LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN ITALY

MARISTELLA DE PANIZZA LORCH

A PERSONAL PREMISE

     An analysis of the complex relation of Italian literature to society allows me the unexpected pleasure of reopening an intense dialogue. This I shared during my forty American years with many contemporary Italian writers and critics, as well as with men and women from all walks of life. All of whose personal friendship I shall treasure to the end of my days. That dialogue was interrupted when I left the directorship of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America in 1996. I trust that the Italian Academy at Columbia University, built together for the intensification of that particular dialogue, will fulfill its scope in a not too distant future. For me, personally, the dialogue re-opens today.

     Eduardo de Filippo, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Ernesto Grassi, Maria Corti, Alberto Arbasino, Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Umberto Eco, Annalisa Cima, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Giovanni Vattimo, Giuliana Morandini, Gianni Riotta are just a few of my longtime Italian writer friends. Among the critics: Giuliano Manacorda in particular; with him, Petrocchi, Bosco, Sansone, Ossola, Branca, D'Amico, Asor Rosa, Padoan, Baratto, Segre, Quondam, Ferroni, Lombardo, Perosa, Massimo Salvadori. Each of these names evokes for me the story of a happy crossing which overcame the separation of Gibraltar and the Atlantic which lay between us.

     Many other Italians come to my mind today, too many to mention by name. They were the women and men from different walks of life -- artists, professionals, leaders and officials in the political world, diplomats, businessmen, publishers, journalists, shopkeepers and workers of all kinds -- whom I met officially or casually in my many tours of Italy during the past fifty years, alone or with my family. Among them I cannot refrain from mentioning a handful of men and women: Annalisa Cima, Maria Fede Caproni, Dina Vattani, Carla Martella, Marika Bollea; Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti; Giulio Andreotti, Francesco Cossiga, Francesco Corrias, Antonio Amato, Antonio Ruberti, Luigi de Nardis and Michele Dipace.

     Thanks also to Ambassador Paolo Janni, the most active among the first Guarantors of the Academy, and to the Department of Politics of the Catholic University of America. These dear Italian friends today are all present among us. They are a bridge which strengthens and corroborates nella realtá effettuale de la cosa, as Machiavelli would say, the meaning and value of an international agreement Italy signed in 1991 with an important American university. It is not a marriage vow that unites a couple but the need and patiently sustained desire to complement each other through hardships and differences. Our meeting today evidences that "pensare insieme", the motto of the Italian Academy at Columbia, can be successfully realized everywhere in America, beyond a specific Agreement and a particular beautiful building.

     Within the Academy itself, I wish to thank the staff for their technical assistance and hospitality and Jenny McPhee, Fellow in Residence and translator of Italian literature, for having enriched my understanding of the ongoing debate on the noir novel. The `contemporary' aspect of literature provided an occasion to meet with young Americans and Italians on the Columbia campus whose familiarity with the contemporary Italian novel has been much more intense than mine. I am thankful also to Oonagh Stransky, writer and translator of prose and poetry. Oonagh translated the excerpts from Arbasino's Fratelli d'Italia and the other Italian quotations that appear in the final section of the essay. My thanks to Giuliana Ferrone, a voracious and super-enthusiastic reader of everything Italian, who inspired me to look beyond the close circle of personal acquaintances.

     The central part of this essay deals with Dante and Ariosto, whose Poems offer two paradigmatic examples of an ideal relationship of Literature to Society. Had he lived, Italo Calvino would have co-taught a course with me on Ariosto in the "Renaissance Program" at Barnard/Columbia. For the `contemporary' section, I offer up a collection of notes, gathered from the perusal of my own library, a personal homage to the Italian writers and critics who enriched it.

THE `DIVINITY' OF A MEDIEVAL COMEDY

     Within the deep transformation that European society and its literature has undergone during the past fifty years, the Italians stand out for the combative spirit with which they greeted, during the years 1943-46, a radical cut with their Fascist past. Evidenced in both theory and practice, Italian neo-realistic film and literature of that period, by boldly identifying the artist's mission at the service of his people, constitute a unique moment of spontaneous encounter of the writer with his `people,' not to be equaled in the rest of the century. The writer and the artist in general, according to the neo-realistic aesthetic code, should not only reflect with realistic immediacy moods and mainly needs of his society, but should support and lead society in the realization of its needs.

     The neo-realistic aesthetic canon is not traditionally Italian. There is, however, an example of `engagement' or impegno at the very origin of Italian literature which deserves our attention. The example is so extraordinary that it precludes imitation.

     When Dante wants to express lightness, . . . no one can do it better than he does, . . . but his real genius lies in the opposite direction . . . in transmitting the sense that the world is organized into a system, an order, a hierarchy where everything has its place. . . . Dante gives solidity even to the most abstract intellectual speculation. (Italo Calvino, Memos for the Next Millennium [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988])

     Columbia takes pride in one college course named "The Great Books". Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace, Livy and Tacitus, Augustine, Dante, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Galileo -- authors within the Latin-Italian tradition -- have provided me with my daily bread during my half century of life as an American. They convinced me that every book that survives through the centuries, that is, very `good' book (a term I prefer to `great') or those we read more than once lives a life of its own. The `contemporary character' of such a book is defined by its power to speak to us today, no matter when and where its author lived. In the case of a so-called `Great' or `good book,' author and book live together as an indissoluble unity. This implies that the author survives somehow within that `immortal' book as a human being living in time and space, in a specific historical moment and place. The contemporary nature of a `great book' is to be found in the universality of the theme dealt with, not in the abstract but in the hinc and nunc of the society within which the author lived. From these obvious and rather banal premises, we may conclude that, generally speaking, literature and society are indissolubily connected, if not always, then at least in special moments of man's History.

     Yet, these miraculous moments of `Grace' are explained only partially by `particular events' in the life of a given society, such as a great war, a revolution, a famine, a political upheaval. I personally side with those who, in the much debated issue, believe that the miracle takes place by force of exceptional Human Beings who reflect the life of their society not directly, like an historian, but through a `poetic' Myth or Fable of their creation.

     Italian Literature opens with such a miracle. The Divine Comedy so clearly proves the point as to make me hesitate to bring it to your attention. Italian received its baptism as a literary language with a story whose author takes himself, together with his `society,' on a pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise; it starts with a poem in 100 cantos of 120 lines each, in the words of its author "a cui han posto mano e cielo e terra," to which heaven and earth contributed. The Comedia was in fact so perfect in this unusual combination of the human and the divine that Boccaccio, an Italian poet and writer who lived a generation after Dante, called it "divine", read it in public and wrote one of the first commentaries on it. Its spirituality is based on the concrete of human experience and a `system' based on it. Its `weight', in Calvino's terms, does not mess on the part of the poet a magic use of `lightness'. Dante seems, in fact, to be one of those rare poets who can render the exact weight of lightness, as in "come di neve in alpe senza vento" (Inf.XV), and in "come per acqua cupa cosa grave" (Pd. III, 123), snow falling on a mountain without wind, a heavy object falling in dark water: weight and lightness, body and soul, human and divine.

     What is divine about the Comedia is something Boccaccio, who was an instinctively sharp critic of poetry, perhaps intuited and therefore implied. Its `divinity' -- I dare argue -- makes it today the Italian book most popular in America, the Italian book which enjoys every year a steadily increasing number of translations. The Comedia is undoubtedly the most contemporary of all Italian books because of the harmonious coexistence within it of the absolute and the relative, the universal, and the particular, what man can perceive and enjoy under any sky and in any time, and the very personal connection with Dante's own `world' or society and not necessarily ours.

     "Dante's World" was the title of a very popular course at Barnard and Columbia which I introduced in the early 70's--immediately after the Columbia riots -- with the participation of the medieval historian, Susan Wemple, the theologian Ewert Cousins, translator of Bonaventure's "Itinerarium mentis in deum" and the art historian, Howard Davis, a specialist on Giotto. "Dante's World" stood at the center of a "Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies" which we officially inaugurated in 1976 with a generous grant from NEH. Umberto Eco, a medievalist whose doctoral dissertation deals with Saint Thomas's esthetics, presented in that course "Il nome della rosa" before it was translated into English.

     What prompted us four colleagues to join hands for one course was the very `divinity' of the Comedia, defined above as its contemporaneity. How can one hold a class of fifty American students for three or four hours prisoners of the luminous heavens of Dante's Paradiso if the poet, by virtue of his art had not accomplished the miracle of transforming the theology and the astronomy of his own time into a `vision' that lives like his Empyreon beyond time and space? Although, however, we were, all four colleagues in the course, convinced of the miracle accomplished by Dante as poet, we felt the students should become aware of Dante as a human being within the historical background, in all of its ramification, in which the miracle took place.

     Dante held our students spellbound -- as they listened to his poetry in the original, I must add -- not because he is a saint or a life model, but because he is a man/poet whose poem was born out of his very human experience. He lived the problems of his own society with an extra-ordinary perceptiveness and intensity, not necessarily with historical objectivity. Dante accomplishes the miracle of universalizing the reality of his own personal life and society as a human being conditioned by the human body within which he breathes. The Comedia lives of this paradoxical reality.

     From the very first Cantos the reader learns that Dante is an exceptional human being with a tremendous faith in God and in himself; he is God's creature as a poet, the two being inextricably interwoven. Dante is so convinced of being the `Chosen One' as to discourage , at the threshold of paradiso, those readers who cannot identify with his mission from following his boat into an ocean that nobody has faced before or will ever face after him:

     O voi che siete in piccioletta barca

     desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti

     dietro al mio legno che cantando varca

     tornate a riveder li vostri liti. . . .

     L'acqua ch'io prendo gia mai non si corse

     Minerva spira, e conducemi Apollo.

     O you that are in your little bark, eager to hear, following behind my ship that singing makes her way, turn back to see again your shores. . . . The water which I take was never coursed before. Minerva breathes and Apollo guides me. (Singleton)

     Then he adds:

     Voi altri pochi che drizzaste il collo

     per tempo al pan delli angeli . . .

     metter potete ben per l'alto sale

     vostro navigio, servando mio solco

     dinanzi all'acqua che ritorna equale (Pd. II, 1-15).

     You other few who lifted up your necks betimes for bread of angels . . . you may indeed commit your vessel to the deep brine, holding to my furrow ahead of the water that turns smooth again. (Singleton)

     Paradise is the kingdom of light. Yet, the Light of which paradise is made, expression of God's glory, is darkened by the constant shadow of a misled humanity on earth that daringly attempts to efface such glory. Dante conceives of, and portrays humanity in the most detailed concreteness of his own personal life, of his own society, of his own city, the Florence he loves and detests. In the very heart of paradise, the most powerful invectives against a Pope that misleads humanity involve Florence, the Poet's sweet nest. There he was born and grew to be a man; there he hopes to return someday honored with the laurel crown he earned as a poet. High up in paradisiacal space, in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, Dante expresses this hope with a sudden tragic sense of certainty which disconcerts us. The canto was composed in 132O, one year before the Poet's death in exile, in a moment in which he drew hope from the historical condition in Italy and Florence:

     Se mai continga che 'l poema sacro

     al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra

     sí che m'ha fatto per piu'anni macro,

     vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra

     del bello ovile ov'io dormi' agnello

     nemico ai lupi che li danno guerra;

     con altra voce omai con altro vello

     ritornero'poeta, ed in sul fonte

     del mio battesmo prendero' il cappello. (PD XXV, 1-9)

     If ever it come to pass that the sacred poem to which heaven and earth have so set hand that it has made me lean for many years should overcome the cruelty which bars me from the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy to wolves which was on it, with changed voice now and with changed fleece a poet I will return, and at the font of my baptism I will take the crown. (Singleton)

     The Comedia, which marks the birth of Italian literature, is at first sight a powerful indictment of the society in which the Poet lived. The Poet speaks not for himself, but in the name of God for the people who suffer under leaders who are unaware that individual human life on earth is nothing but `a running towards death':

     "Tu nota," says Beatrice to his beloved in the unreal light of Earthly Paradise, "e come da me son porte,/ cosi queste parole segna ai vivi/ del vivere ch'e'un correre alla morte". (PG. XXXIII, 52-4)

     Do write down (in your memory) and as they are said by me, reveal these words to the living of a life which is a rapid run to death. (Lorch)

     Here in a nutshell is the case of the divine comedy. At the threshold of the 14th century, Dante Alighieri, socially-speaking a modest Florentine poet, boldly declares: God has chosen me, a Florentine poet, to experience the other world. God himself engaged me to write down that experience by memory, so as to warn the misleading leaders of humanity of the impending divine intervention to re-establish order within a humanly-created chaos. The poet speaks for and to his own Florence, as well as to the people of the world as Vox Dei. By living it as real, he believes the very myth on which the poem is based and which is unbelievable by human reason.

     The Comedia stands like a lonely rock in a desert. Unreachable and therefore inimitable. Dante creates a language but does not establish a tradition of deeply committed literature. Popular in Italy through the XIV century, the Comedia was almost immediately eclipsed by Petrarch's Canzoniere and its imitators, and later by the revival of ancient Rome during the Renaissance. Dante re-emerged only four centuries later, not by merit of the Italians but of the German and English Romanticists, as the most forceful expression of the rediscovered Middle Ages.

     A poetic myth, even as forceful as Dante's Comedia, carried within itself the characteristics and tastes of a society antithetical to, and therefore rejected by, a differently oriented society. Dante's moral, religious and political engagement did not appeal for centuries to the literary world of Italy, because it was for centuries alien to the taste of Italian society. If asked, I guess Calvino would say that the Italians incline to the `light'.

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM AND THE MYTH OF FOLLY AND INSANITY IN ARIOSTO'S ORLANDO FURIOSO

     We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature. One tries to make language a weightless element that hovers above things, like a cloud, or better perhaps the finest dust, or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density and concreteness of things, bodies and sensations. . . . We should be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it. . . . Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard. (I. Calvino)

     An epoch, like an individual, has its own unique way to express its essence and identity. The Comedia proves by its very contemporaneity that poetic myth expresses forcefully, in a way different from history, the essence of Medieval society in crisis. Two centuries after Dante, during the Italian Renaissance, which was wrongly defined by some 19th century historians as the triumph of `Art for Art Sake', two leading poems, the Orlando innamorato and the Orlando furioso, closely mirror, through their fantastic tales of labyrinthine adventures, the essence of an era we define today as "Renaissance Humanism" .

     `Lightness', Calvino would say, characterizes the two poems of fantastic adventures in contrast with the `weight' of the Comedia; the lightness, however, is not obtained at the expense of precision and determination. The precision of images, as well as the masterly use of irony within the world of adventures created by Boiardo and Ariosto, is a direct reflection of a society permeated with the philological and rhetorical ideals of a militant kind of humanism which climaxed in Italy during the second half of the 15th century. It takes `lightness' to convey through literature a feeling for such a complex and in many ways contradictory period in the history of Italian society as the phenomenon in question.¹

     A myth which centers on the folly of Orlando, the wisest and the most popular Paladin of Charlemagne -- the very popular Italian version of "Roland" of the Chanson des gestes -- is the leading motif of the Orlando innamorato and of the first half of the Orlando furioso (up to Canto 23). Only folly, as freedom of the senses and of the imagination defeating all conventions, can explain as expression of extreme vitality, the most passionate, all encompassing, doubly sinful, unrequited love of the wisest and strongest Christian warrior for Angelica, an Oriental Muslim princess. In spite of its sinfulness and unconventionality, this love spurs Orlando to the most daring adventures. With him the best Christian knights and Muslim heroes all lost in their love for Angelica.

     The myth of Orlando's folly reflects in its extraordinary irrepressible vitality the mood of the society to which Boiardo and Ariosto belonged. Orlando's immenso vigor, the leading motif of the Innamorato and of the first half of the Orlando furioso constitutes in this sense a homage to the greatness of an era in which philology was born as the discovery of the revealing power of Literature, the key to the affirmation of Man in history. The era of erudition and of its limitless value; of a godlike drive for life, not in contrast, but in harmony with a new concept of Christianity; of the liberating power of laughter, which triumphs particularly in Pulci's poem Morgante; of the constructive force of diletto; of docta ignorantia and coincidentia oppositorum. Tout court, it was the era of folly. Erasmus composed the first version of his "In Praise of Folly" after a visit to Italy in 1512!

     At the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, the Dutchy of Ferrara, seat of the Court of Este, where the two poets lived and wrote as courtiers and refined humanists, offers the ideal background and inspiration for a society of literati, most of them very practical men, involved in the politics of their time, all inspired by the highest humanistic values.

     At the time Boiardo was working at the Orlando innamorato Ferrara had enjoyed almost 50 years of `golden peace', during which art and letters thrived and a free exchange of ideas was enjoyed at its best throughout the peninsula without limits or borders. The literati like the bankers, were citizens of the world. Debates on ideas of this very special res publica literarum had given birth to a new literary genre, the dialogue which was realistic at least in appearance.

     A century before Ariosto, the daring humanist, Lorenzo Valla, founded `philology' in the "Elegantiae Latinae linguae" and `history' based on philologically credible documents in the "De falso credita donatione constantiniana." He vigorously upheld in his dialogue "On Pleasure as the True Good" man's godlike drive for earthly sensual pleasure as the source of life. The dialogue was composed by a very young Lorenzo at the court of Pope Martin V. Later it was revised by him as a teacher at the universities of Pavia and Milan. It was finally completed at the court of Alphonse of Aragon in Naples before Valla returned to Rome in charge of translations from the Greek at the Vatican Library. Valla had not only boldly defined the basic drive for life as voluptas, or sensual pleasure, but with the support of the Bible and of Saint Paul developed it into love of and for God, source of all kinds of goods for man to enjoy. Voluptas'/`utilitas', pleasure/expedient, was proved by Valla to be the basic Christian virtue, antithetical to `honestas' the pagan (Ciceronian) virtue for virtue's sake.

     In his dialogue, De Voluptate ac de Vero bono (1421-44, Rome, Pavia, Milan, Naples, Rome), Valla attempted to give a daring philological justification to sensual pleasure as the origin and source of life. This eloquently interprets a curiosity, widely experienced in Italy, for life on earth in all its aspects. It is this new intense form of `curiosity' that leads Italian society to exploit the discovery of classical antiquity as a new model and inspiration for a fuller life on earth, as well as to face with a new enthusiasm the challenge of the new geographical, scientific and artistic frontiers. With the humanistic dialogue there triumphed a new form of thinking and visualizing reality. This inspired both the Innamorato and the Furioso, and in Ariosto found its most daring and well-rounded expression.²

     Ariosto goes one step further than Boiardo in the interpretation of Amor omnia vincit improbus. The positive creative force of `folly', precisely in the middle of the Poem (Canto 23), transgresses into insanity, a subhuman state in which man -- in this case, the great Orlando -- loses his identity. It is `folly,' as life's creative spirit, however, in the first half of the poem, that allows us to enjoy a vision and extraordinary portrayal of human passions parallel to society's discovery of a world within man.

     Ariosto's poetic interplay, within the myth he invents, of `folly' and `insanity' betrays the Poet's awareness of the dramatic historical change that took place in the world around him after Boiardo's death in 1494. The year 1494 marks, with the descent of the French King Charles VIII into Italy, the first of a series of catastrophic events.

     The tale of Orlando's folly, before the hero is overcome by insanity, can be understood in itself as the most comprehensive metaphor of life a poet could conceive. Within this metaphor, la gran follia or Orlando's insanity presupposes a development to the limits of Orlando's positive follia, his greatness in love, in arms, in life, the great humanity, tout court, of the opening of man's inner life. Orlando's positive follia should be read as a homage the poet pays to the discoveries and ideals of a `humanistic' society of which he is the product, insanity should be interpreted as the mythical version of the dismay for its tragic ending, caused in great part by almost thirty years of bloody fighting the poet Ariosto witnessed in part at least with his own eyes.

     With the end in 1509 -- year of the first publication of the Furioso -- of the so called "Herculean peace", an epoch abruptly ends for Ferrara. During the next three years the city and its poet are hurled into one war after the other. In 1508 the League of Cambrai had allied Emperor Maximilian and King Louis XII of France against the Venetians for the partition of the territory of the Republic. The League ends in 1510, setting Pope Julius II free to try to expell the French from Italy. Alfonso, Duke of Este, is at the side of the French, providing with his two famous guns, Gran Diavolo and Terremoto, the best part of their artillery. Fighting takes place all over around Ferrara. The Pope now proclaims The Holy League with Venice and Spain against the French and Ferrara -- which, by the way, had been for centuries a fief of the Vatican. The Duke of Este and General Bayard cut to pieces the Papal forces. In 1511 the Spaniards and the Papal Army enter the territory of Ferrara. Yet, the young French General Gaston de Foix moves triumphantly from one victory to the next. Joined by Alfonso's powerful artillery, Gaston de Foix fights on Easter Sunday , April 11, 1512, the bloodiest battle fought on Italian soil since the overthrow of the Goths: the battle of Ravenna, a city a short distance from Ferrara. The dead included 4,000 Frenchmen and 10,000 confederates; all Spanish and Papal leaders are captured. Gaston de Foix is killed when the fighting is almost over. Alfonso's artillery is a decisive factor in the final victory, as well as in the cruel death of thousands of people. When the fighting is over, he tries in vain to restrain the French from committing atrocities against the unarmed people of Ravenna.

     The poet Ariosto openly condemns such atrocities in the first person at the opening of a canto in the 1516 version of his poem. He witnessed, against his own will -- since he was by nature `a lover of tranquilities' -- many of these events as he physically stood near Alfonso, against his will courtier and `servant' of the defiant Duke. As a poet, he takes his revenge by carving out for himself a space at the opening of each canto -- a couple of octaves -- within which he expresses his own view on human passions as well as, at times, on contemporary events. It is however through the myth of Orlando's Folly degenerating into insanity, that he succeeds in making those tragic events as permanent as they were originally vivid.

     The treaties of Cateau Cambresis, some twenty years after Ariosto's death, brought, with Emperor Charles V, a definitive peace to the peninsula. With peace came the end of the independence of most Italian states. Ferrara will survive under the Dukes of Este until the end of the century when the Pope will finally reclaim it as his possession.

     Ariosto lived long enough (he died in 1532) to see the end of the harsh fighting. The final development of Orlando's myth may be read as reflecting a serene acceptance of the new political equilibrium established under Emperor Charles V. Orlando, who acted through 16 cantos as a brute deprived of reason, finally regains sanity in Canto 39, five cantos before the closing of the story. Orlando's recovery of his senno by will of God, specifically in order to assure the victory of the Christians in the final duel against the Muslims (42), evidences a remarkable optimism on the part of the poet, an optimism in spite of all odds, an adaptability and a resilience which I am tempted to define as typical of Italian society in general, not uniquely of 16th century Italy.

     I am tempted also to relate, by contrast, what I call Ariosto's final `optimistic' solution in the development of his hero Orlando to the deeply pessimistic view of a Northern society which is evidenced by the contemporary Poem, Narrenschiff. Brandt's Ship of Fools, published in 1494, stands at the threshold of German literature as a strong pillar of Reason and social order, a nostalgic longing for the old order, described in word and image as chaos through the shipwreck of the historically real `boat of the insane' or `ship of fools'.

     In contrast with Brandt, Ariosto's agile and fluid development of his myth from folly to insanity to a kind of miraculous recovery of reason by divine intervention is made possible by Ariosto's masterly use of `literature', that is by his capacity of molding to his heart's content that kind of `lightness' of language which Calvino describes as one of the two opposite tendencies in literature;

     One tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud, or, better, perhaps, the finest dust, or better still, a field of magnetic impulses. (Calvino, Six Memos . . ., p. 15)

     Ariosto's `lightness' of language is to be identified mainly with his all pervading use of irony, in the development of the plot of the poem, as well as within the individual stories. As light as Dante's magic butterfly `that flies towards justice without impediments' (Pg. X), Ariosto's irony untangles the world he creates free from the worm of the `real'. Not darting straight upwards like Dante's, but flittering from flower to flower, irony follows and permeates in the Furioso the uninterrupted wandering of its knights into a borderless world of forests, mountains, plains and islands, their duels and love making, their fantastic battles in which horses and men inextricably intermingle like in a painting of Paolo Uccello. Irony transforms the real into a magic world that exploits the earth to the maximum by including the moon as part of it, together with new islands, continents and underground miraculous realms. At the very center of this magic world is man as the poet sees him, spurred into living by his passions and desires, so greedy of life as hardly to listen to the voice of reason. Irony imbues the whole of the poem, transforming it into something `else,' as does a snowfall to a familiar landscape.

     Irony permeates from beginning to end the episode of Orlando's re-acquired mental sanity. The most foolish of the Christian warriors, the English Astolfo, recovers the hero's senno (reason) in a huge flask among discarded objects, by flying to the moon on the Ippogrifo, a winged horse. Subsequently, helped by some friendly Paladins, Astolfo chains the giant brute Orlando -- after having properly washed him -- to the Atlas Mountains. Finally, Orlando is forced to breathe in the content of the flask. What the poet gives us in the end is the old Orlando, the one we have never known in the Italian literary tradition, the Paladin devoted to the Cause of God and Emperor, who will, indeed, contribute to its final victory. But `Reason,' alas, has deprived our hero of the creative charge of Folly's imagination! Ariosto's final message regarding the fate of his hero Orlando is ambiguous to say the least, as ambiguous, perhaps, as his opinion of the political developments he witnesses in Italian society .

     Ariosto acquires his `lightness' of language often in the wake of Dante's `weight'. Analogies and differences can be discovered at times in Ariosto's use of a Dantesque image, a word, a metaphor. This is the case of the word/image/metaphor selva, forest.

     The first image we meet as we open the Comedy is the one of a dark forest in which the poet/pilgrim is lost:

     Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la diritta via era smarrita.

     Midway in the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood for the straight way was lost. (Singleton)

     What the poet Virgil offers Dante is a way out of that dark forest, not directly but through a long deviation that includes Hell and Purgatory. The allegory of Dante's forest is transparent: the moral and psychological confusion that cuts the poet/pilgrim off from the Light of God.

     Like Dante's Comedy, Ariosto's poem is written in the first person. The poet, however, is not a pilgrim in search of personal salvation but a storyteller who entertains his fellow courtiers with the product of his imagination, the fantastic adventures of the mythical Italianized Orlando. While the Comedy proceeds on a straight line, focusing on Dante as the main character, the Orlando Furioso moves on by continuous digressions, offering the view of a thick forest, an intricate interplay of adventures by a great number of knights who endlessly wander through a mythical world covering the whole planet and beyond. Orlando's story of folly and insanity is but one thread of the multicolored cloth.

     Under a certain aspect the Furioso could be read as the parody of the Comedy, which it definitely is not. The most constructive and enjoyable way to read it is actually in relation with the Comedy as the reflection of a moment in the history of Italian society which is as much plurivocal and rich in contradictions as Dante's is univocal.

     Realism triumphs in the description of the phenomenon of insanity itself, in its physicality, of the stages one by one that a human psyche undergoes when in prey of this terrible illness, until a human being, no matter how noble and strong, totally loses all contacts with the world around him. Without senno action lacks motivation and purpose. Orlando, insane, can be explained only like the eruption of a volcano, a flood, an earthquake.

     At the threshold of the second section of his Poem (Canto 24, 1-3), immediately after the description of Orlando's painful entrance into darkness, Ariosto stops to meditate for a moment on the nature of pazzia, insanity, which he conceives of as a human deviation from the road of sanity. The poet humanist's main interest is not the pursuit of spiritual happiness, but serenity of soul. This is obtained within an Epicurean/human rather than a Christian/religious context. Here in the description of pazzia or insanity, he echoes Dante's language. The loss of reason, in consequence of unrequited love leads man into a great forest, una gran selva where one is bound to get irremediably lost, no matter how much one tries to find a way out. That forest is a prison where one is forever chained down, without hope of escape:

     Varii gli effetti son, ma la pazzia

     e'tutt'una pero che li fa uscire.

     Gli e' come UNA GRAN SELVA, ove la via

     convien a forza a chi vi va fallire:

     chi su' chi giu', chi qua', chi la' travia.

     Per concludere insomma, io vi vo dire

     a chi in amor s'invecchia, ogn'altra pena

     si convengono i ceppi e la catena. (XXIV, 2)

     The various effects which from love spring

     By one same madness are brought into play.

     It is a wood of error, menacing,

     Where travelers perforce must lose their way;

     One here, one there, it comes to the same thing.

     To sum the matter up, then, I would say:

     Who in old age the dupe of love remains

     Deserving is of fetters and of chains. (Reynolds)

     The ironic twist to which Ariosto submits the Dantesque metaphor of selva -- echo in more than one instance Dante's episode of the unfortunate lovers Paolo and Francesca. It is reinforced by the poet's following personal confession, carried out tongue in cheek in the first person. The poet would personally like to free himself from the chains of physical sensual love, but he cannot do so because the illness has reached the bones: "ma tosto far come vorrei non posso/che'l male e' penetrato infin all'osso." "And yet I fear my vow I cannot keep: In me the malady has gone too deep" (Reynolds).

     Is Ariosto using the metaphor of selva for insanity or for `life' itself in general, human life as he sees it is prey of passions and desires? Is this a confession of frustration on the part of a humanist who lives `free' of the many constrictions to which Dante and his society were subjected, or rather an acceptance of a de facto condition which has its advantages? It is hard to tell. There are very few moments in which Ariosto seriously means what he says. One instance of tough seriousness, indeed anger, is the episode of Ebuda -- an addition of the last, 1532 version of the poem -- in which Orlando pronounces a curse against firearms --l'archebugio -- by throwing the satanic invention into the ocean. What evokes the poet's unconditional condemnation is an inhuman deviation of society around him, a threat for human survival. For the rest we are left to guess.

     Dante singles himself out within the society in which he lives. Victim of his own society, he seeks and finds justice and harmony by appealing to eternal principles above humanity. Ariosto, a man among men, shares the good and the bad of his own society. Through the arm they have in common, the use of language in literature, Dante condemns while Ariosto smiles at human weaknesses and sins and at the deviations of his own society.

NOTES ON LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORARY ITALY: A NOVEL; A GENRE; DEBATES 1945-2000; THE PROFILE OF AN AUTHOR

A Novel

     From Arbasino's Fratelli d'Italia (1969-1993) (Milano, Adelphi, 1993):

     Da noi, si agita Antonio, in questo momento sono denunciati o sotto processo Testori, Pasolini, Visconti, Antonioni, mi pare anche Fellini, e parecchi altri che non ricordo, tra i quali parecchi astuti che fanno in fretta un romanzo con un titolo equivoco e un poco di porcate nelle prime pagine, le sole che il magistrato di solito legge. . . . Tutti ben scritti, tutti brillantini, tutti uguali . . .perfettamente traducibili, coi falsi problemi moderni di una coppia molto moderna in vacanza tra l'autoroute e la Riviera in mezzo a ragazzine tutte uguali alle attricette . . . vanno sempre bene . . . grandi puttanate . . . solo esercizi, collages di parole in pagine come pezze di tweed . . . e mai un'opera compiuta, mai LE LIVRE! come se un pittore o un musicista producessero solo schizzi e abbozzi e `appunti per.' (pp. 92-3)

     "In our country," Antonio says agitatedly, "they're accusing and prosecuting people like Testori, Pasolini, Visconti, Antonioni -- Fellini too, I think, as well as many others whose names I can't remember, bright people who churn out books, give them provocative titles, throw in a couple of raunchy scenes in the first few pages -- the only pages the judges actually read . . . they're all well written, all quite brilliant, all the same, perfectly translatable, with their false modern day problems -- a modern couple on vacation, caught somewhere between the highway and the Riviera, surrounded by girls that look like young actresses . . . it always works . . . all gimmicks . . . they're only exercises, really, just collages of words woven together like tweeds . . . there's never a completed work, never Le Livre! It's as if a painter or a musician were to produce only sketches or drafts or `Notes for'."

     Cosi raccontiamola anche a questo, al ristorante Margana, la vecchia storia degli anni di guerra passati sentendo i bombardamenti di la dal confine. . . . (p. 197)

     And so, while sitting at the Ristorante Morgana, we tell him, too, the same old story of how we spent the war years listening to bombs dropping on the other side of the border.

     Il Romanzo, all 'osteria! . . . a cercar padron migliori. . . . (p. 95)

     The Novel, to the tavern! . . . to find a better host.

     Se poi il tema di un tuo romanzo o di un tuo film fosse come sempre la Fine di un Mondo? o di una societa', o di una civilta' o di una cultura . . .? (p. 94)

     And what if your film or your novel were always about the end of a world? Or the end of a society or of a civilization or a culture . . . ?

     "La fine di un'epoca!" come sigla e formula di successo. . . . (p. 1342)

     "The end of an Era!" as the mark of, and formula for, success.

     Il romanzo tradizionale, invecchiato come le pensioni con clientela interessante. Ordine, cautela, assenatezza, rispettabilita', decoro. . . . Garanzie: il Passato assicura l'Immobilità..la Morte accerta che tutto é gia' successo, nulla puo' cambiare, ci si puo' dar pace; l'imperfetto stabilisce l'atmosfera; il Filtro della Memoria regola il passaggio a senso inico di materiali preselezionati, senza imprevisti ne `turbative.

     Due periodi ben distinti: fino a un certo punto si e' tentato di vivere; dopo si e' cominciato a scrivere " (p. 1343).

     The traditional novel, like a run-down pension with its "interesting" clientele. Orderliness, prudence, common sense, respectability, decorum. . . . Guaranteed: the Past assures Fixedness. . . . Death ascertains that everything has already happened, that nothing can change, that we can leave each other alone; the Imperfect sets the atmosphere, the Filter of Memory regulates the flow of pre-selected material in one direction, with no surprises or disturbances.

     Two clearly distinct periods: up until a certain point one attempts to live; then, one begins to write.

     . . . Un Nido di Memorie: tana di nostalgie, cuccia di malinconie, covo di rimpianti. Desiderio di immutabilita'; riordino di dagherrotipi; il paese dei nonni, non un posto nuovo. Vegheggiamento del finito, del gia' conosciuto. Elevazione del concluso, congelamento dello status quo, con manutenzione in economia e un alone 'flou'.

     Tema fondamentale per tutta la cultura piccolo-borghese: come avendo chissà cosa da rimpiangere e da inorgoglirsi: Sciuscia', Ladri di biciclette, Riso amaro, Fontamara, La Ciociara? L'8 settembre e date analoghe? . . . Nostalgia della provincia sentimentale e crepuscolare, nella letteratura a successo. Vagheggiamento per il Rinascimento, nella regia antiquaria e gentilizia.. Costumi e mobilio. Magazzini e deposito. (p. 1343)

     A nest of Memories: warren of yearnings, lair of sorrows, cove of regrets. Desire for constants; the immutability of things; the reorganization of daguerrotypes; the land of our grandparents; no new places. The longing for endings, for the already known. The elevation of conclusions, the congealing of the status quo, thriftiness and a blurred halo.

     Basic theme for the culture of the petit bourgeois: having something to mourn, something to be proud of: Sciusciá, Ladri di Biciclette, Riso Amaro, Fontamara, La Ciociara? What about the 8th of September, and other such dates? Nostalgia for the sentimental and crepuscular aspects of the provincial, as in the major literature. Courting the Renaissance with antiquated and heraldic stagings . . . costumes and furnishings, warehouses and storage areas.

     La riproduzione della lingua parlata . . . Ma insomma come sara' stata la conversazione italiana in un paese che (secondo la sua letteratura) e' sempre stato impacciato o muto? (p. 1350)

     The reproduction of the spoken language . . . now really: what can spoken Italian have been like -- in a country (as depicted by its literature) of awkward and embarrassed silences?

     Non soltanto le persone: anche le epoche hanno un loro modo riservato, scaltro e frivolo insieme di comunicare il proprio io piu'profondo a qualcuno che coglie al volo le confidenze piu' sorprendenti di un secolo spossato e vicino alla morte come un altro Swann . . . dando a una societa, a un momento storico la possibilita' di raccontare le proprie memorie. . . . (p. 1368)

     Not just people: epochs, too, have their hidden ways, simultaneously cunning and frivolous, of communicating their deepest sense of self to one who can grasp the shocking intimacies of a worn out century, close to its death, a Swann. . . . Giving society, giving a historical moment a chance to retell its own memories.

     Ma che non muta l'eta'? Si rivolgono i regni mentre che io canto e si cambiano le mode galanti.

     (Abbiamo appena ordinato i pomodori al riso)

     What doesn't alter a period? Kingdoms turn against me as I sing, and gallantries change.

     (We just ordered tomatoes with rice.)

     Sento rumore: due o tre gridi, trambusto nel corridoio. Poi bussano forte. Desideria si e' buttata dalla finestra. Scendo le scale di corsa, e il corpo e' davanti alla porta sul marciapiede; lo stanno coprendo adesso. Morta sul colpo battendo la testa. (Tutto da riscrivere qui).

     Siamo li tutti. Non aveva parlato a nessuno? No. Non ha lasciato scritto qualche cosa? No, niente. (p.l371, closing statement).

     I hear a noise, two or three yells, a scuffle in the hallway. Then they're knocking hard at the door. Desideria threw herself out the window. I run downstairs, the body is in the doorway, on the sidewalk; they're covering it at this very moment. Dead on impact, a blow to the head. (All this has to be rewritten.)

     We're all there. She didn't say anything to anyone? No. She didn't leave anything in writing? No, nothing.

     Carlo Bo, a veteran of Italian letters, said more than once that everybody in Italy today writes a novel, but very few have something to say. Faced with the challenge of a choice of books to select that may serve the purpose of relating literature to society in Italy, I remind myself that my aim in the present lecture is not to offer you a path in the dark forest of contemporary literature. For that task I am not the most competent person available. Rather, I follow my natural instinct which almost unconsciously leads me towards those books whose authors I have met, towards those critics who have allowed me a personal insight into their way of thinking and a perusal of their books they left in my personal library.

     There are two copies of one book in my library, a ponderous novel of 1371 pages, entitled Fratelli d'Italia. Each copy has an affectionate dedication by the author. My reaction as I reread the book today, seven years after the publication of its second version, is more positive than ever before. Here is one of the few novels of which it can be said that it truly takes place in contemporary Italy , light and anguishing, happy and tragic, brilliant and dark. It is a novel that deals with the present with a deep almost unconscious awareness of the past. It `photographs' Italian society as it breathes around its author with such an uninterrupted use of irony as to allow us readers from this shore of the Atlantic ocean a sense of its complexity, rather than of its merits. For discriminating Italians, in my opinion, it is "the Italian novel of the century"; it lashes out while laughing and praises while condemning. It takes into account not only the world of creative writing , of novels (romanzo) in particular, but of the lively debates on its nature and mission. These have thrived in Italy since the early 50s, that is, from the birth of the so called `neorealistic' movement in literature and film after the end of the war and the fall of Fascism. Its author, Alberto Arbasino has been, from beginning to end, a leading figure within those debates, as well as a prolific writer.

     The title itself of the novel, Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) makes us stop and think. Coming from the opening of the Italian National Anthem, the title denounces ironically as fake and void a nationalistic inclination in Italian letters which the book sets out to destroy.

     The l371 page volume I have in hand today constitutes Arbasino's rewriting of a novel he wrote in the 60s, a living echo of the Italian society of the time. The plot is so loose that it can hardly be summarized: the story of a grand tour of Italy by a group of young men and women, Italian, French, German, Antonio, Jean Claude, Klaus, Enrico and many others as they meet in their uninterrupted wandering -- a group of young men and women permanently "on the road".

     The result of the 1993 re-elaboration of the original is an irreverent and imposing novel which portrays Italian contemporary society in action with incomparable lightness and mobility. What inspires Arbasino to rewrite an old book is his conviction that "literature is not made only of definitive texts. Most of it reveals itself as temporary versions that one can improve by going back to them with the added advantage of new experiences. . . ."

     Tutto libri, the Italian version of our New York Review of Books, with reference to the new version of Fratelli d'Italia -- said "Arbasino -- it was written in a 1994" is one of the few Italian successful writers because of his immense curiosity in overcoming `la letteratura da cortile che affligge da sempre il nostro paese' (the `neighborhood literature' that forever afflicts our country). He is an Italian writer who acts, speaks and writes like a Frenchman or an Englishman, bending the Italian language and behavioral patterns of Italians to ways foreign to them. Excess of knowledge, of information may hinder the narrative rhythm. Aware of this risk, Arbasino breaks the sentence in two, overcoming the structure based on monologue (of the first version) molding it into a structure marked by intensive dialogue. The result may be fatiguing for the reader. Yet in Arbasino we have the one Italian who consciously breaks with the traditional novel still in use in Italy today, `un romanzo', he says, "invecchiato come le pensioni con clientela interessante" (like a run-down pension with its `interesting' clientele). Hence, the co-presence in the new version of narrative and reflection, soul and body, irreverence and real drama. A parody of life. The young men and women who are the protagonists of the story meet, converse, eat, sleep, laugh, admire without really `existing' because they have apparently used up their existence in an effort to capture everything that the century has produced in ideas, emotions and thought, experiences, fantasies, pain, desire, anguish and miseries. . . .

     Fratelli d'Italia is an indescribable novel in American terms which we should read. It calls for translation!

     Arbasino's Fratelli d'Italla reflects with irony a confused echo of ideas and voices in contemporary Italian society as well as in Italian literature and at the same time a longing for something new and different to express a moment of crisis. Among the many genres practiced in Italy today, the most successful, in the sense that it has found a favorable audience in America, judging from the recent translations, is a special kind of detective novel, `il giallo', the noir.³

     I shall not attempt here to trace the origins of the genre, but only say what I know about it. At the beginning there was Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, as an example of a mixed genre, the detective and the historical novel. Was Eco aware that he was inaugurating a genre destined to great success? I doubt it. If one were to ask him, he would dismiss the question as irrelevant. I have in my library one of the first copies of Il nome della rosa brought to America. It bears a generous dedication from its author "da letterato esordiente, timorosissimo". Eco followed with the apprehension of a `novellino' the reception of his first novel in society.

     Eco's first novel was successful not because of the genre he chose, but because it is written from beginning to end in limpid, fluid prose and because, within the `detective', the author, a most serious medievalist, respects the medieval environment in which it takes place -- one intense week in 1327, five years after Dante's death.

     Most novels by Sciascia are classified as `detective' and reflect with passion contemporary history. But today's Italians seem to have moved further than Eco and Sciascia. Whereas the detective novel follows a paradigm of clues-- my friend Oonagh reminds me of Ginzburg in Miti, emblemi, spie -- in the noir surprises and contradictions beset the plot. The noir offers at first sight at least a mimetic interpretation of society. On a deeper level, however, the protagonist lives within a reality that's not based on cause and effect, but formed of compromises. In line with Gianni Vattimo's `pensiero debole' all choices, however, are weak ones. The protagonist does not seem to obey any universal law. Violence prevails and overwhelms the reader. The author, on the other hand, may stand aside and philosophize about it. What can we make of it in America today?

     It is perhaps this `philosophizing' that unbalances the American reader. Take the case of Antonio Tabucchi in his recently translated and successful The Headless Body. A reviewer in the Times on Feb. 20 (Michael Pye, author of Taking Lives), definitely likes the book. Yet he remarks as a weakness that

     this Italian academic, professor at the University of Siena, theoretician and translator, does not write the usual type of thriller. Fascinated by Portugal, he follows crimes in Oporto with the precision of a reporter. The result is an exceptionally `vivid book' but `for the oddest reasons': the author, obsessed with observing reality with all his senses, focuses on "how theory can possibly relate to literature," how, for example, the literary world connects with someone being tortured. Result: a journalist who makes his living with bloody murders suddenly slams the door on the captive reader and starts a seminar. You may sometimes snort with exasperation and send Tabucchi's book swirling across the room. But then again when did you last find a novel this interesting?

     What the American writer resents in his Italian colleague, I surmise, is the art of mixing high and low culture, evil and good, dark humanity and higher ideals: To contaminate the pure divertissement of the noir with reflections on violence and on the nature of evil.

A Genre

     A debate on the Italian passion for and against the noir is going on at this moment on the Internet, Giuliana Ferrone reminds me. I should follow it. The writer Scalfaro defends the traditional novel as it changes through phases, against the fixedness and superficiality of the noir. Isn't the traditional novel dying of its self-inflicted death -- the defenders of the noir counterattack -- because the society on which it is based has become a `folla vociante di individui anonimi e isolati'?

     A fact universally recognized in the world of letters is that Italy does not traditionally incline towards long narratives as do France, England and Russia. Perhaps the noir fits best with the short novel the Italians tend to write. Or is Italian society rejecting the `intellectualism' of some Italian novels? (Thus runs my discussion with Jenny McPhee.)

     Simon Blackburn, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, in reviewing Eco's latest book (which is certainly not a novel) "Kant and Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition" in the New Republic of February 7, 2000, warns the reader that the "intellectual temperature is here much higher than in the novels. . . . Eco's trademarks are there: high themes, arcane learning, strange corners of philosophy and history and natural history, large intellectual vistas, a sense of play." Yet something is discouraging about this particular book. In reading it one finds oneself running off with the author to the edge of a cliff. Eco refuses to recognize the cliff because "like the platypus he has adapted himself perfectly to an environment, in this case an intellectual environment. But what he has produced should make us worried about that environment, which is much bigger and ubiquitous even than he is."

     Eco is one of the intellectuals more deeply connected with a recurrent debate on the issue of engagement or commitment of the writer to the community. Although the reviewer deals here with a collection of essays, not with a novel, by relating this particular work to Eco's novels he suggests that there is an inclination to consider intellectualism characteristic of the contemporary Italian novel. Do intense recurrent intellectual debates interfere in any way with the spontaneity of Italian novelists? Is the noir one of the forms of escape from this tendency, while still partakiing of it?

     E pero' vero che tutto il Novecento e' mosso dalla contraddizione. L'intrecciarsi, l'intersecarsi e il divergere di discorsi (e correnti) su questo nostro secolo vuol dire proprio che esso e' aperto a ogni possibile discorso sulla letteratura, che mai potra' essere esaustivo, allo stesso modo che mai potra' essere esaustivo un discorso sulla realta' e l'uomo contemporanei. (Giovanni Occhipinti, L'ultimo Novecento, Foggia, 1997)

     And yet, it is true that the 20th century was spurred by contradictions. Discourses and trends have intertwined, intersected and deflected in such ways that now any commentary on literature is to be considered valid, the topics will never be exhausted, just as the discourse on reality and contemporary man can never be exhausted.

     Dove sarebbe la mia libertà se

     non fosse nel libro

     Se il mio libro non fosse la mia liberta' cosa sarebbe?

     (Edmond Jabes, quoted by Occhipinti)

     Where would my freedom be

     if not in the book

     If my book were not my freedom, what would it be?

     Un concerto indifferenziato. (R. Luperini)

     An indifferentiated concert.

     Ognuno senza trionfalismi e con i mezzi a disposizione se ne va per la sua strada. (A. Beradinelli)

     Each of us, freed of the need to triumph, equipped with our natural means, sets off down his own path.

     Il probema numero uno resta quello di sopravvivere (G. Majorino)

     The major problem is still survival.

     Nulla e' sicuro, ma scrivi (F. Fortini)

     Nothing is sure, so write.

     (All quoted by G. Manacorda in Letteratura italiana d'Oggi, 1965-85).

Debates

     Among my Italian documents I most treasure the 1945-46 correspondence Eduardo de Filippo entertained with my then husband, Claude Bove, an officer in the American army in Italy, and myself. Overwhelmed by the first Roman performance of Napoli Milionaria, I had introduced Claude to Eduardo and convinced him to translate the play, find a financial backer in New York and launch it on Broadway. Having lived through the tragedy of Naples while in Rome, Eduardo's dramatic interpretation of the war and after-war period in Naples and its rehabilitation of Neapolitan society was, in my opinion, stunning. Kazan liked the play but did not give the final yes for its production on Broadway by William Cowan. "Eduardo's Naples comes too late and too early for our American audience" was his sibylline statement. Dolph Sweet, director of the Barnard Theater, and later an actor in Hollywood, and I performed the first act of Napoli Milionaria at Barnard College in November 1951, with actors that were members of the Barnard faculty.

     Eduardo de Filippo is for me one of the most vivid examples of the break between the old and the new in Italian literature that characterizes the immediate post-war period. WWII had cut the peninsula in two, brought the end of twenty years of dictatorship, and fed, with the resistance movement against the German occupation, a civil war destined to have serious consequences in the subsequent political formation of democratic Italy. Society calls at this point for a new kind of literature not only to portray its moods and needs, but to speak for the people and support it in its fight for survival. The writers of the Ventennio are violently attacked, first and foremost the philosopher Croce and his 1925 "Manifesto" for his defense of an independent art. The call is for literature and art committed à tout prix, for `impegno' at all cost. Among the writers under fire are Ungaretti, Montale and Moravia.

     The attack, seen from this shore of the Atlantic at the distance of fifty years, is as fascinating as the defense carried out at first, among others, by Carlo Bo, today still alive and active in the world of letters. A weakness is admitted by the accused writers, not however a crime. Angiolelli boldly proclaims in the Fiera letteraria against Trombadori that art is an individual phenomenon. As for the popular art of the day, he proclaims it a horror (che bruttezza!).

     The debate itself as it develops from the 50s to the 90s, from Milan to Sicily, involved most of the writers whose names we know in America from their novels. A summary would illustrate better than any commentary on the subject the vital contribution of the Italians to an understanding of the issue in question. It affords us, as well, an insight into an aspect of Italian society which is often neglected as we look at Italy from this shore of the Ocean: its instinctive deep commitment to the written word.⁴

     What we witness in the original post-war polemics, carried out viva voce and through a proliferation of journals, is best described as the painful childbirth of a new reality . Vittorini stands in the forefront, inspired in the journal he directs, by a kind of fanatical longing for a truth that allows the committed writer the discovery of a new Italy. Journals proliferate after the call to arms proclaimed by the communist Rinascita and the new Politecnico. This was born in Milan, as were most of these journals, and destined to survive for a couple of years.

     Partly on the footsteps of the old realists, such as Verga or Pirandello, the literary movement that ensued is baptized "neorealism" (in film as well as in literature). From the bird's eye view of contemporary Italian literature over the last half century, one could argue that the terms of the original polemics remain the basis for a proliferation of polemics and corresponding journals that characterize the literary life in Italy for the rest of the century.

     Fortunately, parallel to the theoretical debates, and in spite of them, the writers thrive, some born before or during Fascism, some more direct products of the post-war period. They all breathe a new air, joyously investing a new content with a new style. Berto's Il cielo e' rosso, Carlo Levi's Cristo s'e'fermato ad Eboli, Italo Calvino's Il sentiero dei fili di ragno, and Primo Levi's La tregua are just the tip of an iceberg. The tragic theme of the war and the magnificent adventure that was for many the Resistance Movement contributes to killing in style as well as in content the hated Fascist imperialism and its false nationalistic rhetoric. Curzio Malaparte's La pelle and the skeptical rendition of war in action given in Kaput seem to stand a part from the rest: A Neorealism of a special kind, without enthusiasm.

     The miracle produced by the war lasted up to the 50s. Calvino's trilogy signaled a search for new themes, a new inspiration and hence a new language and a new style. Gadda's Quel pasticciaccio di Via Merulana, an untranslatable novel with its linguistic experiments, is one of the most successful representatives of the period. Many of the old universally recognized writers, such as Ungaretti, Montale, Saba, Moravia, Vittorini, Pavese, Pratolini, while obeying their own inspirations, participate in and adapt to the new trends.

     Speaking in general terms, the 60s express disappointment and skepticism, while offering an example of intense creativeness. "From the disappointment of the events rises the sublimation of words", Manacorda comments. Alberto Bevilacqua's "La Califfa" (1964) -- paradigmatic, perhaps, of this period -- attempts to give in an intense and accentuated visual way a total sense of life, l'intricata matassa del vivere. Il Gattopardo, the only book by a singular writer -- the Sicilian Principe di Lampedusa -- a sudden bestseller, (1958), transformed by Visconti into a film, reflects forcefully the vanished enthusiasm of the 40s. The individual stands alone and defenseless against the political power.

     Parallel to the economic boom that the country experienced between the 1950 and 1960 and the increasingly industrialized production of books there emerged the fragility of the political structures (see Vittorini in the journal Menabò). The mission of literature is seen now in anticipating the representation of industrial alienation, and the upcoming liberation from it. The great ideals of the past gone , literature tends also to the vindication of its autonomy, hence to the renunciation of its ethical and political content. Sanguineti, the most provocative representative of one aspect at least of this period, in spite of his original communist faith, favors a new kind of the once condemned `ermetismo'. The critic Anceschi, speaking via the old journal Il Verri documents these tendencies.

     During this period one of the most interesting literary debates centers on the "opera aperta". Arbasino leads a proposal to transform one's diary into a critical account of ideas, which could inspire the novel in its necessary metamorphosis. Eco in his book Opera aperta (1962) suggests such structure of the world as to allow the reader an interpretation ad infinitum of a given work of art. Guglielmi among others violently reacts: a given work of art proposes one and one only interpretation of reality! Sanguineti attacks the false ideology of refusal and vindicates the historical function of the movement called `avantgardia' to which all the above literati belong, provided it is filled with an ideology that promotes engagement, which in his case coincides with Marxism .

     This particular debate is central to a literary acolyte that goes by the name of "Gruppo 63," which, in its second official Congress in Reggio Emilia (1-3 November, 1964) finally admits that experience itself is more valuable than the impossible theoretical solutions to the problem. Literature, some declare, must recapture contact with reality, with complete disregard of the instruments proposed by traditional culture. Within the violent divergence of opinion, a wise, critical voice comes from foreign observers -- the French Wahl, the American Marc Slonim, the German Wagenbach -- isn't the "Gruppo 63" risking to become another Accademia della Crusca? An ideological commitment of some kind must be considered by all writers! Special attention is given to language (Sanguineti), but is literature a luxury for the few that can afford it?

     At the third meeting of the "Gruppo," or of the "Neo-Avangardia," which took place in Palermo in September 1965, in a chorus of discordant voices Eco speaks with the voice of Reason when he asserts that all sort of avantgard groups aspire to tradition. Insane is the avantgard author who writes in order to be never understood. "He writes to break with a given situation, in order to communicate something different." . Even this common sense assertion is booed by many.

     The debates of the 60s find an outlet in the Sessantotto, the events of '68, which in principle, aim at upheaval of the bourgeois society. The year, defined in Italy as Anno dei Portenti, had long repercussions into the decade that follows. Debates on the role of literature versus society move parallel to the political debates on the attitude towards traditional wealth. Flowing from an acute and chronically pathological stage, these debates focus mainly on how to justify the cultural elite in society.

     One advantage literature draws from them, in theory at least, is a greater amount of independence. This is the conclusion we can draw from reading the monthly called "Quindici" (Alfredo Giuliani, June 1967). What poisons the atmosphere, however, is the political orientation of the journal, the position it takes towards a serious international conflict, i.e. Israel/Palestine in 1969. Eco dominates the scene again with an article in which he condemns the occupation of the Milan Triennale (Dobbiamo vedere chi occupa, che cosa occupa, e in che rapporto sta con la cosa che occupa). Violently attacked by Sanguineti and Bonino, he answers ironically with an article "Vietando s'impara". Eco again faces the basic problem of the relation literature/society: what should an `operatore di cultura' do to parallel the strikes of a factory or the protests of the students against the war in Vietnam? The answer is plain: simply write!

     The Neo-avantgard proclaims in Quindici a new moderate poetic canon: "Un romanzo sensato . . . e' un romanzo che ha sacrificato al senso il linguaggio." (A sensible novel is one that has sacrificed language to substance.) The neo-avantgardistic stereotype is discarded. The basic question focuses on the way intellectuals conduct politics. Here Eco prevails by clarifying what was at the start the poetic canon of the "Gruppo 63": "non serve comunicare nei modi consueti la volonta di rottura (suonare i piffero alla rivoluzione) ma bisogna rompere i modi stessi della comunicazione. Questa fu la poetica del Gruppo '63." (It does not help to communicate the desire for rupture in the usual ways [to blow the fife of revolution]. One must rupture the `ways' of communication. This was the poetic canon of the "Group 63".)What the Group was contesting was not the necessity of political involvement, but the way in which it was carried out by the traditional left. Guglielmi gives the last interpretation of `commitment' or impegno by stating that the most meaningful writers in our century in Italy are those "che non hanno detto nessuna parola piena, ma hanno significato il dramma della letteratura borghese e fatto della metaletteratura. . . ." The most significant writers are the writers of meta-literature.

     The late 70s and the 80s are dominated by the so called `riflusso', not only in literature but in every aspect of art, a great tiredness and a deep disillusionment for a failed revolution and for its having given birth to terrorism. Dominant themes are the defense of eternal values, of quiet living. The voices are many. Pasolini was the first in 1971 to denounce from Nuovi Argomenti a literary void created by the "letteratura/negazione" of the new avantgard and the literature/negation of the rioting students . The many voices are often in dissent one with the other. There are many real as well as apparent contradictions. New journals, such as the Collettivo, propose new forms of commitment . The traditional must be revised, rules and forms of crystallization, eliminated. Journals proliferate: e.g., Quasi, Salvo Imprevisti, 1975 in Florence. The focus is on the relation of politics to culture with reference to the journal of the 40s Politecnico. Reality is always political; pure art is a thing of the past. The concept emerges of `alternative culture'; authors such as Sciascia participate in the polemics.

     A new form of commitment is proposed in Sicily with the creation of the "Antigruppo 73", followed by the "Antigruppo 75". What counts in literature -- they seem to agree -- is not language but the tone, the attitude of the writer . Writers must draw from their own experiences and reflect them in a simple and direct style. A new journal is born: "Impegno 70," but strong dissent divides its collaborators. The year 1974 sees the birth of still another Journal "Pianura" and still others "Aperti in Squarci" and "Altri Termini". The authors involved speak with nostalgia of the enthusiasm of the 40s. Drawing from the need for literature to reflect the moral and the political, a voice of resignation comes from the Piemontese critic Barberi Squarotti: "Credo che alla scrittura non resti altro spazio che quello di essere il negativo continuamente dichiarato dell'utilmente detto. . . ." (To repeatedly declare the negation of what has been usefully said: this is what is left to literature.) For this purpose, irony is an ideal instrument. Irony must act through an overabundant use of rhetorical figures.

     "Confusion, the Espresso comments, is a basic happy moment." Towards the 80s the confusion is political, as well as literary, and not exactly `happy'. In 1978 the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades cause a showdown of his party, the Cristian Democrats, who refuse to deal with the `brigatisti' to save his life; the Mafia infiltrates the political apparatus; Craxi is elected Secretary General of the Socialist Party, Pertini is at the Quirinale. New literary forms cannot alter immobility in politics. The journal "Anterem" (Naples) offers the possibility of a moment of reflection. Apathy reigns. "The only answer left to us, declares Piemontese quoting Baudrillard, is theoretical violence not truth." "Altri termini" joins in. The problem that Italian literature faces in its effort to survive, while taking into account a necessary form of social and political commitment, is finding a way to overcome some extreme positions of the neo-avantgard movement. What was called for in the 80s and 90s was a positive action which would put an end to the wild theorizing as well as to some neo-realistic and neo-hermeticist positions. A form of commitment was necessary, but without threatening the survival of the written word, especially poetry. "Without poetry nothing can be done". The rescue of poetry seems to be the Leitmotif of Altri Termini in particular. In 1975 a volume was published Zero, testi e antitesti di poesia an anthology of 15 Italian poets by Cavallo, an initiative picked up by the journal Colibrì. At the same time experiments in language reach extremes. A new journal of poetry founded in Milan in 1977 Niebo, directed by Milo de Angelis, signals the rejection of all form of compromise that may impede immediacy-- an irrational moment of `dopo l'attesa e prima dell'incontro'. The inspirers are Rimbaud and Holderlin. Among the many poets the most acclaimed is Valerio Magnelli.

     Literary debates do not take place in a literary void. Among the many voices of novelists to be heard during this period is Primo Levi who first wrote two collections of short stories, Storie naturali (1966) and Vizio di forma (197l), both lamenting the defeat of reason in the use of scientific and technological progress. He established his identity with a book, Il sistema periodico (1975), where science is used metaphorically to describe human situations (the Jewish family) or to reminisce on the past of a scholar of chemistry. La chiave di stella follows (1978), centering on the life of a worker, and finally Se non ora quando? (1982) where Levi acheives the form of the novel although connected with the chronicle of war. Levi gives here credibility and dignity to the "partigiano" as the symbol of a humiliated people that fights for his dignity.

     Ottiero Ottieri produces through the 70s and the 80s a number of novels of interest, among which Il campo di concentrazione (1972), a syncretism of a story, a diary and an investigation. He analyzes the mind of the psychopathic in Di chi e' la colpa (1979), and in Il divertimento (1984) deals with the fear of growing old.

     Particularly dear to me personally are four women, two novelists and two poets: Giuliana Morandini, Francesca Sanvitale, Annalisa Cima and Maria Luisa Spaziani. I followed all four in their writing and introduced them to American audiences. Morandini exploits a theme in which I am interested: her origins (Friuli, Trieste) lead her to deal with the Austro-Hungarian empire (I cristalli di Vienna, 1980 and Caffe' Specchi, 1983). Sanvitale follows with a highly lyrical style the memory of contested feelings (Madre e figlie, 1980). Cima and Spaziani are splendid poets. Each in different ways is connected personally with Montale, but as poets speak with a voice of their own.

     Goffredo Parise's Il padrone is the best known novel dealing with the human condition within the industrial world. Finally Bevilacqua emerges in the 80s reminiscing with a limpid style on his youth in Parma (Vita mia, 1985). Among the many that come to my mind, I wish to mention Enzo Siciliano, collaborator of CISE (Barnard/Columbia 1980-1990) in the translation of one issue of the journal Nuovi Argomenti dedicated to Moravia (1988). In La notte matrigna of 1975, Siciliano deals with Nazi Germany and Italy during and after the war. In the Diamante (1984), he takes us to a contemporary Calabria in prey of fear. Elegance of style and language are Siciliano's constant preoccupation.

     In closing I cannot avoid reporting a sudden change of direction by the Italian Left which inspired Asor Rosa, in the 1982 introduction to the first volume of the history of literature which he edited Letteratura, testo, società.

     Asor Rosa was for ten years my direct partner in exchanges with CISE, which I founded and directed at Barnard/Columbia between 1980 and 1990. Among the many acts of collaboration, he brought two of his students to Columbia, both became wellknown scholars, Quondam and Ferroni. Asor Rosa, for years a recognized intellectual of the Left, polemicizes in his introduction with two famous critics of the past who stood for an Italian literature of commitment: Francesco de Sanctis and Antonio Gramsci. Asor Rosa refuses to accept two of their basic premises: Italian literature as associated with the ethical and civic history of the country and that the origins of great literature stem from a great moral life. Of course, he admits the obvious: the writer cannot draw his inspiration from literature, that is literature is not born by parthenogenesis. Objecting to the long predominant historical, as well as the structuralist and semiotic orientations, Asor Rosa makes an eclectic choice by establishing as basic to any literary structure the three elements of critical discourse: the text as point of departure and arrival, the literary `system', and the relation between literature and history. "Una buona teoria della letteratura serve a spiegare le cose come sono, mai perche' sono come sono." A good theory of literature serves to explain things as they are, never why they are as they are.⁵

     The confusion of the 70s is caused perhaps by the fact that the cultural and political avantgard movement of the 60s was not followed by restoration but by a prolonged agony of hope of the avantgard itself. The youth of the 60s who had ridiculed literature now turns to it in a normal way.

     The most organic formulation of literature and Marxist ideology is found in Quaderni di critica whose seven collaborators reaffirm in redefining realism, the superstructural character of art and literature.

A PROFILE OF AN AUTHOR LEONARDO SCIASCIA (1921-1989)

     I hesitated for a while in the choice of a contemporary writer, who, in my own view and within the context of the first section of this essay -- the use of the Comedia and the Furioso in a theoretical approach to the theme -- best represents a successful coexistence of what I have defined for the Comedia as the universal and the particular.

     I hesitated between Calvino and Sciascia. In considering Calvino, I was influenced by a long beautiful evening my husband Ray, a mathematician, and I spent at the home of Italo Calvino in Rome, shortly before his sudden death, to prepare for a course he had agreed to give at Columbia on Ariosto, after his lectures at Harvard. Ray and Italo were both deep in "mathematical speculations", not, however, in the abstract. The human and personal were predominant. Calvino was interested in learning more about education in America, the relation of science to literature; Ray in how a mathematician could write stories. (He was rewriting Genesis in four letter words.) Both Italo and Ray were masters in the use of irony. Calvino was fascinated by the fable. They both knew the limits of reason.

     I shall try to explain why my choice fell on Leonardo Sciascia. Because I never met him, I can freely imagine him in his native Sicily, in the Agrigento I so much love, writing his first story on the benches of the school where he was teaching. Perhaps he leads me back to Pirandello whose plays I directed and acted at Columbia under the guidance of Martha Abba in the early 50s.

     What attracts me to Sciascia is the marvelous combination of cold irony and warm passion, the harmonious coexistence of reason and non-reason, the passion with which he embraces an idea, lives with it, working around it in his own mind until he finally translates it into most concise writing. He was extremely proud of his conciseness. He prided himself for having invented a new literary genre, the genre of the short essay.

     His life stretches through Fascism, the war, the postwar moment of ecstasy, when writers believed they could write as the Voice of the People. He takes part in the intense literary debates of the avantgard in the 60s, at a distance, from the advantage point of his insular balcony, and dives ferociously into the accusation of political power in the 70s and the 80s, up to his death.

     Sciascia begins very humbly by publishing a story via Calvino in "Nuovi Argomenti," and publishes in 1956 and 1958 two books: Le parrocchie di Regalpetra and Gli zii di Sicilia. His great trilogy which emerged between 1961 and 1966: Il giorno della civetta, Il Consiglio d'Egitto, A ciascuno il suo, shows the author overwhelmed by the immensity of evil in society. Other works follow rapidly, one after the other: in 1971 Il contesto, a detective story immersed in contemporary politics; in 1974 Todo Modo another detective story or "giallo mafioso" (tutti possono essere uccisi in qualsiasi momento); for the theater L'onorevole, I mafiosi, Commedia siciliana. His tendency to read history in the light of contemporary events is evident. In 1975 with La scomparsa di Majorana he faces the problem of the scientist's responsibility versus his discoveries. A fundamental revelation of his personality is found in his 1977 Candido, ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia, where Catholicism and Communism are equally condemned. "E se l'insieme di tante verità," he writes, "fosse una grande menzogna?" Voltaire is his idol. From this moment on, he specializes in short pieces or Cronachette, dealing mostly with Sicily, such as the Pirandellian Il teatro della memoria and the Bruneri/Canella case; in 1986 La strega e il capitano, a trial for witchery. In 1970 a collection of his writings appears, called La corda pazza, whose subject is Sicily, from the Arab and Norman times to the contemporary.

     In 1978 L'Affare Moro, written a few months after the tragedy, allows Sciascia a political and linguistic analysis of Moro's letters written from prison, on the basis of which he pronounces the most ferocious condemnation of the state as it coexists with the Sicilian Mafia: "da piu di un secolo lo stato Italiano convive con la Mafia siciliana, con la camorra napoletana e il banditismo sardo. . . . Ma ora si leva, di fronte a Moro prigioniero delle Brigate Rosse, forte e solenne. . . ." This very same State dares to declare today that the Moro of the letters from prison is a different person from the once political man! "Moro e'un altro". In conclusion, Sciascia condemns the Christian Democratic Party of Moro as well as `the others'. His aversion for the Comunist party is relentless, unconditional, categorical.

     In 1979 Nero su nero collects various essays which focus on Sicily, but seen from the point of view of `an Italian writer'.

     Sciascia's books, through their brevity, give form to a magical mystery made of violent passion and ironic detachment. A touch of Dante and Ariosto are humbly compressed in his `volumetto'. He makes of a detective novel a work of art.

     Neither his pessimistic view of human life, nor his violent rejection of the power of the state can kill within him a joy of living which expresses itself through writing as well as reading. He loves to deal with the present by reliving a moment of the past. His sense of the past is so genuine that it allows him to build through it a poetic Myth of the present. Not even reason can check Sciascia's poetic inspiration. He loves reason but as a poet.

     Tu sei ben piu' rigorosamente illuminista di me -- Italo Calvino wrote to him on Oct. 26, 1964 -- le tue opere hanno un carattere di battaglia civile che le mie non hanno mai avuto, hanno una loro univocita' sul piano del pamphlet, anche se sul piano della favola come ogni opera di poesia non possono essere ridotte ad un solo tipo di lettura (quoted by Gianfranco Dioguardi in Ricordo di Leonardo Sciascia [Milano, 1993], p. 41).

     You are a far more demanding Illuminist than I -- your work has a sense of civil struggle that mine never did, it speaks with the unambiguous strength of the pamphlet, and yet on the level of the myth, as with all true poetry, your work cannot be reduced to a single interpretation.

     I love Sciascia for the way he reads as well as for the way he writes :

     Un libro .  . . e' come riscritto in ogni epoca in cui lo si legge e ogni volta che lo si legge. . . ." (ibidem p. 40)

     A book . . . is rewritten in each age in which it is read and each time it is read.

     Sciascia attracts me in particular for the joy he experiences in rereading:

     E sarebbe allora il rileggere un leggere inconsapevolmente carico di tutto che tra una lettura e l'altra e' passato su quel libro e attraverso quel libro nella storia umana e dentro di noi. Ed e' percio' che la gioia del rileggere e' piu grande di quella del leggere. E si potrebbe arrivare a formulare un paradosso: che a rileggere per tutta una vita lo stesso libro si conseguirebbe maggiore felicita' che a leggere un'intera biblioteca. Naturalmente bisogna trovare un libro per cui valga la pena che tutta una vita ruoti a rileggerlo come la terra intorno al sole. (from Cruciverba quoted by Dioguardi).

     And so, re-reading is itself a reading unconsciously charged with all that has taken place in the interval between the readings: to the book and, through the book, to mankind and, ultimately, to us. That is why re-reading gives us far more pleasure than reading. It constitutes something of a paradox: to read just one book for one's entire life would give greater pleasure than reading a whole library full of books. Naturally, one would have to find that particular book worth revolving a life around, as the earth around the sun.

     I know now why I chose Sciascia as my favorite Italian writer among his contemporaries. As a writer, he identifies with the society about which he writes. He is at the same time a writer I can accept as a soul friend, beyond the boundaries of a given society. Because of Sciascia, I regard and study Sicily today as the microcosm of the world in which I live. Among all Italian writers he has provided me with a point not of literary, but of human reference.

     NOTES

     1. The philosopher Ernesto Grassi and I made this particular myth the object of a close study within a theory of "Folly as Creativeness," a course given at Barnard and Columbia in 1984. See Folly and Insanity in Renaissance Literature (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1986), pp. 90-4, 104-06.

     2. The relation of Valla's `voluptas' to the concept of `follia' and `insania' in the two Ferrarese poems was the subject of the course Grassi and I offered at Columbia in 1983 (see note above). As for Valla's dialogue "On Pleasure," see M. de Panizza Lorch, A Defense of Life. Lorenzo Valla's Theory of Pleasure (Munchen: Fink Verlag, 1985); L. Valla, De Vero Falsoque Bono, critical ed. by Maristella de Panizza Lorch (Bari: Adriatica, 1970); Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure/De voluptate, trans. by Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch, Intro. by Lorch (Abaris Books, 1977).

     The issue has been dealt with also in specific articles.

     3. Italy counterbalances our Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammet, Jim Thompson with Alessandro Barrico in Oceano/mare, Andrea Camilleri in Il ladro di merendine, Ferrandino in Pericle il Nero (a day in the life of a gangster told in the first person). Publishing houses like New Directions and Steer Force, as well as translators like Bill Weaver, have given the Italian noir particular attention.)

     4. Again in this case, I find in my own library a generous competent Virgil who guides me through the thick forest of attacks and counterattacks, journals, congresses, debates and ferocious disputes. My main reference book is Petrocchi's and Giannantonio's superb Letteratura, Cultura e Societa' del Novecento (Naples, 1974).

     It is mostly, however, Giuliano Manacorda who, first in the courses he gave at Columbia within the "Center for International Exchange" and now through his two volumes, leads me through the past forty years of Italian debates on the relation of literature to society. I treasure as great gifts his Storia della letteratura italiana contemporanea (1940-1975) published in Rome 1979 and his Letteratura italiana d'oggi 1965-1985, published in Rome in 1987.

     5. Useful for the purpose is A. Berardinelli, Trasformazione dell'idea di letteratura nel corso del decennio '70.