82 and the pensiero number 50: “Luxury is the cause of procreation / Gluttony is maintenance of life / Fear or dread is prolongation of life / Pain is salvation of the instrument.”83 Bring in your heavy load of dry herbs bring in your pain and keep it frozen to your own essence, it might shine itself into white light if you but dig into it.84

The other side of desire in Rosselli’s poetry implies the petrification of Eros: Rosselli always lived her desire “under the protection of death.”85 Indeed, desire is triggered by the alternance of absence and presence, a shock that drives the subject into the space of death.86 Death becomes a “necessary vehicle of our passions,” the unavoidable counterpart of the 80

Sandra Petrignani, “Non mi chiedete troppo, mi sono persa in un bosco,” in Una scrittura, 291. 81 Unpublished, 6. 82 Leonardo da Vinci, Pensieri, in Tutti gli scritti, ed. Augusto Marinoni (Milano: Rizzoli, 1952), 59. 83 83 “Lussuria è causa della generazione. / Gola è mantenimento di vita. / Paura ovver timore è prolungamento di vita. / Dolo[r] è salvamento dello strumento.” Leonardo da Vinci, Pensieri, 66. 84 Rosselli, Sleep, 54-55. 85 Rosselli, Primi scritti, in Le Poesie, 91. 86 Alessandro Baldacci, “Il Petrarca di Amelia Rosselli: da Mallarmé verso Celan,” in Un’altra storia. Petrarca nel Novecento italiano, ed. A. Cortellessa (Roma: Bulzoni, 2004), 271- 277.

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“incandescent / commotion of love.”87 The striving for death is governed both by the fear of the unknown and the trust in the ultimate escape from the existential anguish: “death / is the sweetest of companions.”88 In her Diario in tre lingue, the young Rosselli affirms: “O that I might rise and meet you at the round gates of hell!” And later, with a formula repeatedly used in the unpublished verse above, she writes: “I sit, and wait, for death’s fine door./ Open the door, open the door / (farsi una bella camomilla).”89 Between Life and Death our Sibyl of Trastevere remains waiting, always and forever. In the order of the straight streets beckons my orderly Upturning of life: be gone, you who disrupt the rigour Of void and the scarlet letter written to my soul An agony in waiting.90

In these lines we see a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. This novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, an English woman punished for her adultery according to the morally rigid Puritan law. Like the protagonist of Hawthorne’s story, Rosselli has an adulterous soul, as she cannot resist carnal love but waits for social redemption. Amelia seeks moral order, “straight streets,” “orderly upturning,” “the straight heart,”91 as she “cannot withstand the turn of life.”92 The reference to The Scarlet Letter illustrates Rosselli’s sense of exclusion from a world of righteousness and respectability.

V. The imperfect squaring of the circle I want to conclude my paper with a very interesting unpublished poem, which seems to be an epitaph that Rosselli wrote for herself: Here lies A.R. – she sits, lies, stands, drinks twists her mind out of order then puts it back again into order, with a thin87

Amelia Rosselli, War Variations, 251; “necessario veicolo delle nostre passioni” incandescente / turbamento dell’amore.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 271. 88 Rosselli, War Variations, 186; “la morte / è la più dolce delle compagnie.” Rosselli, Le Poesie, 240. 89 Rosselli, Primi scritti, 109 and 119. 90 Rosselli, Sleep, 102. 91 Rosselli, Sleep, 102. 92 Rosselli, Sleep, 102.

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The “belligerence” – what we bring inside94 – is connected with the need to love, with the inevitability of death and the essence of writing. All of these themes appear every time Rosselli mentions her “belly.” Rosselli invokes the “sweet, sweet, sweet, child,” then addresses a “belligerent waste,” a “penetrating delicacy,” “saliva watching / into the mystery of death which is a penetration:” the end consists of a call to the things that “take your hand / and beg: express me!”95 After all, the bowel from which the voice comes is also the belly that gives birth: the neologism “belligerence” is bound – even phonetically – to the idea of pregnancy as well as fight.96 Moreover, Rosselli speaks of the relationship with a man that “can become war, which must be the withdrawal of projected love and becomes female inner life or activity: there is a war that is also love.”97 Here lies the perturbing aspect of Rosselli’s erotica, which shapes how desire is articulated in her poems. In the notes to Sleep (in the 1989 edition published by Rossi and Spera) Rosselli comments on the opening poem “Well, so, patience,” and describes it as “the sublimation of sexual desire in writing,” establishing the body as a starting point. Here the body is still seen as a metaphysical problem, an object that cannot transcend its shape and that remains trapped in a prison cell. The body is not an alternative to the mind, but it represents one of its facets. Knowledge passes through the body, and transcendence passes through sexuality. “In the void of mortal power / all change must take a turn: you down and kill / suffer you be the host.”98 If there is a possibility of redemption, it is through the pain which leads to atonement through knowledge, so to Amelia the charis, the favour that God grants, lies in the suffering that God sends us, the compulsion to feel pain an opportunity for redemption through the body. Within this context, passion and desire bring pain and ultimately redemption. 93

Unpublished, 31. JƟURJƟULVJHVVLJHVWXPJƟUƟUH (to bring) plus belly. 95 Rosselli, Sleep, 154-55. 96 Let us consider the phonetic constraint of the Italian adjective “bellico” and the connection with the English “belly.” 97 Gabriella Caramore, “Paesaggio con figure,” in È vostra la vita che ho perso. Conversazioni e interviste 1964-1995, ed. Monica Venturini and Silvia De March (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2010), 280. 98 Rosselli, Sleep, 142. 94

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The line “rounding the point of belligerency” refers to T.S. Eliot’s “still point,” which alludes to Dante’s unmoved Mover, God. It is “a mathematically pure point,” the “generator of the dance of the cosmos.”99 To Rosselli, this point is laughter, a smirk and a false smile, a “triangular smirk” that is all that remains to a “soul discomposed,” watching “from afar but no regard of angels enwrapped / his studious regard with love.”100 The poetess does not achieve the “squaring of the circle” as she cannot find a balance between the tension of her own desire and the obstacles that stand in her way, therefore she can only laugh at her pain and accept the perturbing chthonic reality of love. My reading of Rosselli’s English poems has fleshed out the mechanism of desire, a desire that is never fulfilled. Rosselli appears as one of the desiderantes, soldiers waiting under the stars for those coming back from the battle, and the reader, just like her, cannot help carrying the feeling of an unresolved absence inside (carrying in the belly), of an often disillusioned wait that it is better to consider with irony. I am one of the several hungry like me but for God I will build if I am able to another channel to my need and my cravings will be quite different then!101

Bibliography Baldacci, Alessandro. “Il Petrarca di Amelia Rosselli: Da Mallarmé verso Celan.” Un’altra storia. Petrarca nel Novecento Italiano. Edited by Andrea Cortellessa. Roma: Bulzoni, 2004. 271-77. Butler, Judith. Subjecys of Desire: Human Reflections in 20th Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Caputo, Francesca. Una scrittura plurale. Saggi e interventi critici. Novara: Interlinea, 2004. Da Vinci, Leonardo. Tutti gli Scritti. Edited by Augusto Marinoni. Milano: Rizzoli, 1952. 99

Chiara Carpita, “Rebellion to the Gods.” Il conflitto con i “Santi Padri” nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli: I thank the author for having provided me with the text of the paper included in the session dedicated to Amelia Rosselli (“Conflictuality in the Poetry of Amelia Rosselli”), First MOSAICI Conference on Poetry in Conflict organizzato dalla University of St. Andrews (15-17 March 2010). 100 Rosselli, Sleep, 66. 101 “Io sono una fra / di tanti voraci come me ma per Iddio io forgerò / se posso un altro canale al mio bisogno e le / mie voglie saranno d’altro stampo!” Rosselli, Le poesie, 146.

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Di Stefano, Paolo. “Amelia Rosselli sulle palafitte.” La Repubblica. February 22, 1992. Ferroni, Giulio. “Un’altra vita perduta.” Galleria, numero speciale, a.48, n.1-2 (1997): 15-24. Palli Baroni, Gabriella. “Amelia Rosselli assetata d’amore: colloquio con Aldo Rosselli.” Trasparenze, 17-19 (2003): 59-64. Paz, Octavio. La duplice fiamma. Amore ed erotismo. Translated by Mariapia Lamberti. Milano: Garzanti, 1994. Perilli, Plinio. “Anacoreta e amorosa. La poesia e l’anima di Amelia Rosselli.” La Scrittura, Estate/Autunno (1996): 27-32. Re Lucia. “Frammenti di un discorso amoroso.” “Se/ dalle tue labbra uscisse la verità.” Amelia Rosselli a dieci anni dalla scomparsa. Quaderni del Circolo Rosselli. XXVII, no. 98 (3/2007): 53-65. —. “Variazioni su Amelia Rosselli.” Il Verri 3-4 (1993). 131-150. Rosselli, Amelia. È vostra la vita che ho perso. Conversazioni e interviste 1964-1995. Edited by Monica Venturini and Silvia De March. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2010. —. Le Poesie. Edited by Emanuela Tardello. Milano: Garzanti, 1997. —. Sleep. Poesie in inglese. Translated by Emmanuela Tardello. Milano: Garzanti, 1992. —. War Variations. Translated by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005. Vicentini, Isabella. “Un passo cavalleresco in una poesia da batticuore.” Galleria 1-2, no. 48 (1997): 89-90. Zambrano, Maria. All’ombra del dio sconosciuto: Antigone, Eloisa, Diotima. Edited by Elena Laurenzi. Parma: Pratiche, 1997. —. L’uomo e il divino. Translated by Giovanni Ferraro. Roma: Edizioni Lavoro, 2001.

PART II DESIRE AND POLITICS

CHAPTER FIVE DESIRING DISSENT: THE FUNCTION(S) OF DESIRE IN NESSUNO TORNA INDIETRO KATHLEEN GAUDET UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Alba de Céspedes’s Nessuno torna indietro,1 first published in November 1938 and depicting the period between the fall of 1934 and the summer of 1936, follows eight female characters residing in a religious boarding house in Rome. 2 Most of the boarders rebuke to varying degrees what Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls “the over-determined nature of gender and social roles under Fascism.” 3 Due to these socially inscribed norms, the frustrated young women cannot hope to deviate from their alreadydetermined futures if they do not capitalise on opportunities for transgression. In many cases, their breaching of the rules that Fascist rhetoric has dictated for them involves the desire for romantic relationships. In fact, for some of the protagonists, it is ironically their experience with men, whether actualised or simply yearned for, that allows them to confirm that they have options beyond that of becoming a wife and mother. 1

Carole C. Gallucci, “Alba de Céspedes’s There’s No Turning Back,” in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 202. 2 Although Ellen Victoria sees Emanuela as the protagonist of the work (see Ellen Victoria Nerenberg, “‘Donna proprio … proprio donna’: The Social Construction of Femininity in Nessuno torna indietro,” Romance Languages Annual 3 [1991], http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/RLA-Archive/1991/Italian-html/Nerenberg,Ellen.htm), for the purposes of this essay I consider all eight of the young women sufficiently important to plot development to be called protagonists. 3 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 189.

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In this paper I discuss the function of desire, which to Jay Clayton is “one of the master tropes of contemporary criticism,”4 in the depiction of the women’s efforts to come of age in Fascist Italy. That they feel and conceptualise love in a variety of ways is recognised by the women themselves, as evidenced by the following exchange: ‘We each have a different way of thinking about love,’ Milly said. ‘Some,’ observed Augusta, ‘don’t think about it at all.’ ‘That’s not true,’ Vinca retorted. ‘It’s just that there are those who confess it and those who don’t.’5

In order to highlight both how they diverge and how they converge, I have chosen to analyse a broad range of female characters rather than focusing in a detailed manner on a few of them. I first touch on the implications of Anna’s, Valentina’s, and Vinca’s more traditional desires. I then move to an examination of Milly, Augusta, Silvia, Xenia and Emanuela, who most openly grapple with life decisions that result from amorous desires transgressing gender norms that have been established by authority figures and society.6 Operating with the core assumption that the gendering of desire in Nessuno torna indietro is profoundly affected by the social institutions and practices that the novel in turn problematises, I also explore the connection between the socio-cultural context and the development of the protagonists’ romantic experiences. In doing so, I consider how the degree to which the characters act in accordance with or in opposition to 4 Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 34. Many theoretical texts focus on the philosophy of desire, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this essay. Especially useful is Hugh J. Silverman, ed., Philosophy and Desire (New York: Routledge, 2000). 5 “‘Ognuna di noi ha un modo diverso di pensare all’amore’ disse Milly. ‘Qualcuno’ precisò Augusta ‘non ci pensa affatto.’ ‘Non è vero’ ribatté Vinca: ‘Soltanto c’è chi lo confessa e chi no.’”Alba de Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro (Milan: Mondadori, 1966), 101. All translations are my own. Although the novel was first published in 1938, I quote from the later, revised edition. For a publishing history of the novel, see Marina Zancan, “Nessuno torna indietro,” in Romanzi, Alba de Céspedes, ed. Marina Zancan (Milan: Mondadori, 2011), 1611-1629. 6 Desire in Nessuno torna indietro corresponds, at least in a general sense, with René Girard’s foundational theory of desire as elaborated in Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Within this triangular model, the young women are subjects, each has a different object of desire, and the mediator in all cases is a society with significant divergence between social norms for males and those for females. See René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), especially 1-17.

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expectations for women influences how they are perceived and treated by others. Piera Carroli reminds us that Fascism emphasised the Mary-Eve dichotomy “between the woman who accepts the role traditionally imposed on her by male ethics and the woman who refuses it and is therefore ostracised by society.” 7 Indeed, many of the protagonists of Nessuno torna indietro are ostracised due to their refusal to passively follow the path that has been laid out for them. As I will show, however, there are appreciable, and sometimes curious, variations to this general rule. An important situational consideration is the convent in which most of the novel takes place, thus foregrounding the protagonists’ personal narratives. Though the Pensione Grimaldi is designed to suppress much of the young women’s desire, its effect is the opposite. Away from patriarchal influence, the women begin to question the gender roles decreed by Fascist doctrine and encouraged by their families. Within what Robin Pickering-Iazzi terms “a city within a city – a women’s city in Rome – ”8 they form a network that allows them to socialise and support one another, frequently gathering after lights-out under the pretence of study. While the students living at the Grimaldi are controlled by the permanent community of nuns who enforce the rules with gusto, insisting that the residents behave according to a narrowly conceived ideal for young woman, the relationship between the religious order and the students can be analysed in a light more sympathetic to the sisters. Ellen Nerenberg likens them to “those female Fascists who saw in Fascism relief to women’s predicament within Italian society,” 9 but the nuns are also imprisoned by the walls of the Grimaldi. By dedicating their lives to the Church, they have chosen one of the few widely accepted alternatives to marriage available to Italian women, a lifestyle that by definition excludes sexuality. They are not uniformly satisfied by the systemic inequities inherent to convent life. In fact, the very actions that infuriate the boarders 7 “Tra la donna che accetta il ruolo tradizionalmente impostole dall’etica maschile e la donna che lo rifiuta e perciò è ostracizzata dalla società.” Piera Carroli, Esperienza e narrazione nella scrittura di Alba de Céspedes (Ravenna: Longo, 1993), 48. 8 Robin Pickering-Iazzi, “The Sexual Politics of the Migrational City,” in Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, ed. Carole C. Gallucci and Ellen Victoria Nerenberg (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 90. 9 Ellen Victoria Nerenberg, Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 92.

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are indicative of the nuns’ discontent with the status quo. Vinca recognises this early in the novel when she claims that Suor Lorenza denies her the privilege of making a telephone call “out of anger, because she’s locked up in here.”10 In other words, the protagonists, who sense that they do not have to become prolific mothers and thus serve their time in the Grimaldi, are overseen by a religious group that represents one such choice under the limiting force of Fascism. With their vows of chastity and obedience, the nuns have renounced the possibility of expressing any kind of romantic desire. A last point regarding the framework of the novel is that de Céspedes develops the characters via both their individual actions and their interactions with each other. Notably, the solidarity that develops among the members of the group does not bar dissidence. The inventive narrative structure, which weaves together flashbacks, stories from individual women’s lives, and depictions of communal living, allows de Céspedes to highlight the variances of opinion represented by the female protagonists. Instead of glorifying the women’s community and struggle, de Céspedes depicts discordant elements that detract from an idealised vision of a women’s community. This is an essential feature of the novel’s sociopolitical message, since the women’s differentiated ideas and heated discussions reveal their individuality and the inadequacies of the Fascist ideal. The message is clear: encouraged models of female self-sacrifice leave no room for desire, whether formulated as sex (as in the Freudian conception) or as power (as in the Hegelian conception).11 Before discussing the protagonists who act in clear opposition to codes structuring female roles, it warrants mention that for all the young women living in the boarding house, realisation of desire is in some way impeded. Remarkably, this is true even for those whose goals are marriage and motherhood. Anna is a case in point. Unlike the majority of the young women, who “feel their way blindly, groping for opportunities beyond those Fascism afforded women,”12 Anna has a firm and cogent vision of her future. Although her desires to return to Puglia and to marry coincide almost exactly with Fascist ideals, her parents have decided to adopt a modern lifestyle and, contrary to sanctioned discourse and Fascist models, encourage Anna to finish her education and relinquish her ancestral roots. Their disavowal of a traditional rural lifestyle can be seen as a comment 10 “Per rabbia … perché lei sta chiusa qui dentro.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 10. 11 See Silverman, Philosophy and Desire, 1-7 for a detailed discussion of theories of desire as sex versus theories of desire as power. 12 Nerenberg, Prison Terms, 83.

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on the inevitability of change and is a clear disenchantment of the archetype at the base of much Fascist propaganda. As a result of their wish for Anna to be a modern and independent woman, she too must rebel in order to fulfil her desires. She thus goes against her parents in order to stay in Puglia, marry Mario Aponte, and presumably have children. Valentina and Vinca offer similar examples of young women for whom desire for a traditional life does not guarantee an easy path to maturity. In contrast with Anna, both Valentina and Vinca are unsuccessful in achieving their goal. Valentina wants to get married as should befit a young Italian woman, saying, “I wasn’t born to work; I would like to get married, to get married immediately: I think about it night and day.” 13 Her socioeconomic and familial position, however, dictates that she has no choice but to work. Valentina’s reaction to news that she receives while home for the summer in Puglia from other residents of the Grimaldi makes evident her discontent and jealousy at the life she cannot have; as is reported, “Valentina was upset by those letters that spoke always of love. In the evenings, in the white silence of the moon, she would hear the young people of the town sing, laugh, passing under her windows. 14 Since young love, not to mention matrimony, is an impossibility for her, Valentina’s desperate desire for marriage leads only to erotic fantasies involving an Indian prince, which are elaborated in detail and which, according to Gallucci, make plain “the way De Céspedes situates woman as the subject of her own desire, the creator of a prince who satisfies her different desires.”15 The Spanish resident, Vinca, also craves a committed, traditional relationship. She is deeply in love with her compatriot, who returns to Spain to fight in the civil war. Before leaving, he reassures her that they will be reunited: “I’ll come back soon. Or else you’ll come back to our country. Don’t you remember the discussions we had about Andalusia? If you wait for me, if you have the strength to truly wait for me … I’ll return, you’ll see.”16 Despite her total devotion to him, he becomes engaged to another woman. All three of these protagonists’ ability to realise their 13

“Non sono nata per lavorare; vorrei sposarmi, sposarmi subito: ci penso notte e giorno.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 191. 14 “Valentina era sconvolta da quelle lettere che parlavano sempre d’amore. La sera, nel silenzio bianco della luna, udiva i giovani del paese cantare, ridere, passando sotto le sue finestre.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 196. 15 Gallucci, “Alba de Céspedes,” 214. 16 “Tornerò presto. Oppure tornerai tu, al nostro paese. Non ti ricordi i discorsi che facevamo dell’Andalusia? Se tu mi aspetti, se hai la forza di aspettarmi davvero … Tornerò, vedrai.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 160.

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respective objectives proves negatively affected by barriers imposed by dominant male characters: Anna’s by her father, whose insistence that she become independent and self-sufficient is ironic given that she is the woman who most craves a traditional lifestyle; Valentina’s by her uncles, whose mistreatment necessitates her staying at home to support her mother; and Vinca’s by Luis, with whom she is hopelessly enamoured even after he betrays her trust, leaving her alone and dejected. There is a certain feeling of injustice in the fates of both the women who wish to conform and those who do not, especially given the obstacles they must face. The consequences of Milly’s yearnings seem designed to evoke the most sympathy from the reader. She comes to the boarding house because her single father sent her to Rome from Milan after misinterpreting the nature of her meetings with a blind musician. True to her meek, passive, and forgiving disposition, the sickly Milly does not hold her father’s actions against him; she is happy to have her days free to play the harmonium and write in Braille to the blind man with whom she shares a relationship that is to all appearances platonic. Her interactions with him provide her with great pleasure and a sense of purpose. As she reports to Emanuela upon reading his letter: The words enter into my skin, into my blood. Do you notice yourself breathing, perhaps? And yet life enters into you. This is what happens to me with his words. He says that we must play the same oratory at the Christmas mass. It’s necessary that I stay well, that I manage to go, do you understand? Otherwise it would be a betrayal.17

The extent to which Milly is penalised for her perceived transgression is revealed when she is on her deathbed. The nuns who run the Grimaldi want to contact her father, but Milly has grown to appreciate her freedom and insists that she would rather die in Rome than return to Milan with him, stating, “yesterday the nun said that she wanted to write to my father. If she writes to him, Papa will come immediately to get me; and if I return to Milan with him I will truly die.”18 Her father arrives in Rome only after

17

“Le parole entrano nella pelle, nel sangue. Ti accorgi di respirare, forse? Eppure la vita entra in te. Così m’accade con le sue parole. Dice che dobbiamo sonare lo stesso oratorio alla messa di Natale. Bisogna che stia bene, che riesca a scendere, capisci? Se no sarebbe un tradimento.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 6465. 18 “Ieri la suora ha detto che vuole scrivere a mio padre. Se gli scrive, papa verrà a prendermi súbito; e se torno con lui a Milano muoio davvero.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 105.

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she has already passed away. Considering the circumstances, his behaviour is baffling: He did not even regret that he had not been there the evening before, that he had seen his daughter again when she was already marble. He made one feel uneasy and understand why Milly preferred to stay far away; but he was kind, very courteous: he shook everyone’s hand saying: “thank you, thank you.”19

Though he is reportedly “kind, very courteous,”20 Milly’s father denies her comfort at the end of her life because he believes that she has acted in opposition to stringent gender norms. Even if his suspicions were true, his grievous action is unwarranted and extreme. When compared with Milly, Augusta is at the opposite extreme in her views of marriage and motherhood. Indeed, her rejection of traditional male-female relationships is total. An aspiring author, she is the oldest student at the Grimaldi, the resident closest to the inner circle of nuns, and the most vocal opponent of resigning oneself to life as a meek and obedient wife. Wanting to apprise the younger women of her opinionated feminist viewpoints, she encourages them to gather in her bedroom, “the only room in which one felt that someone really lived,” 21 where she predicates the merits of a male-free existence. Her long tenure at the Grimaldi suggests that she values life among women, but she is also realistic with her companions about the impermanence of their situation. Marriage, the inevitable fate of many among them, is a dividing force that renders impossible the kind of friendship that can develop in an all-female space. In what could be considered the maxim by which she lives, she proposes a solution: “to liberate herself from the tyranny of man, the woman must take his place, creating for herself an autonomous life, freed also from the servitude of the senses: she must achieve independence of spirit and of flesh.”22 19

“Neanche si rammaricava di non essersi trovato lì la sera prima, di aver rivisto la figliola quando era già di marmo. Imponeva soggezione e si capiva che Milly preferisse starne lontana; ma era gentile, compitissimo: strinse la mano a tutti dicendo: ‘grazie, grazie.’” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 112. 20 “… gentile, compitissimo.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 112. 21 “La sola camera dove si sentiva che qualcuno viveva veramente.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 24. 22 “La donna per liberarsi dalla tirannia dell’uomo deve sostituirsi a lui, creandosi una vita autonoma, affrancata anche dalla servitù dei sensi: deve conseguire l’indipendenza dello spirito e della carne.”De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 271-272.

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Two of Augusta’s desires explicitly subvert “cultural constructions of the bourgeois family, romantic love, and femininity.”23 The first of these is her desire to live independently as a female intellectual. Augusta is cognisant of the unfeasibility of being both a writer and a woman conforming to the Fascist model and has firmly decided that the former is of preference. Rejecting femininity has physical consequences, since her appearance and mannerisms change in accordance with the “masculine” activity in which she engages: as a consequence of the long hours Augusta spends writing, for example, “her gestures were every day less feminine.” 24 Appropriately, the topic of her work will be “a universal problem: the conflict between man and woman.” 25 The second, and somewhat related, of these desires is linked to the manner in which Augusta, as Gallucci states, “challenges the heterosexual contract, and provides configurations of lesbian desire.”26 In a revealing exchange with Vinca and Silvia, Augusta suggests that she recognises the potential for sexual desire between two adult women.27 Other aspects of her personality and actions likewise hint at her homosexuality. According to Nerenberg, Augusta’s “unambiguous feelings about marriage and men” allow the identification of “a lesbian position.”28 Like Augusta, Silvia chooses scholarly pursuits over a traditional lifestyle. 29 She struggles with the realities of this decision when she develops feelings for her supervisor. Such desire, based at least in part on her admiration of his academic accomplishments, is problematic; as Pickering-Iazzi indicates, “the scenes between Silvia and professor 23

Gallucci, “Alba de Céspedes,” 215. “I suoi gesti erano ogni giorno meno femminili.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 358. 25 “Un problema universale: il conflitto tra uomo e donna.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 212. 26 Gallucci, “Alba de Céspedes,” 209. 27 De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 102. 28 Nerenberg, “Donna proprio.” Both Gallucci and Nerenberg perform analyses of Augusta’s lesbianism. Nerenberg’s is the more detailed of the two. See Gallucci,“Alba de Céspedes,” 209-210 and Nerenberg, “Donna proprio.” 29 Carletti analyses the intellectualism of Augusta and Silvia in significant detail, suggesting that their “nonconformity to feminine canons” (121) cause them to be displaced from both the female and male world. See Carletti, “Internalizing the Gaze: Surveillance, Sin, and Mortality in Nessuno torna indietro,” in Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, ed. Carole C. Gallucci and Ellen Victoria Nerenberg (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 119-126. See also Gallucci, “Alba de Céspedes,” 207211. 24

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Belluzzi propose both a form of romantic desire arising from shared intellectual labours of love and its impossibility.”30 For Silvia, intellectual and lover are mutually exclusive possibilities, since her “‘sacrificed femininity’ and her renunciation of love are the price she has to pay for her ‘incursion into man’s dominion.’” 31 Ultimately, Silvia’s desire for the autonomy necessary to be an intellectual is greater than her feelings of romantic desire for Belluzzi or her willingness to attempt to find romantic love with another man. Observing Belluzzi’s relationship with his wife Dora, who epitomises stereotypical femininity, makes Silvia further aware of her priorities. She therefore symbolically departs for Littoria to take up a teaching job that Belluzzi has found for her. Of all the women, with the obvious exception of Augusta, Xenia breaks most transparently with the conventional role of women, taking concrete and cogent steps to liberate herself from propagandised models of female self-sacrifice. After failing her exams, she leaves the Grimaldi and travels to Milan, where she finds employment in a glove shop and lives independently until a mutual friend introduces her to Dino Ricci, a young businessman. Initially, her pursuit of him is motivated by her need to be the object of desire, to be loved, needed, and wanted. Though her growing ambivalence is clear in her response of “no, but … I like him,”32 when asked if she is in love with Dino, she becomes continually more interested in him.33 Xenia reflects on her goals while on vacation with Dino and his friends. Alone in front of the mirror, she wonders what her desires reveal about her: “but is a woman who is determined to take a lover actually pure? Or is she impure even if she is intact?” 34 She considers the alternative, which would entail returning to her elderly parents, and comes to a resolute verdict:

30 Robin Pickering-Iazzi, “The Sexual Politics of the Migrational City,” in Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, ed. Carole C. Gallucci and Ellen Victoria Nerenberg (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 96. 31 Carletti, “Internalizing the Gaze,” 124. 32 “No, ma … mi piace.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 160. 33 “Ma è pura davvero la donna risoluta a prendersi un amante? O è impure anche se è intatta?” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 165. 34 “Libertà. Gran cosa la libertà. Tentava di convincersi che, di questi tempi, la famiglia, il matrimonio, non hanno più grande importanza; tentava di riderne perfino. ‘La verità è che poche donne hanno il coraggio di confessare: mi va un amante, sì, me lo piglio.’” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 166.

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Freedom. Freedom is a great thing. She tried to convince herself that, in these times, family and marriage are no longer of great importance; she even tried to laugh about it. “The truth is that few women have the courage to confess: I want a lover, yes, I will take one.”35

The beginning of Xenia’s sexual relationship with Dino signals a significant, unequivocal shift. Deciding to give in fully to her desires, she takes advantage of her femininity to become a kept woman. At first her primary goal was the relationship itself – even before it officially began, she wanted only “that he at least kiss her.”36 Now, however, her desire is not so much for Dino as it is for his lifestyle and his money. Dismissing the promoted archetype of male-female relationships, she embraces her new sense of freedom and power. Though Dino is the catalyst for Xenia’s transformation, he is just the first of a series of men with whom she is involved. Valerio Ferme sums up the progression as follows: After her first lover, Dino, is jailed for some bad business deals, Xenia takes up with Raimondo Horsch, a married man who keeps her as his mistress, lavishes expensive gifts on her, and even gives her the fake title of baroness. To reach her goal of being financially secure, she then renounces her love for Maurice, a young bohemian tennis player she meets on vacation, preferring instead a life of sensual, unadulterated pleasure that defies the social standards of the time for women.37

Xenia’s choices regarding Maurice are especially telling. Before meeting him in Nice, she is quite adamant that her contentment does not hinge on men or love. Like Valentina, whose fantasy life “gives literary representation to female sexuality and autoeroticism,” 38 Xenia is the source of her own happiness. In fact: To her, of all pleasures, only one seemed beyond compare: to enjoy oneself, one’s own company, one’s own image. Women think that

35

“Che la baciasse, almeno.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 127. Valerio Ferme, “Marriage and Child-Rearing: Alba de Céspedes’ Nessuno torna indietro vis-à-vis the Social Framework of Mussolini’s Pro-Natal, Pro-Marriage Campagins of the Ventennio,” Italian Quarterly 43 (2006): 54. 37 Gallucci, “Alba de Céspedes,” 213. 38 “A lei di tutti i piaceri, uno soltanto pareva ineguagliabile: godere di se stessa, della sua compagnia, della sua immagine. Le donne pensano che la felicità venga soltanto dall’amore. Lei era perfettamente felice eppure non si era mai inamorata.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 307-308. 36

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Her reactions to Maurice cast doubt on this assertion by making her temporarily receptive to the idea that she is capable of developing meaningful romantic connections. Nonetheless, when he asks her to live with him she is unwilling to give up the material comforts that her life as Horsch’s mistress provides. Still, her relationship with Horsch, though apparently not based on romantic desire, goes deeper than the lavish lifestyle they share. She feels some obligation to him, but they also have the same vision of what success for them entails: She had accepted the part that he was offering to her: loyalty was the compensation, the only honour that she still had. Furthermore, only to him could she show herself as she was. There existed between them a profound affinity, a secret resemblance: for her, as for Horsch, the life dreamed for was nothing but the chance to arrive where they wanted, with whatever means.40

Xenia’s desire for a life of pleasure and independence in the end eclipses her desire for true love. Ferme points to the larger significance of her decision, arguing that though eventually she must choose … erotic self-indulgence over the love for Maurice, Xenia’s choice to return to her life as a kept woman is symbolic of a new, more practical way of understanding womanhood and its challenges under Fascism.41

Interestingly, the fact that Xenia opts to indulge her subversive desires has a positive outcome; unlike the majority of her former classmates, “she becomes rich, lives in a lavishly-furnished home, and enjoys the social atmosphere of her own salon, a clear rebuff to the idea that a woman’s perversion of the nation’s moral agenda will lead to her downfall.”42

39

“Lei aveva accettato la parte che egli le offriva: la lealtà era la contropartita, il solo onore che le restava. Inoltre, a lui soltanto poteva mostrarsi qual era. Esisteva tra loro un’affinità profonda, una segreta somiglianza: per lei, come per Horsch, la vita sognata non era che la possibilità di arrivare dove volevano, con qualunque mezzo.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 317-318. 40 Ferme, “Marriage and Child-Rearing”: 54. 41 Ferme, “Marriage and Child-Rearing”: 55. 42 Carletti, “Internalizing the Gaze,” 114.

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In terms of desire and the results thereof, Emanuela’s situation is particularly challenging. She has a tangible reminder of past transgressions in her young daughter, the product of her relationship with an air force pilot killed during a training flight. Pregnant when he dies, Emanuela finds herself in an impossible bind, having two equally uncomfortable options: abort the foetus or give birth to a child who would keep the memory of her lover alive, but would also be symbolic of her weakness in giving in to desires of the flesh. She decides on the latter, and the child is taken from her soon after birth. Carletti describes the complexity of Emanuela’s attempt to appease her parents and lessen the disgrace on the family: More than any other character, Emanuela embodies the conflicts deriving from the attempt to adjust one’s image to the model offered by society. Having sinned, Emanuela is asked to cover her deviation from the norm by lying, so that the gaze of society might find her conforming to its reassuring standards. Emanuela finds herself playing two incompatible roles: ‘la ragazza che abitava in un pensionato per studentesse, la madre che bussava al collegio della figlia.’43

By the time Emanuela is allowed to move to Rome to be closer to Stefania, who now lives in a convent-run boarding school, 44 a critical period has passed. She and Stefania have developed separate lives built on half-truths and lies, and cannot achieve any real mother-daughter intimacy. Emanuela hated the idea of carrying “a creature that hoarded her blood, that grew in her in spite of her, owner of her life even before being born,” and now struggles to develop a maternal identity.45 Stefania, the consequence of her mother’s first experience of deep desire for a man, factors heavily into the failure of Emanuela’s second attempt at romantic love. Emanuela recognises that there is no place for her daughter in her relationship with Andrea, a chauvinistic university student with traditional conceptions of marriage and male-female relations, so keeps Stefania a secret from him. As the deceit becomes increasingly problematic, Emanuela begins to detach herself from Stefania, at one point going so far as to dine with Andrea and his parents 43

Note the analogous living situation of mother and daughter, which points to their closeness in age and maturity. 44 “Una creatura che accaparrava il suo sangue, che cresceva in lei a suo dispetto, padrona della sua vita già prima di nascere.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 96. 45 “Se moriva, niente più discorso ad Andrea. Avrebbe seguito il funerale, sola, con un velo in viso, e con l’ombra di quel padre ignoto che costruiva aeroplani.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 238.

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rather than staying with her critically ill daughter. In this moment her desire for a new life with Andrea is more impelling than any lingering sense of maternal responsibility she might feel. In fact, she considers how things would change for the better if Stefania were to die: “if she died, no more discussion with Andrea. She would attend the funeral, alone, with a veil over her face, and with the shadow of that unknown father who built airplanes.”46 Emanuela eventually discloses her past to Andrea, thus shattering the idealised image that he had built of her. His reaction, although expected, is as severe as it is hypocritical. He cannot accept that Emanuela has felt desire for and slept with another man and is bothered by her claim that she did not love Stefano. The idea that she had sex solely to satisfy bodily desires is at the core of his displeasure: The Emanuela that I loved, if she had gone to bed with someone would have done it for love. On the contrary, you didn’t love him, you told me. You did it to know what it was like, no? A kind of woman that I detest …47

Andrea continues his tirade, his harsh words condemning Emanuela’s immorality. He soon makes an ironic admission of his own: I’ve been sincere from the first moment, I haven’t even pretended to be better, to please you, I’ve come across as nervous, impatient, even heartless … The only thing that I have hidden from you is having had, occasionally, some women. Women I had never seen before, like one takes an aspirin for a headache.48

His words imply a socially entrenched double standard. Andrea’s transitory sexual encounters with these women are somehow justified by his being a man “di oggi” needing to satisfy his sexual needs, while Emanuela’s relationship with one man is incomprehensible, since as a woman she must live by a different moral code. Though in hard fact Emanuela and Andrea have committed very similar sins by hiding their 46

“L’Emanuela che amavo, se fosse andata a letto con qualcuno l’avrebbe fatto per amore. Invece tu non lo amavi, m’hai detto. L’hai fatto per sapere che cos’era, no? Un genere di donne che detesto …” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 368. 47 “Sono stato sincero fin dal primo momento, non mi sono nemmeno finto migliore, per piacerti, mi sono mostrato nervoso, impaziente, duro persino … . L’unica cosa che ti ho nascosto è di aver avuto, di passaggio, qualche donna. Donne mai viste prima, come si prende un’aspirina per il mal di testa.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 369. 48 Ferme, “Marriage and Child-Rearing”: 53.

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sexual past, what sets them apart, in Andrea’s mind, is “his duplicitous belief that he is entitled to what she is not.”49 Like other women at the Grimaldi, Emanuela must acquiesce her desire for the emotional stability afforded by a committed, traditional relationship with a man. Andrea’s rejection of her nonetheless has positive repercussions. Forced to take responsibility for her own future, she withdraws Stefania from boarding school and departs with her on a cruise around the world. She appreciates that by taking the hard way out and not trying to reconcile with Andrea, she has in some way saved both herself and her daughter. Emanuela recognises that Stefania, formerly a burden, has been transformed into her liberator: She should be grateful to Stefania: without the little girl she would have married Andrea out of laziness. She would have grown old next to him, among merchants and professionals of the petit bourgeoisie: evenings at the cinema, later eating pizza, and summers in Rimini or Riccione. She felt a shiver in her spine, at that idea.50

By both physically and metaphorically setting sail from Italy, Emanuela seizes an opportunity to start anew, this time independently of oppressive influences. Within and outside their community in Rome, all of the young female protagonists of Nessuno torna indietro struggle to define roles for themselves. Whether by choice or by fate, at the end of the novel most of their romantic desires, which, as I have shown, differ greatly from woman to woman, are superseded by their desire or need to act independently of men: Augusta remains at the boarding house to continue writing, Xenia gives up romantic love to stay with Horsch, Valentina supports herself and her mother, Vinca decides to leave the Spanish women with whom she lives and takes a job in order to provide for herself, Silvia finds employment away from Belluzzi, and Emanuela takes her daughter and embarks on a trip. The exceptions are Milly, who dies prematurely, and Anna, the only one of the students to assume a life representative of 49

“Doveva essere grata a Stefania: senza la bambina avrebbe sposato Andrea, per pigrizia. Sarebbe invecchiata accanto a lui, tra negozianti e professionisti piccoli borghesi: la sera al cinema, poi a mangiare la pizza e l’estate a Rimini o a Riccione. Provava un brivido per la schiena, a quell’idea.” De Céspedes, Nessuno torna indietro, 397. 50 Michela De Giorgio, preface to Writing Beyond Fascism, Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, ed. Carole C. Gallucci and Ellen Victoria Nerenberg (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 13.

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Fascist moral and cultural codes (although, of course, she must act in opposition with her parents in order to achieve this). It is important to observe, as Michela De Giorgio does, that despite their suffering, “de Céspedes’s young women are not victims, at least in sentimental terms.”51 I would argue that De Giorgio’s view is especially valid for Augusta, Silvia, Xenia and Emanuela. The impact of the sociocultural context in these women’s exploration of desire has interesting implications. While they are certainly repressed by virtue of their gender and other restrictions imposed by society under Fascism, the chastisement that they face for expressing desire is ironically instrumental in their eventual self-liberation, since it forces them to look further than what they initially perceive to be their respective sentimental and social destinies. Punished for embracing a morality dissonant with Fascist ethic, they discover that they do not need to, and indeed cannot, rely on men if they wish to conduct meaningful, productive lives.

Bibliography Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Carletti, Sandra. “Internalizing the Gaze: Surveillance, Sin, and Morality in Nessuno torna indietro.” In Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, edited by Carole C. Gallucci and Ellen Victoria Nerenberg, 110-131. London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Carroli, Piera. Esperienza e narrazione nella scrittura di Alba de Céspedes. Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Clayton, Jay. The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. De Céspedes, Alba. Nessuno torna indietro. Milan: Mondadori, 1966. De Giorgio, Michela. Preface to Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, edited by Carole C. Gallucci and Ellen Victoria Nerenberg, 7-18. London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Ferme, Valerio. “Marriage and Child-Rearing: Alba De Cèspedes’ Nessuno torna indietro vis-à-vis the Social Framework of Mussolini’s Pro-Natal, Pro-Marriage Campaigns of the Ventennio.” Italian Quarterly 43 (2006): 48-61.

51

Michela De Giorgio, preface to Writing Beyond Fascism, 8.

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Gallucci, Carole C. “Alba de Céspedes’s There’s No Turning Back.” In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi, 200-219. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Nerenberg, Ellen Victoria. “‘Donna proprio… proprio donna’: The Social Construction of Femininity in Nessuno torna indietro.” Romance Languages Annual 3 (1991). http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/RLA-Archive/ 1991/Italian-html/Nerenberg,Ellen.htm. —. Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. “The Sexual Politics of the Migrational City.” In Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, edited by Carole C. Gallucci and Ellen Victoria Nerenberg, 85-109. London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Silverman, Hugh J., ed. Philosophy and Desire. New York: Routledge, 2000. Zancan, Marina. “Nessuno torna indietro.” In Romanzi, Alba de Céspedes, edited by Marina Zancan, 1611-1629. Milan: Mondadori, 2011.

CHAPTER SIX MEDIATED DESIRE AND MODERN MASCULINITIES: CONSTRUCTING THE MALE SELF AND OTHER IN I DUE AMICI EMMA KEANE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK

In Alberto Moravia’s sizeable body of narrative, which spans over sixty years, many recurrent themes can be identified in its ambiguous representations of gender and sexuality. While female identities are grotesque creations that are often regrettably limited to mother-whore dichotomies, male identities are continuously questioned and reshaped in his works, albeit through a parallel employment of binary oppositions. The Roman writer’s inept male protagonists are defined by intellectual malaise and, most significantly, by a hyperconsciousness of their waning influence in the ever-changing social, political and cultural reality of 20th century Italy. This is especially evident in Moravia’s postwar novels, in which the male self is split between sexual and intellectual impulses, a dualism that dominates oppositions between male characters while representing self and other. In the unfinished and posthumous I due amici, a rivalry which distinguishes between impotent and prepotent male identities is created through a contraposition of Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean readings of desire, both of which symbolise the polarised political ideologies of wartime and postwar Italy. Preceding the homoerotic triangle of desire presented in Il disprezzo, this novel consists of three versions of one definitive story, which describes the psychosexual dynamics behind political choice and motivation. This essay investigates the articulation of homoerotic male sexualities in this work through an analysis of the prevalence of the sociopolitical to the protagonist Sergio’s triangulation of

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desire and his construction of the self. Focusing mainly on Version B, the second and most significant of the three drafts of I due amici in relation to the representation of postwar masculinities, we argue that this narrative both deviates from as well as conforms to Moravia’s prior and subsequent literary structures of gender and power. It is thought that Moravia commenced writing I due amici directly after finishing Il conformista, which was published in 1951. The three drafts of the same basic work were not published until Simone Casini’s edition in 2007, when the title was also added by the editor. Although various problems confront any critical analysis of this work, due to its incompletion and the existence of multiple drafts, common reference points can also serve to underline the central foci of this literary project. One of the principal connectors between this work and Il conformista, for example, is the homoerotic subtext that the writer attaches to ideological fanaticism. In fact, both narratives’ protagonists exemplify a highly allegorical sexual repression and a noteworthy contempt towards their female counterparts. In the case of the unfinished texts, all three drafts trace the friendship between another typical Moravian inetto, the journalist Sergio Maltesi, and his antagonist Maurizio. The drafts converge upon the figure of the intellectual’s sense of inferiority when facing the “progress” that modern society had already aggressively sustained in this period through Capitalism and war. This anxiety is portrayed as the catalyst for the intellectual Sergio’s involvement with the Communist party, a drive spurred on by his feelings of subordination to a model of manhood in postwar Italy that was connected to action and, by association, power. “Version A” is the least structured and articulate of the three drafts, and recounts events in Rome in the days following the fall of Fascism in 1943. Viewed by Simone Casini as the most autobiographical of the three drafts (XLIV), it is perhaps for this reason that the narrative fails to engage the reader by virtue of its obsessive focus on historical events. “Version B,” possibly the most compelling whilst demonstrating a fervent theatricality (for which it is somewhat reminiscent of Gli indifferenti), concentrates on the period after Liberation in Italy, in which the tensions between an emergent Communist party and exemplars of the Fascist political establishment are evident. Here Moravia manages to balance historical detail and the psychological nuances of his characters, and the rivalry between men has never been so intimately conceptualised. Finally, the third version – “Version C” – sees Moravia adopt a more subjective and essayistic style by shifting from third to first person, foregrounding a technique that would be more successfully mastered in later novels. Despite this, most of the experiences from the second draft remain. The

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reader becomes privy to the innermost insecurities and existential reflections of Sergio in this final draft in particular. Less emphasis is placed on the dualisms between the ideologies of Left and Right incarnated in protagonist and antagonist, for the practical reason that the existence of these differences is continuously called into question by Sergio himself, as the following stream of consciousness attests: Maurizio was essentially the symbol of everything that I wanted to overcome inside and outside of myself, the battle against Maurizio was the testing ground of both my personal strength and the strength of the ideas and principles that I had embraced. I don’t know if it was the awareness of the material difference between the two of us, or the importance of the stake of this quite modest rivalry. I knew only that I was suffering …1

The incongruity between the sexually repressive and psychologically perceptive behaviours of Moravia’s male characters is less manifest in his third person narratives, and in this case Version C. To Sergio the Communist intellectual, Maurizio is a type of alter ego, and represents the emptiness behind his own political motivation. As an active member of the partito, the journalist is outwardly an ideal man of action in this historical context, but his ideological beliefs reveal a stimulus that is fundamentally narcissistic and over-compensatory when confronted with the political Other. Moravia attempts to deconstruct the psychological motivation behind these propensities, and interpret what lies behind these desires. Sergio seeks to convert his friend to Communism despite Maurizio’s self-proclaimed inclinations towards Fascism, and precisely due to these very convictions, as the following citation from Version B imparts: Besides the mutual fondness and obscure and unexplainable attraction that Sergio felt for Maurizio … Between them there was this matter of the conversion to Communism, suspended and unspoken but acknowledged by both, almost like a game whose rules were known to them both. In reality, then, this game, Sergio thought, was a test of strength: the strength of the idea of whose truth and reality he was trying to convince his friend … 1

“Maurizio era insomma il simbolo di tutto quello che volevo vincere dentro e fuori di me, la lotta contro Maurizio era il banco di prova, come si dice, della mia forza personale e di quella delle idee e dei principi che avevo abbracciato. Non so se mi facesse soffrire di più la consapevolezza della differenza di materia tra noi due o dell’importanza della posta in gioco in questa rivalità in fondo così modesta. Sapevo soltanto che soffrivo …” Alberto Moravia, I due amici. Frammenti di una storia fra guerra e dopoguerra, ed. Simone Casini (Milano: Bompiani, 2007), Version C, 351. All translations from I due amici are my own.

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After all, he was convinced that there was nothing but weakness on Maurizio’s side: weakness produced by the lack of ideas, personal and individual weakness of a man whom he judged as weaker than himself, weakness finally of a social situation that the same friend viewed as desperate and condemned and refused.2

Through a focus on the rivalry between two opposing ideologies and power struggles, Moravia subverts the typical association of the rich borghesia (represented by Maurizio) with hegemonic authority. Furthermore, Sergio’s attempt to convert his friend to an ideology is highlighted for its relation to sexual repression: “the attraction he felt for Maurizio annoyed him and he thought that once Maurizio had become a Communist, such an attraction would become legitimate and justified.”3 There is an evident connection between this self-conscious reasoning, and the author’s commentary on the political codification of gender and sexual norms elsewhere. In Il conformista, Marcello Clerici’s Fascism legitimates his sexual ambiguity. Moravia’s message was simple: “something that has a negative connotation at the individual’s level becomes (or so it is thought) something positive at the collective level.”4 Indeed, this discourse is reiterated in Sergio’s obsession with the conversion of his love rival to Communism: Being Communist, however, seemed to him to be the only positive purpose of his life; but this purpose also required, he felt, a confirmation, a victory, a recovery of self-love. In other words, even this position would be transformed into a negative, where he would not manage to do what at this 2 “C’era insomma tra di loro, oltre alla simpatia mutua e all’attrazione oscura e inesplicabile che Sergio provava per Maurizio, questa questione della conversione al comunismo sospesa o taciuta ma ammessa da ambedue, quasi come un gioco le cui regole fossero note ad ambedue. In realtà poi questo gioco, come pensava Sergio, era una prova di forza: forza dell’idea della cui verità e realtà egli cercava di convincere l’amico. Egli era convinto d’altronde che dalla parte di Maurizio non ci fosse che debolezza: debolezza prodotta dalla mancanza d’idea, debolezza personale e individuale di un uomo che giudicava meno forte di sé, debolezza finalmente di una situazione sociale che l’amico stesso confessava disperata e rifiutava e condannava.” Moravia, I due amici, Version B, 113-14. 3 “quella sua attrazione per Maurizio gli dava vagamente fastidio e pensava che una volta diventato comunista, questa attrazione avrebbe avuto un carattere lecito e giusto.” Moravia, I due amici, Version B, 102. 4 “un fatto che ha un valore negativo su di un piano individuale si tramuta (o si crede che si tramuti) in positivo sul piano collettivo.”Alberto Moravia in Enzo Siciliano, Alberto Moravia. Vita, parole e idee di un romanziere (Milano: Bompiani, 1982), 72.

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Sergio’s desire to legitimise his homoerotic rivalry with Maurizio through political masquerade is another attempt by one of Moravia’s inetti to repress desire through ideology. Influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s thesis that “sexual consciousness and mystical sentiments cannot coexist,” 6 Moravia points to the critical role that sexual repression plays in its relation to “mystical excitations” such as Fascism and Communism. I due amici reveals itself to be just as scathing towards the politics of Sergio as it is towards Maurizio’s “ideology.” From this brief introduction to Moravia’s treatment of Communism, it might be easy to misinterpret his reflections as mere political rhetoric, but it is important to note that the writer’s disenchantment with the political representation of Communism in the postwar years is palpable not just through the comparison made between Fascist and Communist struggles for power personified in these rival figures. In this regard, an important essay is “La speranza ossia Cristianesimo e Comunismo” (“Hope or Christianity and Communism”), published in 1944, in which the writer expounds the quasi-religious idealism of the Communist ideology, hinting at its fundamental irrationality as a belief system which, like religion, bases itself on the premise that hope brings salvation. Our desire to convert others to our religion is no different to our desire to convert to Communism, when salvation is promised as a reward in both cases. Sergio’s desire to convert Maurizio in I due amici is questioned for its psychological ramifications in Moravia’s attempt to further examine this discourse. What becomes apparent is that in the course of the postwar years and leading into the early 1950s Moravia had lost all faith in Communism’s manifestation of power because, like Fascism, it required the end to justify the means, 7 adopting rational means to justify a wholly irrational end. 5 “L’esser comunista però gli pareva il solo punto positivo della propria vita; ma anche questo punto richiedeva, come sentiva, una conferma, una vittoria, una rivalsa dell’amor proprio. In altri termini anche questo punto si sarebbe tramutato in un punto negativo, ove non fosse riuscito a fare quello che ormai formava l’ossessione dei suoi giorni: convertire Maurizio al comunismo.” Moravia, I due amici, Version B, 156. 6 Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (M.D, London, Souvenir Press, 1991), 183. Author’s use of italics. 7 “Nel mondo moderno l’uomo non è che un mezzo e si è detto che questo mezzo è sempre adoperato razionalmente ossia con il massimo di violenza”. Alberto Moravia, L’uomo come fine, in L’uomo come fine e altri saggi, (Bompiani, Milano 1964), 217.

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The negative characterisation of the Communist intellectual is not altogether new to scholars of Moravia’s literature, since even prior to the period of production of this work, inept antifascist activists foregrounded his general anti-ideological positioning. With the depiction of ineffective intellectuals such as Mino in La romana and Professor Quadri in Il conformista, Moravia depicts these masculinities as fraudulent performances of political action. Their political conviction is challenged through their antiheroic representation. The mediation of Sergio’s desire in I due amici reiterates the author’s belief in the close relationship between sexual and political compulsions in periods of rapid socio-historical change, times when conventional gender identities are especially at risk of destabilisation. Moravia advances an argument that the virile man of action, poster child of the 20th century and exemplified in Maurizio, is an archetype of masculinity that is not outmoded, despite Italy’s adieu to Fascism. Sergio’s homoerotic attraction towards such a paradigm of culturally exalted manhood is emblematic of a more general condition of insecurity and anxiety of the 20th century male intellectual. Before looking at this discourse as presented in I due amici, let us briefly relate the novel Il disprezzo to the unfinished work I due amici. The novel was published in 1954 and recounts another failing intellectual’s solipsistic existentialism and uneasy association with ideology via his relationship with the Communist party. Although Riccardo Molteni’s political convictions are more openly questioned by himself than is the case with Sergio in I due amici (facilitated by Moravia’s use of the first person), Riccardo’s own construction of a mediated triangle of desire between himself, his wife and the figure of padrone in Battista, the film producer, replicates Sergio’s triangulation of desire. Sergio’s desire for his lover Lalla (or Nella, depending on the draft) is mediated by the authority of the male Other – a ideal version of the male self in socioeconomic terms. Both Sergio and Riccardo view their lovers as their object and possession, and as a means of acquiring dominance in a game of power between themselves and a competing male identity. In both texts, Maurizio and Battista are offered the female as a conduit of homo-social exchange, although the “end” or greater good in I due amici is ideology in the form of Communism, whereas in the later work “capital” is the gain for the servile male. Is Moravia correlating Capitalism and Communism as two sides of the same coin, we might then ask? This is a question that needs to be raised, despite its controversial implications. When analysing the core of the Roman writer’s thematic repertoire, it becomes apparent that he places diverse forms of male identity in direct opposition with each other, and consequently he contrasts differing

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manifestations of human desire as structures of power. One discernment of desire, which is incarnated in the figure of the inetto, is Schopenhauer’s treatise on the conflict within human beings between, firstly, a propulsion towards a “will to live” and, secondly, the suffering which it creates. Desire is futile, masochistic and mediated, according to the philosopher. The antidote for the masochism that desire propagates is an immersion into art and philosophy, Schopenhauer argues, because desire is, in his words, “a striving that is bound to frustrate itself.”8 A denial of the body (named by Schopenhauer as “the will’s phenomenon”) is thus advocated. In I due amici, the intellectual-protagonist represents an opportunity to defeat the cycle of endless dissatisfaction that human desire creates through his identity as a man of contemplation. It is suggested that Sergio’s social role is as imitative and false as his political will, a role tainted by a dramatic sense of inferiority, which symbolises collective experience. Bourgeois Maurizio is emblematic of a Nietzschean “will to power” in his attachment to the cultures of violence and decadence of his social class. Indeed, a Hegelian master-slave dialectic is perpetuated throughout the various interactions between Moravia’s rivals, especially when money is described as the possession which causes a distinction between deficiency and normality between men, in an increasingly capitalist Italy. Let us compare two passages from I due amici and Il disprezzo respectively, both of which underscore the complicity of weaker models of manhood in patriarchal structures of power: No longer paying attention to Sergio he started to write the check. He wanted to protest, tell him no, but he felt like he wouldn’t do it, and he didn’t even know why. He felt a strange feeling, like one of gratitude and humiliated attraction for Maurizio, and at the same time, stronger than ever, the bitter sense of his own impotence, of his own irretrievable inferiority.9

And the following is an excerpt from Il disprezzo:

8

Arthur Schopenhauer, Aforismi sulla saggezza del vivere, edited by Maria Teresa Gianelli (Milano: Mondadori, 1998), II. 574. 9 “Senza più curarsi di Sergio egli cominciò a scrivere l’assegno. … Avrebbe voluto protestare, dirgli di no, ma sentiva che non l’avrebbe fatto, non sapeva neppur lui perché. Provava uno strano sentimento, come di gratitudine e di umiliata attrazione per Maurizio, e al tempo stesso, più forte che mai, il senso amaro della propria impotenza, della propria irrimediabile inferiorità” Moravia, I due amici, Version B, 181.

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I couldn’t help but … murmur: ‘Thanks Battista … you know I need it.’ I bit my lip: firstly it wasn’t wholly true that I needed it, at least not urgently, as the sentence would lead to believe; and then I felt that I shouldn’t have uttered those words, not even I knew why.10

The analogies between these two passages are striking. Both intellectuals experience a masochistic desire to submit to their rivals, revealing a thirst for power and possession which René Girard defines as metaphysical rather than materialistic, calling it “the triumph of the mediator, the god with the human face.” 11 Moravia describes modern forms of enslavement and corruption in this way, through these intellectuals’ aping of their social and economic superior, and their offering of their object of desire to the mediator. This discourse reminds us of another of Moravia’s works in the context of a complex construction of male desire, this time the novel La ciociara from 1957. A narrative that was produced after I due amici, it seems to rest much more hope in the hands of its male intellectual protagonist Michele. Michele should be mentioned because his ascetic existence marks a positive alterity into which we are rarely granted an insight in the novelist’s fiction. In this work the corruption of wartime masculinities is depicted as both sexual and economic, symptomatic of the vices of neocapitalist Italian society. This corruption of the men in the text is contrasted with the Puritanism of Michele the hero, which places him outside both sexual and economic realms. Having proposed a positive alterity with the figure of the intellectual in La ciociara, Moravia suggests that contemplation, which promotes chastity and a denial of possession, can renounce patriarchal impositions of gender identity.12 Suggestions towards this more positive alternative of male selfhood, a type of synthesis between the oppositions discussed in I due amici, present themselves towards the end of the narrative with the introduction of 10

“Non potei fare a meno, … di mormorare: ‘Grazie, Battista … lei sa che ho bisogno’. Mi morsi le labbra: prima di tutto non era del tutto vero che io avessi bisogno, almeno non urgentemente, come la frase lasciava intendere; e poi sentii che non avrei dovuto dire quelle parole, non sapevo neppure io perché.” Moravia, Il disprezzo, in Opere/3 Romanzi e racconti 1950.1959, ed. Simone Casini. (Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2004) 831-1060, 912. Translation is my own. 11 René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 61. 12 For more on the significance of Michele in La ciociara, see Emma Keane, “Un’alterità maschile: La funzione pedagogica dell’eroe antifascista ne La ciociara”, in “Alberto Moravia e La ciociara. Letteratura. Storia. Cinema.” Sinestesie. (Napoli: Edizioni Sinestesie, 2012), 129-141.

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Moroni, a third male and fourth character of a certain significance in Version B. He is a misogynist and sinner who has repented and has undergone a conversion after the death of his wife. Only in her absence can he ironically deconstruct the mediation of the object of his desire, and through her death can he arrive at the knowledge of true love via contemplation. This is as Schopenhauerian as Moravia gets, and as Moroni is excluded from ideological affiliations, he is symbolic of an alternative manhood which is disassociated from action and thus somehow depicted as the most authentic. As both Sergio and Maurizio are two opposing versions of the male Self, they cancel each other out through their equal corruption when it is revealed towards the end that they have both used “man” (the female in this case) as a means to an end à la Machiavelli. Sergio becomes his lover Lalla’s procurer in exchange for the promise of Maurizio’s conversion to Communism, which never ultimately comes about. It is suggested that the impediment to fulfilment for both men is, in fact, their narcissism, which manifests itself in political aspiration, as Maurizio reminds his friend in the epilogue: People want to be loved for who they are … when on the other hand they feel that they are being used, they pretend to believe that they are loved but then, they give themselves to the first person that really loves them and turn their backs to others.13

As the main obstacle to their experiencing real love and real desire, these men’s narcissism is their corruption, and thus no conversion (political or literary) is possible. Moravia here claims that suffering leads to redemption, but only when we suffer authentically, that is, through compassion, and not through the fruitless striving of metaphysical desire. This is exactly the viewpoint of Michele from La ciociara, whose negative proclamation “we are all dead and we believe that we are alive”14 refers to the lack of compassion in a time when the domination of a collective “will to power” manifested itself most aggressively through the violence and tyranny of wartime Italy. 13 “gli uomini vogliono essere amati per se stessi … quando sentono invece che ci si vuol servire di loro, fingono di credere di essere amati ma poi, al primo che li ama veramente, si danno a lui e voltano le spalle agli altri.” Moravia, I due amici, Version B, 239-40. 14 “siamo tutti morti e crediamo di essere vivi,” Moravia, La ciociara, in Opere/3 Romanzi e racconti 1950.1959, ed. Simone Casini (Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2004), 1260.

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In I due amici an alternative to both models of male desire, the ascetic and the mediated, is suggested by the author in what we argue is one of the most positive endings for a female character in Moravia’s texts. In Version B, Lalla recognises the true manifestation of love once both Maurizio and Sergio expose their true selves for using her as a Machiavellian means to their end. Unexpectedly, the minor character Moroni takes central stage at the end of the draft, when it becomes apparent that he represents a type of “via di mezzo,” a third space, an alternative to the narcissistic sadomasochism of the other men. Lalla chooses Moroni over the protagonist and antagonist because he is the man who is able to experience passion and love without disdain. He embodies an overcoming of the will to power, as a reformed tyrant, something that neither love rivals can achieve, because, as Lalla states, Sergio and Maurizio are “two puppets,” whereas for her Moroni “will be a man.” 15 Interestingly, Sergio had previously made the correlation between succeeding in converting Maurizio to Communism, and proving his manhood: “After some conversations with Maurizio, Sergio told his lover that he had to convert Maurizio to his ideas or he would no longer be considered a man.”16 In subverting traditional conceptions of masculinity and desire here, the author follows in the footsteps of his master Dostoyevsky by using dialectics to deconstruct meaning and reach a synthesis through a contrast of oppositions. The positive value of contemplation is overturned in this work. The author claims that ideology can often masquerade as intellectual pursuit when, in fact, it merely transforms itself into another form of political action. What Moravia is really suggesting is not that contemplation is an invalid exercise in modern society, yet rather, that it needs to be separated from hierarchical structures of desire that deny its positive value, and used instead as a substitute for the will. Unfortunately the modern types of manhood that Moravia would portray after the production of I due amici were rarely positive, and they highlighted the uneasy relationship that the author himself had with questions of masculinity, power and desire and their literary construction.

15 16

Moravia, I due amici, Version B, 233-34. Moravia, I due amici, Version B, 103.

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—. Impegno controvoglia: saggi, articoli, interviste: trentacinque anni di scritti politici, edited by Renzo Paris, Milano: Bompiani, 1980. —. “La speranza ossia Cristianesimo e Comunismo” in Impegno controvoglia: saggi, articoli, interviste: trentacinque anni di scritti politici, edited by Renzo Paris, Milano: Bompiani, 1980, 11-29. —. L’uomo che guarda. Milano: Bompiani, 1985. —. “Breve autobiografia letteraria”. Alberto Moravia. Opere 1927-1947, edited by Geno Pampaloni. Milano: Bompiani, 1986. —. Moravia, Alberto and Alain Elkann. Vita di Moravia. Milano: Bompiani, 1990. —. “Gli indifferenti”. Alberto Moravia. Opere/1 Romanzi e racconti 1927.1940, edited by Francesca Serra. Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2000, 3-301. —. “Inverno di malato”. Alberto Moravia. Opere/1 Romanzi e racconti 1927.1940, edited by Francesca Serra. Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2000, 364-402. —. “L’amore coniugale”. Alberto Moravia. Opere/2 Romanzi e racconti 1941.1949, edited by Simone Casini. Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2002, 1195-1315. —. “La disubbidienza”, Alberto Moravia. Opere/2 Romanzi e racconti 1941.1949 edited by Simone Casini. Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2002, 1071-1194. —. “La romana”. Alberto Moravia. Opere/2 Romanzi e racconti 1941.1949, edited by Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2002, 642-1069. —. “Il conformista”. Alberto Moravia. Opere/3 Romanzi e racconti 1950.1959. edited by Simone Casini. Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2004, 3-354. —. “Il disprezzo”. Alberto Moravia. Opere/3 Romanzi e racconti 1950.1959, edited by Simone Casini. Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2004, 831-1060. —. “La ciociara”. Alberto Moravia. Opere/3 Romanzi e racconti 1950.1959, edited by Simone Casini. Milano: Classici Bompiani, 2004, 1123-1493. —. I due amici. Frammenti di una storia fra guerra e dopoguerra, edited by Simone Casini. Milano: Bompiani, 2007. — . La noia. 1960. Milano: Bompiani, 2007. —. L’attenzione. Milano: Bompiani, 2008. —. Intervista sullo scrittore scomodo, a cura di Nello Ajello, Bari: Laterza, 2008

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1968. Reich, Wilhelm. The mass psychology of fascism. Translated by Vincent R. Carfagno. Edited by Mary Higgins. Chester M. Raphael, M. D., London: Souvenir Press, 1991. Rubin, Gayle. The traffic in women: Notes on the ‘political economy’ of sex. Feminist Anthropology. A reader. Edited by Ellen Lewin, Malden: Blackwell, 2006, 87-106. Sanguineti, Edoardo. Alberto Moravia. Milano: Mursia, 1962. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969. —. Aforismi sulla saggezza del vivere. Edited by Maria Teresa Gianelli. Milano: Mondadori, 1998. Siciliano, Enzo. Alberto Moravia. Vita, parole e idee di un romanziere, Milano: Bompiani, 1982. Spackman, Barbara. Fascist virilities: Rhetoric, ideology, and social fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Tessari, Roberto. Alberto Moravia: introduzione e guida allo studio dell’opera moraviana. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1977.

PART III OEDIPUS AND THE DESIRE FOR KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER SEVEN CENSORSHIP AND DESIRE IN MATILDE SERAO’S LA MANO TAGLIATA AND ALESSANDRO MANZONI’S I PROMESSI SPOSI MARISA ESCOLAR UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL

The premise of I promessi sposi, that Alessandro Manzoni revised an obscure 17th-century manuscript in order to render “so beautiful a story”1 accessible to his 19th-century readers, is its foundational fiction. More than stylistic, these revisions are moral in nature, according to the narrator: in the first draft, Fermo e Lucia, he purports to have skipped over the demonstrations of love between his betrothed protagonists that in the manuscript actually constitute “the most developed part,”2 self-censoring his transcription/translation, in the name of readers (particularly clergy) who might be negatively influenced by explicit depictions of love. However fictional, this topos of revision is inextricable from the book’s labyrinthine genesis, produced through a process of “profound reworking,”3 and from its reception, as readers have generated a veritable corpus of new versions of this beautiful story – through additions, alterations or abridgements – many with the explicit goal of transmitting it, 1

Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed and History of the Column of Infamy, ed. David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. Revised and annotated by Matthew Reynolds (J.M. Dent: London, 1997), 5; “Una storia così bella.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, ed. Vittorio Spinazzola (Milan: Garzanti, 2002), 1. 2 “La parte la più elaborata.” Manzoni, Fermo e Lucia, ed. Salvatore Silvano Nigro (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2002), 68. All translations mine except where specified. 3 “Profondo rimaneggiamento.” Spinazzola, xiv.

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in turn, to a new group of readers.4 In so doing, critics and novelists have redressed this ostensible self-censorship, hypothesising what might have happened outside the narrative’s bounds and inside the character’s heads, as Luciano Parisi cogently explores.5 In his preface to I promessi sposi (1930), Guido Da Verona tropes Manzoni’s narrator by claiming to have repositioned “the old story of Lucia Mondella on the lukewarm knees of our beautiful women in love with the latest jazz,”6 and, as such, hopes to provide the tale with a contemporary public. 7 As Parisi shows, Da Verona’s eroticising of I promessi sposi foreshadows a criticism which from the 1930s on will ever more frequently be made of Manzoni: his excessive modesty; and a question that will be asked of I promessi sposi with growing urgency: why does the author keep a deliberate silence on most expressions of love?8

My essay starts, then, with this underlying concern of I promessi sposi’s reception: that behind the fictive premise of Manzoni’s revisions of the beautiful story lies a form of self-censorship, specifically in regard to erotic desire. However, rather than ask why Manzoni employed this rhetorical strategy, I will examine more precisely who or what is being censored and to what end and, following Da Verona, I start with Lucia, whose reticence and insistent blushing, Parisi notes, have long been a subject of critical interest, and then turn to her protector-turned-betrayer, Gertrude, whose psychology is more thoroughly elaborated.

4

An exhaustive list of Manzonian revisions and parodies falls outside the scope of this essay. An early example of an explicitly antimanzonian revision is Gli sposi non promessi. Parafrasi a contrapposti dei Promessi sposi (1895) by Cletto Arrighi. On antimanzonianism see L’antimanzonismo, ed. Gianni Oliva (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2009). A recent pro-manzonian example comes in the guise of the children’s book by Umberto Eco which aims to “Save the story” by modernising the language, abridging the “beautiful story” (“bella storia”) and extracting it from its arid scholastic context Umberto Eco, La storia de I promessi sposi (Turin: Biblioteca di Repubblica-Espresso, 2010), 95. 5 Luciano Parisi, “Alessandro Manzoni’s “I promessi sposi”: A Chaste Novel and an Erotic Palimpsest,” The Modern Language Review 103, no. 2 (Apr., 2008): 42437. 6 “La vecchia storia di Lucia Mondella su le tepide ginocchia delle nostre belle donne innamorate dell’ultimo jazz.” Guido Da Verona, I promessi sposi (Milan: Società editrice Unitas, 1930), xix. 7 For an account of Da Verona’s disastrous editorial experience, see Parisi, “Chaste”: 429. 8 Parisi, “Chaste”: 424-5.

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In order to do so, I introduce a further intertext, Matilde Serao’s relatively little-studied La mano tagliata (1912),9 a self-conscious text that melodramatically reproduces and revises topoi of the Romantic, Gothic tradition and, I argue, sets itself in dialogue with the foundational novel of modern Italian historical realism. Beginning with the discovery of a suitcase containing a woman’s perfectly preserved, bejeweled, severed hand, La mano tagliata signals its participation in – and critique of – the Gothic and its dismembering of the female body. 10 La mano tagliata’s deployment of the Gothic, however, does not distance it from I promessi sposi, on the contrary: a quest to achieve a marriage deferred, La mano tagliata offers a fantastic, grotesque and tragic iteration of the Manzonian plot that draws attention to the structural, gendered violence at its core.11 My analysis thus will show how La mano tagliata recasts I promessi

9

Ursula Fanning notes that only she, Nancy Harrowitz and Laura Salsini have considered the novel seriously, forgetting Deanna Shemek’s earlier “Prisoners of Passion: Women and Desire in Matilde Serao’s Romanzi d’Amore” in Italiana, eds. Albert N. Mancini, Paolo Giordano and Pier Raimondo Baldini (River Forest IL: Rosary College, 1988): 243-54. See Ursula Fanning, “From Domestic to Dramatic: Matilde Serao’s Use of the Gothic,” in The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions, eds. Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sulis (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007): 119-140. La mano tagliata has not received much critical attention, particularly in contrast with Serao’s veristic texts. See Laura Salsini, Gendered Genres: Female Experience and Narrative Patterns in the Works of Matilde Serao (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 23. 10 For Serao’s subversion of the Gothic in La mano tagliata see Fanning, “Domestic” and Salsini, Gendered Genres. Shemek points out that Serao’s critique of the topos of female dismemberment extends back as “an implicit critique of the poetic bella mano and of the Petrarchan lyric tradition in general. The lyric canon conventionally elides the woman’s bodily presence and features instead a catalogue of abstracted, idealised parts of the female body. Concretising the sensualised violence of such images, Serao exposes their inhuman strangeness.” Shemek, “Prisoners,” 249. 11 The Gothic and historical realism are, of course, not mutually exclusive; Fredric Jameson uses I promessi sposi’s dual narrative structure precisely in order to illustrate their interrelation. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 144. Forgacs also emphasises I promessi sposi’s link to the Gothic, recogniszed by D.H. Lawrence. David Forgacs. Introduction. The Betrothed and History of the Column of Infamy, eds. David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds (J.M. Dent: London, 1997), xxiii.

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sposi’s purported moral foundation12 in terms of a gendered opposition, whereby patriarchal entitlement aligns protagonists (Renzo) and antagonists (Don Rodrigo, Gertrude’s father, Egidio) and forecloses the possibility that women (Lucia and Gertrude) express desire as subjects but only endure or resist it. Taking a feminist, narratological approach that draws from Teresa de Lauretis’ reading of Freudian psychoanalysis13 and Soviet semiotics, specifically her claim that “desire in conventional quest narrative is none other than the Oedipal desire of a male subject who must overcome a generically female obstacle or narrative matrix in order to achieve masculine identity,”14 I will show how La mano tagliata’s Gothic iteration of I promessi sposi’s Oedipal narrative calls attention to the gendered violence structuring its declared battle of good and evil. However, more than signalling I promessi sposi’s relation to the patriarchal order, this intertextual relationship will ultimately allow for ambivalence in the notion of censorship itself. After showing how La mano tagliata both replays and critiques I promessi sposi’s Oedipal plot structure, insofar as it acts as a repressive censorship mechanism, I will argue that La mano tagliata also demonstrates the resistant potential of censorship,15 as the heroines remain unsolvable mysteries, stimulating and frustrating the desire of characters and readers who search for, or even attempt to author, the full version of the story – much like Freud ever in 12

“Deeds of virtue and angelic goodness contrasted with these diabolic machinations.” Manzoni, The Betrothed, 3; “Imprese virtuose e buontà angeliche, opposte alle operationi diaboliche.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 1. 13 De Lauretis aptly summarises her critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, “Psychoanalysis defines woman in relation to man, from within the same frame of reference and with the analytical categories elaborated to account for the psychosocial development of the male. That is why psychoanalysis does not address, cannot address, the complex and contradictory relation of women to Woman, which it instead defines as a simple equation women = Woman = Mother. And that, as I have suggested, is one of the most deeply rooted effects of the ideology of gender.” De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1987), 20. 14 Susan Knutson, Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard (Waterloo, ON, CAN: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 41. Knutson’s updating of de Lauretis has influenced recent developments of this project. 15 Although traditional discourse on censorship has focused on its repressive aspects, “new scholarship,” based on the theoretical contributions of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, has pointed to this double-edged nature. See Robert C. Post, Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998.

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pursuit of his patients’ complete narrative. 16 In light of the ambivalent narrative position occupied by La mano tagliata’s women, I then reconsider Lucia and her protector-turned-betrayer, Gertrude, and their paradoxical relationship to desire and censorship. I promessi sposi makes its first explicit appearance in La mano tagliata in the hands of Rachele, a Jewish girl, being raised by her ostensibly widowed father, Mosè, who is trying to force her to marry an old, mysterious and powerful suitor, Marcus Henner: for Mosè, who has not read I promessi sposi, it is “one of those bad, ugly, Christian books!”;17 for the lovestruck Rachele, it is a love story. 18 In fact, both the Christian morality and the romantic content of the novel offer connections to Rachele’s life: a budding convert, Rachele plans to flee with her beloved, Ranieri, in order to escape Henner – an echo of Don Rodrigo’s implacable pursuit of Lucia. However, Rachele, distracted, leaves the novel unfinished.19 Ironically, had she continued, she could have anticipated the results of her own escape attempt: like Lucia, she will hide in a convent and attempt to become a nun, sending Ranieri on a quest to extricate and marry her. The Gothic storyline weaves its way into the Ranieri-Rachele plot by way of the psychic communications Rachele receives from her absent (purportedly dead) mother, Maria, in support of her escape. Maria, who has lived for years as Henner’s prisoner, also has her own plotline, which starts when Ranieri’s best friend, Roberto, an aimless, dispassionate traveller, falls in love with her severed hand, forgotten by Henner in a suitcase on a train. (We later learn that he had severed the hand in order to wake Maria from the hypnotic state he put her in, while unsuccessfully trying to convince her to fall in love with him). Roberto’s desire to find the hand’s owner catalyses a rescue mission, parallel to Ranieri’s search for Rachele, a quest so elaborate that “Roberto Alimena felt that, in spite of 16

Here I make use of Toril Moi’s feminist Derridian reading of Freud, whose own patriarchal power depends upon, and is undermined by, his ability to obtain “complete” knowledge of his patients. Toril Moi, “Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud’s ‘Dora.’ Feminist Review 9 (1981): 60-74. 17 “Uno di questi brutti libracci di questi cristiani!” Matilde Serao, La mano tagliata (Florence: Salani, 1921), 43. 18 Serao, La mano tagliata, 48. For the significance of reading for Serao’s heroines in genera, see Salsini, Gendered Genres, 96-7. For Harrowitz and Fanning, the book represents the Christian world Rachele embraces and Mosè and Henner oppose. Harrowitz, Anti-semitism, 122; Fanning, Gender Meets Genre: Woman as Subject in the Fictional Universe of Matilde Serao (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002), 271. 19 Serao, La mano tagliata, 120.

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himself, he was sailing deep into a novel; and, as he became a character, this novel began to dominate him, someone who almost never read.”20 This narrative self-consciousness recurs as Roberto and Ranieri view their dramas as the well-charted terrain of a familiar tale, 21 and indeed, the repeated insistence on the novelistic quality of the events, familiar even to a character who rarely reads, is no coincidence. The reason Roberto feels that he has heard this story before is because, in fact, he has: he is the protagonist of a quest, a narrative of Oedipal desire, cast by narratologists as a “universal narrative structure.”22 La mano tagliata is rather self-conscious about its replaying of conventional literary topoi, and this typological reading, which will serve as the point of departure for my intertextual analysis, is also encouraged by I promessi sposi: as David Forgacs has noted, the Manzonian plot “has many motifs of the traditional folktale,”23 and its protagonists fit precisely into conventional gendered oppositions: in Richard Lansing’s reading, with Renzo playing the text’s “dynamic” hero, and Lucia, a static obstacle. 24 Indeed, Lucia typifies woman as closed space, 25 a gendered

20 “Roberto Alimena sentiva che, suo malgrado, navigava in pieno romanzo; e questo romanzo, egli che non ne leggeva quasi mai, cominciava a predominarlo, ora che ne diventava un personaggio.” Serao, La mano tagliata, 74. 21 When Rachele ends up cloistered after her botched escape, Ranieri thinks back to “medieval novels … in which lovers forced open the doors of monasteries, and kidnapped their beloved woman, on a dark and stormy night”; “Romanzi mediovali … in cui gli amanti forzavano le porte dei monasteri, e rapivano la donna del loro cuore, in una notte buia e tempestosa.” Serao, La mano tagliata, 317. See also ibid. 263, 280, 294, 296 and 305. 22 Knutson, Narrative, 39. While narratologists such as Lotman have worked to uncover universal, natural, cultural codes, feminist theorists like de Lauretis and, after her, Knutson, argue for its cultural constructedness, as “a paradigm for European patriarchy.” Ibid., 41. Knutson explains the implication of this naturalisation: “since narratology interprets the quest as universal, this situation is understood to be “natural” and “real”: male subjectivity is formed in relation to a female matrix, and the process takes place within an ontological hierarchy of male and female which is both metaphysical and essential, existing beyond the realm of human intervention.” Ibid., 41-2. 23 Forgacs, Introduction, xxiii. 24 “[Renzo’s] journey in quest of justice contrasts markedly with [Lucia’s] stasis and passive acceptance of her condition” Forgacs, ibid.,(358,). Richard Lansing, “Stylistic and Structural Duality in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi.” Italica 53.3 (Autumn 1976), 358. For Lucia as static and Renzo as dynamic, see Guido Baldi, I promessi sposi. Progetto di società e mito (Milan: Mursia, 1985), 197.

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linkage designated as “natural” by semiotician Jurij Lotman, which serves as the basis of de Lauretis’ critique. Reducing Vladmir Propp’s thirty-one plot functions into two movements, entry into and emergence from a closed space, Lotman casts narrative desire as inherently male, making women synonymous with such spaces, be they “a cave,” “the grave,” “a house.”26 Thus, de Lauretis extrapolates, woman becomes “an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter,” unable to articulate desire and therefore, to narrate.27 This narratological perspective reframes Manzoni’s/Lucia’s “modesty” from a reflection of character28 to a sign of I promessi sposi’s participation in the patriarchal order.29 In other words, Lucia has not self-censored her desire;30 instead the naturalised Western Oedipal narrative paradigm has always already censored her,31 as she is passed as a direct object pronoun from character to character: “a nobleman (Rodrigo) pursues her, a princess (Gertrude), betrays her, a count (the unnamed) kidnaps her, a cardinal (Federigo) saves her.”32 The object of 25

“The house is her emblematic space … The space that is her very own is a closed space”; “La casa è il suo spazio emblematico per eccellenza … Lo spazio che le è proprio è uno spazio chiuso.” Guido Baldi, I promessi sposi, 202. 26 Jurij Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” trans. Julian Gaffy, Poetics Today (Autumn 1979): 167. 27 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 119. This, of course, is not an essentialising, biological distinction, as Knutson explains: “This quest structure reproduces m/f gender regardless of whether or not a female character occupies the subject position.” Knutson, Narrative, 41. 28 For Lucia’s modesty as a reflection of her character, see Parisi, “Chaste”: 426. For a psychologising reading of Manzoni, see Giorgio De Rienzo, “Manzoni contro Manzoni. Il romanzo di Lucia nei Promessi sposi,” in L’antimanzonismo, ed. Gianni Oliva (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2009), 9, 11. 29 I follow Knutson’s “structural” definition of the patriarchy: “a semiotic/social/cultural typology that categorises people according to a binary gender opposition itself aligned with other cultural oppositions and in which the male term is privileged.” Knutson, Narrative, 21. 30 See Vittorio Spinazzola, Il libro per tutti. Saggio sui Promessi sposi (Rome: Editori riunti, 1983), 122; Parisi, “Chaste,” 435. 31 See Knutson, Narrative, 39-40. 32 “Un nobile (Rodrigo) la perseguita, una principessa (Gertrude) la tradisce, un conte (l’Innominato la rapisce, un cardinale (Federigo) la salva.” De Rienzo, “Manzoni,” 9. De Rienzo’s argument is meant to show how Manzoni reserves better treatment for Lucia with respect to Renzo, yet their grammatical functions in the sentence (direct object versus subject) are symptomatic of another hierarchy. In anticipation of the Gertrude-Lucia connection I subsequently establish, I offer a plot summary where Gertrude’s historical counterpart, Suor Virginia Maria de

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the quest, Lucia embodies the patriarchy’s most precious commodity, virginity, which, one scholar goes so far as to describe as “the strongest motor of the narrative.” 33 Thus, when she decides what to do with her virginity (offering it to the Virgin, in exchange for her safe escape from captivity34), she threatens to derail the title’s “promise.” Yet Lucia’s vow, which should end the plot, simply acts as “one last obstacle,”35 and, with help from Padre Cristoforo, Renzo convinces her that the marriage vow precludes all others. Rachele’s plotline in La mano tagliata follows a similar path: betrothal, persecution by a powerful suitor, flight, cloistering, refusal and consent. In the same way that Don Rodrigo’s desire catalyses and undermines Lucia’s flight, Henner propels Rachele’s and thwarts its success. While Rachele decides to run towards Ranieri – something unthinkable for ‘modest’ Lucia – her drama, like Lucia’s, unfolds in a succession of closed spaces. Although she is described with eroticised language, she is dressed to play the nun; her bare, “virginal” room, anticipates her cell.36 The sole decoration – a tiny, faded portrait of her mother, to whom she prays as if she were the Madonna – encapsulates her main difference with Lucia: while Lucia withholds important information from Agnese, starting from Don Rodrigo’s advances, Rachele’s psychic communications with Maria are a veritable lifeline, facilitating her escape. 37 Linked to Maria physically (their delicate hands and intense Leyva, also appears as a direct object pronoun, subjected to violent verb after verb: “the love of the young Osio oppresses her, squeezes her, defeats her, to bring her, confused and exhausted, to her carnal damnation, first to the mistake, then to vice, then to maternity and, to hide all these faults, to the crime”; “l’amore del giovane Osio la perseguita, la stringe, la vince, per condurla, smarrita e sfinita del suo carnal perdimento, prima al fallo, poi al vizio, poi alla maternità, e, per nascondere tutte queste colpe, al delitto.” Giancarlo Vigorelli, Vita e processo di suor Virginia Maria de Leyva, Monaca di Monza, edited by Umberto Colombo (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), xiv. 33 “Il più forte motore narrativo.” Vigorelli, ibidem. 34 Once Lucia pledges her virginity to Maria, she perceives herself as having nothing left to give: “If I had anything else to offer her, I would do so.” Manzoni, The Betrothed, 371; “Se avessi qualche altra cosa da offrirle, lo farei.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 363. 35 Verina R. Jones, “Women in I promessi sposi,” in Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History, HG =\JPXQW * %DUDĔVNL DQG 6KLUOH\ : 9LQDOO (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 210. 36 Serao, La mano tagliata, 59, 136. 37 On the mother-daughter in Serao’s fiction in general, and as a counterpoint to the negatively charged father-daughter relationship, see Salsini, Gendered Genres, 147. For the de-emphasised mother-daughter bond in I promessi sposi, see Susanna

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gaze38), Rachele becomes even more like her through her cloistering39 and, as I will discuss shortly, more like Lucia and Gertrude. The mother-daughter bond protects Rachele from the dangerous patriarchal family dynamic and “shifts attention away from the privileged exclusivity of heterosexual couples in the novel.”40 At the same time, it allows the text to examine – and criticise – the bonds of heterosexual desire through a slightly less obvious doubling, that of Roberto and Henner, both of whom propose identical existences for Maria, in which “she is not allowed to leave either of them.”41 Fanning asserts that Maria’s divergent reactions depend on the men’s diametrically opposite moral standing, a distinction, I argue, only superficially made by the text, which instead iterates their similarities. Callous wanderers, Roberto and Henner both mutilate Maria, the first woman they have ever loved: Roberto cuts her braid, which “closely parallels Henner’s amputation of Maria’s hand.”42 Roberto and Henner’s similarities gesture to the convergent plot functions of Don Rodrigo and Renzo who, despite employing different coercive tactics, both want to push Lucia out of her enclosed space and make her give up a promise.43 Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz notes that while opposite, the two are linked, but ultimately divides them along a moral axis, the way Fanning casts Roberto and Henner: Renzo succeeds because he is “good,” Don Rodrigo, fails because he is “evil,” but their role is to encounter obstacles.44 The struggle of good versus evil is emphasised by I promessi sposi, and the narrative never allows the reader to question whether the hero will “get the girl” in the end, yet it does open the slightest question about whether the girl is happy to be gotten when, at the story’s conclusion, Ferlito, “Fear of the Mother’s Tongue: Secrecy and Gossip in Manzoni’s I promessi Sposi,” MLN 113.1 (1998): 30-51. 38 Serao, La mano tagliata, 55, 114. 39 Fanning, Gender, 262. 40 Salsini, Gendered Genres, 146. 41 Fanning, Gender, 264. 42 Shemek, “Prisoners,” 250-1. 43 Don Rodrigo imagines how to get Lucia out of the monastery, to breech it “by force or by fraud.” Manzoni, The Betrothed, 253; “nè con la forza, nè per insidie.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 249. Renzo’s attempt at changing Lucia’s mind about the vow is framed in terms of pain: “don’t come here any more, [hurting me], and … tempting me.” Manzoni, The Betrothed, 516, translation modified; “non venite più qui, a farmi del male, a … tentarmi.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 508. 44 Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz, “I promessi sposi e la psicanalisi,” in Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Italian Novels, ed. Guido Pugliese (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), 80-1.

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Lucia expresses dissatisfaction with the morals people try to draw from it: “it seemed to her, in a confused sort of way, that something was missing.” 45 What is missing, I argue, is a product of the censorship mechanism of the Oedipal plot that forecloses the possibility of female subjectivity and, therefore, desire. The fulfilment of the title’s promise is of little narrative interest and only the barest details are recorded, specifically the birth of their first child, a girl named Maria, in accordance with Renzo’s offer that, if Lucia’s vow to the Virgin were to be undone, their first daughter would bear her name. Here, the Oedipal narrative is so tightly aligned with nature that the birth of a girl is (almost) attributable to Renzo’s promise: “Before the first year of marriage was over, a fine baby saw the light; and, as if on purpose to afford Renzo an early opportunity of fulfilling that magnanimous promise of his, it was a girl.”46 The only task left for the happy Oedipus is to retell their story, or rather, his story, as Lucia points out: “‘I never went looking for troubles; they came looking for me. Unless you meant to say,’ she added smiling sweetly, ‘that my mistake was to love you, and to promise myself to you.’”47 Lucia cannot understand herself through the morals derived from the plot generated by Renzo’s desire, of which she is the object. By replaying, critiquing and revising I promessi sposi’s plot, La mano tagliata draws attention to its structural violence. At the same time, however, starting from Maria, it shows how censorship may function as a mode of resistance for its female protagonists, a way for them to evade the narrative mechanism of masculine desire. While the text adopts multiple viewpoints and uses letters to delve into the psyches of several characters, “the one character whose point of view we never share is Maria.”48 As her lover, Roberto is in the privileged position of hearing Maria’s stories, yet not even he is granted full access to her mysterious double life.49 There is one story, however, that she does tell him, which he, under the pretence of exhaustion, withholds from Ranieri – the story of her severed hand, which 45 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 550; “le pareva, così in confuso, che ci mancasse qualcosa.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 541. 46 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 549; “Prima che finisse l’anno del matrimonio, venne alla luce una bella creatura; e, come se fosse fatto apposta per dar subito opportunità a Renzo d’adempire quella sua magnanima promessa, fu una bambina.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 540. 47 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 550; “Io non sono andata a cercare i guai: son loro che sono venuti a cercar me. Quando non voleste dire, – aggiunse, soavemente sorridendo, – che il mio sproposito sia stato quello di volervi bene, e di promettermi a voi.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 541. 48 Fanning, Gender, 259. 49 Serao, La mano tagliata, 371.

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has plagued Roberto since he opened the box.50 He wants to “penetrate,” to “violate”51 that “hermetically closed”52 space, to know the woman with the severed arm, to know the story that led to its amputation. However, whereas Roberto succeeds on both counts, the reader is left with a mystery: the severed hand belongs to Maria, yet when Roberto finds her, she is whole. This lack of explanation has been read as a textual oversight,53 but I see it as symptomatic of Maria’s contradictory status: in addition to undermining the Oedipal narrative by denying closure, this paradoxical position sets up the hand as fetish object, forcing Roberto, Henner and the reader to oscillate between Maria as mutilated and whole.54 For instance, Roberto’s account of Maria’s death to Ranieri serves as a reminder that she has both hands: She was caught in a bizarre agitation that grew bit by bit [man mano] and took over her completely. Convulsive movements went through her arms, hands and she stretched them, as if in the grips of a convulsion … .An unknown ill seemed to twist, bit by bit [man mano] her nerves.55

However, the repetition of the expression “man mano” (bit by bit) should give us pause: at the level of the signified, Maria has both hands; at the level of the signifier, the text reintroduces ambiguity. Mano, a feminine 50

Serao, La mano tagliata, 382. Serao, La mano tagliata, 30. 52 Serao, La mano tagliata,17. 53 Fanning, Gender, 272. However, an explanation as simple as the one the critic supposes (that Henner has made Maria a prosthetic) would have been effortless to insert; or Roberto could have discovered her, as he expected, with a single hand. Shemek explains Maria’s wholeness as a “hallucination” by Roberto. Shemek, “Prisoners,” 251. 54 For a Freudian reading of Roberto’s relationship to Maria, see Shemek, “Prisoners,” esp. 250-1. 55 “Ella era in preda ad un’agitazione bizzarra che cresceva man mano e che s’impadroniva totalmente di lei. Dei moti convulsi le attraversavano le braccia, le mani, ed ella le stirava, come presa da una convulsione. … Un ignoto male pareva le torcesse, man mano, i nervi.” Serao, La mano tagliata, 372-3. Henner, too, treats Maria fetishistically: while he dreams of her threatening “bloody stump” (“moncherino sanguinoso”) and her “severed arm, with her single deprecating hand” (“braccio mozzato, con la sua unica mano deprecante”), even he oscillates between the two, claiming shortly thereafter that she has two shadowy hands: “If I did not kill myself, this ghost with its shadowy hands would drive me undoubtedly to insanity and death” (“Se io non mi uccidessi, questo fantasma con le sue mani di ombra mi condurrebbe immancabilmente alla follìa ed alla morte.” Ibid., 393). 51

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noun that ends in the masculine “o,” is irregular. The phrase man mano brings together two hands, one mutilated, lacking its masculine-but-notmasculine ending, and one whole. Maria’s final hysterical episode is brought on, “man mano”: bit by bit, in terms of its temporal progression, yes, but also by her ambivalent condition of being “man mano,” mutilated and whole – a condition, Freud has taught, par for a woman’s course. Perhaps Maria, then, is both Roberto’s question and answer: fragmented and whole, mysterious and understood, desired and desirous, object and subject, she is a textual embodiment of a woman’s contradictions in the patriarchal paradigm. 56 This critique is pointedly literary: if Maria’s severed hand renders her unique – and specifically Gothic – after her death, Roberto cuts of her braid, a mutilation that emphasises her common ground with scores of heroines.57 If the severed hand can be read “as a literary and social critique of the male-constructed portrayals of female characters,”58 the more socially acceptable lock of hair reminds the reader that this objectification is a common literary topos.59 Maria’s body is mutilated and interpreted by the men around her and, her hand works metonymically, speaking for the whole, communicating her age, beauty, class, temperament, hair colour, even the colour of her dress, but it does not give away her secrets: “a hand and an arm say so much and no more.” 60 A similar halo of protection extends to Maria’s relationship with Rachele, even when their psychic communication is concretised through the letter Roberto brings to the convent that convinces

56

Knutson speaks to this contradiction: “The plot positions, and not simply the characters who occupy those positions, are always already gendered, which means that a female character in the hero’s role might be read as hermaphroditic, masculine-feminine, unnatural or androgynous: binary semiosis in conflict. She will not emerge as a female hero without the oxymoron being felt; she will not call up our cultural generic mental representation of ‘woman.’” Knutson, Narrative, 42. 57 Serao, La mano tagliata, 381. 58 Salsini, Gendered Genres, 143. 59 Shemek, who links Roberto’s braid cutting with Henner’s amputation, describes it as a fetishistic aggression on the part of Roberto in which he “assert[s] his own superior power” while emphasising his links to Henner. Shemek, “Prisoners,” 251. The topos of the lock of hair is present in a number of major nineteenth-century Italian novels: Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1816), Niccolò Tommaseo’s Fede e bellezza (1840), Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca (1869), Ippolito Nievo’s Confessioni d’un Italiano (1867), and is reappropriated in a twentiethcentury feminist context by authors such as Sibilla Aleramo (Una donna [1906]) and Elsa Morante (Menzogna e sortilegio [1948]). 60 “Una mano e un braccio dicono tanto e non più.” Serao, La mano tagliata, 84.

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her to marry Ranieri: Ranieri is specifically instructed not to read it,61 and the narrative also denies the reader access to its contents. In this way, the written word remains an inviolate space for the women, rather than the fatal trap it represents for Gertrude. By way of conclusion, then, an examination of Gertrude’s disastrous attempts at narrating will allow me to argue for the emergence of a protective dimension to censorship alongside conventional repressive notions which, in turn, suggests an ambivalence to Lucia’s “modesty,” at once a function of her patriarchal subsumption into a narrative of Oedipal desire and a form of evasion. Although thus far I have focused on Rachele’s similarities with Lucia, she also shares striking overlaps with la monaca di Monza in terms of their paternal relationship, as each is “cloistered” by an oppressive father who wants to marry her off for personal gain. Here, however, we also have a significant difference, as Rachele’s maternal support emphasises, all the more starkly, the purely ornamental role played by Gertrude’s mother, whose womb is cast as an insignificant waiting room leading to an already-plotted journey: The unhappy creature of our story was still hidden in her mother’s womb when her state in life had already been irrevocably settled. All that remained to be decided was whether it was to be that of a monk or a nun, a decision for which her presence, but not her consent, was required.62

As she grows up, Gertrude discovers that she must be an active subject in order to join the convent: “It’s only a question of not giving another yes; and I won’t give it.”63 Yet her lines have already been written. Her father explains, “The abbess will ask what you want; it is just a formality,”64 and indeed, Gertrude’s desire is an insignificant detail. Her first mistake, in fact, is to write to her father about her own ideas for her life, and it is this attempt at authoring a plot, fundamentally at odds with the family’s, that hastens her subjugation. Nonetheless, she again picks up a pen, to write to a male servant with whom she had exchanged glances. However, she 61

Serao, La mano tagliata, 345. Manzoni, The Betrothed, 127; “La nostra infelice era ancor nascosta nel ventre della madre, che la sua condizione era già irrevocabilmente stabilita. Rimaneva soltanto da decidersi se sarebbe un monaco o una monaca; decisione per la quale faceva bisogno, non il suo consenso, ma la sua presenza.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 126. 63 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 132; “Non si tratta che di non dire un altro sì; e non lo dirò.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 131. 64 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 142; “La badessa vi domanderà cosa volete: è una formalità.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 140. 62

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would have done better “not to have written anything,”65 as the paper is torn from her hands by another servant. This bold attempt to write her story seals her fate, as her letter becomes a tool for blackmail: Again and again the phrases, the words, even the very punctuation points of that ill-starred letter went through her mind. She pictured them being scrutinised and weighed up by a reader so unexpected, so different from the one for whom they had been intended; she wondered if the letter had been seen by her mother’s eyes or her brothers, and by how many others.66

The protected space afforded to Maria and Rachele’s correspondence contrasts with the fate of Gertrude’s letter, scrutinised by any number of unsympathetic eyes.67 The trauma of being caught forces Gertrude to pick up the “fatal pen”68 to offer her complacent participation in the patriarchal drama and speed up her plot: “She would have liked … to slow for a moment this machine which had scarcely started, and yet was already rushing along so speedily. But there was no chance.” 69 An obstacle defeated, the story moves forward without her, effectively silencing her: “to make this answer she would have to give some explanation … tell a story.”70 The monotony of the plot thus generated is noted by the narrator in a dismissive abbreviation:

65 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 134; “Non iscriver nulla.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 132. 66 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 135; “Le frasi, le parole, le virgole di quel foglio sciagurato, passavano e ripassavano nella sua memoria: le immaginava osservate, pesate da un lettore tanto impreveduto, tanto diverso da quello a cui eran destinate; si figurava che avesser potuto cader sotto gli occhi anche della madre o del fratello, o di chi sa altri.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 133. 67 Rachele is also protected in terms of her correspondence with Ranieri: In a scene that replays Gertrude’s “tira-tira” with the servant, the narrator protects Rachele from Mosè, as she “lacerates” her letter to Ranieri before he can grab it. Serao, La mano tagliata, 119. 68 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 136; “penna fatale.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi,135. 69 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 139; “Avrebbe desiderato … rallentare un momento quella macchina che, appena avviata, andava così precipitosamente; ma non ci fu verso.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 137. 70 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 148; “Per dare quella risposta, bisognava venire a una spiegazione … raccontare una storia.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 145.

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Through Gertrude’s story, I promessi sposi critiques the patriarchal setup that suppresses all but the first-born son who is obligated to “perpetuate the family, to have children of his own, and so torture himself by tormenting them in the same way.”72 However, that very same paradigm governs its narrative structure, offering a justification of (self)-censorship in the name of readerly pleasure, pushing the narrator to skip the “boring” parts in order to resolve the Oedipal desire that Gertrude threatens to upend, both through her character’s troublesome actions and by the very space afforded to her by the narrative.73 Here, then, if a typological reading of I promessi sposi reaffirms these naturalised, gendered narrative structures, an intertextual reading with La mano tagliata allows room for critique: typologically, Lucia and Gertrude occupy similar narrative functions in the Oedipal quest,74 where they are inscribed as obstacles, their desire repressed; concomitantly, however, in light of Maria and Rachele’s ambivalent position in La mano tagliata, this censorship can be taken as a form of narrative defence: Lucia’s inaccessible interiority likens her to Maria, and not only are her motives unknowable, her desirability is inscrutable; Da Verona’s sexually explicit additions to her story underscore our exclusion from such narratives in I promessi sposi. Continuing along the lines of Manzoni’s readers-turnedrevisionists with which we began, Gertrude’s position holds its own ambivalence: inside the narrative bounds, the brief foray into her biography will provide “enough to account for the unusual and mysterious things which we have noted about her, and to make intelligible the motives

71 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 149; “E neppure descriveremo, in particolare e per ordine, i sentimenti dell’animo suo in tutto quel tempo: sarebbe una storia di dolori e di fluttuazioni, troppo monotona, e troppo somigliante alle cose già dette.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 146. 72 Manzoni, The Betrothed, 127; “conservar la famiglia, a procrear cioè de’ figliuoli, per tormentarsi a tormentarli nella stessa maniera.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 126. 73 In Fermo e Lucia, the episode is labeled “Digression” (“Digressione”). Manzoni, Fermo e Lucia, 171. 74 For parallels between apparently opposite Lucia and Gertrude, particularly in terms of the “curt” narrative treatment of Lucia’s wedding and Gertrude’s taking of the veil, see Jones, “Women,” esp. 215.

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for her behaviour later on.”75 Outside of the novel’s confines, however, our desire for the ‘full’ story has given la monaca di Monza a life of her own, generating studies on her historical counterpart, sister Virginia Maria de Leyva, 76 as well as fan fiction, for the very reason that “No small number of the book’s many readers nor few solemn Critics, have expressed a desire to know more,” as Giovanni Rosini explains in the introduction to his 1829 novel Monaca di Monza. 77 The censorship of Gertrude’s story – perhaps precisely at the moment we most desire to know more – has led contemporary historians to continue the task laid out in I promessi sposi’s introduction, to wage a war against time and bring back the very figures usually forgotten. Thus, Manzoni’s “brilliant reticence,” 78 which reduces Gertrude’s seduction by Egidio into three words (“the poor wretch replied” 79 ), has led to the discovery and publication of a further intertext to which now we can only allude: Suor Virginia’s own (rather divergent) confession about the start of her illicit relationship: “He violated me, throwing me on the ground.” Here, then, reading La mano tagliata and I promessi sposi through the lens of desire evinces the tension invested in Lucia, Gertrude, Maria and Rachele, at once satisfying the Oedipal quest of the respective patriarchal figures and evading ours as readers: Renzo, Ranieri (and Egidio) get the girl, but we are reminded that we do not have the full story. 80 Censorship, then, is shown to be concomitantly an effect of Oedipal desire and a form of resistance.

75

Manzoni, The Betrothed, 127; “Quel tanto … che basti a render ragione dell’insolito e del misterioso che abbiam veduto in lei, e a far comprendere i motivi della sua condotta, in quello che avvenne dopo.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 125. 76 For the philologically accurate publication of the trial, along with commentary, see Vigorelli, Vita e processo di suor Virginia Maria de Leyva, monaca di Monza, ed. Umberto Colombo (Milan: Garzanti, 1985). 77 “Non pochi fra i moltissimi lettori di quel libro, non che qualche Critico solenne, han mostrato desiderio di saper più oltre.” Giovanni Rosini, Monaca di Monza. Storia del secolo xvii. (Pisa: Presso Niccolò Capurro, 1829), 6. 78 Giancarlo Vigorelli, “Presentazione.” In Vita e processo di suor Virginia Maria de Leyva, monaca di Monza, vii; “geniale reticenza.” 79 “La sventurata rispose.” Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 150. 80 Vigorelli, in fact, promises that with the publication of Suor Virginia’s trial the story is “finally, and integrally for the first time, all seals and vetoes removed, brought to light here.” Vigorelli, vii; “finalmente, e per la prima volta integralmente, tolto ogni sigillo e veto, viene qui alla luce.” Although moving beyond the specific bounds of this article, this on-going philological pursuit of the complete story evokes Moi’s Derridian reading of Freud and Dora.

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Bibliography Baldi, Guido. I promessi sposi. Progetto di società e mito. Milan: Mursia, 1985. Colombo, Umberto, editor. Vita e processo di suor Virginia Maria de Leyva, monaca di Monza. Milan: Garzanti, 1985. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. —. Technologies of Gender. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1987. De Rienzo, Giorgio. “Manzoni contro Manzoni. Il romanzo di Lucia nei Promessi sposi.” In L’antimanzonismo, edited by Gianni Oliva, 9-16. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2009. Eco, Umberto (author) and Marco Lorenzini (illustrator). La storia de I promessi sposi. Scuola Holden. Biblioteca di Repubblica-Espresso. 2010. Fanning, Ursula. Gender Meets Genre: Woman as Subject in the Fictional Universe of Matilde Serao. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002. —. “From Domestic to Dramatic: Matilde Serao’s Use of the Gothic.” In The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters. —. Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions, edited by Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sulis, 119-140. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. Ferlito, Susanna. “Fear of the Mother’s Tongue: Secrecy and Gossip in Manzoni’s I promessi Sposi.” MLN 113.1 (1998): 30-51. Forgacs, David. Introduction. In The Betrothed and History of the Column of Infamy. Edited by David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds, xxiiixxxiii. J.M. Dent: London, 1997. Harrowitz, Nancy. Anti-semitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,. 1981. Jones, Verina R. “Women in I promessi sposi.” In Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History, edited by Zygmunt G. %DUDĔVNL DQG 6KLUOH\ : 9LQDOO -223. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Knutson, Susan Lynne. Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. Waterloo, ON, CAN: Wilfrid. Laurier University Press, 2000. Lansing, Richard H. “Stylistic and Structural Duality in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi.” Italica 53.3 (Autumn 1976): 347-361.

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Lotman, Jurij. “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology.” Trans. Julian Gaffy. Poetics Today, Vol. 1.1-2, Special Issue: Literature, Interpretation, Communication (Autumn 1979): 161-184. Manzoni, Alessandro. Fermo e Lucia. Edited by Salvatore Silvano Nigro. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2002. —. I promessi sposi. Edited by Vittorio Spinazzola. Milan: Garzanti, 2002 (xxvi edition). —. The Betrothed and History of the Column of Infamy, edited by David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds. J.M. Dent: London, 1997. Manzoni, Alessandro and Guido da Verona. I promessi sposi. Romanzo. Milan: Società editrice unitas, 1930. Moi, Toril. “Representations of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud’s ‘Dora.’” Feminist Review 9 (1981): 60-74. Oliva, Gianni, editor. L’antimanzonismo. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2009. Parisi, Luciano. “Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi: A Chaste Novel and an Erotic Palimpsest.” The Modern Language Review, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Apr., 2008): 424-437. —. Come abbiamo letto Manzoni. Interpreti novecenteschi. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’orso. 2008. Rosini, Giovanni. Monaca di Monza. Storia del secolo xvii. Pisa: Presso Niccolò Capurro. 1829. Ebook. Salsini, Laura A. Gendered Genres: Female Experience and Narrative Patterns in the Works of Matilde Serao. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana. “I promessi sposi e la psicanalisi.” In Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Italian Novels, edited by Guido Pugliese. 77-88. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Serao, Matilde. La mano tagliata. 1912. Reprint, Florence: Salani, 1921. Shemek, Deanna. “Prisoners of Passion: Women and Desire in Matilde Serao’s Romanzi d’Amore.” In Italiana, edited by Albert N. Mancini, Paolo Giordano and Pier Raimondo Baldini, 243-54. River Forest IL: Rosary College, 1988. Spinazzola, Vittorio. Il libro per tutti. Saggio sui Promessi sposi. Rome: Editori riunti, 1983. Vigorelli, Giancarlo. “Presentazione.” In Vita e processo di suor Virginia Maria de Leyva, monaca di Monza, edited by Umberto Colombo, viixix. Milan: Garzanti, 1985.

CHAPTER EIGHT OEDIPAL DESIRE IN ALBERTO MORAVIA’S L’UOMO CHE GUARDA (THE VOYEUR) MARIARITA MARTINO UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

I. Introduction This article investigates how desire operates within Moravia’s L’uomo che guarda,1 a novel which tells the story of Dodo, a university professor of French literature who is affected by scopophilia, the desire to look at sexually stimulating scenes. Dodo is a voyeur with a curiosity for knowledge and transgression; he is a tormented intellectual who undertakes an existential journey to cope with the antagonistic relationship with his widowed father, Alberto, and the marital crisis with his wife Silvia, who has an adulterous affair with Alberto, and whom Dodo unconsciously associates with his mother. Together with the desire to explore transgressive scenarios, the complex family triangle is central to Dodo’s narrative journey; these two themes, the curiosity of the protagonist and his familial dilemma, as well as the narrative strategies deployed in the novel, make L’uomo che guarda an “Oedipal tale” for their strong similarity to both the subject and the narrative development of Sophocles’ dramatic masterpiece, Oedipus Rex.2 As it is well known, the eponymous character of the Athenian tragedy, suspicious about his biological ancestors, decides to leave the adoptive family to discover the truth about his parents and his origins, thus fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Moravia’s protagonist, like Sophocles’, also desires to discover the nature of his problematic 1

Alberto Moravia, L’uomo che guarda (Milan: Bompiani, 2006; 1st ed. 1985). All English translations provided of this work are my own. 2 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, ed. by Roger D. Dawe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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relationship with his family members. By examining the dynamics of desire in Moravia’s text, my analysis mainly takes a psychoanalytical perspective, which considers both clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. Clinical perspectives, such as those elaborated by Otto Fenichel and Ludwig Eidelberg, will be adopted in order to portray a psychological profile of the voyeur Dodo, and offer a theoretical platform to investigate where Dodo’s desire for knowledge and for scrutinising other people originates.3 In the light of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, the article also examines scopophilia and epistemophilia (the desire for knowledge); these two phenomena represent the “essence” of Dodo’s psyche and are strictly linked to what Freud named, after the Sophoclean myth, Oedipus complex – the unconscious desire to love the mother and the related antagonism with the father. 4 The myth of Oedipus, as elaborated by Freud, plays a central role in explaining the dynamics of psychic development and desire in the life of the protagonist, as well as in the narrative development of plot of L’uomo che guarda. Also, for Jacques Lacan, the notion of desire has Oedipal resonances, since he refers to the desire of the subject to be the phallus for the mother. Lacan also states that desire is essentially generated by “lack,” a feeling of unfulfilment, which is at the core of human experience; because desire is unconscious, it needs to be articulated by the subject in order to be acknowledged.5 Following Lacan, this analysis explores the manifestation of Dodo’s existential malaise, which is at the core of his desire for knowledge; Dodo’s psychological condition will be contextualised in terms of an unconscious “lack,” a desire for the mother he readdresses to his wife Silvia who, in turn, devotes her affections to her father-in-law. Dodo’s struggle translates into a perpetual attempt to understand his role within the familial context, into a first-person introspective narration where he gradually discovers the truth about himself and unravels his repressed feelings for his family members.

3 See Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses (New York: Norton, 1945) and Ludwig Eidelberg, Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis (New York: Free Press, 1968). 4 Sigmund Freud, Threes Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1962), 112-115. 5 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-54, trans. with notes by John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 183; The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, notes by John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 228229; Écrits. A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311.

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The first part of this article intends to contextualise Dodo’s scopophilia, and investigates the origins of the protagonist’s obsession with vision as well as his curiosity that affects the development of his existential discomfort. In this section, the psychoanalytic insights delineated above will be invaluable in outlining the voyeuristic profile of the main character and in understanding the origins of his condition within the economy of the narrative text. The second part of the article is a narratological analysis of Moravia’s novel, and focuses on how desire drives the narrative structure. Specifically, my discussion explores Oedipal echoes in Moravia’s text in the way it presents the desire for knowledge and discovery that drives the main character. In particular, I will employ analytical categories already defined by Roland Barthes in narratological studies, and later applied by Laura Mulvey to the analysis of the Oedipus Rex plot;6 the aim is to examine how desire is shaped within the narrative structure of Moravia’s novel, and how Dodo’s investigation and scopophilia take the form of a desire, specifically a desire for discovery.

II. Desire to look, desire to know The desire to look and to know permeates the whole of the novel of L’uomo che guarda. Dodo is a scopophilic subject, or a voyeur, who whilst scrutinising the people and the reality which surround him, also investigates his Oedipal and conflictual rapport with his father, and his own problematic relationship with his wife Silvia. At the origin of Dodo’s struggle to understand his feelings for his family, there is a lack, something that is repressed and unconscious; this undetermined cause of Dodo’s ambiguous relationship with his relatives affects his behaviour and emotions, and it therefore needs to be understood and articulated by Dodo himself. As the analysis of Dodo’s psychological characterisation will demonstrate, Dodo’s attitude is strictly connected to his condition as voyeur. According to our psychoanalytic reading of voyeurism, the protagonist’s scopophilia finds its origins in Dodo’s childhood, specifically from the beginning of the conflict with his father. Dodo is a 35-year-old professor of French literature at an unidentified university in Rome. He defines himself as an intellectual, as someone who enjoys engaging with and questioning the experiences and objects that inhabit his world. Dodo is married to Silvia, and they both live in an elegant, patrician apartment in Rome city centre with Alberto, Dodo’s 6

Roland Barthes, S/Z, (Paris: Éditions Seuil, 1970); Barthes’s codes were also deployed by Laura Mulvey in “The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx”, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 177-201.

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father. Alberto is a distinguished professor of physics, a “university baron,” 7 who is widowed (Dodo’s mother having died of cancer years before the narration begins); in the story, Alberto is recovering from injuries following a car accident and is bedridden. Regardless of his age and condition, Alberto is still very successful with women, and also remains very vital. Although Dodo is keen to look after Alberto during his illness, he fails to comprehend his own antagonistic relationship with the paternal figure. 8 To Dodo’s eyes, Alberto represents a synecdoche of power and success; unlike his father, the protagonist is an unfulfilled individual, unsatisfied with his private life and with his job, who turns this dissatisfaction into obsessive attention for the world around him and for his literary interests. The relationship between Dodo, his wife and Alberto is not very peaceful; at the end of the 1960s, in order to protest against bourgeois hedonism, which he associates with the paternal figure, Dodo surrenders all claims to an apartment bequeathed to him by his mother. For Silvia, having a home on their own would offer them the opportunity to develop their marital relationship without depending on Alberto, even though the apartment is located in the same building where Dodo’s father lives. 9 Silvia is reluctant to live with her father-in-law, and this stressful situation seems to be the apparent cause of the marital crisis; Silvia abandons the apartment and her husband, and moves to her aunt’s house.10 Throughout the novel Dodo is driven by a desire to understand both the disagreements with his father and the role played by Silvia in the father-son relationship; however, he is unable to rationally frame his feelings for Alberto or to acknowledge the causes of the crisis with Silvia; this indefinability fuels his desire to uncover the ultimate reason for these conflicts. Lacan’s theory of desire helps us illuminate this psychological deadlock affecting Moravia’s protagonist. The notion of desire is central to Lacan’s thought, as he sees it as a crucial concept of psychoanalysis; for Lacan, desire is unconscious and, as such, it needs to be brought into existence by the subject during the psychoanalytic treatment. 11 In this perspective, desire translates into an eternal pressure, a continuous feeling of dissatisfaction, which is caused by what Lacan defines as objet petit a, or “object (little) a,” which represents the lack that sets desire in motion. For Lacan, desire is the origin of the Oedipal complex, since the subject 7

“barone universitario,” Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 9. Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 14. 9 Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 18, 19. 10 Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 21. 11 Lacan, The Seminar. Book I, 183; The Seminar. Book II, 228-229. 8

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desires to be the phallus for the mother. If we read this theory within Dodo’s context, we cannot fail to see a number of consistencies. Dodo is driven by a desire to understand his unarticulated conflict with his father, as well as Silvia’s decision to leave the marital home. Dodo’s continuous questioning of the nature of his ambiguous feelings for Alberto leads him to discover an unconscious, incestuous affection for his mother. This revelation is arrived at by a series of clues that reveal to Dodo that his father is having a sexual relationship with Silvia, and that this extramarital affair juxtaposes the role of Silvia with that of Dodo’s mother. Dodo’s struggle to motivate his antagonism with his father remains perpetual and eternal, since he is caught in the complexity of this ambiguous family triangle; Dodo will never succeed in solving his problem with his father and with his wife, who in this context represents the reincarnation of the maternal figure. However, the articulation of Dodo’s incestuous feelings for his mother can be traced further in Dodo’s account of his experience, especially if the origins of his scopophilia are investigated within the economy of the narrative. From the very first page, Dodo defines himself as someone who “lives through his eyes,”12 an individual who observes the world around him with a voyeuristic detachment. The whole novel, as the title clearly indicates, revolves around a catalogue of described images and situations the protagonist perceives through his subjective narrating gaze. 13 This voyeuristic characterisation of L’uomo che guarda is also particularly explicit if the protagonist’s obsession with theories of scopophilia and with sexuality is taken into account. Scopophilic desire is a narrative thread in Dodo’s life; he is a declared voyeur who, conscious of his condition, exposes his peculiarity practically as well as theoretically. At the opening of the novel’s second chapter, “La conchiglia pallida e rosa” (“The pale pink seashell”), Dodo discusses and illustrates the narrative theories of scopophilia he proposes to his students at the university where he teaches: Voyeurism seems to lie at the source of a great deal of fiction writing and, obviously, of cinema too. … the voyeur doesn’t fasten on the subject, so much as on its movement, or behaviour. What’s more, this behaviour must 12 The original text reads: “io vivo soprattutto attraverso gli occhi,” Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 7. 13 This narrative style is typical of Moravia: as Olga Ragusa pointed out in her study of Moravia as a voyeuristic storyteller, the writer fixes his eye on the scene whilst this is taking place and he deploys the chosisme technique in order to convey a peeping tom effect. See Olga Ragusa, “Alberto Moravia: Voyeurism and Storytelling”, The Southern Review, 4 (1968), 127-141.

Oedipal Desire in Alberto Moravia’s L’uomo Che Guarda (The Voyeur) 133 be strictly private, that is, it must be such that no one, except a voyeur, could chance to see it without being aware that he is guilty of an indiscretion.14

Dodo’s voyeurism is kaleidoscopic and permeates every aspect of his life; the protagonist delivers theoretical insights about his condition and, as a literature specialist, he refers to classical examples of voyeurism such as Erodotus, Mallarmé, and Proust15 to support his views, and extends his definition of sexual voyeurism to a more epistemological interpretation of 14

Here and elsewhere, the source of the translation is Tim Parks, The Voyeur (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 28; the original text reads: “la scopofilia, o, se si preferisce, il voyeurismo sarebbe all’origine di gran parte della narrativa e, ovviamente, del cinema … il voyeur non tanto spia l’oggetto quanto il suo movimento cioè il suo comportamento. Per giunta questo comportamento deve essere strettamente privato cioè quale a nessuno, a meno di essere scopofilo, può avvenire di spiarlo senza consapevolezza di commettere un’indiscrezione.” Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 39. 15 Of the three examples of literary scopophilia presented by Dodo, two are taken from Proust’s seven-volume semi-autobiographical novel Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu), written between 1908 and 1922 (and published between 1913 and 1927), and one from Herodotus’ Histories (Historiae), written in c. 440 BC. In one case, Dodo refers to a narrative episode taken from the first part of “Sodom and Gomorrah” (“Sodome et Gomorrhe”), the fourth volume of Proust’s work, in which the writer plays the role of voyeur, observing sexual intercourse between Monsieur Charlus and the giletier Jupien. Dodo also takes from Remembrance of Things Past, but this time from the first volume “Swann’s Way” (“Du côté de chez Swann”), the episode of a Sapphic scene the author witnesses between Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her friend. From Herodotus, Dodo borrows the example of the King of Lydia, Candaule, from Book I, where the king spies Gydes hiding behind a door in order to peep at the queen whilst she is undressing. Finally, Dodo quotes in Italian and analyses a Mallarmé pornographic poem “A Negress Possessed by a Demon” (“Une négresse par le démon secouée”), which portrays a paedophilic lesbian scene between an African woman, described through animalistic imagery, and a young girl of a lower status, which posits her as subordinate to her female antagonist. The four quatrains of alexandrines describing the sexual assault correspond to a scopophilic scenario, which Dodo interprets as peeped at by the author/narrator who writes the poem, who is voyeur and who, according to Dodo’s interpretation, is describing and sharing with the reader the scene observed. For further details, see Marchel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27), ed. by Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1954); and Herodotus, Historiae (c. 450-20), ed. by Carolus Hude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902); and Stéphane Mallarmé, “Une négresse par le démon secouée”(1887), in Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Carlyle F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; 1st edn 1957), 6.

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curiosity by comparing the desire to look of the voyeur to the desire for discovery which drives scientists in experiments.16 Dodo’s theoretical insights point towards an epistemological dimension of scopophilia that was already envisaged by Freud in his study of infant sexuality and in relation to the Oedipus complex. In particular, Dodo, as Freud before him, explicitly refers to scopophilia, but he also implicitly refers to epistemophilia, that is, the pleasure of exploring unknown realities. Following Freud, then, both scopophilia and epistemophilia use the same energy in unveiling the unknown, an energy that quickens the desire to acknowledge the object of desire. 17 Dodo meticulously describes himself and others, as well as narrative situations which occur in the narration. In a number of episodes, Dodo, who tells his story from a subjective, first-person narration, pays particular attention to sexualised scenarios and details concerning the other characters who inhabit his literary world. To name just a few examples where Dodo’s voyeurism becomes particularly manifest, he describes how he had sexual intercourse with his wife Silvia before their crisis; how Silvia exhibitionistically undressed in her room whilst he watched her from a window in the opposite building; he also voyeuristically gazes at his father whilst the nurse, Fausta, undresses in order to please Alberto; finally, he asks a passer-by, Pascasie, if he could take a nude picture of her.18 These dynamics of desire to look and to know are framed within the psychoanalytic theories Dodo applies to his artistic interests, and which intersect with the narrative of this postmodern novel.19 Dodo’s curiosity extends to literature and to the ways scopophilia has been represented in various arts: scopophilia consists of an energy addressed to discover the unknown. But this obsession with “looking” and “knowing” originates within the familial relationships and can be traced back to his childhood. Dodo’s voyeuristic energy, consisting of a strong desire to know and learn about anything, is not addressed exclusively towards visual and sexualised scenarios; his curiosity and his desire for knowledge are driven by the 16

Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 44, 45, 85, 88. Freud, Three Essays, 112. 18 Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 26-28, 34-36, 110-114, 58-61. 19 Rocco Capozzi refers to L’uomo che guarda as the only text in Moravia’s production which illustrates scopophilia in a theoretical dimension, and this, according to the critic, makes it one of the author’s most postmodern novels. L’uomo che guarda is, in short, a “romanzo a tesi,” in which theory and fiction are intertwined; see Capozzi, “Voyeurism and Intertextuality as Narrative Strategies in Moravia’s Latest Works,”in Homage to Moravia, ed. by Rocco Capozzi and Mario B. Mignone (Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 1993): 35-56, 51. 17

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need to understand his crisis with his wife, the conflictual relationship with his father, and the role that the maternal figures plays in it. It is interesting to note that, according to Eidelberg’s clinical definition in the Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis: Some of the important psychological phenomena which owe their origin in a great part to [scopophilia] are the desire for knowledge (in a general sense), the impulse towards investigation, interest in observation of Nature, pleasure in travel, and the impulse towards artistic treatment of things perceived by the eye (for example, painting).20

The desire for knowledge is a fundamental characteristic of scopophilia, as well as an integral part of epistemophilia. The word scopophilia is the result of the combination of two Greek morphemes: “scopein,” which stands for “to look,” and “philos,” that is, “loving.” The linguistic combination of “scopo-philia” clearly delineates the two frames in which this phenomenon operates: vision and a fixation upon visual scenarios, from which the subject of the look derives enjoyment. This theoretical frame is crucial for identifying some determining features of scopophilia, such as vision, pleasure, secrecy, and transgression, and to contextualise Dodo’s curiosity and desire to discover. From a clinical perspective, which allows us to understand the psychological condition of the protagonist in relation to his family situation, scopophilia owes its origin to an event, which the scopophilic subject experiences or infers. As the psychiatrist Otto Fenichel states: Voyeurs are fixated on experiences that aroused their castration anxiety, either primal scenes or the sight of adult genitals. The patient attempts to deny the justification of his fright by repeating the frightening scenes with certain alterations, for the purpose of achieving a belated mastery … these conditions then represent either a repetition of conditions present in an important childhood experience, or more often a denial of these very conditions or of their dangerous nature. The fact that no sight can actually bring about the reassurance for which patients are striving forces voyeurs to look again and again, and to see more and more, with an ever increasing intensity. Ultimately they displace their interests … to scenes that may better serve as reassurances.21

According to this clinical description, the voyeur fixates on a scene which needs to be reiterated in order for the subject to achieve virtual mastery, control over the object of vision, and reassurance against the anxiety 20 21

Eidelberg, Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, 392. Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses, 71-5, 198-201, and 491.

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caused by the frightening sight. The importance of the primal scene for the development of neuroses such as scopophilia was stressed by Freud in his study of the Wolf Man. According to Freud, the Urszene, or primal scene, consists of a scene that might have been witnessed by a child; the scene consists of sexual intercourse between the parents, which is perceived as an act of violence towards the mother. This scene is used by Freud to refer to a traumatic event in the life of individuals, which generates scopophilia.22 In L’uomo che guarda, we can investigate Dodo’s primal scene as a traumatic event that dooms him to his conflict with his father and to his eternal and continuous desire to know and explore, which is at the core of his scopophilia as well as his literary experience. Dodo describes the original scenario he came to witness and which jeopardizes his relationship with the paternal figure. In chapter 8, “Lo schiaffo” (“The Blow”) the protagonist describes his relationship with his mother, his memories of her, and their complicity. One day, Dodo asks his mother to bring the stamps he collects from his father’s study. As she does not return, Dodo decides to look for her, enters his father’s room, and describes a scene representing an apparent act of violence from the father to the mother: I saw what looked like a decapitated head on the desktop, its body outside my angle of vision. This head, forced fiercely down against the desk, was my mother’s; my father’s hand was squeezing her neck, holding her tight in that position at once so strange and so uncomfortable. All I could see of my father was part of his arm; but this was enough for me to realize that he was behind her, bearing down on her and forcing her to bend over the desk. The idea of violence, a violence inexplicably accepted and unopposed, was suggested not only by my mother’s unnatural position, but also by the expression on her face, which was precisely that of a decapitated head immediately after the execution, with eyes open and staring, and a mouth set in a now silent shriek. With the logic of a child, I imagined my father was inflicting something like a punishment on my mother; but at the same time I sensed a mysterious complicity on her part. She wasn’t struggling; and it occurred to me that the hand that kept her nailed to the desk was unnecessary: my mother would have stayed bent down there even without it. I saw, thought and felt all this in just a split second.23

22 Freud, “From the History of Infantile Neurosis” (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth, 1955), XVII, 1-124. 23 Parks, The Voyeur, 133. The original text reads: “ho visto una testa come decapitata sul piano della scrivania; il corpo era fuori dal mio angolo visuale.

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Following both Freud’s and Fenichel’s theories of the “primal scene,” it is in this precise moment that the child, Dodo, is initiated to voyeurism, scopophilia, and it is also in this past event of his life that his “hate” for his father originates. Dodo perceives the parental intercourse as an act of violence, as a punishment of the mother by the father: this traumatic event generates his desire to look, a curiosity which dooms his destiny as a scopophilic subject in conflict with the paternal figure. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, where Freud discusses scopophilia in relation to sexual development, the father of psychoanalysis identifies the instinct for knowledge as an ontological conceptualisation of vision, which is not explicitly sexual and which constitutes what he calls “love for knowledge,” that is, epistemophilia.24 The drive for knowledge theorised by Freud in his analysis of scopophilia is contextualised in the example of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the story of the mythical king of Thebes. According to the story, Oedipus was the son of the King and Queen of Thebes. He was condemned to death by his family because an oracle predicted he would kill his father, Laïus, and marry his mother, Jocasta. After being rescued, Oedipus was adopted by another royal family and, many years later, questioned the oracle to solve the riddle of his origins; in turn, the oracle confirmed his destiny. Oedipus then left the court he believed to be his native place, and arrived in Thebes, where he killed the king, solved the riddle of the Sphinx and, as an expression of the Thebans’ gratitude, was led to marry the widowed queen Jocasta (his real mother). The prophecy was therefore fulfilled. After a period of time, however, a plague broke out in Thebes, and Oedipus consulted the oracle again, only to be told that the spreading of the disease would end when the Questa testa, duramente schiacciata contro la tavola, era quella di mia madre; la mano di mio padre la stringeva alla nuca, mantenendola in quella posizione così scomoda e così strana. Non vedevo, di mio padre, che una parte del braccio; ma questo mi è bastato per capire che lui le stava dietro, pesandole addosso e costringendola a piegarsi sulla scrivania. L’idea della violenza, una violenza inspiegabilmente accettata e subìta, mi è stata suggerita non soltanto dalla posizione innaturale di mia madre ma anche dall’espressione del suo volto come, appunto, di testa decapitata subito dopo il supplizio, con gli occhi aperti e fissi e la bocca atteggiata in un urlo ormai silenzioso. Con logica infantile ho pensato che mio padre stava infliggendo a mia madre qualche cosa di simile a una punizione; ma nello stesso tempo ho intuito in lei una misteriosa complicità. Non si dibatteva, infatti; e mi è venuto in mente che la mano che la inchiodava sulla scrivania fosse superflua: mia madre sarebbe rimasta piegata anche senza la mano. Tutto questo l’ho veduto, pensato, sentito in meno di un attimo.” Moravia, L’uomo che guarda, 159-160. 24 Freud, Three Essays, 112-115.

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killer of Laïus was condemned to exile. After a long investigation, Oedipus unravels his story and then blinds himself, for the truth he has discovered is unbearable.25 The story of Oedipus is central to Freud’s conceptualisation of the Oedipus complex. For Freud, the riddle the child attempts to solve in his instinctive attempt to confront the primal scene (and the subsequent castration complex and anxiety deriving from its sight) is a reminiscence and a distorted version of the riddle presented by the Sphinx to Oedipus, when, moved by curiosity about his origins and about those of the plague, he begins his investigation. By solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus becomes trapped in a narrative thread, which will lead him to satisfy his curiosity and to answer the following questions: “Where do I come from? What is my story?” The interrogation is Oedipus’ response to his urge to leave his adoptive family in order to discover his true story. In the end, Oedipus, after discovering that he has married his mother, blinds himself as a punishment for having satisfied his knowledge, and the oracle is fulfilled. This psychoanalytic frame well explains Dodo’s behaviour throughout the novel, his conflict with his father, the marital crisis with his wife, and his latent jealousy about his mother. Like Oedipus, Dodo is driven by curiosity – specifically, to discover the truth about his familial relationships. In order to understand the tensions affecting his family, Dodo also embarks on an introspective journey, which leads him to discover that he married a woman who, like his mother, has a close relationship with his father, and that he developed this antipathy for the paternal figure as a consequence of this antagonism, which is not resolved throughout the narration. Dodo is caught in the complexity of his plot: driven by the desire to discover the truth about his unconscious feelings for the members of his family, he realises he cannot afford the apartment left to him in his mother’s inheritance, and that he will have to live with his father and wife in the family home where Silvia will certainly continue the incestuous relationship with Alberto. The result of his quest is the continuation of the tensions that have doomed Dodo throughout the narrative and that will perpetually exercise and trigger his curiosity and desire for a resolution to his family issues. Like Oedipus, Dodo undertakes a metaphorical journey of discovery motivated by an evident conflict with his father, made explicit throughout the novel by the conspicuous use of suspended questions, or ambiguous gaze exchanges and confrontational situations. The analysis of Dodo’s narrative plot will highlight further the points of contact between the Oedipal struggle in 25

See above at n. 2.

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Sophocles plot, and the Oedipal struggle that Dodo, the voyeur, is experiencing in his story.

III. A plot of desire Desire plays a central role in the psychological characterisation of the protagonist as well as in the plot development. Dodo is a declared voyeur who seeks to scrutinise others; this scopophilic energy translates into a desire to investigate his ambiguous relationships with his close relatives as he embarks on an introspective voyage of discovery. Dodo explores his own self, and undertakes a metaphorical journey motivated by a lack that urges him to satisfy his own desire for knowledge. Dodo essentially craves, like Oedipus, to know what is missing in his existential experience; this investigation takes the form of a desire to discover the unknown, which is represented by the origins of his antagonistic relationship with his father, and the roles played in it by both his mother and his wife. As we will see in this section, the first-person narration of Moravia’s novel consists of a progressive unravelling of the plot of Dodo’s life, and that desire shapes Moravia’s novel as it moves the narrative towards the final recognition of both the protagonist’s unconscious hate for his father, and his unconscious love for his deceased mother, a feeling he readdresses to his wife, whose character can be interpreted as a nostalgic reminiscence of the maternal figure. Yet, this search for self-knowledge will lead Dodo to a truth which sustains his desire, and which nevertheless leaves him unsatisfied and caught in the complexity of his narrative plot. According to Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BCE), Sophocles’ text is an example of complex plot tragedy. Aristotle defines the plot of Oedipus as conveying anagnorisis and peripeteia, or the passage from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge following a quest.26 In this type of plot, the incident to which the belated recognition refers occurs in the story and outside the action of the play. Throughout the plot, the construction of knowledge is built through the employment of narrative strategies aimed at provoking a reaction in the audience. Such strategies include reversal (the action changes and provokes an opposite reaction to the one expected), recognition (anagnorisis, change from ignorance to knowledge) and astonishment (the effect of surprise, linked to the effect of recognition and reversal which may provoke a good or a bad reaction). The plot of Oedipus Rex therefore informs the narrative with logical hypotheses, 26

Aristotle, “Poetics” (c. 335 BCE), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991; 1st edn 1984), 2316-2340 (1447a10-1462b1), 2324-2340 (1452b1-1462b1).

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causing role reversals and recognitions, which affect the characters, contribute to create a certain state of suspense, and bring about the denouement at the end of the tale. As both the Oedipus complex and scopophilia draw on a similarly strong desire to discover the unknown, it could be argued that the Oedipal connotation of Dodo’s “plot” is strictly linked with his scopophilia and his desire for knowledge. In L’uomo che guarda, these epistemophilic and scopophilic energies are oriented towards the satisfaction of Dodo’s desire to discover his story, and also his fixation on sexual scenarios. In other words, the investigative desire of the Oedipal malaise moves Dodo’s narrative towards the final recognition, which solves the enigma of the scopophilic subject set out at the beginning of the plot. Why does Dodo hate his father? Who is his rival in love? These are the two main enigmas Dodo attempts to explain throughout his narrative. The solutions to these mysteries are arrived at through a progression of narrative events and clues leading to the final recognition of the truth. As already pointed out, Dodo’s father is his rival in love, and the protagonist is entangled in an Oedipal struggle. In what follows, we will explore and identify similarities between Dodo’s and Oedipus’ search for truth, and see how Dodo’s Oedipal characterisation is linked to his desire for discovery. This will be done by drawing on Roland Barthes’concepts of narrative proairetic codes (the sequential development of the story which supplies the actions’ order in a narrative) and hermeneutic codes (the reordering of the story’s events for the purpose of creating suspense through unanswered questions in the narrative) to the analysis of Oedipus Rex carried out by Laura Mulvey. Mulvey refers to Freud’s retelling of the story of Oedipus from the beginning to the end. Freud unravels Sophocles’ plot and puts Oedipus’ life in a chronological sequence, in a prediegetic time (a narrative time previous to the opening of the Greek tragedy), which is nevertheless part of the world of the text at a later diegetic time. Freud tells the story from the day Oedipus was born to the day he blinds himself for the unbearable guilt of having violated the limits of human nature: Oedipus, son of Laïus, King of Thebes, and of Jocasta, was exposed as an infant because an oracle had warned Laïus that the still unborn infant would be his father’s murderer. The child was rescued and grew up as a prince in an alien court, until, in doubt as to his origin, he too questioned the oracle and was warned to avoid his home since he was destined to murder his father and take his mother in marriage. On the road leading away from what he believed to be his home, he met King Laïus and slew him in a sudden quarrel. He came next to Thebes and solved the riddle set

Oedipal Desire in Alberto Moravia’s L’uomo Che Guarda (The Voyeur) 141 him by the Sphinx who barred his way. Out of gratitude the Thebans made him their king and gave him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He reigned long in peace and honour and she, who unknown to him, was his mother, bore him two sons and two daughters. Then, at last a plague broke out and the Thebans made enquiry once more of the oracle. It is at this point that the Sophocles tragedy opens. The messenger brings back the reply that the plague will cease when the murderer has been driven from the land. But he, where is he? Where shall now be read The fading record of this ancient guilt? The action of this play consists of nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever mounting excitement – a process that can be likened to the work of psychoanalysis – that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laïus, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta. Appalled by the abomination that he himself has unwittingly perpetrated, Oedipus blinds himself and forsakes his home. The oracle has been fulfilled.27

Sophocles’ tragedy begins at a pivotal narrative stage, when Oedipus calls upon the priestess of Delphi to help him to seek and discover the truth about the plague affecting his city. Oedipus is informed that, in order to overcome the spreading of the contagious disease, the murderer of Laïus must be found. The enigma of the murder sets in motion Oedipus’ desire to discover truth, which coincides with his real story: he was the victim of a curse, he grew up in what he believed was his home, he killed his real father, he married his mother, and he is definitely the cause of the deadly infectious disease that is affecting Thebes. It is clear that, in Sophocles’ work, story and plot address two trajectories of narration: the sequence of the events in a chronological order, and the events of the story reordered in a different sequence to cause the effect of a process of revelation, which is arrived at by the motivating desire of Oedipus to unravel the truth about himself. It is not difficult to identify the proairetic and the hermeneutic codes in the narrative of Oedipus Rex. On the one hand, the proairetic code is constituted by the events developing in the story of Oedipus since the day he was born, as he was cast out of home, killed his father, married his mother, discovered his incest, and eventually blinded himself. On the other hand, the hermeneutic code is constituted by the events of the story as narrated by Sophocles (or the actual plot of the story): in the attempt to investigate the causes of the plague, Oedipus is doomed to discover his 27 Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” The Standard Edition, IV, 261-262, in Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 178-179.

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own story, his incest with his mother, Jocasta, and his patricide; since the truth is unbearable, and, after discovering Jocasta’s suicide for the same reason, he takes the pins which were holding her dress together and, in a fit of madness, he plunges them into his eyes. As with Sophocles’ tragedy, in L’uomo che guarda, the central character, driven by his desire to discover his familial issues, is doomed to unravel the mystery set by the novel’s plot; however, as we will see, the conclusion to Dodo’s tragedy is not as dramatic as Oedipus’: Dodo passively accepts the incestuous plot he is caught in without resistance; as a voyeur, he is a bystander who is present within the family context, but he does not take an active role in it. Despite the two different endings, L’uomo che guarda shares narrative properties with Oedipus Rex, and specifically the discursive phrasing the plot enacts in narrating the process of revelation undergone by the protagonist, as well as the main character’s desire, which drives him to discover the truth. At the beginning of the novel, the voyeur Dodo is concerned about his relationships with both his father and his wife, and this generates two enigmas, which in the end he finds to be interwoven. As with the Athenian tragedy, most of Dodo’s story takes place before the opening episode. In the novel, there is a sharp separation of the two irreversible trajectories of narration regulated by the hermeneutic code (creating the suspense of the story) and the proairetic code (subtending the plot as a temporal sequence of events). Let us illustrate the proairetic code of L’uomo che guarda, before moving to the discussion of the hermeneutic code. As far as the proairetic code of the story is concerned, L’uomo che guarda is the story of the son of a university professor who himself becomes a professor. As he grows up, Dodo develops a strong affection for his mother, who in turn is very protective and caring towards him. One day, as we have seen in the previous section, Dodo witnesses what is described as a primal scene, consisting of a more ferarum sexual act, which the child experiences as an act of violence by the father towards the mother. As the psychoanalytic account of the Oedipal complex, he develops an aversion to his father. After his mother’s death, Dodo inherits an apartment that he refuses to accept in an attempt to contest paternal authority. He then marries Silvia and, because of his refusal to accept the inheritance, they live in Dodo’s father’s apartment. As a consequence of the lack of a private space, Silvia begins an extramarital relationship with Dodo’s father and, after eight years, she abandons her husband. Dodo questions the reasons for this change, and this is where Dodo’s tragedy begins.

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The plot of Dodo’s tragedy can be illustrated by pointing at how the events of this story are rearranged. It is worth analysing the plot development of the novel as it emerges from the table presented below, which summarises the main narrative events in the text. Table 1 shows the structural skeleton of the events summarised in numbered points; 28 the Oedipal narrative development has also been pointed out at the end of each numbered phrase as (OE). It is possible to identify both the hermeneutic and the proaireic level of the narration: Table 1 Capitolo Primo – “Un giorno qualsiasi della mia vita come prologo” 1. D introduces himself and the other characters of his story. 2. D describes his conflictive relationship with his father, and he restlessly seeks a solution to this conflict. (OE) 3. D describes his monotonous daily routine, and the reason why S has deserted him (the lack of private space); S has moved to her aunt’s house. Capitolo Secondo – “La conchiglia pallida e rosa” 4. D illustrates the theory of scopophilia. 5. D translates scopophilia into art by photographing P. Capitolo Terzo – “Scherzi del destino” 6. D informs S about the apartment he inherited from his mother. Capitolo Quarto – “Padre e figlio” 7. D meets F, who informs him about A’s advances on her. 8. D and A discuss the atomic experiment as a scopophilic experience; confrontation between D and A. 9. D asks F to give him back the apartment he inherited and rejected for political reasons. (OE) 10. During the injection, D perceives that F intentionally exhibits his genitals in order to challenge D and to cause an implicit confrontation with his son. (OE) Capitolo Quinto – “L’amore al ristorante cinese” 11. D tells S about A’s challenging gesture in exhibiting the genitals. (OE) 12. S informs D about her extramarital relationship with a man who practices more ferarum. (OE) 13. D’s analepsis: D and S interact in an exhibitionistic/voyeuristic dynamic from the opposite windows of their respective hotels. Capitolo Settimo – “Il diavolo che guarda” 14. D meets P; D makes allusion to theories on scopophilia in art. Capitolo Ottavo – “Il corridoio dei libri” 15. D looks through the peephole at A’s directing a half-naked F as she reenacts a picture published in an erotic magazine.

28

List of abbreviations of the names of the characters are listed in order of appearance: D: Dodo; S: Silvia; F: Fausta; A: Alberto; P: Pascasie; OE: Oedipal narrative development of Dodo’s plot.

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Capitolo Nono – “Lo schiaffo” 16. Analepsis of D describing his mother when he was a child and when he once witnessed his parents having intercourse more ferarum. (OE) 17. Epiphany about sexual involvement of S and A: D draws this conclusion from the analogy between his parent’s intercourse he witnessed as a child, and S’s description of her sexual intercourse with D’s rival. (OE) Capitolo Decimo – “La parodia” 18. F informs D he has seen S visiting A. D suspects ’s involvement in his marital relationship. (OE) 19. D unsuccessfully harasses F by parodying the “more ferarum,” thus imitating his father. (OE) Capitolo Decimo – “Le due favole” 20. D realises his jealousy of his mother and his hatred for his father. (OE) Capitolo Undicesimo – “L’appartamento” 21. D and S meet and to see their new apartment 22. S informs D that she started the extramarital relationship on the day of their wedding, but that it has now ended. (OE) 23. S and D decide to go back and live with A again, where S and A relationship will probably start again. (OE)

If we look at the synopsis outlined in Table 1, we can follow the Oedipal narrative thread characterising Dodo’s relationship with his father. The confrontation between the two men is framed as a crucial narrative moment in Dodo’s story. Furthermore, as we can see from the narrated events summarised in points 12, 16, 17 and 18, Dodo is given clues about Silvia’s betrayal; these revelations trigger his desire to know and discover the identity of his antagonist and the character of his relationship with his wife. This is a crucial stage in the narrative development of the novel. Silvia and other characters are offering Dodo the key piece of information around which the recognition, the anagnorisis, revolves. Like Dodo’s mother, Silvia also practices intercourse more ferarum with her lover. The recognition follows shortly; the change from ignorance to knowledge is operated by Dodo who brings to light memories and scenarios related to a crucial stage in his sexual development, as we can see from the points 16 and 17, which describes the experience of Dodo’s primal scene depicting more ferarum sex between his mother and his father. In the end, Dodo’s suspicions are confirmed by Fausta, who facilitates the discovery of truth, as we can see in point 18. As in the case of Oedipus, the narrative turns on itself in a circular movement: Dodo and Silvia decide to live together again and to return to live in Dodo’s paternal house where, probably, Dodo’s tragedy will start again (points 21, 22, and 23). Dodo discovers the truth about himself by understanding the unconscious reason that explains his hostility for his father and also the jealousy he felt for his mother and now feels for his wife. The Oedipal

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jealousy is transferred to his wife as the object of his unresolved conflict with his father. In the economy of Oedipal dialectics, the link between the two characters, the wife and the mother, has incestuous resonances, which respond to the antagonism between father and son. Like Oedipus, Dodo also subverts the patriarchal kinship by metaphorically killing his father and marrying his mother in his own kingdom. Furthermore, Dodo subverts the custom of accepting the inheritance that would offer him the opportunity to live with Silvia in an apartment of their own. Instead, he accepts the compromise of settling in his native home and marrying a woman who is unconsciously associated with his mother. On a narrative level, the story of Oedipus, and its significance as a model of epistemophilic discovery clearly intersect with the context of Dodo’s story and the unravelling of his familial conflict with his father and his “incestuous” relationship with his wife. The plot of Moravia’s novel, like Sophocles’, is moved by the protagonist’s desire to discover the truth about himself, and about his feelings for his family; the outcome of his search is Dodo’s entanglement in the complex web which holds his family together.

IV. Conclusions This article has explored how desire permeates Moravia’s novel from the point of view of both the main protagonist’s psychological characterisation and the narrative organisation of the plot. In analysing how desire is represented in L’uomo che guarda, I have examined the psychoanalytic profile of the main protagonist as well as narrative strategies that show how desire operates in the novel and constructs the plot. These significant narrative elements manifest the subject’s desire for discovery, which shapes the narrative of the novel as it unfolds, and offer the opportunity to question the ultimate meaning of the narration. Moravia created an antihero, a scopophilic subject who is a victim of his own past, which dooms his present and affects his relationship with his family members. His only source of enjoyment derives from this scopic activity, where his desire to discover operates, and which provides him with the energy to scrutinise the others as well as his self. In his individualistic search for knowledge, he unconsciously subdues to his desire and, simultaneously, unravels the truth about his life. As with psychoanalytic treatment, where the aim is to discover the inner truth about one’s mind and unconscious, the psychoanalytic analysis of this novel has allowed us to illuminate the protagonist’s malaise and to understand the textual processes at play in

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L’uomo che guarda: a novel about a scopophilic subject whose desire permeates his psychology and the plot he is caught in.

Bibliography Aristotle. “Poetics”. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 Vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 (1984), 2316-2340 (1447a10-1462b1). Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Éditions Seuil, 1970. Capozzi Rocco, and Mario B. Mignone. Homage to Moravia, edited by Rocco Capozzi and Mario B. Mignone. Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 1993. Eidelberg, Ludwig. Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis. New York: Free Press, 1968. Fenichel, Otto. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses. New York: Norton, 1945. Freud, Sigmund. “From the History of Infantile Neurosis” (1914). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited and translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud, 1124, London: Hogarth, 1955. XVII. —. Threes Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1962. Herodotus. Historiae, edited by Carolus Hude.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. —. The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, notes by John Forrester. New York: Norton, 1988. —. The Seminar. Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-54. Translated with notes by John Forrester. New York: Norton, 1988. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Une négresse par le démon secouée”. In Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Carlyle F. MacIntyre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 (1957). Moravia, Alberto. L’uomo che guarda. Milan: Bompiani, 2006 (1985). —. The Voyeur. Translated by Tim Parks. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Proust, Marchel. À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). Edited by Pierre Clarac and André Ferré. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1954.

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Ragusa, Olga. “Alberto Moravia: Voyeurism and Storytelling”. The Southern Review, 4 (1968): 127-141. Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Edited by Roger D. Dawe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

PART IV DESIRE AS LACK, LOSS AND GAZE

CHAPTER NINE THE VOICE OF HELENA: THE REPRESENTATION OF DESIRE IN GIOVANNI PASCOLI’S “ANTICLO” ELENA BORELLI CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

The poem “Anticlo,” included by Giovanni Pascoli in the first 1904 edition of Poemi Conviviali, has intrigued generations of critics, who have struggled to interpret its enigmatic finale, as the last line of the poem completely reverses the reader’s expectations created in the early stanzas. The poem reelaborates a brief passage of the Odyssey (IV, 277 – 88), where the Greek warrior Anticlo is first mentioned. Taking inspiration from those lines, Pascoli recounts the last night of the Trojan siege, when the Greek warriors are hidden in the wooden horse, waiting to enter the city. They hear Helena’s deceitful voice, which sounds to each man as if it were the voice of his own wife he had left behind in far-off Greece, thus luring them into exiting the horse. Luckily, the cunning Odysseus figures out and exposes the ruse. However, Anticlo, who misses his wife sorely, desperately searches for Helena once he enters the city, because he wants to hear his wife’s voice again. Finally, after Troy has been taken, the mortally wounded Anticlo makes a deathbed request for Helena to be sent to him to speak in his wife’s voice. Surprisingly, as Helena is about to accede to his demand, Anticlo interrupts her, and says that he wants to remember “her and her alone.”1 The conclusion of Anticlo’s story has been variously interpreted. Rinaldo Froldi’s frequently quoted analysis revolves around Helena as a

1 Giovanni Pascoli, Poemi Conviviali, ed. Giuseppe Leonelli (Milano: Mondadori, 1995), 116.

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symbol of absolute beauty, an ideal for which men are willing to die.2 Laura Bellucci reads “Anticlo” in parallel with “Nebbia,” from Canti di Castelvecchio (1903), and argues that, like the mist in the latter poem, here Helena represents the illusion that the poet chooses in order to avoid feeling the lack of the things and people he loves.3 More recently, Rosa Maria Truglio has proposed an interpretation of Helena as an ideal of love and beauty, of which the individual voices of the distant wives are but simulacra, 4 and at the same time as an image that reflects the peculiar uncanniness of Pascoli’s poetry, since the Greek queen is also a harbinger of death. 5 Finally, Francesca Irene Sensini reads Anticlo’s choice of Helena’s voice over that of his wife as a preference for imagination over reality, thereby highlighting the thematic connection between this poem and others in the book, such as “L’Ultimo Viaggio,” which bring into play the dichotomy of dream versus truth.6 In this paper, I read the episode of Anticlo and of Helena’s voice as a parable of the nature of human desire. Specifically, I claim that, in this text, Pascoli paints a picture of the mechanism of desire that is consistent with the posits of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory. Furthermore, I show that the poem is rooted in Pascoli’s own interest in the phenomenon of desire, which is well documented in his theoretical texts and other lyrical works, and which constitutes a major theme of Poemi Conviviali. In Pascoli’s view, desire is bound to repeat itself relentlessly, attaching itself to various objects and constantly moving from one to another, thus causing anxiety and distress in the desiring subject. At the same time, the very nature of desire is a tension which amplifies its object beyond the limitations of reality, so that for Pascoli the desired object is always preferable to the real one, as he says through the voice of Alexander the Great in the conviviale “Alexandros”: “Dream is the infinite shadow of Truth.” 7 The fundamental ambiguity of Pascoli’s discourse on desire – either as “disease” or as “dream” – runs through most of his poetry, from Myricae (1891) to Poemi Conviviali. In my analysis of “Anticlo,” I 2

Rinaldo Froldi, I Poemi Conviviali di Giovanni Pascoli (Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1960), 99. 3 Laura Bellucci, “Per l’Anticlo del Pascoli,” Quaderni di San Mauro 12 (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1996): 140. 4 Rosa Maria Truglio, “Pascoli’s Ventriloquized Female Voices,” Romance Review 8 (1998): 34. 5 Truglio, “Pascoli’s Ventriloquized Female Voices”: 35. 6 Francesca Irene Sensini. Dall’Antichità Classica alla Poesia Simbolista: I Poemi Conviviali. (Bologna: Patron, 2010), 72-73. 7 “Il sogno è l’infinita ombra del Vero.” Giovanni Pascoli, Poemi Conviviali, 243. Translation is my own.

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employ Lacan’s theory to illustrate the mechanism of desire, which is displayed in the text itself. I thus avoid any “clinical” interpretation of Pascoli’s literary production as a set of symptoms of the author’s psychological issues and instead suppose that “Anticlo,” as well as other texts in Pascoli’s production, results from Pascoli’s life-long philosophical exploration of the theme of desire. Before proceeding to analyse “Anticlo” and the theme of desire in Pascoli’s texts, I will briefly outline Lacan’s idea of the nature and mechanism of desire, as it can be found in many of his Seminars and Ecrits. His concept of désir draws on Sigmund Freud’s idea of Wunsch.8 In addition, Lacan clearly establishes a difference between “desire” and “need.” Lacan sees desire as a quintessentially inexhaustible force, that is, one that can never find a fulfilment precisely because it does not coincide with the satisfaction of a need (for instance, hunger and thirst can be satisfied with food and water). Desire is the result of the subtraction of need from “demand,” which is infinite in that it is a demand for love directed to the Other.9 As a result, desire can never be satisfied, but it can only shift from one object to another, inasmuch as at each satisfaction of a need there is a remainder of want, which then directs itself to the next object.10 Interestingly, the idea of the perpetuation of desire links Lacan’s theory to Arthur Schopenhauer’s reflection of the relentless activity of the Will, which pushes individuals and the species as a whole to continue wanting.11 8 Lacan refers to unconscious desires, which are what Freud sees as the source of dreams: according to the Viennese author, “wish fulfillment is the meaning of every dream” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A.A.Brill [New York: Barnes&Nobles, 2005], 122). Those dreams contain the subject’s most profound desires, which are not conscious and do not coincide with biological needs. “Unconscious desire is entirely sexual; the motives of the unconscious are limited to sexual desire. The other great generic desire, that of hunger, is not represented” (Lacan, Ecrits A Selection, trans. by A.A. Brill [New York: Norton, 1977], 142). See also Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2005), 35. 9 “Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference which results from the subtraction of the first from the second- the very phenomenon of their splitting.” (Lacan, Ecrits, 287). 10 As Bruce Fink explains, “desire, strictly speaking, has no object … Desire is fundamentally caught up in the dialectical movement of one signifier to the next.” Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject. Between Language and Jouissance. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 90. 11 Schopenhauer illustrates the relentless nature of the Will in the second book of the first volume of his World as Will and Representation: “Finally the same thing

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Intriguingly, desire is not only unfulfillable, but its only goal is to reproduce itself as desire, 12 which constitutes another point of contact between Lacan and Schopenhauer. More precisely, desire has in itself its own raison d’être. Desire is in itself desirable and it can be pleasurable or repulsive, as it is linked to jouissance: one feels pleasure when fantasising about one’s object of desire, even when it causes one to suffer. Such jouissance of fantasy comes to substitute for the lost mother-child unity. Desire shapes the subject’s identity and is the source of their creativity and élan. This is why, according to Lacan, patients cling to their desires, as these desires supply them with a sense of being.13 In Lacan’s theory, desire is always “the desire of the Other,” where “of” has both a subjective and objective meaning. 14 First, desire is the Other’s desire, that is, what the Other desires and how it desires. According to Lacan, desire arises in the subject from seeing a lack in the Other, whose main embodiment is the mother in her relationship to the child. Only by seeing the other person’s desirousness do we learn to desire.15 Lacan calls this desirousness at times agalma, taking this term from Plato’s Symposium, and at others the objet petit, or objet a. This element is also the cause of desire, as it is the synecdochical object that represents the whole, and on which the subject appoints his or her desire, in virtue of its capacity to express desirousness. At another level, the desire of the Other expresses the influence that society has in shaping individual desires: we learn to desire what other people around us also want and crave. Secondly, desire is also the desire for the Other – playing on the objective meaning of the preposition “of”: the fundamental desire is the incestuous desire for the mother, the primordial “Other.”16 Pascoli was well acquainted with Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818). Schopenhauer’s philosophy was well known amongst the intellectuals who, in the late eighteen-eighties and is also seen in human endeavours and desires that buoy us up with the vain hope that their fulfillment is always the final goal of willing. But as soon as they are attained, they no longer look the same, and so are soon forgotten, become antiquated, and are really, although not admittedly, always laid aside as vanished illusions.”Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 164. 12 6ODYRMäLåHNThe Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 39. 13 Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 60. 14 Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 54. 15 Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 59. 16 Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 38; Lacan, The Seminars: Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, trans.by Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 7, 67.

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mid-nineties, founded the journals of La Vita Nuova (1889-1893) and Il Marzocco (1896-1932). Pascoli was very close to the circles of La Vita Nuova and Il Marzocco, where he published many poems and even the first edition of his most important theoretical text, Il Fanciullino (1897). Indeed, in this latter work, the idea of “pure” poetry, a poetry inspired only by beauty and free from any explicit social or moral content, is much indebted to fin de siècle Aestheticism, and in particular to the ideology of Il Marzocco, which was informed by Schopenhauer’s views on art. The theme of desire recurs quite frequently on the pages of Il Fanciullino. Often overlooked by scholars, who have focused mostly on the poetics of Pascoli expressed there, desire is indeed the pillar of the poet’s moral discourse. In this text, the poet-child is the true Schopenhauerian contemplator, who, thanks to his purely aesthetic vision of reality, frees himself from desire: Now, the poetic feeling of those who find poetry in the world around them is intense … And this feeling is highly beneficial, because it sweetly and gently reins our relentless desire, which makes us perpetually run with unhappy anxiety along the path of unhappiness.17

In Pascoli’s view, the moral value of poetry is not in its actual content, but in the effect that the poetic vision has on the human soul, which returns to the attitude of wonder and awe typical of childhood. The rejection of desire is also developed in Pascoli’s lyrical works. Here, desire is intended both as eros and as the aspiration for glory. For instance, in the Myricae poem “Gloria IV,” Pascoli reverses the exemplum of sloth represented by the character of Belacqua in the Dantean poem (Purgatory IV 97-139). Belacqua, an alter ego of the poet, refuses to pursue glory, as it is a desire that generates anxiety, to which he prefers the tranquillity of poetry, here – and elsewhere – symbolised by the sound of cicadas and the croaking of frogs: The glory is far away, and asks for hands and feet; … and I am happy to stay behind the rock,

17

“Or dunque intenso il sentimento poetico è di chi trova la poesia in ciò che lo circonda … E sommamente benefico è tale sentimento, che pone un soave e leggero freno all’instancabile desiderio, il quale ci fa perpetuamente correre con infelice ansia per la via dell’infelicitá?” Giovanni Pascoli, L’Era Nuova.Pensieri e Discorsi, ed. Rocco Ronchi (Milano: Egea, 1994), 23. All translations from Pascoli’s poems are my own.

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and listen to the cicadas in the sunshine, and the frogs croaking, Water, water!18

In Pascoli’s Weltanschauung, sloth, or inactivity, becomes a positive value, as it represents a reaction against the imperative of the Will. In the poem “Nebbia,” in Canti di Castelvecchio, Pascoli juxtaposes the space of poetry and peace of mind to the passions that would entangle him in the cycle of unfulfilled desire: Hide the faraway things, which want me to go and love! May I only see that white of the road … Hide the faraway things, hide them, steal them from the heart’s flight.19

The idea of movement is associated with desire, whereas the contemplative contentment of the poetic mind is often represented by a garden, or an enclosed space, which ultimately refers to the safety of the homey and familiar nest, as Giorgio Barberi Squarotti has convincingly shown.20 Pascoli’s warnings against the dangers of desire should not be read as an ascetic condemnation of the pleasure and satisfaction that are at the root of every human wish. On the contrary, Pascoli offers a philosophical reflection on the mechanism of desire, while at the same time suggesting that individual objects of desire are mere shadows of the ultimate pleasure, the wholeness of the womb, which children experience in their original and lost unity with their mother, as Truglio points out: The poetic sentiment, ‘che pone un soave e leggiero freno all’instancabile desiderio’ reins in gently the frenzied search for satisfaction among objects that can never fully replace the missing One, halting the metonymic displacement of desire that is doomed to failure from the start. And indeed, Pascoli’s poetry does, in a sense, evoke satisfaction: the only fully 18 “Lungi è la gloria, e piedi e mani vuole; … e qui star dietro al sasso a me non duole,/ ed ascoltare le cicale al sole,/ e le rane che gracidano, Acqua, acqua!” Giovanni Pascoli, Myricae, ed. Giampaolo Borghello (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1996), 203. 19 “Nascondi le cose lontane/ che vogliono ch’ami e che vada!/ Ch’io veda la` solo quel bianco/ di strada … Nascondi le cose lontane,/ nascondile, involale al volo/ del cuore” Giovanni Pascoli, Poesie e Prose Scelte, 2 vols. ed. Cesare Garboli (Milano: Mondadori, 2002) II, 722. 20 Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, Simboli e Strutture della Poesia del Pascoli (Messina: G. D’Anna, 1966), 9-23.

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The recognition of the mechanism of desire is the key concept around which my analysis of poem “Anticlo” revolves. Moreover, as I will show, this poem brings into play another fundamental theme: the idea that full satisfaction is forever unattainable, as it feeds on a lack, and ultimately desire is desirable by itself, as in longing lies the source of human action and a shadow of the original wholeness. Pascoli’s interest in desire influences his reinvention of the figure of Helen of Troy. A recurrent figure in many of Pascoli’s lesser-known works, Helen represents the quintessential simulacrum,22 that is, an object upon which all men project their own desires, and which turns out to be an illusion. This modern interpretation of Helen can be found in Catullocalvos (1897) and in the draft of an unfinished play contained in Nell’Anno Mille, published by Maurizio Perugi in Opere.23 Catullocalvos is a Catullan pastiche that transcribes the poetic game between Latin poets Catullus and C. Licinius Calvus. In this dialogue, Calvus defends the supremacy of reason over the illusion of love, whereas Catullus prefers the sweet deceit of passion. A section of this carmen is entitled “Eidolon Helenae,” and here Calvus explains to Catullus that Helen of Troy, much like every woman that he loved, is nothing but a projection of his own desire: “The woman is not what it is, but what you want her to be, what you imagine her to be; she is not the object of your love, but a shadow of your mind.” 24 Already in this carmen, Pascoli posits a mechanism of splitting in the object of love: the difference between the simulacrum, which is created by the subject himself, as it is a projection of his own wishes, and the thing in itself, which is lost to the subject: “the girl is hidden on the island of Pharos, where the old prophet of the sea lives.”25 The second mention of Helen of Troy can be found in Nell’Anno Mille, a collection of drafts and sketches of theatrical plays. One of them is called 21

Rosa Maria Truglio, Beyond The Family Romance. The Legend of Pascoli (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 132-33. 22 I use the word simulacrum in the original sense of the Latin simulacrum, that is, “likeness” and “similarity.” 23 Giovanni Pascoli, Opere, 2 vols., ed. Maurizio Perugi (Napoli: Ricciardi, 1980), II, 2045-51. 24 “Namque femina non id est, quod ipsa est,/ sed quod esse cupis, quod esse reris/ tute eam; tibi non amatur ipsa,/ sed tuae mera mentis umbra quaedam,” Giovanni Pascoli, Opere, II, 1254. 25 “in Pharo latet insula puella,/ quam verax habitat senex marinus,” Pascoli, Opere, II, 1254.

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Elena-Azenor-La Morta. Trilogia, and narrates Menelaus’ journey to Pharos in search of Helen of Troy. Here he discovers that the woman he fought for is not the heroine he had imagined, but a simple woman, working at her loom, who vaguely resembles the queen of Troy. Once again, in this brief draft, Pascoli describes the gap between the object of desire and reality: at Menelaus’ request that Helen leave with him, she replies: “You love only her. I am nothing but a pure woman; she is a heroine.” 26 Interestingly, many elements of his draft reoccur in the last edition of “Anticlo”: the image of the weaving woman, and Helen’s gift of speaking with the voice of all the Greek soldiers’ wives. The poem “Anticlo,” as it appears in the 1904 edition of Poemi Conviviali, is the final result of a complex editorial history, in which the various versions of the poems reelaborate many of the themes already present in Catullocalvos and in the draft of the play contained in Nell’Anno Mille. The theme of the eidolon Helenae, the nature of Helen as simulacrum, already appears in the poem “Anticlo,” published in 1899 in the journal Flegrea, inasmuch as here the hero Anticlo already mistakes the voice of the queen for that of his distant wife. In the final version, which is the object of my analysis, the elements involved in the phenomenon of desire are clearly recognisable. The first stanza of the poem is constructed as a ring composition beginning and ending with the element of Helena’s voice. As the Greek soldiers are trapped inside the wooden horse, they hear Helena’s voice, an ethereal voice, “the sweetest voice of all, /which for everyone is unique.”27 Helena’s voice is a ruse to entice the soldiers to exit the horse, and Anticlo is about to respond to it when Odysseus prevents him from crying out loud. However, when the soldiers are finally inside the city, Anticlo still wants to hear the voice again, and seeks Helena, even if he knows it is an illusion: “but that voice remained in his heart; … he wanted to hear, amongst cries, and sighs and tears, the voice of his distant woman.”28 The first half of “Anticlo” is dominated by Helena’s voice, which acts as the cause of Anticlo’s actions, and more precisely, as the cause of his desire. In the way in which it is represented in this poem, the voice appears as separated from the body that generates it: in other words, we see here a metonymical mechanism at work, in which the voice of Helena, precisely 26

“Tu non ami che lei. Io non sono che una donna pura; l’altra è un ’eroina,” Pascoli, Opere, II, 2042. 27 “come la voce dolce più che niuna,/ come ad ognuno suona al cuor sol una,” Pascoli, Poemi Conviviali, 113. 28 “Ma quella voce gli restò nel cuore; … egli voleva/ udir, tra grida e gemiti e singulti,/ la voce della sua donna lontana.” Pascoli, Poemi Conviviali, 114.

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because it is separated from her body, comes to signify another “whole” for the soldiers, the bodies of their wives. Helena’s voice is the very object upon which the soldiers’ desire appoints itself. As the Greek men hear this eerie female voice, this voice stirs their desire, as it is the phantasmic feature of it that appeals to their fantasy.29 Indeed, they come to desire their women through the voice of Helena, as this voice works as an empty signifier, which can be filled with individual dreams. Another reason why the voice acts as a trigger for desire can be found in its very function, that of being the expression of somebody’s desirousness. For Anticlo and the other Greek soldiers, the voice is calling them with the amorous and loving attitude of their wives who miss them. Indeed, Anticlo imagines a scenario in which his wife runs to him to call him, as she longs to see him: “he heard her in the high rooms push the loom away,/ descend the steep stairway,/ and open the sunny door and call him.”30 What makes Anticlo long for his wife is the very longing that she feels for him, and the promise of her love. Helena’s voice represents the objet petit a, or agalma, in the Lacanian theory of desire, as it is a metonymical part of the object of desire, which is charged with the wishes of the subject, and whose attractiveness lies in the desirousness it embodies. The protagonist Anticlo is cast as the desiring subject of the poem, whose major theme is the soldier’s last wish. The brief psychological characterisation of Anticlo reveals that he is an alter ego of Pascoli himself, as he shares the same aspirations for peace and domestic life. Anticlo is described as being a brave and strong warrior, but one who does not strive for glory: “Because Anticlo was strong,/ but he was forced to be; and he did not care for the bigmouthed glory, /but for his home and his garden with the tall trees/ and the sunny vineyard/ and his woman.” 31 Anticlo’s disregard for glory reminds the reader of Belacqua in the aforementioned Myricae poem “Gloria IV”: the homey images of the house, the garden and the vineyard echo Pascoli’s idealisation of rural life as an antidote to the evils of greed. However, Anticlo is not deprived of desire: his contempt for worldly ambition betrays the immensity of his longing, which strives for the ultimate satisfaction, the wholeness of being loved by the Other. Indeed, his images of the garden and the vineyard replicate the symbolism of the nest, which Barberi Squarotti has 29

6ODYRMäLåHNThe Plague of Fantasies, 39. “udì lei nelle stanze alte il telaio/ spinger da sé, scender l’ardue scale;/ e schiuso il luminoso uscio chiamare/ lui” Pascoli, Conviviali, 113. 31 “Poi ch’era forte Anticlo,/ sì ma per forza; e non avea la gloria/ loquace a cuore, ma la casa e l’orto/ d’alberi lunghi e il solatìo vigneto/ e la sua donna.” Pascoli, ibidem. 30

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interpreted as the familiar space of childhood and the closeness between child and mother.32 Anticlo goes beyond the satisfaction of a need: his is an infinite demand for love, which stops at nothing, not even cruelty, plunder or murder, in order to reach its goal: and everywhere he killed, set fire, destroyed. He threw the bronze tripods into the fire, pushed his sword into the maidens’ chest; not because he wanted to plunder, he wanted to hear, amongst cries and sighs and tears, the voice of his distant woman.33

The apparently meek Anticlo is completely driven by the ultimate form of desire, or, more precisely, by desire in its raw form, which consists of an unfulfillable demand for love addressed to the Other. The nature of Anticlo’s desire explains why his seemingly humble wish to hear his wife invariably manifests itself in juxtaposition to images of death: the echo of Anticlo’s wife and Odysseus’ warning that Helena is death; the images of plunder and violence and the sweet memory of the female voice and, finally, the contrast between the musical syllables of the refrain “which for everyone is unique” and Anticlo’s own agony. Indeed, as Truglio has explained, maternal and female images in Pascoli’s poetry are invariably cast with uncanniness, inasmuch as they are homey and yet frightening; they represent wholeness and self-annihilation at the same time, as it is the case for Calypso in “L’Ultimo Viaggio.”34 Indeed, as both Lacan and Freud have observed, the ultimate drive to wholeness and love is interconnected with a death wish; desire is inextricably linked with jouissance and death. 35 The figure of Helena in Pascoli’s writings is another embodiment of this uncanniness: on the one hand, she has the beauty that soothes the pain of the world, on the other she brings forth death. The stanzas IV, V, and VI of the poem bring into play the relationship between Anticlo’s declared object of desire, his woman, and Helena, the quintessential object of desire. These stanzas portray the juxtaposition of these two objects through several rhetoric strategies, which highlight the 32

Barberi Squarotti, Simboli e Strutture, 13. “e per tutto egli uccise, arse, distrusse./Gittò nel fuoco i tripodi di bronzo,/ spinse nel seno alle fanciulle il ferro/; ché non prede voleva; egli voleva/udir, tra grids e gemiti e singulti,/la voce della sua donna lontana.” Pascoli, Conviviali, 113-14. 34 Rosa Maria Truglio, Beyond The Family Romance, 69. 35 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 236. 33

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single-mindedness of Anticlo and the steadfastness of his desire. Indeed, unlike the other warriors, it is not Helena whom Anticlo wants, but his wife. Moreover, these stanzas serve as a preparation for the reversal that occurs in the last lines of the poems, where Anticlo claims to want Helena. More importantly, the last four stanzas of the poem reveal the difference between desire per se and its object, and the failure of each individual object to fulfil desire. In the fourth stanza of the poem, which follows the description of the sack of Troy, the reader learns that Anticlo never reached the doors of the city but that he fell wounded by the house of Helena’s last husband, Deiphobus, where the Greek and Trojan soldiers were still fighting for the possession of the beautiful queen. The first line of the following stanza immediately sets itself in opposition to the image of the soldiers’ fight for Helena, as it begins with an adversative conjunction, which highlights Anticlo’s unique desire: “But Anticlo, dying, thought of his woman.” 36 Subsequently, Anticlo sends the Greek hero Leito to ask king Menelaus if Helena can come and speak to him with the voice of his wife. The lines of the poem are carefully constructed to highlight the juxtaposition between “his woman,” Menelaus’ wife Helena, and Anticlo’s woman, and the stanza ends with the allusive refrain: “the sweetest voice of all/ which for everyone is unique,” a reminder of Anticlo’s faithful love for his wife: Leito, son of Alectryone, find in the high house the winner Atreides, whose fierce cry of war we heard today. Tell him that blood runs from my veins like wine from a broken crater. And tell him that I die for his woman, and I have mine in my heart. Let Helena come, and speak to me with the voice of my distant woman, the sweetest voice of all, which for everyone is unique.37

36

“Ma pensava alla sua donna morendo/ Anticlo” Pascoli, Conviviali, 114. “Leito figlio d’Alectryone, trova/nell’alta casa il vincitore Atride,/ di cui s’ode il feroce urlo di guerra./ Digli che fugge alle mie vene il sangue/sì come il vino ad un cratere infranto./ E digli che per lui muoio e che muoio/per la sua donna, ed ho la mia nel cuore./Che venga la divina Helena, e parli/a me la voce della mia lontana:/parli la voce dolce più che niuna,/ come ad ognuno suona al cuor sol una.” Pascoli, Conviviali, 114. 37

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Stanza VI constitutes a repetition of the previous one, containing Anticlo’s request, as reported by Leito to Menelaus. The contrast between “my woman” and “his woman” is repeated here through a grammatical variation: “his woman,” now refers to Anticlo’s wife and “yours,” to Menelaus’ wife, Helena. This repetition and the anaphora of possessive pronouns stress the dichotomy between Anticlo’s desire and everybody else’s desire, between his wife and Helena. The last stanza reverses the hierarchy between Anticlo’s desire and Helena, the object of everybody’s desire and between satisfaction and lack. Anticlo seems to refuse the path of endless greed and ambition that characterises the other warriors and the whole enterprise of the Trojan War, inasmuch as he only cares for the memory of domestic joy. However, as I will show, the fundamental lack at the core of every desire, however small, is revealed in the last stanza, as well as the fact that desire’s only goal is not satisfaction, but to perpetuate itself. The finale of “Anticlo” is dominated by the figure of Helena. The Greek queen is here represented as an image of supreme and otherworldly beauty,whose impassibility and calm create a strong contrast with the violence of the siege, and stir the warriors’ desire: The fire was burning around her and on the fire the full moon shone. She passed, silent and serene, like the moon, above the flame and the blood. The flame leapt higher, as she passed, and veins squeezed a thinner blood.38

As she approaches the dying Anticlo and prepares to speak to him with the voice of his wife, he unexpectedly tells her that he wants to remember her and her alone. This enigmatic finale can be explained by the reflection on beauty and desire that Pascoli derived from late nineteenth-century culture, which was inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The contemplation of beauty, either artistic or natural, was thought to put an end to the relentless wheel of desire and greed. 39 As Otto Weininger observed in his Sex And Character, “Since beauty represents nothing if not a renewed attempt to embody the supreme value, everything beautiful creates a sense of having 38 “Ardeva intorno a lei l’incendio,/ e su l’incendio brillava il plenilunio./ Ella passava, tacita e serena, come la luna, sopra il fuoco e il sangue./ Le fiamme, un guizzo, al suo passar, piu alto;/ spremeano un rivo piu sottil le vene.” Pascoli, ibidem. 39 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as will and Representation, 184-186.

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found what one seeks, which silences every desire and self-interest.”40 The paint-like quality of Helena’s beauty may well act upon the human soul as a force that quenches every desire and temporarily suspends the tyranny of the Will. Within this framework, Anticlo’s choice of remembering Helena can be interpreted as the effect of beauty of soothing every care and giving people the feeling to have finally found what they were seeking. When Helena is about to accomplish Anticlo’s last wish, the dying man silences her, thus preventing the fulfilment of the very desire for which he had fought and killed. He stops at the contemplation of beauty and therefore he halts the cycle of satisfaction and dissatisfaction that is inherent in human desire. From a Lacanian perspective, the refusal of satisfaction can be read as an acknowledgement of the mechanism of desire: Anticlo stops at the contemplation of Helena not only because her beauty makes her an unattainable object of love, but because in her he recognises that every object of desire is unattainable, inasmuch as it is a lost object. Indeed, the whole Trojan War can be read, in the context of Pascoli’s other texts that portray Helen of Troy, as a metaphor for human desire, inasmuch as the efforts of the soldiers are spent in vain, because the Greek queen is only a simulacrum, and her true persona lies hidden away from the city. Had Anticlo decided to have his wish fulfilled, he would have been caught in the process of kenosis of the object and in the metonymic slippage by which desire moves onto a next goal. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the memory of his wife’s voice and the presence of Helena, who embodies the quintessential object of desire, fleshes out the dramatic disproportion between the expectations created by the demand for love, and the limitations of reality. As a consequence, Anticlo chooses to remain with the memory of a dream that fuelled not only his search, but the glorious enterprise of the Trojan siege. By remembering Helena’s beauty, Anticlo “freezes” his desire, and dies in a condition that is similar to the poetic state of mind, according to Pascoli, that is, the contemplation of beauty free from the desire to possess. As Truglio observed in the quote that I reported above, for Pascoli it is this poetic condition, and not the satisfaction of desire, that holds a remembrance of the original jouissance. This reflection on the nature of desire links “Anticlo” to “Alexandros,” another poem of the collection which brings into play the disconnect between human ambition and the limitations of reality. In this poem, Alexandros is pushed to go further and further towards unknown lands by his inexhaustible desire. Interestingly, much like in “Anticlo,” the inspiration for moving further is embodied by a mysterious voice: 40 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, an Investigation of Fundamental Principles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 219.

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“powerful gust of fated going/ beyond death; and it’s in my heart, like in a shell the murmur of the sea.”41 Alexandros journeys his whole life, pushed by his desire to go further, but as he reaches the limit of the world, the Ocean, he is taken by sudden despair, as what he sees is inferior to what he had imagined: “it would have been best to stay/ not to look, to dream: dream is the infinite shadow of Truth.” 42 The infinite force of desire, which fuels human action and feeds imagination, crashes itself against the limitedness of every object and moves away to the next one: “and the chant moves over and fades away.”43 In “L’Ultimo Viaggio” desire is the force that revives old Odysseus to depart once again for a life of adventure and discovery: “Desire is a storm, which obfuscates the eye, but gives wind to the foot.”44 All of the major objects of human desire are listed in the poem: love, glory and knowledge. All of them reveal themselves to be illusions, and to be much inferior to the dream that the desire for them had generated: “to sing the love sleeping in one’s heart, that when it awakens only then it dies.”45 The real object of desire is forever lost: the wholeness which lies at the core of every desire, the promise of which colours every object that triggers desire, is unattainable. At the end of the poem, Odysseus is shipwrecked, having revealed the illusory nature of desire. The only jouissance – the only way to return to the maternal womb, is through death. The Lacanian reading of “Anticlo” that I have just offered restitutes this poem to the context of the reflection on desire, which accompanies Pascoli’s lyrical and prose production. Not only was Pascoli inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophy and by the contemporary speculation on desire, but this topic represents a constant subject of reflection, as shown by the centrality of desire in the poet’s interpretation of the Divine Comedy. At the core of Pascoli’s reflection lies the idea that desire is unfulfillable, as it is inherent in human nature to be dissatisfied and continue wanting. This concept, which Pascoli derives from Schopenhauer, significantly resonates with Lacan’s explanation of how the subtraction of 41

“soffio possente di un fatale andare,/ oltre la morte; e m’è nel cuor presente/ come in conchiglia murmure di mare.” Pascoli, Conviviali, 243. 42 “era miglior pensiero/ ristare, non guardar oltre, sognare:/ il sogno è l’infinita ombra del Vero.” Pascoli, ibidem. 43 “e il canto passa ed oltre noi dilegua.” Pascoli, ibidem. 44 “Una tempesta è il desiderio,/ ch’agli occhi è nube quando ai piedi è vento.” Pascoli, Conviviali, 147. 45 “cantar l’amore che dormia nel cuore,/ e che destato solo allor ti muore.” Pascoli, ibidem,149.

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need from the infinite demand of love individuals address to the Other leaves us with a desire that can have no satisfaction. Anticlo’s poem, as well as “Alexandros” and “L’Ultimo Viaggio” are depiction of the phenomenon of desire, which Pascoli sees as one of the fundamental traits of human nature. While “Alexandros” and “L’Ultimo Viaggio” portray the wreckage of human desire when faced with the limitations of reality, “Anticlo” puts forward a strategy for dealing with the mechanism of dissatisfaction. The strategy suggested here is that of escaping desire by not fulfilling it, by freezing it and by contemplating the object without actually obtaining it, an idea that once again reflects the ascetic tendencies inherent in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For Pascoli, the primary way of achieving this is by means of poetry, as Truglio has observed in the passage I quoted above. In other words, poetry involves the contemplation of beauty, and such a state frees the human mind from a goal-oriented attitude. In “Anticlo,” the final decision to remember Helena alone arrests, on the one hand, the metonymic slippage of desire thanks to the contemplation of beauty; on the other, the recognition of the infinite power of desire rescues the warrior from the disappointment that inevitably follows the achievement of one’s goal, as is portrayed in “Alexandros” and “L’Ultimo Viaggio.” Ultimately, the reflection on desire, as fleshed out in “Anticlo” and in the other Poemi Conviviali, is cast with ambivalence: on the one hand, desire brings pain and anxiety to the subject, but on the other, the power of human drives, as embodied in the search for love and glory, is the source of every great deed, and the nourishment of creativity.

Bibliography Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio. Simboli e Strutture Della Poesia del Pascoli. Messina: G. D’Anna, 1966. Bellucci, Laura. “Per l’Anticlo del Pascoli”. Quaderni di San Mauro 12. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, (1996): 131-141. Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York, Routledge, 2005. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject. Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

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—. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by A.A. Brill. New York: Barnes& Nobles, 2005. Froldi, Rinaldo. I Poemi Conviviali di Giovanni Pascoli. Pisa: NistriLischi, 1960. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminars: Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Translated by Dennis Porter, notes by Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. —. Ecrits. A Selection. Translated by A.A. Brill. New York Norton, 1977. Monti, Carlo. “L’Orto, il Fanciullino e il Poeta Vate. Per una Rilettura di Nebbia di Giovanni Pascoli.” Cenobio. Rivista Trimestrale di Cultura della Svizzera Italiana 37 no.1, (1988): 4-13. Pascoli, Giovanni. Opere, 2 vols. edited by Maurizio Perugi. Napoli: Ricciardi, 1980. —. L’Era Nuova. Pensieri e Discorsi. edited by Rocco Ronchi. Milano: Egea, 1994. —. Poemi Conviviali, edited by Giuseppe Leonelli. Milano: Mondarori; 1995. —. Myricae, edited by Giampaolo Borghello. Bologna: Zanichelli 1996. —. Poesie e Prose Scelte. 2 vols. edited by Cesare Garboli. Milano: Mondadori, 2002. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols. Translated by E.F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Sensini, Francesca Irene. Dall’Antichità Classica alla Poesia Simbolista: I Poemi Conviviali. Bologna: Patron, 2010. Truglio, Rosa Maria. “Pascoli’s Ventriloquized Female Voices”. Romance Review 8 (1998): 29-37. —. Beyond the Family Romance. The Legend of Pascoli. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Weininger, Otto. Sex And Character; an Investigation of Fundamental Principles. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. .

CHAPTER TEN THE SYMPTOMS OF DESIRE: PSYCHOANALYTIC ECHOES IN CALVINO’S SHORT STORIES ALESSANDRA DIAZZI UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

In any case, there should the critic’s task (and so his pleasure) commence: in finding unity among things that are apparently going each one on its own. Italo Calvino, letter to Alberto Asor-Rosa, 21 May 19581

This essay attempts to analyse a relatively homogeneous set of short stories written by Italo Calvino in the 1950s and the 1960s through a deliberately wide understanding of the notion of desire. By focusing on texts included in Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves) (“L’avventura di un viaggiatore” [“The Adventure of a Traveler”] 2 and “L’avventura di un automobilista” [“The Adventure of a Motorist”]), 3 Le Cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics) (“Senza colori” [“Without Colours”])4 and Ti con zero [t zero] (“Priscilla”),5 I will not only take desire as a thematic issue to be 1

“Comunque è lì che dovrebbe cominciare il lavoro (e il divertimento) del critico: trovare un’unità tra cose che apparentemente van ciascuna per conto loro.” Italo Calvino, letter to Alberto Asor-Rosa, 21 May 1958 in Italo Calvino. Lettere 19401985 ed. by Luca Baranelli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), XXXVII. 2 Italo Calvino, “L’avventura di un viaggiatore” in Gli amori difficili (Milan: Mondadori, 2010), 66-81.Translated by William Weaver as “The Adventure of a Traveler,” in Difficult Loves (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1993), 53-66. 3 Calvino, “L’avventura di un automobilista,” in Gli amori difficili, 147-155. 4 Calvino, “Senza colori” in Le Cosmicomiche (Milan: Mondadori, 2011). Translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver as “Without Colours” in The Complete Cosmicomics (London: Penguin, 2010), 49-60. 5 Calvino, “Priscilla” in Ti con zero (Turin: Einaudi, 1967). Translated as “Priscilla” in The Complete Cosmicomics, 203-240.

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detected within texts, but also as veritable paradigm that shapes both the texts’ narrative structures and the processes of interpretation that they require.6 My analysis stems from two main considerations, which, if proved to be true, may shed new light on several aspects of Calvino’s works that have usually been underestimated by secondary literature on the subject. The first assumption is that a peculiar perspective on desire can be retraced in some of Calvino’s short stories, constituting a pivotal element of them. The second is the hypothesis that such understanding of desire shows in many aspects a concealed influence from psychoanalysis as a form of knowledge, through the mediation of the French intellectual environment and notably of Jacques Lacan’s theories. As is well known, desire possesses a strong importance as a theme in Calvino’s storytelling. Despite this pervasiveness of desire, its relationship with Calvino’s works has suffered general neglect, as in the case of all sorts of psychoanalytic connections. This phenomenon is due to both some resistances of the author himself on these specific themes, and to a critical approach that still follows what we may call a “vulgate” reading of Calvino: consciously or not, all aspects that may run the risk of undermining Calvino as an iconic figure of rationalist and scientific writer, shifting throughout his intellectual parabola from impegno to postmodernism, are often undervalued. Alongside this aspect, a secondlevel presence of desire can be detected, especially in the corpus of writings I am analysing here. In these texts, desire, acting within the plot, actually operates as a device that structures and shapes the text itself, determining its functioning and the patterns of narrative dynamics. By following the presences of desire both as a thematic cluster and as a structural element, my analysis deliberately avoids reconstructing its evolution as a notion in Calvino’s oeuvre from a chronological angle. In the same way, I will not attempt to individuate all the possible sources that could have influenced the genesis and development of this notion throughout Calvino’s intellectual journey. Rather, in order to outline the presence of desire as the fil rouge pervading these texts, my work will focus on echoes, symptoms, and clues, revealing a subterranean movement that constantly shifts between influence and resistance. In this way, I will be able to employ desire as a flexible and productive device, with three main aims: to highlight the internal and reciprocal connections between an apparently heterogeneous corpus of texts, thereby reassessing established 6

In speaking of desire as a paradigm shaping narrative structure and dynamics of interpretation I refer to Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).

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readings of Calvino’s oeuvre; to attempt a topological overview of the several influences and exchanges that shape Calvino’s literary work, shedding new light on his theoretical influences and cultural references; and, finally, to consider whether this operation can pave the ground for new readings of Calvino’s intellectual experience, beyond Calvino’s selfconstruction of authorship and its reinforcement by later criticism. As far as the notion of desire is concerned, many of Calvino’s writings from the aforementioned collections entail an understanding of desire that goes beyond its mere presence as a topic, rather constructing it as the very core from which the plot and the literary discourse itself originate. Surely, Gli amori difficili and the “cosmicomic” collections 7 represent two different models of conceiving the short story as a genre, respectively belonging to two different phases of Calvino’s literary work. Roughly speaking, the first collection is inspired by nineteenth-century conventions in tale-writing, as Calvino himself states in introducing the collection, 8 whereas Le Cosmicomiche breaks up with tradition by creating a new and particular genre: through the combination of scientific, fantastic, and humoristic elements, Calvino moves from his previous Neorealist inspiration toward a personal reworking of postmodernism. Notwithstanding these differences, desire proves itself to be a central topic in Gli amori difficili, as well as a remarkable presence within the uncanny “cosmicomic” world. This centrality may not be immediately evident, and, especially in the cases of Le Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero, desire as a theme is often concealed and rearranged in compliance with the collection’s peculiar genre, so that its presence turns out to be a quite intermittent one. This happens because, alongside being a theme, desire finds its centrality in these texts as the aforementioned mechanism that constitutes itself as a driving force for narratives, so that the structural development of the stories mirrors the structure itself of the desiring drive. In other words, the plots’ progress happens to actually mimic the dynamics to desire in the very moment in which it wishes to portray it as a theme. This is precisely the structure of “L’avventura di un viaggiatore” and “L’avventura di un automobilista,” in which the term “adventure” refers only to the expectation for love: the protagonist of the first story is a native of Turin who goes to Rome in order to reach his fiancée, while the second plot is set entirely on the motorway along which a man is traveling to join his beloved after a telephonic quarrel. Both stories have travel as their 7

With Le Cosmicomiche I will refer to Ti con zero as well, since the two collections are grouped together in the collection Tutte le Cosmicomiche (The Complete Cosmicomics). 8 Calvino, Gli amori difficili, XIII.

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main theme, and plots are entirely driven by the purest essence of desire that leads the characters to move; moreover, desire is entirely fed by the subject, without any intervention of the external object. The characters’ only purpose seems to keep desire alive, and to solipsistically talk about desire itself; while traveling on the motorway, as the protagonist of “L’avventura di un automobilista” actually declares: I would get no satisfaction any longer, at this point, in reaching B, going up to Y’s place, and finding her still there, with her headache, and intent on musing over the reasons of our altercation. … By now, I cannot accept any other situation than this transformation of us into our own very message.9

Both plots are structured as movement toward a point, in which Calvino’s storytelling stresses the toward element rather than the point one: the ultimate resolution is even outside the plots’ chain. The achievement of the object is set outside the narrative: as far as it is not really achievable, it cannot even be represented. As the protagonist of “L’avventura di un automobilista” states, the only liveable condition is the tension of yearning, giving more satisfaction and stability than the achievement: “Instead, as far as it goes on this way, everything is perfect. Z who tries to overtake me, or lets me overtake him (but I don’t know whether it’s him or not), Y who accelerates in my direction (but I don’t know whether it’s her or not), having been repented and back in love with me, and me rushing up to her with my jealousy and my eagerness.”10 “L’avventura di un viaggiatore” and “L’avventura di un automobilista” are therefore completely based on desire’s deferring movement that shapes and gives a meaning to both stories. This aspect can be confirmed in that the driving force of desire attenuates in the very moment in which the closeness to the object shows how the object itself is completely unable to fulfil the subject’s desire. The presence of the actual object extinguishes 9 My translation. Where not otherwise noted, the translations are mine.“Ormai arrivare a B, salire a casa di Y, trovare che lei è rimasta lì col suo mal di testa a rimuginare i motivi del litigio non mi sarebbe più di nessuna soddisfazione. … Non riesco più ad accettare altra situazione se non questa trasformazione di noi stessi nel messaggio di noi stessi.” Calvino, “L’avventura di un automobilista,” 153-154. 10 “Invece, finché tutto continua così va benissimo. Z [Z is the character’s rival in love who could be travelling toward the woman after having known the telephonic quarrel] che cerca di sorpassarmi o si lascia sorpassare da me (ma io non so se è lui), Y che accelera verso di me (ma non so se sia lei) pentita e di nuovo innamorata, io che accorro da lei geloso e ansioso.” Calvino, “L’avventura di un automobilista,” 152.

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the desiring tension, so that the lovers’ encounter engenders damage to the relationship rather than a fulfilment: without any place of departure or arrival, threatening the unambiguousness of our run with their bundling of meanings and sensations, and once freed, eventually, from the cumbersome thickness of our bodily personas, of our voices and of our states of mind … without the deforming buzz that our presence, and that of the others, confers to what we say.11

Some differences between the two stories should however, at this point, be highlighted, before moving to the analysis of Le Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero. Chronologically speaking, “L’avventura di un viaggiatore” is an early short story, dated 1957, while “L’avventura di un automobilista” has been written ten years later. Although several traits of Calvino’s conceptualisation of desire remain the same, the earlier text inserts (and, to some extent, conceals) the element of desire within a realistic narrative, built on over-detailed descriptions and on a mimetic plot in which the external world plays a considerable role. “L’avventura di un automobilista,” instead, written in 1967, shows a radical shift in Calvino’s way of portraying desire, heralding, as we will see, the patterns of Le Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero. Although inserted in a collection that is still indebted to a conventional understanding of the short story genre, “L’avventura di un automobilista” shows a remarkable laconicism in terms of actual events and actions, opting for a progressive abstraction and stylisation. The protagonist’s obsessive desire to reach his beloved is the all-pervading element within the text, whose plot is entirely driven by the hypothetical movement toward the object of love. Desire is highly geometrised, a choice that corresponds to a significant detriment of mimetic aspects: characters are only indicated by alphabetic letters (Y the woman and Z the rival) and there is no real story to be told. The only possible subject seems to be the desiring force that pushes characters on their routes: the protagonist moving to reach Y; Y running, in his imagination, towards him; Z, the rival, following Y. This ceaseless advancement proves itself to be the only condition for desire to be kept alive, finding its concrete outcome in an endless run on the motorway, without any chance of a concrete encounter: “Now we are running in opposite directions, moving away the one from 11 “senza luoghi di partenza o di arrivo che incombano gremiti di sensazioni e significati sull’univocità della nostra corsa, liberati finalmente dallo spessore ingombrante delle nostre persone, voci e stati d’animo … senza il ronzio deformante che la presenza nostra e altrui trasmette a ciò che diciamo.” Calvino, “L’avventura di un automobilista,” 154-155.

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the other. Everything is even more uncertain, but I feel that I have reached, now, a state of internal calm.”12 Alongside constituting the only aim of desire, this infinite deferment is mirrored in the very narrative techniques on which the story is built: “L’avventura di un automobilista” seems to dematerialise any concreteness in favour of a desire that only expresses itself. In “L’avventura di un viaggiatore,” although the night of love was the one spent traveling by train (“that night, which he now sensed was fading, like every perfect night of love, at the cruel explosion of day”),13 a call at the end nonetheless allowed some contact between the lover and the beloved. In a quite opposite way, “L’avventura di un automobilista” focuses entirely on the characters’ actual or imagined trajectories, and on the protagonist’s inner speculations on them, so that, when a final resolution should come, the very call is seen as a threat, as it would dissolve the desiring tension and reveal the intrinsic impossibility of every encounter. This point is clearly stated by the protagonist: “I am feeling I have now achieved a condition of inner peace: as long as we can check our telephone numbers, and there is nobody left to answer.”14 Interestingly, strong analogies in the description of desire can be found in two stories respectively included in Le Cosmicomiche (1963-1964) and Ti con zero (1967): both stories – “Senza colori” and “Priscilla” – were composed in the mid-1960s, in the same period as “L’avventura di un automobilista.” As is well known, Le Cosmicomiche employs various narrative and stylistic proceedings in order to describe a primordial and undifferentiated cosmos, situated before time and space, in which the only narrating voice is that of an indefinite being called Qfwfq. In such a context, in which the world is not yet ruled by physic laws nor shaped by standard categories of logic and language, it is quite revealing to see how desire is already present: moreover, it seems that this comic and narrative experiment provides Calvino with the best (albeit camouflaged) setting for outlining the model of desire already drafted in Gli amori difficili, and that we may call “cosmicomic desire.” 12

“Ora stiamo correndo in direzioni opposte, allontanandoci … Tutto è ancora più incerto ma sento di avere ormai raggiunto uno stato di tranquillità interiore.” Calvino, “L’avventura di un automobilista,” 154. 13 Calvino, “The Adventure of a Traveler,” 66; “quella notte, che già sentiva svanire, come ogni perfetta notte d’amore al dirompere crudele dei giorni.” Calvino, “L’avventura di un viaggiatore,” 81. 14 “sento d’avere ormai raggiunto uno stato di tranquillità interiore: finché potremo controllare i nostri numeri telefonici e non ci sarà nessuno a rispondere.” Calvino, “L’avventura di un automobilista,” 154.

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These two stories – “Senza colori” and “Priscilla” – take place in a state of “beforeness,” since they precisely focus on the primordial state from which all things will arise. As its title says, “Senza colori” recounts the origin of colours and shapes, and it is worth highlighting how, in this primordial process, desire is already present, being the only human feeling. The birth of things from a state of nonexistence, in which everything is grey, is due to the presence of a seed of desire. The main character falls in love with Ayl, a female being. In the vacuum surrounding him, he starts a courtship that first concretises itself in explaining the differences among things that are taking their shapes (“I hunted for everything that was in some way detached from the uniform surface of the world, everything marked by a speckling, a stain”),15 and then reaches a crescendo in the final loss. The protagonist expresses his desire and affection by teaching Ayl the new structure of the world, while she is afraid of any sort of difference, preferring a world without colors and oppositions: “For her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord.”16 After a single night in which the couple embraces, her repulsion for differences causes her to remain forever enclosed in the Earth’s nucleus, where everything is confused, without names, light, and boundaries: Ayl! Where are you? Why aren’t you out here? … all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl’s person, with Ayl’s world, with Ayl’s idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here.17

In “Priscilla,” the universe is similarly described in its original state: in this case, however, the story describes the early phases of a being’s birth from a cellular nucleus. The story is divided in three sections, “Mitosis,” “Meiosis,” and “Death,” and it is already clear from the title that the text, unlike “Senza colori,” will focus on biology rather than on astronomy or geology. In spite of these differences, the two stories virtually share the 15

Calvino, “Without Colours,” 53; “Cercavo tutto quello che si distaccasse in qualche modo dall’uniforme superficie del mondo, tutto quel che marcasse una screziatura, una macchia.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 49. 16 “per lei tutto quello che accennava a rompere un’assoluta neutralità visiva era una stonatura stridente.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 49. 17 Calvino, “Without Colours,” 59; “Ayl! Dove sei, Ayl? Perché non sei di qua? … tutto m’apparve così insulso, così banale, così falso, così in contrasto con la persona di Ayl, con il mondo di Ayl, con l’idea di bellezza di Ayl, che compresi come il suo posto non avrebbe mai più potuto essere di qua.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 55.

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same plot: while becoming aware of his own existence and of the world, Qfwfq tells the story of how he fell in love. In “Priscilla,” the cellular development of the organism proceeds in parallel with the subject’s development, and the process of mitosis is defined from the very beginning as a condition that Qfwfq labels as “dying of love”18 and later, more explicitly, as a “state of desire.”19 The process itself of falling in love itself is described in different stages: first, there is a feeling of being in love without any external object, while later, at the end of the section, a female being called Priscilla takes shape as the love object. In the second part (“Meiosis”), Qfwfq, which has now become a multicellular organism, starts describing his relationship with Priscilla, which metaphorically embodies a condition of Otherness. Finally, the third part, entitled “Death,” focuses on mortality, making all subjectivities lost in an unavoidable end. It appears clear, then, how “Priscilla” summarises, and, in a certain way, brings to its extremes, the features of Calvino’s conceptualisation and use of desire as a narrative device outlined so far. In “Priscilla,” desire is again the story’s nucleus, and, at the same time, the driving force shaping its construction, and not only in a metaphorical way. Desire drives the plot from the subject’s initial stream of consciousness, significantly marking its different steps in accordance to biological rules. The first stage (“Mitosis”) depicts an original state of desire from which any Otherness is excluded, so that being in love is not anchored to an external object but rather finds its fulfilment in an individual and narcissistic feeling of completeness. The second stage (“Meiosis”) displays a “pluricellular” desire: Qfwfq actually falls from its primal state of undifferentiated oneness, and acknowledges what is “I” and what is “you.” Desire becomes therefore a force that is directed toward Priscilla, the object of desire individuated in a quite accidental way among all the possible differentiated forms. Once again, the relationship is entirely structured on the desiring longing itself, whereas the presence of the “Other,” rather than implying a chance of reconstituting the original fullness, seems to exclude it: “Separation, the impossibility of meeting, has been in us from the very beginning.”20 This original impossibility, in being placed in an undefined past, leads the subject to be dependent on a sort of determinism that comes from the past itself. Subjectivity is structured by a series of identifications that mirrors something that occurred in some space “before”: 18

Calvino, “Priscilla,” 209; “Innamorato da morire.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 67. Calvino, “Priscilla,” 215; “stato di desiderio” Calvino, ibid., 73. 20 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 229; “La separazione, l’impossibilità d’incontrarsi è già in noi da principio,” Calvino, ibid., 88. 19

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Through the parabola I have attempted to reconstruct, the main features of Calvino’s model of desire should be clear. Moving from it, my aim would be now to attempt reading Calvino’s conceptualisation and structure of desire through a comparison with Lacan’s theories on desire and the way they differ from a general psychoanalytic vulgate, as was present in the broader Italian culture of the 1960s. 22 It is actually important to highlight how Calvino’s structural and thematic notion of desire, presenting evident psychoanalytic echoes, shows a set of subtle and ramified affinities with specific traits of Lacanian thought as they circulated in the Parisian environment in those years, and cannot be reduced to the influence of a broadly Freudian and psychoanalytic trend. Chronologically speaking, even if Lacan had been elaborating his theories since 1953, the year in which he founded the Parisian psychoanalytic society and started the seminar series that would only end in 1980, the 1960s witnessed a significant enhancement of psychoanalytic thought in France, within the frame of the wider vogue of structuralism.23 In 1963, lacking the official recognition of the International Psychoanalytic Society, Lacan founded the independent École Freudienne; his Writings were first published in France in 1966, whereas their first Italian translation had to wait until its publication in 1974 by Einaudi, the 21

Calvino, “Priscilla,” 228; “su quarantasei cromosomi ventitre mi vengono da mio padre e ventitre da mia madre, cioè io continuo a portarmi dietro i genitori in tutte le mie cellule, e non potrò mai liberarmi da questo fardello. … La storia che volevo raccontare dunque è impossibile non solo raccontarla ma innanzitutto viverla, perché è già tutta lì, contenuta in un passato che non si può raccontare in quanto già a sua volta compreso nel proprio passato … un passato generale a cui tutti i passati individuali rimandano.” Calvino, ibid., 87. 22 The reception and diffusion of psychoanalysis in Italy is a too wide topic to be treated here in detail. A general overview can be found in Michel David, La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana (Turin: Boringhieri, 1966), whose publication date, however, prevents it from providing an all-encompassing account, especially of the years on which I am focusing here. 23 On psychoanalysis in France see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co. A History of Psychoanalysis in France. 1925-1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Free Association, 1990).

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publishing house for which Calvino had been working since 1947. During this period, Lacan’s relationship with Italy was quite active: he had some Italian scholars and had held several conferences in Italy.24 Although no explicit or direct references to Lacan can be found in Calvino’s literary writings, Calvino’s notion of desire presents strong and eloquent affinities with Lacan’s theories concerning the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, which may suggest an influence, although not necessarily a direct one (which could, for instance, be mediated by Roland Barthes). 25 To summarise Lacan’s position, we can begin by noticing how the Real presents itself, in Lacan’s theory, a sort of nucleus of fullness, completeness and non-differentiation, without fissure nor structure. It is definable as a pre-Oedipal condition, in which a separation from the external world cannot even be imagined. Everything is a wholeness that preexists and exceeds the borders and the order later provided by the symbolisation through law and language. Because of this “beforeness,” situated beyond every sort of shaped reality, no absence or alienation can exist, since this condition of oneness is interrupted by castration, causing the primordial loss. The Real is placed outside the language, the order of things, the existence of external objects and even outside any possible opposition between absence and presence: only a global and blurred whole exists, in which fullness is endless. I defined the Real as a pre-Oedipal condition, since I aimed to stress the way it is placed, for the subject, in a sort of “time before time.” In the Real, it would not even be proper to speak of “subject,” since subjectivity arises only by accessing the Symbolic order: metaphorically, the Symbolic is the cut made in the Real by the big Other, a primigenial wound that still enables the subject to be itself, thereby speaking and living in the world (the big Other refers to the father in the Freudian Oedipal conflict, in that it embodies language and the law). Nevertheless, before the entrance into the Symbolic order, the subject has to pass through the order named “the 24 On Lacan’s relationship with Italy see Lacan in Italia 1953-1978, ed. Giacomo Contri (Milan: La Salamandra, 1978). 25 References to a relationship between Calvino and Barthes are instead open and explicit. Calvino knew Barthes in person, and he attended his seminars on Balzac’s Sarrasine in 1968. In the bibliography of La chambre claire, Barthes mentions Calvino’s short story “L’avventura di un fotografo” (“The Adventure of a Photographer”). On Barthes’s death, in 1980, Calvino wrote a brief commemoration “In memoria di Roland Barthes,” which was published in the newspaper La Repubblica on April: the text is now included in Italo Calvino, Saggi, ed. Mario Barenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), vol. 1, 481-486. Translated by Patrick Creagh as “In Memory of Roland Barthes” in The Literature Machine (London: Vintage, 1997), 300-306.

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Imaginary,” a symbiotic phase of relationship with the other. Roughly summarising, the Imaginary is a state of narcissism and alienation in which the subject, in a state of deception investing the “I” and reality, tries to articulate its Ego through a series of images received by others. These images act as a mirror, by which the subject identifies itself from an external point of view, by mirroring itself in someone else’s subjectivity. At this stage, a first condition of indistinguishable perception between “me” and “you” occurs, and a sort of desire of symbiosis with the other is preeminent, in a confusion that prevents a proper distinction between subjectivity and otherness. The subject therefore develops a state of confusion between “me” and “you,” and the object of desire is identified with everything the other desires. Proper subjectivity thus finds its form only through castration from the primordial condition, namely through an original lack that causes the entrance into the Symbolic order: the big Other shapes the world and intervenes to halt any symbiotic and narcissistic relationship with the outside world. The father, the law, and language – all functions belonging to the big Other – work on the undifferentiated and imaginary nucleus in order to give an order, to distinguish differences in things and to name them. At the same time, in making the universe symbolic and symbolised, the law has also the role of regulating desire and making it possible to be said. At this point, the subject knows that he or she is in the world, and is in possession of the word that expresses desire. Still, and paradoxically, expressing desire and addressing it toward external objects is made intrinsically vain by the very entrance into the Symbolic order. The original loss caused by the Symbolic, in alienating the subject from its primordial state of fullness, becomes the very drive of subjectivity, structuring and directing desire to objects that cannot help but being transitional ones, in an infinite chain that never satisfies the lack, which, in turn, is itself the constituting element of desire. In sum, desire is structured as the attempt to return to the lost condition of wholeness: every object yearned for is an illusion, in that, within the Symbolic, the subject’s real desire is to be recognised by the other, in the hope of recovering the original completeness. Thus, any chance of fulfilment is excluded, and desire takes increasingly the shape of a drive without an object, as a sort of never-ending discontent fed by its own tensive movement. From this angle, Lacan connects his theory of desire to the signifiers’ chain in Saussure’s linguistics, which cannot really grasp any signified. Desire and language are therefore strongly interconnected, in that language constitutes the means by which the alienated subject tries to articulate his/her desire. Moreover, the infinite chain passing through the different external objects

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must be thought as a drive pushing the subject from behind: desire is structured and caused by the lack that is placed in the primordial “beforeness,” and not provoked by externalities.26 In Calvino’s “cosmicomic” tales, the aforementioned “Senza colori” and “Priscilla,” no mention is made of psychoanalytical theory, as we have seen. Rather, Calvino speaks of cells, biology, cosmology and geological ages, a set of forms of knowledge from which the absence of psychoanalysis is even more striking, as a more or less conscious and deliberate omission. This absence sounds even more telling if we consider the strong analogies these two tales possess with Lacan’s theory, as if the influence of the French psychoanalyst – whether direct or mediated through the French psychoanalytic wave of the mid-1960s – had been concealed behind the screen of “exact” sciences, more appealing to a rationalist and materialist cultural environment.27 First of all, between the biological and astronomical “beginnings,” desire appears to be already present in these texts as a nucleus and a core, thus establishing a strong connection between desire and the state of primordial origin – before time, space, and the very order of the universe. Behind the alleged predominance of biology and astronomy, a parallel can therefore be detected with the “time zero” of the unconscious in the psychic development, and with the role played by desire in the course of this process. It is actually a nucleus of desire that causes Qfwfq – otherwise a prehistoric cell placed in an unstructured universe – to move, 26 I summarise here, in a schematic way, the theories developed by Lacan in the course of some of his seminars, and most notably in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988); Lacan, The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993); Lacan, The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977). I have also considered a selected secondary bibliography on Lacan, including: Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996); Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); The Cambridge Companion to Lacan ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: &DPEULGJH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV 6ODYRMäLåHNLooking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (London: the MIT Press, 1992). 27 It is worth mentioning that Italy, because of its Marxist cultural hegemony during the 1960s, felt the effects of the Soviet refusal of psychoanalysis. On this topic see Luciano Mecacci, La psicologia e la psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana del Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998) and Marxismo e psicoanalisi ed. Angiola Massucco Costa (Turin: Newton and Compton, 1976).

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in the same way as the presence of desire in the original state of undefined wholeness is, in Lacan’s theory, a necessary condition for subjectivity to be formed. In “Priscilla,” the first phase describes a condition of completeness (“before I had established any relationships between myself and anything else … there was the cell that was me and it was already quite an achievement, such a thing is more than enough to fill one’s life”28), in which anything exists beyond a fully satisfied individual being, possessing no relationship with the external world for the simple fact that the external world does still not exist: “here was me … and then there was an outside which seemed to me a void I might occupy … . The dizziness of a void which represented everything possible, the complement of that fullness that was for me all.”29 Furthermore, this condition is placed in an indefinite primordial time, nearly outside memory and consciousness: “not remembering is at a certain point necessary to the story this one and not another … here not remembering the story becomes the very story itself.” 30 This story, in which the lack of memory constitutes the story itself, seems to mirror the progressive construction of subjectivity between the Real – which is, as we have seen, lost by definition – and the entrance into the Imaginary. A similar situation is described in “Senza colori,” in which the world is entirely grey since light has not yet delineated colours and shapes (“the Earth must have resembled a grey ball revolving in space.”31). Equally, mirroring Lacan’s conceptualisation of desire as stemming from the lack of something that has not been (and is actually impossible to be) individuated, Qfwfq describes the desiring drive addressed toward a quintessentially absent quiddity: The nervousness of an individual who knows he has all those lines, he knows he is all those lines, but also knows there’s something that can’t be 28 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 209; “prima che mi mettessi in relazione con niente … quella cellula lì ero io, era questa coscienza la pienezza, era questa pienezza la coscienza.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 67. 29 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 213; “c’ero io … e poi un fuori che mi appariva come un vuoto che avrei potuto occupare io … La vertigine di un vuoto che era tutto il possibile, tutto l’altrove l’altravolta l’altrimenti possibile, il completamento di quel tutto che era per me il tutto.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 70-71. 30 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 211; “non ricordarmela è a un certo punto necessario perché la storia sia questa e non un’altra … qui il non ricordare la storia diventa la storia stessa.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 68-69. 31 Calvino, “Without Colours,” 49.; “la Terra doveva avere l’aspetto di una palla grigia roteante nello spazio.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 45.

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represented with those lines, a void of which those lines succeed only in feeling the emptiness. Or rather the tension towards the outside, the elsewhere, the otherwise, which is then called a state of desire.32

The same primordial desire is portrayed in “Senza colori”: still, nothing is shaped, “we were all deaf and dumb” and “no form could be clearly distinguished from what was behind it or around it.” 33 Nevertheless, amidst this unrecognisable grey, the first and only feeling is desire, occurring – once again – before the recognition and the acknowledgement of its object: “I still hadn’t realised what they were, but I was already in love and running, in pursuit of the eyes of Ayl.”34 This progression reproduces the infinitely metonymic chain of desire, in which the lack does concern a positive object, but rather the early – and forever lost – condition of wholeness. The same desire set before its object is also present in “Priscilla”: And when I say “dying of love” – Qfwfq went on – I mean something you have no idea of, because you think falling in love has to signify falling in love with another person, or thing, or what have you, in other words I’m here and what I’m in love with is there, in short a relationship connected to the life of relationships, whereas I’m talking about the times before I had established any relationship between myself and anything else.35

A later passage perfects this statement: It isn’t true that the state of desire takes place when something is missing; if something is missing, too bad, you do without it … But a state of lack 32 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 215; “il nervosismo di un individuo che sa d’avere tutti quei bastoncini, ma sa che c’è qualcosa che non è rappresentabile con quei bastoncini, un vuoto di cui quei bastoncini riescono a sentire solamente il vuoto. Cioè quella tensione verso il fuori, l’altrove, l’altrimenti, che è poi quel che si dice uno stato di desiderio.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 73. 33 Calvino, “Without Colours,” 50; “eravamo tutti muti e sordi” and “non c’era forma che si distinguesse chiaramente da quel che stava dietro e intorno. A malapena si riusciva a individuare ciò che si muoveva.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 46. 34 Calvino, “Without Colours,” 51; “ancora non m’ero accorto di cos’erano e già correvo innamorato inseguendo gli occhi di Ayl.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 46. 35 Calvino, “Without Colours,” 209; “… E quando dico “innamorato da morire”, proseguì Qfwfq,- intendo qualcosa di cui voi non avete un’idea, voi che pensate che innamorarsi voglia per forza dire innamorarsi di un’altra persona, o cosa, o cosa diavolo, insomma o sono qui e ciò di cui sono innamorato è là, cioè una relazione connessa alla vita di relazione, invece io vi parlo di prima che mi mettessi in relazione con niente.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 67.

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Chapter Ten pure and simple doesn’t exist, as far as I know, in nature: the state of lack is experienced always in contrast with a previous state of satisfaction … And it isn’t true that a state of desire presupposes necessarily a desired something; the desired something begins to exist only when there is the state of desire; … So once there’s the state of desire it’s precisely that something which begins to be, something which if all goes well will be the desired something but which could also remain just a something.36

In both Lacan’s and Calvino’s views, only the entrance into the Symbolic order can enable the chain of desire to unwind, being the Imaginary characterised by a confusion with the desire of the other that leads to a confusion of being the other, because of desiring the same. A similar process occurs to Qfwfw, in that both stories depict a movement from an “imaginary” state to a state of consciousness in which language makes its appearance: the only doing you can allow yourself with the scant means at your disposal is that special kind of doing that is saying. In short, I was moved to express: my state of desire, my state-motion-desire of motion-desirelove moved me to say, and since the only thing I had to say was myself I was moved to say myself, to express myself.37

Subjectivity is formed through language, assuming, in the course of this process, its constitutive division caused by the symbolised structure: I started conversing, all in gestures, “Sand. Not-sand,” I said, first pointing to our surroundings, then the two of us. … “Rock. Not-rock,” I said, to continue that line of reasoning. … “I. You-not-I,” I tried to explain, with

36

Calvino, “Without Colours,” 216; “Non è vero che lo stato di desiderio si verifica quando manca qualcosa; se qualcosa manca pazienza, se ne fa a meno … Ma uno stato di mancanza puro e semplice, che io sappia, non esiste in natura: lo stato di mancanza si sperimenta sempre in contrasto con un precedente stato di soddisfazione … E non è vero che uno stato di desiderio presuppone necessariamente un qualcosa desiderato; il qualcosa desiderato comincia a esserci solo una volta che è lo stato di desiderio; … Quindi una volta che c’è lo stato di desiderio è proprio il qualcosa che comincia a esserci, qualcosa che se tutto va bene sarà il qualcosa desiderato ma che potrebbe restare un qualcosa e basta.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 73-74. 37 Calvino, “Without Colours,” 216-217; l’unico fare che ci si può permettere disponendo di pochissimi mezzi è quello speciale tipo di fare che è il dire. Insomma io ero mosso a dire; il mio stato di desiderio, il mio stato-moto-desiderio di moto-desiderio-amore mi muoveva a dire e, siccome l’unica cosa da dire era me stesso, ero spinto a dire me stesso, cioè a esprimermi. Calvino, “Senza colori,” 75.

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gestures. She was irked. “Yes. You-like-me, but only so much,” I tried to say.38

The Symbolic stage of differentiation – the moment in which, in biological terms, Qfwfq becomes a multicellular being – entails language in connection with the presence of the other: “Priscilla is an individual of my same species and of the sex opposite mine, multicellular as I now find myself, too,” 39 and, similarly to Ayl’s world, questions on subjectivity begin in connection with otherness: “Then the problem begins to arise whether the relationship between me and Priscilla is the relationship only between the differential elements.” 40 At this stage, desire necessarily implies a relationship with otherness that is neither imaginary nor symbiotic, but engrained in a singularity that becomes the object. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the Symbolic – by castrating the subject – condemns desire to a perpetual unfulfilment. In “Priscilla,” this constitutive impossibility of desire to attain satisfaction is clearly related to something happened in an undefined sphere of origin: What now leads me and Priscilla to seek each other isn’t an impulse towards the afterwards: it’s the final action of the past that is fulfilled through us. Goodbye, Priscilla, our encounter, our embraces are useless, we remain distant, or finally near, in other words forever apart. Separation, the impossibility of meeting, has been in us from the very beginning. … the unbridgeable distance that separates in each couple the two companions, the failure, the void that remains in the midst of even the most successful couple.41

38

Calvino, “Without Colours,” 51-52; “Mi misi a conversare, tutto a gesti. – Sabbia. Non sabbia, -dissi, indicando prima intorno e poi noi due. … – Roccia. Non roccia, – feci, tanto per continuare a svolgere quel tema. … Io. Tu, non io, – provai a spiegare a gesti. Ne fu contrariata. – Sì, tu come io, ma così così, – corressi.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 47. 39 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 224; “Priscilla è un individuo della mia stessa specie e di sesso opposto al mio, pluricellulare come ora mi trovo ad essere anch’io.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 83. 40 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 226; “E allora comincia a porsi il problema se il rapporto tra me e Priscilla sia il rapporto tra i soli elementi differenziali.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 85. 41 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 229-230; “Quello che porta me e Priscilla a cercarci non è una spinta verso il dopo: è l’ultimo atto del passato che si compie attraverso di noi. Priscilla, addio, l’incontro, l’abbraccio sono inutili, noi restiamo lontani, o già vicini una volte per tutte, cioè inavvicinabili. La separazione, l’impossibilità di incontrarsi è già in noi da principio. … la distanza incolmabile che separa in ogni

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This consideration reaffirms, in biological and phylogenetic terms, Lacan’s statement about the vain essence of desired objects, summarised by Lacan’s famous affirmation that every encounter is an impossible encounter. Something similar happens in “Senza colori,” in which Ayl, a feminine figure, refuses any sort of differentiation and opposition in her universe. To speak in Lacanian terms, in being afraid of the Symbolic order, Ayl escapes the original separation from unity and oneness, thereby avoiding any symbolised and linguistic relationship with the other, following her disappointment in discovering that “I” is not “you.” Equally, in “Senza colori,” desire fails not only to provide any form of fulfilment, but the possibility itself of an encounter: As I had been projected outwards, into the open, Ayl had remained beyond the rock wall, closed in the bowels of the Earth. “Ayl! Where are you? Why aren’t you out here?” … Ayl’s perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn’t even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of grey stone.42

Significantly, only the wall separating the two remains as a survival of the perfect world, whose memory itself, within the Symbolic, cannot even be accessed (in the same way, in “Priscilla,” the story has paradoxically its essence and beginning in the lack of memory). In “Priscilla,” the protagonist affirms that his story is “The initial phase of a love story which afterwards is probably repeated in an interminable multiplication of initial phases just like the first and identified with the first, a multiplication or rather squaring, an exponential growth of stories which is always tantamount to the first story.”43 This stress on a sort of “combinatory desire,” to use such a crucial term for Calvino, suggests that each story of desire is nothing but a reelaboration and repetition of the coppia i due compagni, il fallimento, il vuoto che rimane in mezzo alla coppia più riuscita.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 88-89. 42 Calvino, “Without Colours,” 59-60; “Mentre io ero stato proiettato fuori, all’aperto, Ayl era rimasta dietro la parete di roccia, chiusa nelle viscere della terra. – Ayl! Dove sei, Ayl? Perché non sei di qua? – … il mondo perfetto di Ayl era perduto per sempre, tanto che non sapevo neppure più immaginarmelo, e non restava più nulla che potesse ricordarmelo nemmeno di lontano, nulla se non quella fredda parete di pietra grigia.” Calvino, “Senza colori,” 54-55. 43 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 211; “una fase iniziale di storia d’amore che in seguito probabilmente torna a ripetersi in una moltiplicazione o meglio una elevazione al quadrato, una crescita esponenziale di storie che è sempre la stessa storia” “Priscilla,” 69.

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same core. A similar statement can be found in Calvino’s introduction to Gli amori difficili: Although these stories mostly concern two people that don’t happen to meet, in their non-meeting seems the author to individuate not only a reason for despairing, but also a central element – if not the veritable essence – of love relationships.44

It seems, therefore, that the primordial desire portrayed in the “cosmicomic” short stories, finding its outcome in a non-encounter, reverberates it remotest structure in each single love story, following that the “exponential growth of stories” is always “the first story.”45 An example of this can be precisely traced in Gli amori difficili, and most notably in the two examples analysed before. They epitomise in a structured and human world the primordial features that desire assumes in its biological and cosmological origins, both of them embodying and at the same time concealing the rising of subjectivity. Travelling on the motorway or by train; running after Ayl, who, in turn, tries to escape in order to recover her perfect universe; becoming aware of one’s self, while at the same time falling in love with the otherness that Priscilla epitomises: all these representations of desire share actually the same structure, repeating the same, primordial fracture. Surely, the possibility of framing this narrative structure within Lacan’s theory of desire, arguing a more or less direct influence of Lacan’s thought on Calvino, would likely meet the strongest resistances in Calvino himself, who always stayed away from psychoanalysis and psychology, and, in his published correspondence covering a time span of forty-five years, briefly mentioned Lacan only thrice,46 and then in not so positive terms. Calvino, in fact, aligned himself to the “rationalist” side, the one of combinatory games and of the Oulipo environment, thereby attempting to combine literature with a specific – and “rationalistic” – understanding of science. Moreover, his neglect of psychoanalysis has also to be connected with his work for Einaudi, a publishing house that had always promoted a leftist, progressive and scientific-oriented policy, in 44

“Se queste sono, per la più parte, storie di come una coppia non si incontra, nel loro non incontrarsi l’autore sembra far consistere non solo una ragione di disperazione ma pure un elemento fondamentale – se non addirittura l’essenza stessa – del rapporto amoroso.” Calvino, Gli amori difficili, XIII. 45 Calvino, “Priscilla,” 211; “una crescita esponenziale di storie che è sempre la stessa storia.” Calvino, “Priscilla,” 69. 46 See Calvino, Lettere 1945-1985 ed. Luca Baranelli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 1025, 1305, 1453.

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accordance with the post-Gramscian Marxist hegemony in Italian culture of the time (although it must be stressed that Einaudi was the first publishing house to propose an Italian translation of Lacan in 1974). Quite interestingly, when speaking of Le Cosmicomiche (where Lacan’s hidden presence seems most influential) Calvino stated that his stories had been inspired by a time spent in reading nothing but astronomy treatises. Still, in his combinatory manifesto “Cibernetica e fantasmi,” dated 196747 (the same year of “L’avventura di un automobilista,” and a few years after the other stories), he explicitly writes about the connection between the unconscious, language and the unspeakable, with direct references to Ernst Gombrich’s Freudian theory of art.48 If we consider the affinities between Calvino’s stories of desire and Lacan’s theories, precisely this consideration may enable to argue a less hypothetical influence of the French psychoanalyst. In this essay, Calvino writes: But what is language vacuum if not the vestige of taboo, of a ban on mentioning something, on pronouncing certain names, of a prohibition either present or ancient? … The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions. The unconscious speaks in dreams, in verbal slips, in sudden association with borrowed words, stolen symbol, linguistic contraband, until literature redeems these territories and annexes them to the language of the waking world. The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious … The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.49

47

Calvino, “Cibernetica e fantasmi. (Appunti sulla narrativa come processo combinatorio),” in Una pietra sopra, ed. Claudio Milanini (Milan: Mondadori, 2011), 201-221. Translated by Patrick as “Cybernetics and Ghosts” in The Uses of Literature (New York: Harcourt and Brace and Company, 1986), 3-27. 48 Calvino refers to Ernst Gombrich’s Freud’s Aesthetics (1966). 49 Calvino, “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” 17: “Ma cos’è un vuoto di linguaggio se non la traccia di un tabù, d’una proibizione di parlare di qualcosa, di pronunciare certi nomi, d’una interdizione attuale o antica? … L’inconscio è il mare del non dicibile, dell’espulso fuori dai confini del linguaggio, del rimosso in seguito ad antiche proibizioni; l’inconscio parla – nei sogni, nei lapsus, nelle associazioni istantanee – attraverso parole prestate, simboli rubati, contrabbandi linguistici, finché la letteratura non riscatta questi territori e li annette al linguaggio della veglia. La linea di forza che la letteratura moderna è nella sua coscienza di dare la parola a tutto ciò che nell’inconscio sociale o individuale è rimasto non detto … Più le

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In these few lines Calvino is proposing an interpretation of the repressed in literature that comes close to Gombrich’s Freudian readings and to Freud’s essay on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Rather similarly, in speaking of humour and literature in “Definizioni dei territori: l’erotico. (Il sesso e il riso)” [“Definitions of Territories: Eroticism”], given that desire is often concealed in the recesses of humour and science, Calvino writes that “The thick symbolic armour beneath which Eros hides is no other than a system of conscious or unconscious shields that separate desire from the representation of it.”50 Finally, in a paper delivered in 1978, while speaking of the writer’s subjectivity in literature, Calvino makes further considerations on literature, resistances, the repressed and mechanisms of defence: The further we go toward distinguishing the various levels that go to make up the ‘I’ of the author, the more we realize that many of these levels do not belong to the author as an individual but to collective culture, to the historical period or the deep sedimentary layers of the species.51

These clues,52 I think, scattered among Calvino’s oeuvre, should invite new reflection on his relationship with psychoanalysis, in that they precisely connect literary production with a complex mechanic of unconscious “ghosts,” symptoms, defences and resistances. In keeping himself distant from psychoanalytic issues, Calvino seems to give the reader a key for detecting secret and concealed influences within his literary work, as if he was authorising interpreters to look for subterranean nostre case sono illuminate e prospere più le loro mura grondano fantasmi.” “Cibernetica e fantasmi,” 214-215. 50 Calvino, “Definitions of Territories: Eroticism,” translated by Patrick Creagh in The Literature Machine, 65-70, 66; “La spessa corazza simbolica sotto cui l’eros si nasconde non è altro che un sistema di schermi coscienti o incoscienti che separano il desiderio dalla sua rappresentazione.” Calvino, “Definizioni dei territori: l’erotico. (Il sesso e il riso),” in Una pietra sopra, 257. 51 The intervention “I livelli della realtà in letteratura” was presented for the first time at the International Conference “Livelli di realtà” at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1978. “Levels of Reality in Literature” translated by Patrick Creagh, in The Literature Machine, 101-121, 113. “Più andiamo avanti distinguendo gli strati diversi che formano l’io dell’autore, più ci accorgiamo che molti di questi strati non appartengono all’individuo autore ma alla cultura collettiva, all’epoca storica o alle sedimentazioni profonde della specie.” “I livelli della realtà in letteratura,” in Calvino, Una pietra sopra, 386. 52 I use this term, of course, with reference to Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal, 9, 1 (1980): 5-36.

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paths in his oeuvre, and for the remnants of a collective unconscious together with the individual one. According to Calvino, literature actually enables the regaining of what has been repressed, both collectively and individually. It would not therefore be a hazard to hypothesise a haunting relationship between Calvino and Lacan, as far as the conceptualisation and narratisation of desire are concerned. Calvino’s apparent distance from Lacan’s theories, and the lack of any positive or negative reference to a scholar who was surely central in the French environment that Calvino was familiar with, seems at least suspicious. 53 Biology, astronomy, and science would all form that “symbolic armour” concealing a specific name and a general cultural environment that Calvino, and Italian culture in general, had good reasons to repress. In fact, the reception of psychoanalysis in Italy took place late, and in quite a schizophrenic way in many of its aspects: scarcely inclined to be framed within the polarisation between “rationalism” and “irrationalism,” a dichotomy that distinctly appears, for example, in the exchanges of letters between Sebastiano Timpanaro, Carlo Ginzburg, and Francesco Orlando, psychoanalysis raised variegated responses that shifted from direct refusal to more or less conscious forms of domestication, aimed at preventing its potentially “decadent” and “reactionary” drives. 54 The possibility of a haunting presence of Lacan in the deepest layers of Calvino’s literary works, beyond the open and explicit references to biology and astronomy, is therefore more than a mere working hypothesis, especially if we consider Calvino’s long-lasting and intense connections with Paris and the French intellectual environment. From the 1960s onwards, Calvino intensified his interests in French thought and culture, and in 1967 decided to move to Paris with his family, where he kept up a close relationship, among others, with Roland Barthes. Interestingly, Calvino stated several times how his relation with Paris was a distant one, as had been the case in several cities where he had lived, but not felt a connection: actually, he defined himself an “hermit in Paris,” stressing his solitary life of study and declaring how

53

It is worth noting that at the beginning of “Priscilla,” there are a series of exergues quoting, among others, Georges Bataille and Jean-Paul Sartre but Lacan is not mentioned. 54 The debate was carried on mostly through private letters: see Carteggio su Freud (1971-1977), ed. Salvatore Settis (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2001) as regards the debate between Timpanaro and Orlando; “Lettere intorno a Freud (1971-1995),” in Sebastiano Timpanaro e la cultura del secondo Novecento, ed. Enrico Ghidetti and Alessandro Pagnini (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 2005), 317-345, as regards the debate between Timpanaro and Ginzburg.

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his movements in the city were not those of a curious flâneur, but those of a tube-traveller, charmed by the “fascination with the underground.”55 Speaking of this “fascination with the underground,” it would be interesting to remark how, in speaking of Paris in the short text “Eremita a Parigi,” Calvino seems to echo his own considerations about the unconscious in relation to literature, the representation of desire and the repressed: This idea of the city as encyclopaedic discourse, as the collective memory, is part of a whole tradition: think of the Gothic cathedrals in which every architectural and ornamental detail, every space and element, referred to notions that were part of a global wisdom, was a sign that found echoes in other contexts. … And at the same time we can read the city as the collective unconscious: the collective unconscious is a huge catalogue, an enormous bestiary; we can interpret Paris as a book of dreams, an album of our unconscious, a catalogue of horrors.56

Significantly, Paris takes the shape of a collective memory, of a catalogue of a global knowledge, and, explicitly, it is compared with an unconscious. It seems likely that this unconscious – bearing the memories of its cultural environment, of Lacan and of a theory of desire that came so close to Calvino’s conclusion in the 1957 “L’avventura di un viaggiatore” – could resurface, disguised as a compromise-formation between the domain of resemblance and that of influence, precisely in the years in which the author felt to be a “hermit in Paris.”

55

The text derives from an interview to Calvino made in 1974 by Valerio Riva. Translated by Martin McLaughlin as “Hermit in Paris” in Hermit in Paris (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), 167-175, 170. “fascino del mondo sotterraneo” Calvino, “Eremita a Parigi,” in Eremita a Parigi. Pagine autobiografiche (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 190-195, 193. 56 Calvino, “Hermit in Paris,” 172-173; “Questa idea della città come discorso enciclopedico, come memoria collettiva, ha tutta una tradizione: pensiamo alle cattedrali gotiche in cui ogni particolare architettonico e ornamentale, ogni luogo ed elemento rimandava a cognizioni di un sapere globale, era un sogno che trovava corrispondenze in altri contesti … E nello stesso tempo possiamo leggere la città come inconscio collettivo: l’inconscio collettivo è un grande catalogo, un grande bestiario; possiamo interpretare Parigi come un libro dei sogni, come un album del nostro inconscio, come un catalogo di mostri.” Calvino, “Eremita a Parigi,” 197.

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Bibliography Antonello, Pierpaolo. Il ménage a quattro: scienza, filosofia, tecnica nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence: Le Monnier, 2005. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Belpoliti, Marco. L’occhio di Calvino. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Calvino, Italo. Le Cosmicomiche, 26th ed. Milan: Mondadori, 2011. Translated by William Weaver as Cosmicomics. London: Cape, 1969. —. Ti con zero. Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Translated by William Weaver as t zero, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. —. Gli amori difficili, 19th ed. Milan: Mondadori, 2010. Translated by William Weaver as Difficult Loves. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1993. —. Saggi, 2 vols. Edited by Mario Barenghi. Milan: Mondadori, 1995. —. Lettere 1945-1985. Edited by Luca Baranelli. Milan: Mondadori, 2001. —. Eremita a Parigi. Pagine autobiografiche. Edited by Marco Belpoliti. Milan: Mondadori, 1994. Translated by Martin McLaughlin as Hermit in Paris. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. —. Una pietra sopra, 11th ed. Edited by Claudio Milanini. Milan: Mondadori, 2011. Cappello, Sergio. Les années parisiennes d’Italo Calvino (1964-1980). Paris: PUPS, 2007. Contri, Giacomo, ed. Lacan in Italia 1953-1978. Milan: La Salamandra, 1978. David, Michel. La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana. Turin: Einaudi: 1966. Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1996. Gabriele, Tommasina. Italo Calvino: Eros and Language. London and Toronto: Associate University Presses, 1994. Ghidetti, Enrico and Pagnini, Alessandro, eds. Sebastiano Timpanaro e la cultura del secondo Novecento. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 2005. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977.

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The Seminar, Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Edited by. Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John. Forrester. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988. The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. Massucco Costa, Angela, ed. Marxismo e psicoanalisi. Turin: Newton and Compton, 1976. Mecacci, Luigi. La psicologia e la psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana del Novecento. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998. Orlando, Francesco and Sebastiano Timpanaro. Carteggio su Freud (19711977). Edited by Salvatore Settis. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2001. Rabaté, Jean-Michel ed. Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co. a history of psychoanalysis in France. 1925-1985. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. London: Free Association, 1990. —. Jacques Lacan. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. äLåHN 6lavoj. Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. London: the MIT Press, 1992.

CHAPTER ELEVEN “IL MONDO DELLE MADRI”: PRE-OEDIPAL DESIRE AND THE DECENTRED SELF IN ELSA MORANTE’S LA STORIA AND ARACOELI KATRIN WEHLING-GIORGI UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

The desire to return to the state of prelapsarian bliss of a maternal Eden typical of early childhood features prominently in Elsa Morante’s writings ranging from the early Diario 1938 to Menzogna e sortilegio (1948), L’isola di Arturo (1957), La Storia (1974) and Aracoeli (1982). Much critical attention has thus far focused on the quintessential “nurturing” or “instinctual” function of the Morantian parent, 1 the “real” mother for which the author herself proclaims a clear personal preference in one of her last interviews: I adore mothers, and real mothers in particular … I really love simple women. … I love women like Nunziatella in L’isola di Arturo, like Aracoeli. And not so much the bourgeois or the intellectual woman.2

1

See for example Cesare Garboli, Il gioco segreto (Milan: Adelphi, 1995), Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth Century Literature (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007) and Grace Zlobnicki Kalay, The Theme of Childhood in Elsa Morante (University: MS: Romance Monographs, 1996). The instinctual nature of the filial relationship is further underscored by numerous animal metaphors, which as Zlobnicki Kalay and Benedetti have pointed out, often bear a religious connotation. See Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow, 79 ff. 2 My translation. “Adoro le madri, le vere madri … Ho un grande amore per la donna semplice. … Amo molto le donne come Nunziatella dell’Isola di Arturo, come Aracoeli. Mica tanto le signore borghesi o le intellettuali.” From an interview

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With the main focus on the idealised, self-sacrificing aspects of maternity,3 critics often ignore a central feature of Morante’s portrayal of motherhood: the profound ambiguity which accompanies the maternal figure throughout her writings, depicting her as intensely loving and caring on the one hand, and as suffocating or even repulsive on the other. While the “destructive” side of maternity is often exclusively associated with Aracoeli, I will argue that there is a clear continuity in the author’s ambivalent discourse of maternal desire, often causing the characters to feel trapped or imprisoned in a state of symbiosis with the parent. The failure to sever the rapport results in the feelings of displacement and decentred selfhood affecting many Morantian characters. In one of his numerous misogynistic invectives in L’isola di Arturo, Wilhelm Gerace even goes as far as claiming that the stifling mother is the most “wicked”4 woman you can meet in life: What she’d really like would be to keep you always prisoner, the way you were when you were pregnant. And when you run away, she tries to pull you back from afar, to set her stamp on the whole of your world …5

While there is a strong sense of the mother disrupting the individual’s attempts at developing an independent form of selfhood, there also remains a profound desire to reinstate the lost unitary notion of the subject experienced in the pre-Oedipal, maternal space. By enlisting the thought of psychoanalyst and literary critic Julia Kristeva, this article will analyse Morante’s complex discourse of maternal desire, with a particular focus on her later novels La Storia (1974) and Aracoeli (1982). Whereas most critics have emphasised the contrast emerging between the idealised portrayal of motherhood in La Storia and the radically transgressive and profoundly ambivalent mother in Aracoeli, 6 I see a clear continuity in with Morante, published in L’espresso on 2 December 1984. Cit. in Zlobnicki Kalay, The Theme of Childhood in Elsa Morante, 46. 3 See for example Nunziata and Carmine in L’isola di Arturo, Giuditta and Andrea in Lo scialle andaluso, Ida and Useppe in La Storia and Aracoeli and Manuele in the eponymous last novel. 4 Elsa Morante, Arturo’s Island, trans. Isabel Quigly (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1959) 135; “maligna,” Elsa Morante, L’Isola di Arturo (Turin: Einaudi, 1957), 158. 5 Morante, Arturo’s Island, 136; “In realtà, [la madre] vorrebbe sempre tenerti prigioniero, come al tempo ch’era incinta di te. E quando le sfuggi, tenta di irretirti da lontano, e di dare la propria forma a tutto l’universo …” L’Isola di Arturo, 160. 6 See Garboli, Il gioco segreto, 174: “the glorious old scheme (mother/son; Nunziata/Arturo; Ida/Useppe) is torn to pieces and thrown to the wolves for them

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Morante’s reflections on maternity, which from the very beginning of her literary career are embedded in the notions of subjectivity and the unstable self.7 Furthermore, I will show that it is only in Manuele’s recuperation of the paternal in the last scenes of Aracoeli that the Morantian protagonist succeeds in “abjecting” the mother, paving the way for an autonomous form of subjectivity that transcends the maternal realm.

I. Psychoanalytical theories of desire In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical models of infant development, the child’s first and natural desire for the mother 8 is repressed and the to mutilate it” (“il vecchio schema glorioso (madre/figlio; Nunziata/Arturo; Ida/Useppe) viene lapidato e dato in pasto ai cani perché ne facciano strazio”); see also Giovanna Rosa, who claims that Aracoeli “immediately shows a distance from the previous works” (“esibisce subito la lontananza dalle opere precedenti”), exposing “the painful solipsism of a narration which offers no guide to the reader, because the physiognomy of who it will reach is by now obfuscated and indefinable”; “il solipsismo doloroso di una narrazione che non offre nessuna guida di lettura perché ormai offuscata e indefinibile è la fisionomia di coloro cui perverrà”, Giovanna Rosa, Cattedrali di carta: Elsa Morante romanziere (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1995), 291. 7 In fact, the disruptive mother already plays a significant role in Morante’s writings from the 1930s. In Diario 1938, a diary in which the young author records her dreams in a nonlinear, fragmentary fashion; the mother’s ubiquitous presence oscillates between unfulfilled desire and an insistent threat of death and disintegration: “At a certain point in these dreams, when I saw my mother’s swollen body and her dishevelled face at a window frame, with me lying on the floor below in some kind of courtyard, I had an overwhelming fear of death. … Death appeared to me like a wretched, viscous, swollen body. A dark affection tied me to my mother, an affection already imbued with the ugliness and decay which for many years prepare us for the end of death.” (my translation; “A un certo punto di questi sogni, vedendo nel riquadro di una finestra il corpo enfiato, il viso disfatto di mia madre, io, distesa a terra più in basso …, avevo un terrore spaventoso della morte. … La morte mi appariva come un corpo squallido, gonfio e viscoso. Un affetto cupo mi attirava a mia madre, già possesso della bruttezza e del disfacimento che preparano per lunghi anni la fine della morte.” Elsa Morante, Diario 1938, ed. Alba Andreini (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 48-49. 8 See Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (Toronto: Hogarth Press, 1961), 225: “[The boy’s] first love-object was his mother. She remains so; and, with the strengthening of his erotic desires and his deeper insight into the relations between his father and mother, the former is bound to become his rival. With the small girl it is different. Her first object, too, was her

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maternal figure assumes a prevalently passive, marginal role that is essentially “to be outgrown.” 9 Dominated by the Oedipus complex, Freud’s account of gender formation is in fact centred on the redirection of the primary desire for the mother towards the father: while the little boy’s fear of castration leads him to repress his longing for the maternal figure and to identify with the father (the so-called castration complex), the girl’s envy of the penis causes her to turn her desire towards the father out of resentment for the mother (so-called penis-envy). 10 Hence, the Freudian notion of femininity is cast in an effectively negative light insofar as it involves a series of losses: relinquishing the preferred erotic organ (i.e. the penis), the first-desired parent (i.e. the mother) and, finally, relinquishing the wish for a penis in favour of a compensatory desire for a child from the father, or later the husband.11 French Feminist psychoanalytic theory of the 1970s and 1980s, on the other hand, revalorises the maternal function in both the earliest stages of infant development and the ontogenesis of language. Critics like Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva turn their attention away from the symbolic order of language, which dominates the Lacanian account of individual development and involves the formal limitations the linguistic order imposes on the individual in favour of the pre-Oedipal, prelinguistic level involving bodily drives and energies. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the mother’s role in the early stages of childhood is particularly relevant in this context, as the critic stresses her liminal position at the threshold of the preconceptual and the symbolic realms of language and selfhood. The child’s separation from the mother, metaphorically represented in the act of birth, coincides with the passage from what she terms the “semiotic,” preconceptual and prelinguistic level to the “symbolic,” the realm of structured language and social order. It is this in-between/threshold status of the mother which lies at the basis of an intrinsically ambiguous approach to her: on the one hand, there is a profound desire to return to the infantile stage of symbiosis with her; but at the same time, in order for the individual to form an independent sense of selfhood or “psychic

mother. How does she find her way to her father? How, when and why does she detach herself from her mother?” 9 Elizabeth Wright, ed., “Motherhood,” in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1992), 266. 10 The Lacanian account of infantile development, on the other hand, is based on the non-essentialist account of the imaginary phallus as the third element in the Oedipus complex. 11 See Wright, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, 266.

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freedom,”12 the mother has to be rejected, or “abjected,” as Kristeva often terms it: “For man and for woman, the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation.”13 What Kristeva terms “matricide” or maternal abjection is hence considered a rite of passage necessary for the emergence of the subject. It is only when the mother has been symbolically “killed” that a definite, psychological separation from the narcissistic union with her has been accomplished. Indeed, Kristeva argues that: without matricide the internal object cannot be formed, the fantasy cannot be constructed, and reparation, as well as the redirection of hostility into the introjection of the self, is foreclosed. … In order to think, one must first lose the mother.14

The archetypal rejection/abjection of the mother hence reveals itself as “a necessary precondition for the psychic freedom of the subject.”15 Hence, in her position at the threshold of selfhood, the mother emerges as simultaneously desired and rejected. The process of individuation initiated by the split from the mother triggers a constant longing for the primal unity experienced in the womb. This “desire to rediscover the mother of the early days, whom one has lost actually or in one’s feelings,” as Klein argues in “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” “is also of the greatest importance in creative art and in the ways people enjoy and appreciate it.” 16 Kristeva ascribes a similarly resourceful role to maternal space by introducing the notion of the semiotic chora, the pre-verbal spatial and temporal realm consisting of perceptual inputs and bodily drives which precede the formal constraints of language which instead distinguish the symbolic order, the realm of structured language and social order. Once the separation from the mother has actually occurred, the self can start engaging in the process of reparation, which often finds expression in the work of art. Indeed, Kristeva argues that a form of poetic practice can subvert the symbolic order and let the semiotic reemerge, as is the case in certain avant-garde 12

Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2001), 131. 13 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leo S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 27-8. 14 Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 130. 15 Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 131. 16 Melanie Klein, “Love, guilt and reparation,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921-1945 (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 334.

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forms of literature. 17 In this process, though, the mother can only be rediscovered, without ever wholly reestablishing the initial bond that linked the individual to her: “The self never stops recreating the mother through the very freedom it gained from being separated from her. The mother is a woman who is always renewed in images and in words, in a process of which ‘I’ am the creator simply because I am the one who restores her.” 18 Hence, the linguistic medium constitutes the instrument with which the initial unity is pursued as well as where the split and liberation from the maternal figure are enacted. Kristeva’s notion of the ambivalent mother, consisting in the desire for her on the one hand and the attempt to free oneself from her on the other, provides a highly productive framework for the analysis of Morante’s complex discourse of maternity.19

II. La Storia Featuring a heterodiegetic, omniscient narrator,20 La Storia (1974) tells the story of Ida, a middle-aged, half-Jewish widow and her youngest son Useppe, who was conceived following a rape by a German soldier. The 17

In this context, Kristeva mentions Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Joyce and Artaud, arguing that reading their texts means “giving up the lexical, syntactic, and semantic operation of deciphering, and instead retracing the path of their production”: Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Weller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 103. See also Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 79: “Art – this semiotization of the symbolic – thus represents the flow of jouissance into language. Whereas sacrifice assigns jouissance its productive limit in the social and symbolic order, art specifies the means – the only means – that jouissance harbors for infiltrating that order. In cracking the sociosymbolic order, splitting it open, changing vocabulary, syntax, the word itself, and releasing from beneath them the drives borne by vocalic or kinetic differences, jouissance works its way into the social and symbolic.” 18 Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 130. 19 A recent study, to which I am greatly indebted, applies Kristeva’s psycholinguistic concept of the semiotic to the insistent imagery of the nursing body and preverbal language in Dante’s Divina Commedia and in Aracoeli; see Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati, “Between Affection and Discipline: Exploring Linguistic Tensions from Dante to Aracoeli,” in Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati, eds., The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), 8-19. 20 Rosa has underlined Morante’s unconventional adaptation of the heterodiegetic, third-person narrator, which is interspersed with “intrusive” authorial interventions: “Insomma la voce narrante in tanto è dotata di piena autorevolezza creativa in quanto è in grado di inoltrarsi nei domini a cui non ha accesso la coscienza opaca dei personaggi.” Rosa, Cattedrali di Carta, 242.

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two characters’ destinies are inextricably linked to the events and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Rome. Ida earns a meagre living as a primary school teacher, and she is one of the few literate maternal characters in Morante’s works.21 Her selfless dedication to motherhood and her symbiotic bond with Useppe have led critics to consider her a “mater dolorosa,”22 with Benedetti going as far as arguing that she “represents the most coherent expression of the ideal woman.”23 Ida’s maternal qualities manifest clear parallels with Nunziatella in L’isola di Arturo, Arturo’s young stepmother who appears completely transformed by motherhood,24 as well as with Aracoeli’s devotion to her son as a young mother. Whereas the narrative fulcrum of La Storia is of course the filial relationship between Ida and Useppe, the pre-Oedipal, prenarcissistic phase of childhood is primarily evoked in two further contexts. Firstly, it is closely linked to the sociohistorical background, with the characters’ nostalgia for recuperating the maternal uterine space being an expression of their attempt to escape the horrors of war and conflict. Secondly, however, the desire for maternal space expresses an altogether more fundamental urge, namely the wish to recover the sense of wholeness or of the unified self experienced in the primary, infantile bond with the mother.

III. Maternal desire as a refuge from war and conflict The desire to return to the maternal realm is often evoked in the context of the brutal reality with which La Storia’s characters are confronted. Ida’s 21

Most Morantian mothers are indeed illiterate, as for example Anna and Alessandra in Menzogna e sortilegio, Nunziata in L’isola di Arturo, Giuditta in Lo scialle andaluso and Aracoeli in the eponymous last novel. 22 See Rosa, who further ascribes to Ida “a maternal instinct capable of bringing about ‘desperate vicissutudes’” (“un istinto materno capace di indurre a ‘peripezie disperate.’”Rosa, Cattedrali di carta, 267). See also Zlobnicki Kalay, The Theme of Childhood, 87-90, who sees Useppe as a redemptive figure and discusses Ida’s depiction as an “earth-mother.” 23 Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow, 80. 24 See Morante, Arturo’s Island, 223: “Now that she had Carmine, she was so happy that she was singing and laughing from morning to night; when her mouth wasn’t laughing, her eyes were. In a few weeks she had blossomed into such unexpected beauty that it really seemed like a miracle that had come out of happiness”; “Adesso che aveva Carmine, dal mattino alla sera ella stava sempre a cantare e a ridere, tanto era beata; quando la sua bocca non rideva, ridevano i suoi occhi. In poche settimane, era sbocciata in una bellezza inattesa, che appariva davvero un miracolo della felicità.” Morante, L’isola di Arturo, 262.

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rapist, the German soldier Gunther, for instance, is overcome by feelings of “ghastly, lonely melancholy” 25 on his first day in the Italian capital, leading him to nostalgically recall the familiar comforts of his maternal home back in Bavaria. Moreover, considerable emphasis is placed on his child-like features and character,26 conferring him an air of puerile naiveté, even innocence. Drunk and disorientated and in search of a comforting presence, Gunther seeks to “redeem” his solitude in the first female body he encounters in a desperate and profoundly disturbing attempt to return to the maternal realm: The only thing he was looking for … was a brothel … because he felt too alone. It seemed to him that only inside a woman’s body, plunging into that warm and friendly nest, would he feel less alone. … [He] was seized by an impossible longing to be at home, curled in his too-short bed, between the cold and swampy odor of the countryside and the smell of the cabbage his mother was boiling in the kitchen. … At that moment, the first female creature who happened to come into that doorway … if she looked at him with a barely human eye – he would have been capable of embracing her violently, or perhaps flinging himself at her feet like a lover, calling her meine Mutter!27

25

Elsa Morante, History: A Novel, trans. William Weaver (London: Penguin, 1977), 17; “orrenda e solitaria malinconia,” Elsa Morante, La Storia (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 16. 26 See for example: “his face betrayed an incredible immaturity”, Morante, History, 15; “faccia … incredibilmente immatura”, Morante, La Storia, 13; “still adolescent character”, 17; “indole non formata”, 16; “the soldier’s eyes … filled in an innocence almost frightening in its timeless antiquity”, 74; “gli occhi del soldato … s’erano empiti d’una innocenza quasi terribile per la loro antichità senza data, 68; “His tone of voice, in uttering that name, was the same that a three-month old kitten might have, claiming its basket”, 73; “il suo tono di voce … fu il medesimo che potrebbe avere un gattino di tre mesi reclamando la propria cesta,” 68. 27 Morante, History, 17-29; “L’unica cosa che in quel momento lui andasse cercando … era un bordello …, perché si sentiva troppo solo; e gli pareva che unicamente dentro un corpo di donna, affondato in quel nido caldo e amico, si sentirebbe meno solo. … Lo prese una voglia impossibile d’essere a casa, rannicchiato nel suo letto troppo corto, fra l’odore freddo e paludoso della campagna e quello tiepido del cavolo cappuccio che sua madre ribolliva in cucina. … In quel momento, qualsiasi creatura femminile capitata per prima su quel portone … che lo avesse guardato con occhio appena umano, lui sarebbe stato capace di abbracciarla di prepotenza, magari buttato ai piedi come un innamorato, chiamandola: meine mutter!” Morante, La Storia, 18-20.

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The direct association between the woman’s body and the “warm and friendly nest,”28 a terminology that Morante frequently uses to refer to the maternal womb, once again clearly evokes the soldier’s desire to return to the protective environment of the uterus in the sexual act. This is further reinforced by the conflation of the two terms “mother” and “lover” towards the end of the above passage, together with the repeated references to Gunther’s nostalgic longing for his maternal home. Ida’s experience of the brutal act of rape is in turn similarly desexualised, and any memory of it is profoundly blurred as the victim suffers an epileptic fit and subsequent blackout, leading her to refigure the act of violence into a dream-like episode in a prepubescent child: “It wasn’t, for her, not even this time, a true erotic pleasure. It was an extraordinary happiness without orgasm, as sometimes happens in dreams, before puberty.”29 While Ida’s infantile regression is arguably a self-protective measure to process the vicious attack, Gunther’s act of violence originates in the desperate and futile desire to reinstate the comforts and bliss of the maternal realm. A further central figure of the novel, the anarchist and drug addict Davide Segre, desires to return to the maternal enclosure which he associates with a peaceful, oneiric state providing shelter from the crude reality and disillusionment of war. In his final, drug-fuelled delirium he longs to retreat to a state of “hibernation,” which is in turn directly linked to the pre-oedipal realm of the mother. The boy … wanted only some sleep, to heal him. A deep, deep sleep below the lowest threshold of the cold and the fear and of every remorse or shame, like a hedgehog’s hibernation or a baby’s prenatal slumber inside its mother’s womb.30 He, orphaned, would like at least a ghost to rock him, to make him sleep …31

28

“nido caldo e amico”; see also use of “tana”, Morante, La Storia, 19. Morante, History, 75; “Non fu per lei, neanche stavolta, un vero piacere erotico. Fu una straordinaria felicità senza orgasmo, come talora capita in sogno, prima della pubertà.” Morante, La Storia, 70. 30 Morante, History, 696; “Il ragazzo … aveva voglia soltanto di una dormita che lo guarisse. Una dormita fonda, fonda, sotto l’infima soglia del freddo, e della paura, e d’ogni morso o vergogna: simile al letargo di un riccio o alla ninna prenatale di una creatura dentro l’utero della madre.” Morante, La Storia, 621. 31 Morante, History, 689; “Lui, come un orfanello, vorrebbe almeno un fantasma che lo ninnasse, per farlo dormire …” La Storia, 615. 29

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In its association with a profound form of sleep and the resulting cessation of pain (“the intoxication, which … cradled him like a mother”), 32 the maternal sphere once again acts as an imaginary refuge from the individual’s internal fears and the external hostility of conflict-ridden Rome. Faced with the impossibility of restoring the bliss of the preconceptual self, Davide ultimately succumbs to the cruel workings of History, the “grotesque Grand Guignol, lunatic, a store of filth in which we have stubbornly infected ourselves for centuries,” 33 resulting in his tragic death by drug overdose.

IV. Maternal desire and the unified self The strongest mother-child duo in La Storia is of course Ida’s and Useppe’s symbiotic union. However, it is not only the young boy, but remarkably also his mother who remains anchored in the prenarcissistic bond, preventing both characters from forming an independent sense of selfhood. Despite her prematurely aged appearance, Ida is repeatedly associated with child-like attributes: “[She] had remained, basically, a little girl,”34 she is commonly portrayed with diminutives such as “Iduzza” and “donnetta” and she has “the face of a worn little girl.”35 Moreover, her lack of bodily awareness, together with the total absence of libidinal drive, portray her as having not only internalised patriarchal ideals of female submissive sexuality, but also as someone who defies binary gender categories. This is further reinforced by the passively endured intimacy with her late husband, characterised by an utter lack of desire or pleasure which is strikingly likened to the act of a child being fed by his mother: “And so from then on, every evening, she let him have her, sweet and willing, like an untamed child who docilely allows his mother to feed him.”36

32

Morante, History, 589; “l’intossicazione, che … lo cullava come una madre” Morante, La Storia, 524. 33 Morante, History, 664; “Un Granguignol grottesco, demenziale, un deposito d’immondezze dove per secoli ci siamo intignati” Morante, La Storia, 592. 34 Morante, History, 21; “Era rimasta, nel fondo, una bambina” Morante, La Storia, 21. 35 Morante, History, 20; “Faccia di una bambina sciupatella.” Morante, La Storia, 21. 36 Morante, History, 38; “E così da allora ogni sera gli si lasciava, dolce e disposta, come un bambino selvatico che si lascia docilmente imboccare dalla madre.” Morante, La Storia, 37.

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Moreover, Ida is profoundly attracted to the maternal, which frequently assumes the form of the protective and calming space of the Jewish Ghetto in Rome (“she was soothed by the thought of going off with Useppe into the Ghetto, to sleep in one of the empty apartments”),37 which she refers to as “a maternal stable, warm with animals’ breath,”38 and which, echoing Davide Segre’s desire to be rocked to sleep, is also directly linked to the alluring sound of nursery rhymes: She recognized the call that was tempting her there and that came to her this time like a low and somnolent dirge, still loud enough to engulf all exterior sounds. Its irresistible rhythms resembled those with which mothers lull their babies, or tribes summon their members together for the night.39

The evocation of the mother in this passage is directly associated with the rhythms and sounds of the maternal, or what Adriana Cavarero refers to as the rhythmic or “vocalic practice of the semiotic” in which the child is “immersed, in the free play of the articulation and differentiation of sounds, tones and rhythms.” 40 Cavarero, who heavily draws on the Kristevan notion of the semiotic chora, emphasises the “profound bodily root” of the vocal element of language, which she in turn directly links to “the indistinct totality of mother and child.” 41 Preceding the symbolic system of language and the sphere of the semantic where syntax and concept rule, the semiotic chora also precedes the paternal order of the separation between the self and the other, as well as between mother and child. Ida’s oneiric impressions of the Jewish ghetto, which are clearly linked to the vocal sphere in their evocation of lullabies and the lure of the “low and somnolent dirge,” not only provide a temporary escape from her daily battle for survival, but also express her nostalgia for the symbiotic fusion experienced in the pre-oedipal stage of existence. 37 Morante, History, 263; “le dava riposo l’idea di andarsene con Useppe dentro il Ghetto, a dormire in uno di quegli appartamenti vuoti,” Morante, La Storia, 238. 38 Morante, History, 263; “stalla materna, calda di respiri animali,”Morante, La Storia, 238. 39 Morante, History, 376; “Riconosceva il richiamo che la tentava laggiù e che stavolta le perveniva come una nenia bassa e sonnolenta, però tale da inghiottire tutti i suoi suoni esterni. I suoi ritmi irresistibili somigliavano a quelli con cui le madri ninnano le creature, o le tribù si chiamano a raccolta per la notte.”Morante, La Storia, 337. 40 Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Filosofia dell’espressione vocale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003), 133. 41 Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 133.

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Useppe also remains firmly anchored in the maternal realm up to the moment of his untimely death at the age of five, and he struggles to affirm his sense of selfhood independent from the maternal body. Unlike his contemporaries, he is utterly unaware of any gender-defining attributes to the extent of defying the Freudian account of infantile sexuality, which is of course centred on the little boy’s awareness of his sexual organs: “Truly Useppe was a living refutation of the science of Professor Freud … he took absolutely no interest in his male organ, any more than in his ears or his nose.”42 Sexual differentiation or awareness indeed lies “in a distance still denied him, like the games of the clouds,” 43 which together with Useppe’s “unlimited ingenuousness” 44 and his illiteracy (“two poor illiterates”) 45 grant him an existence in a state of prelapsarian bliss (“merriest of all”; “positively insane, in love with all”).46 Useppe’s existence beyond the symbolic order is also further confirmed by the emphasis on his being “different” from other children of his age group, on the basis of his underdeveloped mental faculties on the one hand and his illness (epilepsy) and status as an illegitimate child on the other. The little boy’s hesitant language acquisition and speech defects further testify to his marginalised status in society, with the lack of phonetic and semantic differentiation in his language use further reflecting his unawareness of all symbolic codes. Not only is he unable to pronounce certain consonants (“he still hadn’t learned how to pronounce certain combinations of consonants”), 47 the most prominent example of which being the mispronunciation of his own name Giuseppe (“Useppe”), but his use of language is also repeatedly referred to as “unique” and “poetic,” with Ida referring to his “stories” or “poems” 48 as “creations of his

42

Morante, History, 455-56; “Useppe … era una vivente smentita (ovvero forse eccezione?) alla scienza del Professor Freud. … del proprio organo virile non se ne interessava affatto, né più né meno dei propri orecchi e del proprio naso.” Morante, La Storia, 405. 43 Morante, History,456; “una distanza ancora negata, come i giochi delle nuvole.” Morante, La Storia, 406. 44 Morante, History, 204; “ingenuità illimitata,” Morante, La Storia, 187. 45 Morante, History, 589; “due poveri analfabeti,” Morante, La Storia, 524. 46 Morante, History, 277; “allegro più di tutti”, Morante, History, 251; 205; “ammattito, innamorato di tutti”, Morante, La Storia, 187. See also p. 185: “Senza dubbio, per lui non esistevano differenze né di età, né di bello e brutto, né di sesso, né sociali.” 47 Morante, History, 418; “certe combinazioni di consonanti non ancora imparava a pronunciarle”, Morante, La Storia, 373. 48 Morante, History, 446; “storie”, “poesie”, Morante, La Storia, 398.

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fancy.” 49 Useppe also refuses to put his poetic creations into writing, showing a clear preference for the oral medium: “Nnooo … I don’t want to wite … I … no …” (as usual, in moments of emotion or confusion, Useppe lapsed into his erroneous, abbreviated baby’s utterance) “… I think the poems … and I say them …”50

Useppe’s rejection of the written word in favour of poetic language and the vocal, acoustic sphere not only constitutes a further act of resistance to the dominant linguistic order, but also reflects the hesitant development of the subject in its failure to adopt normative forms of language. Useppe’s confinement to the state of pre-Oedipal fusion is ultimately sealed by his death which precedes his passage into the symbolic order, while Ida’s exclusion from both language and society results in her insanity and withdrawal into silence after the loss of her son, which provides an interesting parallel with Aracoeli’s descent into madness and her eventual demise in the second text to be discussed here. Having cut off all communication with the outside world, Ida speaks with “a very low, bestial voice,”51 uttering only the occasional “dreamy murmur,”52 which originates in “a forgotten language, or the language of a dream.”53 Her regression to the preverbal realm of indistinction coincides with her total retreat from society’s norms and practices into a mental asylum (while Aracoeli ends up in a brothel), whereas Useppe’s illness similarly confines him to the realm of utter disintegration in death. With the fatal ending of both characters in La Storia, Morante seems to be suggesting that dissolution or death are the only ways of reconnecting with the maternal, or in fact of “rejoining the lost Einheit” with the mother, as Hanna Serkowska points out with specific reference to Aracoeli. 54 Rather than providing two opposing models of the mother-son relationship, Ida’s and Useppe’s existence within the preconceptual sphere, their exploration of 49

Morante, History, 137; “creazioni di fantasia”, Morante, La Storia, 124. Morante, History, 587; “Nnnoo … Io non voio scìvere … io … no …” (al solito, nei momenti di emozione e di confusione, Useppe ricascava nella pronuncia spropositata e monca dei pupi) “… le poesie io le penso … e le dico …”’ Morante, La Storia, 522. 51 Morante, History, 724; “voce … bassissima, bestiale”, Morante, La Storia, 647. 52 Morante, History, 725; “trasognato mormorio”; Morante, La Storia, 648. 53 Morante, History, 725; “qualche idioma onirico e dimenticato”, La Storia, 648. 54 Hanna Serkowska, “The Maternal Boy: Manuele or the Last Portrait of Elsa Morante’s Androgyny”, in Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante, ed. Stefania Lucamante and Sharon Wood (West Lafayette, IN.: Purdue University Press, 2006), 165. 50

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semiotic forms of expression and their tragic demise do not contrast but in many aspects indeed anticipate the disturbed concepts of subjectivity and maternal desire encountered in Aracoeli.

V. Aracoeli – “tuo scandalo, tuo splendore” Aracoeli has often been dismissed as Morante’s self-destructive and desperate last novel, a claim that is mainly centred on its subversive portrayal of maternity. Featuring the grown-up, homodiegetic narrator Manuele, it tells the story of his trip to his mother’s native Spanish village many years after her death, and his metaphorical journey back to mythical, pre-symbolic symbiosis with her. While in La Storia the mother-child bond follows a largely linear progression, in this last work the relationship is tinged by an increasing sense of ambiguity, developing from the blissful union in early childhood to Aracoeli’s ultimate rejection of motherhood and her gradual descent into madness and nymphomania. Exploring the complexity and the ambivalence of this fascinating figure, I will trace Manuele’s trajectory of desire from the early period of symbiosis to his eventual liberation from the “abject” mother, a move that constitutes an unprecedented form of resolution in Morante’s writings. The early stages of the mother-child union are characterised by a total lack of boundaries or categories of individuation. “Totetaco,” Manuele’s childish pronunciation of the Roman district Monte Sacro where he spent the early, “clandestine” years of his childhood with his mother prior to the legalization of his parents’ relationship through marriage, clearly represents the “enchanting fusion”55 experienced in the idyllic, maternal Eden. The degree of symbiosis experienced by Manuele at this early stage cancels out even basic norms of individuation, suggesting a preconceptual form of existence: For me precise boundaries didn’t exist between unity and its multiples, just as the form ‘I’ was not yet clearly distinguished from the ‘you’ or any other, nor were the sexes distinct. For the whole Totetaco period, I had no notion of being male, or one who could never become a woman, like Aracoeli.56 55

Elsa Morante, Aracoeli, trans. William Weaver (Rochester: First Open Letter, 2009), 102; “fusione incantevole”, Elsa Morante, Aracoeli (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 108. 56 Morante, Aracoeli, 112; “Per me fra l’unità e i suoi multipli non esistevano confini precisi, così come ancora l’io non si distingueva chiaramente dal tu e dall’altro, né i sessi uno dall’altro. Per tutto il tempo di Totetaco, io non ebbi

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In this blissful, Edenic phase of childhood, which Manuele refers to as “my garden of love,”57 his unitary notion of the self literally merges with the maternal figure, who is considered an inseparable part of himself: In the clandestine house of Totetaco there are only two of us: Aracoeli and me. Inseparable, natural conjunction, whose eternity seemed to me equally natural.58

Reminiscent of Ida’s and Useppe’s resistance to binary forms of gender or identity, the early symbiotic relationship between Aracoeli and Manuele is characterised by a similarly “androgynous structure of subjectivity.”59 This is further reflected in the heterogeneous, hybrid Spanish-Italian maternal discourse of the pre-Oedipal period, in which Fortuna and Gragnolati have convincingly identified the reemergence of the Kristevan semiotic.60 There is a clear emphasis on the affective, sensual and corporeal element prevailing in the passages relating to the early Totetaco period, which is dominated by the maternal voice, chants and lullabies, as well as the incomprehensible sounds of preverbal language.61 With their “entrance” into bourgeois society and the transition into the symbolic domain of the

nozione di essere maschio, ossia uno che mai poteva diventare donna come Aracoeli.” Morante, Aracaoeli, 118-19. 57 Morante, Aracoeli, 116; “il mio giardino d’amore,” Morante, Aracoeli, 123. 58 Morante, Aracoeli, 113; “Nella casa clandestina di Totetaco non ci siamo che noi due soli: Aracoeli e io. Congiunzione inseparabile per natura e di cui pareva a me naturale anche l’eternità.” Morante, Aracoeli, 120. 59 “Between Affection and Discipline”, 12. See also the references to Manuele’s androgynous clothes and the similarities with Aracoeli: “In the period I recall, my costume in Totetaco was actually rather androgynous … And at the same time, my curls were allowed to grow, very black, like those of Aracoeli, but kinkier.” Morante, Aracoeli, 125; “nel tempo ch’io ricordo, invero, il mio costume, a Totetaco, era, piuttosto, androgino … E mi si lasciavano, intanto, crescere i riccioli: nerissimi anche i miei, come quelli di Aracoeli, ma più cresputi.” Morante, Aracoeli, 132. 60 Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati, “Between Affection and Discipline,” 1415. 61 See for example “cradle-chants”; “little village songs”; “tender, throaty voice, moist with saliva”; “incomprehensible stammering”; “I receive only the sounds”, Morante, Aracoeli, 12-13; “nenie di culla,” “canzoncine di paese,” “tenera voce di gola, intrisa di saliva,” “incomprensibile balbettio,” “ne colgo solo i suoni,” Morante, Aracoeli, 13.

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father, when the family moves in with him in Rome’s upper class Quartieri Alti, paternal monolingualism comes to dominate instead.62 The first moment of Manuele’s separation from Aracoeli is metaphorically identified in the act of birth, which has a profoundly traumatic effect on the protagonist, triggering a process of “desperate mourning.”63 And it is indeed the frightening severance from the mother which initiates Manuele’s perennial, regressive journey towards her: “From then on, really, I have never stopped seeking her, and from then on, my determination was this: to reenter her. To curl up inside her, in my only haven, lost now who knows where, in what abyss.”64 While Manuele’s childhood is dominated by the desire to reenter the maternal realm,65 after the death of her baby daughter Aracoeli undergoes a series of transformations turning her into an increasingly ambivalent figure: not only does she neglect her maternal duties and reject her son, but Manuele also witnesses her increasingly unbridled sexuality which ultimately results in her leaving the family home to live in a brothel. Deeply traumatised by his mother’s abandonment and her subsequent death, the protagonist’s desire to recuperate the maternal gradually develops into a desperate attempt to free himself from her suffocating presence. The desire for a definite “amputation” from her is repeatedly evoked, and so is the ambition to be “cured of her.” 66 While Aracoeli continues to exert a profound form of attraction on her son, with their symbiotic bond having sheltered him from the disintegrating effect of the symbolic order, Manuele increasingly acknowledges her destructive effect on his individual development: Your sudden death, in amputating you from me, arrested my growth: myyour childish invention would remain eternally immune to reason … And so I thank you for our puerile intrigue. Your terrible ambiguity – your

62

See for example the episode in which Manuele is greeted by a sign in the elevator, which introduces him to the laws and regulations of society at his father’s house in the Quartieri Alti, Morante, Aracoeli, 28. 63 Morante, Aracoeli, 17; “lutto disperato,” Morante, Aracoeli, 18. 64 Morante, Aracoeli, 17; “Da allora in realtà io non ho mai smesso di cercarla, e fino da allora la mia scelta era questa: rientrare in lei. Rannicchiarmi dentro di lei, nell’unica mia tana, persa oramai chi sa dove, in quale strapiombo.” Morante, Aracoeli, 18. 65 As in La Storia, the maternal realm is frequently referred to as “tana” or “nido” (see p. 13 and p. 18). 66 Morante, Aracoeli, 22; “guarire di lei,” Morante, Aracoeli, 23.

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Chapter Eleven darkness and deceit, your scandal, your splendour – will accompany me, playing, to the brink of the void.67

While the “puerile intrigue” which defines the filial relationship has shielded Manuele from the patriarchal order, it has equally inhibited the emergence of the autonomous self, in Kristevan terms. With its emphasis on the semantic field of childhood (“childish,” “puerile,” “playing”), this passage supremely captures both the intrinsic ambiguity of the maternal figure and the suffocating effect she has on Manuele, who remains trapped in the developmental stages of a child. Whereas in previous portrayals of maternity the symbiotic mother-son bond ultimately proves inescapable and even fatal,68 as we have seen in Ida’s and Aracoeli’s confinement to madness (be it in a mental institution or in a brothel) and Useppe’s premature death in La Storia, what significantly distinguishes Aracoeli from previous Morantian narratives is Manuele’s move beyond the maternal. With previous characters failing to liberate themselves from the mother’s grip, the protagonist’s eventual abjection of Aracoeli in the latter part of the novel paves the way for a new form of subjectivity that transcends the pre-Oedipal realm and therefore enables the emergence of what Kristeva would term the “autonomous” self. Rather than passively enduring the act of rejection, Manuele in fact embarks on a striking process of disfigurement and mutilation (“defacing and destroying our love”; “mutilation”)69 of the maternal imago, turning her into a figure inspiring horror (“horrible Aracoeli”; “ugly Aracoeli”)70 and disgust (“you disgusted me”; “repulsive”)71 who is eventually expelled

67

Morante, Aracoeli, 274; “La tua morte tempestiva, nell’amputarmi di te, ha sbarrato la mia crescita, affinché la mia-tua invenzione bambina si serbasse immune eternamente dalla ragione. … E così ti ringrazio per il nostro intrigo puerile. La tua terribile ambiguità – tua buiezza e imbroglio, tuo scandalo tuo splendore – mi accompagnerà, giocando, al traguardo del vuoto.” Morante, Aracoeli, 289-90. 68 See also L’isola di Arturo’s epigraph, which seems to express the impossibility of recuperating the bliss of early childhood: “fuori del limbo non v’è eliso” (there is no paradise except in limbo). 69 Morante, Aracoeli, 284; “sfigurando e devastando il nostro amore”; “mutilazione,” Morante, Aracoeli, 300. 70 Morante, Aracoeli, 285; “orrenda Aracoeli”, “brutta Aracoeli,” Morante, Aracoeli, 301. 71 Morante, Aracoeli, 287; 285; “mi facevi schifo,” 303; “repulsive,” Morante, Aracoeli, 301.

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as part of a self-defence mechanism (“defending myself against her death”):72 And this present Aracoeli of mine [was] the only one that resumed a form for me after her death … It was she, but reduced to a loathsome old woman, sagging and painted … Everyone … came running, returning, to stone the ugly Aracoeli. But I was the director of the massacre, I was the willing executant.73

Hence Aracoeli is not only turned into a sexually transgressive and abhorrent figure after her death, but she is also metaphorically “killed” by her son, who turns into a metaphorical matricide (“executant”). In the final scene of the novel, in which Manuele confesses the love for his father, the protagonist reconfirms that he has finally succeeded in freeing himself from his mother whom, “left behind alone, to decompose in the horrid park,” 74 he claims to have both rejected (“denial,” “repudiation”) 75 and forgotten (“oblivion”).76 While Fortuna and Gragnolati have argued that the protagonist’s recovery of the father suggests some “new possible intersections” 77 between the linguistic realms of the semiotic and symbolic, I have shown that the protagonist’s contemplative and liberating abjection of the “monstrous mother” enables him to overcome the threat of disintegration emanating from her. In fact, Manuele’s move beyond the maternal allows him to envisage a notion of selfhood which is neither confined to the preOedipal realm nor, despite his former suicidal tendencies, the dead-ended pursuit of self-obliteration in death, two desperate paths which Morante illustrates in the fatal destinies of Ida, Useppe and Aracoeli instead. The author’s exploration of selfhood through the narrative portrayal of the mother-son relationship and the investigation into the “disruptive” effect of the pre-conceptual realm in both La Storia and Aracoeli shows an

72

Morante, Aracoeli, 284; “a difendermi dalla sua morte,” Morante, Aracoeli, 300. Morante, Aracoeli, 284-85; “Questa mia presente Aracoeli [era] la sola che mi riprendesse figura dopo la sua morte … Era lei, … ma ridotta a una vecchia laida, cascante e imbellettata … Tutti … accorrevano, di ritorno, a lapidare la brutta Aracoeli. Ma ero io l’ordinatore della strage, io l’esecutore volontario.” Morante, Aracoeli, 300-01, my emphasis. 74 Morante, Aracoeli, 311; “lasciata indietro sola a decomporsi nell’orrido parco.” Morante, Aracoeli, 327. 75 Morante, Aracoeli, 311; “negazione,” “ripudio,” Morante, Aracoeli, 327. 76 Morante, Aracoeli, 311; “oblio,” Morante, Aracoeli, 327. 77 Fortuna and Gragnolati, “Between Affection and Discipline,” 17. 73

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unprecedented progression in Morante’s discourse on the subject in the resolution of the struggle with the split maternal imago in her last novel.

Bibliography Benedetti, Laura. The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. —. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Originally published as Soleil noir: dépression et mélancholie. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Cavarero, Adriana. A più voci. Filosofia dell’espressione vocale. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003. —. Diario 1938. Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Edited by Alba Andreini. —. For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, translated by Paul Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Fortuna, Sara and Manuele Gragnolati. “Between Affection and Discipline: Exploring Linguistic Tensions from Dante to Aracoeli.” In The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli, edited by Fortuna and Gragnolati, 8-19. Oxford: Legenda, 2009. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931) in Vol. XXI, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey. Toronto: Hogarth Press, 1961: 221-43. Garboli, Cesare. Il gioco segreto. Milan: Adelphi, 1995. Giorgio, Adalgisa. “Nature vs Culture: Repression, Rebellion and Madness in Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli,” MLN, Vol. 109.1 (1994): 93116. Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation.” In Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921-1945. London: Hogarth Press, 1988. —. Melanie Klein, translated by Ross Guberman. New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2001. Originally published as Le Génie féminin: la vie, la folie, les mots. Melanie Klein, ou le matricide comme douleur et comme créativité. Paris: Fayard, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Originally published as La Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. —. Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Originally

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published as Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980. Morante, Elsa. Menzogna e sortilegio. Turin: Einaudi, 1948. —. L’isola di Arturo. Turin: Einaudi, 1957. Translated by Isabel Quigly as Arturo’s Island. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959. —. Lo scialle andaluso. Turin: Einaudi, 1963. —. La Storia. Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Translated by William Weaver as History: A Novel. London: Penguin, 1977. —. Aracoeli. Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Translated by William Weaver as Aracoeli. Rochester: First Open Letter, 2009. Rosa, Giovanna. Cattedrali di carta: Elsa Morante romanziere. Milan: Il saggiatore, 1995. Serkowska, Hanna. “The Maternal Boy: Manuele, or the last Portrait of Morante’s Androgyny,” in Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante, ed. by Stefania Lucamante and Sharon Wood, 15787. .West Lafayette, IN.: Purdue University Press, 2006. Wright, Elizabeth (ed.). Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1992. Zlobnicki Kalay, Grace. The Theme of Childhood in Elsa Morante. University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1996.

PART V DESIRE AND THE BIRTH OF LITERATURE

CHAPTER TWELVE WHEN GENDER MATTERS: THE LANGUAGE OF DESIRE IN ANTONIA POZZI’S EROTIC POETRY ENRICO MINARDI ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

I. Antonia Pozzi In light of the quality of her poetry, it is surprising that Antonia Pozzi has been largely forgotten. Her slide into obscurity began after her death at a young age.1 The progeny of a family belonging to the Milan bourgeoisie, with ties to one of the most important figures of Italian Romanticism (Tommaso Grossi), she enjoyed an elite education. Unusual for women of that era, she attended the University of Milan (at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia), graduating in 1935, under the supervision of the famous philosopher Antonio Banfi. 2 Moreover, as a teenager fascinated by the relatively new art form of photography, she left an archive containing

1 All the information about Antonia Pozzi’s life can be found in the excellent biography by Graziella Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue. Antonia Pozzi e la sua poesia, 1st ed. (Milano: Viennepierre edizioni, 2004). 2 The information about Pozzi’s education can be found in Dino, Onorina, “Notizia biografica,” in Antonia Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi (Roma: Luca Sossella editore, 2010), 13-24; Graziella Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue, 179-238; Fulvio Papi, Vita e filosofia. La scuola di Milano. Banfi, Cantoni, Paci, Preti (Milano: Edizioni Angelo Guerini e Associati, 1980), 110-119 (reprinted in Antonia Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 525-536); Gabriele Scaramuzza, “La ‘vita irrimediabile’ di Antonia Pozzi,” in Crisi come rinnovamento. Scritti sull’estetica della scuola di Milano (Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 2000), 90-101 (reprinted in Antonia Pozzi Poesia che mi guardi, 547-558).

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about 2800 images.3 Also of note is the presence in her family (by way of her mother’s side) of a prefeminist figure, Elisa Grossi, daughter of Tommaso, who left her husband (Luigi Gramignola, a rich lawyer), and afterwards led a life devoted to literature and philanthropy (also thanks to her skills as a manager of the inherited properties). Her daughter Maria was the beloved grandmother of Antonia. In 1927, while attending the first year of the liceo classico, she fell in love with her professor of ancient Greek and Latin, Antonio Maria Cervi. Her “tormented affair,” 4 which was complicated by the increasing opposition of Antonia’s family, lasted until 1933. 5 She wrote twenty poems, almost entirely written in the spring and summer of 1929, when she was 17 years old and which she dedicated to Cervi. Moreover, from the same period we have other poems in which love (“not interpreted in an abstract way, but instead as a total rapture, both of soul and body”6) is the poet’s main focus. My goal is to analyse some of those poems, in order to show the influence of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetry on the formation of Pozzi’s erotic poetic code.7 The most iconic of those texts is certainly “Canto della mia nudità” (“Canto of my nudity”),8 written in 1929. It is a clear announcement of the existence of “desire for physical love”9 on the part of the poet: Look at me: from the restless Languor of my hair To the slender tension of my foot. I am an unripe leanness Sheathed into an ivory colour. Look: pale is my flesh. You would say blood isn’t running through. 3

Calvenzi, Giovanna, “La fotografia di Antonia Pozzi,” in Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 594-604. 4 “travagliata vicenda,” G. Benabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue, 66. All translations from Bernabò’s work are my own. 5 For all information about her relationship with Antonio Maria Cervi, see Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue, 63-82. 6 “inteso non astrattamente, bensí come profondo trasporto, spirituale e insieme fisico.” Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue, 84. 7 I n Bernabò’s biography, there are no records of Pozzi’s early reading of D’Annunzio’s poetry. Nevertheless, we hope that, throughout our analysis, the influence on Pozzi of D’Annunzio will be ascertained. 8 The poem appears to have been written in Palermo on July 20 1929 (Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 69). 9 “un desiderio di amore fisico.” G. Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue, 83.

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Chapter Twelve Red doesn’t shine through. Just a languishing Blue pulsation fades away through my breast. See how hollow is my womb. Hesitantly My hips bend, but my knees, Ankles, and all my joints Are lean and sturdy as a purebred. I am arching nude, in the limpid clearness of the White restroom, and I will be arching nude Tomorrow over a bed, if anyone Will want of me. And one day, nude and lonely, I will be lying supine under too much Earth, until death calls me.10

Based on this poem alone, a discussion of Pozzi’s strong thrust toward sensual desire might appear predictable. However, we must remember that Pozzi is a female poet and that she wrote this poem during Mussolini’s regime, when women were not supposed to express their physical desire so openly.11 It is interesting to point out that in a famous novel published by Dante Arfelli just after the end of the war (and so a time after Pozzi’s 10

“Guardami: sono nuda. Dall’inquieto / languore della mia capigliatura / alla tensione snella del mio piede, / io sono tutta una magrezza acerba / inguainata in un color d’avorio. / Guarda: pallida è la carne mia. / Si direbbe che il sangue non vi scorra. / Rosso non ne traspare. Solo un languido/palpito azzurro sfuma in mezzo al petto. / Vedi come incavato ho il ventre. Incerta / è la curva dei fianchi, ma i ginocchi / e le caviglie e tutte le giunture, / ho scarne e salde come un puro sangue. / Oggi, m’inarco nuda, nel nitore/ del bagno bianco e / m’inarcherò nuda / domani sopra un letto, se qualcuno / mi prenderà. E un giorno nuda, sola, / stesa supina sotto troppa terra, / starò, quando la morte avrà chiamato” Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 69. All translations from Pozzi’s poetry are my own. 11 See Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Fascism, 1922-1945 (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). In the introductory chapter to her book (The Nationalization of Women), De Grazia discusses the “integrally authoritarian and antifeminist character of Italian Fascism” ibidem, 4. Further in the introduction, De Grazia fleshes out the repression accomplished by the Fascist regime on women: “Fascism took as axiomatic that women and men were different by nature. The government politicised this difference to the advantage of males, and made it the cornerstone of an especially repressive, comprehensive new system for defining female citizenship, for governing women’s sexuality, wage labor, and social participation. Every aspects of being female was thus held up to the measure of state’s interest and interpreted in light of dictatorship’s strategies of state building. In this system, recognition of women’s right as citizens went hand in hand with the denial of female emancipation; reforms on behalf of women and children were bound up with brutal restraints,” ibid.,7.

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poem), I superflui (1949), the open expression of sexual desire and pleasure by a woman is presented as acceptable because it comes from a prostitute, Lidia. This is obviously not the case of Antonia Pozzi, who – as we have briefly recapped – is a well-educated upper class woman. The presence of the direct expression of sensual desire in one of her poems is a clear sign of her intellectual precocity. It also reveals a keen insight into her own sexuality. From a formal standpoint, the poem is not particularly original; however, it is highly original from the standpoint of its intended message and its main figure, a figure representing female erotic desire. Pozzi’s awareness of her own erotic desire is a problematic element, and in order to be the central theme of a poem, it requires literary legitimation. In other words, a frank depiction of female erotic desire can be justified – made socially acceptable – only by framing it into an existing respected literary tradition. As mentioned above, Pozzi may have drawn her inspiration from Gabriele D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio rooted his poetry in a “panic conception,” and in his “full availability to feel the divine forces that flounder in nature, and therefore, to resolve in a positive way his anxiety for communicating with the natural.”12 D’Annunzio’s panic ideology is expressed with special strength and coherence in his most important collection of poems, Halcyon, published in 1903. 13 And it is in one of the most celebrated poems of Halcyon, namely “Versilia,” that one sees not only the clearest declarations of D’Annunzio poetics, but also precisely those turns of style that are echoed in Pozzi’s poem. “Canto of my nudity” presents the same syntactic structure repeated three times: the use of an imperative (“Look at me”; “Look”; “See”)14 to address the individual who, presumably, is the poet’s lover. 15 In 12

Federico Roncoroni, “Commento,” in Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alcyone. (Milano: Mondadori, 1982), 476; “concezione panica,” reaching “la piena disponibilità a sentire le forze divine che si agitano nella natura e a risolvere positivamente le sue ansie di comunione con il mondo naturale.” Translation is my own. 13 For an excellent reconstruction of its own composition and assemblage, see Roncoroni, “Commento,” 7-97. See also Franco Gavazzeni, Le sinopie di Alcyone (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1980). 14 Guardami, 1; Guarda, 6; Vedi, 10. Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 69. 15 It was probably Antonio Maria Cervi, her professor of Latin and ancient Greek at the Liceo in Milan in 1927-1928, a man eighteen years older than Antonia. Their love had a tragic end, because of the insurmountable opposition of Antonia’s father, Roberto (see Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue, 63-79). However, their love inspired many of her first poems: “The core of the first part of this poem’s collection by Pozzi is nevertheless love. But love not abstractly conceived, instead as being deeply carried away, both physically and spiritually. The name of

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D’Annunzio’s “Versilia,” the poet portrays himself as standing against the trunk of a pine tree while peeling and eating juicy peaches. Versilia, the nymph who lives in the trunk, emerges from the tree, attracted by the smell of the peaches. She can no longer hide her desire to taste the fruit and asks the poet for some, offering herself to him in exchange.”16 The nymph addresses the poet in the same manner as Pozzi addresses her unseen beholder (using verbs in the imperative and similar descriptive allusions to her own body). Furthermore, in both poems one sees the same invitation addressed by a female character to a male one, to be seen and touched, seen and sexually possessed: Meanwhile perhaps you’ll give that peach … to me: I’m dying of the wish. Don’t be afraid. I am all flesh, though cool and fresh as foliage. Touch me. … … And my hair, look, plum-like, is flecked with violet. My teeth are regular, more white than newly shelled pine-nuts. And you need have no fear … … Just so you hold me tight.17

her lover was Antonio Maria Cervi. It is not an accident that between the many poems written in 1929, up to sixteen have been either written and explicitly dedicated to him (through the acronym ‘To A.M.C.,’ which was restored after Roberto Pozzi had erased it), or contained clear references to the love he inspired.” 84; “Il nucleo di questa prima parte del canzoniere pozziano è però senz’altro l’amore, inteso non astrattamente, bensì come profondo trasporto, spirituale e insieme fisico, per Antonio Maria Cervi. Non è un caso che tra le numerose liriche del 1929, ben sedici siano state scritte per lui con dedica esplicita (ossia con la dicitura ‘Ad A.M.C.’, ripristinata nell’edizione critica Garzanti dopo la cancellatura di Roberto Pozzi), oppure con chiari riferimenti all’amore che egli le ispirava.” 16 Roncoroni, “Commento,” 476: “appoggiato al tronco di un pino … pesche sugose … . Versilia, la ninfa che abita nel tronco del pino, sbuca fuori dalla pianta attratta dal profumo delle pesche: non sa più resistere alla voglia di assaggiarle e le chiede al poeta. In cambio gli offre se stessa …” Translation is my own. 17 G. D’Annunzio, Halcyon, translated by J. G. Nichols (New York: Routledge, 2003), 142; Versilia: “Tu la persica che si spicca, / … Dammi, ch’io ne muoio di voglia / … Non temere! Io sono di carne, / Se ben fresca come una foglia. / Toccami. … / … Guarda: ho le chiome / Violette come le prugne. / Guarda: ho i denti eguali, più bianchi / che appena sbucciati pinocchi. / Non temere … / … Rido

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One can notice the same use of the imperative in another of D’Annunzio’s poems, the famous “La pioggia nel pineto,” (“The Rain the Pinewood”).18 It is remarkable that in other erotic poems written in this same summer of 1929,19 Pozzi reproduces exactly this imperative, which becomes one of her recurrent stylistic features. For instance, the poet writes: Listen … Look … Give me your hand … … Give it to me … But come: let’s walk …20

Further evidence of D’Annunzio’s influence in Pozzi’s poetry can be found in the special use of adjectives as they appear in “Canto of my nudity.” To describe her body, Pozzi does not use adjectives descriptive of physical attributes, but rather adjectives that are better suited to describing a person’s moral character. Moreover, she uses these adjectives to qualify abstract and categorical nouns (“languor,” “tension” and “leanness”): assigning concrete qualities to abstract nouns produces a semantic clash which seems to have been drawn directly from D’Annunzio’s poetic language. The effect is a figurative one: the “restless / languor of my hair”; the “slender tension of my foot”; “I am an unripe leanness.” In D’Annunzio’s sonnet “To Gorgo,” Glauco, a mythical embodiment of the poet, describes Gorgo, the Greek woman portrayed in the preceding poem (“Gorgo”), as offering him “grapes and spices” and the “wine of Chio,” and as being “like that ode of mine – slim.”21 In the poem “Versilia,” we find the verb “to languish,” which expresses an intense desire: “came to se tu m’abbranchi,” 75-87 (G. D’Annunzio, Alcyone. Milano: Garzanti, 2006) 7587; 228. For all translations of D’Annunzio’s poems, I will be always using this publication. For the English text, the numbers refer to the pages of the translation; for the original text in Italian, the first numbers refer to the actual lines of the poem and the second numbers refer to the Garzanti’s edition of Alcyone. 18 “Hush. … / Listen. … / Listen. … / Listen, listen,” D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 70-1; “Taci. … / Ascolta. … / Ascolta. … / Ascolta, ascolta. …” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 1, 8, 40, 65; 86, 89, 90. 19 See “Pace” (“Peace”), “Flora alpina” (“Alpine flora”), “Canto rassegnato” (“Resigned canto”), “Fuga” (“Escape”), “Vertigine” (“Vertigo”), Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 60, 66, 67, 72, 75. 20 “Ascolta / Vedi … Dammi la mano … / … Dammela. / … Ma vieni: camminiamo …” Pozzi, Poesia, 1, 3, 10, 11, 20. 21 D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 133-4; “ l’uve e le spezie”; “ vin di Chio”; “snella come l’ode che ti piacque” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 3,5,8; 210, 212.

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my nostrils, came where my / tongue like a tender dripping leaf / against in all their strength my teeth / felt itself languishing away.”22 In “Gli indizi” (“The Signs”) – one of the last poems of the book – the word languore is used in the same sensual context as in Pozzi’s “Canto”: “Alas, the vineyard is oppressed with languor / like a fine lady lying on a bed.”23 As far as the lexical junction of the lines 4-5 is concerned (“I am an unripe leanness / Sheathed into an ivory colour”), the adjective “unripe” in Halcyon is mostly referred to ripe fruits. 24 In “Il novilunio” (“New moon”), the Italian word guaina – for which there are two English words (“sheath” is the general meaning, and “pod” for a vegetable casing) – is employed to describe the hull of a fruit, the carob: “the pods / of the carobs.”25 Even if D’Annunzio’s poetry is the main point of reference for Pozzi, there are nonetheless some differences between her and the vate, and, despite her young age, she is not passively subject to his influence. For instance, the connection between the white colour of ivory and a typical quality of fruits, ripeness is not to be found anywhere in Halcyon. Green is the normal colour of unripe fruit. In “The Rain in the Pinewood” quoted above, the metamorphosis of the poet’s female partner into a plant is marked by a change in her colour: from the human “white” to the plant’s “green” (“not white, / but almost as if you were green, / you seem to appear out of bark”). 26 In “The Oleander” – a long poem in which D’Annunzio retells the myth of Daphne – the protagonist’s metamorphosis is characterised by the same change of colour: “All of a sudden Daphne’s taken fright: / her face and breast are turning green and pale.”27 In Pozzi’s poem, adjectives of a clear Dannunzian ascendance are instead attributed

22

D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 140; “ Mi giunse alle nari; e la mia / lingua come tenera foglia, / bagnata di subita voglia, / contra i denti forti languìa,” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 9-12; 225. 23 D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 206; “Ahimè, la vigna è piena di languore / come una bella donna sul suo letto,” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 1-2; 350. 24 D’Annunzio, “Simiana acerba,” “mandorle acerbe,” “l’acerbo suo Tesoro,” where “Tesoro” is referred to “le frutta,” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 198, 91, 204; D’Annunzio, “one unripe plum”; “almonds before they are ripe”; 70; “her sour treasure” D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 127, 70,130. 25 D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 216; “le guaine delle carrube,” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 8081; 372. 26 D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 70; “non bianca / ma quasi fatta virente, / par da scorza tu esca,” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 99-101; 91. 27 G. D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 110; “Subitamente Dafne s’impaura: / le copre il volto e il seno un pallor verde,” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 275-76; 171.

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to the white colour of her body, as this colour contains a powerful sensual appeal. It is interesting to recall that the junction between “knees” and “joints” (see lines 11-12 of the English version of Pozzi’s “Canto” above) is also present in the following lines of D’Annunzio’s “The Oleander,” even though in a different descriptive context: “She looks about to fall; but the one joint / her knees remain hard and she stands quite still.”28 Continuing the description of her own body, Pozzi connects the red of the blood and the azzurro (light blue) of her breast. In D’Annunzio’s “La tenzone” (“The Strife”) we find the same juxtaposition, when the poet portrays the transformation of his partner into a marine life form, while the two of them were sailing in the mouth of the Arno along the Tuscan coast: “Your blood is turning azure like the ocean.”29 For the tenth line – a hendecasyllable a maiore carefully brooded on the alliteration of the sound V + vowel (“Vedi come incavato ho il ventre”; see line 10 of the English version)30 – there does not seem to be any direct reference to D’Annunzio’s poetry. 31 Perhaps Pozzi’s poem shares more similarities with another text by D’Annunzio, “The wave.” Indeed, it is not difficult to find a similar association of sounds and figures, as the quotation from lines 24-42 of D’Annunzio’s poem makes plain: But the wind comes back to rise and redound. Another wave is born, more smooth in its curve than a maiden’s womb! See it throb, and climb, and swell, and curve, 28 G. D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 110; “Ella sembra cader: ma la giuntura / dei ginocchi riman dura e inerte” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 275-76; 271. 29 G. D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 61; “S’inazzurra il tuo sangue come il mare” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 26; 76. 30 I must remind the reader that the poem is only composed by hendecasyllables. I do not agree, however, with Bernabò when, in her biography of Antonia Pozzi, she states that this “audacious text” is “curiously contrasting with the hendecasyllable’s solemn grace” (Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue, 84). A careful examination of the metric structure of the text reveals Pozzi’s artful construction, especially when it comes to the position of the accents, which “break” the hendecasyllable’s solenne compostezza, in what can be considered as a very modern use of a traditional poetical measure. 31 See the entry Ventre in Gianfranca Lavezzi, Concordanza di “Alcyone” di Gabriele D’Annunzio (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1991), 679.

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Pozzi’s poem can be traced back to certain elements of “The wave.” We allude to what has been famously called by Mario Praz “a sensual love for language.” 33 Praz quotes many passages from D’Annunzio’s poetry and prose to show the poet’s attraction to “the correspondence between words both beautiful and resonant” and the “emotions aroused in himself because of the word,” 34 concluding that “for D’Annunzio we could reiterate what Saint-Beuve had written about Chateaubriand: ‘For him, beauty – even the beauty of the thought – depends on the form; beauty is chained to the peaks of the words, to the shining crest of the syllables.’”35 Pozzi’s self-portrayal in “Canto” supports our hypothesis of D’Annunzio’s influence on Pozzi. The poetess intends to convince the beholder of the strength of her body, in spite of a few visible weaknesses, such as her slim hips. Therefore, she is implicitly inviting him not to be afraid of them, because her strength is shown by other parts of her body 32 G. D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 128-9; “Ma il vento riviene, / Rincalza, ridonda. / Altra onda s’alza, / Nel suo nascimento / più lene / che ventre virginale! / Palpita, sale, / Si gonfia, s’incurva, / S’alluma, propende. / Il dorso ampio splende / Come cristallo; / La cima leggiera / S’arruffa / Come criniera nivea di cavallo. / Il vento la scavezza. / L’onda si spezza, / Precipita nel cavo / Del solco sonora” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 24-42; 201. 33 Mario Praz, “D’Annunzio e l’amor sensuale della parola’,” in M. Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, 5th ed. (Firenze: Sansoni, 1976), 329-374. 34 Mario Praz, “D’Annunzio e ‘l’amor sensuale della parola’,” 347. 35 Mario Praz, “D’Annunzio e ‘l’amor sensuale della parola’,” 348; “concordanze di parole belle e bene sonanti” and the “emozioni che suscita in lui la parola,” concluding that “Pel D’Annunzio, insomma potrebbe ripetersi ciò che il SainteBeuve scrisse dello Chateaubriand: ‘La beauté chez lui, même la beauté de la pensée, tient trop à la forme; elle est comme enchaînée à la cime des mots (apicibus verborum ligata), à la crête brillante des syllabes’”. Translation is my own.

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(“but my knees, / ankles, and all my joints / are lean and sturdy as a purebred.”36 Similarly, Versilia, in D’Annunzio’s poem of the same name, invites the poet leaning against the peach tree not to be afraid of her: “Don’t be afraid. I am all flesh.”37 Furthermore, the analogy between her body’s joints and those of a purebred stallion is a clue to the many metamorphoses of humans into animals that we find in Halcyon, and it certainly adds an element of sensuality to her self-portrayal. Within this context, we can see in the verb inarcarsi (“to arch”), which we find in Pozzi’s poem (“I am arching nude, in the limpid clearness of the / White restroom, and I will be arching nude / Tomorrow over a bed”) 38 , as a probable allusion to another famous poem from Halcyon, “The Youngster”: “with the bullock which / arches its back and does it with some grace.”39 In the next lines of the poem, Pozzi does not follow her Dannunzian inspiration. A moral inspiration has replaced the sensual tone: Tomorrow over a bed, if anyone Will want of me. And one day, nude and lonely, I will be lying supine under too much Earth, until death calls me.

Here, Pozzi seems to have changed her reference: here she reconnects to that current of the Italian literary tradition that, from Petrarch and through Giacomo Leopardi to Giuseppe Ungaretti, proposes an intimate bond between love and death. In other words, in these lines, she reflects on human destiny and death, thus shifting from an extroverted stance to a more introverted one. Here Pozzi represents herself as entertaining doubts about the prospect of a happy outcome of her wish for love, and, more importantly, she depicts herself as lying down on her deathbed. We rarely find such funereal images in any of D’Annunzio’s poetical transfigurations.40 On the contrary, his famous poem “Noon,” ends with a 36

Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 11-13. D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 78. 38 Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 11-13. 39 G. D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 25; “la grazia del torello/che di repente pavido s’inarca,” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 11; 49-50. 40 Obviously, here we do not take into account some of D’Annunzio late works, such as Il Notturno (1921), or Cento e cento e cento e cento pagine del libro segreto di Gabriele D’Annunzio tentato di morire (1935). As a matter of fact, these two works unfold mainly through the interpretation of memories, in the light of the specific condition of blindness, in which the poet found himself while recovering after a plane accident (1916), and deteriorating health. 37

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celebration of the poet’s strength pervading nature. Here, it is not nature that nurtures the poet, but it is the poet who shapes and moulds nature: And my strength stretched on the ground is stamped into the sand and spread into the sea; and the river is my blood, the hill is my forehead, the wood is my pubis, the cloud is my sweat. I am in the flower of the rush, in the scale of the pinecone, in the juniper / berry; I no longer have a name or fate among men; Noon is how I am known. I live in everything, tacit as Death. And my life is divine.41

Intriguingly, in April 1929, Pozzi wrote a poem with the same title and modelled it on the one written by D’Annunzio.42 There is a definite disconnect between the first part of Pozzi’s “Canto” (focused on the exaltation of her naked body), and the second one, which is dysphoric, and centred on an existential doubt of the possibility of love and the representation of the poet’s death. The model of these final lines obviously can no longer be D’Annunzio’s Halcyon. Here the poetess is afraid of never obtaining love, and she fears death. Thus, this poem is overburdened by an inexplicable and sudden psychological turn. Why would the poet switch from praising her own body’s beauty to evoking her own body’s death? Why would sensuality evoke the thought of death? The only answer to this question is that through this poem Pozzi is building and testing the effectiveness of a poetical code capable of 41

D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 85; “E la mia forza supina / Si stampa nell’arena, / Diffondesi nel mare; e il fiume è la mia vena, / il monte è la mia fronte, / la selva è la mia pube, / la nube è il mio sudore. / E io sono nel fiore / della stiancia, nella scaglia / della pina/ nella bacca / del ginepro …” D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 120; 8292; “Non ho più nome né sorte / Tra gli uomini; ma il mio nome / È Meriggio. In tutto io vivo / Tacito come la Morte / E la mia vita è divina,” ibidem, 121; 105-109. 42 “In this sunshine plating / I am / a hairy gem / … ] Next to me you are / a resting freshenss of grass / where I would like to sink / endlessly.” “In questa doratura di sole / io sono / una gemma pelosa / … / Accanto a me tu sei / una freschezza riposante d’erba / in cui vorrei affondare / perdutamente” Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 38.

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representing and expressing the force of her own sensual desire. Furthermore, we are convinced that a Dannunzian echo is resonating also in these lines. If we keep reading one of the above-cited poems by D’Annunzio, “The Oleander,” we find a passage describing Daphne’s metamorphosis into a tree. Chased by Apollo, she asks her father Peneus for help, and he comes to her rescue, transforming her into a plant, the oleander. Here D’Annunzio, like Pozzi, is also switching to a dysphoric mode: She groans: ‘Apollo!’ in her latest grief ‘take me! Has all your lust just disappeared? O Phoebus, are you not the son of Jove? Are you not, Silver Bow, yourself a god? Capture me, snatch me from this dreadful earth which takes me to itself and drinks my blood! You have pursued me in your lust and fury and now you do not want me, lost, unlucky! Save me for the sake of the lust you had!’43

We find a similar structure in another of Pozzi’s poems, “Canto selvaggio” (“Wild canto”).44 The exaltation of the poetess’ young body is followed by her fear of death:45 I screamed out of joy, in the sunset. I was looking for cyclamens in the brambles: I climbed up a rock … I screamed out of joy climbing down. I adored the rough and wild strength that makes my knees eager to leap; the unknown and virgin strength, stretching me as a bow in the certain run … 43

D’Annunzio, Halcyon, 111; “‘O Apollo’ geme tal novo dolore / ‘prendimi? Dov’è dunque il tuo desìo? / O Febo, non sei tu figlio di Giove? / Arco-d’-argento, non sei dunque un dio? / Prendimi, strappami alla terra atroce / Che mi si prende e beve il sangue mio! / Ed or più non mi vuoi? Me sciagurata! / Salva mio grembo per lo tuo desìo!’” D’Annunzio. Alcyone, 171-172; 293-301. 44 Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 65. 45 In Poesia che mi guardi we find other poems written at this time, and modeled according to the same kind of diagram: the already quoted “Meriggio” (“Noon”), “Bambinerie in tinta chiara” (“Childishness in a clear colour”), 39-40; “Solitudine”(“Loneliness”), 53; the already quoted “Vertigine” (“Vertigo”); “Alpe” (“Alp”), 77. Nevertheless, this difference of intensity seems to weight more heavily on the structuring of the two cantos (except maybe for “Alpe,” see lines 812, 24-27).

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D’Annunzio “saves himself in the literariness, through it and for it”47 – building up a “mannerism at the power of two.”48 Pozzi, on the contrary, employs D’Annunzio’s beautiful but empty ultraliterary code, and his poetic language as an instrument to express her sensuality and her fears, completely free from the “superomistic,” pseudophilosophical frame of the male poet. D’Annunzio’s description of Daphne is just a wonderful arras – cold and superficial, although sensually appealing. However, his poetic code can be reemployed by a poet such as Pozzi, who wants to describe not only the power of sensual desire but also the feeling of emptiness and the physical dissolution that follows erotic fulfilment. At this stage of her brief literary career, Pozzi is still experimenting with literary language and trying to find her own voice. Nonetheless, her focus is clear: the representation of her own sensual desire, and the body as the subject of such desire.49 In this case, her choice of D’Annunzio as a model for her 46 “Ho gridato di gioia, nel tramonto. Cercavo I ciclamini fra I rovai: / ero salita ai piedi di una roccia / … / Ho gridato di gioia, nel discendere. / Ho adorato la forza irta e selvaggia / che le mie ginocchia avide al balzo; / la forza ignota e vergine, che tende / me come un arco nella corsa certa / … / Lontano, in un triangolo di verde, / il sole s’attardava. Avrei voluteo / scattare, in uno slancio, a quella luce; / e sdraiarmi nel sole, e denudarmi, / perché il morente dio s’abbeverasse / del mio sangue. Poi restare, a notte, / stesa nel prato, con le vene vuote: / le stelle – a lapidare imbestialite / la mia carne disseccata, morta.” Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 1-3, 9-13, 18-25. 47 Luciano Anceschi, “Introduzione,” in D’Annunzio, Versi d’amore e di Gloria I (Milano: Mondadori, 1982), XXX. 48 “si salva nella letterarietà, con la letterarietà, per la letterarietà building up a manierismo alla seconda potenza.” Anceschi, “Introduzione,”C. Translation is my own. 49 In “Lampi” (“Lightnings”), a poem written previously, the same summer of 1929 (Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 56), Pozzi already talks explicitely of “my desire sleepless / … hard and shining / as a steel of blade”; “il mio desiderio insonne / … duro e lucente / come una lama d’acciaio.” In “Febbre” (“Fever”) she inserts an openly sexual connotation – her “riped body”; “il mio corpo maturo.”

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poetry is rather obvious. In the recent Italian poetical tradition, only D’Annunzio offers a large repertoire of sensual images. We have, however, seen that Pozzi takes a clear distance from the vate, when she juxtaposes in her poem eros and death, the body and the corpse. This paradoxical juxtaposition has not been fully investigated by scholars of Pozzi. Nevertheless, while commenting on one of Pozzi’s letters, Graziella Bernabo observes: “This passage [of her letter] follows a note by Antonia on the margin of Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies, a book belonging to the library in Pasturo [the town of Pozzi’s summer house]. Marginal notes and underlined sections indicate that Antonia had carefully studied this book, which strongly influenced her during her troubled relationship with Cervi.”50 In this book (published in 1800), the German philosopher reproaches young people for their lack of wisdom, but soon his reproach turns into an exaltation of youth and erotic desire: How does man acquire discreet wisdom and ripe experience? Are they granted him from high, and is it foreordained that he shall not receive them until youth is passed? … it is precisely the urge of youth and the quickened life of the spirit that brings them forth. To inspect all things, to absorb them in the innermost sense, to master the force of random emotions lest tears either of joy or grief dim the spirit’s vision or cloud its impressions, to proceed readily from one thing to another, and being of insatiable energy to assimilate even the experience of others by rehearsing their deeds in imagination, such is the active life of youth, and such too is the process by which wisdom and experience come to being.51

Pozzi’s praise of bodily desire is therefore more understandable than it seems at first glance. Wisdom and knowledge are never completely attainable, because they result from an endless process.52 Youth plays a special role in this endless process because desire gives youth particular strength and boundless energy. Hence, death is the final and unavoidable 50

Questo passo ricalca una nota di Antonia in margine ai Monologhi di Schleiermacher, presenti nella biblioteca di Pasturo in un’edizione accuratamente studiata, come dimostrano le sottolineature e le postille: un’opera che la influenzò molto e che fece da sottofodno al suo travagliato amore per Cervi.” Bernabò, 73. 51 Schleiermacher, Soliloquies, an English translation of The Monologen with a critical introduction and appendix by H. Leland Friess (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1926), 95-96. 52 “… only those who have sought what is cheap and vulgar pride themselves on having found all the desire! What I aspire to know and make my own is infinite, and only in an infinite series of attempts can I completely fashion my own being.” Schleiermacher Soliloquies, 96-97.

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stage of a natural process.53 Furthermore, even if death comes at a young age, it is not a complete tragedy, provided that youth has been experienced to the full. 54 Schleiermacher provides the philosophical background for Pozzi’s poetic imagery of desire and death. For D’Annunzio, desire is not compatible with death, as death constitutes the opposite of desire. On the contrary, desire and death are homogeneous for Pozzi, because they both belong to the same process. Indeed, for the female poet, death is not the negative side of desire: it is rather the point where desire naturally ends. In the poem “Alps,” Pozzi boldly declares: Yes, it is beautiful to die when our youth struggles on the rock, to reach for the heights. It is beautiful to fall, when nerves and flesh crazily excited by their force, want to become soul; when, from the bottom of a crevice, the clear sky seems an impartial hand which blesses … … .. On the heights when the wind brushing against us is the breath of arcane lives parched by purity and sun is a consuming love … … it is beautiful then

53

“Let the strength of years enter into your robust spirit at once to preserve its youth, that in later years youth may protect you against the weakness of old age. The usual division of life into youth and age ought never to be made. He debases himself who wishes first to be young, and then old, who allows himself to be controlled first by what is called the spirit of youth, and only afterwards wishes to follow what is considered the counsel of maturity. Life cannot bear this separation of its elements. There is a two-fold activity of the spirit that should exist in its entirety at every time of life, and it is the perfection of human development ever to become more intimately and more clearly conscious of both its aspects, assigning to each its own peculiar and proper function.” Schleiermacher, Soliloquies, 98. 54 “Thus is my inner life joyous and untrammelled! … Indeed, what reason have I to disdain anything that proceeds so readily and freely and happily from my inner being and its activity? […] in beholding himself, man triumphs over discouragement and weakness, fro from the consciousness of inner freedom there blossoms eternal youth and joy. On these have I laid hold, nor shall I ever give them up, and so I can see with a smile my eyes growing dim, and my blond locks turning white. Nought can happen to affright my heart, and the pulse of my inner life will beat with vigor until death.” Schleiermacher, Soliloquies, 102-103.

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to crash against a boulder and bright ascertain life, is death.55

My conclusions are tentative. A more complete and in-depth study of Pozzi’s poetry would be necessary to answer the important questions we have raised. However, my study has highlighted the modernity and relevance of Pozzi’s poetry, which is ultimately grounded in her firm conviction vis-à-vis the strength and legitimacy of her desire.

Bibliography Arfelli, Dante. The Unwanted. Translated by F. Frenaye. New York: Scribner, 1951. —. I superflui. Venezia: Marsilio, 1994. Bernabò, Graziella. Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue. Antonia Pozzi e la sua poesia, 1st edition. Milano: Virennepierre edizioni, 2004. Calvenzi, Giovanna. “La fotografia di Antonia Pozzi”. In A. Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 594-604. Roma: Luca Sossella editore, 2010. D’Annunzio, Gabriele. Alcyone. Edited by F. Roncoroni.Milano: Mondadori, 1982. —. Halcyon.Translated by J.G. Nichols.New York: Routledge, 2003. De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Fascism, 19221945.Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. L’anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie .Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972/1973. —. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizofrenia. Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie.Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1967. —. Of Grammatology.Translated by G. Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976. Gavazzeni, Franco. Le sinopie di Alcyone. Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1980.

55 Sì, bello morire, / quando la nostra giovinezza arranca / su per la roccia, a conquistare l’alto. / Bello cadere, quando nervi e carne, / pazzi di forza, voglion farsi anima; / quando, dal fondo d’una fenditura, / il cielo terso pare un’imparziale / mano che benedica … / … / Sulle vette, / quando la brezza che ci sfiora è l’alito / di vite arcane riarse di purezza / ed il sole è un amore che consuma / … / … allora bello / sopra un masso schiantarsi e luminosa, / certa vita la morte …” A. Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 77.

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Lavezzi, Gianfranca. Concordanza di “Alcyone” di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Milano: Franco Angeli,1991. Onorino, Dino. “Notizia biografica”. In Antonia Pozzi, Poesia che mi guardi, 13-24.Roma: Luca Sossella editore, 2010. Papi, Fulvio. Vita e filosofia. La scuola di Milano. Banfi, Cantoni, Paci, Preti.Milano: Edizioni Angelo Guerini e Associati, 1980. Pozzi, Antonia. Poesia che mi guardi.Roma: Luca Sossella editore, 2010. Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, 329-374. 5th ed. Firenze: Sansoni, 1976. Santagata, Marco. I frammenti dell’anima: storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca.Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992. Scaramuzza, Gabriele. Crisi come rinnovamento. Scritti sull’estetica della scuola di Milano.Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 2000. Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies. Trans. H. Leland Friess. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1926. Zorat, Ambra. La poesia femminile italiana dagli anni Settanta a oggi. Percorsi di analisi testuale Ph.D., Université la Sorbonne-Paris IV/Università di Trieste, 2009.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN DESIRE AND ITS POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE: FOR A PSYCHOANALYTIC READING OF GIORGIO BASSANI’S IMAGERY BETWEEN LIDA MANTOVANI AND GLI ULTIMI ANNI DI CLELIA TROTTI ALESSANDRO GIARDINO MCGILL UNIVERSITY

In Bassani’s Cinque storie ferraresi, 1 female figures are often characterised as marginal and solitary. In particular, the female protagonists of Lida Mantovani and Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti occupy a lateral position within the space of the text and therefore afford the reader a similar vantage point on that space. In my article, I will read Giorgio Bassani’s Lida Mantovani and Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti as exemplary cases of this representational strategy. More specifically, I will argue that in these stories the author’s anamorphic gaze2 intersects a space that is not only based on traditional laws of perspective, but also situated at 1

In the quotations I refer to the first version of the five stories as a collective work, Cinque storie ferraresi (1956), also in Storie ferraresi (1960). Since the five stories were edited and republished several times, when differences between editions are relevant to my analysis I signal the year of edition. Otherwise, I used for all the quotations a double numeration. With the first number I signal the quotation as reported in Giorgio Bassani, Cinque storie ferraresi (1956) in, Opere (Milano: Mondadori, 1988). With the second, I refer to the English translation in, Giorgio Bassani, Five Stories of Ferrara, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). 2 In my use of the expression “anamorphic gaze” I draw on Lacan’s theory of anamorphosis. See, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1998). In particular, see the section, “Of the Gaze as Object Petit a.” Ibid., 67-122.

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the intersection of behavioural and perceptual prescriptions. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that owing to the authorial musings taking place between Lida Mantovani and Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, the anamorphic gaze becomes an integral aspect of Bruno Lattes, the second story’s male protagonist, eventually suggesting an overlapping between this character and the authorial subjectivity. 3 Whereas in Lida Mantovani male characters are defined by their projective relationship with Lida and their dependence on her desire, in Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, Bruno undermines the agency of Clelia, his mother figure, thus relinquishing their original bond and seeking a point of entry to his own desire. However, as the progressive sexualisation of Clelia and the consequent explosion of castration anxiety alert Bruno to the pressures exerted by Fascist norms on his own sexuality, he slowly comes to realise that by accepting a heteronormative frame of desire, he would sanction the discriminatory rules that cast him out as a Jew. Finally, while in Lida Mantovani the relations between Lida and the male characters reinstate a child’s dyadic relationship and its dependence on a narcissistic imagery, in Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti Bruno’s unease with the Oedipal scheme portrays his ambiguous relationship with the Symbolic order and Bassani’s silent protest against Fascist norms and Fascist visual culture. While previous scholars have emphasised Bassani’s dependence on the teaching of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi,4 this article retraces Bassani’s textual 3

In my use of the world “authorial subjectivity” I draw on Kaja Silverman’s definition. Silverman refuses Walter Booth’s term “implied author,” by demonstrating how the author can be simultaneously inside and outside the text. Silverman also highlights the psychoanalytic and visual aspects of this subjectivity. By paraphrasing Freud, Silverman also writes “The author is simultaneously the place from which the set of representations are ordered and organized,” and toward which “they are channelled back.” See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 157-81; 161. 4 In particular see, Marco Bazzocchi, “Longhi, Bassani e le modalità del vedere,” Paragone V. 63-64-65 (2006): 55-77; Simona Costa, “Un palco di proscenio: il personaggio-spettatore di Giorgio Bassani,”Paragone V. 63-64-65 (2006): 46-56; Anna Langiano, “Il tempo e l’immagine: la scrittura antiprospettica di Giorgio Bassani,” Sincronie V 24 (2006): 157-78; Alessandro Guetta, “La luce e gli oggetti: lo sguardo come rivelatore nell’opera di Giorgio Bassani,” Testo Senso V. 11 (2010): 1-10. The list could be longer since almost all Bassani scholars refer to Bassani’s metaphysical setting, by treating it vaguely or associating it with Morandi. Gianni Venturi is probably the only Bassani scholar who has examined the topic more extensively. See, Gianni Venturi, “Giorgio Bassani e l’ermeneutica del vedere. Nuove Ipotesi, ” Letteratura e Arte. V.8 (2010): 255-281. However, Venturi implies that Bassani’s connection to metaphysical painting is a permanent feature of his writings, rather than a phase of his production. Also, Venturi does

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relation with metaphysical painting as well as his efforts to overcome the limiting aspects of this aesthetics.

I. Lida Mantovani, and the Mirror Stage Lida Mantovani is the first story of Cinque storie ferraresi and the one that the author reworked most extensively, rewriting it no fewer than four times over the span of twenty years. In this story, Lida and her mother Maria live in a basement on the outskirts of Ferrara where they spend a repetitive and solitary existence without anything major ever happening. Although both women had romantic relationships in the past, hence a brief experience of a social existence, their lives appear at the moment of narration devoid of future and haunted by the obsessive memory of their past. Lida Mantovani is divided between these opposing temporalities, and more specifically between the account of Lida’s relationship with David and the history of her unwanted marriage with Oreste Benetti. What is more, if Lida’s relationship with David signals her aspiration to break out of the symbiotic union with her mother, her marriage to Oreste represents the renunciation of any such attempt. Indeed, David’s refusal to give Lida full access to the Symbolic order determines Lida’s regression to her starting position where, given the specific nature of Oreste’s desire, she once again becomes a projective surface and the victim of a claustrophobic confinement. From the very first pages of the story, Lida is described as a human thing living in an almost vegetative state. In describing the days when she gave birth, the narrator recalls: For a month she had been living lying in bed, at the end of a corridor … The pains came very late; she could no longer think or feel in a normal way. She was reduced to a very swollen, insensitive thing (the calm that surrounded her was like the calm she carried within herself), abandoned at the end of a ward.5

not see any relation between the imagery and the psychoanalytic content of the text. Furthermore, Venturi focuses on the story Una lapide in Via Mazzini, but he fails to notice the metaphysical scenes that I describe in my text. 5 “Era vissuta per un mese distesa in un letto, in fondo a un corridoio … I dolori la assalirono con molto ritardo; non capiva né sentiva in modo normale. Si era ridotta ad essere una cosa molto gonfia e insensibile (la calma che la circondava era pari a quella che aveva dentro), abbandonata in fondo ad una corsia.” Giorgio Bassani, Cinque storie ferraresi, 1583; 3.

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Her condition does not change when, following David’s abandonment, Lida returns to live with her mother Maria. In her childhood house Lida goes back to her old habits and spatial position, becoming again part of a tableau vivant doomed to eternal repetition: “they sat opposite the window, as they had always done since Lida finished elementary school. Heads over their sewing, side by side, they talked only of indifferent matters.”6 It is my contention that Lida and Maria are described by Bassani “en tant que chose,” and as such, they recall the wax-like figures characterising Italian painting during the Fascist Ventennio.7 I also believe that, for similar reasons, the visual aspect of their “thingness” is further reinforced by the author in the final edition of Lida Mantovani. Here, the image of the two women at the window recalls a still-life painting and the two women appear as objects among other objects. The author writes: Seating in front of the window they were immobile and silent, like the grey furnishing at the back – like the table, and the straw chairs, and the long, narrow and paired shapes of the beds, and the cradle, and the wardrobe, and the chest of drawers, and the tripod of the basin, and the jug of water at its side … if they raised their heads from the fabric it was only to exchange a few words.8

Through the perfect symmetry of their figures, their destinies, and their respective alienation, Lida and Maria enact Novecento’s pictorial theme of “a woman at two different ages,” as represented in paintings such as Achille Funi’s Una persona a due età (1924), Felice Casorati’s Le due 6 “Si sedettero di fronte alla finestra, come avevano sempre fatto così da quando Lida aveva finite le elementari. La testa china sul cucito, vicine, non discorrevano che di cose indifferenti.” Bassani, Cinque storie ferraresi, 1585; 5. 7 Giorgio De Chirico writes, “Voir tout, même l’homme, en tant que chose. C’est la méthode nietzschéenne. Appliquée en peinture, elle pourrait donner des résultats extraordinaires.” See Giorgio De Chirico, Il meccanismo del pensiero, ed. Maurizio Fagiolo (Einaudi: Torino, 1985), 31. On Novecento painters’ tendency to treat the human figure as an object, see Fabriano Fabbri, I due Novecento (San Cesario di Lecce: Manni, 2003). In particular, Fabri emphasises the similarity between Novecento paintings’ characters and wax-figures, mechanical toys, and human-androids. 8 “Sedute a ridosso della finestra, immobili e silenziose quasi come le grige suppellettili retrostanti – come il tavolo, cioè, e la seggiola di paglia, e le lunghe, strette sagome appaiate dei letti, e la culla, e l’armadio, e il comò, e il treppiede del catino con a fianco la brocca dell’acqua … quando alzavano la testa dalle stoffe era solo per rivolgersi qualche parola.” See Giorgio Bassani, Dentro le mura, in Opere (Milano: Mondadori, 1998), 15; my translation.

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sorelle (1921), or Ubaldo Oppi’s Povertà serena (1919). 9 In particular, appearing as projective and symmetrical figures, Lida and Maria are petrified in a condition tantamount to Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, their own reflexivity prompting the paranoid aggressiveness, which becomes understandable on the basis of Lacan’s study on the mirror’s function in the formation of psychological disturbances. In particular, whereas Lacan explores the convoluted paths leading from narcissism to paranoia, hence from paranoia to violence, Bassani similarly shows how Lida’s narcissistic personality determines her attachment to her mother as well as her antithetic desire to emerge from under her shadow and ultimately destroy her.10 The author writes: One evening, she took Lida by the hand and led her to the mirror in the wardrobe door. ‘You see? You see?’ She said, in a stifled voice. In the room only the whisper of the carbide lamp could be heard. And they stood for a long time, looking at their faces, side by side in the clouded mirror.11

And shortly after: Then she took barely a moment to slip on her coat, dab a bit of powder on her cheeks, fix her hair before the wardrobe mirror. She had only a moment: but that was enough for her to see, in the mirror, her mother’s grey head, tiny, with glistening hair drawn to her napethe light from behind made – her seem almost bald – appear and disappear, rapidly at her back.12

9 The theme was largely exploited by Novecento painters. Achille Funi’s Una persona a due età (1924) is the one that more closely resembles Bassani’s image of the two women. Funi, a Ferrarese painter, depicts the two women of his painting as both individuals and projective images, thus casting a certain ambiguity on the nature of their relationship. Moreover, Funi is particularly able to bring together the Fascist call for a retour à l’ordre and the Metaphysical theme of human reification. Finally, it is not impossible to conjecture Bassani’s interest in this specific painting, as its quick apparition in the filmed version of Bassani’s novel Gli occhiali d’oro also seems to suggest. 10 For Lacan’s theorisation on the topic see his seminal article, “Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des soeurs Papin,” Minotaure 3/4 (December, 1933): 25. Lacan’s early interest in the intersection between gaze and paranoia is tied to his subsequent elaboration of the mirror-stage. 11 “Una sera prese Lida per mano, conducendola davanti allo specchio dell’armadio. “Vedi,vedi?” diceva con voce soffocata. Nella stanza non si udiva che il soffio della lampada a carburo. Ed esse restarono a lungo a guardare dentro lo specchio appannato i loro visi accostati.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1586; 6. 12 “Allora le rimaneva appena un attimo per infilarsi il soprabito, darsi un poco di cipria, aggiustarsi i capelli davanti allo specchio dell’armadio. Non le era concesso

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In the end, the paralysis at the mirror stage represents for Lida and Maria Mantovani the lack of any concrete plan for the future, the emptiness of their eyes signalling, as in the case of the Novecento painting, the lack of any hope and the relapse into a circular past.13 If Lida is Lida Mantovani’s main character, a series of male figures gravitate around her as partial projections of the author’s narrative persona, that is, as Bassani’s “forme del sentimento.”14 The first of these men is David, the bourgeois Italian-Jew who dates Lida out of boredom and gives her a child. Intuiting Lida’s similar condition of separation and alienation, David projects onto her his aspiration to a full integration into society. Therefore, if Lida’s house in Via Salinguerra is the epitome of stasis, David does not only draw Lida out of a segregated existence but introduces her to the dynamics of desire and love. While Oreste arrives every evening at the same time, “the vigorous ring of the bell announcing him, his calm step up the vestibule stairs,”15 Lida still recalls “the days when another vigorous ring meant that David, in his blue coat with his fur

che un attimo: ma bastava perché nello specchio, piccola e lucida di capella tirati sulla nuca-la luce da tergo la faceva sembrare quasi calva-ella vedesse apparire e sparire, svelta svelta dietro le proprie spalle, la testa grigia di sua madre.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1596; 16. 13 Expanding on Lida’s unability to overcome this stage, in the version of Lida Mantovani in Dentro le mura, Bassani adds an entire paragraph. Through the voice of Oreste, the narrator highlights Lida’s main default, that is “quello cioè di star sempre con la faccia girata indietro, a rimasticare cose passate/That of being with her face always turned behind, uselessly rehashing past events” (Opere-Dentro le mura, 23; my translation). The topos of the “face turned behind,” does not only emphasise Bassani’s acquaintance with the themes of the Metaphysical School of Painting and Italian Novecento, but also creates a link between the Lida and the character of Micol in, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini. In particular, Micol is also described as having her “face turned behind.” See Giorgio Bassani, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, in Opere (Milano: Mondadori, 1988), 513. 14 Speaking about his characters Bassani says: “On one side, each of these characters has a connection with the objective truth – and many got offended because of this – on the other, they are all ‘forms of the sentiment’ which belong to the person who wrote this novel” (my translation); “Da un lato, ognuno di questi personaggi ha un rapporto col valore oggettivo-e molti si sono offesi per questoperò da un altro lato, sono tutte ‘forme del sentimento’ di chi ha scritto questo romanzo.” See in, “Intervista inedita a Giorgio Bassani,” Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani, eds. Roberta Antognini & Rodica Diaconescu Blumenfeld (New York: Led Editors, 2012). Led Online; 611-623; 620. 15 “La scampanellata rigorosa che lo annunciava, ecco il suo passo tranquillo su per la scala del portico, eccolo di lassù.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1595; 16.

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collar, was stamping on the cobbles in his impatience and in the cold.”16 Eventually, Lida and David interrupt, although temporarily, the closed circuit of their respective narcissism, hence representing what Sartre and Lacan both saw as the irreconcilability between loving and being loved, looking and being looked at:17 At the first darkness, at the first patch of grass, she was thrown down on the ground. With her chin over his shoulder, her eyes wide, she surrendered herself. Afterwards, she was the first to stand up. And if, at a certain point, she had felt herself seized by a sudden desire to struggle beneath him, to bite him, to hurt him (David never resisted: letting his long back go limp, he sank on her with all his weight) then that fury, that anger that had finally led her to tear him off her, gave way, within her, to a kind of fear … how far away he was already, already she meant nothing to him.18

Nonetheless, the relationship with David is in Lida Mantovani a mere parenthesis. Expelled from the Symbolic order, Lida eventually returns to 16

“Quando una scampanella altrettanto vigorosa significava che David, chiuso nel suo cappotto blu dal bavero di pelliccia, battendo i piedi sui ciottoli per l’impazienza e per il freddo.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1596; 16. 17 See in, Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). In particular, see the section, “The Look,” 340-400. For an analysis of the intertwining of vision and desire in Sartre, see in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: California UP, 1993). Paraphrasing Sartre, Jay writes: “Although the expression of desire is often tactile, coming through the caress, it has inevitably visual component as well. ‘I am possessed by the Other,’ Sartre writes; ‘the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it.” The Other holds a secret-the secret of what I am. Lovers, for Sartre are engaged in a mutual dialectic of possession, which goes beyond the Hegelian master-slave interaction because ‘the lover wants the beloved’s freedom first and foremost, wants, that is, to have it entirely for himself.’ … The sadomasochistic dialectic of the look is thus doomed to failure for both lovers, as there is no way to reconcile human freedom with the desire to possess” 292-93. 18 “Al primo buio, al primo prato, veniva rovesciata per terra. Col mento sopra la spalla di lui, gli occhi spalancati, si lasciava andare. Dopo era la prima ad alzarsi. E se, a un certo punto, si era sentita prendere da un improvviso desiderio di dibattersi sotto di lui, di morderlo, di fargli del male (David non resisteva mai: allentando immediatamente la lunga schiena, le si abbandonava addosso con tutto il peso) ecco che quella furia, quella rabbia che in ultimo l’avevano indotta a strapparlo via da sé, davano luogo in lei a una specie di paura … Come era già lontano, come non gli importava più niente di lei!.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1600; 21.

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the dark quarters of her house in Via Salinguerra and her life is once again regulated by the monotonous rhythm of her previous routine; and it is exactly at this point, that the figure of Oreste Benetti makes a decisive entry into the story. By proposing to Lida, Oreste Benetti tries to step in where David had failed, and yet, the access to society that is implied in his proposal eventually proves to be merely illusory. In fact, Oreste is unable to create a family, and despite his best intentions, he appears incapable of breaking the idleness and isolation of Lida’s world. At first, Oreste’s request forces Lida to see him as someone different from her narcissistic projection, that is, “to see him for the first time:”19 One evening, while she and Benetti were sitting in their usual places, separated as always by the table and by the lamp, suddenly, with great simplicity, the bookbinder asked her if she would marry him. Lida started and looked at him. It was as if she were seeing him for the first time.20

Then, both Lida and Oreste are brought back to the opposite sides of the imaginary mirror that defines their relationship: As she came down the steps, Benetti and her mother, who hadn’t moved from their seats in her absence, turned to look at her, their faces awaiting an answer. Lida shrugged slightly. She went and sat down again in her place; and for the rest of that evening, as, for that matter, the other evenings that followed, none of the three brought the subject up again.21

Finally, the tie between Oreste and Lida becomes a further instantiation of Lacan’s theorisation of the Imaginary. In particular, living in the shadow of Lida and regulating his whole existence on the premise of her approval, Oreste brings to mind the child’s dependence on the mother during the early stages of life, their relationship developing, “in the imaginary paths by which the child’s desire manages to identify with the mother’s want-tobe, into which she herself was, of course, inducted by the symbolic law in 19

Bassani, Cinque storie, 1592; 13. “Una sera, mentre lei e Benetti sedevano ai loro soliti posti, divisi come sempre dal tavolo e dalla lampada, ad un tratto, con molta semplicità, il legatore le chiese se acconsentiva a sposarlo. Lida trasalì e lo guardò. Le pareva di vederlo per la prima volta.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1592; 13. 21 “Mentre scendeva la scala, il Benetti e la madre, che durante la sua assenza non si erano mossi dalle loro seggiole, si voltarono a guardarla col viso di chi attende una risposta. Lida si strinse leggermente nelle spalle. Andò a sedersi di nuovo al suo posto; e per quella sera, come del resto, anche per le altre, nessuno dei tre tornò più sull’argomento” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1593; 14. 20

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which this want is constituted.” 22 In fact, Oreste’s whole conduct with relation to Lida can be easily interpreted in terms of a regression to infantile sexuality, his castration anxiety unconsciously perturbing his marital dream. Moreover, not only is Oreste presented as constantly delaying the day of his wedding, but also, on the verge of realising his dream, he is seized by a most typical outbreak of castration anxiety: During the last days Oreste’s calm turned suddenly into anxiety, anguish. Lida was amazed. It seemed strange to her, contradicting his character, that after having been satisfied for years with a promise of marriage not even expressed in words, after having agreed to every postponement, he should now be seized with such impatience. … Smiling, she asked him the reason for this change. He looked at her without answering, with desperate eyes. Then he said softly: ‘I’m like those horses that collapse at the finish line.’23

In the end, in dying without a son of his own and without fulfilling his socially determined desire, Oreste is denied access to society. Therefore, while Lida will admit in hindsight that, something had always been lacking for him, Oreste does fail to enter the Symbolic order and dies in a space situated outside of language, outside of life, and outside of history.

II. Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, and the Demise of the Metaphysical Mirror Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti has a narrative structure that is in many ways symmetrical to the one used in Lida Mantovani. However, what in the latter was a woman’s condition of marginality becomes in Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti the Italian-Jew’s feeling of alienation during and after Fascism. In Lida Mantovani, the female character still plays a central role, with David and Oreste emerging as reflections of her isolation and narcissistic stillness. In Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, instead, the male protagonist increasingly strives for a voice of his own, thus paralleling the simultaneous formation of the authorial subjectivity. Therefore, if Clelia 22

Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Écrits, 445-88; 471. 23 “Negli ultimi giorni la calma di Oreste si trasfomò improvvisamente in ansia, angoscia. Lida se ne stupì. Le pareva strano, in contrasto col suo carattere, che egli dopo essersi accontentato per anni di una promessa di nozze nemmeno formulata a parole, dopo avere acconsentito a qualsiasi dilazione, ora si lasciasse prendere da tanta smania … Gli chiese sorridendo perché questo cambiamento. Egli la guardò senza rispondere niente, con occhi disperati. Poi disse piano: ‘Io sono come quei cavalli che scoppiano sul traguardo.’” Bassani, Cinque Storie Ferraresi, 1615; 37.

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Trotti gives the title to the story, and if Bruno’s relation to her is at first of a projective and mirror-like nature, by the end of the story his attachment to her is completely severed. In fact, although biographical aspects of Bassani can be found in all of his characters, Bruno Lattes arguably represents his first narrative alter ego. For the same reason, while Lida Mantovani is based on a narrative scheme which, by starting in Lida’s recent past and by then going back to her relationship with David, eventually brings us back to the starting position, Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti not only focus on Bruno’s past but also takes the reader into a dimension of presentness. Moreover, although Lida’s detachment is determined by her regression into the Imaginary and exemplifies her maternal position and final elision from the Symbolic, Bruno’s distance is a direct consequence of his interiorisation of an anamorphic gaze. 24 Finally, by sexualising Clelia and by increasingly seeing her as a woman rather than an ego ideal,25 Bruno’s identification with her quickly starts to fade, and so does the Imaginary that she so persistently embodies. The abandonment of metaphysical aesthetics and the entry into language will be the result of this operation. In Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, Bassani stages a scene whose aim is to convey the immobility of Ferrara and of its society. More precisely, by mimicking the visual strategies of proto-Fascist painting, Bassani conjures up the image of a metaphysical Ferrara, and in other words of a city of the Imaginary. In the story, the idea of a geometrical space 26 is conveyed through the description of public spaces as, for instance, Via del Borso, “a straight street about two hundred yards long … a mere passage, with the stonecutters’ shops and the florists all gathered at the beginning and at the

24 Speaking of the anamorphic gaze, Lacan asks rhetorically, “Is it not clear that the gaze intervenes here only as it is not the annihilating subject, correlative of the world of objectivity, who feels himself surprised but the subject sustaining himself in the function of desire?” See, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 85. 25 On the link between narcissistic relationships and the construction of an egoideal, see in Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Strachey, J. Vol. XIV (1914-1916), 67-102. Accessed June 15, 2012. http://www.pep-web.org/static. php?page=standardedition. 26 A first analysis of the connection between the construction of a geometrical space and strategies of power is in, Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991 [1927]). Several studies have followed, often in a foucaltian vein.

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end.”27 Moreover, by a precise use of lines and perspective Bassani lays out the pictorial space of an immutable Ferrara, hence revealing the fictitious nature and the structural void, which sustains such an image. By opening Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti with the narration of Clelia Trotti’s funeral, the author depicts this commemoration as a farce, suggesting that what might, at first, look like a significant political gesture is instead just another example of Ferrara’s hypocrisy. The narrator maintains that if, “at first sight, with a sudden leap of the heart and the blood, the observer felt he had been called again to witness of those typical collective examinations of conscience so frequent at that period,”28 on the other hand, “even a slightly observant eye would easily have noticed, from an infinity of details, how illusory that first impression of a magic return to the atmosphere of ‘45 had been.”29 In other words, not even a decade has gone by and Ferrara’s community has already lost interest in Clelia Trotti, in the recent eradication of the Jewish community, or in anything concerning its Fascist past. Yet, the reader has just started to see these funerary rituals as another rendition of Ferrara’s immobility when its facade is traversed by an outburst of modernity and progress. In fact, just at the moment when Hon. Bottecchiari begins his eulogy, a motorbike, a Vespa to be exact, enters the geometrical space of the Certosa complex, noisily bursting into view. Bruno, who has so far remained in a state of aloofness, is thus brought back to the roots of his frustrated desire. Sitting on the Vespa are a slender girl, with blue eyes and blonde hair, and a boy, about seventeen years old, “also very blond, and with the same hard indifferent expression in his pale eyes.” 30 Most importantly, these two characters bring back to Bruno’s mind the image of a couple of identical Aryan traits which he had seen during his last meeting with Clelia, hence re-opening a wound whose meaning would become clear only at the end of the story. 27 “Una strada dritta, di un duecento metri di lunghezza … nient’altro che un budello di transito, con le botteghe dei marmisti e dei fiorai raccolte tutte all’inizio ed al termine.” Bassani, Cinque Storie Ferraresi,1680; 115. 28 “A prima vista, con un soprassalto improvviso del cuore e del sangue, sembrava di essere stati chiamati ad assistere ancora una volta ad uno di quei tipici esami di coscienza collettivi, così frequenti a quell’epoca.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1683; 117. 29 “Un occhio appena esercitato si sarebbe facilmente accorto, da un’infinità di particolari, quanto la prima impressione di un magico ritorno all’aria del ’45 fosse stata ingannevole.”Bassani, Cinque storie, 1684; 118. 30 “Biondissimo anche egli, come la ragazza, e con la stessa espressione dura e indifferente negli occhi chiari.”Bassani, Cinque storie, 1689; 123.

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While Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti opens and closes with the images of these two similar couples, its whole development chronicles Bruno’s relationship with Clelia Trotti. Starting with Bruno’s several attempts to meet the woman under Fascist surveillance and coming to an end with his resolution to leave Ferrara, the plot of the story runs parallel to Bruno’s parabola and to the final dissolution of his narcissistic fantasies. Describing the long-gone days with Clelia and their common desire to fight Fascism and Jewry’s passivity, Bruno recounts his first encounter with Hon. Mauro Bottecchiari, an ex-socialist who had opted for a solution of political neutrality in order to survive Fascism. In the story, Bottechiari gives Bruno important information on the ex-teacher and left-wing activist Clelia Trotti, and yet, when referring to her, he makes allusions that are particularly disturbing to Bruno. The author writes: As he walked along, he pondered the ex-Deputy’s ambiguous reception. He saw the man’s face again as it had last appeared, through the halfclosed door. He had said: ‘Rovigatti’; and at the same time he had winked with an expression decidedly, exaggeratedly vulgar. What had he meant, the Hon. Bottechiari, by that knowing wink? Had he really meant, with it, and with that whispered name, to apologize tacitly for having kept to general things, during their conversation, wanting, also, to make up for his rudeness by specifically compromising himself at the last minute? Or wasn’t it perhaps (and thinking of this, Bruno felt his stomach contract in disgust: not even white hair, then, brought wisdom anymore!), perhaps to hint discreetly at the bond that had once united him and – who knows? – might still unite him with the old political companion.31

Also adding: And wasn’t this the way, for that matter, people behaved customarily in Ferrara (in Ferrara, in that provincial sewer, in that sump of every vice and 31 “Ripensava, camminando, all’ambigua accoglienza dell’onorevole. Rivedeva il suo viso quale gli era apparso da ultimo, attraverso la porta socchiusa. Aveva detto “Rovigatti”; e insieme aveva ammiccato con espressione decisamente, esageratamente volgare. Che cosa aveva voluto significare, l’onorevole con quell’ammicco d’intesa? Davvero aveva voluto, con quello, e col nome che aveva sussurrato, chiedergli tacitamente scusa per essersi tenuto, durante il loro colloquio, un po’ troppo sulle generali, e nello stesso tempo riparare allo sgarbo con una precisa compromissione in extremis? O non, forse (e pensando a ciò, si era sentito subito torcere lo stomaco dal disgusto: nemmeno i capelli bianchi, dunque, portavano oramai più consiglio!), magari per alludere con discrezione al legame che un tempo l’aveva unito, e forse chissà, ancora segretamente l’univa, all’antica compagna di partito.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1694; 128.

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every scepticism), when among the ‘right’ set, half-confidences were exchanged, a bit boastingly and a bit in shame, winking man to man, hinting at an affair with a girl of the poor class?32

While Bottecchiari’s withdrawal from socialism and his middle-class complacency are the protagonist’s most ostensible reasons to disapproval, it is the aura of sexuality hovering over Clelia which stirs in Bruno a feeling of repulsion. Indeed, the train of thought following Bruno’s physical response to Bottechiari also confirms that Bruno’s preoccupations are, in the main, of a libidinal nature. For instance, walking up Via Mazzini and Via Saraceno after his meeting with Bottecchiari Bruno sees, “the merchants coming to the doors of their shops, resembling in their manner and their smiles the hags of Via Colomba or Via Sacca, always generous in calls to the students who passed within range of their doorways.”33 And it is arguably because of Bruno’s ambivalent attitude towards Clelia’s sexuality that, “everything he saw … bore the mark of a hidden vice, the ill-concealed brand of corruption.”34 By breaking away from the uncomfortable feelings occasioned by the meeting with Mauro Bottecchiari and searching for a version of Clelia still connected to his narcissistic fantasies, Bruno heads to the neighbourhood surrounding Piazza Santa Maria del Vado. Here he finds a small old world cadenced by “the crying of a baby; a ‘good night’ and a ‘see you tomorrow,” 35 and, in other words, a safe harbour reminding him of the appeasement of his early childhood. Like Lida Mantovani’s rooms in Via Salinguerra, Piazza del Vado becomes an example of immobile and metaphysical city-space, and it is through the sense of revelation triggered 32

“E non era proprio così, del resto, che ci si comportava abitualmente a Ferrara (a Ferrara: in quella fogna di provincia, in quella sentina del vizio e di ogni scetticismo!), quando, tra gente ‘per bene,’ un po’ vantandosene e un po’ vergognandosene, ci si confidava a mezzo, strizzandosi l’occhio da uomo a uomo, una relazione con una ragazza del popolo?” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1694; 129. 33 “I negozianti che si facevano sulle soglie delle botteghe, simili nei modi e nei sorrisi alle megere di Via Colomba o Via Sacca, sempre prodighe di richiami per gli studenti che passavano a tiro dei loro anditi.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1695; 130. 34 “Tutto quello che vedeva attorno a sé portava impresso il segno di un vizio nascosto, il marchio mal dissimulato della corruzione.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1696; 130. This paragraph is significantly extended in Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti’s version of Il romanzo di Ferrara, where the libidinal nature of Bruno’s thoughts emerges with even greater clarity. 35 “Un pianto sommesso di un bambino; un ‘buona sera’ e un ‘a domani’.” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1696; 131.

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by this place that Clelia makes her fairy-tale entry into the story. The author writes: One fine day the door of the house on Via Fondo Banchetto opened and the threshold wasn’t immediately blocked by the squat form of Signora Codecà. It was natural, obvious, after all, that as time went by, this would happen. In every self-respecting fairy-tale (it must have been three or three thirty in the afternoon, there was actually something unreal about the silence of the completely deserted neighbourhood) it is rare for the story to end without the disappearance of the metamorphosis of the Monster. All of a sudden, the spell had been broken, Signora Codecà had vanished. And who, if not Clelia Trotti, could be the person who came to the door in her stead?36

In describing this apparition Bassani evokes De Chirico’s concept of “enigma” as epiphany and transforms it into a narrative strategy that he will then repeatedly use in Cinque storie ferraresi. More specifically, by choosing a specific time and a particular setting – “it must have been three or three thirty in the afternoon, there was actually something unreal about the silence of the completely deserted neighbourhood” – Bassani conjures up the revelatory power of the Italian squares under the metaphysical light of the afternoon sun.37 However, although alive in Bruno’s narcissistic and metaphysical fantasy, Clelia’s idealised figure is nonetheless destined to perish once exposed to the eye of society, since Bruno’s gaze cannot withstand the assaults coming both from the Symbolic order and his own desire. More to the point, not only is the real Clelia a slighter version of the woman Bruno 36

“Un bel giorno la porta della casa di Via Fondo Banchetto si aprì senza che il vano venisse subito ostruito dalla la tozza figura della signora Codecà. Era naturale, infondo ovvio, che a lungo andare succedesse questo. In ogni favola che si rispetti (potevano essere le tre, tre e mezzo del pomeriggio: c’era sul serio qualcosa di irreale nel silenzio della contrada affatto deserta), è raro che la vicenda non si concluda con la sparizione e la metamorfosi del mostro. D’un tratto l’incantesimo si era spezzato, la signora Codecà era scomparsa. Ebbene chi poteva essere se non Clelia Trotti, la persona venuta ad aprire in sua vece?” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1703; 138. 37 The “enigma” and the “clock which stopped at around three” are ubiquitous themes in Giorgio De Chirico’s paintings and writings. See also, James Thrall Solby, Giorgio De Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art Press, 1955). In the story Una lapide in Via Mazzini, Bassani makes explicit reference to those themes and he repeatedly uses the term “enigma,” often restating De Chirico’s own writings. See, Giorgio Bassani, Una lapide in Via Mazzini, in Opere (Milano: Mondadori, 1988).

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had so persistently sought out, but also, due to her misery and neglect, she turns out to be a painful reminder of the sexual frustration that awaits him outside of the Imaginary. If the narrator recalls that “he looked at her, the famous Socialist, the pitiful prisoner, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the barely visible dark line that marked her thin and wrinkled neck,”38 it is not impossible that this “dark line, clearly visible … marking her neck all around” is meant to evoke the traumatic image of circumcision as well as to resonate with Bruno’s increasing castration anxiety. In brief, while the Symbolic order appears tainted by corruption, the sojourn in the Imaginary slowly becomes synonymous to passivity and decay. In the conclusion of the story and while Bruno’s fear of castration becomes more pressing, the figure of the father suddenly comes into the limelight, thus setting a pattern which will start appearing as a topos of Bassani’s writings. 39 In particular, the father is often depicted by the author as a solitary figure waiting for the return of the prodigal son, that is, of the son who, in accepting his heteronormative destiny, ultimately accepts his masculine sexuality and reconciles with the Name-of-theFather. 40 In doing so, however, Bassani demonstrates once again to be aligning himself with the imagery of metaphysical painting, and more specifically with the one of Giorgio De Chirico. Indeed, if De Chirico’s failure to go beyond the Imaginary determines the recurring theme of “the prodigal son” as a fantasy posterior to the death of the father,41 it is not accidental that Bassani’s stories replicate De Chirico’s imagery both in layout and content. It becomes clear, in fact, that the prodigal son represents in Bassani an ambivalent relation to the Symbolic order, and a vacillation between the desire to prevail over the father and the impossibility to act accordingly. And it is because of this ambivalence that Bruno seems incapable to bring his “destiny” to completion. 38

“Egli la guardava, la celebre socialista, la pietosa prigioniera, e non riusciva a staccare gli occhi dalla riga scura, appena visibile che segnava … il collo magro e rugoso di lei” Bassani, Cinque Storie Ferraresi. 1706; 141. 39 The topos of the son who in the middle of the night finds a moment of reconciliation with the father is also in La passeggiata prima di cena (82-83), and Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (559-67). 40 With the formula “Name-of-the-Father,” Lacan indicates the symbolic father, thus the complex of symbolic rules organising society. See also in, Jacques Lacan, “Translator’s Note,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 281-82. 41 De Chirico developed the theme throughout his whole career. See for instance, Giorgio De Chirico, Il ritornante, il cervello del bambino (1914); Il ritornante (1917); Il figliol prodigo (1922); Il figliol prodigo (1924); Il figlio consolatore (1926).

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In Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, Bruno is presented as being at a crossroads. On the one hand, Bruno understands that a full participation in the Symbolic order would signify his surrender to Fascism; on the other hand, he has to find a balance between his fascination with the narcissistic universe of Clelia Trotti and the vanity and impracticability of such an alternative. In particular, if the author writes: “from her prison on Via Fondo Banchetto Clelia Trotti dreamed of Socialism’s rebirth,”42 Bruno’s retrospective look, that is, his narration after Fascism and after WWII, unquestionably establishes the inconsistency of Clelia’s optimistic ideals. Towards the end of the story, Clelia expresses to Bruno the desire to read Benedetto Croce and asks him to instruct her on the Italian philosopher’s system of thought. In fact, in believing that the future was somewhere beyond Ferrara’s current appearance, Clelia incarnates that religion of freedom, debatably created by Croce as an anaesthetic to Fascist coercions. Bruno, however, appears already distracted, and while Clelia keeps talking to him, he projects himself out of Ferrara’s walls, that is, out of the realm of the Imaginary. It is at this point that Bruno sees the Aryan couple whose demeanour and physical appearance ultimately shed light on his desire. The author writes: He continued to look at them, half closing his eyes. There they were, the exemplars, the prototypes of the race! He said to himself, with desperate hatred and love. They seemed not so much beautiful as wonderful, unattainable. Their blood was better that his, their soul was better than his! … Oh, to be with them, one of them, in spite of everything!43

In the end, while Lida remains a prisoner in the mirrored castle of the Imaginary, Bruno’s attraction to the Aryan couple testifies to his yearning for an impossible assimilation. In particular, Bruno’s struggle with a desire that is socially prescribed and whose satisfaction would represent a disavowal of his Jewish identity does not only make him aware of his inferiority complex – that is, of his inextricability from Fascist discourse – but, through Bruno’s resistance to it, bears witness to his strategy of passive disobedience. Furthermore, Bruno’s final assumption of anamorphosis and subsequent undermining of the Imaginary determine his 42 “Dal suo carcere di Via Fondo Banchetto, Clelia Trotti sognava la rinascita del socialismo,” Bassani, Cinque Storie Ferraresi. 1711; 146. 43 “Continuava a guardarli socchiudendo gli occhi. Eccoli lì i campioni, i prototipi della razza!- si diceva, con odio e amore disperati. Più che belli gli sembravano meravigliosi, irraggiungibili. Il loro sangue era migliore del suo, la loro anima era migliore della sua! … Oh essere con loro, dei loro, nonostante tutto!” Bassani, Cinque storie, 1724; 160.

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resolution to flee Ferrara, simultaneously hinting at the author’s passage from a metaphysical imagery to a more discursive narration. In fact, in the novels following Cinque storie ferraresi, Bassani will give birth to a narrator-protagonist who will function as an intradiegetic extension of his narrative persona, eventually overcoming the limits of metaphysical aesthetics. But this is already a completely different story.

Bibliography Primary source Bassani, Giorgio. Opere. Milano: Mondadori, 2009 [1998].

Other works Bassani, Giorgio. Five Stories of Ferrara. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Bazzocchi, Marco. “Longhi, Bassani e le modalità del vedere.” Paragone V. 63-64-65 (2006): 55-77. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction 2nd ed. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1983. Costa, Simona. “Un palco di proscenio: il personaggio-spettatore di Giorgio Bassani.” Paragone V. 63-64-65(2006): 46-56. De Chirico, Giorgio. Il meccanismo del pensiero. Ed. Maurizio Fagiolo. Einaudi: Torino, 1985. Fabbri, Fabriano. I due Novecento. San Cesario di Lecce: Manni, 2003. Foster, Hal. “Convulsive Identity.” October Vol. 57 (Summer 1991): 1854. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Strachey, J. Accessed June 15, 2012. http://www.pep-web.org/static.php?page=standardedition. Guetta, Alessandro. “La luce e gli oggetti: lo sguardo come rivelatore nell’opera di Giorgio Bassani.” Testo Senso V. 11 (2010): 1-10. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought. Berkeley: California UP, 1993. Lacan, Jacques. “Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des soeurs Papin.” Minotaure 3/4(December, 1933): 25. —. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Allain Miller. New York: Norton, 1998 [1977]. —. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2002 [1966].

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Langiano, Anna. “Il tempo e l’immagine: la scrittura antiprospettica di Giorgio Bassani.” Sincronie V 24 (2006): 157-78. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991 [1927]. Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani. Edited by Roberta Antognini & Rodica Diaconescu Blumenfeld. New York: Led Editors, 2012. Accessed June 15, 2012. http://www.ledonline.it/ledonline/index.html?/ledonline/510giorgio-bassani.html. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. Solby, James Thrall. Giorgio De Chirico. New York: Museum of Modern Art Press, 1955. Venturi, Gianni. “Giorgio Bassani e l’ermeneutica del vedere. Nuove Ipotesi.” Letteratura e Arte. V.8 (2010): 255-81.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN DESIRE AND THE BIRTH OF LITERATURE: ROBERTO CALASSO’S LE NOZZE DI CADMO E ARMONIA LARA FIORANI INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR

Roberto Calasso’s bestseller Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (1988) is a sophisticated postmodern rewriting of the great tales of Greek mythology. It was hailed by Simon Schama as “not a treatise, but a story: one of the most extraordinary that has ever been written on the origin of Western self-consciousness.”1 From the opening pages, though, Calasso gives away that what is at stake is not simply a self-reflexive contemporary renarration of the great stories of Greek mythology for a sophisticated contemporary reader, but also a philosophical reflection on the birth of literature from desire.

I. “Irresistible to the gods” As is typical of epic narrations, the book opens in medias res, with the tale of the love between Zeus, metamorphosed into a bull, and the “girl”2 Europa. In this opening, brimming with pictorial details, a character, standing in a corner, could almost go unnoticed. It is Eros, the god of love and desire. Eros silently lifts Europa onto the back of the bull, 3 the 1 Simon Schama, quoted in “Roberto Calasso,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume 81: Yearbook 1993, 39. 2 Roberto Calasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (Milan: Adelphi, 1988), 15. The English translation renders Calasso’s “fanciulla” simply as “girl.” I propose a better translation would be “nymph.” See Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, (London and New York: Vintage, 1994), 3. 3 Calasso, Nozze, 15; Calasso, Marriage, 3.

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metamorphosis of Zeus. His presence in the opening may be seen as an Alexandrianism, as the rest of the book does not devote much space to this minor deity. However, I will treat it as the first signal of the importance of desire in his highly intellectual re-creation of Greek mythology, and henceforth of Western literature. “But how did it all begin?”4 asks the author, just after the introductory scene. This question is then repeated, like a mantra, throughout the first chapter of Le Nozze. What does Calasso mean by “all”? Europa is the first of a number of nymphs whose love stories with gods constellate the book, just like they constellate Calasso’s writing, from his first book, the 1974 novel L’impuro folle, to his more recent essay collections La letteratura e gli dei (2001), and La follia che viene dalle ninfe (2005).5 After narrating the abduction of Europa6 – in terms that echo Ovid’s Metamorphoses7 – Calasso moves the spotlight on to other nymphs, whose charm has proven “irresistible” to the gods: “A group of girls were playing by the river, picking flowers. Again and again such scenes were to prove irresistible to the gods.”8

From the second page of his text, the writer has already established a clear connection between the figures of the nymphs and desire. Furthermore, with his reply to the question “how did it all begin?” Calasso invites his readership to see Greek mythology as a series of stories of girls seduced by gods and heroes, “stories” that “never live alone.”9 In a few brush strokes, he captures the moment of the rape of Persephone, Thalia and Creusa, before taking the reader back to Europa. The “all” of Greek mythology would therefore be this garland of interconnected nymph stories. 4

Calasso, Marriage, 4. “Ma come era cominciato tutto?”; Calasso, Nozze, 16. Not translated in English, at the time of writing. All translations from this book are my own. 6 Like Ovid, Calasso recreates a scene where the princess meets a dazzling white bull, whose horns she crowns with garlands. Calasso, Nozze, 16; Calasso, Marriage, 4. 7 Ovid, Metamorphoses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1955), II, 846-875. 8 Calasso, Marriage, 4. “Un gruppo di ragazze giocava lungo un fiume, raccogliendo fiori. Numerose altre volte una scena del genere sarebbe apparsa irresistibile agli dei”. Calasso, Nozze, 16. 9 Calasso, Marriage, 4. Calasso fascinatingly adds that “stories never live alone: they are branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.” ibidem, 10; “Le storie non vivono mai solitarie: sono rami di una famiglia, che occorre risalire all’indietro e in avanti.” Calasso, Nozze, 23. 5

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Given that Le nozze is Calasso’s attempt to trace the beginning of Greek mythology, the question “how did it all begin?” can be recognised as metanarrative. Thus, his renarration of these remote tales of desire should be read as a reflection on the origin of literature.

II. The harbinger of literature? After his swift depiction of Europa’s fellow nymphs, Calasso repeats his rhetorical question, and answers it by taking the reader back to the events preceding the abduction, retelling how it had “all begun” for Europa herself. The narration culminates in another fresco-style representation of the nymph, first “terrified,” and calling her friends, then disappearing amongst the waves, holding on to the horn of the bull with one hand, and lifting her peplum with the other, while “behind her, the tunic billowed out in a purple sail.”10 The description of the abduction of Europa seems to echo a Botticelli painting, or the work of art historian Aby Warburg, whose study of representations of classical deities in the Renaissance is marked by a strong fascination with the figure of the nymph. In his seminal essay on Sandro Botticelli’s La nascita di Venere, Warburg studies the tale of Europa and maps out a line of influence for the tale of the rape, narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,11 rewritten by Angelo Poliziano, and then passed from Poliziano to Botticelli. Discussing these two artists, Warburg notes that Poliziano lingers on the motif of the dress and hair of Europa, which are in movement.12 Calasso’s description of Europa’s hair and clothing, blown by the wind, can thus be seen as an allusion to Poliziano, Warburg, or both.13 Warburg’s study concludes that the windy landscape, the fleeting garments and hair symbolise and anticipate the appearance of a nymph.14 But in Warburg’s work, the appearance of a nymph is the harbinger of the rebirth of ancient paganism, and effectively of an artistic creativity that allows the representation of this paganism. 10

Calasso, Marriage, 5; “Dietro alle sue spalle, il peplo si era gonfiato in una vela purpurea.” Calasso, Nozze, 17. 11 Ovid, Metamorphoses, II.873, II.927. 12 Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the Arts and Humanities, 1999), 98. 13 Warburg’s essay also analyses the group of Flora and Zephyrus in the Venere, where again a young woman is portrayed in a windy landscape, with fleeting hair and clothes. See Warburg, Renewal, 159. 14 Warburg, Renewal, 108.

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Similarly, as we will now see, in Nozze the nymph acts as the harbinger of literary creativity, and desire for the nymph can be taken to symbolise desire for literature.

III. Desire for representation In Nozze, Calasso reflects extensively on the god Apollo, and the “twisted relationship, of attraction, persecution and flight,”15 often culminating in rape between Apollo and the nymphs. This relationship is also explored in La follia che viene dalle ninfe, dedicated to Warburg, and in La letteratura e gli dei. The nymph at the centre of La follia is that of the Delphic myth of Python. Calasso narrates Apollo’s simultaneous defeat of the nymph Telphusia,16 and of Python, presented – in line with the pseudo-Homeric “Hymn to Apollo,” rather than mainstream tradition – as a “dragonessnymph”17 instead of a dragon. The monster defeated by Apollo at Delphi, the former master of the oracle, would thus be a nymph, one of the many “feminine beings,” holders of knowledge more ancient than Apollo, and whom Apollo wants to humiliate. 18 Calasso defines this nymphidic knowledge, “usurped” by Apollo,19 as “a liquid, fluid power, to which the god will impose his meter.”20 The association between nymphidic images, sources, fluidity, water, and snakes, is already apparent in Warburg’s work, but the reference to poetic metre reveals that the nymphidic conveys a specific literary theme. This is echoed by Le nozze, where Calasso relies on the theme of the Delphic power struggle to represent the birth of poetry: The god knew that power came from possession, from the snake coiled around the water spring. But that wasn’t enough for Apollo: his women, his soothsaying daughters, must reveal not only the enigmas of the future but verse itself. Poetry thus arrived on the scene as the form structuring 15

“rapporti tortuosi, di attrazione, persecuzione e fuga,” Roberto Calasso, La follia che viene dalle Ninfe (Milan: Adelphi, 2005), 13-14. 16 The first being to whom Apollo spoke in Delphi. Calasso, Follia, 11. 17 Calasso, Follia, 12. 18 Calasso, Follia, 14. 19 In the text, Apollo is described as “the first invader and usurper of this knowledge that did not belong to him” (primo invasore e usurpatore di un sapere che non gli apparteneva). See Roberto Calasso, Literature and the the Gods (New York:Vintage, 2002), 31, and La letteratura e gli dei (Milan:, Adelphi, 2001), 36. 20 “un sapere liquido, fluido, al quale il dio imporrà il suo metro,” Calasso, Follia, 13-14.

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those ambiguous words that people came to hear to help them make decisions about their life, words whose meaning they often appreciated only when it was too late.21

The nymphs were tasked by Apollo, now ruling over “the supreme, the invincible oracle of the word,”22 with the revelation of verse to men, and were the first to utter exameters, as the exameter had been Apollo’s gift to Phemonoe, Python’s successor, his first “Pythia.”23 Behind this view of nymphs as the revealers of poetry is a distant Greek antecedent. As Calasso remembers in the first pages of La follia, the beginning of Western literature is Hesiod’s Theogony. The first lines of this poem narrate the poetic initiation of Hesiod, the first known Greek author, at the hands of three Muses at the feet of mount Helicon.24 Like his Pythia, the Muses of the Theogony foreground the nymph as the force behind the birth of literature. I agree that the tale of Python is not strictly a love story, and Apollo’s actions in it are not explicitly driven by erotic desire. However, Calasso proceeds to establish a connection between the tale of Apollo and Python, and that of his unrequited love for Daphne, by suggesting that they are each “the shadow of the other.”25 Apollo desires the nymph Daphne, but she chooses death and metamorphosis into a laurel over the god’s passion.26 However, continues the author, “if we look carefully at Python, we can see the delicate Daphne in the snake. Looking at the laurel leaves, we can see the scales of Python.”27 The interchangeability between the monster and the nymph in the realm of Apollo confirms that both tales should be read as having to do 21

Calasso, Marriage, 144. “Il dio sapeva che la potenza veniva dalla possessione, dal serpente arrotolato intorno alla fonte. Ma questo non gli bastava: le sue donne, le sue figlie vaticinanti dovevano rivelare il verso, non solo gli enigmi del futuro. La poesia si presentò come la forma di quelle parole ambigue che i consultanti chiedevano per decidere della loro vita e di cui spesso capivano il significato solo quando i fatti erano gia avvenuti.” Calasso, Nozze, 168. 22 Calasso, Marriage, 145-6; “l’oracolo della parola, il supremo, invincibile,” Calasso, Nozze, 170. 23 Calasso, Marriage, 144; Calasso, Nozze, 168. 24 Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), v. 5-34. 25 Calasso, Marriage, 147; Calasso, Nozze, 172. 26 Calasso, Marriage, 148; Calasso, Nozze, 172. 27 Calasso, Marriage, 148; “Osservando Pitone, riconosciamo nel serpente la delicata Dafne. Osservando le foglie dell”alloro, vi riconosciamo anche le squame di Pitone.” Calasso, Nozze, 172.

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Through Apollo’s desire for representation, the author confirms our hypothesis, that his nymph, like Warburg’s nymph, is the harbinger of mythology in its etymological sense – the harbinger of the representation of myth through discourse, through poetry and literature.

VI. Io and Europa – desire for difference In the opening chapter of Le nozze, answering for the third time the question “how did it all begin,” Calasso re-writes the tale of Io, Europa’s great grandmother, stressing that her tale is the reversal of Europa’s. Although he states that Io’s love story with Zeus sets all subsequent tales into motion,29 making it a first from a chronological perspective, he also suggests that Europa and Io’s tales are variations, reenactments of the same plot – with a difference. This clearly emerges in the lines from the ekphrasis on the fate of Io, which Europa had seen on the golden basket, wrought by Aephestus, which she was carrying before the abduction: As she walked towards the flowery meadows near the sea, what Europa was carrying, embossed in precious metals, was her destiny. As in a piece of music, her own tunic was the melodic inversion of her ancestor, Io’s. A bull would carry her off from Asia toward the continent that was to be called Europe, just as years before the desperate sea wandering of a young cow who had first grazed in Greek pastures was to end in Egypt with the light touch of Zeus’s hand. And one day the gift of the golden basket would be handed down to Europa. She carried it along, without thinking.30

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Calasso, Marriage, 148; “Apollo non riesce a possedere la ninfa, e forse neppure lo vuole. Dietro la Ninfa, cerca la corona di alloro che gli rimane in mano quando si dissolve il corpo di Dafne: vuole la rappresentazione.” Calasso, Nozze, 172. 29 Calasso, Marriage, 24; Calasso, Nozze, 38. 30 Calasso, Marriage, 6-7; “Scendendo verso le praterie fiorite, vicino al mare, Europa teneva in mano, sbalzato in nobili metalli, il suo destino. Come in musica, la sua melodia era l’inverso di quella della sua antenata. Un toro l’avrebbe rapita dall’Asia verso quella terra che si sarebbe chiamata Europa, come anni prima il

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Calasso’s handling of the relationship between Io and Europa, and his play with their respective tales, simultaneously overlapping and mirroring each other, calls to mind what poststructuralist practice defines as an undecidable. The term indécidable, employed by Derrida, indicates a process, a “pratique,” that simultaneously composes and decomposes the meaning of a certain word, text, or symbol.31 As variations of each other, Europa and Io, and the meaning of their tales, cannot be seized by examining their respective tales in isolation, but by the relationship between them. The closing pages of the first chapter narrate the “secret love” 32 between Zeus and his future consort Hera, the goddess whose ritual includes a bed, “the playpen of erotic devotion.”33 With Hera, in the closing of the chapter, the text depicts a further and more extreme case of undecidability. Zeus first betrayed Hera with Io, and this caused the first of her numerous revenges, which set mythology in motion. But Io was not simply a nymph, she was also one the priestesses of her most important temple, the Heraion in Argo: In looks and dress it was Io’s duty to re-create the image of the goddess she served. She was a copy endeavouring to imitate a statue. But Zeus chose the copy; he wanted that minimal difference that is enough to overturn order and generate the new, generate meaning. And he wanted it because it was a difference, and her because she was a copy.34

disperato errare marino di una giovenca che aveva pascolato in terra greca si era concluso in Egitto, al lieve tocco della mano di Zeus. E un giorno sarebbe giunto in dono alla fanciulla Europa un canestro d’oro. Lo teneva in mano, distratta.” Calasso, Nozze, 19. 31 “Ce qui compte ici, ce n’est pas la richesse lexicale, l’infinité sémantique d’un mot ou d’un concept, sa profondeur ou son épaisseur, la sédimentation en lui de deux significations contradictoires (continuité et discontinuité, dedans et dehors, identité et différence, etc.). Ce qui compte ici, c’est la pratique formelle ou syntaxique qui le compose et le décompose.” Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (Paris, Editions de Seuil, 1993), 271. 32 Calasso, Marriage, 23; Calasso, Nozze, 37. 33 Calasso, Marriage, 24; “il luogo primordiale, il recinto della devozione erotica,” Calasso, Nozze, 38. 34 Calasso, Marriage, 24; “Nel suo aspetto, nelle sue vesti, Io era tenuta a ripetere l’immagine della dea che serviva. Era una copia che tentava di imitare una statua. Ma Zeus scelse la copia. Desiderò la differenza minima, che basta a disarticolare l’ordine, a produrre il nuovo, il significato. E la desiderò perchè era una differenza, perchè era una copia.” Calasso, Nozze, 38.

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In choosing the priestess over the goddess, Zeus, moved by desire, chooses the “variation,” the copy, over the original. Zeus betrays Hera with a nymphidic copy of her, creating another relation and process of undecidability. Interestingly, Calasso even employs the term difference, notoriously used in Derrida’s writing, to represent the meaning-generating power of writing. Like in Derrida’s theory, in Calasso’s mythological discourse, difference is the power that generates representation. But in Calasso the beginning of representation is caused by the desire for the nymph. The same theme and the same inscription of difference within the folds of Le nozze appear, unsurprisingly, in the authorial reflections on the tales of Daphne and Python. Here, the author utters what may sound like a poststructuralist claim on the power of the “variant” – to generate meaning and literature. No sooner have you grabbed hold of it then myths open out into a fan of a thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin. Everything that happens happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth.35

Even the re-writing of the Trojan War is centred on the same poles of meaning, desire, difference and literature – and its inscription: When the Greeks needed to appeal to an ultimate authority, it wasn’t a sacred text but Homer that they went to. Greece was founded on the Iliad. And the Iliad was founded on a play of words, the substitution of a couple of letters in a name.36

Like Zeus, Achilles longs for a nymph that he recognises as “different.” His love for Briseides and his rebellion against Agamemnon, a hieratic symbol of order and repression, generate the content of the first epic poem. The Iliad, the ultimate mythological text, is born out of desire and writing, in the fold of the difference between Briseides and Criseides. 35

Calasso, Marriage, 147-8; “Appena lo si afferra, il mito si espande in un ventaglio dai molti spicchi. Qui la variante è l’origine. Ogni atto avvenne in questo modo, oppure in quest’altro, oppure in quest’altro. E in ciascuna di tali storie divergenti si riflettono le altre, tutte ci sfiorano come lembi della stessa stoffa.” Calasso, Nozze, 172. 36 Calasso, Marriage, 90; “Quando i greci dovevano appellarsi ad un”autorità ultima, non citavano testi sacri ma Omero. Sull’Iliade si fondava la Grecia. E l’Iliade si fondava su un gioco di parole, sullo scambio di una lettera.” Calasso, Nozze, 110-111.

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Once again, desire for the nymph brings about the beginning of that “all” that is Greek mythology.

VII. The crown of desire and literature It is time now to link the theme of difference, so clearly outlined in the opening of Le nozze, to the metaphor of the crown, which haunts almost every page of Calasso’s text. We have seen through our review of the tale of Daphne that Apollo is portrayed as seeking a power that is simultaneously “representation” and “crown,” hence the laurel crown of representation. In the opening chapter, images of crowns constellate the tale of Ariadne. Her tale is, we are told, “woven into a crown.”37 By the time Ariadne turned her gaze on the handsome Theseus, she was no longer a girl playing with her sisters in the palace of Cnossos. She was a god’s bride, even if no one knew of their union. The only witness had been that shining crown. … When he set off into the dark passages of the labyrinth, Theseus was led by the light of the resplendent crown. … When he reappeared in Naxos, Dionysus was waving a shining crown. Ariadne looked at it and thought of the other crowns that had been behind the other deceptions in her life. She realized now that that crown was the same crown and always had been. Her story really was over now; Ariadne would be forever alone, prisoner of that radiant crown in the sky; Corona Borealis.38

A crown blesses the first love encounter between Dionysus and Ariadne, in a cave.39 But this crown is “a circle of seduction” and “the perfection of deceit.” 40 It is this “crown-deceit” that she passes on to Theseus, to help him defeat the Minotaur. If on one level this “crown37

Calasso, Marriage, 19; “intrecciata tutta in una corona”; Calasso, Nozze, 33. Calasso, Marriage, 20-1; “Quando Arianna fissò lo sguardo sulla bellezza di Teseo, non era già più una fanciulla che gioca con le sorelle nel palazzo di Cnosso. Era sposa di un dio, anche se nessuno sapeva delle nozze. Unico testimone era stata quella corona lucente. … Teseo si inoltrò nei corridoi oscuri del labirinto guidato dalla luce della corona fulgente. … A Nasso, quando riapparve, Dioniso brandiva una corona raggiante. Arianna la guardava e pensava alle altre corone che erano state per lei l’origine di tutti gli inganni. Ora sapeva che quella corona era sempre stata la stessa. Ora la storia era davvero finita, e prigioniera di quella corona raggiante Arianna sarebbe rimasta solitaria nel cielo: Corona Borealis.” Calasso, Nozze, 33-34. 39 Calasso, Marriage, 20; Calasso, Nozze, 33. 40 Calasso, Marriage, 20; Calasso, Nozze, 33. 38

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deceit” symbolises Ariadne’s love for Theseus, on another we can easily recognise in it, and in Ariadne herself, a metaphor of the fictionality of literature. Calasso’s metafictional reference to a possible meaning of Ariadne/Koronis as the “the wavy flourish that used to mark the end of a book, a seal of completion”41 also supports this interpretation. But the metaphor of the garland is scattered throughout Le nozze, and not limited to the tale of Ariadne. In the closing chapter another instance of this metaphor effectively seals the completion of the book. At the wedding of Europa’s brother Cadmus with Harmony, the bride is given by her mother, the goddess Venus, a magic necklace, “a snake shot through with stars.”42 Calasso’s reflections make this necklace one with the belt of Venus herself, Ariadne’s crown, the garland given by Europa to the bull, and the garlands, which accompany all Graeco-Roman banquets.43 Within the book, the semantic field of this metaphor stretches to include a range of symbols including “woolen strips”44 and a “veil,”45 as well as Harmony’s necklace and Aphrodite’s girdle.46 These symbols seem to appear to mark the moments in the tale when desire generates literature: “The necklace, the crown, the garland … what once had given rise to whole cycles of stories, the Theban cycle, the Trojan cycle.” 47 For example, in the opening tale, Europa breaks the ice with the bull, setting in motion the bull’s passion, her abduction and mythology by decorating his horns with flower garlands.48 The appeal of this metaphor may also have a linguistic origin, in the Italian word “antologia,” a word of Greek origin, meaning “collection of flowers,” and normally used to refer to a selection of excerpts from great texts of the past. Seen in this light, the garland-crown of literature and the garland-crown that marks the unleashing of desire in Europa’s tale are clearly one and the same. 41

Calasso, Marriage, 58; “il fregio ondulato che contrassegnava la fine di un libro: sigillo del compimento” Calasso, Nozze, 74. 42 Calasso, Marriage, 386; “un serpente trafitto di stelle” Calasso, Nozze, 432. 43 Calasso, Marriage, 109-114; Calasso, Nozze, 130-136. 44 Calasso, Marriage, 283-5; They are “bende” in Calssso, Nozze, 318-320. 45 Calasso, Marriage, 368; Calasso, Nozze, 410. 46 Calasso acknowledges his influence in Simias, but this symbol is also in Nonnus and the Iliad. Nonnus, Dionysiaca (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1940), XXXII. 1-8, and Homer, Iliad (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), XIV, 214-221. 47 Calasso, Marriage, 114; “La collana, la corona, la ghirlanda … ciò che una volta aveva sprigionato interi cicli di storie, il ciclo tebano, il ciclo troiano.” Calasso, Nozze, 136. 48 Calasso, Nozze, 16; Calasso, Marriage, 4.

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When the tale of Europa’s great-grandmother Io49 is first mentioned in Le nozze, Calasso reminds us that this nymph had a special connection with memory. The Greeks for a long time numbered their years with reference to the succession of priestesses in the Heraion of Argos. 50 Towards the end of the book, Calasso resumes this theme to give us a glimpse of another metaphorical garland, the “intertwined rings” (“inanellarsi,” lost in the English translation) of tales of girls that make up mythology: After the age of the heroes, the Greeks measured time by the succession of priestesses in the sanctuary of Athena in Argos. During the age of the heroes the passing of time took its rhythm from the succession of divine rapes. … In those races where divine rape was frequent, so was contact, exchange, and interbreeding with remote and fabulous lands. It was among these peoples that sea routes where opened, kingdoms rose and fell, dynasties migrated. … ƜKRtH: “Or like she who”: such was the recurrent formula in the Catalogue of Women, for centuries attributed to Hesiod, and then lost. … Thus was each new link in the chain of generations opened, as though, for the Greeks, the only form in which the heroic past, from beginning to end, might be recorded, was not that of a genealogy of kings but this linking together of scores of girls and their stories in monotonous and stupefying succession.51

At the cosmic junctures, where heroic families, together with their “storia” (simultaneously “story” and “history”), are born, stands the figure of a girl, simultaneously within and without the story. These girls, with their “vicende inanellate” mirroring, even lexically, the rings of generations, “gli anelli delle generazioni,” are the pearls of Harmony’s 49

Calasso, Nozze, 18; Calasso, Marriage, 5. Calasso, Nozze, 18; Calasso, Marriage, 6. 51 Calasso, Marriage, 355-6; “Dopo l’età degli eroi, i Greci misurarono il tempo sulla successione delle sacerdotesse nel santuario di Hera presso Argo. Durante l’età degli eroi lo scorrere del tempo era scandito dalla successione degli stupri divini. … Nei ceppi dove gli stupri divini sono frequenti, frequente è anche il contatto, lo scambio e l’incrocio con terre remote e favolose. Lì si aprono i passaggi del mare, i regni sorgono e crollano, migrano le dinastie. … ƜKRte: “O come colei … .”: era questa la formula ricorrente nel catalogo delle donne, che per secoli fu attribuito ad Esiodo, prima di perdersi. … Così si aprivano, ogni volta, gli anelli delle generazioni. Non già una successione di sovrani, ma l’inanellarsi di tante vicende di fanciulle, il loro succedersi monotono e stupefacente, furono l’unica forma in cui il passato eroico, da un capo all’altro, accettò di trasmettersi per i Greci.” Calasso, Nozze, 396-397. Unfortunately, the metaphorical power of this section does not come across well the English translation. 50

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necklace, their stories the gems that make up literature. But the greatest amount of stories comes from the races and the families with the highest frequency of divine rapes. Therefore, again, literature emerges as an “anthology,” generated by desire.

VIII. With the help of Aphrodite I would like to take Calasso’s cue and explore the role played in Le nozze by the goddess of love, Aphrodite. Whilst this goddess does not seem to occupy vast space in the economy of the text, her direct and indirect appearances are placed at very strategic points in the development of the narration. Her son Eros, as we have seen, effectively opens the book by helping Europa get on the back of the bull, and the tale of her daughter Harmony as Cadmus’ wife closes it. Furthermore, the name of Aphrodite appears in a couple of mysterious statements in Le nozze. First of all, in the pages on the oracle of Delphi, already discussed, when exploring the theme of representation in the tale of Apollo and Daphne, Calasso also narrates the obscure tale of the nymph Íynx, the origin of possession. This girl sorceress is responsible for giving a love potion to Zeus. 52 It is after drinking this potion that Zeus becomes “possessed by love for Io,”53 and the “all” of the first chapter begins: “And so began history on earth, a history of flight, persecution, metamorphosis.”54 “Possession” is a term dear to Calasso that deserves further discussion. In La follia, where he also discusses the tale of Íynx,55 he underlines that for the Greeks possession was “a primary form of knowledge, born long before the philosophers who named it.”56 He also links it to the nymphidic, 52

Calasso, Marriage, 146; Calasso, Nozze, 170. Calasso, Marriage, 146; Calasso, Nozze, 170-1. 54 Calasso, Marriage, 146; “Allora ebbe inizio la storia sulla terra, fatta di fughe, persecuzioni e metamorfosi.” Calasso, Nozze, 171. 55 In this text, Calasso also provides an insighftul definition of the figure of the nymph, based on its etimology: Nymphs would be “ever-rippling, ever-changing waters, from where a symulacrm suddenly emerges to subjugate our minds”; “quelle acque perennemente increspate e mutevoli dove improvvisamente un simulacro si staglia sovrano e soggioga la mente.” Calasso reminds us that in Greek “Nymph simultaneously means ‘girl ready to become a bride,’ and ‘source’”; “QêPSKƝ significa sia ‘fanciulla pronta alle nozze’ che ‘sorgente.’” Follia, 32. 56 Calasso, Follia, 27. 53

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relying upon Plutarch’s Life of Aristides,57 Aristotle’s Ethic to Eudemos, and Plato’s Phaedrus,58 to explain that it is caused by desire for the nymph and is a sort of madness, as expressed through the Greek word nympholeptos, “taken by the nymph.”59 Let’s see how the tale of Íynx continues. The nymph, transformed into a bird – a wryneck – by an infuriated Hera, is taken by Aphrodite, who fixes her with bonds to a little wheel, creating a little plaything, “the mechanism, the artifice of possession.” Aphrodite will pass this plaything on to Jason, to help him make Medea fall victim to desire. 60 “Erotic possession,” concludes Calasso, “is the starting point for any possession.”61 Possession is thus explicitly consigned by the nymph to the realm of Aphrodite, mother of Eros, and goddess of desire. But a comparative analysis of Le nozze, La follia and La letteratura reveals that possession by the nymph is also possession by “the very stuff of literature … this power that precedes and upholds the word.”62 Nymphs are the matter of literature, offered by them to the gods after they have been conquered. The obscure role of Aphrodite as the “maker” of possession turns the goddess of desire into the originator of literature. Unsurprisingly, then, when Calasso discusses the metaphor of the crown which, as we have seen, is an image of literature, he stretches it to include Aphrodite’s girdle: “in the girdle of Aphrodite, in the crown, in the body of Helen and her phantom, beauty is superimposed over necessity, cloaking it in deceit.”63 It is hard to think of a better definition of literature, and it all starts in the name of Aphrodite. But another name appears in this sentence, and it is the name of a demi-goddess who was promised by Aphrodite to Paris, and whose attractiveness caused the Trojan War.64

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Calasso, Follia, 22-24. Where Socrates appears as “nympholeptos,” when the dialogue opens, on the banks of the Ilissus, next to a sanctuary to the Nymphs. Calasso, Follia, 34. 59 Calasso, Follia, 25. 60 Calasso, Marriage, 147; Calasso, Nozze, 171. 61 Calasso, Marriage, 147; Calasso, Nozze, 171. 62 Calasso, Literature, 32; “La materia stessa della letteratura … potenza che precede e sostiene la parola.” Calasso, Letteratura, 37. 63 Calasso, Marriage, 114; “Nel cinto di Afrodite, nella corona, nel corpo di Elena nel suo simulacro il bello si sovrappone alla necessità avvolgendola nell’inganno” Calasso, Nozze, 136-7. 64 Calasso, Marriage, 124; Calasso, Nozze, 146. 58

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IX. Helen’s Aphrodite – like charm During a conversation with Hector, Helen is made to utter a self-reflexive statement, in which she predicts that her future and that of the heroes that fight for her will be in literature: “Zeus has prepared a woeful destiny for us so that in the future we may be sung of by the bards.”65 But the literary traits of Helen, the demigoddess desired by virtually all heroes who fight in the plain of Troy, do not stop here. In the age of the nostoi, when she gives to Telemachus and his companions a drug so that they can abandon themselves to discourses,66 Calasso also presents Helen as the custodian of the memories of the age of the Trojan War, of the heroes’ names and stories. If in the two excerpts discussed above Helen appears linked to the content of the Iliad, elsewhere in the text her relationship with the crowndeceit of literature appears to be taking place in the realm of form. Following tradition, Calasso casts Helen as the cause of the war and, repeatedly, portrays her as a “traitor,”67 a term he had already applied to Io, “forebear” of this line of traitors.68 But in his writing the term appears to have some positive connotations: All her life Helen did nothing but show herself off and betray. We know little about how she felt, and what we do know is subject to doubt, because she had such a talent for mimicry (another of Aphrodite’s gifts) that they used to call her Echo. So she could easily have faked anything she wanted to. … The only thing she cared about was appearance, and hence poetry too.69

“Show off and betray” are words that ring similar to the ones used to define the miraculous power of the girdle of Aphrodite and the crown of Ariadne, beauty and deceit. A number of clues in this paragraph suggest that Helen could be an image for literature. She has “a talent for

65 Calasso, Marriage, 359; “Zeus ci ha predisposto un destino funesto perché in futuro ci tocchi di essere cantati dagli aedi.” Calasso, Nozze, 400. 66 Calasso, Marriage, 360; Calasso, Nozze, 401. 67 Calasso, Marriage, 68-9; Calasso, Nozze, 86. 68 Calasso, Marriage, 68-9; Calasso, Nozze, 86. 69 Calasso, Marriage, 135; “Nella sua vita, Elena non fece altro che mostrarsi e tradire. Poco sappiamo dei suoi sentimenti, e tutto è soggetto a dubbio, perchè aveva un tale dono per l’imitazione (anche questo un dono di Afrodite) che la chiamavano Eco. Così avrebbe potuto facilmente simulare ogni verità … La sua cura andava solo all”apparenza, quindi anche al canto.” Calasso, Nozze, 158.

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mimicry”70 and can therefore perform “the most dangerous of activities for world order,”71 the simulation that causes Plato to expel the poets. Both in La follia and Le nozze, furthermore, Calasso is fascinated by the “variant” of the flight of Helen claiming that she had never actually made it to Troy, and the heroes had fought for a phantom, 72 again reinforcing the theme of Helen as a deceit, as textuality. The literariness of Helen is presented in fascinating terms in the rewriting of her love life. As well as Menelaus and Paris, Deiphobus and Theseus, he makes of her the woman loved by Achilles, and stresses that of her five husbands she loved Achilles and Paris the most, because they were capable of loving her as a name, a simulacrum, before meeting her in the flesh. Paris had rewarded Aphrodite with the apple purely on the basis of a promise of the goddess, of her mention of the name of Helen. Achilles had gone to war for her, without having met her. Helen is the power of the phantom, the simulacrum – and the simulacrum is that place where absence is sovereign. Of her five husbands, the ones she loved most were Paris and Achilles. And, for both Paris and Achilles, Helen was a phantom before she was a woman. … Despite grim omens, the shepherd of Ida, now recognized as a prince, set off with galleys full of treasure towards that name. As for Achilles, he was the only one of the Aechean leaders who hadn’t rushed off to Sparta to ask for Helen’s hand. He thus set off to a war he knew would end in death for him, for a woman about whom he knew nothing but her name.73

Despite Calasso’s repeated statement that “in Homer, body and phantom coexist tacitly,” 74 he makes the Homeric Helen prefer the husbands who can desire her as textuality, that choose the “simulacrum” of a name over the presence of her body. Having presented Helen, the nymph desired by all heroes, as custodian of the content of literature, and as textuality, Calasso goes one step further. 70

Calasso, Marriage, 135; Calasso, Nozze, 158. Calasso, Marriage, 358; Calasso, Nozze, 399. 72 Calasso, Marriage, 363; Calasso, Nozze, 405. 73 Calasso, Marriage, 123-4; “Elena è il potere del simulacro – e il simulacro è il luogo dove l’assenza soggioga. Fra i suoi cinque sposi amò essenzialmente Paride e Achille. E, per Paride e Achille, Elena fu un simulacro prima di essere una donna. … Accompagnato da tesori funesti, il pastore dell’Ida, ora riconosciuto come principe, partì con vascelli colmi di tesori verso quel nome. Quanto ad Achille, era l’unico dei capi Achei che non fosse accorso a Sparta come pretendente di Elena. Andò in una guerra che sapeva a lui fatale per una donna di cui aveva soltanto udito il nome.” Calasso, Nozze, 146. 74 Calasso, Marriage, 157; Calasso, Nozze, 134. 71

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He contrasts her with Napoleon: “Napoleon began as a novelist: Helen wished to end up as the narrator of her own life.”75 But he suggests that she did not stop at narrating her own life – she may have actually written, or, more precisely, dictated, the Iliad. Helen behaved with the same shamelessness as the Olympian goddesses when ‘she appeared one night to Homer and ordered him to write a poem about the warriors of Troy, wishing to make their deaths more enviable than those of other men; and it was partly thanks to Homer’s artfulness, but above all because of her, that that poem became so seductive [epaphróditon] and famous everywhere.’ Rather than weep over her crimes, Helen, like a sovereign, commissioned the Iliad from Homer to celebrate them. And literature obeyed her command, assimilating Helen’s Aphrodite-like charm.76

In one of the most unforgettable moments of Le nozze, the poet is turned into a mere scribe, while Helen, thanks to her “Aphrodite-like” charm, her ability to generate desire, takes on the role of author, and brings back fugitive gods and fugitive heroes. Through Helen, Calasso emblematises not simply the birth of the Iliad, and therefore Western literature, in desire, but the power of desire to undo the predefinite roles of character, author and text, and foreground in their place the power of literature. The special powers of Helen and her poem are explicitly linked to their being epaphróditon, carrying the enchantment of the goddess of desire, the driving force behind literary creation.

75 Calasso, Marriage, 135; “Napoleone aveva cominciato come romanziere, Elena volle finire come narratrice di se stessa.” Calasso, Nozze, 159. 76 Calasso, Marriage, 132-133; “Elena manifestò la stessa insolenza impudica delle dee, quando “apparve una notte ad Omero e gli ordinò di scrivere un poema sui guerrieri di Troia, volendo rendere la loro morte più invidiabile di quella degli altri; e in qualche misura per l’arte di Omero, ma soprattutto a causa di lei, quel poema divenne così attraente (epaphróditon) e celebre tra tutti.’ Invece di piangere le sue colpe, Elena commissionò, come un sovrano, l”Iliade a Omero, perché la cantasse. La letteratura obbedì al suo comando, assorbendo l’incanto afroditico di Elena.” Calasso, Nozze, 155-6; Calasso, Follia, 34.

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Bibliography Apollodorus. The Library of Greek Mythology. London:Oxford University Press, 1998. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation.Paris:Galiléé, 1981. Calasso, Roberto. L”impuro folle.Milan:Adelphi, 1974. —. Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia. Milan:Adelphi, 1988 (2004). —. “Il terrore delle parole”, in Fondation Charles Veillon ed., Fondation Charles Veillon. Roberto Calasso, Bossigny: Fondation Charles Veillon, 1992, 17-18. —. “La folie qui vient des nymphes”.Res no. 26 (Autumn 1994): 125-132. —. .La letteratura e gli dei. Milan:Adelphi, 2001. —. La follia che viene dalle Ninfe. Milan:Adelphi, 2005. Callimachus. Callimachus: Hymns, Epigrams, Select Fragments. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Cecchetti, Valentino. “Roberto Calasso”, Fiesole, Cadmo, 2006. Colli, Giorgio.La sapienza greca. Milan: Adelphi, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. “La double séance”, in La dissémination, 214-346. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1993. —. “Des Tours de Babel”, in Psyché: inventions de l’autre, 214-346. Paris: Galilée, 1997. —. “La différance”, in Marges de la philosophie, 1-29. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972. Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Fontenrose, Joseph. Python: A Study of the Delphic Myth and Its Origins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Forsters, Kurt, “Introduction to The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity by Aby Warburg, i-xxlv. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the Arts and Humanities, 1999. Fränkel, Hermann: Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1975 (1962). Kamuf, Peggy ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS JESSICA GREENFIELD is a Lecturer in Italian at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on Sicilian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries with particular attention to Giovanni Verga. MARCO SALVIOLI teaches Philosophical Anthropology at the Studio Filosofico Domenicano in Bologna and Fundamental Theology at the “San Domenico” section of the Facolta Teologica of Bologna. He is a member of the School of Anagogy (Bologna) and of the Centre of Philosophy and Theology (Nottingham), directed by John Milbank. Since 2010 he is director of the journal Divus Thomas. His publications include Tempo e le Parole. Ricoeur e Derrida «a margine» della fenomenologia (2006), Bene e male. Variazioni sul tema (2012) and L’invenzione del secolare. Postmodernità e donazione in John Milbank (2013). GIANNI FESTA teaches History of Medieval and Modern Church at the Facolta Teologica of Bologna, Modern Italian Literature at the Collegio San Carlo in Milano and he is Cultore della Materia in Modern Italian Literature at the Cattolica University of Milano. His research and his many publications focus on early medieval authors and on the poet Mario Luzi. SILVIA MONDARDINI earned a doctorate in Contemporary Italian Literature from the University of Bologna with a thesis entitled La Babele dell’Inconscio: Amelia Rosselli, la Lingualatte e le Voci degli Altri and was Visiting Scholar at Oxford University (UK). She is a high-school teacher in Italy (Italian, Latin Literature and History), while she keeps collaborating with the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on the intertextual aspects of Rosselli’s poetry, especially in its relations with Anglo-american literature and her other interests include female writing and translation studies. She has translated Rosselli’s unpublished English poems conserved in the Manuscript Archive in Pavia. She most recently edited new Italian translations from Oscar Wilde (Rusconi, 2012) and Emily Dickinson (Feltrinelli, 2012), and published the book L’infame Sant’Oscar di Oxford, poeta e martire (Liguori, 2008). KATHLEEN GAUDET is a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, working under the supervision of Dr.

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Luca Somigli. She completed her MA in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto in 2009 and her BA in Italian Studies and Linguistics at the University of Victoria in 2008. Her primary research interest is Italian literary realism(s) of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the novels of Umberto Barbaro, Carlo Bernari, Fausta Cialente, Alba de Céspedes, and Alberto Moravia. Among her publications are articles on Bernari’s Tre operai and on Luigi Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore. EMMA KEANE received a PhD in Italian Studies from University College Cork, Ireland in 2011. Her dissertation is entitled Gender, Sexuality and the Male Self: Representations of Twentieth-Century Masculinities in Borgese, Brancati and Moravia. Her most recent publication, also on Moravia’s work, is a contribution for a peer-reviewed special edition on the Italian romanzo di formazione: “Constructions of Manhood, Constructions of Nationhood: Moravia’s Post-War Narratives of Formation” in Quaderni del ‘900 XI. MARIARITA MARTINO has taught for many years at the University of Warwick, where she obtained a Ph.D in Italian Studies with a thesis on the notion of “scopophilia” and its intersemiotic translation from novels to films. She is author of articles on intersemiotic translation, photography, and psychoanalysis, and she has recently co-edited a special issue for the journal Italian Studies entitled “Da Sodoma a Gomorra: Framing Crisis and Rebirth in Italian Cinema.” In the United Kingdom and in Italy, Mariarita has taught at the University of Birmingham and at the University of Siena. In 2008 she has worked as an intersemiotic translator for the Royal Shakespeare Company for the project “Directing the Image.” She is working on her PGCE at the University of Buckingham based in Oakham School (Rutland). MARISA ESCOLAR earned her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley. She is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she works on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Italian literature and culture. She has published articles on Curzio Malaparte and Gabriele D’Annunzio and is preparing a book manuscript on representations and translations of Allied-Italian relations in postWWII Italy. ELENA BORELLI is Assistant Professor at City University of New York, in New York City. Her research interests focus on nineteenth and twentieth century Italian literature. She has published articles on the reception of Dante in the early twentieth century and Vittorio Alfieri. Currently she is

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preparing a book manuscript on the theme of the vita activa and vita contemplativa in the Italian fin de siècle. ALESSANDRA DIAZZI studied Italian Literature (Lettere Moderne) at University of Milan, Faculty of Arts (Università degli Studi di Milano, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia). At present, she is a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, Italian Department, with a dissertation on the reception of psychoanalysis in Italian post second World War culture and literature, supervised by Professor Pierpaolo Antonello. Since 2009 she is editor of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory and Philosophy of Literature. Her research interests include Twentieth Century Italian literature and culture, critical and literary theory, psychoanalysis, relationships between psychoanalysis and Italian Twentieth century Italian literature and culture. Among her publications: “Dalla nevrosi d’autore al linguaggio dell’inconscio. Limiti, questioni e innovazioni della teoria psicoanalitica della letteratura” (in Opera Etica Passioni. Elementi di stilistica e semiotica del testo ed. by Stefania Sini, Milan, CUEM, 2009), “Il sapere inquietante di Elvio Fachinelli: una psicoanalisi ‘anni Settanta’” (Enthymema VII, 2012) and “Il Nom-du-Père: percorsi del desiderio ne L’uomo che guarda di Alberto Moravia” (Between, vol. III, n. 5, May 2013). KATRIN WEHLING-GIORGI completed her D.Phil. in Italian literature at the University of Oxford (New College) in 2010, and she is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. Her current research focuses on maternal figures who fail to correspond to the culturally and socially constructed archetype-stereotype of the mother in twentieth century Italian women writers (Vivanti, Morante, Sapienza, Ferrante). She has published articles on Céline, Gadda, Morante, Joyce and Beckett in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Italian Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, and a monograph entitled Gadda, Beckett and Fractured SelfNarrative is forthcoming with Legenda (2014). ENRICO MINARDI has completed his Laurea Degree at the University of Florence, and earned two PhDs (Paris-IV La Sorbonne, and UWMadison), both in Italian studies. He has been teaching Italian in the US since 2001 in various universities, and now he teaches at Arizona State University, where he is currently holding the position of instructor of Italian and French. He has published two monograph books (about P. V. Tondelli, 2003, and Enrico Palandri 2010), and he is the editor of a

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collection of essays about Enrico Palandri (2009). In addition, he has published many essays on Italian modern and contemporary poetry, particularly from the standpoint of gender studies. ALESSANDRO GIARDINO recently completed his Ph.D at McGill University, where he currently teaches courses in Italian literature, culture, and aesthetics. His articles have appeared in Carte Italiane, Quaderni d’Italianistica, and in several anthologies and art catalogues. His forthcoming book on Giorgio Bassani was awarded the Roberti NissimHaggiag Prize,and will be published in the G. Pozzi Editore Bassani Series. LARA FIORANI lives in London, where she has completed a Masters in Comparative Literature (UCL), followed by a part-time doctorate in Italian Studies. Her Ph.D dissertation Roberto Calasso – Deconstructing mythology: a reading of Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, was the first doctoral study in the UK devoted solely to the work Roberto Calasso. Lara continues to juggle her research interest with a job as a marketing manager, specialising in global sponsorships.