PROPERTIES OF WRITING: IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSES IN MODERN ITALIAN FICTION

Transcription

1 Sante Matteo 283 ROBERT S. DOMBROSKI PROPERTIES OF WRITING: IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSES IN MODERN ITALIAN FICTION Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. Literature does make a difference in the real world, Robert Dombroski insists: a literary work, itself shaped by the socio-historical conditions in which it is produced, in turn alters those conditions and changes the course of future history. In our post-everything age when even the erstwhile certitudes of Marxism have been either deconstructed or simply laid aside for more fashionable or more expedient theoretical constructs in politics even more extensively than in literary studies Dombroski sticks to his Marxist guns, which have served him well in the past, garnering him an international reputation as a perceptive and rigorous scholar of modern Italian fiction. A danger of "strong" interpretative systems, such as Freudian or Jungian analysis or Marxist interpretation, is their tendency to become formulaic and to process all texts by imposing the same heuristic grid on them and thereby eliciting (or producing) the same meaning: every story is about oedipal tensions or class struggles. Dombroski avoids this danger: his subtle, complex, dense interpretations not only do justice to the specificity of each work, but actually enhance and illuminate those characteristics which make each unique both as literary artifact and as historical document. He does this by concentrating not on the plot or the setting or the characters' social standing, but on the novels' formal aspects, their metalinguistic and metanarrative dimensions: e.g., Manzoni's use of an ironic voice which is filtered through the fiction of an anonymous found manuscript and his juxtaposition of epic and comedic modes; Verga's scientism combined with a choral lyricism to produce an ethnographic allegory; Svevo's use of the diary as a

2 Sante Matteo 284 confessional format; Gadda's mix of linguistic registers and literary genres, subverting the detective genre's aspiration to solution and order with a macaronic impulse to confusion and disorder. What makes Dombroski's book original and enlightening is precisely its insistence that "literary ideology is mainly an effect of form" (156). It is not (or not only) the content of a novel which reflects and affects historical circumstances and developments, but its formal aspects: "Form is made possible by history, that is, by the material conditions of its possibility" (vii). The aesthetic choices and formal innovations which characterize literary works create and convey ideology, even if that ideology is not always immediately obvious: "I believe not in any direct access to literary ideology but rather in numerous mediations" (vii). In this study Dombroski methodically works through "numerous mediations" to provide forceful interpretations of major novels by nine Italian writers: Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, Giovanni Verga's I Malavoglia, Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il piacere (but with many references to other novels, including Il trionfo della morte, L'innocente, Le vergini delle rocce), Luigi Pirandello's Uno, nessuno e centomilla, Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno, Carlo Emilio Gadda's La cognizione del dolore and Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, Antonio Pizzuto's Signorina Rosina, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il gattopardo (along with Luchino Visconti's film version), and Italo Calvino's Le città invisibili. The narratives he analyzes "all engage in the construction of reality and claim (implicitly) to instruct the reader as to what reality is and how to think about it" (viii). The nineteenth-century and turn-of-thecentury narrators he treats Manzoni, Verga, D'Annunzio, Pirandello, and Svevo all rely on the "transformational power of the word [...] [T]hey all adopt the novel form, either as a means of affirming life in the face of a troubled reality or as a refuge for the fragmented self (x). The more recent writers Gadda, Pizzuto, Lampedusa, and Calvino "[b]y contrast abandon [...] the quest for certainty in representation and sustain a tolerance for incompleteness and fragmentation" (x). I promessi sposi is both a transitional and foundational text for the bourgeois takeover of Italian culture: "Manzoni's novel plays a significant role in forming the consciousness of selective human action and initiative crucial to the development of all bourgeois cultural revolutions, a transformational process that prepares the human psyche for a new way of perceiving reality in the new world of market

3 Sante Matteo 285 capitalism" (9); "It is a truly hegemonic work, in that it does not impose its ideology on the reader but rather promotes ideological adherence by offering what Jameson calls 'substantial incentives' in the form of utopian impulses" (21). By the end of the nineteenth century, in I Malavoglia, "Verga places this primitive community [Aci Trezza] on the fringes of the capitalist social order; though it still exists, the storm that will render it inoperative is on the horizon, distant yet inevitable. The metaphorical prefiguration of the end of tradition and the beginning of capitalist secularization is the shipwreck, a true moment of epic significance in which the terms of value and activity become synthesized" (35). D'Annunzio's novels do not manifest the same materialist view: "If there is a single feature that sets Gabriele D'Annunzio's prose fiction completely apart from Verga, verismo, and all other varieties of realism, it is the belief that reality in all its manifestations is ultimately inaccessible and, therefore, incommunicable [...]. In D'Annunzio's canon, the literary artist is neither creator nor scribe. Rather, he operates as a kind of frequency that transmits Beauty and the hidden mysteries of Race and Tradition" (44); "D'Annunzio's concept of Tradition and the mythical thinking on which it is founded allow the reader to experience life in opposition to its rationalization under capitalism" (54). Pirandello's notion that "the Self is an object to be created [...], an aesthetic contruct [...] is an ideal consistent with the aestheticization of collective political life that emerging fascism advanced as a means of purifying, thus exonerating, the violence and the exploitation it fostered. In this sense, Pirandellian epistemology can be viewed as an ideological act far more relevant to the political reality of the times than D'Annunzio's utopian appeal to Race and Tradition" (71). Conclusions: "first, that its rejection of the rational consciousness of the traditional bourgeois intellectual is a variant of the petit bourgeois subversiveness common in Pirandello's times; second, that its critique of the liberalist subject is shared not only by 'revolutionary' fascism but also by fascism after 1925; third, that the restructuring of consciousness according to an irrational imperative, whereby conflict is resolved by means of intuition and myth, is a solution to the crisis of personal reality consistent with that advanced by emergent fascism in relation to the crisis of society; and fourth, that the Self as an aesthetic construct constitutes a logical basis for fascism's aetheticization of politics" (91). At the other end of the peninsula from Verga and Pirandello, closer

4 Sante Matteo 286 to the capitalist centers of Europe, Italo Svevo embraces the bourgeoisie's liberal, progressive agenda while at the same time revealing its faults: "In sharp contrast to Pirandellian humor, Svevian irony emphasizes that reality, rather than being a horrific abyss, is an endless field of possibilities, an occasion, in a truly modernist sense, for intellectual free play" (93). "Unlike Pirandello, Svevo does not base his literary ideology on the destruction of reason, and [...] he has no dream of escaping the capitalist social order [...]. The contradictions that the capitalist economic order generate are left unresolved, as part of the human condition itself, and, paradoxically, are signs of both its health and its decay" (100). Gadda's writing is more subversive of both fascist and capitalist ideology. Despite his own avowed sympathy for fascism, his novel La cognizione del dolore is radically opposed to fascist dogma: "The surfacing of deep meaning, produced by Gadda's psychoanalytical writing of the text, has an important historical function. It can be seen as a response to fascist Italy's rejection of Freudian ideas: both intellectually, at the hands of Crocian and Gentilean neoidealism, and culturally, according to the popular myth of latin purity and decorum. In this sense, there is no other literary text of the 1930s that compares with La cognizione for its outright subversiveness. Gadda's negation of maternity, family, and community, the basis of institutionalized society, strikes to the heart of fascism's grand objective to reinstitute order and obedience as fundamental social values" (119). The later novel Quer pasticciaccio is equally subversive of post-fascist bourgeois values: "[T]he murder of Liliana is the same as the destruction of the metaphysical foundation from which derive the ideals of culture and civilization that fascism proclaimed to defend. The metaphysical heritage that her figure evokes does not disappear, however, but remains as a violated norm, as a kind of theoretical utopia [...]" (135). "In terms of literary style, Gadda's Freudian struggle against the law and against the metaphysical dimension of human existence turns into a battle against the aesthetic ideals of bourgeois realism and its veristic and neorealistic variants" (135-6). As Italy embraced American capitalism after World War II, Pizzuto's Signorina Rosina reflects the imminent disappearance of history, tradition, and even the narrative subject "for the sake of consumption" (149): "Pizzuto's art is an attempt to liberate the reader from narrative structures that depend on [modernist] dichotomies and to

5 Sante Matteo 287 thereby create a new postmetaphysical and posthistorical perspective, one whose formal features express the rationale of a new social system that marked Italy's entry, in the wake of the economic boom of the fifties, into the world of late capitalism" (141). Lampedusa and Visconti, though both of aristocratic backgrounds, nevertheless perceive and give voice to the new hegemony of capitalist culture: "Lampedusa and Visconti join hands in evoking a world that has been thoroughly eclipsed by the exchange value of capitalism. It is no small irony that what their detractors labeled either aristocratic substance or residue were nothing other than memories of an era translated into style as the only means left capable of repossessing cultural properties on the verge of oblivion" (170). The last chapter, on Calvino's Le città invisibili, is possibly the most provocative and significant as it attempts to repoliticize Calvino's later writings, those most closely associated with a postmodernist aesthetic, redeeming them from the charge of political indifference and recharging them with ideological and political relevance. First he acknowledges the politically castrating tendency of the postmodernist stance: "[O]ne problem with [postmodern] eclecticism of textual practice is that [...] it loses all its political efficacy in the very moment it promotes difference or otherness to the level of an aesthetic [...]" (172); "It is not hard to understand why what are generally viewed as the properties of the postmodern (its fetishism of style and surface, its depthlessness or two-dimensionality, its hedonistic investment in technique, its valorization of the multivalent and the hybrid, its reification of the signifier, etc.) can be, as Eagleton remarks, either defended as subversive of metaphysical truth claims and epistemological hierarchy or debunked as complicit with consumerism's philistine rationale [...]. We can now see why a poetics of postmodernism may be of negligible critical usefulness" (175). Subsequently he rescues Calvino from the postmodernist prison house, not by claiming that he avoids the properties of the postmodern, but that he exploits them in order to critique them and go beyond them: "If we approach Le città invisibili as a metafictional game of signification played out in the text, we must inevitably equate the game's language with the novel's message and agree with Hutcheon, who sees the novel as a discourse on textuality. But what if we were to regard textuality itself as a language Calvino makes use of, a local cultural idiom that he must adopt lest his message fall on deaf ears?

6 Sante Matteo 288 Then the game of signification becomes a function, rather than a telos, which at the same time conveys the postmodern condition and defines the limits of that condition, thus disputing its truth claims" (177); "The writer's responsibility is thus connected to a rhetoric, grounded in a semiotics that communicates the meanings a culture holds dear at the same time that it chooses to experience and inhabit the space in which new and provocative meanings will find expression. This is perhaps a way of both asking and answering Jameson's final question of whether there is a way of resisting the logic of consumer capitalism [...]. The existence of a third dimension hinges on the operations of the reader; it requires a merger of the fable with history [...]" (180). Finally, in lieu of a conclusion for the entire book, in the final pages of the Calvino essay Dombroski expands his discussion, associating postmodern poetics with capitalist consumerism, but also providing his model of reading as an escape route which can release us from the labyrinth of textual self-referentiality, by working through the "numerous mediations" which hide and contain ideology, into the "real" world of history: "Consumer culture has turned intellectuals into complacent Kublai Khans, more interested in the 'line of the arch' than the labor process that made it possible. The purpose of this discussion is to refocus interest on the rhetorical transformations of form into idea, signified into signifier, that mark the period called postmodern. Its intention is also to offer a perspective that mediates between the discredited universalizing of modernism and the soulless dematerializing of postmodern theorizing, thus suggesting a new correspondence between language and action" (182). "Calvino forces the reader to rehistoricize, to connect back to the world, even when he and the reader, like Marco, have no faith in the results. Readers of Le città invisibili are compelled to privilege the world of things over the world of words although they can find no logical reason to do so" (194). If nothing else, this valorous attempt to reconnect Calvino as postmodern wordsmith to his early days of partisan engagement in politics and history is laudable and refreshing. The book closes with end notes and an index of names, but no list of works cited. All bibliographical information is inconveniently contained in the end notes, so that the reader is forced to interrupt his/her reading to flip to the back of the book, anticipating explanations, but in most cases only to find a page number preceded by author and title, and occasionally even an antiquated ibid.: information that could

7 Sante Matteo 289 more conveniently have been provided parenthetically in the text. Unfortunately, the book seems to have benefited from very little editing, if it was edited at all (a deplorable trend these days, even among the major university presses, despite the higher prices they charge for their books). There are few pages which aren't marred by typos, oversights, inconsistencies, or malapropisms. Here are just a few examples: "eperience" (2); "better that ever" (22); "slight of hand (33); "when if viewed" (39); "spadai" (81, 132, 193); "non-being," "nonbeing," "non being" (82); "Pirandello's characters are literally 'thrown into the world'" (87, emphasis added); "ogni mora" [delay] translated as "every flower" (111); "each [sentence] [...] strikes the reader in all of its threatening materiality" (143) [the materiality of a sentence is already hard to fathom, how it can be threatening is even more mysterious]; "lo videro" = "they saw her" (147); "Visconti repies [sic] [...] quei [sic] psicologici" (162); "Whereas architecture is rich in referents, postmodern literature is rich in signs" (182) [referents as in the referents of words or linguistic signs? It is difficult to imagine what the referents of architecture might be]; "Pirandello talks about the importance of Uno, nessuno e centomila in an interview published in Epoca (July 5, 1922)" (190, note 3) [the novel was published in 1926); "he who would know to [sic] what lofty parameters of molested dignity to lead it back to [sic]" (197, note 3) [one "to" too many]; "PLMA" (197, 3); "of he novel" (197, 4). Since several of these chapters were previously published as articles, an editor should have ensured consistency (e.g., words such as "self," "other," and "tradition" are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not; foreign terms, such as verismo, are not always italicized) and could have eliminated contradictions: e.g., in a note we read: "I do not use the term allegorical in opposition to symbolic. All literary description symbolizes, in that it takes the place of something imagined to be real. At the same time, it is allegory because it is a practice referring to something else; it speaks of the other" (188, n. 14); while previously, in the text of the same essay, he claimed: "Verga's work thus contains no deep, symbolic level of meaning [...]. Its meaning is of a more comparative and abstract nature, allegorical rather than symbolical or representational" (24). Despite its stylistic and production flaws (which ironically and perhaps appropriately mar the book as an artifact, thus subverting its capitalist value as a consumer good), Dombroski's probing and provocative readings constitute fundamental contributions to our

8 Sante Matteo 290 understanding and assessment of the ideological implications of Italian narrative from Manzoni to our day. Miami University, Oxford, Ohio SANTE MATTEO