Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction 9781442698093

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy
PART ONE. Beccarian Introspection
1. Investigative Introspection: Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal
2. Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives
3. Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum
4. Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom
PART TWO. Lombrosian Vivisection
5. Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal
6. Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence
7. Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence
8. Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare
Epilogue: Crime in the Twenty-First Century
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

METHODS OF MURDER Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction

This page intentionally left blank

ELENA PAST

Methods of Murder Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4388-8

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Past, Elena, 1976– Methods of murder : Beccarian introspection and Lombrosian vivisection in Italian crime fiction / Elena Past. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4388-8 1. Detective and mystery stories, Italian – History and criticism. 2. Beccaria, Cesare, marchese di, 1738–1794. Dei delitti e delle pene. 3. Lombroso, Cesare, 1835–1909. Uomo delinquente. 4. Crime in literature. I. Title. PQ4181.D4P38 2011

853’.0872090914

C2011-906836-2

This book has been published with a grant from Wayne State University’s Office of the Vice President for Research and the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

To my parents, with love

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

3

PART ONE: BECCARIAN INTROSPECTION 1 Investigative Introspection: Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 23 2 Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 3 Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

82

4 Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom 107 PART TWO: LOMBROSIAN VIVISECTION 5 Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal

135

6 Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 7 Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence 8 Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

171

207 238

49

viii Contents

Epilogue: Crime in the Twenty-First Century Notes

277

References 331 Index 347

269

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to have so many partners in crime: inspired and patient readers and dear friends whose input shapes my thinking and my writing. Deborah Amberson, Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, Mariana Past, and Jessie Swigger read and reread countless versions of my work with their characteristic grace and brilliance. Thibaut Schilt, Pierluigi Erbaggio, and Silvia Carlorosi provided invaluable feedback on several chapters. Millicent Marcus and Anne Duggan, aside from making important contributions as readers, have been gifted, caring mentors. Kevin Brownlee, Stefano Cracolici, Victoria Kirkham, and Philippe Met were indispensible critics during the project’s early phases. Raffaele De Benedictis, Silvia Giorgini-Althoen, Jim Michels, and Kate Paesani are generous and supportive colleagues, and discussing research and teaching with them makes it a pleasure to go to work. Students in my seminar courses at Wayne State University have accompanied me in studies of crime fiction with a passion that fuelled my own. Stephanie Friedman, Sally Nash, Ann Warner, and Fabiana Cecchini have followed the progress of this project for years, and their curiosity and enthusiasm make things worthwhile. A heartfelt thank you to my parents, Al and Kay Past, for their love, support, and editorial skills, and for loving languages and literature. Finally, a special thanks to my partner Ed Slesak for his boundless patience, love, and encouragement. My research was funded in part through the generous support of Wayne State University’s Humanities Center, a University Research Grant, and the Office of the Vice President for Research. It is an honour to be a part of an institution so willing to encourage and to fund scholarship. I am indebted to Riccardo Bottoni of the Progetto Insmli-Issnaf, who graciously provided research support from Italy at the conclusion

x Acknowledgments

of the project. Ron Schoeffel at the University of Toronto Press has been a wonderful editor, and I also thank Kate Baltais for her superior editorial eye. A version of Chapter 4 appeared in Quaderni d’italianistica (‘Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio’s Literary Courtroom,’ Quaderni d’italianistica 31/2 (2010): 127–48); part of Chapter 7 was originally published in Forum italicum (‘The Dying Diva: Violent Ends for Clara Calamai in Ossessione and Profondo rosso,’ Forum Italicum 42/2 (2008): 296–312). My thanks to these journals for granting me permission to reprint my work here.

METHODS OF MURDER Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

The ‘Absurd Hypothesis’ of the Italian Giallo Italy, land of intrigue, dark pasts, and organized crime? Or Italy, land of sunshine, sunflowers, and cheery beaches? Italy, ideal backdrop for tales of violence and crime? Or Italy, incompatible with such lurid narratives? During the 1930s and in years following, this line of questioning drove debates about the relevance of crime fiction – and about its very existence – on the Italian peninsula. As numerous scholars of crime fiction note, comments by critic Alberto Savinio and writer Augusto De Angelis fuelled inquiries about the relationship between the Italian nation and this popular form of literature. Savinio famously avowed that ‘il “giallo” italiano è assurdo per ipotesi’ (the Italian giallo [detective novel]1 is an absurd hypothesis), suggesting that sunny Mediterranean landscapes and well-behaved Italians were hardly the appropriate protagonists for tales of crime.2 De Angelis, on the other hand, insisted that the ‘romanzo poliziesco è il frutto – frutto rosso di sangue [. . .] della nostra epoca’ (detective novel is the fruit – the red, bloodied fruit of our age), reminding readers that Italy is the land of the Borgias, of the popes: ‘Nulla è più vivo della morte, oggi’ (Nothing is more alive today than death).3 The heated discussion regarding the pertinence of crime fiction in Italy also may have been driven by the tardy entry of the detective on the Italian literary scene. As early as 1841, the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ first met the man who, according to many scholars, was literature’s first detective, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. Although Dupin and his rapidly multiplying counterparts in England, the United States, and France captivated innumerable

4

Methods of Murder

readers in the ensuing years, the figure of the classical detective, with his well-honed intuition and analytical prowess, arrived late on Italian soil. Scholars of the genre often argue that the notion of the classical detective novel did not exist in Italy until 1929, the year that Mondadori issued the first of its now-renowned yellow-covered paperbacks, not only launching the editorial series but also inspiring the Italian name for the genre.4 In spite of the strange history of crime fiction in Italy, the split between Savinio and De Angelis makes clear that critics and writers agreed, early on, that there was something important at stake in this form of popular writing. The intellectual significance of crime fiction in Italy extends far beyond questions of national stereotypes and of the appropriateness of the Italian landscape and national character for tales of crime. Since its emergence, in both positive and negative terms, crime fiction has been part of a national discussion about culture and politics and has reflected Italian attitudes towards crime. In fact, an argument in favour of the national cultural significance of crime fiction in Italy in the early twentieth century is an easy one to make, given that two prominent figures in Italian politics, actively concerned with the politics of culture, directed their attention to the genre. Around the same time that Mondadori began publication of its popular Libri Gialli series, Antonio Gramsci and Benito Mussolini squared off at opposite ends of a debate on crime fiction, arguing for its importance to contemporary Italian culture and politics. The Marxist thinker and the Fascist administration both mulled over the ways such publications might support or threaten their divergent cultural ideologies. Gramsci, arrested by the Fascist government for his political views, spent a significant period of time in a Milanese prison reading and reflecting on popular novels, such as Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes. He was fascinated by the wide appeal of such literature, and interested in understanding what societal needs it fulfilled. Most of all, he was perplexed by the lack of such literature in Italy: ‘Neanche il romanzo poliziesco, che ha avuto tanta fortuna internazionale (e finanziaria per gli autori e gli editori) ha avuto scrittori in Italia’ [Not even the detective novel, which has enjoyed such great international fortune (and financial fortune for its authors and editors), has had writers in Italy].5 Detective fiction, Gramsci felt, might be an example of the national-popular literature that could form alliances between the intellectuals and the broader, national masses. He

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

5

thus imbued it with the potential for revolutionary national change, the capacity to form linguistic and social alliances between disparate groups and, ultimately, thought it might play a key role in the project of nation building. Detective fiction and Italy, Gramsci suggested, could grow hand in hand. The political prisoner obtained permission to work on an ambitious cultural project from his cell in 1929, and that February Gramsci began writing the Quaderni del carcere. It was the same year that Mondadori began publication of its Libri Gialli series, marking the national editorial launch of the genre for which Gramsci held high hopes. The Fascist government, however, also developed ideas about potential connections between detective fiction and national identity, and it began to intervene in the creative production of works soon after Mondadori launched its series. In an attempt to control both the creation of culture and its consumption, the Ministry of Culture (the infamous Minculpop, or Ministero di Cultura Popolare) legislated that writers of detective fiction must follow its mandates. Initially, the Minculpop required that names of characters in all novels must be Italianized; the giallo was obligated to cast any potentially ‘negative’ or ‘corrupt’ characters as foreigners; and the setting for a crime had to be either foreign or ‘peculiar,’ such as the film studio Cinecittà, where foreigners abounded.6 Alberto Tedeschi, who worked for the Mondadori series, remembers that if at first the triumph of good over evil in detective fiction seemed to placate the Fascist government, things eventually changed: Un giorno arrivò l’ordine di non parlare di suicidi. Evidentemente, il regime pensava che togliersi la vita fosse una debolezza indegna del saldo carattere littorio. E così, per amore del Giallo, quando capitava l’occasione mi mettevo al tavolino e trasformavo i suicidi in incidenti stradali, o in accidentali cadute dalla finestra.7 [One day the order arrived to not speak of suicides. Evidently, the regime thought that taking one’s life was a weakness unworthy of the firm Fascist character. And so, for love of the giallo, when the occasion arose, I sat down at my desk and transformed suicides into car crashes, or into accidental falls from a window.]

Eventually the Fascist government completely outlawed the publication of gialli. Mussolini ordered that by 31 October 1941, all detective novels ever printed or sold had to be confiscated, and Mondadori’s

6

Methods of Murder

successful Libri Gialli series was closed that year with the publication of Ezio D’Errico’s La casa inabitabile.8 L’Assalto, a Fascist-leaning magazine published in Bologna, reported: Il Ministero della Cultura Popolare ha disposto, per ragioni di carattere morale, che la pubblicazione dei libri gialli sia sotto forma di periodici, sia di dispense, venga sottoposta alla preventiva sua autorizzazione [. . .] Il provvedimento è saggio e intelligente. Era ora di finirla con questo genere di bassa letteratura [. . .] importata dai paesi anglosassoni, esercitava – specie nella gioventù – una influenza negativa, favorendo, in maniera rilevante, la delinquenza minorile. Ben venga, dunque, la disposizione ministeriale.9 [The Ministry of Popular Culture has ordered, for reasons of moral character, that the publication of gialli both in periodical and in instalment form, should be submitted to its preventive authority [. . .] The provision is wise and intelligent. It was time to put a stop to this genre of low literature [. . .] imported from Anglo-Saxon countries; it often exercised a negative influence, especially on youth, favouring, in a significant way, juvenile crime. The ministry’s order is welcome.]

Marxist and Fascist interest in crime fiction make a compelling case for its importance in Italian culture. These positions reveal the potentially strong ties between a nation and its literature, between printed word and national self, and they show a desire to stage political ideologies and epistemologies in popular fiction. They also help point to the wider philosophical and ideological significance of crime fiction, its ability to speak to and even influence the attitudes and perceptions of its wide readership. Fascist fear of the genre, revealed in the administration’s ultimate decision to prevent publication of detective novels, further indicates its intellectual potential to subvert dominant structures of power: gialli might teach citizens how to challenge the status quo. Today, after lurking for many years at the margins of the book market and the edges of critical and academic inquiry, the Italian detective has dramatically emerged from the shadows. At the turn of the millennium, a popular Italian literature of crime erupted onto the market with remarkable force. An article in La Repubblica suggests that crime fiction written in Italy increased by 1700 per cent in the decade 1994–2004.10 Critical retrospectives on the history of the genre have begun to retrace its national past, commencing with Loris Rambelli’s seminal work, Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano (1979), and academic studies have begun to direct their attention to popular crime fiction in Italy, taking a wide variety of

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

7

approaches in order to consider its generic, social, and even psychoanalytical significance.11 In the introductory essay to an issue of the journal Symposium dedicated to the topic, Luca Somigli calls for historical, aesthetic, and ideological studies of crime fiction, arguing that ‘behind the façade of escapism and disengagement that has traditionally characterized the genre, there lies a powerful instrument for social analysis and cultural criticism.’12 As Somigli suggests, the recent abundance of crime fiction reopens debates about the genre’s significance and about the intellectually important ideas that its popular façade might obscure. Detective fiction invites criticism that focuses, predictably, on the question of genre since precisely codified rules, such as the canonical procedures established by Ronald Knox in England and S.S. Van Dine in the United States in the genre’s ‘Golden Age’ of the 1920s, provide a natural framework against which to read such texts. Critical studies that depart from a generic understanding of such fiction might examine sub-genres, shifting generic trends, or transgressions of the type. They tend to circulate around a literary-thematic centre and a circumscribed group of parent texts, and they are based on a particular understanding of the literary paternity of the detective. While various ‘archeological’ studies of detective fiction propose classical myths, such as that of Oedipus, biblical stories, the Arabian Nights, or ancient Chinese and Japanese tales as prototypes for the crime-investigation-resolution paradigm,13 most analyses take as their point of departure a familiar lineage of investigative forefathers. Many emerging studies of Italian crime fiction, in fact, link the burgeoning tradition of detectives to a string of memorable literary predecessors, including Poe’s Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret;14 they distinguish between varying shades of ‘giallo’;15 they consider regional variations on the Italian detective story;16 and they catalogue the contributions of Italian writers, beginning in 1929, to this monumental literary past.17 Epistemologies of Crime Historical approaches are critical interpretive tools for a self-conscious literature that frequently plays with its relationship to the generic past. But as Somigli’s call proposes, there is much more to be explored. Some of the most intriguing scholarly works that consider crime fiction press beyond the literary, linking the genre with paradigms of thought and

8

Methods of Murder

structures of power. Michel Foucault discusses crime fiction in Discipline and Punish, arguing that the emergence of this kind of fiction can be read in tandem with changing governmental power structures. Whereas during the days of public executions, the criminal was glorified and, in some ways, symbolically empowered, Foucault argues that the emerging literature of crime essentially participated in the gentrification of wrongdoing, and so ‘the people was robbed of its old pride in its crimes; the great murders had become the quiet game of the well behaved.’18 Crime fiction, then, is both symptom and effect of the transition to the disciplinary society that Foucault illustrates in his landmark study. In a celebrated essay titled ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,’ historian Carlo Ginzburg hypothesizes the existence of an epistemological model that emerged silently in the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, but with roots in much older currents of thought.19 The trend, which he calls the ‘paradigma indiziario’ or ‘evidential paradigm,’ reflects a new strategy of examining the ‘most trivial details’ to decipher or analyse a given subject. Sherlock Holmes used the evidential paradigm to solve cases; Giovanni Morelli used the study of details to identify works of art; a young Sigmund Freud was fascinated by seemingly trifling information. Ginzburg’s spiralling analysis of the precursors and successors to this developing epistemology demonstrates the complex associations that can spring from this kind of investigation. Near the end of the essay, Ginzburg revisits his itinerary describing the ‘threads in a carpet’ he has woven. The historical threads run vertically through time (from Serendip to Zadig to Conan Doyle), horizontally across disciplines (from medicine to graphology), and diagonally from one historical context to another. Although Ginzburg points out the prevalence of medical discourse in his study,20 crime is also a recurrent theme: from Sherlock Holmes’ investigations, to handwriting analyses that could ‘safeguard’ ‘civil (i.e., bourgeois) society,’ to anthropometric methods for recognizing recidivist criminals.21 Confirming the lessons evident in the above-cited cases of Gramsci and Mussolini, Ginzburg demonstrates that investigation, and even more specifically crime, sits at the crossroads of diverse historical threads and paradigms of thought. Following the invitations in the works of Foucault and Ginzburg to challenge the limits of disciplinary and generic boundaries, possibilities emerge for a new critical understanding of the tradition that has nourished the copious production of Italian crime fiction in recent years.

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

9

Although the ties between detective fiction and science have been solidly established,22 Italian scholarship has yet to analyse thoroughly an intellectual past that historically and philosophically has influenced the development of investigative thinking in science and literature in Italy. The present study extends beyond literary genealogy in order to put crime fiction in dialogue with other paradigms of thought that contribute to its development. Criminology is one of the most significant fields in this regard, since alongside the literary past, crime fiction also communicates a society’s relationship to delinquency itself. If Italians did not begin writing codified crime fiction until many years after its emergence on the global scene, they had been theorizing wrongdoing and actively contributing to international understandings of crime and punishment long before 1841. Philosophical and theoretical debates on the topic of criminology constitute a provocative conceptual base for the analysis of contemporary crime fiction and contribute to the formation of the Italian literature of crime. In spite of the fragmented history of crime fiction in Italy, the country has long been known for its contributions to criminology and is, in fact, considered in most criminological studies to be the birthplace of this field of research. Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), the Enlightenment-era philosopher who worked specifically in the area of penal reform, and Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), who concentrated attentions on the criminal subject and was at the head of the positivist school of criminal anthropology, are frequently cited as the founding fathers of criminology. Questions regarding crime and the criminal, then, have been pondered and debated in the Italian context for a number of centuries. And underlying the recent outpouring of crime fiction, whether procedural, hard-boiled, noir, etc., are discernible attitudes towards the problem of crime that in many ways determine the unfolding of the narrative, its style, and its substance. Enlightened Investigations: Voltaire and Beccaria The Enlightenment roots of Poesque thought are often cited at the foundations of the literary phenomenon of detection. Stefano Tani comments, ‘Voltaire and Beaumarchais epitomize the triumph of Enlightenment rationality and in their playful examples of “inductive reasoning” foreshadow the detective’s role.’23 Tani lauds Voltaire’s novella Zadig (1747) as one such ‘playful example’ and as the prototype

10

Methods of Murder

par excellence for methods of detection. In this short work of fiction by the celebrated French philosopher, Zadig displays remarkable skills of deduction in concluding that a search party is looking for a horse and a female dog, both of which he describes accurately without ever having seen them by interpreting the traces left behind when the animals passed by.24 Such ratiocinative savvy, argue critics, marks the beginning of the kind of thinking that could lead Poe to create the brilliantly rational detective C. Auguste Dupin, who had ‘a peculiar analytic ability’ and took ‘an eager delight in its exercise.’25 By shifting the focus of analysis on the Zadig story slightly, however, a parallel path becomes evident, offering an interpretive frame that more closely follows the figure of the criminal than that of the detective. The story of Zadig also includes the astute observer’s appearance before a court of law; the judges who initially condemn him for theft of the king’s animals later praise his brilliant interpretive skills and allow him to go free. A second path, then, rather than indicating the way from Zadig to Dupin, leads us to a judicial investigative context, and an alternative itinerary for the history of crime fiction departs from the figure of the criminal rather than the detective as fictional protagonist. In support of this alternative Enlightenment framework, it is important to note that the fictional elaboration of Zadig’s investigative talents was not Voltaire’s only foray into the world of detection. The French philosopher also dedicated long hours to a story of failed investigation, and this historical conduit indicates another possible itinerary for the epistemological origins of detection, one connected directly to the Italian role in the history of criminology. While Zadig’s cunning intellect may have been playful, knowledge in the Enlightenment era also self-consciously attached itself to the spirit of the Kantian motto, ‘Sapere Aude! “Have courage to make use of your own understanding!” ’26 Engaged thought was also called to the service of political and social change: the same process of accumulation of evidence and deduction of facts that could direct Zadig to identify the owners of runaway pets could also lead to mandates for effecting social reform. Just as scholars of the detective novel mark Zadig’s appearance as the beginning of modern methods of detection, so do various scholars of criminology consider the philosopher’s interest in a particularly famous criminal case an apt starting point for their histories of the discipline.27 The French philosophe’s engagement with his contemporary society led him to follow closely a number of trials and, perhaps most famously,

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

11

the highly charged events surrounding a murder trial that came to be known as the Calas affair.28 On 18 March 1762, Jean Calas was executed in the city of Toulouse, convicted for murdering his eldest son, Marc-Antoine, by hanging him in the family’s fabric shop at 16 Grand Rue des Filatiers. After the aggrieved family had reported finding the body of Marc-Antoine, police arrested and imprisoned five people who at the time were at the Calas home, located just over the shop.29 The family initially claimed that the young man was murdered, possibly because in eighteenthcentury, predominantly Catholic Toulouse, suicide was stigmatized as shameful and would have reflected badly on both victim and family.30 Eventually, however, they admitted that Marc-Antoine, who had been depressed and had often threatened to kill himself, had succeeded. Jean Calas continued to sustain his innocence through months of questioning and eventual judicial torture; nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to a horrifically violent punishment.31 Voltaire took interest in the case and was outraged at what he perceived to be an unfair trial and an unfounded conviction.32 He actively campaigned for the reversal of the sentence, and upon Calas’ execution, composed the celebrated Traité sur la tolerance à l’occasion de la mort de Jean Calas (Treatise on Tolerance). Following a method that foreshadows Edgar Allan Poe’s analyses of current events (via the newspapers, for the ‘Mystery of Marie Roget’), Voltaire demonstrated what he considered the impossibility of Calas’ murder of his son by analysing the evidence culled from reports on the case: It was clearly impossible that Jean Calas, an old man of sixty-eight who had long suffered from weak and swollen legs, should have strangled and hanged his son of twenty-eight, whose strength, moreover, was above the average; it would have been absolutely necessary for him to be assisted in the crime by his wife, by his son, Pierre, by Lavaisse, and by the servant. Besides, on the evening of the fatal event they had not left each other’s side for one moment. Yet this latter proposition is as absurd as the first. For how could one conceive that an ardent Catholic servant should suffer Huguenots to assassinate the young man she had brought up all his life, precisely to punish him for embracing the religion she herself professed? How could it be imagined that Lavaisse should make the journey from Bordeaux expressly to kill his friend when he was totally ignorant of his supposed conversion? How could one suggest that a tender-hearted mother should stain her hands with the blood of her own son? And how

12

Methods of Murder did one suppose that they could join forces to strangle a young man who was more robust than all of them put together, without a long and violent struggle, without screams to alert the entire neighbourhood, without blows, bruises, or torn clothing?33

The Calas affair offended both the workings of enlightened human reason and of justice because the legal narrative of the crime, which permitted the judges to hand down the sentence, was full of logical holes. A faulty legal system allowed incompetent investigators (the judges) unfairly to persecute the innocent. Falsely accused suspects, for whom there was no evidence of guilt, were subjected to cruel detention and punishment. Voltaire’s discourse on tolerance encouraged the distancing of such victims from the long arm of the law. It demonstrated the dangers of allowing political, religious, or social ends to interfere with reason and, thus, sounded a call for a criminal justice system to be administered with attention to clear, enlightened thought.34 In a frustrated letter to Jean le Rond d’Alembert discussing his dismay at the working of the judicial system, Voltaire proclaimed one of the famous cries of the French Enlightenment: ‘écrasez l’infâme!’ (crush the infamy!). Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) [On Crimes and Punishments] was published in Italy just two years later, as if answering Voltaire’s call. The work begins by echoing Voltaire’s consternation at the barbarism inherent in the contemporary legal system and maintains throughout the belief in the powers of reason to generate social and philosophical change. Voltaire, who was instrumental in the 1765 French translation of Beccaria’s opus, wrote an appreciative commentary to introduce it, the ‘Commentaire sur le livre Des délits et des peines’ (‘Commentary on the book On Crimes and Punishments’ ), which was appended to the 1766 edition. He additionally dedicated his ‘Account of the Death of the Chevalier de La Barre,’ another lamentation of the misapplication of judicial power, to the marquis. This time, Voltaire lauded Beccaria’s staunch support for the ‘cause of humanity’ and condemned an ‘advocate of barbarity’ who failed to appreciate Dei delitti.35 According to the French philosophe, Beccaria’s treatise provided an ideologically committed solution to the problem of the barbarous actions of the French judiciary.36 The judges’ decision in the case of Jean Calas reflected what appeared to be a wilful misinterpretation of the facts, not only a blow to the Calas family and to the wheels of justice, but an affront to reason itself, a misuse of the powers of elucidation

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

13

diffused by Enlightenment thought. Beccaria’s disquisition, then, provided the philosophical model needed to avoid such cruelty, for its scientific precision in aligning crimes with appropriate punishments was based on the belief that reason could eradicate the arbitrary, the incorrect, and the unjust.37 It protected against the dangers of bad investigation, forming, instead, a staunchly rational model to be employed in dealing with criminality. This itinerary, diverging from the typical chronology that leads – implicitly or explicitly – from the Enlightenment to Edgar Allan Poe to the history of classical detection, instead, emerges on a parallel intellectual path, and one that takes us from the same philosophical starting place to the world of penal reform and to classical criminology and, hence, directly to the notable Italian history inventing the criminal. Even if canonical detective fiction was late to bloom in Italy, Dei delitti e delle pene makes evident the ways in which the southern European nation was thinking about crime and actively participating in exchanges on the subject since at least the eighteenth century. The criminal as carefully delineated object of scientific study was also a child of the Enlightenment, arguably born in Beccaria’s internationally acclaimed treatise.38 The reaction to the work both in Italy and abroad was clamorous, inspiring heated global debates on the subject of penal reform and criminality. Thus, the ‘classical’ school of criminology took its place on the global conceptual stage at the precise moment when, according to many scholars, epistemological models emerged making equally ‘classical’ detective fiction possible.39 Introspection vs. Lombrosian Vivisection Cesare Beccaria and Cesare Lombroso worked to make what is now called criminology into a science, into an organized system of knowledge, but they did so in significantly different ways. Beccaria is widely considered the father of the ‘classical’ school of criminology. Dei delitti e delle pene proposes systemic reforms that Beccaria hopes will assure the smooth and fair functioning of the criminal justice system. Lombroso was at the head of the positive school of criminology, at the time known as the school of criminal anthropology, a group committed to understanding crime as it resided within the body of the criminal. His massive publication, L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man), first published in 1876, was the result of empirical studies of the living and dead bodies of hundreds of convicted offenders. It led Lombroso to hypothesize

14

Methods of Murder

a special, atavistic genealogy for criminal man, and to suggest that because of stunted or degenerative evolutionary development, the born criminal is genetically predisposed to commit crimes. Although his conclusions have proven problematic for their advancement of theories of biological determinism, Lombroso’s work is, historically speaking, an essential part of this history of criminological thought. Alongside their passionate affirmations of a commitment to scientific precision, Beccaria and Lombroso also delve into an intriguing relationship with the criminal and his milieu, formulating the beginnings of a fictional criminal and providing later writers with all the trappings of a popular criminological mythology. Ultimately, Beccaria’s juridical musings and Lombroso’s scientific explorations offer hermeneutic frameworks in which to examine the mind and body of the criminal. Their works, powerfully suggestive in the discipline of criminology, deserve a place on the shelves of the Italian crime fictional past as well. In this study, the terms ‘Beccarian’ and ‘Lombrosian’ are starting points that mark, in turn, the points of departure of writers who make questions of crime and criminality central in their work. The analyses thus diverge, in large part, from questions of genre and sub-genre, choosing, instead, to consider the epistemologies of crime in works by six artists. Although this book’s two sections begin with theoretical chapters dedicated to the work of Cesare Beccaria and Cesare Lombroso, this is not a genealogical study that seeks to find direct filiations linking contemporary authors to these thinkers (although such connections in some cases exist, and when they do, they will be discussed). Writers in the Beccarian tradition might reject Enlightenment philosophy. Writers in the Lombrosian tradition might take issue with the conclusions of Cesare Lombroso’s deterministic theories. Yet, the portraits of the criminal world and of the crime scene that they sketch reveal frameworks that reflect these differing understandings of the problem of criminality. Bringing to the fore critical interpretive questions raised in the works of the two thinkers serves to draw out approaches to crime and the criminal, approaches that to this day drive the criminal justice system and that similarly motivate writers of fiction who take crime as their central subject. When applied to a study of contemporary crime fiction, these frameworks in some cases help to illustrate the critiques at work in innovative texts, and in others, expose a failure to critically assess dominant paradigms of thought. The Beccarian line, although characterized by an approach born in the era of Enlightenment, is not a sunny and optimistic one. Rather, it

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

15

is an approach that begins with the idea that the system, and not the criminal, is the primary object of study, the first consideration when contemplating the problem of crime. Beccarian epistemology is based on a strategy of introspection, an act the Oxford English Dictionary describes as looking into or under the surface of things, especially with the mind. Beccaria’s treatise disembodies the criminal, positing that the biological human subject should be protected from abuses by the state (most famously, capital punishment). Consequently, he figures the criminal as a ‘citizen-delinquent,’ an introspective being who contemplates crime rationally, but who lacks a body to punish. Beccaria envisions a justice system that can express itself in clear, contemporary language and that can function with mathematical precision. The Beccarian criminal, then, is a calculating, intelligent being who reflects upon his environment and acts accordingly; he is understood primarily through his ability to reason. His accompanying investigator is generally a detective-philosopher, capable of understanding (like Beccaria) the criminal thought process as well as idly musing about myriad other conundrums. The ethical question at the centre of such crime fiction is a universal one, one that aspires to the repeatability of Galilean science:40 does justice exist, and can it be delivered by observing the procedures and laws of the existing system? The Lombrosian tradition, on the other hand, advanced the belief that the limits of the knowable lie not in an abstract analysis of systems, but rather within the biological human being. Thus, the criminal body might be poked, prodded, shocked, and finally dissected in the quest for quantitative results to analyse. Although Lombroso’s research is declaredly positivist and thus in large part empirical, including the collection of numerical evidence and anthropometric measurements of the body, his science also recognizes the inevitably slippery nature of the living individual. As a result, L’uomo delinquente lurks around the divide separating the living from the dead, recognizing in this moment of bodily transition an opportunity to delve inside the criminal. While Lombroso obsessively investigates the offender, and the texts examined often focus on the victim of crime, both positivist science and fiction in the Lombrosian vein betray a preoccupation with the body as site of crime and of criminal investigation. The Lombrosian criminal is generally a more dangerous creature, capable of physically assaulting victim or investigator alike, posing serious threats (and serious investigative challenges) to the bodies of his adversaries. The corresponding Lombrosian investigator must be prepared to take on the physical

16

Methods of Murder

mysteries of the criminal subject, and perhaps to engage in a physical battle with him or her. At the centre of Lombrosian crime fiction, then, there presses a need for conjectural truth, the kind of truth that the social sciences promise to deliver by way of rigorous analysis of the sign system that is the human body. In the most complex Lombrosian fiction, authors use this framework to question deterministic science and the limits of what we can hope to know about how criminal bodies and minds function. Beccaria, Lombroso, and Crime Fiction This study proposes an alternative interpretive framework rooted in the criminological past, and shows that Italian crime fiction is embedded in a centuries-old Italian discussion, and not simply an Anglo-Saxon literary tradition. Beccarian and Lombrosian epistemologies in works of twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction expose assumptions that contemporary authors make about how to approach crime and criminality. Philosophical and stylistic practices in fiction echo thinking about the problem of criminality, revealing the way that popular culture interacts with intellectual movements and scientific practice. Part I of the book, ‘Beccarian Introspection,’ analyses works in the Beccarian vein. After a discussion of ‘Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal’ (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 posits that the writer Leonardo Sciascia engages a Beccarian position to critique abuses of power and, ultimately, the failure of Enlightenment thought in Sicily. Sciascia’s characterization of the eighteenth century as a ‘secolo educatore’ (educating century) lauds a ‘joy in reasoning’ proper to its most central figures. But his essay ‘Il secolo educatore,’ a meditation on the Enlightenment period, demonstrates a Foucauldian concern regarding less luminous questions of power that also surfaced during that period. His crime fiction exists at the intersection of the utopian ideal of joy in the pursuit of knowledge and the more perilous question of the exercise of power. The conflict between these two expressions of Enlightenment drives Sciascia’s crime fiction, which, in leaving many crimes unpunished, demonstrates the failure of the justice system and the impossibility of joyous reason in Sicily. Chapter 3 analyses Andrea Camilleri’s series dedicated to the investigations of Salvo Montalbano, in which the author creates a simulated Sicily built on a Beccarian concept of crime. Montalbano, a cerebral investigator whose intellectual musings are featured but whose physical appearance is almost never

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

17

described, uses Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightenment as a set piece that augments the hyperreality of the invented world of Vigàta. Whereas in Beccaria, theatrics (in the form of invented monologues in the mind of the hypothetical criminal) become a means for understanding justice, in Camilleri, justice becomes a privileged subject of inspiration for theatrics. The Beccarian framework is used as an aesthetic strategy and serves the true aim of the novels: pleasure in reading. Chapter 4 considers a trio of novels by Gianrico Carofiglio that recount the legal adventures of attorney Guido Guerrieri. Rooted in a Beccarian system of legal procedure, the Guerrieri novels demonstrate a constant concern with the violence of the law, considering legal channels necessary to combat injustice. Yet, reflecting on debates surrounding Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence,’41 it becomes evident that attorney Guerrieri negotiates a weak application of the law, using it to acquit and to absolve, in an attempt to mitigate its violence. Part II of the book, ‘Lombrosian Vivisection,’ introduces Cesare Lombroso (in Chapter 5) and is dedicated to Lombrosian-style narratives. Chapter 6 presents an analysis of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s crime fiction, in particular, the novels Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana and La cognizione del dolore. These two works focus on an investigation of the bodies of the victims at the moment of death, demonstrating a Lombrosian fascination with the divide between the living and the dead. Gadda’s recurrent representation of the body’s abjection is rooted in a philosophical conviction that the internal tangle of our bodies’ viscera – our biological complexity – is an essential part of the disorder of the world. Through the dismemberment caused by crime, the internal disorder of the body pushes irretrievably outwards, reminding us of the permeability of our personal boundaries, both intellectual and corporeal. Chapter 7, on film director Dario Argento, departs from an analysis of the ‘animal trilogy,’ Argento’s earliest directorial work, to explore the thematic scientific foundation that underlies this group of films. In expositions at the end of each film, Argento offers a biological or psychological explanation for the crimes committed. Yet, the films systematically dismantle their own accounts of criminal men and women; in Profondo rosso it becomes clear that the deconstruction of scientific determinism is actually the springboard from which Argento launches an innovative, Lombrosian aesthetic. Argento’s visual space, which resembles a Deleuzian ‘cinema of the body,’ allows him to protest not only scientific determinism, but also the narrow critical framework by which his work has been judged. Chapter 8 proposes

18

Methods of Murder

that Carlo Lucarelli’s serial killer trilogy is rooted in a contemporary concept of mediatic schizophrenia, echoing Baudrillard’s understanding of a postmodern subject who lacks the ability to separate himself from an increasingly invasive, technologically driven world. Pushing past this postmodern surface, it becomes possible to identify Lucarelli’s Lombrosian fascination with the inner, biological workings of the crime scene. Departing from philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s work on the ‘anthropological machine,’ a contemporary tendency to take on biological life as a political task, it becomes evident that the violence of Lucarelli’s texts and their investigative settings reveal a criminological framework that can be tied, conceptually speaking, to the work of Lombroso. This fixation, confirmed by Lucarelli’s participation in a series of publications composed in collaboration with criminologist Massimo Picozzi, reveals the haunting presence of positivist criminological thought at the root of these works of high-tech crime fiction. The Case for Criminology Although Beccaria’s and Lombroso’s writings have been subject to frequent and often vehement criticism (a fact discussed at greater length in the chapters dedicated to each author, in particular, regarding Lombroso), an increasing number of scholars agree nevertheless that echoes of their thought continue to sound in contemporary academic studies and, more specifically, in contemporary culture. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, who includes an extensive chapter on Lombroso in her book The Pinocchio Effect, argues that the relationship between the ‘juridico-ideological operations of the state,’ on the one hand, and biopolitics, on the other, plays a part in the project of ‘making Italians.’42 She maintains that Italy develops a compromise between these two forms of power, and that in the process of ‘making Italians’ it attempts ‘to theorize the relationship between sovereign power and biopolitics, between state and national culture.’43 In an analysis of the production of discourse about the criminal in nineteenth-century England and France, Marie-Christine Leps cites both Beccaria and Lombroso in her opening chapter, as she demonstrates that the ‘similarities between the modern resurgence of criminology and its emergence at the end of the nineteenth century are amazingly numerous and far-reaching.’44 Crime and criminology, justice and power, it seems, are deeply embedded in the fabrics of nation and culture. This study draws the literature and cinema of crime into a discussion whose relevance is uncontested

Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy

19

among historians, criminologists, and philosophers. More significantly, this lens helps bring to the fore issues regarding power, justice, and the criminal that proliferate in these tales of crime. Read in conjunction with contemporary philosophy and theory, it becomes clear that crime fiction, both popular and canonical, weighs in on these questions. Cast as detective and as criminal, the Italian subject of the literature and cinema of crime plays out the drama of criminality in the contemporary world.

This page intentionally left blank

PART ONE Beccarian Introspection

This page intentionally left blank

1 Investigative Introspection: Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal

Introspection 1. The action of looking into, or under the surface of, things, esp. with the mind; close inspection or examination of something.? Obs. exc. in reference to one’s own thoughts or feelings: see 2. 2. spec. (with no object expressed): The action of looking within, or into one’s own mind; examination or observation of one’s own thoughts, feelings, or mental state.1

Upon publication, Cesare Beccaria’s groundbreaking Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) crossed the Alps and began to influence scholars around the world: in France, in particular, but also in England, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Germany, Spain, the American colonies, and in Russia. In the introduction to his critical edition of Dei delitti, Franco Venturi writes, ‘La reazione dei singoli, in ogni angolo d’Italia, rivelò i sintomi d’un sommovimento profondo’ (The reaction of individuals in every corner of Italy showed symptoms of a profound stirring).2 Along with accolades and fervent discussions came invitations for the treatise’s young author: from the French philosophes who sought his company in their salons, and from Catherine II of Russia who hoped for his help in reforming the Russian penal system. As part of the Accademia dei Pugni (Academy of Fisticuffs),3 Beccaria and his Milanese colleagues, ‘credettero nella possibilità di riformare e di liberare il nostro paese da servitù ideologiche, religiose e sociali con l’uso della ragione’ (believed in the possibility of reforming and of freeing our country from ideological, religious, and social servitude with the use of reason).4 Yet, in spite of his reformist ideals, Beccaria famously

24

Methods of Murder

refused the invitation to action from Catherine II and only reluctantly agreed to visit his Parisian friends. He cut short his voyage to the French capital, writing in a letter to Pietro Verri while en route that he was ‘pentitissimo del mio viaggio’ (extremely regretful of my trip).5 Venturi explains that the Milanese aristocrat was timorous and extremely tied to his friends and family: ‘Le paure cominciavano ad assalirlo appena fuori della cerchia familiare, delle difese e delle protezioni abituali [. . .] Come avrebbe sopportato, in questo stato d’animo, il gioco raffinato, il dialogo libero e spregiudicato dei philosophes?’ (xxiii) [Fear began to assail him as soon as he was outside the family circle, away from his defences and habitual protections [. . .] How would he have endured, in this state of mind, the refined game, the free and unconventional dialogue of the philosophes?]. Far from an able, gregarious contributor to the debates of the French Enlightenment philosophers, Beccaria was, instead, an introspective individual, happier when carefully examining possibilities for reform than defending his ideas in the more aggressive intellectual atmosphere of the salons. In this respect, Beccaria has a good deal in common with the surly, canonical investigator in the style of Sherlock Holmes or Salvo Montalbano: meditative, gifted, and highly uncomfortable when forced out of his routines. It is not the man, however, but rather Beccaria’s treatise that lays the philosophical basis for an approach to criminality known as the classical school, an approach that considers with declared introspective rigour the significance of the system that tries and convicts the criminal. While Beccaria’s work has generally been explored from the point of view of criminologists, philosophers, and legal scholars, it sketches the contours of an attitude to criminality and, provocatively, develops a means (stylistic and philosophical) for approaching the subject of crime and a particular criminal, an approach that resonates in studies of crime fiction as well.6 At its incipit, Beccaria’s work emerges from what he suggests are the shadows of the past. In presenting his book ‘A Chi Legge’ (To the Reader), he begins by recalling the ancient laws that continue to govern the legal system and that he suggests must be updated: Alcuni avanzi di leggi di un antico popolo conquistatore fatte compilare da un principe che dodici secoli fa regnava in Constantinopoli, frammischiate poscia co’ riti longobardi, ed involte in farraginosi volumi di private ed oscuri interpreti formano quella tradizione di opinioni che da una gran parte dell’Europa ha tuttavia il nome di leggi; ed è cosa funesta

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 25 quanto comune al dí d’oggi che una opinione di Carpzovio, un uso antico accennato da Claro, un tormento con iraconda compiacenza suggerito da Farinaccio sieno le leggi a cui con sicurezza obbediscono coloro che tremando dovrebbono reggere le vite e le fortune degli uomini.7 [Some remnants of the laws of an ancient conquering people, compiled on the orders of a prince ruling in Constantinople twelve centuries ago, later mixed with Langobardic customs and bound together in the sprawling volumes of private and obscure interpreters – this is what forms the tradition of opinions that in a large part of Europe goes under the rubric of law. It is as deplorable as it is common that an opinion of Carpzov, an ancient practice mentioned by Claro, or a torture suggested with wrathful indignance by Farinacci should constitute today the laws so confidently applied by those who ought to be humbled by the task of governing the lives and fortunes of men.]

The dark, deplorable labyrinth of past laws contrasts with the clear, lightness of modern thought valued by Enlightenment thinkers. Past laws were a pastiche of old texts and codes, incomprehensible mixes of opinions, citations, and suggestions culled from ‘farraginosi volumi’ (sprawling volumes) that were both ‘private’ and ‘obscure,’ the exact lexical and ideological opposite of the ideal of public, enlightened thought. In contrast, Dei delitti commences with a penetrating look at the past in an attempt to create order of the confused chaos of the penal system: Queste leggi, che sono uno scolo de’ secoli i piú barbari, sono esaminate in questo libro per quella parte che risguarda il sistema criminale, e i disordini di quelle si osa esporli a’ direttori della pubblica felicità con uno stile che allontana il volgo non illuminato ed impaziente. (3)8 [These laws, which are the dregs of the most barbarous ages, are examined in this book insofar as they pertain to the system of criminal justice. An attempt has been made herein to expose their flaws to those in charge of the public welfare and to do so with a style intended to ward off the unenlightened and impatient masses. (5)]

Thus, Beccaria turns his attention specifically to the criminal branch of the justice system, where the individual enters into the most perilous contact with the government. As a corrective to the barbarous disorder of past laws, he proposes a ‘science of man’ conceived by those dedicated to the search for truth.9 And, as this passage insists, his strategy

26

Methods of Murder

is not simply propositional, but also stylistic: disorder can be kept at bay by the use of a ‘style’ that distances itself from that which is not enlightened. A number of different strategies are at work in the short treatise as it elaborates a theory of penal reform, and this chapter will examine the layers of the argument with the goal of illuminating the Beccarian construction of a criminal subject. One of the most prominent of the analytical strata in Dei delitti takes the form of a critique, often a lamentation of the sick body politic. In order to diagnose the maladies of the system, he uses the canonical image of a human body that, suffering from centuries of ill health, fails to function as it should. This corporeal metaphor underlines a fundamental tension in the treatise, the conflict between human or bodily disarray and rational precision. When sounding a call to heal the sick body politic, in fact, Beccaria’s metaphoric system shifts, preferring to disconnect the discussion from the realm of the physical and to shift it into the more precise contexts of architecture and mathematics. The language of these systems more precisely aligns with his idea of justice, a justice that should be removed from the subjective and thus unpredictable existence of the human body. Yet, the well-being of the citizen is the goal of the treatise, and in order to ensure this welfare, the body must be taken into consideration. In an attempt to negotiate this potential contradiction, Beccaria effects a division of the body of the state from the human subject of the state. In the solution that he proposes, an enlightened government can eliminate such abuses of power as the death penalty and judicial torture. The new, rationally calibrated justice system thus attempts to prevent undue intrusion by the system into the physical world of human subjects. As a direct result of his careful politics of separation (the civic divided from the religious, the historically contingent separated from the eternal), Beccaria formulates a disembodied criminal subject: the individual offender, protected from the potential abuses of the state, exists as a rational mental being, an entity with a voice but largely alienated from more corporeal concerns. The criminal is formulated on a social stage, described as he mulls over the societal reasons that might drive him to commit a crime, and we witness his thought process in the form of hypothetical internal monologues. This approach allows readers to empathize with the criminal’s plight; it is also a representational style that defines Beccarian aesthetics. The formulation of the criminal-asthinking-being serves his ethical ends because the bodiless delinquent occupies a realm distinct from that of the nation and, as such, can be inoculated against the maladies of the state.

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 27

Although Dei delitti has been widely recognized as an important foundational text for modern criminology, its acclaim has not been universal.10 One of the most substantive criticisms of Beccaria’s text appears in Discipline and Punish, where in his history of strategies of punishment Michel Foucault argues that the ‘need for punishment without torture was first formulated as a cry from the heart or from an outraged nature. In the worst of murderers, there is one thing, at least, to be respected when one punishes: his “humanity.” ’11 Foucault’s description of the moral outrage of early penal reformers betrays a hint of irony, because in his view, although the work of the ‘great reformers’ (Beccaria tops his list) pointed out the barbarous nature of judicial torture and public executions, it also contributed to the creation of a quiet, secretive method of punishment that resulted in our contemporary disciplinary machine (and in particular the penal system).12 Nonetheless, as Piers Beirne maintains in Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis,’ this kind of reading of Beccaria’s treatise largely takes into account its effects, rather than its actual discursive strategies.13 Foucault’s study of the transition from a punitive to a disciplinary society is a landmark work important to my own, and I will return to his arguments below. However, this chapter remains committed to Beccaria’s text, and thus focuses on the moment prior, chronologically speaking, to the main thrust of Discipline and Punish. It aims to perform a close, epistemological reading of Dei delitti, examining both its stylistic and its ideological approach to the criminal. Alongside his proposals for an updated, rational means of punishing the criminal, Beccaria also offers an artistic means for understanding him: his study actually includes imaginative criminal monologues that ponder the motivations for crime. Although the criminological effects of the Enlightenment-era treatise are beyond the scope of my work, I argue in subsequent chapters that Beccaria’s approach to his subject informs contemporary literary ideas about crime and the criminal. Dei delitti’s impartial system and the thinking, introspective subject of the law at its centre provide the epistemological foundation – as well as an aesthetic base – for contemporary works of crime fiction by Leonardo Sciascia, Andrea Camilleri, and Gianrico Carofiglio. Intestinal Ferment in the Body Politic Like Voltaire, Beccaria was a socially engaged thinker and eager reformer whose position in society, under the Austrian-ruled Milan, was an active one. He and his fellow members of the Accademia dei

28

Methods of Murder

Pugni were ‘capace [. . .] non soltanto di leggere e discutere insieme, ma anche di agire concordemente’ (capable [. . .] not only of reading and discussing together, but also of acting in agreement).14 Although their subjects of study varied from politics to economics to jurisprudence to language and literature, the modus operandi of such collaboration was scientific, for advances in science formed the means for activating these eager political consciences. Franco Venturi explains: ‘La scienza era necessaria a [i compiti della loro esistenza], cosí come il diffondersi sempre piú largo della cultura scientifica era indispensabile ai ricercatori e agli scopritori. L’uomo pratico doveva continuare a guardare alle grandi leggi dell’universo’ (science was a necessary part of [their endeavours], just as the ever-wider diffusion of scientific culture was indispensable to researchers and discoverers. The practical man had to continue to observe the great laws of the universe).15 Beccaria, nicknamed ‘newtoncino’ for his mathematical abilities, was reputed to be extraordinarily gifted in expressing himself in clear, logical language. Yet, his subject matter, crime and punishment, challenged this clarity of thought with its inherent disorder. At stake in Dei delitti (and in a wider sense in the Enlightenment academies and salons) is the conflict that Ginzburg identifies as the ‘unpleasant dilemma’ of the humane sciences, in their attempt to reconcile the rigours of science with the infinite variability of individual subjects.16 The choice, Ginzburg suggests, is the following: ‘either assume a lax scientific system in order to attain noteworthy results, or assume a meticulous, scientific one to achieve results of scant significance.’17 Beccaria’s treatise attempts to have it both ways – to achieve noteworthy results (a reformed justice system) while maintaining the (enlightened) rigour of his system. A number of philosophical moves characterize this attempt, and these, in turn, distinguish his inventive epistemology and constitute an important part of his legacy. In Dei delitti, the first step is to turn a clinical eye to the problem: Beccaria’s search for truth, which he strategically refers to as an ‘ingenua indagazione della verità’ (3) [sincere search for truth (5)], characterizes society as a patient, object of the scrutinizing, clinical gaze of the researcher who seeks to understand the source of its ills.18 All criminology can be considered social pathology because it regards man and society with the intent of discovering the causes of crime, but Beccaria very specifically invokes the canonical image of the body politic in order to breathe life into his study, making reference to the ‘corpo politico’ on numerous occasions.19 Analogies between body and state have

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 29

long been a part of the literary tradition, figuring in texts from Livy’s History of Rome to the Bible to Dante’s Divina commedia and Petrarch’s Canzone 128.20 Beccaria becomes a societal doctor whose self-imposed task is to diagnose the severity of society’s illness in order to calculate the ‘danno della società’ (23) [injury caused to society (20)]. In Dei delitti the understanding of the body politic serves specifically as a diagnostic tool that will allow the philosopher not only to understand problems, but also to propose strategic solutions. As such, the correct administration of the laws depends upon a vital understanding of society, rather than on an inspection of the body politic conducted as an autopsy, that is, a study of the past, of an immovable, unchanging system. Beccaria’s disquisition insists repeatedly on the inherently mutable qualities of society, which he refers to explicitly as a ‘vivente società’ (15), a living organism in which the flows of the vital political system assure its unpredictability but also allow for change. While the use of corporeal language is persistent in the text, its significance frequently changes. At times his characterization of this collective body tends towards the ephemeral, as when Beccaria describes the human body as a repository of the fundamental principles that must guide lawmaking: Consultiamo il cuore umano e in esso troveremo i principii fondamentali del vero diritto del sovrano di punire i delitti, poiché non è da sperarsi alcun vantaggio durevole dalla politica morale se ella non sia fondata su i sentimenti indelebili dell’uomo. (12) [Let us consult the human heart, and in it we will find the fundamental principles of the sovereign’s true right to punish crimes, for no lasting advantage can be expected from political morality, unless that morality is founded upon the indelible sentiments of mankind. (11)]

The image of the heart here stands for the ‘sentiment’ of all mankind, a moral compass that should guide the creation of punishments. In this case, which describes the ideal working of a healthy state, the body politic has a legislative function. At other times, however, the political corpus is represented with terminology that evokes a sense of the actual function and dysfunction of its parts. Judges receive laws, for example: come effetti di un tacito o espresso giuramento, che le volontà riunite dei viventi sudditi hanno fatto al sovrano, come vincoli necessari per frenare

30

Methods of Murder e reggere l’intestino fermento degl’interessi particolari. Quest’è la fisica e reale autorità delle leggi. (15) [as the result of a tacit or explicit oath that the combined wills of living subjects have sworn to their sovereign, as bonds necessary to restrain and regulate the internecine [intestinal] turmoil born of particular interests. This is the tangible [physical] and real authority of the laws. (14)]

The dramatic discomfort of ‘intestino fermento’ contrasts with the gentler consultation of the ‘cuore umano,’ testifying to the various levels on which this societal body is constructed. The adjective ‘intestino,’ which means ‘internal’ or ‘internecine,’ as the translation suggests, can refer either to that which occurs within a region or a state, or to that which occurs within a body or an organism.21 In Dei delitti, the adjective functions on both levels, part of the system of references to the state as well as to the body of the state. In fact, as this citation makes evident, there is a constant contamination – in the treatise as in the law – between historical and poetic forces, since the authority of the laws is both ‘physical’ and ‘real.’ Laws, which are intended to keep the symbolic physical systems of the body politic functioning smoothly, have very palpable effects on real human bodies. The health of the body politic depends on the existence of such a body (which must have members that compose it), and to this end Beccaria constructs a general list of the categories of crimes according to the varying degrees to which they threaten the survival of the state. The first among these are crimes of treason, since ‘ogni delitto, benché privato, offende la società, ma ogni delitto non ne tenta la immediata distruzione’ (25) [all crime, however private it may be, injures society, but not all crimes aim at its immediate destruction (21)]. This logical argument, which posits that a society depends on its citizens and therefore a healthy society depends on its citizens’ health, allows Beccaria to make arguments in favour of their protection. Laws should act on citizens with the least possible force, since otherwise they threaten to effect the demise of the very society they are designed to protect. In emphasizing the importance of keeping the body politic integral, Beccaria even argues that suicide is less harmful than emigration, since in the former case the body (and its possessions) remains within the borders, while in the latter the body is lost to the state. Thus, he hypothesizes that ‘la forza della società consiste nel numero de’ cittadini’ (79) [the strength of a society consists in the number of its citizens (66)].

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 31

As societal diagnostician, Beccaria is at his most objective when he works with the tools of his profession to propose that laws should be both certain and eminently repeatable, applicable to any subject of the law, regardless of social or economic status. There is an inherent danger in imprecision, he suggests, which can be understood as a reliance on the ‘spirit of the law.’ If judges are allowed the freedom of approximation, Beccaria argues in corporeal terms that the ‘spirit of the law’ would be the result of ‘una buona o cattiva logica di un giudice, di una facile o malsana digestione’ (16) [a judge’s good or bad logic, of his effortless or unhealthy digestion (14)]. As scientist, he seeks the normalizing role, for in finding such a central position, he can, in Galilean style, depend on the ‘quantification and the repetition of phenomena’22 necessary to the precision he desires for the justice system. In this capacity, he insists that one of the most important qualities of punishment is its ‘infallibilità’ (49) [inevitability (49)], and defends the surgical exactitude of the law: Quando un codice fisso di leggi, che si debbono osservare alla lettera, non lascia al giudice altra incombenza che di esaminare le azioni de’ cittadini, e giudicarle conformi o difformi alla legge scritta, quando la norma del giusto o dell’ingiusto, che deve dirigere le azioni sí del cittadino ignorante come del cittadino filosofo, non è un affare di controversia, ma di fatto, allora i sudditi non sono soggetti alle piccole tirannie di molti. (17) [When a fixed code of laws, which must be observed to the letter, leaves the judge no other task than to examine the actions of citizens and to judge whether or not they are consistent with the law as written, and when the norms defining the just or the unjust, which must guide the actions of the ignorant citizen as well as those of the philosopher-citizen, is a matter not of controversy but of fact, then subjects are no longer exposed to the petty tyrannies of many men. (15)]

Laws, Beccaria argues, must be unchanging regardless of the social status or any other particular quality of the accused: nobles, for example, should receive the same punishments as the ‘lowest of citizens’ (42). This is the rational, Enlightenment argument for a precise, universally applicable system of justice. Given the inherently unique nature of the human form, however, in order for laws to work with such accuracy, a number of lines of demarcation must be drawn to separate the mutable from the immutable, the subjective from the objective. The danger of the body politic is its

32

Methods of Murder

potential lack of precision, and errors of imprecision are the ones about which Beccaria demonstrates the greatest concern. A malfunctioning, metaphorical body politic risks subjecting real, human bodies to injustices: unjust imprisonment, judicial torture, or even death. This is, in fact, perhaps an inherent danger in the socio-political organism: Foucault argues that the body politic is ‘a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge.’23 The metaphor of the body politic, ultimately, leads Beccaria to recognize the importance of establishing limits to the reaches of the state, limits that essentially belie the universality he claims to seek. In a discussion of the role of the family within the state, he admits that ‘le società hanno come i corpi umani i loro limiti circonscritti’ (58) [like human bodies, societies have their circumscribed limits (49)]. Beccaria’s diagnosis of the malfunctioning of the body politic thus leads him to turn away from the metaphorical realm of the body, relying, instead, on a system that Richard Bellamy has called a ‘modified empiricist epistemology.’ This novel approach to criminality, Bellamy explains, follows Locke and Helvétius in empiricism because Beccaria believed that human knowledge came from ‘impressions upon our senses’; however, the Milanese philosopher revises empiricist philosophy in his insistence that humans also have the capacity to control their passions through the use of reason.24 In Dei delitti, while the metaphor of the body politic is used to diagnose problems, the solution is formulated according to a different set of principles. As he begins to write proposals for a more justly functioning system, we see Beccarian language shift to describe an ideal world that, rather than suffer intestinal ills, self-consciously constructs itself according to the rational principles of mathematics and architecture. The Enlightenment Equation Dei delitti is divided into forty-seven short chapters that examine a number of aspects of criminal law, including duels, secret accusations, torture, oaths, theft, violent crime, and suicide. Beccaria’s primary stated goal is to rethink the penal system, and frequently, he works to poke holes in the antiquated logic that guides penal practice. As part of this discussion, he devotes significant time to the construction of the image of an avowedly enlightened structure, capable of providing

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 33

his proposal with the trappings of rational legitimacy. The term Enlightenment itself is charged with the suggestive aura of luminosity, which contrasts with the darkness of the past. Beccaria repeatedly invokes the language of Enlightenment when speaking of his historical epoch: he commends the ‘luce di questo secolo’ (10) [this enlightened century (9–10)], and praises his contemporaries, who include the ‘dolce e illuminato governo sotto cui vive l’autore’ (3) [mild and enlightened government under which the author lives (5)]. Thus, the precision that, according to Beccaria, is a necessary part of prison reform becomes an equally important characteristic of his own discursive space. The Enlightenment era affords, he says, ‘maggior fermezza’ that ‘può essere somministrata da un esame geometrico’ (24) [greater conviction afforded by a mathematically rigorous analysis (21)]. The Milanese author arranges punishment according to the order of reason; his penal mathematics circumscribes the condemned body in a universe of correspondences where suffering aligns with the affliction caused by the crime. He perpetuates the metaphor of the structural quality of punishment by asserting: ‘il legislatore fa come l’abile architetto di cui l’officio è di opporsi alle direzioni rovinose della gravità e di far conspirare quelle che contribuiscono alla forza dell’edificio’ (20) [the legislator plays the part of the skilful architect, whose task is to counteract the ruinous pull of gravity and to align those forces that contribute to the strength of the building (18)]. Each body, theoretically, belongs in a different conceptual space, for each crime must be punished differently. Between rampant injustice and harmless infractions of the law, there exist ‘tutte le azioni opposte al ben pubblico, che chiamansi delitti, e tutte vanno per gradi insensibili, decrescendo dal piú sublime al piú infimo’ (20) [all those actions contrary to the public good, which are called crimes, and which are distributed across a scale that moves imperceptibly by diminishing degrees from the highest to the lowest (18)]. The image of the ladder that Beccaria employs to illustrate these infinite gradations creates a metaphor of eternally ascending penal cells, enclosing the perpetrator of each crime in an appropriate theoretical and physical space of punishment. In the end, enlightened exactitude allows the human builder to fabricate a human justice acceptable to all the inhabitants of a nation. Beccaria returns to the image of the architect at the end of his treatise, pleading: Saggio architetto, faccia sorgere il suo edificio sulla base dell’amor proprio, e l’interesse generale sia il risultato degl’interessi di ciascuno, e non

34

Methods of Murder sarà costretto con leggi parziali e con rimedi tumultuosi a separare ad ogni momento il ben pubblico dal bene de’ particolari, e ad alzare il simulacro della salute pubblica sul timore e sulla diffidenza. (103–4) [The lawmaker ought to be a wise architect who raises his building on the foundation of self-love, and the general interest ought to be the product of the interests of each. In this way, he will not be forced at every moment to separate the public good from the good of individuals with partial laws and chaotic remedies, and to build a false image of public well-being on fear and mistrust. (85)]

Thus, he urges leaders to enact his proposed reforms, realizing the metaphorical construction of a structurally sound and rationally informed institution of justice. At the same time, he invokes the ideal of the ethical nature of exactitude, suggesting that structural (and stylistic) rigour and social justice exist at least metaphorically on the same plane. Beccaria’s proposal depends not only on his accurate discussions of crimes and punishments, however, but also on his careful sidestepping of philosophical areas into which he dares not venture. For this reason, he erects divisions between different types of justice: Sonovi dunque tre distinte classi di virtú e di vizio, religiosa, naturale e politica [. . .] Dunque l’idea della virtú politica può senza taccia chiamarsi variabile; quella della virtú naturale sarebbe sempre limpida e manifesta se l’imbecillità o le passioni degli uomini non la oscurassero; quella della virtú religiosa è sempre una e costante, perché rivelata immediatamente da Dio e da lui conservata. (5) [There are, therefore, three distinct classes of vice and virtue: the religious, the natural, and the political [. . .] The idea of political virtue, therefore, can plausibly be called variable; the idea of natural virtue would ever remain clear and manifest were it not obscured by the stupidity and passions of men; the idea of religious virtue is always one and invariable, because it has been revealed directly by God and is maintained by Him. (6)]

In locating the importance of his work in the realm of political and natural virtue, while steering it away from the absolutism of religious conviction, he neatly separates the fate of the soul from that of the body, just as the conventions of medical practice would require. This careful move allows him to claim to create a form of justice which ‘non è un affare di controversia’ (17) [is a matter not of controversy (15)]: in short,

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 35

something that transcends subjectivity. Yet, once again, we encounter a complication: political virtue is variable, not absolute like divine virtue. The tension between the universal and the individual thus emerges once more. ‘Le fissazioni dei limiti sono cosí necessarie nella politica come nella matematica’ (86) [It is as necessary to fix limits in politics to measure the public good as it is in mathematics to measure quantities (71)], warns Beccaria. The rule of law may be a matter of ‘fact’ and not of ‘controversy,’ but it applies to humans, and is inevitably confused by this association. ‘Bisogna guardarsi di non attaccare a questa parola giustizia [original emphasis] l’idea di qualche cosa di reale, come di una forza fisica, o di un essere esistente [emphasis added]; ella è una semplice maniera di concepire degli uomini’ (13) [Care must be taken not to attribute to the word justice [original emphasis] the notion that it is some real thing, such as a physical force or a living being [emphasis added]. It is simply a human way of conceiving things (12)]. Justice, he reminds his readers, is materially non-existent, whereas men are not: it is an abstract concept, not a physical force, and thus something that must be applied to the very different world of human bodies with care. Thus, on the one hand, the prevalence of a mathematical and architectural lexicon might seem to suggest that Dei delitti concerns itself primarily with the physical space of punishment with almost simplistic optimism. Piers Beirne argues that classical criminology ‘has been universally assumed to be a mid- to late eighteenth-century discourse couched in the rhetoric of classical jurisprudence; its chief object, as demonstrated in the works of Beccaria, Bentham, Romilly, and others has been held to be the construction of a rational and efficient penal calculus directed to the actions of the volitional legal subject.’25 But, on the other hand, Beccaria’s study is more subtly modulated than broad generalizations about Enlightenment thought might suggest. Taking a historical look backwards, the often-accepted shift in paradigms of thought that theoretically led via the Enlightenment to an unshaken faith in reason gives way to more complicated differentiations in the ways in which eighteenth-century practices analysed the changing world around them. Ultimately, the Enlightenment was not a period in which rational, mathematically and scientifically centred epistemologies enjoyed absolute sovereignty over other systems of belief: it does not stand as the definitive triumph of reason over faith, of empiricism over intuition, of intellectual ‘light’ over mental ‘darkness.’ Instead, human unpredictability proves to complicate the erection of this space.

36

Methods of Murder

Even while celebrating the light of rationality, Beccaria is careful to acknowledge that it must shine in a world of unpredictable human subjects. As suggested above, in Beccaria’s criminal science, ultimately, the understanding of the body politic works both metaphorically and literally, since the awareness of the effects of the system on living, human bodies, remains vivid. The agreement between enforcers of the law and members of society comprises an understanding of the social contract, one that protects the actual physical well-being of the subjects. Seeking to generalize, as Beccaria does, the ideal laws of criminological processes requires the superimposition of these laws over a shifting map of moving individuals and changing societies. Many studies of Enlightenment thought seem to suggest that the universalizing tendencies of this epoch define its methodologies, to the exclusion of the admission of individuality. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, for example, in defining the ‘Concept of Enlightenment,’ assert that the importance of the individual as such disappeared in the new, eighteenth-century understanding of science: ‘In science there is no specific representation: and if there are no sacrificial animals there is no god. Representation is exchanged for the fungible – universal interchangeability.’26 And Lewis Hinchmann, studying the interlinking questions of autonomy, individuality, and self-determination, suggests that Enlightenment-era autonomy (primarily as conceived by Kant) itself depended upon this ability to universalize: ‘Autonomy essentially involved the kingdom of ends, since, when individuals submitted their maxims to the test of universalizability, they imagined them to be laws capable of being followed by all other “citizens” of that kingdom.’27 The language of mathematics, characteristic of Galilean science in Ginzburg’s estimation, demonstrates just such an empirical, universalist bent in Beccaria’s argument. Yet, his arguments are more complicated than this, as becomes evident each time he qualifies the punitive system: Vi deve essere una proporzione fra i delitti e le pene. È impossibile di prevenire tutti i disordini nell’universal combattimento delle passioni umane. Essi crescono in ragione composta della popolazione e dell’incrocicchiamento degl’interessi particolari che non è possibile dirigere geometricamente alla pubblica utilità. All’esattezza matematica bisogna sostituire nell’aritmetica politica il calcolo delle probabilità. (19–20)

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 37 [There must be proportion between crimes and punishments. It is impossible to anticipate all of the misdeeds engendered by the universal conflict of human passions. They multiply at a compound rate with the growth in population and the interlacing of particular interests that cannot be directed with geometrical precision towards the public utility. In the arithmetic of politics, the calculus of probabilty must replace mathematical exactitude. (17)]

Here, for the unbending laws of mathematics, Beccaria substitutes a more flexible ‘calculus of probability’ that can counterbalance the ‘confusa serie delle azioni umane’ (20) [confused series of human actions (17)]. Such a correction again points to the difficulty of creating an exacting system in the context of real human bodies, and leads to Beccaria’s next move – the distancing of the rigorously constructed penal system from the physical person of the criminal. ‘Delinquente Cittadino’: The Citizen-Criminal In crime, comparisons between body and state are intensified by the fact that the physical body is the direct subject of the state apparatus; struggles to contain criminal activity constitute efforts to control human bodies. While the body politic, a collective comprised of numerous subjects, can be analysed and discussed in generalizing terms, and whereas the architecture of the laws and the places of punishment ensures their exactitude, the subject-status of criminal man requires that he be regarded with a more flexible eye.1 Beccaria, in fact, recognizes that ‘non vi è libertà ogni qual volta le leggi permettono che in alcuni eventi l’uomo cessi di esser persona e diventi cosa’ (50, original emphasis) [there is no liberty whenever the laws permit a man in some cases to cease to be a person and to become a thing (41, original emphasis)]. Ultimately, men are not things, and objectifying humans thus threatens to encroach upon their freedoms. Like his contemporary practitioners of medicine, Beccaria recognizes the unrepeatable nature of human experience and the necessarily contingent quality of any science of man: ‘l’uguaglianza delle pene non può essere che estrinseca, essendo realmente diversa in ciascun individuo’ (51) [equality of punishment can only be extrinsic, for it is actually different for each individual (43)]. In order to resolve the problem of how to apply the law to a shifting, ever-changing human subject, Beccaria outlines a hypothetical, abstract ‘citizen-criminal’ who is carefully defined in terms that avoid assigning

38

Methods of Murder

to the body privileges and punishments that more specifically pertain to the realm of the citizen. In discussing banishment and confiscation, Beccaria meditates the case of a citizen whose worldly possessions have been taken away: this is the kind of act in which society annihilates all relationships with a ‘cittadino delinquente.’ So, he continues, ‘muore il cittadino e resta l’uomo’ (55, emphasis added) [the citizen dies and the man remains alive (46, emphasis added)]. This brief idea communicates one of the key characteristics of the citizen-delinquent: his relationship with the nation can be changed, and the ‘citizen’ might perish, but the man never should. He continues: ‘rispetto al corpo politico deve produrre lo stesso effetto che la morte naturale’ (55–6) [as far as the body politic is concerned, this should produce the same effect as natural death (46)]. Physiology is separated from the political in this formulation, making it clear that the body politic and the body of the citizen occupy distinct realms.28 Not only does Beccaria create the concept of a citizen-delinquent in order to protect the human behind the citizen; he also carefully attempts to protect the delinquent himself from undue harm. The term ‘citizen-delinquent’ also appears earlier in the text, when the philosopher explains that ‘non può un magistrato sotto qualunque pretesto di zelo o di ben pubblico accrescere la pena stabilita ad un delinquente cittadino’ (14) [a magistrate cannot, therefore, on any pretext, whether out of zeal or concern for the public good, increase the punishment established for a delinquent citizen (12)]. Indeed, for Beccaria, the rule of punishment must follow his philosophy of the least possible incursion of the state into the private world of the citizen. Any fair punishment, he says, must be ‘meno tormentosa sul corpo del reo’ (31) [the least torment to the body of the condemned (26)]. In arguing the uselessness of judicial torture, Beccaria insists that the practice is unfair, insofar as it effectively punishes someone who is still considered innocent before the law (not having yet been convicted of a crime). However, even more precariously, it confuses the relationship between accuser and accused, forcing people to incriminate themselves, their bodies (under duress) admitting to crimes they may not have committed: egli è un voler confondere tutt’i rapporti l’esigere che un uomo sia nello stesso tempo accusatore e accusato, che il dolore divenga il crociuolo della verità, quasi che il criterio di essa risieda nei muscoli e nelle fibre di un miserabile. (38)

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 39 [it is a wilful confusion of the relationships between cause and effect to require that a man be at once accuser and accused, and that pain should be made the crucible of truth, as if the criterion of truth lay in the muscles and fibres of a poor wretch. (32)]

The eminently physical world of torture, a domain of violations of bodies and forces applied to them, becomes a place where truth can be fabricated, in alchemistic fashion, in a crucible of pain.29 Another ‘ridiculous’ reason that torture is sometimes inflicted, he objects, is the purging of infamy, in which a man judged infamous by the law ‘deve confermare la sua deposizione collo slogamento delle sue ossa’ (39) [must confirm his testimony with the dislocation of his bones (33)]. Such use of physical punishment, argues Beccaria, is cruel and, further, ineffective, since it can actually cause sufferers to ‘confess’ non-truths in order to end their suffering (41). A functional justice system, instead, should direct itself away from this human body, from the bones, the fibres, the muscles, and from everything that might be in danger of suffering pain. For Beccaria, truth does not exist in the physical fabric of the criminal, in his muscles and fibres. Torture misdirects judicial investigation to the wrong part of the criminal. An intelligent form of justice should focus on the weightless, formless mental sphere in which the precision impossible in the human body is possible. Thus, Beccaria’s treatise also enacts a distancing of the physical body of the subject, whether criminal or investigative, from the mind housed inside it. Foucault, in his landmark study of the formation of our modern punitive society, suggests that penal reformers including Beccaria in 1760 ‘opened up a new period that is not yet at an end,’30 marking the shift of the focus of punishment from the body to the soul: ‘The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came on the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.’31 While the workings of the body are an appropriate metaphor for the state, allowing the body to be subject to the workings of the political system is one of the abuses Beccaria seeks to remedy. And while Foucault traces in this history the beginning of a deeply embedded system of punishment, Beccaria’s treatise engages not with the criminal’s soul, but rather with the thought processes that lead him to misbehave, creating the suggestive image of a bodiless, introspective delinquent.

40

Methods of Murder

The Disembodied Criminal In Beccaria’s society of individuals, there exist exemplars who transgress the law and thus are labelled criminals. While principally focused around acts committed by and punishments levied upon offenders, Dei delitti also creates an idea of who these criminals are. Tracing the emergence of this figure of the criminal man, Beirne suggests that in Dei delitti e delle pene there surfaces a ‘movement away from a single-minded focus with how to punish Homo penalis to a wider “criminological” concern with understanding the situation of Homo criminalis.’32 And Richard Mowery Andrews argues that Beccaria ‘invented the “rational” criminal; most crimes were personal choices, and therefore results of calculations.’33 Beccaria’s understanding of crime is intimately tied to the society in which it arises, and as a result, argues Beirne, Dei delitti ‘teases its audience with a presociological view of the relation between crime and social organization.’34 In explaining the presence of crime in society, a certain sympathy for the criminal also begins to emerge: Manca nella maggior parte degli uomini quel vigore necessario egualmente per i grandi delitti che per le grandi virtú per cui pare che gli uni vadan sempre contemporanei colle altre in quelle nazioni che piú si sostengono per l’attività del governo e delle passioni cospiranti al pubblico bene che per la massa loro o la costante bontà delle leggi. In queste le passioni indebolite sembran piú atte a mantenere che a migliorare la forma di governo. Da ciò si cava una conseguenza importante, che non sempre in una nazione i grandi delitti provano il suo deperimento. (75–6, emphasis added) [Most men lack that energy that is as necessary for great crimes as it is for great virtues, and so it seems that the former always go hand in hand with the latter in those nations that sustain themselves more through the government’s activity and passions working together for the public good than through their size or the consistent excellence of their laws. In the latter sort of nation, weakened passions seem better suited to maintaining rather than to improving the form of government. And from this an important conclusion may be drawn: great crimes do not always show that a nation is in decline. (62–3, emphasis added)]

In the tradition of Dante’s Ulysses, the Enlightenment scholar thus recognizes the potential genius, and the great courage, that can be products of the transgression of societal and conceptual boundaries.

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 41

Such criminal courage must not be thoroughly reviled, he suggests, because if channelled differently, it can be a beneficial part of a healthy society: sono meno fatali ad una nazione i delitti di coraggio che quegli di viltà, perché il primo non è frequente, perché non aspetta che una forza benefica e direttrice che lo faccia cospirare al ben pubblico. (90) [crimes of courage are less detrimental to a nation than crimes of cowardice. This is because the former kind is not frequent and awaits only a beneficent and guiding power to make it contribute to the public good. (74)]

In this sympathetic view of certain kinds of criminality, and in his virtually unqualified admiration for courage, Beccaria also expresses the more universal object of his treatise and his hands-off approach to the physical person of the criminal. If many kinds of criminals do not actually represent a danger for the nation, it becomes evident that the true danger is the nation itself, and the damage it might cause its citizens if not functioning healthily. ‘È meglio prevenire i delitti che punirgli’ (96) [It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them (79)], he asserts in the final pages of the text. Thus, rather than focus on the criminal as physical subject, as body, he turns to speculation about the workings of the criminal mind. The frontispiece of the third edition of Dei delitti features an illustration of Justice with her hands out in protest, her head turned away from an approaching executioner who holds up bloody heads by their hair. Here, the allegorical representation of Justice, which in the text Beccaria will say (as discussed above) is not an ‘essere esistente,’ is personified as precisely that. In the illustration, this non-being is waving away a very real executioner holding a graphically explicit collection of human parts. Thus, the frontispiece already signals the danger of cross-contaminating one system with the other, of mixing real bodies with abstract systems. Beccaria’s philosophy reserves its own physical space of representation for a metaphorical body politic and an allegorical justice and constructs, on the other hand, a disembodied, universal criminal subject. This delinquent exists as a thinking being, and not as a body. His body is physically wrested away from the state by Beccaria: Se sostenendo i diritti degli uomini e dell’invincibile verità contribuissi a strappare dagli spasimi e dalle angosce della morte qualche vittima sfortunata della tirannia o dell’ignoranza, ugualmente fatale, le benedizioni e

42

Methods of Murder le lagrime anche d’un solo innocente nei trasporti della gioia mi consolerebbero dal disprezzo degli uomini. (31) [If, in upholding the rights of men and the invincibile truth, I were to contribute to saving some unfortunate victim of tyranny or ignorance, which is equally fatal, from the spasms and anguish of death, the blessings and tears of even one innocent man in the transports of joy would console me for the contempt of men. (26)]

With a decisive ‘strappo’ (rip or tug) Dei delitti hopes to separate the physical sufferings of the individual (the ‘qualche vittima’) from the generalizing violence of the state. Excessive punishment is to be avoided, as should all unnecessary contact between the state and the bodies subject to it: it is useless, he insists to ‘fare dello stato una prigione’ (80) [turn the state into a prison (66)]. In the final sentences of the text Beccaria insists that his purpose is to create a justice system that ensures that ‘ogni pena non sia una violenza di uno o di molti contro un privato cittadino’ (104, original emphasis) [punishment should not be an act of violence committed by one or many against a private citizen (86, original emphasis)]. In order to avoid violence and, in the absence of the figure to whom violent or retributive punishment (as in the case of Jean Calas) might be inappropriately doled out, Dei delitti applies a technique of introspection and, instead, engages with the mind of the criminal, figured as an inward-looking, communicative entity that contemplates and formulates crimes. This rational criminal emerges as a collection of motivations and as a rhetorical style: Beccaria imagines what happens inside the offender’s head, but deliberately opts to stay as far from his body as possible. Beccaria’s own familiarity with criminals came through Alessandro Verri, a fellow member of the Accademia dei Pugni who had worked as a prison inspector and had observed the ‘miserable conditions and treatment endured by the incarcerated.’35 Thus, his knowledge of the imprisoned was secondhand, a connection facilitated by language and by intellect, rather than direct experience. In similar fashion, his formulation of the relationship the state should have with the criminal respects such boundaries and is built on such a foundation. Through a process of imaginative identification, Beccaria constructs short, theatrical sketches by way of which a potential delinquent, speaking in the first person, considers the laws to which he is subject: Quali sono queste leggi ch’io debbo rispettare, che lasciano un cosí grande intervallo tra me e il ricco? Egli mi nega un soldo che gli cerco, e si scusa

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 43 col comandarmi un travaglio che non conosce. Chi ha fatte queste leggi? Uomini ricchi e potenti, che non si sono mai degnati visitare le squallide capanne del povero, che non hanno mai diviso un ammuffito pane fralle innocenti grida degli affamati figliuoli e le lagrime della moglie. Rompiamo questi legami fatali alla maggior parte ed utili ad alcuni pochi ed indolenti tiranni, attacchiamo l’ingiustizia nella sua sorgente. Ritornerò nel mio stato d’indipendenza naturale, vivrò libero e felice per qualche tempo coi frutti del mio coraggio e della mia industria, verrà forse il giorno del dolore e del pentimento, ma sarà breve questo tempo, ed avrò un giorno di stento per molti anni di libertà e di piaceri. (66) [What are these laws that I am supposed to respect, which leave such a great gap between me and the rich man? He denies me the penny I ask of him and justifies himself by ordering me to work, something with which he himself is unfamiliar. Who made these laws? Rich and powerful men who have never deigned to visit the squalid hovels of the poor, who have never broken mouldy bread amid the innocent cries of hungry children and a wife’s tears. Let us break these ties, which are harmful to the majority and useful only to a few and to indolent tyrants; let us attack injustice at its source. I will return to my natural state of independence; for a while, I will live free and happy on the fruits of my courage and my industry; perhaps the day for pain and repentance will come, but it will be brief, and I will have a single day of suffering for many years of liberty and pleasure. (55)]

Here, as he delineates with compassion the outlines of a figure who might tend towards criminality, Beccaria literally gives voice to the concerns of the criminal, indicating through direct, first-person narration the potential musings of someone struggling on the margins of society. The forces at work are not those of a Kantian universal subject, because they are predicated on difference: criminality occurs because the criminal’s subject-position, his faculty of reason, and his social situation are other, significantly different from the subjects he perceives around him. It is in the contrast between self and other, in the awareness of the lacuna that divides the criminal from the surrounding social context that problems develop. Such subjective thought, when brought to bear on a flawed, subjective justice system, leads to the recognition of injustice. Beccaria posits that delinquency partially stems from the criminal’s belief that society views him as an object: ‘Re di un piccol numero, correggerò gli errori della fortuna, e vedrò questi tiranni impallidire e palpitare alla presenza di colui che con un insultante fasto posponevano ai loro cavalli, ai loro cani’ (66) [King of a few men, I will set

44

Methods of Murder

fortune’s errors right, and I will see these tyrants turn pale and tremble in the presence of one whom, with insulting ostentation, they considered lower than their horses and dogs (55)]. If the causes of crimes are understood through the perspective of those who commit them, penalties must be carefully formulated with the idea of the lawbreaker in mind. For Beccaria, punishment must take into account the limits of man’s imagination and of his memory, for it is only when the criminal envisions the effects of a punishment and remembers these images in the moment in which he desires to commit a crime that the sentence can function, as it should, as a deterrent to the criminal act. The correspondence between the citizen and the state, understood through the metaphor of the body politic, makes it necessary for the state to model itself in the shape of its component parts, for the consequences of not doing so are dire. He demonstrates the dangers of using the death penalty, for example, by imagining the following reasoning taking place in the mind of a criminal: Ah!, diranno essi, queste leggi non sono che i pretesti della forza e le meditate e crudeli formalità della giustizia; non sono che un linguaggio di convenzione per immolarci con maggiore sicurezza, come vittime destinate in sacrificio, all’indolo insaziabile del dispotismo. L’assassinio, che ci vien predicato come un terribile misfatto, lo veggiamo pure senza ripugnanza e senza furore adoperato. Prevalghiamoci dell’esempio. Ci pareva la morte violenta una scena terribile nelle descrizioni che ci venivano fatte, ma lo veggiamo un affare di momento. Quanto lo sarà meno in chi, non aspettandola, ne risparmia quasi tutto ciò che ha di doloroso! (68) [Ah!, they would say, these laws are nothing but pretexts for power and for the calculated and cruel formalities of justice; they are nothing but a conventional language for immolating us with greater security, like victims offered in sacrifice to the insatiable idol of despotism. We see assassination, which is preached to us as a terrible crime, employed without repugnance and without outrage. Let us take advantage of this example. In the descriptions that we have been offered, violent death seemed a terrible spectacle, but we see it as a momentary affair. How much less terrible it will be for someone who, not expecting it, is spared almost everything about it which is painful! (56)]

A state that kills its citizens, he suggests, invites citizens to feel justified in acting against it. The danger of laws apparently crafted in a

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 45

‘conventional language’ lies in their failure to distinguish between subjects, their inability to accord to a being the dignity of his individuality. A subject’s uniqueness, while cellular, biological, and systemic, is expressed in part through language, which is as subjective as the body itself. Through his assignment of language to the criminal, Beccaria suggests a potential risk of the legal objectification of the subject: such generalization threatens to create, of the individual, a collective criminal conscience ultimately more capable of undermining the system than a single offender. From the first-person singular subject of the first passage cited above, the narration passes to the first person plural, the militant ‘noi,’ which proposes action against the state: ‘rompiamo,’ ‘attacchiamo,’ ‘prevalghiamoci.’ Beccaria’s recognition of the subject serves, as does his entire treatise, a utilitarian end. His desire to unravel the ‘funesti paralogismi che, se non con chiarezza, confusamente almeno, fanno gli uomini disposti a’ delitti’ (68) [baneful paralogisms that, if not clearly, at least confusedly, make men disposed to crime (56)], seeks to prevent the plausibility of such aggressive reasoning. If for primarily utilitarian, and not humanitarian reasons, however, the complex series of opposing concepts at the foundation of Dei delitti and of criminological thought continues. The physical body must be respected as an individual being, and while this individual being, in Beccaria’s schema, can be physically punished, it must not be objectified. As a corrective, he suggests that such confused thought processes should be replaced with mathematical ideas that mirror the rational structure of the penal system. Fixed, clear laws, suggests Beccaria, allow the ideal introspective criminal to ‘calcolare gl’inconvenienti di un misfatto’ (17) [to calculate accurately the negative consequences of a misdeed (15)]. Instead of reforming bodies, then, the ideal enlightened penal system should subtly change the way that citizen-delinquents think about crime. In the penultimate section of Dei delitti, Beccaria issues a call to social reformers: Profondo e sensibile filosofo, lasci che gli uomini, che i suoi fratelli, godano in pace quella piccola porzione di felicità che lo immenso sistema, stabilito dalla prima Cagione, da quello che è, fa loro godere in quest’angolo dell’universo. (104, emphasis added) [As a deep and sensitive philosopher, he ought to allow [leave] men and their brothers to enjoy in peace that small portion of happiness that the immense system – established by the First Cause, by He Who Is – set aside for them to enjoy in this corner of the universe. (85, emphasis added)]

46

Methods of Murder

This imperative to ‘lasciare,’ to ‘leave’ men in peace, constitutes the key to the Beccarian approach to the criminal: one of physical distance, of prudence, and of cautious respect, when deserved, for both his intelligence and his humanity. Ultimately, Beccaria’s creation of the interior monologue of the criminal highlights a representational problem that imprisons subjects unable to speak eloquently for themselves: ‘So che lo sviluppare i sentimenti del proprio animo è un’arte che s’apprende colla educazione; ma perché un ladro non renderebbe bene i suoi principii, non per ciò essi agiscon meno’ (66) [I know that developing the sentiments of one’s own mind is an art that is learned through education; but the fact that a thief may not be able to articulate his principles well does not mean that they are any less operative (54–5)]. The problem of the criminal is, in a sense, a problem of mimesis and expression. If, indeed, his social station precludes the possibility of a good education, then his ability to communicate his personal difficulties to others will necessarily be limited. Beccaria’s account implicitly proposes that ‘arte,’ or in this case the fictionalization of criminal man, is one of the best means for understanding him, and his criminal monologues serve as miniature, socially engaged crime narratives. Crime and Punishment after Beccaria Beccaria’s strategies in Dei delitti outline an ideologically engaged criminal epistemology that attempts to draw clear lines of demarcation separating the justice system from the body of the criminal. As I have suggested above, the techniques at play were complex and various, and thus subject to debate. While the treatise was immediately acclaimed, it also was vehemently attacked by contemporaries – perhaps most famously by the Venetian monk Ferdinando Facchinei, and by the Venetian Inquisition, which blocked the manuscript’s circulation in that territory.36 And while histories of criminology almost universally cite Dei delitti as one of the founding texts of the discipline, concerns about the treatise and its effects have also lingered into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Foucault views Beccaria’s plan to align punishments logically with crimes as the cornerstone of a system that would obfuscate the workings of power. On the one hand, he acknowledges the idea of the disembodied criminal, noting that as a result of the historical conceptual shift marked in part by eighteenth-century penal philosophy, ‘one no longer touched the body.’37 On the other

Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 47

hand, however, Foucault maintains that the body of the condemned became ‘the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.’38 Yet, Foucault also believes that, essentially as soon as Dei delitti’s theories emerged, the spirit of Beccaria’s treatise was misunderstood. Rather than producing a society capable of empathizing with offenders and a system attentive to keeping away from their bodies, eighteenth-century reformers’ ideas were translated into a modern, prison-obsessed society: ‘The theatre of punishment of which the eighteenth century dreamed and which would have acted essentially on the minds of the general public was replaced by the great uniform machinery of the prisons, whose network of immense buildings was to extend across France and Europe.’39 Justice, he argues, was ‘relieved of responsibility for [punishment] by a bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself.’40 Foucault’s concerns point to the complexity of Beccaria’s and Voltaire’s reformist ideals, and to the fact that their effects were not as clear-cut as many historical retrospectives of the Enlightenment would have us believe. In spite of varying opinions about the effects of Beccaria’s work, these theorists make clear that this particular Enlightenment-era treatise, as well as intellectual debate from the period more generally, continue to influence ways of thinking about crime. The continued relevance of Beccaria belies a tendency, in particular in postmodern scholarship, to dismiss the eighteenth-century project. In The Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony J. Cascardi argues that, since Romanticism, scholars have assumed ‘that any continuation of the ethical and emancipatory goals of the Enlightenment, and certainly any project committed to an ethical praxis grounded in mutual recognition and respect, must overcome Enlightenment rationality.’41 Cascardi, however, takes issue with the idea that any contemporary thinker working towards a social or ethical goal must by necessity take an anti-Enlightenment stance. He argues, instead, that Enlightenment ideals have not been abandoned, but rather are being continually rethought and reworked, and that our ‘current position is itself a consequence of the nonclosure of the Enlightenment.’42 Cascardi continues: If we can understand Enlightenment rationality as something whose central ambition to be at once systematic and complete was left unfinished, then it can be argued that the lingering controversy over the Enlightenment itself represents a moment in the ongoing transformation of selfconsciousness, but also a continuation of subjectivity even if by other,

48

Methods of Murder aesthetic, means. At the very least, this can help us refute what may be left of the idea that we have – for better or worse – reached the ‘end of philosophy,’ the ‘closure of metaphysics,’ or the ‘end of history.’43

Beccaria’s strategy in confronting crimes and criminality in Dei delitti leads to an understanding of the contemporary fictional inheritance of his enlightened style of thought, a school of literary production I call Beccarian. Although the judiciary legacy of Dei delitti may contribute to our own contemporary punitive society, the epistemology that underlies the Milanese reformer’s work forms part of the discursive past of the contemporary philosophical space of Italian crime fiction. Traces of this past are evident in the works of a certain kind of detective fiction, in particular that of Leonardo Sciascia, and more recently in the works of Andrea Camilleri and Gianrico Carofiglio. In works by all of these authors, Enlightenment-era concerns continue to be pondered and, in some cases, debated. Contemporary crime narratives written by Sciascia, Camilleri, and Carofiglio are inspired epistemologically by the mathematical precision of Enlightenment thought, and they consider criminality from the point of view of the system that identifies and prosecutes (or more perilously, persecutes) criminals. Moreover, they follow Beccaria’s ideologically charged attitude to criminality, focusing their attention on questions of justice and legality. They also participate in the Beccarian tradition of moving the judicial and legal systems away from the body of the criminal and towards his mind, projecting the search for the criminal into an introspective realm strategically and definitively separated from his delinquent body. That they do so in distinctly different ways helps to reveal the ideologies at play in both the style and the substance of their narratives of crime.

2 Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives

Caro Leonardo, ho letto il tuo giallo che non è un giallo, con la passione con cui si leggono i gialli, e in più il divertimento di vedere come il giallo viene smontato, anzi come viene dimostrata l’impossibilità del romanzo giallo nell’ambiente siciliano [. . .] La commedia di caratteri e la saggistica storico-letterario-sociologica trovano un punto di fusione di cui tu solo, nella narrativa d’oggi, possiedi la formula.1 [Dear Leonardo, I read your giallo which isn’t a giallo, with the passion with which one reads gialli, and also with delight in seeing the giallo dismantled, or rather how it demonstrates the impossibility of the giallo in the Sicilian context [. . .] A comedy of characters and a work of historical-literary-sociological non-fiction find a point of fusion, for which only you, in today’s fiction, have the formula.]

Upon finishing A ciascuno il suo (1966) [To Each His Own], Italo Calvino penned these complimentary lines to Leonardo Sciascia, assuring his friend that it would be ‘un libro che piacerà, e di cui si discuterà, anche’ (a book people will like, and that they’ll discuss, too).2 Calvino’s initial response to the novel reflects the tenor of much scholarship on Sciascia, which identifies the author as a writer of non-traditional or anti-detective fiction and proposes that such a style is made necessary by the corrupt Sicilian context in which many of his works are set. As the letter suggests, many of Sciascia’s novels fruitfully use the conventions of the detective genre to activate and then undermine readers’ expectations. Generic subversion is a key part of Sciascia’s engaged relationship with the history and politics of his island home. It is an approach he historicizes in the critical essay ‘Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco’ (A Short History of the Detective Novel).3 Much has been written about Sciascia’s enthusiasm

50

Methods of Murder

for the investigative genre – manifest in works such as A ciascuno il suo, Il giorno della civetta (1961) [The Day of the Owl], Il contesto (1971) [Equal Danger], Todo modo (1974) [One Way or Another], Il cavaliere e la morte (1988) [‘The Knight and Death’], or Una storia semplice (1989) [‘A Straightforward Tale’] – which finds its origins in his committed, contestatory political conscience. The rigorous framework of classical detection provides the narrative space from which to struggle against mechanisms of power, whether literary or political.4 Sicily long operated within a strictly delimited expressive matrix (thanks to the laws of omertà), and Sciascia’s courageous fiction helped begin the erosion of the walls of silence. Yet, another consistent presence across Sciascia’s fiction is the Enlightenment, including Cesare Beccaria’s famous treatise. The interplay between stories of crime and the enlightened past – the Beccarian bent in Sciascia’s fiction – provides a powerful interpretive framework for the ideological concerns he voices and also the stylistic choices he makes. The Beccarian tradition arises in the cerebral, procedural mindset of the Enlightenment, creating a literature that perceives criminality primarily as an issue of civil justice. Criminal man and the context in which he is pursued are predominantly a systemic, intellectual space of dialogue and words, but not of bodies.5 Sciascia’s protagonists, like Beccaria’s, are introspective, disembodied, discursive subjects that exist primarily as rational and not corporeal beings. They are portrayed in the context of an unhealthy social body, in this case usually Sicilian. Sciascia frequently uses the Enlightenment in ironic terms, pointing out the tragic differences between the best of the eighteenth century and the worst of Sicily. In spite of his well-documented love for the Settecento, however, and his concerns regarding the state of justice in his island home, Sciascia does not assert simplistically that Paris is diametrically opposed to Sicily. Rather, he points out some of the complications inherent in the Enlightenment itself – complexities born in a conflict between power and reason. The Enlightenment becomes a tool for focusing attention on problems that Sciascia feels are still critical issues in contemporary Italy. It is because of their complex rapport with the historical intellectual background that his detective novels never satisfy traditional investigative curiosity, never conclude in rational, gratifying solutions. Instead, they expose the bankruptcy of a society – any society – dominated by a focus on power that too often trumps reason and the impartial pursuit of justice.

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 51

The Pro-Enlightenment Anti-Detective W.H. Auden famously refers to the ‘completely satisfactory detective’ as one who can ‘restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one.’6 This potently masculine image is ‘archetypal,’ according to Sally Munt, for the detective fulfils the role of ‘the warrior knight, the tough cowboy, the intrepid explorer – he is the representative of Man, and yet more than a man, he is the focus of morality, the mythic hero.’7 Morality, ethics, positive change: these are the philosophical trappings of the canonical detective figure, capable of rooting out evil and putting things to rights. The crime fighter exists in a decidedly godly world (structurally speaking; in terms of overt religious practice, it is often a thoroughly secular one) where a linear teleology drives progress towards a definitive solution. J.K. Van Dover, writing of the science of detection, jokes that a ‘lending library in hell might, as the old line would have it, be stocked with Agatha Christie novels with the last page, identifying the villain, torn out.’8 In the universe of traditional detection, resolution is, indeed, analogous to divine reward, and being denied that satisfaction constitutes a virtual condemnation to darkness, an eternity in the unenlightened halls of Hell. In the ‘Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco,’ Sciascia defines classical detection in terms of its relation to metaphysics: Nella sua forma piú originale ed autonoma, il romanzo poliziesco presuppone una metafisica: l’esistenza di un mondo ‘al di là del fisico’, di Dio, della Grazia – e di quella Grazia che i teologi chiamano illuminante. Della Grazia illuminante l’investigatore si può anche considerare il portatore, cosí come santa Lucia nella Divina Commedia [. . .] L’incorruttibilità e infallibilità dell’investigatore, la sua quasi ascetica vita [. . .] il fatto che non rappresenta la legge ufficiale ma la legge in assoluto, la sua capacità di leggere il delitto nel cuore umano oltre che nelle cose, cioè negli indizi, e di presentirlo, lo investono di luce metafisica, ne fanno un eletto.9 [In its most original, autonomous form, the detective novel presupposes a metaphysics: the existence of a world ‘beyond the physical,’ of God, of Grace – and of that Grace that theologians call ‘illuminating.’ The investigator can consider himself the bearer of illuminating Grace, like Saint Lucy in the Divine Comedy [. . .] The incorruptibility and the infallibility of the investigator, his almost ascetic life [. . .] the fact that he doesn’t represent the official law but rather the absolute law, his capacity to read crime not just in things (or clues), but also in the human heart, and to

52

Methods of Murder foresee it, invest him with a metaphysical light, make him one of the elect.]

At the end of this essay, however, Sciascia provides insight into his own peculiar take on the genre. Notwithstanding its relatively traditional genealogy of detection, traced through the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Erle Stanley Gardner, Sciascia’s essay paradoxically ends with an affirmation of a disruption of the genre: ‘Ci basta ora finire con Gadda: che ha scritto il piú assoluto “giallo” che sia mai stato scritto, un “giallo” senza soluzione’10 (We can now end with Gadda, who wrote the most absolute ‘giallo’ ever written, a ‘giallo’ with no solution). The writer thus discredits monotheistic faith in the detective, or in the science of any detective story that posits the existence of a godly world, a metaphysics, in favour of a pluralistic uncertainty in the ability of man to resolve such mysteries. This final sentence of his essay aptly indicates Sciascia’s own approach to the creation of crime fiction, one that refuses to adhere to the conventions he so carefully acknowledged in the preceding body of text. In straining against the bars of what Sciascia called the ‘cage’ of genre, his texts take part in a ‘postmodern’ tradition that Stefano Tani dubs the ‘anti-detective novel,’ a particular perversion of generic convention that refuses to provide readers with a fulfilling solution: It is the more or less radical treatment of the solution that distinguishes different kinds of anti-detective novels; the treatment of the old form creates the new content. All the other elements must seem apparently unchanged so that the fiction at the beginning can be identified by the reader as a detective novel and reveal itself as a negation of the genre only at the end. Thus what in an anti-detective novel seems suspense that promises fulfillment actually proves unfulfilled suspense by the end of the reading, while the delay of the solution becomes nonsolution [. . .] Conventions hence become deceitful clues planted by the writer to rouse the attention of the reader before disappointing his expectations; conventions are paradoxically functional in the disintegration of the genre.11

In Tani’s view, generic literary confinement mimics the political cage of Sicilian politics, and in challenging its prescriptive boundaries Sciascia simultaneously proposes resistance to restrictive societal norms.

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 53

Attention to the tenets of genre does importantly characterize Sciascia’s fiction. At times, the author constructs narratives with selfconscious references to the ‘rules’ that guide classical detection. In Il contesto, the police detective Rogas, for example, is created in the image of the perfect, canonical detective by way of a self-conscious wink to the reader: Si era fatta ora di colazione, e Rogas si avviò al ristorante del giovedì: ché ne aveva uno per ogni giorno della settimana, sette dunque che lo consideravano buon cliente ma non affidato e stabilizzato al punto di poterlo trattar male. Come ogni investigatore che si rispetti, che abbia cioè di se stesso quel rispetto che vuole poi riscuotere dai lettori, Rogas viveva solo; né c’erano donne nella sua vita.12 [Lunchtime had come, and Rogas set out for Thursday’s restaurant; he had one for every day of the week – seven, then, that thought of him as a good client but not so faithful, so settled in, that they could give him poor service. Like every self-respecting investigator – that is, every investigator who entertains the same respect for himself that he wishes to arouse in his readers – Rogas lived alone; nor were there women in his life.13]

Undistracted by women, absolutely regular in his routines, Rogas thus dedicates himself wholly to the enterprise of crime fighting with the ascetic sensibility of a classical detective. Frequently, however, clever nods to the rules of genre indicate its disintegration; according to JoAnn Cannon, they are ways of drawing readers ‘into the game of detection.’14 In Il cavaliere e la morte, the Vice and the Commissario evaluate the validity of their investigative hypotheses with reference to generic rules. The Commissario discounts his colleague’s insightful theories by insisting, ‘la sua è una linea romanzesca, da romanzo poliziesco diciamo classico, di quelli che i lettori, ormai smaliziati, arrivano a indovinare come va a finire dopo aver letto le prime venti pagine’ (the line you are following is lifted straight from fiction, from one of those books they call a classical detective novel, where the sharp-witted reader can guess, after the first twenty pages, how it is all going to turn out).15 Near the end of Todo modo, the police investigator sighs, ‘Se si continuava a star tutti qui [. . .] sarebbe finita come in quel romanzo di Agatha Christie: tutti ammazzati, uno appresso all’altro. E avremmo dovuto resuscitarne uno, per trovare il colpevole’ (If we waited much longer [. . .] it would have

54

Methods of Murder

ended like that Agatha Christie novel – everyone murdered one after the other. And we’d have to resurrect one of them to find the criminal).16 Sciascia’s novel will not end as Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians: there will be no cunning, last-minute appearance of truth, but rather a murky tragedy reflecting the failure of limpid reason. Such self-consciousness indicates that the tidy boundaries of detection do not fully circumscribe any of Sciascia’s investigators. In A ciascuno il suo, the traditional working of the detective novel is undermined when the detective-figure, the nosy Professor Laurana, is murdered because he gets too close to identifying the people guilty of committing a crime. Rogas’ untimely death in Il contesto similarly assures that the secrets of the state will not be revealed, as does the assassination of the Vice at the end of Il cavaliere e la morte. The demise of the professor and the police inspectors ensures that the mysteries will officially go unsolved, and the perpetrators will enjoy the future secured by invoking the code of silence. In the abrupt endings of these works, it is not only justice that suffers an affront, but reason itself, which had been diligently if somewhat clumsily employed in Laurana’s scholarly and Rogas’ and the Vice’s political inquiries. The anti-detective bent of Sciascia’s fiction reflects his staunchly held belief that criminal investigations in his contemporary political climate do not have satisfying endings. Far more important than the way in which Sciascia deconstructs and undermines the workings of genre, is why he does so. Traditional gialli, he suggests, allow readers to exist in a state of passive torpor, waiting for the investigator to deliver a solution. The unreliable detectives and unpredictable endings of his works deny readers the possibility of accepting ‘a priori, per pregiudizio, per convenzione, un ruolo di inferiorità e passività intellettuale’ (a priori, because of bias, because of convention, a role of inferiority and intellectual passivity), the role that the reader of a traditional detective novel occupies, according to the ‘Breve storia.’17 Reading traditional detective fiction, he posits, is a paradox, because by inducing a state of intellectual inertia, it performs a ‘rovesciamento della condizione che è propria, naturale ed essenziale, alla lettura’ (overturning of the condition that is proper, natural, and essential to reading).18 The subversions of genre thus help to restore reading’s natural, intellectually engaged essence. Sciascia insists that literature must subvert rules: ‘Il fascismo non è morto. Convinto di questo, sento una gran voglia di combattere, di impegnarmi di più, di essere sempre più deciso e intransigente, di mantenere un atteg-

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 55

giamento sempre polemico nei riguardi di qualsiasi potere’19 (Fascism isn’t dead. Convinced of this, I feel a great desire to fight, to be more engaged, to be ever more resolute and intransigent, to maintain a polemical attitude with respect to any power). The ‘qualsiasi potere’ that demands a polemical attitude can be considered genre itself, a literary force that has always invited polemics, but more widely this attitude reflects Sciascia’s vision of the relationship between intellect and power, conceived historically through the Enlightenment. His fiction does battle with church and state, rails against the death penalty, attacks the compromesso storico, and its anti-detective bent ensures that far from facilitating the relaxing pleasure of armchair detectives, it sounds an insistent alarm.20 Thus, for Sciascia, the detective framework is not simply a clever subversion of genre, but rather a complicated meditation on power, ideology, law, and the might of the intellect. Like the traditional detectives he describes, Sciascia understands his investigators to be representatives of a universal ideal, the ‘legge in assoluto’ (absolute law) not the ‘legge ufficiale’ (official law), and as such inheritors of the universalizing tendencies of the Enlightenment. In the ‘Breve storia,’ he posits that the role of the traditional investigator, who occupies that world of ‘Grazia illuminante’ (illuminating Grace), is a moral one, descending from the prophet Daniel in the Bible. In his own crime fiction, however, this morality is not of a religious nature. Pier Paolo Pasolini illuminates Sciascia’s moral sphere in a short essay on Todo modo, calling Sciascia’s a ‘moralismo meridionale’ (southern moralism), a form of moralism that derives in his ‘giudizio sul mondo’ (judgment on the world). This moralism cannot be moralist, insists Pasolini, because it is not Christian, and if it seems Catholic, it is only Catholic in a superficial sense. Sciascia’s ‘southern’ way of thinking the world has, according to Pasolini: carattere civico [. . .] piuttosto che moralistico. Il ‘buono’, in Sciascia, è chi non accetta una condizione tradizionale fondata sull’ingiustizia, e l’infinità delle sue abitudini: ma non può manifestare la sua ‘bontà’ se non attraverso una forma conoscitiva di carattere pragmatico (facendosi testimone o detective per esempio: o, infine, giustiziere).21 [a civic character [. . .] rather than a moralistic one. The ‘good,’ in Sciascia, is whoever doesn’t accept a traditional condition founded on injustice, and his infinite habits: but he can only manifest his ‘goodness’ by way of a pragmatic cognitive form (by becoming, for example, a witness or a detective; or finally, a seeker of justice).]

56

Methods of Murder

Pasolini ably connects the lines in Sciascia’s works: the Sicilian author’s investigations are a means for staging the potential existence of a form of ‘good,’ and this ‘good’ bears strong echoes of secular Enlightenmentera thought, and specifically of protest against injustice in the context of the law. Joseph Farrell rightly demonstrates that Sciascia’s ‘Breve storia’ underlines the contention between criminal and investigator as ‘transcendental and spiritual, rather than social, political or merely legal in character,’22 but Pasolini intriguingly suggests that the transcendental and spiritual in Sciascia are also civic. In fact, Sciascia’s analysis of the traditional detective story reveals his discomfort with its traditional moral sphere, and this discomfort, in turn, means that his own crime fiction might be productively read against an entirely different historical and epistemological background. In an aside about homicides in crime fiction, he discusses the ‘pena del taglione’ (retributive punishment), suggesting that frequently the investigator actually helps the criminal evade such a punitive response by offering the guilty the possibility of suicide – even the mild Poirot and the humane Maigret take such steps.23 Sciascia’s discomfort with such a form of justice is clear when he refers to the crime as a ‘pena di morte’ (death penalty): one of the most prominent echoes in his fiction appears in the form of a lifelong protest of the death penalty, a protest that echoes Beccaria’s extraordinary opinion on the subject in the eighteenth century.24 Sciascia confronts the failings of the judicial system and the death penalty in many works, including Il contesto, Todo modo, and Porte aperte (1987) [Open Doors]. The question of whether or not the state should have the power to terminate an individual’s life allows him not only to enter a heated debate about ethics and politics, but to cast that debate in the light of his wider philosophy of life.25 Thus, in terms of the canonical morality of crime fiction, and in terms of reader reception of such narrative, Sciascia demonstrates a deep, ideologically charged resistance; such opposition is connected directly to the ethical lessons he takes from the Enlightenment. By shifting the frame of analysis to bring to the fore the presence of Beccarian thought in Sciascia’s works, rather than by privileging the detective framework, we discover a philosophical, cerebral backdrop against which the frustrating limits of the justice system emerge in sharp relief. And we discover that, for Sciascia, the ‘legge in assoluto’ is the same ‘law’ to which Beccaria and Voltaire appealed in sounding eighteenth-century calls for reform.

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 57

Illuminismo Meridionale and Il Consiglio d’Egitto Sciascia’s context is both insistently contemporary, his world mired in the trials of post–Second World War Italy, and inevitably Sicilian. According to Farrell, the author’s relationship with Sicily verged on ‘monomania, causing him at times to view other countries and cultures not for their own sake but for the insights they offered into Sicilian life.’26 Fellow Sicilian novelist Andrea Camilleri confirms Sciascia’s obsession with the island: Leonardo aveva una forte propensione verso gli scrittori siciliani. Quando gli parlavo di un autore non siciliano: ‘Sì, però vedi, Camilleri,’ faceva delle doverose riserve sullo scrittore nato oltre la linea gotica. Una volta gli chiesi: ‘Pirchì sei così? . . . ’ ‘Pirchì io degli scrittori siciliani vorrei essere padre, complice, amico, tutto. Sugnu mafiusu rispetto agli scrittori siciliani.’27 [Leonardo had a strong inclination for Sicilian writers. When I spoke to him of authors that weren’t Sicilian – ‘Yes, but you see, Camilleri,’ – he had a dutiful reserve regarding the writer born on the other side of the Gothic line. Once I asked him, ‘Why are you like this?’ ‘Because I want to be father, accomplice, friend, everything for Sicilian writers. I’m mafioso about Sicilian writers.’]

This all-encompassing rapport connecting him with other Sicilian figures is one that Sciascia cultivates by way of a historically defined mode of thinking that, for him, is intimately connected to the Enlightenment. Jacqueline Risset suggests that one of the author’s life-projects was to ‘ritrovare un tessuto di legami sotterranei tra Francia e Sicilia, queste due entità così distanti’ (find a web of subterranean links between France and Sicily, two entities so far apart).28 Sciascia recounted the myth of his own, seemingly predestined relationship to Enlightenment works, a bond that in some ways supercedes his declared affinity for Sicilian writers: Personalmente posso dirLe che mi sono trovato tra le mani Diderot e Courier prima di Pinocchio e del Cuore; non perché fossi un ragazzo prodigo, ma perché questi (oltre il Telemaco di Fénelon, le novelle del Casti, I promessi sposi e i romanzi storici popolari di Luigi Natoli) erano i solo libri di cui potevo disporre.29

58

Methods of Murder [I can tell you personally that I had Diderot and Courier in my hands before Pinocchio and Cuore; not because I was a prodigy, but because these (and Fénelon’s Thelemacus, Casti’s short stories, I promessi sposi, and Luigi Natoli’s popular historical novels) were the only books I had.]

And Marcelle Padovani writes that this idealized connection ran deep: Sciascia, in fact, confessed that ‘Ho sempre sognato [. . .] di assomigliare a Diderot’ (I always dreamed [. . .] of being like Diderot).30 Why this persistent affiliation with the Enlightenment and its authors? Camilla Maria Cederna suggests that ‘in nessun altro secolo come nel ’700, la scrittura è stata utilizzata come arma, come strumento di lotta nei conflitti politico-ideologici’ (in the 1700s like in no other century, writing was used as a weapon, as a tool to fight political and ideological battles).31 Sciascia’s political engagement as a writer led him to seek exemplary modes of viewing the world in the secolo dei lumi, a means to critique and expose the injustices of his own period.32 Thus, for Sciascia, Sicily and the Enlightenment went hand in hand as parallel obsessions, an historical period and a geographical context that his writing repeatedly juxtaposed. While references to eighteenthcentury thinkers and philosophies are present in practically all of Sciascia’s works, some of the most important connections are established in the historical novel Il Consiglio d’Egitto (1963), set in Enlightenment-era Sicily; in Candido ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia (1977), a novella modelled on Voltaire’s Candide; and in his numerous detective-style novels, in which Enlightenment thinkers including Voltaire, Diderot, and Courier recur in the plots of the texts, in epigraphs, and in spirit. As Farrell suggests, Sciascia’s perceptive readings of historical moments and countries and cultures often serve his desire to profoundly understand Sicily. This desire drives a view of the Enlightenment period that focuses, in particular, on issues of justice, power, and the law – the same concerns that predominate in Beccaria’s treatise and that led Sciascia to produce crime fiction that reflects these deeply held beliefs. One of the clearest descriptions of Sciascia’s Enlightenment takes the form of the essay, ‘Il secolo educatore,’ in which the Sicilian author elaborates his personal historiographical view of the eighteenth century. In this regard, the essay constitutes a provocative complement to the ‘Breve storia’ when considering his crime fiction. Sciascia specifically invokes the historical importance and philosophical contribution of Beccaria to Italian culture when he declares: ‘Al centro del secolo, come un sole allo zenit, stanno – 1759, 1763, 1764 – il Candide e

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 59

il Traité sur la tolérance di Voltaire, il Dei delitti e delle pene di Beccaria’ (At the centre of the century, like a sun at its zenith, are – 1759, 1763, 1764 – Candide and the Treatise on Tolerance by Voltaire, On Crimes and Punishments by Beccaria).33 Voltaire and Beccaria represented what for Sciascia was the ‘essenza del secolo’ (century’s essence): in the midst of trying social inequalities that continued to proliferate around them, they were at the forefront of the somewhat improbable belief in justice.34 Beccaria, Voltaire, and the Calas case are, in fact, often cited by critics exploring Sciascia’s concept of justice in relation to the death sentence, mirroring the itinerary that I suggest marks the origins of the investigative paradigm in Italy.35 But even more Beccarian than the specific naming of the Milanese philosopher is the tenor of the essay, and its central focus. Sciascia characterizes the ‘secolo’ in question as a long ‘century’ that he believes begins in 1679 with the death of Jean-François-Paul di Gondi, cardinal of Retz, and ends in 1814 with the death of CharlesJoseph de Ligne, prince of Ligne. He chooses these two figures above all for ‘il loro diverso modo di vivere – a parità d’intelligenza – una condizione quasi pari, il loro rapporto col potere e l’esserne parte’ (their different ways of living – with equal intelligence – almost the same circumstance, their relationship with power and being part of it).36 These men’s relationships with power are the guiding classificatory tools that Sciascia uses to bookend the Enlightenment period: although both enjoyed significant authority, the cardinal was hungry for power, while the prince was satisfied with his lot; the former would have agreed to a revolt at a moment’s notice, while the latter hesitated before jumping into revolution. These different visions of power frame Sciascia’s discussion of the Enlightenment, and the issue of authority becomes the central force in his understanding of the long eighteenth century. Sciascia’s description of the period closely resembles that elaborated by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, which sketches a history of the changing shape of punitive apparatuses as society moved from favouring spectacles of punishment (like public hangings) to more solitary discipline, enforced behind prison walls. Foucault suggests that, in the eighteenth century, reformers (and he repeatedly cites Beccaria) created ‘the gentle way in punishment,’ a strategy that made punishments less arbitrary, transforming random, spectacular penalties performed violently in town squares into useful, retributive ones – punishments that made sense and that discouraged the potentially guilty from breaking

60

Methods of Murder

the law. For Foucault, this re-formation of the law constitutes a ‘ritual recoding’ that makes punishments a ‘school rather than a festival’ (111), making every citizen a ‘missionary’ of the law, a moralist: each citizen understands the potential risks of crime and can imagine the resulting punishment, and thus knows why and how he should behave. Beccaria’s was a ‘technology of power’ based in representation; it was a ‘scenic, signifying, public, collective model,’ not a ‘physical exercise of punishment.’37 It seems to be with some regret that Foucault asserts that this Beccarian model was not the one adopted, as he asks: ‘Why did the physical exercise of punishment (which is not torture) replace, with the prison that is its institutional support, the social play of the signs of punishment and the prolix festival that circulated them?’ The punitive model of the prison (and not the representative model proposed by eighteenth-century reformers) was the technology of power that gave way to a panoptical society and a disciplinary individual that today form a ‘central and centralized humanity [. . .] subjected by multiple mechanisms of “incarceration” ’ – a subjected, centralized humanity of which we are all an institutionalized part in the contemporary world.38 Sciascia’s understanding of the eighteenth century runs parallel to Foucault’s both in his concern with the centrality of power and in his interest in spectacle as a central key to understanding its impact. He quotes Paul Valéry writing about Montesquieu in suggesting that barbarity existed in the era of fact, and so, instead, order must exist in the era of fiction. Further, men must be able to envision obstacles that will keep them from committing crimes: ‘È indispensabile all’ordine che un uomo si senta come sul punto di essere impiccato, se sa che merita di esserlo’ (It is indispensable, to maintain order, that a man feels like he’s about to be hanged, if he knows he deserves it).39 Like Foucault, Sciascia sees in the Enlightenment a central, imaginary spectacle of power being developed as a disciplinary tool. Yet, while Foucault, seeking to trace disciplinary practices into the twentieth century, abandons Beccaria (suggesting that Beccaria himself was abandoned by societies that adopted another means of punishment, the carceral), Sciascia chooses to follow the eighteenth-century path both in this essay and throughout his literary career. He elaborates on the power of fiction for the philosophes: Con questa parola – finzione – tocchiamo il cuore del secolo, la mente del secolo [. . .] Dalla finzione, dalla convenzione, dalle cose assenti date per

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 61 presenti, nasce la virtú; dalla pratica della virtú, o comunque dal porsela, i singoli e le collettività, come meta in rapporto a sé, agli altri e alla cosa pubblica, viene la grazia, la gradevolezza del vivere.40 [With this word – fiction – we touch the heart of the century, the mind of the century [. . .] From fiction, from convention, from absent things taken as present, virtue is born; from the practice of virtue, or at least from setting it as a goal (individually or collectively) for oneself, for others, for the state – comes grace, pleasure in living.]

In fiction lies virtue, and in the practice of virtue lies grace and pleasure in living. ‘Grace,’ it is important to note, is one of the central qualities of the investigator, according to Sciascia, but here, it is the ‘grace’ born of intelligence, not divine inspiration. Grace, pleasure, intelligence: these are the (happy) qualities that made Diderot, Beccaria, and the encyclopedists Enlightenment models for Sciascia; but power, justice, and law: these were the more weighty themes that put Voltaire and Beccaria at the century’s zenith. All of Sciascia’s fiction exists at the intersection of an enlightened, utopian ideal and the perilous exercise of power, and this conflict, rather than being ideally sublimated in his historical vision of the Enlightenment, is at its centre. The clash between these areas transcends any simple opposition between reason and non-reason, between the rational and the irrational. Instead, the Enlightenment stands for a complex conflict between Grace and power, pleasure and the law – precisely the types of concerns Beccaria raised in Dei delitti. Sciascia’s reading of Enlightenment history is not utopian, or at least not exclusively so. Rather, his recurrent obsession with the period betrays a conviction that eighteenth-century questions, and in particular Beccarian ones, continue to press in twentieth-century Italy. The best qualities of the age of Enlightenment, which ‘Il secolo educatore’ casts in a pedagogical light, were evident in ‘quegli uomini vivi e sensibili la cui intelligenza, svagatamente tormentando il regno di Dio e quello dei re, agita l’Europa senza sconvolgerla’41 (those lively, sensitive men whose intelligence, distractedly tormenting God’s kingdom and that of the kings, stirs Europe without upsetting her). These characteristics, proper to Voltaire and Diderot, and which in part define the person of the ideal investigator, are most evident in the attorney-revolutionary Francesco Paolo Di Blasi, a Beccarian hero in Il Consiglio d’Egitto. Di Blasi helps to make clear the issues at stake in Sciascia’s novels: a concern with universal justice, a preoccupation with the abuses of an allencompassing power, and the tragic failure of Enlightenment ideals.

62

Methods of Murder

A brief examination of the explicit presence of Beccaria in Sciascia’s writing establishes the foundation for an investigation of the more abstract Beccarian elements, both stylistic and ideological, that drive his crime fiction. While not a work of detective fiction, Il Consiglio d’Egitto is the story of a crime, and provides significant evidence of the importance of Beccarian thought in Sciascia’s work. The book, a brilliant historical study of the false translation of an Arabic text into Italian, is set against the backdrop of late eighteenth-century Palermo. Situated in a time (the novel begins in 1782) when an enlightened viceroy, Caracciolo, ruled Sicily and struggled against the deeply rooted local aristocracy, the novel uses this fraud to explore such themes as revolution, originality, the dignity of man, and the dangers of limpid, intellectual thought in a society that favours silence and dissimulation. Set within the framework of Sciascia’s long eighteenth century, the novel explicitly realizes the juxtaposition of Enlightenment thought and the Sicilian context that plays an implicit role in the rest of his fiction. Further, Il Consiglio stages the conflict between the physical and the intellectual, demonstrating the ideal of Enlightened introspection, even as that ideal is almost entirely extinguished by barbarities committed in the name of power. One of the novel’s principal protagonists, the revolutionary lawyer Di Blasi, explicitly works to bring French Enlightenment ideals – egalitarianism, liberty – to Sicily: quella che in Di Blasi, e nei pochi suoi amici che a lui si erano stretti in congiura, era idea e passione, la Francia, la rivoluzione francese, la repubblica francese, e l’esercito della Francia rivoluzionaria come speranza di un pronto e fraterno aiuto alla futura repubblica siciliana. [To Di Blasi and to those few friends who had joined him in the conspiracy, France was both idea and passion; the French Revolution, the French Republic, and the armies of Revolutionary France spelled the hope of prompt and fraternal aid to the future Sicilian republic.]42

Yet, far from a simple, brilliant ‘sole allo zenit,’ Di Blasi is a complex character in the midst of an even more intricate and maddening society. The handsome young lawyer lives a privileged life among the Sicilian aristocracy, who amuse themselves with lavish parties and tableaux vivants; Sciascia makes clear that any number of things are infiltrating Sicily from France: ‘dalla Francia veniva ogni moda: e felicemente si avviava e trascorreva in una società che era, se mai, il labirinto della

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 63

voluttà e dell’ozio’ (35) [every fashion came from France and flourished lushly in a society that was a labyrinth, if labyrinth at all, of voluptuousness and indolence (31)]. Through his portrait of this wealthy class, Sciascia demonstrates, according to Farrell, his ‘deep knowledge of the culture of the age of Enlightenment, its cult of “feeling” as well as its cult of “reason.” ’43 Farrell’s analysis makes clear the juxtaposition of optimism and pessimism, idealism and frivolity, hope and despair that run throughout the novel and also Sciascia’s understanding of the century. These juxtapositions, however, are particularly poignant when seen through the novel’s Beccarian lens. In the final section of Il Consiglio d’Egitto, Di Blasi is arrested for insurgency, subjected to judicial torture, and finally executed, victim of the kind of injustice against which Beccaria and Voltaire passionately railed. After his arrest, an angry judge attempts to wrench more information from the valiant lawyer in order to discover his co-conspirators. In the enraged rhetoric of his accusers, it becomes clear that Di Blasi is a specifically Beccarian figure under attack: Hai scritto che la tortura è contro il diritto, contro la ragione, contro l’uomo: ma su quello che hai scritto resterebbe l’ombra della vergogna se tu ora non resistessi . . . Alla domanda quid est quaestio? hai risposto in nome della ragione, della dignità: ora devi rispondere col tuo corpo, soffrirla nella carne, nelle ossa, nei nervi; e tacere. (137)44 [You’ve written how torture is contrary to law, contrary to reason, contrary to man’s nature, but a shadow of shame will hover over what you have written if you yourself do not resist it now . . . To the question Quid est quaestio? [. . .] you’ve answered in the name of reason, of human dignity; now you must answer with your body, suffer in your flesh and bones and nerves, and still not speak. (168, translation modified)]

The lawyer’s persecution stages dramatically the physical difficulty of living one’s intellectual ideals: wrenched from the security of the salons, he is required to reproduce on his body the conditions his treatise attempts to rectify. Initially, the description of his torture is brief: ‘Il suo corpo era un contorto tralcio di vite, una vite di dolore: grave di racimoli, incommensurabile’ (137) [His body was a twisted, tangled vine of pain: incommensurable, heavy with gobbets of blood (168)]. During the penultimate torture session before his execution, however, the lawyer’s crippled body is described in ghastly terms: ‘i piedi informi come le zolle che si attaccano agli arbusti sradicati, sanguinolente

64

Methods of Murder

e grommose zolle di carne. E facevano lezzo di unto bruciato, di decomposizione’ (147) [they were shapeless feet, like the lumps of earth that cling to uprooted bushes; bloodied, encrusted lumps of meat. They stank of scorched fat, of rotting flesh (181)]. This is perhaps one of the most garish physical descriptions in all of Sciascia’s fiction, a sensorial and painful depiction of human suffering including, as it does, horrific sights and smells emanating from Di Blasi’s body. The spare, elegant simplicity of the Sicilian writer’s prose rarely describes any being with such specificity. Yet, each torture session and each description thereof serves to underline the tragically noble functioning of Di Blasi’s mind, his belief in the utility of separating body from mind, and his attempt to use the power of thought and memory to keep him from physical or intellectual resignation. Even as the executioner tightens the cords around him, the idealistic lawyer makes recurrence to his mind as his saving grace: ‘ “Non accecarmi la mente” pregò’ [‘Don’t make me black out!’ he prayed] and later, ‘Devi pensare, se vuoi resistere, devi pensare’ (138–9) [‘You must keep thinking; if you want to hold out, you’ve got to keep thinking’ (170)]. Humanitarian thought against physical judicial violence: this is the utopian Enlightenment ideal at work. This ideal comforts Di Blasi in the last moments of his life: ‘ “Questo non deve accadere a un uomo” pensò: e che non sarebbe più accaduto nel mondo illuminato dalla ragione’ (165) [‘This should not happen to a man,’ he thought. In the future it would not happen, not in a world enlightened by reason (205)]. Power, however, eclipses Di Blasi’s ideals, and he is executed on the final page of the novel by an executioner who makes the sign of the cross and prays to ‘his’ God – ‘il Dio delle capre e del malocchio’ [the God of goats and of the malocchio] – and not the investigator’s God of illuminating Grace (170, 212). While Di Blasi contemplates his final days of life, the abbot Vella, the second of the protagonists of the novel and author of the great historical forgery that is its subject, the false translation of Il Consiglio d’Egitto from Arabic, progresses from being a self-centred, opportunistic dependant to a figure with an ethical conscience, a conscience that leads him, according to one scholar, ‘verso la ragione. [. . .] Questa la penetrazione della ragione e dell’illuminismo nell’orbita mentale di Vella, che finisce di essere l’uomo dell’impostura e si avvia ad essere l’uomo che si prepara alla ragione’ (toward reason [. . .] This is the penetration of reason and Enlightenment in Vella’s mental orbit; he is done being the man of the imposture and is on his way to becoming the man in whom reason is brewing).45 Reason, in his case, begins with empathy, and the

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 65

progress he makes takes place in the ‘mental orbit,’ in his head. Upon hearing of Di Blasi’s arrest, ‘per la prima volta nella sua vita effettivamente sentiva di partecipare ad una pena altrui’ (142) [for the first time in his life he perceived, he shared, the agony of another (174)]. Finally, this empathy turns into faint intellectual curiosity, a form of interest, nonetheless, that he lacked earlier: La ferocia delle leggi, l’esistenza della tortura, le atroci esecuzioni di giustizia, di cui una volta era stato persino spettatore, non avevano mai turbato i suoi sentimenti: li metteva in conto di eventi naturali [. . .] Sapeva che c’era un libro, di un certo Beccaria, contro la tortura, contro la pena di morte: lo sapeva perché monsignor Lopez, proprio in quei giorni, ne aveva ordinato il sequestro [. . .] Ora [. . .] a figurarsi una persona che conosceva, un uomo per il quale aveva stima ed affetto, straziato dalla tortura e destinato alla forca, sentiva improvvisamente l’infamia di vivere dentro un mondo in cui la tortura e la forca appartenevano alla legge, alla giustizia: lo sentiva come un malessere fisico, come un urto di vomito. ‘Mi piacerebbe leggere il libro di Beccaria.’ (153) [The cruelty of the law, the practice of torture, and the atrocious executions, several of which he had witnessed in the past, had never disturbed him: he had assigned such things to the category of natural phenomena [. . .] He knew that there was a book by someone called Beccaria that opposed torture and the death penalty: he knew of it because Monsignor López had only recently ordered any copies of it to be sequestered [. . .] Now, however, he had to envisage a person whom he knew, a man whom he esteemed and loved, wracked by torture and condemned to the gallows; suddenly he felt how infamous it was to live in a world where torture and gallows were a part of the law, of justice; his revulsion was physical, he felt as if he were about to vomit. ‘I’d like to read Beccaria’s book.’ (189)]

Vella’s vague curiosity regarding Beccaria, his conditional desire to read Dei delitti e delle pene, reflects his more vivid estimation of Di Blasi and his sacrifice, seeming to establish a connection between unenlightened cynic, enlightened friend, and Enlightenment philosophy. Although Il Consiglio’s reflection on Sciascia’s contemporary Sicily is sardonic (just after Di Blasi expresses his hopes for the future, the narrator interjects a lengthy parenthesis dispelling his optimism),46 Vella’s spark of interest in Beccaria seems to offer a modicum of hope in the midst of an otherwise desperate ending.

66

Methods of Murder

The final appearance of the forger in the text concedes a bleak possibility of truth. As Vella hears the bells tolling for Di Blasi’s imminent execution, he makes the sign of the cross and ‘pregò luce perpetua per Francesco Paolo di Blasi. “Tra poco sarà nel mondo della verità,” pensò. Ma gli sorse, a sgomentarlo, il pensiero che il mondo della verità fosse questo: degli uomini vivi, della storia, dei libri’ (168) [‘Soon he will be in the world of truth,’ he thought, and was struck with dismay at the sudden idea that the world of truth might be here and now, in the world of living men, of history, of books (210)]. Even as Vella prays for his friend, his mental credo is one that places faith in the project of Dei delitti e delle pene, in living humans, in books, in history. When the blade falls in the following and final sentence of the text, the guillotine decapitates intelligence, enlightened thought, and justice, cruelly detaching mind from body and lopping off the very nerve centre of such concepts. Di Blasi’s death exposes the uselessness of the system of ‘justice’ in a context in which violence prevails. When arrested and dragged to his death by execution, the disheartened lawyer kicks at his volumes of Diderot, musing to himself as he knocks over stacks at a time, ‘E anche per te, ora; non ti servono più, ammesso che ti siano mai serviti; che ti siano mai serviti se non per ridurti a questa condizione’ (130–1) [But what about you, now? What value can books have for you any longer? Were they ever of use to you, except perhaps to bring you to where you are now? (159)]. Sicily, as Sciascia here suggests, knows the Enlightenment – it is not the historical period that was absent on the southern island – but its goals have been misread: its effectiveness as a mode of perceiving the world is constantly and frustratingly undermined by a competing system, one that functions via political and social oppression. Il Consiglio stages the conflict between Grace and power, the same tensions that conditioned the eighteenth century in France and Milan, and in dramatic fashion, the latter triumphs. Enlightened Investigators in a Dark World Il Consiglio d’Egitto makes the connection between Sciascia and Beccaria explicit, but traces of Beccarian thought also form a suggestive subtext for Sciascia’s detective fiction. The decisive ending of Il Consiglio is decapitation, a violent state mechanism that commits harsh symbolic violence as well: it literally enacts the separation of body from mind, wresting the intellective capacity away from the body capable

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 67

of performing actions. This mode of death is particularly significant in the Beccarian universe, a literary space dependent on the workings of the mind. Methodologically speaking, Sciascia’s investigative figures participate in a cerebral tradition of investigation that accompanies them in a declaredly mathematical search for truth, a search that echoes language from Beccaria’s treatise. The Sicilian author’s economical narrative voice dedicates considerable space to conversation, to mental dialogue, and to events, but remarkably little to description, whether of landscape or, more significantly, of human figures.47 As a result, detectives are portrayed primarily as thinking beings who lack virtually any trace of a physical body. The criminals they pursue are similarly non-corporeal beings, and in any case, are often stand-ins for a concept of justice, who as such lack the biological attributes that would lend them the weight of corporeal verisimilitude. Investigation is the fictional equivalent of Enlightenment-style reason; the investigated is the (non-corporeal) personification of criminal man as subject of the judicial system; and the investigator, the narrative avatar of a Beccarianfigure himself. Yet, Sciascia’s detective narratives, like his reading of the Enlightenment, are not exclusively rational, and are embroiled in questions of power, not solely questions of reason. In spite of their ratiocinative talents, his detectives are often revealed to lack the power that would allow them to deliver criminals to justice. The Enlightenment conflict between Grace and power is waged in a narrative system in which the two normally go together: the detective would usually be the bearer of illuminating truths and physically or practically capable of restoring order. Thus, it is no surprise that, in the end, the detective genre does not unfold in the traditional fashion. In a number of cases, it seems that it is explicitly because Sciascia’s detectives have misread the Enlightenment, hearing only its utopian message, that they are doomed to fail. Sciascia’s detective-figures are generally dedicated to the exercise of reason as an intellectual pursuit. A number of them are honest, committed members of the police force, and as such devote themselves to the Enlightenment ideal of an impartial legal system, and to the feasibility of the project of justice, to the ‘legge in assoluto’ in which Sciascia also reluctantly places some faith. Antonio Lagandara of Una storia semplice practises his art with eagerness: ‘Il mestiere lo appassionava, e voleva perciò farvi carriera’ (He found the job stimulating, and decided to make a career of it).48 Lagandara demonstrates a reverential attitude towards those he perceives as enlightened. When assigned to

68

Methods of Murder

chauffeur a professor who helps investigate the murder of Giorgio Roccella, he reacts with ‘grande contentezza’ (great delight) since ‘parlare con persone che avevano fama di intelligenza e cultura dava una specie di ebrezza’ ([he] was always intoxicated by the prospect of talk with people who enjoyed a reputation for intelligence and culture).49 Such joy at intelligence and culture, just the kind of joy Sciascia describes in ‘Il secolo educatore’ as proper to the Enlightenment is, however, shortlived when it encounters the workings of organized crime in the Sicilian setting. Capitan Bellodi of Il giorno della civetta commands the authority Lagandara dreams of acquiring, although he, too, betrays an unwarrantedly optimistic view of the law. Sciascia, in fact, sketches the portrait of a man who lives as if he had first-hand experience of the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment and, therefore, believes, wholeheartedly, that the law is a surgical instrument of freedom and justice: Bellodi, emiliano di Parma, per tradizione familiare repubblicano, e per convinzione, faceva quello che in antico si diceva il mestiere delle armi, e in un corpo di polizia, con la fede di un uomo che ha partecipato a una rivoluzione e dalla rivoluzione ha visto sorgere la legge: e questa legge che assicurava libertà e giustizia, la legge della Repubblica, serviva e faceva rispettare [. . .] Sarebbe rimasto smarrito, il confidente, a sapere di avere di fronte un uomo, carabiniere e per giunta ufficiale, che l’autorità di cui era investito considerava come il chirurgo considera il bisturi: uno strumento da usare con precauzione, con precisione, con sicurezza; che riteneva la legge scaturita dall’idea di giustizia e alla giustizia congiunto ogni atto che dalla legge muovesse.50 [Captain Bellodi [. . .] an Emilian from Parma, was by family tradition and personal conviction a republican, a soldier who followed what used to be called ‘the career of arms’ in a police force, with the dedication of a man who has played his part in a revolution and has seen law created by it. This law, the law of the Republic, which safeguarded liberty and justice, he served and enforced [. . .] The informer would have been astounded to know that the man he was facing, a carabiniere and an officer too, regarded the authority vested in him as a surgeon regards the knife: an instrument to be used with care, precision and certainty; a man convinced that law rests on the idea of justice and that any action taken by the law should be governed by justice.51]

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 69

Bellodi’s cautious, conservative ideal of law is precisely that prescribed by Beccaria, a restraint that recognizes and respects the limits of legal powers. And finally, Rogas, the police inspector of Il contesto, is among the most meticulous of the detective-figures in Sciascia’s novels, and also the most cynical: without a romantic idea of justice. With diligent attention to detail and intellectual brilliance, he excels at the rational game of detection: Rogas fece una lista di coloro che nei ventidue processi erano stati condannati, completa di ogni indicazione che servisse a rintracciarli. La diramò agli uffici giudiziari e di polizia in grado di conoscere la sorte di quelle persone, che si trovassero ancora in carcere o ne fossero usciti. Seppe così che quattordici erano ancora ospiti delle case di pena, che veramente erano tali anche se era in corso una proposta di legge per mutare quella triste denominazione (ma soltanto la denominazione); e otto erano tornati in libertà, avendo scontata la pena o avendola avuta abbreviata per condoni e amnistie o essendo stati assolti in appello. Su questi otto, sulle carte dei loro processi, Rogas si concentrò per più di una settimana. Era una specie di evasione, di giuoco.52 [Rogas made a list of those in the twenty-two trials who had been sentenced. It was complete in every detail that might serve to track them down. He distributed the list to judicial and police officers that were in a position to know the fate of those persons, whether they were still in prison or had left. In this way, he learned that fourteen of the men were still in prison; eight had regained their freedom, either because they had served their sentences or had had them reduced for good conduct or by amnesties, or because they had been found innocent upon appeal. Rogas concentrated for more than a week on these eight men and the documents relating to their trials. It was a kind of escape, a kind of game for him.53]

The rational language of mathematics allows Rogas to tidily add up various possibilities, suggesting that detection is a form of carefully organized ‘game’ which, theoretically, if played with precision, can be won. And his criminal mathematics does, indeed, lead him to the assassin in question, demonstrating the possible efficacy of such carefully rational thought (if only the system were less corrupt than the Sicilian context in which he works). Each of the above-cited descriptions also provides a characteristic sketch of a detective-figure, insofar as each recounts the general tenor

70

Methods of Murder

of his thought. In spite of the central position of each of these protagonists, however, their physical forms remain shadowy. All of Sciascia’s investigators are thinkers, and a significant part of the ‘action’ of his stories transpires in their heads. In Il contesto, Rogas ‘con la mente lavorava’ (Rogas’s head was working),54 for example; in A ciascuno il suo, Professor Laurana involves himself in the inquiries because he feels they require his ‘mente libera e pronta’ (free and quick mind).55 In Il giorno della civetta, even when not officially pursuing the guilty, Bellodi ‘andava rimuginando’ (pondered) various thoughts and theories.56 And in Il cavaliere e la morte, the Vice shares intellectual kinship with other sceptics, including his boss and a friend who works in the secret services. In describing this latter affinity, the mind becomes a kind of computer, functioning mechanically and with precision: ‘Era come se nella loro mente ci fossero gli stessi circuiti, gli stessi processi logici’ (It was as if the same circuits, the same logical processes operated in both their minds).57 Thus although a large part of the narrative is dedicated to the thoughts, dialogues, and actions of these protagonists, in practice they remain ephemeral. Sciascia’s texts are peopled less by protagonists than by figures representing ideological positions, however complicated, in relation to the societies in which they live. Their positions are generally eccentric, whether they come from outside (as the painter in Todo modo, the Emilian Capitano Bellodi in Il giorno della civetta, or the Sicilian Vice in the industrial setting of Il cavaliere e la morte) or are simply consummate outsiders (as Paolo Laurana of A ciascuno il suo 58 or Rogas in Il contesto).59 The detective-figures all participate at some point in their investigations in abstract intellectual discussions that recall salon culture – Bellodi with don Mariano Arena, Laurana with the vecchio Roscio, the painter with don Gaetano. These exchanges with lively interlocutors, however, lead the detectives not to a belief in a utopian ideal, but rather closer to an understanding of the apparently inevitable triumph of power over reason. More fleeting than the detectives are the victims themselves, generally described briefly and without regret. They are simply dead bodies, victims of injustice, but never corporeal figures that suffer as tragically as Di Blasi in Il Consiglio d’Egitto. Corpses appear, cold and dead, early in the narratives, providing the impetus for the investigation to follow. In A ciascuno il suo, for example, the slaying of two prominent citizens is sketched elegantly and dispassionately: ‘insieme chiusero quella felice giornata di caccia, a dieci metri di distanza: colpito alle spalle il farmacista, al petto il dottor Roscio’(they ended that happy

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 71

hunting day together, only thirty feet apart – the pharmacist shot between the shoulders, the doctor in the chest).60 This situation recalls the first sentence of Il contesto, which reports the first of a string of slayings of judges: Il procuratore Varga era impegnato nel processo Reis, che durava da circa un mese e si sarebbe trascinato almeno per altri due, quando in una dolcissima sera di maggio, dopo le dieci e non oltre la mezzanotte secondo testimonianze e necroscopia, lo ammazzarono. Le testimonianze, in verità, non coincidevano strettamente coi risultati della necroscopia: il medico legale tirava verso la mezzanotte il momento del decesso, mentre gli amici coi quali il procuratore, uomo di rigide abitudini, usava intrattenersi ogni sera, e coi quali si era anche quella sera intrattenuto, affermavano che alle dieci, minuto più minuto meno, li aveva lasciati.61 [District Attorney Varga was conducting the prosecution in the Reis trial, which had been going on for almost a month and would have dragged on for at least two more, when, one mild May night, after ten and not later than twelve, according to various testimony and to the autopsy, they killed him. The testimony, in point of fact, did not strictly coincide with the results of the autopsy: the medical examiner placed the time of death near midnight, whereas friends with whom the District Attorney, a man of rigid habits, was accustomed to spend the evening, and with whom he had indeed spent that evening, stated that at ten o’clock, give or take a few minutes, he had left them.62]

In both cases, death is announced ironically (at the end of the ‘felice giornata di caccia’ in the former and on a ‘dolcissima sera di maggio’ in the latter); and the distance between the occurrence and its reception, carved out by such a tone, prepares us for the narratorial distance from death’s bloody reality. Il contesto places District Attorney Varga’s death unapologetically in the context of medical and procedural debates about details, and his corporeal human form, in a sense, is lost in the process. As the following pages reveal, wildly varying accounts of his character and his final moments (dry and practical on the part of the police; lyrical and sentimental according to speakers at his funeral) position him in the interpretative context of human understanding, rather than the physical context of human form. His corpse as such is only perceived as a function of the discourses surrounding it. This non-physicality of crimes serves the larger purpose of Sciascia’s work. Claude Ambroise points out: ‘Sciascia, diversamente da Agatha

72

Methods of Murder

Christie o da Simenon sa che lo Stato – l’istituzione giudiziaria – non è in grado di conferire efficacia al paziente lavorio di ricostruzione dell’ispettore o del detective [. . .] [L]’inchiesta diventa “cosa mentale” ’ (unlike Agatha Christie or Simenon, Sciascia knows that the State – the judiciary – is not able to effectively conduct the inspector’s or the detective’s patient work of reconstruction [. . .] The investigation becomes a ‘mental thing’).63 Ambroise’s observation helps make clear the political nature of Sciascia’s style of detective prose, the reason for its reticence vis-à-vis the human form. In Il giorno della civetta, Bellodi suggests that excessive attention to the idea of the physicality of crime is unwarranted in Sicily and tends to lead investigations in the wrong direction, to a space in which rational precision is at the mercy of public opinion, which tends to blame crimes on passion and passion on women. He insists, rather, on a more abstract cerebral analysis, which he suggests is too often ignored on the island. The true impetus to criminality lies in intellectual and not physical passion: Il delitto passionale, il capitano Bellodi pensava, in Sicilia non scatta dalla vera e propria passione, dalla passione del cuore; ma da una specie di passione intellettuale, da una passione o preoccupazione di formalismo, come dire?, giuridico: nel senso di quella astrazione in cui le leggi vanno assottigliandosi attraverso i gradi di giudizio del nostro ordinamento, fino a raggiungere quella trasparenza formale in cui il merito, cioè l’umano peso dei fatti, non conta più; e, abolita l’immagine dell’uomo, la legge nella legge si specchia.64 [In Sicily, thought Captain Bellodi, the crime passionnel is not the result of geniune passion, a passion of the heart, but of a sort of intellectual passion, an almost juridical concern for forms; juridical in the sense of the abstractions to which law is reduced at various levels of our legal system until they reach that formal transparency in which ‘merit,’ that is, the human element, no longer counts. Once this is eliminated, law simply reflects itself.65]

These crimes of ‘intellectual’ passion represent the problem in Sciascia’s Sicily: crimes are systemic, committed by an obscure aggregation of interests that function collectively as their own, corrupt state, one in which the human does not matter. For this reason, the detectives attempt to subtract themselves from the human, subjective world in order to be, like Sciascia’s classical detectives, representatives not of the ‘legge ufficiale,’ but rather the ‘legge

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 73

in assoluto.’ On some level, they thus stand for Sciascia’s own belief in the force of justice, which Farrell calls a ‘cult of justice in the abstract,’ and which he says is the ‘one source of light and hope in Sciascia’s generally dystopian view of life’:66 [La democrazia ha] tra le mani lo strumento che la tirannia non ha: il diritto, la legge uguale per tutti, la bilancia della giustizia. Se al simbolo della bilancia si sostituisse quello delle manette – come alcuni fanatici dell’antimafia in cuor loro desiderano – saremmo perduti irrimediabilmente, come nemmeno il fascismo c’è riuscito.67 [[Democracy has] in its hands a tool that tyranny does not: rights, equal laws for all, the scales of justice. If the symbol of the scales were substituted with handcuffs – as some anti-Mafia fanatics want, at heart – we would be irreparably lost, in a way even Fascism couldn’t manage.]

Thus, we find that Laurana is motivated by a: ‘curiosità umana, intellettuale, che non poteva nè doveva confondersi con quella di coloro che la società, lo Stato salariavano per raggiungere e consegnare alla vendetta della legge le persone che la trasgrediscono o infrangono’ (human, intellectual curiosity that could not, and should not, be confused with the interest of those whom society and State paid to capture and consign to the vengeance of the law persons who transgress or break it).68 And, curiously, we discover that a number of the police investigators began their careers with the desire or the intention to be – like the idealist Di Blasi – lawyers: impartial representatives of the law, and not its enforcers. In Una storia semplice, the initially optimistic Lagandara actively pursues his degree: ‘Si era iscritto alla facoltà di legge, la frequentava quando e come poteva, studiava. La laurea in legge era la suprema ambizione della sua vita, il suo sogno’ (He enrolled at the Law Faculty, attended lectures as and when he could, and studied hard. A Degree in Law was the supreme ambition, the ultimate dream of his life).69 Bellodi, in Il giorno della civetta, was ‘destined’ to be an attorney.70 And in Il cavaliere e la morte, the Vice explains that he did not choose to be a lawyer ‘forse perché mi sono illuso che si potesse essere avvocati appunto facendo i poliziotti’ (perhaps because I deluded myself that you could best be a lawyer by being a policeman).71 This glum realization is significant for all the detectives, because in each case, the would-be lawyer-idealist-revolutionaries discover that their actual positions require them to negotiate the human power that corrupts or unbalances the abstract scales of justice.

74

Methods of Murder

Thus, neither Bellodi nor any of the protagonists of Sciascia’s novels manage to wholly implement an oppositional justice system. In A ciascuno il suo, the narrator admits that his ‘real’ world can only dream of functioning like the world of detective fiction: Che un delitto si offra agli inquirenti come un quadro i cui elementi materiali e, per così dire, stilistici consentano, se sottilmente reperiti e analizzati, una sicura attribuzione, è corollario di tutti quei romanzi polizieschi cui buona parte dell’umanità si abbevera. Nella realtà le cose stanno però diversamente.72 [One corollary of all the detective novels to which a goodly share of mankind repairs for refreshment specifies that a crime presents its investigators with a picture, the material and, so to speak, stylistic elements of which, if meticulously assembled and analyzed, permit a sure solution. In actuality, however, the situation is different.73]

At best, they might have the capacity to recognize that the process they long to admire (as Lagandara, Bellodi, and Rogas laud the investigative methods they put to use) is itself flawed. Capitan Bellodi, for instance, realizes that a man to whom he directs questions has named his aggressive mongrel dog ‘Barruggieddu’ after ‘Bargello,’ which meant chief of police: Capì che non c’era niente da cavare da uno che riteneva il capo degli sbirri cattivo quanto il proprio cane. E non è che avesse torto, pensava il capitano: da secoli i bargelli mordevano gli uomini come lui, magari li facevano assicurare, come diceva il vecchio, e poi mordevano. Che cosa erano stati i bargelli se non strumenti della usurpazione e dell’arbitrio?74 [He realized that there was nothing to be got out of a man who considered a chief of police as evil as his own dog. Perhaps he wasn’t so far wrong, thought the captain; for centuries the bargelli had bitten men like him, bitten after reassuring, as the old man had said. What had the bargelli been but tools of invading tyrants?75]

Bellodi’s admission constitutes a moment of critical self-awareness, a realization that his surgical precision and extreme caution in applying the tools of his trade are far from typical of the system itself. At worst, Sciasica’s investigators realize that the system, bloated by power, is rotten to the core. The Vice’s friend in the secret services, with

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 75

whom he shares an intellectual affiliation, explains the degree to which power consumes societies: C’è un potere visibile, nominabile, enumerabile; e ce n’è un altro, non enumerabile, senza nome, senza nomi, che nuota sott’acqua, e specialmente nei momenti in cui si permette di affiorare gagliardamente, e cioè violentemente e sanguinosamente: ma il fatto è che ne ha bisogno.76 [There is one power which can be seen, named and counted, but there is another which cannot be counted, which is without name or without names and which swims underwater. The visible power is in permanent conflict with the underwater power, especially when it has the gall to break surface with vigour, that is to say with violence and bloodshed: but the fact is that it needs to behave that way.77]

The two men, allied by an almost mystical ability to reason, are more tragically connected by their impotence to act against this power. Both are killed in the end, and the Vice’s final thought is, ‘che confusione!’ (what confusion!) as his mind dissolves into eternity.78 Cannon suggests that the dissolution of the Vice’s ‘power of thought into a supreme and eternal “pensare” is the final hope that Sciascia’s novel holds out to his reader.’79 The dissolution of the individual capacity to reason, however, indicates the end of the possibility for this individual to act against this particular force. Reason, or Grace, routinely fails to counteract power in Sciascia’s crime fiction. Yet, perhaps most troubling, when considering the Beccarian perspective, is the potentially devious nature of the Enlightenment itself when misunderstood by its followers. In A ciascuno il suo, for example, Laurana spends the last evening of his life at a café reading Voltaire, but rather than choosing Zadig or a treatise on justice, he distractedly reads the Lettere d’amore. As he waits anxiously for the woman who has betrayed him to his assassins, Laurana fails to comprehend the ‘italiano doppiamente osceno di una lettera di Voltaire’ (a letter of Voltaire’s, doubly obscene in the Italian version).80 As the central detectivefigure, it is particularly significant that Laurana has chosen the wrong Enlightenment path to follow – individual sentiment, instead of universal philosophy – and that he furthermore does not even understand this Voltaire very well. Meanwhile, his acquaintances at the Caffè Romeris initially complain astutely that ‘da quello che succede intorno non si direbbe che Voltaire sia oggi uno scrittore molto letto’ (with the world going as it does, you wouldn’t say that Voltaire is a widely read author

76

Methods of Murder

today) but then go on to make vulgar jokes about Voltaire’s relationship with his niece.81 In casting Voltaire as the inspiration for such confusion and crudeness, Sciascia demonstrates his own awareness of the limitations of eighteenth-century reason in the hands of a naive investigator and a playful but ideologically vacant crowd. The ironic and somewhat pathetic critique of Laurana’s use of the Enlightenment in A ciascuno il suo becomes decidedly more sinister in Il contesto. As Rogas visits Riches, president of the Supreme Court (soon to be a victim of assassination), the judge launches into a tirade in which he defends the impossibility of judicial error, avowing that not all victims are innocent. He describes an essay he authored that confutes Voltaire’s Traité on Jean Calas, arguing: È stato il punto di partenza dell’errore: dell’errore che potesse esistere il cosidetto errore giudiziario . . . [. . .] Io ho passato molto tempo della mia vita, una infinità di quelle ore che si usa chiamare libere [. . .]: le ho passate a confutare Voltaire sul caso di Jean Calas. Cioè a confutare l’idea della giustizia, dell’amministrazione della giustizia, che da quel caso, per come Voltaire l’assume, si diparte.82 [It was the starting point of error – the error of believing that there could exist such a thing as judicial error . . . [. . .] I’ve spent a great deal of my life, an infinity of those hours one calls free [. . .] in confuting Voltaire about the case of Jean Calas. That is, in refuting the idea of justice, which, so Voltaire assumes, was belied in that case.83]

The judge’s fantasy is that of rewinding time to a pre-Beccarian ethos, erasing the possibility of recognizing judicial error, erasing Italian modifications of the judicial system prompted by Beccaria’s treatise, and officially acknowledging the de facto return to an absolutist, mythical belief in the justice ritual: la giustizia non può non disvelarsi, non transustanziarsi, non compiersi. Prima, il giudice può arrovellarsi, macerarsi, dire a se stesso: non sei degno, sei pieno di miseria, greve di istinti, torbido di pensieri, soggetto a ogni debolezza e a ogni errore; ma nel momento in cui celebra, non più. E tanto meno dopo.84 [justice cannot not be revealed, not transubstantiated, not completed. A judge may torment himself, wear himself out, tell himself, ‘You are unworthy; you are full of meanness, burdened by passions, confused in

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 77 your ideas, liable to every weakness and every error’ – but in the moment when he celebrates the law, he is no longer so. And much less so afterward.85]

Farrell has powerfully demonstrated that, for Sciascia, justice ‘may be, and is, the supreme good, but the act of judgement is nothing more than the act of domination of one man over his fellows.’86 Further, the judge himself is the ‘creature of a regime, a product of a system of power.’87 In the case of Riches, his hubris as administrator of justice is intermingled with a belief that society is inherently violent, and thus retributive justice (that same justice mentioned in the ‘Breve storia’) must apply. He insists that Voltaire’s error was to attempt to differentiate between kinds of violence, and specifically between death in war and death ‘per giustizia’ (at the hands [. . .] of justice).88 The only possible form of justice, according to the extremist judge, is through the exercise of violence and power: ‘quella che nella guerra militare si chiama decimazione’ (the form that in a military war is called decimation).89 Riches’ death shortly after this tirade might be perceived as an end to this ridiculously categorical perception of his own infallibility and a judgment on his extremism. But, instead, his death is only a minor interruption in the functioning of a thoroughly sinister system and a confirmation of his brutal diagnosis of society. His is a negative exemplum of engagement with Enlightenment thought, but one that in its very negativity posits a slightly more positive model. The Perilous Power of Enlightened Illumination As Riches continues to confront Rogas, he ridicules the detective’s role: Il suo mestiere, mio caro amico, è diventato ridicolo. Presuppone l’esistenza dell’individuo, e l’individuo non c’è. Presuppone l’esistenza di dio, il dio che acceca gli uni e illumina gli altri, il dio che si nasconde: e talmente a lungo è rimasto nascosto che possiamo presumerlo morto. Presuppone la pace, e c’è la Guerra.90 [Your profession, my dear friend, has become absurd. It presupposes the existence of the individual, and the individual does not exist. It presupposes the existence of God, the God who blinds some men and enlightens others, the God who hides – and has remained hidden so long that we may presume Him dead. It presupposes peace, and there is war.91]

78

Methods of Murder

Riches counterposes his own categorical thinking (war, not peace) to the categorical thinking of the detective (resolution, not chaos). His characterization of the role of the detective in part parallels Sciascia’s own description of the canonical investigator in the ‘Breve storia.’ Using very similar language, Sciascia wrote that the detective novel ‘presuppone una metafisica,’ and he suggested that the world of the detective was the world of illuminating, god-given Grace. Both Riches and this canonical detective demonstrate the problem with either side of that argument, whether one takes the role of the absolutist judge or the optimistic investigator: both assume a metaphysics born in strong thought, and as such both comprise a form of perilous, human power. The mistrust of reason as power is something that Sciascia teases out of the Enlightenment itself, corresponding to my own reading of Beccaria. While recollections of the Enlightenment often focus on the powers of reason and on the supremacy of human rationality, Beccaria failed to definitively establish the absolute dominance of these qualities in his works, engineering instead, like Sciascia, a tenuous compromise between the sacred and the profane, between order and chaos. Largely because of the politics of his times, science had to coexist alongside God, and chaos constantly lurked around the borders of Beccarian thought in the irretrievably unpredictable form of the criminal subject. Speaking of his youth spent under a Fascist government, Sciascia describes the society in which he grew up as one that was ‘doppiamente non giusta, doppiamente non libera, doppiamente non razionale . . . so benissimo che in quei vent’anni ho finito con l’acquisire una specie di “nevrosi di ragione,” di una ragione che cammina sull’orlo della non ragione’ (doubly not just, doubly not free, doubly not rational . . . I know perfectly well that in those twenty years I ended up with a kind of ‘neurosis of reason,’ of a reason that walks the line of unreason).92 This ‘neurosis of reason’ becomes a means for avoiding strong thought that leads to binary thinking and to the exercise of power. Sciascia’s Sicily remains obstinately out of balance, and the elaborate balancing act that generally fails to create synthesis between chaos and order equals a narrative malaise that renders his novels living, contradictory creatures. Reason and non-reason, sanity and insanity blur into a narrative space that refuses the consolation provided by generic or epistemological predictability, dealing with societal and philosophical problems without insisting on unravelling the contradictions it encounters. This nihilistic tendency is particularly evident in Sciascia’s relationship to metaphysics, but this relationship also complicates an

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 79

interpretation of the postmodernity of his work – the necessary, if complex, result of philosophical nihilism, according to the philosopher Gianni Vattimo. The epistemological base of Sciascia’s work might be discussed in terms of Vattimo’s concept of ‘weak thought,’ deliberate nihilism. Jon Snyder explains that Vattimo works to ‘unmask all systems of reason as systems of persuasion, and to show that logic – the very basis of rational metaphysical thought – is in fact only a kind of rhetoric.’93 As such, explains Snyder, ‘all distinctions between truth and falsehood, essence and appearance, the rational and the irrational must be dissolved, insofar as no ultimate guarantee or unshakable ground of “difference” (for example, God) exists.’94 Discussing the postmodern in a Heideggerian framework, Vattimo (quoting Heidegger) explains that metaphysics cannot be left behind ‘ “like an opinion. Nor can it be left behind us like a doctrine in which we no longer believe”; rather, it is something which stays in us as the traces of an illness or a kind of pain to which we are resigned.’95 But Vattimo also casts the response to metaphysics as a ‘convalescence,’ or an overcoming, that indicates the possibility of being cured.96 Sciascia’s fiction portrays metaphysics as the kind of memory described by Vattimo, still evoked as a prominent and unavoidable part of present-day society (perhaps most evident in the executioner and Vella at the end of Il Consiglio d’Egitto, both of whom pray to God). Yet, he seems to remain unconvinced of the possibility of a ‘convalescence’ in a world in which he sees power, and strong thought, as forces that must be counteracted, but also as forms that inevitably quash voices of opposition. Sciascia’s essay on the eighteenth century called it the ‘Secolo educatore,’ a title that expresses his desire to frame the Enlightenment in terms of what we are supposed to have learned from it, something about human intellect and its exercise. His personal contemporary world, like Vattimo’s, is one in which Verwindung, that acceptance and deepening of what came before, comprises a repetition of modernity (in Sciascia’s case, the Enlightenment), but with a recognition of the limits of its legitimacy.97 But, as Laurana and as Riches demonstrate, many people have learned the wrong lessons, have the wrong understanding of the eighteenth-century message. If Sciascia believed that Voltaire and Beccaria were at the ideological centre of the century, he says that the ‘essence’ of the century, its greatness lies in the sensitive men whose intelligence stirs, or agitates, but does not overturn Europe.98 The result of such intellectual revolution, revolution that ‘agitates’ but

80

Methods of Murder

does not ‘overturn’ or ‘upset’ is the ‘spirito gioioso e giocoso, divertito, ironico, beffardo, leggero, sottile’ (joyous and playful, amused, ironic, mocking, light, subtle spirit) of Enlightenment. This is the spirit that inspires reformers (Sciascia cites Frederick of Prussia, Catherine of Russia, and Leopold II of Tuscany, among others), moved by the lightness of this intellectual fiction, to attempt to make real, significant changes to laws. Yet, this is not the revolutionary spirit that the protagonists of Sciascia’s novels have learned. Most significantly in this regard are the Figli dell’ottantanove (Children of Eighty-nine), a supposed revolutionary group in Il cavaliere e la morte that claims responsibility for the death of Sandoz. The Vice, convinced that the Figli dell’ottantanove are non-existent (and being created), suggests that the French Revolution is being invoked as a ‘bandiera di rivoluzione, scomparsa ormai quella rossa [. . .] per sedurre le menti deboli, gli annoiati, i vocati alle cause perse e al sacrificio, i violenti che vogliono dar nobilità ai loro istinti’ (now that the red flag no longer flies high [. . .a] revolutionary banner [. . .] to seduce feeble minds, to attract the bored and the violent who need to dignify their instincts, or to appeal to those with a vocation for sacrifice and lost causes).99 The so-called children of the revolution are actually being formed as part of a complicated power play, which Mark Chu calls a ‘strategia della tensione designed to further the interests of those in power.’100 Significantly, their movement is born ‘per mitomania, per noia, magari per vocazione a cospirare e a delinquere’ (of mythomania, of boredom, maybe of a vocation for conspiracy and criminal activity)101 – in short, for reasons almost diametrically opposed to the joyous, light, subtle intellect that drove the ‘Secolo educatore.’ Once again, this is the wrong Enlightenment: it takes a view of the eighteenth century as a time when one can seize power, and fails to realize the inherent danger of strong thought, even if ideologically motivated, in a fragile society. By repeatedly evoking the eighteenth century in his work, Sciascia continues to reclaim it as a ‘secolo educatore.’ But his era of Enlightenment is one of ‘finzione,’ not of ‘ragione,’ and the non-fictitious effects of power repeatedly overshadow the joys of Enlightened philosophy. Once again, Sciascia’s thinking aligns with that of Foucault in viewing relations of power as central to understanding connections, structures, and strategies in history. The French philosopher asserts that the ‘history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.’102 For

Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 81

Foucault, though, these relations of power are not exclusively negative; power ‘traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse,’ constituting a ‘productive network which runs through the whole social body.’103 As Sciascia’s negative portrayal of Riches in Il contesto demonstrates, the Sicilian author staunchly resists the idea that we must understand ourselves in warlike terms, in terms of force. His interpretation of the Enlightenment is the key moment in which we see this, because he continues to imagine the possibility of agitating without overturning – the possibility, in short, of intellectual ‘joy in reasoning,’ some kind of secular Grace. Yet, time after time, Sciascia stages the failure of his own philosophy, as he shows that joy can be crushed by power. His unsuccessful detectives remind us that there is no time for armchair pleasure, but rather that literature must remind us to act, however futile such action might be.

3 Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

Leonardo Sciascia’s last novel, Una storia semplice, was published in 1989, the year of his death. Just five years later, a novel by another Sicilian writer of detective fiction emerged as one of the great literary triumphs of recent decades. Andrea Camilleri’s La forma dell’acqua (The Shape of Water), the work that introduced Commissario Montalbano, appeared in bookstores in 1994, and since then the detective from Vigàta has become a ubiquitous figure in the Italian media. Camilleri’s unparalleled popular success, which has broken Italian records for publication, has led scholars to initiate their own investigative foray into what is known as the ‘caso Camilleri,’ the mystery of the unprecedented love for this writer of detective fiction.1 He follows Beccaria perhaps first of all in international renown, with works translated into numerous languages, including French, English, German, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, Icelandic, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Polish, Finnish, and Basque; his fiction has also been transformed into other media, including television and radio, comic books, and interactive CD-ROMs. One of his books, La gita a Tindari (2000) [Excursion to Tindari], has even been found in a counterfeit edition on the black market in Palermo and Naples, the ‘evidenza più lampante della popolarità dello scrittore’ (clearest evidence of the writer’s popularity), according to one critic.2 Although scholarly reactions have been predictably mixed, given the author’s popular success,3 the ‘caso Camilleri’ has helped to initiate serious, contemporary studies of the wider phenomenon of crime fiction in Italy.4 A focus on the Beccarian qualities in Camilleri’s fiction reveals two apparently contradictory tendencies at play in his work. First, the Montalbano novels share thematic interest in the same Enlightenment

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

83

issues present in Dei delitti e delle pene and, in particular, in Leonardo Sciascia’s novels: concerns regarding the excesses, the inadequacies, and the abuses of both power in the abstract and of the justice system, in particular. Second, the series is characterized by a humorous lightness that seems to contradict this concern. Using many of the same tools, thematic and stylistic, that Leonardo Sciascia employed in his scathing indictments of political corruption and abuses of power, Camilleri’s novels achieve almost precisely the opposite effect: humour and pleasure. The novels’ lightness (or ‘insostenibile leggerezza’ [unbearable lightness] according to one view),5 however, is also rooted in a Beccarian aesthetic, a hypothetical, largely dialogue-driven, noncorporeal intellectual space. An investigation of Camilleri’s Sicily and, in particular, his relationship with the Enlightenment and with Sciascia, uncovers the radical nature of cheery seriality in a context that makes such a jolly outlook unlikely. We find a sick body politic housed within a healthy, productive narrative system apparently capable of repeating itself (in the form of the Montalbano serials) almost infinitely. The discovery of Beccaria and of Sciascia as means to an aesthetic (rather than, as might be expected, an ideological) end reveals that Camilleri’s works create a simulated Sicily that strategically avoids being weighed down by the island’s socio-political problems. Camilleri’s ‘Serva Italia’ Much of the attention devoted to Camilleri has attributed his triumph to things other than his investigative skills – for example, his use of an inventive Sicilian dialect, his investigator’s passion for good food, or the ironic sense of humour that characterizes the voices of author and investigator. Robert Rushing is particularly intriguing in his explanation of the author’s originality, suggesting that ‘the cognitive pleasure produced by the unfolding of a Camilleri mystery is slight; what is significant is the reader’s initiation into a series of social problems.’6 The strong suit of the Commissario Montalbano mysteries, according to Rushing, is something other than the entertainment value of the individual cases confronted; rather, the panoramic geographical and social landscapes captivate the attention of the voracious audiences that rush to bookstores to purchase the Sicilian author’s latest novel. This focus on the social thus expands the small-town universe of Vigàta to encompass issues on a global scale, directing attention, at least at the level of plot, to a universal human condition (albeit in a

84

Methods of Murder

Sicilian key). In particular, narrative concern with human rights and civil justice parallels the Beccarian focus of Sciascia’s novels. As in Beccaria, we find that in Camilleri’s novels the Italian body politic is sick and that the lens for his concern about the state of society is that of the criminal justice system. The novels mention topics of contemporary interest to Sicily and to Italy, such as the controversy over police brutality at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 – a source of great professional and personal frustration for police chief Montalbano in Il giro di boa (2003) [Rounding the Mark] – or the problems posed to the island by waves of immigration from northern Africa, which is the subject of La gita a Tindari and Il ladro di merendine (1996) [The Snack Thief ]. In the later novels, as Montalbano ages, he increasingly laments the state of society as represented in the dark chronicles that comprise the evening news. These protests range from the international, including a condemnation of the American invasion of Iraq (‘Del resto l’America non aviva scatinato ‘na guerra basannosi supra le farfanterie, le minchiate, le mistificazioni giurate e spergiurate dagli òmini cchiù ‘mportanti del paìsi davanti alle televisioni di tutto il munno?’ [Anyway, hadn’t America stirred up a war based on roguery, bullshit, deceptions that the most important men in the country swore to again and again on televisions all over the world?])7 to the local, as when, in Le ali della sfinge (2006) [The Wings of the Sphinx], he complains that the news on ‘Retelibera’ is always the same – reports of cars set on fire, arson, the Mafia, shoot-outs.8 Frequently, Montalbano touches upon the specific issue of justice and the problem of corruption in Sicily, expressing concerns about the Mafia, political dishonesty, and the embedded relationships between legal and illegal power. The Commissario censures the justice system from the inside, as when, in La pazienza del ragno (2004) [The Patience of the Spider], he enters a lawyer’s office and contemplates the legal tomes that surround him: ‘Scaffali di ligno nìvuro, chini di libri mai liggiuti, raccolte di leggi che risalivano alla fine dell’ottocento ma sicuramente ancora in vigore pirchì nel nostro paìsi delle liggi di cent’anni passati non si buttava mai nenti, come si fa con i porci’ (Dark wood bookcases full of unread books, collections of laws dating back to the late nineteenth century but surely still in effect, because in Italy no part of any hundred-year-old law is ever thrown away. Same as with pigs).9 His frustrations echo those of Beccaria at the beginning of Dei delitti, lamenting as they do the persistence of antiquated ideas in contemporary law. Antonio Di Grado describes Montalbano’s righteous anger in terms

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

85

that recall the fury of the philosophes at systemic injustice: ‘ogni indagine [. . .] lo coinvolge in una rete di corresponsabilità morali e lo fa vibrare di con-passione, ovvero di scontrosa pietà per le vittime inermi, per gli spettatori sgomenti e come lui impotenti, dell’ “universo orrendo” che li circonda e li opprime’ (every investigation [. . .] involves him in a web of moral joint responsibility and makes him tremble with com-passion, that is, with surly pity for the helpless victims, for the dismayed spectators who, like him, are powerless in the ‘horrible universe’ that surrounds and oppresses them).10 In lamenting the problem of the precarious state of justice in Sicily, Camilleri self-consciously adds his voice to many Italian authors who have expressed concern about the condition of the Italian body politic, often alongside citations from other notable sources. In La vampa d’agosto (2006) [August Heat], he sighs in resigned frustration at the corruption that dominates Sicilian society: ‘Zarazabara, si annava sempri a finire tra parentele perigliose, collusioni tra mafia e politica, tra mafia e imprenditoria, tra politica e banche, tra banche riciclaggio e usura’ (Mutatis mutandis, one always ended up caught in dangerous webs of relations, collusions between the Mafia and politicians, the Mafia and entrepreneurs, politicians and banks, money-launderers and loan sharks).11 The well-read investigator then evokes the most famous literary lamentation of the state of the body politic in Italy: Come diciva patre Dante? Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello, nave senza nocchiere in gran tempesta, non donna di provincie ma bordello! L’Italia continuava a esseri serva.12 [How did Papa Dante put it? Ah, servile Italy, you are sorrow’s hostel, a ship without helmsman in terrible storms, lady not of the provinces, but of a brothel! Italy was still servile.13]

This citation of ‘patre Dante’ is symptomatic of the style and the significance of social protest in the Montalbano mysteries. Dante, introduced with a frustrated and colourful ‘Zarazabara’ and framed in Camilleri’s Sicilianized Italian, is representative of the author’s playful relationship with his literary and social environments. While Camilleri repeatedly

86

Methods of Murder

affirms his intellectual debt to the past and his concern for the present, he does so with a postmodern fondness for citation and with a deliberate move away from the engaged pessimism of Leonardo Sciascia. Taking umbrage at the suggestion that the giallo is a conservative genre, typical of a capitalist society, Camilleri argues, instead, that gialli were never published in Germany under Hilter, in the USSR under Stalin, in China under Mao, or in Franco’s Spain: ‘La verità è che il giallo nasce, fiorisce e si sviluppa non nelle società capitalistiche, ma nelle società libere’ (The truth is that the giallo is born, blossoms, and develops not in capitalist societies, but in free societies).14 Although deliberately positioning himself in the footsteps of a writer whose pessimism regarding the state of the world was legendary,15 it is with the happy conviction that he exists in a free society that Camilleri creates the adventures of Salvo Montalbano. Vigàta as Metaphor In the context of this optimism, an examination of the presence of Enlightenment-era thought in the Montalbano novels provides an interpretive key for Camilleri’s work. It is a minor yet important part of the novels’ surface strategy for the construction of a world whose purpose is to provide enjoyment, not ideology: the body politic’s illness, in Vigàta, turns out to be little more than a scratch (albeit a persistent one). The Beccarian intellectual framework is largely filtered through Sciascia’s works, and the relationship between the two becomes a critical means for understanding the significance of justice and of the Enlightenment in Camilleri’s Sicily. Commissario Montalbano’s investigative skills triumph in spite of the ‘bordello’ that is the social environment surrounding him, allowing readers a glimmer of optimism that ratiocination might still hold sway in the contemporary world. Although a voracious reader of international detective fiction,16 Camilleri cites an almost obsessive dependence on Sciascia in the creation of his work. His novels are marked by a literary self-consciousness that persistently situates them in concentric literary circles, Sicilian, Italian, and European.17 Sciascia’s influence on his writing, however, is by far the most emphatic and widely acknowledged by critics. Their relationship was in part professional: Sciascia originally encouraged Camilleri to present his work to Elvira Sellerio, thus helping to initiate the lucrative relationship between publisher and writer. It was also personal, however. Simona Demontis suggests that ‘il più forte ascendente su

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

87

Camilleri sembra averlo esercitato proprio Leonardo Sciascia, in qualità di amico e mentore’ (the strongest influence on Camilleri seems to have been exerted by Leonardo Sciascia, as friend and mentor).18 Discussing the early stages of Camilleri’s career as a published writer, Giovanni Capecchi agrees that ‘è poi l’amicizia con Leonardo Sciascia a risultare determinante per lo scrittore di Porto Empedocle’ (it is the friendship with Leonardo Sciascia that is decisive for the writer from Porto Empedocle).19 Maurizio Pistelli concurs, after considering the links between Pirandello and Camilleri, that ‘l’altro autore siciliano fondamentale nell’ambito della poetica camilleriana è [. . .] Leonardo Sciascia, il quale fu il primo a suggerirgli di cimentarsi con il genere giallo, influenzandone così i futuri destini narrativi’ (the other Sicilian author fundamental in the circle of Camillerian poetics is [. . .] Leonardo Sciascia, who was the first to suggest that he venture into the detective genre, thus influencing his future narrative destiny).20 In the frequent interviews that have accompanied his rise to fame, Camilleri also pays anecdotal homage to the work of his literary mentor: ‘Io prima di scrivere un romanzo, quale esso sia, leggo un libro di Sciascia. È lo stesso che andare dall’elettrauto a farsi ricaricare le pile’ (Before writing a novel, whatever it may be, I read a book by Sciascia. It’s like going to the mechanic to have my battery recharged).21 In his own critical analyses of the detective genre, besides situating Sciascia and Gadda at the apex of contemporary Italian crime fiction, Camilleri also singles out some of the predominant preoccupations in Sciascia’s fiction related to the contemporary political climate that inform his own fictional production. Citing Italy’s great mysteries, from Ustica to Piazza Fontana to the Moro affair, he notes that while writers of detective fiction cannot necessarily answer the questions that linger after these events, they do have the capacity ‘di dire, di descrivere, di decrittare gli ambienti e le situazioni, il terreno di coltura insomma dal quale possono muovere i germi che portano appunto a Piazza Fontana o alla stazione di Bologna’ (to say, describe, decipher the environments and the situations, the fertile ground that leads to Piazza Fontana or the Bologna train station).22 Like Sciascia, he finds the socio-political potential of crime fiction to be its most significant quality. Pistelli concurs that intellectual ties bind the two Sicilian authors: Sciascia costituisce per Camilleri un modello intellettuale più che linguistico, del quale egli apprezza in primo luogo la passione politica, la capacità

88

Methods of Murder di affrontare e interpretare i temi d’attualità più scottanti, l’inteso rapporto d’amore e la sete di conoscenza per la sua terra d’origine.23 [For Camilleri, Sciascia constitutes more of an intellectual model than a linguistic one. He appreciates first of all the political passion, the capacity to confront and interpret the most burning topics, the understood love and thirst for knowledge in his relationship with his land of origin.]

The parallels drawn between Camilleri and Sciascia are hardly surprising, considering the authors’ shared commitment to narrating Sicily and, in particular, their passion for situating all stories – from historical accounts to political treatises to fiction – in the context of investigation and crime. Further, following his mentor, Camilleri also pursues a Beccarian focus on the justice system, and his own criminal literary realm shares many characteristics of the model so powerfully formulated by Sciascia. Yet, when translated into his serialized fiction, Camilleri’s Beccarian system differs radically from that of his Sicilian colleague. Whereas Sciascia used the Enlightenment to expose the defeat of reason in Sicily, Camilleri’s fiction portrays a popularized version of eighteenth-century events, provocatively staging the triumph of reason in a Sicily that depends upon Leonardo Sciascia as central set piece. Because his writing is so emphatically tied to Sciascia’s, both through extratextual efforts (interviews, essays, etc.) and literary citations, an examination of the relationship that Camilleri constructs with Sciascia’s fiction shows how and where Enlightenment thought enters contemporary popular culture (and where, by extension, it is absent). While he lauds the importance of Sciascia in his literary formation, Camilleri also recognizes the divide that distances him from his Sicilian neighbour: ‘Da lui tutto mi divide e a lui tutto mi unisce’ (Everything divides me from him and everything unites us), he explains poetically.24 Camilleri, though clearly a child of his native Sicily, and though committed to paying literary respect to his Sicilian predecessors, especially Sciascia and Pirandello, but also Verga, De Roberto, Brancati, and Tomàsi di Lampedusa, is not part of the innermost circle of sicilianità. In an interview with the author, when Marcello Sorgi asked whether he felt that he was a true ‘scrittore siciliano,’ Camilleri replied that he was a ‘scrittore italiano nato in Sicilia’ (Italian writer born in Sicily).25 His is, in fact, a very different approach to the science of the island.26

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

89

Montalbano Returns Again . . . and Again The divide between Sciascia and Camilleri is exemplified in the serialized, demystified Sicily of the Montalbano series, in which the investigator confronts the laws of omertà and the difficulties of bureaucratic inefficacy with ironic humour: he can come to grudging understandings with Mafia bosses, or ridicule the practice of sending anonymous letters by writing them, strategically and contemptuously, to himself. The weighty, cyclical nature of Sicilian history depicted in Verga’s I Malavoglia, Tomàsi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, or Sciascia’s Il Consiglio d’Egitto is replaced by the linear functioning of the classical detective story, proceeding from the commission of a crime through its investigation and eventual resolution. Camilleri’s Sicily is marked by a grudging optimism, the hesitant belief in the possibility for change, and as head of the police force of Vigàta, his detective hero works to successfully fight crime from within the very system of bureaucracy that he perpetually critiques. The resulting novels enjoy the epistemological stability made possible in a context where evidence is provided and questions answered, a framework that derives from a popular Enlightenment model and relies on a cheerful understanding of the period and on the myth of the reliability of reason. The Montalbano mysteries thus guarantee readers the consistency lacking in Sciascia’s detective texts.27 Camilleri’s depiction of Sicily is complicated by problems of Mafia, violence, and dishonesty, and Montalbano does age and change over the course of the novels, but the narrative schema is not one that overturns the canonical working of detective fiction. There exist thus far eighteen novels in the Montalbano series: La forma dell’acqua (1994), Il cane di terracotta (1996) [The Terra-Cotta Dog], Il ladro di merendine (1996), La voce del violino (1997) [The Voice of the Violin], La gita a Tindari (2000), L’odore della notte (2001) [The Smell of the Night], Il giro di boa (2003), La pazienza del ragno (2004), La luna di carta (2005) [The Paper Moon], La vampa d’agosto (2006), Le ali della sfinge (2006), La pista di sabbia (2007) [The Track of Sand], Il campo del vasaio (2008) [The Potter’s Field], L’età del dubbio (2008) [The Age of Doubt], La danza del gabbiano (2009) [The Dance of the Seagull], La caccia al tesoro (2010) [The Treasure Hunt], Il sorriso di Angelica (2010) [Angelica’s Smile], and Il gioco degli specchi (2011) [The Game of Mirrors].28 In the science of detection, seriality becomes a form of popular, narrative Galileian repeatability that Ginzburg describes in Myths, Emblems, Clues: the capacity to apply familiar literary structures again and again to a wide array

90

Methods of Murder

of socio-political problems.29 In reading a series, Umberto Eco argues, ‘one believes one is enjoying the novelty of the story (which is always the same) while in fact one is enjoying it because of the recurrence of a narrative scheme that remains constant.’30 The titles of the books reveal their popular formulaic nature, consistently composed in a similar grammatical form. By the end of each investigation, the reader is left to marvel at the ratiocinative prowess of the Commissario, who clearly indicates the guilty party (even if he does not inevitably deliver the delinquent to the traditional halls of justice). The relatively predictable structure of Camilleri’s stories does not preclude his capacity for linguistic and narrative innovation.31 Nevertheless, the dangerous duplicity of Sciascia’s works is exchanged for a form that allows the reader a sense of complicity and ultimate comfort. In a discussion of Camilleri’s fiction, Robert Rushing revises the traditional theory about pleasure in reading serials, suggesting that quotidian themes that recur across the series – the detective’s relationship with his Genovese partner, Livia, or his contentious meetings with the questore – serve to irritate the reader repeatedly. From this irritation, he suggests, stems enjoyment (understood in a psychoanalytical sense), a perverse pleasure in that which is never attained.32 The kernel of irritation in Camilleri’s works, Rushing suggests, is a missing foreign object (a) that ‘both intrudes and is missing’ and that is ‘an itch in the corner of the mind that we cannot forget.’33 At the centre of the Montalbano mysteries, however, there also exists a missing giant: the absent Sicily, and in particular, the Sicily of Leonardo Sciascia. The veil of narrative optimism that characterizes the Montalbano fiction contributes to the creation of a virtual Sicily, an island Disneyland that copies a non-existent original.34 The weight of Montalbano’s world is lightened by its status as copy, a postmodern phenomenon in which the ‘great philosophical question’ that used to be ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ has been exchanged for the question ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’35 According to Jean Baudrillard, representation is predicated on the equivalence of the sign and the real; simulation, on the other hand, ‘starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value.’ As such, the simulacrum ‘bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.’36 Using the example of Disneyland, simulacrum par excellence, Baudrillard argues that the California theme park conceals the fact that all of America is Disneyland, that in fact the real is no longer real.37 As in the case of Disneyland, an ideological

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

91

analysis of Montalbano’s Vigàta is possible, with a simple substitution of terms: it is a ‘digest of the American [Sicilian] way of life, panegyric to American [Sicilian] values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure.’38 Sciascia and the Enlightenment, in this context, serve as part of Camilleri’s strategy to give what Baudrillard refers to as ‘reality-energy’ to the simulated island.39 After Sciascia, a successful detective in Sicilian literature must exist as part of a Sicilian theme park, a mythical island on which the ideals of Beccaria and the Enlightenment have been unproblematically brought to fruition. And on this mythicalpopular island, in the invented town of Vigàta, Camilleri dexterously simulates the Sicilian context by provocatively drawing on Sciascia and the enlightened past. One of the most prominent elements at work in creating this hyperreal Sicily is Camilleri’s language, a hybrid combination of Italian, Sicilian, and language of the author’s own invention. It is a system not immediately transparent to the uninitiated; according to the author’s own admission, many Sicilians fail to recognize his terminology: ‘Molti siciliani mi dicono: questi termini non li abbiamo sentiti mai’ (Many Sicilians tell me: we’ve never heard these terms).40 At the request of the publisher Garzanti, the author compiled a glossary to accompany Un filo di fumo (1980); more recently, the interactive CD-ROM cartoon version of Il cane di terracotta contains a Dizionarietto vigatese-italiano compiled by Beppe di Gregorio and Filippo Lupo. In an article on the language of Il re di Girgenti, one of the author’s historical novels, Jana Vizmuller-Zocco records a remarkable range of critical descriptions of Camillerian language: è stata chiamata ‘straordinaria mistura linguistica’ (Tomaselli 2001); ‘ibridazione di dialetto e lingua’ (Cinque 2001), ‘lingua ‘strammata’’ (Piazza 2001), ‘inimitabile impasto di siculo-italiano’ (Baroni 2001), ‘stile miscidato’ (Trotta 2001) [. . .] ‘arzigogolato linguaggio siculo-italico’ (Trivelli 2001) [. . .] ‘una apoteosi del dialetto siciliano’ (Mondo 2001) [. . .] ‘siciliano beffardo, sornione e irriverente, popolare e astruso’ (Pressburger 2001).41 [it has been called ‘an extraordinary linguistic mix’ (Tomaselli 2001); ‘hybridization of dialect and language’ (Cinque 2001), ‘disoriented’ language [a Camillerian term] (Piazza 2001), ‘incomparable mixture of SicilianItalian’ (Baroni 2001), ‘mixed style’ (Trotta 2001) [. . .] ‘elaborate SicilianItalian language’ (Trivelli 2001) [. . .] ‘an apotheosis of the Sicilian dialect’ (Mondo 2001) [. . .] ‘a scoffing Sicilian, sneaky and irreverent, popular and abstruse’ (Pressburger 2001).]

92

Methods of Murder

Ranging from the highly complimentary (‘an apotheosis’) to the harshly critical (‘sneaky and irreverent, popular and abstruse’), these descriptions make evident the importance of Camilleri’s inventive linguistic system, as representative a part of the hyper-Sicilian landscape as the olive trees, coastal waters, and steaming plates of seafood generously seasoned with lemon and olive oil. The linguistic pastiche that is the initial sentence of La forma dell’acqua, the first of the Montalbano novels, immediately initiates readers into the Camillerian world: Lume d’alba non filtrava nel cortiglio della ‘Splendor,’ la società che aveva in appalto la nettezza urbana di Vigàta, una nuvolaglia bassa e densa cummigliava completamente il cielo come se fosse stato tirato un telone grigio da cornicione a cornicione, foglia non si cataminava, il vento di scirocco tardava ad arrisbigliarsi dal suo sonno piombigno, già si faticava a cangiare parole.42 [No light of daybreak filtered yet into the courtyard of Splendor, the company under government contract to collect trash in the town of Vigàta. A low, dense mass of clouds completely covered the sky as though a great gray tarp had been drawn from one corner to another. Not a single leaf fluttered. The sirocco was late to rise from its leaden sleep, yet people already struggled to exchange a few words.43]

‘Cataminare’ (to move) and ‘arrisbigliare’ (to wake up), together with an assortment of other words such as ‘tanticchia’ (a little), ‘tambasiàre’ (to wander aimlessly), ‘babbiare’ (to make fun of) recur with such great frequency that they become part of a linguistic toolbox familiar to any reader of the Montalbano mysteries, a cultural heritage common to Camilleri’s fans but not necessarily to the Italians his novels purport to represent.44 Language itself thus engages readers in a relationship of complicity with Camilleri’s world, for comprehension implies, on some level, an affirmation of this fictional version of Sicily as existent and understandable. ‘ “Dottori ah dottori!” vociò Catarella dallo sgabuzzino. “Ci devo diri una cosa d’importanzia! [. . .] Ci voliva diri che tilifonò il dottori Arquaraquà” ’ [‘Ahh, Chief, Chief!’ Catarella yelled from his closet. ‘I got some importance to tell ya! [. . .] What I wannet a say is a Dacter Arquaraquà called.’]45 In the mouth of the comical, linguistically challenged receptionist Catarella, Sciascia’s dark concept of the ‘quaquaraquà,’ the basest of men, becomes humorously garbled. The deformation of

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

93

Sciascia’s famous neologism allows the reader a spark of recognition, but otherwise bears little relation to its intertextual referent. In the context of the Sicilian simulacrum, Leonardo Sciascia’s work serves as an indispensable set piece, a remnant of a real fictional world that lends verisimilitude to the constructed Vigàta. Like the elegant canals of ‘Venice’ in the Walt Disney World themepark, Epcot Center, Sciascia is a form of cultural capital in Camilleri’s invented Sicily. Upon closer inspection of the occasions on which Camilleri cites Sciascia, it becomes evident that these moments of apparent deference also solidify the optimism of the former and the pessimism of the latter with respect to the common Enlightenment heritage at the base of their thought. Camilleri’s acknowledgments of Sciascia are gestures of respect, but they also serve as declarations of independence, in a sense, from the weighty social engagement and dark philosophical scepticism typical of the author from Racalmuto.46 Like his creator, Montalbano admires Sciascia’s work. This admiration is expressed explicitly in the short story ‘Miracoli di Trieste’ (Miracles of Trieste) when the Commissario insists to an interlocutor: ‘le vorrei dire una mia convinzione. Leonardo Sciascia, se invece di fare il maestro elementare avesse fatto un concorso nella polizia, sarebbe diventato meglio di Maigret e di Pepe Carvalho messi assieme’ (I want to tell you something I’m convinced of. If instead of being an elementary school teacher, Leonardo Sciascia had applied to the police force, he would have been better than Maigret and Pepe Carvalho put together).47 Montalbano’s compliment to the writer’s investigative skills sidelines, however, the most important cognitive point made consistently throughout Sciascia’s literary career: that these skills are not sufficient to combat the systemic corruption that plagues Sicily. Although his enthusiastic compliment to Sciascia’s investigative talents might suggest that the detective has misread Sciascia, Montalbano is the perfect reader in terms of the exigencies of the detective fictional universe. Reading serves his primary purpose, that of solving mysteries. A collage of literary citations adorns these texts, serving as transitions or decorations but not significant intellectual contributions to the narrative itinerary. The novels dedicated to investigations of the surly Commissario are a virtual clearinghouse of literary reference, and over the course of the series the detective reads a number of works written by Sciascia and connected to the Enlightenment. Curiously, of the many books by Sciascia cited in the Montalbano series, none include citations of any of Sciascia’s most noted detective fiction – A ciascuno

94

Methods of Murder

il suo, Il giorno della civetta, Todo modo, Il contesto, Il cavaliere e la morte, or Una storia semplice – but rather are texts more strongly tied to other generic traditions. Montalbano’s de facto avoidance of these particular works seems to suggest a specific program on the part of Camilleri of distancing himself from the investigative framework and the guiding philosophy of the gialli written by his predecessor. Two of the works cited are, instead, works based on Enlightenment themes or set in Enlightenment-era Sicily, Candido ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia and Il Consiglio d’Egitto. The citations themselves and the context in which they appear offer further insight into the ways in which Montalbano’s realm represents a popularized reading of Sciascia’s Sicily and of the Enlightenment. Two citations of Il Consiglio d’Egitto in two separate works make evident Sciascia’s status with respect to the world Camilleri creates around the fictional city of Vigàta. In the first of these, Il ladro di merendine, Sciascia appears as part of the well-loved library of Montalbano, a voracious reader: Nel dopogranzo [sic] del giorno appresso, mentre stava stinicchiato sul letto a rileggersi per la ventesima volta Il Consiglio d’Egitto di Sciascia, gli venne a mente che si era scordato d’avvertire Valente di quella specie di patto che aveva fatto col colonnello. La cosa poteva risultare pericolosa per il suo collega di Mazàra nel caso avesse continuato nelle indagini. Scinnì al piano di sotto dove c’era il telefono.48 [On the afternoon of the following day, as he was lying in bed reading Sciascia’s Council of Egypt for the twentieth time, it occurred to him that he’d forgotten to tell Valente about the odd agreement he’d made with the colonel. The matter might prove dangerous for his colleague Mazàra if he were to continue investigating. He went downstairs where there was a telephone.49]

Montalbano’s twentieth perusal of Sciascia’s historical novel does not involve specific engagement with the ideas and ideals expressed in his reading material. His re-reading is narrated in the imperfect past tense, taking place when the event of actual importance to the plot occurs. Sciascia’s text neither incites the protagonist to action nor prompts an insight fundamental to the case. Il Consiglio d’Egitto simply forms part of the background furniture of the narrative, a Sicilian detail which, like a plate of arancini, adds to the regional flavour.

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

95

The citation does, however, occur near the novel’s conclusion when the talented Commissario, with typical disregard for official legal channels, restores order both to the universe of Vigàta and to his personal life. Simona Demontis suggests that this lack of respect for certain rules of procedure cements the link between Camilleri and Sciascia. Both authors’ books, she argues, lack a traditional detective-figure who delivers criminals to justice: Come in molti dei libri di Sciascia, nei romanzi di Camilleri manca il poliziotto tradizionale che consegna alla giustizia i criminali e le sue indagini portano invece spesso verso una verità possibile ma impossibile da affermare. Così Montalbano può con un certo disincanto ammettere di essere perfettamente consapevole che facilmente una verità processuale segue un cammino parallelo (quindi, per definizione, non convergente) a quello della verità reale, come due binari che pur marciando nella stessa direzione non sempre confluiscono nella medesima stazione.50 [Like in many of Sciascia’s works, Camilleri’s novels lack the traditional detective who turns the criminals over to justice, and his investigations instead often lead towards a possible truth but one that is impossible to affirm. So Montalbano can, with a certain disenchantment, admit to be perfectly aware that a procedural truth follows a road parallel (and thus by definition not convergent) to the real truth, just as two tracks that, although proceeding in the same direction, don’t always meet in the same station.]

Granted, Montalbano is reluctant wholly to embrace the system of police bureaucracy, but this hardly exempts him from the list of illustrious, canonical detectives who are grumpy, socially inept figures. On the contrary, that Il Consiglio d’Egitto should only be mentioned in passing is indicative of the difference between the Camillerian detective and the very particular investigators of Sciascia’s fiction.51 A few pages after Commissario Montalbano wrests himself away from Il Consiglio in order to address the real problems at hand, he pens a letter to Livia, his long-time love interest who lives a safe distance away in the elegant Boccadasse quarter of Genoa: Tu una volta mi rimproverasti una certa mia tendenza a sostituirmi a Dio, mutando, con piccole o grandi omissioni e magari con falsificazioni più o meno colpevoli, il corso delle cose (degli altri). Forse è vero, anzi certamente lo è, però non credi che questo rientri anche nel mestiere che faccio?52

96

Methods of Murder [You reproached me once for a certain tendency I have to play God by altering the course of events (for others) through omissions great and small, and even through more or less damnable falsifications. Maybe it’s true. Actually, it most certainly is. But don’t you think this, too, is part of my job?53]

In this epistle, Montalbano neatly describes himself as a perfect exemplar of the traditional detective, a figure often described by his critics in precisely these lofty, deific terms. The investigator described by Sciascia in the ‘Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco,’ the incorruptible, infallible representative of justice is Montalbano, this figure endowed with the light of illuminating Grace. Camilleri’s deus indagator thus creatively alters Sciascia’s protagonists, transforming them into popular affirmations of the project of rationality on the Sicilian island. The second citation of Il Consiglio d’Egitto occurs just after a return to the idea of detective-as-God, when Montalbano remembers his original conversation with Livia and apparently intends to rewrite that past: Non c’era stata una volta che Livia l’aviva aspramente accusato come un dio minore, un piccolo dio che si compiaciva di alterare i fatti o di disporli diversamente? Livia si sbagliava, non era un dio, assolutamente. Era solo un omo che aviva un personale criterio di giudizio supra a ciò che era giusto e ciò che era sbagliato. E certe volte quello che lui pinsava giusto arrisultava sbagliato per la giustizia.54 [Didn’t Livia harshly accuse him once of acting like a minor god, a little god who took pleasure in changing or rearranging the facts? Livia was wrong. He was no god. Absolutely not. He was only a man with his own personal judgment of right and wrong. And sometimes what he thought was right would have been wrong in the eyes of justice.55]

While apparently deconstructing his status as a minor god, however, Montalbano in actuality simply unravels the metaphor of his divine status and redefines it in specifically earthly, investigative terms. He is not, of course, actually a god, but he is a human being with extraordinary powers of judgment: a canonical detective. In the next pages, having reflected on his role as detective, he observes that he feels ‘riposato, sereno, affrancato’ (rested, calm, free) and then realizes that in thinking these three adjectives, he is thinking

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

97

a citation, specifically a citation of Il Consiglio describing Vella’s state of mind: Era la straordinaria pagina di quanno l’abate Vella piglia la decisione di rivelare a monsignor Airoldi un fatto che stravolgerà la sua esistenza e cioè che il codice arabo era un’impostura, un falso da lui stesso fabbricato. Ma prima di andare da monsignor Airoldi, l’abate Vella si fa un bagno e si vivi un cafè. Macari lui, Montalbano, s’attrovava a un punto di svolta.56 [On that extraordinary page, the abbé Vella decides to reveal something to Monsignor Airoldi that will turn his life upside down, to wit, that the Arabian Code is an imposture, a forgery created by his own hand. Yet before going to Monsignor Airoldi, the abbé Vella takes a bath and drinks a coffee. Montalbano, too, stood at a crossroads.57]

Montalbano, who is about to explicate his ingenious understanding of the case under investigation, is in a situation analogous to that of Vella in that he is about to unmask (to the criminal guilty of deceit) a case of fraud. However, unlike Vella, his revelation is not an act of great personal sacrifice; the impostura is not of his construction; his act will not fundamentally change the course of his own life, but instead will confirm, once again, his rational genius. At the end of the passage, Montalbano realizes that one adjective was missing from Vella’s state of being: ‘sazio’ (sated). And this humorous digression creates that apposite transition to another indulgent meal at his favourite trattoria. Leaving the restaurant ‘sazio,’ he in fact, incorporates the satisfied state of the readers of Camilleri’s fiction, who have once again been delivered a fulfilling solution. Another citation of Sciascia in La forma dell’acqua, the first of the Montalbano series, appears just before the moment of exposition, the traditional narrative denouement of a work of classical detective fiction. Here the questore, to whom the police chief is in the process of reporting an investigation, uses Sciascia’s Candido ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia to reproach the detective’s epistemological practices: ‘Lei ha letto sicuramente Candido di Sciascia. Si ricorda che il protagonista a un certo punto afferma che è possibile che le cose sono quasi sempre semplici? Io questo volevo ricordarle’ [Surely you’ve read Sciascia’s Candido. Do you remember that at a certain point the protagonist asserts that it is possible that things are almost always simple? I merely wanted

98

Methods of Murder

to remind you of this].58 Montalbano retorts that Candido claims that things are ‘almost always’ simple, and not ‘always’ thus. He rebuts the questore’s criticism by asking whether his superior remembers the subtitle of the work, ‘Un sogno fatto in Sicilia’ (A Dream Dreamed in Sicily) and then suggests that the case he proceeds to elegantly unravel is instead ‘una sorta d’incubo’ (a nightmare of sorts).59 At this point, the text of his predecessor is left behind and, after exchanging in witty, literate repartee with the questore, Montalbano brilliantly explicates the case at hand. This moment of explanation, which is the moment of truth, is an essential element of a classical detective story, but is completely lacking in Sciascia’s detective fiction. To use one of his novels as a means for arriving at such a narrative unwinding is to make the author from Racalmuto the direct discursive means by which a very un-Sciascian end is attained. If in Il ladro di merendine Sciascia was contextual furniture, in La forma dell’acqua, his Voltairean novella is a cunning transition from one narrative moment to the next. Although the novel technically ends shortly thereafter, with the investigator’s decision to allow the case to drop for lack of prosecutable evidence, it is clear to readers as it is to the questore that the astute Montalbano has once again fulfilled his mystery-solving destiny, supplying an explanation that puts the cognitive questions at the base of the novel’s plot safely to rest. Camilleri’s use of Sciascia, while constituting a declaration of a certain poetic leaning (that of pertaining to the realm of sicilianità, of plying questions of justice and contemporary politics, etc.), then also makes evident his postmodern, double degree of removal from the Sicilian society he represents. Ironically, those elements that most evidently contribute to the appearance of Sicilianness in his writing are details that, ultimately, take him further into the world of postmodern simulation, into impostura, if you will, in the style of Il Consiglio d’Egitto. This reluctance is calculated, not unrehearsed, and part of a narrative strategy that cheerfully recognizes its own limits. All the World’s a Sicilian Stage The lines of demarcation of Camilleri’s narrative world are perhaps nowhere so explicit as in his ironic, self-deprecating short story ‘Montalbano si rifiuta,’ a story that demonstrates that the Beccarian Enlightenment inheritance is not an ideological mandate, but rather an aesthetic one. In ‘Montalbano si rifiuta,’ we find the case of a detective

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

99

who refuses to exceed self-imposed generic limits, eliminating (and humorously ridiculing) the paths that would lead to a different, less reassuring type of fiction. In this playful piece of metafiction, the Commissario, returning home after an exhausting day at work witnesses two young thugs calmly cooking and consuming a young female victim. Montalbano, disgusted and on the point of vomiting, finds a telephone card and hurries to a phone booth, where he proceeds to complain vigorously to Camilleri about this transgression. The author defends himself, saying: Figlio mio, cerca di capirmi. Certuni scrivono che io sono un buonista, uno che conta storie mielate e rassicuranti; certaltri dicono invece che il successo che ho grazie a te non mi ha fatto bene, che sono diventato ripetitivo, con l’occhio solo ai diritti d’autore . . . Sostengono che sono uno scrittore facile, macari se poi s’addannano a capire come scrivo. Sto cercando d’aggiornarmi, Salvo. Tanticchia di sangue sulla carta non fa male a nessuno. Che fai, vuoi metterti a sottilizzare? E poi, lo domando a tia che sei veramente un buongustaio: l’hai mai provato un piatto d’occhi umani fritti, macari con un soffritto di cipolla?60 [My dear boy, try to understand. Some people write that I’m a goodygoody, one who tells honeyed, reassuring stories; others say that the success I’ve had thanks to you hasn’t done me any good, that I’ve become repetitive and only think about copyrights . . . They maintain that I’m an easy writer, even if they’re dying to understand how I write. I’m trying to update myself, Salvo. A little blood on paper never hurt anyone. What’s going on, are you going to start splitting hairs? And besides, I’m asking you, a real gourmet: have you ever tried a plate of fried human eyeballs, maybe with a few sautéed onions?]

Montalbano’s defiance subverts the genre of this particular short story that begins promisingly as a typical work of horror. His refusal to enter the horror or pulp genre demonstrates Camilleri’s own devotion, within the scope of the investigation, to the confines of more traditionally defined detective fiction, which operates according to a logic of elimination, an abandonment of that which is not perceived as relevant to the case. In ‘Montalbano si rifiuta,’ according to Camilleri, we come to understand that: Montalbano è un poliziotto vero, uno sbirro vero che non fa mai un’indagine astratta. Conduce sempre un’indagine sul ‘territorio’ che cerca di

100

Methods of Murder

conoscere. Può essere un paese, un rione, un quartiere, una famiglia dentro la quale si è svolto un determinato fatto di sangue. Vuole capire. Vuole interpretare i codici di comportamento di quella famiglia, di quel rione, di quel paese, perché altrimenti l’indagine non gli riesce. È un poliziotto che ha bisogno di concretizzare.61 [Montalbano is a true policeman, a true cop who never performs an abstract investigation. He always conducts an investigation of the ‘territory’ that he tries to get to know. It might be a town, a district, a neighbourhood, a family in which a certain episode of bloodshed unfolded. He wants to understand. He wants to interpret the codes of behaviour of that family, of that district, of that town, because otherwise the investigation doesn’t work. He’s a policeman who needs to make things concrete.]

Montalbano’s rejection of the messy viscosity of blood becomes a mimetic representation of his cognitive insistence on the rational precision of the detective genre, and of his complicity with the more conservative forms that underpin canonical investigative fiction. Yet, while Montalbano eliminates the superfluous from the central plot of detection, we discover that, as Rushing points out, there are effectively many narrative distractions from this investigative thread. Although the author insists on the ‘concreteness’ of the detective-figure, this materiality actually refers to rational processes in the mind of the detective. Camilleri’s insistence on the detective’s desire to understand and interpret actually signals the intensely introspective character of his protagonist, which becomes the hallmark of Camilleri’s literary style and Montalbano’s investigative method. As opposed to the physically ‘concrete,’ Montalbano’s personal manner is characterized by a certain degree of physical ephemerality, and by a committed theatricality that situates him in the Beccarian introspective criminal universe. Rather than having imbibed the philosophical principles of Beccaria and the Enlightenment, as Sciascia did, Camilleri absorbs and cheerfully plays with them, using them, as he uses Sciascia, as elements of his unique Sicilian simulacrum. In Camilleri, investigator and criminal alike are characterized by their thoughts and their words, but not by their bodies. This criminal epistemology, which refuses outright to follow the cannibali into the gory details of cannibalism, becomes an aesthetic strategy. ‘Montalbano si rifiuta’ lends evidence of the novels’ Enlightenment style: they embrace Beccaria, Sciascia, and the rational as a literary technique that, in lively and entertaining terms, moves the investigation forward.

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

101

The resulting Camillerian aesthetic follows the Beccarian tradition of disembodying the characters in the Montalbano series. As we have seen, dialect is one important part of this style, but other elements also contribute to the creation of a world that is self-consciously a stage, a world in which the linguistic effects of existence are more pressing, and more powerful, than the physical effects. Camilleri’s staunch reliance on dialogue to drive action perpetuates the Beccarian tradition of the physical disappearance of the actors in the crime scene. Montalbano’s parallel reliance on theatrics as a part of his investigative strategy puts emphasis on the hypothetical, rather than physical, material evidence as a strategy in criminology. This degree of removal from the physical is quite central at the level of plot, where, violent murders notwithstanding, bodies are largely absent. While Montalbano collaborates with the Scientifica and, in particular, with the grumpy Dottor Pasquano, who conducts autopsies, his branch of work is decidedly removed from the examination of these bodies. He additionally distinguishes himself from the public prosecutor, Tommaseo, who takes perverse delight in the most lurid details of the cases they examine. In Le ali della sfinge, Montalbano passes on an opportunity to see the body of a murder victim: ‘non voliva vidiri quello che avrebbe dovuto vidiri doppo che Augello gli aviva ditto che si trattava del catafero di una picciotta poco più che vintina’62 (he didn’t want to see what he should see after Augello told him they were dealing with the body of a young girl, hardly over twenty). Each time Montalbano demurs in the face of physical violence, of course, the reader’s attention is also directed away from the body and from the material specificity of the investigation. Relatively rarely do Camilleri’s works narrate physical occurrences directly, leaving the reader to fill in the elliptical spaces left by missing bodies, objects, places. As a result of the novels’ theatricality, the figure of Montalbano remains primarily a function of his articulations and not a corporeal presence sketched with greater narrative definition. In an article considering the Commissario, Tiziana Jacoponi asks: ‘Chi è dunque questo Commissario? Che tipo di uomo è? [. . .] Dettagli fisici su Montalbano non ce ne sono’ (Who is this Commissario? What kind of man is he? [. . .] There are no physical details regarding Montalbano).63 Rather than a commanding physical presence (as, for example, the corpulent Nero Wolfe or the tough Mike Hammer), Montalbano (as Sciascia’s detectives) is a thinker, passing hours, for example, under the gnarled

102

Methods of Murder

olive tree that is a source of inspiration.64 These mental activities are frequently the subject of narration. Montalbano actively plays the ‘game’ of detection, and his mind works to put together pieces of the investigative puzzles that confront him: ‘nel ciriveddro sò alcuni dati apparentemente incollegabili tra loro improvvisamente si saldavano e ogni pezzo s’assistimava al posto giusto nel puzzle da comporre’ (a variety of apparently unrelated facts all came together at once in his brain, each piece assuming its proper place in the puzzle).65 Even as the detective begins to show definitive signs of age, the physical symptoms of advancing years are, most importantly, tied to mental challenges, the most critical of his concerns. In La luna di carta, he claims to struggle against his bodily desire for a beautiful woman as he dives into the sea outside his house: Immobile, Montalbano aspittava che la risacca gli trasisse nel ciriveddro e, sciacquettando, glielo puliziasse a ogni passata. E finalmente gli arrivò la prima onda liggera come una carizza, sciiafff, e si portò ritirannosi, glogloglo, Elena Sclafani e la sò billizza, sciiafff [. . .] Cancellato l’omo Montalbano, doviva solo ristare il commissario Montalbano, una funzione quasi astratta, colui che è preposto solo a risolvere il caso, senza sentimenti pirsonali. Ma mentre se lo diciva, sapiva benissimo che non ne sarebbe mai stato capace.66 [Motionless, Montalbano waited for the surf to enter his brain and wash it clean with each breaker. At last the first light wave came like a caress, swiiissshhh, and carried away, glugluglug, Elena Sclafani and her beauty [. . .] Once Montalbano the man was erased, all that should have remained was Inspector Montalbano – a kind of abstract function, the person who was supposed to solve the case and nothing more, with no personal feelings involved. But as he was telling himself this, he knew perfectly well that he could never pull it off.67]

Although he protests that he will not be able to leave the physical behind, Montalbano actually does, disappearing into his ‘ciriveddro’ to mull over the difficulty of mulling things over. Because detective and victim are thus generally disembodied, intellectual entities, the criminals that Montalbano pursues also take this indeterminate form. In Il campo del vasaio, for example, when a sensual femme fatale turns out to be guilty of conspiring to murder her husband, her object of seduction is Montalbano’s partner Mimì; readers

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

103

are never privy to the scenes of seduction. The Commissario’s explication of the case takes place in a letter to another colleague, who actually carries out the arrest; word of her capture arrives via a telephone call. Each of the most physically critical steps in the process that lead to her body’s punishment by confinement is handled at the careful arm’s length afforded by dialogue and discourse. Introspection – which might include descriptions of the Commissario thinking about his aging or desiring body, or about the person of a criminal, but rarely comprises any narrative lingering on actual description of his physical frame – contributes to the theatrical quality of the mystery series. Camilleri began his career as a director, not a writer, studying theatre with Orazio Costa at the Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica in Rome.68 His first professional experience came as contributor to the Italian theatre journal, Scenario, and as director of programs for radio, television, and theatre.69 Theatrical experience is important both to his perception of the crime fictional genre and to his work therein, a link he suggests is a natural one occasioned by the narrative exigencies of detective fiction: I primi scrittori italiani a cimentarsi col romanzo poliziesco sono, negli anni che vanno dal 1930 al ’35, Edoardo Anton, Guido Cantini, Alessandro De Stefani, Guglielmo Giannini, Giuseppe Romualdi, Vincenzo Tieri, Alessandro Varaldo. Questi autori provengono tutti dal teatro, non dalla narrativa. Perché tanti commediografi? Azzardo una discutibile ipotesi. La scrittura drammaturgica per sua stessa natura non può abbandonarsi alla divagazione o all’indugio su un particolare marginale, pena la caduta della tensione drammatica.70 [The first Italian writers to venture into the detective novel are, in the years from 1930 to 1935, Edoardo Anton, Guido Cantini, Alessandro De Stefani, Guglielmo Giannini, Giuseppe Romualdi, Vincenzo Tieri, Alessandro Varaldo. These authors all come from theatre, not from fiction. Why so many playwrights? I’ll hazard a debatable hypothesis. Writing for the theatre by nature can’t abandon itself to digression or linger on one marginal detail, or it risks losing the dramatic tension.]

The reason for the compatibility between theatre and detective novel may be pacing, narrative economy, but the result is a particular writing style characterized by attention to dialogue, to speech patterns and enunciations (and, in Camilleri’s case, to dialect), and to interior monologues (in the form of third-person reflections, most often inside

104

Methods of Murder

the head of Commissario Montalbano).71 While the works are action driven, the action is almost entirely verbal, whether conversational or mental. Montalbano even bifurcates into Montalbano Uno and Montalbano Due in some novels in order to converse with himself in direct discourse. He frequently works out difficult cases by writing letters to himself; the extended hypotheses reported in italics mirror Beccaria’s technique of imaginative identification with the crime scene. Whereas in Beccaria, however, theatrics (in the form of inventing monologues in the mind of the hypothetical criminal) becomes a means for understanding justice, in Camilleri, justice becomes a privileged subject of inspiration for theatrics. This is certainly the case for Montalbano, who considers acting to be an important part of his job. In La pista di sabbia, he feigns indignation when working with the questore, and then congratulates himself on his acting skills: ‘A Hollywood avrebbi fatto sicuramenti carrera. E capace che ci scappava un oscar’ (He would certainly have made a career for himself in Hollywood. And maybe even come out with an Oscar).72 In Le ali della sfinge, he coaxes a suspect to confess his guilt by staging an elaborate scene with the help of Fazio; we witness his thought process as he thinks, ‘Qui ci stava bene ‘na risateddra tanticchia sinistra che gli arriniscì alla perfezioni’ (Here a slightly sinister laugh would be good. It came out perfectly).73 Such performances on the part of the chief investigator allow serious concerns, such as the murder investigation in the aforementioned novel, to become occasions for lighthearted repartee. ‘Mangiare o non mangiare? Questo era il problema: era più saggio sopportare le fitte di un pititto vrigognoso oppure futtirisinni e andarsi a riempire la panza da Enzo?’ (To eat or not to eat? That was the question. Was it nobler in the mind to suffer the pangs of outrageous hunger or to hang it all and go stuff his belly at Enzo’s?).74 Hamlet’s existential angst feeds Montalbano’s gluttony, and Shakespeare, like Sciascia and like Beccaria, provides fuel for the literary machine. Theatrical moments function as part of the Vigatese simulacrum, which frequently refers back to itself and to its significance as representation. Sicilian Robustness For all their serious borrowings – a Beccarian concern with justice and the health of the system, a Sciascia-inspired Sicily – the Montalbano mysteries, guaranteed by seriality and by genre to be ‘healthy,’ smoothly running systems, work according to a logic of exclusion that

Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum

105

essentially forecloses the possibility of literary sickness: they can never be ill. Even though the body politic they represent is the rotten, corrupt Sicily in which personal favours, corruption, and qualunquismo continue to contaminate the socio-political landscape, narrative form and narrative content work together to create a sane, vigorous serial. Montalbano’s innovative theatrics and introspective investigative techniques lead him to solve his cases, and Camilleri’s inventive linguistic style and picturesque fictional Sicilian universe provide ample stage space for new adventures in Vigàta. The Beccarian framework is used as set piece and as aesthetic strategy, and serves the true aim of the novels: pleasure in reading. Given controversies over the importance of Camilleri on the Italian literary scene (evident in the wide range of critical reaction to his language, cited above), it seems important to consider the implications of this fiction. The vast repertoire of cultural material, including especially the fiction of Leonardo Sciascia, that Camilleri cites in the works dedicated to Montalbano, creates the foundation of the Sicilian simulacrum that drives the success of the novels. In an essay on Camilleri and Sicilian identity, Sicilian journalist Antonio Calabrò suggests that all Sicilians carry the ages-old burden of pessimism regarding the state of the island. Yet, he insists that one major part of life on the island is the love for storytelling: ‘Noi siciliani amiamo raccontare. E scriviamo moltissimo. Abbiamo pochissimi imprenditori (che, come abbiamo visto, per fortuna cominciano ad aumentare). Ma abbiamo moltissimi scrittori’ (We Sicilians love to tell stories. And we write a lot. We have very few entrepreneurs (although, as we have seen, they fortunately begin to grow in number). But we have many writers).75 Calabrò goes on to suggest that Camilleri captures, in the figure of Montalbano, the essence of the best Sicilians: ‘un poliziotto capace che, senza eroismi da sceriffo Americano e con l’intelligenza acuta e spregiudicata e la densa umanità d’un buon siciliano, viene a capo delle cose’ (a policeman who can, without heroic acts in the style of an American sheriff, and with the acute and unconventional intelligence and the full humanity of a good Sicilian, get to the bottom of things).76 Yet, the lesson of Montalbano is another, one removed from the social background that the investigator cheerily represents: it may be that, in Camilleri’s formulation, art is the patrimony of Sicilians (as Calabrò implicitly suggests), and not crime or injustice or corruption. In discussing the origins of the simulacrum, Baudrillard describes iconoclasts, ‘who are often accused of despising and denying images,’ as ‘in fact the ones who accorded them their actual

106

Methods of Murder

worth.’77 Like Baudrillard’s iconoclasts (and like Baudrillard himself), Camilleri’s work seems to recognize, in Beccaria’s and Dante’s images of Italy or Sciascia’s of Sicily, their worth as images, as representations, and not as rational or ideological positions. Rather than treat the same problems these earlier authors consider at one degree of removal, Camilleri simply integrates them into a Sicily in which ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ have the same weight. The critiques that Beccaria and Sciascia levied against a lumbering and antiquated status quo, in large part, and certainly their pessimism, are lost. In compensation, however, Beccaria and Sciascia can go on forever in the infinitely repeatable world of the Commissario Montalbano. Beccaria, Sciascia, and all of the other sophisticated philosophical and literary figures that Montalbano calls on in the service of his investigations, are used as tools to cleverly shift the island sand under their own feet. In a conversation with Marcello Sorgi, Camilleri says of his relationship with Sciascia, ‘io non appartenevo alla cerchia di quelli che potevano consentirsi di chiamarlo Nanà’ (I wasn’t one of the circle who could allow themselves to call him Nanà).78 Camilleri’s relationship with Sciascia is, in fact, one of thematic debt, rather than one of intense ideological kinship; he is more a name on a spine on a bookshelf than an interlocutor in an armchair across from the author, engaged in active debate. Sorgi comments that ‘insomma i rapporti tra Camilleri e Sciascia sono rapporti di rispetto nella diversità’ (in short, the relationship between Camilleri and Sciascia is one of respect for difference), and adds: ‘Una cosa che li avvicina, probabilmente, e lui lo dice, è una certa condivisione dello scetticismo illuminato di Sciascia, ma una confidenza, una colleganza di scrittori, sicuramente non c’è’ (One thing they have in common, probably, and he says so, is a certain sharing of Sciascia’s Enlightened scepticism; an intimacy, a connection as writers, surely is not there).79 As I have suggested, the two authors share a Beccarian point of departure and an enlightened framework, but their ports of arrival are vastly different. Although in Sciascia’s own Sicily, Sciascia-asinvestigator would never enjoy Montalbano’s epistemological success, in Camilleri’s Sicilian simulacrum, the author from Racalmuto, with his highly developed ethical compass and intensely introspective approach to the world, might indeed be the perfect image of the detective.

4 Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

In Leonardo Sciascia’s Il cavaliere e la morte, the Vice responds to his boss’s query about why he didn’t become a lawyer saying, ‘Forse perché mi sono illuso che si potesse essere avvocati appunto facendo i poliziotti’ (Perhaps because I deluded myself that you could best be a lawyer by being a policeman).1 The Vice’s disenchantment as a member of the police force, echoed by investigators across Sciascia’s fiction, reflects the character’s awareness of the perilous nature of a violent vocation, regardless of whether he enforces or infringes the law. Gianrico Carofiglio’s attorney-protagonist Guido Guerrieri makes certain not to repeat the Vice’s mistake in his choice of careers. In Testimone inconsapevole (2002) [Involuntary Witness], Carofiglio’s first novel, Guerrieri recounts the story of how, as a child, he always wanted to be a sheriff, like Gary Cooper’s lawman Will Kane in High Noon: ‘Quando mi dicevano che in Italia non esistono gli sceriffi, ma tutt’al più i poliziotti, rispondevo con prontezza. Sarei stato un poliziotto sceriffo. Ero un bambino duttile e volevo dare la caccia ai cattivi, in un modo o nell’altro’ (When they told me there weren’t any sheriffs in Italy, but only policemen, I promptly replied that I would be a policeman sheriff. I was a good child and wanted to hunt down wrongdoers one way or another).2 And yet, Guerrieri hazily remembers seeing, at the age of eight or nine, a purse-snatcher arrested and savagely beaten by two police officers who shouted expletives in pugliese. The scene was forever impressed on the mind of the young boy: violent language and physical violence at the hands of the ‘enforcers of the law’ led him to renounce his desire to be its representative, at least in the capacity of police officer. ‘Qualche volta,’ says Guerrieri, ‘mi ero detto che avevo fatto l’avvocato per una specie di reazione al

108

Methods of Murder

disgusto di quella scena’ (Sometimes I told myself I had become a lawyer as a sort of reaction to the disgust I had felt).3 As if having learned the lesson of Sciascia’s policemen, Guerrieri seems to figure himself as a servant of what Sciascia called the ‘legge in assoluto,’ an abstract, universal justice. Carofiglio, an anti-Mafia prosecutor from Bari and more recently a member of the Italian Senate, is author of a series of novels, often described as legal procedurals or crime thrillers that follow the professional and personal adventures of the fretful attorney Guerrieri.4 Since his 2002 debut, Carofiglio has rapidly become one of the best-known writers of crime fiction in Italy. For example, the third of the Guerrieri novels, Ragionevoli dubbi (2006) [Reasonable Doubts], was included in a 2008 collection of works by ‘undici scrittori di grosso calibro’ (eleven writers of high calibre) selected by La Repubblica and L’Espresso for a summer promotion. Carofiglio’s name appeared alongside those of Carlo Lucarelli, Andrea Camilleri, Carlo Fruttero, Loriano Macchiavelli, and Giorgio Scerbanenco, among others, marking his inclusion in the canon of popular crime fiction that in recent years has witnessed enormous growth. In interviews, however, Carofiglio resists classification as a writer of genre fiction, preferring the idea that his works have more universal appeal.5 This chapter does not seek to contest Carofiglio’s generic classification. Rather, it argues that his work resonates powerfully in contemporary debates about justice, violence, and the law. In the aforementioned anecdote, as Guerrieri contemplates his career, he concludes that he decided to become an attorney for lack of a better idea, ‘perchè non avevo trovato di meglio o perchè non ero stato capace di cercarlo’ (because I had found nothing better to do or wasn’t up to looking for it).6 Yet, a sense of discomfort and disgust at the exigency of applying the force of law motivates Guerrieri’s career and Carofiglio’s fiction. The attorney’s hesitant account of the path that led him to become a lawyer reveals his awareness of the ethical complexity of such a choice. As the contemplative Guerrieri reflects on his profession over the course of the novels, he proceeds through a Beccarian meditation on the role of the justice system and its impact on individuals. Carofiglio’s work examines the undercurrent of violence that – in his view – underlies the system and risks undermining its purpose. His works exhibit the Beccarian conviction that legal channels should be followed in order to exercise justice, but they betray a constant fear that justice is too often misapplied. Carofiglio’s novels, like those by Sciascia, weigh in on matters of civil rights,

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

109

discrimination, and the Mafia, contesting abuses of power. Like Sciascia, he lacks intellectual confidence in the potential for an absolute law, able to do good. Whereas Sciascia’s works focus on exposing abuses of power in the system, Carofiglio’s fiction focuses its attention, and its hope, on the law, even as it demonstrates the perilous limitations of applying this system to the bodies of citizens. Yet, in a more hopeful key than anything found in Sciascia’s fiction, his attorney-protagonist provisionally succeeds in using pragmatic strategies – and especially discursive ones – to distance his clients from the judicial system and from the violence that seems to be an inherent part of it. Violence and the Law In a short story published as an essay, Il paradosso del poliziotto (The Policeman’s Paradox), the Beccarian nature of Carofiglio’s argumentation is clear, specifically as it relates to violence. The story, a dialogue between a young writer and a retired police officer, unfolds as the policeman demonstrates his curious combination of bookish intelligence, storytelling prowess, and practical law-enforcement skills, to the surprise of the author. As he recounts his first days in the force, the officer remembers his squad’s brutal beating of a young suspect in a robbery. The author anxiously asks if interrogations are always so violent, and the elderly officer replies, speaking of ‘botte’ (blows), that ‘non c’è nessun poliziotto – parlo di sbirri, non di archivisti o magazzinieri – che non le abbia mai date, sottoscritto incluso’ (there are no policemen – I’m talking about cops, not file clerks or warehousekeepers – who haven’t delivered them, including yours truly).7 Yet, the police officer, troubled by this violent propensity among his peers, carefully draws the line in highly pragmatic terms regarding violence in the police headquarters: ‘A parte ogni considerazione etica – e giuridica, naturalmente – una confessione ottenuta con le botte, o con altri sistemi analoghi, non dà nessuna garanzia di attendibilità’ (Aside from any ethical considerations – and legal ones, naturally – a confession obtained with blows, or with other similar systems, doesn’t offer any guarantee of reliability).8 He goes on to explain, at the author’s request, the exact common-sense argument against judicial torture that Beccaria made in the eighteenth century: false confessions can often be extracted from innocent victims under duress, as they seek to end their pain. At this revelation, the author registers surprise that the law can attempt to make pain, as Beccaria described centuries before, a ‘crucible of truth.’9

110

Methods of Murder

Although Carofiglio’s fiction fast-forwards the investigative procedure by bringing criminals and victims into the courtroom (beginning, then, well after crimes have been committed), his critique rewinds time to interrogate the nature of the law itself. In this way, his fiction follows a Beccarian interest in the way the law applies its force on individuals, as well as a desire to protect subjects of the law from this force. Carofiglio’s work additionally adopts a Beccarian discursive aesthetic, staging Guerrieri’s investigations primarily as dialogues that often take place in the courtroom. Yet, unlike Sciascia, whose position of critique leads him to despair at the incompatibility of reason and power, Carofiglio takes the position of an actor in the legal system who must reconcile, in a complex and sometimes less-than-wholly satisfying strategy, theory, and praxis. Guerrieri might spend hours contemplating justice and truth, but, situated as they are in the world of the courtroom, his novels are committed to the principles of technique, rather than of inquiry: they belong, ‘più che alla sfera del conoscere’ (more than to the sphere of knowledge) to the ‘sfera del fare’ (sphere of action).10 In fact, according to Carofiglio, ‘La tecnica offre in primo luogo risposte alla domanda “come si fa?”: e solo dopo questo passaggio consente eventualmente la speculazione, l’individuazione di princìpi di natura teorica, di risposte alla domanda “cosa significa?” ’ (Technique first of all offers answers to the question ‘how is this done?’: and only after this step does it perhaps allow for speculation, for the identification of principles of a theoretical nature, or answers to the question ‘what does this mean?’).11 Although the Guerrieri novels fret about the inevitability of violence in the law, their style expresses faith in the power of clear speech, of language, of storytelling, and of individual testimony. And as protagonist of a series of novels, the sceptical Guerrieri returns from one book to the next, an exemplar of a postmodern, pragmatic Enlightened thinker. Examining Cross-Examination Carofiglio’s interest in theorizing the legal system began before his career as a novelist and is made explicit in his revision of a legal manual on cross-examination, published for his fiction-reading fans as L’arte del dubbio (The Art of Doubt) in 2007. A work originally published by Giuffrè as a manual for attorneys under the title Il controesame: Dalle prassi operative al modello teorico (1997) [Cross-examination: From Operating Practice to a Theoretical Model], L’arte del dubbio stands at the crossroads

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

111

of fiction and the law. For this popular republication of the earlier work, Carofiglio eliminated sections dedicated to juridical practice and simplified (or worked to ‘bonificare,’ ‘reclaim’ or ‘rehabilitate’) its language, but maintains that the substance remains unchanged.12 Thus prepared for a general public, L’arte del dubbio engages in the kind of interdisciplinary work proper to the Enlightenment salons, with its specialized focus directed to engage the widest possible public. The stories recounted therein, excerpts of trials, are ‘schegge del reale, pezzi di vita che, raccontati sul palcoscenico del processo, diventano modelli del mondo’ (slivers of the real, bits of life that, when recounted on the trial stage, become models of the world).13 Carofiglio’s literary career thus dovetails with his legal career, and both are means for making sense of the complex problem of what it means to pursue justice in a world where ‘le storie sono tutto quello che abbiamo’ (stories are all we have).14 In terms that recall Beccaria’s treatise, the project sets out goals of clarity and scientific precision in an area where such style and thought have long been absent. Noting inadequacies in courtroom strategies, and in particular in the art of cross-examination, Carofiglio remarks that there has been ‘un ritardo della riflessione scientifica e della elaborazione giurisprudenziale sul sistema degli esami dibattimentali come meccanismo per la produzione di attendibili conoscenze processuali’ (a lag in scientific reflection on and legal formulation of systems of examination as means for producing reliable knowledge in a trial).15 His work, like Beccaria’s before it, proposes to take a scientific approach to his subject of study, an approach that will involve ‘profili epistemologici, tecnico-giuridici, retorico-argomentativi, psicologici e deontologici’ (epistemological, technical-juridical, rhetorical-argumentative, psychological, and ethical profiles).16 In order to set forth these strategies, Carofiglio reports transcriptions from exemplary counter-examinations. In the best cases, he demonstrates that pointed, thoughtful questioning in cross-examination can help to corroborate an attorney’s position. Clear language and purpose are critical to such courtroom strategy.17 Such clarity and accessibility reflect the tenor of Carofiglio’s and later Guerrieri’s courtroom strategy, which like Beccaria’s work, holds clear exposition as an essential component of rhetorical ‘science.’ A negative example of courtroom technique, on the other hand, begins with questions that Carofiglio characterizes as ‘lunghe and farraginose’ (long and muddled), adjectives that repeat language from Beccaria’s criticism of the malfunctioning criminal justice system.18 Both Carofiglio’s revision

112

Methods of Murder

of L’arte del dubbio and the content within demonstrate the relationship between representational style and justice. As in the case of Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene, justice is initially served by rendering the penal and judicial systems limpid, by making sure these critical societal machines are comprehensible to all involved. Yet, the motivating philosophy for Carofiglio’s fiction and the practical basis for his work are evident at the end of this legal essay, when the author quotes Norberto Bobbio’s introduction to a work on argumentation and rhetoric. Bobbio’s words, in fact, close the volume: La teoria dell’argomentazione rifiuta le antitesi troppo nette: mostra che tra la verità assoluta degli invasati e la non-verità degli scettici c’è posto per le verità da sottoporsi a continua revisione mercé la tecnica di addurre ragioni pro e contro. Sa che quando gli uomini cessano di credere alle buone ragioni, comincia la violenza.19 [The theory of argumentation refuses clear-cut antitheses: it shows that between the absolute truth of the possessed and the non-truth of sceptics there is room for truths that can be subjected to continual revisions, at the mercy of advancing reasons for and against them. It recognizes that when men stop believing in good reasons, violence begins.]

Argumentation and rhetoric, two discursive strategies and essentially the subject of the investigation of L’arte del dubbio, keep violence at bay. Words, according to Bobbio, and more specifically ‘buone ragioni,’ are correctives both to excessively absolutist forms of thinking – the ‘antitesi troppo nette’ – and to physical violence.20 The attorney, whose job is rooted in the manipulation of discourse, becomes the representative of the law best positioned to adopt this theory of argumentation, to harness the power of stories to counter the danger of violence. Carofiglio’s work recognizes the perilous contradictions of enforcing the law, and his novels revolve around the question of what to do when law’s violence has been acknowledged. Guerrieri often attempts to skirt the law, seeking acquittals and finding ways to distance his clients from its more physically violent applications. Yet, as he practises his career, the attorney falls victim to the violent paradox of the law, using aggressive language in the courtroom and, occasionally, forceful action on the streets. Violent language and violent action, recurrent themes in the Guerrieri novels, lead the attorney to a pathological relationship with his career, a pathology that manifests itself in physical illness. By casting a hesitant, sometimes problematic participant in the legal system as

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

113

central protagonist, Carofiglio maintains an engaged curiosity regarding how to respond to the apparently inevitable presence of violence in the law. Violence and the Law The question of the relationship between violence, the law, and justice is one that Walter Benjamin contemplates in his brilliant, muchdiscussed essay ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt,’ translated in English as ‘Critique of Violence.’ Jacques Derrida, who has written extensively about this work, calls it ‘brief and disconcerting.’21 Benjamin’s complex work helps to focus some of the most pressing questions in Carofiglio’s fiction. According to Benjamin: ‘the function of violence in lawmaking is twofold, in the sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with violence as the means, what is to be established as law, but at the moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence, but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power.’22 Law and violence are thus inextricably intertwined, as violence represents both the means of establishing law (by way of revolution, for example), and the means of preserving it once established.23 As Derrida points out, the complication regarding the nature of violence resides in the translation of the term Gewalt as ‘violence,’ for Gewalt is ‘both violence and legitimate power, justified authority.’24 This troubling indeterminate space between legitimate authority and violence, which seems to result in the omnipresence of violence in the application of the law, weighs heavily on Guerrieri. Witnessing the violent act of the two police officers, a foundational event for the attorney, becomes the base from which Carofiglio launches his convoluted and sceptical relationship with the legal system as expressed in the courts. The excessive force of the police, who punch and kick the young thief until he is unable even to breathe, comes to represent for him the brutal, suffocating weight of a formless power, a power that Benjamin describes as a ‘nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states,’ a power that, in a democracy, ‘bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence.’25 Benjamin’s essay, written in 1921, has in recent decades become central to discussions of philosophy and political theory. Among the most prominent of these scholarly reactions, Derrida and Dominick LaCapra have debated Benjamin’s essay in articles in the Cardozo Law

114

Methods of Murder

Review (1989 and 1990),26 and Giorgio Agamben focuses on ‘Critique of Violence’ in State of Exception (2005). Why the return to Benjamin? All of these more contemporary discussions share with Benjamin’s essay a conviction that law and violence are entangled, that some kind of justice might exist outside of these two, and that it is worthwhile to attempt to imagine how or where this justice might reside.27 Although they take issue with the controversial ending of Benjamin’s essay, in which the experience of justice is located in a mythical, purifying violence outside of the state, Derrida, LaCapra, and Agamben nevertheless seek alternative ways to act, politically speaking. In spite of their acute awareness of the paradoxes inherent in law and the modern state, they opt to confront themselves as actors on a political stage. Echoing concerns debated in these essays, Carofiglio’s novels treat the problem of how to act in the contemporary state. Although one might question the rebelliousness of a child who rejects the police profession to become an attorney, Guerrieri establishes himself in an oppositional position vis-à-vis a certain kind of law. Deeply committed to justice, but uncertain what justice is or whether the system of law is the place in which to seek it, he navigates his career with considerable philosophical concern. He is a lawyer in order not to be a sheriff, in order not to occupy the traditional post of the fearless detective hero at the centre of a crime story – in short, to evade the most troubling implications of collaborating in semi-legal violence. Police, according to both Benjamin and to Derrida’s reading of Benjamin, occupy the unenviable position of exerting law-establishing and law-preserving violence in a dark grey zone that is at the frontier between the two. Derrida explains Benjamin’s account of this abstract role: ‘Where there are police, which is to say everywhere and even here, we can no longer discern between two types of violence, conserving and founding, and that is the ignoble, ignominious, disgusting ambiguity.’28 When Guerrieri rejects the totalizing violence of the police force, he instead, attempts to negotiate an acceptable position within the grey zone, working on behalf of the marginalized and seeking justice for the violence committed against them. But he never experiences his work as wholly satisfying, for in spite of the fact that he has chosen a less physical role as a representative of the law, violence erupts in his practice. The English-language concept of enforcing the law, Derrida suggests, reminds us ‘that there is no such thing as law (droit) that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being “enforced,” applied by force.’29 Reminiscing about the idealistic

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

115

beginnings of his career, Guerrieri laughs bitterly, ‘Come faceva quella canzone di De Gregori? Cercavi giustizia, incontrasti la legge’ (How does that song go? The one by De Gregori? You were looking for justice and you found the law).30 The difficulty is that, as Derrida aptly points out, ‘it turns out that droit claims to exercise itself in the name of justice and that justice is required to establish itself in the name of a law that must be “enforced.”’31 Guerrieri constantly struggles with the contradictions born of this conflict. As a result of this tension, we often find Guerrieri vehemently protecting his clients from the application of the law, rather than directly using it to protect them. In Testimone inconsapevole, his client is an immigrant from Senegal wrongfully accused of having violently murdered a young boy and tossed him in a well; Guerrieri takes the part of the defence, seeking simply to demonstrate that his client is not guilty, at least not beyond a reasonable doubt. In Ragionevoli dubbi, he fights to absolve a man claiming to be unjustly imprisoned for drug trafficking, perhaps victim of a trap set by the lawyer originally supposed to represent him. Even when he represents the prosecution, as in Ad occhi chiusi (2003) [A Walk in the Dark], Guerrieri also finds himself in an oppositional position: this time he represents a young woman brutally abused by her boyfriend, who happens to be the son of the president of a division of the court of appeals. The father is widely reputed to be corrupt, and essentially untouchable. Guerrieri’s decision to represent Marina constitutes an effort to stop the violence against her, but also a refusal to accept an extreme violence within the system. His determination is voiced, in his head, with vehement resolve: ‘Fanculo a Scianatico. Padre e figlio. Fanculo a tutti e due. Adesso vediamo, se non ti può succedere proprio niente, stronzo’ (Fuck Scianatico. Father and son. Fuck both of them. We’ll see if nothing ever happens to you, you bastard).32 With ironic, angry determination, Guerrieri attempts to combat the violence of the crime with a non-violent strategy in court. Professional Pathologies Carofiglio’s Bari is a place where the illness of the entire Italian social body is evident. In Testimone inconsapevole, Guerrieri’s client, a Senegalese vendor named Abdou Thiam, is clearly the victim of racism and xenophobia, as Guerrieri’s skilful cross-examinations demonstrate. In Ad occhi chiusi, the attorney squares off against a man known as an ‘ex

116

Methods of Murder

picchiatore fascista, giocatore di poker. E cocainomane’ (one-time Fascist thug, a poker player. And a cokehead); the man’s father, on the other hand, is one of the most powerful men in the city.33 In Ragionevoli dubbi, Guerrieri’s client was himself a ‘picchiatore fascista’ (Fascist thug) during the years of student protests and the anni di piombo: ‘Si raccontava di rapine a mano armata [. . .]. Di campi paramilitari [. . .]. Di cosiddette feste ariane in ville lussuose della periferia. Soprattutto si diceva che Raybàn avesse fatto parte della squadraccia che aveva assassinato a coltellate un ragazzo di diciotto anni comunista e poliomielitico’ (Stories about armed robberies [. . .] About military camps [. . .] About so-called Aryan celebrations in luxurious villas on the outskirts of town. But the thing you heard most often about Raybàn was that he had been part of the paramilitary squad that had stabbed to death an eighteen-year-old Communist who suffered from polio).34 Guerrieri exists in an Italy terrified of its future as a destination for immigrants, haunted by its violent past and by the disappointments of its radical movements, and despoiled by corruption that runs through the system that is supposed to exercise justice. This sickness is transmuted to Guerrieri’s physical body. His discomfort with enforcing the law is figured as a sort of pathology, as if he were allergic to the implications of fully serving the system. At the beginning of Testimone inconsapevole, he begins to experience panic attacks; the first of these, significantly, occurs in his office elevator while returning from court. Subsequent to the first onset of panic, the fear that another terrifying wave might overtake him – in particular, in the courtroom – prevents him from entering an elevator, causes him to suffer insomnia, occasionally finds him fighting back tears, and requires him to spend long nights drinking, smoking, and watching television. His doctor at last sends him to a psychiatrist, who prescribes a series of antidepressants and tranquilizers that he acquires and promptly flushes down the toilet. An attorney friend also confesses to physical reactions to his career: ‘Quando ho cominciato mi sentivo come un angelo vendicatore. Adesso – potresti crederci? – ogni volta che devo arrestare qualcuno ho la nausea’ (When I started I felt like an avenging angel. Now – would you believe this? – I feel sick every time I have to arrest someone).35 Sartrean existential nausea assails the forty-year-old attorneys, causing them to question the validity of a profession that in more idealistic days they thought was the means to ‘fare giustizia’ (bring about justice). Like his friend, Guerrieri is ‘sempre più a disagio con questo lavoro’ (increasingly uncomfortable with this job).36

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

117

Rather than take medication for his anxiety, however, Guerrieri boxes to relieve his stress. Boxing, ‘una delle mie nevrosi’ (one of my neuroses), according to the attorney,37 is another remnant from childhood, a sport to which his grandfather introduced him when he came home from school with a face swollen from blows received from ‘un tipo più grande – e più cattivo – di me’ (a fellow bigger – and nastier – than me).38 While contemplating the time in his life spent boxing, Guerrieri realizes that ‘era stata una delle poche cose reali della mia vita. L’odore del cuoio dei guantoni, le botte – darle e prenderle –, la doccia calda dopo, quando ti accorgevi che per due ore nella tua testa non era passato un solo pensiero’ (it had been one of the few solid things in my life. The smell of glove leather, the punches given and taken, the hot shower afterwards, when you discovered that for two whole hours not a single thought had passed through your head).39 Within the structured context of the ring, conditioning includes an agreement both to deliver and receive blows. Guerrieri’s cataloguing of his history as a boxer, first as a welter weight and then as a middle weight, recalls the sportsmanlike levelling of physical ability that ensures that power is carefully managed in the sport to guarantee fair matches. His recollection of the sound of the bells that signal the end of a match similarly indicates the temporal limitations on sporting events, which provide that violence is delimited and can be halted. When Guerrieri becomes an attorney, he largely leaves aside sparring in the ring in favour of hitting a punching bag at home, and so boxing is practised in an intensely personal, introspective space in which to sublimate the violence, and the injustice, of enforcing the law. Guerrieri is not the only character in Carofiglio’s novels to take advantage of the therapeutic powers of recreational violence. Margherita, whom he meets in the first novel and with whom he has a relationship in the second, has a black belt in aikido. A recovering alcoholic, she practises her sport in order to combat a pathological desire to drink. Suor Claudia, a central figure in the second, is a master of the martial art Wing Tsun. As a child, her father molested her, and she killed him before he could abuse her younger sister in the same way. She took up Wing Tsun after her release from a reformatory. For Margherita, Suor Claudia, and Guerrieri, skills in physical combat accompany the need to avoid violence to self, and also to sublimate a desire to do violence to others. The clearly delimited rules of boxing, aikido, and Wing Tsun, rules that determine the type of force used, the willingness of the opponent, the duration of a match, serve as checks that guarantee the nature

118

Methods of Murder

and the appropriateness of the violence. Such checks do not, of course, exist in the world at large. As a result of their athletic passion, the protagonists in Carofiglio’s novels are routinely shapely, muscular, and lithe, while their antagonists are often massive, overweight, out of shape. However, unlike a detective who might use his physical prowess to chase down a criminal, Guerrieri’s physical fitness corresponds to the need to use recreational sparring as a means to sublimate the violence of the law itself. At one point, satisfied that he has done a good job for his clients, Guerrieri decides he no longer needs to train and explains, ‘non avevo neanche il senso di colpa, che di solito mi spingeva a fare a pugni con il sacco’ (I didn’t have a sense of guilt, which was what usually got me pounding that punch bag).40 More frequently, however, the attorney must turn to the punching bag to help diffuse or deflect the violence of his profession. ‘Io cerco di scaricare l’aggressività facendo a pugni’ (I try to get rid of my aggression with my fists), he explains to Suor Claudia.41 Guerrieri learned to box as a boy in order to be able to defend himself against the bigger and the badder in the world, but as an adult, his skills instead sustain his courtroom strategy of meditative non-resistance. This approach is illustrated in a fable that Suor Claudia recounts, her favourite about a martial art: the legend of the origins of ju-jitsu. A Japanese doctor, she explains, spent many years studying means of combat. He was dissatisfied at the idea that force, the quality of arms, or other ignoble means usually prevailed in a fight. No matter how well prepared a student of the martial arts might be, he might still encounter a stronger, better armed, or more cunning opponent. On a snowy day, the doctor observed weeping willows that, under the weight of an extraordinary snowfall, bent their gentle bows and let the snow fall to the ground: ‘Vedendo quella scena il medico provò un improvviso senso di esultanza e si rese conto di essere giunto alla fine della sua ricerca. Il segreto del combattimento era nella non-resistenza [. . .] Ju-jutsu significa: arte della cedevolezza’ (When he saw that, the doctor felt a sudden sense of elation and realized he’d reached the end of his quest. The secret of combat was non-resistance [. . .] Ju-jitsu means: the art of yielding).42 ‘Cedevolezza,’ or a willingness to yield, is the secret to the martial art, and provides an initial key to understanding Guerrieri’s legal strategy. The technique of capitulation, which can also be understood as a strategy of deflection, parallels the attorney’s invocation of the power of the law in the weakest terms possible: he uses

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

119

it to diminish, rather than to establish, certainty. Guerrieri becomes a defensive warrior whose means of resistance off the mat or out of the ring, rests in the power of inaction. In each novel, redirection of violence, as he refracts it into an insentient object, is also metaphorically his courtroom strategy. The Art of Non-violence Guerrieri attempts to negotiate a path of non-violence for his clients, where non-violence is understood, as Benjamin suggests, as ‘the omission of an action, or service.’43 Like a master of ju-jitsu, in the best circumstances he coaxes the law to cede to a non-violent solution, to withhold its powers to convict and to condemn, expressing a Beccarian desire to wrest his clients from the arms of the law. In Testimone inconsapevole and in Ragionevoli dubbi, his clients are absolved; the law opts not to convict, and thus omits judgment, generally on the basis of insufficient evidence. This path of rupture constitutes a form of weak thought as Gianni Vattimo conceives it, as Guerrieri defends his clients against transcendent interpretations that would allow the absolutist force of the law to be brought to bear against them.44 As for any defence attorney, his words are used not to assert one truth, but rather to destabilize another. Guerrieri’s strategies in the courtroom most often seek to demonstrate things that his interlocutors do not know – people they cannot recognize, things they do not remember, places they have not visited. On a number of occasions in the case defending Abdou Thiam, Guerrieri reminds the court of a wellknown fact: ‘Lasciatemi ripetere questo concetto: l’imputato non deve provare niente. È l’accusa che deve provare, al di là di ogni ragionevole dubbio, la responsabilità dell’imputato. Vi prego di ricordarlo in ogni momento di questo processo’ (Let me repeat that: the defendant does not have to prove a thing. It is up to the prosecution to prove the responsibility of the defendant beyond all reasonable doubt. I ask you to bear this in mind at all times during this trial).45 These familiar words, which describe a central tenet of legal procedure, draw attention to the philosophical core of Guerrieri’s practice. His position is one of nonaction, a position carefully barricaded within the simple need to notknow. When Testimone inconsapevole closes, we have no idea who has actually violently murdered the young boy. As Guerrieri explains to a friend who inquires about his client’s innocence, ‘In un certo senso non è un problema mio. Ci tocca difenderli meglio che possiamo, siano

120

Methods of Murder

innocenti o colpevoli. La verità, se esiste, la devono trovare i giudici’ (In a certain sense it isn’t my problem. We have to defend them as best we can, whether innocent or guilty. The truth, if it exists, has to be found by the judges and jury).46 Although the friend bursts out laughing and mocks Guerrieri for his formality, and although we know that he does, indeed, believe that Thiam has been wrongfully accused of the murder, this lateral approach to justice is the one he most frequently takes. Instead of offering retributive satisfaction, the novel concludes with the gratifyingly just absolution of a presumably innocent man. The work of disproving strong truths is inherent in the role of the attorney, a role based not in a search for certainty or an active investigation, but primarily in language, language enunciated in the courtroom. Language, potentially a ‘sphere of human agreement,’ according to Benjamin, is a realm of possible non-violence.47 In each novel, a significant portion of the narrative takes place in the courtroom, where aside from limited descriptions of people standing up, sitting down, and casting glances one way or the other, the great majority of the text is occupied by direct and indirect discourse as the attorneys and judges exchange versions of their stories and question witnesses. Guerrieri is particularly attentive to his arguments as stories, a strategy that aligns with legal scholarship suggesting that storytelling holds particular power for marginalized groups. In an introductory chapter to an anthology titled Law’s Stories, Paul Gewirtz explains this trend in legal studies: ‘Telling stories (rather than simply making arguments), it is said, has a distinctive power to challenge and unsettle the legal status quo, because stories give uniquely vivid representation to particular voices, perspectives, and experiences of victimization traditionally left out of legal scholarship and ignored when shaping legal rules.’48 These subjective stories, these shifting narratives that people assert as their distinct realities, vie for dominance in the world of the courtroom, where often someone’s freedom hangs in the balance. Guerrieri, with a Beccarian attention to the stories of the cittadino-delinquente, attempts to take control of these narratives in order to ensure that the most gentle (and often the most subjective) version is that which emerges. For example, in the case that Guerrieri and assistant public prosecutor Alessandra Mantovani prosecute on behalf of the delicate Marina, the corpulent, aggressive defence attorney Dellisanti repeatedly raises objections to the very existence of the trial proceedings: ‘Questo era un fascicolo che non doveva arrivare a dibattimento. Doveva finire molto

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

121

prima con una bella archiviazione’ (This case should never have come to trial. It should have been dismissed by now).49 Part of the courtroom fight, then, is one that allows a silent circumstance (domestic abuse), which stands for a greater silence (the frequent silence of one partner abused by another), to find a voice. Language is thus already a form of justice, as it recognizes and enunciates the quiet suffering of a victim. Using words to protect citizens, Guerrieri’s defensive strategy also leads him to erect barriers made of language. In Testimone inconsapevole, for example, as part of his defence of Abdou Thiam, Guerrieri makes a trip to the law library to consult a dictionary. The definition of ‘verosimile’ helps him to argue his position: Verosimile, dice il vocabolario della lingua italiana Zingarelli, è quello che sembra vero e che, quindi, è credibile. Sembra vero e quindi è credibile. Sempre nello Zingarelli leggiamo la definizione di vero. Vero è ciò che si è effettivamente verificato, che è pienamente conforme alla realtà oggettiva. Alla voce vero troviamo, fra le altre, la locuzione: sembrare vero. Lo Zingarelli spiega che questa epressione – sembrare vero – si usa a proposito di cosa artificiale che imita perfettamente la realtà.50 [Verisimilitude, we read in the most authoritative dictionary, is ‘the appearance of being true or real . . . the likeness or resemblance to truth, reality, or fact.’ And under the heading ‘truth’ we read this definition: ‘conformity to fact; agreement with reality.’ And under the heading ‘appearance’: ‘apparent form or look, especially as distinguished from reality.’ We also find an explanation of the phrase ‘It looks real’ as being used of something artificial that imitates reality to perfection. What looks real is therefore something artificial, something which imitates reality.51]

While the prosecuting attorney at this point accuses Guerrieri of sophistry, he goes on to demonstrate that the case against his client is constructed in the world of verisimilitude, of fiction and artifice, rather than in reality. Although it appears true, there is no way to confirm that it actually is. By gradually chipping away at that which had been presented as certainty, Guerrieri demonstrates that punishing a verisimilar criminal with a real term of incarceration would be an affront to justice. In this case, a real body would be subject to the effects of an abstract, absolute concept. Again, he makes this argument with reference to language: ‘Le sentenze [. . .] non si scrivono – non si possono

122

Methods of Murder

scrivere – al modo condizionale. Si scrivono all’indicativo, affermando certezze. Certezze’ (Verdicts [. . .] are not written – cannot be written – in the conditional mood. They are written in the indicative, they affirm certainties. Certainties!).52 While well aware that judicial sentences are not actually based on ‘certainties’ but rather on stories that convince beyond a reasonable doubt, Guerrieri uses these words to ensure Abdou Thiam’s acquittal and eventual freedom. Guerrieri’s strategic use of language may aspire to be gentle, yet time after time, Carofiglio portrays his attorney capitulating to more forceful passions. Storytelling can help to achieve a desirable legal end, but words, too, risk violence. Ultimately, Carofiglio emphasizes that Guerrieri also manipulates language to his advantage and forcibly shapes outcomes in the courtroom. This becomes explicit in a seemingly autobiographical detail, when the attorney confesses his desire to become a writer. Late one night in his favourite bookstore, the owner shows him a book titled La manomissione delle parole: Appunti per un seminario sulla scrittura. Guerrieri reads an excerpt suggesting that the words that we use are often stripped of their significance by overuse and, in particular, by unwitting use. In order to tell stories, then, words must be regenerated: broken to bits and reconstructed. This is the act of ‘manomissione’: La parola manomissione ha due significati, in apparenza molto diversi. Nel primo significato essa è sinonimo di alterazione, violazione, danneggiamento. Nel secondo, che discende direttamente dall’antico diritto romano (manomissione era la ceremonia con cui uno schiavo veniva liberato), essa è sinonimo di liberazione, riscatto, emancipazione. La manomissione delle parole include entrambi questi significati. Noi facciamo a pezzi le parole (le manomettiamo, nel senso di alterarle, violarle) e poi le rimontiamo (le manomettiamo nel senso di liberarle dai vincoli delle convenzioni verbali e dei non significati).53 [The word manumission has two meanings, apparently very different. The first meaning is synonymous with tampering, violating, causing damage. The second, which derives directly from ancient Roman law (manumission was the ceremony at which a slave became a free man) is synonymous with liberation, redemption, emancipation. The manumission of words encompasses both these meanings. We take words to pieces (we manumit them, in the sense of tampering with them, violating them) and then we put them back together (we manumit them, in the sense of liberating them from the bonds of verbal conventions and meaningless phrases).54]

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

123

According to this definition, the task of a writer, like that of an attorney, occupies a space characterized both by freedom and by violence. In the case of the writer, the violence is enacted specifically in order to free the words – an apparently necessary step towards a new sphere of language. Although language is the space that brings Carofiglio closest to Guerrieri, author and protagonist cannot, of course, be conflated. Mark Chu points out that Guerrieri, a fully developed and self-reflective character, is constructed in such a way that readers must evaluate his behaviours critically.55 Additionally, Chu observes that at times Carofiglio sets himself in an antagonistic relationship with his protagonist. For example, Guerrieri not infrequently uses courtroom strategies that Carofiglio specifically warns against in L’arte del dubbio, betraying a tendency to allow his passions to get the better of him.56 Periodically, then, he seems to fail at the art of non-violence. As Guerrieri and Mantovani work to accuse Scianatico of abusing Marina, both at times erupt in violent language in the courtroom. Irked by the arrogantly aggressive attitude of the defence attorney, Guerrieri takes issue with a piece of evidence that has been added to the trial records (and with the unkind language Dellisanti uses to label the woman a ‘squilibrata’ [unbalanced woman]).57 Defence attorney Dellisanti, red in the face, ‘urlò che lui non accettava lezioni di procedura’ (yelled that he would not take lessons in procedure) and yells other things too, but Guerrieri admits, ‘non le sentii perché anch’io alzai la voce, e in breve l’udienza si trasformò in quello che si dice una indegna gazzarra’ (I didn’t hear them because I too raised my voice, and it didn’t take long for the hearing to be transformed into what’s known as an unholy row).58 Later, in the same trial, Mantovani objects to an intimidating line of questioning that Dellisanti takes with Marina, and he bristles at her objections. Her response is ‘breve, rapida e micidiale come una pugnalata’ (short, quick and deadly as a knife thrust) as she intervenes: ‘ “Stia attento lei, avvocato; stia attento a lei.” Lo disse con un tono che faceva gelare il sangue. C’era una violenza, in quelle parole sibilate, che lasciò esterrefatti tutti i presenti, me incluso’ (‘No, Avvocato, you take care.’ She said it in a tone that froze the blood. There was a violence in those hissed words that left everyone present dumbfounded, including me).59 The fierce nature of Alessandra’s words, words compared to a physical blow, once again underlines the violence of the law. Like writing, Guerrieri’s justice by means of non-action functions at times, but it also serves to demonstrate the ‘problematic nature of law

124

Methods of Murder

itself.’60 Violence interpolates itself into Guerrieri’s court cases, and into his life, in spite of his best efforts. In Ad occhi chiusi, while prosecuting the wealthy, privileged son of another member of the legal system, he performs an assault on the system itself. The defence’s case rests on the argument that the woman accusing Scianatico of abuse, who has suffered anorexia nervosa in the past and seen a psychiatrist, is thus an unreliable witness. In the course of the trial, rather than taking a positive position, Guerrieri makes some progress in demonstrating the corresponding unreliability of the defendant – rather than proving the offence to his client, he opts to prove the weakness of the position of the defence. Whether this strategy had the potential to convince the courts, however, is uncertain, because the defendant in the meantime beats his ex-girlfriend to death, suspending her complaint against him. Scianatico kills Marina immediately after one of Guerrieri’s successful interrogations in which he brings the defendant’s character into question. And so Guerrieri muses: Ho ripensato spesso a quell’udienza, e a quello che successe dopo. Mi sono chiesto spesso se le cose potevano andare diversamente, e quanto siano dipese da me, dal mio comportamento nel processo, dal modo in cui interrogai Scianatico. Non ho mai trovato una vera risposta, e probabilmente è meglio così.61 [I’ve often thought about that day in court, and what happened later. I’ve often wondered if things could have gone differently, and to what extent it was all down to me, my behaviour at the trial, the way I questioned Scianatico. I’ve never found the right answer, and it may well be better that way.]62

Unlike Testimone inconsapevole, then, in which non-proof spurs the nonaction of not-convicting Abdou Thiam, an outcome guaranteed by the right kind of dialogue, Ad occhi chiusi closes with tragic action, action precipitated by the inherent violence of the law. This, in theory, is part of ju-jitsu as well, and is the contradiction at the heart of Guerrieri’s strategy. When Suor Claudia recounts the story of the origins of the martial art, and he considers sceptically her ability to yield to others, she explains: Ovviamente bisogna intendersi su cosa significhi cedevolezza. Significa resistere fino ad un certo punto, e poi sapere esattamente in quale momento cedere, e sviare la forza dell’avversario, che alla fine si ritorce

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

125

contro di lui. Il segreto dovrebbe essere nel saper trovare il punto di equilibrio fra resistenza e cedevolezza; cedevolezza e resistenza; debolezza e forza.63 [Obviously you have to understand what yielding means. It means resisting up to a point, and then knowing exactly when to yield and divert your opponent’s strength, which in the end will rebound against him. The secret is in knowing how to find the point of balance between resistance and yielding, yielding and resistance, weakness and strength.64]

So Guerrieri sometimes side-steps violent action, but at other times he fights, ever seeking the balance between forceful resistance and pliability. In Testimone inconsapevole, threatened by a couple of thugs sent to discourage him from prosecuting a case against illegal dog-fighting rings, Guerrieri must defend himself. His first act is defensive: he blocks a punch with his left hand. But ‘quasi contemporaneamente lo colpii con un destro al viso’ (almost simultaneously delivered a straight right to the face).65 Guerrieri proceeds to knock down Thug Number Two, although he does resist the impulse to kick his assailant in the face: ‘O di offenderlo; o di offenderli tutti e due’ (Or to insult him; or to insult them both).66 Here, the attorney controls the desire to apply excessive force, using only the aggression necessary to ensure that he can continue to prosecute the case, and thus help to halt a cruel practice. When in Ad occhi chiusi he has to stop a crazed Suor Claudia from killing Scianatico, who has just killed Marina, the knock-out punch he employs is portrayed as an almost clinical means of immobilizing her, ‘come un’anestesia’ (like an anaesthetic).67 An anaesthetic, used in medicine to render a subject unconscious or to make her immune to pain, constitutes another form of weak action, a numbing and an undoing rather than a deliberate infliction of harm. In both cases, when Guerrieri uses his physical skills against others, violence is used to combat and prevent further violence. Strategy, as Guido knows well, is ‘l’arte del paradosso,’68 and regardless of his desire to tread a path of non-violence and of justice, at times this paradox requires him to betray his principles in order to (pragmatically) act his conscience. Paradoxical Positions One of Guerrieri’s most complicated crises of conscience occurs in Ragionevoli dubbi, when a telegram arrives announcing that Fabio

126

Methods of Murder

Paolicelli has named him his defence attorney. The name sounds familiar to Guerrieri, and when he meets his client in prison, he recognizes him immediately: Paolicelli is also known as Fabio Raybàn, and was allegedly, as noted above, part of a squad of Fascist thugs who killed a young Communist in Bari in the 1970s. But Raybàn has a more personal connection to Guerrieri, and a more hostile one. Days after the assassination, in a Bari rocked by violence, a young Guerrieri and his friend are assaulted by a group of older, aggressive boys, one of whom is wearing Ray-ban sunglasses. Accusing Guerrieri of being a compagno, the gang begins to kick, punch, and slap him, until someone finally arrives and sends them away. ‘Un giorno ve la farò pagare’ (One day I’ll make you pay), Guerrieri promises himself.69 Thus, when years later, Paolicelli asks Guerrieri to defend him against charges of drug trafficking, the attorney has a chance for revenge: ‘Capii molto chiaramente che volevo essere il suo giudice – e forse anche il suo boia – piuttosto che il suo avvocato. Volevo regolare un vecchissimo conto’ (I realized that I wanted to be his judge – and maybe also his executioner – rather than his lawyer. I had an old score to settle).70 Guerrieri’s grouping of the roles of judge, executioner, and lawyer in the course of this short revenge fantasy reveals a number of important points. First, through his role as an attorney, in the right circumstances he has the possibility of being all of these things simultaneously: through an ineffective or outright antagonistic representation of his client, Guerrieri could, indeed, deliver Raybàn back into the bowels of the prison system for a very long time, acting effectively as judge and a sort of executioner. Second, we learn that Raybàn is imprisoned because of the criminally fraudulent work of his first attorney, who years before had performed precisely those roles – ‘defending,’ judging, and leaving his client to suffer. Potentially guilty of many things, he is most likely innocent of the crime for which he has been locked away. Most importantly, however, we learn that Guerrieri attempts to transcend his own past; he opts to dedicate himself to the case and succeeds in securing Raybàn’s acquittal and release. Judging Raybàn/ Paolicelli for the events of thirty years ago is not his current job, nor is it the role of the penal system. Guerrieri neatly slips a man, a delinquente cittadino with a shady past, out of prison, insisting, with Beccarian conviction, that the law must not make inappropriate incursions into the life of its citizens. In spite of his recognition of the slippage between attorney, judge, and executioner, Guerrieri endeavours to

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

127

maintain the integrity of his role by learning to cedere, to give in, to weaken his relationship to his past and his memory in order to serve justice and truth, although he does not fully believe in the latter. He exchanges his revenge narrative and the circular logic of ‘an eye for an eye’ for another, less decisive, non-violent story. When the court retires to deliberate, his mind is filled not with conviction but with questions: ‘I fatti degli ultimi quattro mesi erano veramente accaduti? [. . .] In base a cosa possiamo dire con certezza che una immagine nella nostra testa è il risultato di una percezione o di un atto di immaginazione? Cosa distingue davvero certi sogni da certi ricordi?’ (Had the events of the past four months really happened? [. . .] On what basis can we say with any certainty that an image in our head is the result of something we’ve actually seen or an act of the imagination? What really distinguishes our dreams from our memories?).71 This tenuous belief in reality, coupled with Guerrieri’s conviction that sentences are written as certainties and that incarceration is incontestably absolute, leaves us to conclude that this fictional lawyer can only successfully perform the role of defence attorney, can only help to acquit, to forgive: this is the path of cedevolezza. A testimone consapevole of the rocky path he treads, in the Guerrieri novels, Carofiglio performs a critique of the violence of his own position, and like Benjamin, seeks to see, through this assessment, the relationship of violence to law and justice.72 For Benjamin, however, this reflection led to a dramatically mystical conclusion to his essay. Towards the end of ‘Critique of Violence,’ after a political analysis of the mechanisms of power and their ties to violence, Benjamin begins to speak of a messianic, pure violence, which would have no relation to the law and which would, therefore, somehow create a rupture in the system, allowing for a position outside the vicious circle. This ‘divine’ violence, for Benjamin, exists in opposition to the ‘mythical’ or ‘state’ violence and is ‘law-destroying,’ rather than ‘lawmaking’ or ‘lawpreserving.’ The extreme solution to the philosophical impasse Benjamin reached is, not surprisingly, a turn that preoccupies readers. Yet, Benjamin’s messianic solution seems to reflect a temptation that lurks at the root of many discussions of justice – a desire to break free of the paradoxical nature of law. As noted above, when confronting the challenging final section of ‘Critique of Violence’ many critics agree that at the heart of Benjamin’s essay there lies an irreconcilable contradiction that, however problematic, does reflect the knotty nature of violence in the law. For Derrida,

128

Methods of Murder

this is an aporia that exists at the heart of justice; for Agamben, it is evidence of the constant tension between juridical order and anomie, between power and pure violence. The question of anomie is a particularly significant one in Carofiglio’s novels. For Agamben, anomie is a ‘zone’ in which ‘violence without any juridical form acts,’ a state that reflects the sense of the term as a kind of breakdown of societal forms.73 Anomie, however, also has a more personal definition; it can be defined as ‘personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from lack of focus or ideals,’ a state proper to individuals, rather than societies.74 It can, thus, either be general – as the state of the sick body politic – or specific – as the state of an individual attorney from Bari who suffers panic attacks and has few friends. Guerrieri, suffering anomie, risks being paralyzed, as we find him at the opening of the trilogy: C’erano diverse persone la cui libertà dipendeva dal mio lavoro e dalla mia concentrazione. Suppongo che avrebbero trovato interessante scoprire che trascorrevo i pomeriggi sfogliando distrattamente i loro fascicoli, che di loro e del contenuto di quei fascicoli non poteva importarmi meno, che andavo in udienza del tutto impreparato, che l’esito dei processi era affidato praticamente al caso e che, insomma, il loro destino era nelle mani di un irresponsabile psichicamente disturbato.75 [There were a number of people whose freedom depended on my work and my powers of concentration. I imagine they would have been interested to learn that I spent the afternoons absent-mindedly leafing through their files, that I couldn’t care less about them and the contents of their files, that I went into court totally unprepared, that the outcome of the trials was to all intents and purposes left to chance and that, in a word, their destiny lay in the hands of an irresponsible nutcase.76]

Guerrieri’s exceedingly problematic feeling of resignation, as has been evident, does not persist throughout the Guerrieri novels. But, given his concern regarding the paradoxical nature of the relationship between violence and the law, one might wonder why it does not. How can he be so sceptical and yet so diligent at the same time? The answer lies somewhere between Benjamin and Beccaria, somewhere between the exigency to critique and the need to act, or between the interpretive ‘cosa significa?’ and the technical ‘come si fa?’ In his debate with Derrida about ‘Critique of Violence,’ LaCapra usefully notes that Benjamin’s final, abstract distinction between ‘mythical’ or ‘state’

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

129

violence and ‘divine’ violence is problematic, politically speaking, because it leads Benjamin ‘to lump all states together independent of their constitutions or political and economic regimes. All are violent in a “rotten” manner.’77 LaCapra warns that ‘Benjamin’s mode of address may seem acceptable if one believes one may justifiably subvert or even destroy the state, ignore consequences, and leave one’s objective a blank or an act of faith.’78 Somehow, a contemporary conscientious relationship to the law, which cannot embrace Benjamin’s mystical solution, must nevertheless recognize the inherent contradictions that arise at its founding – that challenging difference between justice and the exercise of justice. Carofiglio’s reluctant, sometimes panic-stricken, non-sheriff lawyer, exists in the author’s awkward knowledge of this link between power and pure violence, and in the discomfort of wanting to protect people from the law while knowing that there is no good position from which to do so. But, although Guerrieri frequently bumbles through the legal system, encountering its limits, Carofiglio continues to write novels that focus on these crises, recounting them to popular audiences. As Derrida and LaCapra meditate on the enduring significance of ‘Critique of Violence,’ they opt not so much to disagree as to focus attention on different aspects of Benjamin’s essay. Derrida suspects that justice is a non-road, an aporia, that we are unable to experience. Law, an element of calculation, might be held accountable when a courtroom decision comes out well, but law is not justice: ‘justice is incalculable.’79 He identifies a fundamental difference between justice, which he says is ‘infinite, incalculable, rebellious to rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous and heterotropic [sic]’; and the exercise of justice, which is legitimate, stable, ‘calculable, a system of regulated and coded prescriptions.’80 Building on Derrida’s reading, LaCapra highlights the problem the essay creates: a problem of ‘the relation between ignorance and the problem of decisive action’ – in short, the problem of what to do, given this problematic reading of justice, violence, and the law.81 In defending Abdou Thiam, Guerrieri makes a distinction between justice and summary justice, ‘giustizia sommaria,’ when appealing to the jurors, saying that they must leave aside temporary solutions. By implication, he suggests that they must, instead, call on an eternal concept of justice, one not bounded by the temporary need to inflict violence, to punish. But for Guerrieri, this eternal concept of justice constitutes one more reason to not apply such a concept. Jurors, he insists, must apply the criteria of certainty before condemning the

130

Methods of Murder

accused to a life sentence; they must be able to say that every other hypothesis is implausible and have proof that the proposed narrative is the only one possible. ‘Certezze,’ he reminds them time after time. ‘Certezze.’ These arguments extend past legal practice and its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In spite of the attorneyprotagonist’s insistence on truth, Carofiglio’s narratives remind us of the near-impossibility of certainty, and thus in order to serve justice, infinite, heterogeneous justice, his novels prefer to depict the weakest possible exercise of justice (almost a non-exercise) – the decision not to condemn. By writing popular novels about Guerrieri, Carofiglio maintains his commitment to action and to justice, even as he muses about its limitations and the potential rottenness of the system, and this is the quality that makes him a postmodern, enlightened pragmatist. A form of pragmatism is necessary in order to live in spite of the anomie that plagues Guerrieri, his lawyer friends, and other determined but troubled representatives of the law. Guerrieri combats anomie in Ragionevoli dubbi when he asks the court, ‘che cosa è giusto fare? Non in astratto, nel rispetto del metodo e della teoria, ma in concreto, in questo caso, per la vita di quest’uomo’ (what is the right thing to do? Not in the abstract, not according to any method or theory, but specifically, in this case, in relation to the life of this man).82 Together with the contemporary scholars, Carofiglio demonstrates that it is imperative to move past the paradoxes and find a way to act. Derrida hypothesizes: ‘That justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles.’83 And LaCapra focuses attention on the all-important political question, ‘ “What is to be done?” – one political question if not the political question par excellence – as crucial to Benjamin’s text.’84 While Guerrieri is tentatively happy at the outcome of some of his courtroom cases, Carofiglio makes clear that philosophical doubts remain regarding their absolute value. ‘A volte,’ Guerrieri muses, ‘quello che facevo poteva addirittura avere a che fare con la giustizia. Qualunque cosa significhi la parola’ (Sometimes what I did really had something to do with justice. Whatever the word meant).85 His sardonic ‘sometimes’ and ‘something to do with’ qualify the nature of his legal interventions as tenuous, occasional, uncertain – weak actions that necessarily characterize the life of someone so unsure about the reasons for engaging in an institution that may be irretrievably tainted.

Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom

131

But the final means of countering anomie constitutes a distancing, a play that takes him momentarily away from the question of violence and the law. As Ad occhi chiusi closes, we find Guerrieri skydiving, suspended in the air with his arms out, recalling his happiness as a child; he is literally removed from the world he attempts to serve. Ragionevoli dubbi ends in a similarly liminal space. Guerrieri jokingly affirms his friendship with police inspector Tancredi with a reference to Casablanca (‘Louis, credo che questo sia l’inizio di una bella amicizia’ [Louis, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship]), and the two wander off into a hazy border space at the edge of Bari, ‘là dove finiscono le case, i ristoranti, le insegne, e rimangono solo le luci cordiali ed enigmatiche dei lampioni di ghisa’ (where the houses and restaurants and signs come to an end, and all that’s left are the cast-iron lamp-posts and their friendly but mysterious lights).86 The non-space of the skydive and the nonspace at the edges of Bari establish another means to non-violence, a way in which the novels can act out a playful relationship with a larger, somewhat troubling portrait of society. These two endings stage a temporary suspension of their focus on the law, pulling away in significant fashion from the courts into the more personal world of play. As such, they open an awareness of Guerrieri’s, but more emphatically of Carofiglio’s, tendency to a ‘studious play’ – a possibility that Agamben sees beyond the impasse that blocks law in a place of violence – as a possible means to open a ‘passage toward justice.’87 Reflecting on another essay by Benjamin that examines a short story by Kafka, Agamben suggests that the law, ‘no longer practiced, but studied – is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity [inoperosità] – that is, another use of the law.’88 In this sense, Carofiglio’s legal procedural novels, which many critics laud for things other than their representations of legal procedure, play with the law in a way that makes it useful for something entirely new and different. The focus on Guerrieri’s passion for the martial arts, seen in this light, allows Carofiglio to connect play and the law in a studious fashion. The novels’ conclusions outside of the courtroom cement the author’s commitment to a place after the law – after the world, even – where such a relationship to the law is possible. As Guerrieri jumps from the plane, he enacts a new use of his body, discontinuous with all other experiences up to then. His joking but affectionate words for Tancredi, a police officer and thus someone Guerrieri definitively refused to be, shows a new ability to deactivate the violence of the idea of

132

Methods of Murder

‘police’ by assigning it another use: friendship. At the end of the novels, then, Carofiglio sketches a fictional version of what Agamben, again discussing Benjamin, suggests one might achieve in studious play: a ‘state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.’89 In theorizing the potential theoretical benefits of ‘play,’ Agamben may fall prey to a criticism levelled frequently against Enlightenment thinkers, that of utopianism. In her excellent (and generally positive) review of State of Exception, Margaret Kohn characterizes Agamben’s hopes regarding ‘studious play’ as ‘messianic,’ as ‘utopianism that provides little guidance for political action.’ She warns further that ‘Agamben might do well to consider Hannah Arendt’s warning that the belief in justice unmediated by law was one of the characteristics of totalitarianism,’ and suggests that the philosopher risks falling into a trap similar to the one that caught Benjamin at the end of ‘Critique of Violence’ – that of hoping that politics can be liberated from ‘the law tied to violence and the demarcating project of sovereignty.’90 Carofiglio’s fiction may nevertheless indicate one way in which ‘play’ (in the form of literature, of fiction) can comprise a form of political action separate from violence. At the very least, Carofiglio’s novels are a forum in which to sound the problems of violence and the law.

PART TWO Lombrosian Vivisection

This page intentionally left blank

5 Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal

Vivisection 1. The action of cutting or dissecting some part of a living organism; spec. the action or practice of performing dissection, or other painful experiment, upon living animals as a method of physiological or pathological study. 2. fig. Excessively minute examination or criticism.1

Contro Lombroso [Against Lombroso] Ombroso, Ombroso, io ti pavento, Pensando alla tua collezione di teschi, Che dalle buiose tu sempre accresci Il numero grande sur lo tuo talento. Nel tuo studio tracce di morte Altro non scorge chi colà viene: Inorridisce pensando bene Che il teschio lascia in carcere morto. Veder nel novero dei criminali Mia testa che non fece tanti mali, Fa ringricciare le carni addosso. Caro Ombroso, non avrai il mio osso.2 [Ombroso, Ombroso, I fear you, Thinking of your collection of skulls, Which you build from dark places, Increasing your fame. In your laboratory, only traces of death Are visibile to he who comes there:

136

Methods of Murder

Horrified, he rightly thinks That, dead, he will leave his skull in prison. To see among the number of criminals My head, which did not commit many wrongs, Makes my skin crawl. Dear Ombroso, you will not have my bones.]

With what seems to be good-humoured irony, Cesare Lombroso includes this poem by an unknown author, titled ‘Contro Lombroso,’ in the Palimsesti del carcere (1891) [Prison Palimpsests], an anthology of the writings and drawings by inmates that he collected from prison walls and from criminals’ water jugs, library books, and bodies. Part of Lombroso’s project to unveil the particularities of criminal man, the Palimsesti were to ‘fornirci preziose indicazioni sulla tempra vera, psicologica, di questa nuova, infelicissima razza, che vive accanto a noi senza che noi ci accorgiamo punto dei caratteri che la differenziano’ (furnish us with precious evidence of the true, psychological character of this new, unhappiest race, which lives beside us without us even recognizing the characteristics that distinguish it).3 Known as the head of the ‘positive’ school of criminal anthropology, Lombroso is renowned for his empirical studies of delinquents. The collection of ‘palimpsests’ complements his magnum opus, L’uomo delinquente studiato in rapporto alla antropologia, alla medicina legale ed alle discipline carcerarie (1876, lst ed.) [Criminal Man, Studied in Connection to Anthropology, Legal Medicine, and the Prison Disciplines], which combines anthropometric studies and autopsies of hundreds of prison inmates, recording such features as cranial capacity, facial angle, and various anatomical attributes, all in support of his theory of the born criminal. Because of a stunted or degenerative evolutionary development, he hypothesized, the uomo delinquente is genetically predisposed to commit crimes. This theory, and the telescoping editions of the book in which it was elaborated, became key tenets of the positive school of criminology.4 Lombrosian criminology differs from the Beccarian approach, to put it simply, by placing the physical body of the delinquent at the centre of the investigation. Criminal anthropologists must combat the problem of criminality, Lombroso insists, by seeking to understand the individuals who commit crimes: his primary focus is on people rather than on systems, on the criminal rather than on the crime. Yet, although this explanation may make his science seem straightforward, a close reading of L’uomo delinquente reveals a complex and often

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 137

contradictory series of strategies and reporting methods at play in his research. In Lombroso’s work, the universalizing tendencies of Beccaria’s philosophy, which mimicked the Galilean sciences in their abstract understanding of human nature, were exchanged for an investigative paradigm that depended on studies of individual subjects and thus could never achieve such universal results. Although Lombroso and other criminal anthropologists collected vast quantities of measurable data, seeking to use numbers to make their arguments incontrovertible, they ultimately had to apply their knowledge to infinitely variable, unique subjects. As Carlo Ginzburg has suggested, such scientific practices, which he calls ‘evidential and conjectural,’ take as their objects of study ‘individual cases, situations, and documents, precisely because they are individual, and for this reason get results that have an unsuppressible speculative margin.’5 In the case of Lombroso, the ‘speculative margin’ represents a zone that is scientifically indeterminate and, as such, is the theoretical basis for scepticism on the part of the critics, fear on the part of the subjects, and experimentation and even invention on the part of the scientist. This space of speculation is additionally a vital reason for the enduring presence of Lombrosian epistemology in Italian crime fiction. The unnamed prisoner-poet’s lyrical rebellion leads to an understanding of the conceptual spaces where such conjecture happens. Presented without ceremony, the delinquent poet’s quatrains make evident Lombrosian interest in collectionism (‘la tua collezione di teschi’), his habit of moving among living prisoners, and his morbid scholarly concern for what their bodies reveal in death. The presence of the poem in a work of positivist science reveals enthusiasm for eclectic evidence to support his theories, but the inmate’s unwillingness to appear in such a study (‘non avrai il mio osso’) insinuates the challenges that human subjects introduce in research projects. Lombroso’s research comprises studies of both activities carried out by living criminals (his own narratives of crimes, artwork, writing, poetry) and information only collectable from dead criminals, such as precise measurements of skulls, autopsies, and studies of ancient skeletons that help establish theories of atavism. Neither a living nor a dead object of study, however, is perfect: the living criminal is sometimes unreliable because he acts as a criminal, dissimulating when scientists ask questions or attempt to test his strength or sensitivity. The corpse, on the other hand, is somewhat more reliable, but less interesting because it can no longer misbehave. Lombroso’s research might be said to loiter, theoretically speaking,

138

Methods of Murder

around the boundary separating life from death, leading to a Lombrosian ‘lurking’ around the limits of existence, as he attempts to convince that body to give up its secrets.6 Unpacking the complicated and often contradictory choices that guide Lombroso in his work brings to light his concept of the problem of crime and the nature of the criminal. This particular criminological perspective, which drove the positivist school of criminal anthropology to investigate the criminal body, forms the base of the Lombrosian vein of contemporary crime fiction examined in the chapters to come. Scholarly Scepticism Anonymous prisoner-poets were not the only people to regard Lombroso with a measure of sceptical concern. Lombroso and the positive school have long been criticized and often dismissed for reasons that extend from concerns about their heterogeneous methodologies to accusations about the potential implications of their work. Delia Frigessi, author of an important study that situates Lombroso within the intellectual context of his time, asserts: L’opera di Cesare Lombroso fu liquidata senz’appello dai grandi rappresentanti dell’idealismo nostrano, fiancheggiati bravamente dai giovani delle avanguardie fiorentine, ed ebbe scarsa, per non dire quasi nulla considerazione tra gli scienziati e gli studiosi moderni.7 [Cesare Lombroso’s work was definitively liquidated by the foremost representatives of Italian idealism, backed bravely by the young members of the Florentine avant-garde, and he was scarcely considered, if at all, by modern scientists and scholars.]

Today, the reasons for this negative reaction are clear, when one considers that his theory of atavism reflected deterministic and often prejudicial views of women, blacks, Jews, and other groups.8 Lombroso’s science has also been linked to the renewed interest in biological and genetic causes of behaviour. Frigessi mentions, in particular, contemporary ideas about the biological bases of schizophrenia and homosexuality.9 Lombroso’s ideas can, in part, be seen to advance a dangerous incursion literally into the human subject; they risked, through their ‘riduzione medicalizzante’ (medicalizing reductionism), making individual people into laboratory specimens.10

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 139

Critiques of Lombroso’s work can be divided into two principal categories: concerns regarding its use of data, on the one hand, and criticisms of its extravagant presentation of an argument, on the other. The first category includes the passionate and poetic attack by the idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who accuses the Italian positivists of slavishly following empiricism: ‘che consta di queste dottrine consonanti, non turbate dal dubbio filosofico: certe, beate, nell’innocenza di un eden, in cui non ha ancora parlato il serpente tentatore della filosofia’ (that is composed of these consonant doctrines, not troubled by philosophical doubt: certain, blissful, in the innocence of an Eden where the snake-tempter of philosophy has not yet spoken).11 These scientists, he suggests, forget the humanity of their human subjects: [Il positivista] crede di avere spogliato la natura di tutte le vesti impostele dal pensiero, e di stringerla nuda tra le sue braccia; laddove una natura tutta nuda non sarebbe più Giunone, ma la nuvola: e le braccia tornerebbero sempre vuote al petto.12 [[The positivist] believes he has stripped nature of everything imposed on her by thought, and that he clasps her, naked, in his arms; but naked nature would no longer be Juno, but the cloud: and his arms would always return to his chest, empty.]

For Gentile, excessive focus on empirical data is contemptible because of what it omits. Since the positivists fail to concern themselves with the ‘spirit,’ their science lacks philosophical depth. Empirical data, then, distract from more important questions. Stephen J. Gould’s unequivocal and dismissive criticism of Lombroso in The Mismeasure of Man is part of a project to debunk various quantitative assessments of intelligence, from cranial measurements to IQ tests. Like Gentile, Gould focuses his critique in part on empiricism. For example, he reconstructs some of Lombroso’s data to show that there is no statistically significant difference in the cranial capacity of law-abiding versus criminal citizens.13 Gould’s more immediate concern, however, is the potential effects of such readings: ‘As a conservative political argument, it can’t be beat: evil, or stupid, or poor, or disenfranchised, or degenerate, people are what they are as a result of their birth. Social institutions reflect nature. Blame (and study) the victim, not his environment.’14 Regarding the contemporary ramifications of Lombrosian thought, Gould continues: ‘And so the system of indeterminate penalties – Lombroso’s legacy – exerts a

140

Methods of Murder

general and powerful element of control over every aspect of a prisoner’s life [. . .] For Lombroso, [the dangerous was] the born criminal with his apish stigmata. Today, it often means the defiant, the poor, and the black.’15 Concerns about an exaggerated insistence on empirical data, however, are accompanied by a second group of equally, and essentially opposite, vehement attacks. These scholars focus on Lombroso’s rhetorical style and passion for artistic embellishment: his extreme inventiveness, rather than his infatuation with numbers. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg explains that such critical reactions characterize his style (and not his methods) ‘as uncontrolled and uncontrollable.’ In such attacks, she contends, Lombroso’s work is viewed as ‘profoundly antitheoretical, illogical, and unsystematic.’16 Although author Luigi Guarnieri writes with a declared passion for Lombroso as an historical figure, he views Lombroso’s style as extravagant and unscientific. In his loosely fictionalized biography of Lombroso, Guarnieri writes of the scientist’s ‘confuse imprese donchisciottesche e deliranti’ (confused enterprises, Don Quixote-esque and delirious).17 In writing L’uomo delinquente, Guarnieri suggests that Lombroso opts to take the ‘shortcut’ of using popular, rather than scientific, language, and that in his work, he is ‘romanticamente affascinato dall’anomalo, dall’orrido, dall’abnorme, dal lato tenebroso dell’esistenza non meno dei giovani scrittori scapigliati suoi contemporanei’ (romantically fascinated by the anomalous, the horrible, the abnormal, the shadowy side of existence, no less than the young Scapigliati writers that were his contemporaries).18 While the scientist’s delirious Romanticism inspired Guarnieri to compile the events of Lombroso’s life, his work clearly does not constitute a recommendation of positivist science. In spite of harsh critical reactions and initial dismissal of Lombroso’s theories during and after his lifetime, contemporary scholars almost universally agree that the criminologist’s impact has been lasting and significant. Although in a sense a B-level scientist in terms of his critical reception, popular appeal, and scientific methodologies, Lombroso is nevertheless also almost universally acknowledged for his contributions to criminology. In spite of the lack of rigour that leaves L’uomo delinquente open to criticism from all sides for its generalizations, methods, and conclusions, it created a public and, ultimately, international discussion on a myriad of pressing questions regarding the criminal, crime, and punishment; it also definitively shifted the terms of the debate from those that characterized the classical school. The French jurist Gabriel Tarde, a contemporary of Lombroso’s, jokingly

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 141

referred to the phenomenon of ‘Lombroso come un caffè’ (Lombroso as a ‘caffè’), situating the criminal anthropologist at the centre of an informal exchange of ideas.19 Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter identify him unequivocally as the ‘most famous Italian thinker of his era,’20 and Gould refers to L’uomo delinquente as ‘probably the most influential doctrine ever to emerge from the anthropometric tradition.’21 Frigessi, whose critical work on Lombroso has significantly contributed to the rediscovery of his importance in the history of Italian thought, opens her book declaring: Da Mosca e Budapest a Madrid, a Buenos Aires e finalmente a New York, le idee di Lombroso, il suo nome, le opere ripetutamente tradotte correvano il mondo. Nessuna personalità della cultura italiana, nessuno scienziato o scopritore o filosofo conquistò tanta fama negli ultimi decenni dell’Ottocento, fino a rappresentare – è stato detto – la celeberrima e piú diffusa merce della nostra esportazione culturale. A questa straordinaria forza di penetrazione anche popolare hanno fatto seguito, negli anni che precedettero la prima Guerra mondiale, le critiche feroci, il dileggio e la dimenticanza. Nel campo scientifico e della cultura alta, soprattutto, non nel senso comune popolare e neppure nella letteratura, nel romanzo che si valse degli straordinari personaggi lombrosiani e spesso si appropriò dei suoi piú spendibili modelli.22 [From Moscow and Budapest to Madrid, in Buenos Aires and finally in New York, Lombroso’s ideas, his name, his works, repeatedly translated, circulated the globe. No other person in Italian culture, no scientist or discoverer or philosopher won such great fame in the last decades of the nineteenth century; he represented, it has been said, the renowned and most diffused commodity that we exported culturally. Following this extraordinary force of penetration (also in a popular context), in the years before the First World War, there was ferocious criticism, mockery, and oblivion. This was the case in the scientific and high-cultural fields, above all, not in the common popular sense or in literature, in the novel which availed itself of the extraordinary Lombrosian characters and often appropriated his most usable models.]

Lombroso’s zealous, ‘caffeinated’ approach to criminal science (Frigessi characterizes his intellectual energy as ‘La caffeina di Lombroso’)23 excited reactions that could often be illuminating. Frigessi points out that Lombrosian thought, which may have suffered moments of critical unpopularity in scientific and high-cultural circles, never truly

142

Methods of Murder

disappeared from the popular, literary, and public realms. Indeed, contemporary readings of his work resituate the positivist scientist within a broader historical and philosophical framework, understanding Lombroso less as an anomaly than as an active and, in some ways, characteristic voice in nineteenth-century Italy and Europe. If we admit the importance of Lombrosian thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we might still wonder, why read Lombroso today? As debates about Lombroso persist, it seems clear that his work continues to touch an intellectual nerve in contemporary culture and that the conceptual problems it raises still resonate with the ways we think about criminals. Gibson and Rafter are eloquent in their introduction in explaining their changing relationship to Lombroso. The scholars began their English-language translation of L’uomo delinquente concerned about the implications of atavism and biological determinism for social groups including women and blacks (and, indeed, Gibson’s earlier project, cited above, reflects this preoccupation). After lengthy, contextual study of his work, however, they explain that their views changed: ‘Lombroso now appears to have been a curious, engaged, and energetic polymath with a tremendous appetite for literature, art, and folklore, as well as for natural science, medicine, psychiatry, and law. That he was careless and often wrong about the conclusions that he drew from the disparate data provided by these fields does not detract from the significance of his enterprise.’24 David Horn offers a scientific, historical study that makes clear Lombroso’s continuing relevance. He argues that, in spite of the discomforts of transgressing historical and disciplinary boundaries, Lombrosian ‘sciences of deviance,’ although initially dismissed as ‘pseudo-scientific,’ should be considered in their relationships to such canonical sciences as evolutionary biology and biological anthropology. Contemporary ‘reading’ practices, such as penile plethysmography and facial thermography also attempt to allow science to diagnose the dangerousness of the individual.25 While keeping criticisms of Lombrosian criminology in mind, understanding in greater depth how he constructed his criminal science better allows us to follow, and to critique, its continued resonance today. Lombrosian thought is also discernible in contemporary (literal) reading and writing practices, in crime fiction in the Lombrosian vein. Although the name ‘Lombroso’ is immediately associated with positivist thought, Lombroso’s actual practice as criminologist engages in a much more complicated and less quantitative relationship with

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 143

the criminal subject than might be assumed. As critical reactions suggest, his work on the born criminal is guided by two prevalent and seemingly contradictory tendencies. The first is the desire to collect and record as much empirical data as possible from the bodies and experiences of criminals. The second is to narrate and to sometimes apparently take joy in the lurid details that such studies provide. The former tendency resides in what is commonly recognized as his positivist background; the latter, instead, rests in an artistic tendency that compromises the objectivity this system promised. Two very different kinds of language produce these two very distinctive tendencies: one complex, medical, and obscure, and the other simple, vivid, and clear. These two worlds of Lombroso reveal a tension between fact and fiction, objective and subjective, general and specific, life and death, concerns that inform the crime fiction of contemporary writers in the Lombrosian tradition. The most interesting and potentially troubling aspect of Lombrosian epistemology occurs in the border space between these two extremes, in the latent theoretical desire to be able to reconcile them. And this obsessive, messy, complicated science – not the clear-cut positivist research that received wisdom attributes to Lombroso – is that which has become part of the contemporary relationship with the born criminal. Absolutely, Positively Positivist: Empirical Lombroso Lombroso located his studies in the context of criminal anthropology, a self-defined ‘school’ that based its methodologies on the exigencies determined by positivist science. Positivism, which took hold in numerous disciplines including sociology, history, and philosophy, operated, very generally speaking, according to faith in numbers, with the conviction that measurable data could reveal important truths about the world. In the realm of criminology, turning the debate about criminality towards the criminal body allowed positivist scientists to collect empirical data by examining and measuring their objects of study. Departing from the hypothesis that criminality resided within the body of the human subject, that subject might be poked, prodded, shocked, and, ultimately, dissected in the quest for quantitative results to analyse. In his introduction to the fifth edition, Lombroso recalls: A me parve, e non a me solo, ma anche, e ben prima di me, a Holtzendorf, a Thompson, a Wilson, a Beltrani-Scalia, a Despine, a Prinz, ad

144

Methods of Murder

Heger, a Liszt, che a riconciliare tante discrepanze, a decifrare se l’uomo delinquente appartenga alla cerchia dell’uomo sano, dell’alienato o ad un mondo suo proprio, a riconoscere se vi è o no una vera necessità naturale nel delitto, meglio giovi abbandonare così le sublimi regioni delle teorie filosofiche, come le indagini passionate sui fatti ancora palpitanti e procedere invece allo studio diretto, somatico e psichico, dell’uomo criminale, confrontandolo colle risultanze offerte dall’uomo sano e dall’alienato.26 [It seemed to me, and not just to me, but also (and well before me) to Holtzendorf, to Thompson, to Wilson, to Beltrani-Scalia, to Despine, to Prinz, to Heger, to Liszt, that to reconcile so many discrepancies, to decipher whether criminal man belongs in the circle of the healthy man, the madman, or in his own world, to recognize whether there is a true natural necessity in crime, it is more useful to abandon the sublime regions of philosophical theory – passionate investigations of fascinating facts – and proceed instead to the direct study, somatic and mental, of criminal man, comparing him with the results obtained from the healthy man and the madman.]

In keeping with the tenets of positivism, Lombroso draws a distinction between concrete facts and the more subjective domain of philosophy (the ‘sublimi regioni delle teorie filosofiche’), between the emotion of less scientific domains and dispassionate clinical examination, finally focusing his gaze on the ‘somatico e psichico,’ the biological and psychological composition of the individual human being. The ‘Italian school’ of criminology was, in fact, preoccupied with such distinctions as it worked to carve out a ‘new epistemological space.’27 In so doing, Lombroso distances himself from Beccaria and the classical school, moving away from the fictional, hypothetical criminal subject and the ‘armchair theorizing of the classical school,’28 and instead shifting towards flesh-and-blood case studies of the slippery offender. His success was predicated on the accumulation of facts about the criminal, and so quantity often seemed to supercede quality of evidence. The importance of numbers for Lombroso can be seen, in short, in the numbers. The first edition of L’uomo delinquente was contained in one volume of 255 pages. It analysed sixty-six skulls and 832 live subjects. The final edition was more than seven times as long as the first (1,903 pages in all), and analysed 689 skulls and 6,608 living criminals. A chart of ‘Quantitative Studies by Criminal Anthropologists’ in the fourth edition responds to the criticism that his conclusions are based on scanty evidence by demonstrating that the volume draws on 52,313 individual

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 145

cases, including criminals studied by Lombroso and by his colleagues around Italy and Europe.29 All of Lombroso’s research gravitates around real criminals, whether dead or alive. Since his interest was in establishing the biological causes of crime, the most solid kind of evidence was quite naturally that collected directly from the delinquent body. He gained a popular and professional reputation as a skull collector while completing perhaps the most important task of the criminal anthropologist, that of identifying and measuring his subjects. Criminal anthropology, he insists in L’uomo delinquente, ‘vuol cifre e non descrizioni isolate e generiche e quindi gioverà dare quelle che io, Ferri, B. Ribaudo, Ottolenghi, Baer, Hansen, ottenemmo in più di 2500 criminali, e in più di 1200 onesti’30 (requires numbers rather than isolated and generic descriptions to prove its theories. The following conclusions are based on a study of more than 2,500 criminals and 1,200 honest individuals conducted by me, Ferri, Ribaudo, Ottolenghi, Baer, and Hansen).31 Identifying numerous subjects of study, alive and dead, was a first step towards collecting the information that would comprise the statistical sustenance of Lombroso’s texts. The next step was measurement itself. The human body, made up of a generous multitude of surfaces and interior spaces, could only be described with an extremely specialized physiological vocabulary and assessed with a complicated battery of instruments. David Horn’s outstanding study of the practices that guided Lombroso’s laboratory and the tools he used to read the criminal body provides a complex view of this quantitative drive. Horn lists impressive measurements of the skull conducted by Lombroso and his colleagues, including calculations of the relations between its various parts.32 Mario Portigliatti-Barbos gives a sense of the elaborate language that described these measurements, making clear that a sophisticated lexicon accompanied the byzantine readings of the human body: la misurazione è il metodo, anch’esso esasperato e sofisticato, cui affidare il valore scientifico dello studio [. . .] Non si misurano solo il peso, la statura, la lunghezza degli arti, ma la conformazione (plagio-, scafo-, ocro-, oxi-, ipsi-, sfeno-, clino-, plati-, trigonocefalica) e la capacità della teca, i diametri cranici, le curve rispetto a punti di repère convenuti, gli angoli ecc.33 [measurement is the method (this, too, extreme and sophisticated) to which the scientific value of the study is entrusted [. . .] Not only are weight,

146

Methods of Murder

height, the length of the limbs measured, but also the structure (plagio-, scapho-, acro-, oxy-, hypsi-, spheno-, clino-, platy-, trigonocephalic) and the capacity of the theca, the cranial diameters, the curves with respect to agreed-upon points of reference, the angles, etc.]

Measurements of living criminals were also accompanied by more commonplace descriptions of weight, height, head and facial hair, as well as more subjective descriptions of eyes: in habitual murderers, for example, ‘lo sguardo vitreo, freddo, immobile’ (a glassy, cold, motionless gaze),34 while thieves have an eye that is ‘piccolo, errabondo’ (small, wandering).35 This impressive repertory of items to be measured required, in turn, an ample arsenal of tools designed to procure the raw data. Aside from carefully describing the dimensions of the criminal body, positivist criminologists also sought to register the delinquent’s physical capabilities by measuring his sensitivity and his strength. Horn cites numerous examples from a handbook composed for forensic experts, in which Lombroso includes a list of devices needed in an ideal laboratory in order to collect these data: a modified campimeter (which measured visual field), a Mosso ergograph (used to measure the work capacity of a muscle or group of muscles), Broca’s auricular goniometer (angle of the ear), a Regnier-Mathieu dynamometer (muscular power), Sieweking’s esthesiometer (tactile sensitivity), the Eulenberg baristesiometer (sense of pressure), a Nothnagel thermesthesiometer (sensitivity to changes in temperature), a Zwaardesmaker olfactometer (sense of smell), the Anfosso tachianthropometer (used to measure the body), as well as more mundane instruments like measuring tapes and eye charts.36 The international panoply of proper names (Sieweking, Zwaardesmaker, Anfosso, etc.) works together with the lengthy instrument names to give the well-stocked laboratory the semblance of a complex, precisely calibrated machine, capable of delivering reliable results. To continue to construct this empirical credibility, Horn argues that ‘the rhetoric of anatomical and physiological measurement tended to deny the constructed nature of what was measured, relying on (and reproducing) the illusion that indices were features of bodies, simply to be found on its surfaces and structures.’37 Thus, Lombroso and his colleagues creatively busied themselves with the collection of previously unimaginable data, and in the process reimagined the surfaces of the criminal body. To continue to reinforce the empirical credibility of his work, Lombroso added the Atlas as the fourth volume of the 1896–97

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 147

edition of L’uomo delinquente; it records these measurements in graphs, charts, maps, and lists. However, the Atlas, the final volume of the fifth edition of Lombroso’s masterwork, does not only collect and organize statistical data that sketch a numerical outline of criminal existence; it additionally collects felonious faces, skulls, and bodies in the form of drawings and photographs, images that provide visible substantiation of his theories. Some of the most frequently reprinted excerpts of L’uomo delinquente are, in fact, the criminal portrait galleries that adorn its pages. Rows upon rows of pictures of criminal subjects portray real examples of the criminal type. From these specific countenances, readers are invited to recognize the general characteristics of the dangerous individual. This kind of cumulative evidence is important in Lombroso’s work, a fact he emphasizes in his presentation of the volume: Quest’atlante è [. . .] non solo una parte integrante dell’opera, ma anzi la più importante. Vi ho cercato d’illustrare, pel mondo dei criminali, ciò che gli etnografi chiamano la pictografia dei selvaggi e la loro estetica, la loro grafologia, e i loro geroglifici. Sopratutto ho voluto dimostrare colla maggior evidenza possibile la esistenza ed i caratteri del tipo nel criminale nato e nell’epilettico [. . .] Ho voluto accumulare tutte queste prove di un fatto, che è pur tuttavia così evidente, perché in esso sta proprio il nucleo di tutta la mia teoria: senza tipo criminale, infatti, non v’ha criminale-nato: né senza criminalenato v’è antropologia criminale.38 [This atlas is not only an integral part of the work, but in fact, the most important. I have tried to illustrate, for the criminal world, that which ethnographers call the pictography of the savages and their aesthetic, their graphology and their hieroglyphs. Above all, I wanted to demonstrate with as much evidence as possible the existence and the character of the type in the born criminal and the epileptic [. . .] I wanted to accumulate all of this proof of a fact, which is nevertheless so evident, because in it is the nucleus of my entire theory: without the criminal type, in fact, there is no born criminal: and without the born criminal, there is no criminal anthropology.]

While, on the one hand, the Atlas continues the work of the preceding three volumes, on the other, Lombroso insists that it is the most

148

Methods of Murder

important part of the work as a whole. If readers agree that they can recognize the criminal type, they will, he argues, be forced to accept the legitimacy of his entire branch of science, criminal anthropology. And since this process of recognition is imperative, Lombroso employs a range of strategies over the course of L’uomo delinquente to help convince his readers of their capacity to identify the born criminal. At times, the galleries of photographs reproduce Lombroso’s laboratory for the readers. He sometimes studied physiognomy through photographs supplied by his colleagues. In these cases, the reader is provided with a privileged view of the very evidence that leads Lombroso to conclude that a ‘parentela tipica si osserva ancor più stretta fra color che hanno già il tipo criminale, appunto come avviene negli individui delle specie animali e vegetali’ (close kinship can be observed among born criminals, just as it can be in members of the animal and vegetable species).39 Here, the text accompanying the photo gallery invites readers to compare several of the numbered portraits to notice a resemblance so strong ‘da far dubitare talvolta che diversi ritratti non siano che la riproduzione di una stessa persona’ (that it makes one wonder whether different portraits are not actually the same person).40 In other instances, Lombroso uses the Galtonian Method of composite photography, a technique whereby he superimposes photos of different criminal skulls in order to create an image of the type.41 The resulting compound picture suggestively performs the task that the reader must accomplish mentally at other times, that of fusing numerous individuals into one, generalized form. Dangerous Bodies, Difficult Science The evidence collected from criminal offenders is vast, ostensibly an inventory of quantitative proof of the existence of the born criminal. For this reason, it seems particularly strange that Lombroso is so frequently inaccurate when reporting numerical data. These factual errors are particularly evident in the English translation by Gibson and Rafter, since their notes dispassionately indicate such mistakes. In a note in the first edition, the scholars observe that the numbers in a table do not always match the narrative, and alert readers that ‘discrepancies between the tables and text occur frequently in Criminal Man.’42 In a chapter on criminal craniums, in the fifth edition, Lombroso proudly notes that his conclusions are based on the examination of 689 skulls, an increase from the fifty-five of the first edition. In that first printing, though, he

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 149

had actually examined sixty-six. Gibson and Rafter’s notes to the third edition find a number of lists that fail to add up as Lombroso thinks – he should have counted seventy-seven children in a reformatory instead of seventy-nine; 220 photographs of male criminals rather than 219; the sensitivity of sixty-three criminals, not sixty-six, as the editors observe in just two pages of notes.43 The empirical basis for Lombroso’s science is clearly messier than its surface would imply. Empirical error was not the only problem the criminologist faced, however. He additionally had to confront challenges presented by the often-intractable character of his subjects of study. Lombroso encountered numerous practical difficulties: autopsies and certain elaborate examinations were possible only when criminals were dead and their bodies entrusted to his scrutiny. While corpses no longer commit criminal acts, thus preventing scholars from studying behaviours that signal criminality, living bodies can strategically dissimulate, placing the scientist in the difficult unempirical position of interpreter of honesty, sincerity, and ability. Lombroso privileged, as we have seen, the ‘studio diretto’ of his subjects, but this first-hand collection of data, as his own reports demonstrate repeatedly, was not necessarily the guarantor of superior information. The problem of the criminal anthropologist is compounded by the nature of the subject of study. Inconstancy can present specific methodological difficulties for the research scientist. Testing the ‘agility’ of criminals, for example, Lombroso makes note of the following stumbling block: Chi voglia indagare le condizioni della forza muscolare dei delinquenti, non riesce, anche coi più perfetti dinamometri, a farsene una idea nemmeno approssimativa, trattandosi di infelici infiacchiti dalle lunghe detenzioni e dall’inerzia. S’aggiunga che, parecchie volte, per quella malignità che è il carattere costante della loro esistenza, essi fingono di essere più deboli che non lo sieno; non premono sul dinamometro quanto potrebbero.44 [He who wants to investigate the conditions of muscular force of criminals cannot, even with the most perfect dynamometers, get more than an approximate idea, because of the unhappy feebleness caused by long detentions and inertia. One must add that, many times, because of the malice that is the constant character of their existence, these criminals pretend to be weaker than they are; they don’t press on the dynamometer as hard as they could.]

150

Methods of Murder

The criminologist must go head to head with the criminal, and the antagonistic attitude of the latter threatens the success of both scientific and criminal investigations. This passage also indicates a more tragic problem faced by the scientist studying incarcerated delinquents. The degenerating state of the human body, subject to the restrictive conditions of incarceration, gravely counterbalances the humorous problem of the unwillingness of these objects of investigation to cooperate with the scientist who seeks to study them. Confinement elects individuals to their status as objects of criminological study, but it also alters them physically, and thus having suffered the effects of physical imprisonment, Lombroso’s criminal man is physiologically different from the criminal in the act of committing a crime. Throughout his career, Lombroso continued to measure, test, and diligently record numbers. But the criminal anthropologist was perhaps less captivated by such data than it would initially seem. After reporting figures in a chapter titled ‘Anthropometry and Physiognomy of 832 Criminals,’ Lombroso apologetically offers to synthesize: ‘Summing up in a few words that which scientific exigencies oblige me to express with arid numbers, I conclude: [. . .].’45 This sentence (somewhat astonishingly, given the positivist context) portrays science as an imposition, which obliges him to an ‘arid’ style – it implies, conversely, that with a few more words, his findings might be more inspiring. Lombroso’s ‘inattention to detail,’ as Gibson and Rafter characterize it, leads us to turn our attention to the other primary tendency in his work, that of a subjective, artistic reading of the criminal body.46 Numerical reportage is primarily a vehicle that makes his real talent, that of reading and intuiting the born criminal, more credible. Yet, if empirical inaccuracy and uncooperative subjects called his measurements into question, the practice of ‘reading’ criminals and identifying them in works of art draws the scientist even deeper into the speculative margin, and leads Lombroso towards even more nebulous research practices. The Art of Criminal Anthropology: Lyrical Lombroso Connections between criminology and art constitute the foundation of the investigative paradigm described by the historian Carlo Ginzburg. One of Lombroso’s contemporaries, the art historian Giovanni Morelli, was conducting parallel studies of art historical subjects between 1874 and 1876, examining ear lobes, fingernails, hands, and feet in order to

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 151

identify the real artists behind incorrectly attributed paintings. Ginzburg notes that although Morelli was dismissed (like Lombroso) for his excessive positivist confidence, interest in the scholar has been renewed by later studies, in part, because of the connections he drew between art history and the criminal world: ‘Morelli’s books,’ Wind writes, ‘look different from those of any other writer on art; they are sprinkled with illustrations of fingers and ears, careful records of the characteristic trifles by which an artist gives himself away, as a criminal might be spotted by a fingerprint [. . .] [A]ny art gallery studied by Morelli begins to resemble a rogue’s gallery [“museo criminale”].’47

Ginzburg traces epistemological resemblances between Morelli and Sherlock Holmes, but the analogy easily extends to Lombroso as well. Stewart-Steinberg agrees that Lombroso participates in the evidentiary paradigm, ‘for he, too, was obsessed with the ears, fingers, and hair of the modern subject, with all those involuntarily betrayed details that allowed him to read this subject’s specificity and history.’48 Lombroso is particularly ‘Morellian’ as he becomes more lyrical, embracing ‘instinct, insight, intuition’ – the three ‘imponderable elements’ Ginzburg identifies as part of the conjectural paradigm. As Lombroso welcomes such capabilities into his study, L’uomo delinquente strays from the numerical evidence and veers into the even more subjective realm of art. Whereas the Morellian employment of the investigative paradigm constituted a measure of rigour that helped to confirm intuitions about art, in Lombroso’s work rigour gradually cedes space to intuition, which leads, in turn, to the criminologist’s own form of subjective, artistic invention. Lombroso conceives of his investigations metaphorically as part of a prolonged reading process. A good criminologist, he explains, must be a good reader, and specifically a talented interpreter of human faces: In fondo non è un indovinello o una profezia che si fa, come credono il volgo e col volgo i poco accorti critici, ma una lettura, direi, di un palimsesto alla rovescia, tanto più facile, perchè non si limita alla faccia, ma va alla calligrafia, ai gesti, alla sensibilità, ecc.: e che ciò malgrado non si è mai preteso di rendere applicabile, se non in individui recidivi od indiziati di reati.49

152

Methods of Murder

[In the end it is not a riddle or a prophecy that is done, as the common people think and with them the less discerning critics, but a reading, I would say, of a backwards palimpsest, rendered easier because it is not limited to the face, but extends to handwriting, gestures, sensibility, etc. In spite of this, it has never professed to be applicable if not in cases of habitual or suspected criminals.]

From literature written by criminals to high art to body art, Lombroso assigns word and image the status of valuable sources of understanding and regularly integrates invention and art into his science. While the photographic images collected by the scientist served as documentary evidence of the subjects that were being measured, more subjective artistic representations depicting or produced by criminals, ranging from paintings to writing to body art, were called upon with equal confidence in their ability to illuminate and provide proof. The first of these practices, the collection of art depicting criminals, relies upon some of Italy’s most renowned artists to provide confirmation, both visual and narrative, of Lombrosian theories. Artists and scientists alike search for truth, he suggests, although they gain access to it in different ways: whereas science reaches truth by collecting data, the artist relies primarily on intuition. For Lombroso’s work, the significance of this common endeavour lies in the fact that a scientist can also use art as substantiation, collecting examples of good artistic intuition to illustrate, brilliantly and poetically, the legitimacy of his theories. By incorporating evidence born in intuition into his study, however, he reveals his own reliance on this more subjective talent. Using a technique akin to the amassing of photographs for the Atlas, Lombroso invokes canonical images rendered by Michelangelo to demonstrate that the criminal type visible in his Galtonian photographs had been ‘intuited’ hundreds of years before by men of genius: Un’altra prova dell’esistenza del tipo criminale si ha nel vedere come il genio degli artisti ne abbia intuito e applicato l’esistenza assai prima che l’antropologia criminale lo dimostrasse scientificamente. Secondo il dott. E. Lefort (Le type criminel d’après les savants et les artistes, Lione, 1892; Arch. di psich., XIII, pag. 460), Michelangelo aveva già sostituito alla forma animale dei demoni la figura umana, un demonio che ha fronte sfuggente, naso affilato, grandi orecchie ad ansa: nella barca di Caronte vi è una testa di condannato con orecchio animalesco.50

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 153 [More proof of the existence of the criminal type can be seen in the way artistic genius has intuited and applied its existence well before criminal anthropology demonstrated it scientifically. According to Dr E. Lefort (Le type criminel d’après les savants et les artistes, Lione, 1892; Arch. di psich., XIII, p. 460), Michelangelo had already substituted demons with human figures for the animal forms, a demon with a receding forehead, a thin nose, large, handle-shaped ears: in Charon’s boat the head of one of the condemned has animal-like ears.]

While the process of practising science can reveal certainties in one sense, artistic intuition, an equally legitimate means of accessing this pre-existent absolute, actually arrived at Lombroso’s ‘truths’ precociously, before science itself. A number of factors make this strategy credible for the positivist scientist: if the born criminal is a throwback to an earlier human form, recognizable because of a number of distinguishing atavistic features, then he should be visible to a discerning observer. While scientists rely on tools and measurements to enhance their powers of observation, talented artists are endowed with a remarkable ability to scrutinize people, to individuate the characteristics that make them unique. Like positivist criminologists, artists obsess about the human form. Consequently, their conclusions, suggests Lombroso, are scientifically interesting. At other points in L’uomo delinquente, he notes the accurate characterizations of the criminal face in the works of such artists as Andrea Mantegna, Titian, Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco Goya, and Eugène Delacroix, among others.51 His citations of Europe’s most illustrious painters rewrite art history, a secular typological reading in which these talented artists prefigure, with triumphal elegance, his own scientific conclusions. Visual arts were not the only arts to be called upon in Lombroso’s study. While citing Michelangelo provides further visual evidence of the criminal type, Dante Alighieri, on the other hand, helps to reinforce Lombroso’s social strategy for dealing with criminals, this time in literary form. He calls on the Florentine poet to argue against the utility of educating criminals in jail in the following passage: E qui mi farò forte della opinione di Dante: Che dove l’argomento della mente S’aggiunge al mal voler ed alla possa, Nessun riparo vi può far la gente.

154

Methods of Murder

[And here I will strengthen my point by citing Dante: for where the mind’s acutest reasoning is joined to evil will and evil power, there human beings can’t defend themselves].52 (Inferno XXXI)

The Dantean reference adds metaphorical strength, or ‘forza,’ to the Lombrosian text, according to the author. Without irony, Lombroso applies the language of the Florentine poet as he compares souls in the bottom circles of hell to the situation of contemporary criminality. Just as his theory of criminal atavism juxtaposes past and present, equating criminal man with earlier or less-evolved representatives of the species, his literary sensibility finds the combination of medieval and contemporary models appropriate to the elaboration of his argument. This fusion of different time periods is complemented further by mixing the fictional and the non-fictional, the sacred and profane. The rigours of positivist science do not preclude, in Lombroso’s text, poetic digression. Lombrosian Lurking on the Borders of Science Lombroso’s inclusion of artistic and literary evidence of criminality alongside flesh-and-blood studies of criminals indicates the permeability of boundaries (generic, historical, and corporeal) in his research. Porous margins, in turn, become one of the most significant characteristics of his science. As a result of challenges regarding the application of empirical sciences to crime, Lombroso himself tended to willingly cross the border from science to art, engaging a dramatic style that created his born criminal. The contamination between art and science is one of the principle motives for which this social world exists in such provocative, and sometimes troubling, disarray. Artistic forms of proof complement Lombroso’s research, but his own gallery of criminal art is intricately connected to his collection of criminal relics – both are ways of investigating the universe of the criminal subject, collected and created around the figure of the living criminal. To recall, for a moment, the anonymous poet cited at the beginning of this chapter, his fear of the shadowy figure of Lombroso/Ombroso evokes a fascinating aspect of the scientist’s work, an epistemological practice that we might call a strategy of lurking. Voracious in his curiosity about criminals, Lombroso spent years haunting the places where he might find them, taking into consideration anything connected with this liminal existence. This

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 155

collectionism included, in particular, anthropological evidence, which then was amassed in criminological museums: Si pensi ai cinquanta encefali ottenuti dall’autopsia di criminali e preparati con metodo Giacomini, all’analoga raccolta . . . di scheletri di uguale provenienza, o di crani radunati e offerti (quelli africani del capitano Amenduni, o raccolti sul campo di battaglia di Adua dal dottor Brignone; russi di Tarnowsky; indiani di Sir Lamb, governatore di Bombay; della Nuova Guinea e Nuova Caledonia del professor Loria; delle varie province italiane: dottor Ardu in Sardegna, Manuelli e Ottolenghi in Piemonte, Beltrani Scalia nel carcere di Regina Coeli).53 [One thinks of the fifty encephalons obtained from criminal autopsies and prepared using the Giacomini method, of the analogous collection of skeletons of the same provenance, or of the skulls collected and offered (the Africans by Captain Amenduni, or collected on the battlefield at Adua by Dr Brignone; the Russians by Tarnowsky; the Indians by Sir Lamb, governor of Bombay; from New Guinea and New Caledonia by Professor Loria; from the various Italian provinces: Dr Ardu in Sardinia, Manuelli and Ottolenghi in Piedmont, Beltrani Scalia in the Regina Coeli prison).]

Yet, the existence of the poem ‘Contro Lombroso’ in a serious scientific work indicates the trend by which L’uomo delinquente radically broadened standards of evidence in order to admit proof of less traditional types, here departing both from scientific and literary canons. In collecting texts for the Palimsesti del carcere, Lombroso asserted that the soul of the prisoner: si esplica per le vie meno note e sempre sotterranee e nascoste: sulle mura del carcere [. . .], sui margini dei libri che loro si concedono nell’idea di moralizzarli, sulla carta che ravvolge i medicamenti, perfino sulle mobili sabbie delle gallerie aperte al passeggio, perfino sui vestiti, in cui imprimono i loro pensieri col ricamo.54 [expresses itself through less familiar, underground, hidden paths: on the walls of the prison [. . .] in the margins of the books they are permitted with the idea of moralizing them, on the paper that wraps their medicines, and even on the moving sands of the hallways open for their walks, even on their clothes, on which they print their thoughts with embroidery.]

Thus, the ‘measurement’ of criminal man also involved listening to stories, reading graffiti, inspecting marginalia, turning clothing inside

156

Methods of Murder

out, and in general investigating everything that might be associated with a lawbreaker. In this way Lombroso’s research, while still maintaining the subject at the centre of the investigation, reached out to incorporate the traces that such figures left on the world around them. The designation of this research passion with the somewhat sinister term ‘lurking,’ suggested by an anonymous poet’s fear (‘io ti pavento’), is appropriate when the tenor of these collections is made clear. In anthropometric studies, the relevance of a particular individual to a preordained criminal category was reported in figures, graphs, and other forms pertinent to such empirical data. The numerous tables and maps printed in L’uomo delinquente, which amass data on such information as cranial circumference, psychological anomalies, and the population density of various types of crime, collapse a wide range of evidence taken from a diverse group of individuals into percentages, smoothing out and eliminating the presence of the individual subjects of studies. The gathering and depiction of data, however, proceed in apparently contradictory directions. They generalize physiological data in order to create an abstract criminal type, but the criminal type is needed to formulate a system to identify the dangerousness of specific individuals. A theoretical paradox underlies Lombroso’s study, that is, the difficulty of attempting to pinpoint the ‘normal’ criminal (in the sense that the normal conforms to a type, is typical), when ultimately, his point is that the criminal is abnormal, degenerate. Renzo Villa suggests that criminal anthropology is a sort of social science in negativo, in which ‘il protagonista non è un soggetto generale e tautologicamente definito: è l’antropologia del negativo, dei bordi e dei confini entro cui il “normale,” come una sorta di specie assediata, si rinserra e difende’ (the protagonist is not a general subject, defined according to a tautology: it is the anthropology of the negative, of the borders and confines in which the ‘normal,’ as a sort of besieged species, encloses itself and defends itself).55 The ideal subject to illustrate these theories of atavism must at once be capable of revealing a general truth about criminality, and strange or unusual enough to establish that criminal man is not normal.56 Lombroso’s is a science of limit-cases, and in seeking to define the criminal type, that one figure that would constitute the ‘normal’ among a group of social deviants, his numbers (percentages of criminals displaying certain characteristics) reflect the generalizing tendencies of science, whereas his anecdotal evidence and many of his collected poems, tattoos, and drawings vivify those who exceed the limits. The criminal type, although identifiable according to specific

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 157

measurements, the presence of certain physical signs, etc., remained elusive: the born criminal was both ideal and concrete, ‘halfway between empiricism and scientific abstraction.’57 The original expert, Lombroso, could only spot the type in four out of ten cases.58 In spite of this inability to perfect the process of recognition, Lombroso could consistently describe the kind of character he was talking about. The strong suit of Lombrosian science, in the end, actually rests in this ability to create the criminal, although ironically he does so by appropriating true stories and real human bodies. Lombroso the Narrator The most significant art in Lombroso’s project, and certainly the most momentous part of Lombrosian criminal epistemology for the tradition of crime fiction that follows, is that which he created himself. As we have seen, Lombroso strives to officially claim dependence on data to prove his points. In practice, however, he relies heavily on a lively style and narrative, as well as graphic illustrations. In her chapter on Lombroso, Stewart-Steinberg suggests that the excessive quality of Lombroso’s style comes from the fact that his objects ‘talk back.’ His discoveries, she says, are so extravagant that they ‘produce a kind of choral effect of such power that they are able to make Lombroso’s own voice join them to produce a popular language.’59 Following this theory, Lombroso’s selection of narrative snapshots of numerous criminals throughout L’uomo delinquente demonstrates a taste for the unique, the particularly degenerate, the exceptional, the horrific, the cold-blooded, as if channelling the very tendencies he documents when recounting them. Lombroso’s criminal anecdotes are gathered in galleries of descriptive snapshots in the same way that the atlas includes page after page of photographs. Myriad sketches describe criminals by name, place of geographical origin, age, and crime committed, usually the result of interviews he and his colleagues conducted with inmates. In spite of the vastness and seeming exhaustiveness of L’uomo delinquente (particularly in its final, four-volume form), the narrative portraits, especially, evince a process of selection. Unlike the portrait galleries, in which uniformly sized and shaped photographs occupy their appointed space on a page, descriptions of criminals and their delinquent acts vary in length and style and seem to have been chosen for their exceptional rather than their typical qualities. They are piquant,

158

Methods of Murder

often graphic portrayals that direct criminality into a subcutaneous domain of blood and violence. The anecdotes, unlike the statistical tables are, in effect, more representative of Lombroso’s science, since they can never be averaged. As specific narrative portraits, their very presence signals an anomaly worthy of narration. In a briefly recounted example of a young man named Vincent, Lombroso describes a cold, violent crime: ‘Vincent fino a 22 anni era onestissimo: a 22 vede l’orologio di un suo compagno e subito l’adesca a una passeggiata e l’uccide e poi ritorna al giuoco dei dadi’ (Vincent, until 22 years of age, was extremely honest: at 22 he sees a friend’s watch and suddenly entices him to take a walk, kills him, and then returns to his game of dice).60 The staccato, paratactic recounting of details, presumably effected with an eye to objectivity and efficiency, also highlights in its brevity the horror of contrast between the normal, ‘onestissimo’ Vincent and the dramatically violent turn his life took at twenty-two years of age. More importantly, Lombroso underlines the boundaries crossed, the contrasts between criminality and ‘normal’ behaviour. This brief tale highlights the disjunctions between friendship and enmity, honesty and deviance, murder and a game of dice. By setting up this series of distinctions, Lombroso begins to subtly draw lines that will delineate the world of the abnormal criminal type. As in Beccaria’s treatise, dialogue is used to give the criminals a voice, assigning them vocal agency with which to express the deviance of their actions in their own language. Whereas Beccaria invented his criminal dialogue, creating criminals that were universal representatives of a certain human condition, Lombroso’s examples are presented with the veil of documentary truth, direct reportage from the mouths of real historical subjects. They are meant to preserve individuality, because what Lombroso seeks to define is that which is not normal. A girl of twelve who was a ‘feroce antropofaga’ (ferocious cannibal), for example, is quoted as defending her actions: ‘perchè, chiedeva essa, averne disgusto? Se tutti sapessero come è buona la carne umana, tutti mangerebbero i loro figliuoli’ (why, she asked, be disgusted? If everyone knew how tasty human meat is, everyone would eat their children).61 And whereas Beccaria’s monologues illuminate a rational series of motives that might induce a member of society to commit a crime, Lombroso’s dialogues often turn the focus back to the violently anomalous desires of the criminal: bloodlust, cannibalism, rage. As the aforementioned case study, these examples are stories of

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 159

behaviours that, narrated in the simplest of styles, express the deviance of the actors involved. In some instances, however, Lombroso employs a more elaborate narrative approach in order to accentuate details, drawing attention to violence, blood, and particularly irregular behaviour through his expression of fascination with his subjects. In the following anecdote, for example, a young child’s attraction to blood is narrated via such subjective and particularly literary details as dialogue, superlatives, nuanced suffixes, and descriptions of emotions to render the scene more vivid: Un ragazzione, che a 3 anni aveva già abitudini onanistiche e piacere a vedere sgozzare le bestie, a 5 anni era stutissimo nel fare il male. Quando vide il fratellino perdere sangue dal naso, ne trasse tosto profitto e lo fece precipitare dalla sedia col viso a terra, immergendovi con piacere le mani ed esclamando: ‘Voglio uccidere quel piccino, voglio vedere il sangue, solo questo mi da piacere.’62 [A big boy, who at the age of 3 already had onanistic habits and took pleasure in seeing beasts slaughtered, by the age of 5 was extremely cunning in doing bad things. When he saw his little brother with a bloody nose, he took advantage of the situation and made him fall from his chair face-first, plunging in his hands with pleasure and exclaiming: ‘I want to kill that little one, I want to see blood, only this makes me happy.’]

The precocious young criminal is not extraordinary simply for the violence of his actions, but also for his expression of enthusiasm for such acts. He is represented as exceptional grammatically since he is superlative, ‘stutissimo,’ in his criminal tendencies. But it is primarily the perverse, innate enthralment with blood that marks this particular delinquent and this specific anecdote as an extreme case, for blood flowing out of the body represents a transitional, literally fluid space between life and death. The child’s desire to bloody his hands graphically portrays the way in which criminals can sully such sacred boundaries. Into the Palimpsest These physical delineations, violated time after time in Lombroso’s stories of criminality, also reside at the heart of his own science. In the Palimsesti, he directly assaults the Beccarian strategy of keeping

160

Methods of Murder

distance from the criminal, asserting instead the need for both the scientist and the judge to enter the criminal body: OH! lascino i giuristi per qualche tempo il tavolo e le biblioteche da parte, ed entrino e studino il carcere senza prevenzioni; e non nelle mura, nel muto contenente, ma nel contenuto vivo e agitantesi, che vi sta dentro e vedranno che quasi tutte le loro pretese riforme, ideate ed applicate senza il controllo della pratica, non sono che pericolose illusioni.63 [OH! May jurists leave their benches and their libraries aside, and enter and study the prison without judgment; and not in the walls, in the mute container, but in the living, restless contents within, and they will see that almost all their alleged reforms, devised and applied without checking them in practice, are no more than dangerous illusions.]

In spite of his own reliance on the ‘mute container’ of the prison, source of countless criminal documents and objects, Lombroso exhorts reformers to dive into the ‘living contents’ of the prison system. His polysemous science of crime embraces a wide range of practices, but the best means to understanding the criminal lies within. In characterizing his strategy for reading the lawbreaker as a ‘reverse palimpsest,’ Lombroso reveals both the complexity of reading a text buried under other texts, and also indicates his need to delve into – and under – the outer layers of his subjects. His strategy has a style, but it is a style that is also an incursion into a physical body. Although Lombroso claims that reading the criminal palimpsest stretches outward, into the world beyond the criminal, his epistemology proceeds in both directions and also reaches inwards, in order to read the messages inside the body. The practice of understanding the criminal by physically opening him is one described in a series of lessons on legal medicine. Lombroso explains to students: Uno studio antropologico sull’uomo delinquente, e particolarmente di quella sua varietà che chiamiamo delinquente-nato, deve di necessità prendere le mosse dai primi caratteri fisici fondamentali che si rilevano alla tavola anatomica, per passare a quelli che si riscontrano nel vivente.64 [An anthropological study of criminal man, and in particular of the variety we call the born criminal, must necessarily begin from the first, fundamental physical characteristics revealed on the anatomical table, in order to go on to those found in the living [subject]].

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 161

The point of departure, according to the scientist, is the dead body on the anatomical table, which corresponds to many of the empirical measurements discussed above, and the point of arrival, the living criminal. This interest in the dead in order to understand the living is proper to medicine in general. The cold, immobile skeleton, the dead body, and the autopsy all provide analysable, dissectable objects of study, but criminal science is confined by its need to study the living subject, always partially out of reach as long as blood flows through it. This problem had long plagued doctors and researchers who attempted to study medicine. Ginzburg explains: ‘by definition, the living body was beyond reach. To be sure, the cadaver was dissectable: but how could one’s steps be traced from it, already impaired by death, to the characteristics of the living individual?’65 The autopsy table is one of the primary places in which intuition must be activated in order to make this conceptual leap. Lombroso’s studies examine the corpse to comprehend the living criminal. Yet, his conclusions lie somewhere between the two states, as his understanding is born in the intersection between these two extremes of existence. Thus, more scientifically provocative than the autopsy is the tendency to fail to respect death as a boundary. The crux of Lombroso’s research loiters, theoretically speaking, around the threshold separating life from death. A prominent way in which he activates his ability to speculate stems in his understanding of a more fluid continuum between the realms of the living and the dead. Such a position has a clinical basis. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault discusses the ‘discovery’ of pathological anatomy and its application in the study of disease. He describes the complications inherent in conducting an autopsy, where the corpse becomes ‘doubly misleading.’ For one, the living body of the disease disappears in death. Additionally, death causes certain phenomena that change the body ‘according to its own time scale’: decomposition, recession, effacement, possible engorgement of the brain, etc.66 Citing research conducted by anatomist Xavier Bichat at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Foucault describes a more complex idea of death as a continuum that emerges: ‘Death is therefore multiple, and dispersed in time: it is not that absolute, privileged point at which time stops and moves back; like disease itself, it has a teeming presence that analysis may divide into time and space; gradually, here and there, each of the knots breaks, until organic life ceases, at least in its major forms, since long after the death of the individual, miniscule, partial deaths continue to dissociate the islets of life that still subsist.’67

162

Methods of Murder

In another lesson on legal medicine, Lombroso, in fact, establishes his own understanding of such a movement between life and death, noting that certain bodily functions do not cease after someone dies: Non sempre le funzioni dell’organismo, neppure le più importanti, come la respirazione e la circolazione, cessano contemporaneamente nella morte. Di solito qualche battito del cuore, benchè sempre più debole, si nota, anche quando è già arrestato il respiro; ciò appare specialmente nei neonati asfittici, in cui, assai di frequente, vedesi battere per molte ore il cuore, dopochè ogni altra apparenza di vita è cessata.68 [It is not always the case that the functions of the organism, even the most important ones, such as breathing and circulation, cease upon death. Usually one notes a few heartbeats, although weakening, even when breathing has stopped; this appears especially in asphyxial newborns in which, quite often, one sees the heart beat for many hours after all other appearances of life have ceased.]

Yet, while this understanding may have a basis in morbid anatomy, in Lombrosian science, the mobile hinterland separating the living from the dead is also one of the most uncanny spaces, in particular, for the criminal subjects into whose bodies he hopes to delve. In the realm of criminology specifically, Lombroso’s fascination with this medical margin leads to the ‘tracce di morte’ that inspired horror in the anonymous poet who contemplated the scientist’s studio. Although he would argue for continuity between the two, his medical science delves not into the diseased human body, but into the criminal body, and simultaneously into the realms of crime, murder, and criminal insanity. As such, Lombrosian science’s experimental forays into the human form are darkened by association. The hovering around the divide between the living and the dead constitutes another form of Lombrosian lurking, this time around the limits of existence. This obsessive quality, and the fear it inspired in the poet, can be understood by an analysis of the achievable ideal of this lurking, an almost complete possession of the criminal subject – from his life history, to objects he created, wrote, or read, to, finally, his body. Having the ability to follow an offender beyond life offered Lombroso the most totalizing control of the resulting criminal narrative, which in turn, would lend evidence to his theories. In an appendix to the second edition of L’uomo delinquente, one of the best examples of such a relationship lies in the narrative of Giovanni Cavaglià, a bricklayer from Santena who

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 163

was imprisoned for murdering his host. Lombroso recounts Cavaglià’s criminal history, including the gruesome murder but also a crime he committed six years before, and his family history, from his father’s spendthrift alcoholism to his mother’s unhappiness (as well as her goitre). The twenty-four-year-old committed suicide in prison, and Lombroso’s depiction of the subsequent autopsy again points to the fluidity of the life-death bridge, and the importance of this moment to criminal anthropology. When guards found the prisoner hanging in his cell, they took him down and found that ‘la pelle era già fredda, e le estremità avevano già acquistato un certo grado di rigidità, mentre esisteva una grande mobilità del collo’ (his skin was already cold and his limbs were becoming rigid, although his neck was still flexible).69 They also noted that his ‘pene, di grandezza media, era flaccido, ma piegato sull’addome, coll’uretra umida per umore d’apparenza spermatico’ (penis, of medium size, lay flaccid on his abdomen and appeared wet from sperm).70 Lombroso subsequently reports the results of the autopsy, which he claims was ‘praticata in quella stessa ora’ (done immediately).71 The still-flexible neck and still-wet genital organ attest to processes of stiffening and drying that have yet to occur when the criminologists (at least as they recount it) dive into the young man’s body. In narrative space and time, the vibrant, violent life story of Cavaglià exists beside the unemotional, positivist dissection of his brain and the minute examination of his skull. Lombroso concludes that ‘noi non possiamo non mettere in rapporto queste lesioni psichiche colle alterazioni materiali riscontrate nel cervello’ (it is impossible not to connect his intellectual and moral perversion with the physical anomalies of his brain).72 In L’uomo delinquente, a sketch of Cavaglià illustrates the prisoner in life. His water jug, on which he depicted his crimes as well as his eminent self-inflicted demise, sits in Lombroso’s museum in Turin. Giovanni Cavaglià was thoroughly absorbed into the Lombrosian narrative machine. Yet, beyond the achievable collectionism lies an unachievable ideal, the ability to possess an even more perfect knowledge of the criminal body, knowledge accessible only while the criminal lives. All of the scientist’s work, whether it involves collecting measurable data or putting together collections of prison writings, revolves around an implicit theoretical desire to vivisect, hypothetically speaking, the criminal. Vivisection, which is similar to an autopsy but is performed on a living being, has the ambitious pathological goal of observing systems at work in a body opened as if it were a research specimen. The practice of

164

Methods of Murder

vivisection (performed on animals in medical studies) was vociferously condemned and largely outlawed in the eighteenth century. Lombroso did not actually practise or express a desire to practise such science, long deemed cruel. And yet, this is the ideal theoretical space around which Lombrosian thought might be said to lurk. Indeed, it would represent the experimental means to understanding what moves criminal man, biologically speaking, by opening his body, while allowing him to retain his fascinating delinquent nature. The scientist’s regrets about the duplicitous nature of the criminal offender as subject of scientific study, combined with a fascination for anatomical detail, hit around this ideal of opening the criminal body. The Many Faces of Villella That all of these competing tendencies – to measure and narrate, interview and dissect, and especially, to obsess – exist in close relationship to one another can perhaps best be illustrated by one particular man, Giuseppe Villella, who appears across works by and about Lombroso. This man’s story, in theory involving the simple reporting of scientific data, instead becomes the tale of an obsessive relationship, Lombroso’s prime example of his own lurking and of his desire to vivisect the criminal. When he wrote of Villella in a scientific journal in 1871, Lombroso initially recounted that he was struck by the man’s ‘sadness’: Occupandomi da qualche tempo nello studio dell’uomo criminale, nel visitare il penitenziario di . . . , fui colpito dalla vista di un tristissimo uomo, che vi degeva da pochi giorni. – Era certo Villella, di Motta S. Lucia, circondario di Catanzaro, d’anni 69, contadino, sospetto di brigantaggio e condannato tre volte per furto, e da ultimo per incendio di un molino, a scopo di furto.73 [Having occupied myself for some time in studies of criminal man, in visiting the penitentiary of . . . , I was struck by the sight of a very sad man, who had been there a few days. – It was a certain Villella, of Motta S. Lucia, in the area of Catanzaro, 69 years old, a peasant, suspected of brigandry and condemned three times for theft, and most recently for burning a mill with the intent of theft.]

But the sad Villella will, as soon as he expires and Lombroso acquires his ‘osso,’ become a star in the burgeoning field of criminal anthropology. When Giuseppe Villella died in confinement, his body was entrusted

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 165

to Lombroso, who carefully measured and recorded a cranium that seemed to have the ordinary shape and capacity of Calabrese skulls. Its circumference and more than twenty other cranial dimensions were recorded in a list in the journal.74 But then, he chose to go further into his subject’s body: ‘esaminando più addentro, coll’ajuto del professore Zoja, questo cranio, ben altre e più gravi anomalie mi spiccavano all’occhio’75 (examining further within this cranium, with the help of Professor Zoja, other and more serious anomalies caught my eye). Apparently abandoning the measuring tape, Lombroso used his eyes and, presumably, his intuition, to dive into the occipital ‘void’ where his atavistic criminal would be born, a depression in the skull that he designated the median occipital fossa.76 This unusual formation inspired the scientist to hypothesize a special, atavistic genealogy for criminal man, whose cranial structure, as generalized from this particular instance, likened him to the animals in which such forms were more commonly found. This group included, according to Lombroso, the ‘più infimi quadrumani’ (lowest quadrumanes) – not chimpanzees or gorillas, but lemurs, animals that the scientist admits many people would classify as ‘roditori’ (rodents).77 Departing from this premise, Lombroso proceeded to a painstaking process of measurement and evaluation, the core of his scientific practice. In the journal Rendiconti del Reale Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, he reported his findings using a technical lexicon of numbers: ‘Lo spazio occupato ordinariamente della cresta occipitale è convertito in una cavità lunga 34 mm., larga 23 mm., profonda 11 mm.; viceversa, all’esterno di questo si osservava un proporzionato rialzo convesso, in corrispondenza del quale l’osso si presentava notevolmente assottigliato’78 (The space normally occupied by the occipital crest is converted into a cavity 34 mm in length, 23 mm wide, 11 mm deep; vice versa, on the exterior of this one observed a proportional convex rise, in correspondence to which the bone appeared considerably thinned). This reassuring numeric reportage, which divided, subdivided, and quantified Villella’s skull, provided the kind of objective data that were the basis of positivist science. With attention to such empirical details, Lombroso was able to demonstrate the anomalous form of this offender, whose skeleton defied the ‘ordinary’ by having a cavity where there should have been a crest. The literal depth of Villella’s deviance, then, was measurable. Villella would become the first criminal mentioned by name in the first chapter of the first edition of L’uomo delinquente in 1876, one of

166

Methods of Murder

the sixty-six skulls that launched Lombroso’s famous theory. Yet, the criminal whose cranial measurements Lombroso had reported to his colleagues with such numerical precision appeared elsewhere in his writings in a more convoluted narrative form. As Lombroso’s criminal muse, he illustrates the dramatic contrast (but ultimately, the continuity) between the scientist’s most rigorous anthropometric studies and his collection of more subjective evidence. Writing in the introduction to his daughter Gina Lombroso-Ferrero’s English-language summary of L’uomo delinquente, Lombroso explains that the elderly criminal’s lifeless skull revealed much to him: This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.79

In vibrant narrative terms, this passage reveals the process via which Cesare Lombroso creatively transformed the dry numerical research cited earlier into an evocative theory. His work also documents the extraordinarily mutable representation of criminal ‘reality’: in the 1871 account, Villella was described as a passionate thief, but otherwise ‘i suoi discorsi eran d’uomo di senno’ (he talked like a man of sense);80 Lombroso makes special note of the fact that he did not have ‘esagerati appetiti venerei’ (exaggerated venereal appetites).81 Yet, in the later introduction, the subject of his study turns into a blood-thirsty, sexobsessed monster, terrible, impressive, and capable not of inspiring the scientist to make quantitative notes, but rather of causing hallucinatory inspiration.82 Thus, we witness Lombroso’s tendency to privilege, or indeed to create, the sensational as a tool to draw the reader into the text, all the while using this arresting exemplar as a means to further the theories of the general: the criminal type. We also see the progressive appropriation of the criminal subject, who, once followed across the boundary from life to death, becomes fuel for the

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 167

Lombrosian scientific and narrative machine. The ‘speculative’ criminal, the Villella that exists between the enfeebled prisoner and the fascinating absence in the skull, creates the gap into which Lombroso’s science eagerly dives. Villella also serves as a measure of the critical reaction to Lombroso. While many historical texts make reference to the discovery of the occipital fossa without questioning its veracity, other scholars have pointed out that Lombroso’s accounts of the discovery of the unusual shape of Villella’s cranium exceed the limits of scientific credibility; they often base critiques on just such a conflation of empirical data with creative, even artistic expression. In The Mismeasure of Man, Lombroso’s moment of inspiration is characterized ironically as ‘that flash of joyous insight that marks both brilliant discovery and crackpot invention.’83 Renzo Villa sees Villella as a symptom of Lombroso’s chaotic, inventive science: Tutti i critici e i biografi hanno accettato questo castello di volute incongruenze e contraddizioni. Che non è solo una riprova di un metodo di lavoro caotico, disordinato, e che troppe volte sfiora il ridicolo, ma anche un fatto sintomale. Come in altri casi [. . .] si deve ricorrere all’invenzione.84 [All the critics and biographers accepted these intentional inconsistencies and contradictions. It is not only new evidence of a work method that was chaotic, disordered, and often on the verge of ridiculous, but also a symptomatic fact. As in other cases [. . .] it becomes necessary to resort to invention.]

The most nuanced readings use Villella as a measure of the complexity of Lombroso’s production. Villa goes on to suggest that Lombroso’s exemplary criminal was probably one of the ‘tanti contadini del sud che la repressione aveva portato davanti ai plotoni di esecuzione o nelle carceri’ (many southern peasants that repression brought before execution squads or into the prisons).85 Horn uses Villella’s tale as a springboard to discuss the criminal anthropologist’s relation to the emergent Italian nation, as well as to describe his theory of atavism. Stewart-Steinberg considers Lombroso’s flash of insight a ‘hallucination,’ and notes that the occipital fossa marks a significant absence at the heart of his research.86 In line with Horn, this absence, she suggests, is a key part of Lombroso’s ‘strange project of “making Italians.” ’ These odd citizen-subjects needed to reflect the ‘void at the center of the modern subject,’ and thus were appropriately made out

168

Methods of Murder

of the ‘detritus of Italian society.’87 Villella, subject of study and font of inspiration, is a material representative of the complexities of Lombrosian science. Lombrosian Legacy Far from a void himself, Villella is omnipresent in stories of Lombrosian criminology, mentioned in virtually every critical discussion of the criminal anthropologist’s theory of the born criminal. As the scientist was, so are we all seduced – even as we are troubled – by the narrative of this individual criminal, and by the fascination of Lombroso’s near-fanatical relationship with the criminal body. In choral fashion, we find ourselves repeating the stories that obsessed the head of the school of criminal anthropology, even while as scholars, we work to discredit them. In an essay on the ‘scuola’ lombrosiana, Virginio Oddone characterizes the impact of this approach: Una abilità polemica e dialettica che, unita all’eclettismo di cui sopra, determina quasi una continua ‘pioggia di sassi nello stagno,’ e una ininterrotta produzione di onde d’urto che si allargano ovunque, coinvolgendo (e provocando) un poco tutti.88 [A polemical and dialectic ability that, joined with the eclecticism mentioned above, determines an almost continual ‘rain of stones in the pond,’ and an uninterrupted production of shock waves that extend everywhere, involving (and provoking) everyone a little bit.]

Oddone suggests that while a positivist criminological ‘school’ in the strictest sense did not exist, what was uncontrovertibly clear was an ‘intricata rete di influssi, ramificazioni, ritorni, la cui mappa non è ancora stata tracciata, ma la cui esplorazione può riservare sorprese impreviste’ (intricate network of influences, ramifications, returns, which has still not been mapped out, but whose exploration may reserve unexpected surprises).89 This network of influences makes it productive to draw connections between Lombroso and literature, and forms part of a wilfully unproblematic contamination of positivist science with literature and anecdote. Lombroso’s voracious, totalizing curiosity as he examined and explicated his criminal subjects created a type of science that treated its object of study as both typical and unique, real and fictional, specimen and spectacle. The vast eclecticism of his thought,

Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 169

as Gibson and Rafter suggest, made him a ‘curious, engaged, and energetic polymath.’90 As a researcher, however, he struck fear in the hearts of subjects because of his unwillingness to respect disciplinary, but also physical borders. Foucault contends that ‘criminal anthropology has not disappeared as completely as some people say, and [. . .] a number of its most fundamental theses – often those most foreign to traditional law – have gradually taken root in penal thought and practice.’91 The French philosopher describes the transition from Beccaria to Lombroso in the law in clear terms: For the modern system of sanctions – most strikingly since Beccaria – gives society a claim to individuals only because of what they do. Only an act, defined by law as an infraction, can result in a sanction, modifiable of course according to the circumstances or the intentions. But by bringing increasingly to the fore not only the criminal as author of the act, but also the dangerous individual as potential source of acts, does one not give society rights over the individual based on what he is? No longer, of course, based on what he is by statute (as was the case in the societies under the Ancien Régime), but based on what he is by nature, according to his constitution, character traits, or his pathological variables. A form of justice which tends to be applied to what one is, that is what is so outrageous when one thinks of the penal law of which the eighteenthcentury reformers had dreamed, and which was intended to sanction, in a completely egalitarian way, offenses explicitly defined beforehand by the law.92

As we have seen how this Lombrosian shift is effected, and in learning more about the means of investigating the ‘dangerous subject’ at its centre, we begin to see traits, lines, and choices that will be echoed in crime fiction in what I refer to as the ‘Lombrosian’ vein. Such fiction tends to conduct literary forays into the question of what its narrative subjects are by nature – making their ‘bare life,’ in the formulation of Giorgio Agamben, a key part of their relevance to the story or the state, or at least a starting point for their ventures into the criminal world. Lombroso’s empirical science is full of errors, but it may also be productive to recognize, as David Horn points out, that criminal anthropology ‘helped to produce the social world as messy, produced social dangerousness as ubiquitous, indeed produced the criminal body as

170

Methods of Murder

never fully legible.’93 Lombroso’s messiness invites scepticism and at times anger, but it also provokes the desire to rethink, revise, or go beyond. In short, it insists on a response. The Lombrosian epistemology, with its fascination for the interior, physical realm of the lawbreaker, becomes a hermeneutics of crime, a way of interpreting and reading the crime scene and the criminal. Built on the ‘tracce di morte’ (traces of death) that he collected by lingering over the bodies of criminals, Lombroso’s criminal science literally embodies the potentials and the dangers at hand in an incautious speculative leap from individual subject to generalized science. Contemporary crime fiction can take the Lombrosian totalizing relationship with the criminal subject (and his victims) to a new level, and as such has the opportunity to investigate crevices of the subject that a scientist could not reach. Carlo Emilio Gadda embraces this complication, as he immerses his protagonists and his texts into a world of Lombrosian abjection. Dario Argento attempts to use Lombrosian fascination with the inner workings of the criminal subject to spectacularly redirect our attention elsewhere, converting a cautionary tale about criminal deviance into a celebratory occasion for an aesthetics rooted in violence. Carlo Lucarelli, finally, works to tame Lombrosian criminology so that he might safely reappropriate it for contemporary use. As we will see, however, Lombroso’s radical conflation of criminal act and text, rather than function as negative exemplum, prefigures Lucarelli’s own provocative alignments between history and fiction, between criminology and crime fiction.

6 Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence

Non vi è legge se non nelle viscere torturate. [There is no law if not that of tortured viscera.] – Carlo Emilio Gadda1

Few dead bodies in the history of Italian literature have garnered the attention that Liliana Balducci’s earns when her corpse is discovered in the second chapter of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. The shocking news is delivered to police investigator Ingravallo by a horrified colleague: Dice che l’ha trovata stesa a terra, in un lago de sangue, Madonna! dove l’avemo trovata puro noi, sul parquet, in camera da pranzo: stesa de traverso co le sottane tirate su, come chi dicesse in mutanne. Il capo rigirato un tantino . . . Co la gola segata, tutta tajata da una parte. Ma vedesse che tajo, dottó! [And he says he found her lying on the floor, in a pool of blood. Madonna! that’s how we found her, too, on the parquet floor in the dining room, lying there, with her skirt all pulled up, in her underwear, you might say. Her head turned away, sorta . . . With the throat all sawed up, all cut up one side. You should see that cut, sir!]12

In the successive pages, proliferating descriptions of the abject spectacle of the murder victim transform vividly from the poetic to the scientific, from the objective to the subjective, from standard Italian to Gadda’s characteristic macaronic. Following a cryptic announcement

172

Methods of Murder

of the discovery of the body to detective Ingravallo (‘a via Merulana . . . è successo un orrore’ (44) [in Via Merulana . . . something horrible’s happened (65)]), the account proceeds through ever more convoluted descriptions including Ingravallo’s horrified, scientifically precise mutterings upon witnessing the carnage: ‘La trachea [. . .] la carotide! la iugulare . . . Dio!’ (47) [The trachea [. . .] the carotid, the jugular! . . . God! (69)]. Gadda’s representation of Liliana’s body is rooted in his philosophical conviction that the abject internal tangle of our bodies’ viscera is an essential part of the disorder of the world. As his narrative shifts registers and styles in describing her death, it mimics a totalizing, Lombrosian interest in the borderland of human existence. Because of the dismemberment caused by crime, the internal disorder of Liliana’s body pushes irretrievably outwards, spilling from its fleshy container to remind readers of the permeability of our personal boundaries, both intellectual and corporeal. Gadda and the ‘Giallo’ Senza Soluzione Quer pasticciaccio has long been recognized as a supreme – if anomalous – example of the detective fiction genre in Italy. In defending the literary significance of the giallo, Andrea Camilleri quotes Leonardo Sciascia’s famous praise for Gadda: ‘Ha detto Sciascia a proposito del “Pasticciaccio”: “Gadda ha scritto il più assoluto ‘giallo’ che sia mai stato scritto, un ‘giallo’ senza soluzione, un pasticciaccio.” ’ (Sciascia said, regarding the Pasticciaccio: ‘Gadda wrote the most absolute “giallo” that has ever been written, a “giallo” without a solution, a pasticciaccio.’3) Claiming Gadda for the halls of detective fiction, of course, stands to benefit the genre by adding the illustrious work of a highly acclaimed writer to its ranks. In a sense, however, Camilleri and Sciascia are odd companions for Gadda in this process of canon formation. Although the Pasticciaccio ends inconclusively, as do many of Sciascia’s gialli, and although Gadda composes in imaginative regional dialects as Camilleri does, his epistemological framework varies significantly from those of both Sciascia and Camilleri. This divergence can be explained in part by way of his recurrent Lombrosian focus on the opened or dying human body. In three texts, in particular, the Pasticciaccio, La cognizione del dolore, and a short narrative titled ‘Anastomósi’ describing a surgical procedure in progress, Gadda mixes discourses of science, investigation, and crime in such a way that the Lombrosian underpinnings of his work become clear.

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 173

Many years of scholarship devoted to Gadda’s texts have interrogated and attempted to disentangle the complicated system of influences that come into play in his fiction. As Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski explain in their introduction to Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, the writer’s ‘revolution in literature’ involves a polysemous approach in which the artistic text is an ‘intersection of multiple codes, in which individual components, or systems, are part of a cognitive enterprise that privileges no one phenomenon or object of knowledge in itself (e.g., history, society, individual psychology), but rather the interaction of these components and the global effect that such an interaction has on the stability of any preconceived systemic constraint.’4 From this conglomerate of components, however, some influences emerge as particularly forceful in Gadda’s fiction. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science is a particularly prominent thread. Seeking to identify the ‘pluridiscursive’ epistemes in Gaddian thought, Pierpaolo Antonello asserts Gadda’s connections to Darwinism and also to thinkers like Enrico Morselli, Salvatore Tommasi, Giuseppe Sergi, and Cesare Lombroso, identifying recurrent thematic and philosophical concerns in Gadda’s work. Antonello insists that it is always the case that, in Gadda’s writing, ‘storia biologico-naturale, geologica e geografica e storia sociale si intrecciano’ (biological-natural, geological, and geographical history and social history are intertwined).5 The insistent presence of scientific thought in Gaddian fiction, Antonello argues, contributes to the epistemology that informs all of his writing: La frequentazione delle scienze esatte e applicate – nelle proprie letture come nella pratica ingegneristica – corroborerà l’istintiva adesione a un materialismo di fondo che non prescrive una separazione netta fra natura e cultura (Benedetti 1995), ma le integra in un continuum, in un nesso fra strutture materiali di base e emergenze cognitive e simbolico-linguistiche.6 [The frequenting of exact and applied sciences – in his reading as well as in his practice as an engineer – corroborates his instinctive adherence to a background of materialism that does not prescribe a clear-cut separation between nature and culture (Benedetti 1995). Instead, it integrates them into a continuum, into a nexus between basic material structures and cognitive and symbolic-linguistic exigencies.]

Antonello demonstrates that Gadda ‘rimane di fatto ancorato per tutta la sua carriera intellettuale a una fiducia in un certo materialismo

174

Methods of Murder

scientifico di matrice positivista’ (remains anchored for his entire intellectual career to a faith in a certain scientific materialism with positivist roots). As Antonello points out, Gadda himself declared an interest in all of the ‘questioni relative all’eredità e allo sviluppo, tutte le trame complesse con cui il pensiero moderno e l’indagine scientifica inseguono le questioni morali, genetiche, lo sviluppo delle malattie nervose e mentali, le loro manifestazioni centrali e derivate’ (questions related to heredity and development, all the complex plots via which modern thought and scientific research pursue moral and genetic questions, the development of nervous and mental illnesses, their principal and derivative manifestations).7 Of course, over his career Gadda declares interest in almost innumerable subjects, and the rational, positivist framework is one that he seems to engage frequently but also light-heartedly, apparently belying its significance and its credibility. Historically speaking, Gadda’s relationship with positivism is one that moves between acceptance and rejection. This link is evident in both the Pasticciaccio and in La cognizione del dolore, when the lucid certainty of rational thought is evoked with irony in characteristically lively digressions. The first section of La cognizione plays with the notion of the ‘good’ that can come from studying ‘ill,’ or specifically the pathologies of the human organism: the doctor, ‘cresciuto in clima positivista’ (brought up in a positivist atmosphere), is described as living a ‘vita impegnatissima e tutta dedita al bene, o per dir meglio al male, del prossimo’ (very busy life all devoted to the good, or rather to the ills, of his fellow man).8 Initially, the doctor’s musings about the illness of Gonzalo Pirobutirro are reported by the narrator with snide positivist hilarity. For example, on his way to visit the privileged son, the scientifically attuned doctor, horrified at his patient’s decadent diet, imagines the perfect, modest repast: ‘Una mezza mela, una fetta di pane integrato, ch’è così saporito sulla lingua e contiene tutte le vitamine, dalla A alla H, nessuna esclusa . . . ecco il pasto ideale dell’uomo giusto! . . . che dico . . . dell’uomo normale . . . Il di più non è se non un gravame, per lo stomaco. E per l’organismo. Un nemico introdotto abusivamente nell’organismo come i Danai nell’arce di Troja . . .’ (così proprio pensò) ‘. . . che il gastrentèrico è poi condannato a maciullare, gramolare, espellere . . . La peptonizzazione degli albuminoidi! . . . E il fegato! . . . E il pancreas! . . . l’amidificazione dei grassi! . . . la saccarificazione degli amidi e dei glucosi! . . . una parola! . . . Vorrei

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 175 vederli loro! . . . Tutt’al più, nelle stagioni critiche, si può concedere la giunta d’un po’ di legumi di stagione . . . Crudi, o cotti . . . baccelli . . . piselli.’ (38) [‘Half an apple, a slice of whole wheat bread, which is so tasty on the tongue and contains all the vitamins, from A to H, none excluded – there’s the ideal meal for the just man! What am I saying? For the normal man . . . more than that is only a burden for the stomach. And for the organism. An enemy introduced wrongfully into the organism, like the Danai into the citadel of Troy’ – these were his very thoughts – ‘which the gastroenteric system is then condemned to grind up, knead, expel . . . the peptonization of the albuminoids! And the liver! And the pancreas! The amidification of fats! The saccharification of the starches and the glucoses! Easier said than done! I’d like to see them try . . . At most, in the critical seasons, a few fresh vegetables might be allowed, as an addition . . . raw, or cooked . . . Beans . . . peas.’ (41)]

Positivism provides the doctor with an ascetic recipe for health, calibrated according to a meticulous understanding of the human body, but the spartan diet does not preclude the author’s hedonistic use of language. The precise, scientific terminology that peppers the doctor’s prescription for a long life is one of the most joyous examples of Gaddian digression. Ellipses and exclamation points contribute to the impression of the breathless zealotry of the physician, whose passion for his medical expertise leads him to this elaborate but extremely technical outpouring of concern. The doctor’s fondness for the accumulation of medical terminology recalls the elaborate lexicon of Lombroso’s laboratory. Yet, as this passage makes evident, the author frequently treats ideas such as scientific precision, and specifically positivist thought, in a mocking or whimsical tone, suggesting his desire to circumscribe the limits of such systems. As in the case of positivism, Gadda affirms a distance from Lombroso, but his debt to the criminologist is nonetheless evident, albeit convoluted: ‘In sostanza io voglio affermare che anche le azioni immorali o criminali rientrano nella legge universale e mi afferro più che al determinismo-eredità (Lombroso, neurologia, psicologia sperimentale, studi biologici) alla mia idea della combinazionepossibilità’ [In essence I want to affirm that immoral or criminal actions are also a part of universal law, and I base this more on my idea of coincidence-possibility than on determinism-heredity (Lombroso, neurology, experimental psychology, biological studies)].9 Despite his

176

Methods of Murder

expressed desire to focus attention away from Lombroso and a biological perception of criminality, however, Gadda repeatedly returns to a language and to subject matters that evoke the world of medicine and of the science of crime. Furthermore, his attention to these epistemological areas at times modulates in tone, moving away from lighthearted digression in the direction of sincere inquisitiveness regarding the complexity of biological systems and the human form. Even the humour evident in the ardour of the doctor in La cognizione might be better understood as particularly Gaddian humour, which Gian Carlo Roscioni suggests is tied to a medicalizing understanding of the term. Gadda and his writing, according to Roscioni, ‘from time to time fell prey to one of the four humours of Galen: sometimes melancholic, sometimes cheerful, sometimes apathetic, sometimes irascible.’10 Gadda’s constant attention to the human body is part of an investigative system that leads his texts, like Lombroso’s science, to lurk curiously around human figures, focusing attention on the body as a source of biological information and as an integral part of the science of crime. The author’s commitment to scientific materialism, rooted in positivism, has particular resonance in the contexts of crime and investigation, contexts to which Gadda returns frequently in his writing. In spite of a critical and authorial reluctance to connect Gadda with Lombroso, the epistemological links between author and scientist stand to help illuminate a new perspective on Gaddian texts. Gadda’s commitment to understanding the science of the human body (particularly clear in ‘Anastomósi’) and his passion for crime (evidenced in the Pasticciaccio but also, in particular, in La cognizione del dolore) make a compelling case for linking the author not only with positivist thought, but more specifically, with the polysemous, subject-centred complexity of Lombrosian criminal epistemology. These connections should be understood as important interpretive tools that do not seek to specifically link Lombroso and Gadda in a genealogical connection, but rather help to understand typologies and epistemologies of Gaddian thought. Like Roscioni’s analysis of the similarities between Gadda and Sterne, this analysis seeks to uncover the ‘unmistakable family resemblance’ between Lombrosian and Gaddian thought.11 As I have shown in my reading of Lombroso, Lombrosian thought is not tidily positivist, but rather is diverse, ambitious, chaotic, and irretrievably obsessed with the (criminal) human subject. Gadda’s fiction shares a passion for physiognomic collectionism, as the author constructs his own literary atlas of criminal faces; it demonstrates a

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 177

preoccupation with the science of the unreliable, ever changeable individual subject; and finally it engages in the practice of (literary) vivisection, entering into the abject, inner reaches of the human body in the quest for material knowledge about the subject of study. As a result of this positivist interest in the science of the body, in Gaddian fiction people are represented in a markedly physical manner.12 The body is the subject of feeling and a font of knowledge, a site inextricably intertwined with the intellect. Antonello argues that ‘comportamenti intelligenti e configurazioni cognitive della materia e della vita sono quindi distribuiti, e non risiedono nel tolemaico centrismo umano, ma fanno parte dei meccanismi propri del vivente’13 (intelligent behaviours and cognitive configurations of matter and life are thus distributed, and do not reside in Ptolemaic human centrism. They are mechanisms proper to the living being). Ultimately, however, the body comes first, existing with an atavistic primacy that precedes and, on some level, supersedes the abilities of the intellect. Dr Gaddus The relationship between Gadda and crime or crime fiction has been widely explored by scholars. Ranging from discussions of the specific crime of matricide (Manuela Bertone) to examinations of Gadda’s relationship to the detective genre (Deborah Amberson, JoAnn Cannon, Robert Rushing, Gerhard van der Linde), these studies convincingly demonstrate the prominent role played by crime and investigation in Gadda’s narrative works.14 In her article on ‘The Reader as Detective,’ JoAnn Cannon observes that the Pasticciaccio is ‘ostensibly a detective novel,’ that the Cognizione is ‘technically an unsolved giallo,’ that Eros e Priapo exhorts readers to help determine ‘la causale del delitto,’ that the short story ‘Anastomósi’ (first published in 1940) portrays surgery as ‘a kind of investigation into the “pasticcio” of the patient’s innards,’ and that ‘un romanzo giallo nella geologia’ characterizes geological research as detection.15 In fiction and in non-fiction, in novels, short stories, and notes, Gadda continually delves with an investigator’s curiosity into the darker recesses of his subject matter. Less well established, though, is the way that Gadda’s penetrating interest in science and the human body intersects with his recurrent attention to crime and criminality. Proliferating causes, or the ‘groviglio’ that represents the human experience, are first and foremost found in the internal systems of the body, and these systems are exposed when

178

Methods of Murder

crime makes human interiors exterior. When, in a work of fiction, a criminal violently attacks a victim, investigator and text can peer into the opened body for a direct view of this physical node. Prior to its appearance in fiction, the Lombrosian tenor of Gadda’s study of the inner workings of the human organism is made explicit in ‘Anastomósi.’ The short essay constitutes a detailed recounting of a visit to observe the surgical procedure of that name in the university clinic in Milan. In the introductory paragraph, Gadda marvels at the ability of the human body to equalize, to provide information that defies social and economic class distinctions: I corpi ritornano argomenti di natura, scevri di ogni sovrapposizione della civiltà. Inetti a rappresentare il grado e la condizione di ieri: spogli degli indumenti distintivi, pelliccia o tabarro, di che lo stato sociale o i meriti o il mestiere o l’ingegno o i risparmi o la tecnica dell’abbigliamento e dell’adulazione potevano averli addobbati, nel giorno di loro intera facoltà. La sola cartella clinica enuncia, quasi incidentalmente, se il lettino a ruote ha introdotto nella sala un falegname o un senatore.16 [Bodies once again become subjects of nature, free of the superimpositions of civilization. Unfit to represent yesterday’s rank and condition: free of distinctive clothing, furs or cloaks, with which social status or merits or trades or intelligence or savings or clothing style and flattering could have adorned them, in the time of their full faculties. Only the clinical file states, almost incidentally, if the hospital bed had brought a carpenter or a senator into the room.]

Stripped of social signifiers like clothing, these bodies instead signify their universal status as living beings.17 By penetrating the surface flesh, doctor, writer, and text arrive in a space where, as Dombroski argues, we find ‘a kind of de-ideologized pure matter, mysterious and sacred in its unfathomable materiality.’18 Yet, the act of performing surgery, rather than having the capacity to universalize, instead, offers the possibility of revealing that which is biologically unique about the subject, in this case, the anomalous ‘duodeno vulnerato’ (266) [damaged duodenum]. The messy entry through the peritoneum, a ‘foglio roseo, sieroso, teso e quasi inturgidito’ (266) [a rose-coloured, serous, taut, and almost swollen sheet], gives access to the deepest recesses of the patient. In the subsequent moments, as layers of flesh are peeled back and the surgeon’s fingers penetrate the body, the author watches in fascina-

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 179

tion as inside becomes outside (the surgeon begins to ‘esteriorizzare’ [exteriorize] the stomach) and the body offers up its secrets. A number of details in ‘Anastomósi’ provide evidence of the Lombrosian nature of Gadda’s curiosity about humans and indicate the connections that he draws – through content and also through word choice – between medical practice and the science of crime. At the beginning of the short account, he speaks of his presence at the ‘inizio dell’indagine’ (263) [beginning of the investigation]. The act of opening the human body is specifically aligned with an investigative paradigm, suggesting that for Gadda, one central element of every inquiry is that of penetrating the surface of the human subject. And the act is a violent one, an invasion hidden from the view of the patient who, obstructed by a white divider between his torso and his head, cannot ‘guardare alla propria eviscerazione’ (264) [watch his own evisceration]. For the narrator, an observer with no specific curative powers or medical assignments, the procedure is, in effect, a vivisection, the dissection of a living being for pathological study. From his vantage point in the dark seating area above the well-lit operating theatre, Gadda compares the view below to an ancient Egyptian spectacle, with the medical technicians acting as the ‘esecutori imperterriti di una imbalsamazione, che operano sulla salma del re Amenhotes gli atti inconsueti e indicibili [. . .] della consacrante pietà’ (263) [unperturbed executors of an embalming, who perform on the corpse of King Amenhotep the unusual and unspeakable acts [. . .] of consecrating pity]. Later in the essay, the body itself becomes an ancient receptacle, equipped with ‘ampolle’ [ampullae] and ‘amuleti’ [amulets] that live in a ‘sarcòfago gemebondo’ [groaning sarcophagus] (271).19 In its more than fleeting resemblance to ancient Egyptian practice, contemporary medicine recalls in Lombrosian fashion the anthropological past, suggesting the work’s atavistic view of humanity that ties us, in our most elemental, naked form (‘scevri di ogni sovrapposizione della civiltà’ [free of the superimpositions of civilization]) to our evolutionary ancestors. Gadda treats the experience as a lesson not only in medical practice, but also in medical language, which he invokes with great specificity to describe the work in progress. Instruments of surgery (needles, syringes, scissors, Kocher’s tweezers), surgical practices (Lembert sutures, the closing of the openings of the stomach), and body parts (the peritoneum, also called the mesocolon, the duodenum, the right epiplòic artery) are represented with precision and detail. Gian-Paolo Biasin

180

Methods of Murder

opens a chapter on Gadda with a lengthy citation from ‘Anastamòsi,’ after which he posits that although the text may be read in reference to ‘technical and medical positivism,’ it is not necessary ‘to insist too much’ on this level of reading.20 For Biasin, the medical language is only a surface, while Gadda’s vision goes ‘beyond the scientific status of the words through which it is manifested’ to posit the ‘text in its literariness.’21 I have argued that Lombrosian positivism is, in any case, more complicated than this dismissal would imply. While it is true that the technical is a vehicle that drives the text in more literary and existential directions, in fact, medical, technical language is pivotal in shaping the Gaddian borderland between the visceral, knotted interiors of the human body and the tangled exterior world of daily existence. Sigificant in this regard is the appearance of two semantically overdetermined words from the Gaddian lexicon in this piece of non-fiction. As the surgeon’s hands arrive at the area of the intestines that must be repaired, the narrator reflects on the ‘groviglio dell’anse intestinali’ (268) [tangle of the intestinal ansae], the complex intersection of parts of the human body. The word ‘groviglio’ of course recalls the famous passage in the Pasticciaccio in which Don Ciccio Ingravallo reflects on his theory of multiplicity: le inopinate catastrofi non sono mai la conseguenza o l’effetto che dir si voglia d’un unico motivo, d’una causa al singolare: ma sono come un vortice, un punto di depressione ciclonica nella coscienza del mondo, verso cui hanno cospirato tutta una molteplicità di causali convergenti. Diceva anche nodo o groviglio, o garbuglio, o gnommero, che alla romana vuol dire gomitolo. (4) [unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, toward which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. He also used words like knot or tangle, or muddle, or gnommero, which in Roman dialect means skein. (5, original emphasis)]

The groviglio intestinale of ‘Anàstomosi,’ read in tandem with this famous passage of the Pasticciaccio, ties both causality and detection to the body, demonstrating that the philosophical knot of this worldconsciousness originates or is reproduced in a human’s insides.22 The violated body at the centre of the Pasticciaccio’s system, the body of

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 181

Liliana Balducci, lays bare the body’s groviglio just as the surgery did, pointing the way to Gadda’s medicalizing interest in the human form, an interest that transcends the divisions of gender and that belongs to the Lombrosian understanding of the workings of the essere umano. The connection between Lombroso and the ‘groviglio’ is encoded a few lines later in the Pasticciaccio, when we learn that Don Ciccio is regarded by his fictional colleagues as somewhat of an outlier because of his complex views of criminal causality. His fellow police officers think that his elaborate explanations of the causal relations between things are ‘questioni un po’ da manicomio: una terminologia da medici dei matti’ (5) [madhouse-style questions: His terminology was for doctors in looneybins (6, translation modified)]. Lombroso, arguably a pre-eminent example of a ‘medico dei matti,’ solidifies the pathological connection between the surgical ‘groviglio’ in ‘Anastomòsi’ and the philosophical one in the Pasticciaccio, between Don Ciccio’s criminal investigations and those of Lombroso. Most uncanny, however, is Gadda’s observation, near the end of ‘Anastomósi,’ of the ‘nefando pasticcio della vita “esteriorizzata,” stanata fuori dalla sua caverna come preda in orrore’ (270) [nefarious mess of ‘exteriorized’ life, driven out of its cave in horror like prey]. The externalized ‘nefando pasticcio’ of life (in this case literally the entrails, the ‘groviglio’ that comprises the patient’s insides), here part of a surgical procedure, will later be transformed into the raw story of the Pasticciaccio, into the bodies of Liliana Balducci and of the mother in La cognizione. Like the surgical patient, Liliana and the Señora will have their inner lives ‘exteriorized’ in vivid accounts of their deaths that lurk, with medical curiosity, around the tragic limit-experience of existence. On numerous occasions, descriptions in the novels make use of the language learned in ‘Anastomósi,’ opening the operating room and the body onto the street. The awful mess on Via Merulana, a chaotic crowd outside of the building where Liliana is murdered, and composed of stolen jewels, bicycles, celery, and sausage sellers, is partly the biological confusion of human existence. In fact, a key element of what is brought to light in Gadda’s most famous crime novel is the inner workings of human beings: the medical studies completed in this short account of a surgical proceeding form part of the epistemological basis for Gadda’s narratives of crime. The ‘groviglio’ of the intestinal system is a philosophical nexus that is also, literally, Gadda’s most significant experience of the abject. Images of the abject – defecation, feces, and death – are, according to

182

Methods of Murder

Julia Kristeva, part of a human experience of the borders of existence, the borders ‘of my condition as a living being.’23 These borders are intimately tied to Gadda’s criminal investigations. Steeped in a world that is compulsively figured as abject, Gadda’s protagonists are constantly faced with ‘excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.)’ that stand for ‘the danger to identity that comes from without.’24 Kristeva describes the abject as a ‘jettisoned object’ that is ‘radically excluded,’ an object that ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.’25 Cognitive investigations are linked to physical ones, and stories of crime offer the opportunity to look within, to splay open the human body in an attempt to connect inside and outside, mind and body. In language that dovetails with Gadda’s fascination with proliferating systems, she continues, explaining that it ‘is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.’26 In the operating room, biological interiority is literally exteriorized, and the observer sits in the presence of neardeath at that place where identity, system, and order are disturbed. And while for the surgeon the operating theatre might be a space of medicalized cleanliness, Gadda’s language ensures that, for the reader, it is one in which we are confronted with the atavistic and animal elements of the procedure. Kristeva places the abject in a non-symbolic space, arguing that entrails, refuse, a ‘wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of a signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.’27 For Biasin, Gadda, who replaces the surgeon’s scalpel with his pen, uses the word to restore ‘form to the “tangle” in the “heap of livid appearances” that are searched in the inside of anatomy’28 (132). Yet, following Gadda’s pen into the Pasticciaccio and the Cognizione, we find, instead, that he uses his writing-scalpel to open the human body to reveal its criminal messiness, to insist on the lack of order – a lack of order that becomes part of the text and that becomes the subject, the non-unitary ‘I’ that correspondingly fails to respect borders.29 Gadda repeatedly attempts to show his readers the things that must be thrust aside intellectually in order that subjectivities might continue to exist in glorious disarray. And crime, in particular, shows the presence of the abject, because it does not respect ‘borders, positions, rules.’30 Kristeva notes that ‘any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 183

crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility.’31 The crimes in the Pasticciaccio and the Cognizione depict with particular clarity the fragility of the law, dissolving the borders that separate protagonists and readers alike from abjection. At the same time, in smudging the lines separating the living from the dead, Gadda’s texts indicate the impossibility of pushing the abject aside to establish any central ‘I’ that exists beyond or before the border. Thus, through the lexical and thematic links between ‘Anastomósi’ and the Pasticciaccio, we begin to see that medicine, the study of the human body, and crime form a network of their own in Gadda’s writing. The author’s much-cited belief in proliferating causes mirrors the complexity of the body and its functioning, and also resembles the eclectic complexity of Lombrosian science. In both Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana and La cognizione del dolore we find that Gadda’s preoccupation with crime consistently circulates around a concern with the body, and more specifically, with the experience of the abject. In Gadda’s work, then, the epistemology of crime is intimately tied to the ability to examine and interpret the complicated groviglio of causes that composes a human being. Testifying Bodies Liliana Balducci’s violently disfigured body undergoes a physical examination upon being transported to the Policlinico, but the medical examiners find nothing new: ‘Sul corpo, nulla, dopo il coltello e quei graffi, quell’unghiate’ (75) [On the body there was nothing, beyond the work of the knife, and those scratches, those fingernail marks (111)]. In spite of her body’s unwillingness to furnish knowledge to the investigative team, a few pages later the narrator refers to the time that Giuliano Valdarena spent being questioned in the presence of the ‘corpo testimoniale della vittima’ (85–6) [the victim’s witnessing body (127)].32 Although Liliana’s body, prostrate on the examining table, does not provide the detectives with immediate information about the perpetrator of the violent crime against her, her body (and bodies more generally in the Pasticciaccio) is an eloquent, testifying body, capable of revealing much more than the disappointing ‘nulla’ evident in that medical exam. In La cognizione, the doctor is one of the most important narrative voices and, perhaps, the only character able to interact with the

184

Methods of Murder

mentally troubled Gonzalo. Roscioni has noted: ‘If more than two chapters of the Cognizione are devoted to Gonzalo’s visit and conversation with the doctor, it is because the doctor has become Gonzalo’s only possible, albeit inadequate, interlocutor. Problems that once fell to the competence of the moralist, if not the theologian, are now the prerogative of science.’33 Gonzalo, who is characterized in precise scientific terms as having a ‘lieve prognatismo facciale’ (56) [slight facial prognathism (64)], is tolerant of the doctor’s careful examination, which probes his ‘schiena, la regione mammaria, l’epigastro, l’addome’ (57) [back, [. . .] the mammary region, [. . .] the epigastrium, [. . .] the abdomen (65)]. The doctor ‘palpò l’ingegnere a lungo, e anche a due mani’ [touched the engineer at length, and even with both hands] and examines everything from heart to stomach, bronchia and lungs (59). Yet, the ‘conscientious’ medical visit, like the polite external examination of Liliana Balducci’s body, reveals ‘nulla di preoccupante [. . .] nulla, assolutamente nulla’ (59) [nothing to worry about [. . .] nothing, absolutely nothing (68)]. Although Gonzalo’s chronic rage clearly indicates a state of instability that leads even his gentle mother to suspect him to be capable of violence, the doctor finds nothing specifically ‘wrong’ with him. In fact, the limits of medicine seem to lie in its very ‘conscientiousness,’ the polite adherence to a professional propriety whose practitioners stay on the surface, rather than discovering the truths that surface conceals.34 Albert Sbragia suggests that the doctor’s incorrect diagnosis and ineffective remedy (Gonzalo is supposed to take a road trip with the physician’s single daughter) are evidence that his ‘positivistic faith in the healing force of civic philanthropy’ is unfounded.35 The doctor’s mistaken science also points the way to Gadda’s much less conscientious relationship with bodies. Standard medical exams are not enough: Gadda’s narrative, like Lombroso’s science, reveals its epistemological strategy of looking deeper and looking differently at the human body. By establishing limits and by illustrating the failures of more traditional medical practice, Gadda emphasizes criminological strategies for examining human subjects, strategies that may not lead to satisfying solutions to the mysteries of his texts but that provide, far from ‘nulla,’ complex and fascinating portraits of the world that his novels render. Ingravallo is one of the primary agents of the careful criminological practice of physical observation, as are his most trusted colleagues. ‘Quello che je premeva, a Ingravallo, era più di tutto la faccia, il contegno, le immediate reazioni psichiche e fisiognomiche, diceva lui, degli

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 185

spettatori e de li prottagonisti der dramma’ (76, original emphasis) [What was important to him, to Ingravallo, was, above all, the immediate psychic and physiognomical reactions, as he said, of the spectators and the protagonists of the drama (112)]. The focus on physical and physiognomic reactions, repeated in exactly the same language and in the insistent italics two paragraphs later so as to suggest its obsessive importance to the investigator, indicates one of the most significant descriptive practices at work in the Pasticciaccio. Like Lombroso (and like Ingravallo), Gadda shares an interest in the revealing nature of physiognomy. His passion for describing faces gives Quer pasticciaccio the tone of a narrative Lombrosian atlas, a collection that reveals the nature of the person behind the features. And this is the consistent desire of Ingravallo in pursuing suspects. ‘Sbrigatevi, che grugno ha questo Lanciani?’ (154) [Hurry up now. What sort of a mug does this Lanciani have? (228)], he asks when searching for a subject. Diomede Lanciani, it seems, has the mug of an exemplary Fascist citizen, ‘da rappresentare in bellezza il Lazio e la sua gioventù, al Foro Italico’ (155) [a type to represent Latium and its handsomeness at the Foro Italico (230)]. For Ingravallo, reticent in the face of more intrusive techniques like the autopsy, physiognomy is the means to access the conjectural paradigm, to generalize from highly individual characteristics those that might best correspond to the makeup of a criminal. Don Ciccio’s affinity for the details of facial features is evident from the very beginning of the narrative, when he dines with the Balduccis and notices the new servant, Tina, who ‘era una faccia nuova’ (6) [was a new face (8)]. In this formulation the face, of course, stands by metonymy for the entire person, and yet arguably the face (the many faces of the Pasticciaccio, in fact) might also be said to stand alone in Gadda’s novel, creating a gallery of mug shots that define the suspects. Tina’s ‘new face,’ which returns to prominence in the last pages of the Pasticciaccio, is described as ‘aspra,’ ‘severa, sicura,’ with ‘due occhi fermi, luminosissin, quasi due gemme, un naso diritto con il piano della fronte’ (7) [harsher, [. . .] severe, self-confident, [. . .with] a pair of steady, luminous eyes, two gems, a nose that made a straight line with the forehead (9)]. Physiognomy frequently defines character in the novel and helps to focus the reader’s understanding of a character’s significance, and Ingravallo’s attention to Tina in the first chapter, before Liliana’s death, not only focuses the narrative on her but also helps to cause her significance: because of her noteworthy face, she can be a considerable player in the

186

Methods of Murder

story. On the other hand, the Commendator Angeloni, another resident of the ill-fated building on Via Merulana, becomes a person of interest for the police squad and the first person to suffer a long interrogation when Signora Menegazzi’s jewels are stolen. The gentleman is repeatedly described in terms of his eyes (initially red, then yellow after a few days in jail (124)) and his nose (runny). The Commendatore, who although not insignificant in terms of the space dedicated to him in the novel, turns out to be utterly irrelevant in the criminal investigation. And this insignificance is, in fact, written on his face: ‘la sua povera faccia, di poveruomo che desidera che non lo guardino, con quel nasazzo al mezzo che non dava licenza un minuto alle inespresse opinioni d’ogni interlocutore’ (32) [his poor face, the face of a poor man who wants people not to look at him, but with that schnozz in the middle which constantly prompted opinions, unexpressed, from every interlocutor (46–7)]. His ‘povera faccia’ corresponds precisely to his effective insignificance, his inability to cause action: ‘la sua faccia parve, a Ingravallo, una muta disperata protesta contro la disumanità, la crudeltà di ogni inquisizione organizzata’ (32) [his face seemed, to Ingravallo, a mute and desperate protest against the inhumanity, the cruelty of all organized investigation (47)]. Angeloni’s face effectively writes him out of the Lombrosian atlas of mug shots assembled in the Pasticciaccio. Instead, the ‘mugs’ that are described tend to be evoked with the exceptional, the anomalous in mind; as in the search for the born criminal, the ‘normal’ as category retreats into impossibility as each subject’s particular characteristics come to the fore. Physiognomic evidence, collected diligently by Ingravallo as he pursues the guilty party, is also proffered by the narrator in helping readers to vividly envision the novel’s protagonists. Thus, Ingravallo is described as having ‘capelli neri e folti e cresputi che gli venivan fuori dalla metà della fronte’ (3) [black hair, thick and curly, which sprang forth from his forehead at the halfway point (3)], ‘labbra carnose’ (4) [fleshy . . . lips (5)], teeth that are ‘quelli d’un bull-dog’ (61) [the teeth of a bulldog (90)]. When he first learns of Liliana’s death, his reaction is recorded on his face: ‘Sulla fronte, in margine al nero cresputo dei capelli, un allinearsi di gocciole: d’un sudore improvviso. Come un diadema di terrore, di dolore. Il volto, per solito olivastro-bianco, lo aveva infarinato l’angoscia’ (46) [On his forehead, at the rim of the crisp black of his hair, a little line of drops: sudden sweat. Like a diadem of terror, of suffering. His face, usually an olive-white, was now floured with anguish (67)].

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 187

Virginia, one of the ‘nipoti’ that the childless Liliana Balducci ‘adopts’ for a period of time, is also one of the most memorable faces in the book. ‘La sua procace bellezza, la sua salute, de diavola de corallo dentro de quela pelle d’avorio, i suoi occhi! davvero c’era da crede che avessero ipnotizzato marito e moje’ (123) [Her provocative beauty, her health, like a coral devil inside that ivory skin, her eyes! one could really believe that she had hypnotized husband and wife (182–3)]. Virginia’s eyes, mentioned often (‘Quegli occhi!’ (124) [Those eyes! (184)], ‘una scintilla di malizia negli occhi’ (123) [a spark of malice in her eyes (183)]), have their own agency, the ability to seduce and hypnotize men and women alike. But they also reveal, with Lombrosian insight, the character behind the organs of sight: they are eyes that ‘sfiammavano a un tratto in una lucidità nera, sottile, apparentemente crudele: un lampo stretto, che sfuggiva a punta, de traverso, come una bugia delatrice della verità, che non anco proferita vorrebbe già smorire sul labbro’ (124) [flamed up suddenly in a black lucidity, narrowed, apparently cruel: a thin flash, which escaped, pointed, oblique, like a lie revealing a truth, which still unspoken, preferred to fade already on the lips (184)]. Her eyes and her face betray the verities that her conscience might, instead, obscure. The revelatory nature of Virginia’s physiognomy is significant, because she is one of the most potent criminal suspects in the novel. The ungrateful nipote is a violent presence in the Balducci household, a harbinger of the violence that will end Liliana’s life. She is potentially the very person who took that life, according to at least one version of Gadda’s narrative.36 Her face, then, testifies to her corresponding physical capacity to assault her generous patron: ‘le strizzava il polso, e glie lo storceva, fissandola’ (125) [she grasped her wrist, and twisted it, staring at her (185)], and ‘je mozzicò un’orecchia’ (126) [she really did bite her ear (185)]. But the narrative, unexpectedly, also commits violence against Virginia, when it gazes admiringly on her breasts: ‘due seni de marmo: du zinne toste che ce voleva lo scarpello’ (124) [two marble breasts: two teats so hard you’d need a scalpel (183)]. While her visage contains evidence of her criminality, the text betrays a desire to move beyond the surface and into the body, evoking the violent image of a scalpel in the place of a sensual caress. Antonello suggests that the ‘performance ordinative’ (regulating performances) of physiognomic collectionism constitute a ‘studio antropologico, con interessi per una fisiognomica tardo ottocentesca’ (an anthropological study, interested in a late nineteenth-century

188

Methods of Murder

physiognomy) that might be more Darwinian than Lombrosian.37 Yet, as the texts delve further into the human body, they usher readers into the shadowy recesses opened by criminality, a world where Lombroso’s legacy lurks, indicating a crucial trend in Gadda’s fiction. Ingravallo’s forehead, Virginia’s eyes, or Tina’s face are surfaces that help to write the story of that which lies below them; the narrative does not stop at the level of physiognomy. Zamira, the witchy madame who runs the sewing shop and brothel, is a key transitional figure in this regard. Her face, marked by the gaping hole where teeth should be, transfixes the Brigadiere Pestalozzi: ‘Fiancheggiato dai quattro canini superstiti il fornice, osceno: le labbra, agli angoli, fecero bava di schifose bollicine, tra l’irraggiare di mille rughe, non anco spianate o dissipate dalla crema’ (188) [Flanked by the four surviving canines, the barrel vault, obscene: her lips, at the corners, drooled revolting little bubbles, amid the irradiation of a thousand wrinkles, not yet smoothed or dispelled by cream (277)]. Zamira’s cavernous mouth, which spouts bubbles of spit, her rotted teeth, and her foul breath mark her body’s transgression of limits. In the pages that examine her encounter with Pestalozzi, she is described as serpentine, diabolical, satanic. In all cases, she represents an extreme limit of humanity, becoming a figure of death-in-life that recalls the outer limits of the groviglio of systems that make up an individual. Zamira’s hole, like Villella’s occipital fossa in Lombroso, recalls a physiological bookend, in the form of an absence, that marks the end of the chain of being. For Gadda, every human being, by virtue of the competing, constantly changing philosophical and physiological systems that create him or her, causes a ‘pause’ in the chain of being; this pause is what allows an individual to be. Antonello describes the Gaddian ‘I’ as ‘una sosta nella lunga catena in costante divenire di accadimenti geneticobiologici, istintivo-etologici, storico-culturali’38 (a halt in the long chain of becoming of genetic-biological, instinctive-etiological, historicalcultural happenings). This subjective pause contributes to Gadda’s notion of limits, which would thus signal the edges or the ends of a given causal chain. Gadda argues that ‘un sistema non è che una porzione (in senso logico generale più che strettamente quantitativo) di realtà e i suoi limiti sono arbitrari’39 [a system is just a portion (in the logical, general sense more than in a strictly quantitative one) of reality, and its limits are arbitrary]. Zamira’s horrible mouth-hole provides one such limit, but another, more definitive (and more absolute) limit is found in death, and in particular, in violent death, when the internal chaos

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 189

spills from its human container. For Gadda, as for Lombroso, it is from the point of view of these arbitrary limits (in particular, the life/death divide) that some of the most penetrating insights into the individual can be reached. Dombroski argues that the human body ‘provides Gadda with an avenue to the root of existence, to life as object-reality, beyond meaning and discursive closure.’40 Crime offers the author a way in. Recurrent Abjection Although Ingravallo’s investigative techniques are largely noninvasive, Gaddian texts demonstrate a Lombrosian desire to delve inside the human body in order to get to the heart of the groviglio, the node of causes, and in some cases to better understand the causes and the physical effects of crime. While the faces of the Pasticciaccio are poetically expressive, Gadda also demonstrates a recurrent interest in the body, and in this context more frequently employs a scientific language reminiscent of the lexicon of the operating room in ‘Anastomósi’ to speak of its biological capabilities. The body becomes an object best characterized by its specific physiological capacities or its physical malfunctions. In lighter moments, this technical language refers to the pleasures of the palate, and emphasizes the scientific precision with which the detective relates to the world, even the world of pleasure. In such contexts, the proliferating medical language serves both a stylistic-creative and a diagnostic-investigative function. For example, Ingravallo appreciates a glass of white wine that ‘gli titillava il velopendolo’ (11) [tickl[ed] his velum pendulum] (15; this last word refers to the muscle-membrane that hangs from the back of the throat and separates the mouth from the nasal passages)]. Later, he appreciates ‘le testimonianze e i modulati accertamenti linguatico-palatalifaringo-esofagici d’una introduzione dionisiaca’ (42) [the modulated controls – lingual, palatal, pharyngeal, esophageal, of a dionysiac introduction (62)]. Emotional reactions have a very specific physiological origin, according to the text: ‘Esiste una drammatica regione d’ogni rancura, dalla milza e dal cistifele drento il rodimento del fegato, insino a le penombre dietro li mobili de casa indove officiano i Lari’ (79) [There exists a dramatic region of every rancor, from the spleen and from the gall bladder inside the gnawing liver, to the very penumbras behind the household furniture where the lares officiate (117)]. This sort of

190

Methods of Murder

categorization of emotion owes a debt to Galenic medicine, the Gaddian ‘humour’ that locates emotion in specific biological regions of the body, but also suggests a criminal anthropological belief in the ability to pinpoint the causes of human behaviours. At other times, physical reactions reveal intellectual ones, when these might not otherwise be evident. The stern Doctor Fumi, for example, reading the excessively generous will of Liliana, suddenly chokes: ‘Accaloratosi nella lettura, a un certo punto gli era andata un po’ di saliva in traverso. Dài e dài, quell’accesso di tosse voleva scardinargli i polmoni’ (90) [Warming to his reading, at a certain point, he had swallowed some saliva the wrong way. Then, on and on, until that fit of coughing seemed about to unhinge his lungs (133)]. Once again, the body shows its tendency to inadvertently offer evidence. The careful and lingering focus on Fumi’s face allows observers to understand his surprise: ‘Il volto appena colorato, ma le vene tumefatte, su la fronte: tutto il macchinone inturgidito da un deflagrare di cariche interne’ (90) [His face barely flushed, but his veins swollen on the forehead: the whole machinery distended by a deflagration of inner charges (133)]. When Ingravallo begins to understand the gravity of the crime being reported to him upon discovery of Liliana’s body, his nervous reaction is recorded with both regional and scientific precision: ‘Raccolte a tulipano le cinque dita della mano destra, altalenò quel fiore nella ipotiposi digito-interrogativa tanto in uso presso gli Apuli’ (45) [Pressing together, tulip-shape, the five fingers of his right hand, he seesawed that flower in the digito-interrogative hypotyposis customary among the Apulians (65–6)]. More elaborate descriptions of characters in both the Pasticciaccio and the Cognizione focus on physical and physiological anomalies that exist in relation to abject qualities. As less prominent players in the novels, these characters exist largely through their distinctive biology. As such, Gaddian description seems to work in the direction of creating a ‘tipo antropologico’ (Pasticciaccio, 183), a sort of anthropological representative of the peasant class. In these descriptions, language fluctuates between the sensational and the technical, suggesting, in a way reflective of Lombrosian eclecticism, that both lexicons are useful ways of understanding how humans work. On the fablelike end of such language, in the Cognizione we meet Beppina, ‘notissima in tutto il territorio di Lukones per il suo modo sbrigativo e piuttosto amazònico di far la piscia’ (18) [famous in all the territory of Lukones and in the neighboring villas [. . .] for her brisk and rather Amazonic way of

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 191

pissing (15)], and later described as ‘nota in tutta la zona per esser solita di scompisciare all’impiedi, ne’ prati, i più popolosi e proliferanti formicai’ (161–2) [known in the whole area for her custom of peeing in a standing position, in the fields, on the most populated and proliferating anthills (198)]. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Gadda’s digressive macaronic sketches minor figures in elegant and precise language, still according to their bodily functions. In the Cognizione, another peasant, self-aware enough not to spit in front of his superiors, is described initially in rather formal lay terms that are parenthetically revised into more scientifically precise language: ‘l’ejezione di liquido giallastro dalla bocca (estroflessa in momentanea proboscide fallica o semplicemente contratta) costituisce atto di troppo dichiarata e disgustosa analogia perchè anche un peone della Cordillera Maradagalese non ne percepisca la sconvenienza’ (154) [the ejection of yellowish liquid from the mouth (extroflected in a momentaneous phallic proboscis or simply contracted) constitutes an act of such open and disgusting analogy that even a peon of the Maradagalese Cordillera would perceive its unsuitability (188)]. In the Pasticciaccio the narrator embarks on a strange and lengthy digression on a woman dressed in black that incorporates highly technical language and a Lombrosian passion for proper names. The text describes her terror at the sight of the darkly clad police officers and explains, in exacting physiological language, the effect of this fear on her body: in spite of her best efforts to hold back, they literally scare the shit out of her. Gadda describes as she attempts to contract the ‘plesso emorroidale medio, plexus haemorroidalis medii’ and her ‘cosiddette valvole di Houston, principe la supervalvola di Kohlrausch, nè le semilunari di Morgagni’ (207) [plexus haemorroidalis medii] and her [so-called Houston valves, chiefly the super-valve of Kohlrausch, not the semilunars of Morgagni (305)]. Regardless of these valiant efforts, her decrepit body ‘consentì all’evento di snocciolarsi a marciapiede inosservato dai due Branca’ (208) [allowed the event to fall out on to the pavement, unobserved by the Grims (305)]. The descriptive practice, even in the case of minor characters, is frequently investigative and often specifically diagnostic, demonstrating that on some level humans are understood most accurately by way of their physical urges. It also implies, obsessively, that a keen investigative eye, with Lombrosian passion for detail, must take note of the unpleasant ‘events’ that occur at the limits of human bodies.41 Gadda’s fictional worlds are peppered by such descriptions, explicit and technical, of the abject, placing his mysteries solidly on the border

192

Methods of Murder

of human existence. According to Kristeva, ‘These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.’42 According to Sbragia, the ‘malodorous peasants’ in the Cognizione are a ‘sign of the fetid disorder of the world.’43 That fetid disorder is originally, atavistically biological, and related to the maternal; it precedes the subject’s experience of the disorder of the world, because, as Kristeva notes, it ‘preserves what existed in the archaism of preobjectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.’44 Liliana, who wanted to be a mother, hoped to usher in a being that would experience this originary abjection, as Ingravallo reveals over the course of his investigation. Instead, crime forces her to embody abjection in death. In fact, a large part of the investigation into Liliana’s death gravitates around the revelation of her desperate desire for the child she cannot have. Ingravallo at last diagnoses Liliana’s problem as one inherent to the female personality, irretrievably centred on the ovaries: La personalità femminile – brontolò mentalmente Ingravallo quasi predicando a se stesso – che vvulive dì? . . . ‘a personalità femminile, tipicamente centrogravitata sugli ovarii, in tanto si distingue dalla maschile, in quanto l’attività stessa della corteccia, int’ ‘o cervello d’ ‘a femmena, si manifesta in un apprendimento, e in un rifacimento, d’ o ragionamento dell’elemento maschile, si putimme chiamarle ragionamente. (94) [The female personality – Ingravallo grumbled mentally, as if preaching to himself – what did it all mean? . . . The female personality, typically gravity-centered on the ovaries, is distinguished from the male insofar as the very activity of the cortex, the old gray matter, of the female, is revealed in a comprehension, and in a revision, of the reasoning of the male element, if we can call it reasoning. (139)]

The victim becomes, on an important level, also guilty of her own capitulation to her physical existence, guilty of being a woman dissatisfied with her lot, and unable to fulfil her biological destiny. Ingravallo, fixing Liliana with his Lombrosian investigative eye, imagines her in this way: ‘Guarda tra i fiori de’ giardini i bambini delle altre: e piange. Si rivolge alle monache e agli orfanatrofi pur di avere la “sua” creatura, pur di “fare” anche lei il suo bambino. Intanto gli anni chiamano, dalla lor buia caverna’ (95) [She looks, among the flowers of the garden, at the

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 193

children of others: and she weeps. She turns to the nuns and the orphanages, anything to have ‘her’ child, to ‘have’ a baby of her own. And in the meanwhile the years call to her, from their dark cave (140–1)]. Ellen Nerenberg has specifically connected Liliana’s ‘guilt’ to Lombroso’s concept of the hysterical female, showing that Ingravallo ‘believes that female biology, or rather, endocrinology, makes women hysterical and (following Lombroso) predisposed toward delinquency.’45 Discussing Virginia and Zamira as well as Liliana, Nerenberg shows that ‘out of the alembic of the female body, Gadda the alchemist distils his bogus meta/physical “method.” ’46 Nerenberg convincingly demonstrates, connecting the Lombrosian construction of the criminal female to the Fascist exercise of control, that women in the Pasticciaccio ‘are locked up or locked out: whether within the walls of the apartment building in Via Merulana or outside city walls, women cleave to Fascist codes of maternity and femininity.’47 In discussing crime fiction, Nerenberg reminds us that the ‘home gives crime a home’ and cites Benjamin, who says that the ‘interieur is also the container of the private citizen.’48 For Gadda, as for Lombroso, the most fascinating container and the most troubling home is the body itself. Liliana’s Lombrosian ‘guilt’ may have been evident to Ingravallo in life, but Gadda’s text betrays its greater interest in that which her body reveals in death. Instead of living the experience of producing a child and separating it from herself in childbirth, her desired experience of abjection, her corpse, instead, becomes the abject reminder, for others, of what they must not be in order to live. Crime, for Gadda, as for Lombroso, is the strategic means for accessing the interior worlds of the human body. When a criminal act splays open a victim, the text dives inside to see what lies beneath the subject’s ‘grotesque surface reality.’49 Dying Bodies In Gadda’s fiction, bodies are at their most revealing when they are most terribly defiled by violence, as the bodies of Liliana Balducci and the mother in the Cognizione. And in the moment of death, with the messiness of the final moment of life persisting in the form of bodily fluids slowly drying on the body of the victim, medicine can reveal something important about the mystery of life. These are the moments when Gadda betrays a Lombrosian push towards vivisection, the desire to split open the human form and spill out its insides. More than

194

Methods of Murder

this, Gadda’s work, like Lombroso’s, keeps death alive: readers do not escape with one abject moment, one encounter with a corpse at the beginning of a text that will then restore form to the tangled knot of the world disintegrated by mystery. Rather, Gadda ensures that we are faced with the abject again and again, facing filth, refuse, and especially corpses. Thus, in effect, throughout the two novels we have to linger in that borderland described by Kristeva where the opposition inside/outside reigns, ‘vigorous but pervious, violent but uncertain.’50 The simultaneous awareness of death and life, of inside and outside, constitutes an experience of the abject. Kristeva explains that the abject is ‘something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.’51 Gadda’s novels, with their recurrent focus on the malodorous waste of physical borders, engulf readers in a sea of abjection. In the Pasticciaccio, Don Ciccio laments that death forecloses interpretive possibilities: ‘la morte gli apparve, a don Ciccio, una decombinazione estrema dei possibili, uno sfasarsi di idee interdipendenti, armonizzate già nella persona’ (58) [death seemed to Don Ciccio an extreme decompounding of possibles, an unfocusing of interdependent ideas, formerly harmonized in one person (84)]. Hesitant to relinquish victims to the otherworld, the Pasticciaccio and the Cognizione focus, instead, on the body perched between the two states.52 Like Lombroso’s, Gadda’s medicalizing fascination for the horrors of death make these important narrative moments in both the Pasticciaccio and in the Cognizione among the most focused, and the most vivid, in the author’s entire repertoire. The body is doubly violated by the crime and by the narrative, which revels in the opportunity to explore the passageways that expose both the modus operandi of the criminal and the fragility of the victim. The murder at the end of the Cognizione, constructed as a matricide although the unfortunate Gonzalo is probably not actually the murderer, is anticipated by the appearance of violence earlier in the narrative. This time the body upon which violence is initially imagined is the villa, which at a number of times is figured as a living space. As a group begins to suspect that something is amiss in the dark recesses of the home, they peer into the dark villa ‘come due fanciulli che osservino, traverso l’apertura chirurgica, l’interno misterioso di un organismo’ (184) [They looked at that interior with amazed curiosity, like two boys observing, through the surgical aperture, the mysterious interior of an

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 195

organism (227)]. This strange simile (what children routinely have the opportunity to gaze into a surgical opening?) reflects the curiosity the text itself will have when faced with the opportunity to gaze inside the mother’s body, pitifully opened by the criminal. But it also communicates the curiosity of human beings vis-à-vis the inner workings of the living body, a curiosity that this very group must come to terms with shortly afterwards when they contemplate the actual, violated body of the mother, lying helplessly in her bed. The mother in the Cognizione is actually half-alive when discovered at the end of the novel: Gli occhi della signora, aperti, non lo guardarono, guardavano il nulla. Un orribile coagulo di sangue si era aggrumato, ancor vivo, sui capelli grigi, dissolti, due fili di sangue le colavano dalle narici, le scendevano sulla bocca semiaperta. Gli occhi erano dischiusi, la guancia destra tumefatta, la pelle lacerata, e anche sotto l’orbita, orribile. Le due povere mani levate, scheletrite, parevano protese verso ‘gli altri’ come in una difesa o in una implorazione estrema. Esse poi apparivano graffiate: macchie e sbavature di sangue erano sul guanciale e sul limbo del lenzuolo. (190) [The Señora’s eyes, open, did not look at them; they looked at nothingness. A horrible clot of blood had coagulated, still vivid on the gray hair, loose, two threads of blood ran from her nostrils, descended to her halfopen mouth. Her eyes were open, the right cheek swollen, the skin torn, also under the socket, horrible. The two poor hands raised, skeletal, seemed stretched out toward ‘the others’ as if in defense or in an extreme imploration. They seemed scratched then, too: stains and drops of blood were on the pillow and on the hem of the sheet. (234)]

The Señora’s body is clearly in a stage of transition: empty eyes, coagulated blood, skeletal hands all point to impending death, while blood, her open mouth, and her weak pulse lend evidence of persisting life. Gadda’s text trembles in this state of abjection, alternately distancing readers and onlookers from the repeatedly invoked ‘horror’ and drawing them in, fascinated. The crowd, realizing the woman is still breathing, immediately sends for an elderly doctor, who begins to minister to the critically injured patient with shots of ‘canforato’ [camphorated oil], ‘strofantina’ [of strophanthin], and ‘un altro cardiocinetico ancora, adrenalina’ [another heart stimulant, perhaps adrenalin] (191) [236]. Technical language occupies the stage alongside the vivid, more graphically descriptive language of criminal violence. The medical

196

Methods of Murder

professional’s arrival temporarily offers relief in the form of science, both lexically and practically distancing the crowds and the readers from the spectacle of death. He gently washes the wounded head, dabbing at the lesions with cotton balls soaked in alcohol and then with gasoline and cologne. But although he can, in part, alleviate the dreadfulness of the violent murder for the observers (‘l’ausilio dell’arte medica, lenimento, pezzuole, dissimulò in parte l’orrore’ (193) [the aid of medical art, soothing, bandages, dissimulated in part the horror (237)]),53 for the reader and for the viewers in the room, this palliative is useless, since the preceding description of the awful sight in the text is, instead, lengthy and memorable. And even as the doctor cleanses, the onlookers are horrified, and the narrative proceeds in elaborating the spectacle of death. The final pages of the Cognizione magnify the horror through repetition and amplification, engaging the very curiosity of peering across a surgical opening innocently invoked as simile pages before this garish discovery. The description of the woman literally lying on her deathbed engages in the Lombrosian practice of vivisection, the entering of the victim’s living body. The doctor, who as Fabio Pierangeli points out, is actually serving more as a minister than a medic, penetrates the mother’s body when he sticks his hand in her mouth to attempt to reposition the tongue: ‘Il dottore, con due dita, cercò allora di estrarnela e di ricondurla alla sua postura normale’ (192) [The doctor, with two fingers, tried then to pull it out and restore it to its normal position (236)]. The intrusion of the doctor’s fingers into the woman’s throat, however, only serves to make clear that the final intervention of medicine will be useless after the more violent assault of the criminal. Although this crime occurs at the end of the Cognizione, in the limited space afforded to the event, the text obsesses about the violated body and returns, again and again, to repeatedly describe the same lurid details. The ‘guancia destra tumefatta’ is repeatedly conjured up, and the narrative’s doggedness drives home the intensity of the crime. Yet, with each description, a new accompanying adverb magnifies the already violent adjective, so that her cheek becomes progressively more wounded: a window onto the living body in horrible motion towards death. Tutta la guancia destra era orrendamente tumefatta. Respirava ora con pena, la lingua pareva essersi affossata nel palato, un rantolo, col respiro,

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 197 ne usciva. Le labbra insanguinate e semiaperte la lasciavano scorgere al medico, giù, afflosciata nel retrobocca, che veniva a intasare. (191–2) [The whole right cheek was horribly swollen. She breathed now with difficulty, her tongue seemed to have sunk into her palate, a rattling came from it, with her breath. The bloodied and slightly parted lips allowed the doctor to glimpse it, down there flabby, in the back of the mouth, which it was clogging up. (236)]

And still the narrative insists on portraying these last moments of life, refusing to let the victim slip into merciful, final sleep. Death, for Gadda as for Lombroso, becomes a fluid process that, as Foucault described in The Birth of the Clinic, is ‘multiple, and dispersed in time.’54 The time of the final pages of the Cognizione is death-time, organized by the successive accounts of the Señora’s painful decomposition in which death reveals its ‘teeming presence.’55 As the doctor cleans the wounds, the lesions become more evident: Il capo, allora, palesò due ferite, apparentemente non gravi, al parietale destro e alla tempia destra, e altre lacerazioni e abrasioni minori: e quella orrenda ecchimosi alla guancia destra, ch’era così spaventosamente tumefatta, fin sotto l’occhio. L’emorragia aveva imbrattato il capo, il viso, le labbra, il coagulo si era aggrumato e stagnato ne’ capelli, nell’orecchio destro, sulla faccia, sotto il naso: anche dal naso era venuto molto sangue: il lembo del lenzuolo, il cuscino, ne erano atrocemente arrossati. (192) [The head, then, revealed two wounds, apparently not serious, at the right parietal and the right temple, and other minor lacerations and abrasions: and that horrible bruise on the right cheek, which was so frightfully swollen, up to below the eye. The hemorrhaging had bloodied the head, the face, the lips; the coagulation had clotted and stagnated in the hair, in the right ear, on the face, below the nose; also from the nose had come a great deal of blood: the edge of the sheet, the pillow, were atrociously red with it. (237)]

In spite of the doctor’s work to clean the body of the marks of death, changes in the narrative’s description do not suggest that the woman’s state is improving. The previously ‘horribly swollen’ cheek is now ‘frighteningly swollen’; the face is still bloodied; the bedclothes, stained. Gadda’s lengthy sentences, frequently interrupted by commas and colons, reproduce the fragmented state of the body and augment the sense of the state of physical emergency.

198

Methods of Murder

An investigative, medicalizing mentality predominates in this final passage, even though a formal investigator is absent. This desire to understand the particulars of the crime is evident in its tentative reconstruction: il capo così ferito doveva avervi battuto violentemente; forse qualcuno doveva averla afferrata a due mani, pel collo, e averle sbattuto il capo contro lo spigolo del tavolino da notte, per terrorizzarla, o deliberato ad ucciderla. Terribile fu e permaneva a tutti l’aspetto di quel volto ingiuriato, ch’essi conoscevano così nobile e buono pur nel disfacimento della vecchiezza. (192) [the wounded head must have struck against it violently; perhaps someone had gripped her with both hands, by the neck, and slammed her head against the edge of the table, to terrify her, or with intent to kill her. For all, the sight of that outraged face was terrible and so remained, when they had known it noble and good even in the decay of old age. (237)]

In spite of the benevolence of the crowd and the ministrations of the doctor, the narrative itself continues to exercise a violent curiosity with regard to the human body. Through its obsessive, repetitive nature and its graphic descriptions, we see the Lombrosian propensity to lurk around the life/death divide, and to peer with scientific curiosity into the spaces opened by violence. The Señora’s fragmented body is described as doubly undone: disfigured by violence, but also already decaying, ‘undone,’ by old age. Criminal brutality, in this final, surprising alignment, speeds the process of undoing that which nature itself effects, making the woman’s body guilty of complicity in its own demise. From the terrible perspective of this limit, the ‘cognizione’ of the title is exchanged for the ‘sovrana coscienza della impossibilità di dire: Io’ (193) [supreme awareness of the impossibility of saying: I (237)]. No longer able to push away the abjection of death that allows her to say ‘I,’ the Señora, in near-death, gives herself over to the complex interplay of systems that defies subjective unity. While death in the Cognizione occurs at the end of the novel, the Pasticciaccio, structured more traditionally as a detective story, begins with violence and then conducts an investigation of the crime. The violent opening of the body in a criminal act actually first appears in the Pasticciaccio when Signora Menegazzi, the Venetian countess who also lives on Via Merulana, is robbed of her jewels. In the ensuing investigation, Ingravallo discovers that, ‘come tutte le donne sole in casa’ (like all

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 199

women alone in the house), La Menegazzi spent her hours at home imagining elaborate criminal hypotheses that would result in her violent death. Her vision is cinematic as she pictures: uomini mascherati, in primo piano, e con le suole di feltro ai piedi; repentine per quanto tacite irruzioni in anticamera; martellate in capo o strangolamento a mano, o mediante appropriata cordicella, eventualmente preceduto da ‘servizzie’: idea o parola, questa, che la riempiva di un orgasmo indicibile. (19) [masked men, seen in close-up, with felt-soled shoes: sudden, and equally silent, intrusions into the hall; a hammer brought down hard on her head, or her throat clutched by hands or strangled with a length of string brought for the purpose, preceded perhaps by horrible torture: a notion – or a word – this last, which filled her with unspeakable emotion (27)].

The countess has so long imagined her horrible fate, hypothesizes Ingravallo, that it could not help but create itself: ‘In parole povere, la gran paura le aveva portato scarogna, alla Menegazzi’ (20) [To put it simply, her great fear had brought bad luck to her, to Signora Menegazzi (28)]. The tendency to evoke violence by creatively envisioning it, although a practice derided by the investigator, is one that Ingravallo participates in. In this same chapter, the detective begins to cave to the pressures of popular discourse and refer to the jewel thief (as do the loquacious crowds that mingle outside the building) as an ‘assassino,’ even though no one has been murdered. His slippage anticipates the arrival of a real assassin at the apartment complex, of course, and as such shares the tendency to make violence happen by imagining it. Thus, it seems particularly significant that Menegazzi is described by the narrative as a ‘derubanda-iugulanda-sevizianda’ (19) [woman to be robbed-strangled-tortured (27)], a characterization that prefigures not only the murder of Liliana Balducci, but also and very specifically, the murderer’s means of graphically disfiguring the neighbour’s body. Liliana Balducci is dead when her cousin finds her, and the spectacle is reported to us in complete terms only when the detective arrives on the scene. The observations in this celebrated passage, often focalized through Don Ciccio’s horrified point of view, combine the perspectives of investigator, scientist, and aghast friend: Un profondo, un terribile taglio rosso le apriva la gola, ferocemente. Aveva preso metà il collo, dal davanti verso destra, cioè verso sinistra, per lei,

200

Methods of Murder

destra per loro che guardavano: sfrangiato ai due margini come da un reiterarsi dei colpi, lama o punta: un orrore! da nun potesse vede. Palesava come delle filacce rosse, all’interno, tra quella spumiccia nera der sangue, già raggrumato, a momenti; un pasticcio! con delle bollicine rimaste a mezzo. Curiose forme, agli agenti: parevano buchi, al novizio, come dei maccheroncini color rosso, o rosa. ‘La trachea,’ mormorò Ingravallo chinandosi, ‘la carotide! la iugulare . . . Dio!’ (47)56 [A deep, a terrible red cut opened her throat, fiercely. It had taken half the neck, from the front towards the right, that is, towards the left, the right for those who were looking down: jagged at its two edges, as if by a series of blows, of the blade or point: a horror! You couldn’t stand to look at it. From it hung red strands, like thongs, from the black foam of the blood, almost clotted already; a mess! with some little bubbles still in the midst. Curious forms, to the policeman: they seemed holes, to the novice, like red-colored little maccheroni, or pink. ‘The trachea,’ murmured Ingravallo, bending down, ‘the carotid, the jugular! . . . God!’ (69)]

The passage distinguishes differing perspectives on this horror, even encompassing the surprised gaze of the ‘novizio,’ who views the bubbles in the clotting blood as macaroni. Ingravallo, stunned, demonstrates his capabilities as scientist even as he expresses his distress, ably naming the principal arteries and passageways that have been severed. Unlike the doctor in the Cognizione, whose role is that of providing succour and relief from suffering, Don Ciccio’s position as investigator gives him a reason for exercising more abstract curiosity about the spectacle before him. The young agent’s surprising comparison of blood corpuscles to pasta creates a disjunctive shock in the style of concettismo, by way of its extravagant comparison between things that do not seem to belong in the same conceptual universe. But immediately following this literary device, Ingravallo’s gentle correction at the end of the sentence demonstrates that even without ornate metaphor, the human figure contains a ‘nefando pasticcio’ (nefarious mess) that exerts a shock factor all its own. Once the investigators begin to unravel some of the particularities of the vicious attack, they proceed through a hypothetical reconstruction of the crime. Narrated in the third person in standard Italian, the passage stands out among others in the same chapter for its spare, objective prose, almost entirely lacking the emotive empathy of the initial reaction: ‘Lui, di certo, aveva colpito all’improvviso: e insistito poi nella gola, nella trachea, con efferata sicurezza’ (55) [Certainly he

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 201

had first struck all of a sudden, then worked on the throat, insisting, and on the trachea, with ferocious confidence (81)]. Yet, shortly afterwards, in imagining the last moments of the victim, the prose once again bears linguistic and emotive traces of the presence of the investigator and recovers a Lombrosian enthusiasm for the recounting of lurid detail: Una cerea mano si allentava, ricadeva . . . quando Liliana aveva già il cortello dentro il respiro, che le lacerava, le straziava la trachea: e il sangue, a tirà er fiato, le annava giù ner polmone: e il fiato le gorgogliava fuora in quella tosse, in quello strazio, da paré tante bolle de sapone rosse: e la carotide, la jugulare, buttaveno come due pompe de pozzo, lùf, lùf, a mezzo metro de distanza. Il fiato, l’ultimo, de traverso, a bolle, in quella porpora atroce della sua vita: e si sentiva il sangue, nella bocca, e vedeva quegli occhi, non più d’uomo, sulla piaga. (56) [A waxen hand relaxed, fell back . . . when the knife was already in Liliana’s breath, tearing, ripping her trachea; and the blood, when she inhaled, flowed down into her lungs: and her breath gurgled out, coughing, in that torture, and it looked like so many bubbles of red soap: and the carotid, the jugular, spurted like two pumps from a well, plop, plop, half a yard away. Her breath, her last, sideways, in bubbles, in that horrid purple of her life: and she felt the blood in her mouth, and she saw those eyes, no longer human, on the wound. (81–2)]

In this passage, just as dialect reanimates the prose that had lapsed into a less emotive standard, so does the detective’s reconstruction of the crime reanimate Liliana’s lifeless body. As Ingravallo imagines the struggle between criminal and victim, he transports the clotting blood back into an organ full of life and motion, and even capable of speech, the onomotopaeic ‘lùf, lùf’ that signals the final vital pumping of the woman’s heart. The criminal, according to the investigators, has ‘insisted’ on the throat, and in similar fashion, the text returns time after time to this vital passageway, illustrating the cruelty of the crime but also the vitality of the final moments. The agent who first reports the offence explains initially that the nefarious forces ‘hanno tajato la gola’ (45) [cut her throat (65)], and then continues to describe the way they found her: ‘Co la gola tutta segata, tutta tajata da una parte. Ma vedesse che tajo, dottó!’ (45) [With the throat all sawed up, all cut up one side. You should see that cut, sir! (66)], and shortly afterwards, ‘Un tajo! che manco er

202

Methods of Murder

macellaro’ (45) [What a slice! Not even a butcher could have . . . (66)]. Ingravallo’s own observation of the body focuses for more than a paragraph on the throat, on the ‘terribile taglio rosso’ (47) [terrible red cut (69)] that opens the vital passageway. Valdarena, initially a suspect in the investigation, has a spot of blood on one of the sleeves of his shirt, and admits that ‘l’angolo del polsino deve avere sfiorato la ferita, il collo: era inevitabile: che? . . . con tutto quel sangue!’ (50) [the tip of my cuff must have grazed the wound, her neck: I guess it had to . . . with all that blood! (73–4)]. The reconstruction of the crime cited above similarly focuses on this area of the body, and finally, as the investigator from the criminological office seeks to determine the weapon, the wound in the neck once again comes into focus: ‘la ferita era profondissima, orribile: aveva resecato metà il collo, a momenti’ (56) [the wound was deep, all right, a horrible thing: it had hacked away half the neck, just about (82–3)]. The novel’s obsession with the neck and throat is significant because this vital vessel connects human intellect and emotion, brain and heart, and allows humans to nourish themselves and to speak. The vicious wound that lacerates Liliana’s neck thus opens a terrible window on human existence and allows the narrative to delve into one of the most critical sectors of the human body. Solitudine di visceri/Solitude of Viscera The final pages of the Pasticciaccio, which once again enter the dark recesses of human suffering, stage a strange struggle between investigative reasoning and human biology. The suspect, the Balduccis’ former maid, is at home tending to her dying father. As the investigative team proceeds towards the home of Assunta Crocchiapani, leaving their car behind to walk on a narrow path, they look like a ‘collegio di necrofori, così neri neri nel chiarore aperto del giorno, che andassero a prendere il morto’ (257) [school of grave-diggers, all so black in the clear, open day, as if they were going to pick up the deceased (378)]. In fact, the Gaddian novel ends in a realm marked by the presence of death-in-life, a world in which vitality and collapse coexist under the same roof, ultimately confounding the investigator’s ability to understand the outcome of his inquiry. When Ingravallo knocks at the door, he is greeted not by a person but by a face: ‘Quando fu aperta al tutto Ingravallo si trovò di faccia . . . un viso, un par d’occhi! nella penombra lustravano: la Tina

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 203

Crocchiapani!’ (258) [When it was completely open Ingravallo found himself facing . . . a face, a pair of eyes! gleaming in the penumbra: Tina Crocchiapani! (380)]. It is this physiognomy that takes him back in time, reminds him of a bit of spilled spinach at the dinner table: his investigative mind is reactivated by the details of the suspect’s features. However, deeply suspicious of Assunta, in large part because of her ‘vitalità splendida’ (splendid vitality), he insists on searching the house and irrupts into the bedroom of her dying father, who instead personifies death. Having offended Tina with his crass aggression, Ingravallo feels her glare as he penetrates the inner recesses of the house: ‘Quei due occhi neri e furiosi della Tina, Ingravallo se li sentiva puntati sulla cuticagna: se ne sentiva trafiggere il collo’ (260) [Those two black and furious eyes of Tina – Ingravallo felt them aimed at his nape; he felt them piercing his neck (382)]. The return to the obsession with the neck, of course, evokes the crime scene at the Balducci household. While Tina’s eyes initially serve as a cord reconnecting Ingravallo to dinner at the Balducci house, her glare, instead, takes him back to the physical dynamics of the crime scene, suggesting again this node (or groviglio, or garbuglio, or gnommero) via which humans are connected. The interconnectedness of human beings through their physical attributes, specifically in the ambit of crime, once again, suggests a Lombrosian attention to the fundamental importance of biology to crime and investigation. Although irrelevant in the investigation of the Balducci crime, Tina’s father occupies a critical space at the end of the novel, the space normally reserved for the investigator’s brilliant exposition, and exemplifies the obsession arguably more central to Gadda’s text. The elderly man is literally perched between life and death: ‘Non si capiva s’era un vivo o s’era un morto’ (261) [You couldn’t understand whether the man was alive or dead (383)]. The horrible description of his consumed body reminds us of the nature of the human body at its end. Her father has become a ‘corpiciattolo disteso, come un gatto secco in un sacco adagiato a terra: una faccia ossuta e cachettica posava nel cuscino, immota, d’un giallo-bruno da museo egizio’ (261) [an outstretched little body, like a skinny cat in a sack set on the ground: a bony and cachetic face rested on the pillow, motionless, of a yellow-brown like something in an Egyptian museum (383)]. In the final moments, he is an animal, an anthropological relic of a former state of human existence: reduced to his biology, in fact. In spite of the immanence of death, however, the father is also strangely alive: ‘Strani borborigmi, sotto coperta,

204

Methods of Murder

contraddicevano al coma, e più stranamente alla morte: davano l’impressione d’una miracolosa imminenza’ (262) [Strange borborygms, under cover, contradicted the coma, and, more strangely, death: they gave the impression of a miraculous imminence (385)]. Once again, the narrative focuses on both sides of the divide, considering the body to already be a corpse, while also seeing its miraculous capacity to continue to live. And these lengthy descriptions of the sick room occupy far more space in the final pages than Ingravallo’s questioning of Tina about Liliana Balducci. The pain inflicted on Liliana, and the detective narrative itself, recede into a secondary position in the text when confronted with the fascinating capacity of humans to suffer because of their biology. When the novel at last arrives at its highly inconclusive conclusion, we are left with a final, celebrated physical image of Tina’s vital visage: ‘Quella piega nera verticale tra i due sopraccigli dell’ira, nel volto bianchissimo della ragazza, lo paralizzò, lo indusse a riflettere: a ripentirsi, quasi’ (264) [The black, vertical fold above the two eyebrows of rage, in the pale white face of the girl, paralysed him, prompted him to reflect: to repent, almost (388)]. The mysterious dark fold in Tina’s forehead, subject of much critical debate, paralyses the investigator. Both father and daughter take the Pasticciaccio back to the biological groviglio of abjection that has exteriorized itself throughout. The father, an almost corpse, death-in-life, provides a vivid illustration of the borderland of abjection. But the daughter, vibrant, beautiful, and strong, also reminds us of death.57 As Ingravallo observes the beautiful Tina with an awareness of the presence of her decrepit father, his experience, far from a cognitive one, is instead one of jouissance. Ingravallo becomes the investigative deject (the one ‘by whom the abject exists’) that Kristeva describes as the one who, at the final moment of the investigation, ‘strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.’58 Ingravallo-as-deject ‘never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines – for they are constituted of a nonobject, the abject – constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh.’59 In the case of both the Pasticciaccio and the Cognizione, the fluid, corporeal borders of the Gaddian universe defy solidity, leaving readers with an experience of the physical but without cognitive closure. At the end of ‘Anastomósi,’ a work of non-fiction, the abject can be kept at bay: the patient undergoing surgery is sewn shut, as Gadda compares the metal staples in the saffron-coloured flesh to a corset that

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 205

at last manages to contain its ‘carni reluttanti’ (reluctant flesh). In the final sentence, the fragile contents of the human body, previously spilled onto the operating table around them, are replaced: ‘La fisicità molle e indifesa di tutto ciò che suol dimandare un involucro, un tegumento, è chiusa nel suo riabilitato volume’ (272) [The soft and defenceless materiality of everything that usually requires a casing, a tegument, is shut into its rehabilitated container]. Humanity seems to be only reluctantly enclosed in its earthly container, according to Gadda’s formulation, and the final moments of his most prominent works of fiction show the push outward, the tendency of the inside spaces of human existence to win out over the outsides. The Pasticciaccio and the Cognizione, obsessed as they are with the ‘nefando pasticcio’ of the ‘externalized life’ of the viscera, render the re-establishment of the border impossible. The tenacious persistence of the inside, it seems, is both horrific and fascinating: an occasion for jouissance. The Cognizione at last leaves the victim: Ora tumefatto, ferito. Inturpito da una cagione malvagia operante nella assurdità della notte; e complice la fiducia o la bontà stessa della signora. Questa catena di cause riconduceva il sistema dolce e alto della vita all’orrore dei sistemi subordinati, natura, sangue, materia: solitudine di visceri e di volti senza pensiero. Abbandono. (192) [Now swollen, wounded. Debased by a wicked cause operating in the absurdity of the night; with the Señora’s trust and her very goodness as accomplices. This chain of causes led the sweet and lofty system of life back to the horror of the subordinate systems, nature, blood, matter: solitude of viscera and of countenances without thought. Abandonment. (237)]

The ‘catena di cause,’ the causal chain that also recurs in Gadda’s thought, here leads to a sombre conclusion: we see that the ‘subordinate systems’ of nature, blood, and matter win out over the sweeter (but merely hypothetical) system of intellectual life. Speaking of Gadda’s recurrent preoccupation with neuroses, Romano Luperini suggests that Gadda is unable to accept the disorder of the world interior to man: ‘Gadda non accetta – non può accettarlo – il disordine in sé, dentro di sé, e lo proietta all’esterno: è la storia, è la società a essere malata e barocca’60 [Gadda does not accept – he cannot accept – disorder itself, in himself, and he projects it outward: it is history, it is society that is sick and Baroque]. Yet, if we figure internal disorder as biological disorder,

206

Methods of Murder

the complicated conglomerate of human organs and features and systems, we find that Gadda’s investigative texts end with an acknowledgment of their centrality and their significance. Thus, regardless of the fact that Gadda might like to see a more Beccarian triumph of intellect over Lombrosian biology, he cannot push back his awareness of the relentless presence of the darker, lonely systems of the human interior.61 At the end of the Pasticciaccio, no perpetrator of the Balducci murder is identified, and the abject body of Tina’s father lies in the next room, reminding readers of the corpse that we will all become, one day. Each time his novels and short stories peer curiously into the incisions, surgical or otherwise, that lacerate human flesh, Gadda demonstrates his desire to penetrate not just the surface of the body but also to understand its mysteries, even if he must push the body to its final limit in order to do so. Those physical mysteries are the ultimate quest for detective Ingravallo in the Pasticciaccio, the motive for the tragic ending of the Cognizione, and a driving force in Gaddian investigative poetics. Robert Rushing has convincingly argued that the Pasticciaccio lacks ‘un fine,’ a teleological end point, a ‘confine, or border.’62 He shows that the ‘ending that is sought and not found in Gadda’s novels is what would mark off a boundary – a cognitive and epistemic one as much as a simple terminal point for the physical act of turning pages.’63 A corporeal boundary, however, is also missing, as the constant presence of the abject across the pages of the Pasticciaccio and the Cognizione demonstrates. At the conclusion of the novels the abject (revealed through a Lombrosian investigation into the crime scene) bares the messy, inevitable borderlands of physical being, which become a ‘weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, which crushes me.’64 We are left with a ‘solitude of viscera,’ a significant meaninglessness that human beings must live with every day, an intestinal knot that in the best of circumstances remains sealed inside its fragile container but that accompanies us, in fascination and in horror, in our every hour.

7 Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

Master of a style that has been aptly called an ‘art of darkness,’1 director Dario Argento systematically erodes both the procedural logic of Enlightenment criminology and, more deliberately, popular perceptions of Lombrosian criminal science, creating a cinema that uses the science of crime to focus attention on the provocative aesthetic mysteries of the screen. Although the protagonists of his films often mis-negotiate risk, putting themselves recklessly in the path of psychotic killers, Argento navigates the professionally dangerous waters of genre cinema with elegance and intelligence.2 In spite of tepid critical reception over the years, and with a defiant adherence to certain tenets of genre (his trademark shiny raincoats, black leather gloves, and cruel knives, for example), Argento uses this framework as a springboard to create an aesthetically striking cinematic art. Maitland McDonagh argues that the importance of Argento’s cinema lies in its extremity: ‘the seductiveness of these films lies ultimately in the realm of their excess: the spatial and temporal warping, the curious disjunction between soundtrack and image [. . .] the violently saturated colour palette, the obsessive examination of surfaces [. . .] the full panoply of non-narrative detail that generates the overwhelming sense of weirdness evoked by Argento’s work.’3 Yet another essential element of his cinema is a scientific fascination with the biological and psychological makeup of the criminal. By privileging not the lifeless corpse, but rather the moment of death, by obsessively returning to the divide that separates the living from the dying, he directs viewer attention away from investigative procedure and towards the penetrable human body. Argento’s films do not accept, however, the notion of the born criminal. Departing from the human form, Argento’s cinema converts Lombrosian epistemology,

208

Methods of Murder

which can provide a basis for identifying and punishing the criminal, from a cognitive into a visual tool. His films deconstruct the capabilities of criminal science while exalting its methods as the perfect aesthetic means for viewing the dark world of crime. Like Gadda’s, Argento’s work features the stuff of abjection, blood in particular. In his cinema, the interior realms of the body are exteriorized in spectacular set pieces, and his camera lurks shamelessly around the boundaries separating the living from the dead. Yet, the abject, once externalized, turns out not to be one of those existential borderlands described by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror that reminds us of what we must push away in order to exist. Rather, Argento’s space of abjection becomes a spectacular celebration of the powers of his creative arts, something in which to revel, not to shrink from in horror. ‘When I am beset by abjection,’ explains Kristeva, ‘the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object.’4 This non-object status is caused by the fact that abjection ‘preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship.’5 In spite of its fascination with the body and its contents, Argento’s cinema is situated outside of the pre-objectal relationship and is, instead, firmly committed to the object. When blood is spilled, it stands not for the limits of human life, but rather for the plastic, material potentials an artist can find in that inner life, exteriorized. In the midst of the action that drives suspense and plot, Argento’s films focus attention on a gallery of images and colours that gradually render superfluous some of the most critical elements of Lombrosian criminological detection, instead elevating the cinematic image as autonomously, radically sufficient. The director’s work features central themes of positivist criminological science – determinism; scientifically sophisticated techniques of investigation, with their lexicon of precision; and a cinematic form of physiognomy – only to dissect, distort, and dismantle their coherence in a spectacular vivisection of the criminal. This assault on deterministic science begins in his earliest work, a trilogy of films known as the ‘animal trilogy’ because of the creatures in the titles. In Profondo rosso (1975) [Deep Red], his best-known film, the foundation laid in the trilogy provides a backdrop for the visual fireworks that become Argento’s signature. Raising the body as spectacle to the forefront of his cinema, he engages his own popular understanding of the science of crime, while waging, in the process, a strident critique of all such normative models.

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

209

Determinism and Science in the Animal Trilogy Dario Argento’s early cinema is also his most pointedly giallo. His ‘animal trilogy,’ comprised of L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970) [The Bird with the Crystal Plumage], Il gatto a nove code (1971) [The Cat o’ Nine Tales], and Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (1971) [Four Flies on Gray Velvet], makes the most consistent thematic use of the investigative paradigm, insofar as each features a murder, witnessed early in the unravelling of the narrative, its subsequent investigation, and a final moment of exposition. The trio of films unmasks the structural foundation of the director’s thought and of his aesthetic vision, and more importantly, the forms – narrative, scientific, and artistic – that his cinema contests. Argento’s work makes clear that genre is not a cage (as Sciascia suggested) that restricts the free movement of the imagination; the cage, instead, is a deterministic vision of human events, whether that delimiting process is guided by science or art.6 The animal trilogy explores themes of confinement and of genetic or innate criminality, casting at the centre of each film a killer (or killers) whose secret pathology, awakened by a traumatic event, leads him or her to violence. The ‘animal’ in the title of the trilogy once again suggests a connection with the abject, which for Kristeva ‘confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal.’7 A number of animals appear in the trilogy, including an array of cats, rats, rabbits, and birds. Yet, again, this seemingly appropriate connection is frustrated, as the killers are not aligned with the beasts (or insects) in the titles, and the questions of the existential and biological resemblances linking man to animal are not foregrounded in any systematic way.8 Instead, Argento develops a relationship with the science of crime that strategically converts the normally abject into a collection of beautiful objects, and begins to indicate the way for man to stray into a world built as an art gallery. Giorgio Bertellini traces Argento’s plots to late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century fiction inspired by the work of Lombroso and Mantegazza, in which, ‘in the fashion of an anatomy lesson, a disturbed subject’s (often a woman’s) hidden pathology, whether medical, psychological, or moral’ is revealed.9 Although for Bertellini this borrowing is reflected primarily in the sexually ambiguous figures that populate Argento’s films (and thus is tied to the concept of the ‘donna delinquente’ or hysterical criminal woman), the trilogy also initiates Argento’s relationship to a more abstract notion of criminality and his

210

Methods of Murder

adoption of a Lombrosian epistemology of crime. Each of the films in the animal trilogy ends with a ‘scientific’ explanation for the killer’s psychosis, making, in Lombrosian fashion, aggression the direct result of an innate physical or psychological condition.10 Each film, however, also complicates unilateral condemnation of the criminal by demonstrating that the killers are also victims, irretrievably pushed by society to lash out. The resulting grey zone, in which criminals can be victims and vice versa, is a small but significant part of Argento’s erosion of criminal logic, and the epistemological space from which his Lombrosian aesthetic erupts. Argento’s criminal profiles, proffered with apparent scientific specificity, feature delinquent subjects explored simultaneously as dangerously marginal and yet also comprehensible. Early in L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, American writer Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), trapped between two giant glass windows in front of an art gallery, witnesses an armed struggle between a man and woman. Since the Italian police assume the aggression is related to a string of murders of young women, and since Sam is the sole witness, they detain him in the hopes he will remember an important detail about the case. As the film progresses, Sam becomes increasingly involved in the investigations and is correspondingly pursued by the killer. Sam at last discovers his initial error: as he observed the tussle in the gallery, he fails to notice that the woman, not the man, wields the weapon. Thus, the serial murderer is not, as he suspected, the black-clad man, but rather the person he thought was the victim: a woman, Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi). A final news report, framed onscreen as it is being filmed in a television studio, explains the resolution of the case. A journalist begins: ‘Monica Ranieri, completamente fuori di sé, è ricoverata all’ospedale psichiatrico’ (Monica Ranieri, hopelessly insane, is in custody at the psychiatric hospital) and, then, asks the police chief to explain what might have led Ranieri to kill. The police chief, clearly unwilling to offer an explanation for the killings (he coughs nervously and averts his gaze), asks Professor Renoldi, a police consultant and psychiatrist, to speak for him. Renoldi explains with confidence: Dieci anni fa, Monica Ranieri, un soggetto nato certamente con tendenze paranoiche, fu aggredita e certamente in quell’occasione subì un trauma. Ma la sua fu una follia fredda che rimase alla mente per dieci anni, fino al giorno in cui rivide l’orribile scena che aveva vissuto dipinta nel quadro di un pittore naif . . . La sua pazzia si risvegliò ed esplose violenta ed

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

211

irresistibile. Stranamente lei si identificò non con se stessa vittima, ma con l’aggressore, forse per liberarsi inconsciamente del terrore di lui. [Ten years ago, Monica Ranieri, who had already evident paranoid tendencies, was brutally attacked and suffered severe trauma. Nevertheless she recovered sufficiently to return to a normal life. Her mental disturbance remained dormant for ten years, until the day she came across the painting which depicted the horrible scene of which she had been the protagonist. The latent madness came to life violent and irresistibile. Strangely, she did not identify herself with the victim, but with her attacker.11]

In this early Argento film, the dry language of the psychiatry of crime (the feminine Ranieri becomes an anonymous, masculine ‘soggetto’) explains the criminal insanity of the central protagonist, substituting psychiatric exposition for an investigative reconstruction of material facts. In the Italian, the dual appearance of the word ‘certamente’ reinforces the psychiatrist’s language of ‘positive’ science. Yet, while the concluding broadcast reassures its public, as canonical detective fiction will, that the status quo has been restored and the killer diagnosed and confined, it additionally points out the violent events that make the killer herself a victim. Monica Ranieri is a ‘born’ criminal, ‘nata’ mentally unstable, but she is also a victim of society, since as a girl she was brutally attacked. She did not, in fact, begin to act out until a trauma suffered in childhood was re-evoked through art. As such, Ranieri exists at the crux of the debate on innate criminality, since she is characterized not simply as the person responsible for a given series of crimes, but rather as a complex and chronically troubled human being. Quattro mosche di velluto grigio provides a similar psychological background for its delinquent-figure, but cedes even greater space to the voice and subjectivity of the criminal. The film follows a young drummer in a rock band, Roberto Tobias (Michael Brandon), who is framed for murder early in the film and subsequently stalked by someone who seems to be blackmailing him (although for no apparent material gain). He takes matters into his own hands, and in the film’s denouement, crouches in his dark home to stake out the assassin. When his wife Nina (Mimsy Farmer) appears at the door, Roberto is initially confused, but eventually realizes that Nina is, indeed, the killer. In the concluding moments of this film, the exposition is entrusted to the incensed, pistolwaving assassin, Nina, rather than to the authoritative but emotionally removed psychiatrist. Nina spouts the details of her troubled past to

212

Methods of Murder

her husband Roberto (whom she has just shot in the arm): ‘Anch’io ho sofferto tanto [. . .] Mi ha fatto soffrire’ (I’ve suffered too [. . .] He made me suffer). Her anger at her husband, she explains, stems from an intense hatred for her father, who wanted a son, not a daughter: ‘Mi faceva vestire da ragazzo e mi picchiava . . . mi picchiava! [. . .] È stato capace di tutto’ (He dressed me like a boy and he beat me . . . he beat me! [. . .] He was capable of everything). Yet, Nina’s performance of her assigned gender identity also troubled her father, because, as a girl dressed as a boy, she reacted to his beatings as a man, thwarting his apparent desire to have a more submissive ‘son’: ‘io lo delusi. Reagivo come un uomo . . . Diceva che ero pazza, come mia madre’ (I let him down. I reacted like a man . . . He said that I was crazy, like my mother). As a result, her father had Nina committed for three years, where she was called, ‘una folle, una povera pazza, una maniaca. Ma come potevano sapere tutto quello che avevo sofferto?’ (insane, a poor crazy, a maniac. How could they know all I had suffered?)12 Nina’s criminal lineage is constructed, in her violent monologue, as a complex genealogy of insanity (passed down through her mother) and a traumatic upbringing, both of which led to her fantasies of revenge. Her father died before she was released from the asylum, and so Nina was unable to avenge herself on him. Her husband became the ‘miracle’ subject on whom she can exact vengeance, by analogy. Nina’s insistence on her own suffering is both credible and clear: like Monica Ranieri in L’uccello, she is first a victim and later a criminal. Her mental instability in the film is retroactively pardoned as a function of a cruel past, and causality is once again blurred, leaving viewers uncertain as to whether nature or (lack of) nurture dictated her psychosis. Killers as victims, victims as criminals: the ambiguity of the science of crime even more specifically drives the narrative of the central film of the trilogy, Il gatto a nove code. Set around the scientific laboratories of the Istituto Terzi, a lab that researches genetics and heredity, the film pairs a journalist (James Franciscus) and a blind writer of crossword puzzles (Karl Malden) to form a non-traditional investigative team seeking to identify a killer.13 One of the specific projects to which the scientists at the Istituto Terzi dedicate their time is the study of a genetic abnormality, specifically the chromosomal formation XYY, which they suspect is linked to criminality. Over the course of the narrative, one of the principal scientists discovers in his own genetic makeup the aberration that his study suggests makes him criminal. Paradoxically, he turns to deception and murder in order to

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

213

avoid being identified as the criminal he does not believe himself to be. This particular film testifies to Argento’s popular-cultural fascination with science as it explores an issue in contemporary studies of criminal man. The genetic issue resurrects Lombrosian theories about innate criminality in the ultra-contemporary context of the genome project. In an interview about the film, Argento asserts that the link between the XYY chromosome and criminality ‘non è vero’ (isn’t true). Yet, in fact, some scientists persist in making this connection.14 In The Criminal Body, David Horn reports that as recently as 1984, legal scholars have suggested that genetic disposition to criminality, specifically through studies of the XYY structure may in fact, be a reality.15 While the idea of an ‘inherent’ criminal ‘disposition’ already strongly recalls the theories of L’uomo delinquente, contemporary studies, such as that conducted by law professor Lawrence Taylor, continue to wonder: ‘Is crime a social condition? Or is the well-known (and controversial) English psychologist H.J. Eysenck right in arguing recently that Lombroso was, perhaps, not far wrong?’16 Argento’s adoption of this particular facet of the science of crime reflects his dual fascination with the potentials and dangers of such information and illustrates his enthusiasm for bringing such provocative ethical questions into the popular realm. Under his direction, the plot of Il gatto a nove code spins off to treat an imaginative concern shared by Taylor: ‘How should the criminal justice system deal with a criminal offender whose conduct was caused by a genetic aberration? Does society have the right to seek out such individuals before they cause harm and remove them from the community? Can society prevent such individuals from being born in the first place?’17 The scientist’s turn to crime flies in the face of biological determinism, suggesting that genetic predisposition is nevertheless under the sway of suggestion. In this instance it would appear that only when the criminal is diagnosed as such, or threatened, does his criminal nature surface. The criminal in Il gatto a nove code, a medical investigator, discovers firsthand the potential perils of uncovering ‘truth,’ and fearing the response to such questions, violently silences anyone who might seek to label him as aberrant. Determinism, Deconstructed Each of the three films of the animal trilogy, then, connects criminality to genetics, representing a contemporary tendency to use science, in

214

Methods of Murder

Lombrosian fashion, to explain (and potentially to predict) criminal behaviour. Yet, each film additionally renders such explanations insufficient by linking sociological issues to genetic and hereditary ones and by exposing the inherent messiness of any given criminal subject. Such a framework more closely remains faithful to Lombroso’s own chaotic epistemological inheritance than do received popular notions of his criminal science. The criminal profiles offered at the end of each film, although meant to satisfy viewer needs for exposition, are lacking for other reasons as well. Argento’s films deconstruct deterministic practices by building visual and thematic repertories that defy their logic, instead, training the eye to look more discerningly at the images before it. Over the course of the animal trilogy, the director instructs viewers in his own form of Lombrosian epistemology, using the science of crime not as a cognitive tool, but rather as an aesthetic guide. Argento’s first three films all incorporate a visual lexicon of scientific sophistication. The high-tech crime lab in L’uccello is full of noisy machines and white-jacketed criminal scientists. A laboratory in Quattro mosche uses laser technology to photograph an image on the retina of an eyeball. The research facilities at the Istituto Terzi in Il gatto are carefully guarded, and staffed with nurses and doctors in white uniforms. The camera focuses on whirring, clicking, spinning instruments, while the narrative disproves their apparent function. These machines have great visual presence but contribute little to the ‘knowledge’ produced in the investigations. As the plots deconstruct the reliability of the investigative practices, these architectural spaces rehabilitate the science of crime for the purpose of visual interest. Aside from this narrative presence of science, however, one of the primary ways in which the films dismantle determinism involves an aesthetic of interchangeability. The films build into their plots countless visual red herrings that demonstrate the potential danger of the power to punish. Argento’s films recurrently suggest that sinister potential can appear to reside in innocent subjects, and as they do so, remind us of the deceptive nature of the gaze (and, in particular, the investigative gaze). In some instances, in a technique common in crime fiction, the potential for guilt is distributed across a wide number of subjects, visually implicating the innocent by way of analogy. In L’uccello, the opening titles feature a pair of black-gloved hands at a typewriter as the killer composes a threat, and then feature Sam Dalmas, a writer who spends hours at his typewriter, as the detective-protagonist. In Il

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

215

gatto, journalist Carlo Giordani stops in for a shave after his friend’s murder, and the barber sharpens his razor and scrapes the long, shiny instrument across his neck while commenting on how easy it would be for him to kill his clients. In Quattro mosche, the postman wears a dark shiny raincoat that recalls that of Roberto’s stalker. In each case, the camera lingers in close-ups on the dissociated objects: the typewriter, the razor, the dark shoes and the black raincoat, to make that object seem to carry information significant to the crime. Yet, Sam Dalmas, the barber, and the postman are clearly not the killers, in spite of the suggestive visual slippage, and so even as they are evoked, the limitations of such analogies are underlined: although the killer might wear a black raincoat, the black-raincoat-wearing postman is not an assassin, and attacking him (as Roberto does) is criminal, not self-defensive or cathartic. The writer, the barber, and the mailman, objectified, are themselves ‘framed’ cinematographically for crimes they did not commit. Thus, Argento’s films take on one of the specific problems of the evidential paradigm as Ginzburg describes it, that of developing adequate systems of identification for individuals.18 Other scenes make this notion even more literal. In L’uccello, Sam Dalmas trails a man in a distinctive yellow jacket and a bright blue cap after the man attempts to kill him. He pursues him into a hotel and asks a bellhop if he has seen a subject so described, and the bellhop nods and indicates a dark panelled doorway. Sam cracks the sliding doors to dramatically reveal a swath of yellow jacket, shown in close-up as a detail at the centre of the frame. As he slides the doors open and the camera pans up, however, we discover (with Sam, whose confused expression is foregrounded) that the room is full of identically dressed men, attendees of a boxing convention. This scene comes after one set in the crime station lab, in which the Commissario, flanked by high-tech computers printing out sheet after sheet of paper, shows Sam the developing profile of the killer: individuo di sesso maschile. eta’ approssimativa: 40 anni. altezza: tra metri 1,80–1,85. corporatura snella. capelli: colore castano scuro. peso: 75 kg. circa. [male. approx. 40 years. height 5’10” – 6’. thin. brown hair. 165 pounds].

Approximations of height and weight already indicate the subjective nature of these data. This anthropometric study recalls Ginzburg’s

216

Methods of Murder

description of a problem that Alphonse Bertillon encountered, when in 1879 he used techniques parallel to Lombroso’s to collect anthropometric data about criminals: ‘the principal defect in Bertillon’s anthropometric method was its purely negative quality. It permitted the exclusion, at the moment of identification, of individuals not corresponding to the data, but not the positive verification that two identical series of data referred to a single individual.’19 How, then, could the forces of order know for certain that two men did not share the same measurements? Argento’s film makes the prognosis for the investigation much worse: after sketching what seems to be a promising criminal profile, which appears on a dot-matrix printout that occupies the entire screen, the document scrolls up to confess that ‘i dati corrispondono a circa 150,000 uomini della citta’ [the data correspond to approximately 150,000 men in the city]. Thus, a chorus of evidence shows that, like the yellow-jacketed assailant, details of appearance only work if no one else can be described in the same terms. A description of 150,000 men in the city hardly constitutes a breakthrough in the case and, instead, highlights the limits of the elaborate technological mechanisms built to practise the science of crime. That the first descriptor on the list (‘individual of the male gender’) is blatantly wrong, since the killer is, in fact, a woman, reinforces the fragility of the law-enforcement strategy and the kind of case the police seek to build. Vivisecting the Subject: The Aesthetics of Criminal Science Although ‘satisfying’ moments of exposition conclude each film, Argento’s deconstruction of the effectiveness of the science of crime suggests that his obsession with delinquency serves another purpose. Critics often note the emergence of Argento’s signature camerawork in these first films, the shifting point-of-view shots that implicate the viewer.20 But there is more: in part by pushing the Lombrosian epistemology of crime in other, more aesthetic ways, the animal trilogy points the way to the dissolution of narrative that will characterize the masterful Profondo rosso. The most prevalent of these strategies involves fragmenting the subject (usually the victim of a crime, but also the criminal). The camera constantly frames details of bodies as part of its investigative strategy and, at times, dives into the living body. Most of the murder scenes represent violence only in pieces, replacing the direct representation of aggression with the disassembly of the victim

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

217

by the camera. In Quattro mosche, the camera depicts an early victim’s murder by framing only her supplicating hand, clawing at a park wall. The private investigator that Roberto hired is killed by lethal injection, and the camera zooms in to alternate between a frame first of the narrow swath of chest where the needle penetrates the flesh and then an odd, slightly blurry detail of his right eye and forehead. The final victim hides in a closet, and her face is visible in a narrow strip of light in the middle of a dark frame. When she is attacked, the camera captures only her head from the neck up as it slides down a flight of stairs, and a final, low-angle shot reveals her nose, wide-open eyes, and eyebrows, registering horrified surprise. L’uccello features a spectacular moment of vivisection in a murder scene midway through the film. As a victim lies prone on her bed and the killer waves a knife in the foreground, she opens her mouth to scream. In that moment, the camera moves in and out of her mouth, literally entering the victim’s body in an investigation of the anatomy of her fear. The scene was shot using the Snorkel, a camera that, Argento explains, works on the principle of endoscopy; it thus engages medical science for aesthetic ends.21 As in Lombroso’s work, the moment of death becomes an opportunity for a privileged understanding of the body, but although Argento’s camera work is clinical, his goals are not. Instead, somatic and emotional reactions to violence, captured as they unfold, offer occasions for different views of human beings, who assume new postures, flail limbs, and open eyes in ways they would not otherwise. In Il gatto, detailed shots of body parts again proliferate when victims are murdered, but a new technique emerges featuring, instead, the presence of the killer. An unseen figure wraps a noose around the neck of a photographer, working in his photo lab. The first shots capture the photographer’s hands in close-up as he grasps the cord around his neck, and then his open mouth, in a biologically suggestive frame of tongue, spit, and teeth, in an even closer shot. The ensuing, energetic montage juxtaposes these particulars of the victim’s body with extreme close-ups of the killer’s iris. This iris reappears frequently throughout the film, the distinctive fragment of the killer’s face blown up to occupy a disproportionately large space and long cinematic time. Gary Needham, remarking on this ocular recurrence, argues for its criminological significance: ‘The foregrounding of the iris, in extreme close-up, recalls not the aggressive eye of Argento’s later Profondo rosso (Deep Red), but rather the genetic trope of the iris as a unique physical characteristic (like the fingerprint).’22 Yet, this visual ‘fingerprinting’ also leads

218

Methods of Murder

nowhere; for all its visual interest, the striking, hazel eye fails to reveal the killer’s identity to viewers. Once again, criminological science – in particular, a Lombrosian collection of a particular bodily detail – cannot provide the kind of answer that would lead to the resolution of a case. Instead, the camera reveals an inability to perform this simple task of recognition, as it simultaneously exalts the beauty of the minute detail, a beauty that resides in large part in abstraction. The opening titles of Quattro mosche, the final film in the animal trilogy, comprise a visual demonstration of Argento’s anomalous form of vivisection. Roberto, a drummer in a rock band, rehearses with the other musicians; an imaginative montage captures overhead shots of the drums and adopts skewed angles that look down the long necks of electric guitars. An energetic soundtrack by Ennio Morricone runs, uninterrupted, as the titles intersperse flashbacks of Roberto noticing his stalker watching him through a window, trailing him in a park, or following him in a car. But the music stops abruptly when the screen flashes to black, and a graphic, veined beating heart appears, pounding, beside the film’s title. The heart, fleshy and shiny, appears to have the texture of a real organ, but the shape of a Valentine’s heart. The band’s music returns, accompanied by a sassy electric organ now, in a visual pun, only to be interrupted again by the heart. In the next musical sequence, the camera cuts to shoot from a dark space, observing the band through a circular aperture as if from a point of hidden surveillance. The focus shifts to reveal a set of strings dividing the space, and then a hand begins strumming: the perspective is from inside a guitar. The beating heart interrupts the music a final time, now appearing beside Argento’s name as he is credited for the screenplay and direction. In the concluding sequence, a fly annoys Roberto as he drums. The camera catches his eyes as they peer through the cymbals on his drum set, where the unfortunate fly has landed. The talented drummer closes the cymbals onto the fly, and then reopens them with a grin to reveal his dead prey. In this sequence, the plastically convincing but anatomically stylized heart signals the obsessive importance of the body’s interior in Argento’s cinema, although it shows that body as an object of artistic manipulation. The perspective from inside the guitar recalls the director’s ability to dive into his subjects with the penetrating skill of a scientist, although his interest in the inside is aesthetic, not pathological. The dark screen surrounding the guitar’s aperture is one of many dark spaces that temporarily fill Argento’s screens, focusing attention on what Deleuze calls the ‘interstice between two

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

219

images.’23 In Deleuze’s theory, a black screen carries a potentially ‘genetic’ value: ‘with its variations and tonalities, it acquires the power of a constitution of bodies.’24 And in Quattro mosche, the genetics of the scene acquires this power, as the beating heart interacts acoustically with the musical soundtrack, and the dark screen provides a counterpoint to the light in the park and the studio. The ‘real,’ beating heart, which might provoke a shiver of horror for its anatomical specificity, instead, beats in time with the soundtrack, indicating the crucial alignment between the opened body and Argento’s imaginative art. The vivisection of the subject, however violent in content, is thus the starting point for comprehending Argento’s transformation of criminal science into art. Fragments of the body literally lead us to the conclusion that this cinema wants us to see differently, but not necessarily understand what we see (or condemn or convict as a result of this visual evidence). Biological investigation serves as a means to an aesthetic, and not a cognitive or punitive end. One particular scene in the trilogy expresses Argento’s visual biology in spectacular terms, directly converting the organ of sight from abject fragment into aesthetic object. In Quattro mosche, police adopt a high-tech ‘scientific’ technique to attempt to track down the killer: they remove the victim’s eye in order to photograph the last image she saw, an image purportedly captured on her retina for several hours after her death. This scene, which gave the film its title, is based on ‘weird science of the most egregious kind,’ according to Maitland McDonagh.25 McDonagh notes that the superstition suggesting that the eye recorded the last image seen by the dead was popular in the nineteenth century, but in the context of the 1970s-era film, would have been long discredited.26 The police rush to extract the organ of sight catching, as Lombroso sought to do in his autopsies, the body poised in a state between life and death. In the laboratory, the eyeball, including the optic nerve, which hangs evocatively from the back, rests in horrifying view between the pincers of a high-tech machine as the camera closes in. A scientist turns off the lights in the room, and viewers are plunged into near-complete darkness for a moment. Then a switch is flipped, and the camera follows a long, red laser across the screen. The technician photographs the retina, and a mysterious image comes into soft focus on the screen. ‘They look like four flies,’ remarks the technician. The chief investigator agrees, and then asks, perplexed, ‘What does it mean?’ looking to Roberto. Unable to answer, Roberto is non-plussed by the brilliant science of crime at work. This virtuoso collection of data, while anec-

220

Methods of Murder

dotally interesting and scientifically accurate, leads to no helpful conclusion because it is abstracted from its context. ‘Science,’ albeit science based in superstition, fails to explain the evidence. In the space where a logical explanation might have resided, art emerges to perform its job, as the high-tech machine in the crime lab is, in fact, a camera and projector, and Argento’s camera follows its beams to show us how to look. That the victim’s eye carries the data necessary to resolve the crime is ridiculous science, but perfectly logical in Argento’s cinema. Science does not exist to explain, but rather to illustrate. The faculty of sight is the most important, and although what we see is cognitively impenetrable, its visual impact is clear.27 The revelation made possible by weird ocular science leads in the film’s final frames to a high-tech visual conclusion. The four flies of the title mean very little to the investigator, but they will eventually lead Roberto to recognize, in a pendant swinging from his wife’s neck (a fly suspended in amber), the killer before him. The final gaze of the dead woman rests on a hypnotic, swinging piece of jewelry (and not the killer’s face), evidence of the ability of art to transfix the viewer. In the final minutes, the play of light and shadows as Roberto waits for the killer provides a prolonged, suspenseful prelude to the film’s concluding act, Nina’s death in a car accident. Argento filmed Nina’s violent crash into the back of a heavy truck using the Pentazet, a camera borrowed from a university in East Germany that films thousands of frames per second. As Needham explains, when this film runs at normal theatrical speed, it ‘shows the image in a wholly different temporal register. It is not slow motion, as the image doesn’t drag or shudder, but flowing.’28 Along with criminal investigative technology, the director engages cutting-edge cinematic technology, changing the motive for lurking around the criminal subject from a pathological to an artistic one. In Quattro mosche, the solitary eye, perched alone for examination, formalizes the transition from biological to aesthetic investigation. The ability of science to solve the mysteries of the screen gives way to the logic of the eye. The animal trilogy redirects attention to the primacy of the image; in Profondo rosso, that image takes centre-stage. Profondo Rosso and the Biology of Crime The themes that underlie the initial trilogy continue to resonate in Profondo rosso, where the director perfects his aesthetic technique and furthers his assault on deterministic thinking. Scholars and critics agree

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

221

that Profondo rosso marks a turning point in Argento’s career. It is ‘il film che serve ad Argento per sbarazzarsi una volta per tutte di alcuni materiali e di alcune gravose eredità: prima fra tutte, quella hitchcockiana’ (the film that Argento needs in order to rid himself once and for all of certain material and of certain onerous inheritances: first of all, the Hitchcockian one);29 ‘the first of his truly accomplished works’;30 a ‘paradigmatic example of the visually excessive Dario Argento style’;31 ‘il film più celebrato di Dario Argento, il thriller per eccellenza, l’opera che ha ispirato e influenzato numerosi registi italiani e stranieri (Dario Argento’s most celebrated film, the thriller par excellence, the work that inspired and influenced numerous Italian and foreign directors).32 After Profondo rosso, ‘Argento sembra disporre con un controllo assoluto dei mezzi del linguaggio cinematografico, e sviluppare, altresì, un progetto che, perse certe salutari rozzezze degli esordi, compie definitivamente il salto verso un cinema d’autore coerente e riconoscibile’ (Argento seems to have all of the means of cinematographic language at his disposal; he seems to develop, likewise, a project that, having left behind some of the roughness of his first films, moves towards a coherent, recognizable auteurist cinema).33 It is also a film that inspired legions of writers of crime fiction after Argento.34 Profondo rosso functions as a cinematic manifesto, a dramatic filmic gallery through which to observe the director’s career. The primary colour that adorns the title of this, Argento’s most prominent work, indicates its distance from the animal trilogy by focusing principally on the aesthetic project realized as the narrative unfolds. In Profondo rosso, as in the animal trilogy, Argento absorbs popular understandings of deterministic scientific world views, and his narrative shudders at the potentially drastic ramifications of such categorical positions, initially for criminal subjects but ultimately, and more insistently, for his own cinema. These subjects, vivisected sometimes literally by the killer and other times metaphorically by the camera, might seem to meet violent, ignoble ends. But the human figures in Profondo rosso are deeply embedded in an aesthetic system meant to expose its own artifice, in what is arguably also a humanistic endeavour. The deaths, often cited by critics for their beauty, are moments of violent liberation from formal narrative and scientific strictures. The film follows the investigative meanderings of Marc Daly, played by actor David Hemmings.35 Marc, a jazz pianist by profession,36 witnesses the gruesome slaying of his neighbour Helga, a psychic, who unfortunately publicly intuited the murderous guilty conscience of an

222

Methods of Murder

audience member at a conference on parapsychology. Since his photograph is featured in the paper as a potential eye-witness to the killing (he is exposed by Gianna Brezzi, an intrepid and persistent journalist who wants to assist Marc in his investigations), Marc becomes another target for the murderer and self-defensively opts to look into the crime.37 Following a string of obscure clues, the pianist gradually gets closer to the killer. As he stumbles along his investigative path, his criminal nemesis forecasts every move, murdering the most important contacts in suspenseful sequences that climax in violent death, just before Marc can glean the information necessary to move ahead in the case. Profondo rosso’s camerawork vivisects the environment surrounding the victims. Just before Helga, the ‘seer,’ is killed in an early scene, it becomes evident that the camera’s non-invasive vivisection foreshadows a more violent physical attack. As Helga begins to suspect that something is amiss, a montage of rapid shots begins. The first is a cut to an extreme close-up of the upper quadrant of her face in profile: it focuses on her nervous eye, which appears, enormous, on the screen. Then, in eight following cuts of one second or less, the camera peers down the hallway, covered with paintings; it captures a sculpture of a giant seashell with direct, objective candour; it focuses on the door through which the killer will enter, then on the doorknob. ‘Sì, sono un po’ nervosa’ (Yes, I’m a little nervous), says Helga to her interlocutor on the phone, echoing the nervous energy of the camera. Immediately following this artistic vivisection of the German seer, the murderer bursts through the front door and begins a literal segmentation of her body. The parallel between the killer’s knife and the cinematographer’s camera suggests that blade and lens share the capacity to take apart the living human form. Although the narrative demonstrates an interest in the human form, it becomes clear that the real ‘scientist’ is the camera, which lurks around its most intimate details. The most repeatedly invoked corporeal fragment is the eye, whether Helga’s, Marc’s, or most often, the killer’s. The camera films the murderer’s eye in extreme close-up several times just before an attack. The massive orb fills the screen just before Helga is killed, while the killer applies a thick layer of black eyeliner. In a later scene, what appears to be the same shot turns out to be the eye upsidedown, a detail we distinguish when the camera rotates 180 degrees to right side-up. As in the animal trilogy, the camera forces us to experience the irony of our direct, penetrating gaze into the eye of the killer,

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

223

whom we will later not recognize in spite of seeing her eye in the larger context of her whole face. The upside-down eye evokes the killer’s distorted gaze, but it also emphasizes the curious, deceptive symmetry of the eye itself, which can be upside-down without revealing itself as such. Argento’s camera, once again, becomes a Lombrosian-style tool of measurement via which the particularities of the criminal subject are recorded for posterity. These techniques of cinematic vivisection, which complicate biological notions of criminality, build on the animal trilogy’s base. Profondo rosso, however, further dismantles the logic of the plot in order to conduct an even more penetrating study of the violent image. Distracted Detection In the context of investigation, we might expect the logic of the Deleuzian action-image to prevail. The action-image, which according to Deleuze is one of the kinds of movement-images in classical cinema, ‘presupposes a space in which ends, obstacles, means, subordinations, the principle and the secondary, predominances and loathings are distributed.’38 A classical story of detection would traditionally comprise such a space of ends, obstacles, and means, making certain clues important and subordinating other details of daily life to the thread of the investigation. Instead, Argento’s ‘cinema of the body’ is one in which ‘disparate sets overlap and rival each other, without being able to organize themselves according to sensory-motor schema.’39 The investigation is plagued by elements that rival its importance, overlapping its teleological progress and confounding organization. The difficulty of discerning the most important details in a number of scenes aligns the position of the spectator with that of the detective in Profondo rosso. Both spectator and detective struggle against a narrative that relentlessly diverts them from the course of the investigation. Distracted detection becomes another means for prohibiting narrative convention from dominating the film, and one that thus complements and strengthens the deconstruction of criminal science. While Marc performs the investigative task of amassing evidence, his attention to detail is often decidedly misdirected.40 In fact, narrative incoherence, not narrative continuity, dominates Profondo rosso, and Argento’s camera reflects this chaotic point of view.41 The disjunctive opening scenes of the film set the tone, initiating an artistic project of distraction that shifts the focus from tidy narrative

224

Methods of Murder

teleology to dramatic aesthetic image. A shot of a sunlit room interrupts the black backdrop of the opening titles. Against a brilliantly lit background, one shadow violently attacks another, and a knife falls to the ground at the feet of the androgynous legs of a child. A gentle children’s song accompanies the scene on the soundtrack, seemingly innocent until the cheerful melody modulates unexpectedly into a minor key. The opening titles return. Cut to a shot of a jazz band rehearsing in a spectacular, columned circular space; the camera circles behind the columns, and halts when the conductor (Marc Daly, the investigator) stops to chide the musicians: ‘Bello. Davvero. Va bene. Molto bene – forse un po’ troppo per bene. Troppo pulitino, sì, preciso – troppo formale. Deve essere più buttato via’ (Great! Really . . . really, that’s good. Very good. Maybe a little too good. Too clean. Yes, too precise. Too . . . formal. It should be more . . . trashy). His voice fades as the image does, and the camera cuts to the door of the Congresso di Parapsicologia. Suddenly, it moves through a theatre lobby and with a quiet, dramatic snap of fabric, red curtains are pulled aside. We move swiftly inside the red world: red curtains, red seats, and red fabric covering the table on a stage where three figures sit. The camera zooms in at a low angle, jump-cuts to peer from a balcony, jumps back down, shooting the figures from the audience, from above, from the opposite balcony. The strange juxtaposition of these initial scenes, their jarring discontinuity, prevents both narrative and viewer from settling into complacency or relaxing into the predictable tide of generic convention. As often happens in Argento’s cinema, camerawork anticipates and subsequently echoes dialogue: ‘too tidy,’ suggests Marc; ‘too precise.’ The jumpy sequence that follows, although far from ‘trashy,’ prefers an anarchic mix of perspectives to an easily identifiable optic point of view. Anarchy accompanies Marc in his investigations, foiling his efforts to understand events as they unfold. The piano-player-turned-detective makes phone calls, for example, from the most improbable locations. He uses a pay phone in the middle of a highway with traffic screaming by in both directions; he shouts above the noise of animated voices, ringing bells, and clanking plates in a café and is scalded by a milk steamer as he talks; he makes a phone call to Gianna, who answers in the midst of a press room equally abuzz in the chaos of voices, typewriters, ringing phones; he meets Professor Giordani in the middle of a crowded market, where singing, shouting, and general confusion prevail. In these scenes, Marc’s voice is drowned out by more insistent and

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

225

more assertive sounds, the thread of his investigation subordinated to the visual and audible cacophony around him. Even more jarring, however, are disconnected scenes of aggression. One occurs during a phone call, when the camera briefly and unexplainably cuts from Marc to two men sitting in the café, arguing and banging their fists against the counter. Another is a cut, contextually divorced from the rest of the film, to a scene of two dogs fighting savagely in the middle of a street. These scenes constitute the visual equivalent of being taken by the shoulders and shaken: they are violent, kinetic reminders that coherence and continuity are not the most important things about this film. The strange montage forces emotional detachment, requiring viewers to confront Argento’s cinema as cinema, and not simply as a cunning narrative. While Marc’s role as detective-figure suggests that he must be a restorer of order, the constant incursion of chaos in the visual universe that surrounds him compromises his authority in this realm. Although the killer’s violence surpasses the harsh reality of the market, the highway, or the dogfight, the film’s focus on these scenes of cruelty suggests a problem that transcends the investigation itself. And while these moments of random violence are reminders of the kinetic potential of cinema, they also interrupt the linearity of the narrative, tucking discrete cinematic snapshots into what otherwise might appear to be a forward-moving teleology. They create an undecidability that, in failing to unify the narrative, rather allows it to be ‘dispersed’ in the ‘‘plurality of ways of being present’’ that for Deleuze characterize the cinema of the body.42 Thus, by using the investigative setting as a foil, Argento draws back the curtains of the narrative to reveal what Pier Paolo Pasolini suggests always underlies linear stories: the monstrous substratum of oneiric im-signs, or image-signs, drawn from a shadowy world of imagistic chaos. His cinema, thus, ‘frees itself of function and presents itself as “language as such” – style.’43 Ultimately, Argento’s ‘art of darkness,’ his focus on the dark recesses of human bodies, is part of a strategy that hacks open not only victims but also narrative itself, allowing aesthetic rather than investigative concerns to surface. Detective and viewer are together distracted from curiosity about the outcome of the investigation by the powerful images that surround them. Argento focuses his system around the form of the human body, elevating its fascinating and often bloody depths as the ultimate work of art.

226

Methods of Murder

The Art of Investigation Cesare Lombroso’s collection of evidence strayed into the realm of the artistic as he reported violent anecdotes of crime using lively language. Argento’s cinema delves wholly into the collapse of the divide between science and art as he converts the science of investigation into an aesthetic strategy. Marc’s investigation focuses on a succession of clues, most connected to a sister art: there is the haunting children’s song that Helga associated with the crime; the book, Fantasmi di Oggi e Leggende dell’Età Moderna, which contains a photograph of the villa where a crime associated with the mysterious children’s song apparently took place; the drawing on a wall of the abandoned mansion that he initially uncovers and then seeks to identify. His role as detective thus proceeds from that of music critic (he attempts to find significance in the notes of the children’s symphony heard before each of the murders); student of architecture (he studies the photograph of the villa attentively to identify its whereabouts); and art historian (he scrapes away the layers of colour which cover a childlike drawing on a wall of the villa). This final obsession, the crudely depicted murder scene appearing twice – both on the villa wall and in a sketch done by a child at the suggestively named Scuola Leonardo da Vinci – merges with Marc’s continual perplexity at the missing element in the apartment hallway.44 Together, these clues link detection to the interpretation of image. Were Marc able to understand the drawing, were he capable of calling to mind the exact image of the corridor at the time of the murder, the puzzle pieces would begin to cohere into an unfragmented, narratively significant image. From the first frames, the film creates a performative world of theatre and art, peopled with actors who self-consciously represent themselves as such. When the heavy red drapes are swept aside as the camera enters the conference on parapsychology, not only are we enveloped in colour, but in theatrics, in artifice, in fiction. The substitution of the relatively stable camerawork of the previous scenes with the unearthly or at least multiple points of view of the cameras inside the theatre prevents the viewers from deciding whether their role is that of stalker or of prey. Implicit when the curtains sweep open is the sense that they will also fall closed behind us. The film to come, it follows, is a theatrical staging, and we as viewers are enveloped in the deep red world within.45 When Professor Giordani later recounts the moment when Helga sensed the presence of evil in the room, a cut brings the

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

227

spectator to the stage of the theatre featured at the film’s beginning. Moving across the stage dramatically, the professor, triply an actor (Glauco Mauri is a noted stage actor in Italy, an actor in Profondo rosso, and now a re-enactor of a preceding moment in the film) exactly repeats Helga’s words in a dramatic recollection of her moment of illfated awareness of evil. The two men who flanked Helga as she sat on stage explain that the lights glaring onstage blinded them, rendering them unable to see the person she indicated with a trembling finger. As Marc, the professors, and Gianna gaze out into the empty theatre from the stage, bright white lights obstruct their vision and that of the viewers of the film, the dusty beams baldly exposing the artifice of the stage and the mechanisms of cinema. Argento’s cinematic art is unveiled on several occasions before the killer strikes, in elongated interim shots in which the camera, in extreme close-up, moves over a black surface where strange, brilliantly coloured childlike objects are scattered: a doll crib on rockers (immediately knocked over), a red yarn voodoo doll filled with pins, a rough drawing of a person being stabbed, a colourful braid of yarn, a group of marbles. The camera caresses the items in such great close-up that they move in and out of focus; it is only when it nears the end of its pan that two sinister wood-handled knives appear, retrospectively colouring the strange scene with malice. The shot ends as a black-gloved hand plucks a plastic baby doll from the assortment; the camera then cuts to an enormous eye, to which black eyeliner is being applied, filling the entire screen. Does the group of objects comprise a sidelong reference to the victims? To methods of murder? A clue to the killer’s identity? The scenes following will discount any particular correspondence between object and victim, object and method, object and assassin; the explosion of colour on the black background, the minute attention to detail in the painstaking movement of the camera across the surface, and the pounding soundtrack acquire significance through their lack of significance. The scene is one of pedagogical value: it exposes viewers to a repertory of objects from which an idea can spring, shows the precision with which these images can be portrayed, and suggests the arbitrary beauty of the object. Divorced from any scenic context, the articles foreshadow death but do not constitute a clue. Or rather, they offer a clue, but not of the kind we expect in a detective story. Instead, this clue shows how to read Argento’s cinema, how to relate as viewers to the spectacular dramatic images that boldly occupy the screen. This is the imagistic and conceptual toolkit on which the director can

228

Methods of Murder

draw, and his cinema interpolates any number of cultural artifacts on the same plane, interrupting the hierarchies of values, mixing kitsch bloodshed with refined references to art. Reshaping ‘Reality’ These artistic citations are more than passing frames depicting works of art: they are the very spatial settings in which the plots of Argento’s films unfold. The films’ sets and the spaces through which Argento’s characters move meld distinctive architectural and art historical images and anonymous structures. They mix together different cities and constructed set pieces with on-location shots in the creation of an imagistic hybrid: Le strade, le case, gli oggetti, sembrano pervasi da una misteriosa, oscura vita segreta. L’ambiente nel quale si muovono i personaggi di Dario Argento, prede e cacciatori, non è mai né completamente immaginario né del tutto realistico. Si tratta di un territorio di confine, un paesaggio ibrido, che comunica contemporaneamente consuetudine e straniamento. Nonostante possa apparire del tutto familiare e perfettamente riconoscibile nel suo manifestarsi, è un sistema instabile, cangiante, in bilico. Prospettive possibili e impossibili combaciano alla perfezione nella stessa struttura architettonica, come nelle stampe di Cornelis Escher.46 [The streets, the houses, the objects seem to be pervaded by a mysterious, dark secret life. The atmosphere in which Dario Argento’s characters move – both prey and hunters – is never completely imaginary nor completely realistic. It’s a borderland, a hybrid landscape, that simultaneously communicates familiarity and estrangement. Although it might appear familiar and perfectly recognizable, it’s an unstable system, changing, hovering. Possibile and impossible perspectives are perfectly joined in the architectural structure, like in prints by Cornelis Escher.]

The director sometimes films a single work on location in different cities, fitting blocks together to create his new, uniquely cinematic space. Milan, Turin, and Rome, for example, are seamlessly edited together to form an apparently unitary set piece. In this way, the sets fashion a wall-less museum, an interstitial space that, like an art museum, draws freely on a heterogeneous repertory to create itself as cohesive institution.47

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

229

The most striking set in Profondo rosso is part real-life piazza in Turin, part filmic construction. One of the most iconic images to appear in this cinematic museum has often been pointed out by critics, the ‘Bluebar’ inspired by Edward Hopper’s iconic painting ‘Night Hawks.’ The citation of the renowned painting introduces, according to Giulia Carluccio, ‘una alterazione o una contaminazione immaginaria nello scenario realistico dell’architettura del luogo’ (alteration or imaginary contamination in the realistic backdrop of the architecture of the place) which serves to heighten our sense of the reality of the scene.48 Although the brightly lit bar is at times peopled with silhouettes of immobile figures, Hopper’s painting, a life-sized set piece in Profondo rosso, becomes a space around which and through which the characters move. The twodimensionality of the original painting, the existential isolation represented in the frozen isolation of three anonymous figures who sit in a bar with no depicted door, is shaken from its numbness in Profondo rosso by the violent actions and impassioned conversations that take place in and around it. The reconstruction of the painting, a cinematic tableau vivant, ironically becomes a tableau mort when it is the site from which Marc witnesses Helga’s death in a window above the piazza. The killer, clad in a dark raincoat, also crosses the space as she disappears into the night.49 Art becomes vital because it is involved in the human traffic of life and death; contact with three-dimensional, mortal figures in the film enlivens Hopper’s painting. Vibrant art and sick, dying bodies: the film elevates the vital nature of aesthetic representation while laying bare the fragile and temporary nature of human existence. The other locus of primary importance in the film is the abandoned villa where a murder was committed years before. On an investigative ramble, Marc enters the monumental house and begins looking around. The shot sequences in this episode are extremely varied, and the camera seems to seek new angles, frames, silhouettes, and spaces. It shoots Marc from directly above, captures his shadow, and then cuts to an extreme close-up of his face, showing only his moving eyes and forehead. By segmenting his face and isolating his eyes, these shots shift focus to the architectural and artistic monuments around them. They thus create a logical chain that links our own viewing experience to that of the observation of objects. The elongated sequence of wandering through the villa, accompanied by an energetic musical soundtrack, constitutes a narrative errare, in the sense both of an artistic wandering around the vast, beautiful space of the mansion and in erring, losing

230

Methods of Murder

the most linear path of the narrative. Marc’s wanderings do eventually lead him to discover a clue that assists his investigations, but this cinematic digression is drastically out of proportion with the interest of narrative directness. Theodor Adorno has suggested that there is a certain continuity between museums and death, pointing out that the German word ‘museal’ describes objects in the process of dying.50 The cinematic museum of horror represents a strategic space of indiscernibility, the encounter of Lombroso’s criminological museum and a museum of art. In Argento’s cinema, each work of art is actually the process of dying, and in spite of this grim perspective, achieves vibrant immediacy. Whereas Beccarian narratives, like those of Sciascia and Camilleri, shy away from penetrating the sacred space of the body, Argento plunges in, delighting in the possibilities afforded by parting the curtains on the spectacle of the human form. The height of such artistic death is reached in moments when characters are actually killed, or almost, by works of art: in L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Sam Dalmas is trapped under a giant modern sculpture as the killer closes in on him; at the beginning of Suspiria, a woman is killed by falling pieces of an enormous stained glass window in what Luigi Cozzi aptly called ‘un’esemplare sinfonia di morte’ (an exemplary symphony of death);51 author-killer Peter Neal is impaled in the final scene of Tenebre on the sharp edges of a strange metal sculpture; a young woman in Inferno, having just been stabbed, staggers through an enormous, filmy blue curtain that first fills the entire screen and becomes, in the last moments of her life, a beautiful, mobile ars moriendi. As the blood of the victims commingles with the cold materials of the work of art, aesthetics literally takes on the role of a decisive part of the ebb and flow of human existence and the depleted bodies stumble into the halls of enduring artistic images. Accompanied by the energetic soundtrack performed by the Goblins, each of the victims’ final moments in Profondo rosso are an explosion of movement, colour, and sound. Helga dies impaled on shards of a fractured window pane; the writer Amanda Righetti is scalded to death in a bathroom dramatically transfigured by the steaming hot water; the professor is distracted from the killer’s presence by a dancing mechanical puppet, planted in front of him to keep him from noticing the attack from behind; the killer herself is decapitated when her necklace is caught in an elevator shaft. Violence is stylized, and blood gushes too red and too viscous to really be blood. The images, like the ones Steven Shaviro discusses in Godard’s cinema, are aestheticized ‘precisely to

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

231

the extent that they insist before, and persist beyond, the act of recognition that stabilizes and rationalizes perception.’52 When knives and hatchets sink into the victim’s flesh in Argento’s cinema, viewers shudder in horror even as they admire the elaborateness of the spectacle. These are bodies, Argento emphasizes, which are real and yet not real; the flesh penetrated by the sharp blades of his arsenal reveals, when wounded, the brilliant colour of cinematic artifice. And yet, artifice allows his camera to approach the human form and to access a liminal realm, that between life and death. This artistic deceit locates Argento’s scientistic poeticism safely in the realm of fiction, far from the prescriptive worlds of medicine, justice, and law. Artistic Rebellion through the Body In Argento’s cinema of the body, which incessantly transgresses the life/death divide, ‘all the components of the image’53 come together on the body of Carlo’s mother, and on actress Clara Calamai. Throughout the film, her body is caught between moments in cinematic time, contains the ‘before and the after,’ and focalizes the deconstruction of criminological and cinematic logic.54 Through specific semi-biographical references, Profondo rosso writes itself as a kind of sequel to Calamai’s earlier career. Proudly recalling her days of glory as an actress in the cinema, Calamai’s character claims: ‘Io sono attrice. O meglio, ero attrice. Guardi quelle foto – che ne dice? Ero brava o no?’ (I’m an actress. Or rather I was an actress. That’s me in all those photos. What do you think? Was I good or what?). The photographs in question are a gallery of still shots from films that Calamai herself starred in; the pictures adorn the wall of her apartment, and the camera cuts to individual frames of the photographs, invoked in close-up such that in several instances they entirely fill the frame, constituting, for the space of a few seconds, the entirety of Profondo rosso. These frames form part of the film’s family tree: the characters Calamai played in previous, primarily Fascist-era costume dramas, are part of her own cinematic lineage, but the films themselves are part of a celluloid genetic strand to which Profondo rosso also belongs. As the character looks up at her photo gallery, cinematic and historical time collapse to form a multifaceted image whose multiple sides reflect the ‘hidden ground of time, that is, its differentiation into two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved.’55 The stills from previous films become non-simultaneous mirrors that reflect the multiple sides of the

232

Methods of Murder

diva, and confuse the lines between character and actress. In part film archive, they safeguard frozen images from the cinematic past on more contemporary film stock; but the montage of disconnected photographs also freezes Marc’s investigative progress to concentrate, instead, on the imprecise relationship between Carlo’s mother, Calamai, and the photographs of her adorning her walls. The scene is a moment in which the relationship between present and past is complicated: is Carlo’s mother supposed to be Clara Calamai? Is this role a cameo? Which of the multiple pasts in the photo gallery are we supposed to believe? The montage of still shots becomes a crystalline description, as described by Deleuze, that stands for Calamai; each still, captured in Argento’s moving image, ‘constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, display, or modify the preceding ones.’56 This crystal-image reflects her past and present, but also the future of Argento’s cinema. The black-and-white photographs and Calamai’s dramatic black-and-white clothing contrast starkly with the deep red of the film’s title, associating her cinema and her glory with a visually different era, an era that Argento’s film honours but hopes to surpass. The photos break cinema apart into its component parts, simultaneously dissolving the continuity of the filmic image and advising viewers to consider the significance of the still frame. In spite of her pride in her former status as star, as Carlo’s mother, Calamai seems to play a relatively minor role: piano-playing detective Marc Daly is dismissive of her, and her marginality reinforces our suspicion that an actress so universally acclaimed for her physical beauty must be eclipsed when that beauty is marked by the lines of age. But in the film’s final moments, when we discover that Carlo’s mother is the assassin who has disposed of a string of other characters, we realize, in retrospect, that she has actually been a maleficent but cloaked presence in much of the rest of the film. The fatal neck wound inflicted on Calamai, who is in fact decapitated, signals the defeat of the killer, but also leads us to acknowledge the sudden success of the actress who is revealed to be a diva, albeit of a different kind, after all. In this moment, Carlo’s mother reveals that her true cinematic lineage is not exclusively that of the Fascist-era films recalled by the stills on her walls; rather, she enters in dialogue with a canonical cinematic tradition that, like her identity as killer, is hidden but significant.57 The film stills on the wall act as red herrings, suggesting a nostalgia for the kind of cinema that functions via wish-fulfilment. They are false clues, though, because just as the elderly woman is not who she

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

233

seems, Argento cannot be reductively dismissed for his predilection for genre cinema. Profondo rosso’s back-story, revealed through flashbacks, supports the idea that Carlo’s mother represents a crucial statement on Argento’s cinema. In a sequence that interrupts the final chase scene, a flashback in which we witness the young mother murdering her husband, we discover that Carlo’s mother acted in an attempt to pursue a more vibrant life. Following the advice of doctors, her spouse sought to confine her to a ‘clinic,’ and to escape this fate, the desperate woman, instead, murdered her spouse as her young son looked on. In this moment, both Carlo’s mother and Calamai are constructed in memory, incarnating, as Deleuze quotes Fellini, ‘simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity.’58 Carlo’s mother struggles against her biology and against a positivist system that would seek to label and confine her as a danger to society. She thus joins the aforementioned protagonists of the animal trilogy and prefigures a host of Argentian protagonists that later will complicate the relationship between the pathologies of crime and the system of punishment.59 In the societies Argento depicts, received attitudes towards criminality continue to exist in a contemporary positivist framework, a context in which an ‘anatomy of deviant and dangerous bodies’ classifies and condemns.60 Whether the science of the body is intended for good, but goes wrong (Trauma, Phenomena), offers condemning evidence that leads to crime (Profondo rosso, Il gatto a nove code), or simply fails to take into account the horrific reasons that can motivate crime (La sindrome di Stendhal), ultimately medicalizing absolutism leads Argento’s killers to resist, violently. Like the animal trilogy, Profondo rosso points out that if society operates according to a Lombrosian belief in the unerring objectivity of psychological and genetic designations, ‘criminal’ men and women are forced to realize biological destinies that might not otherwise have been preordained, were it not for the categorizing impulse of science. Yet, imprisonment was not the only confinement that Carlo’s mother faced at the hands of her husband. As Calamai admires photos of herself and expresses nostalgia for her cinematic past, she laments: ‘Quando ho sposato il papà di Carlo [. . .] ha voluto che smettessi la mia carriera . . . tutto . . . tutto finito’ (When I married Carlo’s father, he wanted me to quit my career . . . all . . . all over). Her fictional spouse insisted that she end her career as diva, and thus she was doubly marginalized as clinically unstable and artistically unrealized. Murder freed her to

234

Methods of Murder

live outside of the mental institution; but it also freed her to reach old age and to star in Argento’s film (neither as a woman confined to an institution nor as docile housewife would she have had this opportunity). On the level of plot, the murders vindicate Carlo’s mother’s/Calamai’s truncated cinematic career. Visually, they justify the actress’s cinematic career, creating a new kind of beauty dependent upon kinetics and colour, and not on the beauty of youth. The connection between mental instability and art, rendered explicit at the end of the film, provides a new framework through which to read the film, and the key connection between Lombrosian science and Argentian aesthetics. Argento’s reclaiming of Calamai as a new kind of criminal reflects the ideology of his cinema and informs his aesthetic sense, making it possible to see Argento’s schizophrenic camerawork and dismantling of traditional frameworks of detection as a form of empathy for the marginalized view of the killer. His films dispute not the confinement of dangerous criminals, however, but rather the absolutist categorization of science. The societies in the films struggle in discomfort at the loss of the irrational (at the behest of the ultimate rationality imposed by enlightened and positivist science), a loss that threatens art itself. The killer in Profondo rosso, whose husband would have ostracized her for her peculiar vision of reality, makes Argento’s breed of cinema possible. Disjunctive camerawork, subjective shots, the hyper-saturated colour palette and startling editing practices are let loose thanks to the eccentric minds that are the impetus for Argento’s films. Yet, Calamai, cast as a solitary maniac, also represents Argento’s uneasiness with cinema criticism that he accuses of functioning with the same deterministic world view of certain science. Profondo rosso came out in 1975, a time when political violence at the hands of extremist groups was rampant; it was a violent moment in the ‘anni di piombo,’ the ‘years of lead’; the massacres at Piazza della Loggia in Brescia and on the train from Rome-Brennero both happened in 1974, just before Argento made the film. Some critics have wondered whether the ‘red’ in the film’s title and the bloodshed in its plot, are connected to this phenomenon. On the other end of the spectrum, many criticized the film (and Argento more generally) for a lack of political engagement, going so far as to describe it as ‘fascist.’61 Yet, Argento specifically refutes this kind of criticism, rejecting a critical approach that long characterized Italian reception of film. It was an approach he initially participated in: Argento spent a number of years in the mid-1960s as a film critic writ-

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

235

ing for the newspaper Paese Sera, a publication tied to the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano). In his own preface to a book of collected writings on cinema, Argento remembers the time spent at Paese Sera with affection and embarrassment, citing in regards to this latter his necessary adherence to the party line: Il giornale aveva una filosofia e una strada che noi dovevamo percorrere. E se sbagliavi venivi ripreso. Dovevi stare sempre nel solco del giornale. Così oggi arrossisco a leggere certi miei articoli, così pervasi da ardori politici esagerati. E alcune recensioni mi fanno vergognare. Paese Sera, pur essendo uno dei quotidiani più vivaci d’Italia, era tuttavia un giornale emanazione di un partito, il PCI, e nella linea del partito bisognava stare.62 [The journal had a philosophy and a path that we had to follow. And if you made a mistake, you were reprimanded. You always had to follow the paper’s line. So today I blush reading some of my articles, so permeated with exaggerated political zeal. And some reviews embarrass me. Even if Paese Sera was one of the most vibrant dailies in Italy, it was still a paper that came from a party, the PCI, and one had to stay within the party line.]

Argento’s mortification at his clear, party-line criticism reflects a turning away from the devoted adherence to the idea of a politically engaged cinema, the kind of thinking that characterized a generation of well-known directors before him. And his resistance to what he perceives as the confines of political cinema is played out as he celebrates and then mutilates Clara Calamai. The film’s denouement involves a sort of art-historical investigation by Marc Daly, who realizes that he has seen the killer before. Earlier, in a hallway of the apartment where the first murder happened, he observed a gallery of paintings and recalled having seen something anomalous but fleeting in one of them. In the final scene, he at last realizes that one of the paintings was actually a mirror reflecting a painting, and that he had seen the killer – Carlo’s mother – reproduced at its centre. Once again, Calamai is part of a gallery of images that crosses temporal boundaries, linking the beginning of the film to the end. The camera oscillates between Marc’s flashback and his present investigation, between Calamai as a static monument of the past and Calamai as an active, perilous presence. Since, initially, we all proceed to be dismissive of the aging diva, we too, are implicated in Argento’s accusation that the viewing public lives insistently in the cinematic

236

Methods of Murder

past. When the past forcibly detaches itself from the wall, armed with a meat cleaver, she – and thus, Argento’s cinema – can no longer be ignored. As the closing credits roll, the detective contemplates his own image in the brilliant red puddle of blood at the base of the decapitated head of the female assassin. Narratively speaking, the substance on the ground is the life-blood of the female protagonist, even though its strange viscosity and unnaturally brilliant hue belie its verisimilitude. Marc Daly’s intense but placid gaze in the face of an apparently horrific moment leads viewers into the depths of the ‘profondo rosso’: the deep red is above all an intense colour, a profoundly imagistic experience of self, of art, of cinema. And this experience emanated, literally, from the body of Clara Calamai. Argento, then, might be said to use Calamai in order to ask the Deleuzian, ‘archaeological question of what [cinema] is in the present, what its history is, and what it can become.’63 His is a cynical (yet celebratory) view of affairs, representing his reluctance to agree to be this kind of young intellectual, the inheritor of this particular kind of cinema. This attitude is reflected in his own understanding of his critical reception in Italy, an attitude that seems to contain equal measures of pride and resentment: In Italia quasi tutti i critici sono contro di me, ed è una situazione strana ma anche divertente . . . I critici mi amano moltissimo in Francia. Invece in Italia, se si esclude qualche giovane critico, la maggior parte non dice che i miei film sono brutti e fatti male ma che sono film ignobili. Forse è il mio modo di fare cinema che li irrita.’64 [In Italy almost all the critics are against me, and it is a strange situation but also an amusing one . . . The critics love me in France. In Italy, instead, excluding a few young critics, the majority doesn’t say that my films are ugly and badly made but that they are ignoble films. Maybe it’s the way that I make cinema that irritates them.]

By casting an aging diva as a new kind of anti-heroine, Argento wages his frustration at the idea that cinema can, or should (or can still) appeal to the collective social conscience. The crisis in his film is the crisis of the unpredictable, the extreme, the incongruous, and such issues do not easily lend themselves to collective political action. The act of physical mutilation that Profondo rosso performs in its final scene is the last act of Calamai’s career, a leave-taking that might also seem to suggest a death-knell for a certain kind of cinema.

Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence

237

When Argento opts to physically dismantle the diva, his visually overdetermined space, the bright red blood that accumulates in a pool in front of her, is thus simultaneously a refusal and an affirmation. In littering Profondo rosso with intertextual references to the actress’s cinematic past, Argento creates, instead of ’embodied discourse’ (which allowed filmmakers in generations before him to make bodies do their ideological bidding),65 a cinema of the body.66 Calamai’s presence in the film’s multiple galleries (of paintings, of photographs) allows Profondo rosso to cross ‘the threshold of a new kind of perception, one that is below or above the human. This new perception is multiple and anarchic, nonintentional and asubjective; it is no longer subordinated to the requirements of representation and idealization, recognition and designation.’67 The incompatible image systems that comprise the film grant her body artistic autonomy, the freedom to exist as a forceful, provocative figure. By way of its excess, art in Argento’s cinema overtakes narrative, setting his troubled protagonists free from their Lombrosian criminal diagnoses and protesting critical verdicts on his films. The end of Profondo rosso not only signals the end of a psychotic killer, but hopes to herald a new era of aesthetically obsessed cinema: a pronouncement that spills in horrifying, luminous colour from the body of Clara Calamai.

8 Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

Deep Red Turns Almost Blue Early in Carlo Lucarelli’s novel Almost Blue (1997), serial killer Alessio Crotti stares at his reflection in a red pool of blood, the gory chaos resulting from his most recent crime.1 Taking this narrated image as a point of departure, Carlo Lucarelli draws on the canonical final frame of Argento’s Profondo rosso. This act of homage on the part of the younger writer indicates Lucarelli’s appreciation for Argento’s ‘art of darkness,’ visible in his aesthetics of violence. Notwithstanding vivid similarities linking the two artists, and in spite of Lucarelli’s confessed obsession with Argento’s 1975 film, the younger author’s multi-media universe pushes the dark art of crime fiction in new directions.2 Born in 1960, Lucarelli belongs to the next generation of writers of investigative fiction and, with Camilleri, has been one of the key contributors to its prolific visibility in Italy at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Lucarelli haunts the Italian airwaves and best-seller lists, and in recent years has become a ubiquitous presence in contemporary culture: Carlo Lucarelli il romanziere. Carlo Lucarelli lo scrittore di racconti. Carlo Lucarelli lo sceneggiatore di fumetti, l’autore di testi teatrali e radiofonici. Ma anche Carlo Lucarelli il giornalista, il protagonista del mondo editoriale e l’appassionato di musica, tanto da aver fatto parte di un gruppo punk. Ma anche Carlo Lucarelli – non dimentichiamolo – il presentatore televisivo. Tante figure per un solo uomo, tante sfaccettature per raccontare a proprio modo la vita e la morte, gli amori, i conflitti di ieri e di oggi.3

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

239

[Carlo Lucarelli the novelist. Carlo Lucarelli the writer of short stories. Carlo Lucarelli the scriptwriter for comic strips, the author of theatrical and radio scripts. But also Carlo Lucarelli the journalist, the protagonist of the editorial world and the musical enthusiast, so much so that he was part of a punk group. But also Carlo Lucarelli – let us not forget – the television presenter. So many figures for one man, so many facets from which he can recount life and death, the loves, the conflicts of yesterday and today.]

Lucarelli’s career reveals his flexibility in terms of media; in similar fashion, many of his works incorporate a remarkable fluidity of perspectives, tones, periods, and styles, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, literature and science. Like Argento’s, his career (and his oeuvre) seems to gravitate around the transgression of boundaries: professional, narrative, mediatic, and corporeal. But, where Argento’s work consistently pushes the science of crime into the realm of the aesthetic, Lucarelli’s fiction often moves in the opposite direction. A trilogy of experimental, postmodern novels actually engage imaginative narrative strategies to serve a contemporary criminological program characterized by strong echoes of Lombrosian thought. Lucarelli’s understanding of criminal science leads him to cast serial killer protagonists in a series of three novels, and to give each of these an animal nickname and bestial qualities. Although the serial killers exist in fragmentary narratives that stylistically destabilize the workings of the investigation, their atavistic natures expose a tendency, evident in Lombrosian science, to separate the criminals’ ‘human’ and ‘animal’ qualities. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theories of the anthropological machine, I argue that this particular manifestation of Lombrosian thought in Lucarelli’s fiction situates his work in a ‘space of exception’ where both animal life and human life are ‘separated and excluded from [themselves],’ leaving ‘only a bare life.’4 Lucarelli’s texts offer complex experimental possibilities in narrative terms, but they also run the risk of essentializing their human protagonists, and most of all, the criminals at their core. Multiformity is a theme in a number of Lucarelli’s most popular works of crime fiction. In a trilogy of noir novels that follow serial killer protagonists and the high-tech police squads that track them, Lucarelli chronicles what Jean Baudrillard has described as the invasive violence of the postmodern condition. Lupo mannaro (1994) [The Werewolf ], Almost Blue (1997), and Un giorno dopo l’altro (2000) [One

240

Methods of Murder

Day after the Next], which all feature the young police investigator Grazia Negro, are polyphonic novels, narrated alternately from the point of view of the serial killer, the investigative police squads, and innocent bystanders who somehow become involved in the cases. Rife with the intellectual noise of police scanners, heavy-metal music, super-computers, and Internet chatrooms, the novels stage the schizophrenic condition of the subject in the postmodern world that Baudrillard illustrates in ‘The Ecstasy of Communication.’ Extreme alienation or electronic ‘encephalization,’ which according to Baudrillard, often makes our body appear ‘simply superfluous,’ plays a central role in these contemporary narratives of crime.5 In the novel Almost Blue, perhaps the most high-tech of the trilogy, Commissario Vittorio Poletto and his division exemplify the complex exteriorization of interior details at the hand of technology. Poletto heads up the scientific branch of the police force, specifically the newly formed UACS (Unità per l’Analisi di Crimini Seriali) (22). The UACS forms part of the Italian police force, embedded in a series of complicated anagrams attesting to its impersonal precision – ‘Un po’ come il VICAP dell’FBI,’ the agency uses the SCIPS (Sistema Centrale Informatico della Polizia Scientifica) (23), the SASC (Sistema di Analisi della Scena del Crimine), and the SART (Sistema Automatico per i Rilievi Tecnici) to track down suspected repeat offenders (22–4). With profiles of victims and criminals fed into the super-computer, the SCIPS, the SASC, and the SART conduct elaborate comparative studies that seek to find correspondences between different cases, flagging the sinister presence of a serial killer in otherwise apparently unrelated crimes. The work they call ‘Consulenza Preventiva’ is none other than predictive criminal profiling à la Lombroso, a high-tech mode of recording and predicting the behaviour of contemporary uomini delinquenti. In the process, while the narrative follows Grazia’s mouse as it negotiates and clicks through layer after layer of data, we see the human being become measureable, traceable, quantifiable – criminal, victim, and police force adrift on the information highway. Baudrillard diagnoses this kind of postmodern condition as a contemporary Stendhal Syndrome, and the subject of such a condition as a ‘schizo.’ Living in a technologically overdetermined world, suggests Baudrillard, this ‘schizo’: is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion [. . .] What characterizes him is less the loss of the real,

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

241

the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said: but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat. It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.6

The serial killers in each of the three novels are victims of this contemporary mediatic schizophrenia, unable to retreat from the noisy, mediadriven exterior world that invades their psychic and physical existence. Ingegner Velasco in Lupo mannaro envisions himself as Jack Nicholson in The Shining as he kills a victim. In Almost Blue, Alessio Crotti, known as the Iguana, listens constantly to heavy-metal music on headphones, attempting to shut out the infernal bells he hears otherwise. Vittorio, known as the Pit Bull, accepts lethal assignments through Internet chatrooms in Un giorno dopo l’altro. In each case, the killer’s willingness to extinguish human lives is based on an inability to respect boundaries, a condition that seems to be caused in part by the overly intimate proliferation of sounds, communiqués, and images in the contemporary world. Lurking behind the technologically complicated networks of influence, however, there exists the spectre of a much older, positivist concept of criminality, an epistemological concern that ties Lucarelli’s narratives, conceptually speaking, to Lombroso’s practices. If readers focus excessively on the exterior, on surfaces as aesthetic (certainly a relevant consideration in his work), they might fail to notice a lingering, penetrating insistence on interiors, on the viscera that Lucarelli’s texts seek time after time to bring to our attention. Whereas Lombrosian science serves largely as a cautionary backdrop and then as a pretext for exploring aesthetics in Argento’s films, Lucarelli’s obsession with the criminal body and with his own ability to read its signs is manifest in his direct appropriation of science for popular ends. As host for a series of television programs, Blu notte, Mistero in blu, and finally Misteri d’Italia, Lucarelli’s physical presence in the Italian media has been an important part of the transformation of the field of crime fiction: Non a caso, il successo arrecato a questi autori, ovviamente in diversa misura, è stato veicolato anche dal mezzo televisivo, dalla presenza

242

Methods of Murder

sullo schermo di Lucarelli, che si è imposto come personaggio in proprio (come conduttore e video-investigatore), abituando lo spettatore alla sua fisicità, al tono e all’impostazione della sua voce, al suo argomentare da esperto del settore (non più solo scrittore di crime story, ma criminologo tout court).7 [Not by chance, the success brought to these authors, obviously to different degrees, has also been made possible by television, by Lucarelli’s presence on the screen. He has adopted a position as a character of his own (as a host and video-investigator), accustoming the spectator to his physicality, to the tone and style of his voice, to his deductions as an expert in the field (no longer just a writer of crime stories, but as a criminologist tout court).]

Sangiorgi’s comments on Lucarelli’s public persona suggest that the author serves, physically, as a complement to his narrative corpus – his material, biological presence stands behind this body of crime fiction. More importantly, however, Sangiorgi indicates the slippage in Lucarelli’s production from writer of fiction to scientist, the transformation from ‘scrittore di crime story’ to ‘criminologo tout court.’ Lucarelli’s fascination with the criminal subject is so intense that he returns contemporary crime fiction to its biological past, bending his own career so that it converges with the work that Lombroso embarked upon more than a century before him. While a generalizable postmodern condition is responsible, in part, for the style and substance of Lucarellian production, the violence of his texts and their investigative settings reveal a persistent preoccupation with criminology. This fixation, confirmed by Lucarelli’s participation in a series of publications composed in collaboration with criminologist Massimo Picozzi, reveals the haunting presence of positivist criminological thought at the root of these works of high-tech crime fiction. Criminal Science and the Serial Killer Lucarelli’s fascination with Lombroso is documented in the series of popular studies that he co-authored with Picozzi, works with a curious relationship to Lombrosian science. The authors are cautious not to embrace positivist criminology without pointing out its limitations, yet they nevertheless betray a tendency to accept some tenets of Lombroso’s approach. In Serial killer: Storie di ossessione omicida (2003) [Serial Killer: Stories of Homicidal Obsession], Scena del crimine (2005)

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

243

[Crime Scene], and Tracce criminali (2006) [Criminal Traces], Lucarelli and Picozzi explain to a lay audience the history of criminological practice, illustrating their studies with hundreds of vividly recounted, violent examples of the science of crime at work. Serial Killer demonstrates explicitly the degree to which Lombrosian thinking has become an imaginative and technical source for Lucarelli’s contemporary crime fiction. It is the work most closely tied to Lombroso, as it contemplates the question of the compulsive repeat offender, the contemporary extreme of the ‘born criminal.’ Lombroso is an explicit source, cited in the scholarly bibliography at the end of the volume and invoked as the father of the study. Chapter 1, ‘Anatomia del serial killer’ (Anatomy of the Serial Killer) begins with the story of Vincenzo Verzeni and Lombroso’s anthropometric measurements of the killer from Bergamo.8 The authors almost always cite both the first and last names of the scientist when discussing his work: ‘Cesare Lombroso annota tutto scrupolosamente’ (9) [Cesare Lombroso notes everything scrupulously]; ‘Cesare Lombroso, antropologo, criminologo, docente di psichiatria all’Università di Pavia’ (10) [Cesare Lombroso, anthropologist, criminologist, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pavia]; ‘Cesare Lombroso misura l’angolo facciale dell’uomo seduto rigido e paziente sulla sedia’ (12) [Cesare Lombroso measures the facial angle of the man seated rigidly and patiently on the chair]; ‘Scrupolosamente annotati nella perizia di Cesare Lombroso ci sono anche tutti i dati relativi alla famiglia del bergamasco’ (13) [Scrupulously annotated in Cesare Lombroso’s expert report are all the data regarding the family of the man from Bergamo]; ‘Cesare Lombroso, il padre della criminologia, è uno scienziato famoso’ (21) [Cesare Lombroso, the father of criminology, is a famous scientist]. In all, Lucarelli and Picozzi name the nineteenth-century criminologist fifteen times in as many pages, as if to hypnotically fix the figure of the father of criminal anthropology in the minds of readers. At first glance, Lucarelli and Picozzi appear to criticize Lombrosian science, characterizing it more as part of a mythological than a scientific past. The story of Verzeni, which occupies the majority of the first chapter, recounts (with graphic attention to detail) the crimes committed by the violent young man from Bergamo, including his evisceration of a number of young women. At the end of the trial in which he was condemned to a lifetime of forced labour, Verzeni chose to give himself over to Lombroso’s criminological machine, attempting to explain his lurid past to the scientist. When Verzeni eventually commits suicide in

244

Methods of Murder

prison, his body is entrusted to Lombroso.9 Yet, Lucarelli and Picozzi report that, upon conducting an autopsy, Lombroso failed to find the expected cranial anomalies: Cesare Lombroso viene immediatamente informato del suicidio e, nel volgere di trentasei ore, si ritrova in sala anatomica; innanzi a lui il cadavere di Vincenzo Verzeni, necrofilo, sadico sessuale. Ne scoperchia il cranio, cerca le prove che confermino le sue teorie sul criminale atavico, in particolare una fossetta nella parte occipitale del cranio, quella anomalia che ha scoperto aprendo la testa del brigante Villella. Non trova nulla. (22–3) [Cesare Lombroso is immediately notified of the suicide, and, within thirty-six hours, finds himself in the anatomy theatre; before him the body of Vincenzo Verzeni, necrofile, sexual sadist. He uncovers the cranium, seeking proof to confirm his theories of the atavistic criminal, in particular a fossetta in the occipital part of the cranium, the anomaly he discovered opening Villella’s head. He finds nothing.]

Lucarelli and Picozzi detail, in fact, the complications in Lombroso’s atavistic theory of crime, or in any theory that attempts to elucidate criminality with a single explanation. Criminal behaviour, like all human behaviour, is ‘costituito da un’inestricabile interazione tra eredità e ambiente’ (55) [constituted by a complicated interaction between inheritance and environment]. They thus argue that ‘solo un approccio integrato può farci compiere dei passi avanti nella comprensione’ (55) [only an integrated approach can help us to take steps ahead in comprehension].10 Notwithstanding their caution, however, the authors, delighting in the gory details provided by the examples of the world’s most famous serial killers, demonstrate a Lombrosian commitment to the biology of the crime scene and to the narrative opportunities that this kind of approach to criminality provide. In ‘Anatomia del serial killer,’ they trace the central importance of Lombroso in the development of contemporary criminology: Non sono trascorsi molti anni dalla rivoluzione darwiniana, e lo scienziato italiano pone le basi per un’interpretazione dei comportamenti criminali fondata sulla biologia. La sua eredità è stata raccolta da studiosi

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

245

di ogni paese e differenti discipline: da medici e psicologi, più di recente da endocrinologi e genetisti, nel tentativo di identificare un’unica spiegazione causale, un unico momento scatenante, evidenziando di volta in volta la responsabilità delle strutture cerebrali, il ruolo degli ormoni, l’importanza dei cromosomi. (56) [Not many years have passed since the Darwinian revolution, and the Italian scientist lays the foundation for an interpretation of criminal behaviour founded in biology. His inheritance has been received by scholars from every country and different disciplines: by doctors and psychologists, more recently by endocrinologists and geneticists, in the attempt to identify one causal explanation, one decisive moment, making evident the responsibility of cerebral structures, the role of hormones, the importance of chromosomes.]

Lombroso is thus the launching point for their understanding of the biological causes of crime. Although their history continues to identify problems with work conducted by geneticists and endocrinologists, ultimately, their research points to a conviction that criminologists are taking ‘steps ahead,’ making teleological progress in understanding the figure of the criminal. As further evidence of the Lombrosian tone of these contemporary studies, we find that the paratext of Serial Killer tempts its audience with universalizing claims that recall Lombrosian atavistic theories about the nature of criminality: Chi sono i serial killer e perché la nostra immaginazione è così colpita da queste terribili figure? Perchè ci fanno paura, certo. Ma anche, e soprattutto, perché sono la personificazione di quanto c’è ancora di irrazionale, di ferino, di primordiale in noi e nella nostra vita apparentemente logica e ordinata. (Serial Killer, back cover) [Who are serial killers, and why is our imagination so struck by these horrible figures? Because they scare us, certainly. But also, and above all, because they personify all that is irrational, feral, primordial in us and in our apparently logical and orderly lives.]

This language, repeated in the book’s introduction, equates the serial killer with a ‘dark side’ of the human, the ‘irrational,’ the ‘feral.’11 For our ancestors, explain the authors, this ‘monstrous’ figure lived in a space of the imagination populated by dragons, vampires, werewolves, and orcs (6). But this world of grim fantasy, which they claim

246

Methods of Murder

was once outside, now exists inside of us: ‘La metà oscura in cui immaginare i mostri da fuori si è proiettata dentro, ed è nelle nostre stesse città, nelle nostre strade, dentro noi stessi, nel nostro cuore e nella nostra mente che andiamo a cercare gli orchi del nuovo millennio’ (6, original emphasis) [The dark side where we imagine monsters from the outside has been projected inside, and so it is in our cities, on our streets, inside of us, in our hearts and in our minds that we go to look for the ogres of the new millennium]. With this sweeping gesture, Lucarelli and Picozzi make the serial killer a material, dissectible product of the imagination, and propose implicitly that, in order to understand this wild side, we must dive into our cities, our streets, and ourselves. In these popular criminological studies (as in his journalistic work), in which Lombroso has a central importance, Lucarelli works through the details of a criminal epistemology that informs his fiction, where he can play out the investigative fantasies impossible to the student of historical criminal practice. In each work in the collaborative series, the voices of scientist and writer blend inextricably, leaving no single firstperson position from which to narrate. Describing their collaboration, Picozzi and Lucarelli characterize themselves as one, complex, extraordinarily complementary narrative voice: Uno scrittore che viene dalla fantasia narrativa dei romanzi noir e attraverso trasmissioni televisive come ‘Blu notte’ finisce per ritrovarsi in mezzo alla realtà concreta di atti processuali, referti autoptici e perizie psichiatriche. Un medico, un professionista nelle scienze della mente e della criminologia, che viene dalla conoscenza diretta della follia, della solitudine e della violenza delle carceri, delle aule di tribunali e attraverso una serie televisiva come ‘Sk. Predatori di uomini,’ si accosta a quel mezzo di comunicazione così potente, così incisivo che è la narrazione. (7) [A writer who comes from the imaginative genre of noir novels, and by way of television programs like ‘Blu notte’ finds himself amid the concrete reality of legal proceedings, postmortem results, and psychiatric examinations. A doctor, a professional in the science of the mind and a criminologist, who comes from a direct knowledge of madness, solitude, and the violence of prisons, of courtrooms, by way of a television series ‘Sk. Predatori di uomini’ approaches that means of communication that is so powerful, so incisive: narrative.]

This study is the fruit of a collaboration so complete that neither fiction nor science remain recognizable as such. Yet, although Lucarelli

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

247

headlines as the single author of his novels, these works, too, feature a fusion of science and fiction. If by working in concert with Picozzi, Lucarelli can witness autopsies, read police reports, conduct interviews, and learn the practice of the science of crime, in his fiction, the author can vivisect the crime scene, open the human subject in order to study its drives. In the serial killer trilogy, Lombroso becomes a spectral presence, not cited but evident epistemologically in the novels’ opening of victims and criminals, and with atavistic explanations for the killers’ motivations. Although both the popular criminological studies and the novels attempt to indicate the limits of science, providing examples of unsolved cases in which science fails to triumph, the curious, persistent mixing of postmodern literary experimentation and the science of crime leads to a riveting, potentially perilous confusion between the two. The Beast Within: Werewolves, Iguanas, and Pit Bulls In spite of their high-tech plots, Lupo mannaro, Almost Blue, and Un giorno dopo l’altro anticipate the problems Lucarelli encounters in his later true-crime works, confusing the boundaries between the rational and the irrational, between science and science fiction. The noise of the postmodern world finds a narrative complement in the insistently corporeal domain of the investigation. The trilogy systematically questions the suggestion by Baudrillard that ‘this body, our body, often appears simply superfluous, basically useless in its extension, in the multiplicity and complexity of its organs, its tissues and functions, since today everything is concentrated in the brain and in genetic codes, which alone sum up the operational definition of being.’12 The texts are imaginative in their narrative style, but the series dedicated to Grazia Negro’s tracking of serial killers is obsessed with the body, and specifically with the complex workings of organs, tissues, and functions. The trilogy exemplifies an insistent, violent curiosity regarding the human form, and is conceptually focused around the idea that the key to investigative practice lies in the physical proximity and eventual opening of the subject – thus, its conceptual vivisection. While Lombroso takes the criminal as his object of study and Lucarelli often focuses his narrative lens on the victim, the epistemological framework insists that the medicalized, exposed body is the means to opening the crime scene. Lucarelli’s narratives, haunted by the spectre of Lombrosian criminology, immerse the reader in a universe dominated by bodies, a space predicated on the body’s fragility and on its tenacity.

248

Methods of Murder

The serial killer protagonists of the novels in the trilogy are reduced, narratively speaking, to their bare life, each equated with the animal they resemble or the animal they channel in order to kill. This is less true in Lupo mannaro, where the ‘animal’ is actually a sort of transitional figure, the Werewolf, one of the atavistic figments of the imagination that Lucarelli suggests – in the time of our ancestors – kept internal tumult at bay by externalizing it, making it other. The Werewolf bites his victims and howls after killing them. Noel Carroll explains that in many horror narratives, monsters are ‘interstitial,’ ‘categorically incomplete, or formless.’ They cause a sense of horror because they ‘cross the boundaries of the deep categories of a culture’s conceptual scheme.’13 More beastly, however, are the Iguana in Almost Blue and the Pit Bull in Un giorno dopo l’altro. The Iguana feels an animal running around under his skin, and kills people in order to shed his outer layers and take theirs on. The Pit Bull has the ferocity and insistence stereotypically associated with that breed of dog. In these last two cases, it becomes clear that both animals and humans suffer in these comparisons: the human avatars of the animals represent the worst of the animal world, and the animalization of the humans signifies their descent into a vicious world of cruelty. As political subjects, the Werewolf, the Iguana, and the Pit Bull represent a fear of ‘animalization,’ which according to Agamben is a significant part of the ‘anthropological machine’ that governs contemporary philosophy and politics. Agamben connects this ‘animalization’ to the Hegelo-Kojevian notion of the ‘end of history’: ‘for a humanity that has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of the unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task.’14 Characterized as Werewolf, Iguana, and Pit Bull, the serial killers mark what Matthew Calarco, discussing The Open, refers to as the ‘constitutive outside of humanity proper.’15 The outsider status assigned to the killers, which connects them to Lombroso’s concept of the atavistic criminal and his biological distinctiveness, becomes a part of the narrative fabric of the novels. Chapters dedicated to the serial killers’ perspective alternate with those focused on the activities of the investigative squads, allowing the offenders to speak with a distinct narrative voice. The texts also lurch back and forth ideologically between formal experimentation (in the style of Argento) and criminological conviction in the ability to find what lies beneath. As Grazia Negro and the texts themselves investigate the violent

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

249

crimes committed by these beastly figures, the novels stray from the postmodern concept of the schizophrenic’s body, continuous with the technological world around it, and delve into the warm, abject regions of the human subject, making the investigation of biological life their supreme task. Body and Blood The significance of the body is evident, first and foremost, in the perils of lost blood. Each of the novels begins with a short chapter in the third person, printed in italics, recounting a violent crime scene in vivid detail. In Lupo mannaro, we immediately encounter the title character as he sinks his teeth into a young female victim. Almost Blue opens as a carabiniere enters a room and slides across a blood-covered floor, while a second officer rushes to the building’s courtyard and heaves violently, ready to vomit. A young brigadiere waits patiently beside the victim of a car bombing in the first pages of Un giorno dopo l’altro, as the fatally burned, now-legless man pulls him close and yells ‘Pit bull!’ The lexicon of the first few pages of the three novels tells a graphic, physical story, when culled for material references to the human body. Tongues, lips, teeth, cheeks, throats, shoulders, temples, backs, chins, fingers, fingernails, arms, legs, feet, little fingers, fingertips, in short, an entire glossary of limbs and body parts mingles with the stuff within: kidneys, bones, saliva, vomit, and especially blood, lots of blood – and all of this within the space of the first two or three pages of each novel. In each case, the opening chapter, presented brusquely and in somewhat elliptical fashion, immediately forces the reader to delve into a world of physical specificity, a world that graphically emphasizes the vital importance of organs, tissues, and bodily functions. The narratives spring to life as the first victims draw their final breaths, firmly situating the stories in a framework that follows bodily evidence from victim to criminal, from the dead to the living. The pathways of investigation constantly leave aside the corpses in order to pursue the next living physical trace. In investigative language, the killers’ tracks go ‘cold’ when the bodies they attack acquire the rigidity of death; and so Lucarelli’s texts depart energetically in search of the next warm victim. The choice of the serial killer as central criminal subject in these novels is significant in this regard. Unlike more traditional detective fiction, which might begin with one dead body (a body that might

250

Methods of Murder

already be cold as the narrative opens), the presence of the serial killer requires that victim after victim be splayed open, as the text constantly renews its curiosity about the divide separating the living from the dead. The serial killer provides occasion to examine and re-examine the human body as it perches on that divide, realizing the theoretical desire to view the body as an experimental testing ground for questions about what our biological nature has to do with the way we live in the world. The protagonists can play out the obsessive scientific fantasies of vivisection in a literary key, as the numerous depictions of death shift perspectives and emphasize different moments on the path towards annihilation. In Lupo mannaro, the killer strikes in different ways, once with a rock to the victim’s head, another with a knife in the stomach, and lastly by biting a woman to death. In Almost Blue, instead, the narratives portray the crime scenes from a wide variety of temporal perspectives: the carabinieri arriving in a bloody apartment, a victim chatting with the killer as he stares at her strangely, another victim talking to the killer on the phone before she meets him for the first time, and finally, the killer himself circling the victim, encountering him physically. In Un giorno dopo l’altro, Vittorio, a professional killer, is represented as he stalks his victims and executes elaborate plans to kill them – in their homes, in an airport lounge, in their offices at work. In each instance, the numerous victims offer repeat opportunities to examine the body’s final moments, and the multiple perspectives allow for varied language in discussing the end: from the horror of the victim, to the cold calculation of the killer, to the ballistic, psychological, and forensic examination of the crime scene. The Detective and the Criminologist Each of the novels features the collection of criminological evidence, and the attempt, again in contemporary Lombrosian style, at criminal profiling. Minor characters become the mouthpiece for the kind of criminological work Lucarelli and Picozzi conduct in their popular studies of serial killers and the crime scene. Professor Del Gatto, a consultant for the investigation in Lupo mannaro, offers Grazia Negro and her superior a typology of serial killers, which he claims have been long ignored in Italy: Visionari, come il Figlio di Sam, che ammazzava perché glielo ordinava il cane del suo vicino; Missionari, come lo Squartatore dello Yorkshire che

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

251

voleva ripulire le strade dalle prostitute; Assassini per lucro, come Landru, che uccideva le amanti per i loro soldi; e Assassini per libidine, che uccidono per soddisfare un impulso sessuale o comunque per la ricerca del piacere.16 [Visionaries, like the Son of Sam, who killed because his neighbour’s dog ordered him to; Missionaries, like the Yorkshire Ripper who wanted to tidy the streets of prostitutes; Murderers for Profit, like Landru, who killed his lovers for their money; and Murderers for Lust, who kill to satisfy a sexual impulse or in search of pleasure.]

After carefully considering the evidence, the professor classifies the Werewolf and directs the investigators to seek his ‘sense of guilt,’ which will inevitably lead him to commit an error. Un giorno dopo l’altro features the work of an analyst who looks into the professional killer’s past. We learn that the Pit Bull killed another child at school when he was ten years old, in what would seem to have been an accident. A report by Professor Morri profiles the killer and explains that ‘quanto al fatto che dal ’99 abbia iniziato a firmare acuni [sic] delitti collegandoli e rivelando la propria esistenza, questo può essere interpretato come un’accelerazione del processo psicotico’17 [regarding the fact that from ’99 on he began to sign some crimes by connecting them, revealing his existence: this can be interpreted as an acceleration of the psychotic process]. In Almost Blue, criminologist-psychiatrist Vittorio Poletto works alongside Grazia, attempting to understand the killer as she attempts to catch him. His medical history of the Iguana, in a note to Grazia, explains the reason for his animal drive: L’Iguana viene ricoverato in psichiatria con un Trattamento Sanitario Obbligatorio e là gli prendono le impronte che hai trovato tu. Resta tre anni in manicomio giudiziario dove lo curano con 50 mm di Aloperidolo Decanoato ogni 15 giorni e intanto gli fanno test, ipnosi e terapia conoscitiva. Finché il Padiglione 4 non salta per aria, privandolo di quella identità da cui cerca di fuggire. Bum! Alessio Crotti non c’è piú. Adesso è veramente nudo. Ora c’è bisogno di un’altra identità. Di un’altra maschera. Ora c’è l’Iguana. Ecco perché ammazza la gente. Di piú: la sbrana, la spappola, la distrugge. L’annienta. La spoglia nuda, si spoglia nuda e ne assume l’aspetto, come se si rivestisse di una seconda pelle. (96–7)

252

Methods of Murder

[The Iguana gets committed to the Psychiatric Ward of the prison hospital. He’s given the standard treatment: every fifteen days he gets a 50 mm dose of Aloperidolo Decanoato. They take his fingerprints, the ones you found on the statuette. They run tests on him. They do hypnotic and cognitive therapy. He stays there for three years. Then – boom! – Pavilion 4 explodes and Alessio Crotti escapes, freed of that identity. But he feels naked now. He needs a new identity. A mask. That’s how we have the Iguana. That’s why he kills people. Butchers them. Mutilates them. He nullifies them. Tears off their clothes. He tears off his own clothes and puts on theirs, as if he were putting on a second skin. (99–100)]

Each text includes the careful construction of the profile of the bestial nature of the serial killer, with attention to the tenets of contemporary psychiatry and criminology. Lucarelli’s integration of criminologists into his texts stands as a signpost for the ‘real’ criminological work that he conducts when writing his novels: the characterization of the Iguana, for example, developed from a sketch that he submitted to a psychiatrist friend for clinical analysis. He then elaborated basic details (aural hallucinations, nude victims, disguises) into a scientifically valid criminal profile.18 Distractingly evident, given Lucarelli’s concern with the science of crime and his interest in the verisimilitude of these profiles, is the failure of this science in the context of the fictional works. The brutal world of the serial killers – and correspondingly the world of the officers who track them – has no patience for the precision of science, which repeatedly comes up short, unable to deliver the solutions the police squads need. In Un giorno dopo l’altro, after a horrific crime is carried out in the airport, a DNA test returns a genetic fingerprint and confirms that the killer is a male. But DNA samples, although ‘inequivocabile come quelle digitali’ [unmistakable like fingerprints] are ‘inutile senza qualcosa con cui confrontarla’ (101) [useless without something to compare them to]. As Grazia Negro recounts the Pit Bull’s past, her colleagues accuse her of ‘dietrologia’ [conspiracy hunting], of reversing the forward progress of the investigation. Grazia blushes violently and reassures them, ‘Sono soltanto dati, dottore. A me il Pit bull non interessa capirlo, io voglio prenderlo’ (213) [They are only facts, dottore. I’m not interested in understanding the Pit Bull; I want to catch him]. And

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

253

when a professor-analyst sends his assessment of Vittorio the Pit Bull to the police agents, explaining why the professional hit man might be considered a serial killer, the commissario notes that the profiling is nothing more than ‘cazzate’ (223) [a load of crap]. In Almost Blue, when criminologist and psychiatrist Vittorio must face the intriguing, multifaceted figure of the Iguana, he finds himself unable to invoke science in order to restore order: – Io non sono un poliziotto, – disse Vittorio. – Io sono uno psichiatra. So che i serial killer si prendono perché nascondono i cadaveri sotto il pavimento e poi puzzano, perché si fanno scappare le vittime o perché fanno un passo falso distrutti dal senso di colpa. Ma come si prendono, esattamente, non lo so. Ho fatto tanto per farmi affidare questa indagine e adesso che Alvau si è deciso, non so da che parte incominciare. – Sorrise, ma di un sorriso ironico e cattivo. – Vuoi che te lo dica, bambina? Questo Iguana . . . a me, piú che prenderlo, interessa capirlo. (163) [‘I’m a psychiatrist, not a police officer,’ Vittorio said. ‘I know that serial killers get caught because they tend to hide their victims in places where they will eventually begin to decompose or because they let their victims get away or because they end up giving themselves away, haunted by a sense of guilt. But I really don’t know how to catch them. I did everything I could to get this case and now that Alvau has decided to give it to us, I don’t know where to begin.’ He smiled ironically. ‘You know what, sweetheart? More than wanting to catch the Iguana, I want to understand him.’ (166)]

When he comes face to face with the killer who presents himself, handcuffed, in order to turn himself in, Vittorio’s trembling hands betray his lack of authoritarian resolve. As the criminologist/psychiatrist trains a gun on him, the Iguana begins to recall scenes from his childhood, offering up a voluntary clinical session that testifies to his lifelong struggle with multiplicity. He quotes a conversation he overheard, in which his mother’s desperate lover, incensed, inveighed against her young son: ‘Quel bambino mi fa venire i brividi, Agata! Quello non è normale! Io non ce lo voglio in casa! O me o lui! O me o lui! O me o lui!’ (170) [That kid freaks me out, Agata! He’s abnormal! I don’t want him in this house! It’s him or me! It’s him or me! Him or me! (173)]. The categorical binary ‘him/me,’ the exclusionary logic of detection (tracking down one guilty criminal implies excluding all incorrect possibilities, the not-guilties) is revealed in its reductive,

254

Methods of Murder

sometimes cruel simplicity. This kind of logic, Alessio tells his wouldbe captor, is the reason for his violent relationship to the world. Unsuccessful criminologists, however, do not inevitably move Lucarelli’s texts away from a Lombrosian epistemology, nor from Agamben’s anthropological machine; rather, stories of the scientists’ failings cement portraits of beastly, innate criminality driving the killers that defeat them. When the Iguana kills Vittorio moments after the abovecited dialogue, feeling his inner animal re-emerge, he performs the incongruence in Lucarelli’s texts between the ‘rational’ human and the ‘irrational’ animal. In order to be successful, the detectives must take on the mentality not of the scholar or the psychiatrist, but of the hunter. Thus, Grazia’s mantra becomes not the empathetic ‘capirlo’ (understand him), but rather the absolutist ‘prenderlo’ (get him).19 Fragmented Body, Fragmented Text Lucarelli’s fiction criticizes the excessive complexity of the science of crime and instead favours a perilously unilateral desire to confine or kill its criminal protagonists, confirming their atavistic nature and awarding them key narrative space in each novel. Yet, the texts themselves seem to resist such unitary thinking. Tania Modleski, connecting Baudrillard’s theories to fiction, affirms: ‘if the text is “an anagram for our body,” as Roland Barthes maintains, the contemporary text of horror could aptly be considered an anagram for the schizophrenic’s body [. . .] It is a ruptured body, lacking the kind of integrity commonly attributed to popular narrative cinema.’20 Lucarelli’s texts, which through shifting points of view and multiple narrators recount bloody tales of horror, in similar fashion, become an anagram for the schizophrenic’s ruptured body. A multiplicity of perspectives via which the stories of the serial killer are recounted constitutes a fragmentary stylistic practice, which in its turn, might be considered Lombrosian as it effects an opening of the narrative subjects. Lucarelli demonstrates a desire to penetrate the minds and bodies of his protagonists through his choice of alternating narrative voices. Short chapters and shifting focalizers allow the narrator’s voice to venture inside of the minds and bodies of serial killers, police officers, and other onlookers to the criminal scenes. Fluctuation between first and third person, between internal monologue, dialogue, and descriptive narratives increases the text’s ability to open the characters to careful scrutiny.

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

255

The serial killer trilogy thus takes on a critical mass of viewpoints, renouncing an omniscient point of view in favour of allowing more than one character to say ‘I.’ Lupo mannaro alternates between the third-person perspective of the serial killer and the first-person detective, who may suffer from ‘lethal insomnia,’ a genetic disease of the nervous system that renders him exhausted and ineffective. Almost Blue formally mirrors the sinister schizophrenic practices of the Iguana by focalizing the action through the varying lenses of detective, criminal, and the blind man who spends his days listening to police scanners and Chet Baker classics. Chapters shift between the first-person perspective of the killer, that of the blind man, the thirdperson narration of the investigation conducted by the special police unit, and a section of newspaper ‘articles’ that report on the crimes and lend an air of verisimilitude to the entire project. Un giorno dopo l’altro oscillates between the third-person descriptions of the Pit Bull, the first-person perspective of a young employee of an Internet provider who inadvertently intercepts communiqués from the serial killer, and the third-person police work of Grazia Negro. Mirroring the multiplicity of frames of reference filmed through the lens of Argento’s camera, Lucarelli’s texts employ an artistic strategy that mimics the psychological state of its troubled main characters, preferring the multiple to the restrictive point of view of exclusive, third-person omniscience. Almost Blue, the most experimental of the three texts, lends evidence of the investigative strategy that emerges as a result of this technique. Although two characters narrate in the first person, one of the three perspectives is third-person omniscient. This section follows the process of investigation, focused around police psychologist Vittorio and Grazia Negro. The most linguistically impersonal excerpts of Almost Blue describe in elaborate and recurrent detail Grazia’s menstrual cramps, her struggles with masculine authority, her frustration at the strange irrational facts collected over the course of the investigation. Elisabetta Bacchereti suggests that these portions of the novel: consente all’autore una indispensabile operazione di raccordo oggettivo dei fatti, anche con la presentazione di finti materiali (referti, testimonianze, appunti, immaginari articoli di quotidiano) che tendono a radicare quella storia incredibile in un contesto ambientale fortemente restio a metabolizzare l’idea della presenza di un criminale seriale nella bonaria Bologna, e a garantirne la verosimiglianza.21

256

Methods of Murder

[allow the author a necessary way to objectively link the facts. The presentation of fictitious materials (reports, evidence, notes, imaginary newspaper articles) tends to root the incredible story in an environment strongly reluctant to accept the idea of the presence of a serial criminal in goodnatured Bologna and to guarantee its verisimilitude.]

Yet, in the surreal world of Almost Blue, the ‘objective’ force of the third person point of view is discredited by the contrasting, first-person voices of Simone and the Iguana. Grazia’s physical affliction (and our unease in witnessing such an intimate condition from too objective a perspective) mirrors the discomfort of objectivity in a world constructed around what seems to be a more empathic belief in the subjective and its inscrutable, animal irrationality. These sections of narrative are ‘necessary’ only because they permit, by contrast, an appreciation of the more troubling viewpoint from inside the heads of the other two protagonists. Slippery Subjects The ‘unreachability’ Carlo Ginzburg assigns to the living body is thematized in the slippery form of the Iguana. The serial killer’s psychosis manifests itself in a feeling of being penetrated by the sound of the ‘campane dell’inferno’ (bells of hell) in his ears: ‘Le sento, le campane dell’Inferno. Sempre, ogni giorno e ogni notte, sempre, le sento le campane dell’Inferno che suonano a morto e suonano per me’ (14) [I hear death bells. Day and night. Ringing for the dead and ringing for me (14)]. Convinced that an evil animal exists inside him, the Iguana feels overwhelmed by the sounds and feelings that explode from within, and in order to mask them, he ‘reincarnates’ himself in the form of his victims. The Iguana lives in a space that looks, sounds, and feels different both inside and out. His psychosis only makes sense through the use of comparisons, by way of the employment of poetic language that approximates understanding, and not through dry, clinically precise images. From the first-person perspective of the Iguana, however, metaphor is truth; hypothetical language that describes him by analogy is the world around him. Like the characters in Argento’s Profondo rosso, the Iguana loses himself in aesthetics, and their fiction is his reality. The Iguana is text, is poetry, and beneath the horror of violence there bubbles the postmodern horror of the breakdown of boundaries:

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

257

the threatening implications of completely fluid borders between life and art. Stylistic practice in these graphic, violent novels cannot, however, be separated from its material implications: the poetics of schizophrenia takes a curious, biological form, in which the permeability of boundaries characteristic of the mental state of the schizophrenic takes on a pervasively corporeal nature. In Almost Blue, the Iguana perceives his own condition not as a mental but as a physical one. He kills his victims in order to take on their identity: È proprio questo che fa dopo che ha ucciso la gente, si reincarna, in un modo tutto suo, piú in fretta e senza aspettare un intero ciclo di vita. Si spoglia nudo e si disegna sul volto una maschera di cerchi, come i tatuaggi dei guerrieri Maori. Cambia pelle come un IGUANA delle Galapagos. Un selvaggio primitivo, un dinosauro, un drago, pronto a trasformarsi in uno stadio piú evoluto (evoluto?) (111) [That’s what happens when he kills someone, but in his own way. And faster, without a whole life cycle taking place. He takes off his clothes and draws a mask of circles on his face, like the Maori warriors’ tattoos. He changes skin like an Iguana from the Galapagos. Like a primitive man or a dinosaur or a dragon – ready to transform into a more evolved form. (114)]

When we witness for the first time an actual physical act of violence committed by the Iguana (in other instances, the narration precedes or immediately follows his attacks, but avoids their representation), a metamorphosed, non-human creature springs to action: Improvvisamente, sento che la pelle del viso mi si è screpolata in miliardi e miliardi di sottilissime crepe. La sento che mi si spacca e staccandosi a scaglie mi scivola lungo le ossa, lasciandomi il teschio lucido e nudo. Gli occhi, senza piú palpebre, mi rotolano in avanti e si fermano incastrati sul bordo delle orbite. (77)22 [Then, without warning, the skin on my face cracks into millions of fragments. It scales off the bones of my face, leaving my skull completely exposed. My eyeballs, no longer protected by the flap of eyelids, roll forward, frozen partway through their orbit. (80)]

The fabric of his body, he feels, changes from one moment to the next, leaving him naked and isolated inside. This, of course, is a first-person subjective account of the biological transformation that occurs in the

258

Methods of Murder

Iguana’s body. And yet, Grazia’s third-person encounter with her criminal nemesis uses much of the same language. When she comes upon the killer in Simone’s room after he has killed the young man’s mother, she is horrified: Soffocò un urlo a vederselo cosí, una larva insanguinata senza volto e senza corpo, coperta da quella membrana aderente che gli disegnava adosso curve e sporgenze, che si gonfiava sui rilievi degli anelli e scavava i buchi degli occhi e del naso, che entrava, rossa, fin dentro la bocca spalancata. Bloccata dal terrore [. . .] lo vide spingere il volto contro la tenda e apparire in trasparenza, come una maschera d’argilla screpolata da miliardi di rughe sottilissime, una maschera calva e nuda, lucida di acrilico e di schizzi coagulati. (159–60) [Grazia held back a scream. She saw a bloody, faceless, hairless, larvaelike figure. The thin curtain highlighted the bumps and ridges on his body – it was raised where he had earrings and it drooped into his eye sockets and nostrils, into his open, red mouth. Frozen in terror [. . .] [s]he saw his face in relief. It looked like a cracked, clay mask. A mask of naked skin, glistening with clotted blood. (162)]

The words in Grazia’s description, ‘screpolata,’ ‘miliardi,’ ‘sottilissime,’ ‘lucido,’ ‘nudo,’ repeat precisely the terms with which the Iguana described himself from his supposedly unreliable frame of reference. Suddenly the world of metaphor becomes the world of actuality, and the third-person narrative slides over, subtly, to confirm and validate the first person subjective of the killer. Grazia unknowingly authorizes the Iguana’s world view and makes his schizophrenia not simply psychological but corporeal. As she describes his body from her purportedly objective point of view, his form takes on the characteristics that might have been dismissed as the hallucinations of a madman. In fact, a few pages later, a metamorphosed, non-human creature attacks Grazia’s partner: Poi la pelle mi si spacca all’improvviso, si ritira sulle ossa, come gomma, e il naso mi esce fuori di colpo, trascinandosi dietro il resto della faccia. Scatto in avanti e prima che lui riesca a muoversi gli pianto il mio becco in un occhio. (170–1) [Suddenly, my skin splits, it peels back over my bones like rubber and my nose pokes forward, pulling the rest of my face along with it. I lean toward him, and before he can move I shove my beak into his eye. (174)]

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

259

The Iguana’s hallucinated, animal body is realized when its actions cause Vittorio’s death in the ‘real’ world. In fact, each of the serial killers in the novels is increasingly adept at changing his identity, as if attempting to escape the biological destiny to which criminology has bound him. The lupo mannaro transforms himself from respectable employee and father to bloodthirsty killer; the Iguana attempts to become his victims; the Pit Bull, a talented actor, successfully alters his gait, uses masks and makeup and wigs to modify his appearance, and adjusts his voice to escape detection by the police. When Grazia sees a photograph of the Pit Bull without a disguise, looking for a distinguishing expression, a means for understanding him, she finds ‘niente’ [nothing]. Like the Iguana, the Pit Bull is a blank canvas, his face ‘anonima e vuota come un identikit’ (208) [anonymous and empty like an identikit]. The killers’ blank visages and their selftransformations transcend the simple need to evade recognition by the authorities, and instead, signal a desire to escape the perilous categorizing tendencies of biological criminology. The Iguana’s hallucinated, animal body, which leads to Alessio’s characterization as a human ‘larva,’ might be interpreted as his attempted radical, corporeal refutation of criminological science. Devoid of distinguishing human characteristics, mid-metamorphosis, the Iguana creates himself in the imprecise image of a blank slate of which no telling profile can be sketched. He looks in a mirror and perceives his body as a canvas, emptied of colour and significance, on which an identity needs to be painted. In this blankness, he represents his own attempt at escape from a system that, from an early age, attempted to fix and record his criminal profile. Vittorio’s note about the young killer observed that he had been the subject of a ‘Trattamento Sanitario Obbligatorio,’ not dissimilar to Lombroso’s proposed confinement for young criminals: E quindi, se oramai col Roussel, col Barzilai e col Ferri troviamo biasimevoli le case di correzione, che con triste bisticcio potrebbero dirsi di ufficiale corruzione, crediamo sarebbe di un immenso vantaggio pel paese invece il manicomio criminale, o, meglio ancora, una casa di ricovero perpetuo pei minorenni affetti da tenaci tendenze criminose e da pazzia morale.23 [And so, if along with Roussel, Barzilai, and Ferri we find reform schools [case di correzione] reprehensible, since in a sad pun they could call themselves places of official corruption, we think it would be a huge advantage

260

Methods of Murder

for the country to use a criminal asylum, or better yet, a hospice [‘house of perpetual recovery’] for minors suffering from lasting criminal tendencies or moral insanity.] (emphasis added)

The ferocious violence with which the Iguana resists identification after his escape, the fear he feels at both his own identity and his lack thereof, also represents unwillingness to be physically confined and scientifically labelled. This very non-mediatic, corporeal schizophrenia is, in a sense, his only hope of escape, and thus the naked slate that is his body is constantly repainted in order to continue signifying freedom. Yet, the slipperiness of the criminal subjects also contributes to their status at the fringes of human existence. The Accidental Detective If the serial killers take these shifty forms, Almost Blue and Un giorno dopo l’altro seem to suggest that the most appropriate means of countering their unpredictable aggression involves non-institutional creative forces. In Almost Blue, facing a devious criminal in the form of the Iguana, Grazia turns to the blind, socially isolated Simone Martini, a random citizen of Bologna who, thanks to his inability to see the physical world, is better able to track the serial killer than the high-tech, well-supported specialized police squad, through his recognition (on the scanners he listens to constantly) of the particular ‘colour’ of his voice. The deliberately named Simone24 interprets the world of sounds around him through a colour palette of adjectives, demonstrating explicitly the way that words can become vivid images and vice versa, elaborating a theory of the permeability of the boundaries of artistic representation: Hanno una voce, i colori, un suono, come tutte le cose. Un rumore che li distingue e che posso riconoscere. E capire [. . .] Il verde, per esempio, con quella erre raschiante, che gratta in mezzo e prude e scortica la pelle, è il colore di una cosa che brucia, come il sole. Tutti i colori che iniziano con la b, invece, sono belli. Come il bianco o il biondo. O il blu, che è bellissimo. (8–9, original emphasis) [Colors have a voice, colors make sounds, just like other things, so that I can distinguish between them. Identify them. Understand them [. . .] Green, with that harsh r sound that scratches and flares its way out of

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

261

the middle of the word, is the color of something that scathes and burns, like the sun. But blue, on the other hand, is the color of beauty. For example, for me, a pretty girl might have blonde hair, but a truly beautiful girl would be barefoot, brave, and have blue hair. (6–7)]

Simone, reluctant to touch people and things (for this reason he rarely ventures out of his attic room, where his police scanners and record player keep him company), lives in a world entirely dominated by sound. His leitmotif is Chet Baker’s ‘Almost Blue,’ a song that serves as his personal soundtrack: Cosí tutte le sere e tutte le notti aspetto che Almost Blue mi scivoli lentamente in fondo alle orecchie, che la tromba, il contrabbasso, il pianoforte e la voce diventino la stessa cosa e riempiano il vuoto che ho dentro la testa. (9) [‘Almost Blue’ is my favorite song. I always play it first, even though it’s the last track on the record. I wait all day for that moment at night when the trumpet, the bass, the piano, and his voice come together and fill the emptiness inside my head. (7)]

His heightened sensitivity to sound, to music, and to voices leads him to recognize the voice of the Iguana, an acutely ‘green’ voice. Because of this creative technical ability, the desperate police force opts to involve him in their search for the killer. In contrast with Simone, the police squad attempts to specify the information in a stereotypical criminal profile; they find a photograph of the Iguana, and can describe him with relative precision: Ripreso a mezzo busto, su uno sfondo bianco. Aveva le mani sui fianchi e una maglietta grigia con le maniche corte arrotolate sulle braccia fino alle spalle. Aveva i capelli neri tagliati a spazzola, schiacciati sulla fronte. Aveva gli occhi socchiusi e la bocca semiaperta in un sorriso che gli scopriva tra le labbra la macchia piú chiara di due denti. Sembrava di altezza media, di corporatura media, di peso medio. (57–8) [It showed him from the chest up, on a white background. His arms hung down by his sides. The sleeves of his gray T-shirt were rolled up to his shoulders. He had short, cropped, black hair, a lock of which lay flat across his forehead. His eyes were half-closed and he smiled lazily. There was a gap between his front teeth. Average height, average build, average weight. (58–9)]

262

Methods of Murder

In spite of the detailed information their computer searches provide, however, the police cannot find the person whose body can be so coldly delineated. The white background, grey t-shirt, and black hair Grazia observes in the photograph aptly indicate the colourless, technical universe she occupies, a universe woefully unable to come to terms with the multiple faces of the schizophrenic serial killer. Instead, Grazia turns to Simone: ‘Non voglio dire che sei la nostra unica speranza, però’ (118) [I mean, it’s not like you’re our only hope, but even so (122)], she confesses elliptically to him. The hope of the narrative lies in Simone’s subjective, suggestive space of questionable rationality, dominated by music and by analogy. Simone explains that the voice of the Iguana is ‘verde’ (green) and elaborates: ‘Fredda, finta, stretta . . . come se dovesse trattenerla per non farsela scappare dalla lingua. Come se ci fosse qualcos’altro che si muoveva sotto’ (119) [Cold, fake, tight – as if he had to hold it back or it would slip off his tongue. As if he were hiding something (123)]. His grammar, aside from being a semantic space of colour, is dominated by comparison, by analogy, by the use of the subjunctive: ‘come se dovesse,’ ‘come se ci fosse.’25 In fact, the Iguana is not a being who can be fixed with decisive language. Simone seems to be the detective-figure most able to accurately identify the killer, for his method lacks accuracy. Grazia is joined in Un giorno dopo l’altro by the depressed, chronically insomniac Alex, the malcontent employee of an Internet service provider who listens obsessively to Luigi Tenco. Alex describes himself as a ‘portiere virtuale, un portiere di notte’ (a virtual porter, a night porter), because his job primarily involves lurking around chat rooms and Internet domains to make sure no viruses or illegal content are transmitted. Alex, who owns a sleepy American Stafford commonly mistaken for a Pit Bull, once again represents a gentler, existentially confused counterpoint to the bloodthirsty determination of the killer. He also, however, provides a foil to the methodical investigative techniques of the police squads. When Alex inadvertently takes interest in the transactions between the professional killer and his handler (conducted in the chat rooms he administers), a co-worker helps him to track their conversations. Suspicious of the strange tone in the interactions between ‘Ilvecchio’ and ‘Pitbull,’ Alex and Luisa set the computer to notify them each time either logs on. They eventually suspect that the interlocutors might be involved in organizing an illegal dog-fighting ring. Alex, lovesick at the romantic loss of Kristine, the former owner of the American Stafford, has senses heightened by his

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

263

self-destructive suffering. His fascination with the serial killer thus comes from self-interested self-loathing, not law-enforcing zeal. Yet, his contemporary, technological savvy, fed by insomniac obsessiveness, becomes the most immediate means for reaching the killer. When he and Luisa manage to trace the phone number of the Pit Bull’s boss, they make a threatening prank call that allows the Pit Bull to track them down in the office. Alex’s ability to engage in the postmodern game of proximity, to collapse the boundaries that separate him from the killer, brings their physical bodies together in a bloody shooting in the Internet provider’s office. This point of contact, in turn, gives Grazia one, surviving witness to interview. Animal Intuition and Animality The serial killer trilogy offers an entire range of investigative strategies: those practised by the traditional police detective, the criminologist, and the accidental detective. Ultimately, however, none of these techniques succeed in capturing the killer. In the end, the killers always find the investigators. In Lupo mannaro, the Werewolf tracks down detective Romeo at his home, appearing in the dark to explain his homicidal obsession to him. In Almost Blue, although Simone is enlisted by the police department to track down the Iguana, it is, instead, the killer who finds the blind Simone in his apartment; he locates the psychiatrist Vittorio and attempts to turn himself in; he ‘metamorphoses’ into a police agent in order to find Grazia and Simone in their secure hotel. In Un giorno dopo l’altro, the Pit Bull finds Alex and murders his colleagues at the Internet service provider, and then later finds Grazia in her home and captures her. From a psychiatric point of view, the mutable, homicidal characteristics of the Werewolf, the Iguana, and the Pit Bull, and the very permeability of their boundaries, become the means allowing them to anticipate the actions of those around them. But given the characterizations of the trio as bestial, and given the immensely physical character of the texts, once again postmodern schizophrenia cannot quite explain their investigative success. For Carlo Ginzburg, intuition (which he also calls instinct or insight) is a critical part of the investigative paradigm, for any field that counts on being able to take into account the ‘unique and indispensable nature of the data.’26 This ‘low intuition’ makes the conjectural paradigm extend beyond any one particular discipline, for it can be found,

264

Methods of Murder

according to Ginzburg, ‘throughout the entire world, with no limits of geography, history, ethnicity, sex, or class,’ and it ‘binds the human animal closely to other animal species.’27 The Werewolf, the Iguana, and the Pit Bull have clearly honed their intuition and their investigative skills, but we discover that these talents lead them to take human lives. Lucarelli’s texts assign the serial killers an animality that essentially extinguishes their humanity and that does so, in part, by lending them narrative space exclusively so that they might plot, stalk, and kill. The criminals’ schizophrenic nature, which makes them alternately man and beast, means that the protagonist-killers, in the throes of homicidal rage, are ‘poor in world,’ in the Heideggerian sense that Giorgio Agamben considers in The Open.28 When they are poised to kill, the killers, like the Heideggerian animals Agamben describes, are both open and not open – they can only instinctively behave, rather than convincingly apprehend the consequences of their actions.29 According to Heidegger, an animal is always ‘essentially captivated,’ Agamben explains, and cannot ‘truly act (handeln) or comport itself (sich verhalten) in relation to [its disinhibitor]: it can only behave (sich benehmen).’30 Like these captivated animals, Lucarelli’s killers are trapped in the biological and artistic cage of bestiality, represented only as a function of their animal dysfunction. The killers have the problem of ‘defining the border – at once the separation and proximity’ – between their own animal and human natures.31 Each of the killers is produced as a character through the opposition man/animal or human/inhuman, or through the functioning of the ‘anthropological machine,’ which for Agamben functions ‘by means of an exclusion (that is also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (that is also always already an exclusion).’32 The killers’ non-human nature, isolated within their human form, is both that which the narrative hunts and that which renders them effective hunters. The result is a ‘lethal and bloody’ logic that endangers not only because of the existence of these killers, but because of their formulation as beastly humans.33 True Crime? Atavism in the Twenty-First Century For Agamben, this anthropological machine, along with the Heideggerian view of animals as ‘poor in world,’ constitutes a perilous justification for the exploitation and the control of both non-human animals and human political subjects. Separating man from non-man represents a dangerous tendency on the part of contemporary society, one

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

265

with strong nineteenth-century criminological resonance, to allow for the appropriation and control of certain parts of experience. In an essay on the anthropological machine, Matthew Calarco argues that Agamben ‘insists that the distinction [between the human and the animal] must be abolished altogether, and along with it the anthropological machine that produces the distinction.’34 Calarco convincingly argues that the success of a post-humanist position, like the one Agamben takes, requires us to recognize that the ‘locus and stakes of the human-animal distinction are also deeply political and ethical.’35 The question remains, then: does Lucarelli’s casting of animal-like killers allow him to critique the contemporary criminological, anthropological machine? Or should we be more cautious and wonder whether Lucarelli himself is seduced by the absolutism of positivist science, and whether his vivisection of victim after victim in his crime fiction betrays a belief in the exactness of science in predicting human behaviour? On the one hand, the author’s multi-mediality and diffuse, prolific production seems to build itself on blurred boundaries. Since the publication of the trilogy, Lucarelli’s body of work has revealed its own schizophrenic tendencies. Undecided between history and fiction, science and art, the popular writer positions himself both as actual investigator and as author of fiction, explicitly posing the problems of the postmodern condition for his popular audiences: Scienza e narrativa, perché il serial killer è sicuramente un argomento scientifico di enorme importanza ma è anche talmente ricco di suggestioni da non poter sfuggire, tutte le volte che ci si pensa, a una dimensione narrativa che investe con feroce violenza giornalismo, letteratura e cinema. (Serial Killer, 7) [Science and fiction, because the serial killer is surely a scientific topic of enormous importance, but also so richly suggestive that it cannot escape, each time one thinks of it, a fictional dimension that strikes, with ferocious violence, journalism, literature, and cinema.]

The temptation to fictionalize crime, which in L’uomo delinquente brought Cesare Lombroso to a sort of scientistic poeticism, through science to a taste for narrative elaboration, draws Lucarelli in the opposite direction. Like the illusory figures it creates, Lucarelli’s art speaks in a polyphonic range of voices indistinguishable one from the other. In Mistero in blu (1999), Misteri d’Italia (2002), and Nuovi Misteri

266

Methods of Murder

d’Italia: I casi di Blu Notte (2004), all books that are narrative versions of the television series Mistero in blu and Blu Notte, the author reconstructs the stories of such famous unsolved mysteries in Italy as the deaths of Enrico Mattei, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the ‘mostri di Firenze.’ The first of the cases in Mistero in blu, the ‘Caso Alinovi,’ begins by explaining that its protagonist, Francesca, is ‘una persona, non solo un personaggio.’ Lucarelli continues: Se fosse un romanzo giallo il ‘caso Alinovi’ sarebbe Prima di mezzanotte di Andrew Klavan o un film come Io ti salverò di Alfred Hitchcock o La parola ai giurati di Sidney Lumet. Abbiamo un colpevole, tutto è chiaro, il caso è chiuso . . . però, però . . . c’è qualcuno che non è convinto. C’è qualcosa che non torna.36 [If it were a detective novel the ‘Alinovi case’ would be True Crime by Andrew Klavan or a film like Spellbound by Alfred Hitchcock or 12 Angry Men by Sidney Lumet. We have a guilty party, everything is clear, the case is closed . . . but, but . . . someone isn’t convinced. Something doesn’t add up.]

Throughout the work, he describes the way things happen ‘come nei romanzi gialli’ (5) [like in detective novels]. At the end of his narration of the ‘Caso Alinovi,’ Lucarelli asserts: ‘Ma questo non è un giallo, questo è un caso di cronaca, e chi abbia ucciso Francesca, bella, inquieta e sensibile insegnante del Dams, noi non lo sappiamo’ (29) [But this isn’t a giallo, this is news, and who it was that killed Francesca, the pretty, restless, and sensitive teacher at DAMS [an art, music, and theatre program at the University of Bologna], we don’t know]. Besides constituting a true crime, unsolved mysteries series, the book Mistero in blu is an obsessive classificatory study of the genre: Lucarelli assigns authors to each (‘se fosse un romanzo, il “caso Falcidia,” lo avrebbe scritto proprio lei, la regina del giallo: Agatha Christie’ (32) [if it were a novel, the ‘Falcidia case’ would have been written by the queen of the giallo: Agatha Christie]; ‘sarebbe un racconto di Patricia Highsmith’ (53) [it would be a story by Patricia Highsmith]), as if reality itself were a genre study, and all of its protagonists Pirandellian characters in search of authors. While the hypothetical language that blankets his text in a chorus of protest insists (implicitly or explicitly) that what Lucarelli recounts is not, after all, a work of fiction, the resulting self-conscious literary style belies the separation between distinct realms. In demonstrating the difficulties of applying empirical

Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare

267

scientific practices to living human beings, in narrating Lombroso’s frustration, Lucarelli glories in his ability, instead, to benefit from the flexible creative space of art. Can we conclude, though, that Lucarelli’s postmodern fiction opens sufficient experimental space that it challenges the confines of biological determinism? Argento’s films, and in particular Profondo rosso, make their final moments into occasions for formal contemplation, thus avowing the primacy of their aesthetic messages.37 The final pages of the novels in the trilogy, however, return to the human/animal binary. The fate of the killers at the conclusion of each of the three novels is significant in this consideration. Lupo mannaro is the most open-ended of the three: a ‘prostitute’ whom we assume to be Grazia sits in the car of the serial killer, ready to strike as the Werewolf moves in on his prey. Almost Blue leaves Alessio Crotti in a mental hospital, carefully nurtured and cared for by doctors. At the end of Un giorno dopo l’altro, Grazia kills the killer, and in a page-long description, we follow the Pit Bull as he registers, in numbers one to ten, the physiological process of his death, from adrenaline giving way to pain, to hemorrhaging, a slow fall to the ground, a contraction of the heart, a lowering of blood pressure, and finally, death. Thus, over the course of the novels, we have the Lupo mannaro attempting to strike one final time, demonstrating the ineluctability of his need to kill. At the end of Almost Blue, Alessio Crotti is restrained by the 50 mm of Serenase that his doctors give him each day, but he still feels an animal running along under his skin. And the Pit Bull, in death, coldly vivisects his own body, participating in his collapse with the same scientific perspective he has applied to the numerous cold-blooded murders he has carried out. Lucarelli’s novels return to their obsession with serial killing as they conclude, demonstrating that each ending signifies only a temporary halt in the violence, inevitable in the protagonists’ animal-like nature. The trilogy hunts, confines, or extinguishes the bestial serial killers, safely cordoning them off in order to ‘protect’ the integrity of the other humans in the texts. Yet, in their seriality, and in their construction of the final vision of the protagonists, the novels perpetuate both the cycle of violence and the strategy of emphasizing the animal/human divide.38 The animal within, a recurrent trope in the trilogy, risks creating the conditions for the contemporary anthropological machine, the machine that for Agamben allows totalitarian regimes – but also democracies – to ‘determine and isolate the animal aspects of the human animal and

268

Methods of Murder

exclude them from humanity proper.’39 Calarco explains that, for Agamben, drawing a distinction between the human and the animal ‘creates the conditions for contemporary biopolitics, in which more and more of the so-called “biological” and “animal” aspects of human life are brought under the purview of the State and the juridical order.’40 Of course, this anthropological machine is one that Agamben sees as deeply embedded in the humanist project. Calarco explains: ‘To think through a human form-of-life that does not divide zo from bios – such would be the task of the politics of the coming community, a task and a politics that, as Agamben tells us, remain “largely to be invented.” ’41 Although inventive in its formal structure, Lucarelli’s Lombrosian fiction, read in conjunction with his non-fiction and true crime work, risks laying a popular narrative foundation for a biopolitical machine that openly functions by means of exclusion, and thus with the power to identify and control the animal in any state subject. While they blur representational boundaries, Lupo mannaro, Almost Blue, and Un giorno dopo l’altro reinforce the divide between the human and the non-human in man, and through their scientistic prose affirm a system that appropriates bare life. Thus, while the serial killer novels might leave us shaken by their vivid portrayals of death, we might also tremble at the realization that they tell the story of a lingering belief that contemporary science, like positivist science before it, can lay bare a primordial monster that lurks inside us all.

Epilogue: Crime in the Twenty-First Century

(Beyond Investigation) In discussing the limits and potentials of the evidential paradigm, Carlo Ginzburg describes criminology’s treacherous ability to exercise control over the individual. When discussing fingerprinting, he explains that ‘an indistinct mass of Bengalese “snouts” (to use Filarete’s disparaging term) became at one stroke individuals, each one distinguished by a specific biological mark. This prodigious extension of the concept of individuality was in fact occurring by means of the State, its bureaucracy and police. Thanks to the fingerprint, even the least inhabitant of the poorest village of Asia or Europe was now identifiable and controllable.’1 In a more optimistic vein, however, Ginzburg extends to the investigative paradigm the intellectual ability to challenge the status quo: ‘But the same conjectural paradigm employed to develop ever more subtle and capillary forms of control can become a device to dissolve the ideological clouds which increasingly obscure such a complex social structure as fully developed capitalism.’2 In similar fashion, in the best case, crime fiction can sound a warning regarding the workings of power, potentially helping to dissolve or at least disperse the clouds of ideology that surround issues of criminal justice and investigation. In less ideal forms, it can risk trivializing, or even replicating the structures of power that increasingly reach into the everyday lives of the individual. Beccarian and Lombrosian epistemologies of crime provide a path to explore the criminal and his body in contemporary Italian crime fiction and film. Although my analyses focus on the ways that these two epistemological approaches differ in scope, one may also find many

270

Methods of Murder

points of contact between them: both Beccarian and Lombrosian fiction approach contemporary culture with an eye to understanding the criminal. Whether the criminal body is considered an intangible intellectual subject of the judicial system, as in the Beccarian framework, or whether it is a physical entity to be vivisected for study, as in the Lombrosian, body and subject exist at the centre of a discourse on the behaviour of citizens and on their treatment. Both the Beccarian and the Lombrosian veins of crime fiction, then, stage some of the most pressing problems of the modern subject of the state, whether its intellectual subjugation or its physical penetrability. Most of the authors in this study address issues of power and justice in the light of political situations contemporary to their composition. Gadda’s crime fiction explores questions related to Italian Fascism, and his work reflects the complex and contradictory fact that he was ‘a convinced Fascist, and then, in the immediate aftermath of its fall, he wrote vitriolically against Fascism.’3 Sciasica’s novels often contain thinly veiled criticisms of political figures, comprising political allegories that Mark Chu argues are not meant to be read as ‘romans-à-clef,’ but that nevertheless become ‘difficult to ignore.’4 Camilleri protests the Berlusconian political climate in novels and short stories, and he makes reference to the G8 in Genoa, problems of immigration, and other contemporary events. Lucarelli studies famous Italian crimes, from Pasolini’s murder to the story of the Uno bianca, and integrates theories on the direction of criminality in contemporary Italy into his crime fiction. These questions prove a point made by Luca Somigli, who argues that ‘unlike the modernist or the post-modern novel, popular fiction still believes that the gap between signifier and signified can be filled, and that language can represent the world.’5 Crime fiction has the capacity to take a solemn, direct gaze at the events occurring in the social, political, and natural environment in which it is set. By way of its criminological lens, however, the present study resolved to focus on the more abstract concerns that also drive these works, their philosophical reflections on questions of power and justice. In particular, these contemporary fictional meditations on crime and criminality express unease about society’s tendency to obscure the workings of power, and to forget the lessons learned in years of its exercise. As such, this form of fiction affirms the critical importance of examining our relationship to the criminal past. In explaining his approach to the criminal body, David Horn suggests that only through a dialogue of continuity with the past, only by ‘transgressing [. . .]

Crime in the Twenty-First Century 271

comfortable boundaries’ is it ‘possible [. . .] to locate criminal anthropology in relation to the emergence of new reading practices [. . .] that seek to make human difference and dangerousness legible.’6 Beccaria and Lombroso are not outmoded thinkers, although at times it might seem opportune to isolate them in their eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury contexts. Rather, the issues raised in their works dovetail with contemporary social theory and philosophy, and through them we can see the ways in which contemporary authors of crime fiction attempt to make sense of the relationship between the subject and the state. Beccarian fiction takes on the question of the visibility and effectiveness of the system that prosecutes crimes. As such, it engages with the Foucauldian concern for the disappearance of the spectacle of punishment and the increasing ‘normalization’ of processes of discipline. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that our contemporary disciplinary society works to hide the most drastic ramifications of the penal process. As Beccarian reforms took place, the criminal was figured as an introspective subject in an attempt to put his body out of the reach of the state. Foucault suggests that as this distancing occurred, historically speaking, ‘whatever theatrical elements [punishment] still retained were now downgraded, as if the functions of the penal ceremony were gradually ceasing to be understood, as if this rite that “concluded the crime” was suspected of being in some undesirable way linked with it [. . .] Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process.’7 As a result of the penal system’s changing focus, then, an abstract form of justice ‘keeps its distance from the act, tending always to entrust it to others, under the seal of secrecy. It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing.’8 Rather than continue with a public model of punishment, or with a symbolic juridical system, Foucault argues that societies tended to adopt a ‘coercive, corporal, solitary, secret model of the power to punish’ by sending their condemned into the prison systems.9 He accuses crime fiction of confirming the solitary model of punishment, becoming ‘the quiet game of the well behaved.’10 However, as I argued, Beccaria’s creation of the judicial subject was cerebral, not corporal, and staged the drama of justice prior to the body, keeping it out of reach and attempting to definitively wrest that body from the system. Instead of ‘behaving’ in a way that reinforces the Foucauldian solitary model, crime fiction in the Beccarian vein, at least, has the potential to act out an alternative system, a theatrical model of punishment that Foucault thought was abandoned after

272

Methods of Murder

it was formulated in the eighteenth century.11 This symbolic system, which performs its effectiveness, ‘uses not marks, but signs, coded sets of representations, which would be given the most rapid circulation and the most general acceptance possible by citizens witnessing the scene of punishment.’12 The Beccarian literature of crime, with its focus on the justice system, stages the theatre of crime in the context of highly performative, dialogue-driven narratives that become sign systems representing the rituals of crime, investigation, and punishment. By restoring theatricality to the penal system, Sciascia, Camilleri, and Carofiglio create a stage on which to re-open Enlightenment-era concerns about criminality. Sciascia’s fiction most closely follows Foucault’s line of critique. His novels adopt a vision of a justice system that affirms a divide between power and reason, wondering whether the power to punish is ever exercised in the name of justice. The invisible networks of power that underlie Sicilian society extend throughout Italy and the world, subjugating criminal and non-criminal alike to their disciplinary authority. By integrating a memory of the eighteenth-century judicial reformers and their hope for joy in reasoning, Sciascia incorporates nostalgia for the optimism of certain moments of Enlightenment. But by reminding readers that power struggles were also prevalent in the eighteenth century, he historicizes his anxiety and extends it, genealogically, to the very foundation of his faint hope. Camilleri’s novels are, in Foucauldian terms, perhaps the bestbehaved of the works in this study, as they tend to conclude with the resolution of the case and the punishment of the criminal. The Montalbano novels, in fact, may tend to exercise the ‘power of normalization’ that Foucault identifies as proper to the mechanisms of the disciplinary society.13 Although focused around the process of investigation and not the act of punishment, however, Camilleri’s novels assign theatricality to the criminal realm. In the Sicilian author’s Beccarian crime fiction, we return to the concept that ‘saw punishment as a procedure for requalifying individuals as subjects, as juridical subjects.’14 Camilleri nostalgically creates a world in which, through serial repetition, correct behaviour can be learned and enforced. Consequently, his novels narrate the power to effectively punish, but they also constitute a sign system that teaches the functioning of a justice system, however creaky, in the hands of Commissario Montalbano. Carofiglio’s novels, finally, delve into the ‘coercive, corporal, solitary’ universe of the prison, for Attorney Guerrieri frequently visits

Crime in the Twenty-First Century 273

his clients behind bars. Aware of the violence inherent in the power to punish, Guerrieri attempts to remove them from the reach of the long arm of the law, adeptly manoeuvring the legal system to prove his clients not guilty. More emphatically, by way of the representation of studious play, the Guerrieri novels conclude with an attempt to deactivate the law, to focus attention on their status as novels, and not crime fiction. Legal procedurals that are not about the law: Carofiglio’s insistent conceit, one upheld in interviews with the author, indicates his desire to resituate his topic in a more personal sphere, although, paradoxically, his novels remain insistently tied to questions of justice and legality. This position of wilful uncertainty resembles the ‘field of tension’ that Agamben recognizes as a constant presence in our culture: ‘one [force] that institutes and makes, and one that deactivates and deposes.’15 For Agamben, ‘the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical machine.’16 Carofiglio’s Beccarian fiction, then, draws us into the zone of ambiguity that, for other authors, leads to the examination of the Lombrosian body. The Lombrosian vein of crime fiction takes ideology into the body, in a political act that implicates readers on a more (literally) visceral level. In The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro argues: ‘It is in the flesh first of all, far more than on some level of supposed ideological reflection, that the political is personal, and the personal political.’17 If the Beccarian literature of crime attempts to reveal the workings of power, Lombrosian fiction, in the best case, has the capacity to show readers the importance of remembering the criminological past critically. David Horn argues that ‘criminal anthropology has been limited to a supporting role in a cautionary tale about deviant or spurious science; it has been invoked either to make visible the differences between impure and pure ways of knowing, or else to reassure us of the ability of real science to police its borders or to straighten the path to truth.’18 A closer examination of the presence of Lombrosian epistemologies of crime in fiction demonstrates that criminal anthropology can be taken up to recount a cautionary tale, but that it should not reassure us that more contemporary approaches to the criminal lead us to ‘truth’ or ‘pure’ ways of knowing. Focused as they are around the opening of the human body, the Lombrosian novels consider ‘biological life,’ the borders of human existence that separate the living from the dead, the inside from the outside. According to Agamben, contemporary society has taken on

274

Methods of Murder

‘as a task the very factical existence of peoples, that is, in the last analysis, their bare life,’19 and on some level, this bare life becomes the focus of each of the works of fiction in the Lombrosian vein of the literature of crime. This attachment to the biopolitical, argues Agamben, takes us into an ‘impolitical’ realm, in which ‘genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate.’20 Gadda’s crime fiction, which ends with the image of the eternal push of the internal viscera, tends towards despondency at the encroachment of this bare life. Lombrosian crime stories, however, also have the capacity to repoliticize this biopolitical realm. Argento situates crime fiction in the physical space of the crisis of the body, casting narratives that evoke horror in an experience of the aesthetic. In the process, he allows for a critical rethinking, or a personal awareness, of our positions as biopolitical subjects. Lucarelli demonstrates similar potential in his fiction, although his fascination with the potentials of criminal science to provide a path to a truth, however weak, threatens to undermine his political message. One of the final, implicit questions that my work addresses is one of specificity. The criminological framework, based in works by two familiar Italian figures, might lay a claim to a national tradition of thought, but ultimately, we may wonder whether this is an Italian question. In part, it is. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg eloquently makes a case for the ‘historical and theoretical interest’ of both theories of sovereign power and biopolitics in the formation of Italian identity: ‘to the extent that Italy develops a “historic compromise” between these two forms of power, it constitutes a singularly clear case.’21 Yet, more pressing than questions of Italian identity in these texts are the wider questions of crime and the criminal. By tying the analyses to cultural theory and philosophy, and by pushing these texts to reveal their conceptual foundations, I touched upon questions that resonate with a body of crime fiction that transcends the Italian context. Guantanamo Bay, police responses at the G8 summits, the U.S. Patriot Act, and countless other highly charged, highly publicized efforts to define and redefine criminality remind us of the high stakes of such a move.22 Scholars have begun to discuss the contemporary political moment in terms of ‘global lockdown,’ linking the movement of global capital and neo-liberal politics, theoretically speaking, to the prison.23 For Julia Sudbury, the ‘prison is thus simultaneously local and global,

Crime in the Twenty-First Century 275

or, to use a neologism coined by Nawal El Saadawi, it is “glocal,” a product of local, national, and global political, economic, and cultural phenomena.’24 Prior to the prison exists the negotiation of criminality, a decision-making process that determines who to incarcerate. The Beccarian and the Lombrosian frameworks in my work define different ways of constructing the criminal and show that, when fictionalized, crime becomes a means for thinking through these critical questions of contemporary existence. This book is merely one window onto these questions. In 1929, in the Quaderni del carcere, Antonio Gramsci despaired at the absence of a national-popular literature in Italy and was specifically perplexed at the nation’s lack of detective fiction. One has to wonder what Gramsci would think of the millions of copies of Montalbano mysteries sold throughout Italy and the world. How would Gramsci react to Carlo Lucarelli’s didactic late-night television appearances, in which the author meticulously unravels the complexities of highprofile crimes for curious audiences, explaining history alongside the methodology of detection and its limitations? What would he make of the websites, chat rooms, discussion boards, CD-ROMs, comic books, graphic novels, television series, and films that have sprung up around these narrative forms? How would he regard the increasing scholarly attention being dedicated to studies of these popular works? He certainly would have taken note: Gramsci’s was and remains the voice of a certain Italian critical conscience, persistently reminding scholars that contemporary crime fiction (and all popular fiction) has the potential to resonate in an area much wider than that of the literary phenomenon itself. ‘Neanche il romanzo poliziesco?’ [Not even the detective novel?] mused Gramsci, contemplating what he perceived to be the gaps in the history of popular fiction in Italy.25 Gramsci’s most famous work was written from a prison cell, where he lived the effects of shifting definitions of criminality and contested ideologies. Had he looked around the carceral chamber from which he composed the Quaderni del carcere, perhaps he would have discerned the shades of the intriguing criminal figures whose minds and bodies would inspire a copious fictional legacy in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Italian fiction.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

All translations not cited specifically are my own. Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy 1 The detective genre in Italy has been known as the giallo (which means ‘yellow’) since 1929, when the publisher Mondadori first began issuing detective fiction in paperbacks with bright yellow covers. 2 Alberto Savinio, Palchetti romani (Milan: Adelphi, 1982), 85. Savinio’s affirmation originally appeared in the weekly Omnibus in July 1938. 3 Augusto De Angelis, ‘Conferenza sul giallo (in tempi neri),’ La lettura: rivista mensile, March 1980, 30. The notes in which this quote appears were published in 1980, but are from a lecture given by De Angelis during the Fascist era. 4 See Loris Rambelli, Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), 7–22; Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), xiii. The very first works in this series were not Italian: novels by S.S. Van Dine, Edgar Wallace, Anna Katharine Green, and Robert Louis Stevenson comprised the first four volumes of the ‘giallo’ series. Poet Leonardo Sinisgalli reviewed the four books in 1929, defining them ‘romanzi gialli,’ and launching the Italian name of the genre (Andrea Camilleri, ‘Difesa di un colore,’ http://www.vigata.org/bibliografia/ colore/shtml, accessed 17 Aug. 2009). The first Italian author to contribute was Alessandro Varaldo, whose Il sette bello (1931) was the 21st book in the Mondadori series (Marco Sangiorgi, ‘Il fascismo e il giallo italiano,’ Il giallo italiano come nuovo romanzo sociale, eds. Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò (Ravenna: Longo, 2004), 117).

278

Designer Notes to pages Animals 4–8

5 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere: Letteratura e vita nazionale (Rome: Riuniti, 1996), 131. 6 Stefano Benvenuti and Gianni Tizzoni, Il romanzo giallo: Storia, autori e personaggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1979), 186. 7 Alberto Tedeschi, ‘Ma il vero colpevole sono io,’ La repubblica (2 April 1979). Works like Simenon’s The Suicides presented almost insurmountable difficulties under these regulations (Sangiorgi, ‘Il fascismo e il giallo italiano,’ 119). 8 Andrea Camilleri suggests that the real ‘casa inabitabile’ in July 1941 was Italy (‘Difesa di un colore’). 9 ‘Libri gialli,’ L’Assalto: Organo della Federazione dei fasci di combattimento di Bologna, XXI, no. 43 (30 Aug. 1941), 2. 10 Marco Cicala, ‘Il boom del giallo (tutti i particolari in cronaca),’ Il venerdì di Repubblica, no. 900 (17 June 2005), 32. 11 For some recent studies, see Luca Crovi, Tutti i colori del giallo: Il giallo italiano da De Marchi a Scerbanenco a Camilleri (Venice: Marsilio, 2002); Massimo Carloni, L’Italia in Giallo: Geografia e storia del giallo italiano contemporaneo (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1994); Raffaele Crovi, Le maschere del mistero: Storie e tecniche di thriller italiani e stranieri (Florence: Passigli, 2000); Sangiorgi and Telò, Il giallo italiano. 12 Luca Somigli, ‘Form and Ideology in Italian Detective Fiction: Introduction,’ Symposium 59/2 (2005): 69. 13 Such archaeologies of detection include Oreste del Buono, I padri fondatori: Il giallo da Jahvè a Voltaire (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), and Dorothy Sayers’ canonical essay which links S.S. Van Dine’s rules for detective fiction to Aristotle’s Poetics. See Sayers’ ‘Aristotle on Detective Fiction,’ in Robin Winks, ed., Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), or the website maintained by Luciano Stupazzini which proposes numerous classical and biblical sources (accessed 5 April 2010, http://kidslink.bo.cnr.it/irrsaeer/padri/giallhtm.html#bellaria). 14 See, e.g., the chapter ‘Delitto all’italiana,’ in Benvenuti and Rizzoni, Il romanzo giallo; and Rambelli, Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano. 15 See Carloni, L’Italia in Giallo. 16 See esp. ibid. 17 See esp. Crovi, Tutti i colori; and Crovi, Le maschere del mistero. 18 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 69. 19 In Carlo Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990).

Notes to pages 8–10 279 20 He explains, ‘Freud was a physician; Morelli had a medical degree; Conan Doyle had practiced medicine before turning to literature. In each of these cases the model of medical semiotics is evident’ (Myths, 102). 21 Ginzburg, Myths, 119. On Holmes, see 97–8; on handwriting, see 118–19; on recidivist criminals and fingerprinting, see 120–1. 22 See J.K. Van Dover, You Know My Method: The Science of the Detective (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994); Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Lucille Frackman Becker, ‘Science and Detective Fiction: Complementary Genres on the Margins of French Literature,’ FLS: On the Margins of French Literature 20 (1993): 119–25; Eric Leif Davin, ‘Inspector Zadig: Voltaire and the Birth of the Scientific Detective Story,’ Fantasy Commentator 8/3–4 (1995): 172, 214–16. 23 Tani, Doomed Detective, 7. 24 Umberto Eco cites this example of Zadig’s investigative thinking in the opening chapter of Il nome della rosa (Milan: Bompiani, 1980), when Frate Guglielmo demonstrates his powers of perception to the incredulous Adso by describing in detail Brunello, an escaped horse he has never seen, as the two arrive at the monastery. Ginzburg asserts that ‘these lines, and those which followed, were the embryo of the mystery novel. They inspired Poe, Gaboriau, and Conan Doyle – the first two directly, the third perhaps indirectly’ (Myths, 116). Among the many other critics who cite Zadig as a significant prototype of the modern detective, see Del Buono, I padri fondatori; Benvenuti and Rizzoni, Il romanzo giallo, 11–13; Crovi, Le maschere del mistero, 9; and Davin, ‘Inspector Zadig.’ 25 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage, 1975), 144. 26 Kant’s essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ links the project of Enlightenment to humanistic freedom. He continues, ‘Thus when nature has unwrapped, from under this hard shell, the seed for which she cares most tenderly, namely the propensity and calling to think freely, the latter gradually works back upon the mentality of the people (which thereby gradually becomes capable of freedom in acting) and eventually even upon the principles of government, which finds it profitable to itself to treat the human being, who is now more than a machine, in keeping with his dignity’ (in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17; original emphasis). 27 See, in particular, Piers Beirne, Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis’ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993),

280

28

29

30

31

32

33 34

Designer Notes to pages Animals 11–12

11–13; David A. Jones, History of Criminology: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 4–6. Primarily, it would seem, as a result of Voltaire’s interest in and writing on the matter, there are numerous studies of the affaire Calas that deal with both empirical and social questions surrounding it. See David D. Bien, The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); Edna Nixon, Voltaire and the Calas Case (New York: Vanguard, 1961); A. Coquerel, Jean Calas et sa famille: Étude historique d’après les documents originaux (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970); and Frederic Herbert Maugham, The Case of Jean Calas (London: Heinemann, 1928). The people present were Marc-Antoine’s mother; his brother Pierre; a family servant, Jeanne Viguier; a guest, Gaubert Lavaysse; and the unfortunate father, Jean Calas. The Criminal Ordinance Act of 1670 legislated a public spectacle of shame: suicide victims were to be dragged through the streets of a city, face down, to the town’s dumping grounds (Bien, Calas Affair, 9–10). The judges ordered that Jean Calas be ‘taken in a cart, from the palace prison to the Cathedral. There, kneeling in front of the main door, holding in his hands a torch of yellow wax weighing two pounds, he must make the amende honorable, asking pardon of God, of the King, and of justice. Then the executioner should take him in the cart to the Place Saint Georges, where upon a scaffold his arms, legs, thighs, and loins will be broken and crushed. Finally, the prisoner should be placed upon a wheel, with his face turned to the sky, alive and in pain, and repent for his said crimes and misdeeds, all the while imploring God for his life, thereby to serve as an example and to instil terror in the wicked’ (quoted in Beirne, Inventing Criminology, 11–12). The case represented a double affront to the ideals of reason, for not only was empirical evidence distorted, ignored, and misinterpreted, but the realms of state power and religious belief were conflated. The Calas family was Protestant in a predominantly Catholic society, and anger at Jean Calas’ arrest and conviction was also based on the perceived persecution of the man because of his religious belief. Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance, trans. Brian Masters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8. Voltaire lamented the injustices eloquently in his ‘Commentary on the book On Crimes and Punishments’ (introduction to the French translation of Dei delitti e delle pene), and also expressed the idealistic, activist attitude of the Enlightenment: ‘Whichever way you look, you find contradiction,

Notes to pages 12–13 281

35 36

37

38

harshness, uncertainty, arbitrariness. We are seeking to perfect everything in this century; so let us seek to perfect the laws on which our lives and fortunes depend!’ (Political Writings, ed. and trans. David Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 279). Voltaire, ‘An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de La Barre,’ trans. Simon Harvey, in Treatise on Tolerance, 137–48, 139. Voltaire reportedly implored Filippo Mazzuchelli, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to France, to tell Beccaria ‘que je suis un pauvre vieillard âgé de soixante et dix sept ans, que j’ai le pié dans la fosse, que je ne souhaiterai d’être à Milan que pour le voir, le connaître et l’admirer de plus près, comme je fais toujours içi’ [I am a poor old man of 77 years, with one foot in the grave, whose only wish is to be in Milan, to see and know it, to admire it from close up, as I have always done from here] (quoted in Venturi, introduction to Dei delitti, xxvi). Melchoir Grimm echoed this hope placed by the French Enlightenment in Beccaria’s treatise, writing: ‘Il sérait à desirer que tous les législateurs de l’Europe voulussent prendre les idées de M. Beccaria en considération et remédier à la barbarie froide et juridique de nos tribunaux’ [We must hope that all the legislators in Europe will take Beccaria’s ideas into consideration and remedy the cold and juridical barbarity of our tribunals] (quoted in Venturi, ibid., xxi). Beccaria reciprocated Voltaire’s admiration. In a 1766 letter to André Morellet, he gratefully praises French philosophical writings: ‘Le vostre opere immortali formano la mia continua lettura’ [Your immortal works are my constant reading material] (‘Lettera a André Morellet,’ Dei delitti, 363). For more on the intellectual exchanges between Voltaire and Beccaria, see Luigi Firpo, ‘Voltaire e Beccaria,’ in L’Età dei Lumi: Studi storici sul Settecento Europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Naples: Jovene, 1985), vol. 2, 925–66. Enrico Ferri, one of the founding members of the positivist school of criminology, ‘that science which even foreign scientists admit to be our specialty, namely the science of criminology,’ noting the laudable reputation of Italians in the field, was one of the first to place Beccaria at the beginnings of the discipline: ‘aside from two terrible books of the Digest, and from the practical criminologists of the Middle Ages who continued the study of criminality, the modern world opened a glorious page in the progress of criminal science with the modest little book of Cesare Beccaria’ (The Positive School of Criminology: Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901, trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr, 1913), 10).

282

Designer Notes to pages Animals 13–23

39 In histories of criminology, Beccaria is considered the founder of the ‘classical’ school of criminology, a field which focuses on legalistic interest in the punishment of crimes; it exists in contrast with the ‘positive’ school, which instead, focuses on the search for biological explanations for criminality. 40 Ginzburg locates the ‘evidential paradigm’ at the site of an encounter between ‘rationalism’ and ‘irrationalism,’ seeking through his analysis to ‘break out of the fruitless opposition’ that divides the two (Myths, 96). Whereas mathematicians and researchers in the empirical sciences (‘Galilean science,’ according to Ginzburg) expect results to be repeatable, universal, generalizable; conjectural sciences such as art history, psychoanalysis, or detection recognize the more subjective nature of their findings. In the Beccarian vein, following trends visible in the work of Beccaria, the universalizing force of Galilean science comes to the fore, whereas the Lombrosian favours the speculative, conjectural knowledge proper to the ‘humane’ sciences. 41 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 277–300. 42 Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians (1860– 1920) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 10. 43 Ibid. 44 Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 42. 1. Investigative Introspection: Cesare Beccaria’s Disembodied Criminal 1 See ‘introspection,’ Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Accessed 10 Oct. 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com. 2 Venturi, ‘Introduzione,’ xiii. 3 Active between 1762 and 1766, the Milanese ‘Accademia dei Pugni’ modelled their studies around the French tradition of the philosophes. Between 1764 and 1766, they published the journal Il caffé, a periodical that provided a domain in which debates about reform might emerge. 4 Lucio Villari, ed., Illuministi e Riformatori (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1995), vii. Lombardy was under Austrian rule at this time. The Academy sought to ‘[win] over the Austrian rulers [. . .] to a broad programme of reform and to [bring] attention to themselves as potential agents of these changes within the imperial administration’ (Richard Bellamy, ‘Introduction,’ in On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Richard Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

Notes to pages 24–37 283

5 6

7

8

9

10

1995), x; emphasis added). Thus, intellectuals who worked relatively unproblematically for the occupying government laboured simultaneously to lay the groundwork for a new Italian nation. Letter from Beccaria to Pietro Verri, ‘Lione, 12 ottobre,’ in Venturi, Dei delitti, 380. In their ‘Introduction: Philosophy, Crime, and Theoretical Criminology,’ in Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), Bruce A. Arrigo and Christopher R. Williams remind readers that ‘one could not have postulated a view of punishment without crime serving as a basis for such a theory (e.g., de Beccaria, 1764/1963; Foucault, 1977). Consequently, we can look to theories of law and punishment for some indication of how crime and criminal behavior were conceptualized’ (5). Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), 3. For the English translation, see Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 5. Henceforth, page references to Dei delitti, in both languages, will be included parenthetically in the body of the text. Benedict Carpzov (1595–1666) was a German jurist; Giulio Claro (1525–1575), an Alessandrian jurist; and Prospero Farinacci (1544–1618), a Roman jurist and lawyer (Venturi, Dei delitti, 3n). Ever aware of his public, Beccaria historicizes problems with the legal system, insisting that his context is one of ‘grandi monarchi, i benefattori della umanità che ci reggono’ (3) [great monarchs, the benefactors of humanity who rule us] and who love ‘le verità esposte dall’oscuro filosofo con un non fanatico vigore’ [the truths that are expounded with non-fanatical vigour by the humble philosopher (5)]. It is in a later treatise, the ‘Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile,’ in Franco Venturi, ed., Illuministi Italiani (Milan: Ricciardi, 1958, vol. 3) that he elaborates the idea of the ‘science of man,’ explaining that ‘la morale, la politica, le belle-arti, che sono le scienze del buono, dell’utile, e del bello, sono scienze che hanno una più grande prossimità, anzi una più estesa identità di principii di quello che taluno potrebbe immaginare: queste scienze derivano tutte da una scienza sola e primitiva, cioè dalla scienza dell’uomo’ (124) [morals, politics, and fine arts, which are the science of the good, the useful, and the beautiful, are sciences that share a greater proximity (or better, a more extensive identity of principles) than might be imagined: these sciences all derive in one, primitive science: the science of man]. In ‘Penological Reform and the Myth of Beccaria,’ an article in the journal Criminology (28/2 (1990): 325–46), Graeme Newman and Pietro Marongiu argue polemically that ‘the idea of Beccaria as a great reformer is a myth

284

11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18

Designer Notes to pages Animals 27–28

slavishly adhered to by modern penologists’ and that ‘the treatise for which Beccaria is so famous not only is full of irresolvable contradictions, but holds within it reactionary, antireformist doctrines’ (326). Most criticism of Beccaria is more measured in tone, as is Piers Beirne’s Inventing Criminology, which examines misrepresentations of the text, but does not dispute ‘the momentous practical effects exerted in Europe and colonial America by Beccaria’s book’ (5). Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 74. Ibid., 74–5. See also ‘The Gentle Way in Punishment,’ in ibid., 104–31. Beirne contends that many readings of Dei delitti take this route and that, in fact, much scholarship on Beccaria is guilty of a ‘persistent misrepresentation’ of his arguments (Inventing Criminology, 5; see also 15–16). Beirne points out that ‘some scholars nowadays suggest [. . .] that because concepts such as “crime,” “criminal,” and “criminality” were absent from their epistemological universe, classical criminologists such as Beccaria and his followers were not representative of a criminology of Homo criminalis as such. As Foucault declared, while referring in Discipline and Punish to the era of classical criminology not only in France but also apparently everywhere else, “One will have to wait a long time before homo criminalis becomes a definite object in the field of knowledge” ’ (4). Beirne’s study aims to give a more nuanced portrait of classical criminology, demonstrating continuity with the positivist model to follow. Franco Venturi, ‘La Milano del Caffè,’ in Settecento Riformatore: Da Muratori a Beccaria, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 680. Franco Venturi, ‘Gli uomini delle riforme: La Lombardia,’ in Settecento Riformatore: L’Italia dei Lumi (1764–1790), vol. 5 (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 431–2. This difficulty is what Ginzburg formulates as ‘the inability of medicine to achieve the exactness of the natural sciences.’ Such difficulty, he argues, stems from ‘the impossibility to quantify, except with purely auxiliary functions. And the impossibility of quantifying was due to the unavoidable presence of what was qualitative, of the individual; and the presence of the individual was indebted to the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to differences (even marginal ones) between human beings than those between rocks or leaves. The future epistemological essence of the humane sciences was already being formulated in these discussions on the “uncertainty” of medicine’ (Myths, 114). Ibid., 124. The ties linking medicine and criminology both practically and metaphorically are everywhere evident. In his 1935 work An Introduction to Criminology, trans. Emil Van Loo (London: Methuen, 1936), Willem Bonger asserts

Notes to pages 28–38 285

19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28

that the ‘element of la science pour la science should be present in every scientist, otherwise he will be no good in his profession; and this applies to the criminologist too. But this point of view is secondary as compared with the practical aspect, just as in the case of medical science. Indeed, comparison with the latter repeatedly suggests itself’ (7). See, e.g., references to the ‘corpo politico’ on pages 31, 51, and 55. For a discussion of the role of the body politic in Italian literary and cinematic history, see Millicent Marcus, ‘The Italian Body Politic Is a Woman: Feminized National Identity in Postwar Italian Film,’ in Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish, eds., Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and Its Afterlife: Essays in Honor of John Freccero (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), 329–47. In the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, Salvatore Battaglia gives the following example (among others) of the use of the adjective ‘intestino’ in this latter sense: ‘Per non poter più resistere agl’intestini tormenti delle viscere addolorate, forassi con le forfici il ventre di propria mano’ (Segneri, II–49) [Because he could no longer stand the intestinal torments of aching bowels, with his own hand he pierced his belly with shears]. Ginzburg, Myths, 107. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 28. Bellamy, ‘Introduction,’ On Crimes and Punishments, xvi. Beirne, Inventing Criminology, 4. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10. Lewis Hinchman, ‘Autonomy, Individuality, and Self-Determination,’ in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 495. In his essay ‘Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty’ (Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 43–69), Steven DeCaroli points out that Beccaria’s formulation of the death of the citizen corresponds to Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of the onto-political category of ‘bare life’: ‘Whereas the removal of liberty requires either incarceration or bondage, and consequently an intensification of the relation between the individual and the state, the loss of citizenship alone does just the opposite [. . .] [T]he life which remains – stripped of citizenship, deprived of the barest necessities of “fire and water,” and abandoned to foreignness even within the heart of the state – is bare life, a life for which the withdrawal of the law is on the one hand deeply punitive, on the other hand full of potential’ (63). Beccaria formulates such life as full of potential, and contemporary manifestations of the Beccarian epistemology tend to debate these ramifications.

286

Designer Notes to pages Animals 39–49

29 On more than one occasion, Beccaria suggests the capacity of violence to manufacture ‘truth’: ‘Ogni azione violenta confonde e fa sparire le minime differenze degli oggetti per cui si distingue talora il vero dal falso’ (42) [Every violent action confuses and eliminates the tiny differences in things by which the truth may sometimes be distinguished from falsehood (35)]. 30 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 16. 31 Ibid., 16–17. I will discuss Foucault’s critique of Beccarian epistemology below. 32 Beirne, Inventing Criminology, 44. 33 Richard Mowery Andrews, ‘The Cunning of Imagery: Rhetoric and Ideology in Cesare Beccaria’s Treatise On Crimes and Punishments,’ in Mary B. Campbell and Mark Rollins, eds., Begetting Images: Studies in the Art and Science of Symbol Production (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 129. Andrews’ work is otherwise a scathing critique of Dei delitti, an attack in which he claims: ‘In the Treatise, Beccaria rigorously attempted to de-Christianize criminal law and justice. Modern secularists, from Voltaire to Diderot onward, have celebrated this radical separation of crime from sin. But the textual result was a program of criminal justice devoid of moral complexity, compassion, and mitigations of punishment. Beccaria translated human beings into a rhetoric of measurements and proportions in service of public and propertied order. His imagery of moral concern served to conceal that purpose and its great statist repressiveness’ (ibid.). 34 Beirne, Inventing Criminology, 47. 35 Aaron Thomas, ‘Preface,’ in On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, by Cesare Beccaria (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), xxii. 36 Ibid., xxiii. 37 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 11. 38 Ibid., 109. 39 Ibid., 116. 40 Ibid., 10. 41 Anthony J. Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 6. 2. Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia’s Enlightened Detectives 1 Italo Calvino, ‘L’impossibilità del giallo in Sicilia,’ in Matteo Collura, ed., Leonardo Sciascia: La memoria, il futuro (Milan: Bompiani, 1998), 15. 2 Ibid.

Notes to pages 49–53 287 3 Leonardo Sciascia, ‘Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco,’ in Opere: 1971– 1983, ed. Claude Ambroise (Milan: Bompiani, 1989), 1181–96. 4 In his essay ‘Contemporary Italy (since 1956),’ in Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, eds., The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Michael Caesar has suggested that all of Sciascia’s works constitute a type of detective fiction, as the ‘characteristic situation in Sciascia is the conflict, or more exactly the simple noncommunication, between the patient research, conjecture, deduction, speculation and reconstruction of the investigator, and the “wall of silence,” omertà or blankness which faces him’ (591). 5 In an interview with Claude Ambroise, Sciascia asserted: ‘Tutto è legato, per me, al problema della giustizia: in cui si involge quello della libertà, della dignità umana, del rispetto tra uomo e uomo’ [For me, everything is connected to the question of justice. This question involves freedom, human dignity, and mutual respect] (’14 domande a Leonardo Sciascia,’ in Claude Ambroise, ed., Leonardo Sciascia: Opere 1956–1971 (Milan: Bompiani, 1987), xiii). 6 W.H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage,’ in Robin Winks, ed., Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 21. Auden’s essay opens with an epigraph from the Bible: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law,’ Romans VII:7 (15). 7 Sally Munt, Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1. 8 Van Dover, You Know My Method, 27. 9 Leonardo Sciascia, ‘Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco,’ in Opere: 1971– 1983, ed. Claude Ambroise (Milan: Bompiani, 1989), 1183; original emphasis. Sciascia goes on to suggest that the first detective story is the story of Daniel in the Bible, and also notes that G.K. Chesterton, a ‘grande scrittore cattolico,’ wrote a series in which the investigator, Father Brown, was, in fact, a Catholic priest. 10 Ibid., 1196. 11 Tani, Doomed Detective, 42–3. 12 Leonardo Sciascia, Il contesto (Milan: Adelphi, 1994), 90. See also the investigator in Todo modo (Milan: Adelphi, 1995 [1974]), who, assisting in reconstructing the crime scene, elicits the following comment: ‘ “Ma tu” mi disse con un sorriso di compatimento “sei un lettore di romanzi polizieschi o addirittura li scrivi?” ’ (72) [‘But you,’ he said with a pitying smile, ‘you’re addicted to detective novels, or perhaps you even write them’ (One Way or Another, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), 60).

288

Designer Notes to pages Animals 53–56

13 Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger, trans. Adrienne Foulke, in The Day of the Owl and Equal Danger (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), 81. 14 JoAnn Cannon, The Novel as Investigation: Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, and Antonio Tabucchi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 36. 15 Leonardo Sciascia, Il cavaliere e la morte (Milan: Adelphi, 1988), 34; Leonardo Sciascia, The Knight and Death and Other Stories, trans. Joseph Farrell (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), 15. 16 Sciascia, Todo modo, 118; One Way or Another, 100. 17 Sciasica, ‘Breve storia,’ 1183. 18 Ibid., 1182. 19 Leonardo Sciascia, La Sicilia come metafora: Intervista di Marcelle Padovani (Milan: Mondadori, 1979), 85; emphasis added. 20 In ‘Introduzione,’ in La Sicilia come metafora, Marcelle Padovani affirms: ‘se c’è un messaggio nell’opera di Sciascia non è certo la rassegnazione: nati da una collera prorompente e una profonda indignazione, i suoi libri spingono più alla lotta che all’abbandono; come dice Dominique Fernandez l’unico mito che Sciascia in fondo propone è: “L’energia al servizio della ragione” ’ (ix) [If there’s a message in Sciascia’s works it’s certainly not resignation: born in irrepressible rage and profound indignation, his books incite struggle more than renunciation; as Dominique Fernandez says, the only myth that Sciascia truly proposes is ‘Energy at the service of reason’]. 21 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Il buono e il cattivo nell’universo di Sciascia,’ in Matteo Collura, ed., Leonardo Sciascia: La memoria, il futuro (Milan: Bompiani, 1998), 18. See also JoAnn Cannon’s discussion of Todo modo, in which she suggests that Catholic mysticism is a metaphor for fanaticism of all types (‘Todo modo and the Enlightened Hero of Leonardo Sciascia,’ Symposium 35/4 (1981): 282–91). 22 Joseph Farrell, Leonardo Sciascia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 61. 23 Sciascia, ‘Breve storia,’ 1185. 24 In elaborating on Sciascia’s obsession with Sicily, however, Farrell points out that the author ‘wonders why the sixteenth-century [Sicilian] writer Argisto Giuffridi, whose work predated Beccaria’s attack on capital punishment by two hundred years, never attained greater international renown’ (Leonardo Sciascia, 34). 25 In his essay ‘La giustizia e il giustiziere di fronte alla pena di morte,’ in Italo Mereu, ed., La morte come pena in Leonardo Sciascia, da ‘Porte aperte’ all’abolizione della pena di morte (Milan: La Vita Felice, 1997), Farrell explains: ‘Il contrasto fra Sciascia e Alfredo Rocco – ovvero fra il Piccolo Giudice e il procuratore generale – sulla pena di morte costituisce, quindi, non soltanto

Notes to pages 57–59 289

26 27 28 29

30 31

32

33 34

una divergenza politica ed etica tra fascismo e antifascismo, ma una riedizione di controversie più antiche: quella fra l’ottimismo e la fiducia umanista dell’illuminismo da un lato, e quella fra il pessimismo e la sfiducia antiumanista dell’antilluminismo dall’altro’ (20) [The difference between Sciascia and Alfredo Rocco – or between the Piccolo Giudice and the public prosecutor – on the death penalty constitutes not only a political and ethical divergence between Fascism and anti-Fascism. It is also a revival of an older dispute: that between optimism and the humanist faith of the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and between pessimism and the anti-humanist distrust of the anti-Enlightenment, on the other]. Alfredo Rocco was a Fascist-era essayist who wrote the article ‘Sul ripristino della pena di morte in Italia,’ a work that torments the Piccolo Giudice of Porte aperte. Farrell, ‘La giustizia e il giustiziere,’ 35. Salvatore Lodato, La linea della palma: Salvatore Lodato fa raccontare Andrea Camilleri (Milan: BUR, 2002), 244. Jacqueline Risset, ‘Francia e Sicilia, la fitta rete degli opposti,’ in Luciano Luisi, ed., Leonardo Sciascia (Taranto: Mandese, 1990), 55. Cited in Gian Paolo Prandstaller, ‘Il neo-illuminismo di Sciascia,’ in Antonio Motta, ed., Leonardo Sciascia: La verità, l’aspra verità (Mandria: Piero Lacaita, 1985), 175–6. Padovani, ‘Introduzione,’ in La Sicilia come metafora, ix. Camilla Maria Cederna, ‘La storia non esiste: Erudizione e impostura in Sciascia,’ in Rosario Castelli, ed., Leonardo Sciascia ed il Settecento in Sicilia (Caltanissetta-Rome: Salvatore Sciascia), 61. Sciascia’s literary and philosophical ties to Enlightenment culture are well established by scholars. See, e.g., the numerous essays collected in Castelli’s Leonardo Sciascia ed il Settecento in Sicilia; or Italo Mereu, ed., La morte come pena in Leonardo Sciascia, da ‘Porte aperte’ all’abolizione della pena di morte (Milan: La Vita Felice, 1997). The latter is a collection of essays stemming from a conference on the topic outlined in the title. The location of the conference, Florence, was significant as the place where Grandduke Leopold enacted Beccaria’s proposed plan, abolishing the death penalty in 1786. Thus, the conference was organized around a perceived convergence of Enlightenment philosophy and political action, and in a sense, the figures of Beccaria and Sciascia. Sciascia, ‘Il secolo educatore,’ in Opere 1971–1983, 1012. Ibid. Beccaria and Voltaire were fundamental in diffusing the idea of justice that was being formed, however slowly, at this moment in the Settecento: ‘La maggior parte degli uomini continuava a faticare duramente, a guerreggiare, a conculcare e rapinare i deboli, ad assistere a tremendi spettacoli

290

35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

Designer Notes to pages Animals 59–63

di “atti di fede” e di giustizie feudali: ma l’idea che i deboli fossero buoni, le guerre stupide, gli ‘atti di fede’ mostruosi, le giustizie feudali ingiuste, e che alla dura fatica dovesse corrispondere il godimento del frutto, si faceva strada’ (1012) [Most men continued to work hard, wage war, oppress and rob the poor, witness tremendous spectacles of ‘acts of faith’ and feudal justice: but the idea gradually took hold that the poor were good, wars stupid, ‘acts of faith’ monstruous, feudal justice unjust, and that to hard work should correspond an enjoyment of the fruits of this labour]. Sciascia further notes that this was a moment in which kings, too, took part in the fiction, ‘riformando, bonificando, addolcendo rapacità fiscali e penali atrocità’ (1012) [reforming, reclaiming, softening fiscal greed and penal atrocities]. See Farrell, ‘La giustizia e il giustiziere,’ esp. 20–1 on the ‘caso Calas’; Valentina Fascia, ‘Ordine Omnia Inquirere: Sciascia: La tortura e la pena di morte,’ esp. 38–9 and 46–50; and Gianfranco Rubino, ‘Tra morale e finzione: La morte per decreto in alcuni scrittori francesi,’ esp. 61–4; all in La morte come pena in Leonardo Sciascia. Sciascia, ‘Il secolo educatore,’ 1007. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 131. Ibid., 308. Sciascia, ‘Il secolo educatore,’ 1009. Ibid., 1009–10. Ibid., 1011. Leonardo Sciascia, Il Consiglio d’Egitto (Milan: Adelphi, 1989), 123. For the English translation, see The Council of Egypt, trans. Adrienne Foulke (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), 148. Henceforth, page references to Il Consiglio d’Egitto, in both languages, will be included parenthetically in the body of the text. Farrell, ‘La giustizia e il giustiziere,’ 109. Di Blasi reflects on the tortures he has undergone, creating as he does a repertory of instruments and techniques of punishment: ‘Perché questo poteva ora con più coscienza affermare, dopo aver subito per cinque volte la corda, per quarantotto ore la veglia, per sette volte il fuoco: che coloro che avevano concepito la tortura e coloro che la sostenevano erano degli stolti; gente che aveva dell’uomo, e della propria umanità, la nozione che ne può avere il coniglio selvatico, la lepre’ (148) [For, after enduring the strappado five times, and sleeplessness for forty-eight hours, and having his feet burned seven times, he could now affirm with greater awareness that those who had conceived torture and those who upheld it were senseless men: they were men who conceived of man and of their own humanity as the wild hare or the rabbit might (182)].

Notes to pages 64–67 291 45 Nicolò Mineo, ‘Il Consiglio d’Egitto,’ in Rosario Castelli, ed., Leonardo Sciascia ed il Settecento in Sicilia (Caltanissetta-Rome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1998), 56–7. 46 The text continues: ‘(E la disperazione avrebbe accompagnato le sue ultime ore di vita se soltanto avesse avuto il presentimento che in quell’avvenire che vedeva luminoso popoli interi si sarebbero votati a torturarne altri; che uomini pieni di cultura e di musica, esemplari nell’amore familiare e rispettosi degli animali, avrebbero distrutto milioni di altri esseri umani: con implacabile metodo, con efferata scienza della tortura; e che persino i più diretti eredi della ragione avrebbero riportato la questione nel mondo: e non più come elemento del diritto, quale almeno era nel momento in cui lui la subiva, ma addirittura come elemento dell’esistenza)’ (Il Consiglio d’Egitto, 165–6) [(What despair would have accompanied his last hours had he had even a presentiment that, in the luminous future he envisaged, whole peoples would devote themselves to torturing others; that men of culture, lovers of music, exemplary family men, men who were kind to animals, would destroy millions of other men with implacable method and beastly skill, that even the most direct heirs of Reason would reintroduce the ‘question’ into the world – no longer as a factor of law, which it was at the moment he endured it, but actually as a factor of existence) (205)]. 47 On the question of narrative economy, Sciascia writes in a note appended to Il giorno della civetta: ‘ “Scusate la lunghezza di questa lettera – scriveva un francese (o una francese) del gran settecento – poiché non ho avuto tempo di farla più corta.” Ora io, per quanto riguarda l’osservanza di quella che è la buona regola di far corto anche un racconto, non posso dire mi sia mancato il tempo: ho impiegato addirittura un anno, da una estate all’altra, per far più corto questo racconto’ (133) [‘Excuse the length of this letter,’ wrote a Frenchman or Frenchwoman of that great eighteenth century of theirs, ‘but I have not time to make it shorter.’ I cannot make this excuse with regard to the golden rule that even a short story should be shortened. I took a whole year, from one summer to the next, to shorten this one (The Day of the Owl, 121)]. He goes on to suggest that his efficiency is partially due to being unable to say, politically speaking, all that should be said: ‘è certo, comunque, che non l’ho scritto con quella piena libertà di cui uno scrittore’ (134) [One thing is certain, however: I was unable to write it with that complete freedom to which every writer is entitled (122)]. 48 Sciascia, Una storia semplice (Milan: Adelphi, 1989), 40; ‘A Straightforward Tale,’ in The Knight and Death and Other Stories, trans. Joseph Farrell (Manchester, Carcanet, 1991), 74.

292 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58

59

Designer Notes to pages Animals 68–70

Sciascia, Una storia semplice, 51; ‘A Straightforward Tale,’ 82. Sciascia, Il giorno della civetta (Milan: Adelphi, 1993), 29–30. Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, 30. Sciascia, Il contesto, 22. And later: ‘Rogas vide passare, a distanza di circa cinque minuti una dall’altra, le cinque automobili. Cinque per cinque venticinque: venticinque minuti’ (87) [Rogas saw the five automobiles pass by, at about five-minute intervals one from the other. Five times five, twentyfive: twenty-five minutes (Equal Danger, 77)]. Rogas’ aside regarding the ‘case di pena’ constitutes, of course, an authorial condemnation of the as yet inadequately reformed penal system. Lagandara of Una storia semplice also claims to work with this precision; once the case begins to make sense to him, he visits his professor friend and insists: ‘Voglio raccontarle tutto quello che, partendo ora dall’interruttore, sto mettendo aritmeticamente insieme’ (55) [I want to tell you about every single thing, starting from the light switch. I am putting it all together with mathematical precision (‘A Straightforward Tale,’ 85)]. Sciascia, Equal Danger, 11–12. Sciascia, Il contesto, 15; Equal Danger, 5. Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo, 30; To Each His Own, 23. Sciascia, Il giorno della civetta, 105; The Day of the Owl, 96. Sciascia, Il cavaliere e la morte, 56; ‘The Knight and Death,’ 30 Paolo Laurana is described as ‘Un uomo onesto, meticoloso, triste; non molto intelligente, e anzi con momenti di positiva ottusità [. . .] si sentiva ed era tanto diverso dai colleghi (A ciascuno il suo, 46) [An honest, meticulous, melancholy man; not very intelligent, and indeed at times positively obtuse [. . .] he felt – and was – so different from his colleagues (To Each His Own, 40)]. Rogas is similarly marginal. A colleague accuses him of being ‘quasi un letterato’ [almost a man of letters], and the narrator expands. ‘Rogas aveva quella malafama, tra superiori e colleghi, e per i libri che teneva sul tavolo d’ufficio e per la chiarezza, l’ordine e l’essenzialità delle sue relazioni scritte. Che erano talmente diverse di quelle che da almeno un secolo circolavano negli uffici di polizia da far risuonare spesso il grido “ma come scrive, costui?” oppure “ma che dice, questo qui?” Si sapeva, poi, che frequentava qualche giornalista, qualche scrittore. E frequentava gallerie d’arte e teatri’ (Il contesto, 59) [Rogas had this bad reputation among his superiors and colleagues on account of the books he kept on his office desk and the clarity, coherence, and succinctness of his written reports. These were so unlike the ones that had been circulating in police offices for at least a century that they often sparked the shout, ‘How this character can

Notes to pages 70–77 293

60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

write!’ or again ‘What’s this fellow trying to say?’ It was known, furthermore, that he frequented journalists and authors. And he was said to go to art galleries and to the theatre (Equal Danger, 48–9)]. Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo, 18; To Each His Own, 11–12. Sciascia, Il contesto, 11. Sciascia, Equal Danger, 1. Ambroise, Invito alla lettura di Leonardo Sciascia (Milan: Mursia, 1983), 203. Sciascia, Il giorno della civetta, 103. A ciascuno il suo is also organized around the manipulation of public opinion about crimes of passion, as is evident in the knowing reaction of the acquaintances of one of the victims: ‘ “La lettera” disse il notaro Pecorilla “è tipica di un delitto passionale: quale che sia il rischio, il vendicatore vuole che la vittima cominci a morire e insieme a rivivere la propria colpa fin dal momento che riceva l’avvertimento” ’ (22) [‘The letter,’ the notary Pecorilla said, ‘is typical of a crime of passion. No matter at what risk, the avenger wants his victim to die – and at the same time to start to relive his guilt – from the moment he receives the warning’ (To Each His Own, 16)]. Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, 94–5. Farrell, ‘La giustizia e il giustiziere,’ 21, 22. Leonardo Sciascia, ‘A futura memoria (se la memoria ha un futuro),’ in Claude Ambroise, ed., Opere: 1984–1989 (Milan: Bompiani, 2004), 877. Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo, 116; To Each His Own, 110. Sciascia, Una storia semplice, 40; ‘A Straightforward Tale,’ 74. Sciascia, Il giorno della civetta, 30. Sciascia, Il cavaliere e la morte, 82; ‘The Knight and Death,’ 47. Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo, 59. Sciascia, To Each His Own, 53. Sciascia, Il giorno della civetta, 96. Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, 88. Sciascia, Il cavaliere e la morte, 59–60. Sciascia, ‘The Knight and Death,’ 32. Sciascia, Il cavaliere e la morte, 91; ‘The Knight and Death,’ 54. Cannon, The Novel as Investigation, 43. Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo, 132; To Each His Own, 127. Ibid. Sciascia, Il contesto, 97. Sciascia, Equal Danger, 87. Sciascia, Il contesto, 94. Sciascia, Equal Danger, 85. Farrell, ‘La giustizia e il giustiziere,’ 27.

294 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Designer Notes to pages Animals 77–82 Ibid., 26. Sciascia, Il contesto, 98; Equal Danger, 88. Ibid. Sciascia, Il contesto, 99. Sciascia, Equal Danger, 89. Sciascia, Sicilia come metafora, 5. Jon Snyder, ‘Translator’s Introduction,’ in Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), xii. Ibid., xii. Vattimo, End of Modernity, 172–3. Ibid., 172. Snyder, ‘Translator’s Introduction,’ xlix–l. Sciascia, ‘Il secolo educatore,’ 1011; emphasis added. Sciascia, Il cavaliere e la morte, 33; ‘The Knight and Death,’ 14. Mark Chu, ‘Le royaume de la folie: “Power” and “Reason” in Sciascia’s Last Narrative Works,’ Italian Studies 47 (1992): 69. Sciascia, Il cavaliere e la morte, 37; ‘The Knight and Death,’ 17. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 114. Ibid., 119.

3. Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Simulacrum 1 Camilleri (b. 1925) began his own prolific narrative production much later in life than Sciascia (b. 1921). He published several poems and short stories as early as 1945, beginning with the poem ‘Solo per noi’ in the journal Mercurio (edited by Alba de Céspedes), and he was recognized by several prize juries for his work. It was not until 1978, however, that his first novel, Il corso delle cose, was published. Camilleri acknowledges his late entry into the world of fiction, and Giovanni Capecchi, in Andrea Camilleri (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2000), quotes him explaining: ‘Le mie parole italiane si disponevano ordinatamente in fila come dei bravi soldati, ma erano dei soldati pigri, svogliati, molto spesso inerti e con nessuna volontà di ingaggiare la battaglia della scrittura’ (27) [my Italian words arranged themselves in orderly rows, like good soldiers, but they were lazy soldiers, listless, very often immobile and with no desire to engage in the battle of writing]. 2 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco, ‘I test della (im)popolarità: Il fenomeno Camilleri,’ Quaderni d’italianistica 22/1 (2001): 36.

Notes to pages 82–86 295 3 For a survey of scholarly responses to Camilleri, see ibid. 4 See the scholarly edition of his Opere by Mondadori, Storie di Montalbano (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), ed. Mauro Novelli. In the introduction, ‘Camilleri gran tragediatore,’ Nino Borsellino suggests that while in the twentieth century great writers such as Svevo, Pirandello, and Tozzi suffered critical incomprehension that blocked their popular success, Camilleri, instead, ‘si inaugura con il sempre crescente successo di pubblico che blocca o ritarda l’interesse dei critici’ (xiii) [began with the ever-growing public success that blocked or delayed critical interest]. 5 Antonio Di Grado, ‘L’insostenibile leggerezza di Andrea Camilleri,’ Spunti e ricerche: Rivista d’italianistica 16 (2001): 33–7. 6 Robert A. Rushing, Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture (New York: Other Press, 2007), 33. 7 Andrea Camilleri, La pista di sabbia (Palermo: Sellerio, 2007), 201. 8 Andrea Camilleri, Le ali della sfinge (Palermo: Sellerio, 2006), 164–5. 9 Andrea Camilleri, La pazienza del ragno (Palermo: Sellerio, 2004), 174; The Patience of the Spider, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: Penguin, 2007), 159. 10 Di Grado, ‘L’insostenibile leggerezza,’ 35. 11 La vampa d’agosto (Palermo: Sellerio, 2006), 114; Andrea Camilleri, August Heat, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: Penguin, 2009), 110. 12 Camilleri, La vampa d’agosto, 115. 13 Camilleri, August Heat, 111. 14 Camilleri, ‘Difesa di un colore.’ 15 In a short piece on ‘La politica come etica,’ in Leonardo Sciascia: La memoria, il futuro (ed. Matteo Collura; Milan: Bompiani, 1998), Federico Campbell recalls that when critics called him pessimistic, Sciascia replied, ‘D’altronde, come non essere pessimisti, se la realtà è pessima? C’è per caso qualcosa, in Italia, in Sicilia, nel mondo, che consenta di essere ottimisti?’ (121) [Besides, how can we not be pessimistic, if reality is hopeless? Is there anything in Italy, in Sicily, in the world, that permits us to be optimistic?]. 16 See Camilleri’s essay on detective fiction, ‘Difesa di un colore,’ in which he discusses the history of gialli from the inception of the Mondadori series in 1929 and demonstrates a command of Italian and international authors. 17 Camilleri, Pirandello, and Sciascia all come from the southwestern region of Sicily bounded by the cities of Porto Empedocle, Agrigento, and Regalpetra, a zone that, according to Maurizio Pistelli, writing in ‘Montalbano sono’: Sulle tracce del più famoso commissario di polizia italiano’ (Florence: Le Càriti, 2003), constitutes ‘un ben preciso retroterra geografico e culturale, questo, che non è relegato a svolgere un ruolo di semplice e neutro fondale, ma assurge spesso a vero e proprio co-protagonista delle storie

296

18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26

27

28

Designer Notes to pages Animals 86–89

narrate’ (45) [a very specific geographical and cultural hinterland, that isn’t relegated to play the role of a simple, neutral backdrop, but often becomes a true co-protagonist of the stories told]. Simona Demontis, I colori della letteratura: Un’indagine sul caso Camilleri (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001), 157. Capecchi, Andrea Camilleri, 30. Pistelli, ‘Montabano sono,’ 53. Quoted in Capecchi, Andrea Camilleri, 32. In a more serious discussion, Montalbano’s creator suggests that the giallo in Italy was reborn with the 1957 publication of Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana and Sciascia’s Il giorno della civetta in 1961 (‘Difesa di un colore’). Camilleri, ‘Difesa di un colore.’ Pistelli, ‘Montalbano sono,’ 56. Quoted in Beppe Benvenuto, ‘Montalbano, “teorico” del giallo,’ in Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia, intro. Antonino Buttitta (Palermo: Sellerio, 2002), 62. Marcello Sorgi, ‘Camilleri e gli intellettuali siciliani,’ in Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia, intro. A. Buttitta (Palermo: Sellerio, 2002), 42. On other occasions, Camilleri also self-styles as a Sicilian author, insisting (quoted in Pistelli, ‘Montabano sono’): ‘Appartengo totalmente alla cultura della Sicilia e alla letteratura di Verga, Pirandello, De Roberto, Tomàsi di Lampedusa, Brancati, Sciascia, Bufalino e Consolo. Benché abiti a Roma da cinquant’anni, continuo a sentirmi vicino a questa tradizione, a cui mi sono sempre interessato’ (45) [I belong completely to the culture of Sicily and to the literature of Verga, Pirandello, De Roberto, Tomàsi di Lampedusa, Brancati, Sciascia, Bufalino, and Consolo. Although I’ve lived in Rome for fifty years, I continue to feel close to this tradition, which I’ve always taken an interest in]. While critics such as Simona Demontis (I colori della letteratura, 167) would attempt to preserve the analogy between the two Sicilian authors by suggesting that ‘anche i casi che deve risolvere Montalbano raggiungono quasi sempre una soluzione parziale e il poliziotto deve accontentarsi della “mezza messa” ’ [the cases that Montalbano must solve also almost always reach a partial solution, and the policeman must be happy with this ‘half victory’], ultimately they agree, as Demontis does, that ‘rispetto ai protagonisti di Sciascia, però, il commissario scopre sempre tutta la verità’ [compared with Sciascia’s protagonists, though, the Commissario always discovers the whole truth]. Camilleri has also published several collections of short stories dedicated to the crime-fighting Commissario. Although he plans to continue writing

Notes to pages 90–91 297

29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

novels in the series, Camilleri confesses to have already written the final book devoted to Montalbano; it sits in a drawer at Sellerio and is to be published upon his death. This final episode, reports Camilleri, features the ‘real’ Montalbano taking issue with the ‘televised’ Montalbano (see Lorenzo Rosso, Caffè Vigàta (Reggio Emilia: Aliberti, 2007), 62). Montalbano’s investigative prowess does not equate formally to the precision of the Galileian sciences, which aspire to universality; yet, in a popular sense, the Montalbano novels do in some ways demonstrate, as mathematics and the empirical method, the ‘repetition of phenomena’ (Ginzburg, Myths, 106). Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 86. Eco agrees that contemporary literature which employs the aesthetic of the serial is not ‘opposed to innovation’ (ibid., 93). Rushing, Resisting Arrest, 35–6. Ibid., 35. In this regard, various offerings of the Camilleri Fans Club website are significant: for example, the group proposes actual driving tours to the fictional town under a heading ‘La gita a Vigàta,’ and sells ‘Vini Vigàta’ at a 10 per cent discount to members of the fan club. Porto Empedocle, Camilleri’s hometown, is the home of a statue of Commissario Montalbano by sculptor Giuseppe Agnello. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1996), 2. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 173; original emphasis. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, 175. Ibid., 172. Ibid. Quoted in Capecchi, Andrea Camilleri, 85n. The author goes on to explain, historicizing his chosen form of dialect: ‘Ma certo, perché appartenevano alla campagna povera; sono quelli del vecchio contadino cui regalavo le sigarette “Milit” subito dopo la guerra, perché mi raccontasse favolose storie di briganti. Le storie sono cadute, mi sono rimaste le parole che la piccola borghesia non sa usare, ma che Pirandello conosceva bene quando traduceva i classici in siciliano’ [But of course, because I came from the poor countryside; they are the [words of] the old peasant to whom I gave ‘Milit’ cigarettes after the war, so that he would tell me stories of bandits. The stories have been lost, but I retain words that the petty bourgeois doesn’t know how to use, but that Pirandello knew well when he translated the classics into Sicilian].

298

Designer Notes to pages Animals 91–94

41 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco, ‘La lingua de Il re di Girgenti,’ in Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia, intro. A. Buttitta (Palermo: Sellerio, 2002), 87. 42 Andrea Camilleri, La forma dell’acqua (Palermo: Sellerio, 1999), 9. 43 Andrea Camilleri, The Shape of Water, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: Viking, 2002), 1. 44 The simple definitions offered here for these words are dwarfed by the numerous permutations for each word offered by the lengthy dictionary on the Camilleri Fans Club website, under the heading: ‘Ecco un breve dizionarietto dei termini siciliani più usati dal SOMMO, per orientarsi meglio nel Camilleri-linguaggio’ [Here is a brief dictionary of the Sicilian terms most used by the Supreme Author, to help orient readers in the Camillerilanguage]. ‘Cataminare,’ for example, is defined thus: ‘smuovere, spingere con sforzo, spostare continuamente, muoversi, agitarsi, dimenarsi camminando, tentennare di cose che non stanno ben ferme, muoversi lentamente o indugiare a bella posta, maneggiare’ [shift, push with effort, move continually, move, to be agitated, fidget while walking, the tottering of things that aren’t steady, move slowly or hesitate on purpose, to manage] (www. vigata.org, accessed 6 April 2010). 45 Andrea Camilleri, La luna di carta (Palermo: Sellerio, 2005), 183–4; Andrea Camilleri, The Paper Moon, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: Penguin, 2008), 173–4. 46 Sciascia’s work makes this sardonic attitude clear, but in La Sicilia come metafora, the author also aptly describes his own work in these terms: ‘Lo scetticismo è salutare. È il migliore antidoto per il fanatismo. Impedisce cioè di assumere idee, credenze e speranze con quella certezza che finisce con l’uccidere l’altrui libertà e la nostra’ (6) [Scepticism is healthy. It’s the best antidote for fanaticism. It impedes the assumption of ideas, beliefs, and hopes with that certainty that kills the freedom of others, and ours as well]. 47 Camilleri, ‘Miracoli di Trieste,’ in Un mese con Montalbano (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 121. 48 Andrea Camilleri, Il ladro di merendine (Palermo: Sellerio, 2000), 231. Gli arancini di Montalbano (Milan: Mondadori, 1999) features a similar citation, in which Montalbano, setting out on an investigation, rereads a favourite text by Sciascia before coming to an important realization about his case. ‘Si era portato appresso La corda pazza di Sciascia che rileggeva spesso, forse per capirci qualcosa di più di se stesso. A un tratto, mentre leggeva, scoprì quello che l’aveva squietato il giorno avanti’ (181) [He brought with him La corda pazza by Sciascia, which he reread often, maybe to understand something about himself. Suddenly, as he read, he figured out what had unsettled him the day before].

Notes to pages 94–101 299 49 Andrea Camilleri, The Snack Thief, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: Viking, 2003), 271. 50 Simona Demontis, I colori della letteratura, 158. 51 Sciascia’s detectives are, of course, also literally unique, in the sense that they are not part of a serialized form of investigative fiction but each appear in one novel, novella, or short story that stands alone. 52 Camilleri, Il ladro di merendine, 242, italics in text. In La forma dell’acqua, in fact, Livia addresses Montalbano accusingly: ‘ “Ti sei autopromosso, eh?” domandò Livia dopo essere rimasta a lungo in silenzio. “Da commissario a dio, un dio di quart’ordine, ma sempre dio” ’ (169) [‘So you gave yourself a promotion, eh?’ asked Livia after a long silence. ‘From inspector to god – a fourth rate god, but still a god’ (The Shape of Water, 215)]. 53 Camilleri, The Snack Thief, 284. 54 Camilleri, La pazienza del ragno, 238. 55 Camilleri, The Patience of the Spider, 221. 56 Camilleri, La pazienza del ragno, 239. 57 Camilleri, The Patience of the Spider, 222. 58 Camilleri, La forma dell’acqua, 158; The Shape of Water, 200. 59 Ibid. 60 Camilleri, Gli arancini di Montalbano, 168. Camilleri here defies the giovani cannibali, a group of writers dedicated to the writing of graphically violent fiction. Nino Borsellino, in ‘Camilleri gran tragediatore,’ writes with evident distaste: ‘L’autore lo sta cacciando in una vicenda hard-boiled, horror, pulp, o come altro chiamare quell’orrenda fiction cannibalesca da cui il commissario evade ingiungendo allo scrittore di non continuare, ché “non è cosa” ’ (liii) [The author is throwing him in a hard-boiled, horror, pulp event, or whatever we call that horrible cannibalistic fiction the commissario evades, enjoining the writer not to continue, that it’s ‘not the thing’]. 61 Quoted in Lodato, La linea della palma, 376. 62 Camilleri, Le ali della sfinge, 19. 63 Tiziana Jacoponi, ‘ “Fra donne e cucine, ecco apparire Montalbano”: Riflessioni sull’opera di Camilleri,’ Narrativa 16 (1999): 244. Simona Demontis, in I colori della letteratura, also makes note of the lack of physical specificity of Montalbano: ‘Il dato più curioso è senz’altro la mancanza di una precisa raffigurazione fisica degli investigatori, a fronte di una sovrabbondanza di descrizioni dedicate a altri personaggi’ (174) [The strangest fact is certainly the lack of a specific physical portrayal of the investigators, given the overabundance of descriptions of other characters]. Jacoponi points out that many readers feel they know the Commissario thanks to Luca Zingaretti’s performance in the role of Montalbano for the

300

64

65 66 67 68

69

70 71

Designer Notes to pages Animals 102–104

popular RAI television series, but these details are lacking in the texts themselves. Quoted by Marcello Sorgi, in La testa ci fa dire: Dialogo con Andrea Camilleri (Palermo: Sellerio, 2000), Camilleri was actually thinking of Sciascia himself when he formulated Montalbano: ‘In Montalbano, ci può essere anche l’ironia e una certa timidezza di Leonardo [. . .] [P]er costruire la personalità di Montalbano, in tante cose ho preso da Leonardo Sciascia. Tra quelle riconoscibili, c’è il suo caratteristico impaccio nel parlare in pubblico’ (98–9) [In Montalbano, we can find Leonardo’s irony and his shyness [. . .] To create Montalbano’s personality, I took many things from Leonardo Sciascia. Among the recognizable ones, there’s his characteristic awkwardness when speaking in public]. Again, the details are related to intangible elements of character and personality, but not of physical form. Camilleri, La pazienza del ragno, 121; The Patience of the Spider, 110. Camilleri, La luna di carta, 95. Camilleri, The Paper Moon, 87. During the time spent at the Accademia, writes Capecchi, in Andrea Camilleri, ‘dalle 8 alle 12 di tutte le mattine, in una grande aula, si trova ad ascoltare da solo le lezioni di Costa che imprime una svolta nella sua vita: “Prese il mio cervello [. . .] e lo dirottò sul teatro” ’ (24) [from 8 to 12, every morning, in a big classroom, he finds himself alone listening to Costa’s lectures, and it’s a turning point in his life: ‘He took my brain [. . .] and rerouted it towards the theatre’]. For the theatre, Camilleri directed Finale di partita by Samuel Beckett, Pirandello’s I vecchi e i giovani, I giganti della montagna, and La favola del figlio cambiato, as well as works by the Russian poet and writer Majakovskij, among others; he also collaborated with Diego Fabbri in adapting the works of George Simenon for television. Camilleri, ‘Difesa di un colore.’ Particularly striking in terms of use of dialogue are several short stories in Gli arancini di Montalbano, such as ‘Il gatto e il cardellino,’ ‘Catarella risolve un caso,’ and ‘Una brava fímmina di casa,’ in which the plots unfold almost exclusively in dialogue. In his introductory essay ‘L’isola delle voci,’ to Camilleri’s Opere, Mauro Novelli remarks: ‘È rimarchevole come le trasposizioni per il teatro, la televisione e la radiofonia non abbiano richiesto soverchi aggiustamenti sui lavori narrativi, già predisposti per sequenze, spartite dai colloqui’ (lxxv) [It’s remarkable how the transpositions for theatre, television, and radio didn’t require excessive changes from the narrative works; they were already arranged in sequences, divided by dialogues].

Notes to pages 104–111

301

72 Camilleri, La pista di sabbia, 224. 73 Camilleri, Le ali della sfinge, 197. 74 Camilleri, Il giro di boa (Palermo: Sellerio, 2003), 219; Rounding the Mark, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: Penguin, 2006), 210. 75 Antonio Calabrò, ‘L’identità siciliana e la lezione di Camilleri,’ in Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia, intro. A. Buttitta (Palermo: Sellerio, 2002), 37. 76 Calabrò, ‘L’identità siciliana,’ 40. 77 Baudrillard, Selected Writings, 169. 78 Sorgi, ‘Camilleri e gli intellettuali siciliani,’ 44. 79 Ibid., 45; emphasis added. 4. Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio’s Beccarian Courtroom 1 Sciascia, Il cavaliere e la morte, 82; ‘The Knight and Death,’ 47. 2 Gianrico Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole (Palermo: Sellerio, 2002), 220; Involuntary Witness, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2005), 190. 3 Testimone inconsapevole, 222; Involuntary Witness, 192. 4 This chapter discusses three novels, Testimone inconsapevole (2002), Ad occhi chiusi (2003), and Ragionevoli dubbi (2006). A fourth novel featuring attorney Guerrieri, Le perfezioni provvisorie, was published by Sellerio in 2010. 5 In a 2007 interview with Roberto Barbolini, entitled ‘Guerrieri, L’avvocato a duello con Perry Mason,’ in Panorama, Carofiglio quotes G.K. Chesterton as he argues that ‘la distinzione fondamentale è tra libri scritti bene oppure male’ (151) [the fundamental distinction is between well-written and badly written books]. 6 Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 222; Involuntary Witness, 192. 7 Carofiglio, Il paradosso del poliziotto: Dialogo (Rome: Nottetempo, 2009), 14. 8 Ibid., 15. 9 Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, 32. Beccaria goes on to explain that such violence ‘is a sure way to acquit the robust criminals and to convict the innocent who are weak’ (32). 10 Gianrico Carofiglio, L’arte del dubbio (Palermo: Sellerio, 2007), 16. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 12. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. In the third of the Guerrieri novels, Ragionevoli dubbi (Palermo: Sellerio, 2006), Guerrieri repeats this belief almost word for word speaking to the court at the end of a trial: ‘Le storie, a ben vedere, sono tutto quello che abbiamo’ (284) [When we get down to it, stories are all that we have

302

15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26

27

28 29

Designer Notes to pages Animals 111–114 (Reasonable Doubts, trans. Howard Curtis (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2006), 237)]. Carofiglio, Arte, 15. Ibid. In this regard, Guerrieri receives an important compliment regarding his courtroom strategy from a tough-looking guard who, after a trial, makes a point of saying, ‘Complimenti avvocato. Vi ho ascoltato e ho capito tutto’ (Ragionevoli dubbi, 293) [Congratulations, Avvocato. I listened to you and understood everything (Reasonable Doubts, 244)]. See Beccaria, ‘A Chi Legge,’ in Dei delitti e delle pene, 3. Quoted in Carofiglio, Arte, 222; emphasis added. Ibid. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority,” ’ in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 29. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ 295; original emphasis. In the specific case of the police, the philosopher asserts that intervention on the part of law-enforcement officers signals the point ‘at which the state [. . .] can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain’ (ibid., 287). Benjamin also asserts that law attempts to monopolize the violence that individuals might exercise – that is, to prohibit individuals from using violence – not in order to preserve legal ends, but simply to preserve the law itself (281). Derrida, ‘Force of Law,’ 6. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ 287. Derrida’s work, ‘Force of Law,’ was originally presented at a symposium titled ‘Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice’ at the Cardozo School of Law in 1989, and then published in the Cardozo Law Review. My citations come from a 1992 volume, cited above, the collected papers from the conference. Derrida focuses on this paradox when he describes justice as ‘an experience of the impossible,’ but insists that it exists as an aporia: ‘Law is an element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is, of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule’ (16). Derrida, ‘Force of Law,’ 43. Ibid., 6; original emphasis. While the word ‘enforce’ has particular resonance in English, Derrida points out that in French, the concept of ‘force

Notes to pages 114–122

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52 53 54

303

of law’ exists (6); in Italian, the notion of ‘forza di legge’ also bears out this interpretation. Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 140; Reasonable Doubts, 113. Derrida, ‘Force of Law,’ 22. Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 38; A Walk in the Dark, trans. Howard Curtis (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2006), 27. Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 36; Walk in the Dark, 25. Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 21; Reasonable Doubts, 10–11. Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 140; Reasonable Doubts, 113. Ibid. Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 152; Reasonable Doubts, 123. Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 33; Involuntary Witness, 23. Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 34–5; Involuntary Witness, 24. Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 61; Walk in the Dark, 48. Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 79; Walk in the Dark, 63. Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 141; Walk in the Dark, 115. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ 281. In The End of Modernity, Vattimo describes weak thought as a form of philosophical nihilism that ‘leads to a weakening of the cogent force of “reality” ’ (27). In so doing, it opens the realm of possibility ‘to make possible all the other possibilities that constitute existence’ (27). Guerrieri’s defensive strategy, which attempts to dislodge the narratives that apparently incriminate his clients, seeks to open other possibilities for them. Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 167; Involuntary Witness, 142–3. Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 181; Involuntary Witness, 155. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ 289. By virtue of its civic nature, the courtroom is not a space that can be equated with the ‘conference’ (‘Unterredung,’ which Derrida translates as ‘dialogue’ (49)), a discursive practice that Benjamin hypothesizes might be a private-sector corrective to the more violent public sphere. Nevertheless, the courtroom does become a space in which discourse, both direct and indirect, is the primary modus operandi. Paul Gewirtz, ‘Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law,’ in Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds., Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 5. Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 66; Walk in the Dark, 53. Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 278–9; original emphasis. Carofiglio, Involuntary Witness, 241. Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 297; Involuntary Witness, 258. Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 128–9; italics in text. Carofiglio, Reasonable Doubts, 103; italics in text.

304

Designer Notes to pages Animals 123–128

55 Mark Chu argues that ‘while the character of Guerrieri sometimes displays prejudice and sexist attitudes, the author sometimes introduces an element of critique into the representation, with varying degrees of success’ (‘Crime and the South,’ in Giuliana Pieri, ed., Italian Crime Fiction (Swansea: University of Wales Press, 2011), 100). 56 In Testimone inconsapevole, Carofiglio playfully acknowledges this divergence between non-fictional theory and the fictional novel while still recalling the issue of violence and the law. As he proceeds with a daring but risky move in the trial, Guerrieri admits, ‘I manuali per avvocati direbbero che questo è un modo sbagliato di procedere [. . .] Volevo vederli fare un maledetto processo, quei signori che scrivono i manuali. Voglio vederli in mezzo al rumore, alla sporcizia, al sangue, alla merda, di un processo vero. E voglio vederli applicare le loro teorie’ (177). [Handbooks for lawyers would have said that this was the wrong way to set about it [. . .] I’d really like to see the fine fellows who write such manuals conduct a damned trial. I’d like to see them in the thick of the noise, the dirt, the blood, the shit of a real trial. I’d like to see them apply their theories then (Involuntary Witness, 151)]. 57 Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 121; Walk in the Dark, 97. 58 Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 126; Walk in the Dark, 102. 59 Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 174; Walk in the Dark, 144–5; original emphasis. 60 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ 287. 61 Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 221. 62 Carofiglio, Walk in the Dark, 185. 63 Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 142. 64 Carofiglio, Walk in the Dark, 115. 65 Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 97; Involuntary Witness, 81. 66 Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 98; Involuntary Witness, 81. 67 Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 231; Walk in the Dark, 194. 68 Carofiglio, Ad occhi chiusi, 142. 69 Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 24; my translation. 70 Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 27; Reasonable Doubts, 16. 71 Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 287; Reasonable Doubts, 239; original emphasis. 72 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ 277. 73 Agamben, State of Exception, 59. 74 See ‘anomie.’ Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Merriam-Webster Online. Accessed 1 Oct. 2009, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/anomie. 75 Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole, 26. 76 Carofiglio, Involuntary Witness, 16.

Notes to pages 129–138 305 77 Dominick LaCapra, ‘Violence, Justice, and the Force of Law,’ Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 1071. 78 Ibid. 79 Derrida, ‘Force of Law,’ 16. 80 Ibid., 22. 81 LaCapra, ‘Violence,’ 1078. 82 Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 286; Reasonable Doubts, 238; original emphasis. 83 Derrida, ‘Force of Law,’ 28. 84 LaCapra, ‘Violence,’ 1075. 85 Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 231; Reasonable Doubts, 192. 86 Carofiglio, Ragionevoli dubbi, 299; Reasonable Doubts, 249; italics in text. 87 Agamben, State of Exception, 64. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Margaret Kohn, ‘Bare Life and the Limits of the Law,’ Theory and Event 9/2 (2006). Accessed 8 Oct. 2009, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/ v009/9.2kohn.html. 5. Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal 1 See ‘vivisection.’ Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Accessed 10 Oct. 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com.proxy. lib.wayne.edu/cgi/entry/50278588. 2 Anonymous prisoner, collected by Cesare Lombroso, Palimsesti del carcere (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1891), 94. 3 Lombroso, Palimsesti, 6. 4 There were five editions of L’uomo delinquente published between 1876 and 1897; the first was published by Hoepli in Milan in 1876, and the four subsequent editions by Fratelli Bocca in Turin in 1878, 1884, 1889, and 1896–97. These grew from 255 pages in 1876 to 1,903 in 1896–97. The excellent English-language translation of significant excerpts from L’uomo delinquente, entitled Criminal Man (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), by Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter explains the most significant changes made from edition to edition. 5 Ginzburg, Myths, 106; original emphasis. 6 In The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (New York: Routledge, 2003), David G. Horn affirms that the criminal anthropologists were in large part interested in ‘the ways the body might give itself away – by writing, by gestures, by movements – if the scientist only knew how to prompt it, or to get out of its way’ (6; original emphasis).

306

Designer Notes to pages Animals 138–139

7 Delia Frigessi, Cesare Lombroso (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), xiii. 8 Mary Gibson’s Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), a study of the areas of influence of Lombroso’s work, discusses his deterministic views of men, women, and racial groups in carefully contextualized terms. Cautious not to oversimplify, Gibson points out some of the most egregious implications of Lombrosian thought, including some insidious extremist positions that may have stemmed in positivist criminology. In their analyses of women, positivist scientists, for example, ‘endorsed a nineteenth-century bourgeois model of womanhood stripped of political activism’; their views ‘not only crippled the Italian feminist movement, but created an atmosphere conducive to the further restriction of women’s rights under fascism’ (67, 89). Gibson further explains that racism was an integral part of the positivist science of criminal man. She asserts that in late nineteenth-century Europe, ‘many biologists, anthropologists, and statisticians were trying to turn racism into a science’ (101), concluding that criminal anthropologists were most likely the precursors of racist thinkers under Fascism, and that criminal anthropology ‘also set a precedent for the kind of slipshod research methods that typified fascist pronouncements on race’ (120). In Antisemitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), Nancy Harrowitz explores some of the implications of Lombrosian science (particularly through the publication of La donna delinquente) for women and Jews. She argues that Lombroso reacts to his own marginalization as a Jew, disguising his prejudice behind what he calls his ‘impartiality’ (12–13). 9 Frigessi, Cesare Lombroso, xiii–xiv. 10 Ibid., xiii. 11 Giovanni Gentile, Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia: II: I positivisti (Florence: Sansoni, 1957), 5. 12 Ibid., 306. Delia Frigessi, in Cesare Lombroso, provides an excellent summary of Gentile’s critique: ‘Gentile costruisce l’immagine complessiva di un positivismo “consapevole piú o meno della propria insufficienza filosofica”, i positivisti sfilano “tutti come osservatori trasognati di una realtà che sfugge loro, poiché essi sfuggono a se medesimi”. Non si innalzano, infatti, “al concetto dello spirito, che ci dà poi il vero concetto della natura” [. . .] È questo il punto, quel disconoscimento del mondo dello spirito, “col suo valore, con la sua libertà”, dello spirito soggetto autonomo della conoscenza, al quale i positivisti sostituiscono la infelice e grottesca credenza nella “pura e schietta naturalità” della natura, “scevra d’ogni immistione mentale” ’ (63–4) [Gentile constructs an aggregate image of a positivism

Notes to pages 139–145 307

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28

29 30 31

‘more or less aware of its own philosophical inadequacy’; the positivists appear ‘as dreamy observers of a reality that escapes them, since they escape themselves.’ They never raise themselves to the ‘concept of the spirit, which gives a true concept of nature’ [. . .] This is the point, this disavowal of the world of the spirit, ‘with its worth, with its freedom,’ of the spirit that is an independent subject of knowledge, for which the positivists substitute the unhappy and grotesque belief in the ‘pure and unadulterated naturalness’ of nature, ‘free of any interference of the mind’]. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 160. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 172. Stewart-Steinberg, Pinocchio Effect, 232. Luigi Guarnieri, L’atlante criminale: Vita scriteriata di Cesare Lombroso (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), 9. Ibid., 139. Quoted in Frigessi, Cesare Lombroso, xiv. Lombroso, Criminal Man, 2. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 152. Frigessi, Cesare Lombroso, xiii. Ibid., xiv. Lombroso, Criminal Man, 2. Horn, Criminal Body, 2. In their introduction to Criminal Man, Gibson and Rafter clarify that contemporary biological theories of criminality do not ‘mark a simple return to Lombroso’s positions,’ and identify a number of fundamental differences between these positions and the ones advanced by Lombroso and the positivist school (31). Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente in rapporto alla antropologia, alla giurisprudenza ed alla psichiatria (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1896–97), xxxiv–v. Hereafter, all Italian citations of L’uomo delinquente will be from the 1896–97 edition unless otherwise indicated. Citations appearing only in English come from Gibson and Rafter’s Criminal Man. Horn, Criminal Body, 318. Mary S. Gibson, ‘Cesare Lombroso and Italian Criminology: Theory and Politics,’ in Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell, eds., Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141. Lombroso, Criminal Man, 234. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, vol. 1, 282. Lombroso, Criminal Man, 310.

308

Designer Notes to pages Animals 145–154

32 Horn, Criminal Body, 13. 33 Mario Portigliatti-Barbos, ‘Introduzione,’ in La scienza e la colpa: Crimini criminali criminologi: Un volto dell’Ottocento, ed. by Umberto Levra (Milan: Electa, 1985), 236. 34 Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, vol. 1, 278. 35 Ibid. 36 Horn, Criminal Body, 81. 37 Ibid., 82; original emphasis. 38 Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente. Atlante, iii–iv; original emphasis. 39 Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, vol. 1, 297. 40 Ibid. 41 The technique is explained in a note in Criminal Man, 232n. 42 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 375n4. 43 Ibid., 388–9. 44 Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, vol. 1, 404. Horn makes note of another difficulty that plagued the scientist before his renown unlocked closed prison doors and made it possible for him to interrogate and examine prisoners: that of locating living men to study. ‘Criminals did not present themselves at the door of Lombroso’s laboratory, even when they were offered cash. Lombroso therefore enlisted his assistant Giovanni Cabria, by trade a bookbinder and lithographer, to go out and find criminals and bring them back to the lab [. . .] [He] became a “veritable bloodhound for criminals” ’ (Criminal Body, 79). 45 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 55. 46 Ibid., 375. 47 Ginzburg, Myths, 97. 48 Stewart-Steinberg, Pinocchio Effect, 244. 49 Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, vol. 1, xv. Lombroso defends himself here against accusations that his science might label non-offenders as criminals, insisting that his ‘reading’ practices would only be applied to certain segments of the (already criminal) population. 50 Ibid., 321. 51 He notes again that ‘great artists depicted criminal physiognomy in their painting long before criminal anthropologists demonstrated scientifically the existence of a criminal type’ (Criminal Man, 312). 52 Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, vol. 3, 134. Allen Mandelbaum’s English translation from Inferno (New York: Bantam, 1980). The citation comes from the canto in which Virgil and Dante encounter the giants who guard Satan; the pilgrim is unable to see their massive forms in their entirety, and they are thus described in fragments. Like the criminal man, these fearful

Notes to pages 155–160 309

53

54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

beings are dissected and understood in component parts. In the Palimsesti del carcere, Lombroso defends the explicit nature of his transcription of criminal texts by way of Dante: ‘Se nel fingere il linguaggio dei demoni, il Poeta non potè non esprimersi in versi sudici, a me, ch’ero il paleografo, il trascrittore dei pensieri di questa specie di demoni terrestri, non era certo dato far meglio’ (6) [If in imagining the language of the demons, the Poet could not avoid expressing himself in filthy verses, it was certainly not for me, the paleographer, transcriber of the thoughts of this kind of terrestrial demon, to do better]. Portigliatti-Barbos, ‘Introduzione,’ 235. Horn provides an excellent explanation of the ‘power relations that enabled physicians and biological scientists to move freely in nonpublic spaces, to compel subjects to remove their clothes, to probe and manipulate the body, and even to inflict pain’ (Criminal Body, 77). In particular, he mentions Lombroso’s assistant, Giovanni Cabria, who would search for criminals in arcades and taverns and then convince them to return to the lab, or collect skulls from urban construction sites in Turin (79). Lombroso, Palimsesti, 5. Renzo Villa, Il deviante e i suoi segni: Lombroso e la nascita dell’antropologia criminale (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985), 8. Discussing Lombroso’s selection of photographs for his atlas of criminal images, Horn affirms that Lombroso’s goal was ‘not to construct a composite image of “the criminal,” and then to extract typical (in this case average) features, but to identify a range of anomalies and deviations from commonsensical norms that might be used as aids in reading individual bodies. In Lombroso’s text [. . .] photographs needed to resist what Sekula has called “taming,” the transformation of the idiosyncratic into the typical’ (Criminal Body, 21–2). Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal, 57. Ibid. In Il deviante, Villa affirms the imprecise nature of the science of identifying the born criminal: ‘Delinquenti nati sono in effetti assai pochi, e molti vengono riconosciuti tali solo dopo l’esame autoptico!’ (33) [Born criminals are few, and many are recognized only after the autopsy!]. Stewart-Steinberg, Pinocchio Effect, 232. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, 2nd ed. (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1878), 278. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, 1896–97 ed., vol. 1, 113. Ibid., 115; original emphasis. Lombroso, Palimsesti, 323. Lombroso, Lezioni di medicina legale (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1900), 30; original emphasis.

310

Designer Notes to pages Animals 161–168

65 Ginzburg, Myths, 114. 66 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1994), 134. 67 Ibid., 142. 68 Lombroso, Lezioni di medicina legale, 531. 69 Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, 1878 ed., 516; Criminal Man, 151. 70 Ibid., 517; Criminal Man, 151. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 521; Criminal Man, 152. 73 Cesare Lombroso, ‘Antropologia – Esistenza di una fossa occipitale mediana nel cranio di un delinquente,’ Rendiconti del Reale Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere 4/2 (Milan, 1871), 37. 74 Ibid., 38. 75 Ibid.; emphasis added. 76 Regarding this discovery, Stewart-Steinberg explains that ‘there where there should have been something, instead there was a concavity, a void [. . .] Villella’s fossa, this nothing opened up for Lombroso a whole new terrain, whose boundaries were drawn by the possibility of making an analogy between criminals, the insane, and prehistoric races’ (Pinocchio Effect, 230–1; original emphasis). 77 Lombroso, ‘Antropologia,’ 40. 78 ‘Esistenza di una fossa occipitale,’ 39. The article also includes a table with measurements, including all of the lengths of parts of Villella’s skull, the cranial capacity (all in millimetres), and the weight of his brain (in grams). 79 Lombroso, ‘Introduction,’ in Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Lombroso’s Criminal Man (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972), xxiv. 80 Lombroso, ‘Antropologia,’ 37. 81 Ibid., 40. 82 Horn even notes that Lombroso’s daughter carried on the tradition of creative hyperbole, calling Villella ‘the Italian Jack the Ripper’ (Criminal Body, 31). 83 Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 152. Frigessi, in Cesare Lombroso, also refers to the discovery while using quotation marks to cast doubt on its veracity: ‘Ma ben prima di aver “scoperto” l’anomalia della fossetta mediana nel cranio di Villella’ (101) [But well before having ‘discovered’ the anomaly in the median fossetta of Villella’s cranium]. 84 Villa, Il deviante e i suoi segni, 149. 85 Ibid., 149. 86 Stewart-Steinberg, Pinocchio Effect, 230–1. 87 Ibid., 287–8.

Notes to pages 168–174 311 88 Virginio Oddone, ‘La scuola lombrosiana,’ in La scienza e la colpa: Crimini criminali criminologi: un volto dell’Ottocento, ed. Umberto Levra (Milan: Electa, 1985), 239. 89 Ibid. 90 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 2. 91 Michel Foucault, ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual,” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry,’ trans. Alain Baudot and Jane Couchman, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1 (1978): 14. 92 Ibid., 17. 93 Horn, Criminal Body, 133; original emphasis. 6. Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Bodies of Evidence 1 Scritti vari e postumi, vol. 1, ed. Andrea Silvestri, Claudio Vela, Dante Isella, Paola Italia, and Giorgio Pinotti (Milan: Garzanti, 1993), 594. 2 Carlo Emilio Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (Milan: Garzanti, 2001 [1957]), 45. For the English translation, see That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, trans. William Weaver (New York: George Braziller, 1984), 66. Henceforth, page references to the Pasticciaccio, in both languages, will be included parenthetically in the body of the text. 3 Camilleri, ‘Difesa di un colore.’ 4 ‘Introduction,’ in Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski, eds., Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 4. 5 Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘Gadda e il darwinsimo,’ Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies 4 (2004): n.p.. Accessed 28 May 2008, http://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/ Pages/journal/supp3atti1/articles/antoconf1.php. 6 Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘ “Opinò Cartesio”: Monismo cognitivo e materia pensante in Gadda,’ Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies 3 (2003): n.p. Accessed 28 May 2008, http://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/journal/issue3/ articles/antoncartesio03.php. 7 The citation actually describes the library of Daniele Classis at the beginning of ‘Dejanira Classis (Novella 2.a)’ (in Romanzi e Racconti, vol. 2, 1029). Gadda mentions the importance of positivism in his thought in an interview with Alberto Arbasino (see ‘Genius loci,’ in Certi romanzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1977)), noting the limits of the Lombard Enlightenment (and thus Beccaria): ‘Alla psicanalisi mi sono avvicinato e ne ho largamente attinto idee e moventi conoscitivi con una intenzione e in una consapevolezza nettamente scientifico-positivistica, cioè per estrarre da precise conoscenze dottrinali e sperimentali un soprappiù moderno della vecchia etica, della

312

8

9 10

11 12

13 14

Designer Notes to pages Animals 174–177

vecchia psicologia, e della cultura che potremmo chiamare parruccona e polverosa di un certo tardo illuminismo lombardo’ (353) [I explored psychoanalysis and mostly took from it ideas and cognitive motives with an intention and an awareness that were definitely scientific-positivistic. That is, I wanted to extract a modern surplus from its exact doctrinal and experimental knowledge, separating it from the old ethics, the old psychology, and the culture of a certain late Lombard Enlightenment that we could call outdated, dusty]. Carlo Emilio Gadda, La cognizione del dolore (Milan: Garzanti, 2002 [1963]), 31, 33. For the English translation, see Acquainted with Grief, trans. William Weaver (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 31, 35. Henceforth, page references to La cognizione, in both languages, will be included parenthetically in the body of the text. Gadda, Cahier d’Ètudes I, in Scritti Vari e Postumi, 407. Gian Carlo Roscioni, ‘Gadda as Humorist,’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 18; original emphasis. Ibid., 11. In ‘Opinò Cartesio,’ Antonello emphasizes this centrality of the material subject in Gaddian epistemology: ‘la conoscenza non si organizza solo attraverso un processo logico-proposizionale, ma si alimenta dal sentire del corpo, dalle infinite “piccole percezioni” che formano in maniera integrata un’anima. L’io prima di essere soggetto conoscente è soggetto senziente. L’io pensa innanzitutto attraverso il corpo’ [knowledge is not only organized according to a logical, propositional process, but is nourished by the body’s capacity to feel, the infinite ‘little perceptions’ that form, in an integrated way, a soul. Before being a knowing subject, the ‘I’ is a sentient subject. The ‘I’ thinks first of all through the body]. Ibid. See Manuela Bertone, ‘Murderous Desires: Gaddian Matricides from Novella seconda to La cognizione del dolore,’ in Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski, eds., Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 111–31; Deborah Amberson, ‘A Singular Detective: Methodological and Aesthetic Proliferation of Justice in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana,’ MLN 123 (2008): 23–39; Robert Rushing, ‘ “La sua tragica incompiutezza”: Anxiety, MisRecognition and Ending in Gadda’s “Pasticciaccio,” ’ MLN 116.1 (2001): 130–49; Gerhard Van der Linde, ‘The Body in the Labyrinth: Detection, Rationality and the Feminine in Gadda’s Pasticcaccio,’ American Journal of

Notes to pages 177–182 313

15 16

17

18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

Italian Studies 21 (1998): 26–40; and JoAnn Cannon, ‘The Reader as Detective: Notes on Gadda’s “Pasticciaccio,” ’ Modern Language Studies 10/3 (1980): 41–50. Cannon, ‘Reader as Detective,’ 41–2. Carlo Emilio Gadda, ‘Anastomósi,’ in Saggi Giornali Favole e Altri Scritti, ed. Dante Isella (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 263. Henceforth, page references to ‘Anastomósi’ will be included parenthetically in the body of the text. Robert Dombroski, in Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), shows that, ‘from the reader’s standpoint, the patient is only a body subject to the surgeon’s art and the narrator’s probing gaze’ (56). Ibid. In the Pasticciaccio, Ingravallo finds Liliana’s violated body in a room that recalls the Egyptian past he experiences in ‘Anastomósi’: the victim’s limbs ‘avevano perduto il loro tepido senso, già si adeguavano al gelo: al gelo del sarcofago, e delle taciturne dimore’ (46) [had lost their tepid sense, were already becoming used to the chill: to the chill of the sarcophagus (68)]. Gian-Paolo Biasin, Literary Diseases: Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1975), 129. Ibid. In ‘The Body in the Labyrinth,’ van der Linde argues that the ‘crimes in the Pasticcaccio are part of a network of impulses which traverse the body and by which it responds to the world.’ He ties this ‘groviglio’ even more specifically to the physical form, explaining that ‘at the centre of the tangle lies the body of the victim, the carnal feminine, traversed by the gaze projected from the investigators’ bodies’ (38–9). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 3. Biasin, Literary Diseases, 132. Dombroski’s powerful interpretation of ‘Anastomòsi’ proposes that ‘the cut body will then disclose its own order of reality, one that is “undecidable” in terms of meaning [. . .] We are at the beginning of the subject’s eclipse as signifying entity or discursive force and its remaking as an alienated object’ (Creative Entanglements, 58). Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

314

Designer Notes to pages Animals 183–191

31 Ibid. 32 Ellen Nerenberg, in Prison Terms: Representing Confinement during and after Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), points out that Ingravallo is a remarkably old-school investigator, since he ‘eschews any technological advances in forensic anthropology and pathology that might assist him in solving the crime and that could bring him up-to-date of his fictional counterparts’ (153). 33 Roscioni, ‘Gadda as Humorist,’ 22. 34 The limits of medical practice are also indicated in the Cognizione in the investigation into Palumbo’s ‘deafness.’ The hospital is characterized by its passion for collection of information; its patients subjected to ‘ramazze, matricola, raggi, elettrotermia, elioterapico, cinesterapico, bagno; e poi ancora orine, sangue, sputi, feci, all’analisi’ (103) [brooms, registry, X rays, electrothermy, heliotherapy, kinesitherapy, bath; and then further, urine, blood, sputum, feces to be analysed (123)]. In spite of these advances, only by chance is his ‘condition’ revealed to be invented. Palumbo recalls Lombroso’s laments regarding the trickiness of his criminal subjects. The narrator wonders: ‘come si fa a provare che un sordo di guerra non è sordo? che ci sente benone da tutt’e due gli orecchi? A rifletterci anche soltanto un istante, uno lo vede subito, [. . .] che il problema è tutt’altro che semplice’ (97) [how do you prove that a war-deaf veteran is not deaf? That he can hear perfectly with both ears? If you reflect only a moment, you can see at once [. . .] that the problem is anything but simple (116)]. 35 Albert Sbragia, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), 107. 36 For a history of the changes in the plot, and of the publication of the novel, see Robert Dombroski, Introduzione allo studio di Gadda (Florence: Vallechi Editore, 1974), 127–44. For a description of the cinematic version of the Pasticciaccio, Il palazzo degli ori, and a comparative reading of its ending, see Rushing, ‘La sua tragica incompiutezza,’ 130–49. 37 Antonello, ‘Gadda.’ 38 Antonello, ‘Opinò Cartesio.’ 39 Gadda, Scritti vari e postumi, 822. 40 Dombroski, Creative Entanglements, 55. 41 Dombroski cites Battistina, a Pirobutirro domestic with an enormous goitre, as an example of Gadda’s grotesque, which he argues is used ‘to take the human subject to its extreme limits and in so doing strike out against conventional narrative formulae [. . .] founded on the belief, common to modern character description, in individuality itself’ (ibid., 53). He argues,

Notes to pages 192–204 315

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

53

54 55 56

57

then, that Gaddian art must ‘deliver the alienated object from its own obsessions of unity and identity by focusing on its radical otherness’ (53). Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. Sbragia, Gadda and the Modern Macaronic, 128. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 10. Nerenberg, Prison Terms, 140. Ibid., 172. Ibid. Ibid., 153, 152; original emphasis. Dombroski, Creative Entanglements, 43. Dombroski argues that the lines of Gadda’s thought ‘intersect at one principal (aesthetic and ethical) concern: to extract the self from representation by making its existence as a narrative structure problematic. This will entail the work of petrification, a virtual killing of the self, making the self thing-like by reducing it to a grotesque surface reality’ (43). Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 7. Ibid. Discussing the figure of Gonzalo in the Cognizione, Fabio Pierangeli, in ‘Gadda, il medico, la cognizione,’ Campi immaginabili 13–15/1–3 (1995), recognizes the proximity of life and death in Gaddian texts: ‘Le “basse cagioni” vivono finanche nel corpo umano: la morte convive nella vita, come le ombre nella luce’ (159) [The ‘base causes’ live even in the human body: death coexists in life, as shadows in life]. In ‘Anastomósi,’ too, the medical profession attempts to hold back the horror when the patient is sewn back up: ‘Ricacciate di tra i ferri le genìe invisibili, gli infinitesimali agenti della putredine: respinto, al di là di ogni suo pensiero, l’orròre’ (271) [The invisible ancestors, the infinitesimal agents of rot are forced back behind the irons: repelled, beyond every thought, the horror]. Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 142. Ibid. Gadda also notes the shades of red and the shapes and textures of internal organs in ‘Anastomósi,’ where near the end of the operation he describes ‘l’ultimo e strascicato attardarsi d’una rossa paccottiglia: le rosee bolle e il pallone bisbetico del peritoneo’ (272) [the final, drawn-out lingering of red junk: the rose-coloured bubbles and the irritable ball of the peritoneum]. For Rushing, the fold on Assunta’s forehead recalls Liliana’s neck wound; it is a ‘dis-membering, as it leads to a castrating language of arrest and blockage, incomprehension, a return to the original shock and cognitive stasis produced by the violence done to Liliana’s body’ (Resisting Arrest, 139).

316

Designer Notes to pages Animals 204–207

58 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8; original emphasis. 59 Ibid. 60 ‘Nevrosi e crisi dell’identità sociale nella Cognizione del dolore,’ Problemi 60 (1981): 67. 61 As Norma Bouchard has demonstrated, in Celine, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writings of the 1930s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), Gadda’s Lombrosian framework proves to be a corporeal lens through which to see that ‘all dreams of personal and historical order are ultimately defeated by the chaos and messiness of the world’ (8). 62 Rushing, ‘La sua tragica incompiutezza,’ 142. 63 Ibid. 64 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 7. Dario Argento’s Aesthetics of Violence 1 See the collection of essays edited by Chris Gallant, titled Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento (Surrey, England: FAB Press, 2001). 2 Argento began his career collaborating on the screenplay for C’era una volta il West (1968) with Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. As Daniele Costantini and Francesco Dal Bosco have emphasized, in‘Introduzione,’ in Nuovo cinema inferno: l’opera di Dario Argento (Milan: Nuova Pratica, 1997), his work in genre cinema has led to an effective critical ghettoization, calling the realm of genre, ‘una zona marginalissima’ [an extremely marginal zone]. They add that working in genre cinema is particularly perilous in Italy because ‘in un paese come il nostro, che ancora oggi opera una rigida distinzione tra cultura “alta” e cultura “bassa”, era un rischio sicuramente non da poco’ [in a country like ours, that still maintains a rigid distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, it was certainly not a minor risk] (15–16). Philippe Met, in his essay ‘ “Knowing Too Much” about Hitchcock: The Genesis of the Italian Giallo,’ in R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, eds., After Hitchcock: Imitation/Influence/Intertextuality (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006, 195–214), confirms that, saying: ‘In spite of the advent of DVD facilitating access to an ever increasing number of the actual films (hitherto available only on murky bootleg tapes for the most part) and spawning renewed interest in the genre at large (among fans, if not scholars), the ‘founding fathers’ and major players of the giallo are still conspicuously absent from most of today’s encyclopedias and dictionaries of Italian film, and the generic constellation itself does not appear to be worthy of an autonomous entry’ (196).

Notes to pages 207–212 317 3 Maitland McDonagh, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds (London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1991), 25; original emphasis. 4 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1; original emphasis. 5 Ibid. 6 See Chapter 3 for more on Sciascia’s views on genre. 7 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 12; original emphasis. 8 The one exception is L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), in which investigator-figure and object of prey of the killer Sam Dalmas (a writer) witnesses an attempted murder while trapped between two glass doors in the enormous window leading into an art gallery. Even before this early scene, we learn that Dalmas, an American writer, has been making money by writing a manual about rare birds. The camera tracks him as he goes to pick up a check in a gallery full of stuffed birds captured behind glass, while a cat watches with wide eyes and rapt attention. The killer is eventually found by isolating a unique sound in a telephone call, a rare bird call identified as the sound of a caged bird in the local zoo, a creature useful in the narrative economy only because its freedom is restricted. From the first image of the detective-figure-witness enclosed in a transparent glass showcase, to the denouement that depends on a clue available only thanks to the confinement of a rare animal, the Argentian oeuvre begins to address themes of entrapment and the ramifications of such restrictive practices. For more on Argento and images of entrapment, see Frank Burke, ‘Intimations (and More) of Colonialism,’ in Kinoeye 2/11 (http://www.kinoeye. org/02/11/burke11.php, accessed 15 June 2011). In general, however, the killers are not animal-like, but rather the animals are anthropomorphized to suggest the metaphor of confinement, and by extension, determinism. 9 Giorgio Bertellini, ‘Profondo Rosso/Deep Red,’ in Giorgio Bertellini, ed., The Cinema of Italy (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 213–22, 216. 10 Roberto Pugliese, in Dario Argento (Milan: Il Castoro, 1996), makes reference to recurrent scientific pretexts that drive Argento’s early films, and says that the Gatto features ‘una mappa cromosomica quasi lombrosiana’ (39) [a chromosomal map that is almost Lombrosian]. 11 The translation, which is not exact, is taken from the English language track of the DVD The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Blue Underground, 2005 [1970]). 12 Nina’s final monologue was significantly cut for the U.S. theatrical release; about one and a half minutes of her final ‘exposition’ were eliminated. The recent release of the DVD by Mya Communications restored this dialogue, integrating the Italian language track into the English

318

13

14 15

16 17 18

Designer Notes to pages Animals 212–215

version. Although the subtitles read ‘I didn’t react like a man,’ in Italian, Nina says ‘Reagivo come un uomo’ (emphasis added). Her self-diagnosis accords with one provided earlier in the film when the private detective hired by Roberto visits the asylum where Nina was confined for three years. The staff member who speaks to the P.I. says that Nina’s was a case of ‘homicidal mania.’ Argento’s co-writer, Dardano Sacchetti, was inspired by an article appearing in Scientific American to develop the story around the chromosomal anomaly XYY (‘Tales of the Cat,’ interview with Dardano Sacchetti,’ The Cat o’ Nine Tales, DVD extra materials). Dario Argento, ‘Tales of the Cat,’ interview, The Cat o’ Nine Tales, DVD extra materials. In a chapter titled ‘After Lombroso’ in The Criminal Body, David Horn further traces the Lombrosian inheritance in contemporary scientific practice: ‘efforts to “decode” and then “read” the human genome offer perhaps the broadest range of possibilities for identifying criminal dangers. Here, the link is less with genetic “fingerprinting” – a forensic tool that is part of the genealogy of “signaletics” rather than semiological practices – than with cytogenetic tests that aim to identify chromosomal patterns (in particular, men who have an extra Y chromosome), or attempt to identify genetic markers that might indicate a propensity to violence or other forms of social danger (a predisposition to alcoholism or schizophrenia, for example)’ (145–6). In a chapter of their criminological study of serial killers, Serial Killer: Storie di Ossessione Omicida (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), entitled ‘Anatomia del serial killer,’ Carlo Lucarelli and Massimo Picozzi also mention the presence of an extra chromosome in studies of violent behaviours. The chapter begins by recalling Lombroso’s studies of the violent crimes of Vincenzo Verzeni, and thus reinforces the link between Lombrosian criminology and contemporary genetic research (57). Stephen J. Gould, on the other hand, suggests that the ‘tale of XYY as a criminal stigma has now been widely exposed as a myth’ (Mismeasure of Man, 174). Lawrence Taylor, Born to Crime: The Genetic Causes of Criminal Behavior (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 20. Ibid., 161. Ginzburg ties this problem specifically to the rise of new capitalist means of production, and to the need to recognize individuals who infringed the new bourgeois concept of property (Myths, 119–22). The problem of the image was quickly brought to the fore: ‘The idea of an enormous criminal photographic archive was rejected at first because it posed unsolvable

Notes to pages 216–220 319

19 20

21

22

23

24 25 26 27

problems of classification: how was one to isolate distinct features in the continuum of an image?’ (120). Ibid., 120; see also Horn, Criminal Body, 16–25. See Gary Needham, who discusses the ‘vision/knowledge dynamics’ explored ‘to great effect,’ in L’uccello (‘Playing with Genre: An Introduction to the Italian giallo,’ Kinoeye 2/11, accessed 16 June 2011, http://kinoeye. org/02/11/needham11.php); Luigi Cozzi, who discusses the cinematic originality of the trilogy (Dario Argento, 55–8); and Stefano Della Casa, ‘Storia e storie di un critico d’eccezione. Il primo Argento,’ in Giulia Carluccio, Giacomo Manzoli, and Roy Menarini, eds., L’eccesso della visione: Il cinema di Dario Argento (Turin: Lindau, 2003), 73–7. In the interview in Pugliese (Dario Argento), Argento explains his use of the Snorkel in Profondo rosso in medical terms: ‘funziona col principio dell’endoscopia, è splendida perché può entrare dappertutto fra le dita, in bocca, in una tromba, però solo in piccoli spazi’ (7) [it works on the principle of endoscopy. It’s splendid because it can enter everywhere – between fingers, in the mouth, in a trumpet, but only in small spaces]. Gary Needham, ‘From punctum to Pentazet, and Everything in Between: Dario Argento’s Il gatto a nove code (The Cat O’ Nine Tails, 1971) and Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1972),’ in Kinoeye 2/11 (accessed 16 Dec. 2009, http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/needham11_no2.php). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 200. Deleuze explains that the ‘new value of the black or white screen’ shows that, ‘on the one hand, what is important is no longer the association of images, the way in which they associate, but the interstice between two images; on the other hand, the cut in a sequence of images is not now a rational cut which marks the end of one or the beginning of another, but a so-called irrational cut which belongs neither to one nor the other, and sets out to be valid for itself’ (200). Ibid. McDonagh, Broken Mirrors, 77n. Ibid. The image of the eye also dominates in Il gatto. The first murder in the film occurs at a train station, and the camera depicts a scientist from the Istituto Terzi waiting for someone, taking alternately the perspective of the scientist and of the assassin. As it pans around, an eye painted on a column as part of an advertisement foreshadows an extreme close-up of an eyeball, presumably that of the killer. When the scientist is pushed in front of a train, the camera gauges reactions of spectators by closing in on their

320

28 29 30 31

32 33

34

35

Designer Notes to pages Animals 220–221

somatic reactions: a woman’s hands, thrown to her cheeks, and a man’s mouth, splayed large in a scream. Once again, a vivisected detail will provide a key clue to the crime: a photographer shooting the scene enlarges a photograph to discover that the scientist, originally thought to have fallen in front of the train, was in fact, pushed. A hand at the extreme left of the frame provides this key detail. Needham, ‘From punctum to Pentazet.’ Pugliese, Dario Argento, 49. McDonagh, Broken Mirrors, 32. Aaron Smuts, ‘The Principles of Association: Dario Argento’s Profondo rosso,’ in Kinoeye 2/11 (accessed 16 June 2011, http://kinoeye.org/02/11/ smuts11.php). Antonio Tentori, ‘Traumi e deliri: I film di Dario Argento,’ in Franco Vitale presenta Dario Argento (Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2000), 19. Roy Menarini, ‘Dal thriller all’horror: Tra modernità, postmodernità e manierismo,’ in L’eccesso della visione: Il cinema di Dario Argento (Turin: Lindau, 2003), 29. In an interview with Elena San Pietro (accessed 17 June 2011, http://www. kinematrix.net/testi/lucarelli.htm,) Carlo Lucarelli cites Profondo rosso as one of the most significant influences on his generation of writers of crime fiction: ‘Scrivere con Dario Argento è talmente incredibile che l’avrei fatto anche se avessimo dovuto mettere in scena le Pagine Gialle! Si imparano un sacco di cose’ [Writing with Dario Argento is so incredible that I would have done it even if we had to stage the Yellow Pages. You learn so much]. And of Profondo rosso more specifically, he admits: ‘Poi sicuramente, per tutti quelli che appartengono alla mia generazione, se da una parte, letterariamente, Scerbanenco ci ha fatto capire delle cose, dall’altra Profondo Rosso, non dico Dario Argento, proprio Profondo Rosso ci ha fatto iniziare a dire: “Così voglio fare anch’io!” ’ [Certainly, for everyone in my generation, if on the one hand Scerbanenco made us understand things in literary terms, on the other, Profondo Rosso, not Dario Argento, but specifically Profondo Rosso, made us start saying, ‘I want to do that, too!’]. Hemmings’ most prominent previous appearance in Italian cinema was in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), where he was cast in the role of a curious photographer who becomes the film’s detective-figure. JeanBaptiste Thoret, in Dario Argento, Magicien de la peur ([Paris]: Cahiers du cinéma, 2002), suggests that the link with Antonioni’s film is one ‘illustration limpide du fantasme qui hante son cinéma: une descente à l’intérieur de l’image’ (10–11) [clear illustration of the ghosts that haunt his cinema: a descent into the interior of the image].

Notes to pages 221–226 321 36 Marc Daly is one of a host of artist-detectives in Argento’s films; these include drummer Roberto Fabiani (Quattro mosche), writer Peter Neal (Tenebre), dancer Susy Bannion (Suspiria), and soprano Betty (Opera). 37 Gianna accompanies Marc in his investigations, but also (unlike Watson or the narrator in Poe’s Dupin stories) constantly undermines Marc’s investigative ‘genius’ by ridiculing him until he appears petulant, defensive, and largely ineffectual. The police inspector mocks his career as piano player, and Carlo’s mother insists that he is an engineer instead of a musician, rendering suspect the validity of his career choice through her misunderstanding. 38 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 203. 39 Ibid. Deleuze describes the ‘cinema of the body’ as fluctuating between two poles, the ‘everyday body’ and the ‘ceremonial body.’ The ceremonial body sometimes ‘takes on an initiatory and liturgical aspect, and attempts to summon all the metallic and liquid powers of a sacred body, to the point of honour or revulsion’ (ibid., 191). This body, different from what Deleuze describes as the ‘everyday body’ present in Antonioni’s cinema, is the kind of form that dominates Argento’s cinema. 40 Nuovo cinema inferno, 16. In a short essay on the film, ‘Deep Red,’ in Chris Gallant, ed., The Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento, (Surrey, England: FAB Press, 2001, 115–24), Julian Grainger suggests that ‘Argento’s great joke in Deep Red is that actually he couldn’t give a damn who did it. It is a murder mystery in which the revelation of who committed the murder is of no importance’ (123). 41 In Dario Argento: Il brivido della critica, Scritti sul cinema (Turin: Testo and Immagine, 2000), critic Stefano Della Casa suggests that, in fact, aesthetics and not narrative drive all of Argento’s films: ‘Ad Argento la storia interessa in quanto capace di fornire un ambiente e delle suggestioni, niente di più’ (vii) [Argento is interested in the story insofar as it can furnish an environment and some ideas, nothing more]. 42 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 203. 43 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry,’ in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 182. 44 The violent infantile drawing recalls Lombrosian narrative sketches of children with criminal tendencies, using the sinister juvenile fascination with blood as another means to underscore the ambiguities of the science of crime. The original drawing was sketched by a child who witnessed the crime he depicted, which became for him a horrific primal scene etched in

322

45

46 47

48

49

Designer Notes to pages Animals 226–229

his adult mind. A recreation of the drawing was sketched by a young girl apparently innately attracted to violence, a child who skewers live insects on pins and glories in their suffering. Trauma or thrill? Innate or acquired? Argento offers both possible answers, preferring uncertainty to any one prescriptive solution. Argento’s choice of actors in Profondo rosso includes notable names of the Italian stage, such as Macha Meril, Glauco Mauri, Giuliana Calandra, and Gabriele Lavia. Pugliese (in Dario Argento) explains that ‘Argento stermina uno dopo l’altro alcuni tra i più bei nomi del nostro palcoscenico, in una mimesi naturalistica che disvela, ancora, uno stretto e conflittuale rapporto con il teatro’ (48) [One after the other, Argento exterminates the best names from our stage, in a naturalistic mimesis that reveals, again, his close and conflictual relationship with the theatre]. Costantini and Dal Bosco, ‘Introduzione,’ Nuovo cinema inferno, 16. Argento’s 1989 film La sindrome di Stendhal takes this principle of cinema as museum to its logical conclusion, as its protagonist, Anna Manni (played by the director’s daughter, Asia) periodically loses herself in works of art. During the opening titles, works by Caravaggio, Degas, Manet, Michelangelo, Monet, and Warhol, scroll past on the far right-hand side of the screen, already participating in cinema as moving images, defying the observer to analyse their significance as anything more than monuments of art historical importance. As Anna stands before canonical paintings in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, she begins to hear the noises the depicted scenes suggest (clashing swords, horses, wind, water). Eventually, the images become kinetic: before our eyes, paintings become cinema, and the Uffizi gallery becomes, through the perspective of the protagonist-focalizer, home of a panoply of mini-films, waiting for the artist or observer to turn them into moving images. Giulia Carluccio, ‘Poetica dell’erranza: Flâneries, architetture, percorsi della visione,’ in Giulia Carluccio, Giacomo Manzoli, and Roy Menarini, eds., L’eccesso della visione: Il cinema di Dario Argento (Turin: Lindau, 2003), 56–7. Argento’s use of Turin as the location of many films creates an urban connection with Lombroso, who conducted much of his research in that city. Marc and Carlo often meet in front of (and occasionally inside) the Bluebar or in front of statues representing the Po and Dora rivers on the other side. The alcoholic Carlo sometimes crumbles at the base of the statue, cowed by its marmoreal grandeur, and his drunken posture duplicates the reclining elegance of the towering figure above him. At other times, the two friends talk and gesticulate dramatically while separated by the monolithic Fascist-era monument. The camera’s neo-classical attention to symmetry

Notes to pages 230–233 323

50

51 52 53 54 55 56

57

58 59

privileges the visual over the words spoken. The statues, created by sculptor Umberto Baglioni, were made according to the specifications of the Fascist regime in neo-Roman elegance. Thoret suggests that they recall certain motifs of painter Giorgio De Chirico (Dario Argento, 82). ‘The German word ‘museal’ [museumlike] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art’ (Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 175). Dario Argento, 79 caption. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 62. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 193. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 126. Felicity J. Colman, in her entry ‘Crystal,’ in Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), summarizes Deleuze’s concept of the crystal-image, explaining that it encompasses ‘vast shifts in meaning caused through the exchanges between past, present and future images, in their various states of virtual and real’ (60). I argue elsewhere that Carlo’s mother can, in fact, be read as a reincarnation of Giovanna in Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (also played by Calamai). See Elena Past, ‘The Dying Diva: Violent Ends for Clara Calamai in Ossessione and Profondo rosso,’Forum Italicum 42/2 (2008): 296–312. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 99; original emphasis. Phenomena’s killer is another protective mother whose ‘monstrous’ son suffers the fate of a disfiguring genetic makeup. She, too, stops at nothing to protect her unfortunate progeny, killing a string of people who come in her path. The young woman who acts as detective-figure, thanks to uncanny abilities of perception and her capacity to communicate with insects, is subjected against her will to a series of psychological and medical examinations testing her sanity. The plot of Trauma revolves around a mother driven insane when an accident in the hospital resulted in her child’s death; to ‘correct’ her incapacitating despair, doctors attempt to subject her to electroconvulsive therapy which either fails to fix the problem or is responsible for driving her mad. Anna Manni in La sindrome di Stendhal feels herself invaded by a man she killed, a serial rapist who tortured her, and at ‘his’ behest, begins to kill men around her.

324

Designer Notes to pages Animals 233–238

60 Horn, Criminal Body, 10. Horn gives numerous examples of techniques via which contemporary scientists continue to hope to be able to identify innate criminality. In a 1998 paper, for example, he states: ‘A group of scientists led by Adrian Raine at the University of Southern California have [. . .] proposed that pictures produced by Positron Emission Tomography (PET) might help to identify patterns of brain activity characteristic of “predatory murderers,” “affective murderers” (what Lombroso might have called criminals of passion), and a control population’ (145). The genome project offers ‘perhaps the broadest range of possibilities for identifying criminal dangers’ (145). 61 For his lack of evident political engagement, Argento was accused of being a fascist: ‘In questo incubo abitato da mostri e da mamme con la mannaia facile [. . .] esplodono i connotati propri dell’ideologia fascista’(214) [In this nightmare inhabited by monsters and mothers with the ready axe [. . .] there explode the features typical of Fascist ideology] (Gianluigi Bozza quoted in G. Lucantonio, ‘La fortuna critica in Italia e all’estero,’ in Giulia Carluccio, Giacomo Manzoli, and Roy Menarini, eds., L’eccesso della visione: Il cinema di Dario Argento (Turin: Lindau, 2003). 62 Della Casa, Dario Argento, xiii–xiv. 63 Felicity J. Colman, ‘Cinema: Movement-Image-Recognition-Time,’ in Charles J. Stivale, ed., Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (Chesam: Acumen, 2005), 142. 64 Pugliese, Dario Argento, 11. 65 Visconti’s Ossessione [1943, Obsession] marked the beginning of his conviction in the power of art to represent material culture, his ‘faith in the expressive possibilities of embodied discourse’ (Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 53), and a means of realizing his political engagement. 66 In describing the transition beyond neorealism, Deleuze asserts that neorealists ‘still retained a reference to a form of the true’ (135), but that the new wave ‘deliberately broke with the form of the true to replace it by the powers of life.’ These powers of life contribute to the formation of a cinema of bodies: ‘When Cassavetes says that characters must not come from a story or plot, but that the story should be secreted by the characters, he sums up the requirement of the cinema of bodies’ (192). 67 Shaviro, Cinematic Body, 44–5. 8. Carlo Lucarelli’s Lombrosian Nightmare 1 ‘Guardo il mio volto riflesso nella pozza rossa che si è formata sotto il letto’ (14) [I look at my reflection in the red puddle that has formed under

Notes to pages 238–251 325

2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16

17

the bed] (Carlo Lucarelli, Almost Blue (Turin: Einaudi, 1997)). For the English translation, see Almost Blue, trans. Oonagh Stransky (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2001), 14. Henceforth, page references to Lucarelli’s novel, in both languages, will be included parenthetically in the body of the text. Argento and Lucarelli collaborated in writing the screenplay for Argento’s Non ho sonno. Sara Re, ‘Intro: I mille volti di un uomo in noir,’ in Paolo Giovannetti, ed., Almost Noir: Indagini non autorizzate su Carlo Lucarelli (Milan: Arcipelago, 2005), 7. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 38; original emphasis. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication,’ in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1998), 149. Baudrillard, ‘Ecstasy,’ 153. Marco Sangiorgi, ‘Il fascismo e il giallo italiano,’ in Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò, eds., Il giallo italiano come nuovo romanzo sociale (Ravenna: Longo, 2004), 129. Lucarelli, Serial Killer, 9–80. Henceforth, page references to Serial Killer will be included parenthetically in the body of the text. According to Lucarelli and Picozzi, Verzeni’s cellmate was Giovanni Cavaglià, another criminal-prisoner whose story and whose body became a key part of the history of the Uomo delinquente, discussed in chapter 5. In fact, Lombroso’s extensive study included studies of the environment as well. See Lucarelli and Picozzi, Serial Killer, 6. Baudrillard, ‘Ecstasy,’ 149. Noel Carroll goes on to discuss ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, etc.; the ‘interstitial’ is generally other-worldly (‘The Nature of Horror,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46/1 (1987): 55). Agamben, The Open, 76. Matthew Calarco, ‘Jamming the Anthropological Machine,’ in Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 171. Carlo Lucarelli, Lupo mannaro (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 41; original emphasis. Henceforth, page references to Lupo mannaro will be included parenthetically in the body of the text. Carlo Lucarelli, Un giorno dopo l’altro (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), 223. Henceforth, page references to Un giorno dopo l’altro will be included parenthetically in the body of the text.

326

Designer Notes to pages Animals 252–257

18 Elisabetta Bacchereti, Carlo Lucarelli (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2004), 143–4. Lucarelli is convinced of the importance of the scientific credibility of his characters. In an interview with Elena San Pietro (http://www.kinematrix.net/testi/lucarelli.htm, accessed 17 June 2011), Lucarelli explains: ‘Quando ho messo insieme quattro o cinque cose funzionali alla mia narrazione le ho prese e sono andato da uno psichiatra: abbiamo fatto una vera perizia psichiatrica su un personaggio che non esiste. Lo psichiatra ha costruito un serial-killer ‘vero’ [. . .] [H]o evitato di creare un altro dei tanti serial-killer, il mio è lui perché in effetti è vero, è un personaggio reale, in un certo senso’ [When I put together four or five things useful to my story, I took them and went to a psychiatrist: we created a real psychiatric examination for a character who doesn’t exist. The psychiatrist constructed a ‘real’ serial killer [. . .] I avoided creating another of the innumerable serial killers; mine is who he is because he’s real, a real character, in a certain sense]. 19 In Un giorno dopo l’altro, ‘prenderlo’ becomes a mantra: ‘Prenderlo se si fa vivo con qualcuno [. . .] Prenderlo se si ferma a dormire [. . .] Prenderlo se cerca di andarsene. Prenderlo se usa i suoi documenti [. . .] Prenderlo se usa il cellulare [. . .] (222) [Get him if he contacts someone [. . .] Get him if he stops to sleep [. . .] Get him if he tries to leave. Get him if he uses his i.d. [. . .] Get him if he uses his cell phone]. 20 Modleski, ‘The Terror of Pleasure,’ in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 695. 21 Bacchereti, Carlo Lucarelli, 145. 22 See also: ‘Certe volte miliardi di piccolissimi ami da pesca mi agganciano la faccia da sotto la pelle e me la risucchiano fin dentro la gola. Partono da qualche punto, dietro la lingua e mi attraversano la testa come una cascata finissima di stelle filanti. Gli ami passano tra poro e poro e mi si piantano nella pelle e sono cosí sottili che quasi non pungono neanche. Quando succede, corro a specchiarmi da qualche parte perché mi piace vedere il mio volto che brilla di milioni e milioni di puntini luminosi, come microscopiche gocce d’argento. Ma poi gli ami cominciano a tirare e il naso e la bocca e tutta la faccia mi si accartocciano dentro, come un pugno che si chiude e trascina tutto con sé, occhi, naso, labbra, guance e capelli, tutto giú, in fondo alla gola’ (50) [Sometimes I feel thousands of tiny fishhooks under my skin, clawing at my face, pulling it into my throat. They come from somewhere under my tongue and explode through my head like shooting stars. I feel the barbs pulling at my pores, tugging so delicately they barely even seem to pierce the skin. I like to look in a mirror when it

Notes to pages 259–264 327

23 24

25

26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33

happens. My face gets all shiny, as if covered with millions of microscopic silver drops. Infinitesimal, luminous dots. But then, when the hooks pull hard and my whole face crinkles up from the inside, like a fist closing around itself, then I feel my eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, and hair getting shoved down my throat (50)]. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, 135. Simone Martini (c. 1284–1344) was a renowned painter active primarily in Siena, known in particular for his innovative use of materials (such as glass) in his frescoes, and for the application of gold, silver, and other substances to add texture and contrast to his work. Lucarelli’s choice of the protagonist’s name further roots his character in the realm of art and colour. For a more complete discussion of Martini’s work, see Andrew Martindale, ‘Martini, Simone,’ Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press), accessed 17 Jun. 2011, http://www.groveart.com. Simone often uses the ‘come se’ construction when describing the voice of the Iguana. The first time he hears the voice, he reflects: ‘Non riesco ad ascoltarla quella voce verde. Ha qualcosa dentro che mi fa venire i brividi. È come se ci fosse un altro suono, sotto, come se mormorasse qualcosa nelle pause di silenzio. Come se pregasse, ma non sembra una preghiera’ (38) [I can’t stand the green voice. There’s something about it that sends shivers up my spine. It’s as if something was being mumbled in the silences, like a prayer, but it’s not a prayer. It’s whispering something (37)]. Ginzburg, Myths, 124. Ibid., 125. Ginzburg’s concept of intuition comes from ancient Arabic physiognomics, which he explains was based in ‘firâsa, a complex notion which, in general, designated the ability to pass, on the basis of clues, directly from the known to the unknown’ (125). In Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), Leland de la Durantaye explains, discussing Agamben’s The Open, that for Heidegger, animals ‘live in such intense and incessant proximity to their environment and its stimuli that they do not see the existential forest for the environmental trees. They can never take a step away from the immediacy of their perception and for this reason cannot be said to possess a “world” in the sense that man, in Heidegger’s view, does’ (325). Agamben, The Open, 53. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38.

328

Designer Notes to pages Animals 265–272

34 Calarco, ‘Jamming the Anthropological Machine,’ 172; original emphasis. 35 Ibid., 171; original emphasis. 36 Carlo Lucarelli, Mistero in blu (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), 4. Henceforth, page numbers referring to Mistero in blu will be included parenthetically within the text. 37 An earlier novella by Lucarelli, Guernica, chooses to return to a postmodern formal argument on its last page, by citing a poem by Borges. I argue elsewhere that this is a form of Vattiman ‘weak thought,’ which would represent a more deliberate and consistent commitment to formal experimentation. Later texts, I believe, show greater interest in the criminological-scientific perspective. See Elena Past, ‘Lucarelli’s Guernica: The Predicament of Postmodern Impegno,’ Italica 84/2–3 (2007): 290–308. 38 Grazia is permitted human and narrative seriality, with corresponding menstrual difficulties, relationship problems, and career concerns, specifically because she tackles and defeats the serial killers. Her bare life is appropriated for the texts, as they lurk around her bloated belly and moments of sexual intimacy, but Lucarelli implies that her animality serves humanity, as she casts out the beasts and makes the streets safe again. 39 Calarco, ‘Jamming the Anthropological Machine,’ 170. 40 Ibid., 171. 41 Ibid., 169. Epilogue: Crime in the Twenty-First Century 1 Ginzburg, Myths, 123. 2 Ibid. 3 Peter Hainsworth, ‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Gadda,’ in Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski, eds., Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 221. 4 Chu, ‘Power and Reason,’ 78. 5 Somigli, ‘Form and Ideology,’ 68. 6 Horn, Criminal Body, 2. 7 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 9. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 Ibid., 131. 10 Ibid., 69. 11 Ibid., 130. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 308. This power of normalization is described as the chief political issue of the prison: ‘the problem lies rather in the steep rise in the use of

Notes to pages 272–275 329

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

these mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them’ (306). Ibid., 130. Agamben, State of Exception, 87. Ibid. Shaviro, Cinematic Body, 9. Horn, Criminal Body, 2. Agamben, The Open, 76. Ibid., 77. Stewart-Steinberg, Pinocchio Effect, 10. Agamben makes an urgent case for the importance of considering the definition of the criminal when he discusses the U.S. Patriot Act in his introduction to State of Exception: ‘What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws’ (3). See the volume edited by Julia Sudbury, titled Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex (New York: Routledge, 2005). Ibid., xii. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, 123.

This page intentionally left blank

References

Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. Translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. – State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 1980. Amberson, Deborah. ‘A Singular Detective: Methodological and Aesthetic Proliferation of Justice in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana.’ Modern Language Notes 123 (2008): 23–39. Ambroise, Claude. Invito alla lettura di Leonardo Sciascia. Milan: Mursia, 1983. Andrews, Richard Mowery. ‘The Cunning of Imagery: Rhetoric and Ideology in Cesare Beccaria’s Treatise On Crimes and Punishments.’ In Mary B. Campbell and Mark Rollins, eds., Begetting Images: Studies in the Art and Science of Symbol Production. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. 113–32. Antonello, Pierpaolo. ‘Gadda e il darwinsimo.’ Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies 4 (2004): n.p. Available at http://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/ journal/supp3atti1/articles/antoconf1.php. Accessed 15 June 2011. – ‘“Opinò Cartesio”: Monismo cognitivo e materia pensante in Gadda.’ Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies 3 (2003): n.p. Available at http://www. gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/journal/issue3/articles/antoncartesio03.php. Accessed 15 June 2011. Arbasino, Alberto. ‘Genius loci.’ In Certi romanzi. Turin: Einaudi, 1977. 339–71. Argento, Dario, dir. Il gatto a nove code (The Cat O’ Nine Tails). DVD. Blue Underground, 1971.

332

Designer Animals References

– Inferno. DVD. Fox, 1980. – La sindrome di Stendhal. DVD. Medusa Film, 1996. – Opera. DVD. CDI, 1987. – Profondo rosso (Deep Red). DVD. Anchor Bay, 1975. – Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Gray Velvet). DVD. Mya, 1971. – Suspiria. DVD. PAC, 1977. – Tenebre. DVD. Titanus, 1982. – Trauma. DVD. Penta Film, 1993. – L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage). DVD. Blue Underground, 2005 [1970]. Arrigo, Bruce A., and Christopher R. Williams. ‘Introduction: Philosophy, Crime, and Theoretical Criminology.’ In Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 1–38. Auden, W.H. ‘The Guilty Vicarage.’ In Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Robin Winks. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 15–24. Bacchereti, Elisabetta. Carlo Lucarelli. Fiesole: Cadmo, 2004. Barbolini, Roberto. ‘Guerrieri, L’avvocato a duello con Perry Mason.’ Panorama, 22 Feb. 2007, 150–1. Battaglia, Salvatore. Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1961–ca. 2002. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘The Ecstasy of Communication.’ In The Anti-Aesthetic. Edited by Hal Foster. New York: New Press, 1998. 145–54. – The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 1996. – Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001 [1988]. Beccaria, Cesare. Dei delitti e delle pene. Edited by Franco Venturi. Turin: Einaudi, 1994. – On Crimes and Punishment and Other Writings. Edited by Richard Bellamy. Translated by Richard Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. – On Crimes and Punishment and Other Writings. Edited by Aaron Thomas. Translated by Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. – ‘Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile.’ In Franco Venturi, eds., Illuministi Italiani, vol. 3. Milan: Ricciardi, 1958. 124–52. Becker, Lucille Frackman. ‘Science and Detective Fiction: Complementary Genres on the Margins of French Literature.’ FLS: On the Margins of French Literature 20 (1993): 119–25.

References 333 Beirne, Piers. Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis.’ Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Bellamy, Richard. ‘Introduction.’ On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings. By Cesare Beccaria. Translated by Richard Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ix–xlix. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Critique of Violence.’ In Reflections. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. 277–300. Benvenuti, Stefano, and Gianni Rizzoni, eds. Il romanzo giallo: Storia, autori e personaggi. Milan: Mondadori, 1979. Benvenuto, Beppe. ‘Montalbano, “teorico” del giallo.’ In Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia. Intro. Antonino Buttitta. Palermo: Sellerio, 2002. 61–75. Bertellini, Giorgio. ‘Profondo Rosso/Deep Red.’ In Giorgio Bertellini, ed., The Cinema of Italy. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. 213–22. Bertone, Manuela. ‘Murderous Desires: Gaddian Matricides from Novella seconda to La cognizione del dolore.’ In Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski, eds., Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 111–31. Bertone, Manuela, and Robert S. Dombroski, eds. Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Biasin, Gian-Paolo. Literary Diseases: Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1975. Bien, David D. The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in EighteenthCentury Toulouse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. Bobbio, Norberto, ed. and intro. Il positivismo e la cultura italiana. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985. Bonger, Willem A. An Introduction to Criminology. Translated by Emil Van Loo. London: Methuen, 1936. Borsellino, Nino. ‘Camilleri gran tragediatore.’ In Storie di Montalbano. By Andrea Camilleri. Edited by Mauro Novelli. Milan: Mondadori, 2002. xi–lvii. Bouchard, Norma. Céline, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writings of the 1930s. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000. Burke, Frank. ‘Intimations (and More) of Colonialism.’ Kinoeye 2/11. Available at http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/burke11.php. Accessed 15 June 2011. Caesar, Michael. ‘Contemporary Italy (since 1956).’ In Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, eds., The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 561–606. Calabrò, Antonio. ‘L’identità siciliana e la lezione di Camilleri.’ In Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia. Intro. Antonino Buttitta. Palermo: Sellerio, 2002. 31–41.

334

Designer Animals References

Calarco, Matthew. ‘Jamming the Anthropological Machine.’ In Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. 163–79. Calvino, Italo. ‘L’impossibilità del giallo in Sicilia.’ In Matteo Collura, ed., Leonardo Sciascia: La memoria, il futuro. Milan: Bompiani, 1998. 15. Camilleri, Andrea. Le ali della sfinge. Palermo: Sellerio, 2006. – August Heat. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. New York: Penguin, 2009. – La caccia al tesoro. Palermo: Sellerio, 2010. – Il campo del vasaio. Palermo: Sellerio, 2008. – Il cane di terracotta. Palermo: Sellerio, 1996. – La danza del gabbiano. Palermo: Sellerio, 2009. – ‘Difesa di un colore.’ Available at http://www.vigata.org/bibliografia/ colore/shtml. Accessed 17 Aug. 2009. – L’età del dubbio. Palermo: Sellerio, 2008. – Un filo di fumo. Milan: Garzanti, 1980. – La forma dell’acqua. Palermo: Sellerio, 1999 [1994]. – Il gioco degli specchi. Palermo: Sellerio, 2011. – Il giro di boa. Palermo: Sellerio, 2003. – La gita a Tindari. Palermo: Sellerio, 2000. – Gli arancini di Montalbano. Milan: Mondadori, 1999. – Il ladro di merendine. Palermo: Sellerio, 2000 [1996]. – La luna di carta. Palermo: Sellerio, 2005. – Un mese con Montalbano. Milan: Mondadori, 1998. – ‘Miracoli di Trieste.’ In Un mese con Montalbano. Milan: Mondadori, 1998. 121–7. – ‘Montalbano si rifiuta.’ In Gli arancini di Montalbano. Milan: Mondadori, 1999. 159–68. – L’odore della notte. Palermo: Sellerio, 2001. – The Paper Moon. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. New York: Penguin, 2008. – The Patience of the Spider. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. New York: Penguin, 2007. – La pazienza del ragno. Palermo: Sellerio, 2004. – La pista di sabbia. Palermo: Sellerio, 2007. – Il re di Girgenti. Palermo: Sellerio, 2001. – Rounding the Mark. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. New York: Penguin, 2006. – The Shape of Water. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. New York: Viking, 2002. – The Snack Thief. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. New York: Viking, 2003. – Il sorriso di Angelica. Palermo: Sellerio, 2010. – Storie di Montalbano. Edited by Mauro Novelli. Milan: Mondadori, 2002.

References 335 – La vampa d’agosto. Palermo: Sellerio, 2006. – La voce del violino. Palermo: Sellerio, 1997. Camilleri Fans Club. Available at http://www.vigata.org. Accessed 6 April 2010. Campbell, Federico. ‘La politica come etica.’ In Matteo Collura, ed., Leonardo Sciascia: La memoria, il futuro. Milan: Bompiani, 1998. 121–2. Cannon, JoAnn. ‘The Reader as Detective: Notes on Gadda’s “Pasticciaccio.”’ Modern Language Studies 10/3 (1980): 41–50. – ‘Todo modo and the Enlightened Hero of Leonardo Sciascia.’ Symposium 35/4 (1981): 282–91. – The Novel as Investigation: Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, and Antonio Tabucchi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Capecchi, Giovanni. Andrea Camilleri. Fiesole: Cadmo, 2000. Carloni, Massimo. L’Italia in Giallo: Geografia e storia del giallo italiano contemporaneo. Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1994. Carluccio, Giulia. ‘Poetica dell’erranza: Flâneries, architetture, percorsi della visione.’ In Giulia Carluccio, Giacomo Manzoli, and Roy Menarini, eds. L’eccesso della visione: Il cinema di Dario Argento. Turin: Lindau, 2003. Carofiglio, Gianrico. A Walk in the Dark. Translated by Howard Curtis. London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2006. – Ad occhi chiusi. Palermo: Sellerio, 2003. – L’arte del dubbio. Palermo: Sellerio, 2007. – Involuntary Witness. Translated by Patrick Creagh. London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2005. – Il paradosso del poliziotto: Dialogo. Rome: Nottetempo, 2009. – Ragionevoli dubbi. Palermo: Sellerio, 2006. – Reasonable Doubts. Translated by Howard Curtis. London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2007. – Testimone inconsapevole. Palermo: Sellerio, 2002. Carroll, Noel. ‘The Nature of Horror.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46/1 (1987): 51–9. Cascardi, Anthony J. Consequences of Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Castelli, Rosario, ed. Leonardo Sciascia ed il Settecento in Sicilia. CaltanissettaRome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1998. Cederna, Camilla Maria. ‘La storia non esiste: Erudizione e impostura in Sciascia.’ In Rosario Castelli, ed., Leonardo Sciascia ed il Settecento in Sicilia. Caltanissetta-Rome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1998. 61–84. Chu, Mark. ‘Le royaume de la folie: “Power” and “Reason” in Sciascia’s Last Narrative Works.’ Italian Studies 47 (1992): 68–79.

336

Designer Animals References

– ‘Crime and the South.’ In Giuliana Pieri, ed., Italian Crime Fiction. Swansea: University of Wales Press, 2011. 89–114. Cicala, Marco. ‘Il boom del giallo (tutti i particolari in cronaca).’ Il venerdì di Repubblica, 17 June 2005 (no. 900), 32. Collura, Matteo, ed. Leonardo Sciascia: La memoria, il futuro. Milan: Bompiani, 1998. Colman, Felicity J. ‘Cinema: Movement-Image-Recognition-Time.’ In Charles J. Stivale, ed., Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Chesham: Acumen, 2005. 141–56. – ‘Crystal.’ The Deleuze Dictionary. Edited by Adrian Parr. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 59–61. Coquerel, A. Jean Calas et sa famille: Étude historique d’après les documents originaux. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. Costantini, Daniele, and Francesco Dal Bosco. ‘Introduzione.’ Nuovo cinema inferno: L’opera di Dario Argento. Milan: Nuova Pratica, 1997. Cozzi, Luigi. Il cinema di Dario Argento. Rome: Fanucci, 1991. Crovi, Luca. Tutti i colori del giallo: Il giallo italiano da De Marchi a Scerbanenco a Camilleri. Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Crovi, Raffaele. Le maschere del mistero: Storie e tecniche di thriller italiani e stranieri. Florence: Passigli, 2000. Davin, Eric Leif. ‘Inspector Zadig: Voltaire and the Birth of the Scientific Detective Story.’ Fantasy Commentator 8/3–4 (1995): 172, 214–16. De Angelis, Augusto. ‘Conferenza sul giallo (in tempi neri).’ La lettura: Rivista mensile (March 1980): 27–44. De La Durantaye, Leland. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Del Buono, Oreste. I padri fondatori: Il giallo da Jahvè a Voltaire. Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Della Casa, Stefano. Dario Argento: Il brivido della critica. Scritti sul cinema. Turin: Testo & Immagine, 2000. – ‘Storia e storie di un critico d’eccezione. Il primo Argento.’ In G. Carluccio et al., eds., L’eccesso della visione: Il cinema di Dario Argento. Turin: Lindau, 2003. 73–7. Demontis, Simona. I colori della letteratura: Un’indagine sul caso Camilleri. Milan: Rizzoli, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority.”’ In Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge, 1992. 3–67.

References 337 DiCaroli, Steven. ‘Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty.’ In Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. 43–69. Di Grado, Antonio. ‘L’insostenibile leggerezza di Andrea Camilleri.’ Spunti e ricerche: Rivista d’italianistica 16 (2001): 33–7. Dombroski, Robert. Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. – Introduzione allo studio di Gadda. Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1974. Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. – Il nome della rosa. Milan: Bompiani, 1980. Farrell, Joseph. Leonardo Sciascia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. – ‘La giustizia e il giustiziere di fronte alla pena di morte.’ In Italo Mereu, ed., La morte come pena in Leonardo Sciascia, da ‘Porte aperte’ all’abolizione della pena di morte. Milan: La Vita Felice, 1997. 19–28. Fascia, Valentina. ‘Ordine Omnia Inquirere: Sciascia: La tortura e la pena di morte.’ In Italo Mereu, ed., La morte come pena in Leonardo Sciascia, da ‘Porte aperte’ all’abolizione della pena di morte. Milan: La Vita Felice, 1997. 37–60. Ferri, Enrico. The Positive School of Criminology: Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901. Translated by Ernest Untermann. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1913. Firpo, Luigi. ‘Voltaire e Beccaria.’ In R. Ajello, E. Cortese, and V. Piano Mortari, eds., L’Età dei Lumi: Studi storici sul Settecento Europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, vol. 2. Naples: Jovene, 1985. 925–66. Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic. New York: New Press, 1998. Foucault, Michel. ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual,” in 19thCentury Legal Psychiatry.’ Translated by Alain Baudot and Jane Couchman. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1 (1978): 1–18. – The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1994. – Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. – Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Frigessi, Delia. Cesare Lombroso. Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Gadda, Carlo Emilio. Acquainted with Grief. Translated by William Weaver. New York: George Braziller, 1969. – ‘Anastomósi.’ In Dante Isella, ed., Saggi Giornali Favole e Altri Scritti. Milan: Garzanti, 1991. 263–72.

338

Designer Animals References

– La cognizione del dolore. Milan: Garzanti, 2002 [1963]. – ‘Dejanira Classis (Novella 2.a)’. In Romanzi e racconti II. Edited by Dante Isella. Milan: Garzanti, 2007. 1027–69. – Eros e Priapo (da furore a cenere). Milan: Garzanti, 1967. – Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. Milan: Garzanti, 2001 [1957]. – Saggi Giornali Favole e Altri Scritti. Edited by Dante Isella. Milan: Garzanti, 1991. – Scritti vari e postumi. Vol. 1. Edited by Andrea Silvestri, Claudio Vela, Dante Isella, Paola Italia, and Giorgio Pinotti. Milan: Garzanti, 1993. – That Awful Mess on Via Merulana. Translated by William Weaver. New York: George Braziller, 1984. Gallant, Chris. Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento. Surrey, England: FAB Press, 2001. Gentile, Giovanni. Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia: II: I Positivisti. Florence: Sansoni, 1957. Gewirtz, Paul. ‘Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law.’ In Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds., Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. 2–13. Gibson, Mary. Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. – ‘Cesare Lombroso and Italian Criminology: Theory and Politics.’ In Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell, eds., Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 137–58. Ginzburg, Carlo. Miti, emblemi, spie: Morfologia e storia. Turin: Einaudi, 2000 [1986]. – Myths, Emblems, Clues. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990. Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Grainger, Julian. ‘Deep Red.’ In Chris Gallant, ed., The Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento. Surrey: FAB Press, 2001. 115–24. Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni del carcere: Letteratura e vita nazionale. Rome: Riuniti, 1996 [1929]. Guarnieri, Luigi. L’atlante criminale: Vita scriteriata di Cesare Lombroso. Milan: Rizzoli, 2007. Hainsworth, Peter. ‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Gadda.’ In Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski, eds., Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 221–41. Harrowitz, Nancy. Antisemitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

References 339 Hinchman, Lewis. ‘Autonomy, Individuality, and Self-Determination.’ In What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. 488–516. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Horn, David G. The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance. New York: Routledge, 2003. Jacoponi, Tiziana. ‘“Fra donne e cucine, ecco apparire Montalbano”: Riflessioni sull’opera di Camilleri.’ Narrativa 16 (1999): 243–8. Jones, David. History of Criminology: A Philosophical Perspective. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Kant, Immanuel. ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ In Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 17–22. Kohn, Margaret. ‘Bare Life and the Limits of the Law.’ Theory and Event 9/2 (2006). Available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/v009/9.2kohn.html. Accessed 8 Oct. 2009. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. LaCapra, Dominick. ‘Violence, Justice, and the Force of Law.’ Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 1065–78. Leps, Marie-Christine. Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. ‘Libri gialli.’ L’Assalto: Organo della Federazione dei fasci di combattimento di Bologna, XXI, no. 43 (30 Aug. 1941), 2. Lodato, Salvatore. La linea della palma: Salvatore Lodato fa raccontare Andrea Camilleri. Milan: BUR, 2002. Lombroso, Cesare. ‘Antropologia – Esistenza di una fossa occipitale mediana nel cranio di un delinquente.’ Rendiconti del Reale Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere 4/2 (1871): 37–41. – Criminal Man. Translated and edited by Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. – Lezioni di medicina legale. Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1900. – Palimsesti del carcere. Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1891. – L’uomo delinquente, in rapporto all’antropologia, giurisprudenza, e alle discipline carcerarie. Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1878. 2nd ed. – L’uomo delinquente, in rapporto alla antropologia, alla giurisprudenza ed alla psichiatria. 3 vols. and Atlante. Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1896–97. 5th ed. Lombroso-Ferrero, Gina. Lombroso’s Criminal Man. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972.

340

Designer Animals References

Lucantonio, Gabrielle. ‘La fortuna critica in Italia e all’estero.’ In G. Carluccio et al., eds., L’eccesso della visione: Il cinema di Dario Argento. Turin: Lindau, 2003. 211–19. Lucarelli, Carlo. Almost Blue. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. – Almost Blue. Translated by Oonagh Stransky. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001. – Guernica. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. – Il giorno del lupo. Turin: Einaudi, 1998. – Lupo mannaro. Turin: Einaudi, 2001. – Misteri d’Italia: I casi di Blu Notte. Turin: Einaudi, 2002. – Mistero in blu. Turin: Einaudi, 1999. – Nuovi misteri d’Italia: I casi di Blu Notte. Turin: Einaudi, 2004. – Un giorno dopo l’altro. Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Lucarelli, Carlo, and Massimo Picozzi. La nera: Storia fotografica di grandi delitti italiani dal 1946 a oggi. Milan: Mondadori, 2006. – Scena del crimine: Storie di delitti efferati e di investigazioni scientifiche. Milan: Mondadori, 2005. – Serial Killer: Storie di ossessione omicida. Milan: Mondadori, 2003. – Tracce criminali: Storie di omicidi imperfetti. Milan: Mondadori, 2006. Luperini, Romano. ‘Nevrosi e crisi dell’identità sociale nella Cognizione del dolore.’ Problemi 60 (1981): 66–73. Marcus, Millicent. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. – ‘The Italian Body Politic Is a Woman: Feminized National Identity in Postwar Italian Film.’ In Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish, eds., Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and Its Afterlife: Essays in Honor of John Freccero. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000. 329–47. Martindale, Andrew. ‘Martini, Simone.’ Grove Art Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at http://www.groveart.com. Accessed 17 June 2011. Maugham, Frederic Herbert. The Case of Jean Calas. London: William Heinemann, 1928. McDonagh, Maitland. Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds. London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1991. Mereu, Italo, ed. La morte come pena in Leonardo Sciascia, da ‘Porte aperte’ all’abolizione della pena di morte. Milan: La Vita Felice, 1997. Met, Philippe. ‘“Knowing Too Much” about Hitchcock: The Genesis of the Italian Giallo.’ In R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, eds., After Hitchcock: Imitation/Influence/Intertextuality. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006. 195–214.

References 341 Mineo, Nicolò. ‘Il Consiglio d’Egitto.’ In Rosario Castelli, ed., Leonardo Sciascia ed il Settecento in Sicilia. Caltanissetta-Rome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1998. 51–60. Modleski, Tania. ‘The Terror of Pleasure.’ In Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 691–700. Munt, Sally. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York: Routledge, 1994. Needham, Gary. ‘From punctum to Pentazet, and Everything in Between: Dario Argento’s Il gatto a nove code (The Cat O’ Nine Tails, 1971) and Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1972).’ Kinoeye 2/11. Available at http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/needham11_no2.php. Accessed 16 Dec. 2009. – ‘Playing with Genre: An Introduction to the Italian giallo.’ Kinoeye 2/11. Available at http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/needham11.php. Accessed 16 June 2011. Nerenberg, Ellen. Prison Terms: Representing Confinement during and after Italian Fascism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Newman, Graeme, and Pietro Marongiu. ‘Penological Reform and the Myth of Beccaria.’ Criminology 28/2 (1990): 325–46. Nixon, Edna. Voltaire and the Calas Case. New York: Vanguard, 1961. Novelli, Mauro. ‘L’isola delle voci.’ Andrea Camilleri. In Mauro Novelli, ed., Storie di Montalbano. Milan: Mondadori, 2002. lxi–cii. Oddone, Virginio. ‘La scuola lombrosiana.’ In Umberto Levra, ed., La scienza e la colpa: Crimini criminali criminologi: Un volto dell’Ottocento. Milan: Electa, 1985. 239–41. Padovani, Marcelle. ‘Introduzione.’ In Leonardo Sciascia, La Sicilia come metafora: Intervista di Marcelle Padovani. Milan: Mondadori, 1979. vii–xiv. Parr, Adrian, ed. The Deleuze Dictionary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. ‘The Cinema of Poetry.’ In Heretical Empiricism. Translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. 167–86. – ‘Il buono e il cattivo nell’universo di Sciascia.’ In Matteo Collura, ed., Leonardo Sciascia: La memoria, il futuro. Milan: Bompiani, 1998. 17–19. Past, Elena. ‘The Dying Diva: Violent Ends for Clara Calamai in Ossessione and Profondo rosso.’ Forum Italicum 42/2 (2008): 296–312. – ‘Lucarelli’s Guernica: The Predicament of Postmodern Impegno.’ Italica 84/2–3 (2007): 290–308. – ‘Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio’s Literary Courtroom,’ Quaderni d’italianistica 31/2 (2010): 127–48.

342

Designer Animals References

Pierangeli, Fabio. ‘Gadda, il medico, la cognizione.’ Campi immaginabili 13–15/1–3 (1995): 155–74. Pistelli, Maurizio. ‘Montabano sono’: Sulle tracce del più famoso commissario di polizia italiano. Florence: Le Càriti, 2003. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage, 1975. Portigliatti-Barbos, Mario. ‘Introduzione.’ In Umberto Levra, ed., La scienza e la colpa: Crimini criminali criminologi: Un volto dell’Ottocento. Milan: Electa, 1985. 231–8. Prandstaller, Gian Paolo. ‘Il neo-illuminismo di Sciascia.’ In Antonio Motta, ed., Leonardo Sciascia: La verità, l’aspra verità. Mandria: Piero Lacaita, 1985. 173–80. Pugliese, Roberto. Dario Argento. Milan: Il Castoro, 1996. Rambelli, Loris. Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano. Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Re, Sara. ‘Intro: I mille volti di un uomo in noir.’ In Paolo Giovannetti, ed., Almost Noir: Indagini non autorizzate su Carlo Lucarelli. Milan: Arcipelago, 2005. 7–10. Risset, Jacqueline. ‘Francia e Sicilia, la fitta rete degli opposti.’ In Luciano Luisi, ed., Leonardo Sciascia. Taranto: Mandese, 1990. 54–6. Roscioni, Gian Carlo. ‘Gadda as Humorist.’ In Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski, eds., Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 11–24. Rosso, Lorenzo. Caffè Vigàta. Reggio Emilia: Aliberti, 2007. Rubino, Gianfranco. ‘Tra morale e finzione: La morte per decreto in alcuni scrittori francesi.’ In Italo Mereu, ed., La morte come pena in Leonardo Sciascia, da ‘Porte aperte’ all’abolizione della pena di morte. Milan: La Vita Felice, 1997. 61–76. Rushing, Robert A. Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture. New York: Other Press, 2007. – ‘“La sua tragica incompiutezza”: Anxiety, Mis-Recognition and Ending in Gadda’s “Pasticciaccio.”’ Modern Language Notes 116/1 (2001): 130–49. Saada, Nicolas. ‘Les terreurs de Dario Argento.’ Cahiers du cinéma 532 (1999): 53–4. Sangiorgi, Marco. ‘Il fascismo e il giallo italiano.’ In Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò, eds., Il giallo italiano come nuovo romanzo sociale. Ravenna: Longo, 2004. 117–52. Sangiorgi, Marco, and Luca Telò, eds. Il giallo italiano come nuovo romanzo sociale. Ravenna: Longo, 2004. San Pietro, Elena. Interview with Carlo Lucarelli. Available at http://www. kinematrix.net/testi/lucarelli.htm. Accessed 17 June 2011. Savinio, Alberto. Palchetti romani. Milan: Adelphi, 1982.

References 343 Sbragia, Albert. Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996. Sciascia, Leonardo. ‘Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco.’ In Opere: 1971–1983. Edited by Claude Ambroise. Milan: Bompiani, 1989. 1181–96. – Candido ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia. Turin: Einaudi, 1977. – Il cavaliere e la morte. Milan: Adelphi, 1988. – A ciascuno il suo. Milan: Adelphi, 1988 [1966]. – Il Consiglio d’Egitto. Milan: Adelphi, 1989 [1963]. – Il contesto. Milan: Adelphi, 1994 [1971]. – La corda pazza: Scrittori e cose della Sicilia. Turin: Einaudi, 1970. – The Council of Egypt. Translated by Adrienne Foulke. Manchester: Carcanet, 1988. – The Day of the Owl. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver. In The Day of the Owl and Equal Danger. Manchester: Carcanet, 1984. – Equal Danger. Translated by Adrienne Foulke. In The Day of the Owl and Equal Danger. Manchester: Carcanet, 1984. – ‘A futura memoria (se la memoria ha un futuro).’ In Opere: 1984–1989. Edited by Claude Ambroise. Milan: Bompiani, 2004. 763–900. – Il giorno della civetta. Milan: Adelphi, 1993 [1961]. – ‘The Knight and Death.’ In The Knight and Death and Other Stories. Translated by Joseph Farrell. Manchester: Carcanet, 1991. 1–54. – One Way or Another. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987. – Opere: 1956–1971. Edited by Claude Ambroise. Milan: Bompiani, 1987. – Opere: 1971–1983. Edited by Claude Ambroise. Milan: Bompiani, 1989. – Porte Aperte. Milan: Adelphi, 1987. – ‘Il secolo educatore.’ In Opere: 1971–1983. Edited by Claude Ambroise. Milan: Bompiani, 1989. 1006–16. – La Sicilia come metafora: Intervista di Marcelle Padovani. Milan: Mondadori, 1979. – ‘A Straightforward Tale.’ In The Knight and Death and Other Stories. Translated by Joseph Farrell. Manchester: Carcanet, 1991. 55–92. – Todo modo. Milan: Adelphi, 1995 [1974]. – To Each His Own. Translated by Adrienne Foulke. Manchester: Carcanet, 1989. – Una storia semplice. Milan: Adelphi, 1989. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Smuts, Aaron. ‘The Principles of Association: Dario Argento’s Profondo rosso.’ Kinoeye 2/11. Available at http://kinoeye.org/02/11/smuts11.php. Accessed 16 June 2011.

344

Designer Animals References

Snyder, Jon R. ‘Translator’s Introduction.’ In Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. vi–lviii. Somigli, Luca. ‘Form and Ideology in Italian Detective Fiction: Introduction.’ Symposium 59/2 (2005): 67–9. Sorgi, Marcello. La testa ci fa dire: Dialogo con Andrea Camilleri. Palermo: Sellerio, 2000. – ‘Camilleri e gli intellettuali siciliani.’ In Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia. Intro. Antonino Buttitta. Palermo: Sellerio, 2002. 42–7. Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne. The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians (1860–1920). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Stupazzini, Luciano. Available at http://kidslink.bo.cnr.it/irrsaeer/padri/ giallhtm.html bellaria. Accessed 5 April 2010. Sudbury, Julia. Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex. New York: Routledge, 2005. Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Taylor, Lawrence. Born to Crime: The Genetic Causes of Criminal Behavior. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Tedeschi, Alberto. ‘Ma il vero colpevole sono io.’ In La repubblica, 2 April 1979. Tentori, Antonio. ‘Traumi e deliri: I film di Dario Argento.’ In Franco Vitale presenta Dario Argento. Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2000. 13–43. Thomas, Aaron. ‘Preface.’ On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings. By Cesare Beccaria. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xv–xxxii. Thomas, Ronald R. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Thoret, Jean-Baptiste. Dario Argento, Magicien de la peur. [Paris]: Cahiers du cinéma, 2002. Van der Linde, Gerhard. ‘The Body in the Labyrinth: Detection, Rationality and the Feminine in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio.’ American Journal of Italian Studies 21 (1998): 26–40. Van Dover, J.K. You Know My Method: The Science of the Detective. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Translated by Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Venturi, Franco. ‘Introduzione.’ In Dei delitti e delle pene. By Cesare Beccaria. Edited by Franco Venturi. Turin: Einaudi, 1965, xii–xxxix.

References 345 – ‘La Milano del Caffè.’ In Settecento Riformatore: Da Muratori a Beccaria, vol. 1. Turin: Einaudi, 1969. 645–747. – ‘Gli uomini delle riforme: La Lombardia.’ In Settecento Riformatore: L’Italia dei Lumi (1764–1790), vol. 5. Turin: Einaudi, 1987. 425–834. Villa, Renzo. Il deviante e i suoi segni: Lombroso e la nascita dell’antropologia criminale. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985. Villari, Lucio, ed. Illuministi e Riformatori. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1995. Vizmuller-Zocco, Jana. ‘La lingua de Il re di Girgenti.’ In Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia. Intro. Antonino Buttitta. Palermo: Sellerio, 2002. 87–99. – ‘I test della (im)popolarità: Il fenomeno Camilleri.’ Quaderni d’italianistica 22/1 (2001): 35–46. Voltaire. ‘An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de La Barre.’ Translated by Simon Harvey. In Treatise on Tolerance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 137–48. – Political Writings. Edited and translated by David Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. – Treatise on Tolerance. Translated by Brian Masters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Winks, Robin, ed. Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

abjection, 17, 170, 171 – 2, 177, 181 – 3, 189 – 95, 198, 204 – 6, 208 – 9, 219, 249 Accademia dei Pugni, 23, 27 – 8, 42, 282n Adorno, Theodor, 36, 230, 323n Agamben, Giorgio: anthropological machine, 18, 239, 248, 254, 265, 267 – 8; ‘bare life,’ 169, 239, 248, 268, 274, 285n, 328n; The Open, 239, 248, 254, 264 – 5, 267 – 8, 273 – 4, 327n; State of Exception, 114, 128, 131 – 2, 273, 329n Alighieri, Dante, 29, 40, 85, 106, 153 – 4, 308n, 309n Amberson, Deborah, 177, 312n Ambroise, Claude, 71 – 2, 287n Andrews, Richard Mowery, 40, 286n animality, 152 – 3, 165 – 6, 203, 209, 239, 248, 251, 254, 256, 259, 263 – 5, 267 – 8, 317n, 327n, 328n Anni di piombo, 116, 234 anthropometry, 8, 15, 136, 141, 146, 150, 156, 166, 215 – 16, 243 Antonello, Pierpaolo, 173 – 4, 177, 187 – 8, 312n Antonioni, Michelangelo, 320n, 321n

Arbasino, Alberto, 311n Argento, Dario, 17, 170, 207–39, 241, 248, 255, 267, 274, 316n, 318n, 320n, 321n, 322n, 324n; Il gatto a nove code, 209, 212–15, 217, 233, 317n, 319n; Inferno, 230; La sindrome di Stendhal, 233, 322n, 323n; Non ho sonno, 325n; Opera, 321n; Phenomena, 233, 323n; Profondo rosso, 17, 208, 216–17, 220–37, 238, 256, 267, 319n, 320n, 322n; Quattro mosche di velluto grigio, 209, 211, 214–15, 217–20, 321n; Suspiria, 230, 321n; Tenebre, 230, 321n; Trauma, 233, 323n; L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 209–10, 212, 214–17, 230, 317n Arrigo, Bruce A., 283n atavism, 14, 137 – 8, 142, 153 – 4, 156, 165 – 7, 177, 179, 182, 192, 239, 244 – 5, 247 – 8, 254, 264 Auden, W.H., 51, 287n Bacchereti, Elisabetta, 255 Barbolini, Roberto, 301 Baudrillard, Jean: postmodern schizophrenia, 18, 239 – 41, 247, 254; simulation, 90 – 1, 105 – 6

348

Designer Animals Index

Beccaria, Cesare, 9, 23 – 48, 281n; Dei delitti e delle pene, 9, 12 – 13, 15 – 18, 23 – 48, 50, 56, 58 – 9, 61, 65 – 7, 76, 82 – 4, 111 – 12, 158, 280n, 281n, 283n, 284n, 286n, 288n, 289n, 301n ‘Beccarian’ thought, 14 – 17, 23 – 48, 50, 56, 59 – 63, 66 – 7, 75 – 6, 82 – 4, 86, 88, 91, 98, 100 – 1, 104 – 6, 108 – 12, 119 – 20, 126, 128, 136 – 7, 144, 159, 169, 206, 230, 269 – 73, 275, 282n, 285n, 311n Becker, Lucille Frackman, 279n Beckett, Samuel, 300n Beirne, Piers, 27, 35, 40, 279n, 280n, 284n Bellamy, Richard, 32, 282n Benjamin, Walter, 17, 113 – 14, 119 – 20, 127 – 32, 193, 302n, 303n Benvenuti, Stefano, 278n, 279n Benvenuto, Beppe, 296n Bertellini, Giorgio, 209 Bertillon, Alphonse, 216 Bertone, Manuela, 173, 177, 312n Biasin, Gian-Paolo, 180, 182 Bichat, Xavier, 161 Bien, David D., 280n Bobbio, Norberto, 112 body politic, 26 – 32, 36 – 8, 41, 44, 83 – 6, 105, 128, 285n Bonger, Willem A., 284n Borsellino, Nino, 295n, 299n Bouchard, Norma, 316n Brancati, Vitaliano, 88, 296n Brandon, Michael, 211 Burke, Frank, 317n Cabria, Giovanni, 308n, 309n Caesar, Michael, 287n Calabrò, Antonio, 105 Calamai, Clara, 231 – 7, 323n

Calandra, Giuliana, 322n Calarco, Matthew, 248, 265, 268 Calas affair, 11 – 12, 42, 59, 76, 280n Calvino, Italo, 49 Camilleri, Andrea, 16 – 17, 27, 48, 57, 82 – 106, 108, 172, 230, 238, 270, 272, 277n, 278n, 294n, 295n, 296n, 297n, 298n, 299n, 300n; Le ali della sfinge, 84, 89, 101, 104; La caccia al tesoro, 89; Il campo del vasaio, 89, 102 – 3; Il cane di terracotta, 89, 91; La danza del gabbiano, 89; ‘Difesa di un colore,’ 172, 277n, 278n, 295n, 296n; L’età del dubbio, 89; Un filo di fumo, 91; La forma dell’acqua, 82, 89, 92, 97 – 8, 299n; Il gioco degli specchi, 89; Il giro di boa, 84, 89; La gita a Tindari, 82, 84, 89; Gli arancini di Montalbano, 298n, 299n, 300n; Il ladro di merendine, 84, 89, 94, 98; La luna di carta, 89, 102; ‘Miracoli di Trieste,’ 93; ‘Montalbano si rifiuta,’ 98 – 100; L’odore della notte, 89; La pazienza del ragno, 84, 89; La pista di sabbia, 89, 104; Il re di Girgenti, 91; Il sorriso di Angelica, 89; Storie di Montalbano, 295n; La vampa d’agosto, 85, 89; La voce del violino, 89 Camilleri Fans Club, 297n, 298n Campbell, Federico, 295n Cannon, JoAnn, 53, 75, 177, 288n, 313n Capecchi, Giovanni, 87, 294n, 297n, 300n Carloni, Massimo, 278n Carluccio, Giulia, 229 Carofiglio, Gianrico, 17, 27, 48, 107 – 32, 272 – 3, 301n, 304n; Ad occhi chiusi, 115 – 18, 124 – 5, 131;

Index L’arte del dubbio, 110 – 12, 123; Il paradosso del poliziotto: Dialogo, 109; Ragionevoli dubbi, 108, 115 – 16, 119, 125 – 7, 130 – 1, 301n, 302n; Testimone inconsapevole, 107, 115 – 16, 119 – 22, 124 – 5, 129 Carroll, Noel, 248, 325n Cascardi, Anthony J., 47 – 8 Castelli, Rosario, 289n Cavaglià, Giovanni, 162 – 3, 325n Cederna, Camilla Maria, 58 Chesterton, G.K., 287n, 301n Christie, Agatha, 51, 53 – 4, 72, 266; Hercule Poirot, 56 Chu, Mark, 80, 123, 270, 304n Cicala, Marco, 278n Cinecittà, 5 Cittadino-delinquente, 15, 37 – 8, 45, 120, 126 classical detective fiction, 4, 13, 50 – 1, 53, 72, 89, 97 – 8 ‘classical’ school of criminology, 13, 24, 140, 144, 281n Colman, Felicity J., 323n Conan Doyle, Arthur, 4, 7 – 8, 52, 279n; Sherlock Holmes, 4, 7 – 8, 24, 151, 279n Coquerel, A., 280n Costantini, Daniele, 316n Costa, Orazio, 103, 300n Courier, Paul Louis, 57 – 8 Cozzi, Luigi, 230, 319n criminal anthropology, 9, 13, 136 – 8, 141, 143 – 5, 147 – 50, 152 – 3, 156, 163 – 4, 167 – 9, 190, 243, 271, 273, 305n, 306n, 308n criminology, 9–10, 13–14, 18, 27–8, 35, 46, 101, 136, 140, 142–4, 150, 162, 168, 170, 207, 242–4, 247, 252, 259, 269, 281n, 282n, 306n, 318n

349

Crovi, Luca, 278n Crovi, Raffaele, 278n, 279n Dal Bosco, Francesco, 316n Davin, Eric Leif, 279n De Angelis, Augusto, 3 – 4, 277n De La Durantaye, Leland, 327n De Roberto, Federico, 88, 296n DeCaroli, Stephen, 285n Del Buono, Oreste, 278n, 279n Deleuze, Gilles, 218 – 19, 223, 225, 232 – 3, 319n, 321n, 323n, 324n; cinema of the body, 17, 223, 225, 231, 237, 321n; crystal-image, 232, 323n Della Casa, Stefano, 319n, 321n Demontis, Simona, 86 – 7, 95, 296n, 299n Derrida, Jacques, 113 – 15, 127 – 30, 302n, 303n determinism, 14, 16 – 17, 138, 142, 175, 208 – 9, 213 – 14, 220 – 1, 234, 267, 306n, 317n Diderot, Denis, 57 – 8, 61, 66, 286n Di Grado, Antonio, 84 – 5 Dombroski, Robert S., 173, 178, 189, 313n, 314n, 315n Eco, Umberto, 90, 279n, 297n Enlightenment, 9 – 10, 12 – 14, 16 – 17, 24 – 5, 27 – 8, 31 – 3, 35 – 6, 40, 47 – 8, 50 – 1, 55 – 68, 75 – 83, 86, 88 – 9, 91, 93 – 4, 98, 100, 111, 132, 207, 272, 279n, 280n, 281n, 289n, 311n, 312n Fabbri, Diego, 300n Facchinei, Ferdinando, 46 Farmer, Mimsy, 211 Farrell, Joseph, 56 – 8, 63, 73, 77, 288n, 290n Fascia, Valentina, 290n

350

Designer Animals Index

Fascism, 4 – 6, 54 – 5, 73, 78, 116, 126, 185, 193, 231 – 2, 234, 270, 277n, 289n, 306n, 322n, 323n, 324n Ferri, Enrico, 145, 259, 281n Firpo, Luigi, 281n Foucault, Michel, 8, 16, 27, 32, 39, 46 – 7, 59 – 60, 80 – 1, 161, 169, 197, 271 – 2, 283n, 284n, 286n Freud, Sigmund, 8, 279n Franciscus, James, 212 Frigessi, Delia, 138, 141, 306n, 310n Fruttero, Carlo, 108 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 17, 52, 87, 170 – 206, 208, 270, 274, 311n, 314n, 315n, 316n; ‘Anastomósi,’ 172, 176 – 9, 181, 183, 189, 204, 313n, 315n; La cognizione del dolore, 17, 172, 174 – 7, 181 – 4, 190 – 8, 200, 204 – 6, 314n, 315n; ‘Dejanira Classis (Novella 2.a),’ 311n; Eros e Priapo (da furore a cenere), 177; Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, 17, 171 – 2, 174, 176 – 7, 180 – 94, 198 – 206, 296n, 313n, 314n Gallant, Chris, 316n Galtonian method, 148, 152 Gardner, Erle Stanley, 52 Gentile, Giovanni, 139, 306n Gewirtz, Paul, 120 Giallo, history 3 – 7, 52, 86, 172, 277n, 278n, 279n, 296n, 316n Gibson, Mary, 141 – 2, 148, 150, 169, 305n, 306n, 307n Ginzburg, Carlo, 8, 28, 36, 89, 137, 150 – 1, 161, 215 – 16, 256, 263 – 4, 269, 279n, 282n, 284n, 297n, 318n, 327n; conjectural paradigm (search for investigative, conjectural, evidentiary), 8, 59, 137, 150 – 1, 179, 185,

209, 215, 263, 269, 282n; ‘Galilean’ science, 15, 31, 36, 89, 137, 282n, 297n Gould, Stephen J., 139, 141, 310n, 318n Grainger, Julian, 321n Gramsci, Antonio, 4 – 5, 8, 275 Green, Anna Katherine, 277n Grimm, Melchoir, 281n Guarnieri, Luigi, 140 Hainsworth, Peter, 328n Harrowitz, Nancy, 306n Hemmings, David, 221, 320n Hinchman, Lewis, 36 Hopper, Edward, 229 Horkheimer, Max, 36 Horn, David G., 142, 145 – 6, 167, 169, 213, 270, 273, 305, 308n, 309n, 310n, 318n, 319n, 324n introspection, 15 – 16, 23, 42, 62, 103, 282n Jacoponi, Tiziana, 101, 299n Jones, David, 280n Kant, Immanuel, 10, 36, 43, 279n Knox, Ronald, 7 Kohn, Margaret, 132 Kristeva, Julia, 182 – 3, 192, 194, 204, 208 – 9 LaCapra, Dominick, 113 – 14, 128 – 30 Lavia, Gabriele, 322n Leps, Marie-Christine, 18 Libri Gialli series, 4 – 6, 277n, 295n Lombroso, Cesare, 9, 13 – 18, 135 – 70, 173, 175 – 6, 180 – 1, 184 – 5, 188 – 9, 193 – 4, 197, 209, 213 – 14, 216 – 17,

Index 219, 226, 230, 240 – 8, 259, 265, 267, 271, 306n, 307n, 308n, 309n, 310n, 314n, 318n, 322n, 324n, 325n; Lezioni di medicina legale, 160, 162; ‘Lombrosian’ thought, 14 – 18, 135 – 70, 172, 176, 178 – 81, 183, 185 – 93, 196, 198, 201, 203, 206 – 8, 210, 213 – 14, 216, 218, 223, 233 – 4, 237, 239, 241 – 5, 247, 250, 254, 268 – 70, 273 – 5, 282n, 306n, 316n, 317n, 318n, 321n; L’uomo delinquente, 13, 15, 136, 140 – 60, 162 – 3, 165 – 6, 213, 265, 305n, 307n, 308n, 325n; Palimsesti del carcere, 136, 155, 159 – 60, 309n Lombroso-Ferrero, Gina, 166, 310n Lucarelli, Carlo, 18, 108, 170, 238 – 68, 270, 274 – 5, 318n, 320n, 325n, 326n, 327n, 328n; Almost Blue, 238 – 41, 247 – 63, 267 – 8, 325n; Un giorno dopo l’altro, 239 – 41, 247 – 52, 255, 260, 262 – 3, 267 – 8, 326n; Guernica, 328n; Lupo mannaro, 239, 241, 247 – 50, 255, 259, 263, 267 – 8; Mistero in blu, 241, 265 – 6; Nuovi misteri d’Italia, 265 – 6; and Massimo Picozzi: Scena del crimine: Storie di delitti efferati e di investigazioni scientifiche, 242; Serial Killer: Storie di Ossessione Omicida, 242 – 7, 265, 318n; Tracce criminali: Storie di omicidi imperfetti, 243 Luperini, Romano, 205 Macchiavelli, Loriano, 108 Malden, Karl, 212 Marcus, Millicent, 285n, 324n Marongiu, Pietro, 283n Martindale, Andrew, 327n

351

Maugham, Frederic Herbert, 280n Mauri, Glauco, 277, 322n McDonagh, Maitland, 207, 219 Menarini, Roy, 221, 320n Mereu, Italo, 289n Meril, Macha, 322n Met, Philippe, 316n Mineo, Nicolò, 291n Ministero di Cultura Popolare (Minculpop), 5 – 6 Modleski, Tania, 254 Morellet, André, 281n Morelli, Giovanni, 8, 150 – 1, 279n Munt, Sally, 51 Musante, Tony, 210 Mussolini, Benito, 4 – 5, 8 Needham, Gary, 217, 220, 319n Nerenberg, Ellen, 193, 314n Newman, Graeme, 283n Nixon, Edna, 280n Novelli, Mauro, 300n Oddone, Virginio, 168 Omertà, 50, 89, 287n Padovani, Marcelle, 58, 288n Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 55 – 6, 225, 266, 270 Past, Elena, 323n, 328n Pentazet (camera), 200 physiognomy, 148, 150, 176, 185 – 8, 203, 208, 308n, 327n Picozzi, Massimo, 18, 242 – 7, 250, 318n, 325n Pierangeli, Fabio, 196, 315n Pirandello, Luigi, 87 – 8, 266, 295n, 296n, 297n, 300n Pistelli, Maurizio, 87, 295n

352

Designer Animals Index

Poe, Edgar Allan, 3, 7, 9 – 11, 13, 52, 279n, 321n; Auguste Dupin, 4, 7, 10, 321n Portigliatt-Barbos, Mario, 145 ‘positive’ school of criminology, 9, 13, 18, 136 – 8, 142 – 3, 146, 153, 168, 208, 241 – 2, 265, 268, 281n, 282n, 284n, 306n positivism, 15, 139 – 40, 143 – 4, 154, 163, 165, 174 – 7, 180, 184, 233 – 4, 307n, 311n, 312n Pugliese, Roberto, 317n, 319n, 322n Rafter, Nicole Hahn, 141 – 2, 148 – 50, 169, 305n, 307n Rambelli, Loris, 6, 277n, 278n Re, Sara, 238 – 9, 325n Renzi, Eva, 210 Risset, Jacqueline, 57 Roscioni, Gian Carlo, 176, 184 Rosso, Lorenzo, 297n Rubino, Gianfranco, 290n Rushing, Robert, 83, 90, 100, 177, 206, 312n, 314n, 315n Sacchetti, Dardano, 318n San Pietro, Elena, 320n, 326n Sangiorgi, Marco, 242, 277n, 278n Savinio, Alberto, 3 – 4, 277n Sayers, Dorothy, 278n Sbragia, Albert, 184, 192 Scerbanenco, Giorgio, 108, 320n schizophrenia, 18, 138, 234, 240 – 1, 249, 254 – 5, 257 – 8, 260, 262 – 5, 318n Sciascia, Leonardo, 16 – 17, 27, 48, 59 – 84, 86 – 98, 100 – 1, 104 – 10, 172, 209, 230, 272, 287n, 288n, 289n, 290n, 291n, 294n, 295n, 296n, 298n, 299n, 300n; ‘Breve storia del

romanzo poliziesco,’ 49, 51, 54 – 6, 58, 77 – 8, 96, 287n; Candido ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia, 58, 94, 97 – 8; Il cavaliere e la morte, 50, 53 – 4, 70, 73, 80, 94, 107; A ciascuno il suo, 49 – 50, 54, 70, 74 – 6, 94, 292n, 293n; Il Consiglio d’Egitto, 58, 61 – 6, 70, 79, 89, 94 – 8, 291n; Il contesto, 50, 53 – 4, 56, 69 – 71, 76, 81, 94, 292n; La corda pazza: Scrittori e cose della Sicilia, 298n; ‘A futura memoria (se la memoria ha un futuro),’ 73, 293n; Il giorno della civetta, 50, 68, 70, 72 – 3, 94, 291n, 293n, 296n; Porte aperte, 56, 289n; ‘Il secolo educatore,’ 16, 58, 61, 68, 79 – 80; La Sicilia come metafora: Intervista di Marcelle Padovani, 288n, 298n; Todo modo, 50, 53, 55 – 6, 70, 94, 287n, 288n; Una storia semplice, 50, 67, 73, 82, 94, 292n Sellerio Editore, 86, 297n Shaviro, Steven, 230, 273 Simenon, Georges, 7, 72, 278n, 300n; Maigret, 7, 56, 93 simulacrum/simulation, 16, 83, 90 – 3, 98, 100, 104 – 6 Sinisgalli, Leonardo, 277n Smuts, Aaron, 221, 320n Snorkel (camera), 217, 319n Snyder, Jon, 79 Somigli, Luca, 7, 270 Sorgi, Marcello, 88, 106, 300n Spillane, Mickey; Mike Hammer, 101 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 277n Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, 18, 140, 151, 157, 167, 274, 310n Stout, Rex: Nero Wolfe, 101 Strategia della tensione, 80

Index Stupazzini, Luciano, 278n Sudbury, Julia, 274 Tani, Stefano, 9, 52, 277n Tarde, Gabriel, 140 – 1 Taylor, Lawrence, 213 Tedeschi, Alberto, 5 Telò, Luca, 278n Tentori, Antonio, 221, 320n Thomas, Aaron, 283n Thomas, Ronald R., 279n Thoret, Jean-Baptiste, 320n, 323n Tomàsi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 88 – 9, 296n Van der Linde, Gerhard, 177, 312n, 313n Van Dine, S.S., 7, 277n, 278n Van Dover, J.K., 51, 279n Vattimo, Gianni, 79, 119, 303n Venturi, Franco, 23 – 4, 28, 281n, 283n

353

Verga, Giovanni, 88 – 9, 296n Verri, Alessandro, 42 Verri, Pietro, 24, 283n Verzeni, Vincenzo, 243 – 4, 318n, 325n Villa, Renzo, 156, 167, 309n Villari, Lucio, 282n Villella, Giuseppe, 164 – 8, 188, 244, 310n Visconti, Luchino, 323n, 324n vivisection, 17, 135, 163 – 4, 177, 179, 193, 196, 208, 216 – 19, 221 – 3, 247, 250, 265, 267, 270, 320n Vizmuller-Zocco, Jana, 91 Voltaire, 9 – 12, 27, 47, 56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 75 – 7, 79, 98, 280n, 281n, 286n, 289n; Zadig, 8 – 10, 75, 279n Wallace, Edgar, 277n Williams, Christopher R., 283n Zingaretti, Luca, 299n