The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature 9781442686175

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THE REVOLT OF THE SCRIBE IN MODERN ITALIAN LITERATURE

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THOMAS E. PETERSON

The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4089-4

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Toronto Italian Studies Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Peterson, Thomas E. (Thomas Erling) The revolt of the scribe in modern Italian literature / Thomas E. Peterson. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4089-4 1. Italian literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Italian literature – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. PQ4085.P48 2010

850.9′008

C2009-907522-9

This book has been published with help from a grant from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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PART ONE: THE LEGACY OF THE POETA VATE

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1 Justice, Modesty, and Compassion in Ugo Foscolo’s Ajace 37 2 Paradoxical Romanticism: Alessandro Manzoni’s Il Cinque maggio 59 3 Pascolian Intertexts in the Lyric Poetry of Attilio Bertolucci 81 4 The Ethics and Pathos of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s ‘Ragioni d’una poesia’ 97 5 Diego Valeri: A Classic Poet in the Modern Era 112 PART TWO: ROADS TO ROME: THE FEMININE VOICE

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6 The Typological Journey of Grazia Deledda’s Canne al vento 131 7 Iconicity and Social Thought in Elsa Morante’s ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ 146 8 Of the Barony: Anna Banti and the Time of Decision 162 9 The Religious Experimentalism of Amelia Rosselli 181 PART THREE: PERIPHERAL NOVELISTS AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 195 10 From Z to A: Italo Svevo’s Corto viaggio sentimentale

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Contents

11 The Pains of the Prophet: Guido Morselli and the Problem of Evil 218 12 Vasco Pratolini’s Il quartiere as a Calque of Purgatorio 253 Conclusion Notes

289

Bibliography Index

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351

337

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge a Research Grant for this project from the University of Georgia Office of the Vice President for Research in 2003. I am grateful to the Willson Center at the University of Georgia for an Assistance in Publication grant. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Thomas E. Peterson’s ‘Justice, Modesty and Compassion in Foscolo’s Ajace,’ Modern Language Notes (MLN ) 116:1 (2001). Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. I thank the Editor of Annali d’Italianistica for the permission to reproduce Chapter 4, which first appeared in Annali d’Italianistica. An earlier version of Chapter 8 appeared in Thomas E. Peterson’s ‘Of the Barony: Anna Banti and the Time of Decision,’ Modern Language Notes (MLN ) 114:1 (1999). Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. I am especially grateful to an anonymous reader from the University of Toronto Press who helped guide me to a clearer and fairer presentation of the authors presented here. I would like to thank the heirs of Attilio Bertolucci and Diego Valeri for permission to reprint their poems in this volume: From Attilio Bertolucci, Opere (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), the following poems: ‘Gli anni,’ 12 lines (p. 99 source, p. 85 this book), and ‘L’undici agosto,’ 24 lines (p. 250 source, p. 89 this book). Permission to reprint these poems is granted by Giuseppe Bertolucci, son of Attilio Bertolucci, representative of copyright holders (6 April 2010). From Diego Valeri, Poesie (Milan: Mondadori, 1967), the following poems: ‘Milano,’ 8 lines (p. 47 source, p. 114 this book), ‘Albero,’ 8 lines (p. 152 source, p. 118 this book), and ‘La metamorfosi dell’angelo,’ 22 lines (p. 324 source, p. 124 this book); and the following selected lines:

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Acknowledgments

10 lines from ‘Sole lontano’ (p. 371 source, pp. 119–20 this book), and 10 lines from ‘Anacreonte, sei vecchio’ (p. 378 source, pp. 126–7 this book). Permission to reprint these poems is approved by Marina Valeri, daughter of Diego Valeri, representative of copyright holders (3 April 2010). I would also like to thank Garzanti Libri for permission to reprint poems of Amelia Rosselli: from Poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1997), the following poem: ‘Il soggiorno in inferno era di natura divina,’ 10 lines (p. 218 source, pp. 185–6 this book); and the following selected lines: 9 lines from ‘On Fatherish Men’ (p. 64 source, p. 183 this book), and 6 lines from ‘Il tuo sorriso ambiguo curvava ogni mia speranza’ (p. 325 source, p. 188 this book). © Garzanti Editore s.p.a., 1997; © 2004, Garzanti Libri s.p.a., Milano.

THE REVOLT OF THE SCRIBE IN MODERN ITALIAN LITERATURE

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Introduction

1. Copyism, Alienation, and the Italian Scribe This is a study of personal revolt and literary conversion among selected Italian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For these authors the writing process is critical to a mutatio vitae that coincides with a redirection of writerly practice away from established cultural norms. In personal terms, the writerly turn involves a reappraisal of one’s views about self, society, and self-expression. This process is heuristic in nature and begins with the author in the role of ‘native informant’ of a cultural group, subject to its linguistic and educational norms, its conventions and protocols. Here the author participates in the literary mode of discourse as a way to participate in a common ethos. As the complexity of literary communication increases, the scribe turns away from this cultural conditioning (or ‘copyism’) and attempts to alter the literary and linguistic tradition by exposing the contradictory nature of the normative within the domain of the arts. Here the author discovers the literary work’s potential to alter the expectations of the reader and be an instrument of social change. As Theodor Adorno writes concerning the hierarchies of postEnlightenment society and aesthetics: ‘One of the primal aesthetic phenomena of the nineteenth century was the stylistic copy. Style-copying is specifically bourgeois in that it promises freedom while simultaneously curtailing it. Everything is supposed to be available to the grasp of the bourgeois artist. But in grasping it, he stoops to copying.’1 Stated in the terms proposed above: only once a scribe has absorbed a tradition does a meaningful innovation become possible; to acknowledge this is to recognize the complex network of social and linguistic practices that under-

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The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature

lies the achievement of personal style. By exploring the links between literature and history, the scribe aims to achieve a kind of universality, to become what Emerson called a ‘Representative Man,’ or indeed a Representative Woman. Such a move is deeply symbolic in and for the culture. In addition to designating a phase in the formation of the individual that is preliminary to revolt, a period of replication of norms and imitation of earlier styles, my use of the ‘scribe’ metaphor aims to emphasize the physicality of the craft of writing. The presence of a writing technology implicates, in the words of Walter Ong, an act of social and noetic ‘distancing’ and an interiorization of written language.2 How the literary scribes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy assume the role of scribe when negotiating their creative impulses concerns a distancing from at least two different verbal regimes: that of the local and oral culture, often dialectal to some degree, and that of the written and standardized national language, behind which the classical tradition of the so-called dead languages retains a certain prominence in the formation of the Italian letterato. As one seeks to formulate a theory of the scribe, therefore, a high value is placed on the author’s involvement in these collective codes while maintaining his or her linguistic authenticity and separateness as an individual artist. Thus, even within an intensely chirographic society, the scribes draw attention to the intimacy of orality. In philosophical terms, the scribe in revolt expresses a processual view of life. In contrast to the philosophies of subjectivism – which define life as the product of internal senses and mentation – and those of objectivism – which affix identity in empirical or positivistic terms – the process view understands life and identity as emerging from networks of relations that possess their own inherent logic and shared planes of communication. Under the process view, the coherence and stability of literary forms depends on their creative flexibility and adaptability to reality. The subject-object divide is more mutable in this view. Literary practice is deemed to be dialogical, even when that concerns the internal dialogue of a solitary individual. Thus the scribe rejects the merely utopian or aestheticist solutions adopted by the avant-gardes; while such solutions proliferate in the modern period, they only serve to reinforce ‘a cleavage between outside and inside, between individual and collectivity, which, while it may have existed to some extent in antiquity, did not have the concise shape it was to take on later under bourgeois auspices.’3 The scribe in revolt is not concerned with literary rebellion and considers questions of social class as peripheral to the actual changes in consciousness that determine cultural evolution. Evolution is under-

Introduction 5

stood in this light as neither constant nor guaranteed, but as a process that is at once ‘slow,’ ‘radical,’ and ‘spontaneous.’4 To say that literary revolt is processual is to affirm its epistemological and ethical nature. The work is manifestly concerned with the author’s knowledge of the world and how this is conditioned by ethics. The revolt is not the result of a program so much as a working-through of the complex process of authorship, a process made more difficult by challenges of history itself in the modern era. At the basis of the moral challenge to the scribe is the experience of alienation. This term is understood as referring to a phase in the construction of the self and to the recognition by the mind of something outside oneself, a reality ‘alien’ to one’s concrete experience of nature and of being in the world. In its composite, alienation is to be viewed in terms of the opportunity and challenge afforded by otherness, in spheres ranging from the religious to the secular to the economic to the psychological. As Kenneth Burke writes, ‘Alienation is a term borrowed from Marx, who borrowed it from Hegel, who borrowed it from Diderot. We use it to designate that state of affairs wherein a man no longer “owns” his world because, for one reason or another, it seems basically unreasonable. Alienation has both spiritual and material aspects.’5 The specific challenge presented by alienation is that of overcoming a sense of moral errancy or loss perceived in oneself and to do so by means of the writerly and humanistic practice of courtesy, humility, and reflection. In this sense, alienation has been a constant in Italian literature from its origins to the present day.6 Yet in the modern era the nature of the crises has changed, and thus so has the nature of the revolt that is occasioned in the author who would attempt to restore reason to the world. 2. History, Ethics, and Style At the heart of this change, beginning in the late eighteenth century, is the notion of history. It is only since 1800, writes Charles Olson, that man has begun to overcome alienation by learning that history is the means to restore the familiar. Citing Heraclitus’ statement, ‘Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar,’ Olson argues that modern man, by seeing his myths as synonymous with his history, has begun to cancel out two thousand years of denial: ‘History is story. It means nothing else as a noun. Heraclitus was the first to use the word ... and he used it as a verb: to find out for yourself.’7 Olson sees Romanticism as initiating a return to the ‘Actual,’ understood as a process ‘“involving

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acts or action” and “opposed to potential, virtual, theoretical, hypothetical, etc.”.’8 The great novelty of Romanticism is twofold: the pursuit of justice as a primary goal of the literary text, and the reliance on personal experience as the means of defining reality. A precursor in this regard was Giambattista Vico, whose view of history anticipated the shifts of Romanticism. For Vico the poet belongs to a specific ethos, emerges out of orality, and reflects the heroic and imaginary stages of cultural evolution. History, like language itself, is understood as a human product. Philology and myth are deemed to be of great importance to the human striving for self-knowledge and religious or spiritual fulfilment. Vico’s extensive research into historical ethnography led him to designate poetry as the original ‘mother tongue’ of humanity; this concept, at once symbolic and realistic, provided him the means to resolve the Cartesian paradox of a knowing object and a feeling subject. After Vico, whose ideation of a poetic logic foresaw a fertile interchange between the areas of philosophy and philology, the study of the poetic documents of the past took on a new validity. The works of Foscolo, Manzoni, and Leopardi possess a strong ‘archaeological’ character. These poets resisted the outward trends of the Romantic movement, even as they contributed to the unique character of Italian Romanticism, which added to the classicism of the Enlightenment a deeper historical and spiritual significance. To oppose the status quo at this time required courage and humility, a strict obedience to craft, and an accurate understanding of the need to integrate aesthetic and ethical issues. As seen in these poets, the role of literature in the life of the emerging nation could be encompassed by a newly didactic and dialogical sense of civic mission. What occurs in these authors is a breakup of earlier imitative patterns, and an emphasis on growth, novelty, and emerging ‘Italian’ qualities. It is the act of reframing literary language that carries these authors beyond the realm of technique and virtuosity to the realm of meaning and appropriateness, to a kind of middle ground with respect to the earlier tradition; in the symbolic characters they choose to reflect back on their habitus as cultural copyists, one sees the seeds of the liberating steps to follow. One of the modes of this emerging modernity is the dialogic. Bakhtin’s dialogism contains enduring insights for the critic who would view literature as a fundamentally communicative act.9 As one seeks within the literary work the critical terms for its analysis and eventual interpretation (this too being a Bakhtinian insight), one seeks naturally to integrate questions of ethical and social context with those of a more

Introduction 7

formal, stylistic and philological nature. If one is to convey the verbal texture of the work along with its thematic development, one must adopt a working procedure that moves from the more external and mechanical aspects of a text to its more embedded and disputable cultural information. The attention to the dialogic mode and to such Bakhtinian topics as multivoicedness, prosaics (the rudimentary attachment to the details of everyday life), and the unfinished, or open-ended, text is highly compatible with the view of an ethical imperative to restore the familiar and overcome alienation. Such a composite thematics is present in each of this book’s chapters. Thus we share the desire voiced by Cesare Segre ‘to recognize among the most important parameters for the evaluation of a literary work that of ethical commitment.’10 As Segre suggests, such a critical emphasis goes against the Crocean aesthetics, which considers ethics to be incidental to the value of the literary text, located in its intuition, its spirit, and its beauty. So too our emphasis on style goes against Croce, for whom style is a purely literary concept, coinciding with the poetic activity of the author, but not with the materiality of the text’s linguistic features. Stylistic critics such as Terracini or Spitzer, Corti or Mengaldo, see the problems of language variation (for example, between the idiolect, the sociolect, and the normative language) as central to literary analysis. The exceptional literary work is seen by such a critic to exist in tension between the subjective and objective modes of interpretation, which are mediated by a theory of the symbol. The symbolic function of language resolves various working dichotomies: dal carattere simbolico discendono la natura soggettivo-obiettiva del linguaggio e ad un tempo la sua funzione espressivo-significativa che si realizza secondo due tendenze necessarie all’atto linguistico: da un lato, il soggetto tende a distinguersi dall’oggetto sul quale opera la sua attività linguistica sino ad attribuire a questo una esistenza e struttura autonoma; ma contemporaneamente, tende a penetrare in esso per ritrovare il proprio essere e i propri modi di essere, espressi in forma intelligibile.11 from the symbolic character descend the objective-subjective nature of language and at once its expressive-signifying function that is realized according to two tendencies necessary to the linguistic act: on the one hand, the subject tends to distinguish itself from the object upon which its linguistic activity is working to the point of attributing to it an autonomous existence and structure; but at the same time, it tends to penetrate the object

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The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature in order to refind its own being and its own ways of being, expressed in an intelligible form.

In contrast to the subjective tendencies that focus on individual psychology and the objective analyses that limit themselves to parsing linguistic structures, the stylistic critic attempts a mediation based on the premise that the uniqueness of the literary work, its ‘style,’ emerges only from a consideration of its formal, structural, and symbolic features.12 In exploring the nature of literary symbolism, Terracini cites the Cassirean notion that language is a symbolic form that, through reflection, finds within itself the law of its structure. He makes clear that for the desired symbolic synthesis to take place, much analytical work must be done: the study of syntax, lexicon, rhythm, and rhetorical figures is essential; so too is a consideration of the Saussurean sign in its twofold nature as signifier and signified. A further concept that emerges for the stylistic critic, is that of ‘distinctive points’ (punti distinti): Il ‘punto distinto’ è quindi una traccia esplicita e diretta del valore simbolico di cui tutto il complesso espressivo è sinteticamente portatore: ma esso a un tempo si manifesta modulato e articolato come viva ‘parola’, anzi come parola storicamente determinata.13 The ‘distinctive point’ is thus an explicit and direct trace of the symbolic value of which the expressive complex is synthetically the bearer: but at the same time it is shown to be modulated and articulated as the living ‘word,’or rather as a word historically determined.

Readers of Spitzer familiar with his ‘philological circle’ will understand that the identification of distinctive points depends on the critic’s ability to sense the particular humanity and pathos of a text. Thus the empathy and intuition of the critic are invaluable. Terracini employs such expressions as ‘moti del cuore’ (motions of the heart), ‘moti dell’anima’ (motions of the soul) and ‘brividi’ (shudders) with surprising frequency. By virtue of its engagement of a theory of symbol, the stylistic criticism we advocate is focused on the communicative nature of the literary text; it is not the kind of formalism often associated with stylistics in which the critic’s exclusive attention is on the signifier at the expense of semantics. 3. The Legacy of the Poeta Vate The rare poet who can alter the course of the national life is tradition-

Introduction 9

ally known as the poeta vate. Beginning with the nineteenth century, one might say that the prophetic figure of the vate, the visionary poet assumed to be the moral conscience of the society, becomes one who contends with prophecy as a metaphor for a deeper understanding of nature and human affairs. In the modern period the vatic vision concerns a new mixture of order and disorder, spiritual harmony and historical complication, natural mysteries and national destinies. It can also be manifest in the acknowledgment of failure, as in Leopardi’s denunciation of the pathetic civic conditions in his country: ‘Se noi dobbiamo risvegliarci una volta e riprendere lo spirito di nazione, il primo nostro moto dev’essere, non la superbia e la stima delle nostre cose presenti, ma la vergogna’ (If at some point we must wake up and take up again the spirit of a nation, our first impulse must be, not the pride and esteem of our present things, but shame).14 Leopardi wrote in 1823 that the collective conditioning of Italian letterati had reached a perilous juncture: Sono oggimai più di centocinquant’anni che l’Italia né crea, né coltiva per se verun genere di letteratura, perocché in niun genere ha prodotto scrittori originali dentro questo tempo, e gli scrittori che ha prodotto, non avendo mai fatto e non facendo altro che copiare gli antichi, non si chiamano coltivatori della letteratura, perché non coltiva il suo campo chi per esso passeggia e sempre diligentemente l’osserva, lasciando però le cose come stanno.15 Today it has been more than one hundred and fifty years that Italy neither believes nor cultivates for itself any type of literature, since it hasn’t produced original authors in any genre during this period, and those authors it has produced, who never made anything except for imitations of the ancients, are not to be called cultivators of literature, because a person who diligently walks through a field and observes it, leaving everything there unchanged, is not a cultivator of that field.

Leopardi’s ethical critique of modernity was supported by an intense philological activity and attention to the artisanal specificity of writing. Excluding all but the lyric genre from the forms of poetry appropriate to his age, Leopardi was able to transcend his own materialism by means of a poetics of indeterminacy rooted in his study of the ancients. Eschewing the errors of his contemporaries (on either side of the Romantic controversy), he reaffirmed the importance of philology in an era when he felt that science was ignored. As one sees in the following entry from the Zibaldone, the poet suggests a connection between the Greek word

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The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature

‘scribe,’ the French ‘greffier’ (recorder, scribe), and the English ‘grief’: ‘graMeu;õ (scriba) – greffier (se non viene da grief ).’16 In the final entry of the Zibaldone, Leopardi wrote as follows about the difficulty of achieving genuine social change: La cosa più inaspettata che accada a chi entra nella vita sociale, e spessissimo a chi v’è invecchiato, è di trovare il mondo quale gli è stato descritto, e quale egli lo conosce già e lo crede in teoria. L’uomo resta attonito di vedere verificata nel caso proprio la regola generale.17 The most unexpected thing that happens to one upon entering the social life, and quite often to one who has grown old there, is to find the world as it has been described and as he already knows it and believes it to be in theory. Man remains stunned to see the general rule verified in his own case.

Though he is not one of the authors studied here, Leopardi casts a long shadow over the literature of the twentieth century, as a poet and commentator on the troubled state of the Italian culture. In the early nineteenth century, as Giulio Bollati writes, the fact that ‘the Italian’ exists is incontrovertible. But what exactly the Italian is is the subject of considerable debate. A key figure in this transition is Foscolo, whose primary literary model was Vittorio Alfieri. As a writer of tragedies, Alfieri opposed tyranny but did so from a largely ahistorical and pre-national context. The same was true of Foscolo’s first tragedy, Tieste (Thyestes, 1797). But in his treatment of the Ajax myth, Ajace (Ajax, 1811), one finds a historical reflection on justice and the doctrine of raison d’état with references to the national question.18 Foscolo’s version of the Ajax tragedy contains his views on the severe limits of justice in human society, and seeks out a system of values – incorporating wisdom, modesty, and compassion – that might compensate for this state of affairs. In writing Ajace Foscolo has gone well beyond the protagonism of Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802), a work in which the preeminence of the passions ultimately steers the protagonist to suicide and the author to an effusion of uneven prose. In contrast to this youthful work, in the Ajace the concepts of sacrifice and altruism are vivid and complex. While Napoleon is not an explicit target of the Ajace, he is criticized indirectly, not as a member of the class of moralists and politicians (in whom Foscolo found a ‘complete and irreconcilable discord between theory and practice’) but as a monstrous tyrant in the Alfierian mode, prepared to sacrifice thousands of Italians in

Introduction 11

order to gain his goal of conquering Russia.19 A pessimistic political vision having debts to Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Vico is combined with a high lyricism, in particular through two characters who fulfil the role of the Chorus: Tecmessa, Ajax’s wife, a figure of modesty and compassion, and Calcante, a seer who advances the message of justice. I illustrate this idea of the choral function through a comparison of the play to Sophocles’ Ajax. Coming at a critical time in Foscolo’s life, between the writing of Dei Sepolcri and Le Grazie, and shortly after the loss of his professorship at Pavia, Ajace has not yet received adequate critical attention.20 The nineteenth century marked the beginning of a quest to universal literacy as advocated by Mazzini, Garibaldi, and D’Azeglio. It is in this context that Alessandro Manzoni represents the foremost moral and linguistic force of the country-to-be, though this fact is ignored by a cadre of experts who have sought to deny Manzoni’s work its political force, as in his support of the French revolution. Such critics have ignored the revolutionary value of Manzoni’s Christianity, which distinguished between the utiliarian and the just, essentially requiring that his literary works be aimed at the institution of a sense of justice through the opening-up of the individual conscience.21 In analysing the ode on the death of Napoleon, Il Cinque maggio (The Fifth of May, 1821), I consider its themes of conversion and Christian piety, also in relation to the poetry of Monti and to Manzoni’s earlier poetry; in the process I consider the logical form and structure of the ode as that of an abduction or imperfect syllogism. Manzoni is not simply a political moderate and linguistic unifier; he is also a firebrand who reflects on the private-public dichotomy and the national destiny. He seeks in the the vatic role the incarnation of a purity that exceeds the boundaries of intellect; his is a vocation to solitude by one who is yet a ‘man of the people.’22 Manzoni, like Foscolo and Leopardi, was educated to the Enlightenment epistemology but came to reject the assumption that reason and logic could dominate Nature. By reinvesting in the cognitive and ethical force of poetic language, these men were instrumental in steering ‘a revolt of human nature against the oppressive power of purely instrumental reason over culture and personality.’23 Despite countless rebellions, strikes, and armed uprisings during the first half of the nineteenth century, the final act of Italian unification was more a fact of diplomacy (a ‘Piedmontization,’ it has been said) than anything else. The ruling aristocracy never intended to destroy the idols of monarchy and empire. Running in parallel to the new nation was the concept and ideal of Italy as it had existed in the literature, the so-called ‘Re-

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pubblica delle lettere’ (Republic of Letters), the aspirational nation of the literary patrimony whose linguistic centre was Florence. This vision of Italy possessed extraordinary longevity and continuity, but also a palpable sense of unreality when juxtaposed to the problems of the new nation.24 Even after the annexation of Rome in 1871, the Italian state and the Catholic Church would struggle for decades over questions of the Church’s involvement in public life. In the general climate of unrest, corruption, and poverty, a decisive juncture is marked by the departure of intellectuals and artists from the mainstream culture to form the bohemian movement of Scapigliatura in the 1880s and 1890s. Robert Dombroski writes, Having traded commitment to a channel of mobility that ended in a secure (with respect to the true goals of the risorgimento) patronage for a commitment to succeed ‘in the real world’ (i.e., to establish a genuinely active link between artistic development and social change), the intellectuals then found themselves excluded from the possibility of achieving the status they felt they deserved, as moral and spiritual guide for the nation they were working for.25

Such was the social reality for Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italo Svevo, and Grazia Deledda, who came of age during this period. In 1905 one sees the passing of the torch from the vate Giosue Carducci to his successor at the University of Bologna, Giovanni Pascoli; at this time European poets had experienced a lowering of stature in the society as a whole, owing to the long-term effects of the Industrial Revolution – which was slower to arrive in the South – and the massification of society. In Pascoli one finds the vatic insights deriving from a devotion to nature and to the rhythms of the seasons. Though he also pursued civic poetry and compiled a substantial number of patriotic poems, Pascoli’s most visionary works are humble evocations of small, intimate spaces and relations. If there was ever a maternally sensitive poet it was Pascoli, for whom woman comes to symbolize the balance between intellectual and material concerns, between obedience to forms and the spontaneity of creative growth, between pattern and matrix, patria and matria. Pascoli was a master of Greek and Latin verse composition, and an unparallelled master of metrical composition in Italian. He never travelled out of Italy, nor was he noticeably influenced by the French symbolist writers, whose advent had marked a kind of rupture between the figure of the author and the society. My comparison of two poems by Pascoli to two poems

Introduction 13

by Attilio Bertolucci offers an occasion to examine the notion of intertextuality; the obvious similarities between the works suggest that Bertolucci derives considerably from Pascoli, viewing nature from the immediate material and biological context of the family setting, in the lyric succession of seasons and generations. With the twentieth century came the expansionist wars in Africa (billed as a way to elevate the Italian worker), interventionism, the ‘mutilated victory’ of the First World War, the rise of Fascism and its state economy of syndicalism and corporatism. With the Lateran Pacts (1929) the Catholic Church enjoyed new secular powers and became an active partner in the repression of Italian civil society. 1938 was the year of the Pact of Steel, the institution of the Race Laws, and the victory of the Spanish Falange. Mussolini’s support of the war against the Spanish Republican movement was the last straw for many Italians and set the stage for Italy’s next civil war, that of 1943–5. Not until the end of Fascism would Italy dismantle its monarchy; even then, however, it did not destroy the icons of monarchy. The decadenti were followed by the crepuscolari and futurists and other variations on the avant-garde, then by the so-called ‘pure poetry’ and hermeticism.26 What these tendencies have in common is the construction of the poem around internal references and the elevation of expressonism over direct social communication. This convulsively innovative generation of poets – including Campana, Rebora, Lucini, Marinetti, Palazzeschi, Onofri, Gozzano, Corazzini – flourished in the years prior to the First World War. As Renato Poggioli writes, their prevailing ‘poetics of the Word’ was already present in Pascoli and D’Annunzio: With its symbolistic concept of the word as synthesis of sound and symbol, that poetry re-enters, actually and potentially, with excess and defect, into a dialect of often extreme and antithetical alternations: D’Annunzio’s word sensation and Pascoli’s word-dream; Saba’s word passion and Quasimodo’s word-sentiment; and, a final paradox, Montale’s word-object and the wordincantation of Ungaretti. Enough to show that, in the poetics of the Word, it is not God who is made Word, but Word made God.27

One cannot read this estimation by the great critic without detecting some irony. Poggioli had expatriated to America in order to avoid Fascist persecution; he could not be indifferent to the exaltation of the Word if that action presumed to defend the regime or embolden the poet to assume a demiurgic or mythic stature, as was obviously the case with D’Annunzio.

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Yet Poggioli is meticulous in his attention to the literary fact; his views of Italian modernity engage a sociology of criticism (in particular the ideas of Vilfredo Pareto), but avoid the coarseness of an ideological critique. As he states in a presentation of translations of four contemporary poets, including Ungaretti and Montale, ‘It is easy enough to reconstruct what might be called the passive tradition of a literature, the tradition known from historic, concrete facts; but, on the other hand, it is almost impossible to give even a valid approximation of the active tradition – that fluid system of changing values, provisional ideals, that vague yet real condition of taste which acts as a kind of unwritten poetics.’28 It is the active tradition that guides Poggioli; in the event of Ungaretti, nothing is said of his allegiance to Fascism; rather his profile is given as ‘the archetype of the mystic poet of illuminations and revelations.’29 Giuseppe Ungaretti’s auto-exegetical essay, ‘Ragioni d’una poesia’ (Reasons for a Poetry), is a composite work of articles and speeches from over a forty-year period. The reasons in question are those that place Ungaretti, as the ‘poet of today,’ in a lineage that includes St Francis of Assisi, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Tasso, Camoëns, and Leopardi, but also in line with such luminaries as Racine, Pascal, and Bergson. The essay, used to introduce the collected poems, Vita d’un uomo, is a chronicle of the poet’s creative development and his response to the perceived religious crisis of the twentieth century. A study of this work allows one to better situate Ungaretti’s poetry in the ethical and aesthetic context of earlier poets – and to see his vatic practice as being complicated by certain historical realities such as the poet’s allegiance to Fascism.30 There are classical mysteries to be investigated in Ungaretti’s work, among them the paradoxical definition of the vatic. Just as the vate may communicate a far-reaching view into the mysteries of nature and the nation, he may also uncover profound religious truths. A contemporary of Ungaretti’s, Diego Valeri, is also strongly influenced by Leopardi, but without the protagonism of Ungaretti’s lyrical ‘I.’ One does not find in Valeri the abstractness and expressionism of so much modern poetry, nor its straining for the absolute. Already an accomplished poet at the advent of Fascism, Valeri staunchly opposed the regime’s linguistic practices of pomposity, violence, and vacuous celebration. In his ‘pure poetry’ – where his integral engagement of the French poets of the nineteenth century, starting with Baudelaire, must be taken into account – one has a continuation of the classical tradition. Valeri’s homage to Petrarch establishes once and for all the need for Italian literary culture after De Sanctis to rediscover the complex spiritual

Introduction 15

symbolism of that most classical of Italian poets. The risks taken by Valeri in his civic life were admirable, as was his dedication to teaching. While faithful to the concrete data of the senses, Valeri was not content with the empirical worldview of the ambient positivistic culture. Rather in his verse composition he sought to combine the impulses of the sensory and emotional world with a mystical involvement in another world, the pristine world of the classical, not without references to Christianity. It was within such a formal nexus and discipline that he approached his customary subjects, which included Nature, Woman, the City (Venice), the Child, and Poetry itself. 4. Roads to Rome: The Feminine Voice A series of nineteenth-century historians noted that severe class divisions were inherent and natural to the Italian people. As Giulio Bollati notes, the moderate (or transformistic) element in the Risorgimento process has been underestimated while the more dramatic and Romantic, Jacobin element has been unduly emphasized.31 Even Mazzini and Garibaldi were prone to supporting the idea of dictatorship, depending on contingencies. A certain strategy of tranformism was defended by Manzoni – a reader of Malthus and Adam Smith – who recognized the laws of capitalism as victorious, but who also feared the political involvement of the Church in an eventual Italian state. Verga too, in documenting the misery of Southern Italy, did so from a patriarchal distance. The emergence of the bourgeoisie as a dominant force in society ensued with roughly two centuries of delay in Italy in comparison to northern European countries. The persistence in Italy of a two-tiered society, of aristocracy and plebeians, long after it had gone from England, France, and Germany was due to its lack of a bourgeois revolution and its slower industrialization (or non-industrialization, if one speaks of the South and the Islands). Naturally this system of separate and unequal was also based on gender. It was only with the twentieth century, as the middle class grew to occupy a central role in Italian culture, that a radical change in the role of women was possible. Having been denied the right to own property until 1865 and the right to attend university until 1874, Italian women only acquired the right to vote in 1945. Thoughout these turbulent years, with the growth of the bourgeoisie, one also witnessed a vast increase in the number of women readers. Walter Ong has written about the literary situation of women as follows: ‘Into the nineteenth century most literary style throughout the

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west was formed by academic rhetoric, in one way or another, with one notable exception: the literary style of the female authors.’ Not educated in schools of rhetoric and Latin, ‘women writers. . . normally expressed themselves in a different, far less oratorical voice, which had a great deal to do with the rise of the novel.’32 If one keeps this status quo ante in mind, one can combine it with the theoretical perspective detailed below to examine the critical role of the feminine voice in the literature of Italian modernism. Aldo Gargani provides a most useful definition of the ‘feminine voice’ phrased in terms of the philosophical or epistemological decisions by which one essentially creates one’s ‘version of the world.’ In his patient development of this topic – which leads to a formulation of a specifically feminine mode of viewing the world – the time of the decision is construed not as a preexisting given, but as a force that binds one to the decision even as one produces it with the decision: ‘Each decision is a grain of time, not a linear distension of time. It is as if every decision constituted a new front of time confronting the startled face of the philosopher. Philosophers have banalized – in terms of the relativism or pluralism of our versions of the world – their temporal qualities, established each time by the decision.’33 Because of the decision’s ‘intransitive’ existence ‘outside the dichotomy of “absolutism” and “relativism,”’ one is confronted in any decision by the presence of the will. If one ignores the will or locates it only in the works of others, there is a breakdown in communication. The masking of wilful involvement hardens into the schemes typical of ‘traditional philosophy,’ centred as it is on ‘time remembered’ and resistant to the inevitable ‘fluctuations’ caused by the decision, which is instead always identical to its own organization, to the totality of its elements: ‘Perceptive representation itself is a decision during which an attitude towards the world proceeds to reunderstand itself, to promote a new expectation, a new way of hoping; as to say, a new way of beginning to be born.’34 Gargani differs with Wittgenstein’s formulation that there is an underlying stratum of ‘representations and images’ to which words make reference: since perception is already a form of logical typing, images too must be decided upon in order to exist. As one comes to recognize the inextricable involvement of the will in the images and representations of one’s ‘version of the world,’ one grows closer to the ‘feminine’ means of construing reality, in Gargani’s terms: La voce femminile...sfronda i fatti, allenta la tensione paranoide con la quale il linguaggio maschile vorrebbe far sentire una necessità dura e

Introduction 17 ineluttabile; infine essa scopre al di là dei fatti, delle tesi e dei sistemi erettio dagli uomini lo spazio della contingenza, dell’intenzione, del senso. La voce femminile scopre la forma modesta e incerta che si cela dietro l’armatura verbale del linguaggio maschile, che ha paura e al tempo stesso vuol far paura. Per questo la voce femminile si distende un una lunga, interminabile interrogazione che va alle spalle degli uomini, dove essi non riescono a vedere perché naturalmente non vogliono vedere.35 The feminine voice [...] gleans the facts, diminishes and slows the paranoid tension that masculine language would enforce as a hard and ineluctable necessity; in the end the feminine voice discovers beyond the facts, theses, and systems erected by men the space of contingency, intention and sense. The feminine voice uncovers the modest and uncertain form hidden behind the verbal armour of masculine language, which is afraid and at the same time wishes to strike fear. For this reason the feminine voice stretches out in a long, interminable interrogation which goes behind men’s backs, where they can’t see, precisely because they don’t want to see.

Such a feminine voice and consciousness – present in authors like Virginia Woolf and Ingeborg Bachmann, but also Proust or Lorca – minimizes flat assertions of fact, favouring the interrogative mode; it avoids the verbosity of researchers who don’t identify ‘the matrix of their behaviour, the instinct that pushes them.’36 Lest the masculine/feminine distinction proposed by Gargani seem a bit heavy, we hasten to clarify that the distinction is not intended to situate male and female writers on opposite sides of a divide. Like the yin/yang polarity in Eastern philosophy, the dichotomy can be useful for conceptualizing the opposition of traits that in the final analysis are possessed by men and women both. To grasp the ‘space of contingency, intention and sense’ as feminine is simply to recognize the possibility of an alternative to the authoritative language that pervades a patriarchal culture, penetrating even into its literature. To elevate the neglected voice of the matria and, on a metaliterary level, the madre lingua of poetry itself as theorized by Vico is to refute the obsessive and defensive linguistic posture critiqued by Gargani in his essay. I apply this notion to four authors – Grazia Deledda, Elsa Morante, Anna Banti, Amelia Rosselli – for whom the capital city of Rome has a special significance and occupies a quasi-mythic stature within the literary work: Rome is a place of solace and refuge, of anonymity and self-discovery. In presenting the feminine voice I keep in mind the sym-

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The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature

bolization of primitive cultures that associates the male with ‘form, type, notion, idea, or pattern’ and the female with ‘matter’ and ‘amorphous, transitory, inessential material,’ a symbolization that continued in the patriarchal societies of the twentieth century. Upon realizing this patriarchal arrangement (as shared by the philosophy of idealism), one can envision, in the words of Jean-Joseph Goux, the rediscovery of ‘a dialectized reunion of the two separated poles’: ‘To think of material organizational potency as including the production of concepts, to make mind the offspring of organized matter, is to explode the paterialist barrier between concept and materiality; the “infinity” of matter is once again brought forth into the idea.’37 Each of the women discussed here explodes the paterialist barrier in Italy by reunifying form and matter. Grounded in a realistic view of the material culture, these feminine scribes are dialectical in their ideas, beliefs, and reasoning. This is not to stress material factors over spiritual factors, but rather to pursue ‘a constant interaction between spiritual and material factors.’38 If the presence of the feminine voice depends on the will’s involvement in the formation of one’s version of the world, this voice is not the sole property of women. Proust is the writer of memory – the dominant mode of the feminine voice – who comes most readily to mind. Nevertheless the libido dominandi of the institutional mode of discourse, or masculine world of power, is foreign to it. The feminine voice is thus distinct from those absolutists and relativists who insist respectively on a single shared truth (absolutism) or the truth of individual convictions above all (relativism); either position ignores the centrality of relations as the basis of knowledge and learning. Does a study of the feminine writers necessarily implicate a feminist discourse? The answer is yes insofar as readers have been conditioned to assume a prevalent male identity or authority behind the Text, as in society: a Cartesian subject, detached from commitments, moral actions, or community. Yet beyond this conditioning, one might answer no, seeing in gender an insufficient index for that feminine writing centred on the pathos and intuition of conversing selves rather than on abstractions, declarations of truth, or ‘isms.’ While the authors of the feminine voice are not feminists per se, the extrinsic changes brought about by feminism in Italy are compatible with the world of empathy and affective thinking the feminine voice approaches intrinsically. It should be no surprise that feminine authors employ conventional narrative structures to expand the presence of a feminine voice in fiction. As Veronica Franco and Gaspara Stampa had done with the sonnet in the sixteenth

Introduction 19

century, these authors subvert the literary institution from within, investing texts with an uncommon tactility and locality of emotion. It is thus by means of an internalized revolt, contained in the moral decisions and relations of the protagonists, that the work gains its novelty. Here one encounters a leitmotif present throughout the book, which is the scribal opposition to moralistic, ideological, and prescriptive approaches to literature. Such a position cuts transversally through the book’s three parts and is articulated without recourse to overarching analytical systems (or binary oppositions); rather it is articulated slowly in a process of personal becoming that gives weight to the sentiments, the ethical response to contingencies, and the ability to dwell in ambiguity and mystery. For the sake of illustration, we provide here three examples of the feminine voice that are not discussed in the book: these are the works of Sibilla Aleramo, Maria Luisa Spaziani, and Paolo Volponi. Aleramo, whose autobiographical novel Una donna (1906) documents the consequences of male sexual violence and infidelity, reflecting realities of both culture and conscience, was a catalyst for a great flourishing of the feminine voice in fiction. At age twenty-five she left her husband and children in the provinces of the Marches, moving to Milan and then Paris, eventually settling in Rome. Aleramo’s tale of her struggle against archaic values and sexual hypocrisy in a village culture is a milestone in Italian fiction. Aleramo is raped at fifteen in the southern Italian town where her family has moved from the north. She is then forced to marry the rapist to save herself and her family from ‘disgrace.’ Her husband then tells her of her father’s infidelity with a woman in the village, destroying her respect for the one man who is her beacon. She is then scandalized by a harmless contact with a young man in the village. The initial trauma catalyses a series of inner transformations revealed through her inner dialogue, directed sentimentally to her infant son, who is born despite the wishes of the father, himself a social parasite typical of the culture of hypocrisy in which philanderers cloister their wives. She will only escape at the supreme cost of losing her son. In Rome there will be air to breathe, but her heart will be broken. She becomes friends with a Norwegian colleague at the woman’s magazine where she works. This woman is an image of light and has come to Italy in part because ‘the Italian God is more relaxing. ... You can serve him without exhausting yourself.’39 She gives the woman an insight into the ‘depth of feeling and directness’ of Northern European culture. Each transition – including that to the ‘stable’ job at the magazine – is depicted tentatively, as another in a chain of sacrifices. But, tragically, the new friend will soon die. And, as

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if by sybilline vision, Sibilla Aleramo herself will never recover from the separation from her son, nor will the clarity and impact of Una donna be found in her later works. Aleramo’s essays on the oppression of women remain the most enlightened of their time. Her fabled encounters with poets, painters, and others, and the emergence of a D’Annunzian superdonnismo recall in some respects the widely read poet Ada Negri, whose paeans to women workers projected a kind of faceless universality and found an ally in the rising ‘ism’ of the Fascio. Aleramo, for her part, is drawn irresistibly in her later years to the Communist party secretary, Palmiro Togliatti. What is remarkable about Aleramo’s autobiographical text is its felicitous combination of the universality of this woman’s condition and the intensely personal and intimate force of its testimony. The second example I mentioned is given by Spaziani, whose poetry is described by Luigi Baldacci as ‘feminine,’ being a poetry of the ‘voice’ and the ‘head,’ of ‘sensoriality’ rather than ‘sensuality.’ Spaziani’s refusal to opt for the informal diaristic verse that had become the customary response among her peers to the ‘uncommitted’ poetry of the hermetics was due to her awareness of the ‘heroic’ dimension of the feminine situation. The high mission Spaziani reserves for poetry is revealed in her late title, ‘Il mestiere di profeta’ (The Profession of Prophet), in which the antithesis between labour and vision is only apparent: the two are related, and achieved, in the practice of poetry. As Baldacci writes, ‘It is precisely the key of femininity which allows one to enlarge and alienate the persona, in that the situation of isolation from the social context is typical of woman (and thus heroic).’40 A third example of the feminine voice is found in Volponi, the novelist and poet of Urbino whose La strada per Roma (The Road to Rome) is a novel of formation and mock-heroic adventure that presents the sexual nature of ‘the time of decision’ and its space of contingency, intention, and sense. This space is at once the interior and affective space of the protagonist, Guido, and the human landscape of the Marches in the 1950s, the matria that was seeing its population and indigenous customs being eroded. Setting out on the ‘road toward Rome,’ as had Aleramo and Deledda, as well as the heroines of Banti’s Il bastardo and Un grido lacerante, Guido entertains and represses homoerotic sentiments. His road to Rome is one toward anonymity, the threat and possibility of facelessness: liberation from the strait-jacket of provincial mores but also the loss of that familiarity. Guido is the bourgeois member of a pair of leftist friends for whom Urbino is the loved and hated space of their daily lives. His stated project is that of constructing or finding ‘una morale’ (a set

Introduction 21

of morals). As he is doing this he hires a lawyer to redraft his dissertation to make it acceptable to his examiners. It is primarily the sexual tension and ambiguity of Volponi’s characters, and the intuitive magnetism of Rome as the destination of the pilgrimage of discovery, that allow us to assess it in terms of its fundamental androgyny. Here as in the other feminine voices, one finds a purposeful redimensioning of the notion of virility. Furthermore, Volponi’s critique of the male-dominated political and corporate-industrial cultures of Italy stands explicitly on the side of those who have been excluded. One might say that the feminine voice takes its point of departure from the chasm that exists between the matria, the motherland of the provincial culture, and the patria, the overarching institutional and state apparatus. This is a problem in the early part of the twentieth century, when the post-Risorgimento crisis persists through the Giolitti period, into the inferno of the First World War and through the debacle of Fascism. And it remains a grave problem in the years after the Second World War when, despite the hopes of the Italian people for national renewal and increased economic prosperity, women continued to be excluded from full economic and political participation in the national life. Authors such as those in our study came to see this estrangement as analogous to other exclusions, such as those suggested by Octavio Paz in his formulation of the ‘Other’: peasants, women, oppressed nationalities, submerged cultures, Dostoevski’s underground man – the Other that each one of us constitutes, sexuality and its contradictory complement: the aspiration toward the divine, the beliefs that we call irrational, poetry – in a word, all the areas where exception and difference are the rule, the world of Others and the Other. The multiple other that Marx was unable to recognize.41

The feminine voice in poetry and fiction would share in many respects the model of the ‘exception’ represented by this ‘multiple other.’ As Paz suggests, the adherence to a political ideology is not an adequate means to negotiate one’s otherness or to realize one’s selfhood or religious vocation or artistic potential. Yet the documentation of social differences, of class and language, gender and creed, must underlie the literature of revolt. A major issue in this regard is the Italian geography and what Antonio Gramsci called the ‘Southern Question,’ predicated on the notion that Northern Italy had essentially turned the South (including Gramsci’s home island of Sardinia) into a colony which it exploited as it saw fit.

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Sardinian novelist Grazia Deledda was an autodidact who gained literary recognition despite the powers of the patrie lettere, including the reigning authority of Italian letters, Benedetto Croce. In her extensive opus one sees the vital role women play in Sardinian culture, especially in terms of what is known as ‘shadow labour.’ There is a rapid progression in Deledda’s career away from the fatalism and sentimentality of her early stories and novels – such as La via del male (The Way of Evil, 1896), Elias Portolu (1900), and Cenere (Ash, 1903) – to the typological allegories of such classic novels as Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind, 1913) and La madre (The Mother, 1919). It is fair to say that Deledda’s fiction has not received an adequate treatment by critics because of a failure to consider the author’s progress, and a failure to integrate the ethno-linguistic elements with the symbolic and religious elements in her work. The Deleddian primitive is allegorical, given the interconnection between the literal and symbolic planes of narrative discourse. In her final published book, the posthumous Cosima, o quasi la Grazia (republished as Cosima), Deledda describes herself as a young and passionate woman with Libyan and Hamitic features. In her artful assertion of otherness, Deledda remains unexcelled as a stylistic master of the literature of exception. If there is one ‘ism’ that serves to mediate between the verist and symbolist strains of Deledda’s work, it is Romanticism, understood in its religious and prophetic dimensions, its medievalist reclaiming of Dante’s Comedy as an allegorical model, and its Christian and providential dimension as well as the element of the sublime, evident especially in the landscape. The actuality of the Christian sacraments throughout the Church year, as practised in a locale separated from Rome not simply by the Tyrrhenian Sea but by radically diverse histories, becomes a touchstone for Deledda in the years after 1910, during which time she returns repeatedly to the mystery of the liturgy as a constitutive part of the human landscape she is committed to exploring, and does so without the stylistic tics and trite psychological portraits of the earlier production. In Dantean terms, the early belief in destiny and fate is transformed into a manifestation of the free will that is free because it is detached from the imprisoning passions. Anna Banti bases her late novel Un grido lacerante (A Piercing Cry, 1981) on the final years of her marriage with the celebrated art historian Roberto Longhi. This autobiographical novel is at once a loving testament to her former husband, involving his death and its disquieting aftermath (also from the standpoint of his intellectual ‘estate’), and an autonomous work of fiction. To be precise, it is a daring form of historical fiction which redefines the art object in terms of the ‘sacred place’ of

Introduction 23

the protagonist herself, who, after the midpoint of the novel, when the Master dies, must confront alone the period of mourning and service to her husband’s memory, including the supervision of his archives. To better comprehend this late work, I turn to the early novel Il bastardo (The Bastard, 1943), a disturbing portrait of a Southern family and their road to Rome, their move away from the latifundia estate of the Baron of Omomorto, after he has created a second family and abandoned his wife to her internal demons. Here the author’s magical realism carries us inside the psychological complexities of its heroines, particularly Cecilia, whose battle to educate herself and gain a place in the masculine world of science and technology has tragic consequences similar to those endured by her mother. By covering a span of thirty years in Banti’s career, our treatment seeks to underline the constancy of Banti’s prolific contribution to the Italian literary tradition, a tradition she dignified by siding with the artist, the mystic, the child, and the martyr. Roman novelist Elsa Morante shares a profound empathy with each of these groups, and further exemplifies a revolt founded on the exception to the norm. Morante’s novella ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ (The Andalusian Shawl) provides a parable of a Sicilian woman, artist, and mother, who like Aleramo, Deledda, and Banti, and their characters, moved to Rome. Morante’s dedication in her fiction is to the mother and child, the downtrodden and the eccentric. Her political sympathies are with the marginalized and oppressed, including such geniuses as Mozart, Rembrandt, Joan of Arc, Bruno, Rimbaud, Gramsci, and Simone Weil. Morante’s mercurial personality was that of a moody and sometimes reclusive dreamer who identified with the victims of social injustice. Her sense of alterity gravitated naturally to the fantasy world of the child and the fable, a genre which reveals important truths, though – as the classical definition has it – the fable recounts events that never happened and never could happen. The fable can be inscribed in the world of a character, as is the case in Morante’s novella, where the child Andrea is seen to live in the world of his imagination, which slowly evolves into a devout religious life until, on the threshold of adolescence, the boy revolts against the mores of the dominant culture. This fictive procedure is undertaken by Morante through a particular form of semiosis or figuration known as iconicity. In the iconic scene the imaginary world of the protagonist is exteriorized and concretized in texts, rituals, tableaux, and other silent representations of his or her inner world. While none of the four authors studied in Part Two had children (Rosselli was never married), for Morante this was one of the great sorrows

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of her life. This lack, which might be called the Yerma problematic, is dramatized in the often tragic parent-child relations represented in her fiction. It has been said that Morante’s prose is reminiscent of the nineteenth century, but in a broader sense her romanticism, which sees narrative as the inevitable engendering of myth, suggests the ethos of ancient Greece or the proto-Christian world. Morante is lodged in a figurative tradition, like that of Tasso; like that great poet, Morante commands the contents of myths and fables in an openly positive and spiritualizing sense, by means of her own aesthetic militancy, which presupposes the necessary interruption of those romantic motifs by the modern world in which the experience of alienation is undeniable. Poet Amelia Rosselli shares the situation of feminine isolation announced by Spaziani, and the heroic response to it by means of her poetic persona. The elusive coherence of Rosselli’s poems is rooted in exorbitant phonetic patterns and ‘highly personal pathways, which follow an intimate melody and the flareups of the psyche.’42 Rosselli’s inner landscape is populated with absent interlocutors; these include presumed lovers and the divinity, as well as her numerous literary sources, such as Campana, Montale, Rimbaud. Given the prevalence of the ‘dialogue in absentia,’ that genre can be considered as a kind of organizing structure to a highly heterogeneous and centrifugal body of work. The terrible impact on the poet of the assassinations of her father and uncle, Carlo and Nello Rosselli, in 1937 constitutes the paradigm of this absence, and is a trauma that remains with her until her suicide in 1996. Trained as a musician, adept in French and English, the young Rosselli quickly understood poetry as the key to her self-realization. The forms of her musical-metrical and performative evolution are experimentalist, but not in the fashion of Italy’s neo-avant-garde. The difference lies in Rosselli’s embrace of process, as opposed to the aesthetics of the aleatory, and her persistent sense throughout her work of a Christian vocation. This is apparent in the forms of supplication, lamentation, and praise that underlie what first seems to be a poetry of fragments (albeit one rich in religious symbols). The enigmas of the Rossellian text are best negotiated by readers prepared to enter into her world and experience her language as such, that is, as an expressive whole not reducible to its phonetic, syntactic, and lexical-semantic components. As one comes to imagine a fuller embodiment of that place, that ‘elsewhere’ from which the poem emanates, one also grasps the femininity of Rosselli’s voice in the terms laid out above. Given her dedication to the minimal and chance events of quotidian existence – to the space of contingency, intention, and sense –

Introduction 25

one can even speak of the prosaics of Rosselli’s text. It is on the palette of ordinary language that the singular event of the poem is formed, in the sensory-musical experience of its rhythmic structure and in the ethical self-assertion of the author. Prosaics, as stated by Bakhtin scholars G.S. Morson and C. Emerson, refers to ‘a form of thinking that presumes the importance of the everyday, the ordinary, “the prosaic.”’43 This form is of special importance in the novel, but is by no means restricted to that genre. It was Bakhtin’s conviction that an emphasis on ‘poetics’ in literary criticism privileged poetry and diminished prose. In our use of ‘prosaics’ we mean to share Bakhtin’s view that literary genres possess linguistic and aesthetic features that exist independently of the stylistic imprint of the author. Prosaics allows one to elevate the quotidian, affective, and contingent details within the text; our advocacy of prosaics extends beyond Part Two of this book, insofar as the scribes in Parts One and Three are also committed to the literary text’s self-sufficiency and its communicative engagement with the world. As we discuss in section 6 of this Introduction, such an advocacy is based on the conviction that no overarching or universal critical method exists to adequately decode the literary text. 5. Peripheral Novelists and the Problem of Evil In Part Three, I present three novelists from the cultural periphery who focus on the problem of evil. After the Treaty of Versailles (1919), when Italy acquired Trieste and the Alto Adige region, the status of being a new citizen living near a new national boundary took on special importance. The topographical periphery became ‘central’ to the national literature; as the nation realized its military and economic marginality with respect to the rest of Europe, its own margins and heteroglossia acquired an increased symbolic importance. What Gramsci envisioned as the ‘deprovincialization’ of Italian literature would involve a redimensioning of the classics, a reevaluation of the genres of popular literature, and an interweaving of the realities of the province, nation, and continent. In the Fascist period, such a literature could only exist in extreme tension with the state, which exercised oppressive control over the national cultural life. While the powers of the centre considered the periphery as no more than the hinterlands – the site of the exotic, the quaint, the antiquarian, the subaltern – Gramsci understood its heterogeneity as the source of national wealth and sustenance. In addressing literary deprovincialization, therefore, one needed to recognize the biases against it

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The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature

and the means by which a hegemonic centre seeks to program its scribes, to enforce an illusory cultural uniformity and suppress the multiformed Other, and to do so on the level of writerly form. For Italo Svevo the standard Italian language retained an artificial, constructed quality. Accused of writing awkwardly, he made a considerable contribution to the deprovincialization of the national literature. A student of Darwin, of the scientific works of Binet, Weininger, and Wassermann, of Schopenhauer and Renan, Svevo inscribed himself into the discourse of the self of Italian modernism from the remote vantage point of Trieste, a major port sitting at the crossroads between Europe and the East, between Italy and Mitteleuropa. As Freud’s first Italian translator, Svevo represented a culture which was historically the colonizer of Italy and was himself the figure of the outsider sceptical of cultural-linguistic assimilation. In his final work, the short novel Corto viaggio sentimentale (Short Sentimental Journey), one reads of the train voyage from Milan to Trieste of a certain Giacomo Aghios, another of Svevo’s alter egos, like Zeno Cosini in La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience), an aging merchant who confronts a series of speculative problems in what is otherwise an uneventful journey. The densely allusive work is informed by a proliferation of courtly and pseudo-erotic imagery including a rich intertextuality with Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. I assess the Corto viaggio as an intriguing post-Zeno development with which Svevo – after his period of lying fallow after the success of his great novel – eschewed the self-enclosed, autoironic, and sceptical world views of Zeno Cosini and embarked on a more adventurous and spiritually affirming work. There is perhaps no more fitting successor to Svevo’s literature of irony and ambivalence situated on Italy’s boundary with Mitteleuropa than Guido Morselli. At once a scholar and critic of literary modernism (which had a minor impact in Italy) and a sceptic of its positive impact on the novel, Morselli does not associate Svevo with that movement (of Kafka, Proust, Joyce, etc.) but with an earlier, more nineteenth-century mode. He describes Zeno as ‘a masterpiece of that narrative inspiration which was once called intimism and psychologism,’ and further describes Svevo’s novel as ‘crepuscular.’44 Morselli is emphatic in rejecting the critical notion that Freudianism can provide the interpretive key to Zeno (which he does not consider to be Svevo’s finest work). Svevo, on the other hand, was also a sceptic and had distanced himself from Freud in ways that Morselli did not fully appreciate. In any case, it is clear that both Svevo and Morselli reject the notion of overarching systems

Introduction 27

(whether Freudian, Saussurean, Cartesian, Hegelian, or Crocean) that would cancel out the problem of evil. As with the authors of feminine voice, theirs too is a valuing of the sentiments as antidotes against totalizing systems that would explain away chance events or the importance of ethical responses to them. Each of Morselli’s eight novels involves a radical experimentation with the genre. Ignored by the publishing establishment during his life, his novels became a sensation shortly after his suicide in 1973. Philosopher, parodist, scientific journalist, novelist, and theologian, Morselli lived most of his life in Varese, near the Swiss border. The cross-cultural, often fantastical direction of his novels qualifies him as a powerful dissenter to the status quo. As a philosopher Morselli attempted to balance the Catholic pessimism of Pascal, the scepticism of Montaigne, and the Epicureanism of Lucretius. Realismo e fantasia (Realism and Imagination, 1947) is a series of dialogues presented as an ‘Itinerarium mentis in philosophiam.’ The little-known work invokes the philosophies of Leibniz, Marcel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and the poetic perspectives of Poe, Valéry, and Novalis. In these nine dialogues the Socratic figure of Sereno, who speaks to an I-figure who transcribes their conversations, denies he has developed a rigorous system. However, in the course of his remarks, Sereno does focus on the philosophical modality of the simploche (or simplex), the ‘I am,’ being the fusion of the human subject and predicate that combine to make self-consciousness. In the simploche (a kind of inverse of the phenomenologists’ epoché), the ‘All’ and the ‘Individual’ combine to form the ‘Logos’; the ‘I’ and ‘Existence’ are unified in ‘Thought.’ This conjunction of opposites is understood as a finite opposition, a complementarity. Our discussion of Realismo e fantasia focuses on the simploche as a psychological and ethical construction present in Morselli’s first-published novel, Un dramma borghese (A Bourgeois Drama, 1961). The book is the sordid account of a father’s relationship with his eighteen-year-old daughter, whom he barely knows. This study in a pathological relationship is centred on the father’s inability to properly mourn his dead wife, or to share that process with his daughter, whose emotional confusion escalates over the course of the claustrophobic novel (most of the ‘action’ occurs in two adjoining hotel rooms) into desperation. How such a story is told is the novelty of Morselli’s scribal experimentation. One has a dense weave of imbricated temporalities: memories of self, self-projections of a weakened ego, fantasies and escapist flights to another time and place. The book is overdetermined in this sense: the I-narrator – whose name is not given – attaches deeper mean-

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ings to objects and relations than those objects and relations justify. His associative and rationalistic mind is awash in surrogates, substitutes, and fetishes; he possesses – in Freudian terms – an intensely egoistic personality. In this way, the I-figure in Un dramma borghese is ironically similar to that of Zeno: an unreliable narrator with intimistic orientations. Novelist Vasco Pratolini emerges from the working-class centre of 1930s Florence. As an artisan typographer already at work at age fourteen, Pratolini represents ‘the periphery of the centre.’ His familiarity with Dante began in his childhood as he read the carved stone plaques of citations from the Commedia scattered about the centro storico. His novel Il quartiere (Tale of Santa Croce) is studied here in terms of its intertextuality with Dante’s Purgatorio. Pratolini, the Tuscan populist and onetime member of the Fascist left, was a student of Florentine history accustomed to drawing parallels between the violent conflicts of the Middle Ages and those of the present day. The figural use of Dante is apparent throughout Il quartiere, such that the reality of the quarter of Santa Croce seems to recapitulate in its moral geography and temporal progressions the mountain of Purgatory. In the structural interweaving of episodes the plot achieves great economy, mixing minor episodes with the challenges faced by Valerio and his associates. The continuous ascent of Il quartiere includes some surprise descents, delusions, and losses; the moral and physical challenges confronted emerge naturally from the interpersonal contexts and relations as the protagonists’ lives are situated within the larger political reality. The actions of the Fascist regime are perceived imperfectly by the characters, whose hopes and needs tend to colour their fragmentary understanding of world events. Ultimately one is left with a moral drama driven by the centrality of free will and the positive spiritual development of the characters in search of a harmonious polity. Pratolini’s intertextual borrowings from Dante are not without deviations from the medieval poet.45 While he has assimilated Dante’s vocabulary, his figural representations and view of Florentine history, Pratolini does not presuppose Dante’s metaphysics or understanding of Christian doctrine and dogma. 6. A Note on Method In the first half of the twentieth century, the most important critical thinker in Italy was Benedetto Croce. Croce’s aesthetics centred on the intuition, as in his juxtaposition of the ‘poetry’ of Divine Comedy to its ‘non-poetry,’ a putative separation of Dante’s poem into moments of

Introduction 29

lyric brilliance and the supporting architecture. For Croce the literary product was successful if form served content; his preference was for a stable, balanced, and harmonious text. One could argue that Croce’s mental constructs adversely conditioned his views of mannerist, Romantic, and decadent poetry. Certainly his negative commentaries on such authors as Tasso, Leopardi, Pascoli, and Deledda demonstrate more than a lacuna in his method. The two great novelists contemporary to Croce – Svevo and Pirandello – were exempt of any influence from him. Croce’s idealist historicism is dismissive of the materialistic elements of literature, from questions of social class to the categories of rhetoric and genre. While his method was vastly influential during the first half of the century, it was inevitable that other critical methods would arise to respond to the changing ethos: among these many methods (ranging from the psychoanalytical to the semiotic, from Marxism to formalism), the one of greatest interest to us is stylistic criticism, owing to its combination of rigorously philological, text-based study, humanistic flexibility, and tolerance of eclecticism.46 I would include under this rubric the eclectic critic Giacomo Debenedetti, who, like many of his peers, owed much to Croce. Debenedetti identified a root problem in Croce’s subjugation of literature to philosophy and to morality, locating in the Neapolitan critic ‘the seal of a deeply felt and gentlemanly evasion, of a reserve that has disgust for the inflated motions of the affections.’47 Debenedetti offered an intuitive and text-based criticism that probed into the work for the clues it could provide on ‘how to read’ it. This was a sign of respect to such modern authors as Baudelaire or Proust or Saba whose radical novelty with respect to their predecessors had all but eluded Croce. If one is to reassess the Italian literature of the last two centuries, one must examine the history of the criticism and of the political climate as well other socio-historical parameters such as the changing demographics of the readership and the involvement of Italian authors with other national literatures. Moreover one must confirm the importance of style in literary interpretation. It is in this spirit that the works examined here are considered both extensively, as messages about the world and the self, and intensively, as the encoded and self-similar instructions for use of those messages. Such an operational duality is fundamental to communication theory, which holds that lexical and logical codes have limited and interpenetrating fields of mutual relevance and significance.48 It is also a central tenet to the brand of stylistic criticism described earlier in this Introduction. Such a stylistics, informed by a theory of symbol,

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looks within the text for the cues to the text’s interpretation. Because of its non-allegiance to historicist, formalist, or ideological criticism, stylistics remains flexible and able to support a view of the literary discourse in which objective and subjective modes are interpenetrating. Because of its neutrality, it is able to reveal the biases of a certain intellectual class and to suggest that a more rigorous study of those works of modernity that have been overlooked or swept aside might offer a means out of the immobility of postmodernity. As Raymond Williams suggests, ‘an alternative tradition’ of modernity might ‘address itself [...] to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.’49 In order to clarify our notion of stylistics and relate it to concrete historical modes of social communication, we cite an essay by Giovanni Nencioni in which the linguist argues that style has been overly identified with linguistic difference (scarto), a practice that has distanced the code of literary ‘style’ from that of ordinary language. This has led to an extreme formalism weakened by its loss of contact with semantic context. Such a trend has positioned the poetic message opposite the pragmatic message, and thus ignored poetry’s communicative thrust. In addition, the loss of touch with day-to-day language and linguistics has resulted in a polemical counterreaction on the part of the defenders of ‘content.’ Nencioni finds fault with his fellow linguists for having ignored the importance of the theory of communication in their own discipline. In assessing the phenomenology of poetic form, Nencioni suggests that literary genres emerge from linguistic genres or ‘paradigmatic syntactic structures’ present in all languages. These are frequently archaic, being rooted in age-old anthropological practices. One such genre or mode is the ‘dialogue in absentia,’ as one finds in Leopardi’s ‘A Silvia’ or in Petrarch’s poems addressed directly to the dead Laura. Such a dialogue ‘is not a constitutive act of a social relation’ as one might find in a letter (where the addressee’s point of view and possible response are assumed by the terms of the message), since the rules of ordinary language-use do not permit one to address an absent party. One does find exceptions to this exclusion in daily life, such as the lamentations or addresses to the dead, or the public and private practice of prayer. One also finds them in literature, as in ‘the appeal to the divinity,’ or the invocation of the Muses in epic poetry. What interests us in Nencioni’s ‘anthropological poetics’ is its ability to reconnect contemporary literature to ‘remote forms of social communication.’50 This is essential for the literature of revolt, since its approach to the experience of alienation presupposes an emergence from actual social forms. The promise of such a poetics is the

Introduction 31

revelation of more complex modes of communication that are impervious to a merely formalistic analysis, on the one hand, and to a purely thematic analysis on the other. Within the broadly defined field of stylistic criticism we are proposing, we would include the field of cultural studies represented by Raymond Williams, as well as the anthropologically informed approach of cultural materialism. I refer in this regard to the distinction between etics and emics used by ethnographers. Originally derived from the distinction between phonetics and phonemics, these terms concern the source and nature of scientific descriptions and analyses. Etics relies on assessment and measurement by means of external observers; emics relies on the experience of native informants.51 Etics deals largely with behaviour, while emics deals mostly with thought or mind; the etic versus emic distinction is useful to the literary critic because it requires that one consider the external features of a text and the world it evokes prior to any discussion of its subjectivity or deeper significance.52 By first having the experience of an external observer, one is better prepared to discuss the internally sensed cultural meanings and values. If one skips over the etic mode, one risks losing contact with the referent. As Marvin Harris asserts, ‘To insist on the priority of mind in culture is to align one’s understanding of socio-cultural phenomena with the anthropological equivalent of pre-Darwinian biology or pre-Newtonian physics,’ or ‘intellectual infantilism’; in contrast, the diverse meanings that emerge from speech acts are decisive: ‘The difference between etic meanings and emic meanings of speech acts is the difference between the conventional or “code” meaning of a human utterance and its deeper psychological significance for speaker and hearer respectively.’53 In the field of literature the comparable error is to ignore the physical and empirical data of experience and stress a metaphysical or mental concept of a work’s meaning. To apply the etic/emic distinction to literature does not mean to separate speaker from hearer, author from reader; it does mean to distinguish between the etic code on the one hand and the emic meaning of the utterance on the other. The meaning requires, or is caused by, the code, but the code is not required or caused by the meaning. Historicist and idealist schools of scholarship have tended to minimize the etic for the sake of the emic; structuralist, poststructuralist, and formalist schools have tended to do the opposite. The emic/etic distinction is important if one is to avoid the intentional fallacy – the assumption that one can know the author’s intent – and avoid the confusion of authors with first-person narrators and

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characters. Since this study is concerned with the figure of the author, it maintains the strict separation between author and narrator, even in autobiographical works. To focus on the author is to minimize the purely synchronic and semiological criticism that isolates the work as an autonomous mechanism (a variation of which is the reader-centred criticism of ‘reception’). By setting etics before emics, one also addresses writing as a technology, a code of accepted conventions, and a sanctioned means of cultural transmission.54 Within these parameters one can ask: What are the linguistic, geographical, socio-political, bio-bibliographical contexts that delimit the author and text? What specific horizons of expectations are in force? What technical constraints are observable? What standards of taste? Are such contexts, constraints, and standards peculiar to this author, or do they display similarities to other authors, such that one might speak of imitation, cultural transmission, and continuity of tradition? The responses to these etic questions suggest emic points of interest and further questions. The transition from a behavioural or technical discussion to one of sentiments and ideas is subtle and nuanced. As one explores the question of mutatio vitae and of a turn that represents a vertical integration between the conscience of the author and the empiria of the world, one forms hypotheses about the larger meaning of the work, broader questions about its context and culture. We might sum up the importance of cultural materialism to the stylistic critic as follows: while the text is rooted in material process, it exceeds the boundaries of materialism. Thus the historical realities present in fictional and poetic works are mindful of the ‘places of memory’ of actual history, but they preserve their transcendent autonomy as well. George Steiner has argued in this sense for the value-inherent, ethically and socially contexted nature of any work of art, in opposition to the nihilism and anti-historicism of our current ‘age of theory.’55 Steiner writes that the modern period begins with neoclassicism, a period of affinity ‘between the poetic and the programmatic-critical articulations.’56 In Italy this is followed by the Romantic period and the age of professionalism, which brings an increased gravitas to the intellectual disciplines and a continued tendency to form literary Arcadias or other escapist endeavours that separate the literary enterprise from the social and civil life of the nation. The Italian scribe in revolt turns against such idyllic representations and rejects attempts to officialize literature or critical theory. The fate of the scribe is seen generally to endure an initial position of apprenticeship and obligation to the rigours of a trade, to

Introduction 33

the acquisition of knowledge and construction of one’s life in the world. Inevitably there is a dissatisfaction that emerges regarding one’s relation to the institutions of literature and the arts. The presence of ‘scripts’ or sanctioned narratives and modalities of expression – including the literal technologies of writing and publishing – is modified as part of the author’s pursuit of the truth, especially when that pursuit requires a rejection of the former knowledge. The scripts of literary convention and those of everyday life are the raw material for the scribe’s venturing forward into the actuality of history. Amidst the ruins of Italy’s classical past and the contradictions of its social structure, and the static nobility of its literary language, the scribe shapes new hypotheses, animates new characters, forms hybrids and novel fusions of archaic linguistic and literary genres, all in response to the dissatisfaction. By transcribing the ‘master’ texts of the past – even if only in memory – the scribe finds a way to break the mould, to overcome the experience of anguish and trauma, and to assume the mantle of authorship.

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PART ONE The Legacy of the Poeta Vate

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1 Justice, Modesty, and Compassion in Ugo Foscolo’s Ajace

Vate era sommo, ed avea cinto l’armi, E alteri come il brando eran suoi carmi. – Silvio Pellico1

Whitehead’s discussion of ‘Understanding’ in Modes of Thought identifies the nineteenth century as the period of final resolution of Renaissance ideas, and consequently of Greek thought, a gathered edifice whose aesthetic limitations are too seldom remembered or applied critically to its historical recurrences.2 If human understanding is to be expanded in the modern period, says Whitehead, the multiple as well the unitary, the confused and manifold as well as the singular and orderly, must be included in our intellectual and aesthetic models. ‘In the history of European thought,’ he adds, ‘the discussion of aesthetics has been almost ruined by the emphasis upon the harmony of the details.’3 In Italy the transition out of neoclassicism into the Romantic period is multiple and confused in this way, a fact complicated by Italy’s perennial classicism and identity as the cradle of the Renaissance. All too rarely have scholars given sufficient weight to the radically eristic nature of the Romantic revolt; literary works whose details are not harmonious are simply deemed unworthy. A case in point is the historical reception of Ugo Foscolo. Born in Zante, Greece, of a Greek mother and Venetian father, Foscolo first studied the Greek classics. When he arrived on Italian shores it was with a great literary and patriotic passion, and a great proclivity for involving his personal aspirations in his literary endeavours. The tragedy I have chosen to study, Ajace, comes at a point in Foscolo’s career when he has overcome his self-centredness and left behind the contradictory self-

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projections of his twenties. In the real world of power, saturated by the animal instincts of man, Foscolo has come to realize that rebellion, no matter how righteous, is futile and self-defeating. This is the crux that presents itself in this difficult work, which steps beyond the harmony of the details and delivers in its formal synthesis a prophetic vision of modernity. The poor reception of Ajace, as Walter Binni has demonstrated, should not prevent us from considering it as a masterwork essential to any genuine understanding of Foscolo.4 Before approaching the Ajace, I will look briefly at two earlier texts: ‘A Venezia’ (1796), and the celebrated ode, Dei Sepolcri (1806). As the first historian of the Italian sonnet, Foscolo was always sensitive, even in his earliest attempts, to the fragile thematic and musical equilibrium of the genre. ‘A Venezia’ marks a step forward in his quick mastery of the genre and is well known among later Italian patriots and activists. The poem is based, in essence, on a series of contrasts: between reality and myth; between the Venetian Republic’s cowardly neutrality and the aura of its illustrious past; between the sorry state of a colonial Italy and the great future of the nation foreseen by Foscolo in his (for now) Vichian conception. A Venezia O di mille tiranni, a cui rapina riga il soglio di sangue, imbelle terra! ’ve mentre civil fama ulula ed erra, siede negra Politica reina; dimmi: mai ti val se a te vicina compra e vil pace dorme, e se ignea guerra a te non mai le molli trecce afferra onde crollarti in nobile ruina? Già striscia il popol tuo scarno e fremente, e strappa bestemmiando ad altri i panni, mentre gli strappa i suoi man più potente. Ma verrà il giorno, e gallico lo affretta sublime esempio, ch’ei de’ suoi tiranni farà col loro scettro alta vendetta.5 To Venice Oh peace-throttled land, Throne coated

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with blood by a thousand tyrants! your civic name roves about and cries out as evil Politics reigns on high; tell me: what could it concern you if cowardly peace shops and sleeps nearby, if fiery war never grips your soft tresses to cause you to crumble into noble ruin? Your gaunt and trembling people are now crawling, cursing as they tear off others’ clothing, while a stronger hand rips off theirs in turn. But the day will come, and Gaul hastens it, sublime example, when she will gain high revenge upon her tyrants, and by their own sword.

Written six years before the Treaty of Campoformio that would mark Foscolo’s final rupture with ‘Gaul,’ the sonnet expresses the poet’s antityrannical fervour and disappointment over the declaration of neutrality by the Venetian oligarchy toward Austria and France. The eighteen-yearold’s political ambitions are apparent, as he states his concern over the political change that is imminent (on 12 May 1797, the end of the Venetian Republic would be declared). ‘Oligarchy,’ he writes, has multiplied tyranny as many times as there are patricians. Though the power of the Doge’s throne is great, as the forces in surrounding lands were tamed and rendered ‘unwarlike,’ so too did the Republic grow cowardly and impotent. Whatever peace the throne contrives with its corrupt Politics is unsatisfactory, for its denies Venice’s true destiny and greatness. This thesis is argued in the second quatrain by means of the metaphor of the Republic as a woman who fails to recognize the growing disparity between myth and reality, nobility and realpolitik. The first tercet depicts the reality of tyranny: poverty, rebellion, and the contradictory behaviour of the Venetians, whose livelihood is stripped by their government while they strip others of their property. The concluding tercet, in praise of France, predicts the rehabilitation of the people and the overthrow of the tyrants, whose own swords shall be turned against them. To better understand the unresolved dichotomy of this poem, its exaggerated manner and desire for a concise concept of justice amidst political tumult, one is led to Dei’ Sepolcri, written on the occasion of the edict of Saint-Cloud by which Napoleon restricted burial practices within the Italian colony. After listing the proper uses of monuments – to exalt the poet, the scientist, the painter – Foscolo names the heroic figure of Ajax

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as one whose glory merits a great tomb. Thus the shield of Achilles shall be stolen away from Ulysses’ ship and delivered to the bones of Ajax: alle prode Retee l’armi di Achille sovra l’ossa d’Aiace: a’ generosi giusta di gloria dispensiera è morte; nè senno astuto, nè favor di regi all’Itaco le spoglie ardue serbava, ché alla poppa raminga le ritolse l’onda incitata dagl’inferni Dei. (ll. 219–25)6 ... returning the Shield of Achilles to the Retean shores, over the bones of Ajax: death is the just rewarder of glory to the generous. Nor were cleverness of mind, or royal influence, of any use to Ulysses, since the infernal Gods stirred the stormy seas to seize off his deck the hard-won Shield.

It is this same archetype of heroic virtue and justice that Foscolo will turn to when commissioned in 1809 (largely owing to the acclaim of Dei Sepolcri) to write a tragedy.7 On 24 March 1809, Foscolo is nominated as Professor of Italian and Latin Eloquence at the University of Pavia, only to see the position eliminated by Napoleonic decree eight months later. (It was the practice of the regime to hire scientists and bureaucrats, and to fire humanists.) It is in this context of reaction, uncertainty, and strife that he drafts the story of Ajace – working with numerous classical sources – and, beginning on 2 February 1811, sets it into verse.8 One senses in the chronology that a long meditation on content is followed by a swift execution, as if to guarantee both poetic resonance and moral and logical coherence. In fact, the five acts and 1904 versi sciolti constitute a compelling, politically pointed, and emotionally vibrant play which finds Foscolo at the peak of his intellectual and artistic power.9 When the Ajace was staged on 9 and 10 December 1811, at La Scala in Milan, the reception was at best mixed. Certainly the presence of Foscolo’s enemies in Milan contributed to his play’s being censored so that it could not be performed as scheduled in Venice (where antiNapoleonic sentiment ran high).10 After the play’s cancellation Foscolo was subjected to police surveillance. Critics saw the play as a political allegory in which the characters of Ajax, Ulysses, and Agamemnon were proxies for the principals in the French army: General Moreau, Fouché, and Napoleon. Yet, as Binni argues, while the Napoleonic aggressions of 1811 are surely on Foscolo’s mind, the drawing of such an interpreta-

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tion is inaccurate and ignores the generality and aesthetic autonomy by which the Ajace gains its intellectual and spiritual coherence. Foscolo’s is a reinvestment in a historical genre and in a classical Greek patrimony that he, perhaps uniquely in the Italy of his day, knew intimately. Given that his earliest education was in the Greek classics, his mediation of the various classical sources for the Ajax myth involved a sort of return in memory, or anamnesis, to his origins. Of the primary sources of the Ajax myth – Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Pindar, Ovid – Foscolo cites the first three as models, each of which contributes to the potential plasticity in his development of the characters. The play opens as Agamemnon announces to his men that the end of the truce between Greeks and Trojans is imminent. He hears from Ulysses that the masses of Greek people (‘la turba,’ ‘il volgo lungo il lito del mar trascorre a torme’ [the throng, the people are running along the shoreline in droves]) are crazed and terrified over the death of Achilles, a hero who had lived for altar and oracles (‘l’are e gli oracoli’) and not simply for his own people, the Myrmidons. When Ulysses accuses Ajax (also of the Myrmidons) of excessive pride, Agamemnon rebuts that he is an excellent soldier who did not join Achilles in rebellion, and who keeps in check the rival Greek kings (‘emuli prenci’) as well as the Trojan enemy: ‘a sé dannoso, utile a noi’ (harmful to himself, useful to us). Ulysses responds that at the assembly of the Greek kings Ajax had split with Agamemnon, stirring up the people in the name of the ‘patria.’ The emperor is taken in by the deception and vows, ‘il tempo / Ed io ben presto avvezzerem gli Achei / All’ossequio e al silenzio’ (I, 106–7) (time and I shall quickly accustom the Achaeans to respect and silence). Ulysses then raises the issue that Ajax’s wife, Tecmessa, was a Frygian (Trojan) slave and that his half-brother, Teucro, had a Trojan mother. Now Teucro appears and reports that Ajax and the Myrmidons have singlehandedly defeated the Trojan attackers; that Tecmessa, mourning the loss of her father to the war, has convinced the remaining combatants to surrender; that Calcante has declared Troy will fall; and that the gathered masses have demanded that the arms of Achilles be awarded to Ajax. Agamemnon responds that heaven has bestowed on him alone the right to make such decisions, or delegate them, as he now does to the assembly of Greek kings. Ulysses dispatches Teucro and his troops to a remote post, promising that he and Ajax will rejoin them and supply them with the enemy’s weapons when the time comes for the final victory. Once Teucro has left, Ulysses will spread the rumour that he has fled, betraying both king and brother, leading even Ajax to suspect him.

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In Act II Calcante arrives, denouncing Agamemnon’s infamy, pride, envy, and abuse of power, assuring him that if true glory is his goal, Ajax will be his most loyal and noble supporter. (Here indeed is an allusion to Napoleon’s Russian campaign, an example in Foscolo’s mind of a bad war.) The antefact of the King’s sacrifice of Ifigenia is revealed, making it clear that the price paid for the maintenance of power continues to have terrible consequences. (It is this cycle of violence which Ajax will attempt to end.) Calcante warns the King that he should fear Ulysses not Ajax, to which Agamemnon responds, ‘Me solo / Giudice avrò, carnefice me solo. / Ma voi, chinate gli occhi vostri: io sdegno / Lagrime, e lodi; il terror vostro io voglio’ (II, 150–3) (I shall have only myself as judge, as executioner myself alone. But you, lower your eyes: I disdain both tears and praise; I want only your terror). Calcante then speaks alone with Ajax, asking him to respect the rights of the humble people who choose not to fight, but simply to endure under an unjust system (II, 208–15). Ajax’s sense of nobility, patterned on his own father’s ‘Gloria di giusto re’ (II, 232), does not heed the sacred Olympian balance of Calcante’s perspective.11 In his first encounter with Agamemnon, Ajax asks to hear his ‘reasoning’ about the arms of Achilles; the King responds by accusing Ajax of factionalism, of desiring the same power as Achilles, who had rebelled against him. Ajax (who, uniquely in Foscolo, is eloquent and articulate) recalls more illustrious times, praises Achilles, and brashly reminds the Emperor of his murder of Ifigenia, accusing him of risking Greek unity in order to soothe his guilty conscience, and of ignoring the virtues of faith, patriotism, and courage in his attempt to scatter and disunify the fighting troops: Ma le tue doti a noi che pro? per esse Vedo più sempre conculcata l’alta Dignità de’ mortali, e dar lor nome Di greggia ... (II, 383–6) But what good to us are your gifts? Due to them, I see, the high dignity of mortals is ever more oppressed, they are given the name of sheep ...

Whereas the mythical and Sophoclean Ajax hallucinates the soldiers as sheep and then slays them, Foscolo’s hero critiques the demeaning of

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the soldiers as sheep, speaking truth to power even as he sublimates the instinct to violence and vows to honour the decision of the kings. As Act III opens, Ulysses recounts the proceedings of the council, where he intervened when all seemed to favour Ajax; after Ulysses’ speech, turmoil arose among the troops, leading the kings to delegate the vote over the arms to the imprisoned Trojan princes. Ajax now enters and hears Ulysses tell Agamemnon that Teucro, absent from the assembly, had betrayed the Greeks. Ajax states that his pursuit of the arms is not personal, but that he emulates what Achilles represents to the Greeks: ‘Chè amor gli stringe e meraviglia e l’alta / Religion de’ suoi avi celesti’ (III, 301–2) (For love embraces them and wonder and the high religion of his heavenly ancestors). This pursuit has distanced him from his family, as we see when Tecmessa describes her attempts to find him, not having seen him since the death of Achilles: Soletta con le ancelle mie, Fra le spade e le tenebre m’accinsi A rivederlo. Al limitar l’araldo Tuo ne rattenne: altro non so. Paterno Rito e l’amor de’ nostri lari tiene Divise noi dal viril sesso; e noto Soltanto è a me delle battaglie il lutto: (III, 112–18) Alone with my maidservants I set out among the swords and shadows. We were held back at the boundary by your herald: that is all I know. By parental rite and love of our domestic gods we women are kept separate from the virile sex. All I know of battles is the weeping.

As Act IV begins Agamemnon reveals his loathing for himself and for ‘quel terreo, immoto / Volto di Ulysses’ (IV, 20–1) (that earthy, motionless / face of Ulysses).12 Yet he believes the charge against Teucro and thus decides to take the son of Ajax and Tecmessa as hostage. In his first encounter with Tecmessa, we see Agamemnon’s profound confusion, as he opens his speech with a flattering ‘o sposa del sublime / Propugnator di libertà’ (Oh wife of the sublime propounder of freedom), but closes it by calling Ajax a traitor and exorting Tecmessa to confess, ‘Schiava / Svelati’ (IV, 93–4) (Reveal yourself, slave). Now Ajax arrives, distraught over the iniquities of the Emperor’s forces, which have blocked the

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formation of a multiregional (and therefore multiracial) federation of Greek states and armies. Obsessed with the struggle for liberty, he declares to the Emperor, ‘N’avrai nemici o federati: eleggi’ (IV, 147–8) (You will have enemies or confederates; you choose). Their contentious relationship sinks into futility, a fact seen clearly by Tecmessa and Calcante. Ajax’s destiny closes around him as he again invokes Ifigenia, causing Calcante to call for an end to the cycle of violence: O forsennati, forsennati! io veggio L’inespiata ira d’Iddio chiamarvi A scontar con novelle orride colpe Le iniquità de’ padri. (IV, 242–5) O madmen, crazed! I see the unexpiated wrath of God call you to pay with new and horrible crimes the iniquity of the fathers.

As Agamemnon’s solitude becomes more apparent, like an Alfierian tyrant, so does Ajax’s; the two proud destinies run tragically in parallel.13 What is deceptive about Ajax is also what is deceptive to him: the force of his eristic rhetoric is the modern form of that rage represented in the myth by madness and the humiliating act of murder. The metahistorical message in Foscolo’s Ajax is that by yielding to the forms of discourse of the oppressor, one becomes him. Act V provides the confirmation of Ajax’s tragic weakness and gives the lie to strictly autobiographical interpretations of the play.14 It opens with Tecmessa’s prayer and her plea to Ajax not to succumb to the flames of war. Interspersed by intervals of silence, her speeches reveal the theme of unity amidst racial diversity and the universality of her pacifist message. Calcante proclaims that justice will be served on Agamemnon and Ulysses, and that Ajax struggles in vain against the heavens. But once onstage Ajax fails to heed this eternal context in which modesty, compassion, and justice coexist. Overburdened by the dissolution he has witnessed in the field, and doubting his own brother, he is close to suicide. Calcante prays that the sea will wash away the arms of Achilles from Ulysses’ ship and deliver them (as in the cited lines from Dei Sepolcri ) to the bones of Ajax at sea. While not the taciturn brute of other versions of the Ajax legend, whose courage is never matched by his ability to speak, Foscolo’s elo-

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quent hero is earth-bound in his patriotic passion. The flaw in his character is not comparable to the indecision of Jacopo Ortis, or to the fantastic notion of an ingenuous and pseudo-Jacobin Ugo Foscolo. That would presuppose a political rebellion by the author instead of his actual, aesthetic and ethical, revolt. The wholesale contradictoriness of the revolutionary love-swain, Jacopo Ortis, is no longer interesting or viable to the mature Foscolo, who is involved in a historic mutation and revitalization of the tragic genre. In a study of the Greek myths present in Ajace, Carla Doni stresses the unfolding of the tragedy as a manifestation of the triangle AgamemnonAjax-Ulysses. Others too have remarked on the deemphasis on the title character.15 Certainly when Ajace is compared to the Alfierian tragedy of action, no comparable protagonist exists. But if we are to speak of triangles of characters, we must depart from the military theme and focus instead on Ajax-Calcante-Tecmessa, as they reflect the higher values of justice, modesty, and compassion, the devotion to the Ideal, and to the racial diversity of peoples, the matrie that make up the nation. Only in this light does the sacrifice of Ajax acquire its significance. Ajax embodies the stoic nobility of a Cato, for whom civic virtue and honesty are as valuable as life itself. His is, as Doni writes, ‘il sacrificio sommo da compiersi nel nome della pacificazione’ (the supreme sacrifice to be carried out in the name of pacification) as when Ajax states ‘Va, dì ch’io muojo e fia tronca ogni rissa’ (V, 199) (Go, say that I am dying and that all fighting should cease). Foscolo clearly discerns between the idealistic perspective of an Ajax and his own pursuit of a reasoned detachment from the rhetoric of oppression. If he has a political goal in mind, it is not violent revolution, but an end to factionalism and the formation of an Italian federation; it is pacifist evolution he desires. As Foscolo suggests in a letter to Silvio Pellico, the Ajace is rich because of the diverse makeup (carattere) of the characters, whose respective similarities and differences work together to place in relief the communicative tensions that drive the action. The intended moral hierarchy extends from the malicious and self-hating Agamemnon and the mendacious Ulysses to the more elevated hero ennobled by his avoidance of civil war (‘Ajace ama la gloria e vuol conseguirla per mezzo della virtù difendendo la indipendenza della patria’ [Ajax loves glory and wants to gain through virtue by defending his country’s independence]); to Calcante, who counsels temperance and moderation even to the most elevated (having urged the Emperor not to slay Ifigenia, though Agamemnon argues otherwise, leaving us with a sense of uncertainty), to the

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most sublime and humble of the characters, Tecmessa, a former Frygian slave (all but ignored by critics other than Binni).16 The virtues of Calcante and Tecmessa are the highest values one can employ to justify life in a world of internecine strife, as is demonstrated in the final two acts, and particularly Act V (where the audience’s approval waned during the play’s first performance). Here, in the highest poetry of the play, Foscolo is not concerned about the pleasing stageability of his tragedy, but cultivates the concordia discors of the characters, the fertile interferences of the similar and dissimilar that go to make up the whole.17 In lieu of a conventional plot of action and contrivance, Foscolo presents a metahistorical discourse on the viability of freedom, both secular and religious, individual and collective. Even Ajax – in the classical tradition a brawny figure of noble heart – becomes a master rhetor; his modernity lies in the tensions of speech more than the intricacies of action. In the compressed duration between the play’s antefact and its climax, little importance is accorded the sorts of chance events that lead to ‘colpi di scena’ or great disclosures. Instead, one has, in the continuous sonority and grandeur of the rhetoric, a fatalistic representation of the gap or aporia between history and myth, between the events of human intercourse and their recounting. In Foscolo’s worldview it is the ultimate power of fate and fortune over human lives that provides, however paradoxically, the spur to virtuous behaviour. The immediate and specific political referents of the years 1810–11 are absorbed by the play’s generality; there is no more than a conditional closure in the interrogative nature of its conclusions. Foscolo’s anti-Sophoclean figure of Ajax is a Tacitan suicide-hero, comparable to the figure of Catone in Dante’s Purgatorio (while Foscolo, as I suggest below, reflects the state of mind of the pilgrim who ascends through the terrace of anger in that same canticle). The subtlety and power of the Ajace are due in part to its refusal to privilege either history or myth, rhetoric or favola; one has a passionate meditation on the theme of eloquence as it relates to individual, family, and national destinies. This goes to the heart of the Ajax legend without forcing a strong authorial identification with the figure. Foscolo’s revolt against the Milanese liberals and the old ruling classes (whether supporters of the Austrians or the French) lies in his detachment from immediate historical events, and his investment in poetic expression. As suggested above, Sophocles’ Ajax strikes us as fertile ground for a comparison. In Sophocles’ version, the tragic hero’s negative fate is sealed when the play opens, yet the antefact is revealed slowly, so as to reveal the fac-

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tionalism of the Greek armies in all its nuances. In fact, the hamartia or flaw of Ajax is not the motive for his death: ‘For Ajax in his death scene is not punished, but vindicated. He sets himself a test (peira) and passes it, and attains his salvation.’18 A marked similarity in the two plays is the evil of Ulysses, who has become a symbol for the verbal manipulators of all times, including the intelligentsia of the Regno d’Italia (1805–15). And as Flori notes (though somewhat restrictively) the latter tragedy shares with the former ‘l’impressione e l’eco del suo largo, pieno, magnifico suono’ (the impression and the echo of its wide, full, magnificent sound).19 I would like to extend the comparison by discussing the role of the Chorus in Sophocles’ Ajax and asking to what extent its function is present in Ajace. In Sophocles’ oeuvre the identity of the Chorus varies significantly from play to play, depending on the peculiarities of the hero it sets in relief, the particular lyrical dialogue which his character and actions engender, and the pathos the situation suggests. In general, the Chorus assumes its religious importance by being performable and by enduring the crisis of the hero. In the Ajax the Chorus is at times immediate and instrumental in the plot, and at times remote, engaged in song or ritual utterance: ‘Sophocles does not use his songs to express his own views on matters unrelated to the plots of his plays or to warn, exhort, or instruct his fellow-citizens, but to produce certain dramatic effects and to interpret his plays to an audience.’20 Among these effects is the Chorus’s total empathy for Ajax, a fact that draws in the audience’s empathy for both. The Chorus comprises Ajax’s fellow sailors of Salami, who share and repeat his longing for home; in rhetorical terms they serve as a foil, engaging in ‘gnomic utterances which are neutral and seem dull but prepare for [Ajax’s] intense speeches.’21 They are his closest friends and depend on him, a fact which reveals his isolation from his peers-in-rank, as from his true self, which has become entangled in the verbal competition of his manoeuvring for the arms. The Chorus first speaks after the prologue, in which the spiteful Athena revealed the antefact of Ajax’s madness and slaughter of the livestock. In response to Athena, the Chorus places in question the virtue of Ulysses, whom she describes in terms of his great humanity. Convinced of the divine source of Ajax’s madness, the Chorus tells of the ‘whispered slanders’ of Ulysses, a man formerly possessed of soundness of mind who is now a traitor. Thus two codes of conduct are distinguished: that of the warrior Ajax and the Chorus, on the one hand, and that of Ulysses and Athena on the other. The Chorus fears for its life, functioning until Ajax’s death more as an actor than commentator. Its humanity is evident

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in the ‘delusions, misjudgements, and false conclusions’ of its odes.22 Burton notes an alternation between choral odes of remote relevance (first and third stasimons), which have the air of generalized reflection, and that of immediate relevance (seconnd stasimon) immediately after Ajax’s long speech, which it crystallizes and connects to shameful recognition of his insane slaying of the soldiers and suicide. When Ajax dies at the play’s midpoint (in Act III), the Chorus is entrusted with the defence of his body, as the military superiors discuss his burial, thus echoing the physicality and humility of Ajax’s stature when compared to Ulysses. By the third stasimon we begin to see how the Chorus’s fatigue conditions and alters its view of the glories of the past. Its final ode, while even more remote than in the first stasimon (when the knowledge it was concerned with involved a defence of Ajax and a condemnation of war), recalls the concreteness and immediacy of friendship. Its truth is derived from experience and not coldly imputed by an author on the basis of literary convention or stereotype. Foscolo’s play has no Chorus. Ajax is not humbled or driven mad or accompanied by comrades in his periods of crisis. He dies at the end of the work and his remains do not require a guardian in the form of a Chorus of sailors; he simply asks Calcante, with a finality that excludes considerations of guilt over the evils of war, to cover his body, that it not be tainted by the eye of Agamemnon. It is Ajax’s isolation and singularity that prevail. As Giacomo Leopardi was to write in 1823, the elimination of the Chorus from modern tragedies may suit modernity, but one must bear in mind that the classical Chorus presented to the audience the larger, more general, truths which characters can only present in detail or philosophically. The Chorus, understood as a crowd (moltitudine) of persons of unspecified social background, transmits for Leopardi the same sense of the vague and indefinite he found in the classical poets, and rarely among his contemporaries.23 In this sense, I would argue, the choral function is preserved in the Ajace despite considerable differences from the Sophoclean model; this is accomplished primarily by Tecmessa and Calcante, who advance the author’s meditation on justice, modesty, and compassion. Here Tecmessa recounts Calcante’s calming of the crowd, which drops its swords and invokes Ajax’s name: Ira al terrore sottentrava ne’ popoli. Ma in mezzo Calcante apparve, e rivolgendo gli occhi la riverenza per gli dèi diffuse.

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– Ilio cadrà, – gridò il profeta; – i numi lo edificaro: alle armi, opra de’ numi, il sacro Ilio cadrà – . Levò le palme Febo adorando e il cenno altro del dio: e il pugno intanto degli achei più lente brandia le spade che volgeansi a terra. Chiamano Ajace a un grido solo, Ajace degno dell’armi, e domator di Troia. (I, 231–42) Rage now was added to the terror of the people. But in their midst appeared Calcante, who by gazing about spread forth reverence for the gods. ‘Ilium will fall,’ the prophet shouted; ‘the spirits built it: they also built the arms to which sacred Ilium will fall.’ He raised his palms skyward, adoring Phoebus and the other sign of the god: meanwhile the fists of the Achaeans slowly turned their swords downward to the earth. They call for Ajax with a single cry, Ajax worthy of arms, tamer of Troy.

In several speeches like this the masses are present indirectly; one thus finds fulfilled the extrinsic or popular function of the Chorus. There is a naming of the various tribal groups, or patchwork of cultures, that, according to Ajax’s ideal, would resist tyranny to comprise a federation or republic. At the same time, the intrinsic (or religious) function of the Chorus is served by Calcante and Tecmessa. Thus the lack of a Chorus should not be confused with the exclusion, as in the French model adopted by Alfieri and Monti, of the volgo, of humble characters; nor is it accurate to say that Ajax is any less devoted to his comrades in battle because of his oratorical prowess. While the humbleness and immediacy of the Sophoclean Chorus are embodied by Tecmessa, its wisdom and remoteness are assumed by Calcante.24 Calcante places in question the necessity of freedom for a people that does not desire it, and the value of a heroism that would jeopardize innocent lives. The sense of separation and otherness, the dialectic of distance that is concretized in the distance between Ajax and the other characters, leads, in the conception of many critics, to the opinion that Ajace is plagued by a lack of action. While it is true that Foscolo’s hero is removed from his community and is not prey to the brutishness or sudden wrath of Sophocles’ Ajax, the effect is not to lessen the tragic force of the legend (or to make Ajax into a philosopher, as Donadoni states). The irrationality and injustice of Ajax’s fate suggest the figure of Job. Foscolo favours the protagonist by eliminating the coarser flaws of the

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traditional Ajax, thus tightening the rhetorical tension between seeming (parere) and being (essere). As the problematic nature of language comes into focus, the tragic situation is seen as one of ethical communication. Ulysses and Ajax are not equals; we favour Ajax, who does not go mad but seeks to end a cycle of retribution. To find in Foscolo’s simplification of the plot a dramatic shortcoming or ‘subjectivism’ is to ignore the moral complexity of his shift in focus from the historical models of Sophocles and Homer to a metaphysical and existential model. The nature of this shift is discursive, its modus operandi being the obsessive juxtaposition of secular and religious moral virtues.25 Foscolo’s revolt is a repudiation of any rebellion, literary or otherwise. Summarizing his own resistance to the tyranny of Napoleon, he writes in 1814 that the leader’s downfall was inevitable: Sostenni le sue pazzie perché non poteva abbatterle; non le dissimulai quando mi pareva opportuno il ridirle; prevvedeva – e non ci voleva molta ispirazione profetica – o in una maniera o nell’altra la sua rovina.26 I put up with his madnesses because I could not defeat them; I did not dissimulate them when it seemed opportune to restate them; I foresaw – and great prophetic inspiration was not necessary – his downfall in one way or another.

Foscolo’s concern for the avoidance of unnecessary sacrifices is transmitted through the persons of Tecmessa and Calcante, and his detachment from a stoic Ajax, defender of a republican ideal of civic life. Ajax’s suicide is reasoned, like that of Cato. It is a sublime response to imperialistic tyranny and a defence of the cultural diversity and the ‘armi civili’ of the various components of the Greek armies. More than a revolutionary sacrifice to the patria, the tragic conclusion is important as a vehicle of insight into the matria, that more intimate provenance and bond by which revolt is nurtured and culture evolves. It is critical to note in this regard that the arms of Achilles have been awarded to no one; and yet Calcante had foreseen their awarding to Ulysses when Ajax’s suicide was imminent: L’empio nei nembi ravvolgete, o venti! Deserta il pianga la sua casa! All’empio, O mari, le carpite armi togliete! Recatele alla sacra urna d’Ajace! (V, 379–82)

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Oh winds, turn back the impious one to the clouds! May his house, now deserted, weep for him! Take away From the impious one, oh seas, the arms wrongly seized! Return them to the sacred tomb of Ajax!

One might say that Foscolo aimed to reform the ‘Repubblica delle lettere.’ Or, in terms of our cited remarks from Whitehead, that he eschewed notions of the harmony of details, favouring the multiple over the unitary, the difficult over the facile. Like his admired Tasso, Foscolo privileged the link between the imagination and the probable; such a combination allowed both poets the creative freedom to write tragedies applicable not only to their own times, but to posterity. Tasso had taken issue with Castelvetro’s claim ‘che le persone si formano dal necessario o dal verisimile, che di ciò sia cagione l’azione istessa, la quale principalmente è imitata’ (that characters are formed out of necessity and verisimilitude, that therein lies the cause of the action itself, which is primarily imitative in nature).27 The rebirth of Aristotelian poetics in the eighteenth century had subsided in Foscolo’s time, encouraging once again, as in Tasso, a close bond between the ethical importance of tragedy and its poeticity or linguistic intensity.28 Both Tasso’s Re Torrismondo and Foscolo’s Ajax bottom out in a world without divinities, deaf to the lyrical-religious auguries or ‘imitations’ of the choral figures. Like Tasso, Foscolo reflected on the conflict between religious and secular values, on the stumbling-blocks that stand between a virtuous man and his sovereignty, between knowledge and freedom. This philosophical preoccupation has direct consequences on the stagecraft. In both the Re Torrismondo and the Ajace the action takes place almost entirely offstage: in the former it is summarized by the Chorus (an obsolete convention by Foscolo’s time), in the latter by the various characters. In either case the discursive (diegetic) and lyrical modes predominate, and the redeeming character of the tragedy is a woman. An understanding of the choral function of Calcante and Tecmessa is facilitated by a reading of Foscolo’s 1809 address to the laurea class in law at Pavia, ‘Sull’origine e i limiti della giustizia’ (On the origin and limits of justice). Here Foscolo sets out to define justice and to locate its importance in the practical and ethical life. Given his intellectual limitations, he says, he cannot assay the metaphysics of justice; he states that ever since Cain and Abel (the other story he had considered for his third tragedy), man has been at war, and thus has not achieved any kind of universal justice. He thus sets out to examine the history of human injustice,

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the cultural specificity of justice’s effective range, and the contradictions that result when metaphysical theories of harmony are allowed to supplant the violent realities that divide actual cultural and national groupings. Critiquing the identification in Vico of the civilis aequitas with the ragione di stato, he states: Questa sentenza mi fe’ nuovamente considerare quanto le sublimi contemplazioni, confondendo le verità di fatto con la visione metafisica, spargano semi fecondissimi di illusioni, di paradossi e di sette. Perchè se i pochi pratici di governo tendessero alla conservazione del genere umano, il genere umano o dovrebbe esser retto da un solo governo, o non dovrebbe essere in guerra mai.29 This pronouncement caused me to consider once again how much sublime contemplations, confusing the truths of fact with metaphysical vision, spread forth most fertile seeds of illusions, paradoxes, and factions. Because if the few practitioners of government were actively involved in the preservation of the human race, the human race either would be ruled by a single government, or should never be at war.

Foscolo’s idea of worldly justice is pessimistic, both Machiavellian and Pascalian, in its sombre assessment of the inexorability of raison d’état. This is not to say that he denies a moral solution to human strife; on the contrary, by delimiting his definition of justice to what he can empirically observe, he advances a set of values which fiercely critiques the ‘philosophers’ who have divided man from nature, body from mind. The enemy is tyranny, both that of the revolutionary masses and of Agamemnon; while Ajax situates himself as a prospective mediator, his emotions fail to adhere to the pacific principles enunciated by Calcante, who rejects the factional and sectarian impulse that would force docile persons into destructive rebellion: Ma e quando amino il giogo Qual Dio, qual legge ti dà il dritto a sciorre Chi in obbedir trova sua pace? ... Ahi burrascosa libertà, deh come Spesso l’anime eccelse a disperato Furor strascini! (II, 208–10; 218–20)

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But if they love the yoke as a God, what law gives you the right to undo those who find their peace in obeying? ... Oh storm-tossed freedom, how often the loftiest of souls you cast down raving in desperation!

It is also in ‘Sull’origine e i limiti della giustizia’ that one finds Foscolo’s identification with the feminine voice of ‘compassion and modesty,’ which is the force of a natural ‘alliance’ that is formed in one’s local culture and matria, against the ‘eternal war of individuals and the disparity of their forces’: E per confermare questa alleanza, la voce stessa della natura eccita nelle viscere di molti uomini, che hanno bisogno di unirsi e di amarsi, due forze che compensano tutte le tendenze guerrier ed usurpatrici dell’uomo: la compassione ed il pudore, forze educate dalla società ed alimentate dalla gratitudine e dalla stima reciproca.30 And so as to confirm this alliance, the voice itself of nature excites in the viscera of many men, who need to be united and be loved, two forces that compensate for all the warring and usurping tendencies of man: compassion and modesty, forces taught by society and fed by gratitude and mutual esteem.

Compassion and modesty are the antidotes to consuming anger. If one recalls the terrace of anger in Dante’s Purgatorio, wherein the pilgrim learns how to dispense with this emotion and thus to gain free will, we might venture that Foscolo provides an analogous situation in the Ajace. The tragedy ultimately concerns a noble spirit’s response to totalitarianism, whether of the dictator, the supporting intellectual class, the armed proletariat, or his own internal demons. Foscolo’s realization of a pregnant disharmony, or concordia discors, grew in an aesthetic sense after his dismissal from the cattedra at Pavia, and this is best understood in the figure of Tecmessa. Through her compassion and modesty we begin to understand Foscolo’s own state of disillusionment; we see his revolt as a decisive move toward self-preservation and a retreat from the destructive passions of his former literary alter ego Jacopo Ortis. In its place we

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will see Didimo Chierico, the fictional self-projection of the translator of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. Didimo’s name echoes ‘Didimo il Cieco,’ one of the Fathers of the Church (a member of the Alexandrian school that supported a more allegorical and spiritualistic reading of the Bible over the literal and historical interpretations of the Antiochian school). In the word ‘chierico’ one reads not only a phonetic play on ‘Cieco’ but a self-naming, as cleric or scribe, by one who can now ironize about the conformism and ‘imitationism’ of the mandarin intellectuals. In addition he can show unequivocally the compassion and modesty of women, as against the blindness of the world of power. Let us consider the Pascalian theory of the raison d’état. Commonly associated with the notion that ‘might makes right,’ it may be examined as an abduction (Webster’s: ‘in logic, a kind of argumentation, called by the Greeks apagoge, in which the major is evident, but the minor is so obscure as to require further proof’). The indispensable context of this abduction (or enthymeme) is Pascal’s conviction that the world is permeated with evil, but that since God permits the evil, man cannot suffer injustice but can only commit it. The main premise of this apagoge is: What is truly just is hidden, beyond human understanding. The minor premise is: What is actually powerful is unyielding. The conclusion is: Assume what is actually powerful to be just (and have faith in God). In the Pascalian view of man, history preserves its approval for those who have successfully governed, and shuns those who have been victims of bad fortune. Since God is all-powerful and has allowed for evil, to oppose might or power on earth is to oppose God’s present dispensation. By obeying it, but without internal devotion, the Christian preserves inner faith in God and salvation. Since God is hidden so is his justice. In order to avoid the profound solipsism of human attempts to define justice, man must resign himself to fighting for God’s way. There is a discrepancy here in the explanation or theory which has to do with the word ‘juste’ (right, just), as Auerbach illustrates.31 Far from using ‘juste’ with two different definitions, Pascal uses it under two different subjective perspectives or contextual interpretations: what man ‘imagines’ to be right and what is, in fact, truly right. His conclusion that the state (might, power) is a function of the hidden justice of God thus illustrates the sort of logical slippage typical of dogmas. Pascal reasons, as Auerbach notes, in a series of ‘antithetical propositions arranged in symmetrical pairs (isocola).’ Specifically, in the six pairs of propositions of Fragment 298 of the Pensées, we see the abductive explanations I have glossed above. It is not my intention to defend or attack Pascal’s position, but to show how abduction

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allows for rational formulations not possible within the strict confines of a non-contextual (atemporal) logic. The same sort of abduction occurs in Foscolo’s apparent defence of raison d’état in his 1809 address at Pavia. Given the fact that he already knew of his dismissal from his recently acquired Chair of Rhetoric, the irony is palpable, recalling the Pascalian dictum that the Christian is obliged ‘to fight, not to win.’ Foscolo, in his abduction, transfers the same ‘transcendental’ truths recoverable from Pascal’s absolutist historical context to his battle from within against the French-controlled Kingdom of Italy and his avoidance of useless sacrifices. A non-Christian, Foscolo nevertheless was infused with biblical prophecy (Didimo Chierico’s most read and reread book is the Bible). In the Pavia speech, Foscolo declares that might equals right; but in so doing he moves in the opposite direction from Pascal, reducing the sphere of importance of either might or right as social manifestations or civic parameters. The depth and worth of the individual are found in compassion and modesty, not in what is just. Viewed in these terms Foscolo’s speech and subsequent exile take on added resonance. Auerbach writes in the cited essay on Pascal, ‘Experience shows that ordinary human bravery falters when the struggle seems hopeless – but the man who knows for certain that he must fight regardless of any prospect of success, is immune to despair or panic.’32 I would like to compare this assertion of the need to ‘hope against hope’ to a similar statement of Antonio Gramsci, who, like Pascal, sought to avoid useless sacrifices: it is difficult to extirpate the criminal habit of neglecting to avoid useless sacrifices. Still, common sense shows that the greater number of collective (political) disasters come about because no attempt was made to avoid useless sacrifices of others and other people’s skins were gambled with. Everyone has heard stories from officers at the front of how soldiers would readily risk their lives if it was necessary, but who would rebel when they saw themselves neglected. For example, a company was capable of going without food for many days when it saw that supplies could not get through because of force majeure, but it mutinied when one meal was skipped through neglect and bureaucracy, etc.33

At the point that hope was destroyed, the troops mutinied. The broader question that is raised is the nature of sacrifice, the ethics of sacrifice and the consequent loss of identity. Such a loss and such a mutiny are what is at stake at the conclusion of the Ajace, where Foscolo reflects on

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the struggle to reconcile multiple cultures, whether these be the many ethnic and linguistic ‘Italys’ or the multiple ‘tribes’ of Greece, those autonomous populations that were weighed down over history by the urban elites, whose idea of the nation was another and more powerful one. As Zanzotto writes, L’identità (incerta) gravitante sul recupero ‘da’ una perdita, e quindi su un mancamento, si addice a paesi i quali non possono sentirsi patrie o nazioni se non ‘rispecchiandosi’ in un enigma: il passato. E questo doveva essere particolarmente vero per i Greci come per gli Italiani, in un quadro generale che è molto più complicato. ... Sempre meno si sa, oggi, che cosa sia una nazione, e ancor meno uno stato. Esiste una serie di teorie che ci presentano lo stato e la formazione delle patrie (entro cui tralucono, ‘diverse,’ le matrie) quali fatti che crescono come puro bios e che poi trovano patenti culturali e affettive, che un po’ alla volta si creano una memoria, anche falsa, inventata, a giustificare come eredità di cultura e di solidarietà affettiva quanto, all’inizio, era semplice esplosione di vitalità.34 The (uncertain) identity gravitating over the recovery ‘from’ a loss, and thus over a weakness, is suitable to countries which can only sense themselves as nations by ‘mirroring themselves’ in an enigma: the past. And this had to be particularly true for the Greeks as for the Italians, in a general picture that is still very complicated. ... One knows less and less, these days, what a nation is, and worse still for a state. A series of theories exists that present to us the state and the formation of fatherlands (within which the matrias shine, as ‘different’) as facts that grow as pure life-force and which then find cultural and affective licences, which little by little create a memory, even a false, invented one, to justify as cultural heredity and affective solidarity what, in the beginning, was simply an explosion of vitality.

Zanzotto is right to emphasize Foscolo’s ‘attualità’ (contemporaneity), for in his religiously infused, Pascalian pessimism, and command of the ambiguity of the literary text, he is quintessentially modern. His agonistic muse is a muse of compassion; the lyric force and pathos of the Ajace consitute an open revolt against the dotti and the political superstructure that supports them. The rhetoric is eristic because one is dealing with war, or world conflict; it is combative and seeks to persuade as much as to locate the truth. Ajax’s eristic stance fails because he fails to avoid useless sacrifice; in his pursuit of justice he has ignored modesty and compassion. As regards Foscolo, the success of the eristic moment derives from

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il bisogno di un nuovo superamento, di una nuova elaborazione di valori più intima e ancor più sofferta di quella dei Sepolcri. E nell’Ajace, sulla salda base di un dramma politico, così attuale e così eterno, l’accento pessimistico batteva di nuovo fortemente implicando proprio ... un forte approfondimento dell’elemento istintivo ferino degli uomini ...35 the need for a new overcoming, a new, more intimate and even more painful, elaboration of values than that of the Sepolcri. And in the Ajace, on the solid base of a political drama, so current and so eternal, the pessimistic accent again struck loudly, by implicating precisely ... a strong deepening of the savage, instinctive element in man ...

Foscolo’s conception of a state riven by divisions, sects, nations, and factional groups is thus given its affective equivalent in the bestial element in man. And this is the general problem the rule of law could come to redeem, just as it is the reason for such ceremonial symbols as the arms of Achilles, or the tombs of heroes. Ajax’s reference to his homeland in his suicide speech brings together this theme of the law with that of the diverse cultural identities of the Greeks, being a source of strength, a federal principle the proud and worldly Ajax is willing to die for. The play’s stage history – it was performed but twice at its opening in 1811 at Il Teatro della Scala, and then again in 1816 – testifies to the public’s failure to negotiate its sublimation of violence, a sublimation undertaken through the dialectic of necessity (or unity at any cost, faithfulness to the sovereign) and freedom (stormy freedom, with its incumbent evils of useless sacrifice and factionalism). If the conclusions of the Ajace do not concretely prepare such a program, it is because the underlying thesis of the work is that an intellectual and spiritual recognition of the law-justice paradigm must be apprehended before corrective action can take place, and such a recognition is not yet possible in the Regno d’Italia. Thus too the radical alteration of the tragic genre, as seen in our comparison to Sophocles’ Ajax, abolishes the ‘tragedy of action’ in which Ulysses is seen in a positive light as a brilliant rhetor, for the sake of a meta-reflection on the classical heritage. The fact that Ajax lacks the opulence and horror of Agamemnon and the cunning of Ulysses takes nothing away from the dignity of his suicide. While Ajax does not fill the role of the classical tragic hero, this is because Foscolo has suggested a positive alternative to the traditional catastrophic ending. This alternative is embodied in Calcante’s diplomatic balancing act, his pursuit of justice through pacifism, and in Tecmessa’s modesty and compassion; her feminine voice is

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perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the play. Through these characters, a prudent and measured revolt is given a far higher value than is an act of rebellion. This is Foscolo’s own revolt, of course, and his definitive separation from the angst and impotence of Jacopo Ortis. What lies beyond the conclusion of Ajace are the just deserts of Agamemnon, the ‘vendetta’ of the heavens that the dying Ajax predicts to Teucro and tells him to trust in. There is an astonishing similarity between the words employed by Calcante in predicting Agamemnon’s fall (and the popular response to it) and those of Manzoni’s incipit in the Cinque maggio (written just over a decade later), concerning the death of Napoleon: Muto stupore Al tuo cadere i popoli confonde. Stanno attoniti, immobili. Percote Ajace invan lo scudo ... (V, 71–81) Silent wonder over your falling confuses the peoples. They are standing stunned, immobile. Ajax shakes his shield in vain ... Ei fu. Siccome immobile, dato il mortal sospiro, stette la spoglia immemore orba di tanto spiro, così percossa, attonita la terra al nunzio sta, muta ... He is dead. As the corpse, after he had breathed his last, lay still, all memory gone, void of so great a spirit, so the world stands still in wonder, stunned by the news, silently …36

2 Paradoxical Romanticism: Alessandro Manzoni’s Il Cinque maggio

1 If Romanticism is seen as a popular movement that frees the emotions, a school of radical political reform and denunciation of classical forms, the greatest Italian Romantics – Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi – only assume that label paradoxically. More elitist than populist, they embraced the values of patriotism, pathos, and personal freedom from a detached and complicated critical position. Alessandro Manzoni is perhaps the greatest embodiment of this paradox, since only for him did these values depend on the Catholic morality and the claim of truth for the Christian dispensation in history.1 Like other Romantics, Manzoni sought to free himself from the rhetorical supports of the classical system: imitationism, mythological figuration, the use of fable, the dependence on rules. Poetry was to be conjoined with truth, and for Manzoni this meant the moral truth of the Gospel, as supported by reason, validated by history, and tied to the common man, ‘gli umili’ (the humble people). As Valter Boggione writes, ‘Il cristianesimo interessa a Manzoni non in quanto materia di riflessione e discussione teologica, ma in quanto esperienza di vita’ (Christianity interests Manzoni not as a matter of reflection and theological discussion, but as a life experience).2 Manzoni had read his Voltaire and Diderot well and was attracted to the logic of the Jansenists of Port-Royal and the histories of Sismondi. The sensationalism of Cousin was of great importance to his development. There is a tendency to refer to Manzoni’s engagement with Enlightenment thought as something eclipsed by his 1805 conversion, but the situation is much more complex than that. In the years 1810–20 there is an attempt by Manzoni the poet to move from a poetry based

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on liturgy, as one sees in the Inni sacri (Sacred Hymns, 1812–17), to one based on history and experience, as seen in Il Cinque maggio (The Fifth of May). Salvatore Nigro writes in this regard of the change from ‘one type of poetic language founded on analogy to another founded on identity, from the analogical simile to the “symbolic metaphor.”’3 If the earlier style can be described as closed, the latter is open-ended and has its great manifestation in Il Cinque maggio. Here, in the great ode on the death of Napoleon, Manzoni effectively presents his position that reason and faith are interdependent, though of different orders and existing on different planes of experience. As I argue here, the logical relation between history and faith, reason and revelation, presented in Il Cinque maggio takes the form of an abduction; as seen above, this probabilistic hypothesis or apagoge is an incomplete syllogism. In Manzoni’s poem it is the logical structure by means of which the moral truth of the Gospel and the empirical truth of historical experience are juxtaposed in a fundamentally interrogative pattern. In his Lettre à Monsieur Chauvet (early 1820), Manzoni proposed a representative structure for the historical event, fact, and character within the dramatic work, assigning to poetry and creative invention the role of completing history. As Leone De Castris writes, citing the famous letter, Il vero creare della poesia s’era definito nel ‘completare la storia, restituendole, per così dire, la parte perduta, immaginare anche e persino dei fatti dove la storia non dà che indicazioni, inventare all’occorrenza dei personaggi per rappresentare i costumi conosciuti di una data epoca, prendere infine tutto ciò che esiste e aggiungere ciò che manca, ma in maniera che l’invenzione si accordi con la realtà, non sia anche un mezzo di più per farla risultare.’4 The true creating of poetry was defined as ‘completing history, restoring to it the part that was lost, so to speak, also going so far as to imagine facts about which history only gives indications, inventing characters if need be in order to represent the known customs of a certain epoch, and finally to take all that exists and to add what is missing, but in such as way that the invention agrees with reality, but does not presume to have been its cause.’

In the Lettre and other writings prior to the composition of Il Cinque maggio, Manzoni argues that a proper consideration of history is supportive of a religious worldview. He assumes that reason and revelation are mutually integrable, that reason actually leads to revelation.5 The

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attempt to fill in the missing parts (‘la parte perduta’) of factual history with verisimilar inventions was postulated in the Lettre ; but this position would further evolve in the 1820s as Manzoni rejected the sensationalist empiricism he had previously espoused.6 He was also experiencing a personal crisis. In May 1821, before he heard of Napoleon’s death, Manzoni wrote as follows to his mentor Claude Fauriel: ‘Quanto a me, sarebbe meglio non parlarne [...] ormai, da qualche tempo, sono troppo frequenti i giorni in cui non posso fare niente assolutamente. Non c’è maniera infatti di far marciare la mia testa e questi giorni sono tristi parecchio.’ (As for me, it’s better not to discuss it [...]. For some time now, the days when I can do absolutely nothing are too frequent. In fact, there is no way to get my head moving and these days are sad indeed).7 The crisis that ensues in Manzoni’s life is accompanied by a deepening religiosity.8 After this period – which includes the composition of Il Cinque maggio – one might say that Manzoni does not insist on the integrability of history and revelation, but allows for their mutual presence in the world occupying the horizontal and vertical axes of consciousness. The existence of a separate plane of revelation unfathomable to the reason does not minimize the importance of either reason or revelation in moral and civic life.9 Manzoni now separates his art from the world, a fact hidden by the fidelity of his art to the world. It is precisely for this reason that the poet who ‘represents in the most dramatic way the fundamental aporia of the Risorgimento’ waited until the death of Napoleon – whom he had seen at the Teatro della Scala years earlier, commenting on the strength of his eyes as ‘i rai fulminei’ – to write his first words on him: ‘Ei fu.’10 Manzoni read of the death of Napoleon in the Gazzetta di Milano on 17 July 1821. This launched him into a high state of nervousness and inner turbulence; in three days he had completed Il Cinque maggio. Though the poem was censored by the Austrian authorities, the copy delivered to the censors was copied and released to the popular press, eager for a poem of such clamorous historical moment.11 Il Cinque maggio is a sudden and dramatic work by a poet whose Inni sacri (written between 1812 and 1817) had been the fruit of careful rumination; it is unique among Manzoni’s odes and hymns for the brevity of its composition. As a poet given to extensive corrections and redrafts, he benefited from the spontaneous nature of the task, as if history had commissioned him to do it and God had given him the strength to impress on the historic subject a divine, transcendental value.12 The poem spread like wildfire, despite the Austrian censors. The evangelical message of Il Cinque maggio was

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received by an unprecedented audience whose use of the poem was as different from ours today as it was from that of the classicists who were Manzoni’s contemporaries. And while certain aspects of the poem may seem arid or grandiose, as Guglielmo Alberti writes, ‘that which today still sounds conventional in this poem did not seem that way at all to that public.’13 Despite its canonical position in the Italian literary canon, Il Cinque maggio has remained a challenge to critics because of its arduous and syncretic style and the paradoxical nature of its message. While Manzoni would write that the ode’s popular appeal was due to ‘una certa oscurità che dà l’impressione d’un pensiero profondo e recondito, dove invece non c’è che mancanza di perspicuità’ (a certain obscurity that gives the impression of a profound and recondite thought, where rather there is only a lack of perspicuousness), there is more to it than that.14 One is actually confronting the Manzonian ‘indefinite,’ or as he wrote to D’Azeglio in his 1823 ‘Lettera sul Romanticismo,’ the vacillating nature of any formulation of the ‘vero.’15 Because of the flexible and indeterminate nature of the poetic truth, if one is to understand Manzoni’s poetry one must confront, in Fortini’s words, ‘le due facce d’una stessa lezione: quella di una parola che in nessun modo è assimilabile alla parola discorsivo-prosastica e che, nello stesso tempo, si pone come comunicazione pubblica’ (both sides of a single reading: that of a word that posits itself as a public communication and, at the same time, is in no way assimilable to the language of discursive prose).16 It is also imperative that one look beyond the portrait of Manzoni as a complacent reformer, to find the man who most effectively opposed the mandarin class in Italy which had driven a wedge between the spheres of poetry and morality. In 1814, Manzoni witnessed a Milanese crowd track down and kill the French minister Giuseppe Prina. Though he strongly opposed the Napoleonic occupation, he abhorred this act of violence.17 His position was formalized in the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, begun in 1819, where he systematically rejected all evil means, however good the end. At the same time he sent out ‘bitter censures ... to Monti and Cesarotti for their slavish cupidity toward the Emperor. Manzoni remained a silent but tenacious opponent of the Man of Campoformio and Saint-Cloud even after his conversion, despite the adherence of a few Parisian Jansenist friends of his to Napoleon’s Gallic politics.’18 (This is significant since – as seen below – Manzoni employs the vocabulary of Monti’s poetry in Il Cinque maggio, as he had in the earlier epicedio, ‘In morte di Carlo Imbonati.’)

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Manzoni’s anti-Napoleonic sentiments were rooted in a Rosminian Catholic ethics, on the basis of which he denounced the inadequacy of ‘scribes’ of earlier epochs, as here in the historical introduction to the tragedy Adelchi : In generale gli annalisti di que’ secoli, che noi chiamiamo barbari, sanno, nelle cose di poca importanza copiarsi, l’un coll’altro, al pari di qualunque letterato moderno: s’accordano poi a maraviglia nel tacere di quello, che più si vorrebbe sapere.19 In general the annalists of those centuries which we call barbarous know as well as any modern author how to copy each other in matters of little importance: they are amazing in their shared silence about those things about which one would most like to know.

As a scribe himself, Manzoni is committed to a historical accounting of those matters of moral importance that posterity will need to know. Having meditated at length on the state of the literary institution in Italy, he saw literature as a branch of the moral sciences. He defended the idea of a knowledge not ascertainable by deduction, a poetic truth distinct from philosophical or scientific truths.20 As he wrote in an 1824 letter to Paride Zajotti, many ideas rejected as paradoxical are later accepted as true: Chieggo se molte cose derise, come paradosse, non sono ora tenute come verità d’una evidenza volgare; se molte non sono una ripetizione, o una ricognizione dei principii proposti dai romantici, molte altre una conseguenza, non dedotta esplicitamente da essi, ma pure venuta nella ragione comune: tanto quelle dottrine hanno in sé di vitale, di fecondo, e s’Ella mi passa questa parola, di generativo!21 I’m asking if many things once derided as paradoxes are not now considered as common truths; if many of them do not repeat or recognize the principles proposed by the Romantics, and many others, though not deduced explicitly from them, do not reach the same consensus, so much do those doctrines contain within them of the vital and fertile, and, if you allow me the word, the generative!

Manzoni was quite aware of the historiographic debate between those who stressed the role of great individuals in the formation of history

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and those who stressed the role of the masses. In the case of the French Revolution and Restoration, this debate could be framed in terms of the relative impact of the ‘great man’ or the movement of the ‘people’ in history. Rather than responding to either position, Manzoni engaged a third agent, which affected the great and the humble alike – the role of religion or Providence, as well as the judgment of posterity. It is my position that Il Cinque maggio can only be grasped as a coherent whole if one assesses its argumentative structure. I would suggest that the poem presents itself as an abduction or ‘imperfect syllogism’ according to the Aristotelian formulation. Unlike deduction and induction, abduction forms an hypothesis on the basis of the facts available. As C.S. Peirce demonstrated, abduction is the essential mode of inference basic to the formation of a hypothesis.22 Unlike induction–with which it is often confused–abduction does not begin with a hypothesis which it tests against the facts: ‘Abduction seeks a theory. Induction seeks for facts. In abduction the consideration of the facts suggests the hypothesis. In induction the study of the hypothesis suggests the experiments which bring to light the very facts to which the hypothesis had pointed. The mode of suggestion by which, in abduction, the facts suggest the hypothesis is by resemblance, – the resemblance of the facts to the consequences of the hypothesis.’23 The fact that the truth status of one of the premises in the syllogism is unknown, or merely possible, means that its conclusion is itself only a supposition. Despite its unreliability, the abduction represents a richly communicative heuristic procedure that is universal to mankind. In Manzoni’s case, the ‘facts’ included Napoleon’s past glory and his fall into exile and death, but they also included reports of Napoleon’s turn toward Christianity during his exile. Based on this evidence, Manzoni ventures the theory that Napoleon experienced a full-scale Christian conversion. He believed that such a transformation was enabled by Jesus’ breaking into the world to assume the sin of humanity (which is at once the original sin of Adam); he was also committed, as seen above, to a poetics of historical truth. He was thus eminently qualified to formulate such a hypothesis–to suggest a ‘resemblance’ between common experiences– despite the lack of positive evidence concerning Napoleon’s religious practice and beliefs. 2 The major literary source for Il Cinque maggio was the Second Canto of Monti’s Mascheroniana, the work Manzoni allegedly recited when he

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heard of the death. Similarities between the two poems include the same epithets for Napoleon, the ‘fatal guerriero’ ‘folgorando’ with ‘le fisse / Luci,’ like a ‘Raggio di sole’; other lexemes from Monti include ‘La man le pose,’ ‘la severa / Fronte spianando balenò, siccome...,’ ‘sponda,’ ‘dí,’ ‘secura in trono la ragion s’assise,’ ‘E nocchiere s’assise in su la brune / Poppa,’ ‘l’onda che sul dorso / Sofferse asciutto il piè di Bariona,’ ‘percosse,’ ‘procellosa,’ ‘piè,’ ‘ondeggiavano,’ ‘col sonito,’ ‘immobile trono’ etc.; the constructions of long elaborate similes with ‘siccome’; the lists of geographical place names to indicate a Titanic scansion on the part of the hero of a vast territory; the predominance of the remote past tense. Manzoni’s ‘di quel securo il fulmine / tenea dietro al baleno; / scoppiò…’ recalls Monti’s ‘Reggio ancor non obblia che dal suo seno / La favilla scoppiò d’onde primiero / Di nostra libertà corse il baleno’; Manzoni’s ‘nui / chiniam la fronte al Massimo / Fattor, che volle in lui / del creator suo spirito / più vasta orma stampar’ recalls Monti’s ‘siccome volle / Il suo fattore, ei brilla.’24 The stylistic similarities, or intertextualities, do not translate into thematic similarities. Monti saw in Napoleon the myth of the political redeemer, the Man of Action whose embodiment of the values of freedom, equality, and fraternity provided a great model to the Italians. For Manzoni, as Accame Bobbio argues, the Christian tone is more generalized and more absolute: ‘the same images, connected in Monti to a particular situation, are elevated in Manzoni to signify an action that dominates the centuries; Monti savours them as classical reminiscences fit for expressing the greatness of the man, Manzoni rethinks them and they become concepts that cause the world that remembers him to better understand what that greatness means.’25 Both Manzoni and Monti engage the words of a ‘dead language’ in order to ennoble a historic situation; the archaic language allows them to give to the historic truth an extra-historic and providential gloss, and thus to distance the ethical questions that surround the figure of Napoleon. But unlike Monti, Manzoni has no desire to exalt the patria through the myth of imperial grandeur.26 While Manzoni’s didactic and moralistic self-restraint can be traced to the neoclassical taste, aesthetically he diverges from it, so that among contemporary critics it was common for his poetry to be accused of musical incompleteness, defective rhythms, and uncertain lexicon. If one looks at the 1805 ‘In morte di Carlo Imbonati,’ the accusations are warranted (though when Manzoni rejects these verses it is for doctrinal, not poetic, reasons). While there is much common lexis between Manzoni’s two elegies (‘Dura è pel giusto solitario,’ ‘Su l’orma propria ei giace,’

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‘chinammo il volto,’ ‘E tacque,’ ‘sponda, ‘stette’), the earlier poem lacks the compactness, the brisk rhythm, and the evangelical inspiration of the latter. In Imbonati the author strongly identifies with the figure of the dead hero; in Il Cinque maggio he does not. The major sources of that ode are Dante, Parini, and Foscolo. While of the same genre as Il Cinque maggio, the epicedio for Imbonati sets out to generate an abstract, mythoheroic portrait.27 In contrast, behind the essentially religious content of Il Cinque maggio there is an unanswered political question: What will be the fate of the ‘humble people’ and the Italian nation, in the postNapoleonic age?28 The development is significant: the idealistic rationalism of the poet’s past is corrected by his positive historicism.29 Manzoni had read of Napoleon’s late conversion to the faith, and this was itself a historical matter. If the revelation of Christ could be seen to exercise an active role in the world, then the poem that could document that truth must itself resemble and recreate the experience of that revelation. This is a point one must keep in mind as one considers the stylistic features of the poem. The metre of the elegy is unique: nine double strophes of twelve septenaries create a rushed, percussive rhythm more fitting to a military march than a mournful dirge.30 The dynamic rhythms of the septenaries, with their mixture of rime sdrucciole and rime piane leading up to rime tronche of the final line of each stanza, communicate the tumult of his subject’s life, past and present. Far from being a hero, the primo console is made into a symbol of the transitoriness of human ambition. Napoleon in defeat is seen to possess the same psychology of the ancien régime that he once defeated, an aristocratic and monarchical concept of the sovereign. And when he sets out to write his memoirs he is doomed to fail again; yet Manzoni confers dignity on him in this moment of defeat, a fact central to the poem’s evangelical message. Claudio Varese has written of the ode’s ‘quattro grandi atti, gloria, esilio, conversione e morte’ (four great acts, glory, exile, conversion, and death).31 If one stipulates that the final act, of death, is essentially combined with the act of conversion, one can apply these ‘acts’ to the syllogistic structure of the abduction. Lines 1–24 constitute the protasis, establishing the scribal context and authorial self-inscription. After this the other phases follow, of ‘glory,’ ‘exile,’ and ‘conversion and death’ in Varese’s terms, that correspond to the major premise (ll. 25–54), the minor premise (ll. 55–84), and the conclusion (ll. 85–108). The indefiniteness of the conclusion will be shown to exist in nuce in the minor premise, where, not coincidentally, the most felicitous poetry of the ode is found.

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There is a chiastic symmetry in the division between protasis (four stanzas), major premise (five), minor premise (five), and conclusion (four); as there is in the appearance of the decisive adverb ‘forse’ (perhaps) in the final line of the protasis (l. 24) and the first line of the conclusion (l. 85). The protasis provides the summary statement of the historic and authorial themes, as Manzoni explains his own past and present involvement with Napoleon as poetic subject.

5

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Ei fu. Siccome immobile, dato il mortal sospiro, stette la spoglia immemore orba di tanto spiro, così percossa, attonita la terra al nunzio sta, muta pensando all’ultima ora dell’uom fatale; né sa quando una simile orma di pie’ mortale la sua cruenta polvere a calpestar verrà. Lui folgorante in solio vide il mio genio e tacque; quando, con vece assidua, cadde, risorse e giacque, di mille voci al sònito mista la sua non ha: vergin di servo encomio e di codardo oltraggio, sorge or commosso al sùbito sparir di tanto raggio; e scioglie all’urna un cantico che forse non morrà.32

He is dead. As the corpse, after he had breathed his last, lay still, all memory gone, void of so great a spirit, so the world stands still in wonder, stunned by the news, silently thinking of the last hours of the man of destiny; nor does it know when a like print of mortal foot will come to tread earth’s bloodstained dust. My genius saw him enthroned in glory and kept silent; when, with rapid changes of fortune, he fell, rose again, and fell finally, it

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The earth stands dumbstruck before the death of Napoleon and wonders if and when another of his grandeur and destructive force will come. In response, the poet, whose ‘genio’ resisted any comment during the Emperor’s lifetime, now, still ‘vergin,’ dedicates a ‘cantico / che forse non morrà.’ The protasis sets up the situation of the writing, in dramatic, almost biblical terms.33 As Boggione glosses the opening lines of the poem, ‘Il fallimento dell’avventura umana di Napoleone non solo è affidato alle stesse immagini e voci, ma anche alla stessa tessitura degli accenti (The failure of Napoleon’s human adventure is not only entrusted to the images and voices themselves, but also to the very structure of the accents).34 Moreover, as Luigi Russo notes, the repetition of several deathrelated images in the opening lines has a distinctive power: ‘Questa ridondanza espressiva è stata a torto censurata; essa è assai suggestiva, e indica tumulto di sempre nuove impressioni’ (this expressive redundancy has been wrongly impugned; it is very suggestive and indicates the tumult of ever new impressions).35 Other stylistic features apparent from the start are the poem’s archaic lexis (‘ei,’ ‘orba,’ ‘spiro,’ ‘nunzio,’ ‘cruenta,’ ‘solio,’ ‘Genio,’ ‘sonito,’ ‘encomio,’ ‘securo,’ ‘nui,’ ‘periglio’), and its use of binomials (‘gloria’ / ‘periglio’; ‘fuga’ / ‘vittoria’; ‘reggia’ / ‘esiglio’ / ‘polvere’ / ‘altar’; etc.), duplications (‘percosso,’ ‘premio,’ ‘Pieta (-oso),’ ‘gloria,’ ‘stette,’ ‘forse’), and other forms of parallelism, all of which add to the density of its lyrical language. The exalted epithets used for Napoleon (‘folgorante,’ ‘raggio,’ ‘i rai fulminei,’ ‘fulmine,’ ‘baleno’), when coupled with the remote past tense, speak to the leader’s earthly limitations. Once again, the protasis establishes historical context and confirms the poet’s voice and his awareness of his readership. The major premise announces Napoleon’s accomplishments and grandeur, and the contrasting reactions to his passing. 25

Dall’Alpi alle Piramidi, dal Manzanarre al Reno, di quel securo il fulmine tenea dietro al baleno; scoppiò da Scilla al Tanai, 30 dall’uno all’altro mar.

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Fu vera gloria? Ai posteri l’ardua sentenza: nui chiniam la fronte al Massimo Fattor, che volle in lui del creator suo spirito più vasta orma stampar. La procellosa e trepida gioia d’un gran disegno, l’ansia d’un cor che indocile serve, pensando al regno; e il giunge, e tiene un premio ch’era follia sperar; tutto ei provò: la gloria maggior dopo il periglio, la fuga e la vittoria, la reggia e il tristo esiglio; due volte nella polvere, due volte sull’altar. Ei si nomò: due secoli, l’un contro l’altro armato, sommessi a lui si volsero, come aspettando il fato; ei fe’ silenzio, ed arbitro s’assise in mezzo a lor.

From the Alps to the Pyramids, from the Manzanare to the Rhine, the thunderbolts of that master of decision followed hard upon the lightning; thundering from Scilla to the Don, from sea to sea. Was it true glory? The difficult judgment remains for posterity: enough for us to bow before the Supreme Maker who chose to impress on him so large a trace of the creative Mind. The turbulent, eager joy of a great conception, the restlessness of a heart that unwillingly submits while it dreams of power; and then grasps it and holds a prize it was madness to hope for; he knew it all – glory, the greater for following hard on peril; flight and victory; kingly state and sad exile: twice in the dust, twice raised to the altars. He spoke his name: two centuries, each armed against the other, turned in submission to him as if awaiting his verdict; he called for silence and sat down as judge between them.

The tone of these stanzas is Romantic, as expressed in the words ‘gioia,’

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‘ansia,’ ‘follia.’ Napoleon occupies the throne as arbiter between two worlds, before and after the French Revolution. Here one reads the ode’s first question: ‘Fu vera gloria?’36 The change in focus in lines 30–4, from an evocation of Napoleon to an act of reverence toward God, consolidates the poet’s meditation and raises the poetic aim from a mundane centre to a divine one, for which worldly glory is eventually dissolved into ‘silenzio e tenebre’ (l. 95). By deferring to posterity the response to the question, Manzoni preserves the veracity of his major premise, the historical fact of Napoleon’s greatness, ‘la procellosa e trepida / gioia d’un gran disegno’ (ll. 37–8). The assertion that God had wanted to stamp ‘piú vasta orma’ of his spirit on Napoleon (vaster than what is not stated, as Manzoni acknowledged) is a judgment made about Napoleon’s earthly glory. Certainly the panorama of conquests is factual and finite. Napoleon’s error, as Nigro suggests, is to be seen in his self-naming, a violation and a depravation that Manzoni saw confirmed in his readings of Massillon. By commanding two centuries with his name – a name not mentioned in the poem – Napoleon usurped God’s role.37 The minor premise begins at the poem’s midpoint. The essence of the minor premise is palinodic: the inference is that in revisiting his life Napoleon decided to write of it, but was overwhelmed. This passage begins (‘E sparve’) with a powerful synthesis of all that has preceded it, echoing the poem’s dramatic opening. 55

E sparve, e i dì nell’ozio chiuse in sì breve sponda, segno d’immensa invidia e di pietà profonda, d’inestinguibil odio 60 e d’indomato amor. Come sul capo al naufrago l’onda s’avvolve e pesa, l’onda su cui del misero, alta pur dianzi e tesa, 65 scorrea la vista a scernere prode remote invan; tal su quell’alma il cumulo delle memorie scese. Oh quante volte ai posteri 70 narrar se stesso imprese, e sull’eterne pagine

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cadde la stanca man! Oh quante volte, al tacito morir d’un giorno inerte, 75 chinati i rai fulminei, le braccia al sen conserte, stette, e dei dì che furono l’assalse il sovvenir! E ripensò le mobili 80 tende, e i percossi valli, e il lampo de’ manipoli, e l’onda dei cavalli, e il concitato imperio e il celere ubbidir. And then was lost to sight, and closed his days in idleness, shut in such narrow bounds, object of immense envy and deep pity, of relentless hatred and unconquerable love. As over the head of one shipwrecked, when a wave has arched up and hung – the wave across which, a moment before, the poor wretch, lifted up by the swell and gazing ahead, had just discerned, in vain, a far-off shore – so did the weight of memories pour down upon that soul! O how often he began to tell his story for posterity, and the tired hand fell on the eternal pages! O how often, at the silent end of a dull day, as he stood with flashing eyes lowered and folded arms, the remembrance of days past took him by storm! And he thought again of the tents always in movement, and lines of defence under attack, and the flash of the moving squadrons, and the waves of cavalry, and the eager words of command and the prompt obedience.

If the major premise concerns the horizontal axis of history, the minor premise concerns humanity’s discourse with God, the vertical axis of spiritual need and supplication. The perceived unity of the mythical figure depends on the perception of what Varese calls ‘una contemporaneità di destini, quello mondano e quello religioso’ (a contemporaneousness of destinies, the worldly one and the religious).38 The scheme is also found in De Sanctis’s comments on Manzoni’s assumption that history is a work of Providence, that the only true history is the history of God: ‘Quei preconcetti formano qualcosa d’intermedio, che non ci fa attingere la realtà direttamente, ma sempre con quel concetto in mezzo tra essa e noi’ (Those preconceptions form something intermediate, which does not let us reach reality directly, but always with that concept between us

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and it).39 Disagreeing with De Sanctis’s view of the poem as centred on Napoleon’s epic and worldly glory, Mario Sansone stresses the poem’s interrogative status, its questioning of history itself, ‘l’enorme interrogativo della storia’ (the enormous interrogative of history).40 This passage, in which Napoleon searches in the sea of his memories for solace only to be swept under by their deluge, is itself a kind of question. About the final two stanzas in this section (ll.73–84), Sansone writes: ‘Il ritmo ansimante e tambureggiante s’acuisce e assume significato poeticamente proprio in ciò, che quelle memorie aggrediscono una coscienza già staccata dalla vita e dalle speranze e tutta rivolta a patirne il mistero’ (The panting and drumming rhythm is sharpened and assumes meaning poetically in that, that those memories are assaulting a conscience already detached from life and from hopes and entirely turned toward enduring their mystery).41 The minor premise concerns a now vulnerable man assailed by his memories. There is irony in the image of the shipwrecked man if one recalls the solemn locus of the ode’s beginning, listing the exploits of the man who once commanded ‘dall’uno all’altro mar’ (the same line in ‘La Pentecoste’ refers to the Church). That man is now an impotent scribe, unable to record his memories ‘sull’eterne pagine.’ While some have interpreted the image of shipwreck realistically (and typically found ll. 63–6 to be superfluous), for Luigi Russo the figural quality is decisive as it charts two moments in Napoleon’s soul, before and after the shipwreck of his memories and hopes. In terms of the abductive structure I am proposing for the poem, the complex image of Napoleon’s personal defeat set within two time-frames contributes to the positive alteration of his reality. Thus his fortunes on the battlefield (‘cadde, risorse e giacque’ l. 16) anticipate the falling of his writer’s hand (‘cadde la stanca man’ l. 72) as well as the falling of his longing spirit (‘cadde lo spirto anelo’ l. 86) that opens the poem’s conclusion and precedes the intervention of God’s grace. As Boggione writes, ‘Il Cristo che affascina Manzoni è il Cristo che si è definito pietra d’inciampo, che come spada a doppio taglio è venuto a portare la divisione’ (the Christ that fascinates Manzoni is the Christ who defined himself as a stumbling-block, who came as a two-edged sword to bring division).42 It is precisely this scandalous figure of Christ crucified and resurrected that underlies the epiphanic lines of the poem’s conclusion: 85

Ahi! forse a tanto strazio cadde lo spirto anelo,

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95

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e disperò; ma valida venne una man dal cielo, e in più spirabil aere pietosa il trasportò; e l’avvïò, pei floridi sentier della speranza, ai campi eterni, al premio che i desideri avanza, dov’è silenzio e tenebre la gloria che passò. Bella Immortal! benefica Fede ai trïonfi avvezza! Scrivi ancor questo, allegrati; ché più superba altezza al disonor del Gòlgota giammai non si chinò. Tu dalle stanche ceneri sperdi ogni ria parola: il Dio che atterra e suscita, che affanna e che consola, sulla deserta coltrice accanto a lui posò.

Ah, in such torment perhaps the spirit, gasping, broke down and despaired; but a strong hand came from heaven and bore him mercifully into more breathable air; and turned his steps along the flowery paths of hope, to fields eternal, to the prize that exceeds desires, where the glory that has passed away is silence and darkness. Lovely Immortal! Faith abounding in gifts, faith so accustomed to triumphs, record this one too and rejoice; for no prouder greatness has ever bowed to the ignominy of Golgotha. Drive away from those tired ashes every evil word: the God who humbles and lifts up, who afflicts and consoles, came to that deserted bed and sat down by him.

The word ‘forse’ clarifies the hypothetical nature of the conclusion: to wit, humans have every opportunity not to be saved. But, the abductive logic goes, if one elects to humble oneself to the ignominy of the cross (as Manzoni had read of Napoleon’s adoption of Christianity), the hand of God will descend and carry the spirit heavenward. The abduction is completed in the deus ex machina of the final lines – as ‘spirabil’ (l. 89)

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forms a remote echo of Christic ‘spiro’ of line 3. Just as one read of the downward collapse of ‘la stanca man,’ now the hand of Faith descends from the heavens, and Napoleon is carried skyward by a pitying God. This allegorical figure is asked to write what man cannot, of the joyful testimony of a conversion that echoes Manzoni’s Pauline concept of faith. 3 Francesco De Sanctis spoke of the ode in pictorial terms, distinguishing between the ‘painting’ of the historical subject and the religious ‘frame’ or halo around him. He argued that Manzoni should have painted the facts in their immediacy and abandoned the ‘frame,’ which was weakened by patheticism and irrationality. In a similar vein, Michelangelo Picone criticizes the ‘stanchi e faticati versi dell’ode’ (tired and weary lines of the ode) and ‘le titubanze del giudizio e della partecipazione soggettiva’ (hesitancies of judgment and subjective participation) of the author.43 Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti’s discussion of the poem focuses on syntagmatic ‘groups’ that make up its grammatical container.44 The ode’s ‘extremely constrictive and consolidated construction’ involves patterns of ‘duplication’ and ‘repetition,’ elements that form local antitheses (‘Due volte nella polvere, / due volte sull’altar’; ‘Lui folgorante in solio / vide il mio genio e tacque’; ‘di mille voci al sonito / mista la sua non ha’) that in turn reflect the overall antithesis between the worldly and the divine.45 Bàrberi Squarotti speaks of ‘il prevalere della simmetria, della struttura, sopra il significato’ (the prevalence of symmetry, of structure, over meaning) and of ‘la perfetta specularità del ridotto valore semantico’ (the perfect specularity of the reduced semantic value).46 What is not acknowledged by such a critique as Bàrberi Squarotti’s is the radically interrogative nature of the poem. Similarly reductive is Sapegno’s description of the poem as ‘[una] fusione di fantasia e riflessione, di contenuto umano e terrestre e di contemplazione religiosa’ (a blend of imagination and reflection, of human and earthly content and religious contemplation).47 In my view there is not a fusion or blending of the imagination and the reflection; rather there is a wedge driven between the earthly and the religious, creating a gap that challenges the reader to be actively engaged in the poem’s question, to assume the role of the Christian subject confronting death. It is properly a crisis in the ‘personality’ of the Christian that is the crux of the poem. As Leone De Castris notes, critics have failed to acknowledge

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the importance of this development in Manzoni, largely because of their failure to investigate his historical biography.48 Closer to the position taken here is Terracini’s stylistic study of the poem as a highly concentrated verbal expression that integrates the lofty and serious language of the ‘tradition,’ the language of ‘prayer,’ and the spirit of ‘antithesis’ specific to Romanticism.49 This latter feature is manifest in the tendency toward correspondences and symmetries that tie the smaller syntactic and thematic units to the larger whole, which Terracini argues is unified and ‘continuous’ and possesses dramatic force, owing to the poet’s layering of implicit and explicit meanings, his insistence on a simple syntax with a discursive intention, and the lack of ‘evasive’ language. Double adjectivization is a salient form of this tendency and is evident from the start, when the focus is historical and worldly, straight through to the conclusion, when the focus on the divine has taken over. As Terracini notes, the transition from the heroic theme to that of reflection is enabled by the poetic theme, that is, by the strong voice of the poet-vate who posits that a ‘convergence’ of the human and divine is possible. Thus after the first six stanzas of the exordium, as one reads stanza seven, which opens ‘La procellosa e trepida / gioia d’un gran disegno’ (ll. 37–8), one enters a new, more spiritualized atmosphere in which the lyric discourse completely overtakes the premise of a theatrical representation.50 Thus one sees develop ‘una commozione profonda’ (a profound emotion) made coherent and succinct by Manzoni’s long practice of contemplating matters of life, death, and language from a Christian perspective, so as to reflect such intensity of feeling without proselytizing. The use of inversions and proleptic syntax is one means by which he wrought this combination of discursive coherence and emotional force. According to Giovanni Giudici, it is precisely in the ‘Hymns, major odes and the choruses of the tragedies’ that Manzoni provides a high tragic poetry that has been poorly understood by readers, but stands as unique in the tradition: ‘Manzoni’s is the only example of tragic poetry (of style and of situation) in the Italian tradition, but it has remained unacknowledged.’51 Giudici argues that in Manzoni’s verse ‘poetry becomes its own theatre, the page becomes a stage, the voice (of the author or reader) a mask.’52 In this autonomy from the common language and separation from the common taste, Manzoni’s verse acquires its irony, which penetrates to its very structure. The critic seeks to defend the poet from those critics who ignore his essential and iconic use of language (or what was referred to above as ‘symbolic metaphor’), and he argues, like Terracini, that the poem’s theatricality is not representational but is

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internal to its own stylistic devices. As Giudici puts it, Manzoni’s language is audacious in its confrontation with the real, not least because of its use of irony and artifice. If one keeps in mind the historical moment of the poem, the ‘fateful’ year 1821, with its dreams of freedom and its crushing disappointments (on 9 April the Austrians defeated the Piedmontese freedom fighters, and two weeks later Manzoni began to write I promessi sposi), the paradoxes of Il Cinque maggio seem to suggest the tense equilibrium that existed in this moment in Manzoni’s thought. One is dealing here with the role of paradox not just in rhetoric and poetics–the figures of oxymoron and antithesis–but as a feature of Christian revelation. The body of Napoleon is the integument or veil of Everyman. The radical change in him occurs when his attempt to record his life for posterity fails, and other Words intervene to lift him heavenward out of the hell of despair. For Manzoni, who had read in the Gazzetta di Milano of 18 July 1821 that Napoleon turned toward Christ before his death, this hypothesis seemed more than plausible.53 4 There is a productive fallibilism in Manzoni’s pursuit of literary precepts: as his literary work progresses the precepts change to keep pace with it. The work is always the end solution; like his belief in a Christian Providence and morality active in history, his creative work is a constant. If his rationalistic formation had instilled in him ‘quell’amore per il sillogismo e per la “piccola logica” che Benedetto Croce gli ha lungamente rimproverato’ (that love for the syllogism and for the ‘little logic’ that Benedetto Croce has long upbraided him for), the grand syllogism he constructs in the Cinque maggio is of a different order.54 Once again, the passage from the writing of the Inni sacri and the two tragedies – the ‘romance’ elements of which he had come to regret – to the writing of I promessi sposi is puncuated by the watershed year, 1821, a period of personal crisis and transition. With a new emphasis on the creature and the fact of creation, Manzoni is proposing that the public – almost as an embodiment of posterity – examine the historical and extra-historical parts of the syllogism and make a personal determination of its own.55 Under this perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte is not like the heroes of Manzoni’s tragedies, Adelchi and the Il Conte di Carmagnola; whose types derive more from the mythic projections of tyrants or exalted leaders in Alfieri and Monti than from first-hand knowledge of the historical figure. With

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Napoleon, Manzoni is dealing with a real person whose worldly greatness was known and whose turn to the Christian faith was the subject of journalistic discussion (and who received the Last Rites from a Catholic priest). This profile caused Manzoni to reflect on his own life and on the greatness and ignominy of Christ, his kenosis – that is, God’s becoming human in him.56 Manzoni’s Christian revolt is not simply due to his 1810 conversion but concerns his passage from the earlier Inni, in which ‘l’incontro dell’uomo con Cristo vi è prevalentemente all’insegna della gioia’ (the meeting of man with Christ is prevalently characterized by joy), to Il Cinque maggio, in which there exists ‘una novità, nell’importanza centrale attribuita al dolore quale strumento di salvezza’ (a novelty, in the central importance attributed to pain as an instrument of salvation).57 Boggione notes three paradoxes of Christianity that inspired Manzoni: ‘Cristo, che è immune da ogni colpa, sperimenta in sé tutte le consequenze della colpa, per annullarle’ (Christ, who is immune from any guilt, experiences in himself all the consequences of guilt, in order to nullify them); ‘Dio dona all’uomo il proprio stesso Figlio, perché questi, nel sacrificio della croce, gli venga offerto come ostia innocente, cancellando in sé il peccato’ (God gives to man his very own Son, so that he, in the sacrifice of the cross, may be offered as an innocent host, eliminating sin in himself); ‘la salvezza presuppone la sconfitta, nasce dalla sconfitta’ (salvation presupposes defeat, is born out of defeat).58 The premise that Faith can write (‘Scrivi ancor questo, allegrati / ché più superba altezza / al disonor del Golgota / giammai non si chinò,’ ll. 99–102) refers to these paradoxes contained in the Living Word. While the hypothesis of a Napoleonic conversion is uncertain, this too regards Christianity’s open-ended relationship with history. One is drawn to the cracks in the argument, as in the two uses of ‘forse’ symmetrically disposed in the final line of the protasis (l. 24: ‘un cantico / che forse non morrà’) and in the first line of the conclusion (ll. 85–7: ‘Ahi! forse a tanto strazio / cadde lo spirto anelo, / e disperò’). The abduction grows rich because of the presence of precisely those unknowns and ambiguities that De Sanctis and others denounced. The dead language of Manzoni swells up, not out of excessive ornamentation but due to a combined ethical and aesthetic position; the language functions to ennoble the subject, allowing the reader to calmly accept the image of a cosmos ordered by the hand of God while the ‘hand’ of the man collapses ‘on the eternal pages.’ To state it in the terms of the Lettre a M. Chauvet, in Il Cinque maggio Manzoni combines historical facts with ‘invented’ facts

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where the recorded facts did not exist. He entertains a healthy scepticism toward the traditional Enlightenment view that aesthetic form possessed an implicit and necessary connection to psychological truth. In contrast he seeks a ‘correspondence between the laws of aesthetics and the general laws of the spirit.’59 It is in this light that one must view his apparent disconcern for the secular civic literature that goes from Dante to Machiavelli, from Alfieri to Foscolo, and his adoption of a Petrarchan synthesis of the immanent and the transcendent (such as the one that allowed him to identify the resurrection of Christ in ‘La Pentecoste’ with the Risorgimento desired in Italy). The following graphic represents the juxtaposition of contingent and religious arguments in the poem as representing two axes: the horizontal axis of history and the vertical axis of the eternal, or of revelation: Conclusion (ll. 85–108) (‘il Massimo Fattor’) God

 Protasis (ll. 1–24) Manzoni 

Napoleon



Major Premise (ll. 25–54) ‘i posteri’ / the reader

 the humble (‘Nui’) Minor Premise (ll. 55–84)

To recapitulate: the poet presents himself in the protasis (ll. 1–24) as a heretofore silent witness, then invokes his ‘genius,’ establishing both the historical and religious contexts for what is to follow. One reads a catalogue of Napoleon’s worldly conquests, a metonymics of place that attributes to him the mythic arms of lightning and thunder. The question of glory is posed and deferred to posterity, as Manzoni asserts ‘our’ submission to God’s will. Double figures become pronounced, suggesting the co-presence of two logics–that of the world and that of salvation. The major premise (ll. 25–84) establishes Napoleon’s preeminence (‘ei si nomò’) as the arbiter and controller of two historical worlds, a secular chapter now concluded. On the basis of this historical figure, some critics such as Momigliano have seen the poem’s primary importance as its monumentality, above reproach, ‘nell’immobilità uguale dell’eternità’ (in the equal immobility of eternity).60 Yet if one interprets the poem

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strictly in terms of monumentality, by seeking refuge in the figure of a great man and the ideal of a perfect expression of universal values, one commits the very error that Manzoni intended to correct: in fact, Napoleon does not escape the case of the common man. The place for this clarification is the minor premise (ll. 55–84), in which the exile is presented as shipwrecked in his own memories. Manzoni renders this commonplace simile complex, adding ambiguities by means of a double description. The conclusion (ll. 85–108) commences with a transfer of hands, from the hand of Napoleon to that of God. True glory is confirmed as existing absolutely, though still conditioned by the word ‘forse’ in the case of Napoleon. The final stanza comes full circle, erasing ‘ogni ria parola’: mere names are ephemeral unless they lead to the lessons of Providence. The final distich pairs the exilic keyword ‘deserta’ and that of the protection of divine love, ‘coltrice.’ Thus the gap between the historical-horizontal discourse and the vertical-religious discourse, between monumentality and wonder, is collapsed in the intimate knowledge of Faith; the history explains the religion, and the religion explains the history: they are what Bateson calls a ‘useful abductive pair.’61 In summary, Manzoni’s Romanticism is a product of his classical and Enlightenment education. This is apparent in the precepts found in his ‘Materiali estetici’ (largely from 1817), where he identified three parts to the literary work: ‘il soggetto, che dev’essere vero; il fine, che dev’essere utile; e il mezzo, che dev’essere interessante’ (the subject, which must be true; the goal, which must be useful, and the means, which must be interesting).62 The one precept that stands out as unmistakably Romantic is the first one, demanding the truth of the literary subject. For Manzoni, the idealistic rationalism of the Enlightenment had ignored the dual truth of history and Christianity. This conviction gives rise to a new historicism, similar to Leopardi’s but invested in the Catholic morality and the historical example of Christ and the Church. It is this dispensation combined with the actual event of Napoleon’s exile and death that gives Il Cinque maggio its ‘true’ subject. The poet’s aim, which must be ‘useful,’ and the means of presentation, which must be ‘interesting,’ lead him to a symbolic figuration of Napoleon that is neither rationalistic and secular nor idealistic and monumental. Rather, the once exalted leader is abased, like Christ (about whose treatment at the hands of the authorities we have the reliable accounts in the New Testament). Manzoni connects Napoleon’s remorse and helplessness to his personal turning to the faith, and thus to his emergence as a soul freed from his earthly burdens. This anti-monumental theme is derived directly from the keno-

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sis of Christ, whose mortality was dismally on display to all who viewed the scene at Calvary. Napoleon, the man-god memorialized by Canova and many others, is dead. To put it starkly: the monument is dead. The anti-monumental is the road to Golgotha, and the road to life. Manzoni’s own faith is enmeshed in his scribal adherence to the truth; for the scribe or pharisee who adheres only to the law but not to justice, the scandal is well known (1 Cor. 1:23). Manzoni’s didactic purpose is to respond to the great question of the hour: to what end was the worldly greatness of Napoleon? By exploiting the common experience of pathos and wonder over the death, he traces out a universal dimension that is true for all men. The uncertain nature of the conclusion does not alter the universal dimension of Christ’s example. To Manzoni’s way of thinking, the truth of the poem regards death, confession, redemption, and grace. The analogy for humanity is clear.

3 Pascolian Intertexts in the Lyric Poetry of Attilio Bertolucci

As stated in the Introduction, the scribe is a kind of native informant who reports consistently about an ethos until such time as a deviation occurs in the form of innovation and culture change. Anthropologists know that reliable native informants are not ‘ordinary’ members of the group but possess unusual motivation and skill. To report on one’s ethos in writing is the role of the scribe who inherits a literary patrimony of considerable complexity and adapts it to one’s own era and individual needs. Intertextuality is the name given to this stylistic appropriation of sources. While this is a topic present throughout this book, it is the specific focus of this chapter on two poets of memory and sensibility, Giovanni Pascoli and Attilio Bertolucci. Each of these authors is a teacher and scholar, a transmitter of culture in the public domain. Each of them is also intensely inward in his psychological propensities, absorbed in his personal memories, a doumentarian of family life who encounters a grave crisis that he ‘works through’ in writing. The scribal revolt of both Pascoli and Bertolucci emerges from a poetry of concrete details and perceptions that goes against the grain of a more abstract and conceptladen historical style. There is in either poet an investment in things, the humble objects of daily existence that carry with them a tangible sense of memory. Needless to say, in such an ethos the poems themselves become examples of such objects over time. When Giovanni Pascoli was named ‘Poeta Nazionale’ by the Fascists in June 1925, one had good cause to wonder about their motives. Though such a gesture, thirteen years after the death of the poet, may simply have been a rubber stamp of an academic recommendation by a regime still laissez-faire in its literary politics, it was also a way to counter the authority of Benedetto Croce, a confirmed anti-Pascolian who in May

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1925 had led the signers of the Anti-Fascist manifesto. While Mussolini (who did not attend the ceremony) was privately sarcastic about the coronation, it did allow him to seem ecumenical and to accept that ‘Nationalistic’ Pascoli who appealed to him. One thinks in particular of the 1911 article, ‘La grande Proletaria si è mossa,’ in which Pascoli the vate and populist spoke in support of the Italian invasion and colonialist expansion into Libya, advocating his own brand of nationalistic socialism for the sake of the masses of poor Italian emigrants. Pascoli was a rural property owner and came to symbolize a retreat into the instinctual space behind the hedge of one’s family plot. A large and withdrawing man, he was expert in the language of psychological enclosure, of a turbid and constant impetus toward psychological regression. His work is saturated with an aura of intimacy and nostalgia, and is rooted in a morbid preoccupation with the domestic and familial: the disturbed unconscious of his family drama. While it may be that these features were attractive to the Strapaese faction of the fascist movement that identified the primitive and agricultural Italy as the only authentic one, it is dubious that it appealed to Mussolini. In general one must conclude that the choice of Pascoli as ‘National Poet’ was purely pragmatic, and a nod to the exquisiteness of his lyrics and his imposing, if mediocre, corpus of civic poetry. In contrast, the great novelty of Pascoli for twentieth-century readers and poets lies in his boldly experimental and anti-traditional use of language. As a scholar of Latin and Greek, ‘dead languages’ in which he still crafted poetry, and of Dante, Pascoli’s allegiance was to the particularity of language. He showed great respect for the exact denotative term: for a species, a colour, the precise contours of an utterance. A brilliant versifier, his technicalism provided an extremely diverse range of metrical and lexical solutions. His ear could wander from standard Italian to record the onomatopoeic sounds of birds, the language of Italian-American immigrants, the dialect of the Garfagnana (in Northwest Tuscany), or the verses of the neo-Provençal bard Mistral. One of Pascoli’s artistic progeny who best combines the intimism of the exquisite, lyrical space and the almost Linnean objectivity of his technicalism is Attilio Bertolucci. Born in the same month as the patriotic article on Italian emigration to Libya (November 1911), Bertolucci is an excellent example of that ‘other twentieth century’ (to borrow a locution from G. De Robertis) that found in Pascoli, not d’Annunzio, the major poet of the preceding generation.1 A resident of Rome who returns frequently to his mountain retreat

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near Parma, Bertolucci writes an intimate Proustian poetry of remembrance. His derivation from Pascoli is a testament to the spiritual and musical debt sensed to that poet’s intimistic vein, his poetics of the country domestic enclosure, but also his technical genius and experimental use of diverse poetric genres including the narrative poemetto. Bertolucci in his early years, the 1930s, is an original lyric poet, an avid and omnivorous reader of poetry and prose of Europe and Italy, a poet of the senses and the transitory. In his La capanna indiana (The Indian Hut), another more mature – and more Pascolian – dimension emerges, clearly marking the poet’s departure from European symbolism and the more recent school of hermetic poetry. At the centre of his literary self-discovery lie a number of factors which the poet later encodes for us under the sign of ‘arrhythmia,’ an irregular heartbeat that has profound psychological and existential consequences. In the poet’s new style there is a freedom to experiment with poetic genres – including the fabulous, the romance, and the operatic–but above all there is an immersion in the circular time of the seasons, almost as a protection against the devouring linear time of history. In the opposition of two temporalities one sees the oscillation between past and present, between the phenomenal awareness of nature’s splendours and the ephemeral nature of life. Among the earlier poems included in La capanna indiana are those entitled ‘Lettera da casa’ (Letter from Home, 1935–51), among them ‘Gli anni’ (The Years), the first of two poems by Bertolucci compared intertextually in this chapter to two poems from Pascoli’s Myricae. Bertolucci’s ‘Gli anni’ is a reminiscence of ‘Allora,’ while ‘L’undici agosto’ (1971) refers to ‘X Agosto.’ These are among Pascoli’s best-known lyrics, a fact that heightens their potential referentiality; first published in 1896, the two poems were placed into the fourth edition of Myricae (1897). In either case, Bertolucci pays homage to the Pascolian text while reversing its pessimistic tone and conclusions.2 ‘Intertextuality’ is understood here in terms of two overlapping sets of criteria proposed by Claudio Guillén: the first set, ‘allusion’ and ‘inclusion,’ concerns the extent of purely verbal involvement between two works; the second set, ‘citation’ and ‘significance,’ concerns the intensity of the intepretative or thematic relation.3 Thus a brief reference to another work that carries a deep resonance is a significant allusion, while a more extensive borrowing that remains purely contextual is an inclusive citation. Guillén’s terms afford the critic a means to discriminate and prioritize without reverting to the prematurely emic tool of authorial intention. If one acknowledges a certain literary saturation in the Ital-

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ian context, a common knowledge of a literary koine and canon, then unconscious motives may emerge with as much purpose and grace as the more programmatically designed homages or imitations. Intertextuality goes beyond the discussion of literary sources; when the relation between texts is one of significance, it is the specifically literary form of autopoiesis by which a later author incorporates and affirms ethical and aesthetic positions, portions of verbal memory, taken by the earlier author. To label such practitioners as ‘derivative’ is not a slight so much as a recognition of their skill at adapting to the literary tradition. Bertolucci writes an intimate Proustian poetry of remembrance. His derivation from Pascoli takes the form of significant allusions and inclusions; it is a testament to that poet’s technical genius and poetics of the rural domestic life. Bertolucci’s appreciation of Pascoli’s elegiac and intimistic style is unique among his more formalist and hermetic contemporaries, yet in many respects Bertolucci anticipates a more narrative current of poetry in the latter twentieth century. My discussion proceeds from the formal and syntactic level of analysis to the semantic and thematic; I hope to demonstrate in this way the pascolismo of Bertolucci in his sharing of the ‘lyric tension’ and ‘interior resonances’ of the poet of Barga.4 Allora Allora ... in un tempo assai lunge felice fui molto; non ora: ma quanta dolcezza mi giunge da tanta dolcezza d’allora! Quell’anno! per anni che poi fuggirono, che fuggiranno, non puoi, mio pensiero, non puoi, portare con te, che quell’anno! Un giorno fu quello, ch’è senza compagno, ch’è senza ritorno; la vita fu vana parvenza sì prima sì dopo quel giorno! Un punto! ... così passeggero, che in vero passò non raggiunto,

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ma bello così, che molto ero

felice, felice, quel punto! Then: Then ... in a time far removed / I was very happy; but not now: / yet so much sweetness reaches me / now from so much sweetness then! / / That year! through years that / fled by, that fled speedily by, / you cannot, my thought, you cannot / keep intact more than that single year! / / It was but one day, that is without / companion, and will not return; / life was vain appearance, equally, / before and after that day! / / A point!... so fleeting, / that in truth passed by unattained, / but so lovely, that I was so / happy, happy, at that point!

* Gli anni Le mattine dei nostri anni perduti, i tavolini nell’ombra soleggiata dell’autunno, i compagni che andavano e tornavano, i compagni che non tornarono più, ho pensato ad essi lietamente. Perché questo giorno di settembre splende così incantevole nelle vetrine in ore simili a quelle d’allora, quelle d’allora scorrono ormai in un pacifico tempo, la folla è uguale sui marciapiedi dorati, solo il grigio e il lilla si mutano in verde e rosso per la moda, il passo è quello lento e gaio della provincia. The Years: The mornings of our lost years, / sidewalk tables in the sunny shade of autumn, / friends who went away and came back, the friends / who only went away, I gaily thought of them. / / Because this September day shines / so beguiling in shop windows in hours / similar to those back then, those back then / flee by, by now, within a peaceful time, / / the crowd is the same on the gilded sidewalks / only the grey and lilac are changed / into green and red, due to fashion, / the pace is the slow and gay one of the provinces.

‘Allora’ consists of four quatrains of novenari in regular alternating

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rhyme (a b a b), while ‘Gli anni’ unfolds in three hypermetric quatrains largely of Alexandrines (or double septenaries) without end-rhymes or internal rhymes. The poems contain similar word counts (eighty-five and eighty-seven words respectively), though they differ markedly in their iterativity. In all, seven words or combinations are used twice in ‘Allora’: ‘punto,’ ‘giorno,’ ‘dolcezza,’ ‘quell’anno,’ ‘senza,’ ‘fuggire,’ ‘non puoi’). Two key-words appear three times each: ‘felice’ and ‘allora.’ In addition, the demonstrative ‘quello’ appears five times. Each strophe of ‘Allora’ contains a chiasmus, lending it a symmetrical and self-enclosed structure. The repeated opening and closing is reinforced by oppositions and symmetries (‘sì prima sì dopo’), alliterations (‘la vita fu vana parvenza,’ ‘non puoi, mio pensiero, non puoi / portare’), and internal rhymes (‘quanta’ / ‘tanta’), that attain to an almost claustrophobic sense of the finite and the finished. That the number of stanzas is equal to the number of lines per stanza is another of the parallelisms to be considered along with other antitheses and symmetries which surface in the content. In ‘Gli anni,’ the title is the plural of the longest of three time periods cited in ‘Allora’; other key words carried over include ‘compagno,’ ‘giorno,’ ‘allora,’ ‘pensare / pensiero,’ and three uses of the demonstrative ‘quello.’ The sequence in line 7, ‘quelle d’allora, quelle d’allora,’ betrays by itself the presence of the Pascolian intertext. Yet unlike ‘Allora,’ the syntactic character of ‘Gli anni’ is not of a tightening or closure, but of a progressive and tranquil unfolding, of an openness to prose in a felicitous balance with poetry, of equanimity and calm. The pace of the irregular Alexandrines is slowed by the polysyllabic ‘lietamente,’ ‘incantevole,’ and ‘marciapiedi.’ This slowness is reinforced phonically by the pronounced use of /l/ sounds (twenty-five instances), as it is by the frequent enjambments, which again, as we shall see, support an antinomic attitude with respect to the similar content, of a recollected sweetness and intimacy, of ‘Allora.’ To address now the thematic level: both poems possess an extreme verbal economy; they want to be read on face value. Despite the intense stylization, both men are poets of the object, of real experience. There is no clashing between high and low language, no irony, no inclination toward intellectualist abstraction. ‘Allora’ – which I have described as iterative, emphatic, and chiasmic – conveys a sense of emphasis and constriction: the present state of unhappiness is contrasted with the sweetness of a moment long past: but that too was a moment when sweetness quickly fled. The futility of this situation is overcome by equating eternity

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and the instant, as Victor Hugo had done. (Hugo is one of the few nineteenth-century European poets Pascoli knew.) According to this logic, if happiness is unattainable, being confined to a remote point in memory, then the pathos of that happiness is made much sweeter. ‘Gli anni’ has a similar theme of loss and the struggle to remember, though, as stated in the Proustian incipit, the past years are gone and the friends will not return. Yet the crowd is the same as before, ephemeral in the flow of the seasons, as their coloured garments pass before the eyes. ‘Gli anni’ concludes not with the ‘punto,’ the point, but the ‘passo,’ the footstep, a moment on the clinamen or Lucretian curve, the temporal flow of life in the provincial city. Life changes are not trivial, but external appearances are comparable to fashion: if one remains detached in the face of this mutability, one will see that the ‘gray and lilac’ of yesterday are identical to the ‘green and red’ of today. In the face of the transitory, Bertolucci proposes a sense of physical well-being and equilibrium, a coenaesthesis. This intimate mode is common throughout Bertolucci’s work, from the short lyric to the monumental ‘family-romance epic,’ La camera da letto (The Bedroom). Unlike ‘Allora,’ ‘Gli anni’ (published in 1951) is written largely in the present tense; its discursive development depends on physical movement, not the distillation of a moment in memory. While Pascoli’s thought, ‘mio pensiero,’ is reified and set in the remote past (a tense used five times), Bertolucci’s ‘ho pensato’ concerns an active thought connecting the present time to an earlier sweetness. In ‘Gli anni’ it is the modesty of form and the balance of spontaneity and care, of the commonplace and exquisite, that places the reader in a position to view an intimate and unrepeatable experience. It is the air of peace and gladness, the ‘slow and gay pace of the provinces,’ captured in the words ‘soleggiata,’ ‘lietamente,’ ‘splende,’ ‘incantevole,’ ‘pacifico,’ ‘uguale,’ ‘dorati,’ ‘gaio.’ Bertolucci seeks a temporal decompression, an inclusion of the past in the present. In contrast, Pascoli cultivates his own irremediable sadness. The emphases of iterations, deixes, exclamations, and the overall movement from ‘allora’ to ‘quell’anno’ to ‘quel giorno’ to ‘quel punto’ (an apparent calque of Petrarch’s sonnet 61: ‘Benedetto sia ’l giorno, et ’l mese, et l’anno’), combine to fix in memory the sacred value of sentiment. The second lyric by Pascoli in our comparative study is the canonical ‘X Agosto’ (The Tenth of August), which also features a telescoping back into the poet’s personal memory:

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The Legacy of the Poeta Vate X Agosto San Lorenzo, io lo so perché tanto di stelle per l’aria tranquilla arde e cade, perché sì gran pianto nel concavo cielo sfavilla. Ritornava una rondine al tetto: l’uccisero: cadde tra spini: ella aveva nel becco un insetto: la cena de’ suoi rondinini. Ora è là, come in croce, che tende quel verme a quel cielo lontano; e il suo nido è nell’ombra, che attende, che pigola sempre più piano. Anche un uomo tornava al suo nido: l’uccisero: disse: Perdono; e restò negli aperti occhi un grido: portava due bambole in dono... Ora là, nella casa romita, lo aspettano, aspettano in vano: egli immobile, attonito, addita le bambole al cielo lontano. E tu, Cielo, dall’alto dei mondi sereni, infinito, immortale, oh! d’un pianto di stelle lo inondi quest’atomo opaco del Male! The Tenth of August: St Lawrence, I do know why so many / stars in the tranquil air / are burning and falling, why such a crying / is sparkling in the concave sky. / / A swallow was returning to the roof: / they killed her: she fell among thorns: / she had in her beak an insect: / supper for her little swallows. / / Now she is there, as on a cross, extending / that worm to that distant sky; / and her nest is in the shadows, waiting, / chirping ever more softly. / / A man too was returning to his nest: / they killed him: he said: Forgive; / and a cry was locked in his open eyes: / as he brought home

Attilio Bertolucci’s Lyric Poetry two dolls as gifts... / / Now there, in the solitary house, / they wait for him, they wait in vain: / he motionless, stunned, shows / the dolls to the distant heavens. / / And you, Heaven, from the height of the / serene worlds, infinite, immortal, / oh! you submerge this opaque atom of / Evil with a weeping of stars!

* L’undici agosto La matura perfezione di questa giornata – l’undici agosto ma è come fosse settembre e la roccia è rugosa, dolce, contenente succo – include nella sua luce la montagna presente, prati sonori al piede dorati alla vista, Antiope dormiente, boschi neri alla vista a penetrare argentei di lumache e di vene colanti acqua da più sù più sù, dove improvviso è il cielo a mostrarsi in quella seta pesante d’oggi celeste con applicazioni in seta bianca rasata e in oro sagrale (nuvole e sole), la pianura anche, la cui percezione non sarà, in tale lontananza, possibile se non dopo la fatica d’arrampicarsi al crinale e lì contemplarla in una falce brunita che il padre giovane regge alta seguito da un figlio già cacciatore di nidi da una figlia in lilla stinto da una moglie già vecchia e in quello specchio mobile affrettati a fissare gli occhi vedrai la città orizzontale signora del vizio e della conversazione paisible attraversata da ponti decorata da belvederi: una tale percezione era da ricordare. August 11: The ripe perfection of this day – / August eleventh though it

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The Legacy of the Poeta Vate seems like September / and the rock is creased, sweet, containing juice – / includes in its light the present / mountain, meadows sonorous to the foot gilded / to the sight, sleeping Antiope, forests black / to the sight silvery with snails to penetrate / and water dripping down from veins higher up, / higher up, where suddenly it is the sky / to show itself in that heavy silk of today / sky blue with layers of white satin / and liturgical gold (clouds and sun), / the plains too, which can probably / not be seen at such a distance / save by the labour of climbing to the ridge / and there contemplating them in a burnished scythe / which the young father holds overhead followed / by a son, once a hunter of nests, by a / daughter in faded lilac, and by a wife / already old, hurry to focus your eyes / on that moving mirror you will see the horizontal city / Matron of vice and peaceable / conversation / traversed by bridges decorated by belvederes: / such a perception was worth remembering.

‘X agosto’ and ‘L’undici agosto’ each comprise six quatrains. The former is written in alternating decasyllables and novenari in alternating rhyme; the latter in hypermetric Alexandrines without end-rhymes. Both the elegy on the violent death of Pascoli’s father, and Bertolucci’s idyll of the peasant family’s walk through the forest to a panoramic view of the plains and city, are rich in alliteration, internal rhyme, and repetitions. While each stanza of ‘X Agosto’ comprises one sentence, divided by colons and semicolons, ‘L’undici agosto’ is made up of one sweeping period with various clauses. On the one hand a crisp syncopated versification enables an extended analogy; on the other, an intuitive prose rhythm with numerous enjambments expresses the complex memory of a perception. The linguistic register of ‘X Agosto’ is simple and melodic, and benefits from a certain fin de siecle symbolism.5 Pascoli’s syntax is rich in parallelisms that reinforce the extended analogy of the poem, which is the comparison of the poet’s father (murdered on 10 August 1867) to the mother swallow that is killed. She is carrying a worm for her ‘rondinini,’ he is carrying dolls for his children. The ‘spini’ and ‘croce’ of the mother are Christological and harmonize with the ‘Cielo’ that showers down its cleansing tears on the night of San Lorenzo (‘the night of the shooting stars’ that celebrates St Lawrence’s martyrdom). Pascoli borrows a pronoun and two adjectives from the first stanza of Il Cinque maggio, ‘egli immobile, attonito,’ suggesting his father’s likeness to the larger-than-life figure of Manzoni’s Napoleon, and the stunned moment of his passing. The iteration of ‘cielo lontano,’ ‘cielo,’ ‘pianto,’ ‘aspettano’ and in the

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openings of stanzas 2 and 4 (‘Ritornava’ / ‘tornava’) and 3 and 5 (‘Ora è là’ / ‘Ora là’) creates a closed symmetrical structure and contributes to the bleak, mournful rhythm of the elegy. Bertolucci’s lexis in ‘L’undici agosto’ is luminous, sensual, gestural; his syntax is largely paratactic and includes descriptive parentheses and digressions. Words repeated twice include ‘alla vista,’ ‘percezione,’ ‘tale,’ ‘seta.’ The repeated shifter ‘più su, più su’ (‘higher, higher’) directs the reader to follow the poet’s fleetness of eye and step. One also notes the synonyms ‘questa giornata’ / ‘oggi,’ and ‘dorati’ / ‘oro.’ The important lexemes carried over from ‘X Agosto,’ besides the similar date of the title, ‘L’undici agosto,’ are the keywords ‘nido,’ ‘occhio,’ and ‘cielo.’ The intertextual reference is heightened by Bertolucci’s use of ‘padre,’ ‘figlia,’ ‘figlio,’ and ‘madre,’ words that recall the tragic outcome of Pascoli’s family drama (a year after his father’s death, Pascoli’s mother and sister died as well). The kind of domestic portrait found in ‘L’undici agosto’ was dear to Pascoli, and normally carried a message of tragic loss. The burnished sickle of the young father stands here as a mythic equivalent to that of Father Time. Here Bertolucci transfers to the potential violence of the raised blade what Pascoli had expressed twice in the peremptory simple past tense, ‘l’uccisero’ (‘they killed her/him’), a reference first to the mother swallow then to his father. As stated, one immediately suspects the Pascolian intertext from the title. Unlike the opening of ‘X Agosto,’ with its unusual (for Pascoli) assertiveness in the first person, ‘San Lorenzo, io lo so,’ here the ‘I’ figure is absent. It is clear from the incipit that the subject concerns the perception of a landscape; yet as the poem develops this sensory immediacy in a series of fluid, yet concrete, observations, the layer of memory subtly asserts itself. The foundation of the poem in a concrete perception that resonates in memory is itself a Pascolian trait. The mediation between these discrete temporal planes is accomplished through the images, such as the comparison of the mountain to sleeping Antiope, undoubtedly the figure in Correggio’s painting Jupiter and Antiope in the Louvre.6 A painter active in Parma, Correggio serves to represent Bertolucci’s background in art history and his refined and self-described ‘arrhythmic’ aesthetic, which oscillates between safety and danger, the fear of isolation and abandonment and the warmth and security of the hearth. This essential feature of Bertolucci’s poetics was described by him in two essays on the ‘poetics of the extrasystole’ published in Paragone in 1951 and 1966.7 Here the poet’s own experience of cardiac arrhythmia is

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Correggio’s painting Jupiter and Antiope, also known as Venus, Satyr, and Cupid (1523), Louvre, Paris. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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given as the basis of a poetics rooted in the body’s emotional and physiological response to events. By aligning his sense of psychological crisis with the experience of arrhythmia, Bertolucci aims for a kind of homeopathic cure through poetry; knowing his condition to be ‘functional, not organic,’ he is able to see it positively as the effective and tangible link between the sensory experience of the body and the symbolic constructs of the mind.8 As the essayist Bertolucci recalls his historic condition, which led him to experience disturbing moments of irregular heartbeat from his adolescence on, he sees the nature of memory as imbricated in his mission as a writer. Early readings of Pascoli (‘Breus’) and Carducci (‘La Canzone di Legnano,’ ‘Sogno d’estate’) recreated for him an archaic language of memory that would surface in his work and lead him to a narrative verse, as in those examples, both of whom had taught at the University of Bologna where Bertolucci studied (notably with Roberto Longhi), and both of whom anticipated the possibilities of a more rhythmic modern verse form. ‘L’undici agosto’ is essentially an idyll, in the sense in which that genre was recast by Leopardi as an intensely visual experience (‘idillio’ derives from the Greek eidos, figure or type, and eidèo, I see). The poet sketches out the view of the mountain landscape in lines 1–12, with the ‘forests … silvery with snails,’ its ‘rock ... containing juice,’ and the recumbent eros of the Antiope figure (similar to the image of the female nude in Campana’s ‘La chimera’), and then sketches out in lines 13–24 the peasant family as it travels under the protection of a sky decorated in liturgical gold and white satin, in order to gaze on the plains below and to the lazy ‘matron’ reclining there, the city of Parma. This idyll concludes with a felicitous outcome for the peasant family, in contrast to the pathetic family tragedy of ‘X Agosto.’ The family’s climb to a point of mutual vision is overseen by a sky conceived as a ‘liturgical’ fabric. The twice-used metaphor of the sky as silk recalls Pascoli’s double use of ‘cielo lontano’ and his theme of Christian transcendence. The image creates a sense of protection in contrast to the cosmic opposition of microcosm and macrocosm found in ‘X Agosto’ (here again Pascoli is employing images found in the poetry of Hugo, among them the ‘weeping stars of heaven,’ and the ‘house’ as ‘nest’). Pascoli would resist the idyllic mode throughout his career, just as Bertolucci resisted the moral uneasiness of the Pascolian elegy – in which the figure of crucifixion, and not resurrection, prevails, and in which the shooting stars, or tears of heaven, fail to overcome the ‘opaque atom of Evil’ under the ‘concave sky.’ The physical movement upwards (‘arrampicarsi’) in ‘L’undici agosto’

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indicates a detachment from suffering. By ascending, the family reaches another level of consciousness, another vantage point. The concluding exclamations of ‘X Agosto’ are here implicit in the wonder in and of the collective gaze. The ‘burnished scythe’ conveys finally not simply the reflection of the city below but the cohesiveness of the peasant family which ‘contemplates’ the ‘city.’ On the one hand, the upraised scythe is a kind of periscope; on the other it is a detached reminder of the violence which killed Ruggero Pascoli. We have seen how Pascoli’s theme of injustice, and his tragic view of destiny, are transmuted into a question of detachment and a care for the everyday perception able to elicit a magical sense of wonder. Giovanni Raboni refers to ‘the tight and inextricable relationship that exists in Bertolucci’s poetry between the day-to-day and the magical, between the normality of his repertoire and the disquieting exceptionality of his light (and vice versa).’9 Specifically the view of the city, ‘Matron of vice and peaceable conversation,’ under a serene and silken sky, is seen to counterbalance Pascoli’s cosmic Evil. The word that sticks in the reader’s mind is paisible, ‘peaceable,’ the French word that describes the relaxed, courteous, and urbane conversations in the city below. Instead of the ‘solitary house’ (‘casa romita’) where the children ‘wait’ (‘aspettano’) in vain, the peasant family is ‘hurried along’ (‘affrettati’) to look quickly in the ‘moving mirror’ (‘specchio mobile’) at the ‘horizontal city’ (‘città orizzontale’) below. Instead of evil raining from the stars on the tenth of August, one has lights sparkling horizontally from the city on the eleventh of August, infusing the family, still whole, with wonder. Bertolucci uses the city as a kind of icon. The last line (‘una tale percezione era da ricordare’) is conative; addressed to the reader, it justifies the selection and elevation of an everyday recollection: ‘this perception,’ like Pascoli’s, ‘was worth remembering.’ The splendour of years gone by, and the diffuse rhythms of the everyday, possess an extraordinary if understated lightness and grace. There is a sense in Bertolucci, as in Pascoli, of poetry’s enjoyment of another time and another syntax, its possession of an intimate code of its own which, though it is phrased in a common lexicon, is accessible only to the initiates. Pasolini identified a ‘neurosis’ and ‘crisis’ at the basis of Bertolucci’s inspiration and his cultivation of a poetics of ‘grace’ centred on the themes of the family, countryside, and city; moreover, Pasolini identifies in Bertolucci’s mixture of metrical experimentation and the prosaic a sign of his debt to Pascoli and that poet’s focus on the humble and the meek.10 Viewed in this light, Bertolucci was also outside the mould of the

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formalist-hermetic mainstream of his contemporaries, and prophetic of a more decompressed and narrative poetry to come.11 Looking back to Pascoli and Carducci, as well as to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Proust, and the English Lake poets, Bertolucci’s refined pastoral poetics is anything but naive or rustic.12 Regarding the development of this tranquil style of reverie and wonder, over the slow passages of the seasons in one’s known and beloved rural landscape, Pasolini writes, ‘But the quiet and sweetly monotone iterations of modes, inspirations, of the challenges to grace, through the risk of means which are not inherent to grace, actually conceals an evolution.’13 Thus Bertolucci’s revolt is to be found in his ‘being outdated’ with respect to hermeticism, a situation that leaves him more ‘up to date’ and relevant to the poetry to come.14 The revolt of this intimate, epic and narrative, poet is embedded with a sense of place and a direct involvement in the landscape; it features a lowering of tone, irony, and understatement. Thus Bertolucci like Diego Valeri – also outside the mainstream of Novecentismo – is a poet of grace, of litotes and humour, drawn to the pictorial and figurative art tradition and indebted to the French poets of the nineteenth century. As Bortolo Pento writes, Bertolucci’s relation to Pascoli is a natural one, given his affinity for ‘the poets of an extended and colloquial communication, more than the poets of the contracted and troubled, often densely vibratoed, phoneme.’15 Pascoli persisted in his family drama, universalizing his grief and delivering it over to Nature, striking a vatic chord carried on by Bertolucci, whose quiet, internal debate incorporates prosaics, and thus realism, into the poem. Pascoli too engaged in intertextuality, for which he used the term ‘presupposti a fonti’ (presuppositions to sources).16 I have alluded to various sources (Hugo, Manzoni, Petrarch) present in the Pascoli that is present in Bertolucci. Though the two poets have been contrasted, such a comparison was only made possible by their common perspectives on time, memory, and destiny; there is in either poet an undercurrent of unsettled emotion and risk that is offset by a profound trust in the redemptive power of poetry. As Pietro Citati writes, Bertolucci’s is not a ‘stable, secure, and limited world’ but one ‘intimately threatened,’ of ‘late autumn,’ in which the poet ‘discovers the shadow nesting in the light, the death hiding in life, the turbid and dark threat of every joy.’17 Here those readers familiar with Pascoli will sense a deeper affinity than one can attribute to specific stylemes or motifs; and we mean to refer to the joy and gaiety of Pascoli as well as the tragedy, since it was especially the latter that led to

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meaningless stereotypes of the poet of Barga. ‘X Agosto’ and ‘Allora’ are canonical texts well known to the Italians; it is appropriate to see Bertolucci’s derivations from these texts as part of a larger pattern, as signalled by Pasolini, of a larger reevaluation of Pascoli, in the aftermath of both Fascism and Crocean criticism, by a whole range of twentiethcentury poets.

4 The Ethics and Pathos of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s ‘Ragioni d’una poesia’

Nell’aria spasimante involontaria rivolta dell’uomo presente alla sua fragilità – G. Ungaretti1

The text I discuss here, ‘Ragioni d’una poesia’ (Reasons for a Poetry), is a composite of articles, talks, and essays from the period 1922 to 1969 that Giuseppe Ungaretti used to introduce his collected poems, Vita d’un uomo (Life of a Man).2 While the critical literature on the poetry is extensive, little has been written on the essays and almost nothing on this autoexegesis. Here Ungaretti assumes the stature of the ‘poeta di oggi,’ the poet of his day and of destiny; while such a claim is not unfamiliar to readers of such poets as Carducci and d’Annunzio, in Ungaretti’s case the monumental figure of the national poet or vate is turned upside down. Not a hero so much as a nomad, Ungaretti is only a vate in the oracular sense of one who sees deeper into nature, into its realities and illusions. He is a poet-prophet, a modern classic who would speak in unanimity with the people, a ‘man of pain,’ a wanderer and a visionary in an era of moral blindness. Having lived his first twenty-four years in Alexandria, Egypt, Ungaretti came to Italy in 1912, then moved to France. With the outbreak of the First World War he repatriated and enlisted. After the war he again resided in Paris before moving to Rome in 1920. He taught in Brazil in the late 1930s and subsequently moved back to Rome. Much of the ‘Ragioni’ is a revisitation of these places, viewed as sites of poetry and revelation.3 Ungaretti’s poetry traverses diverse phases, but always under the sign

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of revolt. In the 1920s he was an enthusiastic supporter of Fascism and was pleased to have Mussolini write a preface to L’Allegria ( Joy, 1923). He saw in the apparently populist nature of the regime a great historic opening, both on the level of epistemology and values. As Robert Dombroski details, the early Ungaretti saw the anti-bourgeois ideology of the Duce as compatible with his own artistic mission, to seize on an ‘absence’ or ‘vuoto di senso’ (lack of sense) in the contemporary world and to fill that void with the creative reality of poetry.4 In response to modernity’s perceived crisis in values, in which Ungaretti saw a loss of meaning, the poet joined with the reactionary and pro-Catholic current of the ‘life philosophy.’ Though its ideological position was quite distinct from nationalism, Ungaretti believed its goals were compatible with those of Fascism, which attacked bourgeois culture in the name of the people and sought to institute a religious synthesis between the individual and the state.5 Drawing on his studies with philosopher Henri Bergson, Ungaretti argued that the bourgeoisie’s suppression of the ‘secret of being’ and of mystery ignored the ‘slancio vitale’ (vital impetus) that guided both the Fascist movement and the Catholic church toward transcendent values. Dombroski’s presentation of these often tautological ideas (e.g., ‘mystery’ is that which we cannot define, but we know it in our experience) does not extend to a political denunciation of Ungaretti’s poetry. Instead one has a portrait of the poet as he attempts to coin a ‘new lyric eschatology’ based on the essence of the poetic tradition and, at the same time, its elimination: ‘Il nuovo mondo coscienziale che la poesia di Ungaretti instaura dipende dall’abolizione definitiva della tradizione poetica, al tempo stesso che viene a basarsi sul succo di quella stessa tradizione’ (The new world of the conscience that Ungaretti’s poetry sets up depends on the definitive abolition of the poetic tradition, at the same time that it ends up basing itself on the essence of that same tradition).6 Thus the ‘moment of revolt’ against a world at risk takes the form of an absolute subjectivism, a movement toward the interior whose religious dimension assumes different shapes and mythological references over time, but which otherwise remains constant. It is this radical commitment to renewal, accompanied by a radical manipulation of the Word, that poets of the post-Fascist generation will embrace. (While Ungaretti was still praising Mussolini in 1936, by 1944 he was denouncing the infamy of the Duce for having instituted the Race Laws and joined forces with Hitler. He would continue to look back on his initial adherence to Fascism with real regret.)7 While vulnerable to such criticisms as Fortini’s that his life’s work was neither

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as coherent nor as exemplary as the poet would claim, the impact of Ungaretti’s essentialization of the poetic Word and his human testimony was undeniable.8 As Guido Guglielmi states, Ungaretti did not engage language in its natural and historical dimensions, but rather as an absolute, as mystery: ‘To the alienation of modern man–in a world that represses history – Ungaretti answers with another alienation: an alienation from the no longer accessible or frequented dimension of history.’9 This alienation from history (as opposed to a more existentialist sort of alienation) is a constant motif in the ‘Ragioni,’ which is itself a kind of time-capsule of Ungaretti’s prose. It is this premise that guides Ungaretti’s revolt, with its dual dimensions of music and metaphysics, from the ‘involontaria rivolta’ (involuntary revolt) of the 1916 poem cited in our epigraph to the very wilful and deliberate cultivation of his legacy (including the copious documentation of variants) we see in the ‘Ragioni.’ The ‘Ragioni’ has no scientific or theoretical pretensions, other than that science itself – in a society given over to it – must perceive its limits if the human soul is to remain intact. Ungaretti’s prose is rhetorically prepossessing; he recounts personal truths in the form of a treatise on literature. Referring to himself alternately in the first and the third persons, he inserts himself in a lineage of classic Italian poets joined by their common ‘song.’ The lineage is not defined formalistically but rather by the common ‘heartbeat’ and love of Italy shared by the poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ( Jacopone, Guittone, Dante, Petrarch), Tasso, Leopardi, and the author himself. While not unsystematic, Ungaretti’s ‘poetic reasons’ rely on intuition and experience more than logic. There is a sort of rhetorical halation around his arguments; nevertheless, they are compelling and one is inclined to accept their truthfulness within the particular language system devised by the poet. That is, one is inclined to accept the ‘Ragioni’ in its moral and ethical dimension, as the frank recapitulation by Ungaretti of his ‘responses’ to the conditions of his existence. It is a testimonial whose ultimate focus is the ethics and pathos of poetry itself as the unique form of song capable of satisfying one’s religious yearnings. Before approaching the ‘Ragioni,’ I would like to make some comments about the poetry. This highly concentrated body of work had its meteoric departure with the poems that found their definitive form in L’Allegria. These poems were abrupt communiqués, vertical masts of suffering or revelation, often annotated with the time and place of composition. The word or vocable was all-important, and presumed a direct

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allegiance to speech, breaking free from all previous constraints of literary measure. The word was an emphatic island in the sea of consciousness, a trace of the unsayable on the white page. Like his admired Mallarmé, Ungaretti assumed for his poetry the dual focus of metaphysics and music; this would not change, though each subsequent book would carry the imprint of its temporal passage. Even when his poems grew mannered, Ungaretti’s concerns remained constant, as he continued to dwell on the primacy of religious experience. In the poems of L’Allegria order is achieved by truncating lines and imposing silences as a fact of versification. Franco Fortini writes, ‘The actual duration of a composition is therefore much greater than would seem inherent to the text. The silences end by being associated with all the other graphic signs which suggest diction and intonation.’10 In these graphically encoded and fiercely enunciated silences one senses a desire, equal to that of Eugenio Montale, to overcome any sense of mystification with the poetry of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Yet unlike Montale, who stated that contemporary poets needed to go through (and not around) the poet of Abruzzi, Ungaretti’s reaction is autonomous. It is a revolt based on his own ideals and social attitudes, and not on a negative critique. In his protagonism is an implied trust that the message of his poetry, though inhibited by the slowness of a collective spiritual evolution, will eventually prove his status as ‘the poet of today,’ the one master capable of hearing the distant strains of the aulic tradition without sacrificing his novelty, modernity, and immediacy.11 Here too there is a paradox, for Ungaretti is anything but spontaneous in his editing; he is the first major Italian poet to cultivate his variants in an extensive labor limae of correction and editing over many years. According to Fortini, the intentions of the poet in editing his earliest poems throughout the period 1916–23 is to arrive at the most dramatic versions possible: The poetry of L’Allegria is, in a profound sense, theatrical. The man who has grown silent in this way will not be that of late symbolism, reduced to silence by mystic communion or by metaphysical desperation. In fact, rather than defeat, the tonality of the lyrics of L’Allegria is of a vital tension surprised by itself, amazed at its ability to exist.12

The ineluctability and ethical moment of Ungaretti’s poetry are addressed by Gianfranco Contini in terms of his direct link to Leopardi: ‘Consolation, enthusiasm, passion, illusion are the formulas relative to this character of poetry as human activity.’13 What in Leopardi is accom-

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plished by the entire phrase has its parallel in Ungaretti in the word and specifically in ‘il nome come fatto religioso’ (the noun as religious fact); it is in this syntony that Contini finds ‘the incomparable fertility of Ungaretti’s “allegria” as a word; and at once the point in which ethics becomes poetry.’14 As we will see below, Leopardi’s centrality to Ungaretti’s self-conception concerns the necessary link between morality and style. Beginning with his second book, Sentimento del Tempo (Feeling of Time), Ungaretti evolved a brand of hermeticism that could only allude to the experience of the Absolute (that is, God), or the anguish of one’s solitude in its absence. Only thus, he felt, could he transcend the conflict between nature and intellect, between the mechanical exteriority of being in the objective world and the interior subjectivity of the experience of time and memory. Mario Luzi has written in this regard of Ungaretti’s ‘protagonism’ and ‘nomadism,’ which has obvious connections to his sense of being an exile or a ‘vox clamantis in the desert.’15 In L’Allegria this protagonism occurs within a clearly defined historical framework; from Sentimento del Tempo forward that register is elided, for the sake of a more obscure engagement with time and memory that coincides with a greater rhetorical sophistication and syntactic complexity. Contini distinguishes the two books as follows: L’Allegria gave the sense of things present and pressing, and of an insurmountable distance; having developed such a position to the point of inverting it into the realm of the possible, Ungaretti now puts the accent on the distance. Thus a sense of interval [...] which we will recognize as a temporal interval [...] Sentimento del Tempo has not earned its title cheaply, it is organized upon a change in time.16

As in the Eliot of ‘Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past’ (‘Burnt Norton,’ Four Quartets), the poet defined the site of his poems as that of memory. By exalting memory, he set the limits of literary autobiography within a tradition, like that postulated by Eliot. As Luzi writes: That which is beyond the present as a mirage is a rediscovery of the ancient. The future is the primordial. The promised land is in fact the land of return. This is precisely the dominion of memory, now no longer laden with any difficult frictions with the present. Ungaretti’s memory, comfortably and naturally Bergsonian, is a memory without an object upon which only two possible lights loom, that of myth and that of desire.17

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It is precisely this ‘memory without an object’ and avoidance of ‘frictions with the present’ that defines Ungaretti’s poetry of ‘innocence.’ His pursuit of myth and desire is a religious one, a synchronic mise-enabîme stretched across the poles of a dualism that takes many forms, most prominently that of plenitude and the void. Ungaretti discovers in the void the spiritual validity of doubt, of the Pascalian gamble with God. Pasolini has written of the polarity between the ‘vital heresy’ of Ungaretti’s Jansenism and sensuality, on the one hand, and his confessional pursuit of ‘God as Essence’ on the other.18 In general we can say that Ungaretti’s ability to posit this dichotomy, of anguish and piety, of faith and darkness, is a manifestation of his vitalism, that philosophy Huizinga has defined as ‘anti-noetic’ because it privileges ‘living’ above ‘knowing,’ and tends ‘to relapse into a bewildering confusion of logical and poetical means of expression.’19 I would like to keep this in mind as we discuss the ‘Ragioni d’una poesia,’ where one continues to find the terms of bewilderment and prodigiousness present in the poetry. The original title of the work, ‘Sentimento di Dio’ (Feeling of God), reveals the author’s tendency to associate the affective yearning for the divine with the actual religious experience, and to consider poetry as the vehicle to link the two.20 Ungaretti presents the ‘Ragioni’ as a series of reflections: I have, naturally, like any artist or writer, reflected on the problems of poetic expression and style; but I have done so only in response to the difficulties of expression itself, which demanded a position in integral correspondence to my life as a man.21

In the five separate extracts that open the ‘Ragioni’ and the lengthy coda that concludes it, the ‘difficulties of expression’ that Ungaretti confronts are not technical in nature but concern his root assumptions about life, epistemology, and the limits of knowledge. Specifically they concern the religious crisis of modern man in his confrontation with the horrors of war, the loss of belief, and the possibility of miracle. The earliest entry, from an article published in La Ronda in 1922, concerns Jacques Rivière: Rivière’s error was in believing that Dostoevsky’s work could be transposed to problems of methodology, analysis, and psychology, and thus reduced to generate a good French-type novel. For Dostoevsky there was a beginning – let’s say a lyrical beginning – in the moment when for him every possibility

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of understanding seemed to suddenly collapse, having understood, mysteriously understood, too much.22

The theme of moral blindness that will remain constant through the excursus is thus established. Ungaretti states his belief that ‘art will always have a basis in predestination and nature; but it will have a rational character as well, admitting all the probabilities and complications of a calculation.’23 About this unique ability of art to hypothesize in images, he writes, ‘This is Greco-Latin art, our Mediterranean art, art of prose and poetry, centuries and millennia of art. This art can also be patterned on miracle: the miracle of balance’; and ‘all that power of evocation and reality, that magic power of restoring forever a moment of reality which moves the imagination, is obtained by art primarily through its geometrical force. The gift of true artists is of course that of successfully concealing this force, just as the grace of life hides the skeleton.’24 These remarks are from 1922; the next instalment is from 1930, taken from an article in a Turinese newspaper. By now Ungaretti was famous and widely emulated. He begins the practice of speaking of himself in the third person, as the ‘poet of today’ or the ‘man of sorrow,’ whose calling was to defend the possibility of poetry, against all odds: ‘In those years everyone denied that poetry was possible any longer in our modern world. No journal existed, not even the most well meaning, that did not fear by entertaining it to be disgraced.’25 Here as elsewhere the facts reported preserve the patina of Ungaretti’s way of remembering, which is often selective or over-dramatized. The poems he refers to, written between 1919 and 1925, ‘Le stagioni,’ ‘La fine di Crono,’ ‘Sirene,’ ‘Inno alla Morte,’ were indeed dramatic works. Of them he writes: I was concerned with memory and couldn’t help slighting the dream. In truth, it wasn’t a slight so much as the conviction that was maturing in me that Italian poetry only flourishes in a state of perfect lucidity: technique, sensations, logic, dream or imagination, and feeling: all these make no sense unless they live simultaneously, objectified by a poet in a language that sings. And therefore the very fact of believing much more in our work than in ourselves will implicate the clarifying role of memory. Only in this way do things move our imagination, situated in their true place, and acquire for us the only depth that matters, that of time, and we are amazed at their modesty – already so detached from us, so distant – and they cause us to dream, if you will, but it is a dreaming with eyes open.26

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The task of art is to cope with suffering, with the ‘crowd’ within oneself, ‘as if a man blind from birth were recounting his vision of the world.’27 Recovering his discussion of Dostoevsky he writes, And if in those novels there is a great discussion of the divine and of God, in fact it is a horror for life, it is a sense of the nothing equivalent to the sense of the divine: it is the sense of a humanity which pictures itself in a horrendous mythology and within which each individual is not differentiated from any others if not by the monstrous and torturous crowd of his own fixations.28

In his next series of reflections, Ungaretti focuses on language as a means of measuring the myriad strands of experience that poetry is called on to reorder: It was no longer a matter of understanding measure as a means to clarify the feeling of mystery; but of opening wide one’s frightened eyes to the crisis of a language, that is, to the threatened perishing of a civilization – it was a matter of looking for reasons of a possible hope in the heart of history itself: that is of looking for them in the value of the word.29

These remarks are taken from a talk given in several cities on ‘the historical development of Italian and European poetry,’ in which he traces the historical failure of aesthetic thought to keep pace with the advances of scientific thought: If the seventeenth century has the already scientific idea of memory indicated to us by Galileo, and brings about a great revolution in forms, and is a century violent in expression, it finds precisely in the identity between memory and imagination that excess of imagination that will allow it to rejoin the broken models [of formal beauty] into a new form, yes, but one no less under the control of classicality.30

For the advance in question to take place we must wait for Leopardi, the first figure to return to the sources of the classical since pre-Socratic times. Again, we see the extreme hypotaxis Ungaretti is prone to: If Leopardi’s stylistic procedure can also be called classical, and that was the name he himself used, if he flees from the metaphorical form dear to the poets before Dante, to Dante and Petrarch, to the seventeenth century,

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to virtually all Italian poets until the nineteenth century, and limits himself to describing objects, evaluating their colours with the tone of his own feeling, then his poetry would be anachronistic, it would have the defect which most displeased him – were that tone of his feelings not, as it was, Romantic.31

By the same token, ‘in his work, Leopardi foresees and exhausts the Romantic experience, even opposing himself to it in a certain sense.’32 His discoveries concerning Homeric anachronisms in Virgil are pertinent to the ‘moral relativity’ of his own era: Indicating two stages of sensibility he sets in motion, between those two states of consciousness, a fraction of time as variable reflection, as the fluid symbol or mirror of psychological life. By now the notion of time is established as the history of the soul and of a soul – in those terms which Romanticism will develop. With Leopardi, time becoming the point, the moving point of reference, it is relativity that enters resolutely into camp, moral relativity of good and evil, aesthetic relativity of the ugly and beautiful.33

The Ungarettian themes of ‘a thirst for innocence’ and of ‘memory which has rendered the antinomy between individual and society intolerable and extreme’ are found in Leopardi and in that poet’s reading of Pascal.34 In another essay, Ungaretti asserts that Leopardi’s poem ‘L’infinito’ is based on one of Pascal’s Pensées, in which one reads: ‘Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie’ (The eternal silence of the infinite spaces frightens me).35 Given the general crisis in belief of the last two centuries and the onrush of mechanized civilization, writes Ungaretti, Thus today’s poet has had as his main concern the regaining of rhythm; but as it had to be regained, by recognizing the importance of form. In order to reawaken innocence, he did not deny memory. He listened to the most ancient verse and that of all times, because it expresses the very fatality of a language.36

It is in the ‘fatality of language’ that language must be reborn in rhythm, in the lyrical moment of ambiguity and the indefinite. And again the reference is to Ungaretti’s own poems, with their astonishing brevity and sense of metaphysical confrontation. He compares the rhythm and measure of his work to that of a machine, a machine of memory held in

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common by a gathered lineage one is called on to receive through the spoken word: The machine caught his attention precisely because it encloses within itself a rhythm: that is, the development of a measure man has drawn from the mystery of nature – from that point where he lost his innocence. The machine is formed matter, severely logical in obedience to every slightest fibre of a complex order: the machine is a result of a millenarian chain of coordinated forces. It is not chaotic matter. Its sensory beauty conceals a step forward of the intellect. Thus, in the use of verse, seeking to set in motion the delicate arts, the immaterial levers of a supreme machine, the Italian poet again recognizes that he is preparing to listen, in his own rhythm, to the rhythms by which the music of the soul persuaded the ears of his fathers – the music that leads to that point where, dissolving in mystery, poetry can, in its rare moments of perfection, shine with innocence.37

There is a heavy dependence in this prose on tautology, metaphor, and visual imagery; its coherence is that of a testimonial: This is the primary reason why his poetry bleeds, it is like a smashing of nerves and bones that gives wings to fiery flowers, to a raw lucidity which by vertigo causes expression to be raised to the infinite detachment from dream.38

To gain access to this prose one must attempt to hear the timbre of Ungaretti’s voice, and accept his sincerity when he claims to describe the state of mind of the contemporary poet in terms of the change in consciousness occasioned by Romanticism: ‘It was a return to an acute sense of nature and, simultaneously, the undeniable admission, as a necessary factor of poetry, of the genesis of memory, to be retraced and reconstituted within us – it was the acute state of consciousness that is found in all of today’s poetry.’39 Again speaking of himself in the third person, Ungaretti makes apparent his orphism and pursuit of knowledge through darkness. When, from the contact of images, light is born within him, there will be poetry, and poetry that much greater, for this man who wants to rise from hell to God, as is the distance over which they are joined. We believe in a logic that grows in passion as it grows in the presence of insolubly rich unknowns.40

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The next entry in the ‘Ragioni’ is from 1941, from a talk given in Brazil, where Ungaretti taught in the later 1930s. He now illustrates his point about the historical evolution of styles by referring to two apparently antagonistic painters, De Chirico and Picasso. Both, he argues, have meditated on time, how time has changed and grown more difficult to contemplate, now that all is confused in a single plane, crashing down upon us. And yet we possess no words other than those the culture provides us; but a culture impoverished of all historical substance, become prodigious and frightful as, for primitive eyes, the sun, the stars and moon, birth and death.41 In their heroic confrontation with time, these artists stand tall because they resist this impoverishment and thus show themselves to be the true progeny of Romanticism: Man in the recent Romanticism is struggling with those means he had steadily shaped for dominating and disciplining nature: he is struggling with the revolutionary advances of science, with the gold monopoly, with the chaos of an erudition without limits that no longer possesses a secure religious basis.42

Both the historical and neo-Romanticisms stand ‘in contrast to the moral malaise manifest in all human activity over almost two centuries.’43 Romanticism elevated the inspiration and religious importance of art as a means of connection with the dead. And here once again the poet returns to the aesthetic-moral nexus he seems to have been engaged with from the start: I’m saying that it’s perfectly admissible that moral justice and aesthetic justice be of different orders, as they are, and that a work of art may be aesthetically reprehensible and morally deserving, or vice versa; but I’m saying that in either case one cannot but rightly discern that an anarchy of beliefs can only result in grave detriment to the duties of a language, paralysing its social function.44

In contrast to such cases as the ‘repulsive and sinister style’of certain ancient Egyptian artefacts, possessed by ‘the mystic yearning that steered the hand of the Egyptian artisan or the tenuous social bond, close to breaking, that justifies the sexual solicitations of the prints or miniatures of Casanova’s time,’ Romanticism has attempted to integrate morality and aesthetics and transcend the predicament of the individual soul.45 In line with this view,

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The artist will never resign himself to accepting that the times won’t allow him to consider style as a fact of social unanimity, but only as a personal, symbolical fact in which are projected the distinctive traits of his own conscience, as the affirmation of freedom and the irrepressible uniqueness of the human being. It will always be a cause of utmost pain for an artist to have to resign himself to working exclusively as a personal fact, even if, by the grace of God, an aura of poetry will redeem his fatigue and always be the truest principle of style.46

Ungaretti saw ‘how dangerous the predetermination to respect canons was, canons which from Vaugelas and Descartes and, worst of all, from Voltaire on, risked sterilizing French poetry in the academic – and instead always revived and saved it; but by a miracle.’47 Arguing against academic distinctions and in favour of aesthetic freedom as the only means possible to guarantee ‘the goal, the aesthetic goal–and at the same time the ethical and pathetic goal’ of art, he claims that artists must be free to create without regard for rules or conventions, as indeed he had been: ‘Let us say it again: today’s artist was able to be indifferent and aesthetically needed to be indifferent, if the models he turned to for advice belonged more to one epoch than another.’48 Style had had to vary since ‘the human genius, having to identify and express the secret of its times, had found it within itself in those terms and no others.’49 The point concerning stylistic freedom is illustrated by a discussion of a common topos in Arabic and Provençal poetry, the talking falcon. Ungaretti notes that for the first time, the Portuguese poet Don Denis in the fourteenth century veered away from this convention and chose a parrot instead, a bird that actually does speak. This departure is then traced to Tasso’s use of the parrot of Gerusalemme liberata xvi, a use of wonder predicated on his knowledge of ‘the atrocious bitterness from which the ongoing experience of his century needed to free itself’:50 He will call that winged marvel a monster, but in so doing restore to the word its Latin sense of portent, of a signal set free from the mysterious virtue of things, in order to reawaken the attention or the feelings of men, and to bring to light a truth, which it asserts and bears witness to at the same time.51

After this philological excavation, Ungaretti recalls a visit to a real excavation in Argentina, a ‘necropolis of Indian antiquities’ where he had seen a burial amphora disinterred with ‘a hand with an eye in the palm,

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signifying perhaps that the first poetic sign of humanity had been the graphic image, precedent even to the oral sign; or to signify that the hand rapidly obeyed a sure eye and that the deceased was perhaps a good archer.’52 The observation reminds us of the importance of the senses and the arts in Ungaretti’s work, of nature as opposed to the intellect which is overvalued in the West. The artist has always expressed the common instincts of the living, the hunger and the libido, the immutable instincts of preservation and, unfortunately, also of destruction, but he has also expressed a religious need to know both the contingent and final reasons for living; he has also expressed his need to feel united with all of his dead, and all those who have died and with the entire reality of the universe beyond the night of time; he has also expressed the marvellous pleasure that even a desolate nature is able to offer.53

Once again Ungaretti turns to Leopardi to illustrate his point: Leopardi realizes nevertheless, and he is the only Italian to realize it clearly until the advent of contemporary poetry, that a fracture had occurred in the mind of man. The acceptance of the human condition in its limits of time and space, that is in its material and logical limits, is by now considered in a formative antinomy with the innate aspiration of man to freedom and poetry.54

Leopardi’s ‘irony’ in the face of the French philosophes should not be confused with an abdication of the oneiric and religious purpose of poetry. The language of poetry is essential but approximate, a medium for the benefit of those who may possess it without understanding it. This is the basis of the ‘anguish’ reflected in Leopardi’s poetic language, in his understanding of duration: ‘Duration gives it value in the imagery, by antithesis: a time of vigour opposed to one of agony; the cutting mark of a surge opposed to the arid silence.’55 The closing section of the ‘Ragioni’ concerns the value of recitation and formal eloquence as means of extending beyond the literal or conventional reading of texts. The examples both concern Racine. The first relates an experience of Saint-John Perse: Perse tells us of an Esther he had once been invited to hear recited on a Polynesian island. Some Tongan children who understood nothing of the language in which they had been selected to speak, had learned that text

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– during a week of patient repetitions mouthed by a very old French nun – like a sacred text. To Perse, Racine never seemed less betrayed, nor was ‘the miracle of the French language, whose magic power, whose own genius for precise analysis, often confuses, ever better understood.’56

The second example concerns a letter from Racine himself that takes issue with ‘the extreme impertinence of M. Perrault, who posits that the turn of a word does nothing for eloquence, and that one should consider that a writer is better judged by his translator, no matter how bad he might be, than by reading the author himself.’57 Racine and Ungaretti see the absurdity of this claim. Here once again, Ungaretti argues for the apotropaic power of poetry: Of course, true poetry is presented to all of us in its secrecy. It has always happened that way. We manage to transfer more of our emotion and the novelty of our visions into words, and the words manage to veil themselves in a music that will be the first revelation of their poetic depth beyond any limit of meaning.58

Having made his point about the Renaissance and Baroque patrimony, first with Tasso and then with Racine, Ungaretti now returns in conclusion to his poet of choice: For Leopardi, or for any Romantic, things were infinitely more serious, the word having been reduced to its simple philological value of duration, having been cruelly stripped, and no longer able to recover its poetic function save by dramatic excess; in the second half of his activity, in the Dialogue of Timandor and Eleander in the Operette Morali, Leopardi determines this function as follows: ‘If any moral book could be of use, I think the poetical ones would be of the most use: I say poetical, using this term broadly, books, that is, destined to move the imagination; and I mean prose no less than poetry. Now I have little respect for that poetry which, read and meditated on, doesn’t leave in the reader’s spirit a noble sentiment such that for half an hour the admission of an ignoble thought or completion of an unworthy action is impossible.’ Inspiration was thus brought back to its deep cause, a poetic and moral cause, and if it stretched the words for unknown reasons, for aesthetic reasons, those reasons could only be so if induced by their secret, unknowable cause to produce a purification of the soul.59

In this return to Leopardi, Ungaretti confirms and strengthens his ear-

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lier point about the desirability of linking aesthetic justice and moral justice. It is this idea of moral harmony–and not simply ‘imitative harmony’ – that unifies the ‘Ragioni.’ The technique of temporal stratification of the work is effective in revealing the aesthetic, moral, and linguistic changes in the author over several decades, even as it constitutes a singular poetic memorial. The poet’s understanding of history is seen to be founded on the Bergsonian concept of duration (which was already present in Vico): thus the attention paid to primitive cultures and children, to the mythical heritages of Provence and Egypt, to the mutual dependency of song and measure, to the baroque sense of wonder, and so forth. Ungaretti’s claim that the eternality of art objects lies in their confrontation of mystery depends on a view of creative process that does not risk local assessments (one looks in vain for discussions of his contemporaries, of Novecentismo or ermetismo). The local is quite simply the other pole of the cosmic, just as the fixation on memory is predicated on the recognition of oblivion. In effect, Ungaretti’s critical language is circular and tautological. This is true, for example, of his self-inclusion in the great lineage of the ‘canto italiano’ (of Jacopone, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Tasso, Leopardi). Dombroski considers Ungaretti’s repeated citing of these poets as a kind of ‘metaphysical fetish.’60 Certainly Ungaretti is ‘partial’ in his readings of these poets, and partial in his appropriation of the tradition. It is perhaps more accurate to consider the earlier poets as ‘prototypes’ of the moral and pathetic dimension explored here. Ungaretti’s appropriation of the tradition cannot be a genetic or continuous one, because of this break with the past and what is seen as humanity’s tragic loss of its innocence. The loss of innocence does not prevent Ungaretti from placing the recovery of innocence at the centre of his poetic project. Such a project was undertaken in language, a language whose deeper significance was only partly known to the user, whether in the early years when language was reduced to its primal essence or in the later years, when the poet explored the classicalist and baroque stratifications. Throughout Ungaretti’s career it is the mythopoeic dimension of language that is explored like an archaeological site where the poet can be found overturning shards of memory and dream. It is here that Ungaretti connects with his prototypes–in particular Petrarch, Tasso, and Leopardi–not directly in terms of style or philology, but as a scribe whose perception of human suffering leads to the conviction that all true poetry is born in the desire for solace of the human soul.

5 Diego Valeri: A Classic Poet in the Modern Era

Diego Valeri represents a twentieth-century continuation of the Italian lyric tradition in its purest form. Peripheral to contemporary ideological crises, his voice is imbued with the classical imagery of Petrarch, Poliziano, and Leopardi, and with their subject matter of nature and love, melancholy, anguish and struggle. Beneath the pristine surface of Valeri’s poems one finds a stylistic complexity rich in moral intonations that qualifies him as a poet of rectitude as well as melody and harmony. After receiving a laurea in lettere at the University of Padua in 1909, Valeri won a scholarship to the Sorbonne. He returned to Italy to teach Italian and Latin in the classical lyceums, and then French literature at the University of Padua. At the heart of Valeri’s poetic imagination is Venice, his home city. After the Second World War, Valeri briefly assumed the editorship of that city’s newspaper Il Gazzettino, aiding in its post-Fascist rehabilitation. By all indications his personal life was quiet and uneventful. Certainly his poetry suggests the value of silence and composure, symmetry, harmony and balance. As I argue in this chapter, Valeri’s style possesses a classical constraint and is based predominantly on the themes of love and nature. As Franco Fortini writes, ‘classico’ as a term is often contrasted today to ‘moderno.’ This is because modernity lost track of the Aristotelian idea of the middle way. Fortini notes that during the period from 1780 to 1830, the meaning of classico evolved dramatically to include what Winckelmann called ‘nobile semplicità e quieta grandezza’ (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur) and that subsequently, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the classical ‘[asserted], with a strong sense of necessity, its intention toward communication (more than beauty) and toward realism, harmony, composure, balance, the refusal of excess, the search for limits, for measure, for the organicity and

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unity of the work.’1 It was this set of values that modernity ignored or consciously abandoned in its response to the myriad changes occurring in the world. In some cases modern poets sought to render the poetic language absolute, as we saw in the case of Ungaretti, or fragmentary and contingent. Valeri rather defends the idea of mediocritas in poetry: ‘nothing is more alien to poetry than exaggeration, rhetorical amplification, empty sonorities. Poetry can survive only within its own limits of modesty and silence; its most suitable means of expression will be, as Gide stated, litotes, that is the opposite of hyperbole.’2 It is in fact the understatement of Valeri’s verse, his use of litotes and other figures of modesty, his cultivation of elegance and grace through the common language of communication, that qualify him as a modern classic. Once again, Fortini’s definition of the classical seems to provide an apt description of Valeri’s poetics: ‘Some stylistic principles such as honouring the norms of the tradition, the use of attenuation or litotes, the separation of genres and styles, regularity, composure stand in the service of a maturity of experience and a transmission of ethical values (pietas, discipline, self-control, renunciation).’3 In the years prior to the First World War important first volumes are published by Cardarelli, Campana, Ungaretti, Sbarbaro, and Rebora, each of whom adopted a radically altered poetic idiom. Valeri too published his first book of poetry, Monodia d’Amore (Monody of Love), in 1908. The following quatrain from that book is typical of the poet’s use of a simple language to communicate a complex spiritual and sentimental reality: No, non m’illudo: l’opera fornita per alacre fatica senza tregua al desiderio mio non mai s’adegua di fonder la parola con la vita. (7) No, I’m not deceived: the Work / produced by eager unceasing toil / will never equal my desire / to fuse the Word with life.

In 1913, after the death of his brother, Valeri published Le gaie tristezze (Gay Sadnesses), a book later suppressed.4 Valeri’s other early collections, Umana (Human, 1916), Ariele (Ariel, 1924), and Crisalide (Chrysalis, 1919), contain several poems later included in the Poesie (Poems, 1962), but stripped of refrains, vignettes, and exclamations. In his revisions Valeri purges the works of crepuscular tendencies and

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directs his attention to a more austerely meditative verse; as he later writes: ‘venivo imparando ... che la realtà non ha altra sostanza né funzione se non di motivo alla creazione individuale di una soprarealtà, in cui splenda almeno un raggio del sole dell’anima; che all’infuori di ciò, la vita non è che disordine e essenza: vanità.’ (I was learning ... that reality has no substance or function outside the motive to individual creation of a super-reality, in which at least there shines a ray of the soul’s light; and that beyond that, life is only disorder and essence: vanity) (TP 168). In short, Valeri resisted the exorbitant formal tendencies of his contemporaries, finding in references to the landscape both the source and the end of his solitude; he resisted the opaqueness of language of the Novecentisti and hermetics, preferring an empirical and largely paratactic language committed to the clarification of instances of sensory novelty and wonder. As in Petrarch, one finds in Valeri a highly selective diction and an exquisite array of phonic figures such as assonance, alliteration, and varieties of rhyme. One could say that he creates a set of equivalencies between the sensibility – the awareness of changing tempers and humours in the individual – and the possibility of grace, or between the experience of the natural world and that of one’s deeper self. Given the evenness of his linguistic texture, the presence of an odd word jumps to one’s eyes, such as ‘ubriaca’ (drunken) in the early eight-line poem ‘Milano’: Corso Venezia rombava e cantava come un giovane fiume a primavera. Noi due, sperduti, s’andava s’andava, tra la folla ubriaca della sera. Ti guardavo nel viso a quando a quando: eri un aperto luminoso fiore. Poi ti prendevo la mano tremando; e mi pareva di prenderti il cuore. (P 47) Corso Venezia was roaring and singing / like a young river in spring. / We two, lost, going and going, / among the drunken crowd of the evening. / / I was looking at your face from time to time: / you were an open and luminous flower. / Then I took your hand, trembling; / and it seemed I was taking your heart.

It is against the chaos of that ‘drunken crowd’ that Valeri’s modest re-

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volt is directed. If a poet such as Ungaretti could equate the ‘crowd’ with the unconscious, against which he asserted an imposing ‘I’ figure, Valeri’s opposition is more private. His modernity is not that of Ungaretti, who sought to reduce the word to its essence, nor that of the other contemporaries named above, whose styles were variously fragmentary or expressionist or, in the case of Cardarelli, neoclassical. What Valeri preserves, in contrast to these authors, is the referential function of language. It is, as Fortini writes, a paradox of classical poetics that by preferring the referential to the literary function of language, the art of language is actually heightened: ‘by the law of economy of means, precisely in the apparent transparency of communicative writing, the effects obtained with a minimum angle of refraction are considerable.’5 I believe that Valeri’s reliance on a referential language and a common iterativity, enlivened by a highly legible versification, coincides with what Carlo Betocchi called ‘that lovingly domestic use of the language that is Valeri’s own, and only his, that speaking of life and with life ... like a brother to a sister, a groom to a bride ... with gratitude and shared piety, mutual reverence.’6 Published in 1929, Poesie vecchie e nuove has Venice as its protagonist, not the romanticized city of expatriates but the actual place of water, wind, and stone.7 Readers encounter an evocation of Venice’s past, its momentous sense of place: ‘io non so cosa piú soave e bella / di te, che fai tua festa d’un riflesso / blando d’acque e di cieli’ (I know nothing sweeter or lovelier / than you, who create and celebrate a mild / reflection of waters and skies) (P 91). In Valeri’s world the only authority a poet may seek derives from personal experience. Thus the theme of a locale links a representation of nature with a figuring of human sensibility and culture; in the locale the natural and divine orders are momentarily superimposed. In such poems as ‘Settecentesca veneziana,’ ‘Primavera di Venezia,’ ‘Chitarra veneziana,’ ‘Ottobre di Venezia,’ the city is seen as a kind of pure environs of the sentiments. In ‘Romanza’ the city frames sin, despair, and romance: ‘e se appressavo una mano alla faccia / sentivo l’aroma delle tue braccia’ (and if I pressed my hand to my face / I smelled the odour of your arms), and in the final couplet, ‘E mi chiusi tra le palme la faccia. / Amaro era il gusto delle tue braccia.’ (And I sank my head into my hands. / Bitter was the taste of your arms) (P 108, 110). Venice is also praised as a civic community, the product of a great civilization. What unites these Venices is Valeri’s remarkable visual sense and his embrace of the doctrine of ut pictura poesis. As he wrote in 1956, ‘Ma a Venezia, si sa, tutto finisce a essere pittura; anche le architetture piú

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rigorose, anche la musica più astratta; anche, d’altra parte, le più povere realtà quotidiane’ (But in Venice, as is known, everything ends up being a painting; even the most rigorous architectures, even the most abstract music; even, on the other hand, the poorest daily realities).8 The city of canals is rarely without the figure of Woman: she is a figure of turbulence, but also of transformation. Giuseppe Raimondi has suggested that women serve as a kind of arch-metaphor for Valeri’s poetry.9 He writes, ‘Le donne non sono solo senso. Sono capriccio, e sofisma; sono dispetto, e insolubile scontentezza.’ (Women are not simply sense. They are caprice, and sophism; they are scorn, and unresolvable unhappiness.)10 But I would add that women are also redeemers, as in ‘Suor Gesuina’ – a poem of thirteen quatrains – where the nun and comforter of the ailing poet is a figure of mercy (and of continuity between the low and the high cultures and styles), a consoler whose hospital visitation and prayer to the Madonna comfort the ailing poet, physically, emotionally, and spiritually: Come stanco mi sentii il cuore. ritornato dal nero esiglio – senza un conforto, senza un consiglio – alla sua sorte di dolore: ansia d’amore, atroce male di far soffrire, folle bisogno di possedere in un sogno di sogno tutta la bellezza mortale ... (P 137) – without comfort, without advice – / to her destiny of pain: / / restlessness of love, atrocious evil / causing suffering, mad need / to possess in a dream of a dream / all mortal beauty ...

Other redemptive female figures are Venus, Rebecca, and Ophelia, in whom the conflation of sacred and profane loves calls to mind the poems of Petrarch in which the repetition of the images and attributes of the woman, rather than exhausting them, tends to universalize them in the lover’s absence and the reminiscence of the encounter: E così mi son fermato ai piedi del ponte. E così ti sei fermata anche tu

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un gradino più su. Non sapevo ch’era un addio. L’ho saputo un attimo dopo sentendo le tue labbra sfiorare le mie. Era la prima, era l’ultima volta. Così. (PI 29) And so I stopped / at the foot of the bridge. / And so you too stopped / one step higher. / I did not know it was a good-bye. / I knew it a moment later / feeling your lips brush against mine. / It was the first time, it was the last. / Just so.

The theme of woman, like that of Venice, is a complex one which acquires its symbolic potency through the numerous variations on the theme: the saint, the comforter, the lover or young girl, a figure of innocence and childlike anticipation. One sees Valeri’s trust in young women generally: in their senses, intuition and memory, and their beauty: La giovinetta che davanti al mare, splende, incantando il mare, ha negli sguardi, nei gesti qualcosa di esitante: è felice e dubitosa. Bellezza, di che temi? Forse non d’altro che dell’esser bella, di portar nella carne gloriosa un cosí gran mistero, [ ... ] Forse soltanto di vederti nuda come un tenero fiore. (P 390–1) The girl who shines before / the sea, charming the sea, / has in her glance, in her gestures, something / hesitant: she is happy and doubtful. / O beautiful one, what are you afraid of? / Perhaps of nothing more than being beautiful, / of carrying in your glorious flesh / such a great mystery, / ... / Perhaps only of seeing yourself naked / as a tender flower.

Another critical part of Valeri’s landscape is the tree, as in the following eight-line poem, ‘Albero’:

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Tutto il cielo cammina come un fiume, grandi blocchi traendo di fiamma e d’ombra. Tutto il mare rompe, onda dietro onda, splendido, alle fuggenti dune. L’albero, chiuso nel puro contorno, oscuro come uno che sta su la soglia, muto guarda, senza battere foglia, gli spazi agitati dal trapasso del giorno. (P 152) The whole sky marches on like a river, / pulling on great masses of flames and shadows. / the whole sea is bursting, wave upon wave, / splendid, over the fleeing dunes. / / The tree, closed in its pure outline, / dark as one standing on the threshold, / gazes silently, without batting a leaf, / the spaces stirred by the passing of the day.

In the stark contrast between the violences of sky and sea and the twodimensional outline of the tree, one senses the pregnant absence of the human subject; rarely in the modern period is the pathetic fallacy employed so convincingly. In another poem entitled ‘Albero,’ written thirty years after the first one, the body/tree gestalt is again apparent as a spiritual unity, ‘L’albero solo è forma e voce viva’ (The tree alone is living voice and form) (P 410). Valeri’s tree also provides a model of the poetic event, an epiphany that separates itself from the historical affairs of man. Just so, the image of tree uprooted can stand for the condition of humanity in exile, as one sees in the incipit of ‘Campo d’esilio’: Percossi sradicati alberi siamo, ritti ma spenti, e questa avara terra che ci porta non è la nostra terra. (P 248) Beaten uprooted trees we are, / upright but extinguished, and this stingy land / that holds us is not our land.

Here in this fifty-seven-line poem, with characteristic understatement, one senses the agony of the war; in the title, ‘Campo d’esilio’ one hears the absence, as it were of the ‘campi elisi’ or Elysian Fields of classical reference. Valeri’s intimate view of the things of the world make him a poet of sentiment and sensation, of grace and suffering, like Pascoli.11 Like Pas-

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coli he acknowledges the worth of the fanciullino, the artist-child within the adult who remains capable of wonder and the unadorned observation of nature. Pascoli was a poet of great naturalistic specificity who nevertheless preserved an aura around the object of his attention. As one takes note of the following hapaxes in Valeri’s Poesie, one cannot help but hear the echoes of Pascoli: ‘piare’ (chirp, pipe), ‘gaggiolo’ (iris), ‘bozzolo’ (cocoon), ‘sfrascare’ (debranch), ‘rorido’ (dewy), ‘virgulto’ (shoot), ‘gheriglio’ (kernel), ‘mallo’ (walnut husk), ‘colchico’ (meadowsaffron), ‘salvie’ (sage). As Mengaldo writes, ‘Valeri gathers from Pascoli not only his diction (svolìo, aliare ecc.) and syntax and metrics, but also certain unmistakable phonic-rhythmic solutions (“di tremule oscurità”)... And the impression that Valeri often gives is, precisely, that of a Pascoli who is stronger and less dispersive.’12 Valeri, who wrote several books of poetry for children, has written of the prominence of the child in his work, and of the importance of nature in his early childhood: ‘There must have been seasons, even then; but I see only a clump of irises with flowers of silk, raised up and open upon long stems like flames, blue outside and gold within. [...] Certainly I was never, as in those days and years, so close to the gates of heaven and hell, heart to heart with universal life, and, if I dared to say it, with God.’13 In Amico dei pittori (Friend of the Painters, 1967), a collection of poems dedicated to fourteen contemporary Italian painters, Valeri shows that painters, like children, have a language of their own and an immediacy of perceptions: Bastano pochi fili al vento sparsi per aprire infiniti il mare il cielo; una scrittura di contorni, lieve come il pensiero, basta a formare le forme delle cose, semplici trasparenti impenetrabili. (AP 23) A few threads scattered in the wind / are enough to open the infinite sea and sky; / a writing of outlines, light like / thought, is enough to shape the forms of things, / simple transparent impenetrable.

Like a child or an impressionistic painter, Valeri renders the landscape through understated and immediate imagery, as here in ‘Sole lontano’ (Distant Sun), the sun emerges suddenly after a rain: Dopo la pioggia brilla un sole

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D’improvviso staccato dalle cose, salito in cima al cielo, di là dal cielo, come’esule: assente dalla terra che ancora è verde e calda. Vive la terra; ma spogliata di peso, dentro i suoi fermi contorni d’alberi e case; e sono i suoi colori splendidi senza raggio. Laggiú un grido rosso di salvie, stranamente muto. (P 371) Suddenly after the rain a sun / is shining detached from things, / risen high in the sky, / beyond the sky, like an exile: absent / from earth that is still green and warm. / The earth is living; but stripped / of weight, within the sharp outlines / of trees and houses; and its colours are / splendid but not bright. Down there a red / cry, strangely hushed, of sage.

Valeri speaks to poetry’s capacity to ‘elevate reality,’ to express wonder over the ‘pure spiritual truths’ revealed to us, even as it does so through lessness and lack, as in this picture of an overcast sky that separates the green, warm earth from the sun, whose absent brilliance strips things of their weight and colours of their emanations. For Valeri the literary dimension is a pretext for wonder; as he writes in an essay contemporary to this late poem: ‘Poetry is superlative by itself, in the sense that it elevates reality, within us and around us, to the power of pure feeling, pure image, pure spiritual truth. The root of all poetry is in the poet’s faculty of omnia admirari, so far is he from the animus of the stoic philosopher.’14 The word’s limitations are those of life itself: C’è piú amore che vita. Il desiderio d’amore brucia ancora, quando spenta è la stagione di amare (P 384) There is more love than life. The desire / of love still burns, when the / season of loving is over.

It is precisely in the divergence from perfect harmony, as from the idyll, that one discovers the tension inherent in this modern classic poetry. Valeri’s classicism is not involved in the aesthetics of rupture of the avantgardes; it is not hermetic or expressionistic; nor does he engage in classical reference as a ‘return to order,’ as in the neoclassicism of Cardarelli

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and others. The idea of a century of crisis in which the status of the poet is radically altered, in which physical tensions and linguistic violence are translated into verse, does not suffice to define the story of modernity in Italy. In Tempo e poesia (Time and Poetry, 1964) Valeri discusses the poet’s ability to evince a temporal suchness despite the tenuous involvement with time of his chosen medium: ‘Great poetry is entirely outside time. And yet only the great poet can give us a complete image of the present moment in which he happens to live amidst a million men like himself. [...] Let suffice the example of Petrarch, the sole inhabitant of his own lyrical world, the only speaker of the mysterious language he himself created, and, nevertheless, a highly (aristocratically) popular poet.’15 I would like to briefly focus on this remark in order to criticize the historical tendency to underestimate Valeri’s verse. Such is the case of Ferroni’s brief description of Valeri as one ‘who draws with classical clarity the images of a nature completely unrelated to the traces of the present time, with solutions of absolute perfection.’16 Our interpretation is opposite that of Ferroni, insofar as Valeri provides a better image of the present moment than most of his contemporaries. Following Valeri’s suggestion that Petrarch too provided such an opening to the ‘present,’ we would recommend a comparison of Valeri’s Poesie to Petrarch’s Canzoniere, with which it shares the problematic and evolving sense of the self, of the containment of worldly distractions, and the subject’s dialectical opposition to the cyclical nature of time. To make such a comparison to Petrarch is to emphasize the fullness of time and its underlying mystery and power, as reflected in the two poets’ conscious ordering of their poems as their collections progress. Many of Valeri’s poems, like Petrarch’s, are enigmatic as the poet experiments with open forms such as poems ending in questions or oppositions.17 Upon a first reading of the Poesie one might be tempted to label Valeri’s lyric ‘I’ figure as a passive subject who stands immobilized before the phenomena of nature. But that impression is flawed; it is rather in the awareness of that relationship of wonder and otherness toward the world that the poet establishes himself. As with Petrarch, the relative temporalities of the historical experience and the transcendental experience of the spirit are juxtaposed, with the poet’s preference expressed for the latter. Valeri’s homage to Petrarch is apparent in the following meditation on old age: È una distanza come di colline

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posate dalla luce della sera su l’estremo orizzonte. Cosí nette di segno e cosí tenere, che non osa toccarle l’amoroso desiderio dei sensi. Questa è la tua distanza. (P 386) It is a distance as of hills / laid by the evening light / upon the distant horizon. / So crisply marked and so tender, / that the amorous desire of / the senses dares not touch them. / This is your distance.

There is a religious substrate in Valeri’s poems that comes to the surface in supplications and spiritual interrogations: ‘E allora perché perché, Signore, / dovrò sempre cercare altrove / paesi strani, gioie piú nuove, / piaceri intrisi di dolore?’ (And then why oh why Lord / must I always seek elsewhere / strange countries, newer joys, / pleasures laced with pain?)(P 97); ‘è come se ricreasse / il mondo, e aprisse una vita nuova. / / Stagione benigna e vivace, / che tutto è attesa e annuncio divino, / e il cuore si crede vicino / al suo vero e alla sua pace’ (it is as if a world were / recreated, and a new life opened up. / / Season benign and alive, / when all is expectation and divine announcement, / and one’s heart believes itself / close to its truth and its peace) (P 105); ‘Signore, questa è la mia fine. La mia fine è in pensieri d’amore’ (Lord, this is my end. / My end is in thoughts of love) (PS 76). As in Petrarch, the thematic function of the religious references is to identify spiritual vigour and sentimental honesty as the true subjects of the poet’s response to nature and the landscape, in which he perceives his limits – of language, of cognition, of physical survival – and the necessity of humility before God. Valeri’s poems are the recognition of these limits and of the incapacity of ‘economic man’ to find his earthly paradise. The supplicative nature of Valeri’s religious sentiment is apparent in his comments on his contemporary, poet Clemente Rebora, who was ordained a priest in 1936: The most poetically alive pages among those of religious inspiration seem to me those few in which the contrast between the human and the superhuman is vigorous: that effort of the will to lift up the dead weight of common humanity, in which the soul is still debating between believing and doubting, is still and forever searching, though it has already found. Isn’t

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the eternal uplifting of Christianity precisely here, in the soul’s anxiety and disquietude, even as it knows and believes?18

Valeri’s own anxiety and restlessness emerge with greater clarity in the spiritual tensions of Terzo tempo (Third Time, 1950), a work which combines and edits the previous volumes Scherzo e finale (Scherzo and Finale, 1937) and Tempo che muore (Time That Is Dying, 1942). Here one finds a more troubled voice and a more violent and descriptive view of nature, as in ‘Dicembre’: scivolavano lungo muri lisci, dileguavano via serpenti, con fischi lunghi e lenti strisci ... ora mi sporgo all’attonita pace della grigia mattina: tutto tace (P 158) they slid down smooth walls, / the serpents slipped away, / with long whistles and slow strokings ... / / now I lean into the shocked peace / of the grey morning: all is still.

In the muted chromatism, one finds the poet in a Petrarchan moment of loss and anguish at his distance from love itself: Respiro lussuria senza amore; son avido di gioia e infelice; come chi tien tra le labbra un fiore, e sente l’amaro della radice. (P 164) I breathe a loveless lust; / I am avid with joy and unhappy; / like one who holds in his lips a flower, / and tastes the bitterness of the root.

Poetry counters this anguish, as Valeri writes, by adhering to the classical manner: For one who doesn’t share the rage for the new, but enjoys feeling himself to be within the poetic tradition of his own country, his own land; for one who believes, even in these chaotic times, in the sacredness of beauty, as father Petrarch believed in it (in times, by the way, no less chaotic than our own).19

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Thus the musical essence of poetry possesses a sacred nature which Valeri denotes thematically with the figure of the angel. Se mi sporgo a guardare dentro il pozzo degli anni morti, vedo, in fondo all’ombra, dilatarsi il chiarore di un mattino azzurro e bianco; e te, viso di perla, occhi d’ambra dorata, splendere, luce nella luce, arcana verità del divino amore, dolcissimo Angelo. Ma qui, se qui ti cerco fra terra e cielo, in questa serenità del tardo tempo, nella limpidezza del dí che si fa sera, piú non ti trovo, e invano t’invoco, Angelo. Forse t’ho per sempre perduto. O forse splendi ancora, senza forma, nella vuota aria d’intorno; sei la poca luce che ancora dura... Questa luce attonita; e l’ombra cosí lieve, che vi trema sospesa, come uno sguardo d’occhi bruni, come un passar d’ali nere. (P 324) If I lean over to look into the well / of the dead years, I see, in the depth of shadow, / the glimmer of a morning expanding / blue and white; and you, face of pearl, / eyes of gilded amber, shining, light within light, arcane / truth of divine love, / sweetest Angel. / / But here, if I search for you / between earth and sky, in this / serenity of the late time, in the / limpidness of the day a passing of black wings.

It is this figure of the angel that Valeri employs in the title of his 1956 collection, La metamorfosi dell’angelo (Metamorphosis of the Angel). Also in that year Valeri publishes poems in French in the book Jeux de mots (Wordplay, 1956), in whose preface he writes: ‘This old poet thought that by writing in French it would be possible perhaps to avoid the automatism (of speech, phrase, and verse) that seemed to threat-

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en the very substance of his poetry.’20 In his French poetry one finds the same principles of harmony and parsimony, the same melic tonal values, the same concentration on form and colours as in the Italian verse. Ange plein de candeur et de fine malice, pour un peu de délice vous perdez le bonheur. (P 340) Angel full of candour / and fine malice, / for a bit of delight / you give up happiness.

In the poems after 1950 one notes more attention given to the theme of time and its harbinger the rose, an image that appears in at least twentysix post-1950 poems by Valeri. The rose defies specific meaning, summoning up feelings of indeterminacy, agreeable sensations of sonority and visual harmony, and the sense of habitual pleasures. The rose is a chalice and a plant, a metaphor for woman and a gift to her. Here in a late poem Valeri recalls the conflagrations of the Second World War against which the solitary rose stood inexplicably for the redemption of the collective and individual struggles of that conflict: Io vidi già sotto un cielo d’inferno rotto avvampato dai fuochi di guerra schiudersi la corolla di una rosa bianca, amorosa. (CV 59) I just saw under a hellish sky / burnt and broken by the flames of war / a white, amorous rose / open its corolla.

In the following instance the rose is absent, a kind of litotes by which poet expresses the turbulence of youth: Al mio tempo fanciullo primavera non era il sole nuovo, il vento nuovo la nuova rosa color di rosa in vetta al verde spino. Era il lombrico biondo o bruno

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che si torceva furibondo tra la zolla nerastra, umida, liscia ... (PS 91) In my boyhood / spring was not / the new sun, the new wind / the new pink rose / above the green thorn. / It was the earthworm, light or dark / that twisted furiously / through the blackish, wet slippery clod ...

In conclusion, the uniformity of Valeri’s formal presentation and the emotional intensity surrounding images of Venice, of Woman, of nature, tend to conceal the affective intensity of his projected voice. The lyrical ‘I’ does not comment on the poetry or devise a fictional persona. Throughout Valeri’s opus his poetry is typified by clarity of language, understatement, song, and mystery and by direct communication as in these lines from Poesie inedite o ‘come’ (Unpublished Poetry and Such, 1978): ‘Ho in cuore una città / che nasce ogni giorno dal mare / e ogni sera nel mare si dissolve’ (I have a city in my heart / that is born every day from the sea / and every night dissolves in the sea) (PI 37). The reader of Valeri’s verse finds in its iterative compactness a symbolic density because, throughout his oeuvre, the occasion for the writing is deemed to be greater than the work itself. The presence of a melic poetry of harmonies free of worldly references should not lead one to suppose that Valeri has distanced himself from reality; on the contrary, he is dedicated to the fundamental presences of nature. Thus the representations of desire are muted, but not frustrated; the elegance and grace of the woman is fleeting, but not a figment; the encounters with the city and the landscape are fragmentary but immediate. In lieu of concepts, Valeri’s poetry possesses a highly developed visual and sensory culture, a sense of negative space, of presence and absence: Anacreonte, sei vecchio, sei solo. Col vecchio corpo che ancora ti porta, a fatica ti porta. Solo, col muto antico pianto delle gioie perdute, delle verdi albe svanite sopra i tetti bruni, contemplate con lagrime d’amore. Già sfuma la tua breve piccola luce di sensi, confusa con l’infinita ombra del Tutto, del Nulla. (P 378)

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Anacreon, you are old, you are alone. / With your old body which still carries you, / which carries you fatigued. / Alone, with your silent ancient lament / of joys lost, of green dawns / vanished over the darkened roofs, / contemplated with tears of love. / Already the brief small light of / your senses is fading, lost in the / infinite shadow of the All, of the Nothing.

The role of the sentiments here is to contradict the idyll, to counter disorder, and to invest in affective thinking in a way that was unusual among Valeri’s peers. As Carlo Bo writes: In a time in which – more or less – everyone was a bit afraid of feeling or at least of letting their own sentiments be seen, Valeri confessed and presented himself for what he was. [...] The sadness, the melacholy, the loves (which are his major themes) were transferred onto the page directly but with a rare effect: Valeri, speaking of his own issues, never gave a personal accent to his stories.21

The classical Valeri represents the continuation of the lineage of Baudelaire in Italy. As Valeri writes, that poet’s initial state of being lost and his eventual self-discovery through the organic, tonal and thematic, organization of his book are comparable to the process undertaken in their books by Dante and Leopardi. The author of Les Fleurs du Mal is said to be, ‘among the poets of the nineteenth century, the one who accomplished the most vast and penetrating irradiation of himself, of his own spirit, of his own poetry, over the entire literary world, and thus the world of morality.’22 By combining an ‘audacious, exciting novelty of content’ with the ‘classical rigour of the form,’ Baudelaire ‘imposed aesthetic peace over the tumult of the romantic soul.’23 Returning to Valeri’s verse as we have surveyed it, we see a symbolization and spiritualization of the phenomena of this world, a reclaiming, within the precise formal contours of the lyric, of the common object and the fleeting sentiment, such that poetry leads to knowledge and selfdiscovery. Valeri’s continuation of the Romantic and symbolist lineage must be seen in this light, as an adherence to the classical idea that a theory of knowledge and of transcendence is underlying the poetic art. As a final example of this, let us examine a poem from Valeri’s final book, Calle del vento, in which the contemplation of death is a dominant theme:24

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Si cammina sul filo degli anni da esperti funanboli. È un difficile andare, ma si va. E intanto il mondo, attorno, muta faccia e colore. Senza posa ogni creata cosa in poco d’ora ci diventa strana. E con le cose ci mutiamo noi, d’oggi in domani. Solo sta fermo nel fondo di noi quel nostro tempo primo, l’infanzia, all’ombra della madre, sotto il crocifisso piccolo di avorio. (CV 61) One walks along the wire of the years / like an expert tightrope walker. / It is hard going, but one goes. / And meanwhile the world around one / changes colour and appearance. Ceaselessly / every created thing / becomes strange to us overnight. / And with the things we ourselves change, / from today into yesterday. / The only thing that remains fixed in our depth / are those early years / of infancy, in the shadow of the mother, beneath / the small ivory crucifix.

Valeri’s revolt was accomplished through humility and silence; by elevating the relative truths of daily existence, the middle tones of the lyric genre, and the common experiences of sorrow and joy. In this way he pursued the ideals of harmony and balance so conspicuously absent during the twentieth century. Valeri’s landscape, like Pascoli’s, is colourful but uniform, immediate but distanced, ineffable but ephemeral; at times it is the only thing tangible in his solitude, a world in which spatiotemporal indicators establish a mood of suddenness and stillness, like that of Petrarch. What is classical is the insistence throughout Valeri’s opus of spirit and sentiment sharing a common space: the space of the tree and the crucifix, which is also the world of the child.

PART TWO Roads to Rome: The Feminine Voice

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6 The Typological Journey of Grazia Deledda’s Canne al vento

Dio non volse religioso di noi se non lo cuore. – Dante Alighieri1

1 Self-trained as a writer, Grazia Deledda (1871–1936) slowly developed from an early period of fatalism and conventional formulaic works to the great novels of her maturity, which possess all the complexity and nuance of great literature. In the Sardinian author one sees the role women would have in mending the divisions in Italian society. An early defender of universal suffrage and the right to divorce, Deledda projects her feminine identity along with the ‘shadow labour’ of women throughout her career, from the early novels La via del male (1896), Elias Portolu (1900), and Cenere (1904) to the great novels of her maturity, Canne al vento (1913) and La madre (1919). While Deledda’s recognition in Italy increased considerably after she was awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize for Literature, her fame was gained despite the powers of the patrie lettere. As a young author Deledda was in line with the ‘savage thought’ of the Sardinian people and gained a loyal readership for her sentimental, tragical tales of passion.2 A self-professed grafomane, she wrote compulsively and progressed rapidly, though critics could continue to consider her a regionalist and a woman’s writer. In 1894 Deledda published in serial form an anthropological study, Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro (later published as the book Tradizioni popolari di Sardegna). The cataloguing of customs and folklore, agriculture practices, seasonal celebrations, courtship, and belief structures was an important step toward the objective

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representation of her island; it also meant that Deledda could speak with authority and critical distance of the Sardinian people. Her ability to narrate her world meant that the label of ‘regional’ would need to be rejected – as in the case of Verga – because of her ability to render the local context universally, with vividness and understatement. As Nicola Tanda writes, Deledda’s style runs along an ‘axis’ that is ‘eccentric’ to the main current of Italian literature, so that in order to understand it one is advised to adopt a ‘historical-religious’ approach; this is particularly salient in the later works. Deledda’s revolt occurs at the boundary of two cultures and is catalysed by her move to Rome in 1900. In Elias Portolu, published in that year, the archaic primitivity of the Sardinian culture is combined with a refreshing cognitive and ethical dimension, such that Attilio Momigliano could write of this book: ‘Forse è questo il libro di più solida moralità che sia stato scritto in Italia dopo i Promessi sposi’ (Perhaps this is the book of the solidest morality written in Italy after the Betrothed).3 After the move to Rome, Deledda’s fiction continues to be set in Sardinia, with its ancient silences and non-Italian language, the sombre force of its rituals and landscape. But, as Leandro Muoni writes, once in Rome Deledda would look at both Sardinia and mainland Italy with ‘the gaze of the exile’ and be ‘the most inconvenient of witnesses of the defects of her fellow Sardinians,’ possessing ‘a sort of authentic romantic stimmung.’4 As Deledda’s fiction grows more outwardly austere, the psychological makeup of her characters grows more complex. Less and less does her narrator intervene to fill in gaps or ensure verisimilitude; it is the characters whose decisions and responses to changes of fortune create the drama. The Sardinian culture itself takes on greater complexity as the economic determinism of the early novels, which supported an aesthetic of the typical, is exchanged for a more nuanced view of this multi-ethnic and non-Eurocentric people, a view that is typological and presupposes a symbolic relation between the material culture and the life of the spirit. The catalysing work in this regard is the 1904 Cenere. The antefact of this tragic novel is a love affair between the fifteen-year-old Rosalia (Olì) and a married man, Anania, who swears to her he will leave his wife and move with Olì to the mainland. When this proves to be a lie, the disgraced and pregnant Olì is rejected by her father as a fallen woman; she names her baby boy Anania, after his father, and eventually leaves him to be raised by his father in Nuoro. Olì now disappears and is not seen until the end of the novel.

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As Anania grows, his strongest motivation is to find Olì; he cherishes the one possession she has left with him, a rezetta or cloth sachet that serves as an amulet. Supported by his father and stepmother, he becomes an avid reader, poring over the Latin Bible, the poetry of Giovanni Cena, and Hugo’s Les Misérables. Already as a teenager, Anania has fallen in love with Margherita Carboni, the daughter of his father’s employer, a wealthy landowner. Successful in school, he eventually moves to Cagliari to study law. When he declares to Margherita’s father his intentions to marry her (through an intermediary, as per Sardinian custom), the father approves on the condition that Anania succeeds in the working world. To that end he continues his studies in Rome. But his strongest obsession is to find his mother. Before Anania leaves Nuoro, his stepmother – who has raised him – questions him about his religious faith: ‘Cattivo figliuolo, tu non credi piú in Dio!’ ‘Col cuore, sí!’ Queste parole consolarono alquanto la buona donna che gli narrò l’episodio biblico di Eli... (Cenere 96–7) ‘Bad child, you don’t believe in God anymore!’ ‘With my heart I do!’ These words consoled the good woman somewhat who then told him the biblical story of Eli ...

In reality, Anania’s ‘heart’ is divided between two women: his mother, who he suspects has moved to the mainland, and Margherita, the figure of an unblemished life and higher social class, who is increasingly upset over Anania’s obsessive pursuit of his mother. Part II of Cenere begins with an allusion to Dante’s famous passage on the sailor’s nostalgia at sunset: ‘Era nell’ora che volge il desio ai naviganti ed a quelli che stanno per salpare verso ignoti lidi’ (It was the hour of day that ignites the longings of seafarers and those preparing to set sail to unknown shores) (Cenere 129).5 This calque stands to indicate, in metonymic fashion, that the remainder of the book will be taken up by Anania’s wandering – from Nuoro to Cagliari, then briefly back to Nuoro where he hallucinates the image of Margherita, then on to Rome. Throughout these passages Anania is obsessed by his mother’s image and his sense of guilt. His interior life is absorbed in a kind of mania as the imagination takes on the force of reality and reality recedes into the background. In his first view of Rome, Anania’s self-delusion is apparent:

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Si era addormentato in un tetro paese di dolore, fra onde livide vigilate da una luna sanguigna: si svegliava in mezzo ad un paese d’oro, in un paese di luce, – vicino a Roma. ‘Roma!’, pensò, palpitando di gioia. ‘Roma, Roma! Patria eterna, abisso d’ogni male e fonte d’ogni bene!’ (Cenere 133) He had fallen asleep in a grim land of sorrow, among livid waves watched over by a blood-red moon: he was awakening amidst a land of gold, in a land of light, – close to Rome. ‘Rome!,’ he thought, palpitating with joy. ‘Rome, Rome! Eternal homeland, abyss of every evil and source of every good!’

When Anania fails to find his mother in Rome, he returns to Nuoro. Now he sees the wretched poverty of his island without illusions, as he does the moral poverty of the affluent, including Margherita and her father. He has experienced in the course of his desperate wandering a radical change in his concept of life: E gli pareva di sentire la forza gioconda dell’acqua agitata mentre fino a quel giorno la sua anima era stata una piccola palude con le sponde soffocate da erbe fetide. Sì, le acacie smarrite nelle immote solitudini sarde avevano ragione: sì, muoversi, andare, correre vertiginosamente, questa era la vita. (Cenere 152) And he seemed to feel the joyful force of moving water while until that day his soul had been a small swamp with its shores suffocated by fetid grasses. Yes, the acacias lost in the motionless Sardinian solitude were right: yes, moving, going, running dizzily, this was life.

Staring from a train car, Anania ‘understands’ that life is motion: but for him the reasons for living continue to be his search for his origins. He has come to realize that his father’s behaviour toward his mother – whom he seduced in a mountain nuraghe, the ancient stone tower structure that symbolizes a Golden Age in Sardinia when a man could be a peasant and a nobleman at the same time, a king with a plough of gold – was a sordid act. He has also come to realize that his love for Margherita – and hers for him – were founded on false premises. Now, ironically, when he is finally successful in finding his mother, Olì kills herself, convinced that she will never be free of him and he will never be free of her as long as she is alive. When Anania opens the rezetta or amulet he has worn his en-

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tire life – which was the proof to Olì that he was her son – he finds only ashes, the traces of some memento of his mother’s love: Sí, tutto era cenere: la vita, la morte, l’uomo; il destino stesso la produceva. Eppure, in quell’ora suprema, [...] egli ricordò che fra la cenere cova spesso la scintilla, seme della fiamma luminosa e purificatrice, e sperò, e amò ancora la vita. (Cenere 242–3) Yes, all was ash: life, death, man; destiny itself produced it. And yet, in that supreme hour, [...] he remembered that in the ash there often broods a spark, the seed of the luminous and purifying flame, and he felt hope, and still loved life.

Neither the death of his mother nor the loss of Margherita can defeat the will of Anania. As Anania stares in disillusionment at the degraded reality of his island, he has survived the victimization of his mother and retained the love of God in his heart that he spoke of years earlier to his stepmother. Cenere is a paradoxical and disturbing book in which the gap is opened between the typical, which followed the prescribed contours of the regional novel, and the modern novel. Anania’s alienation has pushed him outside his genealogical identity into exile, but in the process he is liberated of local myths, including that of the nuraghi, the stone towers where giants dwelled and the Sardinians allegedly hid their treasures from the island’s invaders. By escaping from this mythic sphere, Anania outgrows his stated desire to possess Margherita in a nuraghe, a desire tied to the atavistic scene of his own conception, and to his plans to marry Margherita. 2 In Rome, Deledda campaigned against the deforestation of Sardinia and courageously supported feminist causes.6 She became involved with the Roman Secession, an artistic movement whose adoption of the principles of primitive art complemented her own aesthetic research. In her novels after Cenere, Deledda abandoned the facile sonorities and D’Annunzian embellishments of language of her earlier works, along with the overt documentation of Sardinian mores and customs. Instead, in the great novel Canne al vento, one sees a movement toward the universal, such that the Sardinian is rendered symbolically and in terms of a Christian

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allegory. Moreover, as one critic has noted, the strength of the author’s representation is no longer superficial but is due to ‘the internal relations – the deep semantics – existing between the elements of expression.’7 Canne was published as a serial novel between January and April of 1913. In adopting this genre (whose eventual decline in Italy would be lamented by Antonio Gramsci), Deledda’s models were Eugène Sue and George Sand.8 Before discussing the book I will provide some definitions of typology and natural allegory. According to Alan Charity, ‘Typology is either the study or presentation of the quasi-symbolic relations which one event may appear to bear to another – especially [...] when these relations are the analogical ones existing between events which are taken to be another’s “prefiguration” and “fulfilment.”’ More narrowly, it is ‘the science of history’s relations to its fulfilment in Christ.’9 Charity recognizes that the broad and narrow definitions are linked by the issue of faith. Typology is the means by which God acts in the world so that the faithful find the means to reaffirm their faith in his steadfastness and his initiative. In the Old Testament – in contrast to the mythopoeic cults that preceded it – prominence is given to history, specifically the history of God’s wondrous actions upon the tribes of Israel. The major archetype of the Old Testament is the wilderness journey, and the leadership and faith of Moses despite the demands for proof of God’s actions from the people.10 Herein lies a continuity with the New Testament. As Charity tells us, ‘Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom of God relates it to both present and future, it is “here” and yet “not here”, “already” and “not yet.”’11 Typology is profoundly anti-historicist; it is not based on horizontal exegetical method, but on the vertical expectation of new actions by God in conformity with his past actions, thus the fulfilment of prophecy. Typology seeks to make intelligible, not to prove. In terms of the broader, secular definition, this sense of open-endedness and mystery prevails as well. As Edwin Honig writes: ‘Typology provides a generalized framework for appraising characteristic relationships among different works, not legislative acts to which the works must be made to conform. Even the barest survey of the symbolic types indicates that, far from being a set of rigid theoretical codifications, they are useful because richly adaptable to various literary embodiments.’12 In his celebrated essay ‘Figura,’ Erich Auerbach writes: ‘Figural prophecy implies the interpretation of one worldly event through another; the first signifies the second, the second fulfills the first. Both remain historical events; yet both, looked at in this way, have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to

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one another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the actual, real, and definitive event.’13 Auerbach and Charity are scholars of the applied typology of Dante in the Divine Comedy, also a key source for Deledda. Canne al vento announces its typological intentions in its title, referencing passages in the books of Matthew and Luke, where Jesus, having answered the questions of John the Baptist about his being the Messiah – by citing prophecies from the book of Isaiah – speaks to the crowd: ‘What did you go out in the wilderness to behold? A reed shaken by the wind? [...] Why then did you go out? To see a prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is he of whom it is written, “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee.” [...] From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence have taken it by force.’14 In the final verse cited, Matthew’s Jesus emphasizes the fulfilment of the Law, not his superseding of it as Messiah.15 What is implicit in these passages (Luke 7:24; Matthew 11:7) is an ending of violence and of the religions that depend on sacrifice. That would be the essence of the Christian revolt from all previous religions. And since the ancient monotheism of Sardinia persisted in Deledda’s day in a syncretistic blend of Christianity with pagan superstitions, the idea of ending violence and ending sacrificial religions has a living context. ‘Reeds in the wind’ is thus a symbol of frailty that points to the Incarnation. Man is a reed but Christ too is a man who will empty himself of his divinity to suffer and die on the cross. We now pass to a plot summary of Canne al vento. The days are hot as the elderly servant Efix invokes God, looking to the future not the past, recalling a series of unproductive years, meagre desiccated crops, and the failure of his employers, the three unmarried Pottoi sisters, Ruth, Ester, and Noemi, whom he continues to serve though he has not been paid in years. The family’s wealth was squandered by the foolish business practices of the father, Don Zame, whom Efix killed inadvertently as he sought to enable the escape from the island of Lia, the fourth daughter, whom Efix loved. Lia later wrote from the mainland that she had married ‘a plebeian man’ and ‘broken the chain’ of oppression – she and her sisters had been cloistered – and that a son was born, Giacinto. Years later a letter from Giacinto arrives stating that Lia has died. As the book opens, another letter from Giacinto has arrived, announcing his imminent arrival. He has been secretly invited by his aunt Ester. While the youngest sister, Noemi, objects, she can scarcely hide her curiosity: ‘Non è il Messia!’ (He is not the Messiah!) (RN191)

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she screams. It is clear that this bachelor could unify the family if he married his aunt, a prospect Efix imagines and hopes for. The town of Galtè is in semi-ruins, its population stricken with malaria, its church in need of repair; the cemetery has bones exposed amid fallen tombstones: ‘Il passato regnava ancora sul luogo; le ossa stesse dei morti sembravano i suoi fiori, le nuvole il suo diadema’ (The past still reigned over? the place; the very bones of the dead seemed to be its flowers, the clouds its crown) (RN 186–7). Now while attending mass, Efix is revisited by past visions of Don Zame and Lia, who resembles the Mary Magdalen portrait where he prays. The portrait of Christ too descends in Efix’s imagination and walks among the faithful, ‘magro, pallido, silenzioso’ (skinny, pale, silent) (RN 192). At the Pottoi home, ‘un pane bianco e sottile come ostia’ (a white thin bread like the Host) (RN 201) is prepared for Giacinto’s arrival. If Efix’s faith is primitive and austere – the world is a place of penitence – another stratum of the society is governed by superstition and paganism, as represented by the village usurer Kallina and the vulgar landowner Don Predu. Giacinto’s arrival coincides with the Feast of Nostra Signora di Rimedio on 1 May, a religious celebration replete with courtship rituals. Such festivals tend to imitate the tribal practices of the Old Testament and punctuate the otherwise monotonous rhythms of Sardinian life. While Noemi sequesters herself in her rooms, Giacinto is seen dancing with Grixenda, the daughter of Kallina, the ‘perla nell’anello della danza’ (pearl in the ring of the dance) (RN 220). Poetry is recited by travelling minstrels who bring news of the world, such as Italy’s incursion into Libya or the tide of immigration to America. Efix silently participates in the festival, but his heart lies at a point deeper and stiller, ‘sul limite di un deserto’ (at the edge of a desert) (RN 208), as when he praises the solitary farming life to Giacinto: ‘La luna ci fa compagnia come una sposa’ (The moon keeps us company like a bride) (RN 221). It is Efix’s ‘heart,’ his full emotional involvement in his prayers and labours, that connect him to the grand cathedral of nature in the manner of the earliest Christians. This is clear in the basilica when he prays for the marriage of Giacinto to Grixenda – ‘inginocchiato in un angolo, provava la solita estasi dolorosa’ (kneeling in a corner, he felt the usual ecstasy of sorrow) – as it is in this scene where Ester and he are discussing the family’s destitution: ‘Signore, aiutaci!,’ sospirò Efix. ‘Lasciatemi, comare Pottoi. Pregate Cristo, pregate Nostra Signora del Rimedio ...’

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‘Il rimedio è in noi,’ sentenziò la vecchia. ‘Cuore, bisogna avere, null’altro ...’ ‘Cuore, bisogna avere,’ ripeteva Efix fra se, entrando dalle sue padrone. (RN 254–5) ‘Lord, help us!,’ sighed Efix. ‘Help me, comare Pottoi. Pray to Christ, pray to Our Lady of Rimedio ...’ ‘The remedy is in us,’ the old lady stated. ‘You must have heart, nothing else ...’ ‘You must have heart,’ Efix repeated to himself, as he entered his employers’ home.

The poverty of the Pottoi sisters is so extreme they must sell a gift of a basket of vegetables from Don Predu. When Noemi faints out of shame, and because of the presence of her handsome nephew, Giacinto revives her by cleansing her brow with vinegar. Aside from the Christological reference, we recall that in the Old Testament Naomi and Ruth are associated with marriage among kinsmen (Don Predu, Noemi’s eventual suitor, is her cousin). The sisters’ names establish an analogy with the Old Testament, the culture of the Law, of lamentation and prophecy.16 The most devout sister is Ester, whose namesake is a common figura Ecclesiaie. She stands in contrast to the local clergymen, who chew snuff and tobacco and take coffee and cookies before hearing confession. Ester’s devotion is mirrored only by that of Efix, whose namesake, Sant’Efisio, is the patron saint of Sardinia, born in Jerusalem, educated into paganism, converted to Christianity, and sent by Rome to fight the Barbaricians in Sardinia, where he was eventually martyred in 303 AD. When Efix next enters the basilica he is afflicted. As he stumbles to the portrait of Magdalen, he imagines her descending as the figure of Lia and walking with him: ‘Laggiù la sua visione si confondeva. C’era un carro su cui Lia sedeva, nascosta in mezzo a sacchi di scorza’ (Down there his vision grew clouded. There was a wagon that Lia was sitting on, hidden among the sacks of crust) (RN 261). Here one has a conflation of the remembered scene of Leah’s escape and the suggestion of Dante’s dream of Leah – who embodies the active life – at the point of his passing over into the Earthly Paradise (Purg. xxvii). This is also the scene of Efix’s crime, his despair and fear of judgment, his years of service and his desire to contribute, by assisting in a marriage, in the future prosperity of the family. When a summons is delivered to the Pottoi home concerning an un-

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paid loan taken by Giacinto, the family is plunged into crisis. Ester suggests begging; Ruth, in an apparent act of will, simply dies; and Noemi plummets into despair, driven by the image of Giacinto; she imagines his tears on his lips: ‘La sua anima allora vibrava tutta di passione; un turbine di desiderio la investiva portando via tutti i suoi pensieri tristi come il vento che passa e spoglia l’albero di tutte le sue foglie morte’ (Her soul then shook with passion; a storm of desire struck her, carrying away her sad thoughts like the wind that sweeps in and strips the tree of all its dead leaves) (RN 272). She plays with this image in her mind, selecting out the good, ‘penitent’ image of the man she desires. When Noemi awakes from a dream in which she and Giacinto were embracing, she is contrite. She vows to urge her nephew to marry Grixenda and sees herself as a Christ-figure bestowing her blessing: ‘Li benediceva come una vecchia madre, ma si sentiva trasportata in mezzo a loro, attraverso la vita misteriosa, come Gesù fra i suoi genitori nella fuga in Egitto’ (She was blessing them like an old mother, but she felt transported in their midst, through the mysterious life, as Jesus between his parents on the flight into Egypt) (RN 276). Efix is still tormented over his distant crime and what he sees as its consequences; wandering like a ‘dead man’ or a ‘punished soul,’ he sees the natural landscape as his own ‘Calvary’ but also the path to his ‘freedom’ (RN 286–7). Then as he gazes on the Redeemer statue high on Monte Orthobene, he realizes that his freedom is only genuine if it is in consonance with God’s will. At this point in the story Efix is asked by Don Predu to communicate his proposal of marriage to Noemi. Predu is a changed man, reformed and pious, transformed by his love for Noemi; in addition, Ester has consented to sell him the farm, in what is a great boon for the family.17 Deledda’s narrator does not explain the motivations for her characters’ decisions but leaves gaps in the text; by means of the unstated and interrogative modes, the reader is drawn into the text and asked to participate and reflect, as when the mystery of Don Predu’s spiritual turnaround is addressed: ‘Chi aveva interesse a far questo? Non si sapeva: queste cose non si sanno mai chiare e precise, e se si sapessero non sarebbero più grandi e misteriose... (Who would benefit from that? No one knew. These things are never clear cut, and if they were they would no longer be great and mysterious ...) (RN 302). Efix’s role as go-between has typological significance: if he should succeed in promoting the marriages between Predu and Noemi, and Giacinto and Grixenda, then his dream of the family’s resurrection will be possible. The marriages stand allegorically for the marriage between

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God and the Church for which the mediator is Christ. When he passes a pansy to Noemi, saying it is a gift from Predu, she understands immediately it is a proposal of marriage, and she refuses. Now, rather than telling Predu of her refusal, Efix simply departs on a long journey on foot. In the interval that follows, the question of marriage is left suspended. Deledda simply relies on the reader to complete the full sense of the action. Efix sets out by walking to Nuoro where Giacinto has found a job and lodging in a mill; Giacinto has attempted suicide and is now in the process of healing, thanks to a faithful employer. If Efix can assure himself that Giacinto has turned away from sin, and see that his love for Grixenda is sealed in marriage, that will favour the marriage of Noemi and Predu. When Efix hears Giacinto’s employer affirm they are Christians, he regains his will to be Giacinto’s guide on the road to penitence: ‘Perché siamo cristiani!’ Allora Efix tornò come dentro di sé nella casa della sua anima, e ricordò perché era venuto. (RN 322) ‘Because we’re Christians!’ Then Efix turned as if back into the house of his soul, and remembered why he had come.

Considering Giacinto in his labours, ‘gli era parso di intravedere uno scorcio del Purgatorio, e Giacinto che penava fra i dannati ma aspettando il termine dell’espiazione’ (he seemed to see in him a glimpse of Purgatory, and Giacinto who suffered among the damned while waiting out the end of his expiation) (RN 327). The geography around him as he sets out from Nuoro is Purgatorial, with its gradual ascent, its music and exempla, its steady process of purification, of fatigue and heaviness giving way to lightness and grace, its allegorical pathway between the lowlands where the reeds grow and the mountain, where the Redeemer stands. Efix travels from sanctuary to sanctuary, and finds dishonesty among the well-dressed mendicants, including one who feigns blindness and dispenses gross distortions of biblical tales for theatrical effect. The givers too are callous, attempting to buy salvation and impress their companions while scorning the beggars. In contrast to this world with its base appetites, Efix finds and follows a line of faithful peasant women who are themselves undertaking a mission of prayer and penitence: ‘Efix seguiva una fila di paesane avvolte nelle loro tuniche grevi, e col vento che gli batteva sul petto sentiva qualche cosa di nuovo, di forte, penetrargli nel

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cuore.’ (Efix followed a line of peasant women wrapped in their heavy tunics, and with the wind beating on his chest he felt something new and strong penetrate his heart.) (RN 327, our emphasis). Deledda’s passage from the ‘typical’ to the ‘typological’ in Canne al vento can be summed up by the presence of a natural allegory. This is distinct from classical allegory, in which the emphasis is on semiotic discontinuity: ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.’18 The persistence of death imagery in conventional allegory corresponds to what Charity calls the ‘typology of rejection, of judgement and condemnation’ of fallen man; it is the condition of the sinner who resists prophecy and is content with the way of nature. In contrast, to undertake a mission of atonement is to recognize the capacity to change one’s life, to engage in repentance and supplication. Efix’s is a journey of this sort, as well as a self-forgetting or kenosis, like that of Christ, who, as Paul writes, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant’ (Eph. 2:6–7). In the natural allegory of Canne the semiotic markers and bearers of meaning are intrinsic to the story, embedded in the personal reality of the characters. When the weary servant, returned from his wilderness journey, says to Ester ‘siamo proprio come le canne al vento’ (we are just like reeds in the wind) (RN 366), the reeds stand metonymically for the whole of Efix’s penitence.19 As death approaches, he falls into a dream in which Ester and Noemi are blind, so he too pretends to be blind: ‘cantando le laudi sacre dello Spirito Santo’ (singing the sacred praises of the Holy Spirit) (RN 367). When Noemi awakens him to confide in him, he explains that he had undertaken his journey out of fear and shame and because, after Noemi had refused Don Predu’s proposal, ‘Pensavo fosse il Signore a farmi andar via’ (I thought it was the Lord who caused me to go away) (RN 368). Weaving his mat and praying, Efix takes on the weakness and strength of the reeds, enduring his own Calvary: ‘si ripiegava di nuovo su se stesso, livido e tremante, proprio come una canna al vento; ma dopo lo spasimo provava una gran debolezza, una grave dolcezza, perché sperava di morire presto’ (he again bent over in pain, livid and trembling, just like a reed in the wind; but after the spasm he felt a great weakness, a grave sweetness, because he hoped to die soon) (RN 370). On a subsequent night he awakens startled from a dream in which he envisioned the blood drained from his body, soaking his reed mat. Efix desires the union of Don Predu and Noemi; only when that is guaranteed does he consent to see the priest for his final rites and confession.

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In terms of the natural allegory, the marriage is the one made possible by Christ between God and his Church, or humanity. As he lies dying, Ester and Noemi are speaking to him but he cannot decipher their words.20 Finally his body is draped with the funeral carpet, su tapinu du mortu.21 Throughout the human agenda of this story we see a Sardinia in which the primary Law is not the written one, but the oral one that is felt. This feeling of the heart is not contained within the shell of the social hierarchy, but presses outwards with an intrinsic dynamism in order to break through the rigid societal codes. Here is something analogous to the struggle of the Evangelists, of Paul and the early Church, to situate the drama of Christ’s life and death within the providential history foreseen by the Old Testament. The Christian fulfilment of typology is based on such analogies in which the later event fulfils and completes the former; in such a process the reader’s appropriation of the text becomes an essential matter. The religious question is not simply of thematic interest, but is constitutive of the act of revolt, which is a kind of emptying out. With limpid effort Deledda eschews every literary cliché, such that the symbols she employs emerge from the realism of the text: the jewels on the chest of the dead Ruth, the dancer’s costumes in the light of the fire, the lyrical descriptions of the sky in its various colours, the figure of the Redeemer on top of the mountain of Nuoro, the reed mat where Efix lives and dies. Similarly, while Deledda has abandoned the fatalism and materialistic ethnography (and trust in positivism) of her early works, her characters continue to cleave to reality, in their speech patterns, kinship, and work relations. While the fiction conveys the uniqueness of Sardinia on a number of levels from courtship to commerce, from the role played by superstition to the stratification of social classes, Deledda has departed from the typical for the sake of the typological. In line with Christian typology, Efix’s journey centres on the figure of time. Holly Wallace Boucher has written on the primacy of the Christian sense of linear time in the metonymic brand of allegory: ‘Typology is continuous not simply because of the continuity of cause and effect in history, but because purpose is lent by history’s author, God. According to this view God makes each event a partial revelation of his whole purpose and a term relative to the absolute fulfillment in Christ. God constructs history as a tightly written book where every episode depends on the episode before and refers to the episode ahead.’22 Boucher uses the example of Dante’s Comedy, in which the Christian concept of history lends time a peculiar shape. It is a shape re-

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lated to the Platonic, and a product of the Hebrew, but distinct from both. In the Judeo-Christian view time is not perpetual but has a beginning and an end. Each event in time possesses an individual quality because it cannot be repeated; time is not cyclic but linear, so that each historical event is peculiar and particular.23

So too in Deledda’s dedication to the metonymic contiguities of her characters’ experience of time and history, one sees a properly typological understanding. It is in this spirit that the eminent critic Carlo Bo wrote a homage to Deledda: Having to choose between exaltation and monumentalization of the character and common sense, she chose the latter, knowing well that in life what counts is the humble continuity of the day to day. Her religion itself [...] is an eternal connection between men and events, where there are no winners other than the sorrow which alone carries us to the invocation of God and especially to his will.24

To refer to prosaics is to invoke a means of stylistic analysis that values the particularity of daily events as the basis to relations and character. The presence of prosaics concerns a text’s ‘ability to refer to its own enactment and thus to construct deixis.’25 Given this structural complexity, it is incumbent on the reader to seek out the ‘answerability’ of the work. As we have seen in Canne, the story progresses slowly, through the voices and actions of the characters, without commentary. The structure of the serial novel is apt for this kind of engagement with the reader. Because of its art of ‘ending each instalment with an adventure that starts with an enigmatic sentence,’ and its structural displacement over time, the characters are seen in the process of their becoming (‘unfinalizability’), their decision-making and orientation toward the future.26 Within the typological view of time and judgment, the internal temporal structures of the novel take on great importance. The connecting of the remote past to the yet-to-come serves to reinforce the concreteness and spatiotemporal coherence of this world, as well as its similarity to the world of the Bible and that of the Divine Comedy. Readers of the Comedy quickly learn of its personal, autobiographical nature, embedded as it is in Florentine and Italian history; usually they grasp its didactic structure as well, as the fictional journey of a sinner through the realms of the afterlife. A smaller group of readers links the overall figural practice to a new form of allegory – new even with respect

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to the Convivio – whose literality and realism are compelling. As Barbara Reynolds has written: ‘Natural symbols, arising from reality, clamoured for [Dante’s] attention, ousting with their greater, more enduring vitality the perambulating labels of conventional poetic allegory. The literal sense of the Commedia is no mere foundation on which the allegorical is built. It is a structure in its own right, in which the reader may dwell and move about.’27 Among the more remarkable features of the Comedy are the addresses to the reader; these openings in the text challenge the reader to respond and participate. The point of these addresses, according to Alan Charity, is to promote Dante’s overall typological purpose. Only through faith and repentance comes grace, and this holds for the reader as well, if a personal understanding is intended: ‘the reading that the Comedy requires is an active and dramatic one, [...] the reader is supposed to be changed’; ‘The poem does aim, and persistently, to provoke the reader into implicit self-criticism.’28 In considering such questions in terms of answerability and dialogics, one is better prepared to respond to patterns of biblical typology and to interpret in a way that does not discard contradictions and ambiguities but seeks their hermeneutic value. This is the situation in Canne where a typological relation exists between Deledda’s story and the events of the Old and New Testaments; in such a natural allegory none of the personification and abstraction of classical allegory is present. Nature has a part in this but naturalism does not; rather, such symbols as the Cross, or the Servant, or the numerous flora invoked, function in such a way as to suggest an analogy between Efix’s pilgrimage, life and death, and the Christian incarnation and the fulfilment of the ‘servanthood of the Son of Man.’ To conform to the life of Christ means to confront one’s death with piety and vigilance, to be religious in one’s heart. Far from being a transparent text, Canne demands the reader decode and interpret the significance of its allusions, its recourse to dreams and visions, prayers and lamentations. The need to respond is encouraged by the dialogic and questioning modes of discourse. Just as ‘Dante makes it clear [in his addresses to the reader] that the task of understanding is ultimately same for himself and the reader,’ so the mature Deledda transmits the need for the reader to complete the work, to resolve its open-endedness, by decoding its religious symbolism.29 In this revolt Deledda is also a modernist; by advancing her figural thinking by means of gaps and an expanded degree of ambiguity, she has succeeded in universalizing the Sardinian cultural alterity, and placing it in the context of twentieth-century Italy.

7 Iconicity and Social Thought in Elsa Morante’s ‘Lo scialle andaluso’

When Elsa Morante died in 1985, Italy lost a great and popular artist. President Pertini, a friend of Morante and her former husband Alberto Moravia, had visited her and seen to it that her medical costs were absorbed by the state. This ad hoc arrangement recalled another anomaly: the extraordinary success of Morante’s penultimate novel, La storia: un romanzo (History: A Novel, 1974), which had sold nearly a million copies. Previous novels had enjoyed critical acclaim, but her complex ‘artistic’ personality had been too forbidding for mass appeal; the most frequent word for her prose had been ‘poetic.’ Morante bears only a lateral – or casual – relation to literary groups, movements, or tendencies. She is not explicitly neo-realist, ‘committed,’ or experimentalist. Her prose relies on a wealth of lyric sentiment and imagery, yet its architecture obeys the constraints of fiction. While not a feminist, the ‘feminine’ aspects of her writing are central (by which I do not mean the ‘weak’ or sentimental style historically associated with that epithet in Italy). While her characters possess autobiographical features, these are not transparent or mimetic so much as ‘figural,’ migrating, as it were, between characters whose ambivalence and even androgyny is enhanced by the author’s use of poetic ambiguity. To refer to such a tendency as ‘magic realism’ is erroneous, since Morante does not claim the poetic licence of that style which exploits supernatural interventions in the world of the text; rather she pursues a dialectical and demystified disclosure of social and individual ills. The novels’ titles serve as emblems of this circular, rather than linear, progression: from magic and lies, Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars, 1948); to existential isolation, L’isola di Arturo (Arthur’s Island, 1957); to a confrontation with history, La storia; to a sceptical and contradictory exploration of the self, Aracoeli (1982).

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A constant in the novels remains the potential for psychological illness, viewed both as a social and institutionalized evil and as a problem of the will; human beings are of a flexible and ‘viscous’ nature. To show this potential is a necessity for Morante, at the heart of which lies a contestation of bourgeois values, against which the innocence of children remains a kind of ultimate antidote. In the case of Morante, the importance of literary antecedents has been historically understated. Though the idea of a Rimbaud-Artaud ‘lineage of no lineage,’ or of creative auto-gestation, is present, it is sublimated. Moreover, as Gregory Lucente notes, ‘pointed elements of literary intertextuality’ exist with Dante, Dostoevsky, and Manzoni, to whom we would also add Stendhal and Rimbaud.1 One of the great sorrows of Morante’s life was that she never had children; this lack is dramatized through the tragical parent-child relations represented in her great novels, such that it might be construed as their theme. There are at times minor works in a great author’s career that serve to reflect the larger and more complex realities of the major works. One such work is Morante’s favourite novella, ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ (The Andalusian Shawl, 1954), the last and longest story in her collected short fiction. The work may be seen as a bridge between the obscurely romantic prosa d’arte of her earliest fiction and the polemical outcry of her late narrative poetry, as between the cryptic psychologism of her more lyric novels and the expository simplicity of La storia. The novella represents in microcosm the concerns of a career, being a brilliantly realized and understated testament to the marriage of poetic and prose styles, in the story of the crises of maturation of both members of an Oedipal pair. This bridge between styles is manifest in the use of the Horatian ut pictura poesis (‘Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry’), a convergence between the written and figurative arts; thematically it is apparent in the links between characters, and between them and the world at large. Thus the criterion employed here will be the ‘iconic’ unification of the aesthetic and psychological terms proposed by the story itself. One speaks of literary iconicity when the form of language mimics its content, or one form mimics another form, in particular when the gestures or physical monstrations of a character are both literal and symbolic at once. Given the ‘unreal’ overlapping of such elements in the world of the fable, it is not a coincidence that literary iconicity such as Morante’s avails itself of the forma mentis and imaginary of the child, but does so without refuting the emotional realism at the heart of the author’s inspiration. Iconicity bespeaks a certain directness and immediacy in presenting the phenomena of daily life, in particular the emotional

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struggles of maturation and the relations between parents and children. The physically ostensive aspects of the characters’ actions thus take on heightened meanings in the way that a dancer’s gestures do, revealing more about the internal motivations – through graphic signs and acoustic signals – than the characters themselves may be aware of: thus in an emphasis on garments, vestments of ritual passages in life and in relations, not least is the ‘dress’ of language, the mode of discourse (of performance, of communication, of poetic self-expression) externalized in such a way as to resemble one’s state of mind.2 The philosopher C.S. Peirce provided a theory of iconic language based on similarity. The icon is a sign in the Peircean system that resembles the object it would represent. Neither of the two other signs in Peirce’s system, the index or the symbol, involves a likeness or resemblance between sign and object. The index represents the object by virtue of a ‘real’ or cause-and-effect connection. The symbol is a sign that follows a convention, or habit, whose meaning therefore is agreed upon. The icon functions independently of the causal, and indeed of consensus. As an illustration of the icon’s self-similarity, Peirce writes as follows: ‘In contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream, – not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon.’3 Because of this intimate relation to the hypothesis (more than deductive or inductive reasoning), iconicity is richly intuitive. In the case of the mother-son relation explored in ‘Lo scialle andaluso,’ Morante does not assume the premises of psychoanalysis or any other intellectual system which would compromise her sense of aesthetic autonomy. As a Roman, Morante embodies the Roman thematics we are associating with the feminine voice. The capital city has provided a place of refuge, or exile if need be, to women and others seeking to escape the constraints of provincial patriarchal society. Rome, home of the mother Church, did not offer a matriarchy, but in Rome the alienation was overt and modern, even as its cosmopolitan air was diluted with the customs and mores of a large village. For Morante’s protagonist in her first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio, a book which describes the tragic destruction of the existing social structures of the Italian South, the heroine’s solitary final refuge is Rome. Just so, the characters in ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ have a vital relationship to Rome, as point of origin (for the children) and ultimate destination. The heroine of ‘Lo scialle andaluso,’ Judith (suggesting the biblical heroine who beheaded Holophernes), is a ballet dancer who

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moves to the capital from a town in Sicily for the sake of her artistic career. She marries a musician from the North of Italy, they have twins (Andrea and Laura), and then the husband dies. Andrea, the son, is intensely jealous of his mother’s career, which pulls her away from him. Fino dai suoi primissimi anni, prima ancora di aver imparato a parlare in modo comprensibile, Andrea manifestò chiaramente un odio smisurato per la professione di sua madre. [...] La sua avversione per il teatro, passione eterna di sua madre, si dichiarava in tutte le occasioni e si sviluppava nel suo giudizio come una inimicizia irrimediabile. (164) From his earliest years on, even before learning to talk in a comprehensible manner, Andrea clearly manifested an immense hatred for his mother’s profession. [...] His aversion for the theatre, his mother’s eternal passion, was declared on every occasion and developed in his judgment into an irremediable enmity.4

The schematic and improbable nature of the situation, paired with the swift resumé of long time periods which empty into critical and paradigmatic episodes, succeeds in generating a poetic reality comparable to the world of fable. This is a dimension which Giacomo Debenedetti has discussed in terms of Morante’s ‘horizontal’ adherence to the tranche de vie or realistic description: ‘She satisfies with inexhaustible invention and richness of details the minutiae of days scrupulously recorded, without sacrificing either a single day from the calendar or a tick of the clock. So that those days crowded together seem like the days of an epic or of a legendary cycle: days that represent entire epochs.’5 In addition, one must consider the child’s affective involvement in the passage of time, mirrored as it were in his observation of his parent. Moreover, one must not trivialize the inquietude of the child. As Judith soon discovers, her son’s protestations are not just an infantile whim. Those rare nights when Judith is at home, Andrea delights in telling her the pirate stories that are his passion, which he does dramatically and with great flair: ‘Ogni tanto, abbraciava sua madre come se volesse incatenarla; si mostrava pieno di compiacenza per Laura; e ascoltava con gravità e modestia le loro conversazioni di donne’ (Every so often he would hug his mother as if he wanted to chain her up; he showed great kindness toward Laura; and he listened seriously and modestly to their womanly conversations) (165). Several tableaux or iconic scenes seem to mark the stages of Andrea’s

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maturation, pictorially translating the psycho-ethical stages of his relationship with his mother. His first disposition is that of sublimated anger, which causes him to harm himself, or in other instances to lash out, for example when he treats the photographs of Judith’s colleagues like effigies, turning them to the wall.6 In preparation for his First Communion Andrea briefly enters a Salesian convent, an environment suited to his austere personality. But he still takes glee in the new suit his mother buys him for the occasion (including a shiny whistle). Un breve segno di frivolezza mondana apparve in lui quando fu l’ora d’indossare l’abito nuovo, portatogli da sua madre per la cerimonia: [...] Venuto, per lui, il momento di ricevere l’Eucarestia i suoi occhi levati verso il calice splendettero d’una tale innocenza e gloria che sua madre, al vederlo, ruppe in pianto; ma Andrea non parve udire i suoi singhiozzi. Ricevuta l’Ostia, chiuse gli occhi, e parve allora che nella capella si fosse spenta una luce. Quindi rimase per parecchi minuti raccolto, in ginocchio, col viso fra le mani; e Giuditta, guardando la sua testa china dai capelli ben pettinati e lisciati per l’occasione, si diceva: ‘Chi sa che grandi pensieri passano, in questo momento stesso, nella mente di quell’angelo!’ I belli occhi riapparvero infine, ma, per tutto il tempo che durò la Messa, rimasero rapiti a fissare le luminarie dell’altare. ‘Neppure uno sguardo per sua madre’, pensò Giuditta. (170) A brief sign of worldly frivolity reappeared in him when it was time to put on the new suit, which was dark blue, brought to him by his mother for the ceremony: [...] The moment of the Eucharist having arrived for him, his eyes raised to the chalice glowed with such innocence and glory that his mother burst into tears on seeing him; but Andrea did not seem to hear her sobbing. After receiving the Host he closed his eyes, and it seemed a light in the chapel had been extinguished. He then remained still, kneeling, for several minutes, with his face in his hands, and Judith, watching his bowed head with hair well-combed and shiny for the occasion, said to herself: ‘Who knows what great thoughts are passing in this very moment, through the mind of that angel!’ Finally the beautiful eyes reappeared, but for the entire duration of the Mass they remained captivated, staring at the luminaries of the altar. ‘Not even a glance for his mother,’ thought Judith.

This visually encoded ritual marks the beginning of Andrea’s precocious maturation, which will lead in adolescence to his training for the priesthood. A first ecphrastic image symbolizes this rite of passage:

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In un quartiere lontano della città, presso una grande basilica, si levava un’altissima scalinata detta la Scala Santa, che pellegrini e fedeli venuti da ogni parte del mondo usavano percorre in ginocchio, e talvolta a piedi scalzi, per meritare l’indulgenza divina. Sulle pareti laterali della scala erano affrescate le varie stazioni della Passione, e sul fondo della loggia che conchiudeva la sommità splendeva un mosaico trionfale di santi e di martiri tutti ornati d’oro. I quali parevano attendere lassú il pellegrino, per festeggiare al termine della sua penitenza. (172) In a distant quarter of the city, near a large basilica, there rose a very high staircase called the Holy Steps, which pilgrims and the faithful from all parts of the world would climb on their knees, and sometimes barefooted, to merit divine indulgence. On the side walls of the staircase were frescoes of the various stations of the Cross, and at the end of the loggia which enclosed the summit there shone a triumphal mosaic of saints and martyrs all decorated in gold. Which seemed to await the pilgrim up there, to celebrate the conclusion of his penitence.

While accomplishing this act of humility Andrea is discovered by two young ballerinas from his mother’s company who hide his sandals as a practical joke and then pretend to have found them. They tease the boy about his seriousness, asking if he has remembered to pray for them. The silent boy withdraws into his own world, resembling the painted figures of the shrine more than his own peers: what he is still unable to do is play with other people. The second locus deputatis in this iconic drama is found in Andrea’s diary, where we read, over Judith’s shoulder, an adventure poem on a religious subject: IL SIGNORE PARLA A CAINO Che facesti, o Caino infame? Hai fatto un’impresa crudele! Tu hai ammazzato il tuo fratello Abele!!! Abele è in Paradiso, e l’odiato invidioso è unghiato dalle tigri, al nero deserto, peggio d’un uom lebbroso. Ma il Grande Iddio gli dice: – Non pianger, povero figlio. Guarda l’Oceano! Qua avanza un veliero! Sul piú alto pennone sventola un vessillo! Ciurma, alle vele. Guarda i marinai! Sono Arcangeli e Serafini! Adesso il Capitano vedrai, guarda che magnifico Eroe del Paradiso eterno!

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Avanti, miei prodi! Non perdete tempo! Correte al governo! Forza, Caino, sali in coperta! Il mio Velier audace fa duemila leghe al secondo. In meno di tre lune sarem in vista del Paradiso giocondo. Vedrai quanta bellezza ha il Regno del Grande Salvatore! Là vedrai un Sovrumano che di Satana è il trionfatore. Adesso ti devi inginocchiare davanti a quell’unico Re. Ed Ei ti dà il perdono e ti dice: ‘Vuoi stare con me?’ Asciuga il pianto, miser Caino, ti ha perdonato. Vicino all’Iddio splende d’Israel la stella Maria, nel suo lussuoso mantel, di tutte le donne primarie la piú bella. (176) THE LORD SPEAKS TO CAIN What did you do, oh lowly Cain? You’ve carried out a cruel deed! You’ve killed your brother Abel!!! Abel is in Heaven, and the envious hated one is clawed by tigers, in the black desert, worse than a man with leprosy. But the Great God tells him: – Do not cry, poor son. Look to the Ocean! A sailing-ship approaches! A flag is waving on the highest mast! Crew, to the sails. Look at the sailors! They are Archangels and Seraphim! Now you will see the Captain, see what a magnificent Hero of eternal Paradise! Forward, my valiant men! Don’t lose any time! With haste to the helm! Be strong, Cain, climb up to the deck! My bold ship sails at two thousand leagues per second. In less than three moons we will be in sight of joyous Paradise. You will see what beauty lies in the Reign of the Great Saviour! There you will see a Superhuman who triumphed over Satan. Now you must kneel before that lone King. And he pardons you and says: ‘Do you want to stay with me?’ Dry your eyes, wretched Cain, he has pardoned you. Near to God shines Mary, the star of Israel, in her luxurious mantle, of all the primary women the most beautiful.

The conflation of piracy and religion, and once again the exclusion of the mother from the sphere of the elect, are followed in the story by the boy’s enrolment in a religious Collegio for a kind of pre-novitiate. By this same time the mother’s career is crumbling; she is fired from the opera,

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because, it is rumoured, of her misshapen and aging body and lack of talent. With Laura also away at school she is free to find work as an itinerant dancer, to make her own ‘pilgrimages’: ‘La sua persona, come avviene spesso alle donne di sangue siciliano, declinava rapidamente verso una maturità precoce; ma i suoi propri occhi, e gli occhi dei suoi figli, rimanevano ciechi a simile decadenza’ (Her person, as often happens to women of Sicilian blood, declined rapidly toward an early middle age; but her own eyes, and the eyes of her children, remained blind to any such decline) (178). In the meantime Andrea’s face shows an increasing seriousness, such that ‘sulla ruga della meditazione, che gli scavava la fronte fra i sopraccigli, era apparsa una nuova ruga traversale, quella della severità’ (his face, already round, had grown thin, so that his large eyes seemed to devour him; and over the meditation line engraved in his forehead a new sideways line had appeared between the eyebrows, that of severity) (178). The period of alienation between mother and son has begun: Andrea’s oedipal lameness is communicated by his refusal to accompany his mother on a walk when she visits the college. Sensing he does not want to be seen with her on account of the questionable morality of her theatre milieu, she declares that when she meets his father in heaven she will be just as pure as when he left her. Andrea insists that his refusal had nothing to do with her. After this there will be only visits, then only mail contact, and finally nothing. The third of the five tableaux lies at the centre of the novella, and is in the form of an affiche, a theatrical poster featuring Judith’s photograph in exotic costume, as viewed by Andrea on a walk through the town near his college. Now the World of Theatre has an opposite effect on him: blood rushes to his face. Judith’s stage name is Febea (Phoebe): in Greek lore a Titaness, grandmother of the chaste Artemis and third possessor of the Delphic Oracle. She is billed as a ‘vedetta’ or ‘star’ (but also the crow’s nest or sentry on a war-ship, or the ship itself). The projection into the public domain of a graphic sign of his mother evinces the boy’s fantasy world, stimulating him to attend the performance, despite the risk he takes in sneaking out of the college, and entering the frightful World of the Theatre. L’antico fabbricato del collegio sorgeva appena fuori delle mura cittadine, là dove il cessare dell’illuminazione stradale segnava il limite con la campagna. La luna era tramontata già da due ore; ma il firmamento estivo (s’era ai primi di giugno) spargeva un chiarore quasi lunare nella notte bellissima. (185)

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The ancient large building of the college rose up just outside the city walls, there where the last city streetlights marked the boundary with the countryside. The moon had already set two hours earlier; but the summer firmament (it was the first days of June) spread an almost lunar glow through the most beautiful night.

The evocative language depicts a marginal landscape in which fable and reality can meet. The darkness between two worlds is at once threatening and inviting; in its liminality it casts the normal reality into a state of uncertainty, and endows the strange new ‘theatrical’ reality with an uncanny sense of certainty. Once beyond the boundaries of the college, passing through a narrow passage, Andrea has surpassed the boundary of symbolic authority. Not wanting to enter the town in his tunic, he borrows a burlap shirt from a friend nearby, who is singing love songs in a barn with a companion who must depart before dawn for military duty. Andrea’s will and memory combine: he is finally able to ‘play,’ in the dramatic if not yet in the ludic sense. Changing his costume (and violating the authority of the ‘materialist’ father figure, the Church), he begins a kind of courtly investiture. The syntax of such a ‘mythological’ narrative could be examined in light of Todorov’s division of the ‘narrative proposition’ into an agent and a predicate, each of which can be active-dynamic or patient-static: the agent is usually a character, while the predicate is usually a ‘motif’; motifs are heterogeneous, being either ‘associated’ (causally linked to events) or ‘free’ (disinvolved from ‘chronological and causal succession of events’). Two types of episodes result: those that describe a state (of equilibrium or disequilibrium) and those that describe a transition from one state to another. Yet when Andrea leaves the college the ‘boundary’ at stake is both interior and exterior. The movement from a static to an active mode in his character is accompanied by a narrative which moves from the adjectival to the verbal, from the static to the dynamic. This is in contrast to the story as a whole and the fixity of its dominant motifs. As long as the story is not complicated by surprises in plot, Morante privileges the ‘patient agents’ and ‘static motifs.’ Her faithfulness to the details affecting ideas, rather than to ‘events’ (active, dynamic propositions), means that vertical, dramatic, interruptions are suspended. ‘Being’ is privileged over ‘having,’ once again in a feminine tradition recovering that ‘most genuine lesson of Manzoni,’ the role of the humble people as the ‘true protagonists of History.’7 Giacomo Debenedetti suggests that Morante’s ‘instinctive interven-

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tions of the fabulesque’ supply the necessary ‘vertical pressures ... which other novelists of reality obtain from the plot.’8 The fable reflects a profound, spiritualized reality, an atemporal coefficient to the temporal and causal sequences of the story. Here the generic relation between fable and novella is virtually seamless. When Andrea arrives at the theatre – after his donning of sack-cloth, or ‘pre-investiture,’ in a careful allusion to the ambivalence of his desire – he has no money to buy a ticket. He is mocked by the ticket-vendor: is he a Commander, she asks, or perhaps a Chief Inspector? She ironizes about his coarse clothing, and when he insists he has a date with the dancer Phoebe, she points to the artists’ entrance, promising that if all fails she will take him to see The Adventures of Mickey Mouse. Andrea penetrates the dark passage: threshold follows threshold, until he finds a seat in the theatre, unnoticed. He doesn’t raise his eyes but hears his mother’s voice singing from the stage. He loves her presence and fears her being torn away by the world of the theatre. He feels humiliated, unnecessary, just as his mother had felt when he shunned her. Now he raises his eyes to the stage. One might say that Andrea still resides in the dimension of the fable, as he wishes to see in his mother’s elaborate costume a sign of her lofty beauty and spiritual elevation. In un abito d’eleganza mai vista, quale non è dato d’indossare alle donne che s’incontrano su questa terra, neppure alle piú ricche, ma solo alle persone fantastiche delle pitture o delle poesie; seguita, in ogni suo moto, da grandi cerchi di luce che s’accendono per magnificare lei sola e fanno sfolgorare i suoi occhi incavati, che sembrano enormi! Essa è la gala suprema delle feste notturne, il suo nome misterioso è il vanto delle strade e delle piazze. (196) Clothed in an elegance never seen before, to which the women one meets on this earth, even the most wealthy, are not entitled, save only the fantastic persons in paintings or poems; followed in her every motion by great circles of light which are illumined to magnify her alone and cause her deep eyes to glow, seeming enormous! She is the supreme gala of the celebrations of the night, her mysterious name is sounded in praise throughout the streets and squares.

The combined sense of reverie and humiliation is interrupted by catcalls of disapproval, causing ‘Phoebe’ to leave the stage. When Andrea begins to realize what has happened, his world of fable has been shattered. Now,

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responsibly and without fear, he finds Judith’s dressing room, which changes her sobbing into tears of joy. This moment in the unfolding drama of the Oedipal relationship is what Paul Diel calls the encounter with the spiritual mother. Diel’s discussion of the Oedipus myth allows for the positive resolution of the conflict; the son will marry the ‘spiritual’ mother and kill the ‘materialist’ father, leaving behind the pathetic mechanisms of a reified self.9 The Oedipus figure is thus empowered to redefine history for his own purpose, appropriating that term from the domination by the materialistic father and substituting for it the micro-events of a daily reality. In terms of the iconic encoding of this progress, now a wooden ladder next to the orchestra pit suggests Andrea’s earlier pursuit of penitence at the Holy Steps: but at that point in his development there the icon was static and mystificatory; his religious motivation conveyed more about his social maladaptation than his piety. Here the climb up the wooden ladder is sacred, though it is not holy in the sense of consensual religion. I believe Morante cultivates such a distinction, also in the recurrent ambiguity between the terms ‘sacro’ and ‘santo.’ The Holy – as ordained by the religious Orders of the Church – is enforced in the early portions of ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ by Andrea’s superimposing upon the holy the dimension of the fable. It is seen mythically in the vertical motifs of heavenly ascension, but also the escape of the pirate ships or the depicted Resurrection which rewards the pilgrim at the Holy Steps at the end of his prostrations. When this fabulous understanding of the Holy is ended in Andrea’s consciousness, and Phoebe can no longer exist, the outwardly begins its transition to the inwardly Sacred, as manifest in the cited engagement with the spiritual mother referred to above. This bond is not illusory, but concrete; it exists in society and partakes of time. – Santo! Angelo mio santo! Cuore mio! – esclamò sua madre, baciandogli le mani. Febbrilmente, ella si nettava il viso con una pezzuola intrisa di crema. Quindi si nascose dietro una tenda per togliersi la doppia gonnellina di tulle, il busto di pietre preziose, la maglia di seta che le ricopriva tutto il corpo (similmente a una lunghissima calza), e indossare il suo decoroso abito nero, e il cappello con la veletta. (202) Holy one! My blessed Angel! Heart of mine! his mother exclaimed, kissing his hands. She feverishly cleaned her face with a cloth soaked in cream. Then she slipped behind a curtain to take off her double tulle dancingskirt, her bodice of precious stones, the silk mesh which covered her entire

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body (like a long stocking) and to put on her decent black suit, and her hat with the veil.

One recalls as the greasepaint is removed Andrea’s initial hatred for his mother’s theatrical vocation and his subsequent attraction to the robes of the Church. As the professional failure of his mother becomes apparent, the narrator intervenes, heightening the sense of realism – and the reader’s empathy – by a kind of Manzonian parenthesis: Tralasciamo adesso due o tre frasi un poco maliziose e perfide, che le furono date in risposta da qualcuna delle sue colleghe presenti nello spogliatoio, e sulle quali (come sui commenti maligni uditi prima nel corridoio), la mente di Andrea doveva ritornare piú tardi. (202–3) We now leave out two or three rather malicious and perfidious remarks which were offered in response by one of her colleagues present in the dressing room, and to which (as to the unkind words heard earlier in the hallway) Andrea’s mind would later return.

The reconciliation is provisional: there is a parallel and an oppositional aspect to the relationship. The former is expressed in the mutual vow to reject an institutional affiliation; the latter in the reversal which leaves the mother wearing black and the son anticipating the full plumage of young adulthood. Andrea’s negative predisposition to the theatre does not preclude factors of psychological complexity (or obviate the drama of the will); on the contrary, the hybrid fable restores, rather than cancels, the real. Its most ‘iconic’ moments (which echo so much other feminine literature, from Deledda, to Aleramo, to Banti) are provided by the patently visual language, and by the five ‘plates,’ progressively more animated so as to arrive at the symbolic shawl of the title, a kind of elegant talisman of Andrea’s sexual and political awakening, which he dons once he has returned the borrowed clothes to his sleeping friend in the barn. The black shawl comes from his mother’s theatrical wardrobe. She has donned a formal black suit, an indication of her self-sacrifice; prolonging her career as a cabaret dancer would be tantamount to fetishism. The falseness of this option is evident in the shabby decor of the Hotel Caruso (which is actually only an ‘inn’), where a painting stands iconically for the dream of felicity within which stands the figure of the absent father. On the wall is a painting of the smoking volcano Vesuvius with an old man smoking a pipe in the foreground. Judith, seeing Andrea hud-

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dled at her feet in this most humble of rented rooms, rejoices at their being reunited and prays it is not all a dream. Mother and son agree to renounce the past, meaning her theatrical and his religious vocation, and to move forward together. Economic needs will be absorbed by the same small inheritance which supported them before her career. In line with custom, Judith resigns herself to the old age of a Sicilian woman: I loro anni sono un mistero senza importanza, ché, tanto, la loro unica età e la vecchiezza. Tale informe vecchiezza ha occhi santi che piangono non per sé, ma per i figli. E guai a chi pronunci invano, davanti a questi figli, il nome santo delle loro madri! guai! è offesa mortale! (208) Their years are a mystery without importance, insofar as their only age is that of old age. Such an amorphous old age has holy eyes which cry not for themselves, but for their children; it has holy lips which say prayers not for themselves, but for their children; and woe betide those who pronounce the holy names of their mothers in vain before these children! Woe betide them! It is a moral offence!

Judith’s interior monologue explains her continued attachment to the theatre and her desire for Andrea’s continued pursuit of some form of religious vocation, a path that she can assist in. The son will have his own crisis, as lying in bed he dreams the inverse of his boyhead dream of apotheosis and redemption. He sees the armed fleet of the celestial militias pulling away from him, abandoning him as a traitor to the cause. A questa immaginazione, Andrea pianse dolorosamente, di nostalgia e di rimorso. Cominciava a spuntare il giorno, e alla prima luce gli apparve fra le lagrime, un’ampia forma nera che pendeva dalla maniglia della finestra: era lo scialle andaluso, che gli sembrò l’immagine stessa della sua vergogna. Doveva proprio aver perduto il sentimento dell’onore, quella notte, per ricoprirsi d’un simile straccio umiliante senza provarne onta, anzi perfino con un certo gusto. (209–10) Imagining this, Andrea wept in sorrow, nostalgia, and remorse. Day began to break, and at the first light there appeared to him, through his tears, a broad black form which was hanging from the window latch: it was the Andalusian shawl, which seemed to him the image of his shame. He must have lost his very sense of honour, that night, to cover himself with such a humiliating rag and feel no shame, or even feel some kind of enjoyment.

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It is precisely the bourgeois sense of honour that the boy has lost; his anguish will vanish with sleep and especially with the new ‘manly’ garments his mother brings him, complete with a pack of American cigarettes, for which she has sold her jewellery. This state of equilibrium will be challenged, pressed into another transition by Andrea’s reflection on the involuntary nature of his mother’s sacrifice; stated otherwise, he has yet to understand the voluntary dimension of his mother’s love. He grows nervous, melancholic. E non va mai in chiesa, anzi ha tolto anche il quadro del Sacro Cuore da capo del proprio letto. [. . . ] Passa molte ore fuori di casa. Dove va? Con chi s’incontra? Mistero. Una signora, madre d’una allieva di Giuditta, ha avvertito Giuditta, in confidenza, che lo si vede spesso in un caffè della periferia, con una banda di giovani scamiciati, fanatici e sovversivi. (212–13) And he never goes to church, but has even removed the picture of the Sacred Heart from the head of his bed. [ ... ] He’s away from home for many hours at a time. Where does he go? Whom does he meet? A mystery. A woman, the mother of one of Judith’s students, notified Judith confidentially that he is often seen in a cafe on the periphery, with a band of extremist, fanatical and subversive youths.

The mother is reluctant to discuss this with Andrea, because of her excessive pride in him. For his part, he still projects a heroic vision, but God, Christ, and his Mother have been expelled, and his new hero, a fixated self-image, only confuses him. He sees himself as a player in that great ‘Theatre of the Opera’ of the ‘future’: Egli vorrebbe immaginare il futuro se stesso, e si compiace di prestare a questo Ignoto aspetti vittoriosi, abbaglianti, trionfi e disinvolture! Ma, per quanto la scacci, ritrova sempre là, come una statua, un’immagine, sempre la stessa, importuna: un triste, protervo Eroe avvolto in uno scialle andaluso (213) He would like to imagine his future self, and is content to lend to this Unknown victorious, dazzling features, triumphs and nonchalance! But, however much he rejects it, he always finds there, like a statue, the same, always the same persistent image: a sad, haughty Hero wrapped in an Andalusian shawl

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The seeming paradox of the story’s conclusion, when Andrea asks himself if the sacrifice of his vows has been worth it – since his mother’s ‘renunciation’ was involuntary – is contained in the final plate, in its iconicity. The shawl endows him with an androgynous quality hitherto unknown, as well as a theatricality in the world; his indecision and uncertain fate at the end are thus, on the second level, an affirmation of mystery, and a prompt to the reader, to dialogue. The novella concludes in a state (of disequilibrium), not a transition. The Oedipal problem has been extended beyond Freud, but awaits its ‘spiritualization,’ just as a subtle (anti-bourgeois and anti-clerical) subtext exists, but waits to be embodied. Andrea’s is still a ‘revolution,’ and not yet a ‘revolt,’ to use Camus’s terms (see below, p. 277). ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ remained a favourite of Morante’s, owing to its felicitous combination of fable and realism, ecphrastic clarity and emotional ambiguity (wherein the author is free to inhabit both ‘lei’ and ‘lui’). What emerges as the constitutive element of this abbreviated bildungsroman is Andrea’s dialogue with his mother, much of which remains suspended or repressed until the ‘planets’ of their personal universes find their proper ‘conjunction.’ In the growth process dress becomes a metaphor for vocation, as for the overcoming of obstacles and the state of one’s soul, or inner being. The worlds of the monastery and the theatre are not rejected, but left behind by the respective subjects, now conditioned by the paradoxical strength of the family tie. The story ends in a question: will the family adjust to normality (the end of the fable) while resisting the tide of conformism? The mother’s Sicilian provenance, her arrival in middle age into an effective old age of seemingly unlimited duration, the boy’s ‘adventure’ with Catholicism at the expense of a normal maturation, all suggest possible critiques of social institutions. But the essence of the novella is naturalistic, the conclusion undetermined. As in the fable, this essence is lodged in the beautiful, and hardly intends to sidestep the essence of Christianity: suffering, redemption, charity, and grace. The epithet ‘feminine’ has historically meant weak and sentimental when applied to writing in Italy. It is thus aptly reappropriated to describe texts which ask such a quesiton, and encourage the reader’s collaboration, in circumventing the implied power structure of a maledominated Logos. Feminine writing is strong because it ignores the import of any polemical project founded on a duplistic (and fundamentally aestheticist) division of the arts and society. The convergence in ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ of the pictorial-emblematic-associative mechanism (the

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five plates) and the family’s struggle to reunify is accomplished within the strict economy of the chosen genre, and complemented by a careful and skilful use of the poetic function of language.

8 Of the Barony: Anna Banti and the Time of Decision

Anna Banti was for many years an editor at Paragone, the prestigious journal of literary and art criticism. Though she set out to have a career as an art historian, as the student and young wife of Roberto Longhi, her major accomplishments were as a writer of historical fiction. In her famous novel Artemisia, about the social ostracism of a seventeenthcentury painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, who was raped and then labelled a prostitute, Banti funnelled her art historical passion into a compelling depiction of the interiority of this victim of a masculine baronial order. Artemisia stands as a vivid statement of feminine resistance to the subjugation of women by an author who desired to be known as a ‘scrittore’ and not a ‘scrittrice,’ and who rejected the label ‘feminist’ as too restrictive and deterministic. It also exemplifies the vein of historical fiction for which Banti is known. In this essay I will explore Banti’s only two novels set in a time frame roughly contemporary with the writing: Il bastardo (The Bastard, 1953) and Un grido lacerante (A Piercing Cry, 1981). I do so within a philosophical framework constructed around the concept of the ‘feminine voice’ as defined by the contemporary philosopher Aldo Gargani (as presented in the Introduction). The fact of a fictional contemporaneity with the author’s life, though much of the ‘action’ is recalled in verbs in the past tense, will also lead us to consider the two novels in their historical and autobiographical dimensions. From her earliest fiction, Anna Banti was concerned with heroines whose psychological and personal development took the form of resistance to such a rigid or ‘paranoid’ epistemology of control as that detailed by Gargani. A 1951 story, ‘Le donne muoiono’ (Women Die), is set in the year 2617 in a world in which men acquire a deep memory of earlier lives, and thus a sense of immortality, and women do not. For

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men, the experience of mortality is lightened by this ‘second memory’ and the awareness that they will be born again; they grow tyrannical over the women, who gain solidarity in their own practice of the feminine arts and sciences, nurtured by the very finiteness of life and memory. This allegorical theme of memory will remain constant in the fiction to follow, particularly as it concerns the exclusion of women from a male-defined and dominated history. In 1953 Banti wrote an essay on the romanzo rosa, a pulp medium written by and for women since roughly 1800, and a means by which bourgeois society channelled a growing feminine readership, as a sort of propaganda. Rather than the pathos and intuition of conversing selves that one found in George Sand or Madame de Staël, the glib women who wrote these pot-boilers, says Banti, were ‘Avvezze a praticare la docilitaf , le diplomatiche concessioni famigliari’ (accustomed to practising docility [and] the diplomatic concessions of family): ‘liberate, ormai, da freni moralistici troppo stretti, conservarono tutta via un ossequio alle norme e alla posizione soggetta della donna’ (though by now freed of overly strict moralistic constraints, they continued to pay homage to the norms and the subjugated position of woman).1 Banti sees the use of the romanzo rosa, ‘che non sarebbe più il caso di chiamare romanzo rosa, ma forse grigio: il colore della velocità’ (which doesn’t merit the name ‘pink novel’ so much as gray: the colour of speed), as a humanistically reductive genre that continues today and coincides with ‘i miti della virilità sovrana, dell’eroismo a tutti i costi’ (the myths of sovereign virility, of heroism at any cost).2 The danger and scandal of the feminine voice is thus evaded, despite bright exceptions, such as Matilde Serao, the nineteenth-century Neapolitan novelist to whom Banti dedicated a critical biography. Banti’s interest in the South of Italy – her father’s family was from Calabria – is a primary element in the first novel I will discuss, also published in 1953. Il bastardo was first written in 1943, but the manuscript was lost and Banti would have to rewrite it largely from memory after the war. This difficult act of recovery, reminiscent of Dino Campana’s rewriting of Canti orfici, exemplifies the sort of courageous decision that typifies the feminine voice.3 As Il bastardo opens, ‘Donna Elisa De Gregorio’ is introduced as ‘una voce femminile’ (a feminine voice), and then ‘moglie del barone’ (wife of the baron): thus in the third-person narration her being female is immediately equated with her subaltern civil status. The year is 1911, six years after Elisa’s marriage to Don Guglielmo, Baron of Omomorto, a vast latifundium in the area of Benevento, near Naples:

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‘Da dieci anni sospira Donna Elisa, che da undici è maritata’ (Donna Elisa has been sighing for ten years, and has been married for eleven) (B 11). As we shall see, the name ‘Omomorto’ is allegorical, a sign of the Baron and his effective killing of the marriage. He leaves Elisa alone for long periods as he carries on a love affair with the Tyrolese housekeeper by whom he also has a blond child: thus the book’s title. A lengthy flashback to 1905 reveals that before the marriage Elisa was considered a spinster at thirty; ‘è femmina un poco troppo istruita ... e nuota come un uomo’ (she is a somewhat overly educated female ... and she swims like a man) (B 11). An aspiring writer, she had taken the pen-name Polyxena (Hecuba’s daughter sacrificed on the grave of Achilles – a dead man – as the dying hero requested). Though Elisa was proposed to many times, she always refused and did not accept the ‘fact’ that the ‘situation’ of a married or ‘cultured woman and that of an openminded woman ... seemed at that time to be the same thing.’ When her younger sister Adriana was married, she finally agreed to the arranged marriage with the Baron, a betrothal so passive that ‘it was never known who proposed it’ (B 14). The order of the Barony with its inexorable ‘facts’ effaces the decision-making of this precocious woman once so ready to defy the boundaries placed in society between boys and girls. Pushed to marriage by ‘instinct, mysterious unhappiness and tears,’ Elisa is stripped of her ‘reasonableness,’ a quality this society considers an ‘extravagance.’ Naively she still thinks she can manage Don Guglielmo, and actually expects him to worship her. Yet, trapped on the vast estate, she soon learns to accept her condition as a ‘voluntary prisoner’ and renounce her ‘feminine independence’ (B 23). The freedom of will that she does retain is due, ironically, to the Baron’s long absences: she is the slave of an absent master. After nearly a year of marriage, Elisa leaves the estate for the first time and discovers in town that Don Guglielmo has a mistress and a bastard son. When she confronts him he grows violent, but then, miraculously, she realizes she is pregnant. Years later, after the birth of her three children – Cecilia, Diego, and Anna – Elisa makes another discovery: the bastard son Franz is living in the estate’s sprawling farmhouse. Again she confronts the Baron, telling him the boy cannot live there. Her oldest child, Cecilia, overhears this fatal conversation and later that night has a mysterious moonlit encounter with the boy, who she wishes could join the family. The following morning Franz is found drowned in the well. Elisa feels obscurely complicitous, though the death is never explained. The family now moves to Rome without Don Guglielmo. In the ensuing

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years Elisa slowly loses her mind, immobilized by guilt in the dusty Roman apartment. She loses contact with her creative and inquiring self: her alter-ego of Polyxena is dead and buried on the estate of Omomorto, leaving the one adventurous child, Cecilia, to assume the mythical labour of advancing as woman in a man’s world. Profoundly affected by Franz’s death, Cecilia reaches out to a new friend, Francesca (an echo of ‘Franz’). Insofar as nothing concrete is stated about Francesca – where she comes from, what she looks like, who her parents are – the reader is inclined to see her as an almost imaginary character, facilitated by a style that verges on magic realism. This style reflects the childlike, then juvenile, temperament of the lonely Cecilia, who looks forward to Francesca’s sporadic ‘visits,’ as playmate and penpal. These appearances serve as benchmarks of Cecilia’s recurrent crisis, and of the fertile potentialities of her conscious and unconscious decisions. Francesca’s Dantesque name also stands for the amorous passion which Cecilia will apparently never know. The reader is not allowed to enter into of Francesca’s thoughts or feelings, a fact which contributes to her unreality in the text. When as a teenager Cecilia wants desperately to attend university to study science, she decides, in a terrible nighttime interlude of prayer and anguish, to ‘dissolve’ Francesca, to free her of their covenant of friendship. Here as elsewhere the reader is drawn inside the time of decision: Si rammentò di Francesca a cui scriveva ogni settimana e ogni settimana le rispondeva: quelle buste, colla calligrafia dei quaderni di scuola, le facevano battere il cuore, erano la sua ricchezza. Ebbene, la sua decisione scioglieva la sua mano da quella dell’amica, ripudiava le attese comuni, le deliziose incertezze, negava gli incontri coll’audacia, collo stesso pudore. Cecilia scopre di avere affidato a queste futilità, che erano speranze vitali, metà del suo cuore e che di lì deve cominciare per pagare il prezzo della più vera libertà. Ecco finalmente i singhiozzi. (B 118) She remembered Francesca to whom she wrote every week and who every week replied to her: those envelopes, with the handwriting of school notebooks, made her heart beat, were her treasure. So then, her decision loosened her hand from that of her friend, repudiated their shared expectations, the delicious uncertainties, denied the meetings with audacity, with the same modesty. Cecilia discovers she has entrusted in these futilities, which were vital hopes, half of her heart and that from that point on she must begin to pay the price of true freedom. Then finally her sobbing.

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In short, Francesca is the frailest outline of that narrative structure called a character, such that her presence in Cecilia’s affective and psychological life constitutes a ‘dialogue in absentia’ that tells us nothing of the friend but much about Cecilia. When Cecilia finally obtains her father’s permission to attend university, she vows not to look at a man or to associate with ‘le pazze’ (crazy girls); her schedule will be closely monitored. Though she seeks to obey her father’s rules in good faith, one day her eyes chance to meet those of a young gray-eyed man in the classroom; she is joyous, sensing a solidarity which gives her a new confidence and sense of internal harmony. Contava ormai su una devozione immutabile, la assaporava come ricompensa per quanto avesse fatto di bene, concedendosi segretamente l’incanto di vivere fuori che in sé, di specchiarsi, persona e favola, in un’invisibile ma sicura presenza. Non si curava di congetture o speranze, viveva in un lungo giorno soleggiato, senza timori, all’ombra di una protezione arcana. (B 150) By now she counted on an immutable devotion, she tasted it as a recompense for the good deeds she had done, conceding to herself secretly the enchantment of living outside of herself, of mirroring herself, a person and a fable, in an invisible but secure presence. She paid no attention to conjectures or hopes, she lived in a long sun-lit day, without fears, in the shadow of an arcane protection.

Weeks later, when Cecilia looks in vain for the young man’s eyes behind her, she retreats into isolation, and into the crisis/potentiality that is indicated by her invocation of Francesca. One might say that Cecilia’s obedience has been so severe that her flirtation was more with the taboo her father imposed, or the gaze, than with the young man who was their object. In the sublimation of the stilnovistic moment of visual enamourment, far from a reinforcement of the code of the Barony – which denied Cecilia a voice – we see the genesis of her adult revolt. By continuing her dialogue with the fictive friend she constructed as a child out of fear and delusion, while intending disinterestedness and expecting nothing of her stilnovistic desire, she now accepts disappointment as a natural part of living, and thus prepares herself once again to be, not just a person or a fiction, but a presence. She is ready after her university years not for an escape, or for a suffering, but for a realization of life, stated here as the completion of an unwritten novel: ‘desidera di soffrire per la defezione

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degli occhi grigi: ogni giorno accresce una pagina a questo romanzo non scritto, non vissuto’ (she desires to suffer over the desertion of the gray eyes: every day she adds a page to this unwritten, unlived novel) (B 157). This passage occurs near the end of the third of four chapters (not five, as Luti states). Elisa has now worsened, haunted by the death of Franz. Her death is depicted with agonizing clarity, as she becomes the figure of her penname Polyxena, the martyr to the wishes of a dead man (‘Omomorto’). Cecilia’s younger sister Anna, who has cared for her mother and obeyed the Baron’s will, can finally marry. As the Baron reminds all those gathered of a family ‘maxim’ – ‘La missione della donna è il sacrificio’ (The mission of woman is sacrifice) (B 160) – Anna, much like her aunt, joins in a traditional, unequal marriage. Meanwhile Cecilia, having graduated, finds a position as chief engineer in a power plant. As a boss in a man’s world she is a pleasant oddity to her female friends. She can afford a vacation on the Venetian Lido, but in her solitude there writes to Francesca asking her to put her up for a few days in the country; in the allegory I have proposed, this fiction or interiorization is a positive gesture of unification; when Francesca asks Cecilia ‘indiscreetly’ if she has ever been in love and she relates the incident of the man with gray eyes, there is positive change – the mythic wholeness of the superconscious, of the tertium – in Cecilia, whose next action is to gather the De Gregori family together from far and near for the first celebration of Christmas. She is the only optimist in the family, as is seen at this awkward celebration to which she is the only one that brings gifts, the only one hopeful for the future; not even her priest-brother displays a Christian sense of charity and celebration of the nativity. Shortly after this episode Cecilia will die, a sacrifice to her own altruism, to humanity, but not to the values of the Barony. Her end comes abruptly at her workplace, when she undertakes to repair a malfunction in the power plant and is exposed to a lethal substance. Let us analyse this conclusion in terms of the feminine voice. Cecilia’s desire to conform to her father’s will, to accord him superior status, ‘per diritto di natura protettore e arbitro del suo destino’ (by right of nature the protector and judge of her destiny) (B 120), has conflicted with her recognition in him of ‘il volto di un idolo oscuro e potente’ (the face of an obscure and powerful idol) (B 122). By securing a well-paying job as an engineer, she has only begun to resolve that contradiction; while her decison is not a capitulation to the paranoid order that has destroyed her mother and conditioned her existence, she must see her father as

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the monster he is. Only thus will she regain her humanity and ethical selfhood. Just as the feminine condition was a defect in the eyes of the baron – ‘E un fallo era, chi volesse essere preciso, agli occhi del barone, la condizione femminile’ (And, for anyone wanting to be precise, the feminine condition was, in the eyes of the Baron, a defect) (B 124) – the austerity of Cecilia’s life once she is the head engineer, the only woman among fifty men, is not a liberation. This is signalled by the final section of the book in which Francesca reemerges; absent for more than a year, she now comes to life, reading Cecilia’s obituary and attempting to resolve the knot of their relation. She contacts the family, then visits the work-site. It is almost as if the product of a fantasy world hasoutlived the real being that invented her. Francesca asks herself: ‘Cecilia, dolce rinnegata di sé stessa, per amore di un bene ancora oscuro. Cecilia, mistica di una volontà spinta all’estremo. Ma l’aveva immaginata, Francesca, o conosciuta davvero, viva e spirante?’ (Cecilia, sweet one denied to herself, because of a love for a still obscure good. Cecilia, mystic of a will pushed to the extreme. But had Francesca imagined her, or truly known her, alive and breathing?) (B 224). The survival of the phantasm – of the arcane, the obscure, the ambiguous, the knowledge of the divine through darkness – is an allegory of Cecilia’s unresolved selfhood. The closure is thus an aperture to larger social questions as well. In Banti’s focus on the decisions and self-interrogation of female characters in response to a static and destructive status quo, narrative time becomes a voluble medium shaped by events of past, present, and future. Whether compressed into brisk resumés or dilated into long reminscences, this ‘time of decision,’ replete with anxiety and restlessness, exposes the ‘paranoid’ language and space of the Baron and of the world he supports. The book is a sort of roman à clef without the key: the murder of Franz is never explained, but its impact on the family is devastating. Nor is the fiction of Francesca explained, though her importance in the intimate unfolding of Cecilia’s revolt is profound. If the book has a ‘key’ it is the essential unity of these female characters, their ‘presence’ – the tertium after the ‘persona’ and the ‘favola’ merge. Each of the De Gregoris is visited by guilt or obsession, or some other attempt to compensate; Cecilia’s brother Diego has joined the priesthood, repudiating the father’s desire for a patronymic heir. Cecilia, the only optimist in the family, has sacrificed herself at the altar of her scientific knowledge, having saved her colleagues from a disaster. The third-person narration deftly reveals the sense of enclosure and cloistering, and the passing of days in the interior space, first of Elisa, then of Cecilia. The rendering of alienation

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and intermittent hope is so powerful because its subject – the women’s desire and ability to succeed in the world of men – is self-organized in terms of the decisions (including the perceptions) of the characters. As I have suggested, Banti’s texts describe but do not explain the reality of the characters; it is a style permeated with mystery, or by what Bakhtin called the ‘respiration’ of the speakers, the ineradicable continuum of their pathos. There are few proper nouns or precise references to chronological time. The struggle against misogyny and sexual hypocrisy in a Southern provincial culture is reminiscent of that recounted by Sibilla Aleramo in her classic 1905 novel, Una donna (A Woman). In fact 1905 was the year of Elisa’s passive betrothal to the Baron. Certainly Aleramo was a model for Banti as she focused on female courage. To ‘theorize’ the feminine voice is to visualize this courage (as theõria implies). As Gargani writes, ‘the feminine voice is the voice of the courage of sense against the mechanical repetition of the masculine game’; the latter leads to narcissism (and arguably the ludism of a masculine-dominated avant-garde), while the former ‘is the perceptive alarm that one can encounter only in the circumstances of the secret.’4 Such circumstances are at the heart of Banti’s imaginary realism in Il bastardo, a style that carries us inside the psychological complexities of her heroines, whose battles to educate themselves and gain a place in the male world have tragic consequences. Jean-Joseph Goux’s research on symbolization in primitive cultures has found that the male is typically associated with ‘form, type, notion, idea, or pattern’ while the female is associated with ‘matter’ and ‘amorphous, transitory, inessential material.’5 Noting the continuation of this symbolization in patriarchal societies and in the philosophy of idealism, Goux proposes an alternative: the rediscovery of ‘a dialectized reunion of the two separated poles’: To think of material organizational potency as including the production of concepts, to make mind the offspring of organized matter, is to explode the paterialist barrier between concept and materiality; the ‘infinity’ of matter is once again brought forth into the idea.6

The recognition of the form/matter dichotomy as symbolic of the male/female relation in society is a point of departure for authors of the feminine voice. As seen in the case of Cecilia, the attempt to bridge this gap in contemporary society can lead to tragic consequences. Conversely, as seen in the second of Banti’s novels to be discussed, Un grido

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lacerante, the tension that results from reunifying the poles of form and matter can also lead to reconciliation and self-realization. That is not to say that the author bluntly rejects the ‘male,’ ‘formal’ side of the dichotomy, but rather that she invests her empathy and materiality into the abstract plane of ideas, integrating them and thus giving rise to a newly vibrant relationship to the work of art. As Pier Paolo Pasolini suggested, Banti’s work, as it evolved, continued to be of historical moment, particularly as it expressed the great Italian tradition of artistic mannerism; it did so by integrating the facts of an exquisite language (having roots in the prosatori d’arte) with the forceful contents of an ideological or philosophical nature. In Un grido lacerante the integration of these two poles, the reunification of form and matter, is undertaken in the context of a female protagonist’s life story, a protagonist who, like Banti, practises the art of fiction and the scholary pursuit of art history. Yet despite the presence of such autobiographical content, to analyse the novel purely on that basis would be a grave error, equivalent to ignoring its status as a work of art. Un grido lacerante is the story of Agnese Lanzi, a timid, sickly, and somewhat disturbed girl who suffers from ‘nerves’ from early childhood (a malady she is told only men can have). As the book begins, Agnese has graduated from Lyceum and occupies a position as an arts administrator in a small museum in a town in Abruzzi. The third-person narration recounts Agnese’s early years retrospectively from this vantage point. Agnese’s parents had been distant and strict; they considered her moody behaviour to be unusual, the product of an over-active sensibility. A decisive moment in her life came when Agnese attended a class by the art historian Professor Delga. Upon graduation, Agnese takes the somewhat menial job in Abruzzi, where she finds that her scholarly drive is not satisfied; when her request to have an exquisite fourteenth-century ivory crucifix restored is rejected by the local parish priest (who fears the crucifix will not be returned to his church), she suffers a total collapse. By the time Agnese has recovered in her hospital bed in Rome, not only is Professor Delga by her bedside, but she is married to him. As with Elisa in Il bastardo, the marriage is something done to the woman: she has been deprived of the the important element of the will in shaping time and organizing perception. And though Delga will be the one love of Agnese’s life, throughout that adult life she will be troubled by his discouragement of her potential career as an art historian. Delga’s encouragement is restricted to her fiction writing. It is curious in this regard that Agnese’s last name is Lanzi, the name of Roberto Longhi’s most admired

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art historian, Luigi Lanzi (1732–1810), who is buried in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence. Lanzi also embodies the problem that Agnese struggles with as a writer, the ‘tension’ that arises between scholarship and creativity, or, in Contini’s words, in the ‘divergence between science and poetry.’7 Banti’s selection of this surname thus suggests a professional tension between her world and that of her husband, both before and after his death in 1970. When Delga suffers a near-fatal illness, Agnese’s every agonizing moment is painfully described. Upon his recovery, which Agnese considers a ‘miracle,’ she reassesses her intellectual career, and in the process gives a synopsis of Banti’s novels. The mode of narration is one of retrospective third-person internal dialogue. This often takes the form of questions: ‘Who am I?,’ ‘Who are we?,’ and generally ‘What are the ethical lessons to be learned from the past?’ As an adolescent she realizes: ‘Aveva dunque vissuto, per anni, in un clima di falsa modestia e di segreta superbia’ (She had lived, for years, in a climate of false modesty and secret pride) (GL 18). She wants to disappear, to be where time and space don’t exist. As she matures as a writer she meditates on history; she briefly considers writing a novel set in prehistory, inspired by readings of the French ethnographer Lévy-Brühl’s research into the primitive mind. The event of the Second World War interrupts everything, though Delga keeps working at his usual assiduous pace and Agnese, for the first time, begins to be struck by the importance of her writings, a judgment confirmed by Delga, who reads her work and admires it. Given Agnese’s lack of self-confidence, this affirmation transports her to another level. Though she continues to eye her suspended career as an art historian with some regret, she exploits the aesthetic insights she has gained, also in her frequent visits to galleries and churches, undertaken in a spirit of freedom. Agnese comes to appreciate her historic passion, the ‘pietas storica’ (historic piety) at the basis of her desire to explore in fiction the truth of history, a truth she felt had been betrayed.8 On travels with Delga she exults in the art objects of centuries past. While in Spain she imagines a novel set in the mountains, in a fertile and archaic period of artistic production then followed by a sacking by imperial forces. She is outraged at the current state of ‘poor degraded Spain,’ also because of its subjugation of women. Her view of history fundamentally contrasts with the sanctioned ‘History’ of men. In Gargani’s terms, Agnese is sensing the obscure background of possession for which the enunciation of facts is only a pretext. This also relates to her sense of exclusion from the field

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of art history, where current techniques favour empirical analysis over the more intuitive discussion of the creative process within the artist; it is in this latter, more Baudelairean and epiphanic direction that Agnese’s strengths lie. Banti’s own sense of history, we might infer, is comparable to that of Lévy-Brühl, for whom a primitive bond connects ethics, aesthetics, and the soul. Human intersubjectivity depends on precise cultural and historical frameworks, though these are only minimally provided in the fiction. The reader must share in the subjectivity and mystery of the protagonists in order to gain access to such critical details as kinship and dominance structures, or psychological aberrations. Thus the struggles of the soul are literally manifest in the minimal events, the day-to-day decisions of the characters. The crises of Agnese, a self-described ‘donna strapazzata’ (overwrought woman), reach an apex upon the death of Delga (Longhi died in 1970). After another physical collapse she recovers only to see a world of opportunists surrounding her husband’s name and estate. The only genuine mourners, she feels, were Delga’s students. The Institute comprising Delga’s library and study, which was situated on a separate floor of the couple’s house, will now be expanded, leaving Agnese smaller living quarters than previously. As Agnese slowly comes to terms with her husband’s death, a strong antipathy develops between her and the Institute’s Secretary, a former student whose jealousy and vindictiveness toward Agnese torment and confound her. The Secretary is condescending and secretive. He grants Agnese permission to catalogue Delga’s correspondence, a tedious job, but when she collaborates on a volume made from Delga’s lecture notes, he rebukes it. While at first Agnese is drawn into the reactive nature of the conflict, she soon realizes the self-destructive nature of the Secretary’s behaviour: Fu allora che, mistica più che credente cominciò ad invocare disordinatamente l’Inconoscibile. Immaginava il Cosmo come uno smisurato orecchio che poteva, se voleva, recepire le sue parole. Non aveva, una volta, chiesto e ottenuto quello che ancora considerava un miracolo? Ora chiedeva una specie di esorcismo: che il suo nemico fosse liberato dall’odio. (GL 88) It was then that, more a mystic than a believer, she began in a disorderly way to invoke the Unknowable. She imagined the Cosmos as an immense ear that could if it wanted receive her words. Had she not once asked for and obtained what she still considers to be a miracle? Now she was asking for a kind of exorcism: that her enemy be freed of hatred.

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Only upon the surprise resignation of the Secretary will Agnese begin to normalize her relation with the Institute, and indeed, prepare for her own departure from it. As she now seeks to define her most useful and appropriate role there, she reflects on the prospect of another novel, to be set in the present day. She sketches out a plot involving a young man and young woman backpacking across Europe, but soon determines that these middle-class youths lack substance; they are damned by mass society to have no coherent individuality, no romance to write a romanzo about. Here too the narrative rhythm of Un grido lacerante approximates the fluctuating rhythm of Agnese’s life, being a patchwork of vignettes, fantasies, dreams, travel descriptions, and reflections. In her clarification of the history she looks for in the historical novel, Agnese essentially enunciates the principle of a self-organized work centred on the time of the decision: ‘Riguardava non la ricerca strettamente storica e documentata, ma quel tanto di vita vissuta, interpretata, che la ricerca conteneva’ (It was not a question of strictly historical and documented research, but of that substance of life lived and interpreted that the research contained) (GL 109). This statement is not simply inserted as a truism but regards Agnese’s own inspiration as a writer. It follows from this statement that Banti too is dedicated to a vindication of history, by drawing attention to the stories that have been overlooked along with their internal and subjective dimensions. One such story is that of her namesake, St Agnes, whose tomb lies in Agnese’s favourite Roman church, Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura (St Agnes beyond the Walls), where she reads the Latin verses of the inscription honouring the martyrdom. The affective depth of the character’s solitary existence has much to do with the feminine self, including the reflections on maternity (Agnese has no children) and her ambivalent maternal feelings toward the young scholars at the Institute. Even from the standpoint of her prestige as an author and as the wife of Delga, Agnese must confront a patriarchal order and art world that acknowledge an official ‘solar’ history that confines the fragile but tenacious feminine self to the shadows. As seen above, this pattern of feminine resistance was exemplified in Il bastardo at an early point in Banti’s career, as the self of Cecilia grew in ways that remained undisclosed to the reader, such that the motivation for the character’s actions and eventual self-sacrifice needed to be inferred. Seemingly the points of least verisimilitude or greatest access to the imagination mark the high points of crisis. At these moments, history is absent and memory is all-consuming. One stands before the great

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decisional events of Banti’s characters within the space of contingency, intention, and sense outlined by Gargani. To get a clearer idea of Banti’s actual experience, I cite a 1990 article by her colleague at Paragone, Giovanni Testori, who notes her being misunderstood by ‘le anime obliquamente politicizzate o mediocremente talentose’ (the souls obliquely politicized or of mediocre talent), and her rejection of the patrie lettere, ‘quelle mafie dalle quali la Banti restò sempre esclusa perché il suo orgoglio e la sua fragilità non le concedevano di adire ai meccanismi di qualsiasi società segreta’ (those mafias from which Banti remained forever excluded because her pride and her fragility did not permit her to resort to the mechanisms of any secret society).9 It is this tenacious resistence to coteries of any sort that is revealed in Grido with an unprecedented degree of honesty and vulnerability. As stated above, Grido possesses its own fictional autonomy and demands to be analysed on that basis. Agnese’s probing internal voice covers a vast affective and intellectual range. When as a widow she confronts her new professional obligations along with the renewed scholarly ambitions that date from her youth, she must make a number of decisions. As the pressures of the new life threaten her health, she must reclaim her sense of selfhood and dignity in each of these areas. A critical part of this endeavour concerns the role of the art work in human existence, its history (and pre-history) and the interpretive role of the critic, who by virtue of her long familiarity with the art work can escape the trivialization it has experienced at the hands of a certain positivist and purely empirical school of research. As Agnese reinhabits the art works of her research with the same spirit of wonder that characterized her earliest research, she attains her wholeness as a fictional character. It is precisely this latter feature that ultimately allows Banti to communicate her profound moral and spiritual values. It is worth noting that over half the book concerns the years after Delga’s death. In Agnese’s grief there is much self-doubt and remorse, as she assesses what her proper role should be, vis-à-vis the Institute and her own writerly ambitions. Her reentry into the life of the Institute brings with it a sense of service to the memory of the Master. While her ‘victory’ over the Secretary has caused her to revisit her fears of dilettantism and inadequacy, ‘il frutto di una vecchia frustrazione’ (the fruit of an old frustration), it is precisely there that she finds a thirst, the same thirst for the ‘ecstasies of martyrdom’ she had found in Italian art

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since her teenage years. Her crisis over the choice of career now dissolves in the realization that she is adequate to both tasks: managing the Institute and writing fiction. As a harmony is struck between these voices, Agnese becomes less doubtful and more resigned. One device that enables this positive change in her self-understanding is her survey of her fictional works (recognizable as those of Banti). These include characters set in the Renaissance (Artemisia), the Settecento (‘Lavinia fuggita’), the Risorgimento (Noi credevamo), and the twentieth century. Among these latter are the stories of Il coraggio delle donne (The courage of women), a volume whose title story concerns a woman whose pistolwielding husband leads her to fear for her life; as she considers killing him first, moving to his bedside table with the loaded gun, she averts the crisis by achieving a kind of sublime indifference. Another story, ‘Vocazioni indistinte’ (Indistinct Vocations), explores the rise and fall of a pianist who was victimized by her parents’ neglect, then ‘married off’ to a smothering, conformist, and unfeeling husband. The unifying motif of a ‘soundless music’ symbolizes a perfect yet sterile vocation, found only in dreams. These latter two characters are among the ‘unhappy wives’ referred to in the following passage: Lavorava soffrendo. Le tre mogli infelici, vittime di mariti crudeli e mai contente di narrarne scrupolosamente i misfatti, furono agevolmente convertite in isteriche maniache, calunniatrici di uomini un po’ strambi, come, del resto, gran parte degli uomini ... Aveva amato pochi uomini, anzi un uomo solo, ma pochissime donne, e quelle poche, riunite in una favola, sempre la stessa: il mito dell’eccezione contro la norma del conformismo. (GL 112– 13, my emphasis) She worked by suffering. The three unhappy wives, victims of cruel husbands and never content to scrupulously recount their misdeeds, were easily converted into hysterical maniacs, calumniators of somewhat bizarre men, as in fact most men are ... She had loved few men, or rather one man only, but very few women, and those few, joined in a fable, were always the same one: the myth of the exception against the norm of conformism.

The closing phrase, ‘the myth of the exception against the norm of conformism,’ bears repeating as the hallmark of Banti’s feminine voice. The passage also contains an echo of Agnese’s namesake in Manzoni’s Betrothed: ‘I signori, chi più, chi meno, chi per un verso, chi per un altro, han tutti un po’ del matto’ (Gentlemen, some more, some less, some in

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one way, some in another, are all a bit crazy).10 It is precisely the character of the feminine in Banti that has found its revolt against conformism by being the ‘myth of the exception.’ These women have understood that when one’s labour is devalued, one’s spiritual life is threatened as well; the women are forced to dream as an outlet from a world of ‘inexorable facts.’ The necessary response by a non-conformist such as Cecilia or Agnese is to secure a place where can she replenish her labour with spirit, a sacred place, or temple, set apart (the Greek word templum is of the same root as temevos, ‘to cut’). While Agnese’s survey of her own fiction was originally undertaken in order to ‘kill off’ that fiction and erase it, this procedure is subsequently revealed as simply part of the grieving process. Her reappraisal of her fiction’s enduring value is convergent therefore with her reinvestment in her old calling as art historian, and her rejection of the super-scientific direction the field has taken, as she sees in the young fellows in the Institute: La loro mentalità era quasi scientifica: consideravano l’opera d’arte alla pari di un composto chimico da esplorare nelle sue componenti e affinità. La loro maggiore ambizione consisteva nel trovare in opere diverse i medesimi volti, panneggi, gesti, accessori: per loro la qualità non contava, non avevano preferenze, forse le avevano e se ne vergognavano come di una debolezza. (GL 129) Their mentality was almost scientific: they considered the work of art on the same level as a chemical compound to explore in its components and affinities. Their greatest ambition consisted in finding in diverse works the same faces, drapings, gestures, accessories: for them the quality did not count, they had no preferences, perhaps they had them and they were ashamed of them as a kind of weakness.

As one reads Grido, one can only come to the conclusion that this is the novel Agnese has been forced to write, a work which serves as a testimony to Delga and to the validity of a certain intuitive method in the practice of art history. Thus Agnese’s other major project is to return to her earlier study of Lorenzo Lotto and add to it a more creative historical dimension. It is ultimately through her work that Agnese arrives at a cosmic sense of her own vitality, and of the real victory which is victory over Self. The text here approaches an inexpressible limit, the point where labour itself crosses over into spirit. In her confrontation with death, Agnese arrives at a sublime sense of severance, of letting go:

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Né l’uomo, né la sfera ruotante che lo regge può sfuggire alla fine del suo ciclo. Ma un ciclo non è l’eternità che, Regola o Caso, governa. Governare è faticare: e chi ha mai pensato alla fatica di reggere il Cosmo? (GL 174–5) Neither man, nor the rotating sphere that supports him up can flee the end of its cycle. But a cycle is the eternity which, by Rule or by Chance, governs. To govern is to grow weary: and whoever thought of the weariness of supporting the Cosmos?

Between Spirit and Labour – the former ‘a victor and a vanquished,’ the Spirit of creativity, and the latter able finally to rest – there is an unbridgeable gap. Agnese now imagines the deceased Delga reincarnated as a young boy, just like the boy in a photograph that always hung by the Master’s bedside. The couple had agreed that the boy in this portrait would be the only ‘child’ they would ever have. As Agnese now reflects on this decision and this artefact, she imagines the ‘grido’ of the book’s title, a cry or scream at the time of one’s death, almost like a baby’s cry: ‘Un giorno – o una notte – sarebbe venuta l’ora. L’ora che non rintoccherà senza che un grido lacerante la trasformi in un minuto’ (One day – or one night – the hour would come. The hour which will chime only with a piercing scream that transforms it into a single minute) (GL 175). As with Il bastardo, in Grido the reader is asked to confront violent emotions and reject the heroic dimension Banti denounced in her article on the romanzo rosa. While Banti’s characters manifest strong moral and intellectual features, they are not feminist heroines as such; though they experience misogyny and other forms of discrimination as females, this oppression is not constitutive of their identity. Such would be tantamount, in Banti’s mind, to a form of determinism or, in a larger sense, to the strictures of any ‘ism,’ including feminism. Identity is created in the feminine voice’s interrogation of such a skewed perception of reality, in contrast to which the questions carry their own evidence of versimilitude, their own space of contingency, intention, and sense. There are few demarcations of chronological time in Banti’s narratives; there are no concessions to the will to power, or to the idea that perception is a passive faculty. It is by force of events and decisions, rendered with Manzonian verisimilitude, that women are cast in Banti’s fiction as the principal guides to the sacred place, the place of severance from pathological forms of knowledge and language that inhibit understanding. I have chosen to explore this in two works written thirty years apart; in either case the heroine risks becoming an outcast in her pursuit of

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personal autonomy. Banti herself endured this ostracism, in her scholarship and her fiction, in which a great darkness is sensed and brought to bear on a basically tragic plot structure, draped in a masterful if overdetermined use of rhetoric and lyricism. But in addition to the nonprogressive nature of both tragedy and aestheticism, a third element is (auto)biography, and its incumbent interrogation and dramatization of the time of decision. The time of the decision never returns to the same point in time but evolves in its turning in the form of an upward spiral. Thus the novelty of Cecilia in the De Gregori family – she is the incarnation of Elisa, but has freed herself from her mother’s status as victim. The tertium, beyond rebellion or victimization, corresponds to a revolt that is enabled by the topos of ambiguity and by the theme of revolt, evident in Cecilia’s and Agnese’s spiritual pursuits. This ultimately concerns the feminine subject’s knowledge of the world and of nature, and her acknowledgment of and respect for her cognitive limits. Thus the natural chronologies of the two books and their embrace of time and its logics: the efficient logic in which cause precedes effect (e.g., the discovery of the Baron’s illegitimate second family plunges Elisa into isolation and depression) and the finalistic logic, in which a future cause generates a present effect (e.g., Cecilia’s career pursuits require that she sacrifice her social life while at the university). It is the inclusion of both efficient and finalistic logics in the protagonists’ purviews that allows them a greater awareness of the potentialities of positive ethical change. This awareness enables the revolt of the scribe, as it were, of the author or character who surpasses her secure habits as scribe or copyist of cultural patterns and norms: Cecilia, who has risked the ‘writing’ to/ of her other, Francesca, the figure of mourning and melancholy, in order to attain to the status of a scientist; Agnese, who has invested in an art historical concept that runs against the grain of the Master’s young disciples and to some extent the Master himself. Banti’s own resistance to popular trends was marked by a return to ‘sensibility,’ a term that had fallen out of fashion and is still deemed somewhat archaic or out of step with the rigours of modernity. Yet as Raymond Williams glosses the term, ‘sensibility’ is precisely the quality of flexibility and latitude we have attributed to the feminine voice: ‘an area of human response and judgement which could not be reduced to the emotional or emotive ... an apparently neutral term in discussion of the sources of art, without the difficult overtones of mind or the specializations of thought and feeling.’11 It is Banti’s sensibility that privileges the facts of style as a means of recovering, from the depths of her own

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experience, the wisdom of balance and the moral fibre of her characters. Sensibility thus comes to stand for the integration of aesthetics and ethics within the work of art. Thus in Agnese’s thinking about art, the turn is taken away from the trends mentioned above and toward the embodiment of myth: Mentre le famose ‘attribuzioni’ le risuscivano più agevoli, succedeva a volte che la loro importanza critica scomparisse, e le figure, i paesaggi, gli oggetti dipinti si animassero stranamente per dar luogo a una specie di spettacolo. Soggetto sacro o soggetto profano, tutto diventava favola: martirii, episodi biblici, miracoli, penitenti, angeli e arcangeli circolavano fra il bosco lontano e la grotta vicina per poi spiccare il volo verso i cieli gonfi di nuvole scintillanti, mentre carnefici e tiranni si avventavano verso la vittima grondante sangue: e tutti raccontavano la loro storia diversa affatto da quella immaginata dal pittore: il quale, anche lui, prendeva la parola contestando la sua leggenda. (GL 141–2) While the famous ‘attributions’ became easier for her, sometimes it happened that their critical importance disappeared, and the figures, the landscapes, the painted objects were strangely animated so as to create a kind of spectacle. Sacred subject and profane subject, all became fables: martyrdoms, biblical episodes, miracles, penitents, angels, and archangels circulated between the distant forest and the nearby grotto to then fly upward toward the skies swollen with scintillating clouds, while cutthroats and tyrants showed off before their victim gushing with blood: and everyone told their own story quite different from the one imagined by the painter: who, also, had begun his discourse by contesting the legend.

Agnese’s adherence to style, intuition, and sensibility in her approach to art history opposes the increasingly technical emphasis in the field; similarly, Banti herself had grown disillusioned with the failure of academic art historians to comprehend aesthetic perception and production as fundamentally an act of the will. This is the message of relation and of revolt; it is the message that the archaic properly understood signals a return to the moral contours of the self, as they existed before the alienation of masculine scaffoldings and dualistic separations. And, as Whitehead has written, ‘Style is the ultimate morality of mind.’12 What one finds in the second half of Grido is nothing less than an extended meditation on time, memory, and history – and their integration – expressed in the details of a day-to-day coming to terms with one’s ten years

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of mourning a beloved spouse, one’s creativity, one’s style. Style is not content with formal brilliance, but requires a community of fellow speakers, imagined and real, now and through history. This is Banti’s legacy, that from the peculiarity of a single private existence, rendered with style and sensibility, one may reveal the metahistorical presence of the myth of the exception.

9 The Religious Experimentalism of Amelia Rosselli

The goal of this chapter is to present an overview of Amelia Rosselli’s poetry and poetics, to analyse a single ten-line lyric (‘Il soggiorno in inferno era di natura divina’), and to conclude by examining the poet’s use of the rose topos throughout her opus. This approach will show how through the diverse stages of Rosselli’s career certain features remain constant. On a thematic plane, perhaps the most important feature – though one that has been largely overlooked – is the poet’s Christian practice through poetry; this thematics is underscored by the dialogic nature of the poems, which often assume the form of the ‘dialogue in absentia’ (Nencioni) discussed in our Introduction. Rosselli relies on this genre, frequently in plaintive and erotic utterances that preserve the timbre of her voice, and seemingly expect no response from her absent interlocutor. On a stylistic plane, what remains constant in Rosselli’s several books of poetry are the irregularities of language and the intense verbal expressionism. These features have received much commentary, as we summarize below. In general, critics have provided a suitable language for parsing Rosselli’s deviations from lexical, syntactic, and semantic ‘sense,’ and have related her prosody to a psychological profile that is variously referred to as ‘private,’ ‘neurotic,’ or otherwise passionately inclined. What we have found lacking in surveying the criticism, and what we attempt in a small way to accomplish here, is the reconnection of Rosselli’s unique poiesis and experimentalism to the overall coherence of her work in a spiritual and religious dimension. We expect to show that the blockages and occlusions to sense that one encounters in Rosselli’s verse point to another order of reason above and beyond the logical and the lyrical; that this higher reason depends on the nature of relationships, including (but not restricted to) the poet’s own internal dialogue

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and her interrogation of her craft – in which the music of poetry assumes a central importance. Rosselli is unique among the Italian poets of her day in her ability to eschew representation; like an abstract expressionist painter, she engages words as the emblems of consciousness, stretched between the here and now and the eternal, between love and despair, on the one hand, and divinity or damnation on the other. Rosselli’s tense emotions and individual psychology are not themselves sublimated or codified by language. Rather it is Rosselli’s personalism – as radically distinct from individualism – that by absenting itself from the mundane crises of the ego, the struggles of pride and desire, succeeds in sublimating language. These are the terms of Rosselli’s revolt. In theological terms, it is only through the recognition of sin and the upward impetus provided by the involvement in Christ’s person and sacrifice that the sinner surpasses, once and for all, the realm of violence and passion. This logos or idea-in-itself is not an object to be classified. The importance of the unconscious in expressing this idea of the absolute (akin to the mystery of the Cross) cannot be overstated; its partner is the dialogic mode in which, by necessity, one extends outward toward another, even if only to acknowledge one’s despair or helplessness. Born in Paris in 1930, Amelia Rosselli was seven when her father and uncle, Carlo and Nello Rosselli, who had directed the Resistance newspaper and movement ‘Giustizia e Libertà,’ were assassinated by Fascists. After leaving France at age ten she resided in England and the United States before returning to Italy at age sixteen after the liberation. Her experience of catastrophe and transience was compounded by a grave illness, facts that contributed to her isolation and dejection. One of her great inspirations was the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, who writes in ‘Nuit de l’Enfer,’ as part of his famous longer work, Une saison en enfer, ‘L’enfer ne peut attaquer les païens’ (Hell has no power over pagans).1 Rosselli, like Rimbaud, was one over whom ‘Hell’ did have some power. ‘I think I am in hell, and therefore I am. It is the result of my catechism,’ wrote Rimbaud. Rosselli too was challenged by the ‘catechism’ of her formation. Like Rimbaud, Rosselli discovered an antidote in poetry; as she writes in Primi scritti 1952–1963 (now in Le poesie): ‘la poesia è fatto di liberazione, non di riflessione’ (Poetry is a question of liberation, not of reflection) (P 102).2 Rosselli begins her poetic career in a trio of languages – Italian, English, and French – and in a spirit of theoretical experimentation. A musician and student of music theory, she is drawn to compare the three languages in terms of their inherent properties (of metre, lexicon,

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rhythm, and so forth), but also their common usage and the weight of their literary memories. In her research she discovers French to be closest to the ‘surrealistic’ element of the psyche; she states, with some irony, ‘Simply because Surrealism was born in France, is now national (natural?) language’ (P 98). This tendency of eliding or truncating the syntax is evident in her own verse: Les auberges ont fermé leur clefs, les murs internes sont roses, leurs pétales se répètent en se croisant les mains (Elle est devenue folle, elle ne retrouve pas son époux il est devenu mort) (P 36) The hotels have locked their keys, / the internal walls are roses, their petals / are repeated as they cross their hands / (She became mad, / she couldn’t find her husband, / he became dead)

The parallelism here between linguistic rupture, loss of sense, and emotional loss continues through her poetry. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo has noted how her ‘obscure interior monologue contains a desperate will toward conversation; “passion” tries to engage “reason” in a dialectic.’3 There is also in this will a profound religious need that emerges with clarity in the early works in English, in which Rosselli is drawn to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. In the following passage from ‘On Fatherish Men,’ she speaks of her own family drama and her decision to avoid the sort of cataclysm (and catechism, perhaps) that had destroyed her father: I do Love thee, and beg thee be a True Father, Mine is Gone into the Grave, waving a Banner of Idiocee: be thou more Intelligent; Keep from Policee, and Take Mee. Humbly shall I Spit at thee, Crawling my Hand at your HindPocket, as you Kisse Me. But no Lucrous Intents had I, see; twas to wipe the Loaden sea of my Love-tears, with Thine Hankerchiee. (P 64)

Here with the help of mixed registers and linguistic distortions Rosselli

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attacks ideology per se as a ‘Banner of Idiocee.’ Once she has settled on Italian as her language of choice, she will do the same. Italian distinguishes itself, she says, by its ‘riposante musica, ritmo meno acuto, adattabile’ (restful music, [and] less acute, more adaptable rhythm) (P 76); ‘nell’italiano predomina il concreto, verso greco-latino inconscio, anche stornello’ (in Italian what predominates is the concrete, the unconscious Greek-Italian verse, as well as the stornello’) (P 76). The identification of an ‘unconscious’ level of the classical and the popular embedded in the Italian tradition gives rise to her experimentation with metre. She dismisses the accentuative (or qualitative) foundation of Italian verse in the process of seeking to recover the quantitative rhythms of the classic languages. Her private search – including her rejection of the sort of allegiances that end in martyrdom – is translated into manipulations of the public language. She states that the unity of ‘la esperienza sonora logica associativa’ (the logical sonorous associative experience) is one ‘shared by many peoples and able to be reflected in many languages.’ Citing a change in modern speech patterns‘irregolarità ritmo moderno dovuto a varietà di durata (irrazionale musicale) della sillaba’ (irregularity modern rhythm due to variety of durations (irrational musical) of the syllable) (P 73) – she formulates a metrics of a ‘space-cube’ in which ‘il tempo nella poesia diventa volume del cubo; cioè / profondità tramite le attesa-spazio tra verso e verso’ (time, in poetry, becomes the volume of the cube; that is / depth through the waiting-spaces between the lines), and: ‘piazzamento accenti / provoca variazioni dinamiche ... nell’interno del cubo’ (shifting of accents provokes dynamic variations ... inside the cube) (P 104). And while she is adopting a ‘closed metrical’ style, so different from the dispersive and ludic free verse of her beginnings, she retains from the earlier work her metrical freedom: ‘Quanto alla metrica poi, essendo libera essa variava gentilmente a seconda dell’associazione o del mio piacere’ (As regards metre, since it was free it could vary according to my associations or the whims of my pleasure) (P 339). In his The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes writes, ‘No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to jump on you: the political policeman and the psychoanalytic policeman: futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion.’4 If, as Barthes adds, ‘There are few writers who combat both ideological repression and libidinous repression,’ Rosselli is such a writer; the combat that is joined in the Variazioni belliche is a war against the myth of the warrior, against sophistry and reductionism, and for the pleasure, even the erotics, of the text.5 Whether

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it concerns syllabation, lexis, register, metre, or theme, she refuses to see style as the product of syntax, or meaning as something ‘fitted into’ a preestablished structure: ‘non è il contenuto che deve fit in lo spazio / ma tu che devi plasmare lo spazio / cioè il tuo contenuto deve provocare lo spazio’ (It is not the content that must fit in the space, but you who must shape the space / that is your content must provoke the space) (P 114). The phonic and nonverbal aspects of verse are not relegated to the status of ornament or contingency. Nor is any effort made to arrive at a superficial harmony between the parts and the whole.6 Thus she rejects any hierarchy of syntax over semantics, or of the digital mode of communcation over the analogical, as understood by contemporary theorists of communication: The term [analogic communication] must comprise posture, gesture, facial expression, voice inflection, the sequence, rhythm, and cadence of the words themselves, and any other nonverbal manifestation of which the organism is capable, as well as the communicational clues unfailingly present in any context in which an interaction takes place.7

Only by understanding this ostensive modality can one begin to assess the novelty of Rosselli’s integration of the analogic and digital modes of communication. Human beings communicate both digitally and analogically. Digital language has a highly complex and powerful logical syntax but lacks adequate semantics in the field of relationship, while analogic language possesses the semantics but has no adequate syntax for the unambiguous definition of the nature of relationships.8

Such a distinction is useful in explaining Rosselli’s tendency toward grammatical impurities (such as barbarism, pun, solecism, lapsus, anacoluthon), which provide important information about context and relation not available in the pure syntax of the poem, even while that syntax – musical, ordered, and mathematical – is essential to her work.9 In 1959 Rosselli wrote the short gnomic poem ‘Il soggiorno in inferno era di natura divina,’ later published in Variazioni belliche (1963). This ten-line lyric is an ‘infernal recollection’ that possesses a dual structure – of lexical iterations, syntactic parallelisms, acoustic echoes, and psychological doublings – that provides for its remarkable intensity and suggests the need for a careful analysis if one is to grasp its ultimate importance in the life of the poet.

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Il soggiorno in inferno era di natura divina ma le lastre della provvidenza ruggivano nomi retrogradi e le esperienze del passato si facevano più voraci e la luna pendeva anch’essa non più melanconico e le rose del giardino sfiorivano lentamente al sole dolce. Se sfioravo il giardino esso mi penetrava con la sua dolcezza nelle ossa se cantavo improvvisamente il sole cadeva. Non era dunque la natura divina delle cose che scuoteva il mio vigoroso animo ma la malinconia. (P 218) The stay in Hell was by its nature divine but the plaques of providence roared out retrograde names and the experiences of the past grew more voracious and the moon too loomed overhead no longer melancholy and the roses of the garden were slowly fading in the sweet sun. If I passed quickly by the garden, its tenderness penetrated me to my bones if I sang then suddenly the sun was sinking. So it wasn’t the divine nature of things that shook my vigorous soul, but rather it was melancholy.

Two interpenetrating structures are at work: a simple logical-argumentative structure interwoven with a chiastic and synchronic structure. The former, digital, structure is linear and exploits tropes of selection: antithesis, metaphor, rhyme. The latter, analogical, structure is circular, reflexive, and synchronic, and exploits tropes of contiguity: paranomasia, polysyndeton, duplication, alliteration. The former leads to the following conclusion: it was the knowledge of melancholy that shook the poet’s soul and not the ‘divine nature’ of things, or of what was external. But this conclusion is hollow without the semantic data given by the latter structure, which opens outward from the centre of the poem, and whose movement concerns the vaster nature of the relation between self and memory, self and transcendence, self and reader. It begins and ends phonically, as ‘sound events’ made progressively into series of letters, syllables, words, clusters of words, then lines of similar duration (all roughly sixteen syllables), accented by visual pauses between lines. The poem opens dialectically, opposing ‘inferno’ and ‘divina,’ an opposition repeated in what appeared to the poet in ‘Hell: the retrograde names on the plaques or plates, and the solar and pastoral experience of well-being, in which the roses are no longer melancholy but naturally

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fading. The second half of the poem – and the second of three sentences – begins ironically, as ‘sfiorivano’ is echoed by ‘sfioravo.’ The providential aura of the opening (‘provvidenza’) is altered by the suddenness of change, a song begun ‘improvvisamente.’ And while in the opening ‘la luna pendeva anch’essa non più melanconico’ (the moon too loomed overhead no longer melancholy), now ‘il sole cadeva’ (the sun was sinking). In the final sentence, the ‘I’ figure realizes that her ‘vigorous soul’ had not been shaken by the ‘divine nature of things,’ of what was external, but rather by melancholy. In exploring the relation between herself and her past, Rosselli has arranged eleven verbs, almost exactly one per line, all in the imperfect tense. This memorial style leads the poet to a reckoning, the authenticity of which is also guaranteed by ‘mistakes’ at the typewriter (such as ‘melanconico,’ which should be feminine to agree with ‘luna,’ and indeed with the author herself, but the error disallows this possible solution to her being trapped between the options of ‘inferno and ‘divina’). Such irregularities convey the immediacy of Rosselli’s passion and musical impulse. The figurative premise of ‘Il soggiorno’ is seemingly Dantesque: the recollection of a visit to the underworld where the narrator confronted the fierceness of her memories; presumably to detach herself from sin, particularly melancholy (tristitia, sloth, accedia, spiritual cowardice), and to accomplish thereby a return to spring, to hope and sweetness, to the living natural force of song and light. In the opposition between the divine nature of things, ‘cose,’ and the weight of events or experience, the former dissipates and is illusory, while the latter, the ‘rose,’ determines and is determined by the poet’s psyche, her reality and relation with memory. Part of the poet’s memory is her knowledge of earlier poets, including a relationship to D’Annunzio noted by Niva Lorenzini with respect to the above lines, especially the weight of the hanging roses that fade, a common image in the poetry of D’Annunzio.10 Yet for Rosselli the rose remains a symbol of transcendence and pleasure, despite the persistence of hell and the phenomenon of melancholy. ‘Il soggiorno in inferno’ appears in Variazioni (1960–1), a book that documents a most intense period of writing in the poet’s life. In these 137 poems the images of ‘Cristo’ and ‘Jesù,’ ‘Maria,’ ‘Dio,’ ‘inferno,’ ‘i poveri di spirito’ (‘the poor in spirit’ as in the Beatitude, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ Matt. 5:3) proliferate, along with multiple instances of the noun ‘rosa.’ An example of the latter is the following conclusion to a ten-line lyric, once again a personal reflection in the imperfect tense:

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Per i riflessi casalinghi il mio corpo si circondava di nuove cose: luci e fallimenti, sparimenti e castelli dipinti a difficoltà di rosa. Luce di mattina calcolava la rosa e spariva la bruma in un incontro di fiabe, il gigante si mordeva le mani. (P 325) Through the household reflections my body was surrounded / by new things: lights and failures, disappearances and castles / painted pink with difficulty. // Morning light the rose was calculating and the mist was disappearing / in an encounter of fables, the giant was biting his hands.

This image of the rose seems to find a response in Rosselli’s final work, the 350-line poem Impromptu (1981), in which ‘hell’ has become ‘the long military campaign’ of life, amidst which the rose stands for the ‘difficulty’ of living, not perceived in a ‘dream’ but ‘as if it were’: Se risentimento ha per causa questa lunga campagna militare per forza v’aggiungo ch’era nel mio sogno una intera visione del vostro dipinto non di difficoltà di rosa ma come se fosse, nell’esistenza di qui, l’alloro che morale m’aveva ingiunto a dirmi ch’io sono tra i grandi e nascondo perfino il piccolo (P 647) If resentment has as its cause / this long military campaign / I add by necessity that in my / dream it was a whole / vision of your painting, / not of a rose’s difficulty / but as if it were, in the existence / of here, the laurel that, being moral / had enjoined me to tell myself // that I am among the great and yet I hide even what is small.

In general, Rosselli’s use of the rose topos is vague and fertile in the manner seen above. Empty and full, incidental but deliberate, it is a senhal within a highly ambiguous love poetry standing for the absent lover, anonymous, and the religiously tinged flower of the buried stornello, of

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the rosary, balanced between the respective isolations of chastity and wantonness. This can be extremely simple: i giovani, le loro rose simili a te: i giovani le loro rose, simili a me: i giovani, i loro torti, simili ai nostri (P 604) the young, their roses // similar to you: the young / their roses, similar // to me: the young, their / errors, similar to ours.

Or, as in the following lines, it can reflect a great complexity, a need greater than what language can describe, thus a figure of the sublime. Rosselli recalls the positive need in her youth to declare herself ‘illiterate’ in the language of experience: Con tutta la candida presunzione della mia giovane età stabilivo inventarii. Rose coronavano le mie pezze e la luce brillava attraverso un occhio quasi crudele. La regola d’onore era l’inesperienza! Regolatevi secondo il momento giusto esclamò l’analfabeta. (P 327) With all the candid presumption of my / young age I established inventories. Roses crowned / my patches and light shone through an almost cruel eye. // The rule of honour was inexperience! Act / according to the right moment exclaimed the illiterate one!

The same sort of sublime informality persists when Rosselli is ill with Parkinson’s disease in the thirteen-line ‘Risposta’ (Response). She writes from her sickbed that the decorative rosette on her stocking-holder or garter (‘tiracalze’ is a confusion of semantic fields since holding up the stockings is the result of having pulled them on) represents an obstacle, then folds her hands to pray, in order to be in ‘God’s hands’ and supported in that act by her own ‘internal civic tension.’ The memory of youth, the uneasiness over puberty and social standing, and the looming sense of violence and ignorance in society colour the poet’s interior dialogue:

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contrasto tra le ferite e l’ingranaggio una colomba spaziava ma mi persi a cercare colombelle. Seduta stante convocai Ruvido il guanciale mentre non dormi, una rosetta sul porta calza, tiracalze; strettoie delle difficoltà. Per essere nelle mani di Dio giunsi le mani, le punte alleggerite da una pressione civica interna. O un Dio o un’ombra: era lo stesso per chi cerca il sonno. Rivoltàme nelle giungle dei sampietrini oppure chiare acque e fresche ombre, il mangiame dei nostri polli è abituale, tu non ridi se ti sparano. Volli tentare il pieno ne ricavai strette misure. (P 364) contrast between the wounds and the workings a dove flew on high / but I got lost looking for little doves. During the meeting that I convened / or rather I began, so as to drink and the lemon split this time / into equal sections swelling in the bedpan filled with tea. / The pillow rough when you don’t sleep, a rosette on the garter- / belt, hose holder; straits of difficulty. To be / in God’s hands I put my hands together, the tips lightened by / an internal civic pressure. // Whether a God or a shade: it was all the same for one seeking sleep. / The stuff of revolt in the jungles of Saint-Peter-stones or clear waters / and cool shadows, the fodder of our chickens is habitual, / if they shoot at you / you’re not going to laugh. I insisted on the max but I ended up / under tight control.

‘Risposta’ is written from a situation of trauma; its words form a current of musical-logical consequentiality. In effect, Rosselli uses irregular language to inquire into her state of isolation; note the use of the suffix ‘-ame’ to form the collective nouns ‘rivoltáme’ and ‘mangiame,’ or the ironic reference to Petrarch’s canzone ‘Chiare, fresche et dolci acque’: ‘chiare acque / e fresche ombre.’ Like that poet, Rosselli employs dialogue in absentia supported by linguistic variatio, as seen the free shifting of personal pronouns (‘io,’ ‘tu,’ ‘noi’). The supplication to God or to an absent shade is seemingly motivated by the ‘I’ figure’s sense of abandonment and her desire to form a ‘response’ to the evasions and automatisms of others. Similarly, in the following poem, the ‘tu’ figure is a shadowy partner, absent or asleep, as when the poet recounts her waking dream, from within a feminine consciousness, in which pain, sorrow, and melancholy are funnelled into a form of resistance, a sort of ‘alibi’:

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tu fermasti gli occhi al solco della primavera incantando un mondo di bestie con vetrali lacrime che non scendevano ma s’imbrogliavano nel tuo sonno tutto rose. (AP 106) you set your eyes on the furrow of spring / bewitching a world of beasts with tears / of glass which did not fall but grew entangled / in your sleep entirely of roses.

The alibi is another identity or an ‘elsewhere’; here it is the ‘tu’ that involves a translation or crossing over to another place, where one is capable of making a decision that affects one’s life. This elsewhere is not the product of flight, but derives from the posing of a question, and thus a relation to an interlocutor. One means of accessing the alibi is the use of creative errors of language. The phonic stratum – Saussure’s anagrams and paragrams – adds a semantic richness concerning the quality of relation that the digital and syntactic strata cannot. Thus Giudici refers to Rosselli’s ‘use of ... syntactic inversion, ... often on the level not of syntax but of signifieds.’11 Lexically Rosselli accomplishes the same sort of effects through the tropes of repetition and surprise. By phonic redundancy interspersed with rare and shocking images, she redirects despair into pleasure; and by the incessant use of such tropes, she fabricates an erotics of the text. This means that love is present, not that the lover is present. As Keats said, the poet is the least poetic of creatures. And Rosselli, in her faithfulness to life as lived, with its terrors and bliss, leads to a more genuine intimacy than is at first apparent to the reader. Here again writing of her illness, she employs ‘faded roses’ to describe the end of the creative act (of ‘painting’) with some indifference as to why, when, or to whom the fatal quitting occurs: Con la malattia in bocca spavento per gli spaventapasseri rose stinte e vi sono macchie sul muro piccolissime nel granaio dei tuoi pensieri: e con quale colore smetti di dipingere? (P 444) With the disease in your mouth / a fright / for scarecrows / faded roses and there are smears on the wall, / tiny in the hayloft of your thoughts: / and with what colour do you make your final / brushstroke?

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In short, the rose has a metonymic relation to the body, its sickness and its deep desires; a decoration on wallpaper or a design on a garment, the metonym communicates a world of humble objects, as stated above, a prosaics that rarely finds ‘complete’ statement in any of Rosselli’s poems, but contributes to the overall description of her interiorized spiritual world and struggle. And often there is a ‘tu’ figure, a would-be lover or companion: Io sono molto improdiga di baci, tu scegli in me una rosa scarnificata. Senza spine ma i petali, urgono al chiudersi, dinnanzi alla resa dei conti. Tu scegli in me un motivo non dischiuso dinnanzi alla rosa impara. (P 411) I am very improdigal with kisses, you choose / in me a defleshed rose. Without thorns / but the petals, demand to close, before the / time of reckoning. // Choose in me a motive not opened / before the rose, learn.

Impurities of various sorts in Rosselli’s work allow a ‘command message’ to develop in contrast to the ‘report message’ of the individual poem. Communication theorists employ this dichotomy to refer to the explicit content of a message (the report) and the implicit ‘instructions for use’of that message (the command). The report message concerns a literal interpretation of the immediate content of what is said, in and of itself; the command message typically concerns process and relation. Since, for Rosselli, the ‘whole discourse of poetry indicates the thought itself,’ and since her individual poems are viewed as small fragments of the larger, all-inclusive coherence, she must engage in distortions, such as anacoluthon and discontinuity, to set the balance right: Rosa ripulita solitudine dimenticabile contadino meticoloso migliore del mondo riconoscersi serbatoio di nullità recondita sfinita sopraffazione morte-solitudine

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tanto più pregevole se sottile m’armo. (P 582) Freshened rose / forgettable solitude / meticulous peasant / best in the world / to see yourself as a vessel / of recondite nullity / overwrought overwhelmed / death-solitude / all the more praiseworthy / if subtle, I arm myself.

Rosselli’s verbal landscape is dotted with iterated pairs (duplications) that open and close chiastically, a procedure which has the effect of reclaiming experience itself as oscillating and self-similar in its structure. The particular formula Rosselli came up with to describe this manner of working was ‘la esperienza sonora logica associativa’ (logical sonorous associative experience). This self-description amounts to an ars poetica: Rosselli demonstrates a fidelity to experience, to the prosaics of everyday life; by recognizing the mundane details of existence, along with the awkwardness and the emotions of her efforts to communicate, and the sense of risk, she is led in her versifying to a more genuinely intimate assocation with those things that comprise her world; it is in this confusion of sound and sense that she associates through figures of the word and figures of thought; it is her trust in the internal logic of this procedure – as music and as communication – that ultimately endows the poems with their internal coherence, a coherence peculiar to Rosselli’s idiosyncratic language. On the one hand, there is a ‘dissociation’ between signifier and signified; on the other there is a ‘rationalization’ seeking to unite them.12 It was this double order between dissociation and rationalization that was discussed in ‘Il soggiorno in inferno’ in terms of the creative opposition between the analogical and digital forms of reasoning. Over Rosselli’s career one can see this pattern assert itself. The information of a factual or digital sort is abundant, but also fragmented. That is because the analogical mode contains the deeper communication of affect and spirit, and the ‘instructions for use’ – the command message – that must be applied to the report message of that empirical data. The presence of an absent interlocutor is affective and spiritual in nature (not political or ideological) and depends on analogical structures for its coherence. Across this gap there exists, as I have suggested, a dialogical impulse. Over the decades of Rosselli’s poetry, there is frequently an absent interlocutor. While the identity of this ‘other’ is not clear, it can involve a presence or the simple recipient of a correspondence in which the

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codes of communication are held in common. Yet Rosselli’s poetry aims to communicate at all costs, and herein lies its tremendous tension (and perhaps the confusion of those critics who would diminish the poetry by giving it an ideological interpretation). In summary, Rosselli’s imagery (with the rose being the case in point) belongs to a time and place that is not here and now. Rosselli’s image is a retrospective and anticipatory figure, a figure of melancholy, lushness, and potentiality – it is a mantle and a manacle of religious hedonism, of musical practice, of vertigo but also of balance. It is a manifold symbol of the tangles of language and the escape from them. Amidst so many deferrals and absences, Rosselli demonstrates a faithfulness to experience, in which the risk of perishing is always present. Her writing is the act of a scribe who documents the interior voice that paradoxically pushes her to exteriorize herself in a form of reasoning that can demonstrate its own limitations. In this sense it is sublime, a representation of the nonpresentable: the integration of aesthetic and logical forms of communication takes place ‘elsewhere,’ beyond the strictures of conventional language or that of constituted schools and styles. While such ‘errors’ as Rosselli engages in threaten the premises on which her arguments are based, was that not also true for the logical meanderings of Tasso, Rimbaud, Leopardi, Campana, and Montale, that is to say, of her favourite poets?

PART THREE Peripheral Novelists and the Problem of Evil

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10 From Z to A: Italo Svevo’s Corto viaggio sentimentale

Written over a three-year period and published in 1923, Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno (hereafter Zeno) did not receive major critical attention until 1925. Eugenio Montale’s review in that year and the acclaim of the French critics Valery Larbaud and Benjamin Crémieux in 1926 launched Svevo’s European and Italian reputation, after three decades of obscurity. Svevo’s late recognition as a literary great – what he called his ‘resurrection of Lazarus’ – made him, in the words of Renato Poggioli, ‘humbly grateful and innocently happy’ about an event seen as a ‘wonder and a miracle, an act of grace and an act of God.’1 The yeasting effect on Svevo’s self-confidence was apparent as he began to write Corto viaggio sentimentale in 1925 after three years of inactivity.2 This short novel (the longest work after Zeno) is usually referred to as being unfinished: the manuscript is in two phases of completion, only one having been recopied from the original draft. Nevertheless, even in this unfinished form, one could argue that the story is complete as such and belongs in the genre of the deliberately ‘non-finito.’3 In any case, little has been written about the literary consequences of the boost in Svevo’s morale or of the buoyancy and humour that underlie the Corto viaggio. As I will show in this chapter, the work offers considerable novelty with respect to Zeno, in particular as regards its linguistic-discursive character, its literary intertextualities, and the positive ethical turn of its protagonist, who stands in marked contrast to the character of Zeno Cosini. With Zeno, Svevo proposed the textual situation of a diary published by a psychoanalyst in order to spite the former patient who wrote it. The ‘novel’ that comprises this presumed series of journal entries is organized thematically around Zeno Cosini’s personal memories, obsessions, habits, and vices, his family and amorous relations, his business associa-

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tions, and, finally, the subject of psychoanalysis. The time-frames of the chapters overlap and are internally discontinuous as well. The work is not an ‘autobiography’ of Zeno so much as the history of his illness, which is that of a hypochondriac constantly in the process of vindicating himself from wrongs he senses he has committed or suspects others sense he has committed.4 Because of the peculiar nature of the narration, the reader is obliged to sort through the equivocations, rationalizations, and self-justifications of Zeno’s self-accounting. There is a continuous sense in Zeno of occluded vistas, blind spots or areas of ignorance in the two planes of discourse – the plane of the subject’s remembering and the plane of his writing of his supposed memories. The duality of vivere versus scrivere is never resolved though a third possibility is suggested, which is the act of writing as an instrument for the exploration of the self and the enhancement of life. This scribal opportunity is not known to Zeno, though it is one he reveals through the meanderings of his unconscious mind.5 The epistemological probing of Zeno and the irony of his constative discourse are of a piece. In other words, one is always experiencing Zeno’s irony, a fact that makes the reader be a partner in the blurring of the boundaries between truth and fiction. Giorgio Luti describes this modality as a ‘diagnostic type monologue’ in which the boundary beween direct discourse and free indirect discourse is effaced.6 The psychological and personal complications of this effacement of a distinction between direct and indirect discourse are such that Zeno is a figure of considerable ambiguity. As Dombroski writes, ‘There is nothing Zeno can write about himself that is true; what is true is only desire and its offspring: contradiction and equivocation.’7 Zeno’s self-irony extends to the question of language: his thoughts come to him in triestino but they are altered when he writes them in toscano.8 Of this dialectal situation, Vincenzo Coletti writes, ‘The language of Svevo’s masterpiece is, if you will, a concrete example of Italian in the phase of standardization, in search of a balance between the old grammar, the spoken language and dialects.’9 Svevo’s Italian reflects changes of usage that were occurring in different ways around the country.10 If its flaws contributed to the slow recognition of Zeno as a modernist masterpiece, the median style combining aspects of dialect and regional Italian with the national language also demanded a new horizon of expectations and a new kind of reader. As Renato Barilli writes, in Svevo’s novels through Zeno, the ‘esempio’ (example) determines the narrative structure, ‘la misura del capitolo steso per comprovare un punto del dibattito etico-epistemologico’ (the

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measure of the chapter drafted to prove a point of the ethical-epistemological debate); in contrast, after Zeno, ‘l’esempio viene meno’ (exemplarity is diminished), giving the prose ‘un carattere non-finito’ (an unfinished character).11 Such a change from the exemplum to the indefinite and open-ended means that the later Svevo is content to look at selected phenomena of the passing reality without using them to demonstrate or prove a larger point. This essential difference frees the author to elevate the intuitive and allusive layers of his text, including his use of literary intertextuality. If the primary intellectual sources for the author of Coscienza are Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Freud, in Corto viaggio the sources are mostly literary: Capuana, Dante, Carducci, Manzoni, Foscolo, and Sterne. Sitting on a promontory at the northern tip of the Adriatic, a neighbour to Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, Trieste was a great seaport. As a part of Svevo’s job as a sales executive for a marine paint manufacturer, he travelled frequently to London; his occasional remarks on the difficulties of learning the English language are enlightening and amusing. Those observations are shared in the Corto viaggio, which was first published episodically in nine instalments in 1945, then in its entirety in 1949.12 Svevo described the work in a letter to Marie Anne Crémieux, noting that he began the work after he had the very positive news of Zeno’s reception in France: ‘Da allora sono immerso fino agli occhi in una mia novella (lunga come una serpe lunghissima) ... [...] Debbo pur fare in modo di arrivare a finirla!’ (‘From that point on I have been immersed up to my eyes in a story (long like a very long snake) ... [...] I must yet find a way to bring it to a conclusion!’).13 The Corto viaggio is written three to four years after Zeno, and after the down time when Svevo did not write, regathering his forces. The book deserves more attention than it has received, also because of its reframing and reversal of the problematics one associates with Zeno. As Giacomo Debenedetti notes, in his final period Svevo was more optimistic and possessed a more ‘obedient’ attitude toward nature: ‘L’ultimo Svevo ha, dello scrivere, un’opinione più rabbonita. [...] Nel buon vecchio, anche la morale è un conforto’ (‘Svevo in his final period has a calmer opinion about writing. [...] In the good old man, morality too is a comfort’).14 Corto viaggio is the story of a train journey from Milan to Trieste by Mr Aghios, an elderly Triestine who has not been apart from his wife in twenty years; he will be rejoined by his wife in a matter of days . The trip east through Lombardy, the Veneto, and Venezia-Giulia acquires

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its narrative structure from the literal passage of the train. Each of its seven chapters carries the place-name of one leg of the journey. Seen thus the journey is a chronotope, a textual manifestation of the cultural time-space traversed by the protagonist. What mediates between this and the more personal time-space of Aghios are his continuous encounters and cultural relations with his fellow travellers, and his reflections about them. The theme of kindness toward strangers is paired with the theme of aging and the relations between the generations. In addition to these universal questions, there are specific cultural issues relative to the historic context. Each encounter serves as an emblem of particular speech patterns knitted together into a patchwork of discrete and resistant languages. When considering the problems of communication reflected in the mixture of languages and dialects, it is useful to recall that when the regions of Trentino-Alto Adige and Venezia-Giulia were annexed to Italy in 1919, Slovenian and German speakers became Italian citizens. Furthermore, it was only in 1923 – after the completion of Zeno – that the new Fascist government extended its linguistic politics to these areas: ‘It was decreed in 1923 that teaching in all primary schools had to be carried out “in the language of the state”. [...] The purpose of this policy [...] was to make linguistic minorities “Italians in sentiment.”’15 This new citizenship of Italo Svevo, and his own complex ‘sentiments’ about the national state and language, are richly present in the Corto viaggio. Mr Aghios’s aim is to know himself by understanding the freedom/ slavery dichotomy that conditions his marriage. As the book opens, he is saying goodbye to his wife at the Milan station, a departure that requires an entire chapter to accomplish!16 First of all, he needs to find his train: ‘Un treno non è una cosa piccola, ma il signor Aghios nella vasta stazione non trovava il suo’ (‘A train is not a small thing, but in the vastness of the station Signor Aghios could not find his’) (CVS 15). When he does find the train, it is with the help of the Milanese porter whose dialect he cannot understand. The two men are reduced to a language of gestures, including the ritual of tipping, the importance of which for Aghios is to be found in the self-satisfaction of the tipper. Anticipating his departure, Aghios recalls his trip to England twenty years earlier, when he had been away from his wife for several months. On that occasion he returned to Italy with a handful of English soil; since Darwin had presumably stated that a microscopic worm had converted the English rock to fertile soil, Aghios hoped to do likewise with the Italian soil.17 More than anything else, this reveals Aghios’s tenuous

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understanding of the sciences. He has also allowed his family to become a kind of curtain behind which he hides from reality; he hopes this trip will allow him the freedom to emerge from this situation, though he suspects he will be disappointed, like a dying man awaiting the inevitable: Egli sarebbe ritornato dietro a quel velo per vivere nella penombra, protetto, sicuro, ma moribondo rassegnato. Proprio così! Come i moribondi che, abbacinati dalla meta vicina, non conoscono altro sforzo che di trattenere la vita che vuol staccarsi da loro, incapaci di vedere, sentire o salutare le altre cose, concentrati come sono nel lavoro divenuto difficile di respirare e digerire. (CVS 12) He would return behind the veil and live in the half-shadows, protected, safe, but dying in resignation. Just like that! Like the dying, who are so hypnotized by their coming end that their sole effort is to hang on to the life which wants to shake them loose; they are incapable of seeing, feeling, or welcoming other things, absorbed as they are in the difficult business of breathing and digesting.

This ‘veil’ stands to symbolize the character’s self-concealment from society, but also from his family; it is analogous to the veil of illusory beauty that Aghios sees on his wife’s face as he leaves her at the Milan station; it is also the veil of language that strives to represent the sentiments through literature. The arrival of the train – ‘Il treno entrò sbuffando in stazione’ (The train came puffing into the station) (CVS 18) – recalls Carducci’s classic text, ‘Alla stazione in una mattina d’autunno’ (‘Già il mostro ... sbuffa’), in which the poet’s lover is described as wearing a ‘velo,’ a word twice more applied to her: Ahi, la bianca faccia e ’l bel velo salutando scompar ne la tènebra. O viso dolce di pallor roseo, [...] Ah, the white face and the fair veil, / saying farewell, fade in the dark! // O rosy pallor on her sweet face.18

As Svevo’s character sees his wife fade in the distance, her beauty grows: Corrispose al suo saluto mandandole un bacio. La fine elegante figura della moglie che da vicino si scorgeva un po’ disseccata dall’età, ora, come il

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movimento del treno aumentava la distanza fra di loro, gli appariva veramente graziosa con quel velo roseo che, puntato sul cappello, si muoveva nella brezza. (CVS 23–4) He responded by throwing her a kiss. Now, as the train increased the distance between them, the fine, elegant figure of his wife – only from close up could one see she was a shade withered, a shade dried up by age – looked very graceful, with the pink veil pinned to her hat fluttering in the breeze.

Carducci’s poem refers to the lover as ‘la persona gentile’; the same adjective ‘gentile’ is used repeatedly in Corto viaggio, along with the words ‘saluto,’ ‘gioia,’ ‘speranza,’ and ‘avventura,’ suggesting a not altogether ironic reference to the aulic register of the courtly love lyric. There are nine uses of ‘gentile,’ eight of ‘gentilezza,’ and twelve of ‘gioia’ in Corto viaggio. As Aghios leaves Milan, the veil of his wife in the distance becomes the nostalgic figure of amor de lonh (or love at a distance): E, avviandosi alla sua solitudine, guardando quella figura snella, volle avere il pensiero preciso e sincero e pensò: ‘Più m’allontano da lei e più l’amo’. Poi si sentì la coscienza tranquilla. Per il momento, insomma, egli si trovava in ordine con la legge umana e divina, perché egli, sinceramente, amava la propria donna. (CVS 24) And as he advanced into solitude, when he looked back at the slender little figure of his wife, one clear, sincere thought came to him: ‘The farther I travel from her the more I love her.’ Only then did he feel his conscience at ease. Or rather, at that moment he found himself in accord with both human and divine law, for he loved his wife sincerely.

Aghios feels ‘remorse’ at loving his wife more once the train has departed, but he also senses an ‘adventure’ has begun. When he sums up his past sorrows as follows, ‘Ma il dolore ricordato non è sempre dolore’ (But unhappiness recalled is not always unhappiness) (CVS 11), one hears an echo of Inferno v.121–3: ‘Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / ne la miseria’ (There is no greater sorrow than thinking back upon a happy time in misery).19 With the polarities reversed from those of Dante’s Francesca, one sees Aghios hoping that his own recollection of sorrow will be a springboard to happiness. Once the train has departed, his first ‘romantic adventure’ (avventura suggests a tryst in Italian) is no more than a sidelong glance at a

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woman’s leg. One digression follows another as Aghios mulls and reflects on minutiae in the manner of Sterne; as the train heads east to the Italian periphery, he proclaims to himself his hope and joy and desire to feel free.20 The first person Aghios must confront is himself, and he does so literally, staring at his reflection in the crowded compartment: ‘Si analizzò accuratamente. Irrimediabilmente vecchio con quella fronte troppo alta ed i mustacchi non curati, un po’ troppo gonfi’ (He analysed it carefully. Irremediably old, with that too-high forehead and unkempt, too-bushy moustache) (CVS 37). He goes on to cite a scientific explanation reported to him by his son, that whiskers belong to creatures who burrow in the dark, defining the navigable space so they do not strangle themselves. After this troubling association, which reveals his insecurity, Aghios anticipates the problems and opportunities he will encounter on his journey. His thoughts turn to women; to have amorous desires, he decides, is a matter of free will: E il signor Aghios assurse anzi ad un pensiero altamente filosofico: Se il signor Iddio ci avesse fatti proprio allo scopo di vederci agire proprio come lui vuole, non ci sarebbe stato scopo alla creazione. Egli ci fece, eppoi stette a guardarci con curiosità e mai con ira. Perciò il signor Aghios desiderava le donne degli altri, senza averne rimorso (CVS 30) Signor Aghios then soared to a highly philosophical thought: if the Lord God had created us merely to see us do as he wished, there would have been no point in the creation. No, he created us, and then stepped back to examine us – with curiosity, never with wrath. So Signor Aghios coveted his neighbours’ wives without a trace of remorse

Woman is said to give through her beauty a sense of shared humanity to strangers; Aghios recalls a theory that says young women can revivify an old man’s memory. As he ruminates on marriage and the desirability of freedom and free thinking, he concludes that ‘he wanted to live his own life – his own journey,’ to know ‘the great freedom of travel.’ He resents the presence on the train of a young passenger who publicly decants the wisdom of the science of psychoanalysis, and is happy to see him leave. As if in response to this, Aghios affirms to himself the necessity of selflove: E forse, a riprova del riposo assoluto avuto, ridestandosi il signor Aghios giunse al suo mondo con un giudizio sintetico: ‘Io sono un vecchio che

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non amerebbe nessuno e da nessuno sarebbe amato se non ci fossi io stesso che amo e da cui sono amato’. Bisognava rischiarare il mondo a cui egli ritornava. Sorrise, perché non ci fu amarezza. (CVS 44) And, perhaps as a reproach to himself for so much oblivion, on reawakening Signor Aghios returned to the world with a synthetic judgment: ‘I am an old man who would never love anyone or ever be loved by anyone, were it not for my own self, which I love and which loves me.’ He had in some way to illumine the world to which he was returning. He smiled, for he felt no bitterness.

The ‘synthetic judgment’ suggests that of Kant and the idea of affective knowledge as critical if one is to reason effectively about the world and the limitations of one’s knowledge. At this point Aghios enters into a reverie recalling his longtime friendship with a Triestine painter (later identified as Umberto Veruda, a friend of Svevo’s) and their relaxed mountain excursions decades earlier in the Carnian Alps. Aghios also meets a fellow traveller, Mr Borlini, an insurance inspector who is headed to Padua where he must adjust a claim. Borlini emerges as a foil for Aghios, a large and outspoken man with no room in his life for fantasies or dialects; a staunch defender of the national state, he criticizes his young son for wanting to have toys in his bed and being afraid of the dark. Borlini’s denial of sentiments brings Aghios’s sentiments into relief: Aghios is seen by the insurance inspector as an idle dreamer and even perhaps a fool, since he admits to carrying fifty thousand lire in his breast pocket (in actuality it is thirty thousand). Meanwhile a third passenger is sleeping in the compartment, a young blond Friulian by the name of Giacomo Bacis. When the train pulls out of Verona a peasant family speaking Friulian dialect has joined the compartment, but their tickets are only third class. The young girl of the family is staring out the window and is distressed because she cannot see the entire train. While this desire earns her the scorn of Borlini, Aghios sympathizes with her point of view: Il piacere del viaggio sarebbe tutt’altro se si avesse potuto vedere il grande treno con la sua macchina come procedeva traverso la campagna, come un serpente veloce e silenzioso. Vedere la campagna, il treno e se stessi nello stesso tempo. Quello sarebbe il vero viaggio. (CVS 60) The pleasure of the journey would have been completely different if she

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had been able to see that great train with its engine as it slithered across the countryside like a swift, silent serpent. To see the landscape, the train, and oneself at the same time – that really would have been travelling.

One might say that the young girl has expressed in figurative terms, by her stated inability to see herself moving through space, the epistemological question regarding the individual’s inability to observe his or her thoughts and actions objectively. The issue is a contemporary one that Svevo has put into literary form with some wit: the impossibility of arriving at an Archimedean point from which to view one’s own physical existence. In the modern period, with the advent of relativism in philosophy and science, this paradox is inverted; as Schrödinger wrote: ‘The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is in itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.’21 The peasant family is informed by the conductor that they must move from the second-class car in which they are travelling to third class. What Aghios empathizes with is the affective knowledge that such desires as the peasant girl’s represent. He grows impatient with Borlini and with the journey itself: ‘Il vero viaggio sarebbe stato quello con la diligenza traverso a vere vie naturali (chiamava naturali quelle prive di ferro) ...’ (The true journey would be the one in a carriage, along honest, natural roads (natural roads for him were ones without iron rails) ...) (CVS 66).22 The carriage ride on real roads, stopping and starting as one pleased, that would be the real journey! Now as the men’s discussion turns to their separation from their families, Borlini is cold and stoic, to which Aghios retorts, ‘Io, invece, quando sono in famiglia penso a tutti loro e spero che quando sono assente tutti pensino a me’ (As for me, on the contrary, when I’m at home I think of them all, and hope, when I’m away, that they all think of me). Borlini replies, ‘Sarebbe ella forse un poeta travestito?’ (You wouldn’t by chance be a poet in disguise?) (CVS 71). This man in the Fascist mould, ‘il vero uomo normale’ (the true, normal man) (CVS 70) as Aghios sees him, advocates Italian ‘unanimity’: ‘Parlava di politica ed asseriva che sarebbe bastato il buon volere di tutti per trarre l’Italia da ogni difficoltà. Circa quaranta milioni di buon volere. L’unanimità!’ (He was talking politics, and saying that goodwill on the part of everyone was all that was needed to extricate Italy from all her difficulties. Roughly forty million goodwills. Unanimity!) (CVS 76). For Aghios – a new citizen of Italy – the Italians are naturally divisive

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and diverse, so he looks askance at Borlini’s insistence on ‘Il voto ... obbligatorio’ (The obligatory ... vote) (CVS 77). As Borlini rises to get off at Padua, he remarks that it looks as if it’s going to rain. This prompts an informative expansive comment from Aghios about the weather, to which Borlini replies that Aghios knows much about the weather. Aghios replies modestly that he doesn’t know much but has noticed the following occurrence prior to the sunset: ‘“Osservai spesso che il sole, al momento di partire, s’ammanta, quasi volesse nascondervici, di dense nubi che poi, quando non vi è più bisogno di loro, spariscono”’ (‘I have often noticed that the sun, just before sunset, cloaks itself in heavy clouds, as if trying to hide, and when the clouds are no longer needed, they drift away’) (CVS 82). Hearing this ephemeral language, Borlini returns mockingly to his earlier label for Aghios: Sbadigliò, sorrise e disse: ‘Poeta.’ Soltanto che la ‘e’ di poeta divenne una ‘a’ larga come quella bocca. E quando l’ispettore dopo un breve saluto partì, il signor Aghios pensò che il maggior frutto del suo viaggio era la scoperta di essere un poeta. (CVS 82–3) He yawned, smiled, and said: ‘The poet!’ Except that the e in ‘poet’ came out as an a as broad as his yawn. And when, after a brief word of parting, the investigator left, signor Aghios reflected that the chief benefit from his journey up to now was learning that he was a poet.

Eduardo Saccone has focused on Borlini’s idea of a poet in disguise. With regard to Aghios’s alleged identity as ‘poet,’ says the critic, the adjective ‘travestito’ (in disguise) concerns Aghios’s tendency to keep his desires hidden. This is what Aghios himself tells us: Egli credeva d’essere un uomo che desiderava tante cose non permesse e che – visto che non erano permesse – le proibiva a se stesso, lasciandone però vivere intatto il desiderio. Egli poi non ne parlava neppure e stava facendo delle asserzioni che dovevano celare meglio – negandoli – quei desiderii. (CVS 82–3) He believed himself to be a man who desired many things not permitted and which – since they were not permitted – he denied himself, allowing the desire for them however to live on intact. He did not discuss it and was making assertions that would best conceal – by denying them – those desires.

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Saccone states that Aghios’s mental oscillations between the poles of slavery/freedom, duty/pleasure, monogamy/adultery contravene the pursuit of an ostensible goal, whether it is sexuality or freedom or pleasure. Aghios is said to be ‘tormented’ by the label of ‘poet.’ The critic concludes that for Aghios it is not joy that matters but the desire for joy; it is not freedom he seeks but the rule (‘la regola’); though he knows what reality is, Aghios limits himself to dreaming.23 Against this pessimistic view I would argue that Aghios escapes the binarisms of his earlier condition, largely through his creative involvements in the events and individuals he encounters. If the awareness of freedom’s nature comes with a strong dose of disillusionment, that too is accepted as the reality. It is through Aghios’s reconciliation of memories and his current reality – through the sentiments and reason – that he achieves his own ‘poetic’ nature. A critical element in this affirmation of life is the negotation of difficulties and the exercise of patience and prudence in one’s dealings with others, especially those who are difficult or dishonest. Thus when Borlini persists in his authoritarian comments concerning society, Aghios does not protest. He simply grows quiet and gazes out at the countryside where new housing is being constructed; he reflects on the future: ‘“L’avvenire del mondo era di divenire tutto un’unica, una sola città. Addio campagne, addio boschi, addio prati. Come avrebbero mangiato tutti costoro? Chimicamente? Oh! Disgraziati”’ (‘The world of the future is destined to become a single vast city. Farewell to the countryside! Farewell woodlands! Farewell meadows! How would all those people live? On chemicals? Oh, the poor devils!’) (CVS 78). One hears an echo here of Lucia’s speech in the Promessi sposi upon leaving Lecco, ‘Addio, monti...,’ an echo found again at the end of the Corto viaggio, when Aghios reflects, ‘Addio sentimento della libertà del viaggio, addio benevolenza. Somigliava ad una di quelle figure sintetizzate tanto bene nelle nubi nere e minacciose, ma egli non ricordava né le nubi, né i cani e neppure le belle donne, i suoi aggradevoli monti compagni di viaggio’ (Farewell to the freedom of travel! Farewell benevolence! He seemed like one of those figures composed by black threatening clouds, but he didn’t remember the clouds or the dogs or even the beautiful women, the agreeable mountain-peak companions of his journey) (CVS 142).24 By this allusion to Manzoni and the previous references to the courtly lyric, to Dante and Carducci, there is some support for Borlini’s suggestion that Aghios is a poet in disguise. From the very start of Corto viaggio one sees the poet’s emphasis on diction, such that each sentence seems

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to contain a ‘paragraph’ of sentiment. The book began as follows: ‘Con dolce violenza il signor Aghios si staccò dalla moglie e a passo celere tentò di perdersi nella folla che s’addensava all’ingresso della stazione’ (With a gentle wrench, Signor Aghios took leave of his wife, and, walking briskly, tried to lose himself among the people thronging the entrance to the station) (CVS 5). The oxymoronic tone set by ‘dolce violenza’ is reinforced by the following: ‘E il signor Aghios pensò che il lieve rancore che sentiva per la moglie, un sentimento sgradevolissimo, sarebbe sparito non appena si sarebbe trovato solo’ (And Signor Aghios guessed that the slight rancour he felt toward his wife (a most unpleasant feeling) would vanish as soon as he was alone) (CVS 7). The antiphrastic expression ‘lieve rancore’ seems to be a citation of Luigi Capuana’s 1907 ‘Fatale influsso’ (Fatal Influence), a story of marital infelicity in which a sculptor who has stopped loving his wife fears she can read his thoughts: ‘Cominciavo a sentire, e ne avevo dispetto, un senso di lieve rancore per quella che mi sembrava sua ostentazione d’ingannarmi. Non so che cosa avrei poi fatto, se Delia mi avesse risposto: “No, non t’amo! Meriti forse d’essere amato?”’ (I began to feel, and I was spiteful about it, a sense of mild rancour for what seemed to me her ostentation to deceive me. I don’t know what I would have done if Delia had answered me: ‘No, I don’t love you! Do you perhaps deserve to be loved!’).25 To convince himself otherwise he hypnotizes her (with his electromagnetic ‘fluid,’ as was believed by the spiritists of the time) with the result that she gains the powers of clairvoyance he had feared. The two works in question share the theme of slavery in marriage. In contrast to Capuana’s protagonist, Aghios sets out in pursuit of his freedom; the oft-iterated pair ‘gioia e speranza’ gives an early indication of his naivete and his earnestness to seek out new encounters, though at first these are no more than vicarious associations.26 The intertextual markers suggest a new turn in the author, as also suggested in the unfinished fourth novel, Le confessioni del vegliardo (The Confessions of the Old Man, 1928), in which Svevo’s autobiographical character sees the goal of life as ‘meditation’ and ‘literaturization’: ‘Oh! L’unica parte importante della vita è il raccoglimento. Quando tutti lo comprenderanno con la chiarezza ch’io ho tutti scriveranno. La vita sarà letteraturizzata.’ (Oh! The only important part of life is meditation. When everyone understands it with the clarity that I do everyone will write. Life will be literaturized).27 Because of the emphasis on diction, one can say that poetry is inscribed in the work. This is confirmed by Triestine critic Claudio Magris, who refers repeatedly to the late Svevo as a ‘poeta.’ With reference to Le confessioni del vegliardo he writes: ‘La poesia

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di Svevo è anche negli spazi bianchi fra le righe, nelle pause di silenzio durante il colloquio psicoterapeutico, nell’inespresso e nel sottaciuto; la sua penna circoscrive spesso un vuoto, il vuoto dell’amore assente e perduto.’ (Svevo’s poetry is also in the white spaces between the lines, in the pauses of silence during the psychotherapy session, in the unexpressed and the concealed; his pen often circumscribes a void, the void of absent and lost love).28 Magris means to refer to Svevo’s fathoming of the crisis in values that pervades modern culture: Svevo è il poeta del disimpegno e del compromesso, e di tutta la tragica amarezza ch’essi sottendono e ch’egli vela nell’ironia; è uno dei poeti più borghesi e meno cristiani della nostra tradizione, così come borghese e aliena da ogni lievito cristiano era la sua società triestina ignara di domani, di speranza e d’utopia. Svevo is the poet of non-commitment and compromise, and of all the tragic bitterness that they imply and which he hides in irony; he is one of the most bourgeois and least Christian poets of our tradition, just as his Triestine society was bourgeois and disinclined to any Christian ferment, unaware of tomorrow, of hope and of utopia.29

While it is true that Svevo remained a secular writer, Magris overstates the case. A convert to Catholicism at the time of his marriage in 1896, Svevo was intensely aware of the communitarian assumptions of Christian writers such as Ernest Renan. His ‘hope’ for the human community and for world peace – the object of a late essay – is channelled in the Corto viaggio into a number of meditations on the future of civilization and on the origins of our social institutions, and more generally in the goal of benevolence, generosity, and kindness toward strangers. As seen in Aghios’s recollection of his visit to a corner of Friuli that did not even seem Italian, the author’s idea of the ‘Italian’ concerns the feelings of the citizen on the periphery, the anomaly, the artist. Such a view understands the Italian koine, or common language, as a multiple and heterogeneous, dialect-inflected code shared by the koinonia, the common fellowship of speech. As the train moves to Mestre (near Venice), Aghios begins to speak to Bacis – whose name means ‘speaker’ in Greek, and by extension ‘prophet’ or seer. Once in Venice, he invites Bacis to visit the city with him as they wait for their next train. Aghios hires a gondolier whom he knows named Bortolo to deliver them to Piazza San Marco, where he

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has some business to settle. Aghios wants to be a guide to Bacis as they snake through the darkened canals. While Aghios does indeed know Venice, the city continues to hold much mystery to him: ‘Non conosceva Venezia, ma la teoria su Venezia’ (He did not know Venice, but the theory of Venice) (CVS 95). This city has two characters, that of its ruling class and that of the working people, ‘Venezia sontuosa e Venezia modesta’ (two Venices, the sumptuous and the modest) (CVS 102) . In a draft excluded from the final redaction is this variant: ‘Cosí ci sono due Venezie: una nobile come una stanza da ricevimento ed una rustica. Si completano. Chi trova a Venezia antica dell’altro è un dotto e perciò non ha diritto di parlare’ (There are thus two Venices: one noble like a drawing room and one rustic. They complete one another. One who finds anything else in Venice is a scholar and thus has no right to speak) (RS 499). The layover in Venice is a dramatic departure in the linear pathway of the story; it is here that the journey acquires its most serpentine path. As the men proceed in the darkness of the gondola, Aghios reflects: ‘La Laguna apparteneva a tutti i veneti ed anche a lui. Era il pertugio per cui essi arrivavano al grande mondo’ (The Lagoon belonged to all those of Venetia and thus to him as well. It was the opening through which they all arrived at the great world) (CVS 108). Once again the lexical combinations recall a classical intertext: the dark passage taken by Virgil and Dante at the end of Inferno xxxiv to reach the beach of Purgatory, the ‘pertugio’ (opening) that leads ultimately to the ‘chiaro mondo’ (bright world).30 We know that Svevo had been rereading Dante, whom he described as a pacifist (the expression ‘il poeta’ – the poet – refers to Dante ‘by antanomasia’). At the very least one sees here, in the pitch darkness of the Venetian night, that Aghios is reflecting on death and asking himself if life on earth is a fact of pure chance. His destination in Venice is Piazza San Marco and the shop of the jeweller Meuli, an elementary schoolmate from Trieste whom Aghios had assisted financially after Meuli returned home penniless from his (apparent) experience as a slave-jailer in Jamaica. In an earlier mail-order purchase of a pearl necklace for his wife, Meuli had sent him inferior goods. Now visiting Meuli on another errand for his wife, one sees Aghios’s prudence and generosity of spirit. He reminds Meuli of the assistance he had provided him, wondering how he could have attempted to swindle him. Meuli rebuts by asking if Aghios expected special treatment because of his favour to him: ‘Il Meuli socchiuse gli occhi come se avesse voluto costringerli ad un grande sforzo per penetrare nella notte

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dei tempi. Si ricordò e sorridendo disse: “Era a quel tuo beneficio ch’io dovevo la preferenza che volevi accordarmi? A questo mondo la più bella posizione è quella di essere un beneficato”’ (Meuli narrowed his eyes, as if with great effort to fathom the past. He remembered, and said laughingly: ‘Was it because of your help to me that you chose me rather than another jeweller? In life, the best part is to be the thankful debtor!’) (CVS 101). As with the boorish Borlini, Aghios does not allow himself to sink to the same level as Meuli, but simply accepts his response as adhering to the code of the Venetian mercantile spirit, also seen in Bortolo. Svevo once described the Venetians as ‘un popolo sentimentale, lieto e mordace’ (a sentimental people, cheerful and caustic) (RS 58). Once Aghios and Bacis have returned to the Venice station, they convene for a dinner during which Bacis will tell a ‘tragic’ tale about his life and financial predicaments. He is engaged to Berta and thus a potential heir to her estate in Torlano; since this is the same town in Friuli that Aghios had spoken about to Borlini when Bacis was supposedly sleeping, one suspects Bacis’s truthfulness from the start. He says he is engaged to Berta but is in love with her cousin, Anna, a servant girl. Anna, he says, is pregnant, and he wishes to marry her; but if he breaks the engagement with Berta he must repay her father a portion of the dowry he has already received (he first says ten thousand lire, then ups it to fifteen thousand). Aghios swallows the story along with much wine during the dinner. By chapter’s end it is apparent he wants to give Bacis the money he needs, if he will come to see him in Trieste. Once on the night cargo train to Trieste, Aghios offers his new friend a pillow and falls off to sleep. He has the following dream. He is departing for the planet Mars on a trolley when he hears the voices of his wife and of Bacis ask if he wants their company, which he demurs on. Then suddenly he hears the voice of Anna: ‘“Io sono pronta per la partenza se vuoi”’ (‘I am ready to come if you want me with you’) (CVS 137). He accepts – with confused excitement and paternal affection. When she ends up lying beneath him he pushes her away, but only temporarily: Subito Anna fu seduta lontano da lui, ad un angolo del carrello, in grande pericolo di scivolarne nell’orrendo spazio e l’Aghios gridò: ‘Ritorna, ritorna, si vede che su quest’ordigno non si può stare altrimenti.’ E Anna obbediente ritornò a lui come prima, meglio di prima. E lo spazio era infinito e perciò quella posizione doveva durare eterna. Uno schianto! Si era arrivati al pianeta? Infatti il treno, fermandosi, sembrava volesse distruggere se stesso. (CVS 138–9)

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Instantly, Anna was seated some distance away from him, in a corner of the trolley, in great danger of slipping off into the fearsome void. And Aghios called to her: ‘Come back, come back! It’s the only way we can be safe on this machine.’ And Anna, obediently, returned underneath him as before, better than before. And space was infinite, so their posture together would last for all eternity. Crash! had they arrived on the planet? The train, in fact, jolting to a halt, seemed to be trying to burst into smithereens.

The trip to Mars on a speeding celestial trolley is reminiscent of Astolfo’s trip to the moon on his Hippogryph to recover his wits in the Orlando furioso. In Aghios’s case, what he gains is a strong sense of disillusionment. When he awakes he realizes he has been robbed of half of his money, the exact amount Bacis said he required to pay off Berta’s father. Whether one believes his tale or not, the pilfering of half of the money seems appropriate, given the foolishness of Aghios in announcing his possession of the money in the first place, while Bacis pretended to sleep. Just as Aghios unconsciously committed that act of disclosure, now he has unconsciously committed the act of generosity that he was disposed to. The comparison to Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy is merited by the books’ common theme of life as a journey during which the traveller exercises kindness toward strangers in the form of sincerity, generosity, and benevolence. For the Anglican Sterne (referred to by Foscolo as ‘the reverend Laurence Sterne, parish priest in England [...] a truly good and compassionate man and a sincere follower of the Gospel’) the assumption was that human fellowship was advanced by these sentiments, which also served to favour the amorous relation. Foscolo sums up Sterne’s qualified rejection of the apparent French notion that love is made by the sentiments: ‘Che l’amore non deriva da’ sentimenti volontari di generosità e di benevolenza ecc., ma che è un nuovo stato, benché talvolta continuo, dell’anima, e dal quale invece derivano tutti que’ sentimenti’ (That love doesn’t derive from the voluntary sentiments of generosity and benevolence, etc., but is a new condition of the soul, though sometimes in continuity with those sentiments which rather derive from it).31 In his translation Foscolo used his pen-name, Didimo Chierico, and attempted to surpass the existing translations by imitating the Italian language of the Trecento even as he adopted a kind of AngloTuscan jargon capable of negotiating the work’s arduous linguistic complexity.32 As Yorick encounters France (and French women), one also witnesses the comic mastery of Sterne’s prose in depicting the contact of cultures,

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often in analytical descriptions of the physical disposition of the characters as they share courtesies and inch toward flirtation. Bakhtin wrote as follows about Sterne’s style: Comic style (of the English sort) is based [...] on the stratification of common language and on the possibilities available for isolating from these strata, to one degree or another, one’s own intentions, without ever completely merging with them. It is precisely the diversity of speech, and not the unity of a normative shared language, that is the ground of style.33

A similar technique is found in Svevo’s book. As in Sterne one finds the layering of different sorts of generic discourse, a heteroglossia of languages including the Milanese of the porter; the Friulian of the peasants on the train; the bureaucratic national language of the insurance inspector Borlini; the Triestine of Aghios; the literary code and language of the dolce stil nuovo and the chivalric romance; and indirect references to English, a kind of linguistic Gordian knot, ever defying Aghios’s comprehension. As with Sentimental Journey, the form of the book imitates the form of the journey; such a structuring device allows for a detailed exploration of the cultural attitudes experienced by the traveller, with great attention to chance events, language differences, and gestures. The straightforward approach to these matters is perhaps best suggested in Sterne’s words: ‘But what were the temptations (as I write not to apologize for the weaknesses of my heart in this tour, – but to give an account of them) shall be described with the same simplicity with which I felt them.’ Sterne provides a typology of travellers: Thus the whole circle of travellers may be reduced to the following heads: Idle Travellers, Inquisitive Travellers, Lying Travellers, Proud Travellers, Vain Travellers, Splenetic Travellers. Then follow: The Travellers of Necessity, The Delinquent and Felonious Traveller, The Unfortunate and Innocent Traveller, The Simple Traveller, And last of all (if you please) The Sentimental Traveller, (meaning thereby myself) who have travell’d, and of which I am now sitting down to give an account, – as much out of Necessity, and the besoin de Voyager, as any one in the class.34

Sterne’s protagonist, Yorick, is a sentimental traveller, but also one of necessity. Svevo writes an apparent reference to these categories, in which Aghios seems to emulate the Sternean model: ‘Il signor Aghios, nel suo sentimentalismo da viaggiatore ozioso, corse ad aiutare’ (With his sen-

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timentalism of the leisurely traveller, Mr Aghios hastened to the other’s assistance) (CVS 85). Certainly Aghios may have begun as an idle traveller, but he evolves in his journey into the true sentimental traveller, the necessity of whose mission is found in the relations he establishes. It is significant that ‘benevolenza’ appears twelve times in Corto viaggio (including the last paragraph) and not once in Zeno. The moderate syncretism of Sterne, whose Anglicanism existed in harmony with the age of reason and the rise of the natural sciences, is embraced by Svevo as a compelling moral and literary model. At the end of Sterne’s book, the protagonist Yorick offers to share his room at the roadside inn – which is au complet – with a distressed Damsel and her maidservant (the ‘fille de chambre’). He guarantees discretion and propriety by hanging a sheet between the beds. Yet as night falls in the crowded room, the hands of Yorick and the maidservant are connecting through the scrim. Here too the book ends in an ellipsis: ‘So that when I stretch’d out my hand I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s.’ The suspicion of an amorous jouissance beyond the narrative scope and ‘delicacy’ of the work, with its persistent irony and sense of comic frustration, is similar to the dream scene at the end of the Corto viaggio where Aghios – who has dozed off in a wine-induced stupor – dreams of a carnal embrace with Anna, the lover of Bacis, which he also suppresses out of a sense of shame and decency. One can say that the impossibility of jouissance in Aghios’s case, as reality intervenes to crush the illusion, is a sign of the character’s progress and of his greater awakening, now at the book’s conclusion. In short the disillusionment contains a hope: for a greater cultivation of the aesthetic sensibility and the ethic of generosity toward others. Though he is not aware of it, Aghios has committed an act of altruism and generosity. The book ends with an ellipsis, with the city name of the destination interrupted: ‘Alla stazione di Tries’ (At the station of Tries). While Svevo’s other novels are all rooted in Trieste, the Corto viaggio ends exactly upon entering that city, now at the northeastern boundary of the Italian nation. Such an inversion or reversal of the author’s writerly custom is to end at the beginning, since Trieste is the perennial nest and womb of Svevo’s protagonists. Aghios’s progress is also that of Svevo, who, as stated by Debenedetti and Poggioli, was enjoying a period of optimism and bonhomie before the accident that ended his life. Let us clarify this by returning to the character of Borlini, the insurance inspector who is the work ethic personified, a model of business efficiency and a denier of the force of the unconscious and the sentiments.35 Zeno Cosini had been Svevo’s great

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response to such an ethic: an anti-economic man, distracted and abulic, alienated and self-sabotaging, a victim of his own pursuit of pleasure.36 Aghios only resembles Zeno at the outset of the story. Aghios’s attempts at compassion and empathy toward strangers are simply not found in Zeno, where the attention is obsessively focused on Zeno’s duplistic selfhood, his ‘mind/body problem,’ his constant deferral of the conflict between sincerity and self-deception. What Aghios comes to embody is the world of the sentiments as reflected in the subversive realm of the arts represented by Umberto Veruda, the Triestine painter and friend of Svevo’s who is named as the gondola piloted by Bortoli passes Ca’ Pesaro, the Venetian museum where Veruda’s Portrait of a Sculptor is housed. Thus the still point in the story is represented by the nighttime passage through Venice, the great mother city for all the residents of greater Venetia. Moving ‘from Z to A,’ from Zeno to Aghios, Svevo was accomplishing a literaturization of life. The movement of the senex toward the puer, from the old man to the child, is a movement toward lightness and optimism, a recovery of infancy. The change is toward humility: in order to arrive there, Svevo traverses the zone of silence, initiating for himself a new art. In the Corto viaggio the narrator is free to enter into the thought processes of the protagonist but also to present the diverse speech patterns of a variety of comic characters. These features were not present in Zeno, where the protagonist’s ineptitude at living and his desperate compensation through writing do not lead one to a positive or uplifting moral conclusion.37 The extent to which such a conclusion is arrived at in the Corto viaggio may depend on the reader’s interpretation of events; but certainly the recognition is gathered over the course of the journey that Svevo’s concern in Corto viaggio is more literary (and metaliterary) than in Zeno. As Renato Poggioli writes, in the wake of his recent success Svevo was rejuvenated: ‘from the naturalism and Schopenhauerian pessimism of his youth he gradually grew to a kind of olympian serenity, and acquired that “merry wisdom” which is so alien to the modern mind.’38 To the extent that Aghios is a ‘poeta travestito,’ he is veiled from himself. But such is true of all literary artists, as Svevo writes in his longest essay, ‘Del sentimento in arte.’ This seminal text may be seen as a vindication of sentiments as against the imperious control of the rational mind: ‘Il sentimento è anzi tutto irragionevole. Ma questo sentimento sa da solo giungere alle più alte sommità’ (Sentiment is above all unreasonable. But this sentiment knows by itself how to reach the highest peaks)

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(RS 679). Svevo writes that it is useless for the literary author to make distinctions between judging and feeling. Reason is not the ultimate tool of the artist. Feeling must be reappraised, though words usually fail: ‘Il sentimento è per sua natura muto’ (Sentiment is by its nature mute) (RS 666). The author is a sort of town scribe who verifies what others have experienced: ‘Il letterato in arte è simile agli scrivani nei villaggi; tutti pensano, tutti fanno, lui scrive. È lui che dà alle arti l’aspetto di guerre guerreggiate’ (The man of letters in the arts is similar to the scribes in the villages; everyone thinks, everyone makes, he writes. It is he who gives the arts the aspect of wars that were fought) (RS 666). This hardfought experience of the artist is intended to yield pleasure, a fact lost on the majority of the public: ‘In teoria tutti sanno che l’arte è fatta per goderne ma in pratica è esiguo il numero di coloro che sappiano conformarsi a questa massima’ (In theory everyone knows that art is made to be enjoyed but in practice the number of those who know how to conform to this maxim is scarce) (RS 668). As our analysis of the Corto viaggio has shown, the ‘literaturization’ of life undertaken by Svevo in this longest post-Zeno work is consistent with the high values placed on the sentiments, on experience, and on the enjoyment of the work of art. For Svevo the emboldened experimentalist, the satisfaction of these scribal tenets involved a meditation on time and space, love and heroism. Aghios is a traveller exposed to the ills of society, to events he cannot change; but he is also drawn into relations with others that challenge him to participate. From the Oedipal confusion of the opening passages, mirrored by the severe constraints on space and the character’s self-obsession, to various incidents by which he grows more involved in the lives of others, and wary of the guile and brutishness of certain people, to the cosmic crescendo of the Venetian episode, a theory of relations is born between the subject and his ethos, including his numerous literary supports. This theory of relations (an example of Bakhtin’s notion of secondariness of language and other communicative codes) is evident in the alloglots and sociolects spoken by each of the characters in the tale. Aghios represents a further development of Zeno’s neurosis; one could say that Aghios’s self-inquiry is homeopathic and acquires figural coherence through the device of the train trip. While the equivocal internal dialogue typical of Zeno is present, it is not undertaken through a first-person narrator but rather in the third person; there is less equivocation and rationalization on the part of the protagonist and a more regular exposure – internally and in conversations – to the actual con-

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cerns of others. Thus, while the Corto viaggio remains a minor work, the non-oppositional relation between its protagonist and Zeno Cosini represents a positive progression, as was consistent with the idea of the ‘literaturization of life.’ Zeno’s oscillation between the reality principle and the pleasure principle is still present in Aghios, but so is the prospect of a self-knowledge and the acquisition – through meaningful relations with others – of a positive morality. The difference between the characters is also evident in the quality of the prose, which in the Corto viaggio is at once more analytical and more allusive than in Zeno. These qualities replicate the pattern Aghios’s thought, which is constantly in motion, in response to the changing landscape. The perceptual diorama of the journey stimulates Aghios to reflect on other people’s emotions, motivations, and speech patterns in a way that Zeno does not. Therefore, the ‘holiness’ of Aghios’s name is not to be taken ironically. Given the chronotopic shape of the book as a journey from the commercial capital of Italy to its extreme northeastern periphery, a journey that goes from morning to night (like Joyce’s Ulysses) and involves the protagonist in a series of arduous challenges of an affective and spiritual nature, one can easily label it as an allegory. Aghios is the Triestine bourgeois as such, an everyman of his particular time and place, a new Italian citizen who witnesses the economic and cultural imbalances of the country even as he ponders his communitarian bond with the rest of fragile humanity.

11 The Pains of the Prophet: Guido Morselli and the Problem of Evil

1 Guido Morselli was born in Bologna in 1912 and died a suicide in Varese in 1973, at which time his only published books were a study of Proust, Proust o del sentimento (Proust, or On Sentiment, 1943), and Realismo e fantasia (Realism and Imagination, 1947), a sequence of nine philosophical dialogues.1 Morselli’s literary popularity began eighteen months after his death with the publication of the first of seven novels with Adelphi. Most discussion of Morselli has focused on these novels. In addition to the two works mentioned above, the non-fiction includes a religious essay, Fede e critica (Faith and Criticism, 1977), largely written during a religious crisis in 1955 and 1956, and the Diario (Diary), published in 1988, a compendium of journal entries taken from seventeen notebooks compiled between 1943 and 1973 (though a few entries date as early as 1938).2 What I would like to suggest is the importance of Morselli the philosopher and essayist in whom questions of intellect and spirit radically coincide and connect that body of thought to the author’s fiction. Despite excellent critical studies by Valentina Fortichiari and Paola Villani, Morselli’s literary opus has yet to be fully connected to his philosophical and religious ideas, his cultural reality and circumspect view of Italy. This neglect is due to Morselli’s difficulty and his marginality with respect to common ideologies, orthodoxies, and literary groupings. It is also a result of his critical involvement as a Christian in questions of faith and theology. Morselli’s father was an industrialist and a member of the Italian Parliament, a man of action deeply admired by his more contemplative, equally hard-working, son. Through his father, about whom he dreamed constantly after his death, Guido gained a unique view of Italian politi-

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cal and economic institutions, as well as an acute sense of his alterity with respect to the national identity. He resided outside of Varese near the border with Switzerland; though he was of Umbrian stock and was fond of invoking that quiet historical centre of Italy, his vantage point as a participant-observer of Italian culture was decidedly peripheral. As a university student in Milan, Morselli studied with the philosopher Antonio Banfi, one of twelve professors who refused to sign the Fascist loyalty oath. The young Morselli focused on Rousseau, Montaigne, Lucretius, and Schopenhauer, as well as Leopardi, La Bruyere, and Proust. It has been said that one produces one’s literary progenitors, rather than being produced by them. Morselli’s first book, Proust o del sentimento (Proust, or On Sentiment) is a case in point. Here the conflict between ideas and feelings is explicated in terms of a general aesthetic crisis; reason, discourse, and classicism are seen in conflict with romanticism, feelings, and the irrational. Proust is analysed on the basis of certain incidents in À la recherche du temps perdu considered as symbolic pillars in its overall stylistic and philosophical landscape. Marcel, the autobiographical narrator of the Recherche, is seen to fill the textual stage with an imperious present in which memory is free to move detached from the world and which privileges the individual’s involvement with the ephemeral and ineffable. Morselli notes in this figure a morbid attraction to the static and inanimate. By the same token he is fascinated by the mechanism of Proust’s memory: ‘Proust’s most poetic pages are those which describe to us, not the content of the memory, but how it rose in him from the unconscious.’3 Dreams of the past and the future lack reality equally, he says, but they coexist in the surges of involuntary memory: ‘ “ideal without being abstract, real without being present”, they restore in us the idea of existence and have at the same time the prestige of the imagination.’4 Proust is said to create a metaphysical jouissance outside of time and beyond the relative, constituting a possible key to his freedom. By responding to the signals of chance, he breaks the wilfulness of human time and physical confinement – if only intermittently – and is transported by the act of remembering into a state of expressive felicity. The fusion of traditionally discrete planes of the novel – narrative, dialogue, and autobiography – into the dominant mode of memory provides a fleeting ‘spiral over the Absolute.’5 A natural outgrowth of Proust’s temporal saturation of the narrative is the splitting of syntactic from semantic time, both of which maintain a relationship to Identity. At one point, notes Morselli, seven pages of spontaneous recollection – semantic time – are inserted between a simple question and answer in the

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‘normal’ diachronic syntax of the narrative. Thus syntax and semantics are disassociated from a common ground, giving rise to an autonomous ‘textual’ time, not regarding the relation of signs to one another but of signs to their makers. It is textual time, with its emphasis on values and principles, that presents the problem of the artist in microcosm. 2. Realismo e fantasia Morselli’s military service during the Second World War was spent in Calabria, and was a decisive period in the development of his thought: the difficult absence from home and the witnessing of much violence plunged the young soldier into a religious crisis. Here he began both Fede e critica (Faith and Criticism) and Realismo e fantasia (Realism and Imagination), building on many of the concepts of the first book – particularly that of Proust’s spiritual feeling or sentiment, and the existence in him of a median point between relativism and subjectivism. Upon returning to Varese, Morselli completed Realismo e fantasia, which was published in 1947. In the introduction to this work a narrative frame is set: the elderly ‘I’ figure states that these are the conversations held between himself and the thirty-year-old Sereno in a pastoral sub-alpine setting with fruit trees and meadows – not unlike Morselli’s own rustic retreat in Gavirate overlooking the Lake of Varese. The fictional frame serves to reinforce Sereno’s concern that art and philosophy must be compatible; as the ‘I’ states in the introduction: ‘if art is defined as an image of the world seen through a temperament, one could define philosophy as a temperament seen through an image of the world.’6 Sereno does not present a system so much as a living philosophy in the process of being formed (he cites in support the process philosophy of Whitehead). In line with his pursuit of an organic and unitary thought, Sereno rejects the ‘intimistic’ genre of Kierkegaard or Gabriel Marcel, on the one hand, and the doctrines of historical idealism of Croce and Hegel on the other. He is eager to integrate current research by psychological and biological scientists with the thoughts of philosophers such as Leibniz, Kant, and Berdiaev. This is not eclecticism so much as a ‘radical realism’ that elevates the ‘coscienza’ (both conscience and consciousness) and the sentiments, as partners with the reason, into the philosophical project. This process thinking is neither empiricist nor subjectivist, though it is careful in delimiting the appropriate role of empiricism for gaining knowledge of the world, and the role of subjectivism for gaining knowledge of the self. The contemporary pursuit of wisdom must be accomplished by a simple and austere,

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positive philosophy that leans naturally toward dialogue and communication, the practical and aesthetically pleasing, and not the abstractions of idealists or the emotional excesses of Romanticism (which, according to Sereno, continue to pervade modern culture). Sereno begins by pointing out traditional philosophy’s error of identifying the cosmos with the infinite, and Nature with the All. Nature is only an aspect – the least substantial one at that – of Existence. Sereno refutes Kant’s aporia – which states there is an antinomy between the finite and infinite – since these are simply references to different concepts; he also rejects Hegel’s equation of the indeterminate and non-being, which he sees as an elegant sophism. Sereno rejects tout court both Marxist and idealist forms of historicism. In opposition to the Hegelian ternary structure of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, he offers a redefinition of the Aristotelian term simploche (or synthesis): As I shall attempt to show you, thinking and being are one thing, and the subject in its every motion and thought [is] conjunction, simploche of Existence and individuality. I borrow this term from Aristotle, who uses it as a synonym of synthesis to indicate judgment, which for him is the union of concepts. In modern technical jargon, synthesis is what results from the negation of a ‘position,’ as from the negation of that negation: it is a determination superior to two contrary determinations, and different from them. The simploche rather is not what results from the opposites, but is the composition of the opposites, insofar as these are complementary, and, in addition to cancelling each other out, they attract one another. It isn’t a third term, different from the opposites, but is their relationship.7

The simploche is thus conceived as an elementary conjunction of the principles of Individuation and Existence. The ‘I am’ is internal sense and organic sense, it is feeling, it is the always new succession of states and contents of consciousness. Sense and feeling, which do not need to be translated into acts of thought because they themselves are immediately thought.8

In formulating his theory of perception and cognition, Morselli gives the lion’s share of the insights to his interlocutor, Sereno, who lives in a pastoral grove and is pleased to entertain the I-figure’s questions. In this respect, the I-figure can speak of ‘my labours as the patient scribe of the Serenian word,’ labours which involve a considerable force of memory

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since the scribe only transcribes the dialogue in his study once the conversation is complete.9 This fictive framework befits Sereno’s peripatetic spontaneity and dedication to the oral method. The scribe – who grows appreciably in his understanding over the nine dialogues – also serves to exemplify the importance accorded to memory in Sereno’s philosophy. At the basis of this philosophy is a diagrammatic understanding of the primary simploche as an equilibrium between the two component-words of the ‘I am’ (‘Io sono’). The idealists are in error because of their intellectualist attempt to extend thought throughout the entire being: the ‘I’ (or individuation). Conversely the relativists are in error because they see thought as a physiological function and ascribe everything to matter or the Totality: the ‘am’ (or existence). Idealists draw on individual experience to assert the precedence of thought over being, while relativists and materialists assert the opposite, based on the same experience. Both are criticized for the apodictic nature of their thought, depending as it does on undebatable, Manichean assertions. It was the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, Morselli feels, which endowed us with our anthropocentric prejudices, our exalted view of the subject, and our preoccupation with immanence and with History (with a capital H). He opposes this by now ubiquitous forma mentis with an empirical and radical realism, a veritable theory of perception and cognition, which returns to nature and places man in his right perspective. Morselli does not share the enthusiasm of his contemporaries for psychoanalysis, which he sees as glorifying irrationalism in the name of the so-called primacy of the unconscious. He denounces the vulgarity of Freudian pansexualism and plans a work entitled ‘The Psychology of the Conscious.’ The pseudo-rationalism of the idealists (DI 154),Kant in particular, is seen as typically anthropocentric, as are those contemporary philosophies that deny that Existence in itself has an intrinsic spiritual character. In contrast to such dualisms, Sereno expresses a unity that is born out of a non-anthropocentric perspective, as was humanism. It is an empirical and illuministic form of realism based on a mediation between subject and object, the ‘I’ and Existence. As Sereno states in Dialogue IV: It is not a question of a psychic process to which another, physical one corresponds. It’s not a question of an adaptation, however precise, of the physiological order to the psychological order. The process is singular; and we can call it, simply, psychic. A process to which the Id (as I told you) lends, not only content, but one of the active principles. ... [T]here is in us a double order of reality, in whose conjunction consists thought and life itself.

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The subject’s belonging to the sphere of Existence is the fundamental fact which renders knowledge possible to it. If we were entirely and in every way Existence, the knowledge of things would be total and perfect in us; but in such a case we would neither feel nor think, because we would have no individuality.10

The Id (or Es) is generally defined as the primitive, psychic energy source of the unconscious. In the tradition of peripatetic dialogues, Sereno gains strength and momentum from his practical chores, from the intervals between dialogues, as, naturally, from the interest of his interlocutor; there is a premium placed on sincerity, and on the ability to change one’s mind and admit an error. The language is austere and precise, resembling that of the great Italian renaissance dialogues with which it shares, in Coletti’s words, ‘the reduction of context to a minimum, or its emblemization; [and] interlocutors who function as “representatives of ideas.”’11 In the final dialogues of Realismo e fantasia Morselli’s attention shifts to the religious material he will consider in Fede e critica. The sin of pride, he writes in Dialogue VII, results from isolating oneself from one’s fellow human beings (RF 318); history has shown the active life to be an even truer path than the contemplative; thus the example of the author of ‘il cantico delle creature,’ St Francis of Assisi, whose life of practical service was ‘corroborated by an impassioned and hard-working charity’; true religion, the author asserts, evolves out of community.12 In Dialogue VIII Sereno states: Therefore the discourse by which we communicate our thoughts may repeat the series of verbal associations which accompanied in us the rising up of that same thought: but that discourse has its efficient cause, not in them, but in thought as concrete representation of the object (or as self-awareness of the subject), or as simploche (primary synthesis), which excludes any intermediary, reason, consciousness, or intellect, whatever you wish to call it. [...] Being conscious of a sensory message, perceiving it, is different from being able to name it. I maintain that the word originates in us, also physically, from the simploche (or ‘primary synthesis’): which, far from being a simple image of the sensation, is the sensation itself. [...] The word is the reflection of a phenomenon, the sensibility, which is in every subject a singular experience, but whose content is similar for everyone.13

In Dialogue IX Sereno discusses art and criticism, as well as beauty, ugliness, form, content, and theme. Criticism is seen to be an art more than

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a science (though a literary critic is expected to be philologically accurate). A critic must separate the meaning, the inspiration, and the sentiment which distinguish a work. More than the mere appreciator – who is satisfied to either define content or engage in ‘the ecstatic adoration of style’ – the critic must confront the incomplete nature of a work, and show how it beckons for the reader’s involvement, in order to finish it. The reader in this sense recreates the text, an idea Sereno defends by referring to Leopardi and Kant. It is perhaps in the Proustian crisis of aesthetic expression, which derives from idealists and Romantics alike, which lies at the bottom of Morselli’s own ‘speculation’ in fiction. On the topic of love Sereno states that through the superior love manifest in Christ, one reconciles ‘divergent mystical revelations’ in a harmonious religious practice: Love is more than mere abandonment to carnality, just as it is much more than proud exaltation, a drunkenness of the ‘I’, though it has been identified with both of these ‘values,’ especially by the Romantics.14

He also believes that the ideological excesses of the Romantic period led to nationalism and racism, and destroyed the cosmopolitan spirit of the Enlightenment and the chances for a Europe unified by a commonwealth. 3. Fede e critica One of the first entries in the Diario (Diary), from 1943, deals with the introduction into monotheism of the second person of the Trinity, the figure of Christ (DI 7). One of the final entries in the Diario, dated 9 June 1972, is a clarification about the nature of the Gospel: The Gospel announces: – religion is not speculation (it is not theology); – religion is not formalism (or liturgy); – religion is not askesis (or purification); – religion is not even a rule of conduct (it is not a moral doctrine) [...] Faith, the Gospel announces, is love. Because God himself is love, and through love he is incarnate. [...] Jesus is the source of that truth that has revolutionized faith, which has made faith possible to all men, if they only be capable of feeling love. (DI 377)15

This entry is written against the views of Rudolf Bultmann, the theologian who argued one should demythologize the Gospel. Morselli was

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drawn instead to the Protestant theologians Karl Barth and Nikolai Berdiaev.16 The religious matter was constant in Morselli’s thought, as was the concern that contemporary theology was had gone astray along with the culturalism – as he called it – that dominated philosophical, intellectual, and literary discourse in the twentieth century. Fede e critica (Faith and Criticism), which had the working title Imparare a credere (Learning to Believe), is an essay in ten chapters written largely in 1955 and 1956. This inquiry into the human experience of the divine stands as the most rigorous example of Morselli’s conviction that in an appropriate Christian theology intellect and emotions are to be balanced. He refutes the notion that only specialists can speak authoritatively about matters of faith and distrusts the presumed powers of academic language when it comes to matters of theology. He doesn’t accept the romantic notion that language is the immediate and truthful expression of the intimate spirit of the individual. Since Christianity has aspects that are both transcendent and immanent, he finds it essential to ‘sketch out a physiology of religious faith’ (FC 13) able to integrate the language of speculative reason with that of the heart. To discuss a physiology of faith is to confront the tension between one’s sense of self, or ego, and the contradictory desires that arise from that, the sense of insufficiency and defeat, and the desire to know God. Given our human limitations, literature has an important role, as it can dramatize the processes of change in our personal and spiritual lives. The attempt of Bultmann and others to demythologize the Bible was antithetical to Morselli’s aims, which were to gain from the literature of the Bible what literature has to offer: a sense of process and of an evolving narrative, whether that be of the individual believer or of Christianity itself, which for Morselli had evolved into a superior religion out of earlier belief systems. Chapter 1 of Fede e critica, ‘Perché si soffre?’ (Why Do We Suffer), is a treatment of the theodicy or the reconciliation of God’s goodness and the presence of evil. Rejecting speculative forms of religion that reduce evil to ‘pure negativity’ (FC 24), Morselli takes up the case of Augustine, whose view that suffering and evil are simply the lack of good he rejects. This theory of the defectus boni would identify sin as inherent in the act of creation and thus deprive the sinner of responsibility. Against this theory Morselli supports a ‘primitive, spontaneous religiosity’ such as Dante’s that saw Adam in the originary state as comparable only to Christ; thus human limitations and worldly contingencies are not in themselves sinful. While philosophy, within its proper limits, places faith in a cold category, for the believer faith is the warmth and light at the heart of the

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spiritual life. A faith unquestioned is not valid, as is seen in those theologians overly concerned with theodicies and not with the love and charity at the heart of the evangelical message. For Morselli, the suffering of Job, often deemed an archetype of theological contradiction of God’s infinite goodness, must be seen as being followed by Job’s revolt at what he’s been forced to suffer, and God’s indulgence toward him: ‘God is inclined to indulgence toward those who rise up against his decrees, but not toward those who pretend to unveil his mystery, subordinating it to the criteria of an albeit rigorous, but anthromorphic, legality.’17 Continuing to focus on the problem of evil, Morselli writes in Chapter 3, ‘Without God, evil has nothing (in a theoretical way) obscure about it; not even for those who allow for only evil in this world.’18 There is throughout the book a sense that faith, as feeling and as mystery, must be respected without subjugating it to the reductive explanations of negative theologies, which assume that God is absolutely unknowable, or positive theologies, which assume that God is perfectly knowable. It is precisely through a more literary appreciation of enigma, metaphor, allegory, parable, and the lyric qualities of lamentation and consolation that Morselli is able to articulate a middle way between these extremes. Between Chapters 3 and 4, there is an ‘Intermezzo’ of diary entries from 1942–5, when Morselli the soldier witnessed at first hand the horrors of war. Here he establishes an important principle for his thought: ‘la felicità non è un lusso’ (happiness is not a luxury) (FC 99). Those theological optimists who think they can choose the good are simply rationalizing away the fundamental irrationality of things. Well-being and happiness are in no way superfluous or unworthy of the spiritual man; they are absolutely necessary. Nor is joy a luxury we can renounce. Joy is to be seen as a necessity, being the satisfaction of one’s vital and sacred needs, as in the example of Santa Teresa d’Avila, who nurtured her mystical need for ecstatic prayer. In contrast, rebellion and blasphemy are harmful to the repose of the person (DI 211). Chapter 4 of Fede e critica concerns the mystery of God and of the Trinity. The doctrine of original sin – of the sin Adam committed when he was free not to sin – is at the heart of this mystery. Evil is man’s doing; while God is just, his ways and his will are unknown to us. But the very substance of the doctrine of original sin, which results in the retributive principle, is mystery. The novelty of Christianity is that retribution has passed from being direct and ‘material’ (as in the case of Job) to indirect. And yet though Christians are required to expiate the sins of others, the human reason is insufficient to fathom the mystery of this doctrine. But we can ‘inter-

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pret’; specifically we can see in Adam’s rebellion the paradigm of our own natures. As we see the impotence of logic and philosophy to understand the actions and the thought of God, rational armour falls away and faith comes forward, ‘the wondrous virtue of love, which in its heavenly degree produces the distinction of the three Persons, while it assures their substantial unity.’19 The believer understands the truth of the Creation and of the Fall, as well as the fact that many of the descriptive details in the stories are allegories, metaphors. The fact that the Bible has literary features does not limit our interpretation of it, since that interpretation includes the intelligence. Free will, as Augustine finally came to understand, is seriously limited. In examining the doctrine of original sin – which dictates that we must expiate a sin we did not commit – Morselli blends erudition with his conviction that simple spirits are more rigorous than complicated ones and that sentiment is a crucial component of faith. He trusts in simple narrative truths about spiritual reality. The fact of religion is planted in our hearts as a necessity to communicate with the divine; put simply: ‘Fede religiosa significa morale’ (Religious faith means morality). While the superior religion must include the demand for human freedom, after Eden the freedom of humanity is circumscribed: we live in a broken world. Freedom, though unattainable, must be pursued; this pursuit itself is a manifestation of faith. Some will gain justification and salvation through the intervention of grace. Thus the doctrine of original (or ancestral) sin cannot be logically explained. Morselli introduces the conception that original sin does not coincide with the first sin of Adam and that in Judaism the principle of indirect retribution was not present save as a little-known, esoteric doctrine. Hebrew literature understood the Mosaic story of the fall of Adam literally, and thus as a case of direct retribution. Only in Paul’s letter to the Romans does the concept of indirect retribution surface. In the Gospels themselves, as Morselli notes, there is no confirmation of the doctrine of original sin. But there is a passage in John 9 that seemingly opposes it: the story of the man born blind whose ancestors, says Jesus, are not to blame. The man is not expiating an ancestral sin: the evil his debility represents is an opportunity for God to manifest the good. For John, the divine desires follow a single norm. He is distinct from either the Thomistic positive theology or the opposite school, of Duns Scotus, for whom God’s actions are unknowable. With John one goes beyond the themes and motives of theodicy. The blind man’s suffering is due to the law and design of the world established at the creation by a God undoubtedly just and at the same time highly mysterious. So too with grace: redemption must be a mystery.

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Chapter 5, ‘ “Conoscenza” e “Inconoscenza”’ (‘Knowing’ and ‘Unknowing’), contrasts the positive and negative theologies that believe respectively that one can know God and not know God. These are two lofty characters in the Christian tradition that Morselli believes must be reconciled: ‘Either extreme presumes to lead to the total adhesion to the Object.’20 The error of the positive theology is in exalting theology to the point where one’s learning (apprendimento) of the divine renders faith superfluous and excludes mystery. The negative theology also excludes mystery, as in the ‘mysticism of amorous acceptance’ of Angela da Foligno. If God were not considered knowable on the level of his relations with man, religion would fall apart and lose its coherence. In order to speak of revelation, as one must in the Christian tradition, one must speak of revealed truths; and such truths are revealed only in the synthesis of knowing and unknowing. This is expressed in the idea of a ‘median religiosity,’ as found in St Francis and as affirmed by Paul when he writes that ‘we only know the divine “in part” (1 Cor. 13:12).’21 It is also the way of Aquinas, who despite his rationalism gives emotion its proper share in his faith, and conversely in St Bonaventure, whose mysticism is still informed by the reasoning intelligence. Morselli follows up on this topic in the Diario where he states that God’s supposed inscrutability – a major tenet of the negative theology – is unacceptable. If the believer accepts the thesis of God’s inscrutability, he cannot know where the limit is between God’s love and his inscrutability; it means denying the notion of Providence, which is properly understood as God’s just and solicitous intervention in worldly things, his governance of them. The apologetic tradition does not understand that Providence means the comprehensibility of divine actions and desires; and furthermore that the superiority of the Christian message lies in God’s being ‘friendly’ (‘affabile’) (DI 195). Chapter 6, ‘La conversione,’ links the earlier discussions of evil and the doctrine of original sin to the life of faith. Here too the literary themes emerge as Morselli discusses the turning toward faith of Petrarch on Mont Ventoux and of Manzoni, among others. The conversion involved is explored through a range of character types and patterns of thought and action. The notion that reasoning is not involved in conversion is dispelled. A universal factor for the birth and growth of faith in the individual is the crisis of evil. In fact, ‘In suffering the natural relation between us and the universe is reestablished.’22 Through sorrow and grief we make the turn to God. The compensation we seek after our swelling sense of self has been reduced by suffering is sought outside ourselves.

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Morselli cites the story of the thief who converts on the cross next to Christ (Luke 23:43).23 Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is analysed, unusally, as a rational act. Based on Paul’s example – which is akin to our own discernment of evil in everyday life – Morselli rejects the idea that faith is a form of resignation. What is missed by this all too common view is our rational recognition of the destructiveness, disorder, and iniquity in the world. Obscurity does not diminish in the believer, as some would have it. Instead the believer is continuously confronting obstacles. As one recognizes the reality of God, one doesn’t forget the reality of evil: evil which opposes itself to our being. Attempts to sublimate evil or deny it fail to overcome the problem. A deeper reflection is required. Evil is our introduction to mystery. With respect to conversion, Morselli argues that reason has a key role in this process; while there are purely emotive, or contact-derived conversions, based on purely external influences, such as that depicted by Manzoni in l’Innominato, a deeper conversion such as that of Augustine involves a strenuous intellectual commitment. Nor does the proper conversion arise from the pure experience of mystery or evil, but from these factors combined with the intellectual awareness that one’s doubting of God because of one’s suffering is analogous to the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus: Paul ‘understood that those negations of his were nothing other than the release of the exacerbated soul, and not a valid intellectual fact.’24 Since God has both personal and impersonal aspects, we require the instruments of both sentiment and reason to adhere to him. In Chapter 7, ‘Discorso breve sulla fede’ (A Brief Discourse on Faith), Morselli argues that the religious intelligence must reconnect to the religious feeling; that true mystics do not reject the intelligence, that the personal God is actually above (and uninvolved in) our customary mental schemes, and that the mystery of the Cross is tied to the ideal of charity. Excessive rationality leads to the fallacy of speculative theologians who constrain God to fit within their logical formulations and fail to grasp the sentimental impact of the fact that God gave himself to us in the Passion; equally unacceptable is the irrational theology that has thrived in the Germanic north and is based in pure emotion. Morselli’s purpose is to articulate once again how reason and a respect for mystery are mutually supportive of faith, and how the Christian creed presupposes the active coinvolvement of two visions, of the reason and the sentiment. In Chapter 8, ‘La fede come tensione’ (Faith as Tension), Morselli’s mysticism begins to emerge: ‘according to St Bernard’s definition: an

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almost direct participation in the spirit of the Truth.’25 The ‘man of good sense’ is described as balancing the good and evil in the world. Faced with the at times overwhelming and dominant experience of evil and suffering, the believer comes to a valuable conclusion: that one cannot explain evil just as one cannot doubt the wisdom of God; such is to commit blasphemy or what Dante called, in the instance of Capaneo, ‘la violenza contro Dio’ (violence against God). As regards the tension between the fear of God and the love of God, ‘One thinks therefore of their alternation, as in fact emerges from the speeches of those who believed most intensely and as is rendered dramatically vivid by the author of the Psalms.’26 The fear of God is not, as many would have it, a fear of punishment or sense of guilt; instead it is something that acts on the soul from without and from above, in the direct awareness of the power of evil, which Morselli refers to the ‘veil’ or ‘hiding place’ of God. Humbling oneself before ‘the radiant theophany whose connection is goodness, the glory of the divine work,’ the believer comprehends his own limits: ‘humility has one kneel before the majesty of the Lord, but not without having seen how much he exceeds us, and by exceeding us, denies our criteria, disappoints our expectations.’27 Morselli critiques the errors of positivists, on the one hand, who fail to see the rationalistic component in the faith, and idealists on the other, who debase faith, finding it to be ingenuous. He is also critical of immanentism, which sees God as a creation of the human spirit. Since immanentism characterizes a major mystical tradition, his critique is particularly pointed. As against the philological scientism of the early Modernismo movement in Catholic theology, and against the tenets of Bultmann and others, Morselli advocates a greater reliance on stories, fables, myths, and poems. To do so is not to claim the literal truth of those biblical passages that are clearly allegorical, or to sacrifice one’s rational rigour. Morselli’s support of the symbolic and metaphorical aspects of faith followed the pattern, in fact, of Modernismo’s later development, as it advocated a return to a primitive Christianity based on communal spiritual experience rather than dogma. If the modern concept of religiousness is dualistic, it is necessary to reinvest in the ‘gnomic-anagogic language’ that pertains to revelation: One isn’t a man of mature judgment if one is not prepared to establish the extent and the abilities of our powers. The Absolute exists: and it exists – for those who do not wish to joke about such a topic, or demonstrate a pride less monumental than grotesque – outside of us. We are prepared to conceive of it but not to grasp its intrinsic nature, ends, modalities. Revelation

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intervenes, to furnish us greater news about that, to delineate for us in a particular gnomic-anagogic language of its own, what we could call the history of the relations between the Absolute and the relative, or some points of it. (FC 175)28

Such a language was found in Dante. Morselli had seven editions of the Divine Comedy in his library, and one senses Dante in so many aspects of his religious treatise: in his positing of St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventure as complements who balance the reason and the sentiment; in his elevation of St Francis; in his chapter on conversion, and even in his own courageous self-representation as a sinner and seeker. As in Dante, the presence of evil is understood as provoking the intellect and affect to respond, by seeking out reason and compensation; the role of faith is to synthesize these needs. Reason does not consider faith from outside but intervenes to produce faith. Reason’s resistance to the teachings of religion is actually part of the practice of faith. As regards literature generally, Morselli criticizes the dominant trends in prose fiction and criticism; he is pessimistic about the state of the novel, which has been deluged by non-narrative, essay-like material. ‘Culturalistic’ criticism values writers who essentially concur with received opinion on scientific, philosophical, and ideological matters. In today’s world, ideology and technology have assumed the fearful and horrible aspect formerly possessed by nature, which now rather seems innocent (DI 213). These culturalists see literature and art as ‘superstructure’; their main motivation is to be affiliated with a group and not go against the current.29 As in secular matters, so in sacred matters. Morselli was frustrated by the failure of clerics to respond to his correspondence. Though he did not fault the Church for the wandering of the flock, his general view is that there are today ‘few authentic believers’ (DI 276). The biological evolution of the mentality of the masses toward ‘cogestione’ (self-management) has meant a loss of attachment to God the Father (DI 241). Today’s Christians have drifted toward atheism in their failure to honestly confront the problem of evil, to integrate the intellect and the heart, the knowledge and the unknowledge of God. Theology itself has grown static; intellectuals are mired in the stage of solipsism or egoistic self-absorption. Asceticism is mistaken for mysticism. But true mysticism brings the creature back to the community of believers; this is the essence of the person and personality of Christ, to be found in his Church, not in an anchorite’s isolation. The ascetic in isolation is prone to the sin

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of pride. The role of sentiment when it cannot comprehend is to ‘adore’; the role of reason when it cannot understand is to ‘meditate’ (FC 176), which is also to mediate, to connect two poles in tension. As he analyses the term rationabile obsequium (rationable obsequium) or a reasonable service to God, Morselli cites St John of the Cross’s instructions to be satisfied not with what we understand of God, but with what we do not understand and what we do not feel. Morselli wrote extensively of theological matters and corresponded with contemporary theologians about these questions. He also reflected at length on the myths of the Italians, among them Marxism, the Mafia, tourism, and irredentism (‘the ruin of Trieste’), and delivered (in the Diario) penetrating critiques of Hegel, Freud, and Croce, and of Italy’s reception of them. He criticized historical idealism for behaving like a theology, for distancing the sentiments and shunning ambiguities (DI 15–17, 153). Contemporary culture is criticized for many of the same reasons. It is seen to be self-absorbed in a vain anthropocentrism. In its avoidance of ambiguities and distancing of the sentiments, historical idealism behaves like a theology. There is a related tendency in society to overvalue erudition and specialization, which results in the denial of relationships: ‘erudition, and specialism, is egoistic knowledge, which gives no place to relationships, and is thus infertile.’30 Not the least of the elements in Morselli’s reflections on questions of Italian identity concern the loss of humour and pathos in society. The views expressed in the Diario tend to cohere in a radical realism. As Vittorio Coletti has observed: It appeared to him that the myths of history and of the subject conferred a chrism of undue legitimacy onto the occurrence, that they simulated the centrality and superiority of human experience and, in conclusion, that they hid the recurrent anthropomorphic pretence of reducing all reality to man.31

Morselli’s critique of anthropocentrism is also a critique of language use, as apparent in the horror concreti (horror of the concrete) of current jargon, which he connects to the general inability to express one’s feelings: Desolating poverty of our sentimental phraseology! Nostalgia, mood, daydream, ‘reverie,’ melancholy, sadness, are, with a few others, the terms we employ to express an entire immense range of spiritual values.32

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The challenge in reading Morselli is twofold: to integrate and separate, to think critically and to feel. It is a process that requires the whole of one’s intelligence and feeling. Such was how he himself worked. Morselli began writing fiction in the 1940s, though none of his novels were published during his lifetime. His eight novels, with their dates of composition, are Uomini e amori (Men and Loves, 1943–5), L’incontro col comunista (Meeting with the Communist, 1947–8), Un dramma borghese (A Bourgeois Drama, 1961–2), Il comunista (The Communist, 1964–5), Roma senza papa (Rome without a Pope, 1966–7), Contro-passato prossimo (Past Conditional: A Retrospective Hypothesis, 1969–70), Divertimento 1889 (1970–1), Dissipatio H.G. (1972–3). It is my premise that the novels build on the edifice of Morselli’s thought, specifically with respect to philosophy, critical theology, and other cultural matters. Un dramma borghese, in particular, is a watershed book, being the first novel published and the first one written after the religious reflections of Fede e critica. Morselli is a defender of evolution, not revolution; herein lies his scribal revolt. Evolution does not burn bridges or make leaps; it is not constant or universal. Morselli is reminiscent here of Bakhtin, the personalist philosopher of the dialogic imagination, also a cultural evolutionist and a critical Christian in a culture pervaded by utopian and collectivist polemic. It is this involvement with the cultural world at large that Morselli takes up in his fiction. 4. Un dramma borghese If one of the main directions of the modern novel has been toward the ‘autobiographical’ work in which ‘naturalistic observation of the real reaches the point of self-analysis,’ Un dramma borghese can be seen as a parody of this tradition.33 Given the intensity of Morselli’s critique of contemporary society, it is not surprising that one finds in his novels a manipulation of that genre to question the modernist investigation of the self. Among the modernist novelists he was most attentive to were Musil and Flaubert, Proust, Svevo, and Kafka. In these authors the analysis of the self attained to a new complexity, featuring unprecedented forms of narration undertaken by narrators whose psychological state and framing of discourse restricted – or even prohibited – a naturalistic reading of events. Morselli was not enthusiastic about the Italian novelists of his own generation, and dedicated little of his critical writing to his contemporaries, though he did write a (still unpublished) essay on contemporary Italian poetry: ‘Divagazioni quasi critiche sopra un critico recente di Ungaretti’ (Critical Divagations Concerning a Recent Critic of Ungaretti).

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Un dramma borghese (1961–2) is Morselli’s most personal novel; it penetrates to the heart of his ideas through the art of narrative. The situation is as follows: a middle-aged father and foreign correspondent for an Italian newspaper (such as Il corriere della sera) is in Lugano visiting his daughter, whom he barely knows; the eighteen-year-old daughter, Maria-Luisa (Mimmina), is recovering from an appendectomy while the father is bedridden with an attack of rheumatism. The two have adjoining rooms in a lakefront hotel. Since the death of the wife and mother, Carla, eleven years earlier in an automobile accident, Mimmina has attended boarding school in Switzerland. Before and after the death, the father lived in Germany because of his career as a correspondent. The father had written to Mimmina six months earlier, saying he planned to take her home with him. Now shortly after their reunion has begun, he has decided he will not take her home. This distresses Mimmina, who wishes to help her ailing father any way she can. The father – who narrates in the first person – is given to reveries, dreams, and philosophical reminiscences, by which he shields himself from the world and justifies his inaction and passivity. He asserts that he is a materialist in the tradition of Lucretius, a man in tune with nature and the ‘atoms’ of his own organism and the larger environment. Plagued by a multiplicity of moods and states – ‘sono tutto vegetativo’ (I am all vegetative) (DB 46)– he is clearly not simply physically but psychologically ill. Given the father’s weakness of character, the reader senses much irony when he refers to himself as a rare bourgeois, a man of culture and high ethical responsibility. In the early chapters certain events conspire to create a dreary, foreboding atmosphere: the hotel maid has just lost her son to suicide; the son of the hotel doctor, Vanetti, is a victim of polio; Mimmina’s desire for filial intimacy has led her to lavish attention on her father, at times exposing herself. The relationship between the two characters is thus coloured by the suggestions of incest, or at the very least an externalized Electral relation in which every attempt at communication seems coloured by a double sense. The loss of her mother has left Mimmina in a crisis that the father is unable to remedy. In many respects, the failure to properly mourn Carla is the central problem of the novel. The father remembers Carla as a creature purely of the senses, and claims not to have understood her. When one of his wife’s friends tells him of Carla’s intense religious life, he is led to reconfigure his image of her: io la credevo soddisfatta nella sua carnalità che mi si mostrava aperta, a tavola non meno che a letto; e dovetti poi figurarmela nella postuma luce

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delle lettere a doña Costancia, la sua vera amica, a quanto risultò, e confidente, e dei racconti di costei, imprecisi quanto impestivi, assillata da una religiosità puntigliosa, con sussulti mistici, con velleità ascetiche. (DB 22) I thought she was satisfied in that carnality which she openly showed me, at the table no less than in bed; and I then had to imagine her in the posthumous light of the letters to doña Costancia, her true friend and confidante, as it turns out, and the stories of her, imprecise as they are, as one troubled by a stubborn religiosity, with mystical tremors, with aesthetic velleities.

Mimmina, who was only seven at the time of the accident, does not remember her mother, but believes the accident was a suicide. The father not only rejects this idea but finds it offensive to her memory; he notes that Carla was a devoted Catholic who had attended a Eucharistic procession just before her death. The father’s present companion is Hilde, his ‘titular lover’ in Berlin, a foil for the instinctive Mediterranean woman who was his wife. Their pleasures together are described as ‘modici oltre che metodici’ (moderate as well as methodical) (DB 26). She has hepatitis and he dyspepsia. Recalling that a friend of Hilde’s broke off his relation with him, accusing him of being asocial, the father rationalizes his character as follows: ‘mi piace animare della mia presenza gli oggetti e ascoltarli parlare in me e di me. E è un attaccamento che non ha niente dell’egoistico’ (I like animating objects with my presence and listening to them speak in me and about me. And it is an attachment having nothing of the egotistical) (DB 26). For over a hundred pages the two characters do not leave their rooms; beyond the hotel are the fog-covered banks of Lake Lugano, a swamplike late autumn scene that reinforces the sense of claustrophic enclosure, as does the alternation of the father’s internal dialogue and his intermittent conversations with Mimmina. The autobiographical slant of both characters is evident: like the father, Morselli is a bourgeois and his favourite authors are Montaigne, Lucretius, Stendhal, and Proust; like Mimmina, Morselli lost his mother as a boy and was alienated from his distant father; he found solace in Christianity but was also drawn to suicide. The apparent duality in the father’s character concerns his detachment from the very objects he is fixated on; his scepticism conflicts with the fact of his yielding to images of his own creation. This contradiction between objectivity and subjectivity, circumspection and obsession, results in a distorted view of reality. If the paradigm of literary modern-

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ism, as stated above, means thatthe ‘naturalistic observation of the real reaches the point of self-analysis,’ here such self-analysis cannot take place because of the character’s dissociation and abulia. As the father externalizes desires in an attempt to represent reality as he would like it to be, there is a lack of contrast between the self and the object. The father responds to chance events and passing notions, but lacks the human elements – of sentiment or heart, intuition and imagination – that Mimmina possesses in abundance. The father fails to comprehend that his problems with the world (what Freudians would call tangled combinations of object-cathexes) can be resolved by the interpretation of dual meanings lodged in single objects, or symbols. Instead he seeks to place on the order of language – of a text – phenomena which occur prior to language in the integrity that an object gains by having primary function, a function of use, a relation. This is true of actual objects like books – which are fetishized and denied their use as vehicles of mental regeneration – but it is especially true for people. Stated in terms of Morselli’s theory of the simploche, the father focuses on the empirical level of things, of existence, and ignores the subjective level of individuation and self. He is an observer of things, a cataloguer of objects to which he attributes a ‘life’: enmeshed in the ‘sono’ (am) of Existence, he lacks the will power of the ‘Io’ (I), the decision-making capacity that allows one to control one’s primary impulses and instincts. By the same token, Mimmina is a figure of pure subjectivity and ego whose failure to come to terms with the empirical objects of the world will eventually lead to her suicide attempt with the father’s cherished Browning revolver. Mimmina represents the ‘I’ deprived of the ‘am’ of Existence. She possesses the force of sentiment and heart – at times manifest as unrestrained libido – that the father lacks in his reductions of the individual (including his deceased wife) to an object. One might say that the father’s ideas constitute a radically subjective empiricism, being a caricature of the materialist thought of Lucretius, since the father lacks the mediation of the emotions that was so strong in the Latin poet: Poi c’è Lucrezio: il tonico. Sa della casa dove sono cresciuto da bambino, col pavimento della loggia a terreno lustrato a petrolio, e l’uscio della dispensa da cui si sparge il sapore delle conserve, della carne insaccata e del pane. Il suo materialismo sostanzioso rimane un’àncora in mezzo al frasuono delle ideologie, inclusa quella che si appropria quell’impavido nome; senza dubbio. Io, se ne parlo in tal modo, faccio della retorica, poiché per

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me Lucrezio è precisamente ciò che dicevo, non una ‘atmosfera spirituale’ ma meglio assai, un confortante odore di casa. (DB 27–8) Then there’s Lucretius: the tonic. He smells like the house where I was raised from infancy, with the patio floor of earth polished with oil, and the entryway to the pantry from which the taste of preserves, bread, and sausages emanated. His substantial materialism remains an anchor in the midst of the din of ideologies, including the one which has appropriated that undaunted name; without a doubt. I, if I speak about it in that manner, I engage in rhetoric, because for me Lucretius is precisely what I said, not a ‘spiritual atmosphere’ but better yet, a comforting odour of home.

Though he claims to belong to the Lucretian lineage, the father has lost its processual and dynamic character. In this respect, he is what Morselli might have called an ‘anti-Sereno figure.’ His perspective might be called ‘telluric’ in the sense that the human body is compared to the earth, to geology and climate, in a radical misreading of Lucretius: humans are seen to have a crust and an atmosphere where most life takes place; they also have eruptions and schisms, governed by chance. The father constructs in this way a sophistry; by ‘textualizing’ the only important human beings in his life and considering them as factors of the weather, he is confusing the personal and universal facts, the microcosm and the macrocosm. The two other principal characters – the hotel doctor, Dr Vanetti, and Mimmina’s friend from boarding school, Thérèse – serve as foils of the protagonists and catalysts to the limited action of the plot. Their interactions with the father and daughter allow them access to the central core of this relationship, and provide insight into the questions of desire and memory, perversion and abandonment. The father’s susceptibility to the physical influence of things is a means of externalizing his guilt. By fetishizing objects and people, he changes their status and originary function, opting instead for ‘l’universale alienazione’ (the universal alienation) (DB 28) they represent to him, as mirrors of his own object-self which fails to iificare (‘I-ify’), to crystallize and act as an individual. Sono un borghese, senza l’impronta gregaria della specie. Mi diversifico, almeno in questo: in una società di esseri dall’attenzione ‘orizzontale’, la mia è dirittamente verticale. Mentre dilagano gli istinti diffusivi e dispersivi, la parola ridotta a stimolo acustico, le immagini, i suoni, ogni attività di relazione degradata al livello turistico del percepire fine a se stesso, sono

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uno dei pochi che concentrino i loro interessi: e cioè, che ne abbiano. Uno dei pochi, diciamolo, emotivamente intensi, in questo speciale e implausibile significato, aperti alla visione in profondità. (DB 28–9) I am a bourgeois, without the gregarious imprint of that type. I am different, at least in this: in a society of beings whose attention is ‘horizontal,’ mine is directly ‘vertical.’ While they spread their diffuse, dispersive instincts, speech reduced to acoustic stimulus, images, sounds, every activity of relation degraded to the touristic level of perception as an end in itself, I am one of the few of those who concentrate their interests; that is, who has any. One of the few, let us say, of the emotionally intense, in this special and implausible sense, open to a profound vision.

The father does not share his ‘vision’ with Mimmina but simply says: ‘La mia storia non ha niente di commovente, niente di particolare, ne parliamo un altro giorno’ (My story has nothing moving about it, nothing special, we’ll talk about it another day) (DB 29). Despite his claims to be an extrovert, he is constantly withdrawing from relations. When Mimmina is seen chatting and weeping with the hotel maid, the father berates them (and women in general) for this emotional behaviour. As the maid leaves the room, the father describes Mimmina: ‘Pareva una figurazione giovanile, di gusto preraffaelita, della desolazione; la camica leggera, e ahimè trasparente, la fluttuava emblematicamente intorno al corpo, mossa dall’aria di fuori’ (She seemed a youthful representation, of pre-Raphaelite style, of desolation; the light, and oh so transparent shirt, wavered emblematically around her body) (DB 32). As Mimmina continues cleaning up the room, he asks her to clean his dictaphone: – Prendi questo, piuttosto – mi viene in mente di dirle, e le indico il magnetofono. – È sporco, pulisci questo, se vuoi. – Quello no – risponde, senza alzare la testa. – Tu gli parli molto più che a tua figlia. – Gli parlo anche di mia figlia – osservo, ridendo. – E io non sono contenta. (DB 33) ‘Take this, instead’ – it occurs to me to say to her, and I point to the microphone – ‘It’s dirty, clean this, if you want.’ ‘Not that’ – she answers, without raising her head. – ‘You talk much more to it than to your daughter.’

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‘I also talk to it about my daughter’ – I observe, laughing. ‘And I’m not happy.’

With this direct reference to the Electra problem, the father is fetishizing his daughter along with the instrument of his journalistic trade. He peers at her nightgown: Un mese di malattia non ha impedito a una certa parte della sua persona di mostrarsi, poco velando nel caso la camicia, infantilmente paffuta sebbene, dove occorre, ombrosa in maniera nient’affatto infantile. (DB 33) A month of illness hadn’t prevented a certain part of her person to show itself, the nightshirt hiding little in that case, puffed up in an infantile fashion, though, where it occurs, shadowy in a way not at all infantile.

Though he is curious about her nudity, he is at the same time repulsed. At the core of his confusion about his daughter is the father’s attitude toward women. Women are reduced to natural, corporeal and geological, phenomena, constantly in flux, yielding the following stereotypes: L’una e l’altra lavoravano, parlavano, piangevano; con quella versatilità femminile, per cui chiacchierare e piangere sono occupazini così congeniali da accompagnare benissimo il lavoro. (DB 32) Both of them were working, talking, crying; with that feminine versatility, for which chatting and crying are such congenial occupations as to be excellent accompaniment to work. Ma ci sono casi in cui non è facile andare oltre il generico. Questo eccesso di partecipazione. Emotività ostentata, come spesso nelle donne? (DB 35) But there are cases in which it isn’t easy to go beyond the generic. This excess of participation. Ostentatious emotivity, as often among women? Mi sono vantato per trent’anni di prender sul serio, io solo forse fra tutti, il principio della perfetta incomparabilità del suo sesso. Non ho negato valore alla femminilità, come lo negano, a chiacchiere, quelli che di fatto, poi, ne vivono; l’ho onorata, e nell’unica maniera coerente, che consiste nell’accettarla nella sua oscura totalità e fatalità. (DB 53)

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I have dared for thirty years to take seriously, I perhaps the only one of them all, the principle of the perfect incomparability of her sex. I haven’t denied value to the feminine, like those who, chatting about it, live off it; I have honoured it, and in the only coherent manner, which consists in accepting it in its dark totality and fatality. Mimmina ricorre alle espressioni elittiche, care alle donne di tutto il mondo, di tutte le età, pei noti argomenti. (DB 61) Mimmina reverts to elliptical expressions, dear to women around the world, of all times, for the known reasons. È una donna. Per le donne, o per le nature femminee in genere (lo attesta il dottor Vanetti) trasferirsi materialmente da un punto all’altro è una voluttà, forse la più grande, concorrente vittoriosa dei sentimenti di tutte le specie. Non è ancora stata notato che le tendenze al nomadismo coincidono coi tempi del matriarcato, oggi come migliaia di anni fa. (DB 71) She’s a woman. For women, or for feminine natures in general (Dr Vanetti confirms it), to move materially from one point to another is a luxury, perhaps the greatest, being a victorious rival to the feelings of the whole species. It has not yet been noted that the tendencies to nomadism coincide with the times of matriarchy, today as thousands of years ago.

These reflections deny that anything of importance occurs below the surface in women. In this way the father extricates himself from the daughter’s problems. Upon closer examination, his rationalizations point to an avoidance of Mimmina’s needs for love and information. When Mimmina receives a letter from Thérèse seven days into their stay, the father is jealous: ‘Improvvisamente, Mimina mi irrita. Le butto la sua lettera, e me ne vado in camera mia, chiudendo l’uscio’ (Suddenly, Mimmina is irritating me. I throw her that letter of hers, and go into my room, closing the door) (DB 42). When Mimmina shows him the letter, he shuns her and claims to himself that he is healthy and eminently Italian: Basta con questa commedia patetica, e peggio, stupida, e peggio ancora paradossale. [...] Con tutto ciò sono un uomo sano, di spirito se non sempre di corpo. Sano alla maniera della mia razza, che è italiana e umbra, ossia italiana due volte; di una razza che non perde mai il suo interno equilibrio, e il suo solido contatto con la realtà. (DB 43)

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Enough with this comedy, which is pathetic, and worse, stupid, and worse yet, paradoxical. [...] Despite everything I am a man healthy of spirit if not always of body. Healthy in the manner of my race, which is Italian and Umbrian, or Italian twice over; of a race which never loses its internal equilibrium, and its solid contact with reality.

Sensing a need to transmit his identity to his child, the father settles on his Italianness as the key to his responsibility. Much later in the novel he will tell Mimmina of his desire that she marry and settle in Umbria, where his roots are: ‘Vorrei che ti sposassi a casa nostra. La tua futura famiglia dovrebbe essere italiana, o meglio, umbra.’ (I would like you to get married at home. Your future family should be Italian, or better, Umbrian.) (DB 204). The irony is that the father has not been in Umbria for many years. Meanwhile, Mimmina is turning her thoughts to God. She knows the father doesn’t pray and asks him why this is. His avoidance of the question is an example of his displacement of the statements or gestures of others which might affect his actual thought processes. In order to avoid questions about his religious views, he declaims the deficiency of his entire age, mentioning a bombed-out baroque church in Vienna he saw: ‘“Meglio così. C’è troppa edilizia religiosa per troppo poca fede”’ (‘Better that way. There are too many religious buildings for too little faith.’) (DB 99). Mimmina is herself devout – like her mother and Thérèse – and she prays daily. Her simple definition of sin is ‘making someone cry.’ She thanks God for what she has not yet received and here attempts to explain herself on the question of prayer: Dio le nostre necessità le sa meglio di noi, perché è stato lui a farci, e con i bisogni che abbiamo. Non è così? Sicché da un lato è giusto che noi preghiamo... [...] E dall’altro, invece, pregare è quasi una offesa, quindi pregare non si deve, secondo me. (DB 100) God knows our needs better than we do. Because it was he that made us, and with the needs that we have. Isn’t that how it is? So that on the one hand it is right that we pray... [...] But on the other hand praying is almost an offence, so one must not pray, it seems to me.

She means that prayer used selfishly is worse than no prayer at all, but that prayer as the expression of gratitude for God’s generosity cannot be wrong. As stated above, the father’s ‘I’ or sense of selfhood is no more

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than a degraded and alienated shell, a lack of individuation and a fixation on objects; thus he is unable to form meaningful relationships. Mimmina possesses such relationships (including a religious life) but she lacks the wherewithal to function effectively among the things of the world, the myriad objects of existence. Mimmina is attracted to men if they are present, but cannot retain images of them. She is curious about suicide and shows pity for the unfortunate. She has been hidden away by her father in a boarding school, and now she is being abandoned again. The memory of her mother is one of the keys that would unlock her predicament, but that key is denied her, tragically, by the father. Regarding his life he says, ‘È una situazione, di cui mi riesce difficile riconoscermi attore. Soggetto, voglio dire, e non oggetto’ (It is a situation in which I find it difficult to see myself as an actor. A subject, I mean, and not an object) (DB 102). Rather than a child of God, he sees himself as an organism ruled by the capriciousness of the elements: È proprio una commedia, decisamente. Ciò che è malinconico, in cambio, è questa molle tempra dell’aria che mi si comunica. Sono sul balcone, non ho indosso che il pigiama e traspiro. La foschia s’infittisce: stamattina s’intravvedevano i sassi della riva e spuntare in alto con la vetta le montagne della sponda italiana... (DB 103) It’s really, decidedly, a comedy. But that which is melancholy is this moist fibre of air which is communicated to me. I am on the balcony, I am only wearing my pajamas and I’m perspiring. The haze is thickening: this morning one could glimpse the stones on the shore and the peaks of the mountains on the Italian side...

The exculpatory claim that everything is a ‘comedy’ brings to mind the book’s title: the drame bourgeois had its origins in late eighteenth-century France, especially in the plays and theories of Diderot (1713–84). Focused on the middle class, this theatrical form could be tragic but more usually ended on a positive note because of the successful response of the characters to problems manifest in society.34 The drame bourgeois was expected to include modern cultural references, such as regarded the occupations and family relations of its protagonists. Morselli’s referencing of this genre with its realism and didacticism is typical of his experimentation with the novel form. (In two of his novels he employed the ‘fantastoria,’ or alternate history, in which contrary-to-fact agendas project hypothetical rewritings of history.)

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If, in all of his novels, Morselli presents a caricature of modern man as a conflicted and deeply flawed creature, Un dramma borghese is unique for the forcefulness of its emotional dimensions. As Segre writes, ‘One could say that the solid construction of successful evocation of the characters, which only in Un dramma borghese (from 1961–2) is carried out within the circle of their emotional relationships, is usually subordinated by Morselli to a narration strongly stimulated by a theoretical problem.’35 One has in this novel, in so many words, the portrait of a moral monster who, though frequently deluded, can experience moments of painful lucidity: Il mio destino senza vera infelicità, senza rivolta, è quel logorarsi quotidiano degli individui coi quali la vita non è stata particolarmente severa, ma indefettibilmente grigia e faticosa; un male che i romantici hanno molto descritto e aborrito, per la buona ragione che mortifica le pretese di un io in cui essi vedevano il fulcro dell’universo.’ (DB 31, our emphasis) My destiny, lacking in true unhappiness or revolt, is that daily wearing down of individuals with whom life hasn’t been particularly severe, but unfailingly gray and tiresome; an evil that the Romantics described at length and abhorred, for the good reason that it mortifies the pretexts of an I in which they saw the fulcrum of the universe.

In other words, the father’s persistent self-analysis suggests possible ways out of the labyrinth, but those ways are never explored. Instead they are constantly deferred and suppressed beneath the ironies and masks of his urges and instincts. The father’s mind is awash in surrogates and substitutes as he attaches deeper meanings to objects and relations than those objects and relations justify. One could say that he draws attention to the exquisiteness of sensations available only to him. One way of doing this is through memory, in a pattern reminiscent of Proust, but the father’s evocation of that author proves to be another sign of his illness. If Proust’s novel of memory required a theoretical open sheet or tabula rasa that could overlie or even occlude the external action, such a narrative solution led to extraordinary expressivity and the ‘intermittences of the heart.’ In the case of the father’s absorption in a series of involuntary recollections, the intermittences are little more than symptoms of his dissociation, attempts to suppress his personal loss and cast himself into a purely logical light. If a natural outgrowth of Proust’s temporal saturation was the splitting and rejoining of syntactic and semantic time (as discussed in Proust o del sentimento), here one finds

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a conflation of syntax (the relation of signs among themselves) and semantics (the relation of signs to referents). The result of the father’s confusion of syntax and semantics is a loss of ethics (the relation of signs to their makers). This is revealed in his reflection on time during an early morning reverie: Gli oggetti della camera ci levitano con metafisica leggerezza, freddamente esenti dal peso. Anzi, bisognerebbe dire: da ogni dimensione che non sia il tempo. Per capire come tutto sia durata, ci vuole una luce così, oltre all’assenza di suoni e di movimenti. [...] Tra gli oggetti sciolti dal peso, naviganti sulla corrente dell temporalità pura, c’è mia figlia. (DB 117–18) There the objects in the room levitate with a metaphysical lightness, coldly free of weight. Even, one would have to say: of every dimension that is not time. To understand how everything is duration, one needs a light such as this, as well as the absence of sound and movement. [...] Among the objects freed of weight, navigating on the current of pure temporality, is my daughter.

The father believes that his experience of duration – in an apparent reference to Bergson – belongs to him alone and depends on solitude and immobility; once the day begins, all are plunged into the slavery of chronological time. This is the closest he can come to the imaginative grace and rigour of Proust’s Marcel, whose reasoning transcended physical excitation. While considering Mimmina a threatening ‘addition to [his] affective sphere,’ he expresses an indirect desire to possess her, but as only an object whose subjectivity he does not endorse. Posso, con perfetta tranquillità, fare l’assurda ipotesi. Supponiamo che io per Mimmina, e Mimmina per me, proviamo un affetto che non sia paterno, non sia filiale. Ammettiamo che di comune e felice accordo, nel segreto della nostra casa, senza dar turbamento a chicchessia, ci consacriamo a questo affetto vicendevole e ne soddisfacciamo gli impulsi, quanto meno sentimentali; è l’incesto. Una parola che ha preso, da millenni, un suono pauroso; e me ne sto accorgendo. Bene, mi dico, e sotto la parola, che cosa c’è? (DB 154) I can, in perfect calmness, make this absurd hypothesis. Let us suppose that I feel for Mimmina, and Mimmina feels for me, an affection which is

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neither paternal or filial. Let us allow that by common and happy accord, in the secrecy of our home, without disturbing anyone, we consecrate this mutual affection and satisfy its impulses, unsentimental though they be; it is incest, or the imminence of incest. A word which has acquired, over millennia, a fearful sound; and I am realizing this. Fine, I say to myself, and underneath the word, what is there?

The father rejects civilizing or medical reasons for the incest taboo, wanting to reduce the daughter to an object in the flux of the history of ideas. He yearns for a nonexistent time when incest was ordinary because common sense prevailed, and bourgeois privacy was a sovereign and rational institution. Perhaps the most blatant instance of fetish in the novel comes when Mimmina presents her appendix to her father in a bottle. He compares this action to his own fetishization, via tape-recorder, of the sounds of her breathing as she sleeps. When the two listen to this tape of her sleeping noises, he wants to disown responsibility for the act and attribute it to Mimmina: Questa intimità di Mimmina è anche più pietosamente in vitro dell’altra; un’apparenza plausible, impudica e misera, come di un cuore che palpiti sotto una campana. Era meglio rinunciarci, a una simile testimonianza. Esce dall’apparecchio un interminabile respiro di lei, o un sospiro, un ‘oh’ prolungato e desolato, che sembra una constatazione di impotenza e di pena di fronte a qualcosa di soverchiante, una voce ch’altra sera non le avevo udito. (DB 160) This intimacy of Mimmina’s is even more pitifully in vitro than the other; a plausible appearance, wretched and immodest, like that of a heart beating under a bell. It would have been better to ignore and to renounce such a witnessing. There issues from the device an interminable breathing by her, or a sigh, a prolonged and desolate ‘ohhh’ which seems like an acknowledgment of impotence and pain before something overwhelming, a voice which the other evening I had not heard from her.

She wonders why he’s done it and why he made her listen to it. The father’s duplicity can be seen as reflecting castration fears expressed through fetishization, on the one hand, and hypochondria on the other. Now Mimmina will break his dictaphone – the fetish he now refers to as an actress in their drama:

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Quella macchinetta, era terza fra noi, era una modesta attrice (e non muta) del nostro dramma: agli occhi di lei un nemico da sconfiggere, un altro diaframma da tirar giù per arrivare a avermi tutto per sé, come ha già ottenuto in queste settimane di impormisi, il giorno, la notte, con la speranza di rendermisi indispensabile. (DB 187–8) That little machine, it was our third, it was a modest (and not a silent) actress in our drama: in her eyes it was an enemy to defeat, another diaphragm to cast aside to have me all for herself, as she has already had me these weeks, imposing herself on me day and night, with the hope of rendering me indispensable to her.

To follow Freud, the fetish is a substitute for the non-existent penis of the mother, the member which was desired and imagined in the narcissistic mirror stage of childhood, when language was acquired. The coining of fetishes may be carried to the word as well, as to the text and the act of naming. It is signicant that the father’s name is never stated. His story is to that extent anonymous and generic; he is simply a bourgeois journalist with serious problems of alienation and dissociation. He refuses Mimmina’s attempts to confide in him and nurse him back to health, seeing them as passionate and therefore irresponsible, illogical and lacking discernment. As suggested above, the father and daughter are given foils in the personae of Vanetti and Thérèse, each of whom enters into the static binary relationship of father and daughter as a catalyst or reality principle, concretizing the split that can be traced back to the suppression of the mother’s memory. Vanetti, the hotel doctor, described grotesquely as ‘glabro come una foglia di magnolia’ (hairless as a magnolia leaf) (DB 122), is called in to consult on Mimmina’s condition. He also diagnoses the father: ‘Lei è distonico, con una preoccupante diatesi alle malattie immaginarie’ (You are dystonic, with a worrying diathesis toward imaginary illnesses) (DB 69). A widower like the father, Vanetti is otherwise quite opposite: a onetime mystic, he remains a serene spirit, a positivist, and an avid supporter of psychoanalysis, which the father disdains. Mimmina’s foil is Thérèse, whose nicknames for her – ‘Pecorona’ (big ewe) – and her breasts – ‘le meduse’ (jellyfish) – indicate a certain familiarity. Thérèse is Turinese and a practising Catholic. When she arrives from Zurich it is clear she is insightful and more mature than Mimmina. Thérèse tells the father that he is unable to love and suggests that the reason for this is his failure to remember and to properly mourn his wife.

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Upon witnessing the attraction between her father and Thérèse, Mimmina runs away from the hotel in the middle of a heavy storm, leading the father to rescue her in what might be called the first genuine ‘action’ in the book. When Vanetti recommends that the two attend therapy with a psychoanalyst, the father simply scoffs, rationalizing to himself that he belongs to an elite group of bourgeois intellectuals that is overwhelmed by the excessive demands of current society: Specifichiamo: sono uomini di cultura. Un elaborato involucro, sempre tenuto lustro, di una cultura che non è saldezza (‘inumana’) di princìpi, non è rigore (‘astratto’) di deduzioni, ma in cambio è ricca di sfumature e pregnante di implicazioni, non ignara di contraddizioni e riserve eleganti, ben disposta alle velleità critiche. [...] Decorosamente conservatori, dilettanti con finezza, agnostici senza darlo a vedere, egoisti con valide giustificazioni spirituali. (DB 207) Let us be precise: they are men of culture. An elaborate exterior, always well polished, of a culture that is not firmness of principles (‘inhuman’), is not rigour of deductions (‘abstract’), but is rather rich in shadings and pregnant with implications, not unaware of elegant contradictions and reservations, easily disposed to critical velleities. [...] Decorously conservative, refined dilettantes, agnostics without showing it, egoists with valid spiritual justifications.

By identifying with this group, the father manages to excuse himself for the accusations of being untrustworthy. In terms of the father’s alienation, it is manifest here in a darkly parodical way, in psychological torments, physical weaknesses, and an air of malaise. This theme is corroborated by the stateless nature of the family, perched as they are on Italy’s northern boundary, mired in a pestilential fog. The impasse in the father-daughter relation is now acted out in a classically Electral scene which takes place in front of Thérèse. As is known, in Freudian terms the daughter’s attraction to the father starts with the investment of desire in an object which the child charges with cathectic energy: Ha raccolto dal tavolino il termometro e se lo sta infilando fra le cosce. La camicia trattenuta dalla asticciola che sporge, le copre a malapena il pube. Io ci ho fatto l’abitudine oramai, oltre a aver imparato a spese mie che rimproverarla, reagire, è peggior partito. Ma la piccola a questi esibizionismi è nuova. Ha tenuto dietro ai gesti di Mimmina cogli occhi sgranati. Poi li

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ha alzati su di me, a investigarmi. È deliziosa. Mi vien fatto di solare quel viso, quello sguardo, dal contesto della scena sgradevole e avverto, e gusto, l’eccitamento che ne hanno i sensi, più insinuato e pressante della voglia che mi aveva avvampato prima. Ma è una dolcezza breve, e Teresa stessa me ne priva. Si fa dare il termometro e lo legge.37 e 8. (DB 219–20) She’s taken the thermometer from the nightstand and is slipping it between her thighs. The nightshirt, held up by the protruding stick, scarcely covers her pubis. I’m accustomed to it by now, having learned moreover at my own expense that to scold her, to react, is a worse plight yet. But these exhibitionisms are new to ‘little’ Thérèse. She stood back from Mimmina’s gestures with her eyes wide open. Then she raised them to me, to study me. She is sumptuous. It occurs to me to isolate that face, that look, away from context of the unpleasant scene and I notice, and I enjoy, the excitement of her senses in it, more insinuating and pressing than the desire that had first inflamed me. But it is a brief sweetness, and Thérèse herself denies me of it. She has her give her the thermometer and reads it: 99.5.

The father’s voyeuristic arousal over this scene is short-lived, depending as it does on Thérèse’s involvement. Morselli’s exposure of the vacuity of Freudian clichés could not be more pronounced. Thérèse now considers the problem of the father’s ego by way of an anecdote: If a husband stayed at home with his wife on a Sunday because he desired her, would he not be more egoistic, but also more desirable from the wife’s standpoint, than the man who stays at home because it is his duty? The father is of this second type, says Thérèse, suggesting that his problem of depersonalization might have a solution. The precise solution she has in mind is suggested in a second anecdote: Quando Santa Teresa era nel suo convento di Avila, un giorno la superiora la chiama e le dice di andare a trovare una donna peccatrice che viveva nel paese, per convertirla. La santa pensa che se ci andasse lei, la spaventerebbe. Risponde così alla superiora: ‘Invece della sorella ardente, ci manderemo la sorella tiepida.’ Cioè un’altra suora del convento, che aveva fama di non avere tanta virtù. Ora ha capito? Nello stesso modo bisognerebbe comportarsi con lei, io dico. (DB 193) When St Theresa was in the convent at Avila, one day the mother superior calls to her and tells her to go find a lady sinner who lived in the country, so as to convert her. The saint thinks that if she were to go she would frighten

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her. Thus she answers the mother superior: ‘Instead of the ardent sister, let’s send out the lukewarm sister.’ That is, another nun of the convent, who had the reputation of having little virtue. Now do you understand? In the same way, I’m saying, one should deal with you.

The father is the sinner to be converted, his ‘sin’ is that of depersonalization. Thérèse represents the lady of little virtue. If the sinner and the lady of little virtue find a way to come together, then perhaps the father can learn how love Mimmina, who is truly the innocent in this story. Thérèse believes Mimmina is being harmed by the father and would be able to develop freely in a less restricted, more loving environment. In fact, the father’s courtship of Thérèse begins immediately on a getaway trip on a funicular to a mountain overlook. Their first lovemaking takes place in the cramped quarters of his automobile on a drive round Lake Lugano; then in the book’s penultimate chapter they make love again – though heartlessly, clinically – in Thérèse’s hotel room. In the concluding chapter, Mimmina’s jealousy and despair drive her to attempt suicide with her father’s revolver. She is taken to the hospital, after which the father in his blind desperation seeks to find her there, by car and then by foot in the stormy night. During this pursuit the father is trapped, as it were, as he was in the book’s opening pages, in an involuntary recollection of his military service during the Second World War. As the book concludes, it is not known whether Mimmina has survived. The integration of individuation and existence that Morselli proposes in his theory of the simploche is defective in both protagonists in a way that can be simply schematized. If the left-hand side of the following diagram is seen as lacking integration with the right-hand side, one has an apt representation of the psychosis of Mimmina. Conversely, if the righthand side is seen as lacking integration with the left, one has a picture of the father’s dissociation and fetishism. If the simploche is the positive condition that allows for instincts to yield to self-criticism and thence to self-consciousness and individuation, it is also the condition that discounts this process when accurate, empirical perceptions are needed. In this latter mode, of ‘existence,’ the individual moves out of self-consciousness toward the instincts. By juxtaposing these components of the simploche in two diametrically opposed characters, Morselli represents the dissociation and cognitive-affective dysfunction afflicting our society. In the father, the chronic movement away from self-consciousness toward the instincts constitutes a flight from himself (as from any notion of paternal self-sacrifice). Lacking the bal-

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ance and control provided by a healthy sense of self, the father becomes more bestial and resistant to corrective forms of socialization. The character of the daughter is the inverse; in her case the self-consciousness is so overwhelming that she cannot empirically examine her perceptions and cognitions. Lacking the gift of detachment, she is paralysed. How could the Christian humanist Morselli present such a scenario in which the daughter invites the father into an incestuous relation, which he rejects though not without revealing his own perversity? The answer lies in the author’s attempt to portray a pathological family relationship defined by separation and alienation, and by the failure to mourn a dead mother and wife. In this context the theme of incest is a tangible symbol of the crisis of modernity as it has devolved onto the family. The answer also lies equally in Morselli’s understanding of the novelistic genre. For Morselli the novel needed to be formally congruent with its characters; thus each of his novels employs a different technique, offering a hypothesis appropriate to the personal subject matter the author intends to explore. Morselli rejected the idea that literature could promote social reform by depicting noble and heroic characters who, by overcoming forces of evil and oppression, instruct the reader to be good. He also rejected the novel of lyrical fragments, the essay-novel, and the ‘committed’ novel of social realism. Against these tendencies – which he saw as deriving from a flawed understanding of the novel as a means to an end or as a hand-

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maiden to other genres – Morselli carried out numerous experimentations on the novelistic genre. In the case of Un dramma borghese one has an approach to the problem of suffering involving psychopathologies and deviance, in the individual and in society. As with Pirandello, this involved the exposure of grotesque personalities and perverse motivations. In historical terms one has a parody of the symbolist novel’s tendency to exalt the artist as one uniquely qualified to experience sensory extremes and translate (or transvaluate, to use the Nietzschean term) them into images of beauty and illusion. The ephemeral nature of sensation led aestheticists to adopt an enigmatic posture in society as well; whether as bohemians or mystics, they were conscious that life itself could be viewed as a work of art (‘una commedia,’ ‘un dramma’). It is fair to conclude that the father resembles a sophist of the Nietzschean sort, as is apparent in his rationalizing claims – usually to himself – that he exists in a sphere beyond morality and beyond conventional ethics or social mores. In the following description of Nietzsche by Jaspers, one grasps the nature of such a sophistry: It is clear that in Nietzsche’s experience with contradictoriness no conscious method and no thorough and abiding understanding of his own thinking ever developed. He does not distinguish clearly between sophistry and dialectic, or between the purport of a union of opposites and that of a distinction between them. He does not develop the multi-dimensional logic of opposition and contradiction. He becomes clear-sighted by fits and starts as it were, and fails to clarify further what he sees ...36

Morselli himself denounced the Nietzschean idea of ‘genius’ as being mystically inspired but plagued by a psychological imbalance. He rejected those apologists for whom Nietzsche was the primary defender of animal instincts as against the tempering and holisticaspects of modern civilization. Morselli also questioned Nietzsche’s fundamental understanding of theology and thus his capacity to declare the ‘death of God.’ Like Nietzsche, the father possesses a paradoxical optimism (some would say madness) based on the negation of life and the idea that suffering makes one more noble and more righteous. He confuses what Arendt calls exchange values, which have their roots in the spiritualreligious experience, with the self-destructive and masochistic impulse (DI 238). Un dramma borghese begins in the dream-frame of the father’s recollected war experience, like Morselli’s time in Calabria. It concludes with the probable end of Mimmina’s life and the repetition of the same

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wartime scenes in the father’s involuntary memory as he desperately searches for Mimmina in, of all places, the maternity ward of the wrong hospital – a lapsus reminiscent of Zeno Cosini’s failure to attend his friend Guido’s funeral. In this animal-like condition of flight to one’s darkest origins, the father descends to the infantile level. The book ends at this point, upon the probable eradication of the father’s ultimate fetish, his daughter.

12 Vasco Pratolini’s Il quartiere as a Calque of Purgatorio

rivolti al monte ove ragion ne fruga – Dante, Purgatorio iii.3

Coming of age in the 1930s in Florence under the single party system, Vasco Pratolini was drawn to the Strapaese movement, which stood for the virtues of the agricultural heartland as against the economic elites of a more technologically advanced Europe. His writings in the journal Il Bargello showed the populist, revolutionary direction of the Fascist left, its anti-bourgeois identity and program of action. When Mussolini established an alliance with Franco and entered as a partner in his war against the Spanish Republic in 1936, Pratolini and many other artists and intellectuals, like his friends Alfonso Gatto and Elio Vittorini, grew disaffected with Fascism.1 It was as an active member of the Resistance in Rome in 1943 that Pratolini wrote Il quartiere.2 The novel is his fictional reminiscence of the Florentine milieu of the 1930s, a poetic memorial in which history and myth are juxtaposed in a series of elemental and uncontrived episodes. The strands of the narrative form a unique portrait of a community of working-class youths who mature at a time of great social crisis and privation. Pratolini’s mother was a domestic, his father a barman. Already a working typographer at fourteen, he read Dante and other classics he was able to borrow from neighbours. As an autodidact, he remained free of the categorizations, canons, and conformisms of the academy. In a 1947 portrait of his city published in Il Politecnico, Pratolini recalls that when he first went to school at age six he had mastered the ‘sillabario’ because of his memorization of the ‘marmi’ of Dante found

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near his house on via de’ Magazzini, and that in 1931, after the death of his twenty-year-old girlfriend, he found a packet of classnotes on a course on Dante: ‘Sia chiaro, della “Divina Commedia”, qualcosa io credevo di sapere. ... Le note a piè di pagina esigevano immediatamente altre letture: Compagni, Villani, una reazione a catena’ (Let’s be clear: I felt I knew something about the ‘Divine Comedy’. ... The footnotes immediately required other readings: Compagni, Villani, a chain reaction).3 About his fellow Florentines Pratolini writes: ‘I fiorentini sono faziosi, beceri, geniali’ (The Florentines are factious, vulgar, genial).4 The contentious Florentines are for Pratolini a people ‘che tiene ancor del monte e del macigno’ (who retain something of the mountains and boulders) (Inf. xv.60).5 Because of their complex character – he alleges – after 1943, ‘Soltanto a Firenze ci fu, tra patrioti e fascisti, vera guerra civile. Fu lí e soltanto lí, vera Spagna: rossi e neri dietro le barricate ... I partigiani scesero dalle montagne, e i fascisti li aspettarono’ (Only in Florence was there, between the patriots and Fascists, a true civil war. There and only there, a true Spain: reds and blacks behind the barricades ... The partisans came down from the mountains, and the Fascists were waiting for them).6 And he adds: Se c’è un popolo per il quale la storia sia una realtà quotidianamente attiva, anche se inconscia, questo è il fiorentino. [...] In effetti, la lotta politica tra fascismo e antifascismo, negli anni che vanno dal 1919 al 1925, assunse un immediato aspetto di ‘lotta di parte,’ fu subito la piazza ad entrare in scena, con l’imboscata, l’assassinio, lo scempio, la beffa: l’istinto barbarico che esplode sordamente nei popoli consumati da un’estrema civiltà. A Firenze il fascismo si impose allo stesso modo che s’imposero i Guelfi, con l’eliminazione fisica dell’avversario, col terrore. Dopo secoli di servitù e di rivoluzioni bonarie, i fiorentini avevano ritrovato il loro antico sangue.7 If there is a people for whom history is active on a daily basis, though unconsciously, that is the Florentines. [...] In effect, the political struggle between Fascism and anti-Fascism, in the years from 1919 to 1925, assumed an immediate aspect of factional struggle, the piazza immediately became centre stage, with ambushes, assassinations, destruction, insults: the barbaric instinct that deafly explodes in peoples consumed by a civilization at its end. In Florence Fascism imposed itself in the same way the Guelphs imposed themselves, with the physical elimination of the adversary, with terror. After centuries of servitude and affable revolutions, the Florentines had again found their ancient blood.

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With the Commedia as his primer; Pratolini absorbed Dante’s world and began to allude to it in his writings. Pratolini sympathizes with the Ghibellines in the manner of Dante, whose poem he describes as follows: ‘la “Divina Commedia” è l’invettiva privata di un esiliato contro la fazione dominante’ (the ‘Divine Comedy’ is the private invective of an exile against the dominant faction).8 If Fascism was itself a kind of secular religion, which exploited the desire for secular power of the Catholic Church, Dante’s Ghibelline-leaning White Guelph position was that of the resistance, echoing his doctrine of the ‘Two Suns’ in De Monarchia that a church-state separation was in the interest of the soul as well as the political institutions.9 At the basis of Il quartiere are many of the same themes present in Dante’s Purgatorio, beginning with the value of friendship, civic polity and justice, and love. The civic cohesion of Florence and of Italy is a dominant theme in both works. The false separation of individual citizen from collectivity is presented allegorically in terms of the moral deviations and merits of the characters, who share a kind of covenant. It is finally the idea of the interdependence of individual and collective virtues that represents a precious bond for both Dante and Pratolini in the construction of their works. In fact, the allusions to Dante are so consistent that one might consider the novel as a calque of the Purgatorio. The idea of a calque is similar to that of a casting or mould. In order to better categorize this brand of modelling, I recall (from Chapter 3) that Guillén’s discussion of intertextuality is based on two sets of oppositions: the first, between ‘allusion’ and ‘inclusion,’ concerns the extent of purely verbal involvement between two works; the second, between ‘citation’ and ‘significance,’ concerns rather the intepretative or thematic relation between them.10 Thus a passing reference to another work that resonates thematically can be considered a significant allusion, while an extensive lexical borrowing may qualify as an inclusive citation. A variety of combinations is possible, including multiple ones, as in the complex relationship between the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy. In my judgment, the relationship of Il quartiere to the Purgatorio is particularly salient, or in Guillén’s terms ‘significant,’ while its formal and stuctural similarities (such as the division into thirty-three chapters) remain allusive more than inclusive. The choice of significant allusion is appropriate to the ‘small’ scale of Pratolini’s novel, its characters’ embodiment of ‘bona umiltà’ (Purg. xi.119), as Oderisi da Gubbio says to Dante. By not attempting to ‘include’ the Commedia, Pratolini preserves his work’s autonomy and contemporaneity; fortunately there is no attempt to imitate

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the encyclopedic nature of Dante’s text or to reproduce its theology or related anagogical interpretations. Purgatorio is the only canticle in which time is palpable, existing more as shared consciousness than abstraction or trope; it is the most earthlike and colourful canticle and is the only one in which nostalgia is understandable, precisely because on their upward path the pilgrims are consistently focused on the themes of hope and repentance. Hell involves torcere, not volgere; guilt not penitence. Purgatory is the site in which the body is not split from the spirit but is its agent; hands, mouths, words, and kisses are all among the instruments of the conscience. The purgatorial domain of time is the human manifold for the work of the temperament, and temperance. In contrast, the lesson on temperance acquired in the heaven of Saturn will be effortless, contempo-raneous with the contemplation. In Il quartiere, as in Purgatorio, one may speak of an upward ascent. The protagonists, and Valerio in particular, are led along a path of recalled desires and attachments, friendships, reminiscences, and new beginnings. Here too the dominant themes are the distinction of hope from illusion, the acquisition of reason, the naturalness of civic community, the nature of earthly and spiritual love, contrition, and the thirst for redemption. As in Purgatorio, the moral profile of the characters concerns their deviation from virtue, though one is being pushed upward by ‘il buon voler’ in order to recognize one’s sinfulness and perfect one’s will. However, in Il quartiere there is no doctrinal language employed to prescribe the exact tenets underlying that ascent. Rather Il quartiere stands out for its realism, frankness, and purity in relating objects to ideas and feelings in an accurate historical setting. As in Dante, the reader must decipher the various levels of a retrospective narration along with the thresholds of a moral system that is presented experientially. Mario Ricciardi writes in this regard, ‘La storia dell’individuo narrato è la stessa dell’individuo che narra. Per ottenere questo risultato Pratolini deve delimitare tutto il mondo a quello conosciuto per esperienza’ (The history of the individual narrated is the same as that of the individual who narrates. In order to obtain this result Pratolini must delimit the whole world to that which is known by experience).11 This empirical restraint is forecast by the book’s epigraph, taken from Eugenio Montale, the most celebrated Italian writer to grow to prominence in the Florence of the 1930s: Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti: ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo. (Q 15)

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Only this can we tell you today: / what we are not, what we do not want.

One may see the epigraph as the first of several addresses to the reader. It announces in limine the author’s awareness of a shared sense of crisis and his rejection of an outmoded literary aestheticism; implicit too is the positive relation that can inhere between prose and poetry, and the implicit role that literary language can play in constituting the morality of tomorrow.12 The action of Il quartiere is centred on Piazza Santa Croce, where the statue of ‘Il Poeta’ stands in front of the church which is itself a kind of Pantheon of the Italian nation, housing the tombs of such figures as Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, Alfieri, and Foscolo. The action occurs in the years 1932–6 and is the narrator’s retrospective reflection on his development. Francesco Paolo Memmo notes that in the years that culminate in the act of writing the Quartiere, Pratolini leaves behind ‘la dimensione privata, idillica ed elegiaca dei suoi primi libri’ (the private, idyllic, and elegiac dimension of his first books); in this respect the book is Pratolini’s ‘first chronicle.’13 The author’s memorialistic style emerges without the trappings of sentimentality, decadent art prose, or excessive self-consciousness. In the words of Cesare Cases, Pratolini’s ‘immediacy and spontaneity’ in this work are to be seen among the ‘virtues of humanity, generosity, intuition’ appertaining to a certain ‘uneducated’ Italian populace.14 The fact that the characters are seen from within their experience is evident in the opening chapter in which the narrator, Valerio, remembers his community (‘Eravamo creature comuni’), saying in effect, ‘we were flawed but without remorse, innocent, poor and hard-working’: Il nostro lettino, che aveva un crocifisso o un santo inchiodato da capo, con un ramoscello d’ulivo per traverso, conosceva le nostre speranze, inseguite contando le crepe del soffitto. [...] La casa significava i volti che le sue stanze ospitavano, e noi le volevamo bene per questo. Nulla sapevamo, non volevamo sapere forse. Ci promettevamo oneste gioie ... (Q 19) Our narrow bed, with a crucifix or a saint’s image nailed above its head and an olive branch slanting across, knew the hopes we toyed with as we lay counting the cracks in the ceiling. [...] To us the house meant the features of those who lived in it. That was why we loved it. We knew nothing. Perhaps we had no desire to learn. But we promised ourselves honest joys ...

The house sits securely within the grid of the quartiere; the template of

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streets is known to its inhabitants as is the history of strife going back to the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Locations possess an archaic aspect: ‘Via de’ Malcontenti ne era un’arteria e un monito’ (One of the arteries ... was Via dei Malcontenti, its name a permanent reproach) (Q 17). In the very names of the main thoroughfares, Via Ghibellina and Via dell’Agnolo, there are deep understandings, subconsiously shared by the characters in an awareness of their common bonds. Si stava agli angoli delle vie, sotto la Volta ove fu trafitto Corso Donati, e ci si stava senza alcun sospetto di tutto questo, ‘popolo minuto’ sempre, fatto ignaro ormai, ciompi da se stessi traditi. (Q 20) Yet we might stand at the street corners, maybe under the very arch where Corso Donati was stabbed to death, without any suspicion of our heritage. For we were still, as we had always been, the popolo minuto, the lowly workers, grown forgetful of our past. We were rebels, betrayed by our own stupidity.15

Such references to the medieval chronicles of Florence have the effect of a positive anachronism as the crisis of the humble people is presented dialectically in terms of a balance between the solitude of every soul and the importance of community. The focus on the will, and the desire to improve one’s lot, is explicitly stated, and behind it is the implicit subject of civic freedom, the theme of Catone (Purg. i.31–6), whose love for freedom led him to take his own life. If the Inferno was the zone where Dante-pilgrim corrected his will, Purgatorio aims at its perfection, which occurs upon entry to the Earthly Paradise in Canto xxviii. In Il quartiere the will in question is that of the protagonist and first-person narrator Valerio, and that of his guides: his father, and his friends Giorgio and Marisa. But rather than assign a sort of literalist set of parallel functions, the point of our analysis will be to focus on values, ethics, and growth. Selected episodes alluded to – involving the figures of Casella, Buonconte da Montefeltro and Pia de’ Tolomei, Manfredi, Sordello, Oderisi, Marco Lombardo, Guido Del Duca, and finally Lia, Rachele, and Beatrice – must be understood in their essence before one can read Il quartiere as a calque of Purgatorio. In both texts there are minor episodes and descriptive passages that serve as necessary intervals between the major episodes. In Chapter 2 the major characters are named: Valerio, Arrigo, Carlo, Maria, Giorgio, Luciana, and Marisa. We learn that teenaged Maria has scandalized her family by staying out all night, that the more mature

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Giorgio wants to marry her and stem the wrong; that Carlo – like Valerio, younger than Giorgio and older than Maria’s younger brother Arrigo – has had an affair with Marisa, whom Valerio finds fetching (though his initial interest was in Marisa’s friend Luciana). There is a great interaction of people as the amorous theme is introduced through the person of Valerio. The youths enjoy making fun of a street juggler at Piazza Beccaria, but the giocoliere returns at chapter’s end to strike Valerio and warn him against repeating such antics. The episode recalls that of the jongleur Casella, who in reciting the opening of Dante’s poem ‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’ in Purgatorio ii announces the theme of vanity. Casella, whose physical form thrice eluded Dante-pilgrim’s embrace, represents lyric sentiment and romantic love, the vanity one projects in courtship and song, and the nostalgia one feels in love’s aftermath and the need to move beyond a sentimentalizing sort of love. In the concrete blows received at chapter’s end from the juggler, one recalls the stern upbraiding delivered by Catone to seal the Casella episode (Purg. ii.120–3), as he urges the pilgrim to move beyond worldly things and put his moral house in order. Chapter 3 shows Valerio at home with his father; his nickname is ‘Nano’ (dwarf) and he still wears the shorts of a boy instead of the long pants suitable for courtship. Valerio learns from his father that adults have secrets, which can also be called hopes. The space of the quartiere of Santa Croce, like that of the Mountain of Purgatory, is permeated by this vague translucence of hope. It is a space in which every condition stands as a moral result of past actions and every action will have moral consequences; thus each episode implicates a history, an emergence and a passing, a becoming and a perishing, through which meaning and value can be derived.16 This history is related in Pratolini’s memorialistic style, unhindered by sentimentalism. In both works the interpretive correspondences between the physical and spiritual spaces are critical. Thus, for example, when Dante enters into the sunshine and sees his shadow in Canto iii – the canto of the slain Ghibelline Manfredi – he is awaking to the Purgatorial reality. So too in Chapter 3 must Valerio awake to the dichotomy of body and spirit: ‘Per la prima volta intuivo che gli uomini portano con sé dei segreti, che dentro il cuore di ciascun uomo ci può essere qualcosa che nemmeno il piú caro amico conosce e che colui tiene celato dietro la maschera della faccia, piú dentro di dove esce la voce’ (For the first time I began to see that men carry secrets around with them, that in the heart of every man there may be something hidden even from his dearest friend, hidden behind

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a mask – deep down) (Q 31). The goal in either text is the engagement of this hidden component of one’s soul for the purpose of acquiring reason: ‘Dietro le finestre illuminate dalla luna, la nostra povertà diventava davvero un segreto inconfessato, una speranza da custodire fino al giorno in cui avessimo conquistata la ragione’ (Behind our window panes that gleamed in the moonlight, our poverty lay hidden, a secret to be guarded until the day when we should understand the reason for its existence) (Q 37). As the narrative theme of exploring one’s roots is developed, it takes on the contours of a perfection of the will through a series of mimetic tableaux which constitute a kind of morality play, the rendition of which originates in and returns to the autobiographical experience of the author. The consciousness/unconsciousness dialectic among the characters, their adolescent awkwardness and grace, is rendered in a prose that is unadorned, practical, and expressive. In the early chapters and cantos one still finds the nostalgic but impotent fascination for the body. The word ‘corpo’ is used ten times in the first six cantos and only eight times in the remaining twenty-seven cantos of Purgatorio. Among the occupants of this marginal realm there are many soldiers and generals. The body is the battleground, as it were, and war is the great manipulator and diminisher of souls. The princes in the Valley of the Princes are occupied with past loves; just so, it is only after Valerio and Marisa have made love that their moral journey, of expiation and learning, can properly begin. The ‘scalette’ (stairs) along the Erta Canina are figural equivalents of the steps at the entrance to Purgatory.17 A narrative similarity between the works is found in the addresses to the reader. The address to the reader engages one’s participation and marks an architectural division in the text. In terms of communication theory, the address to the reader is a command message that offers ‘instructions for use’ of the surrounding report messages of the narrative. Il quartiere’s first such address is found in Chapter 7, where the narrator opens each of the first four paragraphs, ‘Se io vi parlo di vizio ...’ (If I speak to you of vice ...). Here the narrator explicates the essential difference between vice and sin, and establishes the critical importance of hope in the face of so much misery: ‘Resistiamo da secoli, intatti e schivi. Un uomo cade, una donna precipita, ma erano secoli che resistevano, eternità che stavano in piedi con la forza della disperazione di una speranza’ (For centuries we’ve been fighting back, unharmed, aloof. Then a man gives way, a woman falls – but they had been fighting back for centuries, for an eternity they had kept themselves on their feet, propped up by a despairing hope) (Q 45–6). Among those fallen who are remem-

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bered are Valerio’s mother, Carlo and Olga’s father, Arrigo and Maria’s father. One also learns that Carlo and Olga’s mother is a prostitute, and that Carlo commits petty thievery to survive, though he is a faithful friend. Not coincidentally ‘vizio’ and ‘viziata’ appear in Purgatorio vii, where Sordello represents the proper use of political language, including the language of war or conflict, and he aids Dante in summoning up the courage to proceed. Sordello is also a figure of courtly virtues, the kidnapper of Cunizza da Romano. In Canto viii, which begins at sunset, Dante addresses the reader for the first time in this canticle, noting how the veil of fiction grows thin: Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero, ché ‘l velo è ora ben tanto sottile, certo che ’l trapassar dentro è leggero. (Purg. viii.19–21) Here, reader, sharpen well thine eyes to the truth, for now, surely, the veil is so fine that to pass within is easy.18

The effect of such an address is to reframe the didactic content or, as Spitzer puts it, to instruct the reader as to the ‘allegorical interpretation of the literal sense in the narrative.’19 The same is true for the address in Canto x, where the reader is advised not to be swayed by the punishments on the terrace of pride, but rather by their effects on the souls of the penitent. Non vo’ però, lettor, che tu ti smaghi di buon proponimento per udire come Dio vuol che ’l debito si paghi. Non attender la forma del martìre: pensa la succession; pensa ch’al peggio oltre la gran sentenza non può ire. (Purg. x.106–11) But I would not have thee, reader, fall away from good resolve for hearing how God wills that the debt be paid; do not dwell on the form of the torment, think of what follows, think that at worst it cannot go beyond the great Judgement.(J.S.)

In line with this essential endorsement of the reader’s abilities, Leo Spitzer writes, ‘It is hope, not contrition, fear, or despair that we should see at the center of Purgatorio.’20 Between the above two addresses to the

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reader there is a third, in Canto ix, that concerns Dante’s elevation of his poetic technique. The canto begins at dawn with a strongly sexual astronomical periphrasis followed by Dante’s dream of the eagle, and then by this address, which the poet uses to inform the reader that he has elevated his poetic technique in order to match his elevated material: Lettor, tu vedi ben com’ io innalzo la mia matera, e però con più arte non ti maravigliar s’io la rincalzo. (Purg. ix.70–2) Thou seest well, reader, that I rise to a higher theme; do not wonder, therefore, if I sustain it with greater art.) (J.S.)

In the above three addresses to the reader, it is clear that Dante intends to pass on to the reader, with some sympathy, the increased rigours of the purgatorial journey.21 The above-cited address to the reader in Chapter 7 of Il quartiere also had the effect of interiorizing what had henceforth been a largely external narrative. In the two chapters that follow, one sees the established theme of friendship progressively linked to that of civic polity and love. As Valerio’s courtship of Marisa intensifies, the couple is seen to be on an upward climb: Io ero veramente innamorato di lei in quel momento, colmo della sua figura che camminava al mio fianco. [...] Salendo d’accordo verso i Colli, traversato il fiume, parlando, era un’offerta tacita e reciproca dei nostri corpi adolescenti che ci scambiavamo con gli occhi. La mia castità era scontata da millenni nell’istante in cui passavo la mano sui suoi risvolti di pelliccia avvertendo il seno se premevo un poco. (Q 50) At that moment I was really and truly in love with her, intensely conscious of her presence at my side. [...] Climbing towards the hills on the other side of the river, talking as we went, we exchanged glances. In our eyes was an unspoken offering of our young bodies. My virginity was lost – a thousand years since, it seemed – in that moment when I stroked the fur of her coat, aware of her breasts beneath.

In Chapter 9 the carnal relation is consummated, atavistically and inevitably: ‘D’istinto abbraccai la mia compagna baciandola sulla bocca e sulla gola, convulsamente, affondando il viso fra i risvolti di pelliccia. E

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d’istinto, con l’esperienza dei secoli, la riversai sull’erba, nel gran silenzio del prato, sotto il pallido sole’ (Instinctively I embraced my companion, kissed her repeatedly, convulsively, on the mouth and throat, buried my face between the fur lapels of her coat. Instinctively, with age-old knowledge, I pulled her down into the grass, into the great silence of the fields, under the pallid sun) (Q 57). In Chapter 10 Marisa tells Valerio of when she watched him as a washer-girl by the river and dreamed of him, with his sling in hand aiming at her from his boat; that she confessed her dreams to a priest; and that her riverside neighbourhood is even humbler, poorer than the quartiere of Santa Croce. Chapter 11 begins with the sort of astronomical orientation that Dante frequently employs to open a canto, as in the cited periphrasis of Canto ix: ‘Nel cielo ancora chiaro, coi bianchi cirri naviganti, era comparsa una falce di luna. V’era fra terra e cielo quel distacco di ogni sera, allorché le cose terrene, uomini e flora, acquistano un alone mortale: al di sopra degli oggetti e delle creature, grevi del proprio corpo, il cielo è ancora limpido e terso, con una falce di luna, e Venere che brilla’ (The sky was still bright. A crescent moon had appeared amid the drifting cirrus clouds. It was that moment of the day when earth and sky draw apart, when earthly things take on a halo of mortality. High above the world, weighed down by its earthly burden, the sky is still bright, and Venus is shining) (Q 65). As Marisa describes Carlo’s having tortured her, she is challenging Valerio to understand the positive side of her love for Carlo. Here Marisa emerges as an example of humility: her locus is via Giramontino and the Erta Canina, the same locus as the Angel of Humility who removes the first ‘P’ from Dante’s brow, in Purgatorio xi.100–2: San Miniato al Monte. The calque is so exact that the two itineraries include the same bridge used – Ponte alle Grazie, or in Dante’s day, the ‘Rubaconte’: ‘dove siede la chiesa che soggioga / la ben guidata sopra Rubaconte’ (where the church stands above Rubaconte that dominates the well-guided city [J.S.]) (Purg. xii.101–2). Once again, Pratolini has absorbed Dante; his first serious reading as a boy was the Vita nuova, followed by the Commedia. The reading of Dante sinks into his creative imagination and yields words, lines, structures, characters at a later date, almost unconsciously. The difference in sensibilities explored here – the fact that Valerio’s ‘carità’ is not equal to Marisa’s – is complicated by the retrospective narration, since, from the perspective of many years later when Valerio is recounting this episode, his life has changed and his concept of love is presumably equal to that of Marisa.

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In Chapter 12 one sees the community in preparation for the wedding celebration of Giorgio and Maria. The ceremony will be marked by the absence of Gino, the member of this circle of friends who has deviated most radically from the common bond and ethos; Gino’s envy has carried him down a fatal path. In Chapter 13 it is revealed that Gino has committed a murder, though this is only revealed to the characters after Gino’s arrest and letter of confession in Chapter 25. Passing into this discussion of envy, one may consider with profit the parallel site in Purgatorio: Dante’s terrace of envy, where the penitents have their eyes sewn shut with wire and the air is black with smoke. The once envious Guido del Duca is now the spokesperson of a new evangelical economics by which one gains in the measure that one gives. The parallel figure of generosity (or anti-envy) in the Il quartiere is Giorgio, who has fostered Maria’s spiritual growth. As one reads in Chapter 14: ‘Con la forza di volontà che le nasce da una ragione acquisita, ha voluto provare a se stessa la propria liberazione. [...] È stato un anno di tenere colloqui, di serene parole, di reciproca conquista fra Maria e Giorgio. [...] E inconsciamente, lungo un anno, il loro amore era stata una trepidante ascesa nella grazia, l’elementare bisogno di esprimersi l’inesprimibile che hanno le creature leali innamorate’ (And now that she saw things clearly, she felt the need to prove to herself that she was really free. [...] It has been a year of loving talks, of calm decisions, of mutual conquest, between Maria and Giorgio. [...] And unconsciously, throughout the long year, their love has been a timid striving upwards towards harmony, towards the elementary need, that is felt by all creatures truly in love, to express the ineffable) (Q 81). Giorgio is an anti-Ulysses figure. If Ulysses went on a ‘folle volo,’ spurring on his crew with illegitimate claims – ‘“Considerate la vostra semenza: / Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / Ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza”’ (‘Consider well the seed that gave you birth: / you were not made to live your lives as brutes, / but to be followers of worth and knowledge’ ) (Inf. xxvi.118–20)22 – Giorgio, in his speech to Carlo, who is in favour of the invasion of Ethiopia, counsels his companions to stay close to home, to tend their garden, and to think of their origins, not in the deluded fashion of Ulysses but in the dimension suggested by Guido del Duca after his invective against Tuscany and the filth of the Arno: Di mia semente cotal paglia mieto; o gente umana, perché poni ’l core là ‘v’ è mestier di consorte divieto? (Purg. xiv.85–7)

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Of my sowing I reap such straw. O race of men, why do you set your hearts where must needs be exclusion of partnership? (J.S.)

Virgil’s gloss of Guido del Duca to Dante in Canto xv puts the emphasis on working for a collective good, for the moral preeminence of what is ‘nostro’ (ours). Not coincidentally perhaps, in Chapter 15, as Giorgio and Maria’s wedding is celebrated amidst a veritable effusion of angelic light and harmonious sentiments, one finds a proliferation of verbs in the first-person plural that asserts the unity and harmony of the group: ‘E noi eravamo contenti di essere amici, di essere giunti insieme al punto che chiamiamo felicità’ (And we were glad to be friends and to have arrived hand-in-hand at that point which we call happiness) (Q 86); this spirit is reaffirmed by the announcement at the wedding party of another engagement, that of Arrigo and the angelic Luciana: ‘Aveva il volto raggiante, colorito alle guance’ (Her face was radiant, her cheeks burning) (Q 88). Thus one sees the change in person of the narrator’s voice alter the spiritual thematics and continuity of the work.23 The issue of addresses to the reader in Pratolini’s novel has been raised above with reference to Chapter 7. Now in his next major address to the reader in Chapter 16, one finds a changed perspective. In contrast to the line ‘Se io vi parlo di vizio,’ now the iterated line is ‘Se vi parlo di bontà, fede e affetti...’: E se vi parlo di bontà, di fede e di affetti, fra le mura delle nostre case chiazzete d’umido, odoranti di cinabrese? Siamo gente consumata da servaggi e fazioni; scontiamo colpe secolari, nostre per quanto v’è di somigliante, nei nostri tratti, con le figure che ci contemplano dalle pareti del Carmine, affrescate da Masaccio. [...] Se vi parlo di bontà, fede e affetti vissuti fino all’ineffabile, voi che dite? Impariamo a capire di doverci bastare da noi stessi, di dover meditare il mondo sui nostri volti che sono la sola cosa che ci sia possibile decifrare, e riconoscere. Il nostro cuore è sprovvisto ma intatto. (Q 90–1) And what then if I speak to you of goodness and loyalty and affection within the walls of our houses, houses streaked with damp-stains, and smelling of cinnabar? We are a people worn out in servitude and in struggle. We pay the penalty for wrongs done centuries ago. Our own wrongs, just as the faces that look down from Masaccio’s frescoes in the Church of the Carmine are our own faces. [...] If I speak to you of goodness and loyalty and love that is beyond expression, what have you to say? We are learning that we must

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be content with ourselves as we are, that we must study the world revealed in our faces, the one riddle to which we have the key, the one object we are allowed to possess and recognize. Our heart is defenceless, but intact.

In the rhythmic iterative structure that Valerio adopts to address the reader, he has established a symmetry between vice and virtue at two levels, the personal and the civic. In the arc between the two addresses (Chapters 7 and 16), one has seen the dynamics of love and ethics within the relationships between Marisa and Carlo, and Giorgio and Maria. The question that now emerges concerns the degrees of love and its transferral to others. This is a goodness that also exists on a civic plane, as an elevated and altruistic virtue. And while such goodness depends on reason – as manifest in the intelligence of Giorgio – there is also an obscure threat which has to do with the nature of reason itself. Reason is only acquired after a discerning struggle in the individual, for the sake of self-reliance and against illusion and ignorance. But goodness and affection depend on the limits of reason, of the ineffable. ‘Our’ faces, our volti, says Valerio to the reader, are all we have to decipher; to make our way in the world. I will return to this notion of the face in the conclusion of this chapter. Giorgio was born, Valerio tells us in this chapter, with ‘il sereno dolore del mondo’ (his calm sorrow for the world) and ‘l’aerea quiete del cielo’ (the vast peace of the heavens) (Q 92, 93). Giorgio also recalls, within the purgatorial framework, the figure of Marco Lombardo, who provides Dante on the terrace of anger with a doctrinal recapitulation of the idea of free will, and the importance of learning as the basis of a civil society. Giorgio’s history is provided: ‘Egli aveva abitato, ragazzo, un ultimo piano: fu l’unico di noi a godersi il cielo aperto ad ogni risveglio. Forse per questo i suoi occhi erano celesti’ (As a boy he had lived on the top floor – he was the only one of us who could enjoy the open sky when he woke up. Maybe this is why his eyes were blue) (Q 92). The risk of such a radical morality as Giorgio’s, learned at his father’s knee, is made apparent when the father is arrested for distibuting anti-Fascist leaflets; now Giorgio sets out to read his father’s poltical texts. Like Guido del Duca, who laments the loss of chivalric values, family nobility, and charity, and serves as a voice for Dante to criticize the political figures of his time, Giorgio evokes the honour and chivalry of an earlier time in his personal and political comportment. In this spirit the address to the reader that opens Purgatorio xvii asks the reader to remember a time of perceptual awakening:

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Ricorditi, lettor, se mai ne l’alpe ti colse nebbia per la qual vedessi non altrimenti che per pelle talpe, come, quando i vapori umidi e spessi a diradar cominciansi, la spera del sol debilemente entra per essi; e fia la tua imagine leggera in giugnere a veder com’ io rividi lo sole in pria, che già nel corcar era. (Purg. xvii.1–9) Recall, reader, if ever in the mountains mist caught thee for which thou couldst not see except as moles do through their skin, how, when the moist, dense vapours begin to disperse, the sun’s disk passes feebly through them; and thy imagination will quickly come to see how, at first, I saw the sun again, now near its setting. (J.S.)

Here, as Dante emerges from the terrace of the wrathful, the reader is asked to ‘remember’ a scene comparable to what Dante is experiencing, and thus to imagine the change in atmosphere. It is amidst this clarifying of the internal drive and the spirit of the imagination that the pilgrim passes to the next terrace, of sloth. Here, at the very centre of the Commedia, Virgil educates Dante on the nature of love and one finds the great apostrophe to the imagination. Thus the atmospherics themselves are changing to reflect the more sublime moral sphere one has reached: Già eran sovra noi tanto levati li ultimi raggi che la notte segue, che le stelle apparivan da più lati. [...] Noi eravam dove più non saliva la scala sù, ed eravamo affissi, pur come nave ch’a la piaggia arriva. (Purg. xvii.70–2; 76–8). Above us now the final rays before / the fall of night were raised to such a height / that we could see the stars on every side. [...] We’d reached a point at which the upward stairs / no longer climbed, as we were halted there / just like a ship when it has touched the shore. (A.M.)

The following passage from Chapter17 of Il quartiere suggests some similarity with Dante’s thematics in this passage:

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Al di là delle nostre figure, del ricordo di Gino, qualcosa ci isolava nel nostro ragionamento, come quando in cielo s’accende una luce, balena, e il tuono tarda e, restiamo sospesi. (Q 97) There was something there, quite apart from us and our talk about Gino, that for the moment had set us apart from the world – just as when a flash of lightning rends the sky, and then the thunder is slow in following, and one remains in suspense.

At this point Giorgio speaks to his younger friends about Gino’s deviation, his confusion of illusion for hope. Giorgio employs the metaphor of a large box to address the question of how to form a civil society: ‘È come se qualcuno mi regalasse una cassa dove so che c’è una radio e io non avessi le tenaglie per schiodare la cassa. Nel caso di Gino dentro la cassa c’era il mondo, cioè altre città, altre conoscenze, la bella vita insomma. Ma lui non sa da che parte si comincia, non ha le tenaglie in una parola’ (It’s as though somebody gave me a box with a wireless-set inside it and I didn’t have a pair of pliers to open the box with. In Gino’s case somebody gave him a box with a whole world inside it – new towns, new friends, a new life, in short. But he doesn’t know how to set about getting the box open. He hasn’t got a pair of pliers) (Q 96). Giorgio states that hope is a partner to reason, as it allows one to open of the ‘cassa’ (chest) of one’s world and thus to defeat illusion: ‘ “Poniamo che uno abbia sete: secondo l’illusione vede acqua da tutte le parti e lecca un muro perché gli sembra una cascata. Secondo la speranza invece egli ragiona e cerca di indirizzarsi verso un luogo dove sa che esiste una fontana. Può cadere stecchito dalla sete lungo la strada, ma era diretto verso la fontana”’ (‘Suppose, for instance, somebody’s dying of thirst. He sees nothing but water everywhere, and starts to lick the side of a house because he thinks it’s a waterfall. That’s illusion for you. Hope’s different. Then you work it all out and try to make for somewhere where you know there’s a spring. You may kick the bucket before you get there, but at least you’re going in the right direction’) (Q 97). This simple language expresses the same notion of purgatorial thirst and thirst for purification and redemption that Dante introduces in Canto xxi (where ‘sete’ appears three times) through the character of Statius. In Chapter 21 Valerio and Marisa are almost struck by a car, a harbinger of their imminent breakup. In the instant in which the couple is almost hit, they realize they are a former couple. Valerio’s affections have wandered to Olga, who emerges as a Beatrice-figure (as in the Vita

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nuova) with the implicit expectation of a loss and a sacrifice, of an unfulfilled erotic passion that forces the subject to an ulterior spiritual sublimation of his sincere but misplaced affect. Yet Marisa will ultimately be the Beatrice figure (as in the Commedia) with her ‘carretto’ in the pageant of purity of Chapter 33. In Chapter 22 it is September 1935, and Valerio’s father deplores his son’s enthusiasm for war, not to mention his Fascist sympathies. Here one is led to contemplate the correct motive for political action in the world; if Giorgio has been a steadfast guide for his younger friend, his vision is decidedly laic – Virgilian – within the pattern of allusions I have been identifying. The advent of Valerio’s father, and his decisive reappearance in Chapter 30, evoke a moral example above that of Giorgio, more akin to that of Statius. The father knows that the correct motives for political action lie ‘beyond the world’ in one’s self-realization and one’s fulfilment in love; the father tells Valerio that war is fundamentally useless. This scenario fits with the contrast of the Christian Statius with the virtuous pagan Virgil as reflected in the final third of Purgatorio. As if to mirror Virgil’s ‘departure’ from the increasingly Christian theme, Giorgio now is called away – first he is arrested on illegitimate grounds (he had pawned the stolen wedding gift from Gino, which Gino acquired in a homicide) and then he is drafted into the military. The group of friends – Valerio, Giorgio, Arrigo, and Carlo – have a toast, and follow Giorgio’s advice not to be drawn down into melancholy but to share in one another’s friendship. Carlo shows he has grown out of the violence of his own deviation, dismissing Giorgio’s sense of responsibility for Gino’s demise: ‘Non devi fartene una colpa ... [T]utti gli uomini agiscono secondo la propria natura, e quando l’istinto porta su una strada, non c’è cristi, siamo costretti a seguirla fino in fondo. A meno di non essere un santo od un eroe. E questo non era il caso di Gino’ (‘You mustn’t take the blame,’ Carlo replied. ‘After all, everybody acts according to his nature. If your nature makes you do something then you’ve just got to do it. and that’s that, there’s no help for it. Unless you’re a hero or a saint’) (Q 132). And Valerio understands, precisely at the moment of his friends’ departure, that friendship is the answer for what cannot be found in one’s private self: ‘Cercavamo invano in noi stessi un motivo che ci liberasse dall’impaccio che non trovava un esito interiore’ (Desperately we sought for something to relieve the anguish we could not express) (Q 134). Purgatorio xxiii is cast under the sign of childbirth. If the tree in Canto xxiii tells of Mary preparing wine for the wedding feast, in Chapter 23

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it is the feast for the birth of Giorgio and Maria’s first-born, Lorenzo. In the broadest possible sense the spirit of the quartiere is the spirit of friendship and unity; it leads to self-knowledge and happiness. Each of the interweaving episodes contributes to this moral and collective theme as it is developed retrospectively by the author whose own experience, growing up in the shadows of the Casa di Dante, was to feel Dante as a neighbour and to live in the Florentine world populated by his historical characters. One has in its composite a typology of the soul’s formation analogous to the long discourse regarding the creation of the soul in Canto xxv. The penitents of lust in Canto xxvi correspond in our skeletal parallel to Valerio’s love for Olga, the ideal that he, like Dante encountering Guido Guinizelli within the purifying fire of that Terrace, must comprehend and go beyond. Valerio’s reading of Dante now intensifies: ‘Ora sono alle prese con Dante. Mica ci capisco molto, ma poi leggo le note e imparo la storia’ (I’m struggling through the Divine Comedy now. Not that I take in very much, but then I read the footnotes and follow the train of the story) (Q 150). Valerio’s remarks direct us to the Earthly Paradise: ‘Siccome aprivo gli occhi alla conoscenza su un’edizione popolare della Divina Commedia, pensavo a Beatrice, pensavo a Matelda, a Piccarda pensavo ingenuamente. Col cuore che mi batteva di trepidazione, pronunciavo parole che riuscissero gradite alla mia compagna, in modo da strapparle un sorriso, un segno di consenso alla mia gioia’ (I had been getting to know something of the Divine Comedy, in a popular edition, and so I could not help comparing her ingenuously with Beatrice, with Matelda, with Piccarda. While my heart trembled to win a smile from her, a sign that she shared my happiness) (Q 152). While still selfabsorbed in his adolescent loves, Valerio cites the very canto and pageant with Matelda and Beatrice, Lia and Rachele, that by novel’s end will be figured in the constellation of Marisa, Maria, and Luciana. Valerio still believes that Olga is his Beatrice; when she asks how one can be certain of truly loving, he responds that he loves her only, and: ‘Fatti una ragione del mio amore, poi rispondimi come ti detta il cuore’ (Try to get used to the idea I really do love you. Then tell me what you honestly think) (Q 154), an echo of Purg. xxiv. 52–4: ‘I’ mi son un, che quando / Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando.’ (‘I am one who, when Love breathes / in me, takes note; what he, within, dictates, / I, in that way, without, would speak and shape’ [A.M.]). In Chapter 27 one reads, ‘leggevo la Divina Commedia ripetendomi i versi ad alta voce, quando udii bussare alla porta’ (I was reading aloud from the Divine Comedy. There came a knock at the door) (Q 158). It

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is Carlo who comes to announce that he and Marisa are engaged. He tells the story of his contrition, his passage from a corrupt love to a true friendship, and his hope for true love. Meanwhile Gino has died in his jail cell, ‘consumato dalle estasi e dai digiuni’ (worn out by prayer and fasting) (Q 162), and as Giorgio writes from his regiment in Verona,advising Valerio to visit his older friend, Berto, whose wife is too ill to function and whose lover is married to a dissolute drunkard. When they visit, Berto challenges Valerio: ‘da un po’ di tempo mi piaci poco. Un operaio che la sera si mette a leggere le poesie, mi puzza’ (I’ve been feeling a bit browned off with you for some time. A working-class lad that sits down at night and reads poetry, that’s more than I can stomach) (Q 165). The critique causes Valerio to reappraise his life: ‘Le sue parole mi avevano messo a tu per tu con la mia coscienza; mi trovavo incapace a formulare un pensiero che quietasse l’oscuro rimorso che mi assaliva. Col Dante aperto sul tavolo, gelato nelle ossa, alla poca luce del salotto, mi sentii una creatura inutile, involontario traditore di qualcosa che non ero riuscito a capire’ (I had been brought face to face with my conscience; I was gnawed by a remorse which refused to be stilled. There in the dim light of the sitting-room, chilled to the bone, my Divine Comedy open in front of me, I reflected on the futility of my way of life. I was guilty of some betrayal, yet I didn’t know what I had betrayed) (Q 166). As the romance with Olga grows serious, he resolves to get his diploma and improve his lot in life. Once spring arrives they are engaged, and ‘l’acqua dell’Arno aveva ripreso il suo verde colore dopo le piene invernali’ (the Arno once more ran green after the full spate of winter), ‘Il Dante era chiuso e riposto nel cassetto del tavolo’ (My copy of the Divine Comedy was put away in the table drawer) (Q 167). Meanwhile, Olga’s mother, a prostitute in Milan, has disapproved of the engagement and come to Florence to retrieve her daughter. Olga is suddenly wrested from Valerio, spirited away to Milan by her mother, an event that will mark the definitive end of the relationship: a death, as it were, analogous to that of Beatrice, who is wrested from the adolescent Dante and delivered to another plane. In Chapter 30, the departure of this early Beatrice figure, Olga, causes Valerio to reflect on his own transgressions; his father is instrumental in this corrective effort, as was Beatrice to Dante in her scolding of Canto xxx, when she lists for him the transgressions he committed as a younger man. Now the father instructs the son – upon the son’s request – as to the types of love. He uses the image of fire to describe the progress of love as it passes through stages. Referring to the relation with Olga, the father summarizes two types of love, the juvenile love that burns – ‘E ti sei

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bruciato forte, fino al punto di scoppiare in pianto fra le braccia di tuo padre come una donnina. Sei ancora in mezzo alle fiamme ma credo sia già passato il peggio’ (So you get your fingers burnt and have to come to your old dad and cry in his arms like a baby. And you’re not out of the wood yet. Though maybe you’ve got over the worst of it) – and the mature one that does not burn – ‘Con gli anni troverai un’altra donna: le vorrai meno bene, ma sarà un affetto piú posato e sincero’ (And then sooner or later you’ll find somebody else. Maybe you will love her less than Olga, but it’ll be something more solid, steady) (Q 179–80). In the epistolary Chapter 31, the narrative is advanced toward its conclusion with great economy. The sequence of letters that Valerio receives while on military service relate the death of Carlo in battle in Ethiopia. As Marisa writes on this occasion, spiritual growth occurs through suffering, reinforcing the theme of expiation one has seen previously: ‘Forse sto scontando i miei peccati, vuol dire che non ero pentita abbastanza se Dio ha voluto punirmi in questo modo’ (Perhaps I am paying the penalty for my sins, and it means I had not repented sufficiently, if God has punished me in this way) (Q 184), and she describes various changes in the Quarter, starting with the demolition of many of the older buildings by the Fascist government. Chapter 32 records Valerio’s impressions upon seeing this destruction, which has revealed to the street the inside of those now abandoned homes; thus one has a figural image of man’s departure from this life, revealed by an act of man’s cruelty and capacity for destruction. The experience of eviction is comparable to that of exile. The familiar is made strange and the sun shines where before it remained in shadows. Only now can the figural use of Dante apparent throughout Il quartiere – what I have called significant allusion – reach its culmination. Valerio – whose own reading of the Divine Comedy has traversed various stages – has returned from the military to see his quarter in a new light. The literal unveiling of the insides of homes long buried in shadows – and the visceral term provided – ‘sventramento’ (gutting) – in contrast with the hygienic euphemism ‘risanamento’ (resanitation) provided by the regime, is mirrored by Valerio’s inner vision: ‘io stesso scoprivo cose che non ricordavo o che non avevo mai viste’ (I found myself becoming aware of features I had forgotten, or had never seen before) (Q 190). In this vivid architectural image for the coming to light of the unconscious, one sees the typical purgatorial process of recognition (conversion, expiation, penitence). Valerio has returned from his military service and sees his father, aptly

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described with a touch of trepidation on his smiling face: ‘nel suo volto ridente v’era già l’ombra di un affettuoso timore’ (His smile gave a hint both of affection and respect) (Q 192). By the same token, the father expresses full confidence in his son’s maturity and judgment in the face of political and personal challenges he will now face. I would like to focus – as I suggested above – on the use of this term volto. The word has an iconic presence and significance that exceeds viso or faccia in Dante, ranging from the place where the eyes are, or where the voice comes from, to the mirror of the mind. Moreover, as Andrea Battistini writes, the word ‘volto’ in Dante ‘can acquire the more generic value of “aspect”,“attitude” or “form” detectable as well in the corresponding Latin etymon and explainable with the fact that the volto is the part of the human body designated to express or reveal states of mind and moral qualities (see Cicero’s apothegm “animi est ... omnis actio et imago anima vultus”, De or. III lix 221).’24 The term acquires density, through the variety of uses, frequently referring to the aspect of the sinners and penitents; most of the uses in Paradiso refer to Beatrice. I limit myself to one example taken from the span of the Purgatorio that I am concerned with in order to illustrate this sense of open-ended mystery and dignity evident in the volto, here the face of Beatrice, who is discussing her ‘sustenance’of the youthful Dante with her image: Alcun tempo il sostenni col mio volto mostrando li occhi giovanetti a lui, meco il menava in dritta parte vòlt. (Purg. xxx.21–3) My countenance sustained him for a while; showing my youthful eyes to him, I led him with me toward the way of righteousness. (A.M.)

In the penultimate chapter of Il quartiere the same sort of calm and understated dignity emanates from Marisa’s face: ‘Il suo volto, non piú dipinto ma appena scialbato di rossetto alle labbra, era pallido e un po’ patito, ma tuttavia quel pallore le donava, quasi la illeggiadriva. Nei suoi occhi, al posto della antica malizia, era subentrata una luce serena, un casto languore’ (Her face, no longer made-up, but with just the faintest hint of lip-stick, was pallid, suffering even, but the pallor became her, seemed indeed to heighten her looks. The old malice had gone from her eyes; in its stead was a serene light, that told of suffering and of purity) (Q 194). And then in the final chapter, the couple is seen walking

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through the neighbourhoods where Marisa runs a laundry service, using a pushcart to pick up and deliver bags of laundry. One cannot help but notice the insistence on the iterated tern ‘carretto’ – employed twelve times in the final chapter (recalling the twelve uses of ‘carro’ over the span of Purg. xxix.107–xxxiii.38). As Valerio assists Marisa in pushing her ‘carretto’ through the middle-class neighbourhoods of her clientele, one has a kind of recapitulation of the quiet pageantry of the ‘carro’ of Lia and Rachele, and then Beatrice, in the Earthly Paradise. Marisa’s ‘carretto’ symbolizes her wholesome labour and hopeful optimism, as seen on her face: ‘Rideva, e il suo volto era di gioia’ (She was laughing, her face was radiant) (Q 195–6). Speaking to this serene yet severe Marisa, Valerio admits to a certain uneasiness, to which she responds in a manner reminiscent of Dante’s guides in the Commedia:25 ‘Non so perché: provo una certa soggezione a parlarti.’ ‘Vuol dire che non sei sincero’ essa rispose. [...] Il suo volto aveva un atteggiamento di condiscendenza, di affettuosa ironia. (Q 197) ‘I don’t know why: I feel uneasy talking to you.’ ‘That means you’re not sincere,’ she answered. [...] Her face had an attitude of condescendence, of affectionate irony.

Il quartiere ends in the creative tension it has established between the individual and society, the past, present, and future. It accomplishes this with the realistic aspect of ‘chronicle’ elicited by the author in his previous works, to which it has added the poetics of memory. It is a grave error to consider the quartiere as a kind of populist utopia, as at least one critic has done. A similar error was made in discussing the paintings of Pratolini’s friend Ottone Rosai (next to whom he is buried at San Miniato). According to Pratolini, the critics failed to distinguish between Rosai and his subjects. By assigning to Rosai a ‘monopoly’ of the ‘art of the sidewalk’ and the ‘aristocracy of the people,’ these critics insulated him from the painters of the bourgeois tradition: ‘The error began when one passed from nature (space-creation) to the figures; this ductile material in movement was frozen in the contemplation of poetry.’26 In failing to analyse Rosai’s use of the figure, critics also ignored the ‘terrible’ presence of ‘nature’ in his paintings, a presence without ideology or class: Rosai ‘was opening up a world, and perhaps he was closing it too, a world not born out of a tradition or a label.’27

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Since Pratolini too has been subjected to reductive categorization, it is opportune to consider the separate space of the intellectual that is provided for in Il quartiere, regarding which Romano Luperini has written: ‘è luogo insieme separato e privilegiato, quasi metafora della stessa separatezza dell’intellettuale nella società: la turris eburnea degli ermetici si concretizza in uno spazio reale, ma mantiene caratteri atemporali’ (it is a place at once separate and privileged, almost a metaphor for the separateness of the intellectual in society: the ivory tower of the hermetic is concretized in a real space, but it maintains an atemporal character).28 It is precisely this sort of space in which Dante-pilgrim was led through a series of vices and recreations, in memory, of the logic of penitent sinners, in ante-purgatory, on the seven terraces, and in the Earthly Paradise. The idea of a nurturing space closed to the outside world is an ideal whose nostalgia cannot be redeemed, the misprision of youth and, coincidentally, of ideological criticism. In reality, for Pratolini the moral writer, ideology is seen to erode the metaphysical and aesthetic worthiness, and the historical moment of the work. Ideological literature seeks to illustrate concepts, rendering the human figure motionless and unambiguous, a mere part of the landscape; Pratolini’s opposition to the Fascist regime – whose ‘revolution’ he had supported in the years referred to in Il quartiere – was itself an opposition to this kind of dehumanization. Stylistically Pratolini is a master of the quick sketch, of a succinct visual encoding of his characters. Similarly in the interweaving of narrative episodes he achieves great economy, mixing minor, often proleptic, events with the ongoing challenges faced by Valerio and his cohorts. The continuous ascent of Il quartiere includes some surprise descents, delusions, and losses. Since the political content of an increasingly despotic Fascism is set at a distance from the Quarter, one never views the political reality didactically but rather through the needs and evasions, the conflicts and aspirations of the characters. Thus one is not left with political profiles as such, but rather a variegated portrait of contrition, actualized within the family drama and driven by the realization of the centrality of free will to any questions of spiritual development or the attainment of harmonious polity.

Conclusion

1 Section 1 of this Conclusion returns to the concept of revolt, distinguishing it from rebellion and connecting it to a particular historical perspective, which is the Vichian idea that history and literature, as human products, are closely interrelated. The idea that the literary work can offer an ‘alternative’ history or lead one to reformulate one’s views about the past is followed through in a brief recapitulation of the book’s three parts. Section 2 of the Conclusion presents a more detailed summary of the authors; by placing them in the order of their birth, we allow a direct comparison of authors contemporary to one another. Section 3 concludes with a synthetic assessment of revolt as that condition which occurs when the ethical, aesthetic, and cognitive dimensions of the literary text coincide and complement one another. To revolt is to revolve, to turn back, to reflect in one’s mind. It is to commit to a process of change, not a single action; to revolt is to act on behalf of a larger group, not individualistically. As Octavio Paz writes, Rebellion is a term of military origin and has an individualistic shading; revolution and revolt are related words but revolution is more intellectual; it is a philosophical term, whereas revolt is older and more spontaneous. Revolution is revolt that has turned into a theory and a system. A révolté is an insurgent, one who refuses to obey, who rises up spontaneously against injustice.1

To equate revolt with rebellion, as is commonly done, is to overlook the fact that rebellion is usually based on political confrontation, that it is demotic and seeks out the simplest, most practical form of communica-

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tion. In contrast, literary revolt presupposes a code, a specialized language resistant to immediate comprehension.2 It is essential therefore to distinguish the stylistics of everyday speech, as studied by linguists, from literary stylistics. Only the latter is able to penetrate and decode the complexity of the literary text and seek out convergences within its sentimental, aesthetic, and logical-causal dimensions.3 If the error of idealist historicism was that it diminished the material and technical aspects of the work, stylistic criticism grounds its arguments in these very aspects.4 One of the classic texts on revolt, Camus’s L’Homme Révolté (The Rebel, 1951), established the distinction between revolt and ‘revolution.’5 For Camus, to revolt against alienation was the exercise of freedom. As he argued, ‘revolution’ does not adhere to the just limits of revolt and seeks to impose its ideological version of freedom in various forms, including that of historical nihilism. While, as Thomas Merton states, Camus did not define revolt in terms of an objective system, he did something just as important, which was to articulate a personal resistance to the malady of individualistic nihilism.6 By facing one’s existential situation responsibly and with disillusionment, one could preserve one’s freedom.. To his credit, Camus sees this predicament of the Rebel as a point of departure, not a point of arrival.7 The peculiarity of his essay – being that of a ‘committed’ existentialist – is that the form of revolt it articulates is non-deterministic and non-ideological and has an implicitly theological basis. At heart, Camus provides the best case for an ethical revolt constituted by the refusal to participate in traditional conflict. Ethical conflict, in contrast, is that which occurs in the psyche, in relationships, and in the individual’s reconciliation with the past. Like Camus, the authors in our study reject the view of literature as a technical field closed off from discussions of history and ethics. Literature is not deemed to be an end itself but is a means of engaging reality: psychologically, linguistically, and culturally. Vico was the first Italian philosopher who indicated the centrality of literature and philology to the historical endeavour. His systematic studies of cultural variations in the early human epochs aimed at establishing analogies between those periods and the present. By showing how specific tropes reflected phases of intellectual and social development, he demonstrated rhetoric’s centrality to ethics. As Vico’s thought was carried forward, it served to reinforce the cognitive value of the poetic work, both as a means of exploring the self and as an indicator of the relationship between the individual and the institutions. In the nineteenth century, the vatic notion of prophecy was incorporated into the new his-

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toriography, allowing the creative author to become a kind of alternative historian. If a certain philology is blind to that fact, a more anthropologically informed philology is aware of it. For that reason we have drawn on the social sciences in order to establish the material and historical basis of the text of revolt and to see the scribe as a kind of native informant who, by deviating from the role of cultural copyist, actually renews the tradition. Such an interrelated view of literature and history contrasts with the ‘modernist’ history that sets the historian apart in a kind of timeless space: The modernist historian is not a chronicler, a mere appendix to the story ‘he’ writes but the absolutely privileged and secure site grounding the possibility of the story. Modernism presents a rigid division, a binary opposition. On one side, the present, modernity, the moment (temporal space) of overview, of research and writing, secure in its self-presentation precisely because it is modern; on the other side, the past, a history that surrenders itself to the gaze of modernity.8

The authors in our study reject such a division into two time-frames, preferring to see history as something constructed, as an ongoing process that depends on the dynamics of memory. Within this view, the author may become what F. Schlegel called a ‘retrospective prophet’ or one who, by ‘prophesying the past,’ anticipates new ways to enact it through the literary text.9 There is alive in this notion the sense of a reunification of form and matter, intellect and affect, masculine and feminine. In each of the poets in Part One, the prophetic and spiritual task of the classical vate is transformed into a more intimate and internalized reflection. Thus Foscolo’s view of the mixed, tribal origins of classical societies in Ajace is enhanced by his elevation of the traits of compassion and pathos over the virtues of eloquence and heroism. So too when Manzoni frames his entry into the Napoleonic arena by clarifying that heretofore his ‘genius’ was unsullied by slavish praising (‘vergin di servo encomio’), one sees an alternative history and a new approach to the classic elegy. Manzoni’s assertion that he had not participated in the Napoleon furor until this fatal moment provides the element of the mask, of the performance that is enacted for a reader whose perspective is analogous to a ‘seat’ in the ‘theatre’ of the work.10 In each of the poets in Part One one sees a preference for the internal dimension of history, which presupposes an understanding of the ‘classical’ not founded in imitationism but in the poetics of the pathetic and sentimental.11

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Part Two addressed the feminine voice’s working in the ‘time of the decision’ and in ‘the space of contingency, sense, and intention.’ Our referencing of prosaics served to confirm the authors’ questioning of the patriarchal notion of the literary text as a totality one can master. (As W. Godzich and J. Kittay write, ‘Prosaics seeks ... to espouse the movement of the text as it manages the economy of its discourses, to establish where thresholds of decision arise, what the decisions are, and what their motivations and determinations as well as their consequences have been.’)12 The title of Part Two, ‘Roads to Rome,’ refers to the movement over time to the capital. In Deledda’s case one cannot ignore the tension in the novels between Sardinia and the mainland, and the author’s sense that the Sardinians were expected to be docile subjects of Rome. In the cases of Morante, Banti, and Rosselli, Rome was seen as a place of alienation but also of refuge against the patriarchal oppression of the provinces. Rome – which Serres calls ‘the city of the object; it does not pose the question of the subject’ – provides the ideal backdrop of official history. Against this backdrop the authors of the feminine voice project their preoccupation with history into poems and narratives rich in subjectivity and references to the material culture.13 The authors of Part Three were seen to occupy the cultural periphery, a contested space which becomes in the authors’ narratives a liminal space. The marginality of the individual on a social plane provides the impetus for a transformation on the ethical plane. Intertextual reference plays a key role in suggesting this secondary level of interpretation that complements the initial ‘simple’ reading of the text. Whether in Svevo’s use of Sterne, Pratolini’s embedding of references to the Divine Comedy, or Morselli’s references to his character’s reading of Montaigne, Lucretius, and Stendhal, one is provided an alternative set of references with which to judge the world of the text. The purpose of this transcultural or transhistorical dimension is to put into relief the transformational capacity of the soul. 2 As Armando Petrucci notes, the technologies of writing have affected the ‘events surrounding the composition, diffusion, and transmission of individual works’ in different ways in different eras.14 Beginning with Romanticism, fertile gaps and critical uncertainties in the literary text placed into question the neoclassicist tradition as it was transmitted through the eighteenth century. The impetus provided by Vico allowed

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later authors to investigate discursive and rhetorical practices and reassess their position within the European context. Freed of the constraints of literary precepts, the Romantics were able to retain the humanistic advances of the Enlightenment and integrate them with a commitment to historical process. The shared insight of Foscolo, Manzoni, and Leopardi was that by refusing to imitate the classics, they actually stood in greater harmony with them. As Whitehead has written: It is really not sufficient to direct attention to the best that has been said and done in the ancient world. The result is static, repressive, and promotes a decadent habit of mind ... The most un-Greek thing that we can do is to copy the Greeks. For emphatically they were not copyists.15

As writers confront the difficulties of the Risorgimento era, they find themselves addressing a larger and more heterogeneous reading public. A new literary koine arises in which the oral code and the language of common usage (including dialects) assume a greater role in the national literature. Anticipating the crises and internal challenges to the modern Italian citizen, Foscolo (1778) and Manzoni (1785) looked inward to resolve the aporias of the political-civic culture. Foscolo’s overlooked tragedy Ajace preserves the viability of the classical tragedy for the new era, though it alters the functions of the characters (away from the Sophoclean model) in order to highlight a contemporary demographics and ethics. Foscolo’s tragedy provides a sense of completion to the figure of Ajax, opposed by his own warring conscience and by the imperiously eloquent figure of Ulysses. The eristic persona of Ajax serves as a lever between cultural alterities, between the tribal components of the nation; as such he embodies the perspective ‘from below’ of the peoples who are considered inferior by the dominant cultural group. It is not a question of Foscolo’s identification with his character, but of the dramatization of a moment of decision in response to a crisis that arises from a historical situation. Manzoni’s ode on the death of Napoleon (whose name is not uttered, as if by biblical proscription) situates the Romantic problematic within the individual conscience, where the poet poses a hypothesis of conversion in a dramatic language that is both anachronistic and contemporary. As seen in our analysis of Il Cinque maggio, this hypothesis or abduction is typified by the trope of self-similarity: between the parts and whole as between the sublimity of the style (Manzoni’s abduction) and that of the religious content (Napoleon’s abduction). It is Manzoni’s ironic de-

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tachment from the common language and separation from the common taste that give his poem its universality, and save it from the label of proselytizing. As a text of revolt, this ode requires the scribe’s self-inclusion in the poem; but, as with Foscolo’s tragedy, the involvement of the author depends on his sense of alterity and difference, not on his identification with the character. Born in 1855 and 1861, Pascoli and Svevo are the first of our authors to confront the difficulties of post-Unification Italy. Despite the appearance of regression or indolence, these authors laboured tirelessly to produce an oeuvre of unprecedented cultural novelty and psychological depth for their time period. Pascoli, a Dante scholar, shares that poet’s linguistic experimentalism and plurilinguism, and his conviction that the imagination speaks to one or ‘dictates within,’ whether its inspiration be lyrical, civic, or otherwise. Pascoli demonstrated the contradictions involved in a revolt that was both personal and political, embedded in the family drama and committed to the prospects of a socialist state. In the ‘New Era,’ as Pascoli was to refer to the twentieth century, the author’s autonomy could only be validated by coming to terms with the conditions of cultural and cognitive alienation. In the case of Svevo, literary historians have focused their attention on Zeno, a work in which the new science of psychoanalysis is given its first genuine parody. The lack of action, the inertia and rhetorical density of the text, reveal a duplicitous protagonist, a modern anti-hero. In the works written after Zeno a new lightness seems to emerge. As Svevo drafts ‘Sulla teoria della pace’ (On the Theory of Peace) and other late essays, he is reading Dante and Sterne and reflecting on the universal dimension of the literary text. Our reading of Corto viaggio sentimentale is to be seen in this dimension. While it is clear that the long novella possesses a certain continuity with Zeno and other autobiographical stories by Svevo, it distinguishes itself by its internal complexity and the great number of topics it treats in the course of a train journey from Milan to Trieste. Grazia Deledda (1871) was responsible for broadening the national literature and integrating the interior dimension of Romanticism with the lessons of verism. As a boundary writer and critic of positivism (like Svevo), she abandoned the more deterministic aspects of her early prose, allowing her projection of the ‘other’ Italy to emerge as a mirror of her own subjectivity. In Canne al vento (reminiscent of Yeats’s 1899 title, The Wind among the Reeds), Deledda constructs a natural allegory in which the protagonist Efix’s experience of poverty, disease, and old age leads to a transformation, not simply of himself but of the community. Efix is

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a Fra Cristoforo figure, a devout Catholic who inadvertently killed a man in his young adulthood, a misstep that redoubles his commitment to follow the example of Christ. If in terms of conventional allegory the reed in the wind is the body swept away by time’s ruination, in the natural allegory the reed is a vibrant symbol of the Passion, the Body of Christ and the Church. Born in 1887 in Venice, Diego Valeri elevated the Italian lyric at a time of fragmentism, absolutism, and avant-garde experimentation. It is perhaps the subtlety and elegance of Valeri’s Poesie – a kind of canzoniere reminiscent of Petrarch – that has allowed him to remain in the shadows. Valeri’s absorption of the French and Italian lyric traditions is essential to the classical nature of his oeuvre. He possessed a gift for the realistic sketch, the visual representation of psychological intensity. Drawn to the same religious problematic which led Clemente Rebora into the priesthood, Valeri resolved this matter scribally, in a poetry that combines the motifs of the transcendent and the transitory. There is a Baudelairean symbolism at work in Valeri, especially as regards colours, such that every element in the landscape, usually that of la città lagunare, is alive on the temporal level but also on the eternal level. Born in 1888 in Alexandria, Egypt, Giuseppe Ungaretti had a vast influence on the language of Italian poetry in the twentieth century. As the poet details in his autoexegetical essay, ‘Ragioni d’una poesia,’ he was confronted by a series of metaphysical questions: the nature of time, the situation of humanity in the cosmos, the role of the absolute. Ungaretti’s revolt from history and his pursuit of the sacred through poetry traverses several stages, as the essay documents in its chronological stratifications. For an author as protagonistic as Ungaretti it is essential to find one’s critical vocabulary independently of the author’s self-representations. It is in that spirit that we arrived at pathos and ethics as the salient factors in the ‘Ragioni’ and in the work it attempts to summarize. While Ungaretti began as an enthusiastic Fascist who accepted the Mussolinian myth of national recovery, through his persistent impulse of revolt, including his pursuit of the Bergsonian élan vital, he turned against political solutions as such. Thus the following statement by Seamus Heaney holds true for him: ‘poetry is its own reality and no matter how much a poet may concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality, the ultimate fidelity must be to the demands and promise of the artistic event.’16 Anna Banti (1895) advanced the questions of selfhood and transcendence from the standpoint of female characters forced to contend with

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constricting social and psychological situations. Banti’s cultivation of a style in which historical consciousness and the interiority of the victim were co-present resulted in a narrative prose in which matter and idea – as the mythical emblems of masculine and feminine – are juxtaposed. The care of the scholar and the emotions of the artist join forces in Banti’s depiction of courageous women confronting decisions in solitude. If, in Il bastardo, Banti presents the portrait of a young woman’s struggle for autonomy, torn between career and family, North and South, country and city, in Un grido lacerante she documents the struggle of an author and scholar thrust into crisis by her famous husband’s illness and death. Agnese Lanzi comes to realize that her own sense of time and Proustian absorption in memory were starkly opposed to her husband’s Olympian detachment and investment in the timelessness of the work of art. This realization leads Agnese to discover her worth as an author, friend, and mentor and thus to reunify the poles of matter and idea, masculine and feminine. The next cluster of authors in our study was born in the second decade of the twentieth century and grew up during Fascism. As witnesses to the currents of existentialism and nihilism, they resisted the trend – that we would call the problem of Bartleby – that tied literary production to an exploration of one’s absurdity or alienation. In Melville’s famous tale, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’ the title character is a scribe who refuses to go on copying; but he gives no sign as to why he is defying his employer’s directives. Bartleby’s stoic action leads nowhere, as the character experiences a kind of psychic arrest which Giorgio Agamben has compared to living in a state of ‘pure potentiality.’17 The problematic of Bartleby is pertinent to an era in which literary schools were institutionalized, often giving rise to polemics and sterile rebellion, to self-serving manifestos and self-perpetuating avant-gardes. The scribes we now recall carried on their literary vocations outside the intellectual quarrels of the day. While familiar with the Bartleby-like scepticism and loss of faith of the period of existentialism, they persisted in their trust in transformational nature of the artistic process. The poetry of Attilio Bertolucci (1913) is Pascolian in its outward modesty and lyricism, and Proustian in its absorption in memory. Bertolucci’s home at Casarola was just over the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines from Pascoli’s home in Barga. In Bertolucci’s poetry physical objects take on vibrant personal signficance, participating in the understated drama of a life recollected in the rural landscape. Bertolucci distinguished himself as the most prose-oriented poet of the ‘Third’ generation (Luzi, Sereni,

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Caproni, Solmi, Noventa, Valeri). Circumspect about his own physical and psychological ‘arrhythmia,’ Bertolucci turned this problem into a virtue, grounding himself in the poetics of narrative, notably in La camera da letto, a ‘Romanzo Famigliare’ (Family Romance) in forty-six sections written over a period of three decades, having as its point of departure the discovery of an authentic libro di famiglia of the Bertolucci family. Even after migrating to Rome – as did Ungaretti, Aleramo, Deledda, Rosselli, and Pratolini – Bertolucci represents a periphery of the centre. For these emigrants the eternal city is not experienced as a European capital so much as a meeting place and refuge, an escape from the isolation of the provinces. Born in Bologna in 1912, Guido Morselli was a philosopher, religious thinker, and novelist. His philosophy is peripatetic and mediates between what are perceived to be the extremes of his era: idealism and materialism. These systems were seen to be radically flawed as regards the nature of ‘things,’ which they tend to banish (along with Existence itself) to a place outside of the spirit. As a religious thinker, Morselli believed that Christianity could absorb the most difficult questioning concerning the problems of doubt and suffering. The novelty of Christianity for Morselli is that Jesus was the source of a truth that revolutionized faith, that made faith possible for all people, as long as they are able to feel love (DI 376–7). In Fede e critica, Morselli combined reflections on the topics of evil, conversion, blasphemy, and prayer with interpretations of scripture and writings by theologians. Opposing the atheism of Hegel, Nietzsche, Gentile, and Croce – whom he sees as representing modern man’s turning away from God, as from mystery – Morselli himself follows theologians like Barth and Henri Frederic Amiel, for whom religion is born of a feeling – mystery – and is satisfied by an instinct – faith – and by the actions of worship and prayer. The scribal experiment in Un dramma borghese concerns a Pirandellian grotesque, a father-daughter pair whose emotional dysfunction is seen in the distorting mirror of the father’s narration. Since the father reports only those events or impressions that concern him at any given moment, the mode of the telling resembles the claustrophobic space of the action. The father tends to fetishize the objects in his environment to Mimmina and the other women in the novel, who are reduced to the status of fragmented bodies (or corps morcelés). As in Morselli’s other novels, the experimental shape of the work conforms to its hypothetical content, in this case a parody of the genre of the bourgeois drama. When viewed aright – by setting the parody on end – the women’s suffering can

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be seen as the sign of a religious faith. Morselli wrote in ‘La felicità non è un lusso’ (Happiness Is Not a Luxury) that happiness is essential if one is to be close to God. There is a tragic sense to Morselli’s life, located in his personal isolation – partly by choice, but partly due to editors and critics. As Claudio Magris wrote, ‘As long as Morselli was alive, he was clearly so different with respect to the dominant cultural situation as to be reduced, as a writer, to nonexistence; his fortune was certainly shared with many others beaten down and unknown, to whom not even time finds a way to do justice.’18 Elsa Morante, born three days after Morselli on 18 August 1912, shares the lyrical qualities of a Deledda and a Banti, and excels in her imaginative use of the fable. Writing of the ‘trail of fables’ in Morante’s fiction, Giacomo Debenedetti referred to a way of staying connected to the visionary logic of figures and scenarios, of ascertaining their meanings, at once emblematic and human: a way certainly guided by a secure mental coordination.19

Morante was a defender of such revolters as Spinoza and Mozart, Rimbaud and Simone Weil. She was adept at centring her fictions on the figural and iconic inspirations of the artist. The fact that she was childless (like Banti and Rosselli) was a source of great sorrow, a lack that was dramatized in the strained parent-child relations represented in her fiction. Such is the case in ‘Lo scialle andaluso,’ where the mother and son ultimately stand together on the side of love, art, and divinity, a nexus that is threatened by the orthodoxies of the dominant culture. Vasco Pratolini, born in Florence in October 1913, was raised in poverty; his mother died when he was five and at age seventeen he was hospitalized for two years with tuberculosis. An anomalous presence in the Florentine literary scene of the late 1930s, Pratolini came into contact with Vittorini, Gatto, Montale; he was also impressed by Ungaretti’s idea of the ‘essentiality’ of poetic language.20 This feature is apparent in Il quartiere, a memorialistic account of a generation growing up under Fascism; here the author forges a relationship between the materialistic, the sentimental, and the higher civic and moral virtues, adopting as his model Dante’s Divine Comedy and in particular the Purgatorio, many episodes of which are recalled in the experiences of the young people of Santa Croce. Pratolini never oversteps the limits of significant allusion or presumes to have a relationship with Dante’s theology or metaphysics.

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In the poetry of Amelia Rosselli (1930) one has a blend of the factual and the musically experimental, with obvious reference to the author’s experience of psychological and existential difficulties. A prominent feature in Rosselli’s verse is the repeated phrase or ostinato, a motif that creates a turbulent verbal surface and texture that is conditioned by the author’s consciousness, her awareness that she, like Ungaretti, is the ‘poet of today.’ Like Ungaretti, she employs the dialogue in absentia, also in her use of other poets, a practice characterized by Lorenzini as a ‘process of estrangement and, at the same time, reimplementation of the source.’21 As one attempts to assess the ‘story’ of Rosselli’s poetry – a story which begins with her father’s death, in a manner similar to Pascoli’s loss of his father – one must navigate through the horizontal fragments of historical discourse and the vertical moments of the religious lyric. Rosselli positions herself along the bias of this textual weave, trusting in the power of the poetic process. She is herself the subject pressing onward, only to arrive at sudden interruptions of the breath and precipitous conclusions. 3 To revolt is not to rebel but to pursue novelty and evolve: spiritually, aesthetically, ethically. The literary quest of novelty obviates concerns for doctrines or movements; to revolt is to turn the law of cause and effect on its head. The notion of final causality – of the effect that precedes the cause – is enlisted by the scribe as a means of affirming one’s selfhood and style. Thus abductive hypotheses are used to explain the events of the world as they affect the inner life. Here one thinks of the thought patterns of artists and mystics, for whom visual and iconic thinking, multivoicedness and dialogics, are essential to the construction of the self. The scribe who imagines a different world has already formed a gestalt that subtends an evolution in consciousness. Meaningful revolt depends on the free exercise of the sentiments without regard for overarching deductive-analytical systems. It is only by confronting the difficulties of existence that one finds confirmed what Walt Whitman wrote in ‘To Think of Time’: ‘The earth is not an echo – man and his life, and all the things of his life, are well-consider’d. / You are not thrown to the winds – you gather certainly and safely around yourself.’22 This ‘gathering around oneself’ accurately describes the process of revolt as an evolution in consciousness and style. This would not be possible if the scribe avoided the experience of crisis (war, neurosis, disease, death, injury, betrayal, alienation, oppression).

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The risks involved in being a public intellectual (as articulated by Julien Benda in La trahison des clercs) are many, beginning with hubris and the vanity of authority. When the author aspires to the cachet of the intelligentsia, the language itself can be an accomplice. As Calvino notes, the penetration of political, technical, and other specialized languages into modern Italian have weakened the language to the point of ‘necrosis’: ‘The enemy to defeat is the tendency of Italians to use abstract and generic expressions.’23 One thinks of the literary cleric as a kind of Pharisee, someone of high regard who is subject to a moral blindness. In order to avoid this syndrome of the inappropriate use of knowledge for the pursuit of power, the scribe looks for common ground between questions of aesthetics (colour, harmony, rhythm, symmetry) and questions of ethics (duty, conscience, humility, commitment), between the concrete reality in which literature is produced and the imaginary spaces it creates. If, as stated, the goal of the modern author is to restore the familiar and overcome alienation, it is worth noting that the familiar and the familial are near-synonyms in Italian and that the domestic enclosure is largely the domain of women. As one extends the sensibility of nourishers, caregivers, and grievers into the literary field, it is not only the feminine voice that is placed in relief, but the voice of any author who cultivates the hearth (like Pascoli or Bertolucci) and participates in the matria or ‘multiple other’ referred to in our Introduction. Such a heterogeneous entity presents an alternative to the dominant literary culture and the prevailing intellectual orthodoxies. It is comparable to Barthes’s formulation of the ‘neutral,’ a mode of being and language that resists the ‘paradigm,’ the name given by Barthes to those modes of being and language based on conflict and binary oppositions. To be neutral is to not choose between the binarisms presented by paradigmatic thought. It is rather to choose the ethical as the basis of one’s non-participation in the logic of conflict. For the scribes in our study, the gap between style and intellectual history has given rise to transformations in accepted models, adopted in the spirit of literary autonomy. It was in defence of such a spirit that Cesare Segre wrote the following remarks in 1969, which we cannot improve upon as a synthesis of literary revolt: If the work of art is truly so, it gives a cognitive contribution that is broadly reflected in the way of seeing reality; it is, literally, ‘upsetting’. Through its readers, it gives to the semiological structures of a civilization a push that can transform them in a decisive way. Herein lies the revolutionary function of art, and it is a matter of a permanent and victorious revolution.24

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Notes

Note on Translation As regards the citations in this book, for the primary texts under study (except in Chapters 4 and 11), I include the original Italian and English translations in the body of the text. Most secondary sources cited in the main text are in English with the original placed in the notes. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Introduction 1 T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 294. 2 See W. Ong, Faith and Contexts, vol. 4, 156: ‘As distancing increases beyond those ranges made available by oral naming through the vaster distances opened by writing and print – and now electronics – the original empathetic identification becomes more and more recuperable at the level of conscious reflectivity. That is to say, with writing and its sequels, empathetic identification can be attended to as we are attending to it now, and as oral folk could not attend to it.’ 3 T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 290. The quest for novelty as distinct from the idea of originality is an attempt to reappropriate one’s world as a reasonable place; as George Steiner writes, Real Presences, 226: ‘originality is antithetical to novelty’ because originality implies a return, an ‘instauration.’ 4 G. Morselli, Diario, 361–9. 5 K. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 216. 6 Ibid., 217. 7 C. Olson, The Special View of History, 26. 8 Ibid., 33. See also ibid., 14: ‘It has been the immense task of the last century

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and a half to get man back to what he knows. I repeat that phrase: to what he knows. For it turns out to coincide exactly with that other phrase: to what he does. What you do is precisely defined by what you know. Which is not reversible, and therein lies the reason why context is necessary to us.’ Cesare Segre is citing Bakhtin’s concepts when he writes, Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text, 105–6: ‘Dialogic angle and semantic position make it possible to individuate stylistic varieties even when these are not realized through the mediation of the varieties which exist in the language.’ C. Segre, Tempo di bilanci, x. B. Terracini, Analisi stilistica: teoria, storia, problemi, 26. See ibid., 22: ‘Si profila in sede di analisi linguistica, con funzione concilatrice, la tendenza a designare come stile la forma stessa assunta dalla struttura dell’opera di poesia quando venga considerata nella sua unicità; attraverso questa analisi formale si giunge a determinare l’originale e irripetibile atteggiamento assunto dallo scrittore nel produrla.’ Ibid., 37. G. Leopardi, Zibaldone [865], 24 March 1821, Tutte le opere, vol. 2, 251. G. Leopardi, Zibaldone [3319–20], 1–2 September 1823, Tutte le opere, vol. 2, 830. G. Leopardi, Zibaldone [4182], 5 July 1826, Tutte le opere, vol. 2, 1101. G. Leopardi, Zibaldone [4525–6], 4 December 1832, Tutte le opere, vol. 2, 1239. See G. Bollati, L’italiano, 70–1: ‘Il Foscolo è il creatore d’uno stile patriottico eloquente e teso, drammatico e ultimativo, impersonato al livello piú alto nella figura del vate combattente; è la sorgente d’una appassionata retorica, basata sulla vecchia retorica degli “italiani illustri” (rivisitati nei loro sepolcri a Firenze, la vecchia capitale linguistica e letteraria), ma ricaricata d’un disperato profetismo’ (Foscolo is the creator of an eloquent and tense patriotic style, dramatic and final, impersonated at the highest level by the figure of the fighting poet-prophet; it is the source of an impassioned rhetoric, based on the old rhetoric of the ‘illustrious Italians’ (visited at their tombs in Florence, the old linguistic and literary capital), but recharged with a desperate propheticism). See U. Foscolo, ‘Sull’origine e i limiti della giustizia,’ Lezioni, articoli di critica e di polemica, 165, where Foscolo confronts the gap between theory and practice in questions of morality and politics: ‘nelle [arti e dottrine] morali e politiche, ove la discordia tra la pratica e la teoria è così intera e irreconciliabile’ (in the moral and political arts and doctrines, where discord between practice and theory is so replete and unreconcilable). See A. Zanzotto, Fantasie di avvicinamento, 314: ‘Italy, the reality of our Coun-

Notes to pages 11–19

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22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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try, has lived for centuries its own unity as a series of texts, which the Risorgimento then attempted to transfer into something different. An action which seems not to have had much success. The labile weaving of the texts, with their errors, with their still lofty rhetoric, did not heal the spiritual fractures of Foscolo and those “similar” to him, it wasn’t strong enough to truly “make” the Italians after Italy had been made.’ As G. Bollati states regarding Manzoni in L’italiano, 83: ‘l’utilità è altro dalla giustizia, e questa sola è di competenza della coscienza individuale’ (usefulness is different from justice, and only the latter is of concern in the area of the individual conscience). See G. Bollati, L ’italiano, 81. D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 13. See T. Peterson, ‘Italian National Character As Seen through the Figure of the Poet-Scribe.’ R. Dombroski, Properties of Writing, 66. See G. Guglielmi, Letteratura come sistema e come funzione, 39: ‘Proprio perché l’opera d’arte moderna non si vuol dare come sistema di significati socialmente autorizzati, gli artisti hanno proposto la propria opera come un oggetto, fornito solo di una referenza interna.’ R. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 199. R. Poggioli, ‘A Little Anthology of Italian Poetry,’ 309. Ibid., 311. See R. Dombroski, L’esistenza ubbidiente: letterati italiani sotto il fascismo, 71– 90. G. Bollati, L’italiano, 55. W. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 111–12. A. Gargani, Lo stupore e il caso, 30. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 41. My emphasis. Ibid., 39. J.J. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 235, 236. See K. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 245: ‘[Marx’s] statement that there is “a constant interaction between spiritual and material factors” would provide no grounds for taking materialism as the starting point, the “essence” of the pair. ... And since the church had taken “spirit” as the essence of the pair, Marx stressed the antithesis. Marx was seeking to restore the same insight in a way that could afford a new start. Thus, we do not get the full meaning of his philosophic statement until we “discount” it by considering its behavior in a social historical texture.’ S. Aleramo, A Woman (trans. R. Delmar), 150; and S. Aleramo, Una donna,

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152: ‘“Il Dio degli italiani è piú divertente,” aggiungeva, “si può servirlo senza stancarsi [...].”’ L. Baldacci, in M.L. Spaziani, Poesie, 14. Octavio Paz, Convergences, 111. C. Segre, Tempo di bilanci, 25. In adopting the term ‘prosaics,’ Morson and Emerson combine Bakhtin’s use of terms such as ‘prosaic wisdom’ or ‘prosaic intelligence.’ See G.S. Morson and C. Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, 27: ‘Prosaics is suspicious of systems in the strong sense.’ Thus Bakhtin is against Hegel and Marx, against Saussure and the formalists, against Freud and ‘theoretism’ in general (ibid., 28). G. Morselli, Diario, 290: ‘un capolavoro di quella ispirazione narrativa che una volta si chiamava intimismo e psicologismo.’ Certainly it is true, as Mengaldo asserts, that a lexical debt to an earlier poet in no way denotes a common thematics. See Prima lezione di stilistica, 56: ‘Occorre liberarsi dall’idea che la ricchezza di rapporti linguistico-formali significhi anche affinità tematica, ideologica ecc.’ For three succinct volumes on the Italian critics of the Novecento, see M. Corti and C. Segre, eds., I metodi attuali della critica in Italia; G. Leonelli, La critica letteraria in Italia: 1945–1994; P.V. Mengaldo, Profilo di critici del Novecento. Among the critical voices I consult are Giacomo Debenedetti, Gianfranco Contini, Maria Corti, Cesare Segre, Ezio Raimondi, Luigi Baldacci – along with such non-Italians as Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, and Ernst Curtius. One also saw a number of creative authors for whom criticism became an important second career – Eugenio Montale, Andrea Zanzotto, Mario Luzi, Franco Fortini, Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giovanni Raboni. G. Debenedetti, ‘Sullo “stile” di Benedetto Croce,’ Saggi, 135: ‘[il] suggello di una signorile e commossa evasione, di un ritegno che ha in disgusto le gonfie mozioni degli affetti.’ This semantic finitude has been given the name of a ‘strange loop.’ See V.E. Cronen and W.B. Pearce, Communication, Action, and Meaning: The Creation of Social Realities, 6: ‘The elevation of recursive wonder to center stage is the unanticipated and largely undesired consequence of the development of more powerful tools of extensional wonder, and their application to the mythological functions of cosmology, social institutions, and individuals [...]. In contemporary society, only the most naive artist or scientist [...] can base his/her work on a consensual cosmology or set of stable social institutions or concept of individual psychology. The minimal requirement of an artist or scientist is to choose among competing concepts, thrusting

Notes to pages 29–32

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him/herself into the product of his/her art or science, and thus creating a strange loop.’ As Raymond Williams writes in Politics of Modernism, 33, 35: ‘The innovations of what is called Modernism have become the new but fixed forms of our present moment. If we are to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself not to this by now exploitable because quite inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.’ It is was with similar diffidence that Charles Olson wrote – already in 1956 – of the ‘postmodern.’ Addressing himself to the problem of ‘contingent estrangement,’ distraction, and dispersion, Olson wrote in Special View of History, 26: ‘It is a lie of discourse to split this [...] problem into the individual and society. No ancient man could be so logical and sociological, and a post-modern man is, to his waste and grief.’ G. Nencioni, ‘Antropologia poetica?,’ 257. See M. Harris, Cultural Materialism, 32: ‘Etic operations have as their hallmark the elevation of observers to the status of ultimate judges of the categories and concepts used in descriptions and analyses [...]. Frequently etic operations involve the measurement and juxtaposition of activities and events that native informants may find inappropriate or meaningless’; ‘Emic operations have as their hallmark the elevation of the native informant to the status of ultimate judge of the adequacy of the observer’s descriptions and analyses.’ O. Ducrot and T. Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, 36, gloss the etic/emic pair as follows: ‘The etic consists in refusing all hypotheses concerning the function of the events being reported and in characterizing them only by means of spatio-temporal criteria. The emic, on the contrary, consists in interpreting events according to their particular function in the particular cultural world to which they belong.’ M. Harris, Cultural Materialism, 60, 42. As M. Harris writes, ibid., 56: ‘Theories that bestow causal primacy upon the mental and emic superstructure are to be formulated and tested only as an ultimate recourse when no testable etic behavioral theories can be formulated or when all that have been formulated have been effectively discredited.’ G. Steiner, Real Presences, 199, refers to ‘the lines of denial which lead from elements in Nietzsche to Lacan and Foucault [and] proclaim the vacancy of the subject,’ and proposes as an alternative a poetics of transcendence in

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support of creation, and for the plurality of possible interpretations of the work of art. 56 Ibid., 73. 1. Justice, Modesty, and Compassion in Ugo Foscolo’s Ajace 1 S. Pellico, ‘Ugo Foscolo,’ Prose e poesie, 673: ‘He was a prophetic bard, and girded with arms, / and proud as a sword were his poems.’ 2 Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 45: ‘The very Renaissance itself, of which the last century was the final phase in the agonies of begetting its successor, carried in itself limitations which obstructed the proper expansion of intellectual interest.’ 3 Ibid., 62. 4 The lukewarm reception of Ajace has continued until our day. It is disturbing that a critic as eminent as Natalino Sapegno can value the above lines over the entire Ajace, essentially rejecting its integrity as a work. Glauco Cambon does not mention the tragedy in his study of Foscolo, nor does Mario Fubini discuss Foscolo’s theatre in his two volumes on the author. 5 U. Foscolo, Opere, vol. 1, 128–9. 6 U. Foscolo, Dei Sepolcri, Opere, vol. 1, 320–1. 7 U. Foscolo, Ajace. In Tragedie e poesie minori, 58–138. The choice of the Ajax story came after Foscolo had decided against the theme of Cain and Abel. Some have claimed he also considered the Oedipus story, but in fact he had already written the Edippo, a text only discovered in 1976 among the papers of Silvio Pellico. 8 U. Foscolo, Epistolario. Volume Terzo (1809–1811), 501. 9 G. Chiarini writes in La vita di Ugo Foscolo, 224: ‘In tutta la tragedia la lingua lo stile e la verseggiatura sono incomparabilmente superiori al Tieste’ (Throughout the tragedy, the language, style, and setting into verse are incomparably superior to the Tieste). 10 See W. Binni, Ugo Foscolo. Storia e poesia, 54: ‘Sempre più appassionato alla sorte dell’Italia, il Foscolo sempre più avvertiva in questo periodo la tragica situazione degli Italiani migliori che stavano, come dirà nella tragedia, “fra il giogo e libertà perplessi” e che non potendo augurarsi la vittoria dei nemici di Napoleone, non potevano neppure più desiderare dal profondo i successi imperialistici di questo’ (Ever more impassioned about the fortune of Italy, Foscolo recognized more and more in this period the tragic situation of the best Italians who were, as he will write in the tragedy, ‘perplexed between the yoke and freedom’ and who, being unable to hope for the

Notes to pages 40–7

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victory of Napoleon’s enemies, could not hope either for the imperialistic successes of the latter). Calcante also sees into the secular plots and betrayals of the Achaeans and Ulysses – with whom he never appears on stage – leading Ajax to ask if he is doomed to die because of his dedication to obtain an ‘illustre tomba’ (II, 262). The monologue is addressed to the sun, which will also be the concluding image of the play, as it was in Sophocles’ Ajax. The fact that the sea will come to recover Achilles’ arms should remind us that Ajax and Teucro are maritime forces, while Ulysses and Agamemnon are forces of the land. To E. Donadoni’s claim that Ajax has nothing to die for, we would suggest that Ajax’s blind pride, coupled with his desire to end the cycle of vendetta and violent retribution, is reason enough. See, for example, E. Donadoni, Ugo Foscolo, pensatore, critico, poeta, 87: ‘Ma in realtà il modello di Ajace è Ugo Foscolo: l’Ugo Foscolo reale e l’Ugo Foscolo ideale... Pochi poeti furono così egocentrici come il Foscolo’ (But in reality the model of Ajax is Ugo Foscolo: the real Ugo Foscolo and the ideal one... Few poets were as egocentric as Foscolo). Such a deemphasis on the title character is also seen by F. Fido, who writes, Le muse perdute e ritrovate, 39, ‘il vero protagonista della tragedia non [è] l’impulsivo Ajace ... bensì il complesso Agamemnon, diviso fra i fantasmi di un atroce passato e i sogni di un futuro imperiale, fra la tentazione di ascoltare i perfidi consigli di Ulisse e la viva ammirazione per la virtù di Achille e di Ajace’ (the true protagonist of the tragedy is not the impulsive Ajax ... but the complex Agamemnon, divided between the phantasms of an atrocious past and the dreams of an imperial future, between the temptation to listen to the perfidious advice of Ulysses and the clear admiration for the virtue of Achilles and Ajax). U. Foscolo, Epistolario. Volume Quarto (1812–1813), letter of 23 February 1813, to Silvio Pellico, 216–18. In the cited letter to Pellico we read, ibid., 216, ‘E quanto a’ caratteri il raziocinio tende sempre a comporli tra loro in certa discordia armonica, in modo che dal contrasto di varj caratteri segua quell’armonia che si vede, anzi si sente più che non si veda, nella composizione d’un quadro storico d’egregio maestro.’ R. Lattimore, Story Patterns in Greek Tragedy, 20. E. Flori, Il teatro di Ugo Foscolo, 104. R.W.B. Burton, The Chorus in Sophocles’ Tragedies, 4. Ibid.

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22 Ibid. 22 G. Leopardi, Zibaldone [2805], 23 June 1823, Tutte le opere, vol. 2, 708. 24 As Donadoni writes, Ugo Foscolo, pensatore, critico, poeta, 93, ‘Egli è il sapiente della sapienza dei secoli; il quale si oppone e alle ambizioni tiranniche di Agamennone, e alle furie libertarie di Ajace. Si muove nel mondo morale dei Sepolcri. E’ la voce veneranda di quel passato, a cui il Foscolo veniva piegando sempre più, di quelle tradizioni, nelle quali il Foscolo riponeva la filosofia della umanità, la filosofia eterna.’ (He is the sage of the knowledge of the centuries, who is opposed to both the tyrannical ambitions of Agamemnon and the liberating furies of Ajax. He moves in the moral world of of Dei Sepolcri. He is the venerable voice of that past and those traditions toward which Foscolo was leaning more and more and in which he again situated eternal philosophy, the philosophy of humanity.) 25 A. Ciccarelli, ‘L’Ajace di Foscolo fra azione e inazione,’ has explained Ajax’s ‘inaction’ in terms of Foscolo’s own retreat from an involvement in history and his exemplification of a pessimistic view of justice as depending entirely on force, on political strength. The critic emphasizes the autobiographical dimension of the play (Ugo=Ajax=Jacopo), and concludes that here, in a manner more bitter and absolute than in the Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Foscolo declares the futility of political resistance and his own personal retreat from the world of human affairs. The suicide of Ajax is seen as Foscolo’s swan song, a parting not just from Italy (after his dismissal from his post in Pavia) but from any integrated socio-political involvement between his writings and the political world at large. 26 U. Foscolo, letter to Contessa d’Albany and F.S. Fabre, 23 May 1814, cited in C. Varese, La vita interiore di Ugo Foscolo, 90. 27 T. Tasso, Prose, 620. 28 If in the Enlightenment the classic Greek tragedy was hollowed out, its religious basis rendered inoperable, in Foscolo’s three tragedies one sees its progressive rediscovery. This is Carla Doni’s argument in Il mito greco nelle tragedie di Ugo Foscolo. 29 U. Foscolo, Lezioni, articoli di critica e di polemica (1809–1811), 170. 30 Ibid., 184. 31 See E. Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 101–29. 32 Ibid., 122. 33 A. Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, 144. 34 A. Zanzotto, Fantasie di avvicinamento, 310–11. 35 W. Binni, Ugo Foscolo. Storia e poesia, 156. 36 A. Manzoni, ‘Il Cinque maggio,’ Poesie e tragedie, 226–7. Translation by Kenelm Foster in A. Manzoni, ‘“Pentecoste” and Other Poems,’ 201.

Notes to pages 59–61

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2. Paradoxical Romanticism: Alessandro Manzoni’s Il Cinque maggio 1 See A. Momigliano, Alessandro Manzoni, 172: ‘Nel Manzoni il pensiero religioso, essendo compenetrato colla materia e non giustapposto, ed essendo unito ad un esame diligentissimo dei fatti, riesce ad un’imparzialità più che apparente, ad un’animata, nobile e chiara rappresentazione della realtà, che è proprio l’opposto delle chiacchiere sonanti e generiche degli storici per i quali il criterio di giudizio è piuttosto un vago principio estrinseco che un’idea immanente’ (In Manzoni the religious thought, being interpenetrated with and not juxtaposed to matter, and being united with a most diligent examination of the facts, reaches an impartiality that is more than apparent, an animated, noble, and clear representation of reality, which is precisely the opposite of the ringing and generic chatting of historians for whom the criterion of judgment is a vague and extrinsic principle rather than an immanent idea). 2 V. Boggione, in A. Manzoni, Poesie e tragedie, 20. 3 S. Nigro, Manzoni, 46–7: ‘un tipo di linguaggio poetico fondato sull’analogia a un altro fondato sull’identità, dalla similitudine analogica alla “metafora simbolica.”’ 4 A. Leone De Castris, L’impegno del Manzoni, 110. 5 See ibid.,268, on the relation between Manzoni’s early sensismo and his religious faith: ‘Ma certo non è un caso che quella stessa persuasione religiosa fino a un certo momento si risolva in una pacifica convivenza con la spiegazione sensistica del conoscere (sicché la rivelazione integra la ragione, anzi questa conduce a quella).’ 6 See ibid., 269: ‘Se si guardi in profondità, la critica al sensismo è resa necessaria, proprio a conforto dell’incrollabile fedeltà manzoniana all’ideale religioso, dal fallimento dell’esperienza.’ 7 A. Manzoni, Lettere, 215, 232. I have taken the liberty of citing only the Italian translation from the French text of the letters. 8 See A. Leone De Castris, L’impegno del Manzoni, 268: ‘Abbiamo sempre sostenuto che la genesi medesima di quella religiosità, mentre spiega la tensione storica del Manzoni, ne spiega pure il tradimento.’ 9 All of Manzoni’s great works possess a dual plane of discourse evident in what Franco Fortini, Saggi ed epigrammi, 1465 calls: ‘la tragica compresenza di eterno e di contingente [...] C’è sopratutto un doppio piano, storico il primo, dove la guerra, la peste, i ceti, le classi, le passioni e le miserie si affrontano e il secondo, metastorico, retto solo dalle leggi ora misteriose ora abbaglianti delle verità metafisiche e morali.’ 10 G. Bollati, L’italiano, 81, writes, ‘Manzoni rappresenta nel modo piú dram-

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matico l’aporia di fondo del Risorgimento, l’incrocio di due vettori che vanno in direzioni opposte. Il primo è dato dalla necessità obiettiva di convogliare verso la costruzione di uno Stato indipendente e unitario, verso il superamento di un clamoroso ritardo politico e civile tutte le energie del paese, con una spregiudicata e appassionata subordinazione dei mezzi al fine; il secondo è nella tendenza della borghesia europea della Restaurazione a imbrigliare, controllare, conservare in limiti per essa tollerabili la spinta impressa dalla Rivoluzione francese a un riassetto delle strutture sociali, a una radicalizzazione delle forme politiche, a uno sviluppo economico la cui stessa rapidità poteva risultare eversiva.’ (Manzoni represents in the most dramatic way the fundamental aporia of the Risorgimento, the intersection of two vectors headed in opposite directions. The first is given by the objective necessity to gather and to direct all the energies of the country toward an independent and unitary State, and to overcome a clamorous political and civic delay by an impartial and impassioned subordination of the means to the end; the second is in the tendency of the European bourgeoisie of the Restoration to restrain, to control, to keep within limits tolerable to it the drive, initiated by the French Revolution, toward a rearrangement of the social structures, a radicalization of the political forms, and an economic development whose very swiftness might have the effect of a protest.) An apocryphal version has it that in order to get the poem published Manzoni delivered two copies to the Austrian censors, knowing one would be leaked by a lower-level impiegato to the popular press. If Ralph Waldo Emerson saw in Napoleon an entirely secular and unscrupulous man, Manzoni’s design projects a Christian faith and salvation into a soul overcome by memory and the finiteness of earthly life. See Emerson, Representative Men, 248: ‘Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and population of the world, – he has not the merit of common truth and honesty.’ G. Alberti, ‘Il suo fatidico 1821,’ in Vigorelli, ed., Manzoni pro e contro, vol. 3, 190: ‘quanto in questa poesia si fa ancora sentire di convenzionale non lo sembrava affatto a quel pubblico.’ A. Manzoni, letter to Pagani cited in M.L. Astaldi, Manzoni ieri e oggi, 283. See A. Manzoni, letter to the Marchese Cesare d’Azeglio, ‘Sul romanticismo,’ Opere, 452: ‘Non voglio dissimulare né a Lei (che sarebbe un povero e vano artifizio) né a me stesso, perché non desidero d’ingannarmi, quanto indeterminato, incerto, e vacillante nell’applicazione sia il senso della parola “vero” riguardo ai lavori d’immaginazione. Il senso ovvio e generico non può essere applicato a questi, ne’ quali ognuno è d’accordo che ci deva

Notes to pages 62–5

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essere dell’inventato, che è quanto dire, del falso. Il vero, che deve trovarsi in tutte le loro specie, et même dans la fable, è dunque qualche cosa di diverso da ciò, che si vuole esprimere ordinariamente con quella parola, e, per dir meglio, è qualche cosa di non definito; né il definirlo mi pare impresa molto agevole, quando pure sia possible.’ F. Fortini, Un dialogo ininterrotto, 140. G. Belotti, Attualità dell’umanesimo politico del Manzoni, 54, writes: ‘Ed è una riprova ... della tenace opposizione del Manzoni a Napoleone vivo, che ha reso più alto e più degno l’omaggio del poeta cristiano al dèspota morto’ (And it is a confirmation ... of Manzoni’s tenacious opposition to the living Napoleon, which rendered loftier and more worthy the homage of Christian poet to the dead despot). See also S. Purdy, ‘Manzoni, Stendhal, and the Murder of Prina: A Counterpoint of Literature and History.’ G. Belotti, Attualita dell’umanesimo politico del Manzoni, 52: ‘aspre censure ... al Monti e al Cesarotti per la loro cupidigia di servilismo verso l’Imperatore. Silenzioso ma tenace oppositore dell’uomo di Campoformio e di Saint Cloud, il Manzoni rimase anche dopo la conversione, nonostante l’adesione di taluni giansenisti parigini amici suoi alla politica gallicana di Napoleone.’ Belotti also notes, 35, that Manzoni ‘non è partecipe dell’opinione di Hegel, secondo la quale il ripudio della forza porta alla paralisi della storia e del progresso, ed al naufragio del mondo nella palude materialistica.’ A. Manzoni, cited in G. Vigorelli, ed., Il ‘mestiere guastato’ delle Lettere, 158. See N. Sapegno, Ritratto di Manzoni, 52: ‘Manzoni è il primo a riconoscere quel che v’è di “indeterminato, incerto e vacillante” in questo concetto del vero poetico, che è altra cosa (egli lo sa) da quel vero cui s’appunta il filosofo o lo scienziato, più difficile a definirsi, ma non meno salda e capace di una sua particolare virtù di convincere e soddisfare la nostra mente.’ A. Manzoni, letter to Paride Zajotti, 6 July 1824, cited in Vigorelli, ed., Il ‘mestiere guastato’ delle Lettere, 110. G. Bateson has stated, Mind and Nature, 158: ‘Metaphor, dream, parable, allegory, the whole of art, the whole of science, the whole of religion, the whole of poetry, totemism ... the organization of facts in comparative anatomy – all these are instances of abduction, within the human mental sphere.’ C.S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 106. V. Monti, Poesie, 341–53. A. Accame Bobbio, La formazione del linguaggio lirico manzoniano, 150: ‘le stesse immagini, legate nel Monti, a una particolare situazione, sono del Manzoni elevate a significare un’azione che domina i secoli; il Monti le gusta come reminiscenze classiche atte ad esprimere la grandezza dell’uomo,

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il Manzoni le ripensa e divengono concetti che fanno meglio capire ciò che quella grandezza significa per il mondo che lo ricorda.’ See also ibid., 151: ‘Al Manzoni dunque la lirica settecentesca ha dato non solo i metri della loro astrattezza e talune movenze ritmiche del discorso poetico, ma soprattutto un’abbondanza di formule verbali ch’egli ha il più delle volte rinovato e trasferito a tutt’altro significato da quello precedente.’ It is a question of degrees and not of ideological reversal, as one might find, for example, in the caustic Pascolian poemetto, ‘Napoleone’– ‘Ora egli è solo, tra le lontane acque’ in Poemi del Risorgimento – or in the sonnet by Shelley: ‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte.’ See C. Salinari, Boccaccio, Manzoni, Pirandello 117: ‘Tale delusione storica, che è propria di tutta una generazione d’intellettuali, aveva alimentato il severo moralismo dei Sermoni e dell’Ode a Carlo Imbonati, nei quali predomina “una visione assolutamente negativa degli uomini e delle instituzioni”, la “pittura corale di un universo decisamente fallimentare” (De Castris). A tale realtà vile e corrotta si contrappone la figura dell’Imbonati, cioè del poeta stesso, che si chiude nella cerchia di ideali virtù, e traccia un programma di vita che tende a sottrarsi e a sovrapporsi alla storia.’ As C. Salinari writes, Boccaccio, Manzoni, Pirandello, 118, we are at the moment of transition between ‘un’arte contemplativa e la ricerca di un pubblico nuovo, piú vasto e popolare, al quale trasmettere il messaggio del riscatto nazionale, della costruzione di una società civile e razionale.’ A. Leone De Castris, L’impegno del Manzoni, 13: ‘Maturavano in definitiva, attraverso l’accentuazione nuova ch’essi conferivano ai concetti di “formazione” e di “perfettibilità”, un’esigenza nuova di storia. E in verità lo storicismo positivo ... muove da quella zona di crisi interna dell’illuminismo di cui gli ideologi rappresentano la più esplicita e operosa testimonianza.’ As noted by Giuseppe Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo. Saggi e interventi, 348, this rhythm denotes a clash between the poem’s form and content: ‘Quei versi del Manzoni non erano versi di ritmo italiano... Il ritmo italiano è fatto sulla base di parole piane, e il ritmo del 5 Maggio è fatto sulla base di sdrucciole e di tronche, nell’italiano, moto insolito nelle parole.’ C. Varese, L’originale e il ritratto, 113. A. Manzoni, ‘Il Cinque maggio,’ Poesie e tragedie, 226–40. Translation by Kenelm Foster in A. Manzoni, ‘“Pentecoste” and Other Poems,’ 201–2. S. Nigro finds a Christological reference in the ‘mortal sospiro’ of l. 2. See La tabacchiera di don Lisander, 126: ‘Per via di metafore, Manzoni simula un cataclisma, un simil terremoto; che reinscena il “terra mota est” del Vangelo di Matteo (27, 50), dopo che Cristo ebbe “dato” sulla croce “il mortal sospiro” (“emisit spiritum”).’

Notes to pages 68–75

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34 V. Boggione, in A. Manzoni, Poesie e tragedie, 21. Emphasis ours. 35 L. Russo, ‘“Il Cinque Maggio”: Commento terapeutico,’ 88. 36 The ‘Fu romor vano? o gloria?’ of the first draft (‘romor vano’ was already in Monti) echoes the lines by Dante ‘Oh vana gloria dell’umane posse!’ and ‘Non è il mondan romore altro ch’un fiato’ (Purg. xi.91, 100). 37 S. Nigro, La tabacchiera di don Lisander, 82: ‘Con il solo presidio del pronome, napoleone interepreta nella scena storica dell’ode l’azione biblica di Alessandro. [...] L’arbitraggio sui secoli spodesta Dio dal ruolo di “Roi immortel des siècles.”’ Nigro’s reference here is to Massillon. 38 C. Varese, L’originale e il ritratto, 112. 39 F. De Sanctis, Manzoni, 163. 40 M. Sansone, L’opera poetica di Alessandro Manzoni, 98. 41 Ibid., 104. 42 V. Boggione, in A. Manzoni, Poesie e tragedie, 23. 43 M. Picone, Il mito della Francia in Alessandro Manzoni, 72. 44 G. Bàrberi Squarotti, Teoria e prove dello stile del Manzoni, 168, accentuates the strongly binary pattern or ‘struttura oppositiva (che) tende, in ultima analisi, a definire un ambito totale di cose che non patisce difformità; ventura, vicenda all’esterno della circoscritta costrittività di un’opposizione e di una contestazione che si pongono come capaci di esaurire, per rapporto dialettico, tutto il reale, anzi tutto il possibile.’ He identifies this structure in terms of ‘tutta la serie delle divaricazioni binarie, che si raccolgono in elementi splendidamente astratti, simbolici, nella loro genericità estrema, capace di comprendere ogni possibile grado all’interno dell’indicazione delle estreme collocazioni oppositive: “gloria”, “periglio”, “fuga”, “vittoria”, “reggia”, “esiglio”, “polvere”, “altar” ecc.’ 45 Ibid., 32. 46 Ibid., 34. 47 N. Sapegno, Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 8, 182–3. 48 A. Leone De Castris, L’impegno del Manzoni, 14. 49 B. Terracini, Analisi stilistica: teoria, storia, problemi, 275: ‘quella piú larga gamma di possibilità lessicali che la piú classica delle lingue romanze trova nel latino fin dalle Origini, traendone un aspetto di composta nobiltà.’ 50 See ibid., 257: ‘In realtà cessa da questo punto in poi ogni velleità di rappresentazione scenica, ogni spunto di discorso drammatico; il vate d’ora in innanzi non parla piú di fronte a un volgo discorde, parla per tutti; a partire da questo punto il suo discorso lirico si innalzerà sempre piú libero e puro.’ 51 G. Giudici, Per forza e per amore, 143: ‘gli Inni, le due odi maggioi, i cori delle tragedie’; ‘Questa poesia del Manzoni è nella tradizione italiana l’unico

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esempio di poesia tragica nel senso classico (e di stile e di situazione) ed è rimasto un esempio inascoltato.’ Ibid., 143: ‘la poesia diventa teatro di se stessa, la pagina palcoscenico, la voce (dell’autore o del lettore) maschera.’ With reference to Bàrberi Squarotti’s concept of the ‘sublime cristiano di Manzoni,’ V. Boggione, in A. Manzoni, Poesie e tragedie, 25, writes: ‘non è, banalmente, l’applicazione delle forme retoriche del sublime agli individui e agli oggetti che prima ne erano esclusi, in un meccanico rovesciamento della retorica classica; ma è la definizione, attraverso l’assurdo cui è piegato la parola, di una nuova logica e di una nuova retorica, cofacenti all’homo novus, vivificato dallo Spirito.’ F. Fortini, Saggi ed epigrammi, 1462. M. Caesar has written (Manzoni’s Poetry and the Witnessing of Events,’ 214) that during the period 1821 and 1822, in addition to his great tragedies and poems, ‘Manzoni was laying emphasis in his theoretical writings on the rationality, perceptiveness and critical judgement of the reader. The reader, in fact, at this period of Manzoni’s work, is the counterpart to the fictional protagonist in so far as he embodies virtues which the latter cannot “realistically” have: clarity (in that events present themselves to the reader in a certain shape), analytical curiosity, distance.’ G. Morselli, ‘La felicità non è un lusso,’ 102, writes ironically in this regard: ‘Alessandro Manzoni, con insolita audacia, stabilì che la colpa, o il merito, della meteora napoleonica fosse dell’Autore, che volle più vasta orma stampar; ma è più verosimile si trattasse di un fenomeno di megalomania (composito squilibrio del sistema glandolare e del senso critico, potremmo dire).’ V. Boggione, in A. Manzoni, Poesie e tragedie, 34. V. Boggione, in A. Manzoni, Poesie e tragedie, 21–2. A. Leone De Castris, L’impegno del Manzoni, 21–2: ‘Manzoni sarà indotto a cercare la corrispondenza delle leggi estetiche con le leggi generali dello spirito, con gli affetti, con la psicologia dell’uomo, e a stabilire il principio della necessità costitutiva del momento riflessivo e analitico nella generazione dell’arte.’ A. Momigliano, Alessandro Manzoni, 193. G. Bateson and M.C. Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, 90. Manzoni, cited in A. Momigliano, Alessandro Manzoni, 149.

3. Pascolian Intertexts in the Lyric Poetry of Attilio Bertolucci 1 As I have argued in The Paraphrase of an Imaginary Dialogue, 94–8, Pascoli’s

Notes to pages 83–91

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‘Napoleone’ avoids the larger-than-life Christological incarnation of the condottiere undertaken by Manzoni. Pascoli’s Napoleon, like his absent father – whose death we discuss in this chapter – was a figure of pathos, not power. The Pascoli poems appear in Myricae and were first published in 1896; the Bertolucci poems were published in La capanna indiana (1951) and Viaggio d’inverno (1971). On Pascoli’s importance to the poets of the Novecento, see P.V. Mengaldo, La tradizione del Novecento and P.P. Pasolini, ‘Pascoli,’ Passione e ideologia, 263–71. C. Guillén writes in The Challenge of Comparative Literature, 251–2: ‘In the first place, let us keep in mind a line whose two extremes are allusion and inclusion. Certainly many intermediate positions exist. But in practice, it is clearly one thing to make a simple allusion or reminiscence, necessarily implying a memory from the past, or the externality of what is alluded to, and to include in the poetic fabric of the work itself – adding to its verbal surface, one might say, words or forms or foreign thematic structures. Such an act, by its explicit nature, should by no means be disdained; it is rather a tangible manifestation of the openness of individual poetic language to a plurality of languages – the heteroglossia so dear to Bakhtin. But it is also necessary to distinguish between the two extremes of citation and significance. (Allow me to remove from the word citation here all relevant substance or function.) The intertext is limited to citing when its exclusive effect is horizontal, that is, when it consists in evoking authorities or establishing related links (or polemics) with past figures and styles, without intervening decisively in the vertical structure of the poem. In such cases the function of the intertext is rather more contextual. Significant allusions, of high symbolic tension, exist [...] and there are also inclusions that are primarily citations of a contextual import.’ B. Pento, ‘Attilio Bertolucci,’ 8482: ‘e ovvio viene il riscontro con le pascoliane Myricae più quintessenziate, liricamente più tese, più animate di echi e di risonanze interiori.’ See Giuseppe Nava, ed., in G. Pascoli, Myricae 160: ‘L’aggettivo “opaco” è in opposizione a “stelle” e a “mondi sereni”, come “atomo” lo è a “infinito” e “Male” a “Cielo”: simbologia fin de siècle.’ Furthermore, writes Nava, the use of the word ‘atomo’ is connected to a nineteenth-century tendency: ‘la linea d’uno spiritualismo romantico rivolto a “poetizzare” la scienza.’ Bertolucci is alluding to Correggio’s painting, though a problem exists in the painting’s title, since the figures depicted are actually Venus and a satyr who unveils her as she sleeps. Thus, though the reference is to Antiope, who was raped by Zeus (Jupiter) disguised as a satyr, the woman in the paint-

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ing is Venus, calm and unthreatened. Moreover the name Antiope is itself ambiguous since there are two mythic women with that name: the one we have just mentioned who was impregnated by Zeus and then imprisoned until freed by her own twins; and the other a queen of the Amazons taken prisoner by Heracles and given to Theseus, who married her, then killed her on orders of Apollo. A. Bertolucci, ‘Dalla poetica dell’extrasistole, I,’ Paragone 22 (1951); ‘Dalla poetica dell’extrasistole, II,’ Paragone 198 (1966), reprinted in Aritmie. A. Bertolucci, Aritmie, 10: ‘la percezione soggettiva del disturbo è elemento probante del carattere funzionale, non organico, del male.’ G. Raboni, ‘Metafore poetiche di Bertolucci,’ 8497: ‘il rapporto strettissimo, inestricabile, che esiste nella poesia di Bertolucci fra quotidiano e magico, normalità del repertorio e inquietante eccezionalità delle luci (e viceversa).’ P.P. Pasolini, Passione e ideologia, 405–6. This profile fits the notion of an eluded modernism that exists at the margins of critical attention, as argued by Raymond Williams and referred to in our Introduction. See note 50 to Introduction, above. As Franco Fortini writes, citing ‘Gli anni,’ in I poeti del Novecento, 96: ‘A differenza di non pochi suoi coetanei, Bertolucci giuoca sempre su toni smorzati e su di uno svolgimento ritmico lento e ampio; crede o vuol credere alla cadenza di realtà oggettivamente patetiche come la compagnia, il mutare delle stagioni e degli anni, il passare dell’esistenza.’ (Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bertolucci always plays on the softened tones and on a slow, sweeping rhythmic development; he believes or wants to believe in the cadence of objectively pathetic realities like fellowship, the changing of the seasons and years, the passing of existence.) P.P. Pasolini, Passione e ideologia, 406: ‘Ma l’iterarsi quieto e dolcemente monotono dei modi, degli estri, delle sfide alla grazia, attraverso l’azzardo di mezzi che alla grazia non sono inerenti, nasconde, in realtà, una evoluzione.’ Ibid., 404. B. Pento, ‘Attilio Bertolucci,’ 8482: ‘i poeti della comunicazione distesa e colloquiale, più che con i poeti del fonema contratto e inquietante spesso densamente vibrato.’ Thus, Pento argues, Bertolucci is closer to Saba, Cardarelli, and Pascoli than he is to Montale and Gatto. Cited from B.Croce, Problemi di estetica (Bari: Laterza, 1923), in C. Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, 396. Pietro Citati, ‘Attilio Bertolucci,’ 8495.

Notes to pages 97–101

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4. The Ethics and Pathos of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s ‘Ragioni d’una poesia’ 1 G. Ungaretti, ‘Fratelli’ (Brothers), Vita d’un uomo (hereafter cited as VU), 39: ‘Involuntary revolt / in the air racked with pain / of the man who is witness / to his own frailty.’ 2 G. Ungaretti, ‘Ragioni d’una poesia,’ VU lxi–xcv. 3 An earlier version of ‘Ragioni d’una poesia,’ published in 1949, is combined with the 1946 essay ‘Riflessioni dello stile,’ with some emendations to both texts and with subsequent additions, to arrive at the definitive 1969 text. See G. Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo. Saggi e interventi, 747–67, 1000–6. 4 See R. Dombroski, L’esistenza ubbidiente, 73. 5 Ibid., 79–80. 6 Ibid., 84–5. 7 See the progression of Ungaretti’s letters to Paulhan on this subject, in Paulhan, Correspondance Jean Paulhan, Giuseppe Ungaretti, 288 (from 1936), 341–2 (1944), 534–5 (1959). 8 As Fortini argues in I poeti del Novecento, Ungaretti’s earlier poems succeed because of his ‘capacity to confer dramatic violence on his experience of humility and power’ (70), while the late poems of the 1940s and 1950s lapse into a ‘rather vacuous aristocraticism, of emphatic and antiquarian emblems’ (82). 9 G. Gugliemi, L’invenzione della letteratura. Modernismo e avanguardia, 140. 10 F. Fortini, I poeti del Novecento, 71: ‘La durata reale di una composizione è quindi di molto maggiore di quella che sembrerebbe inerire al testo. I silenzi vengono finalmente associati a tutti gli altri segni grafici che suggeriscono dizione e intonazione.’ 11 VU lxxi: ‘il poeta d’oggi.’ 12 F. Fortini, I poeti del Novecento, 71: ‘La poesia dell’Allegria è, in senso profondo, teatrale. L’uomo così ammutilito non sarà quello del tardo simbolismo, ridotto al silenzio dalla comunione mistica o dalla disperazione metafisica. Infatti, piuttosto che di sconfitta, la tonalità delle liriche dell’Allegria è d’una tensione vitale sorpresa di se stessa, sbalordita di poter esistere.’ 13 G. Contini, Esercizî di lettura, 44: ‘Consolazione, entusiasmo, passione, illusione sono le formule relative a questo carattere della poesia in quanto umana attività.’ 14 Ibid., 46: ‘l’incomparabile fertilità dell’“allegria” di Ungaretti come parola; e insieme il punto in cui la sua etica diventa poesia.’ 15 M. Luzi, ‘Ungaretti e la tradizione,’ 43, 45, 49. 16 G. Contini, Esercizî di lettura, 69: ‘L’allegria dava il senso delle cose presenti

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Notes to pages 101–3

e instanti, e in più d’un’invalicabile distanza; svolta una tal posizione fino a invertirla al possibile, Ungaretti mette ora l’accento sopra la distanza. Senso dell’intervallo dunque [...] ma che riconosceremo come intervallo temporale [...] Sentimento del Tempo non ha guadagnato a buon mercato il suo titolo, s’imposta sopra un cambiamento di tempo.’ M. Luzi, ‘Ungaretti e la tradizione,’ 48: ‘Ciò che è al di là del presente come miraggio è una riscoperta dell’antico. Futuro è primordio. Terra promessa è infatti terra del ritorno. Questo è appunto il dominio, adesso senza più le difficili frizioni con il presente, della memoria. La memoria di Ungaretti naturalmente e per conforto bergsoniano è una memoria senza oggetto su cui svettano due sole luci possibili, quella del mito e quella del desiderio.’ P.P. Pasolini, ‘La nuova allegria di Ungaretti,’ Il portico della morte, 67. See J. Huizinga, In the Shadow of Tomorrow, especially Chapters 10 and 11, ‘The Disavowal of the Intellectual Principle’ and ‘The Worship of Life.’ This is a matter discussed in Pasolini’s essay, ‘Un poeta e dio,’ Passione e ideologia, 350–69. This religiosity is inspired by the works of the Jansenist Pascal, but stripped of Christian practice in the ambivalent manner of Bergson, it could be said to ignore the seed in Pascal of a revolutionary criticism, born of a paradoxical view of the legitimacy of existing temporal powers. VU lxi: ‘Ho, ed è naturale, riflettuto come qualsiasi scrittore o artista, ma non vi ho riflettuto se non per le difficoltà che via via l’espressione mi opponeva esigendo d’essere posta in grado di corrispondere integralmente alla mia vita d’uomo.’ VU lxii: ‘Ora l’errore di Rivière era di credere che l’opera di Dostoevskij potesse trasporsi in problemi di metodo, d’analisi, di psicologia a così ridotta generare un buon romanzo di tipo francese. Per Dostoevskij c’era principio – diciamo principio lirico – nel momento quando gli pareva cessasse ogni possibilità di capire, avendo capito, misteriosamente capito, troppo.’ VU lxiii: ‘l’arte avrà sempre. un fondamento di predestinazione e di naturalezza; ma insieme avrà un carattere razionale, ammesse tutte le probabilità e le complicazioni del calcolo.’ VU lxiv: ‘Questa è l’arte greco-latina, la nostra, l’arte mediterranea, arte di prosa a arte di poesia, secoli a millenni darte. Quest’arte può anche dirsi miracolo: miracolo d’equilibrio’; and lxiv-lxv: ‘tutto quel potere d’evocazione della realtà, quel potere magico di restituire per sempre, muovendo la fantasia, un momento: della realtà, l’arte l’ottiene principalmente per la sua forza geometrica. Certo il dono degli artisti veri sarà quello di riuscire a dissimulare questa forza, come la grazia della vita nasconde lo scheletro.’ VU lxv: ‘In quegli anni, non c’era chi non negasse the fosse ancora possibile, nel nostro mondo moderno, una poesia in versi. Non esisteva un

Notes to pages 103–5

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periodico, nemmeno il meglio intenzionato, che non temesse ospitandola, di disonorarsi.’ VU lxvi: ‘Pensavo alla memoria, e non potevo non essere ingiusto col sogno. In verità non era ingiustizia; ma la persuasione, che stava maturandosi in me, che la poesia che la poesia italiana non fiorisce se non in uno stato di perfetta lucidità: tecnica, sensazioni, logica, sogno o fantasia e sentimento: tutte queste cose per noi non hanno senso se simultaneamente non vivano oggettivate – oggettivate per un poeta, in una parola che canti. E dunque il fatto stesso di credere molto più che in noi, nelle nostre opere, di sentirci senza rimedio modellati non dal nostro mondo interno, ma dalle nostre opere, implicherà da parte della memoria un intervento chiarificatore. Le cose, a questo solo patto, muovono la nostra fantasia, si collocano al loro vero posto, acquistano per noi la sola profondità che conti, quella dal tempo, e ci meravigliamo – già così dístaccate da noi, così distanti – per il loro pudore, e ci fanno, se vi pare, sognare; ma è un sognare ad occhi aperti.’ VU lxvii: ‘come se un cieco dalla nascita raccontasse la sua visione dal mondo.’ VU lxvii: ‘E se in quei romanzi si fa un gran parlare del divino e di Dio, in fondo in fondo è orrore della vita, è senso del nulla equivalente a senso del divino: è il senso d’un’umanità che si raffigura in un’orrenda mitologia e nella quale ciascun individuo non si differenzi dagli altri se non per la turba mostruosa a torturante delle proprie fissazioni.’ VU lxvii: ‘Non si trattava più d’intendere la misura come mezzo per chiarirsi il sentimento del mistero; ma di spalancare gli occhi spaventati davanti alla crisi d’un linguaggio, davanti all’invecchiamento d’una lingua, cioè al minacciato perire d’una civiltà – si trattava di cercare ragioni di una possibile speranza nel cuore della storia stessa: di cercarle, cioè, nel valore della parola.’ VU lxviii: ‘Se il Seicento ha l’idea già scientifica della memoria indicataci da Galileo, e porta una grande rivoluzione nelle forme, ed è un secolo violento d’espressione, trova appunto nell’identità fra memoria e fantasia, quell’eccesso di fantasia che gli permetterà di ricongiungere gli spezzati modelli [della bellezza formale] in una forma nuova sì, ma non meno regolata dalla classicità.’ VU lxviii–lxix: ‘Se il procedimento stilistico del Leopardi può anche chiamarsi classico, se si vuole, ed era il nome che egli stesso dava, s’egli rifugge dalla forma metaforica cara ai Predanteschi, a Dante, al Petrarca, al Seicento, più o meno a tutti i poeti italiani sino all’Ottocento, e si limita a descrivere gli oggetti valorizzandone i colori col tono del proprio sentimento, la sua poesia sarebbe anacronistica, avrebbe il difetto the gli dispiaceva di più – se quel tono del suo sentimento non fosse, com’è, romantico.’

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Notes to pages 105–6

32 VU lxix: ‘nella sua opera, il Leopardi prevede ed esaurisce, anche opponendovisi in un certo senso, l’esperienza romantica’ 33 VU lxviii: ‘Egli, indicando due tappe della sensibilità, mette in moto, tra quei due stati della coscienza, una frazione di tempo come riflesso variabile, come il simbolo fluido, lo specchio della vita psicologica. La nozione di tempo è ormai data come storia dell’anima a d’un’anima – in quei termini cioè che svilupperà il Romanticismo. Col Leopardi, il tempo facendosi punto, punto mobile, di riferimento, è la relatività the entra risolutamente in cameo, la relatività morale, del bene a del male, la relatività estetica, del brutto a del bello.’ 34 VU lxix: ‘una sete d’innocenza’; ‘la memoria che ha reso estrema e intollerabile l’antinomia tra individuo a società.’ 35 G. Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo. Saggi e interventi, 798: ‘Pascal è spaventato dal silenzio della sua scienza, se invoca Dio, e sa che solo agli slanci del cuore Dio dà ascolto; il Leopardi vuole solo indicare che la sua poesia, l’infinito che in quel momento sente usando le parole di Pascal, gli viene: “il guardo esclude” da un’illusione ottica dovuta a un’inframmettenza d’una siepe e, se si vuole, d’un colle’ (Pascal is frightened by the silence of his science, if he invokes God, and he knows that God only listens to the impulses of the heart; Leopardi only wants to indicate that his poetry, the infinite that in that moment he hears Pascal’s words using, comes to him: ‘the gaze excludes’ gives an optical illusion due to the interference of a hedge and, if you will, a hill). 36 VU lxx: ‘Il poeta d’oggi ha dunque avuto per prima preoccupazione quella della riconquista del ritmo; ma come andava riconquistato, riconoscendo l’importanza della forma. Per risvegliare l’innocenza, egli non ha negato la memoria. Ha ascoltato il verso più antico e di sempre, perché esprime la fatalità stessa d’una lingua.’ 37 VU lxx: ‘La macchina ha richiamato la sua attenzione proprio perché racchiude in sé un ritmo: cioè lo sviluppo d’una misura che l’uomo ha tratto dal mistero della natura – che l’uomo ha tratto da quel punto dove è venuta a mancargli l’innocenza. La macchina è una materia formata, severamente logica nell’ubbidienza d’ogni minima fibra a un ordine complessivo: la macchina è il risultato di una catena millenaria di sforzi coordinati. Non è materia caotica. Cela, la sue bellezza sensibile, un passo dell’intelletto. Così, nell’uso del verso, cercando d’imparare a mettere in moto gli arti delicati, le leve immateriali d’una macchina suprema, il poeta italiano torna a riconoscere che si mette in grado di ascoltare, nel proprio ritmo, i ritmi a mezzo dei quali all’orecchio dei padri era persuasiva la musica dell’anima – la

Notes to pages 106–8

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musica che porta a quel punto dal quale, sciogliendosi nel mistero, la poesia può, nelle volte rare della sua perfezione, illustrarsi d’innocenza.’ VU lxxii: ‘Ecco un primo perché la sua poesia sanguina, è come uno schianto di nervi e delle ossa che apra il volo a fiori di fuoco, a cruda lucidità che per vertigine faccia salire l’espressione all’infinito distacco del sogno.’ VU lxxi: ‘Era ritorno a un senso acuto della natura, ed era, simultaneamente, l’inderogabile ammissione, quale fattore necessario di poesia, della genesi della memoria da rintracciare e ricostituire in noi – era lo stato acuto di coscienza che s’incontra in tutta la poesia d’oggi.’ VU lxxiv: ‘Quando, dal contatto d’immagini, gli nascerà luce, ci sarà poesia, e tanto maggiore poesia, per quest’uomo ehe vuole salire dall’inferno a Dio, quanto maggiore sarà la distanza messa a contatto. Crediamo in una logica tanto più appassionante quanto più si presenti insolubilmente ricca d’incognite.’ VU lxxvi: ‘tutto si confonde in un unico piano, precipitandosi contro di noi. Eppure non possediamo altre parolé se non quelle che ci fornisce la cultura; ma una cultura depauperata da ogni sostanza storica, divenuta prodigiosa e spaventosa come, per occhi primitivi, il sole, le stelle e la luna, e la nascita e la morte.’ VU lxxvi: ‘L’uomo, nel Romanticismo più recente, è alle prese con i mezzi che s’era andato foggiando per sottomettersi e disciplinare la natura: è alle prese con i progressi rivoluzionari della scienza, col monopolio dell’oro, con il caos d’una erudizione senza più una sicura radice religiosa e senza limiti.’ VU lxxvii: ‘in contrasto con il malessere morale palese da quasi due secoli in tutta l’attività umana.’ VU lxxvii-iii: ‘Dico che possa perfettamente ammettersi che il giudizio morale e quello estetico siano, come sono, di ordine diverso, e che possa un’opera d’arte essere esteticamente riprovevole a moralmente meritoria, o viceversa; ma dico che del pari non si possa fondatamente non rilevare che un’anarchia nelle credenze non possa se non risultare di grave discapito ai doveri d’un linguaggio, paralizzandogli la funzione sociale.’ VU lxxix: ‘stile sinistro e ripulsivo’; and lxxx: ‘l’affanno mistico che guidò la mano dell’artigiano egizio o il sottile vincolo sociale, vicino a spezzarsi, che giustifica le sollecitazioni sessuali delle stampe o delle miniature del tempo di Casanova.’ VU lxxx: ‘L’artista non si rassegnerà mai ad accettare che non gli venga concesso dai tempi di considerare lo stile come un fatto di unanimità sociale, ma solo come un fatto personale, ma solo come un fatto simbolico

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Notes to pages 108–9

nel quale vengano a proiettarsi i tratti distintivi della propria coscienza ma solo come l’affermazione della libertà e dell’unicità insopprimibile delta persona umana. Sarà sempre una causa di somma pena per un artista doversi rassegnare a operare esclusivamente per fatto personale, anche se, per grazia di Dio, un’aura di poesia riscatterà sempre la sua fatica e sarà sempre il principio più vero di stile.’ VU lxxxix: ‘di quanto fosse pericoloso quel prefiggersi di rispettare canoni che dal Vaugelas e dal Cartesio e, peggio che mai, dal Voltaire in poi, mettevano la poesia francese a rischio d’isterilirsi nell’accademico – e invece la rinnovavano a la salvavano sempre; ma per miracolo.’ VU lxxxii: ‘il fine, il fine estetico – e insieme fine etico e patetico’; and lxxx-xi: ‘All’artista d’oggi, ripetiamolo, poteva essere indifferente e esteticamente occorreva gli fosse indifferente, che i modelli, ai quali si volgeva per consiglio, appartenessero a un’epoca piuttosto che ad un’altra.’ VU lxxxii: ‘il genio umano avendo da identificare a esprimere il segreto dei suoi tempi, lo avrebbe dentro di sé trovato in quei termini a non in altri.’ VU lxxxv: ‘l’atroce amarezza dalla quale doveva snodarsi l’esperienza cui il suo secolo si volgeva.’ VU lxxxv: ‘Mostro chiamerà l’alata maraviglia, ma restituendo è vero alla parola quasi il suo senso latino di portento, di segnale sprigionato dalla virtù misteriosa delle cose, per risvegliare l’attenzione o gli affetti degli uomini, e recare in luce una verità, asserendola e dandone testimonianza nel medesimo tempo.’ VU lxxxvi: ‘necropoli d’antichi Indi’; ‘una mano con un occhio nel palmo per significare che il primo segno poetico dell’umanità sarà stato, suppongo, l’immagine grafica, antecedendo anche il segno orale; oppure per significare che la mano ubbidiva con rapidità a un occhio sicuro e che il defunto era forse un abile arciere.’ VU lxxxvii: ‘L’artista ha sempre espresso gli istinti comuni dei viventi, la fame e la libidine, gli immutabili istinti di conservazione e purtroppo insieme di distruzione, ma ha espresso anche un suo bisogno religioso di conoscere 1e ragioni casuali e le ragioni finali del vivere, ma ha anche espresso un suo bisogno di sentirsi unito a tutti i suoi morti, e a tutti gli scomparsi e a tutta la realtà dell’universo oltre la notte dei tempi; ma ha anche espresso il maraviglioso piacere che anche una natura desolata è in grado d’offrire.’ VU xc: ‘Leopardi si rende tuttavia conto, ed è il solo Italiano a rendersene conto con chiarezza sino all’avvento della poesia contemporanea, che una frattura era avvenuta nella mente dell’uomo. L’accettazione della condizione umana nei suoi limiti di tempo e di spazio, vale a dire nei suoi

Notes to pages 109–11

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limiti materiali e logici, ormai è ritenuta come formante antinomia con l’aspirazione innata dell’uomo alla libertà e alla poesia.’ VU xci: ‘La durata la fa valere nelle immagini, per antitesi: un tempo di vigore opposto a un tempo d’agonia; il marchio lacerante d’uno slancio opposto al silenzio arido.’ VU xciii: ‘Perse ci parla d’una Esther che ebbe una volta invito ad ascoltare in un isolotto della Polinesa. Alcune bimbe Tonga che non capivano un ette della lingua nella quale erano state scelte a declamare, avevano imparato quel testo – lungo una settimana di pazienti ripetizíoni per bocca d’una vecchissima monaca francese – come un testo sacro. Racine non sembrò mai meno tradito a Perse, né “mai capito meglio il miracolo della lingua francese, il cue potere magico, il suo stesso genio per le analisi precise, spesso offusca.”’ VU xciv: ‘l’extrême impertinence de M. Perrault, qui avance que le tour des paroles ne fait rien pour l’éloquence, et qu’on ne dot regarder qu’au sens; et c’est pourquoi il prétend qu’on peut mieux juger d’un auteur par son traducteur, quelque mauvais qu’il soit, que par la lecture de l’auteur même.’ VU xciv: ‘Certo, la vera poesia si presents innanzi tutto a noi nella sua segretezza. È sempre accaduto cosi. Più giungiamo a trasferire la nostra emozione a la novità delle nostre visioni nei vocaboli, a più i vocaboli giungono a velarsi d’una musica the sarà la prima rivelazione della loro profondità poetica oltre ogni limite di significato.’ VU xciv–xcv: ‘Per il Leopardi, o per ogni Romantico, le cose erano infinitamente più gravi, il vocabolo essendo stato ridotto al suo semplice valore filologico di durata, essendo stato crudelmente denudato, e non potendosi più che con eccesso drammatico ricondurlo alla sua funzione poetica, funzione che nel secondo periodo della sua attività, sarà da Leopardi, nel Dialogo di Timandro a di Eleandro delle Operette Morali nel seguente modo fissato: “Se alcun libro morale potesse giovare, io penso the gioverebbero massimamente i poetici: dico poetíci, prendendo questo vocabolo largamente, cioè libri destinati a muovere l’immaginazione; e intendo non meno di prose che di versi. Ora io ho poca stima di quella poesia che, letta a meditata, non lascia al lettore nell’animo un tal sentimento nobile, che per mezz’ora, gl’impedisca di ammettere un pensier vile, e di fare un’azione indegna.” L’ispirazione era così ricondotta alla sua causa profonda, causa poetica e morale, e se dilatava i vocaboli per effetti indefinibili, per effetti estetici, quegli effetti tali non potevano essere, se non erano indotti dalla loro causa segreta, inconoscibile, a produrre una purificazione dell’anima.’ R. Dombroski, L’esistenza ubbidiente, 82: ‘ai feticci morali, modellati con materiale di comune attinenza, Ungaretti sostituisce il feticco metafisico dei poeti genuini.’

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5. Diego Valeri: A Classic Poet in the Modern Era 1 F. Fortini, Nuovi saggi italiani, 262: ‘Dell’area semantica di “classico”, da Winckelmann a Valéry, si può dire che da un atteggiamento razionalistico e volontaristico, fondato in oggettività (naturalismo, empirismo, materialismo) e con un forte senso della necessità, muove un intento di comunicazione (piú che di bellezza) e di realismo, verso armonia, compostezza, equilibrio, rifiuto dell’eccesso, ricerca del limite, della misura, della organicità dell’opera e della sua unità) (Regarding the semantic area of the ‘classical,’ from Winckelmann to Valéry, one can say that from a rationalistic and voluntaristic attitude, founded on objectivity (naturalism, empiricism, materialism) and with a strong sense of necessity, there begins an intent of communication (more than of beauty) and realism, toward harmony, composure, equilibrium, refusal of excess, search for the limit, for measure and the organicity of the work and its unity). 2 D. Valeri, ‘Difficoltà del superlativo assoluto in poesia,’ 902: ‘nulla sarà piú alieno dalla poesia dell’esagerazione, dell’amplificazione retorica, della sonorità a vuoto. La poesia può vivere soltanto dentro il proprio limite di pudore e di silenzio; il suo mezzo piú idoneo di espressione sarà, come disse Gide, la litote, cioè il contrario dell’iperbole.’ The following abbreviations are used for the other cited works of Valeri: P: Poesie; CV: Calle di vento; PI: Poesie inedite o ‘come’; TP: Tempo e poesia; AP: Amico dei pittori; CI: Conversazioni italiane. 3 Fortini, Nuovi saggi italiani, 262: ‘Al servizio di una maturità di esperienza e di una trasmissione di valori etici (pietas, disciplina, autocontrollo, rinunzia) stanno alcuni principî stilistici quali l’ossequio alle norme della tradizione, l’uso della attenuazione o litote, la separazione dei generi e degli stili, la regolarità, la compiutezza.’ 4 In the eulogies for a lost family member, one hears echoes of those written by Giovanni Pascoli and Giosuè Carducci, the poets who, with Gabriele D’Annunzio, were the major figures Valeri’s generation needed to confront. 5 F. Fortini, Nuovi saggi italiani 271: ‘per la legge della economia dei mezzi, proprio nell’apparente trasparenza della scrittura comunicativa massimi sono gli effetti ottenuti con un minimo angolo di rifrazione.’ Fortini also writes, Nuovi saggi italiani, 270–1, of ‘il precetto paradossale della poetica classicista: di ridurre al minimo (in apparenza) la visibilità della funzione letteraria del linguaggio ... a favore (apparente) della funzione referenziale; sapendo che, per la legge della economia dei mezzi, proprio nell’apparente

Notes to pages 115–20

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trasparenza della scrittura comunicativa massimi sono gli effetti ottenuti con un minimo angolo di rifrazione.’ C. Betocchi in D. Valeri, PI 13: ‘quell’uso amorosamente domestico della lingua che è proprio di Valeri, e soltanto di lui, di parlare alla vita e con la vita ... come da fratello a sorella, da sposo a sposa ... con gratitudine e concorde pietà, mutua riverenza.’ C. Betocchi writes of Valeri’s Venice in PI 17: ‘un ambito esistenzialmente definito, ma anche sovranaturalmente definibile come è quello della venezianità quando è sentita e colta nella sua tradizione di libero isolamento fine a se stesso. [...] una condizione di singolarità unica al mondo’ (a setting existentially defined, but also supernaturally definable, like that of the Venetian when felt and grasped as an end in itself, in its tradition of free isolation. [...] a condition of singularity unique to the world). D. Valeri, ‘Introduzione a Venezia,’ no page number. G. Raimondi in P 394. G. Raimondi in P 395. According to Piero Nardi, in V. Zambon, La poesia di Diego Valeri, vii, Valeri’s thought is ‘una forma di vitalismo, il quale ha poco da vedere, in verità, con il crepuscolarismo, sì piuttosto si apparenta con la tendenza, nella tradizione più nostra, classica, a simpatia con le cose, pur nella coscienza, inevitabile dopo Leopardi e Pascoli, della loro vanità’ (a form of vitalism, having very little to do with crepuscularism, but related to the tendency, in that classical tradition closest to us, toward a sympathy with things, even in the awareness, which is inevitable after Leopardi and Pascoli, of their vanity and emptiness). P.V. Mengaldo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, 354–5:‘[Valeri] assume [dal Pascoli] non solo lessico (svolìo, aliare ecc.) e sintassi e fatti metrici, ma anche certe inconfondibili soluzioni fonico-ritmiche (“di tremule oscurità”) ... E l’impressione che Valeri dà spesso è appunto di un Pascoli rassodato, meno dilabente.’ D. Valeri, TP 167–8: ‘Dovrebbero esserci, anche allora, delle stagioni; ma io vedo soltanto un folto di giaggioli dai fiori di seta, erti e aperti sui lunghi steli come fiammelle, azzurre di fuori e dorate dentro. [...] Certamente non fui mai, quanto in quei giorni in quegli anni, prossimo alle soglie del paradiso e dell’inferno, cuore a cuore con la vita universale, e, osassi dirlo, con Dio.’ D. Valeri, ‘Difficoltà del superlativo assoluto in poesia,’ 901–2: ‘La poesia è, per sé, superlativa nel senso che eleva la realtà, posta in noi e disposta attorno a noi, a potenza di sentimento puro, di pura immagine, di pura

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verità spirituale. La radice di ogni poesia è nella facoltà del poeta di omnia admirari; tanto egli è lontano dall’animus del filosofo stoico.’ D. Valeri, TP 42–3: ‘Tutta fuori del tempo la grande poesia. E nondimeno soltanto il grande poeta può darci una compiuta immagine del nunc in cui gli è toccato di vivere in mezzo a milioni di uomini come lui. Il Petrarca, per insigne esempio, fu, è, e sempre sarà il poeta d’Italia: dell’Italia senza tempo. [...] Valga sempre l’esempio del Petrarca, unico abitatore del proprio mondo lirico, unico parlante il misterioso linguaggio da lui stesso creato, e, ciò nonostante, poeta altamente (aristocraticamente) popolare.’ G. Ferroni, Storia della letteratura italiana. Il Novecento, 251: ‘che disegna con classica nitidezza le immagini di una natura del tutto estranea alle tracce del presente, con soluzioni di assoluta perfezione.’ See, for example, the following suspended endings of Valeri’s poems: ‘le incredibili storie / dell’ieri, del domani, del morire’ (the incredible stories / of yesterday, of tomorrow, of dying) (P 285); ‘sangue che va e si gira armonioso, / che va e si gira come le stagioni, / senza riposo’ (blood which flows and goes in harmony, / which goes and flows like the seasons, / without rest) (P 289); ‘Dove vai, stagione d’amore, / luce alta e profumo di prugna, / felicità che mi vuoti il cuore?’ (Where are you going, season of love, / high light and scent of plum, / happiness that empties my heart?) (P 277). D. Valeri, CI 22: ‘Le pagine poeticamente più vive tra quelle d’ispirazione religiosa mi paiono le poche in cui ancora vige il contrasto tra l’umano e il sopraumano, lo sforzo della volontà a sollevare il peso morto della umanità comune, in cui l’anima ancora si dibatte tra il credere e il dubitare, ancora e sempre cerca, benché abbia trovato. Non è, del resto, proprio in ciò l’eterno lievito del cristianesimo: nell’ansia e nell’inquietudine dell’anima, che pur crede e sa?’ D. Valeri, TP 201: ‘Di uno che non ha il furore del nuovo, che anzi gode di sentirsi dentro la tradizione poetica del proprio paese, della propria terra; di uno che crede, anche in questi caotici tempi, alla sacertà della bellezza, come ci credette il Petrarca padre (in tempi, del resto, non meno caotici dei nostri).’ D. Valeri, P 369: ‘Il a pensé, ce vieux poète, qu,en écrivant en francais il lui serait possible, peut-etre, d’éviter l’automatisme (de parole, de phrase, de vers) qui lui parait menacer la substance meme de sa poésie.’ As Valeri wrote in 1964, TP 17: ‘Io sto, insomma, con Sant’Agostino [...]. Il quale, nel trattato De Musica, considera l’arte dei suoni come un mezzo di liberazione a lubricis sensibus. Giungendo ad esaltarla (altrove) come divinis laudibus deputata, investita dell’ufficio di lodar Dio, ch’è ufficio angelico per ec-

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cellenza’ (In short, I stand with St Augustine [...]. Who, in the treatise De musica, considers the art of sounds as a means of liberation from the lucribis sensibus or deceitful senses. Elsewhere having arrived to praise it as divinis laudibus deputata, invested with the function of praising God, which is the angelic function par excellence). Carlo Bo, in E. Cecchi and N. Sapegno, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 9, 393: ‘In un tempo in cui – più o meno – un po’ tutti hanno avuto paura di sentire o almeno di lasciar vedere i propri sentimenti, Valeri si confessava e si presentava per quello che era. [...] La tristezza, la malinonia, gli amori (che sono poi i suoi temi) erano trasferiti sulla pagina direttamente ma con effetto raro: Valeri parlando di cose sue, non dava mai un accento personale alle sue storie.’ D. Valeri, ‘Il centenario delle Fleurs du Mal,’ 324: ‘È, tra i poeti del secolo, quello che ha operato la più vasta e penetrante irradiazione di sé, del proprio spirito, della propria poesia, su tutto il mondo letterario e, di conseguenza, morale.’ Ibid.: ‘audace, eccitante novità del contenuto’; ‘classico rigore della forma’; ‘pace estetica imposta al tumulto dell’anima romantica.’ F. Fortini, Nuovi saggi italiani, 269: ‘Come il sorriso dei defunti o delle maschere o delle cere, il classico educa alla contemplazione della morte di quanto sembra piú vivente. La inattualità diventa, nei classici, un potente additivo di significazione. Non è una qualsiasi diversità di linguaggio o di visione del mondo; è una diversità nel massimo della somiglianza. I classici di una lingua o letteratura o civiltà hanno con il nostro presente un rapporto perturbante, di familiarità e di estraneità: sunt aliquid Manes’ (Like the smile of the dead or of masks or wax impressions, the classic educates about the contemplation of the death of what seems most alive. The outdatedness becomes, in the classics, a powerful additive to meaning. It is not some difference in language or vision of the world; it is a difference in the greatest of similarities. The classics of a language or literature or civilization have a disturbing relationship with our present, of familiarity and estrangement: sunt aliquid Manes).

6. The Typological Journey of Grazia Deledda’s Canne al vento 1 Dante, Convivio [4, 28], 341: ‘eziandio a buona e vera religione si può tornare in matrimonio stando, ché Dio non volse religioso di noi se non lo cuore’ (even those who are married can dedicate themselves to living a life that is good and truly religious, for it is in our hearts that God wishes us to be reli-

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gious) (Dante’s Il convivio, trans. R. Lansing, 233). Dante explains in this way Paul’s statement to the Romans (2:28–9): ‘He is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is that circumcision which is outwardly manifested in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is that of the heart, in spirit and not in the letter, whose praise comes not from men but from God.’ Speaking of the Sardinian people’s ‘sense of justice and respect of the norm,’ Nicola Tanda asserts that a collective morality lies at the basis of their ‘pensiero selvaggio’ (savage thought), Dal mito dell’isola all’isola del mito, 46: ‘La coscienza di questa identità e unità di popolo nella Deledda è costante e implicita.’ Attilio Momigliano, Storia della letteratura italiana, 591. L. Muoni, in U. Collu, ed., Grazia Deledda nella cultura contemporanea, 271–2: ‘lo sguardo dell’esule’; ‘la più scomoda testimone dei difetti dei suoi corregionali’; ‘una sorta di autentica stimmung romantica.’ Dante Alighieri, Purg. viii.1–3: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio / ai navicanti e ‘ntenerisce il core / lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio.’ Landowners were selling their trees to be converted into ash for the fertilizer and detergent industries or into lumber to be used for railroad ties in the expanding national railroad. About this positive change in the language of the mature Deledda, B. Garavelli Mortara writes, ‘La lingua di Grazia Deledda,’ 162: ‘le scelte stilistiche sono ... scelte referenziali; mirano alle relazioni interne, di semantica profonda, tra gli elementi dell’espressione.’ The critic also ties Deledda’s mature style to a greater translatability of her works. The text of Canne al vento is cited from G. Deledda, Romanzi e novelle, abbreviated as RN. A. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife, 1. The Old Testament tribes’ agricultural festivals broke from the previous traditions. As Charity writes, ibid., 54: ‘In the recital or mimetic display of God’s acts, in the Israelite festivals, these acts are not brought into being, effected, or in the strictest sense of the phrase, “made contemporary”; instead, their already existent and existential contemporaneity is proclaimed and realized as “ever new.”’ Ibid., 84. Many scholars see this tension as existential more than temporal. As Charity puts it, ibid., 84–5: ‘Is the future of God salvation or judgment? That depends on how the individual sees the present: is this God’s present or the individual’s own present and dream of the future?’ E. Honig, Dark Conceit, 155. E. Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 53. The citation

Notes to pages 137–43

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continues: ‘This is true not only of the Old Testament prefiguration, which points forward to the Incarnation and the proclamation of the gospel, but also of these latter events, for they too are not the ultimate fulfillment, but themselves are a promise of the end of time and the true kingdom of God. Thus history, with all its concrete force, remains forever a figure, cloaked and needful of interpretation, since even the general direction of interpretation is given through faith.’ A. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife, 122–3: ‘There is every indication that the story from Q where Jesus replies to the doubts of John the Baptist by an indirect citation of eschatological prophecy (Isa. 35. 5; 61. 1) is genuine and a true mirror of his practice (Luke 7. 22 ff.; Matt. 11. 4 ff.). His mission, and God’s action through it, fulfils what was prophesied. Now is the time of decision.’ See F. Kermode, in R. Alter and F. Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible, 388: ‘Although typology is sometimes said to be a Christian invention, it is clearly derived from Jewish habits of thought and reflects Jewish rhetorical modes, some of great antiquity’; in this way the writer of Matthew emphasizes Christ’s obedience to the very Law he is in the process of ‘tranform[ing] ... with many consequences of paradox and excess.’ As regards the names, Ruth (who joined her mother-in-law Noemi in exile) is placed by Dante in the same ring of Paradise as Mary, and Ester is cited an an exemplum in Purg. xvii. G. Deledda, RN 302: ‘Ciò che più sorprendeva era l’accondiscendenza di don Predu; ma da qualche tempo sembrava un altro; s’era persino dimagrito e una voce strana correva, che egli fosse “toccato a libro”, vale a dire ammaliato per virtù di una fattucchieria eseguita coi libri santi.’ W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178. A. Amoia, 20th-Century Italian Women Writers, 12, reductively states that the reeds ‘symbolize nature’s lullaby and prayer for Efix.’ As Leonardo Sole writes, in U. Collu, ed., Grazia Deledda nella cultura contemporanea, 102: ‘Questa comunicazione sotterranea al di sotto delle parole affiora nel romanzo nei punti chiave, che non a caso coincidono con momenti di solitudine interiore e di silenzio’ (This subterranean communication beneath the words appears in the novel at key points which correspond, not coincidentally, with moments of interior solitude and silence). Deledda, RN 385: ‘Ma il tappeto era corto, e i piedi rimasero scoperti, rivolti come d’uso alla porta; e pareva che il servo dormisse un’ultima volta nella nobile casa riposandosi prima d’intraprendere il viaggio verso l’eternità’ (But the rug was short, and his feet remained uncovered, pointed toward the door as was the custom; and it seemed that the servant was sleeping one

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last time in the noble house, resting before undertaking the journey toward eternity). H.W. Boucher, ‘Metonymy in Typology and Allegory,’ 133. Ibid., 132. The citation continues, 134–5: ‘Man stands as the subject of typology as it unfolds in history. Unavoidably man participates in history, and inescapably he must accept or deny the claims of God’s acts. [...] The absolute term of history, the fulfillment of every event and the point to which all others, before and after, refer, is God’s incarnation as man. [...] The extended metonymy of typology is the trope of Christian revelation, because Christian truth involves the particularity of history and the concreteness of the individual person. In the Christian view the Incarnation transformed history not in the sense that it transcended time but in the sense that it redeemed time and invested history with purpose. [...] Typology applies not only to great historical events but to the minutiae of everyday life. [...] Judgement ... involves a typology because each person is judged against the demand of the antitype of Christ. The verdict is rendered by the individual himself. He confronts his own essence in death as God confronts him, and the indelible truth of the earthly career is revealed.’ C. Bo, in U. Collu, ed., Grazia Deledda nella cultura contemporanea, 36, 41: ‘Dovendo scegliere fra esaltazione e monumentalizzazione del personaggio e senso comune, ha scelto quest’ultimo, ben sapendo che nella vita ciò cha conta è l’umile continuità del quotidiano. La stessa sua religione [...] è un legame eterno fra gli uomini e gli eventi, dove non ci sono vincitori ad eccezione del dolore che solo ci porta alla invocazione di Dio e soprattutto alla sua volontà.’ W. Godzich and J. Kittay, The Emergence of Prose, 209. As A. Gramsci writes, Selections from Cultural Writings, 35, ‘the art of the [serial] novelist consists essentially in ending each instalment with an adventure that starts with an enigmatic sentence.’ Barbara Reynolds suggests, in A. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife, x–xi, that it was ‘from the Victorines, with their strong sense of natural beauty and delight in literary art, that Dante learnt to regard the literal sense as a living enactment of the allegorical.’ Reynolds adds suggestively that among Dante scholars it is ‘rare’ to find ‘one who takes Dante serious and personally’ (ix). A. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife, 221, 224. L Spitzer, ‘The Addresses to the Reader in the “Commedia,”’ 162.

7. Iconicity and Social Thought in Elsa Morante’s ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ 1 G. Lucente, Beautiful Fables, 258.

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2 Paolo Valesio defines iconicity, or ‘notatio,’ as follows, Novantiqua, 147: ‘The linking of references of the thematized words on the basis of the etymological and/or formal (nonetymological) synchronic relationships between the words implementing these references, without necessarily making an issue of their morphosyntactic structures and related variations.’ 3 C.S. Peirce, ‘On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation,’ The Essential Peirce, 1:226, 1885. 4 All translations from ‘Lo scialle andaluso’ are my own. 5 G. Debenedetti, Saggi, 1130: ‘Adegua con inesauribile ricchezza e invenzione di particolari la minuzia dei giorni scrupolosamente registrati, senza sacrificare né un foglietto del calendario, né un battito dell’orologio. Tanto che quei giorni così gremiti possono parere le giornate di un’epopea o di un ciclo leggendario: giornate che rappresentano epoche intere.’ 6 T. Sebeok, ‘Iconicity,’ 1436, recounts Indira Gandhi’s account of a similar protest when she put to ‘death’ her doll once she discovered it was made in England: ‘Mrs. Gandhi says then, when she was five, “she discovered that her doll was made in Britain. For days she pondered what she should do about it, and she struggled, in her words, ‘between love of the doll – [along with] pride in the ownership of such a lovely thing – and ... duty towards my country.’” She continues, “At last the decision was made and, quivering with tension, I took the doll up on the roof terrace and set fire to her.”’ 7 See M.A. Parsani and N. De Giovanni, Femminile a confronto, 9. 8 G. Debenedetti, Saggi, 117. 9 P. Diel, Symbolism in Greek Mythology. See also M. Caesar, ‘Elsa Morante,’ 212: ‘The immediate sources of Morante’s writing are to be found in the period between the wars, in Kafka and surrealism, and, more locally, in the “magic realism” (realismo magico) which Massimo Bontempelli put forward in 1927–28 as the epitome of the avant-garde under Fascism: the combination of precise realistic detail and an atmosphere of “lucid stupor”, for which B. saw analogies in Quattrocento painting.’ 8. Of the Barony: Anna Banti and the Time of Decision 1 2 3 4

A. Banti, Opinioni, 77. Ibid., 75, 81. Banti’s Il bastardo will be abbreviated as B, and Un grido lacerante as GL. A. Gargani, Lo stupore e il caso: ‘E la voce femminile e la voce del coraggio del senso contro la ripetizione meccanica del giuoco maschile’ (43); ‘La voce femminile e l’allarme percettivo che si puo incontrare soltanto nelle circostanze del segreto’ (42).

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5 J. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 235–6. 6 Ibid., 235–6. 7 See G. Contini, ‘Memoria di Roberto Longhi,’ 351: ‘Ma il Lanzi? Il Lanzi, stella polare di Longhi fra gli storici come il Cavalcaselle fra i conoscitori, non ha però luogo nel catalogo dei critici-in-quanto-scrittori ... Ci troviamo dinanzi a un nodo di crisi, della tensione appartenente a ogni critico e consistente, più o meno drammaticamente, nella divergenza fra scienza e poesia’ (But Lanzi? Lanzi, that North Star among Longhi’s historians, as was Cavalcaselle among the cognoscenti, does not earn a place in the catalogue of critics-as-writers ... We find ourselves confronting a crisis, of the tension that concerns every critic and is consistent, more or less dramatically, with the divergence between science and poetry). 8 See Un grido lacerante, 33: ‘la verità della storia [...] era stata tradita’ (the truth of history [...] had been betrayed). 9 G. Testori, ‘Ritratto di Anna Banti,’ 15. 10 A. Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 93. 11 R. Williams, Keywords, 238. 12 A. N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education, 19. 9. The Religious Experimentalism of Amelia Rosselli 1 A. Rimbaud, Complete Works, 182. 2 A. Rosselli, Le poesie, 102. The following abbreviations are used for the cited works of Rosselli: Le poesie (P), Antologia poetica (AP). 3 P.V. Mengaldo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, 996: ‘l’oscuro monologo interiore contiene una disperata volontà di colloquio, la “passione” tenta dialettizzarsi con la “ragione.”’ 4 R. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 58. For Barthes, pleasure is a ‘claim lodged against the separation of the text, for what the text says, through the particularity of its name, is the ubiquity of pleasure, the atopia of bliss.’ 5 Ibid., 35. 6 A.N. Whitehead has written, Modes of Thought, 62: ‘In the history of European thought, the discussion of aesthetics has been almost ruined by the emphasis upon the harmony of the details.’ Rosselli is rare in her canny rejection of this prejudice so inherent to the classicalist and romance tradition. 7 P. Watzlawick, J.H. Beavin, and D.D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication, 62. 8 Ibid., 66–7. 9 On the importance of lapsus, see P.P. Pasolini, ‘Notizia su Amelia Rosselli.’

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10 See N. Lorenzini, ‘Amelia e Gabriele: esercizi di “misreading,”’ La poesia: tecniche di ascolto, 79: ‘Si può parlare semmai di estraneità al modello operata da un linguaggio che fa posto alla dolcezza e alla terribilità, pervertendo l’originale, tra evanescenza e passione, “maestà” e “furore.”’ 11 G. Giudici, ‘Per Amelia Rosselli,’ in AP 8: ‘uso di ... inversione sintattica ... non di rado a livello non di sintassi ma di significati.’ 12 F. Fortini writes of Rosselli as follows in Saggi ed epigrammi, 1172: ‘In nessun altro poeta italiano di oggi, se non forse in Zanzotto o Loi, si ritrova la contiguità (immediata e non artificiosa) di dissociazione fra significante e significato e di razionalizzazione pertinace e quindi tragica’ (In no other Italian poet, save perhaps Zanzotto or Loi, does one find the (immediate and uncontrived) contiguity between the dissociation of signifier and signified and a tenacious, and thus tragic, rationalization). 10. From Z to A: Italo Svevo’s Corto viaggio sentimentale 1 R. Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello, 174. 2 The text cited is Corto viaggio sentimentale (abbreviated as CVS). See Svevo, Carteggio, 64.’Passai questi tre anni dalla pubblicazione del romanzo senza far nulla. Incuorato dopo la mia prima visita a Parigi, cominciai a Londra una lunghissima novella.’ 3 Jane Zatta takes this point of view in ‘The Sentimental Journeys of Laurence Sterne and Italo Svevo.’ More empirically, one can point to the fact that Corto viaggio was left in its manuscript form as we know it well before Svevo’s untimely death in 1928, and that as much time had elapsed since its inception as was needed for La coscienza di Zeno. During this time Svevo was well underway with the writing of his unfinished fourth novel, Confessioni di un vegliardo. 4 Dottor S., the addressee (and polemical target) of Zeno’s self-accounting, is a psychoanalyst with whom Zeno has severed his ties. The name suggests ‘Es,’ the Italian word for Freud’s ‘Id.’ 5 See R. Dombroski, Properties of Writing, 94, 101: ‘Zeno is firmly installed in a world of dull yet gratifying bourgeois values (conscience, duty, truth, legality, etc.), which he admires for the sense of well-being they foster, and at the same time exposes as facades, manufactured to give an air of respectability to one’s needs and drives. [...] Zeno is not only a subject whose motivation and behavior are continually at such odds that the language he speaks is inherently ironic; since his text is written as a confession, he is also in a position to evaluate, ironically, the effects of his deception.’ 6 See G. Luti, ‘Monologo interiore e tempo narrativo nella Coscienza di Zeno,’

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n.p.: ‘Il referente stilistico non può che essere l’abbandono della dialettica tra discorso diretto e discorso indiretto libero, con la conseguente nullificazione dell’autonomia espressiva del primo e del secondo’ (The stylistic referent can only be the abandonment of the dialectic between direct discourse and free indirect discourse, with the resulting nullification of the expressive autonomy of both of them). R. Dombroski, Properties of Writing, 95. See I. Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno, 445: ‘Una confessione in iscritto è sempre menzognera. Con ogni nostra parola toscana noi mentiamo! [...] Si capisce come la nostra vita avrebbe tutt’altro aspetto se fosse detta nel nostro dialetto’ (A written confession is always a lie. With each of our words spoken in Tuscan we are lying! [...] One sees how our life would have an entirely different aspect if it were told in our dialect). V. Coletti, ‘Standardizzazione: il caso italiano,’ 333: ‘La lingua del capolavoro di Svevo è, se vogliamo, un esempio concreto dell’italiano in fase di standarizzazione, in cerca di un equilibrio tra vecchia grammatica, parlato e dialetti.’ As Giacomo Devoto writes, Il linguaggio d’Italia, 320–1, Svevo’s usage of Italian betrayed weaknesses and uncertainties, as his formation was dominated by the ‘binomial’ of the Italianate dialect of Trieste and German: ‘Fu un pioniere, in quanto trasferì difficoltà essenziali dalla lingua comune a quella letteraria, ma non propose né impose soluzioni, e tanto meno instaurò una tradizione’ (He was a pioneer, in that he transferred essential difficulties from the common language to the literary one, but he neither proposed nor imposed solutions, and even less did he inaugurate a tradition). R. Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello, 124. It was published in Mondo by Umbro Apollonio in the following issues: 7, 21 April; 5, 19 May; 2, 16 June; 7, 21 July; 8 August 1945; and subsequently in Corto viaggio sentimentale ed altri racconti inediti (Milan: Mondadori, 1949), 17–109. It was republished in Racconti, saggi, pagine sparse, 143–219. I. Svevo, Carteggio, 107. G. Debenedetti, Saggi, 463, 464. Brian Richardson, ‘Questions of Language,’ in Z.G. Baranski * and R.J. West, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, 71. G. Debenedetti, Saggi, 459: ‘Come diceva il filosofo, la natura non si vince se non obbedendole; e questa obbedienza è qualche cosa di molto più attivo che la rassegnazione, comporta molto più iniziativa ed energia, e restituisce in compenso, a chi la esercita, una confortante vena di ottimismo. Proprio l’ottimismo che Svevo non nascose negli ultimi suoi anni.’ See CVS 12: ‘Bisogna sapere che al signor Aghios era stato raccontato che

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il Darwin riteneva che la roccia della granbretagna fosse stata convertita in terra fertile da un vermicello microscopico.’ G. Carducci, Poesie, 470. Translated by J. Tusiani, From Marino to Marinetti, 252. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Subsequent references to this translation are abbreviated A.M. The intertextuality with Sterne’s Sentimental Journey recalls a bond that Svevo has with Ugo Foscolo, the translator of that work. As Andrea Zanzotto writes of the fraternity of writers that emerge from the extreme northeast of Italy, Fantasie di avvicinamento, 313–14: ‘Persistevano gli amori, giusti, non paranoidi, per la Grecia e per l’Italia, matria e patria. E sarebbe ancora il caso di ricordare come, in Italia più che altrove, un’ostinata volontà di definizione e identificazione della nostra realtà nazionale viene con caratteri particolarmente complessi dalla periferia orientale: per cui si potrebbe trovare una ideale linea di continuità che da Foscolo arriva fino a Svevo. Dove sarà mai un perfetto insegnante di italiano, capace di assicurare una buona toscanità a quello che Svevo sta scrivendo? E non a caso le faglie foscoliane sembrano ricollegarsi a quelle, ormai macroscopiche, di Svevo.’ Cited by P. Watzlavick, J.H. Beavin, and D.D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication, 187. The positions of Freud, well known to his translator, were decidedly partial in terms of seeing the whole life and recall St Paul’s monition, that one’s view of the divine is always partial. See I. Svevo, Carteggio, 138: ‘La ferrovia mi fa addiritura ribrezzo.’ E. Saccone, ‘Il poeta travestito,’ in Il poeta travestito: otto studi su Svevo, 11–25. See A. Manzoni, I promessi sposi, 141–2: ‘Addio, monti sorgenti dall’acque, ... Addio, casa ancora straniera, casa sogguardata tante volte alla sfuggita, passando, e non senza rossore; nella quale la mente si figurava un soggiorno tranquillo e perpetuo di sposa. Addio, chiesa, dove l’animo tornò tante volte sereno, cantando le lodi del Signore; dov’era promesso, preparato un rito; dove il sospiro segreto del cuore doveva essere solennemente benedetto, e l’amore venir comandato, e chiamarsi santo; addio!’ L. Capuana, ‘Fatale influsso,’ 529. CVS 7: ‘sentiva, quando era pieno di gioia e di speranza e non vedeva’; 8: ‘si sentiva tanto pieno di gioia e di speranza al momento’; 9: ‘giovine. Certo dalla sua gioia e speranza non bisognava’; 9: ‘Era tanto piena quella gioia e speranza che la donna -’. I. Svevo, ‘Le confessioni del vegliardo’ (1928), Racconti, saggi, pagine sparse (henceforth abbreviated as RS), 372. C. Magris, Dietro le parole, 334. See also ibid, 333: ‘Pochissimi hanno affer-

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rato al pari di Svevo la frattura tra azione e consoscenza, fra vita e giudizio sulla vita, fra la vita che scorre torpida e oscura e la sua onda che s’inalza un istante da quel fluire per cercare di capirne il significato ma subito ricade nel suo gorgo opaco.’ Ibid., 335. Dante Alighieri, Inferno xxxiv. 136–9: ‘Lo duca e io per quel cammino ascoso / intrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo; / e sanza cura aver d’alcun riposo, / salimmo sù, el primo e io secondo, / tanto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle / che porta ‘l ciel, per un pertugio tondo. / E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.’ Defending Italy’s collaboration in the League of Nations, Svevo writes, ‘Sulla teoria della pace,’ RS 650: ‘Una teoria completa e perfetta se anche non piú applicabile alle nostre circostanze fluí dalla nobile mente di Dante che per aver conosciuto gli orrori (che a noi non sembrano troppo grandi) della guerra Senese divenne un pacifista fervente’ (A complete and perfect theory, even if not applicable to our circumstances, flowed out of the noble mind of Dante, who, having known the horrors of the Sienese war (which don’t seem too great to us), became a fervent pacifist). Ugo Foscolo, ‘Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia,’ in Opere, vol. 1, 799. According to Franco Gavezzeni, in Ugo Foscolo, Opere, vol. 1, 704, this was well suited to Foscolo’s ‘experimentalism’: ‘Nessun testo infatti, meglio del Sentimental Journey, poteva convenire allo sperimentalismo foscoliano, nessuna prosa apparendo tanto costituzionalmente lontana dagli istituti caratteristici della sintassi nostrana. Riprodurre l’anfrattuosità del labirintico periodare sterniano, coglierne per intero l’allusiva concinnitas, i frequenti giochi di parola, l’andamento spezzato nelle variegazioni di un umorismo sottilmente evanescente, così come la sfumatura sentenziosa connessa all’intarsio di citazioni bibliche, e di autocitazioni’ (In fact, no text better than the Sentimental Journey was suitable to Foscolo’s experimentalism, no other prose appearing so intrinsically different from our syntax. To reproduce the rugged terrain of Sterne’s intricate phrasing, to grasp in its entirety the allusive concinnitas, the frequent word play, the broken progression in the variegations of a subtly evanscent humorism, as well as the sententious shading connected to the inlay of biblical citations and self-citations). M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 308. As P.N. Furbank writes, Italo Svevo, 192: ‘Svevo found something very congenial in Sterne’s device of counterpointing the minutiae of an actual journey with a sentimental journey in the mind – with comic consequences when their trajectories collide.’ L. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 9, 40–1. See CVS 73–4, where Borlini states: ‘Pensi poi alla responsabilità che mi

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tocca assumere! Talvolta liquido io, da solo, un danno! Dall’a alla zeta!’ (So think of the responsibility I must assume. Sometimes I handle a claim from start to finish, from A to Z!). My emphasis. 36 R. Dombroski, Properties of Writing, 104: ‘Zeno’s text conflates pleasure and reality, showing that the rationale for its construction is inextricably linked to the subject’s drives. Zeno’s reality is his pleasure: the practical achievements of his marriage are his pleasure; his business is his pleasure.’ 37 M. Bakhtin defines ‘heteroglossia’ as follows, Dialogic Imagination, 428: ‘The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiological – that will insure that a word uttered in that place and that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close to a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress.’ 38 R. Poggioli, Spirit of the Letter, 179. 11. The Pains of the Prophet: Guido Morselli and the Problem of Evil 1 The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited works by Morselli: RF: Realismo e fantasia; FC: Fede e critica; DI: Diario; DB: Un dramma borghese; PS: Proust o del sentimento. 2 There is much material available at the Morselli Archives in Pavia, including an essay on Ungaretti and contemporary poetry (which I refer to below), a gastronomic dictionary, an unfinished essay on ‘Christian Atheism,’ and numerous articles, plays, and public interventions and letters concerning theological and contemporary scientific matters. There is also Morselli’s personal library of 1500 volumes, often with copious marginalia and inserts, preserved with cross-referenced binders containing countless articles, correspondence, and reflections. 3 PS 11: ‘Le pagine piu poetiche di P. son quelle che ci descrivono, non il contenuto del ricordo, ma come questo sia sorto in lui dall’inconscio.’ 4 PS 21: ‘“ideali senza essere astratte, reali senza essere attuali,” ci rendono l’idea d’esistenza e hanno insieme il prestigio dell’immaginazione.’ 5 PS 19. Giacomo Devoto has described this procedure, in a manner consonant with Morselli’s observations, as a ‘cult of geometrical time.’ See Devoto, Il linguaggio d’Italia, 178: ‘In connection with the conscious repre-

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sentation of the importance of dream, the word Time unexpectedly appears for the first time with the capital “T”. It then reappears sporadically but with greater frequency until the end, to then conclude the work: Time, a character ... the technique of language suppresses the relief of the semantic timerhythm, and slows them down in an autonomous time-rhythm, responding only to internal, and substantially uniform, demands.’ RF 11: ‘se si definisce l’arte un’immagine del mondo vista attraverso un temperamento, si potrebbe definire la filosofia un temperamento visto attraverso un’immagine del mondo.’ RF 51: ‘Come cercherò di mostrarti, pensare ed essere sono una cosa, e il soggetto in ogni suo moto è pensiero, congiunzione, simploche di Esistenza e d’individualità. Mutuo questo termine da Aristotele, il quale lo usa come sinonimo di synthesis per indicare il giudizio, che è per lui unione di concetti. Nel gergo tecnico moderno, sintesi è ciò che risulta dalla negazione di una “posizione”, come dalla negazione di quella negazione: è una determinazione superiore a due determinazioni contrarie, e diversa da esse. Invece la simploche non è ciò che risulta dagli opposti, ma è composizione degli opposti, in quanti questi sono complementari, e quindi, nonchè escludersi reciprocamente, si attraggono. Non è un terzo termine, diverso dagli opposti, ma e il loro rapporto.’ See Aldo Rossi, untitled interview, 159: ‘Morselli ... riusciva a leggere in Aristotele oltre la sintesi fra una tesi e un’antitesi, tentare la simploche, la riunificazione degli opposti che non fanno in tempo a sprigionare le loro virtualità contrastive. Sempre con la precisa consapevolezza che esiste una malattia del linguaggio (Max Muller), una sofferenza dei sistemi, una mancanza, un’entropia della comunicazione’ (Morselli ... managed to read in Aristotle beyond the synthesis between a thesis and an antithesis, and to touch the simploche, the reunification of the opposites which do not make it in time to release their contrastive virtualities. Ever with the awareness that there exists a [contemporary] disease of language (Max Muller), a suffering of the systems, a lack, an entropy of communication). RF 157: ‘L’io sono è senso interno e senso organico, è sentimento, è successione sempre nuova di stati e contenuti di coscienza. Senso e sentimento, che non debbono tradursi in atti di pensiero perchè sono essi stessi immediatamente pensiero.’ RF 8: ‘la mia fatica di paziente scriba del verbo sereniano.’ RF 118: ‘Non vi è, secondo me, un processo psichico cui ne corrisponda un altro, fisico. Non si tratta di un’adeguazione, per quanto puntuale, dell’ordine psicologico all’ordine psicologico. Il processo è uno solo; e possiamo chiamarlo, semplicemente, psichico. Un processo al quale l’Es (come

Notes to pages 223–8

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ti dicevo) presta, oltre che il contenuto, uno dei princìpi attivi. ... [I]n noi si dà un doppio ordine di realtà, nel cui congiungimento consiste il pensiero e la vita stessa. L’appartenenza del soggetto alla sfera dell’Esistenza, è il fatto fondamentale che gli rende possibile il consocere. Se noi fossimo in tutto e per tutto Es, la conoscenza delle cose sarebbe in noi totale e perfetta; ma in tal caso non sentiremmo nè penseremmo, perchè non avremmo individualità.’ V. Coletti, ‘Guido Morselli,’ 109: ‘la riduzione al minimo del contesto o la sua emblematizzazione; [e] gli interlocutori che fungono da “rappresentanti di idee.”’ FC 319: ‘corroborata da carità appassionata e operosa.’ RF 334: ‘Il discorso dunque, con cui comunichiamo il nostro pensiero, può ripetere la serie delle associazioni verbali che hanno accompagnato in noi il sorgere del pensiero medesimo: ma ciò in quanto ha la sua causa efficiente, non in quelle, ma nel pensiero come concreta rappresentazione dell’oggetto (o come autocoscienza del soggetto), ossia come simploche, a esclusione di qualunque intermediario, ragione, coscienza o intelletto che dir si voglia.’ RF 413: ‘L’amore non è solo uno smarrirci nella carnalità, come non è soltanto un’esaltazione orgogliosa, un’ebbrezza dell’io, quantunque sia stato identificato or con l’uno or con l’altro di questi suoi “valori”, specie dai romantici.’ DI 377: ‘Il Vangelo annuncia: – la religione non è speculazione (non è teologia); – la religione non è formalismo (o liturgia); – la religione non è ascesi (o purificazione); – la religion non è nemmeno una regola di condotta (non è una dottrina morale) [...] La fede, annuncia il Vangelo, è amore. Perché Dio stesso è amore, e per l’amore s’incarna. [...] Gesù è la fonte di quella verità che ha rivoluzionato la fede. che ha reso possibile la fede a tutti gli uomini, solo che siano capaci di sentire amore.’ I do not know if Morselli read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but his position with respect to Bultmann is compatible with that of the martyred theologian. FC 66: ‘Dio è disposto a indulgenza verso chi insorge contro i suoi decreti, ma non verso chi pretende svelarne il mistero, subordinandoli ai criteri di una legalità rigorosa bensì, ma antropomorfica.’ FC 69: ‘Senza Dio, il male non ha (in linea teorica) niente di oscuro; nemmeno per coloro che in questo mondo non ammettono altro che il male.’ FC 121: ‘la mirabile virtù d’amore, che nel suo grado superno produce la distinzione delle tre Persone, mentre ne assicura la sostanziale unità.’ FC 141: ‘Le due opposte mistiche…presumono di portare all’adesione totale all’Oggetto.’

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21 FC 140: ‘religiosità media’; FC 141: ‘il divino non lo conosciamo che ‘per una parte’ (‘ex parte’: I Cor. 13, 12).’ 22 FC 156: ‘Nella sofferenza il rapporto naturale fra noi e l’universo si ristabilisce.’ 23 While in Fede e critica Morselli rejects the optimism of the positive theologians, he defends a radical optimism, which is based on the experiential and searching nature of the believer, and expressed in what he calls the theory of compensations. In actual life, suffering is the rule, but so is happiness and joy; these latter are necessities and are to be cultivated, not for the optimism of the hedonists, but in service to God. At times the literary quality of Morselli’s religious reflections comes in the form of short aphorisms: ‘Fede (religiosa) significa: prestare a Dio, supplire a Dio, perdonare a Dio’ ((Religious) faith means: to give to God, to compensate for God, to forgive God) (DI 343). 24 FC 164: ‘Capiva che quelle sue negazioni non erano altro che lo sfogo dell’animo esacerbato, non un valido dato intellettuale.’ 25 FC 193: ‘secondo la definizione di San Bernardo: una quasi diretta partecipazione dello spirito alla Verità.’ 26 FC 205: ‘Si pensa dunque a un loro alternarsi, quale difatti traspare dai discorsi di coloro che hanno più intensamente creduto, ed è reso con drammatica vivezza dall’autore dei Salmi.’ 27 FC 207: ‘la radiosa teofania che ha per tramite la bontà, la gloria dell’opera divina’; ‘l’umiltà fa sì che ci si inchini alla maestà del Signore, ma non senza aver veduto in quanto egli ci superi e, superandoci, neghi i nostri criteri, deluda le nostre attese.’ 28 FC 175: ‘Non si è uomini di maturo giudizio, se non si è in grado di stabilire sin dove arrivano e che cosa possono le nostre forze. L’Assoluto esiste: ed esiste – per chi non voglia scherzare su una tale argomento, o dar prova di una superbia meno piramidale che grottesca – fuori di noi; siamo in grado di concepirlo ma non di afferrarne l’intrinseca natura, i fini, le modalità. Interviene la Rivelazione, a fornirci maggiori notizie su ciò, a delinearci in un suo particolare linguaggio gnomico-anagogico quella che potremmo chiamare la storia dei rapporti fra l’Assoluto e il relativo, o taluni punti di essa.’ 29 Morselli takes issue with a remark of Elio Vittorini’s, that if God exists everything becomes easy to explain; exactly the opposite is true, he writes, since the true problem of evil only presents itself to the believer and not to atheists, for whom the universe is simply the product of chance occurrences. Morselli is pessimistic about twentieth-century literature, which moves on a parabola ‘Dall’atto gratuito... all’atto coatto o automatico’ (From the gratuitous action ... to the coerced and automatic action) (DI 237).

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30 DI 90: ‘l’erudizione, e lo specialismo, è conoscenza egoistica, che non dà luogo a rapporti, che è perciò infeconda.’ 31 V. Coletti, ‘Guido Morselli,’ 97: ‘I miti della storia e del soggetto gli pareva conferissero un crisma di non dovuta legittimità all’accaduto, fingessero la centralità e la superiorità dell’esperienza umana e, in conclusione, nascondessero la ricorrente pretesa antromorfica di ridurre tutta la realtà all’uomo.’ 32 DI 39: ‘Desolante povertà della nostra fraseologia sentimentale! Nostalgia, stato d’animo, fantasticheria, “reverie”, malinconia, tristezza, sono, con pochi altri, i termini di cui disponiamo per esprimere tutta un’immensa gamma di valori spirituali.’ 33 G. Contini, Letteratura dell’Italia unita, 577–8: ‘Certo autobiografismo è significativo di un ramo maestro del romanzo moderno, quando l’osservazione naturalistica del reale giunge all’autoanalisi: questo punto accomuna Svevo, Proust, Joyce’ (A certain autobiographism stands to signify a major branch of the modern novel, when the naturalistic observation of the real reaches the point of self-analysi: this point draws together Svevo, Proust, Joyce). 34 Morselli felt that the dignity and survival of the bourgeoisie was threatened; he compared its disappearance to the disappearance of the early Christianity of Paul (DI 242). 35 C. Segre, Tempo di bilanci, 22: ‘Si può dire che la salda costruzione o la felice evocazione dei personaggi, che solo in Un dramma borghese (del 1961–1962) viene svolta nel cerchio dei loro rapporti affettivi, di solito è subordinata da Morselli a un’affabulazione fortemente stimolata da una problematica teorica.’ 36 K. Jaspers, Nietzsche, 397. 12. Vasco Pratolini’s Il quartiere as a Calque of Purgatorio 1 See F. Rosengarten, ‘A Crucial Decade in the Career of Vasco Pratolini (1932–1942),’ for an account of the slow shifting of Pratolini’s views in this period when he leaves the polemical politics of his youth by the wayside and focuses more and more on literature. 2 Citations from V. Pratolini, Il quartiere, are indicated by ‘Q’; the translated passages are from V. Pratolini, A Tale of Santa Croce, trans. Peter and Pamela Duncan 3 V. Pratolini, ‘Cronache fiorentine 20° secolo,’ 286. 4 Ibid., 285. 5 A. Asor Rosa, Vasco Pratolini, 107–19, cited in M. Bevilacqua, ed., Il caso Pratolini, 70–82, alleges that the Pratolini of ‘Cronache fiorentine 20° secolo’ is

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limited by naturalistic and deterministic assumptions, not yet aware of the merits of historicism. While it is true that Pratolini attributes certain persistent qualities to the Florentines, we would disagree with the allegation that these traits are presented as deterministic or essentialist. Rather Pratolini has documented the violent factionalism of Florence’s recent past and has accurately conveyed the discomfiting aspects of being Florentine in his day. What makes the ‘Cronache’ such a rich essay is precisely its combination of the literary and the historical character of the Florentine heritage, from the medieval chronicles and the Commedia forward. V. Pratolini, ‘Cronache fiorentine 20° secolo,’ 292. Ibid., 287. Ibid., 286. Pratolini invokes Dante to gloss the deceptive novelties of modernist fiction, in Allegoria e derisione: ‘Proust Joyce Svevo sono moderni e sono grandi perché hanno capito che l’uomo contemporaneo ha perso la nozione del Bene e del Male, e si dibatte in un costante purgatorio dove non c’è nulla di piú infero e di piú, indissociabilmente, celestiale della società borghese coi suoi riti, le sue preclusioni e gerarchie, il suo progresso tecnico e le sue schiavitú, la sua sete di conquista e i suoi arbitrî, la sua ossessiva dissipazione morale e sessuale. Tutti angeli e tutti dannati. Atei (anarcichi e insieme conservatori) Marcel Italo e James hanno del mondo una visione in definitiva cattolica, cioè retriva, mentre Dante, soccorre l’esempio massimo, medievale e credente qual è, teologo e fazioso, edificante e reazionario, non umanista ma uomo, resta nei secoli un campione di laicismo e di libertà rivoluzionaria.’ See C. Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, 254: ‘The intertext is a poet’s use of a device employed earlier, or that has become part of a repertoire of means available to modern writers.’ M. Ricciardi, ‘Coscienza e struttura nella narrativa dell’ultimo Svevo,’ 53, has noted that in the years that culminate in the act of writing the Il quartiere, Pratolini himself left behind ‘la dimensione privata, idillica ed elegiaca dei suoi primi libri’; in this respect the Il quartiere is Pratolini’s ‘first chronicle.’ E. Montale is among those contemporaries most conditioned by the historical-linguistic memory of the Commedia; unfortunately, far less attention has been allotted to prose writers. Studies of Dante’s influence in the twentieth century have dealt almost exclusively with poetry. Examples of studies of Dante’s influence among modern Italian authors that consider poets to the virtual exclusion of novelists include S. Zennaro, ed., Dante nella letteratura italiana del Novecento; A. Noferi, ‘Dante e il Novecento’; Daniele Maria Pegorari, Vocabolario dantesco della lirica italiana del Novecento. P.V. Mengaldo

Notes to pages 257–74

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cites Gianfranco Contini’s importance in affirming the ‘stilistica delle fonti’ for a universal source like Dante, Prima lezione di stilistica, 55–6: ‘Contini ha fissato che la ricerca delle “fonti” mira a constatare “l’intensa storicità linguistica”, ad esempio di un autore come Dante’ (Contini established that the research of the ‘sources’ aims to ascertain ‘the intense linguistic historicity,’ for example, of an author like Dante). F.P. Memmo, Vasco Pratolini, 196. Memmo further outlines the three major interpretative issues at stake in the novel, 196: ‘the problem of definition of the narrative space; 2) the problem of definition of the relations among the characters who act within that space; and 3) the problem of definition of the role of the narrator.’ C. Cases, Patrie lettere, 75. Dante refers to Corso Donati and his eventual infernal collocation (he will die in 1308) in Purg. xxiv.82–7. It seems overly reductive to state with Giulio Ferroni, Storia della letteratura italiana, 418, that the ‘quartiere’ of Pratolini’s conception is ‘[uno] spazio chiuso all’interno della città, ambito familiare in cui tutti gli aspetti della vita privata si svolgono in pubblico’ (a closed space inside the city, a familiar setting in which all aspects of the private life are carried out in public). See Purg. ix.76–8: ‘vidi una porta, e tre gradi di sotto / per gire ad essa, di color diversi, / e un portier ch’ancor non facea motto.’ Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. II. Purgatorio, trans. and comment John D. Sinclair. Subsequent references to this translation are abbreviated J.S. L. Spitzer, ‘The Addresses to the Reader in the “Commedia,”’ 148. Ibid., 185. In contrast to the ‘addresses’ in Inferno, which ‘may be found predominantly in moments of danger or of monstrous appearances,’ writes Spitzer (ibid.,144), ‘in Purgatorio [the ‘addresses’ are found] more often in order to bring the transcendental element home to the reader.’ Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Subsequent references to this translation are abbreviated A.M. One cannot overlook the Dantesque associations of Arrigo’s name, suggesting Arrigo VII (Henry VII of Luxembourg), the emperor Dante hoped would descend over the Alps to unify Italy. At this point in Pratolini’s novel, the marriage of Arrigo and Luciana stands to symbolize a future in which greater harmony might exist between the individual and the social polity. A. Battistini, ‘Volto,’ Enciclopedia dantesca, vol. 5, 1145. See, for example, Purg. xxx.73–5: ‘Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice. / Come degnasti d’accedere al monte? / non sapei tu che qui è l’uom fe-

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lice?’ (‘Look here! For I am Beatrice, I am! / How were you able to ascend the mountain? / Did you not know that man is happy here?’ [A.M.]) 26 V. Pratolini (1937), cited in Ottone Rosai, Opere dal 1911 al 1957, 337. 27 V. Pratolini (1937), cited in Ottone Rosai Opere dal 1911 al 1957, 337. 28 R. Luperini, Il Novecento, 542. Conclusion 1 O. Paz, Convergences, 101. 2 As Gian Luigi Beccaria writes, ‘Variabili tensioni novecentesche,’ 75: ‘La parola che leggiamo nei testi letterari è sempre qualcosa di diverso rispetto a quella che troviamo in un testo non letterario destinato ad assolvere funzioni comunicative e pratiche’ (The word we read in literary texts is always something different with respect to the one we find in a non-literary text aimed at accomplishing communicative and practical functions). 3 As D. Alonso writes, Antología Crítica, 54–67, the stylistics of literature explores the co-presence in the text of the ‘affect,’ the ‘imagination,’ and the ‘conceptual.’ Spitzer wrote in this regard of an ‘inner click’ that occurs when the detail reflects the whole and the deeper significance of the work is manifest. 4 Historicism was like its purported foe, scientism. As Renato Poggioli points out, both the idealists and the positivists tended to avoid the topic of morality in literature. See R. Poggioli, ‘Morte del senso della tragedia,’ 6: ‘historicism and scientism do not consider evil as a reality, even a relative one, but only as a myth or metaphysical abstraction.’ 5 See A. Camus, The Rebel, 302–3: ‘The revolution based on principles kills God in the person of His representative on earth. The revolution of the twentieth century kills what remains of God in the principles themselves, and consecrates historical nihilism. Whatever paths nihilism may proceed to take, from the moment that it decides to be the creative force of its period, outside of every moral precept, it begins to build the temple of Caesar. To choose history, and it alone, is to choose nihilism, contrary to the teachings of revolt itself. [...] The revolution, obedient to nihilism, has in fact turned against its origins in revolt.’ 6 As Merton writes, ‘Terror and the Absurd,’ 232, the ‘weakness’ of Camus’s confrontation with the absurd is not ‘in the integrity of moral feelings but in the obstinate refusal to integrate that feeling into the solidity of a consistent rational structure.’ 7 Nevertheless the positive step of Camus is decisive. See A. Camus, The Rebel,

Notes to pages 278–82

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9–10: ‘Great suffering and great happiness may be found at the beginning of any process of reasoning.... Therefore, if it was legitimate to take absurdist sensibility into account, to make a diagnosis of a malady to be found in ourselves and in others, it is nevertheless impossible to see in this sensibility, and in the nihilism it presupposes, anything but a point of departure.’ B. Readings and B. Schaber, eds., Postmodernism across the Ages, 14. Schlegel’s idea of the historian as a ‘retrospective prophet’ (F. Schlegel, ‘Athenäumsfragmente,’ 80, in Prosaische Jugendschriften, ed. J. Minor, 2nd ed. [Vienna, 1906], vol. 2, 215) is cited by E. Cassirer and glossed as follows, An Essay on Man,197: ‘A new understanding of the past gives us at the same time a new prospect of the future, which in turn becomes an impulse to intellectual and social life.’ See also E. Raimondi, ‘L’Italianistica e l’Europa,’ n.p.: ‘Machado una volta ha detto che la filosofia della storia – diciamo meglio, la storia – può essere anche un “profetizzare il passato”; profetizzare il passato, nel senso che il passato non è fatto soltanto di ciò che si è realizzato: è fatto anche di ciò che non si realizzò, di possibilità che rimasero, per così dire, inevase; e quelli sono gli spazi che ancora ci restano, gli spazi sui quali ancora possiamo noi operare; sono ciò che ci resta come – se lo vogliamo – luogo della nostra responsabilità e quindi anche del nostro futuro.’ For Foscolo and Manzoni the conservation of a sublime ‘vatic’ poetry is associated with the experience of exile and statelessness, a condition these bards confront by investing wholeheartedly in the Italian language and literature as the guarantor of the civic identity of the Italians. See especially G. Leopardi, ‘Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica,’ Tutte le opere, vol. 1, 914–48. W. Godzich and J. Kittay, The Emergence of Prose, 48. M. Serres, Rome,160. See A. Asor Rosa, ‘La storia del “romanzo italiano?”’ 294–5. The critic suggests that women novelists in this period (including Morante and Banti) are more preoccupied with history than their male counterparts, who presume to have crossed that bridge and solved that problem. A. Petrucci, ‘La scrittura del testo,’ 286: ‘Il grado di partecipazione diretta dell’autore all’opera materiale di scrittura del proprio test non è stato, dunque, sempre identico nel tempo; esso, infatti, ha subito variazioni assai nette, ognuna delle quali ha fortemente segnato le vicende della composizione, della diffusione e della trasmissione delle singole opere.’ This is a line of thought pursued by R. Chartier, notably in Inscription and Erasure. A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 352–3. S. Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, 101.

334

Notes to pages 283–7

17 G. Agamben, Idea of Prose, 63. Agamben adds, 65, ‘nothing is bitterer than a long dwelling in potential.’ 18 C. Magris, Dietro le parole, 358: ‘Finché Morselli era vivo, egli era evidentemente così diverso rispetto alla situazione culturale dominante da venir ridotto, quale scrittore, all’inesistenza; la sua sorte è certo condivisa da molti altri calpestati e ignoti, cui neppure il tempo trova modo di render giustizia.’ 19 G. Debenedetti, Saggi, 1127: ‘la pista delle fiabe’; ‘Era già caratteristico, in quelle narrazioni, un modo di stare avvinte alla logica, direi visionaria, delle figure e delle vicende, di accertare i loro significati tutt’insieme emblematici e umani: un modo certamente vigilato da una sicura coordinazione mentale. Ma c’era anche un continuo impennarsi della linea espositiva che, senza smarrire il proprio disegno, sfrecciava verso associazioni favolose, in una gamma soprattutto di splendori fastosi, sfavillanti, creduti con cuore infantile, con ingenuo bisogno del meraviglioso, rimpianti con chiaroveggenza adulta.’ 20 See F. Rosengarten, ‘A Crucial Decade in the Career of Vasco Pratolini (1932–1942),’ 31–2: ‘The word “essentiality” refers to the qualities of purity and vibrant immediacy that Ungaretti had sought to achieve in his poetry; it signifies the direct emotive impact of words and images, that is, their unencumbered correspondence to the thoughts and feelings of the poet.’ 21 N. Lorenzini, La poesia: tecniche di ascolto, 67–8: ‘il processo di straniamento e insieme di rifunzionalizzazione della fonte.’ The critic adds: ‘si assiste insomma sul campo, in misura diretta ed efficace, al risemantizzarsi della parola, al suo configurarsi in assoluta autonomia rispetto alla suggestione fonica e semantica che ne costituisce l’ipotesto che viene contaminato e stravolto.’ 22 W. Whitman, ‘To Think of Time,’ The Portable Walt Whitman, 80. 23 I. Calvino, ‘L’italiano, una lingua tra le altre,’ Una pietra sopra, 148: ‘necrosi’; and 147: ‘Il nemico da battere è la tendenza degli italiani a usare espressioni astratte e generiche.’ Already in the Divine Comedy one has a host of writers penalized for misuse or misunderstanding of the power of the written word, from Celestino V (‘tu che sol per cancellare scrivi’ [Par. xviii.130: ‘you who write only in order to erase’]) to Pier delle Vigne to Brunetto Latini. Conversely it is worth recalling that Dante referred to the Evangelist Luke as ‘the scribe of the meekness of Christ.’ Dante Alighieri, On World-Government (De Monarchia), I, 16, 23: ‘scriba mansuetudinis Cristi’ (the evangelist of Christ’s gentleness [St Luke]). 24 C. Segre, I segni e la critica, 92: ‘Se l’opera d’arte è veramente tale, essa dà un apporto cognitivo che si ripercuote ampiamente nel modo di vedere la

Note to page 287

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realtà; essa è, alla lettera, “sconvolgente”. Attraverso i suoi lettori, essa dà alle strutture semiologiche d’una civiltà una spinta che può trasformarle in modo decisivo. È qui la funzione rivoluzionaria dell’arte, e si tratta di una rivoluzione permanente e vittoriosa.’

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Index

abduction, logical (apagoge), 11, 54–5, 59, 60, 64, 66, 72, 73, 77, 79, 280, 286 Accame Bobbio, Aurelia, 65 Adam, 64, 226–7 Adorno, Theodor, 3 addresses to the reader, 145, 257, 260–2, 267–9, 331n21 Agamben, Giorgio, 283 Alberti, Guglielmo, 62 Aleramo, Sibilla, 19–20, 23, 157, 284; Una donna, 19–20 Alfieri, Vittorio, 10, 44, 49, 76, 78 alienation, 5, 24, 30, 99, 148, 153, 247, 277, 279, 281, 286 Alighieri, Dante, 22, 28, 66, 78, 82, 99, 104, 127, 131, 133, 143, 145, 147, 165, 199, 207, 210, 225, 230, 231, 253, 275, 281, 285; Convivio, 145; De Monarchia, 255; Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia), 22, 28, 143–5, 231, 254, 255, 263, 270–2, 279, 285; Inferno, 202, 210, 230, 254; Purgatorio, 28, 46, 53, 133, 139, 210, 253, 255–75, 285; Paradiso, 273; Vita nuova, 263, 268–9 allegory, 142–5

Amiel, Henri Frederic, 284 Anti-Fascist manifesto, 82 Aquinas, St Thomas, 227–8, 231 Arabic poetry, 108 Aristotle, 51, 221 Auerbach, Erich, 54, 55, 136–7, 292; ‘Figura,’ 136–7 Augustine, St, 225, 227, 229 Austria, 61, 76 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 17 Bakhtin, M., 6–7, 25, 169, 213, 216, 235, 290n9, 292n43, 325n37 Baldacci, Luigi, 20 Banfi, Antonio, 219 Banti, Anna, 17, 22–3, 157, 162–80, 279, 282–3, 285; Artemisia, 162; Il bastardo, 20, 23, 162–70, 173, 177, 283; Il coraggio delle donne, 175; ‘Le donne muoiono,’ 162; Un grido lacerante, 20, 22–3, 162, 169–80, 285; Noi credevamo, 175; ‘Vocazioni indistinte,’ 175 Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio, 74, 301n44 Il Bargello, 253 Barilli, Renato, 198–9 Barth, Karl, 225, 284

352

Index

Barthes, Roland, 184, 287; The Pleasure of the Text, 184 Bateson, Gregory, 79, 299n22 Battistini, Andrea, 273 Baudelaire, Charles, 14, 29, 95, 127, 172, 282; Les Fleurs du Mal, 127 Beatrice (in Divine Comedy), 258, 268– 9, 270, 271, 273, 274 Benda, Julien, 287; La trahison des clercs, 287 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 220, 225 Bergson, Henri, 14, 27, 98, 111, 244, 282 Bernard of Clairvaux, St, 229 Bertolucci, Attilio, 13, 81–96, 283–4; La camera da letto, 87, 284; La capanna indiana, 83 Bible, 54, 55, 133, 136–9, 143, 187, 225, 228–30 Binet, Alfred, 26 Binni, Walter, 40, 46, 294–5n10 Bo, Carlo, 127 Boggione, Valter, 68, 72, 302n53 Bollati, Giulio, 10, 15, 290n18, 297– 8n10 Bonaventure, St, 228, 231 Boucher, Holly Wallace, 143–4 Bruno, Giordano, 23 Bultmann, Rudolf, 224–5, 230 Burke, Kenneth, 5, 291n38 Caesar, Michael, 302n55 Cain and Abel, 51, 151–2, 294n7 Calvino, Italo, 287, 292 Camoëns, Luis de, 14 Campana, Dino, 13, 24, 113, 194; Canti orfici, 163 Campoformio, Treaty of, 39 Camus, Albert, 160, 277; L’Homme Révolté, 277

Canova, Antonio, 80 Caproni, Giorgio, 284 Capuana, Luigi, 199, 208; ‘Fatale influsso,’ 208 Cardarelli, Vincenzo, 113, 115, 120 Carducci, Giosue, 12, 93, 95, 199, 207; ‘Alla stazione in una mattina d’autunno,’ 201–2; ‘La Canzone di Legnano,’ 93; ‘Sogno d’estate,’ 93 Casanova, Giacomo, 107 Cases, Cesare, 257 Catholic Church, 13, 15, 72, 79, 98, 148, 154, 156–7, 231, 282 Cato, 45, 50; as character in Purgatorio, 46 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 62 Charity, Alan, 136–7, 142, 145 ‘Chierico, Didimo’ (Ugo Foscolo), 54, 55, 212 chorus, tragic, 47–9, 51 Christianity, 59, 64, 73, 74–7, 79, 122–3, 135–9, 151, 160, 181–2, 218, 225–31, 235, 284 Ciccarelli, Andrea, 296n25 Citati, Pietro, 95 classical, the, 112–13, 115, 120, 184 Coletti, Vincenzo, 198, 223, 232 communication, analogical and digital, 185–6, 192 Contini, Gianfranco, 100–1, 171, 329n33, 330–1n12 Corazzini, Sergio, 13 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 91, 303– 4n6; Jupiter and Antiope, 91–3 Corti, Maria, 7, 292 Cousin, Victor, 59 Crémieux, Benjamin, 197 crepuscolari, 13, 114 Croce, Benedetto, 7, 22, 27, 28–9, 76, 81, 96, 220, 232, 284

Index 353 cultural materialism, 31–3 Curtius, Ernst, 292 da Foligno, Angela, 228 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 12, 13, 20, 82, 100, 135, 187 Darwin, Charles, 199, 200 D’Azeglio, Massimo, 11, 62 dead languages, 4, 77, 82 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 29, 149, 154– 5, 199, 285 decadenti, 13 De Chirico, Giorgio, 107 deep semantics, 136 Deledda, Grazia, 12, 17, 20, 22, 23, 29, 131–45, 157, 281, 285; Canne al vento, 22, 131, 137–45, 281–2; Cenere, 22, 131, 132–5; Cosima, 22; Elias Portolu, 22, 131, 132; La madre, 22, 131; Tradizioni popolari di Sardegna, 131; La via del male, 22, 131 Denis, Don, 108 deprovincialization of Italian literature, 25–6 De Robertis, Giuseppe, 82 De Sanctis, Francesco, 14, 71, 74, 77 Descartes, René, 18, 27, 108 de Staël, Madame, 164 dialogics, the dialogical, 4, 6, 7, 145, 181, 182, 193, 233, 286 Diderot, Denis, 5, 242 Diel, Paul, 156 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 102, 104, 147 Dombroski, Robert, 12, 98, 111, 198 Donadoni, Eugenio, 296n24 Doni, Carla, 45 Duns Scotus, John, 227 Efisio, Sant’, 139

Electra complex or problem, 234, 239, 247 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 101, ‘Burnt Norton,’ 101 Emerson, Caryl, 25 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 298n12 emics and etics, 31–2, 83, 293n51, 293n54 English Lake poets, 95 Enlightenment, 6, 11, 59, 78, 79, 224 Ethiopia, Italian invasion of, 264 evil, the problem of, 25, 27, 47, 48, 54, 62, 93–4, 105, 134, 147, 225–31, 243, 284, 328n29, 330n9, 332n4 fable, the fabulesque, 23–4, 147, 149, 154–7, 160, 179, 187, 230, 285 Falange, Spanish, 13 fantastoria (alternate history), 242 Fascism, 13, 14, 25, 81, 96, 98, 200, 205, 253–5, 269, 275, 282, 285 Fascist left, the, 28 Fauriel, Claude, 61 feminine voice, feminine writing, 15–19, 20, 27, 53, 57, 148, 160, 162, 169, 176, 279 feminism, 18, 135, 146, 177 Ferroni, Giulio, 121 fetish, fetishism, 28, 111, 157, 236, 237, 239, 245–6, 249–50, 252, 284 Fido, Franco, 295n15 figurality, the figural, 146 Flaubert, Gustave, 233 Florence, 12, 253–8, 285, 329–30n5 Fortichiari, Valentina, 218 Fortini, Franco, 62, 100, 112–13, 292, 297n9, 304n12 Foscolo, Ugo, 6, 10–11, 37–58, 59, 66, 78, 199, 212, 280, 290n18; Ajace, 10, 38, 40–58, 280; ‘A Venezia,’ 38–9;

354

Index

Dei Sepolcri, 38, 39–40, 44, 57; Le Grazie, 11; ‘Sull’origine e i limiti della giustizia,’ 51–2, 53, 55; Tieste, 10; Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 11, 45, 53, 58 Foster, Kenelm, 300n32 Fouché, Joseph, 40 Francis of Assisi, St, 223, 228, 231 Franco, Veronica, 18 French Revolution, 11, 64, 70 Freud, Sigmund, 26, 27, 28, 160, 232, 236, 247–8 Galilei, Galileo, 104 García Lorca, Federico, 17; Yerma, 24 Gargani, Aldo, 16–17, 162, 169, 171 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 11, 15 Gatto, Alfonso, 253, 285 Gentile, Giovanni, 284 Gentilieschi, Artemisia, 162 Ghibellines, 255, 258, 259 Gide, André, 113 Giolitti, Giovanni, 21 Giudici, Giovanni, 75 Giustizia e Libertà, 182 Gospel, the, 59, 60, 137, 212, 224–5, 227 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 18, 169 Gozzano, Guido, 13 Gramsci, Antonio, 21, 23, 25, 55, 136 Greco-Latin art, 103 Guglielmi, Guido, 99 Guelphs, 255, 258 Guillén, Claudio, 83, 255–6 Guittone d’Arezzo, 99 Harris, Marvin, 31, 293 Heaney, Seamus, 282 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 27, 220, 221, 232, 284, 292

Heraclitus, 5 hermeticism, 95, 111, 114 Hobbes, Thomas, 11 Homer, 41, 50, 105 Honig, Edwin, 136 Hugo, Victor, 87, 93, 95, 133; Les Miserables, 133 Huizinga, Johan, 102 hypotaxis, 104 iconicity, 23, 147–8, 157, 160, 319n2, 319n3 intertextuality, 13, 26, 28, 65, 81, 83–4, 86, 95, 147, 199, 255 Jacopone da Todi, 99, 111 Jansenists, 59, 62 Jaspers, Karl, 251 Jesus Christ, 64, 66, 72, 76, 77, 79–80, 136–45, 159, 187, 224–5, 227, 282, 284 Joan of Arc, 23 Job, 49, 226 John of the Cross, St, 232 John the Baptist, 137 Joyce, James, 26; Ulysses, 217 Judith and Holophernes, 148 Kafka, Franz, 26, 233 Kant, Immanuel, 204, 220, 221, 224 Keats, John, 191 Kierkegaard, Søren, 27, 220 La Bruyère, Jean de, 219 Lanzi, Luigi, 171 Larbaud, Valery, 197 Lateran Pacts, 13 Leibniz, Gottfried, 27, 220 Leone De Castris, Arcangelo, 60, 74–5 Leopardi, Giacomo, 6, 9–10, 11,

Index 355 14, 29, 30, 48, 59, 79, 99, 100–1, 104, 105, 109–10, 111, 112, 127, 194, 219, 224, 280; ‘A Silvia,’ 30; ‘L’infinito,’ 105; Operette morali, 110; Zibaldone, 9 Lévy-Brühl, Lucien, 171–2 Libya, 82 ‘life philosophy,’ 98 literature of exception, 22, 23 litotes, 113, 125 Longhi, Roberto, 22, 93, 162, 170 Lorenzini, Niva, 187, 286 Lotto, Lorenzo, 176 Lucente, Gregory, 147 Lucini, Gian Pietro, 13 Lucretius, 27, 87, 219, 234, 235, 236–7, 279 Luperini, Romano, 276 Luti, Giorgio, 198 Luzi, Mario, 101, 292 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 11, 52, 78 magical realism, magic realism, 23, 146, 319n9 Magris, Claudio, 208–9, 285 Marx, Karl, 292 Mary (the Madonna), 116, 187 Mallarmé, Stephane, 100 Malthus, Thomas, 15 Manzoni, Alessandro, 6, 11, 58, 59–80, 95, 147, 154, 157, 177, 199, 207, 228, 229, 278, 280; and the Risorgimento, 297–8n10; Adelchi, 63, 76; Il Cinque maggio, 11, 58, 60–80, 90, 280; Il Conte di Carmagnola, 76; ‘In morte di Carlo Imbonati,’ 62, 65–6; Inni sacri, 60, 61, 76; ‘Lettera sul Romanticismo,’ 62, 298–9n15, Lettre à Monsieur Chauvet, 60–1, 77; ‘Materiali estetici,’ 79; Osservazioni

sulla morale cattolica, 62; ‘La Pentecoste,’ 72, 78; I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), 11, 76, 132, 175–6, 207 Marcel, Gabriel, 27, 220 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 13 Marx, Karl, 5, 21, 291n38 Mary Magdalen, 138, 139 Massillon, Jean Baptiste, 70 ‘matria’ (Zanzotto), 12, 21, 50, 56, 287, 323n20. See also patria. Mazzini, Giuseppe, 11, 15 mediocritas, the middle way, 112–13 Melville, Herman, 283; ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’ 283 Memmo, Francesco Paolo, 257 memory, 18, 32, 41, 56, 72, 79, 81, 83, 84, 87, 91, 93, 101, 102, 103 Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 7, 119, 183 Merton, Thomas, 277 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 14, 111 Mistral, Frédéric, 82 modernismo (theological), 230 modernism, 26, 145, 200, 293n49, 330n9 modernist history, 278 modernity, 30, 38, 48, 98; religious crisis of, 102 Momigliano, Attilio, 78, 132, 297n1 Montaigne, Michel de, 27, 219, 235, 279 Montale, Eugenio, 13, 14, 24, 100, 194, 256–7, 285, 292 Monti, Vincenzo, 11, 49, 62, 65, 76; Mascheroniana, 64–5 Morante, Elsa, 17, 23–4, 146–61, 279, 285; Aracoeli, 146; L’isola di Arturo, 146; Menzogna e sortilegio, 146, 148; ‘Lo scialle andaluso,’ 23, 146–61, 285; La storia: un romanzo, 146, 147 Moravia, Alberto, 146

356

Index

Moreau, (General) Jean, 40 Morselli, Guido, 26–8, 218–52, 279, 285; Il comunista, 233; Contropassato prossimo, 233; Diario, 218, 224, 228, 232; Dissipatio H.G., 233; ‘Divagazioni quasi critiche sopra un critico recente di Ungaretti,’ 233; Divertimento 1889, 233; Un dramma borghese, 27, 233–52, 284–5; Fede e critica, 218, 220, 223–33, 284; ‘La felicità non è un lusso,’ 285, 302n56; L’incontro col comunista, 233; Proust o del sentimento, 218, 219–20, 243; Realismo e fantasia, 27, 218, 220–4; Uomini e amori, 233 Morson, Gary Saul, 25 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 23, 285 Muoni, Leandro, 132 Musil, Robert, 233 Mussolini, Benito, 82, 98, 282 Napoleon Bonaparte, 10, 40, 50, 58, 62, 64–73, 76–80, 90, 278; death of, 60–1, 68, 79, 280 Nava, Giuseppe, 303n5 Nencioni, Giovanni, 30 neo-avant-garde, Italian, 24 neoclassicism, 32, 37, 65, 120 Nietzsche, Frederich, 27, 251, 284 Nigro, Salvatore, 60, 70, 300n33 nihilism, 32, 277 Nobel Prize for Literature, 131 Novalis, 27 Novecentismo, 95, 111 novel, the, 250–1 Noventa, Giacomo, 284 Olson, Charles, 5–6, 293n49 Ong, Walter, 4, 15–16 Onofri, Arturo, 13

Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 212 Ovid, 41 Palazzeschi, Aldo, 13 Paragone, 162, 174 Pareto, Vilfredo, 14 Parini, Giuseppe, 66 Pascal, Blaise, 14, 27, 52, 54–5, 56, 102, 105; Pensées, 54, 105 Pascoli, Giovanni, 12–13, 29, 81–96, 118–19, 128, 281, 286, 287; ‘Breus,’ 93; ‘La grande Proletaria si è mossa,’ 82; Myricae, 83; ‘Napoleone,’ 300n26, 302–3n1 Pascoli, Ruggiero, 94 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 94–5, 102, 170, 292 patria, 12, 21, 41, 45, 50, 56, 65, 134, 323n20. See also matria. Paul, St, 74, 142, 143, 227, 229 Paz, Octavio, 21, 276 Peirce, C.S., 64, 148 Pellico, Silvio, 37, 45 Pento, Bortolo, 95 Perrault, Charles, 110 Perse, Saint-John, 109–10 Pertini, Sandro, 146 Petrarch, Francesco, 14, 30, 78, 87, 95, 99, 104, 111, 112, 114, 116, 121–3, 128, 190, 228; Canzoniere, 121 Petrucci, Armando, 279 Picasso, Pablo, 107 Picone, Michelangelo, 74 Pindar, 41 Pirandello, Luigi, 29, 251, 284 Poe, Edgar Allan, 27 poeta vate, 8–9, 14, 97, 333n10 poetry, apotropaic power of, 110 Poggioli, Renato, 13–14, 197, 215 Il Politecnico, 253

Index 357 Poliziano (Politian), 112 post-Risorgimento crisis, 21 Pratolini, Vasco, 28, 253–75, 279, 285; Il quartiere, 28, 253, 255–75, 279 Prina, Giuseppe, 62 prosaics, 25, 144, 279, 292n43 Proust, Marcel, 17, 18, 26, 29, 83, 84, 87, 95, 219–20, 224, 233, 235, 243– 4, 285; À la recherche du temps perdu, 219, 243–4 Provençal poetry, 108 psychoanalysis, 148, 184, 203, 246, 247, 251–2, 281 Purgatory, 141 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 13 Raboni, Giovanni, 94, 292 Race Laws (Italian), 13, 98 Racine, 14, 109–10 ragione di stato (raison d’état), 10, 52, 54, 55 Raimondi, Giuseppe, 116 rebellion, 38, 50, 52, 276–7 Rebora, Clemente, 13, 113, 122, 282 Regno d’Italia (Kingdom of Italy), 47, 57 Rembrandt van Rijn, 23 Renaissance, the, 110, 175, 223, 294n2 Renan, Ernest, 26, 209 ‘Repubblica delle lettere,’ 12, 51 revolt, literary, 3–5, 11, 18–19, 21, 23, 30, 32, 37, 45, 46, 50, 53, 56, 58, 77, 81, 95, 97–9, 100, 114–15, 128, 132, 137, 143, 145, 160, 165, 167, 175, 177, 178, 181, 189, 226, 233, 243, 276–8, 281, 282, 284, 285, 286–7 Reynolds, Barbara, 145, 318n27 Ricciardi, Mario, 256

Rimbaud, Arthur, 23, 24, 95, 147, 182, 194, 285; Une saison en enfer, 182 Risorgimento, 12, 61, 78, 175, 280, 290–1n20 Rivière, Jacques, 102 Roman Secession, 135 Romantics, Romanticism, 6, 59, 62–3, 69, 75, 79, 105, 106, 107, 127, 224, 280, 281 Rome, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 82, 97, 132– 5, 139, 148, 164–5, 279, 284 La Ronda, 102 Rosai, Ottone, 274 Rosmini, Antonio, 63 Rosselli, Amelia, 17, 24–5, 181–94, 279, 286; Impromptu, 188; Le poesie, 182–93; Primi scritti 1952–1963, 182; ‘Il soggiorno in inferno,’ 185–7; Variazioni belliche, 184 Rosselli, Carlo and Nello, 24, 182 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 219 Russo, Luigi, 68 Saba, Umberto, 29 Saccone, Eduardo, 206–7 Saint-Cloud, Edict of, 39 Sand, George, 136, 163 Sansone, Mario, 72 Sapegno, Natalino, 74 Sardinia, 131–5, 138, 145, 279 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 8, 27, 191 Sbarbaro, Camillo, 113 Scapigliatura, 12 Schlegel, Frederich von, 278 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 26, 199, 215, 219 Schrödinger, Erwin, 205 scribe, the scribal, 19, 27, 32, 63, 80, 81, 178, 194, 198, 216, 233, 283, 284, 286

358

Index

Segre, Cesare, 7, 243, 287, 290n9 sensibility, 178–9 Serao, Matilde, 163 Sereni, Vittorio, 283 serial novel, 144 Serres, Michel, 279 simploche (synthesis), 221–3, 236, 249–50 Smith, Adam, 15 Solmi, Sergio, 284 sonnet, the, 38–9 Sophocles, 41, 42, 280; Ajax, 46–50, 57 Southern Question, the, 21 Spain, 171, 254 Spaziani, Maria Luisa, 19, 24; ‘Il mestiere di profeta,’ 20 Spinoza, Benedictus, 287 Spitzer, Leo, 7, 8, 262, 292 Stampa, Gaspara, 18 Steiner, George, 32, 293–4n55 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 147, 235, 279 Sterne, Laurence, 26, 199, 203, 279; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 26, 212–14 Strapaese movement, 82, 253 stylistic criticism, 7, 29–31, 144, 277, 290n12 Sue, Eugène, 136 Svevo, Italo, 12, 26, 197–217, 233, 279, 281; Le confessioni del vegliardo, 208; Corto viaggio sentimentale, 26, 198, 199–217, 281; ‘Del sentimento in arte,’ 215–16; La coscienza di Zeno, 26, 28, 197–9, 214–17, 252, 281; ‘Sulla teoria della pace,’ 281 symbolic language, theory of symbol, 7, 29–30, 60, 136–7, 143, 145, 147– 8, 150, 154, 169, 187, 194 symbolism, 83, 90, 127, 182, 282

Tasso, Torquato, 14, 24, 29, 99, 110, 111, 194; Gerusalemme liberata, 108; Il re Torrismondo, 51 Teresa d’Avila, Santa, 226, 248 Terracini, Benvenuto, 7, 8, 75, 290n12 Testori, Giovanni, 174 theodicy, 225, 227 Todorov, Tzvetan, 154 tragedy, tragic poetry, 45, 53, 57, 75, 178, 296n28 Trieste, 26, 199, 210–11, 217, 232, 281 typology, 136–7, 140, 142–5 unconscious, the, 82, 115, 182, 184, 198, 212, 214, 219, 222–3 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 13, 14, 97–111, 113, 115, 282, 284, 285, 286, 300n30; L’Allegria, 98, 99, 100; ‘Ragioni d’una poesia,’ 14, 97, 99, 102–11, 282; Sentimento del Tempo, 101; Vita d’un uomo, 14, 97; ut pictura poesis, 115, 147 Valeri, Diego, 14–15, 95, 112–28, 282, 284; Amico dei pittori, 119; Ariele, 113; Calle del vento, 127–8; Crisalide, 113; Le gaie tristezze, 113; Jeux de mots, 124; La metamorfosi dell’angelo, 124; Monodia d’Amore, 113; Poesie, 113, 116–26, 282; Poesie inedite o ‘come’, 126; Poesie vecchie e nuove, 115; Scherzo e finale, 123; Tempo e poesia, 121; Tempo che muore, 123; Terzo tempo, 123; Umana, 113 Valéry, Paul, 27 Varese, Claudio, 66, 71 Vaugelas, Claude Favre de, 108 Venetian Republic, 38–9 Venice, 15, 38–9, 112, 115–17, 209–11, 216, 282

Index 359 Verga, Giovanni, 15, 132 verism, 281 Versailles, Treaty of, 25 Veruda, Umberto, 204, 215 Vico, Giambattista, 11, 38, 52, 111, 277–8, 279 Villani, Paola, 218 Virgil, 41, 105; Aeneid, 255; as character in the Divine Comedy, 210, 265, 267, 269 Vittorini, Elio, 253, 285 Volponi, Paolo, 20–1; La strada per Roma, 20–1 Voltaire, 59 Wassermann, August von, 26 Weil, Simone, 23, 285

Weininger, Otto, 26 Whitehead, Alfred North, 37, 51, 179, 220, 280 Whitman, Walt, 286 Williams, Raymond, 30, 31, 178, 293 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 112 The Wind among the Reeds (Yeats), 281 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 16 wonder, recursive, 292–3n48 Woolf, Virginia, 17 World War, First, 97, 113 World War, Second, 112, 125, 226 Zajotti, Paride, 63 Zanzotto, Andrea, 56, 290–1n20, 292n46