The Poiesis of History: Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy 9781501736797

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The Poiesis of History

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from The Arcadia Fund

https://archive.org/details/poiesisofhistoryOOjewe

Keala Jewell

THE POIESIS OF HISTORY Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Cornell University Press is grateful for a subvention from the Guthrie Fund of Dartmouth College, which aided in the publication of this book.

Copyright © 1992 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1992 by Cornell University Press.

International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2645-6 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 92-52762 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. © The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

To the memory of my brother, WILLIAM H. K. JEWELL

Contents

Preface

ix

CHAPTER ONE

History and Poetry

1

CHAPTER TWO

Palimpsests and Rome

23

CHAPTER THREE

Ilaria and Italia

53

CHAPTER FOUR

Sorrow and Genre

87

CHAPTER FIVE

Epos and Fragment

120

CHAPTER SIX

Compromise and Distance

146

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Interrogative Epos

193

Conclusion

243

Works Cited

247

Index

257

Preface

1 he dilemmas of postwar Italian history are well known to the world outside Italy by way of cinematic exports, if not literary ones. Italian Neorealism gave us the compelling story of Italy’s difficult social recon¬ struction after World War II and Fascism. Hardly the heir to the splen¬ dors of the centuries, to Classicism and the Renaissance, postwar Italy was in this portrait poor, lowly, and divided against itself—crushed by history. The narrative of a lost greatness and the Italian struggle to re¬ gain national pride inspired novels and films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief\ Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, and Italo Calvino’s Path to the Nest of Spiders. All these works date from before 1950; all are illuminated by contemporary European debates regarding literary “com¬ mitment.” Too often, however, our knowledge of Italian cultural history stops right about there. Contemporary historical themes in fact continued to receive the atten¬ tion of Italian writers and filmmakers (who often worked together) well after Neorealism had crested. In the late 1950s and in the 1960s Italy underwent historical changes as wrenching as those brought by the two world wars, changes that deeply troubled many Italian writers. The country entered upon economic boom years that substantially brought it into modernity and the twentieth century. Rural Italy, with its particular set of values, began to disappear, and regional dialects began to die out. The economic and policy choices that favored industrialization forced many to emigrate from the agricultural South to northern cities to find work. Rampant construction was destroying the “poetic” Italy to which tourists flocked in order to see history in a landscape. These ominous developments engaged the concern not only of novelists and filmmakers.

x

Preface

who traditionally have mined social history for material, but also of po¬ ets. Poets in this period constantly took history itself as their theme. Writers were faced, however, with the problem of how to present the history of this newly reconstructed Italy. Neither the commitment of Neorealism produced by the political engagement of many Italian intel¬ lectuals, writers, and artists in the decade following World War II nor the politics of the various opposition parties had been powerful enough to counteract the changes Italy was undergoing. Pier Paolo Pasolini, an influential cultural voice, denounced the proponents of literary commit¬ ment as naive and ineffectual. Pasolini himself, Mario Luzi, and Attilio Bertolucci were instrumental in a shift to more nuanced positions regard¬ ing the relations of literature and history. These three figures strongly influenced postwar cultural history in both their poems and their critical writing. They helped to extend debate over the historicization of art to questions of the ideological functions of historical forms of literary repre¬ sentation in general, and, in particular, to questions concerning the ide¬ ology of genres—to the role, for example, of the elegy and the pastoral at a time when Italy was being modernized. As well as objecting to the cultural politics of Neorealism, which pro¬ posed that literature be the voice of history, these three figures experi¬ mented with historical poetic forms, in both metrics and genre. These experiments were motivated not only by a rejection of Neorealist poetics but also by dissatisfaction with the modernist attempt to destroy genre. In that sense their poetry is postmodern. More important, I believe, the ballad, the lament, the elegy, the narrative verse epic, and the novel in verse reappear as vehicles for a historical consciousness that has long superseded historicism. This reappearance raises several questions. Is it possible to write historical poetry without having to depict things like poor people’s laundry hanging in the streets or workers on the advance? What does it mean either to reject or to retrieve specific inherited poetic forms? I have studied the ways in which these three poets mix poetic forms associated in the cultural tradition with certain forms of conscious¬ ness namely epic and lyric—in order to reconceptualize the relations of history and poetry, and I have found that their works dispel the criti¬ cal cliche that “civic” verse must be narrative and realistic. It is not surprising that two out of the three figures I study are associ¬ ated with the Italian cinema, known for being a social art with its own lyric bent. Pasolini, of course, made a second career out of films. An intimate friend of Attilio Bertolucci’s, Pasolini introduced the poet’s son, Bernardo, to filmmaking. The films of Bernardo Bertolucci bear the marks of both his mentor’s and his father’s art. His 1900 retells the family history invoked in Attilio’s novel in verse. La camera da letto.

Preface

xi

His Before the Revolution echoes the lament for the “lost,” beloved coun¬ tryside found in his father’s poems and in Pasolini’s famous lamenta¬ tion—in a prominent newspaper—for the fireflies that disappeared from Italian evenings when not-so-poetic industrial waste overran the land¬ scape. It is also not surprising that the three poets presented here, different as they were from one another, wrote poems to one another—invoking ' once again old poetic traditions. The most powerful of these is, perhaps, Luzi’s “Poscritto,” a reflection on Pasolini’s murder by a male prostitute in Ostia, near Rome, in 1975, in circumstances that have generated some speculation about potentially political motivations for this act of violence:

A Granata, nel gulag siberiano, a Ostia— una riprova superflua, una preordinata testimonianza oppure sulla lunga controversia un irrefutabile sigillo? . . . escono il poeta e l’assassino l’uno e l’altro dalla metafora e s’avviano al sanguinoso appuntamento ciascuno certo di se, ciascuno nella sua parte \Tutte le poesie, p. 172]

(In Granada, a Siberian gulag, Ostia—/a superfluous confirmation, a pre¬ ordained testimony/or upon the long controversy/an undeniable seal?/ . . . poet and assassin alike/step out of metaphor/and set off to their bloody engagement/each certain of himself, each in his role.)

Pasolini appears in these lines alongside the poets Garcia Lorca and Mandelstam, also murdered. When poetry struggles to inhabit the world of history instead of the private world of lyric, when poetry steps out of metaphor, the bloody outcome is preordained. Each poet’s death exem¬ plifies this rule. Yet Luzi also suggests that we may have seen the last poet-martyrs. The very idea that poetry may enact a revolt may now be defunct, itself sealed off (“upon the long controversy /an undeniable seal”). The death of that idea haunts the verses of Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi. At the same time, it furnishes the stuff of a new poetry. For illuminating discussions about their verse, I thank Mario Luzi and Attilio Bertolucci. Thanks also to Silvio Ramat and Bianca Maria Frabotta for our many conversations on Italian poetry. For their valuable

xii

Preface

comments on the manuscript at various stages I thank Rebecca West, Barbara Spackman, Juliana Schiesari, Kristin Ross, Nancy Harrowitz’ Gregory Lucente, Beverly Allen, Mary Russo, Walter Stephens, Melissa Zeiger, and Claudio Pellegrini. For support and advice at the beginning stages of the project, I am grateful to Silvano Garofalo, Paolo Valesio, and Gian-Paolo Biasin. I am indebted to Stefanie Jed and to Margaret Brose for the inception of Chapter 2 in the context of the session “Rome: Deconstructing the Palimpsest,” at the 1985 meeting of the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast at Santa Cruz. For help in research, I thank Brenda Lunardini, Donatella Alesi, Giu¬ seppe Iafrate (Associazione “Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini”). For manu¬ script preparation, thanks to Gail Vernazza, and for copyediting, thanks to Andrew Lewis. Thanks also to the Fulbright Commission for a Junior Research Award; to the Dartmouth College Committee on Research for continual assistance and to the Office of the Dean of the Humanities at Dartmouth College; to the Ramon Guthrie Fund of Dartmouth College for generous financial support. I thank several authors and publishers for permission to quote: Mario Luzi and Garzanti Editore for lines from the poems “Pnmavera degli orfani,” “Natura,” ‘Torse dice l’addio,” “Onde,” “A Niki Z. e alia sua patria, 11 pensiero fluttuante della felicita,” “Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi,” “II gorgo di salute e malattia,” and “Poscritto,” in Tutte le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1988); Attilio Bertolucci and Garzanti Editore for lines from the poems “Frammento,” “Pensieri di casa,” “Romanzo,” “Romanza,” “II vento di febbraio,” “In un tempo incerto,” and “Per Ottavio Ricci,” in La capanna Indiana (Milan: Garzanti, 1973), from the poems “Settembre” and “Di molto prima,” in Viaggio d’inverno (Milan: Garzanti, 1971), and from the novel La camera da letto (Milan: Garzanti, 1984 and 1988); the heirs of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Garzanti Editore for lines from the poems “L’Appennino,” “Le ceneri di Gramsci,” “II pianto della scavatrice,” “A Bertolucci,” “La Guinea,” “Poesia in forma di rosa, Nuova poesia in forma di rosa,’ and “Poema per un verso di Shakespeare, in Le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1975), and for passages from the essays in Passione e ideologia (Milan: Garzanti, 1960); the Pasolini Estate for lines from “Lingua” and “La scoperta di Marx,” in Uusignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (Milan: Longanesi, 1958), and “A na fruta, in La nuova gioventui Poesie fnulane, 1941 — 74 (Turin: Einaudi, 1975); Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo for their translations in Pier Paolo Pasolinis Poems (New York: Random House, 1982). The lines from “In the Dark Body of Metamorphosis,” “To Niki Z. and to Her Gountry, and The VV hirlpool of Sickness and Health” are reprinted from In the Dark Body of Metamorphosis and Other Poems by Mario Luzi,

Preface

xiii

translated by I. L. Salomon, by permission of W. W. Norton & Com¬ pany, Inc. Copyright © 1975, 1974, 1973, 1972 by I. L. Salomon. Lines from “The Apennines,” William Weaver’s translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Appennino,” in Carlo L. Golino, ed.. Contemporary Italian Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), copyright © 1962 by the Regents of the University of California, appear with the permission of the translator and the University of California Press. I thank the following journals for permission to use freely my own material, which I substantially revised for this book: “Reading Pasolini’s Roses,” Symposium 36, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 207—19, is reprinted in part with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, pub¬ lished by Heldref Publications, 4000 Albemarle St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016, copyright © 1982; “Poetic Horizons: Spatial Configura¬ tions in Mario Luzi’s ‘Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi,’” Stanford Italian Review 4, no. 2 (1984): 177—207, is reprinted in part with per¬ mission of Anma Libri; “Deconstructing the Palimpsest: Pasolini’s Ro¬ man Poems,” SubStance 16, no. 2 (copyright © 1987 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin System), pp. 55—66, is used by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Unless otherwise noted, translations of poetry and prose are mine. Keala Jewell

Hanover, New Hampshire

The Poiesis of History

CHAPTER

ONE

History and Poetry

Wh en did the fracture between the world of history and the world of poetry take place? Was it when the proponents of the “modern” claimed the present as a poetic subject over the past of the “ancients,” with the attendant shift in aesthetic hierarchies and the eventual demise of the verse epic? Did the bildungsroman and the historical novel elbow poetry into its current separateness from history, into a fundamentally elegiac mode? Did the democratizing influence of prose genres such as journal¬ ism cast poetry as an elite and conservative antagonist? Did the lyric withdraw in protest against the utilitarian circulation of artistic commod¬ ities in the increasingly reified and alienated world of modern capitalist Europe? Or does a distance between poetry and history represent an older or permanent tension that, like that between Heidegger s World and Earth, somehow defines or inaugurates Art?1 These questions have occupied the minds and pens of thinkers con¬ cerned with the significance of aesthetic history in ontology and epis¬ temology—G. F. W. Hegel, Benedetto Croce, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and the Italian poets discussed in this book—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922—75), Attilio Bertolucci (1911—), and Mario Luzi 1 I draw here from Fredric Jameson’s discussion of Martin Heidegger’s “Origins of the Work of Art” in “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Ho§ek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 250—51. For the hierarchical distinctions between journalistic prose and poetic genres, I draw on Richard Terdiman’s discussion of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Capital in Discourse!Counter Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Cenlury France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), chap. 6, espe¬ cially pp. 266—67.

2

The Poiesis of History

(1914—). In the post—World War II era, Pasolini and Luzi themselves were leaders in the extensive contemporary debate over the conditions and aims of historicizing aesthetic practice. Their “friendly contro¬ versy to use Luzi s epithet—arose in the context of the familiar dis¬ pute over literary realism, yet it stands out because its frame was the more circumscribed one surrounding antilyrical poetic realism that took place in the pages of the journal La chimera. And although both placed realism in the foreground of their exchange, the controversy was grounded in their common insistence on interrogating the status of poetry in rela¬ tion to history and to other literary genres, past and current. Their es¬ says Luzi s “Dubbi sul realismo” (Doubts about realism) and Pasolini’s Forse ad un tramonto (Perhaps a twilight)—are an outgrowth of the well-established critical problem: how it is that modern poetry seems to have no jurisdiction over historical understanding, over the factual and experiential world?2 If poetry gains status as a “high culture” genre—as an activity of the Spirit that inscribes the course of ideas in history only on an abstract plane—must it as a corollary become socially mar¬ ginalized, isolated, estranged, or irrelevant? Both Luzi and Pasolini studied poetic history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with this query in mind (Pasolini later retitled his piece in La chimera “Osservazioni sull evoluzione del ’900” [Observations on the evolution of the twentieth century]). Both Luzi and Pasolini saw trends in contemporary poetry as attempts by poetry to Find its way out of the lyric. Their own verse, with its experiments in mixed genres, is a response to the lamentable marginal status of poetry. It is precisely this lament which provides a common ground for studying not only Pasolini and Luzi but also Bertolucci. Each of the three was well aware that the “lyric prejudice” appeared alongside the progressive waning or devaluation of

For the idea of the worldly as factual in the context of philosophical thinking on the course of culture, I refer the reader to John Brenkman’s elucidation of Herbert Marcuse’s thought in Culture and Domination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), especially p. 6, and Hannah Arendt s “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modem,” in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), pp. 41—90. Arendt asserts that to consider these questions we must extend our inquiry as far back as the Greek tradition to examine the relations of historiography and poetry in order to compare earlier conceptions with our own. In the works of historiographers such as Herodotus and poets such as Homer, poiesis and historical writing (despite its prose form) fell together on the same side of a divide that separated them both from praxis because they made something—fabricated something—immortal out of great deeds. This was already not the case with Socrates and Plato, who focused instead on mortals’ poten¬ tial for contemplating the immortal. Thought, Arendt asserts, as such comes to outvalue historical memory. The Platonic view, by upholding the transcendence of thought, inau¬ gurated the idea of culture as separate from social life and the lower “factual” world.

History and Poetry

3

epic, dramatic, satiric, and didactic verse genres, genres that they in part retrieve. All three observed that it culminated in the rise of Symbol¬ ism and then, in the twentieth century, in a poetics of lyric purity and a prevailing “negative” thematics. All rejected such a poetics—associated with Hermeticism, the critic Carlo Bo, and the notion that poetry as “what we do not know” is a “true present” capable of abolishing ordinary time.3 All three opposed avant-garde positions that view poetry’s social isolation as favorable to a newly antagonistic or revolutionary position, to a nonbourgeois artistic mode. Dissatisfaction with a reduction of the poetic to the lyric was already apparent in the 1930s (indeed, with the Hermetics themselves) and reached its climax in the postwar years. Attilio Bertolucci states this eloquently when he comments on his choosing the verse novel as the vehicle for an antilyric move: I felt the need, the desire, to continue what I had begun in the short narrative poem titled (after a little-known piece by Bemardin de Saint Pierre) The Indian Hut. I want to add that I was also led to the poema by my desire to undo somehow Edgar Allan Poe’s verdict, made in a famous essay, that the poema was incapable of sustaining tension, since even greats such as Milton had proven unable to avoid drops in tension. That essay influenced Baudelaire and Mallarme and through them opened the way to Symbolism, so-called pure poetry, the Hermetics, and more than a century of glorious verse that has now perhaps come to an end.1

Bertolucci reacted, then, against the disassociation of poetry from forms of discursive composition, thereby defining himself as a post-Symbolist, a post-Hermetic and a postmodern writer who sought a way beyond the lyric and pure poetry. Bertolucci made it clear that literary genres will have an important role to play in this post-lyric enterprise. I shall argue in fact that they have a specific historicizing function for him, and for Pasolini and Luzi as well. These authors retrieved archaic or outdated genres such as the poema (either the verse epic or a didactic treatise in verse), sepulchral verse, the lament, and the poemetto (a long poem usually subdivided into chapters), and thereby invoked a powerful literary tradition in Italy—

1 See Carlo Bo, “Letteratura come vita,” in Otto studi (Florence: Vallecchi, 1939), pp. 7-28. 4 Bertolucci’s comments appeared on the dust jacket of the first book of La camera da letto: Romanzo famigliare (al modo antico), 2 vols. (Milan: Garzanti, 1984 and 1988). (The two books were published separately.)

4

The Poiesis of History

dormant during the Hermetic period. This tradition is at once admired, desired, and inevitably distant. The specific poetic forms adopted con¬ stitute an allusion to the past that both bolsters the antilyric reaction and foregrounds issues of cultural transmission. These attempts by Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi to reconceptualize history through specific generic experiments I call the poiesis, or the poetic composition, of history. These authors opposed in their work, although in very different ways and from differing cultural positions, at least two twentieth-century liter¬ ary currents of poetics, which were themselves in conflict. First, they eschewed ahistorical modernism. Second, they criticized a facile realism based on limited notions of what subjects are properly historical, as well as socialist realism as envisioned by theoreticians such as Andrei Zhdanov. Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi asked how the received forms of the poetic tradition—and by the postwar period modernism itself had become a tradition—articulated the relationship of poetry to history, re¬ alism, and narrative. What poetic traditions were irrevocably dead, which were alive but exhausted, and which were ripe for resurrection? These authors rejected metahistorical poetry as well as historicism and idealist theories of history that associate poetry with the achievements of the Spirit and “high culture.” In this context they moved against the modernist tradition of the antigenre. By mixing widely divergent, ar¬ chaic, or anachronistic genres as fragment, elegy, ballad, novel, and epos (verse epic), they destabilized traditional thinking on such issues as poetry s supposed lyric/subjectivist bent, the hegemony of narrative over realism, and literary engagement. In general, these poets brought to the fore issues of poetic heredities within the context of a twentieth-century historical consciousness. Their poetic experiments aimed furthermore to demonstrate that considerations of form—forms that bear the marks of history—are inseparable from considerations of ideology. Perhaps the Italian cultural tradition, influenced in this century in many but not all quarters by the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, more than other traditions demonstrates an interest in studying ideology, in the words of Hayden White, as “the central problem of intellectual history because intellectual history has to do with meaning, its production, dis¬ tribution, and consumption, so to speak, in different historical epochs.”0 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Repre¬ sentation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 190. I should make clear that I use ideology in the sense that Marx gave to it in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: the “legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological—forms in which men become conscious of this [class] conflict and fight it out (quoted in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], p. 156).

History and Poetry

5

How republican and imperial Rome were viewed and re-viewed over the centuries of Italian history is just one example of the importance of ide¬ ology to how a historical period constructs a relationship to the past. Both Gramsci’s and Pasolini’s writings address this particular example directly, and both attend to the ideological implications of historio¬ graphic writing, literary histories, and literary works with historical themes. Like Pasolini, Bertolucci and Luzi turned their attention to the sedimented history of forms from Antiquity through to the medieval, Renaissance, baroque, neoclassical, and modern periods—a history that one can see in many parts of Italy by simply walking down the street, a fact that prompted Pasolini to model his Roman poems as pal¬ impsests. What is the specific content of the postwar debates on cultural trans¬ mission as it concerns the poetic tradition? These debates are permeated by the idea that ideology manifests itself not only in content but in spe¬ cific forms of representation.6 Three important subjects are relevant to the larger debate on literary realism and constitute the more circum¬ scribed contexts pertinent to the relationship between poetry and history: (1) the fundamentally elegiac character of the modern lyric tradition; (2) the reintroduction of narrative structures into the lyric as an antidote to the solipsism of modern poetry; and (3) the ideological implications of the ensuing mixture of genres. Genre emerges then as a specifically historical context for ideological conflict. In genres cultural meanings become alternately fixed and unbound, and readers’ awareness of the social nature of interpretation is heightened. Elegy, the poetry of loss and mourning, is probably the dominant form of modern lyric. Overcoming the dominance of the elegy might present a way out of the lyric. Each of the poets treated in this book has given sustained attention to the strong link between loss and death and the elegy. They resurrected elegiac forms in the postwar period precisely in order, paradoxically, to disturb them. Luzi composed unmournful and tearless—if hair-raising—elegies on the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades and on the murders of the poets Pasolini, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Osip Mandelstam. Pasolini revived sepulchral verse and lament to recast the funeral elegy into a discourse on political sor¬ row and hence to banish a purified, monumentalized elegy. Implied in that banishing is a critique of lyric poetry. Bertolucci experimented with

6 For a general theoretical statement see Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983). He traces the idea that a poetic tradition “does not ‘reflect’ his¬ tory, yet history is inscribed in it at the level of the signifier” (p. 24).

6

The Poiesis of History

the mixed genre of the novel in verse in order to thematize an impasse connected to the paralyzing grief inherent in historical, rather than ex¬ clusively personal, loss and thereby distanced himself from received ele¬ giac modes. These writers were well aware of the ideologies and poetics that had brought the elegiac tradition to dominate certain sectors of twentiethcentury verse. Luzi wrote extensively on the issue, in his essays on both Giacomo Leopardi and Dino Campana—especially in “Campana, al di qua e al di la dell’elegia” (Campana, this side of elegy and beyond). He adopted the most ontological position of the three by concentrating on the consciousness of death as something intrinsic to the experience of writing. Using an approach related to history of ideas, Luzi examined in his critical writings the complex configurations in the theological and philosophical traditions of the real, sensible, or ontic realm in relation to a supernatural and enigmatic space or to Nothingness and death, or absence. Death, absence, and mourning are inherent in writing itself since writing always selects from the past literary tradition and thus inexorably kills that part of the past it has passed over. It is only in this erasure, however, that a space opens to the life of the future, to becom¬ ing. Luzi views poetry as the attempt to capture the rhythms of this phe¬ nomenon, which is outside of the will of individual subjects. He came specifically to criticize the concept of the poet as a demiurge, a single mythic creator, and he rejected Stephane Mallarme’s Symbolism and his theories of poetic language for their overemphasis on poetry’s power of absolute creation. Symbolist poetics developed in his view as the conse¬ quence of the demise in the late Renaissance of the pre-Copernican universe. Romanticism moved into the abandoned edifice of Humanism, only to be battered by the challenge to the sovereign subject position presented by the scientific world view and pluralistic culture—not to mention the later Marxian critique of consciousness as itself an effect of an ideological superstructure and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Poetry lamented its decentering and loss of cultural authority with end¬ less self-reflexive elegies. Among the frustrated, authority-hungry avantgardists of the twentieth century disempowerment fueled resentment. In Luzi’s opinion poetry has clung to an unbalanced obsession with death and loss in a world that has accepted that it has no fixed center. Luzi, who himself started writing in the thirties as a Hermetic influenced by Symbolism, began very early on to attempt to rewrite poetic subjec¬ tivity—associated in the past with the creative and contemplative power of a conscious ego—and even to reconceptualize anthropocentrism. His new poetics drew precisely on history. Through history poetry may recast the ever-important thematics of becoming and disappearance; it might

History and Poetry

7

also free itself from its marginalization and solitude. In sum, Luzi views the death of the lyric and the elegiac itself as historical necessity. Pasolini approached elegy with conceptual horizons just as broad as Luzi’s.

When Pasolini examined the problem of poetic renewal, he

turned his attention to intellectual—and stylistic—history in relation to the notion of cultural hegemony. Like Luzi, he sought to understand the dominance of elegy. Clearly one of his strongest motives for resuscitating premodem genres such as sepulchral verse and the lament was his de¬ sire to reconceptualize the hegemonic elegy itself, although he is not intent on restoring some lost unity of self characteristic of the ideology of the subject in the earlier poetic tradition but challenged in modernist writing. His critique of modernism—which in Italy came late, with Fu¬ turism in the first decade of this century—centers on its seclusion of the past, on what he called its “novecentismo” or “twentieth-centuryism.” Pasolini took the position that modernism by gearing itself against “what we can no longer do” failed to understand that tradition cannot really be rejected, only understood in ways motivated by ideological considera¬ tions. He debunked rather easily self-proclaimed distance from tradition by analyzing closely the cultural productions that made such claims. Despite the fact that Pasolini himself used some modernist techniques for representing a fragmentary subjectivity enmeshed in the finite and ultimately then in the historical, it is clear that in his own thinking there can in fact be no truly private anguish or loss, no private revolt, and no private poetry. His critical writings on such topics as the “free indirect style” in prose narrative and a parallel subjective camera style in cinema illustrate his conviction that ideology and representations of subjectivity cannot be separated. In Pasolini’s view, ideologies of poetic subjectivity must be examined historically, since history is the locus of their trans¬ mission. Pasolini was influenced in this direction by Antonio Gramsci, who rejected the idea that economics determines culture and focused instead on the role of ideology in defining civil society—and literary history. Pasolini wanted, of course, to overcome poetry’s proclivity for sad la¬ ments over its solitude—a characteristic of the Italian Crepuscular po¬ ets, for instance—but he did not ascribe its marginality solely to an absent aristocratic public for poetry in mass-cultural capitalist society. He certainly did not encourage poets to engage in the heroic but ulti¬ mately self-serving “struggle for poetic prey,” which for Walter Ben¬ jamin was the hallmark of Baudelaire’s enterprise in an already antilyric modern world suffering from the loss of “aura.”7 Nor did Pasolini see

7 Walter Benjamin, Angelus novas, trans. Kenato Solmi (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), pp. 99 and 125.

8

The Poiesis of History

twentieth-century poetry’s rejection—in his view—of social or civic themes as an admirable revolt against the established order, as a useful way of bracketing real social negativity, such as alienation and the com¬ modification of social relations under modern capitalism. This position was adopted instead by Theodor Adorno, who emphasized the negative power of the modem lyric’s nonsocialization and its status as a counter¬ movement.8 Pasolini felt that anguished modernists unconsciously in¬ scribed in their work a loss of social community. He historicized this phenomenon in his antilyric and civic poems by relating it to the transi¬ tion, with its related ideological implications, from an agricultural to an industrial society. Pasolini also links this loss to the birth of a hege¬ monic national identity, which destroyed regional cultures in the postwar reconstruction of Italy. Going a step further, he criticized exponents of engaged political poetry for unconsciously adopting received modernist forms even when they championed, for instance, a naively realist (or Neorealist) treatment of social injustices. Pasolini urged his contempor¬ aries to reexamine the best of the modem tradition as already distant and traditional, and he argued for reinterpreting the premodem poetic tradi¬ tion through modern writers such as Giuseppe Ungaretti. Pasolini desired, then, to develop a critique of the poetic tradition that would not neglect the power and motivations of established cultural and specifically formal hegemonies. He was particularly keen to bring to the fore the problem of historical consciousness—and lack of it on the part of many postwar authors. He did this by closely examining how these authors assimilated or rejected particular poetic codes and conven¬ tions. He noted the migrations and displacements of cultural thematics from form to form and genre to genre in a way that may remind readers of the work of Benjamin. But where Benjamin traces the reappearances of a nature lost to the metropolis in new cultural markets, as in the panoramas in the Parisian arcades or the floral motifs in turn-of-thecentury urban decorations, Pasolini’s less market-oriented interests ex¬ tended more strictly—especially in the 1950s—in the direction of phi¬ lology and stylistic history, and to the relations of folk, mass, and high culture. These issues are in his poetry played out in the realm of experi¬ ments in genre, among them especially sepulchral verse and the lament, the sisters of elegy. Already in the early 1950s, then, Pasolini—along with the others—began touching on themes that would define the mod¬ em versus postmodern debate nearly twenty years later.

8 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Telos 20 (Summer 1974): 56— 71. See also Brenkman, Culture and Domination, pp. 108—9, for a critique of Adorno.

History and Poetry

9

The postwar years brought not only a sense of modern poetry’s losses and shortfalls but also a search for antidotes. The late 1940s to mid1950s are years of intensive debate surrounding literary realism in gen¬ eral as a politico/cultural solution. This debate was itself enmeshed in a myriad of events: the publication of Gramsci’s notebooks (1947—53) and the debate surrounding the notion of cultural hegemony and conse¬ quently hegemonic cultural forms; the translation of Georg Lukacs (1953—56) and a comcomitant concern with modernism’s supposed de¬ fects; the controversies surrounding Neorealism and socialist realism. The nature of poetic realism was, nonetheless, considered by only a few thinkers. Pasolini and Luzi, along with Franco Fortini, were important figures in this respect. One may view their respective critical positions within the framework of an ongoing debate over the progressive or regressive ideological valences of realist as opposed to modernist poetics in the twentieth century—a dispute, as Fredric Jameson noted, “whose naviga¬ tion and renegotiation is still unavoidable for us today, even though we may feel that each position is in some sense right and yet that neither is any longer wholly acceptable.”9 The ground of this dispute is of course extensive, dating at least to the 1930s and the Brecht-Lukacs debate, which touched on problems of popular art, naturalism, socialist realism, avant-gardism, and engaged literature, and, specifically, on German Expressionism. Lukacs took the position that realistic literature had to depict the typical circumstances of history. He was intent on examining how specific kinds of writing and narrative genres revealed, in a complex process of reflection and critique of history, a social content that can be decoded by analyzing the media¬ tions of form. Although, like Lukacs, Brecht wanted to thwart the reif¬ ication of human relationships, he took issue with Lukacs’s criticism of certain modernist works, and especially with his charge that decadence was inherent in modernist art. Objecting to Lukacs’s belief that the avant-gardes championed an undesirable fragmentary world picture over a desirable social cohesiveness, Brecht wanted, as Elizabeth Wright points out, to go beyond the bounds of realist representation to “de¬ naturalize the rigidified world by means of a whole new range of formal devices which would draw the spectator’s attention to the content of the contradictions under which he/she lived.”10 Brecht also objected to 9 Fredric Jameson, “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukacs Debate,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971 — 1986, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), vol. 2, p. 133. I draw in this brief discussion on points Jameson discusses exhaustively. 10 Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 70.

10

The Poiesis of History

Lukacs’s lack of critical attention to poetic and dramatic genres. The postwar debate in Italy over literary engagement reworked some of these same issues, giving new attention to poetic genres. To state the question in its most banal form, how can poetry be pro¬ gressive, be positioned as critical of the current order, or, for some of the participants in the controversy, be socialist, and not be forced to have as its topic either the not-so-poetic history of the social relations of production or large workers waving red flags? How can it escape the coercion of prescribed reflection? Must poetry mechanically “voice” his¬ tory? Part of the problem is the right way to represent history without (and this is tricky) just representing it.11 Just representing it would mean affirming negative history with its cargo of oppression. Will heightened consciousness of the real world lead straight to changing that world, as Italian Neorealists claimed? When in the 1950s the “automatic” part of this process of renewal was challenged, the debate shifted to surround the relations between classical narration itself and history. That narrativity should be the privileged mode for representing history’s encoding of becoming and disappearance, of movement or action and closure, was called into question. The poetics of the realist narrative were in crisis. The crisis extended to issues of poetic genre and was taken as a point of departure by both Luzi and Pasolini in their critical writings. Could narrative or even epic revitalize poetry simply by virtue of narrative’s presumed receptiveness to history and superior powers of representation? Although the rein¬ troduction of the story into twentieth-century poetry remedied some of its shortfalls, many poets and critics alike found that the result was horta¬ tory poetry akin to national anthems. Furthermore, a narrative impera¬ tive functioned to negate a priori the modernist tradition, which many poets sought to historicize and to rewrite, without erasing that tradition. Narrative appears in the poetic works studied in this book, but it is transformed, disassociated from claims to objectivity or reflection. Very often, the “story” revolves around certain aesthetic ideas in social his¬ tory (for example, popular versus elite genres). In their critical writings both Luzi and Pasolini hark back to Dante as an example of an accomplished experimentalist, of a great innovator who moved out of the lyric genre associated with the Dolce Stil Novo and into

11 See Gregory Lucente, “Scrivere o fare . . . o altro: Social Commitment and Ideo¬ logies of Representation in the Debates over Lampedusa’s II gattopardo and Morante’s La storiaItalica 61, no. 3 (1984): 220—51.

History and Poetry

11

the poema?2 They dismiss Petrarch as an elitist poet whose representa¬ tions of the world are too remote and frozen. Luzi asserted in fact that “Italian poetry in its entirety since Petrarch has been deprived of the pride of discovery, of the fresher and possibly more abrupt points of contact between the soul and the episodic circumstances of life, or, if one extends the term, to an Inferno.” Furthermore, “in Italy there was only exceptionally a relish for narration, for that taking possession of reality . . . and that trust in the particulars and the fragments of the world.”13 This statement helps to explain Luzi’s own subsequent propen¬ sity for narrative verse forms. It also points to the larger debate regard¬ ing the specific role of narrative elements—as opposed to the general call for realism—in antilyric poems. Luzi makes it clear that Dantesque solutions to counter persistent Pe¬ trarchan poetic holdovers in the Italian literary tradition would not coin¬ cide with new epic forms. It would be difficult to view the debates of the postwar period as extensions of the polemics concerning the nature, lan¬ guage, and purpose of the epic in poetry that began with sixteenthcentury

Italians.14

Neither

Pasolini’s

poemetti,

Luzi’s

poemi,

nor

Bertolucci’s romanzo in versi can be considered fully epic from a the¬ matic viewpoint, and they hardly propose new heroic forms in support of some orthodox social order. Epic forms were rejected because they do not engage the problem of subjectivity in twentieth-century, post-anthropocentric terms.15

12 Dante’s Divine Comedy was, in Giorgio Barberi Squarotti’s opinion, exemplary' au¬ thorization for poetic renovation after Hermeticism. See “L’ultimo trentennio,” in Dante nella letteratura del Novecento (Rome: Bonacci, 1979), p. 247. Another relevant article is Stefano Vazzana, “II dantismo di Pasolini,” in Dante nella letteratura del '900: Atti del convegno di studi, Casa di Dante, 6—7 maggio 1977, ed. Silvio Zennaro (Rome: Bonacci, 1979), pp. 279-89. 1,1 Mario Luzi, L inferno e il limbo (Milan: II Saggiatore, 1964), pp. 20 and 21. 14 Michael Bernstein sets out to link Pound’s twentieth-century epic to its progenitors in The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 15 Although narrative elements from the epic verse tradition in the genres treated here—the poemetto, poema, and romanzo in versi—do appear, they have certainly un¬ dergone internal transformations (the role of the narrator, for one) and even intergeneric ones (the obvious case of the novel in verse). One should also take stock, as Rebeccca West has done, of a broader “structuring impulse” in lyric collections. West has used the term mosaic to describe the varying strategies poets used to attempt to overcome Symbolist and Hermetic poetics by inserting fragments into an implicit teleology. See Rebecca West, “The Mosaic of Metastructure” (Paper delivered at Dartmouth College, March 1989), p. 4.

12

The Poiesis of History

The antilyric current is, furthermore, post-epic in that it foregrounds narrative codes, but frustrates “the desire for closure.”16 The structural units of these works cannot be considered the single word, the line, or the strophe because they all evince a complex and extended temporality. Their plots are better described as “interrogative” or “conceptual” rather than linear or dramatic. The authors may adopt long forms precisely because of the need for vastness, both temporal and spatial, but this vastness has little to do with the tradition that places epic themes at the service of dominant national cultures. In these works, the question of dominance is raised, especially the dominance of a new industrial cul¬ ture capable of destroying the cultural past, but the authors studied here experiment with modes of distance from the epic and its cultural associa¬ tions. In general, it is useful to view the postwar period in terms of Giovanni Pascoli’s renewed sense of the active life and the poetic epic in his “Poemetti risorgimentali,” since he leaves aside the heroic narrative of the verse tradition after Ariosto and Tasso and dramatizes, as does Dante, philosophical concepts.1

In fact, these narrative verse forms all

dramatize the intellectual lives of their writers. The “autobiographical” elements in them must be understood as stories of cultural lives. Narra¬ tive theory can be applied to illustrate the weak presence of such narra¬ tive elements and their effects on lyric definitions.18 It follows that ex¬ pressions such as poesia-racconto (“poem-story”),

which abound in

critical discourse about antilyric poems, are not intended by their users, or by me, to indicate hard-and-fast typologies. Because of the variety of formal, indeed hybrid, aspects that appear in narrative verse forms, it is more difficult to fix generic coordinates solely through formal analysis than it is to categorize works by theme. Narratological analysis, with its interest in the relationships of blocks of narration, narrative interruption, and refrains, is useful in individual instances but does not reveal immutable structures that could lead us to

16 Marjorie Perloff, “From Image to Action: The Return of Story in Postmodern Po¬ etry,” Contemporary Literature 23, no. 4 (1982): 417. 17 Giovanni Pascoli, Opere, ed. Maurizio Perugi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1980), p. xix. An¬ other predecessor is Cesare Pavese, who wrote in 1940 on the subject of story-poems: “Single poems and collections of poems [canzonieri] constitute more a judgment than an autobiography—as happens in The Divine Comedy” (in Cesare Pavese, Poesie, ed., R. Cantini [Milan: Mondadori, 1985], p. 174). Ia Pier Vicenzo Mengaldo, in his “Introduzione,” in Poeti italiani del Novecento (Milan: Mondadori, 1978), writes of “poetry with a weak narrative rate” (p. xxiv). For a general overview of the way twentieth-century Italian poetry tried to break the identifica¬ tion of poetry with the lyric, see also Mengaldo’s discussion in “Appuntitipologici,” Sigma, 16, nos. 2—3 (1983): 37-56.

History and Poetry

13

the fixed features of, say, the “poemetto.” A more Jakobsonian ap¬ proach, based on literary functions and distinctions of voice, is useful but also inadequate: it cannot tell us anything about the history of poets’ ideas of just what a poetic voice is. I am therefore interested in examin¬ ing how poet/critics themselves construed their own literary practice in this “plural” context. It was through their experiments in generic positioning, their experi¬ ments in genres that mix poetic forms associated in the cultural tradition with certain forms of consciousness—namely the epic and the lyric forms—that Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi attempted to reconceptualize the story of the relationship between poetry and history.19 The mixture of genres in their works disrupts any notions of a fixed “content of the form” for the disparate generic components and brings forward not the harmony or wholeness of cultural history as it evolves in some ideal activity of the Spirit, but rather highlights the conflicts inherent in the cultural heritage. The fragmentation of the narrative in their mixed lyric/ narrative genres is a case in point. On the one hand, it challenges the narrative/realist aesthetic’s claim to representational completeness and to didactic exhaustiveness such as can be associated with Enlightenment poetics. On the other hand, it undercuts the claim of the atemporal lyric on transcendent, eternal truths by foregrounding short narrative se¬ quences that lack closure but are narrative nonetheless. For this reason, I speculate that Bertolucci contributes to the formation of a new genre, the long poetic fragment. The mixed genre also detracts from any complete, unproblematic re¬ construction of temporality. Because generic strains evoke historical as¬ sociations (a revival of ballad forms, for example, evokes both the medi¬ eval and Romantic periods), the mixed genre foregrounds the difficulties of representing historical time, a subject constantly thematized in the works of Bertolucci, Pasolini, and Luzi and embodied in their superim¬ positions of styles. This contaminatio favors pluralizing literary super¬ impositions that textualize reality—especially that of the historically charged Italian landscape—over mimetic models of representation. The lament, for instance, mixes narrative, historical, and lyric strains; in the

19 I have been influenced by Jameson’s view, expressed in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 105, that genre study has a mediatory function that “allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life.” At the same time it is necessary to recognize that the authors discussed here were well aware of the debates in the arena of Western Marxism concerning the literary forms of political consciousness, which lie at the foun¬ dations of Jameson’s work.

14

The Poiesis of History

Romance literatures of Europe it is traditionally linked to historical and political themes such as the death of a leader. Pasolini used the form to forge his own brand of contemporary cultural polemics, to include his charge that history itself, as it is embodied materially and symbolically in the Roman landscape, was at risk, threatened by industrial develop¬ ment and increasing cultural homogeneity. Bertolucci uses a novelistic strain to account for the advance of entrepreneurial agriculture in his native Emilia region over several centuries. He also tells, however, a more enigmatic, halting, and lyric story of the secret illness of his pro¬ tagonist’s beloved mother. The mother’s story does not fit into the resid¬ ual epic of the rise of a prosperous and conquering agrarian capitalism seen as the impetus to historical progress. It is precisely her story that constitutes the marker by which the work measures its distance from the very epos it contains. The result is a poetry of allusion that refuses reflection theories, historicism, and the realist aesthetic, but that also refuses to be socially irrelevant. The work of Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi thus dispels the critical cliche that socially committed, civic verse must be narrative/realist po¬ etry, as though narrative structure alone were the only resource for un¬ derstanding and depicting historical consciousness. The strong critical discourse put forward by these authors both in their essays and in their poetry has important consequences for the problematics and poetics of postmodernism and for questions of the ideology of genre in contempo¬ rary thought. Over other fruitful approaches (ranging from closely exam¬ ining the historicity of the subject as it is articulated in language to drawing historical and archival material into interpretative strategies to investigating the ideological contexts of poetic productions), I have cho¬ sen to use genre as my starting point in examining these issues. My approach centers on composing a form of literary history that puts into focus the relationship between history and poetry in specific poetic and critical texts within a circumscribed period. Despite the fact—Luzi tells us—that historical transitions come about in a small and secret way which cannot be termed episodic and cannot be marked on calendars, the year 1945 was the beginning of what he called “an excited and exciting time”: “What is important is that a wind began to blow in Italy in which one could perceive at once an emanation of death and a resurgence of life—that mourning and that hope which are the countersign of unique periods of history and the disastrous set¬ tlings of nature.”20 Mourning and hope appear here not just in the con-

20 Mario Luzi, “II 1945,” in Tutto in questione (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965), p. 51. Page numbers cited henceforth in the text refer to this volume. Translations mine.

History and Poetry

15

text of the war’s violence but in the context of literary, specifically po¬ etic, history. For although Italian poetry, with some notable exceptions, seemed to many to be on its last, blue-blooded legs (Eugenio Montale asserted that “recent Italian poetry is threatened by exhaustion”21), the early postwar period was heavily influenced by the hopeful mythos of the Resistance (“a resurgence of life”), seen as evidence of a potential popular and democratic revolution, even after the exclusion in 1947 of leftist parties from the Christian Democrat government of Alcide De Gasperi. Changes in civil society would, it was hoped, affect the literary sphere. Justice, freedom, and solidarity were, Luzi notes, urgent and concrete themes. The year 1945 also witnessed the expanding cultural influence of Italian Neorealism and a period of gale-force cultural poli¬ tics. These were marked by intense reflection by those writers who were determined to find out which and how literary forms and modes could best be used to represent—and to affect—the social vicissitudes of a rapidly changing culture in Italy after Fascism, the war, and, later, rapid economic expansion.22 The exemplary Antologia poetica della Resistenza italiana appeared in 1956. It contains some of the most famous poems in contemporary Ital¬ ian poetic history: Ungaretti’s “Non gridate piu” (Cry out no longer), Montale’s “La primavera hitleriana” (Hitler’s spring), Alfonso Gatto’s “Hanno sparato contro il sole” (They shot the sun), Caproni’s “I lamenti (1944—45)” (The laments [1944—45]), Bertolucci’s “Per Ottavio Ricci” (For Ottavio Ricci), Fortini’s “Varsavia 1944” (Warsaw 1944), and Sal¬ vatore Quasimodo’s “Alle fronde dei salici” (By the weeping willow fronds). The editors of the Antologia, Elio Filippo Accrocca and Valerio Volpini, assert that to write of the Resistance is not just to represent the historical instance but to present “a new desire to seek out directions that negated, more or less violently, the poetry of the recent past in the name of a renewal of consciousness that poets must have undergone during that earlier time of agony and resurrection.”21 In sum, a number 21 Quoted in Angelo Romano, Discorso sugli anni cinquanta (Milan: Mondadori, 1955), p. 44. 22 Giorgio Barberi Squarotti and Anna Maria Golfieri summed up the polemic: “The art (the poetry) of the prewar years had been so attentive to the extreme purity of the word, to the receding illusion of song, to not compromising itself with the passwords (e.g., of the prophetic sort, or the realistic, apologetic, communicative, or mass sort) of fascism that it was marked by a total absence of relations with the historical, moral, and social world, with everything that was not precisely poetry’s autonomous measure. So it came to pass that postwar poetry could only choose the opposite path, under the banner of the necessity of political and social engagement” (Dal tramonto dell'ermetismo alia neoavanguardia (Brescia: La Scuola, 1984|, p. 7). 23 Elio Filippo Accrocca and Valerio Volpini, eds., Antologia poetica della Resistenza italiana (Florence: Landi, 1956), p. 9.

16

The Poiesis of History

of poets—and not only in Italy—found themselves dissatisfied with a mythic and metaphysical concept of poetry detached from a social reality and its historical determinants. The Nobel Prize winner Salvatore Quasi¬ modo was one of the more outspoken exponents of political commitment in his postwar poetical volumes and in his critical volume II poeta e il

politico e altri saggi (The poet and the politician and other essays).24 Critics such as Antonio Russi, writing in the review La strada, accused lyric forms of being inadequate both to represent collective history and to voice opposition to Mussolini’s cultural dictates.25 It could even be said that Italian Neorealism, with its use of invective and the chronicle, emerged as a response to the failure of lyric writing. Yet by 1950 the charges brought against prewar poetry because of its alleged asocial and ineffectual isolationism were already being revised. The critical posi¬ tions on how to find a way out of the lyric became more sophisticated and less tactical.26 Cesare Pavese, an author connected with the ethos of anti-Fascism and an inventor of the poesia-racconto, was one of the first, in his essay “Le due poetiche” (Dual poetics), at once to accept the prevailing leftist conviction that poetry and culture are determined by economics, yet to reject the idea that this causality ought to be the only legitimate literary topic.2 He articulated an antilyric reaction that went much further than Montale’s desire to “wring the neck of eloquence” with asyntactic phrases, free verse, and the introduction of spoken forms of language.28 Pavese’s antilyrism, instead, was expressed in terms of genre, specifi¬ cally a dissatisfaction with Hermetic genres: “All of us today are irri¬ tated by ‘rarified’ poetry, by its codified genres—the prose poem, the Hermetic ‘occasion,’ evocative prose, the chapter, the realistico-magical fable.”29 Even around the time of Fascism’s fall, then, such writers as Pavese, though already critical of prewar poetics, also saw the limitations of

24 Salvatore Quasimodo, II poeta e il politico e altri saggi (Milan: Schwarz, 1960). 25 See Antonio Russi, Gli anni della antialienazione: DalUermetismo al N eorealismo (Milan: Mursia, 1967). 26 For a study that critiques the myth that the Hermetics were apolitical, see Silvio Ramat, L'ermetismo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969). 2 Cesare Pavese,“Le due poetiche,” in La letteratura americana e altri saggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1951), p. 356. 28 See Angelo Schiaffini, who traces antilyrism back to the “Crepuscular” poets and Romanticism in his “Antilirismo del linguaggio della poesia moderna,” in Mercanti. Poeti. Un maestro (Milan: Ricciardi, 1969), pp. 132—51. Note his emphasis, however, on “language.” 29 Pavese, “Le due poetiche,” p. 356.

History and Poetry

17

equating an admittedly badly needed realism with the representation of the immediate historical present or with “typical” aspects of social rela¬ tions. The new objectivity and new historicity sought by many was an attempt to resist the realist imperative by substituting experiments in genre and a consciousness of the history of literary forms for an elusive accuracy of historical representation.30 Two very different poets, Pasolini and Luzi, were among the most talented and influential literary critics and theoreticians of their genera¬ tion to address the difficult questions surrounding the social and histori¬ cal potential of verse. They went about this in numerous writings, engag¬ ing additionally in what Luzi called a “friendly controversy” (Tutto in

questioner p. 48) in the Florentine literary magazine La chimera in 1954. Their brief direct exchange had as its point of departure Luzi’s essay “Dubbi sul realismo.” A related issue was the poetic production of the youngest generations in the postwar years and early 1950s.31 The two poets’ critiques of both committed poetry and experimental poetry consti¬ tute the common ground between them and prepare the terrain for future critical debates when the Neo-avant-garde makes its appearance in the early 1960s. In this discussion I draw not only from the direct exchange between the two, but also from their other contemporary writings. I should note at the outset that differences of opinion between Luzi and Pasolini were as important as their shared views. Marxism was a fundamental dividing

30 Naturally the term “realism” was variously defined. The critic Alberto Asor Rosa, undercutting the importance of the year 1945, observed that the “left Fascist writers” had already reacted against lyricism in the 1930s and made realism their watchword. These writers prepared the ground for postwar literary debates on perspectivism, Zhdanovism, and socialist realism. See Asor Rosa, “Lo stato democratico e i partiti politici,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), pp. 604 and 560—61. 31 By the time Pasolini and Luzi debated each other directly, the central issue was no longer really the denunciation of prewar poetics, since Hermeticism’s silence on social topics had been reevaluated in terms of its understanding of “the necessity of resisting abuse.” See, e.g., Romano, Discorso sugli anni cinquanta, p. 25. After Mussolini, he¬ roic poetics were not at all popular in the late 1940s and 1950s. Hermetic poetry had already dispensed with heroic narrative. The latter had also rejected Filippo Marinetti's Futurist poetry, with its advocacy of war in general. Additionally, the negative outcome of Elio Vittorini s endeavors in II politecnico (a journal that challenged socialist realism; it folded rather quickly) had discouraged the hope that there might be a tight relation between politics and culture, lor a description of the two journals’ positions, see Claudio Scarpati, Mario Luzi (Milan: Mursia, 1970), especially p. 126. The reflections of Paso¬ lini and Luzi are nonetheless symptomatic of numerous responses by writers to the sort of trials to which poetry was put, and their views represent fundamental attitudes toward poetry in the years after 1950.

18

The Poiesis of History

factor. In the Bolognese journal Ojficina, Pasolini was advancing his view that literary reform in postwar Italy rested on both wider cultural reform and the formulation of a language for literary expression free of the elitist selectivity and bourgeois underpinnings of standard Italian from the Risorgimento and, indeed, Renaissance times. The editors of

Ojficina, including Pasolini, Fortini, Francesco Leonetti, Roberto Roversi, and Gianni Scalia, had no Italian Communist Party affiliation but were Marxists who opposed reflection theories of literature and distrusted the direct representation of ideology in literature. They saw themselves do¬ ing cultural battle specifically against both modernism and Neorealism. Luzi, writing in La chimera, put his faith instead in the pre-ideological power of poetic expression and attempted to pinpoint the failure of certain kinds of realist descriptions associated in his view with Marxist positions. For Luzi no single realism can capture the multiplicity of the real, and any claim to such an accomplishment can only be anthropo¬ centric. For this reason, Marxism cannot interpret “the whole of reality.”22 Whereas Pasolini felt that writers must make poetry out of the painful division they feel between their elitist cultural position and an idealistic allegiance to a future socialist society, Luzi believed that “for those for whom Marxism does not interpret the whole of reality, and they are not so few, the rather different drama of consciousness, as old as mankind, elevated by the Greeks, heightened by Christianity, complicated by modern philosophies, remains . . . vital and a possible source for poetry, as it always was’’ (Tutto in questione, p. 48). This drama stood for Luzi outside the vicissitudes of committed literature, which he associated with a new Marxist “official culture” that battled against the inertia of an older and admittedly elitist tradition, but on the basis of a mistaken understanding of the nature of poetry.

Though Luzi had expressed

doubts from the start about the phenomenon of political commitment, he nonetheless recognized “at the root of the shared agitation a real need for sincerity and truth” (p. 52). Luzi set out not only to express his dissat¬ isfaction with Marxist positions but also to unmask the shortcomings of his generation’s lyric bent. He began to modify his work, beginning in 1956 with the volume Onore del vero (To honor the truth), in the direc¬ tion of a larger participation in the world. If the two poets’ views diverged on the issue of poetry’s political po-

32 Luzi, Tutto in questione, p. 48. Luzi also discussed contemporary Marxist critics such as Lucien Goldmann in “II marxismo alia Sorbonne,” in Lo stile di Constant (Milan: II Saggiatore, 1962); he noted that if “Goldmann’s interpretation . . . turns out to be formally exact,” it is nonetheless “substantially (humanly) incomplete, exterior” (p.

124).

History and Poetry

19

tential, an area of common ground remains in their critique of realism. Luzi’s “Dubbi sul realismo” inspired Pasolini’s rejoinder, “Forse ad un tramonto”—and later Luzi’s “Postilla.” At issue was what Luzi called the fragmentary and anachronistic nature of contemporary attempts to portray the wholeness of life. He wrote: “The concept itself of the real has never been more in doubt and more subject to dizzying complica¬ tions. ... I would say therefore that no integral realism exists in the way that it could in the nineteenth century. ... It is odd then that the call to realism comes neither from an immanentist doctrine nor from Catholi¬ cism, but from a mood, from a temperament, a taste on the part of the interpreter or of someone who simply describes the world through frag¬ ments” (Tutto in questione, p. 26). For Luzi, contemporary realism has the musty odor of anachronistic epistemology. Pasolini’s description of the call to realism in his response to Luzi’s article was couched in much the same terms—although he noted that Luzi too quickly dismissed Marxist concerns with social change. Pasolini asserted: “Behind Neorealism, for example, one notices that there is no form of knowledge except an immediate, practice-directed form with a social and documentary purpose: there is no idea of reality, only a trend in taste.”15 Like Luzi, Pasolini focuses on the absence of a self-conscious epistemology and the uniformly academic, conventional, and hence su¬ perficial rally for realism. These shortcomings are also related by both writers to the contemporary approaches to history. In an essay entitled “Fine dell’engagement” (The end of engagement) in Passione e ideologia (Passion and ideology), Pasolini examines Accrocca and Volpini’s anthology of Resistance poetry and discovers there besides commitment some surrealist and Hermetic underpinnings.14 He singles out the poetry of Franco Mattacotta, known for his popular epic

Canzoniere di liberta and as the bard of common passions, and deter¬ mines that Mattacotta’s work is an “anachronistic product” that is funda¬ mentally antihistorical: The Resistance taught us above all to believe once again in history, after the evasive and aestheticizing introversions of twenty years of poetry. To be faithful a priori to the Resistance is an antihistorical act, when one tends to make a myth out of the Resistance and its literary halo, forging a sentimental and stylistic crystallization. . . . The changes that Mattacotta

u Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Osservazioni sull’evoluzione del ’900,” in Passione e ideologia (1st ed., 1960; Milan: Garzanti, 1977), p. 321. Henceforth cited in parentheses in the text. 34 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “fine dell’engagement,” in Passione e ideologia, pp. 457-59. Henceforth cited in the text.

20

The Poiesis of History

brings to the “resistential” language, or to its jargon, are, we repeat, inter¬ esting but not determining. The “engaged” jargon/language—bom from an irrational hypothesis of a culture, and not yet by a culture—could only incorporate itself into a preexistent poetic language, into twentieth-century classicism ... so that, beneath the new stratum there survived layers only recently left behind, with all of their cultural consequences, consequences which had been overcome only irrationally and which in fact were still active.

For example, the a priori attempt to achieve poeticity. [“Fine

dell’engagement,” p. 458]

Pasolini observed that Mattacotta’s committed poetry is not that rational and logical process it set out to be, in antithesis to the subjective “irra¬ tionality” of prewar literature. At its worst, besides trying foolishly to imagine the war as a way of becoming more human, his poetry makes a reactionary, unconscious use of the “grandi residuati” (“great residues”) of the artistic past, of bourgeois culture. For Pasolini, the committed poets are not, however, the only ones to commit these sins. The “fourth generation,” named after an eponymous anthology, “banked on” a mix¬ ture of very recent poetic languages, incurring debts to “the most conser¬ vative brand of Flermeticism” (“Osservazioni,” p. 325). Like Pasolini, Luzi finds a trying lack of self-knowledge in the fourth generation’s poetic innovations, but the agenda of the poets of the “fourth generation” appears to him to border on folly with a not-so-repressed penchant for violence: Our critical faculties can certainly intervene in order to distinguish which is the better experimental gamble, what may ultimately be serious or futile about this or that test excogitated for the purpose of capturing a part of the truth or for deriding its impenetrable simulacrum. Yet not even the caution required to distinguish one test from another can dispel that diffuse sense of sickness which can be felt each time we set out to consider our epoch from a perspective slightly more remote from and yet more internal to his¬ tory. It is almost as though, with a lightning-like return of consciousness, we are able to perceive our epoch’s many unstable manias, to perceive that flux of thoughts in which clinicians recognize the symptoms of nervous breakdown: knee-jerk entreaties, reactive pangs useful at best in establish¬ ing certain temporary connections, which are then exchanged for uncontestable criteria by which to judge the present and form conjectures about the future, connections which are exchanged for foundations solid enough upon which to build an edifice that might stand for more than a month. Traps and snares are prepared and set here and there to surprise the real¬ ity of our day, a reality which is all the more elusive the more we give in to the orgasm of considering it “ours” and of abolishing our relation with all the rest. . . . All of these symptoms of neurosis can be summed up, it

History and Poetry

21

seems to me, in a serious loss of concreteness. The gestures neurosis dic¬ tates commit the sin of abstraction; they lack a firm grasp of the terms of the problem while simultaneously they translate the anxious desire of grasping something resolutely and definitively from a position outside any hierarchy, without a center. [Tutto in questione, pp. 12—13; my emphasis]

Luzi objected not so much either to realism or to experimentalism be¬ cause they failed to do what they set out to do. He objected to a manic grasping for foundations and solid beliefs and to the fundamentally an¬ tagonistic attitude of those who set nasty traps or snares for the real. These “realists” lacked a perspective on “our epoch,” on our post-foundational epistemology. Writers must work from a perspective that is “more remote” in that it must grow out of intellectual history and not the newspaper. It must be more “internal” in its recognition that we live inexorably within history’s flux. In critical writings that attempt to rework contemporary conceptions of history, both Pasolini and Luzi compared the shortcomings of their po¬ etic age to the Romantic period. Both thus sought their own way of articulating the relations of poetry and history through detailed studies of modern poetic history. Writing of the schematic character of postwar poetry, Luzi found “a stirring up of 1816-style dilemmas with the same narrow-minded spirit and the same prejudices . . . and everywhere the same old empty celebrations” (Tutto in questione, p. 53). Contemporary discussions of what art was and should be reminded Luzi of the Roman¬ tic Giovanni Berchet and his “experimental attempts at a national and popular poetry” (p. 63). For Luzi, such poetry misunderstands the rela¬ tions of history and poetry. He holds up Leopardi as a superior model because Leopardi, unlike Berchet, did not seek literary renewal in a recourse to immediate political action but sought instead a “modern soul” “through another path, from the depth of the tradition and in the acquistion of a total consciousness of history” (p. 63, my emphasis). For Luzi, the polemics of the postwar years repeat the defects of the Roman¬ tic movements in that they “formulate the hypothesis of a history before the letter rather than becoming conscious of actual history” (p. 64). On similar grounds Pasolini criticized the concept of perspectivism: “Note how many Marxist critics . . . carry out a managerial-style and aristocratic coercion when they interpret the hardly rigid Gramscian no¬ tion of a national-popular literature along tactical lines (or, let’s say it outright, . . . along Stalinist lines). . . . Unlike some who would reduce the world to their angle of vision, adapting the horizon to their peri¬ scope, we do not have a way of making militant positions click into

22

The Poiesis of History

place.”35 Pasolini reiterated Luzi’s dislike for an inordinate and involun¬ tary subjectivism that masquerades as historical poetry. Both believed that a new poetry could only arise out of the dynamic process of consciousness of these issues. The two also agreed that funda¬ mental poetic issues came to the fore through the contemporary contro¬ versies surrounding literary politics, even though their resolution was hasty and inadequate. What for these authors constituted a rightful “de¬ terminism,” or awareness of the determining ideas in poetic history, is treated in the pages of analysis that follow this introduction. In their verses Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi themselves tread a fine line be¬ tween traditionalism and the experiment.36 In the process, historical dis¬ appearance and becoming undergo poiesis.

35 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La confusione degli stili,” in Passione e ideologia, p. 344. 36 See Silvio Ramat, La pianta della poesia (Florence: Vallecchi, 1972), p. 265.

CHAPTER

TWO

Palimpsests and Rome

Italy’s capital appears in the opening poem of Pasolini’s Le ceneri di Gramsci and in nearly all of its poemetti. In Pasolini’s Rome, the rising waters of modern life menace an exquisite aesthetic terrain where “l’arte/ straripante dei secoli eletti/scolora in vecchie carte” (“the overflowing art/of chosen centuries/fades like old paper”) and Rome is transformed into an oxymoronic city-jungle: La jungla delle anime scure come la pelle e gli occhi, che la modema vita nutre a dure necessita e bassezze, ormai e su Roma, la stringe in impure confusioni, in ciechi smarrimenti di stile, come una piena sale oltre i rotti argini.1 (The jungle of souls as dark/as their skin and eyes,/which modern life nourishes/with dire needs and baseness, is now/upon Rome, it embraces her/with impure confusion, with style’s/blind bewilderments;/like a flood it rises high over burst embankments.)

The lowly embraces the sublime to make Rome’s grandeur and beauty. In an interview with Vie Nuove in 1958, Pasolini specifically located Rome’s allure in her “extraordinary quantity of layers” and “grand tradi-

1 These lines are from “L’umile Italia,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1975), p. 45. Poems from Le poesie are henceforth cited in the text by page number.

24

The Poiesis of History

tions.”2 In his poetic works, Pasolini presents the Roman architectural and urbanistic configuration as a splendid palimpsest whose layers and pockets are easily disturbed, as exposed surfaces may vanish into thin air, like the frescoes uncovered by subway workers in Fellini’s Roma.3 If this palimpsest represents a weighty cultural heritage and a visibly long history, it is not, however, simply the material outcome of a linear, or even dialectical, unfolding of events. Palimpsest can also refer to a superimposition of texts and, etymologically, to the newly erased, to subtractions. It evokes, then, a hermeneutical question and leads to in¬ quiries about the nature, motivations, and results of textual representa¬ tions. To Pasolini, it seems that a suburban, peripheral Rome erases the ancient, Christian, and baroque Rome, yet his attention to the cafes and dusty streets of the borgate (“slums”) does not belie the poet’s fascina¬ tion for the “subterranean” or his complex historicist propensities in the field of literary criticism, as they appear in the collection of essays Passione e ideologia.4 Pasolini’s poems might themselves be thought of as palimpsests, if we may understand the term in a metaphorical sense. In an effort to over¬ come the lyric prejudice of twentieth-century Italian poetry and, specifi¬ cally, to redefine realism for poetic expression,5 Pasolini rejected mi¬ metic models in favor of a complex literary technique that textualizes reality—especially the historically charged Italian landscape—through a contaminatio, a plurality of superimposed styles. In doing so, the poet also rejected forms of avant-gardism that eliminate literary traditions and deny the power of the past, and he made his incorporations of past poetic styles provocatively conspicuous, especially by his use of the Dantean (and Pascolian) terza rima. Additionally, Pasolini’s novels and films consist of remakes—of Sophocles, Chaucer, Boccaccio—or rely heavily on pastiche. Throughout his career, Pasolini utilized the concept of the palimpsest to evoke his poetic practice. One of the most explicit

2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “II fronte della citta,” Vie Nuove, March 5, 1958: “If sectioned, Rome would present an extraordinary quantity of layers: this is her beauty.” 3 In 1975, Pasolini remarked: “Italy today is as demolished as it was in 1945. Indeed, the destruction is even greater because we find before us not only heartrending ruins of homes and monuments, but the ruins of values: humanistic ‘values’ and, more important, popular values” (quoted in Giuliano Manacorda, Letteratura italiana d'oggi (1965—1985) [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987], p. 150). 4 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Passione e ideologia (Milan: Garzanti, 1960). Henceforth cited in the text. 5 For detailed studies of the issues see Giancarlo Ferretti, Letteratura e ideologia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964), pp. 205—15, and Alberto Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo (Rome: Savelli, 1966), pp. 374—410.

Palimpsests and Rome

25

formulations appears in his remake of The Divine Comedy, La Divina Mimesis. Here he refers to how this project is to take form: The book must be written in layers; each new version must be in the form of a dated note, so that the book comes across almost as a diary. For example, all of the material I have written up to this point . . . must remain in the latest version. . . . And so on with the subsequent versions. At the end, the book must appear to be a chronological stratification, a living formal process—where a new idea does not erase an earlier one, but rather corrects it or indeed lets it stand unaltered, thereby conserving it formally as a document of thought’s passage. And since the book will be a mixture of things accomplished and things to be accomplished—pages that have been revised with sketchy or merely projected pages—its temporal topography will be complete; it will combine a magmatic form with reality’s progressive form (which never erases anything, which makes past and present coexist, etc.).6 7

In this chapter I will draw on the extended metaphor of the palimpsest to analyze a small number of texts pertinent to Pasolini’s Roman period (which began in 1949) and two, interrelated textual moments of specific interest to contaminatio: (1) the essays in Passione e ideologia in which Pasolini uses a terminology associated with the palimpsest to describe the compacted nature of Italian literary history and to outline the figure of the literary innovator as an excavator in search of subterranean styles; and (2) the title poem of Le ceneri di Gramsci, in terms of its peculiar status as a modern remake of graveyard poetry, as a narrative based on encounters with an intellectual heritage. Representations of Rome have nearly as many layers as the eternal city itself, and almost comprise a genre of their own. A fanciful selection of examples could begin with Virgil’s portrayal of Rome’s glorious des¬ tiny as it appears on the suit of armor forged by Vulcan for Aeneas. It might also include Freud’s likening of the city’s urban fabric to the frag¬ mentary processes of the dream and the philosopher Mario Perniola's claim that Rome represents the height of indeterminacy and that Ancient and Catholic Rome are postmodern.

These examples are not at all ex¬

travagant if we consider a poet such as Giuseppe Ungaretti. In a late work, La terra promessa, characters from the Aeneid figure prominently. And Ungaretti’s fascination with the baroque stems from the temporal

6 Pier Paolo Pasolini, La Divina Mimesis (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 57. 7 See Mario Perniola, “Postmoderna, ‘di transito,’ ‘senza identita, Roma Comune, April 1985, pp. 61-63.

eitta di Venere,”

26

The Poiesis of History

simultaneity inherent in that Freudian condensation of styles, as Marga¬ ret Brose has noted, which is well exemplified in the Church of San Clemente, with its layering of a Mithraic temple, an ancient Roman residence, a paleo-Christian church, and medieval structures.8 A diachronic overview of textualizations of Rome cannot avoid enu¬ merating most of the writers in Italian literature who addressed the thematics of the civitas: Dante, Petrarch, the Humanists, Vittorio Alfieri, Alessandro Verri in “Notti romane alia tomba dei Scipioni” (Roman nights at the Scipios’ tomb), Ugo Foscolo, Pascoli in “Inno a Roma” (Hymn to Rome). Although Pasolini did not cite all these authors explic¬ itly, his poems recall both Rome’s atemporal multiplicity and its role in civic history. Pasolini inserted himself into a poetic and cultural tradi¬ tion that claims the power to include both the past and the civic in its repertoire of legitimate subjects, and in this sense his choice of subject matter emerged as a response to the inadequacy of twentieth-century “pure poetry” to represent collective history. The lengths of the poems in Le ceneri di Gramsci (the title poem is fourteen pages of tercets) attest to that rather monumental claim.

And if this inventory of Roman lore

seems long, that is the point. For Pasolini, Rome had everything and he wanted it all. The wealth of discursive typologies in Pasolini’s poetry (to include didactic forms, confessional autobiography, and the epigram)9 evokes just such an opulence. To create his historicized representations, Pasolini drew on the Romantic traditions, which had discarded Renais¬ sance and Enlightenment idealizations of Rome’s civic virtues. It is pre¬ cisely because Rome is historicized that the myth of the city itself as a sepulchre may come so prominently to the fore. Pasolini also added his own layer, and we can now describe a certain aspect of the city and its sociological makeup (now largely superseded, another “Roma sparita” or vanished Rome) as “Pasolini’s Rome.” His depiction draws partly on the city with fragments of other centuries in its folds, which Mario Praz eulogized in his Panopticon romano10 and on the Rome the Romantics loved to portray as sublime yet filthy, where visits to the triumphal forums (then called the Cow Fields) were punctuated with admonitions to watch your step, or, as Giacomo Leopardi asked more delicately, “Come cadesti o quando/da tanta altezza in cosi basso

8 Margaret Brose, “Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Sentimento del Tempo: Baroque Rome and the Experience of Time,” Pacific Coast Philology 21, nos. 1-2 (1986): 65. 9 For this topic see Stefano Agosti, “La parola fuori di se,” in Cinque analisi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), pp. 127—54. 10 Mario Praz, Panopticon romano (Milan: Ricciardi, 1962).

Palimpsests and Rome

27

loco” (“Whence and wherefore did you fall/from such heights to so lowly a place”).11 Pasolini’s Rome is a variation on the theme of the sublime and the ugly and comes closer to what someone called the sublimely ugly: the Roman landscapes in his poems are littered with “sporcizia afrodisiaca” (“aphrodisiac dirt”), with “sterri fradici e mucchi secchi d’immondizia” (“soaking holes and dry heaps of filth”). The poet Alfredo Giuliani surmised in fact that Le ceneri di Gramsci adapted Giovanni Papini’s provocative view on “the beauty of garbage.”12 We read in “II pianto della scavatrice”: Ero al centro del mondo, in quel mondo di borgate tristi, beduine, di gialle praterie sfregate da un vento sempre senza pace, venisse dal caldo mare di Fiumicino, o dall’agro, dove si perdeva la citta fra i tuguri; in quel mondo che poteva soltanto dominare, quadrato spettro giallognolo nella giallognola foschia, bucato da mille file uguali di finestre sbarrate, il Penitenziario tra vecchi campi e sopiti casali. Le cartacce e la polvere che cieco il venticello trascinava qua e la, le povere voci senza eco di donnette venute dai monti Sabini, dall’Adriatico, e qua aecampate, ormai con torme di deperiti e duri ragazzini stridenti nelle canottiere a pezzi, nei grigi, bruciati calzoncini.

11 Giacomo Leopardi, “All’Italia,” in Canti (Milan: Garzanti, 1975), p. 6. 12 Alfredo Giuliani, Immagini e maniere (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1965), pp. 89—93.

28

The Poiesis of History i soli africani, le piogge agitate che rendevano torrenti di fango le strade, gli autobus ai capolinea affondati nel loro angolo tra un’ultima striscia d’erba bianca e qualche acido, ardente immondezzaio. [Le poesie, pp. 98—99]

(I was in the center of the world, in that//world of sad Bedouin slum towns/ and yellow prairies chafed/by a relentless wind/ /from the warm sea of Fiumicino/or the countryside,

where the city/disintegrated among

hovels, in that world/ /which could be dominated only by/the penitentiary, square ocher/specter in the ocher haze,//pierced by a thousand identi¬ cal/rows of barred windows, amid/ancient fields and drowsy farmhouses. //Dust and trash blindly/lofted by the light wind,/the poor echoless voices//of humble women, emigrants from the Sabine/hills or the Adri¬ atic,/ camping here with swarms of tough//malnourished shrieking kids/in ragged undershirts/and faded grey shorts/ /in the African sunlight and the agitated

rains/that

made streets

muddy

torrents,/buses mired at the

end//of the line, at a corner formed by/a last bleached grass-streak/ and some fermenting garbage heap.)13

This spectacularly littered city marks a second stage in Pasolini’s Ro¬ man writings. A transition has already occurred in which the poet has moved away from the more Symbolist, lyric mode of writing, which marked his verses in the dialect of Friuli and persisted in the early Roman poems. In the first stage, Rome is figured predominantly as a defunct fossil, a spectral architecture of pale bones against lunar skies.14 She is a dead city reminiscent of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s eponymous play and of the section in Pascoli’s “Inno a Roma’’ titled “II grande sepolcro” (The great sepulchre). “Sonetto primaverile, x” (Spring sonnet, No. 10) presents a version of this fossil-like cosmos: Per la povera strada che perduta fra tristi fabbricati e tristi campi mi porta a casa, tiepido s’imbuca

13 Translation of Pasolini’s poems by Norman MacAfee with Luciano Martinengo, in Pier Paolo Pasolini s Poems (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 31—32. Page num¬ bers cited henceforth after translations of Pasolini’s poems refer to this edition. Other¬ wise, translations are mine. 14 See Luigi De Nardis, Roma di Belli e Pasolini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1977), p. 92.

Palimpsests and Rome

29

il vento, smuovendo l’aria stanca. E una sconosciuta primavera ben piu vecchia dei giomi in cui riappare che fa in me rimescolare la vera vecchia vita, alle folate ignare . . . II cadavere va, coi ciechi panni agitati dal vento, e con le gote nere di barba gelida, in silenzio. Un giovanile, fossile suo senso resta nel cosmo, arido, tra ignote forze, gia sue, e riperse con gli anni.15

(The tepid wind, unsettling tired air,/tunnels down the poor street/which leads me home/through saddened blocks and saddened fields./It is an unfamiliar spring/much older than the days in which it reappears;/it makes the true old life /stir in me where those gusts stir. . . ./The cadaver moves, his blind vestments/blown by the wind, with cheeks/blackened by an icy beard, in silence./His youthful, fossile-like sensation/remains in the cosmos, aridly, among unknown/forces, once his, and lost with the years.) Additionally, Pasolini’s earliest Roman volumes portray the capital city variously as either the cadaver of his beloved rural Friuli or its counter¬ part, since the masses on the city outskirts were viewed by Pasolini as the remnants of a more mythic, archaic, peasant world, which had, in its isolation, been spared bourgeois history. Pasolini’s move from Friuli to Rome (in 1949) is then less an indication of his subjective accession to an urban identity than an instrumentalization within the context of the city of his provincial identity.16 Le ceneri di Gramsci falls within a second “Roman” stage, which rep¬ resents Pasolini’s growing love for the city that previously had evoked death. This second stage includes a number of novels and early films (such as Mamma Roma and Accattone). He also began to share in the Neorealist tendency to depict the contemporary in terms of the most marginal social classes, their poverty and tragedies. The Roman novels Ragazzi di vita (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959) are in fact partly defined by a Neorealist subtext, which made bombed-out postbellum

15 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Sonetto primaverile, 1953,” in Ronui 1950, Diario (Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1960), p. 25. 16 Zygmunt G. Baranski documents some of the stylistic transformations that followed this move in a study ol Pasolini’s short stories and essays, “Notes towards a Reconstruc¬ tion: Pasolini and Rome 1950-51,” The Italianist 5 (1985): 138-49.

30

The Poiesis of History

Rome the “new ruins” of the Occident. And although it is true that a narrative, autobiographical dimension contributes to the impression that Pasolini’s work in Le ceneri di Gramsci constituted a new poetic combi¬ nation, just as important was the portrayal of his chosen subject: Rome. Pasolini’s representation of Rome was in many ways deeper than the Neorealist one, however, precisely because it addressed the question of the past, of the Roman overlay. Pasolini’s films juxtapose, for instance, construction sites on the Roman outskirts with half-completed highways around some crumbling tower or aqueduct (Uccellacci e uccellini). One of the most effective passages in Ragazzi di vita portrays a band of fam¬ ished, small-time criminal children who survey the distant historical center’s cityscape from a high point in the suburbs, contemplating their next scrap-iron raid into the bosom of Western civilization. A red sunset evokes the city in flames of Roman history, but not to the lumpenproletariat who could scarcely know that Nero fiddled or that Rome had been sacked before. Pasolini invokes such contrasts not only in his literary works but in the critical essays of Passione e ideologia, where he appears an an excavator in the old and new ruins of Italy.17 In Passione e ideologia, Pasolini presents Italian literary history as a series of layers, accumulations, concretions, and superimpositions of linguistic strata and literary forms from the strambotto to blank verse. He aims there to assess the evolution of literary practices as they are seen in a configuration of progressive or regressive socioeconomic and stylistic transformations, using a militant method inspired by Gianfranco Contini’s brand of philology based on stylistic constants, Leo Spitzer’s forays into paraliterary realms, and Antonio Gramsci’s speculations on the so¬ cial motivations for literary change.18 For example, in an erudite analysis of the history of Italian popular poetry over five centuries, Pasolini studies the contact of folk and high cultures in terms of mutual contam¬ ination. He sketches, in what he called “vile schemas,” the lines of force in a growing bourgeois hegemony and its effects on linguistic strati-

17 Pasolini’s most specific comment on Rome is in the essay “Roma e Milano,” in Passione e ideologia: “This nation within a nation . . . which issues forth with natural strength as though in history’s jolts and irrational pauses, stratifying itself around that logical, explainable fulcrum, its essence as the papal seat and ‘capitol’ by definition, with a grandiosity whose nature has the outlines of the Baroque” (p. 57). For a discus¬ sion of Roman linguistic stratification see his essay “II Pasticciaccio” on Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto di Via Merulana, Passione e ideologia, pp. 314—20. 18 Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni dal carcere (Prison notebooks) were written during the Fascist period but not published until 1948—51, when Pasolini read them.

Palimpsests and Rome

31

fication—a field of study already established in the philological and genre analyses of Constantino Nigra in his Canti Piemontesi (1888). Nigra identified narrative poetic forms with the Northern dialects, for instance, and lyric forms with the Southern ones.19 These issues have, of course, been much debated since the origins of Italian literature in the Sicilian vernacular, but Pasolini (following Gramsci) takes the “Questione della lingua” or the debate on the national language along ideologi¬ cal paths where high and low poetic forms are studied in terms of social class. He extends the discussion well into the twentieth century, with the exemplary essay “Poesia folclorica e canti militari” (Folk poetry and military songs), which examines the “crisis” in popular poetry in terms of Italian Resistance songs. Writing of a Romantic phase in the study of popular poetry linked to an indeterminate, protohistorical and nationalist concept of popular po¬ etry as a collective product and of a more positivistic phase linked to a view of popular poetry as comprised of individual instances of pre-historical works to be studied methodically, he notes that the two phases “do not surpass each other dialectically, but instead fuse to produce perma¬ nent, romantico-philological characteristics that slowly decompose in successive stages of study” (Passione e ideologia, p. 148). This com¬ pacted, putrefying stage comes about when a “new” ideology (concerning what is “popular”) coincides with previous ones to form the “monstrous, rigorous fruit of successive residues, sedimentations, and survivals” (p. 160). An example, discussed by Croce, in Poesia popolare e poesia d arte (Popular poetry and artistic poetry), and Gramsci, in Quaderni del car-

cere, is found in the ideological dovetailing of the popular and the na¬ tional. This holdover stage still influences the postwar period’s aestheticization of the “people.” It contributes to the isolation within which twentieth-century Italian poetry is produced and to its resistance to inno¬ vation. Pasolini points out that the national literary ideology has been sadly devoid of the class consciousness that might have led to other outcomes. And it is on these grounds that Pasolini criticizes Croce’s “metahistorical” historiography, taking issue with Croce’s notion that all poetry, popular or not, is a synthesis of contrasting elements, which achieves poetic perfection only in a proper fusion. Pasolini argues for a newly oppositional mix associated with contaminatio and the palimpsest.

1' Pasolini authored an anthology of poesia popolare (popular poetry), which makes generic classifications (such as canti narrativi | narrative songs]) a basis for ordering the vast material: Canzoniere italiano: Antologia della poesia popolare, ed. Attilio Bertolucci (Parma: Guanda, 1955).

32

The Poiesis of History

although he believes that true literary innovations will appear only when what Gramsci, in the Marxian tradition, called civil society is trans¬ formed. The stratified literary heritage as it appears in Passione e ideologia is, then, an ineluctable, contaminating, powerful presence but also, we shall soon see, the stronghold that resists the sway of false new ide¬ ologies characterized by an intention to destroy the past (Futurism, for instance). The closing words of his essay on popular poetry, on the rela¬ tions of high and low culture, illustrate perfectly important characteris¬ tics of Pasolini’s own brand of literary historiography and his poetic practice: “Dissimilation, therefore, together with assimilation, between the two cultures: with very intense contacts born of both attraction and conflict, in the ‘relationship.’ Popular poetry as a self-contained institu¬ tion is in crisis. History is in the making” (p. 259). In a slightly later essay centered on innovation, Pasolini continues to write of the literary in terms of the buried and the exhumed, but he limits himself to the twentieth century, which he antagonistically refers to as “Novecentismo” (after Massimo Bontempelli’s journal), or “twentieth-centuryism.” In “The Confusion of the Styles,” the poet updates his observations on literary history by dramatizing the plight of the contem¬ porary author, who is faced not only with the near dissolution of genres but with the necessity of using one of the various “dead” languages within which Italians have inscribed their verbal inventions (Latin, the dialects). The writer is here an epuratore (“purifier”) who must scrape away layers of “artistic prose” and “exquisite lyricism” before he can even reach the instrumental koine handed down by the national unifica¬ tion movement. This hypothetical innovator ends up excavating Giovanni Verga, the father of the Italian version of naturalism, but Verga’s lan¬ guage turns out, under Pasolini’s examination, to be more “outdated and often decomposing linguistic material” (p. 329). For his particular use of the free indirect style, which was actually intended to achieve a choral, “popular” effect, Verga appears to Pasolini as a proto-Crocean separator of styles who converts the plurilinguistic (the author’s speech together with the speech of his characters) into a “linguistic drop” and thus cre¬ ates a false effect of transformation (p. 334). In these essays Pasolini does not search for the organic unity of the literary work. Rather, he sees it as a place of dissention and an occasion for mixing the orthodox and the subversive. It is not difficult to read into the essay the author’s polemical stance toward socialist realism, Zhdanovism, Lukacsian perspectivism, and anything resembling reflection theory. Pasolini searches for a politics of style, which can, however, only be excavated with sophisticated tools. Literary form cannot be pre-

Palimpsests and Rome

33

scribed. Pasolini proposes as an alternative that writers follow the divid¬ ing line between the bourgeois past and a socialist future in literature’s “serpentine movements . . . , along its sutures, its details, its internal surfaces, its pages, and its stylemes” (p. 344). This endeavor can suc¬ ceed only when the ideologies of both modernism and historicism are circumvented but not ignored. How is this to be done? Rather than and rather more than inventing a new literary space, Pasolini aimed to oc¬ cupy “the free zones between diverse and preexistent spaces . . . under the banner of the mixed style.”20 Pasolini’s desire to escape a classic fixedness of literary forms and concomitant retrograde representations without resorting to modernism is characteristic of most of his work and finds an analogy in his distinctive portrayal of a Rome at once ancient and modem.21 Pasolini’s views led him to effect in his own poetry an important dis¬ placement away from the classic (the “immobile”) and, in Le ceneri di

Gramsci, largely to erase the Roman historical center by concentrating on the newly expanded, sometimes poor and prematurely ruined, periph¬ eral zones. The latter were populated, ironically, by former inhabitants of the residential areas around the central imperial forums disemboweled by Mussolini to make way for his “Via dei fori imperiali,” and by post¬ war immigrant peasantry turned subproletarian. Pasolini’s strategy of displacement is also exemplified in his choice for the setting of his most civic poem, “Le ceneri di Gramsci.” What more perfectly un-Roman, anti-classic, anti-urban setting than the green, cypress-laden English cemetery in Rome, where Keats and Shelley are both buried? Antonio Gramsci’s (rather displaced) urn is also found in the graveyard described by Shelley, in the preface to his eulogy of Keats in “Adonais,” as ‘'the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy wall and tower, now mouldering and desolate,

which formed the circuit of antient

Rome.”22 20 Guido Santato, Pier Paolo Pasolini: L'opera (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1981), p. 192. 21 Another important critical viewpoint on the general politics of writing in Pasolini is to be found in Paolo Valesio, “Pasolini come sintomo,” Italian Quarterly 21-22 (198081): 31—43. Valesio considers texts that postdate those considered here, concentrating on Pasolini’s Lettere luterane (1976) and his Le belle bandiere (Dialoghi 1960—65). He carefully addresses “the gutting of Rome” and uncovers an “erased genealogy,” which extends to Charles Baudelaire’s portrayal of a changing Paris in “Le cygne” and to D’Annunzio’s Rome as portrayed in Le vergini delle rocce. Valesio does not extend his critique either to the early Friulian period or to Le ceneri di Gramsci. 22 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 390.

Donald H.

Reiman and

34

The Poiesis of History

Landmarks of classical Rome still surrounded the graveyard in Paso¬ lini’s day but do not appear in his verses, which initially depict, instead, the nearby working-class neighborhood of Testaccio, whose workaday sounds reach the poet as he visits Gramsci’s urn and its small monument in the “foreign garden.” The poem’s speaker is not, significantly, im¬ mersed in a still sanctuary, and the bustling artisan neighborhood is in fact evidence of the new, less sepulchral Rome of Pasolini’s second stage: the poet appears to have abandoned the persona of the stranger in the city found in the Roman diary poems in favor of a new identity linked to Roman vitalism, which, as a northerner, did not belong to him automatically (and in this sense he is not unlike those other foreign poets who sojourned in Rome).23 The subject of death and the funereal per¬ sists, of course, but the poem does not center on death as some pure state of finality, nor are mourning and pain heavily marked by melan¬ cholia.24 Gramsci’s tomb does signal the death of Resistance dreams of revolution (in ashes), but the thrust of the poem is not political despair. Instead, “Le ceneri di Gramsci,” which opens with a telling panoramic view, revolves around a broad intellectual engagement reminiscent of Foscolo’s ample “Dei sepolcri”:

Non e di maggio questa impura aria che il buio giardino straniero fa ancora piii buio, o Fabbaglia

con cieche schiarite . . . questo cielo di bave sopra gli attici giallini che in semicerchi immensi fanno velo

alle curve del Tevere, ai turchini monti del Lazio. . . . Spande una mortale pace, disamorata come i nostri destini.

tra le vecchie muraglie l’autunnale maggio. In esso c’e il grigiore del mondo, la fine del decennio in cui ci appare

23 See Anthony Oldcorn’s essay “Pasolini e la citta,” Italian Quarterly 21-22 (198081): 107—19, for a study of these poems and their literary antecedents within a biograph¬ ical framework. ■4 For psychoanalytic themes see Santato’s Pier Paolo Pasolini: Uopera and Anna Panicale’s more deconstructionist approach in “L’ultima gioventii,” in Perche Pasolini (Urbino: Guaraldi, 1978), pp. 203—13.

35

Palimpsests and Rome tra le macerie finito il profondo e ingenuo sforzo di rifare la vita; il silenzio, fradicio e infecondo. . . . [Le poesie, p. 67; Pasolini’s ellipses]

(It isn’t May-like, this impure air/which darkens the foreigners’ dark/gar¬ den

still

more,

then

dazzles

it//with

blinding

sunlight

.

.

.

this

foam-/streaked sky above the ocher roof/terraces which in vast semicircles veil//Tiber’s curves and Latium’s cobalt/mountains. . . . Inside the an¬ cient walls/the autumnal May diffuses a deathly//peace, disquieting like our destinies,/and holds the whole world’s dismay,/the finish of the dec¬ ade that saw//the profound naive struggle to make/life over collapse in ruins;/silence, humid, fruitless. . . . [P. 3])

The two principal intellectual figures in this small-scale pantheon are Gramsci and Shelley. Although neither “interlocutor” appears in this landscape as a ghostly apparition and neither responds aloud to the poet/ speaker’s musings, the “dialogues” with predecessors are themselves one way in which the poem moves rather quickly away from more famil¬ iar poetical graveyard terrains, away from the thematics of extinction; they are a way of distancing “fruitless” silence.23 The poem quickly takes on a meditative quality with a turn to the thematics of gnosis and inner speech and away from funerary objects and the palimpsest of hu¬ man remains. Its minimal narrative begins to take on the form of a con¬ fessional revelation of identity and disagreement by telling (only indi¬ rectly, in its own sectional layerings) the story of shifting and conflicting intellectual perspectives, which might be said to parallel the literary “stories” of Passione e ideologia. The poem itself also illustrates, conse¬ quently, Pasolini’s brand of literary historiography, which here, how¬ ever, functions less discursively and more by allusion; by a not-so-veiled play of dissimilation and assimilation. A complex set of thematic patterns in “Le ceneri di Gramsci'

(the

“patrician boredom” of the English versus Gramsci’s activism; English and Gramscian clarity and light versus the surrounding Latin shadows; Pasolini’s, Shelley’s, and Gramsci’s views of the “people”) emerges in the context of the literary genealogy related to the topos of the burial ground, one well-established indeed in Italian literary history. Of special importance for “Le ceneri di Gramsci” is the Heresiarehs’ circle in canto 10 of the Inferno, likened by Dante to a Roman necropolis. The structure

25 For a study in English of the poem as a whole, and especially of its topographies, see Pia Friedrich’s Pier Paolo Pasolini (Boston: Twayne, 1982), chap. 6.

36

The Poiesis of History

of Pasolini’s cemetery encounters, primarily with Gramsci and sec¬ ondarily with Shelley, recalls Dante’s encounter with the entombed Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti, which is punctuated by a secondary interchange with the father of the poet Guido Cavalcante. The Dantean subtext is even more revealing in light of Pasolini’s self-identification as an arch-heretic in Empirismo eretico.26 (Pasolini turns the tables by mak¬ ing himself the interviewer and not the interviewee.) Furthermore, in canto 10 Farinata predicts exile for Dante; and Gramsci’s burial in the English cemetery as though in exile from Fascist Italy, together with Foscolo’s removal to far-off England, emphasizes this motif and echoes Pasolini’s own sense of exile, which later caused him to characterize himself as a pirate in his Scritti Corsari. Besides coupling politicians and poets, Dante’s canto 10 is important, then, as an example of poetry that dramatizes the theme of the potentially grievous consequences (damna¬ tion, exile) of the intellectual enterprise itself.27 In the case of “Le ceneri di Gramsci,’’ the only intellect present is not, of course, Pasolini: there is Gramsci, with his own incarceration, exile, and damnation. Gramsci, it would appear, is Pasolini’s kindred soul. If, however, we recall Pasolini’s view of his literary and the intel¬ lectual heritage as both a compact stratification and a defense against “twentieth-centuryism,” we might predict that Pasolini’s attitude to his predecessors, those present obliquely (Dante and Foscolo) and directly, will be influenced by that framework. Gramsci should prove no excep¬ tion. Gramsci is in fact treated in a problematic way, in the context of what Pasolini calls a “scandalo della coscienza” (“a scandal of con¬ sciousness”), in a series of comparisons: first between Gramsci and the “free” Imperial English (now themselves in ashes), and, second, be¬ tween the martyred Gramsci and a lost, torn, and tormented Pasolini:

Uno straccetto rosso, come quello arrotolato al collo ai partigiani e, presso l’uma, sul terreno cereo.

diversamente rossi, due gerani. Li tu stai, bandito e con dura eleganza non cattolica, elencato tra estranei

2b Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, 2d ed. (Milan: Garzanti, 1981). 2 I refer to Dante’s text as an example and not as a source for the same reason that Franco Fortini remarked, in Saggi italiani (Bari: De Donato, 1974), p. 125, “never ‘sources,’ but screens, pretexts, points of support. In a word: contamination.”

Palimpsests and Rome morti: Le ceneri di Gramsci . . . Tra speranza e vecchia sfiducia, ti accosto, capitato per caso in questa magra serra, innanzi alia tua tomba, al tuo spirito restato quaggiii tra questi liberi. (0 e qualcosa di diverso, forse, di piii estasiato e anche di piii umile, ebbra simbiosi d’adolescente di sesso con morte . . .) E, da questo paese in cui non ebbe posa la tua tensione, sento quale torto —qui nella quiete delle tombe—e insieme quale ragione—nell’inquieta sorte nostra—tu avessi stilando le supreme pagine nei giomi del tuo assassinio. Ecco qui ad attestare il seme non ancora disperso dell’antico dominio, questi morti attaccati a un possesso che affonda nei secoli il suo abominio e la sua grandezza: e insieme, ossesso, quel vibrare d’incudini, in sordina, soffocato e accorante—dal dimesso rione—ad attestame la fine. Ed ecco qui me stesso . . . povero, vestito dei panni che i poveri adocchiano in vetrine dal rozzo splendore, e che ha smarrito la sporcizia delle piii sperdute strade, delle panche dei tram, da cui stranito e il mio giorno: mentre sempre piii rade ho di queste vacanze, nei tormento del mantenermi in vita; e se mi accade di amare il mondo non e che per violento e ingenuo amore sensuale cosi come, confuso adolescente, un tempo

37

38

The Poiesis of History l’odiai, se in esso mi feriva il male borghese di me borghese: e ora, scisso —con te—il mondo, oggetto non appare di rancore e quasi di mistico disprezzo, la parte che ne ha il potere? Eppure senza il tuo rigore, sussisto perche non scelgo. Vivo nel non volere del tramontato dopoguerra: amando il mondo che odio—nella sua miseria sprezzante e perso—per un oscuro scandalo della coscienza . . . [Le poesie, pp. 70—72]

(A scrap of red cloth, like those the Partisans/knotted up around their necks/and, near the urn, on the waxen earth,//a different red, of two geraniums./There you lie, banished, listed with severe/non-Catholic ele¬ gance, among the foreign//dead: The ashes of Gramsci. . . . Between hope/and my old distrust, I approach you,/chancing upon this thinned-out greenhouse, before//your tomb, before your spirit, still alive/down here among the free. (Or it’s/something else, perhaps more ecstatic, even// humbler: an intoxicated, adolescent/symbiosis of sex and death . . . )/And in this land where your passion never//rested, I feel how wrong/—here, among the quiet of these graves—/and yet how right—in our unquiet// fate—you were, as you drafted your final/pages in the days of your mur¬ der./Here, attesting to the still-not-dispersed seeds/ /of their ancient dom¬ ination, lie these/dead men possessed by a greed/that buries its grandeur and abomination/ /deep in the centuries; and at the same time, /attesting to its end: obsessed/striking of anvils, stifled, softly//grieving, coming from the humble quarter. / And here am I . . . poor, dressed in/clothes that the poor admire in store//windows for their crude splendors /and that filthy back streets and tram/benches (which daze my day)//have faded; while, less and less often, these/moments come to me to interrupt my torment/of staying alive; and if I happen//to love the world, it’s a na¬ ive/violent sensual love, just as I/hated it when I was a confused// adolescent and its bourgeois evils/wounded my bourgeois self; and now, divided—/with you—doesn’t the world—or at least//that part which holds power—seem worthy only/of rancor and an almost mystical con¬ tempt?/Yet without your rigor, I survive because//I do not choose. I live in the non-will/of the dead postwar years: loving/the world I hate, scorn¬ ing it, lost//in its wretchedness—in an obscure scandal/of consciousness . . . [Pp. 7-11])

Palimpsests and Rome

39

Critics have viewed Gramsci here variously as an alter ego, a surrogate brother, a fellow heretic, and a “maestro,”28 although they tend to agree that Pasolini legitimizes the private individual within Gramscian revolu¬ tionary thought. The “people” in Pasolini are a storehouse of Vichian poetic vitality who draw strength from their marginalization, whereas Gramsci’s oppressed classes are immersed in a struggle for progress throughout the stages of capitalist history. The two intellectuals’ differing views of class are the source of Pasolini’s dramatic, yet sorrowful, dis¬ sent: Lo scandalo del contraddirmi, dell’essere con te e contro te; con te nel cuore, in luce, contro te nelle buie viscere; del mio patemo stato traditore —nel pensiero, in un’ombra di azione— mi so ad esso attaccato nel calore degli istinti, dell’estetica passione; attratto da una vita proletaria a te anteriore, e per me religione la sua allegria, non la millenaria sua lotta . . . [Le poesie, p. 73]

(The scandal of contradicting myself, of being/with you and against you, with you in my heart,/in light, but against you in the dark viscera;//traitor to my paternal state/—in my thoughts, in the shadows of action—/I know

28

For the topic of Gramsci and Pasolini’s brother Guido, killed during the resistance

in World War II, see Wallace Sillanpoa’s “Pasolini’s Gramsci,” MLN 96, no. 1 (1981): 120—37. For the role of the “maestro” see Enzo Golino’s Pasolini: II sogno di una cosa (Bologna: II Mulino, 1985). Golino succeeds in widening the view of Gramsci as the object of Pasolini’s own projections through a careful analysis of Gramsci's intellectual influence: “Gramsci reinforces in Pasolini his natural interest in relations between classes in power, between center and periphery, between the norm and difference. The pedagogue of Turi’s prison and Casarsa’s ‘schoolmaster’ share an interest in common, although out of synch in time and space. . . . The ‘corsair’ poet will attempt the same critical discourse on the Italian character in a specific historical moment, i.e., the myth of people as it evolves in a mass society ... a harking back to the historicity of the tradition, to the national-popular, to the role of ethno-pedagogy” (p. 19). For the record, Pasolini himself described Gramsci as “leopardiano,” “reduced to pure and heroic thought, cut off from the world; incarcerated” (Passione e ideologia, p. 487).

40

The Poiesis of History

I’m attached to it, in the heat//of the instincts and aesthetic pas¬ sion; /attracted to a proletarian life/that preceded you, for me it is a reli¬ gion,/ /its joy, not its millennial/struggle . . . [P. 11])

Critics have also emphasized the contradiction between Gramsci’s ra¬ tional/historical and Pasolini’s irrational/aesthetic viewpoints and the metrical and discursive correlatives to this conflict, duly pointing out antitheses and oxymorons.29 Stylistic juxtaposition is a figure for intellec¬ tual strife. Pasolini’s view of literary history avoids, however, an over¬ simplified view of base and superstructural relations; in fact, he shares Gramsci’s critique of economism as he partakes of Gramsci’s whole no¬ tion of cultural hegemony. Cultural history is not for either one deter¬ mined mechanistically by the relations of production, but has residual and emergent forms.30 It is a site of contradictions that extend beyond the realm of material forces. Both Pasolini and Gramsci attempted to define how cultural strata are made ideological and how new forms emerge from past traditions.31 But there is another, more strictly literary contact between Gramsci and Pasolini, which pertains to the overarching temporal organization of Pasolini’s long poems. Gramsci made poetic temporality the subject of an essay on Dante’s Heresiarchs, who have knowledge of the past and future but cannot know the present (this is why the shade of Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti misunderstands Dante’s reference to his son Guido Caval¬ cante, whom he takes to be dead). One of the aims of Gramsci’s essay is precisely to undo Croce’s opinion that canto 10 has some inspired parts but that when Farinata starts to explain the whys and wherefores of the cognition of temporality, the Inferno ceases to be poetry. Pasolini, intent on freeing poetry from pure lyricism, might then well have seen in Gramsci’s essay justification for his own “unpoetic” long poems on “unpoetic” topics and for his revivals of premodern poetic forms.32

29 See Fortini, Saggi italiani, pp. 126—33. 30 For an extended discussion of these subjects see Andrew Ross’s observations on contemporary poetry in the context of Marxist thought in “The New Sentence and the Commodity Form: Recent American Writing,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cul¬ ture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

1988), pp. 361-80. 31 Pasolini directly discusses Gramsci’s Letteratura e vita nazionale in Passione e ideologia, pp. 154—56. 32 One of the earliest charges of “non-poesia” along similar lines was made against Ugo Foscolo, not in the context of innately unpoetic subject matter but in the context of the unpoetic nature of transitions in long poems. Countering the charge of obscurity, Foscolo wrote, in a letter where he claims both the newly political nature of his own

Palimpsests and Rome

41

In the context of these revivals, what is the sense of Pasolini’s use of a “residual” genre, sepulchral poetry, of writing in a genre associated with proto-Romanticism and Romanticism and largely discarded by modern¬ ism? It is worthwhile in this regard to examine the neglected figure of Shelley in “Le ceneri di Gramsci,” whose significance in the poem has rarely been noticed by critics.33 Pasolini wrote little about English Ro¬ manticism, and consequently his critical works provides no help in an interpretative enterprise, although footnotes in the essay in Passione e

ideologia on popular poetry reveal knowledge of even minor figures and of erudite bibliography. A phrase of English verse appears in the poem in a more general passage on the English “soil” that mingles with the Italian terrain: tra questi muri il suolo trasuda altro suolo; questo umido che ricorda altro umido; e risuonano —familiari da latitudini e orizzonti dove inglesi selve coronano laghi spersi nel cielo, tra praterie verdi come fosforici biliardi o come smeraldi: “And 0 ye Fountains . . .”—le pie invocazioni.” [Le poesie, p.70; Pasolini’s ellipses]

(within these walls, earth mixing with//other earth; this moisture/recalling other moisture; and—familiar/from latitudes and horizons//where English glades crown /lakes lost in the heavens, amid meadows/green as phospho¬ rescent billiard tables or//emeralds: “And 0 ye Fountains . . .”—resound the pious/invocations. [P. 7])

In this English cemetery in Rome, English Romantic poetry resounds almost involuntarily in the humus of poetic memory. The general land-

graveyard verse and the sublime poeticity of whatever “gives much cause for thought”: “Transitions are always arduous for a writer, and often for a reader; especially in lyric poetry” (quoted in Giulio Natali, Ugo Foscolo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1959], p. 123). yi Shelley also appears in the poem “LItalia” (1949) in a landscape portraying coastal La Spezia, near his drowning place (Pier Paolo Pasolini, L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (Milan: Longanesi, 1958|, p. 93).

42

The Poiesis of History

scape reference to the English lake district (and by extension its poets) is followed by a specific poetic memory, or resonance, the Words¬ worthian invocation “And 0 ye Fountains” (found in “Intimations of Im¬ mortality”; identified by Fortini). Shelley himself appears only later on in the poem, in a passage that contains Pasolini’s confessional identi¬ fication of himself as a Romantic Englishman: Shelley . . . Come capisco il vortice dei sentimenti, il capriccio (greco nel cuore del patrizio, nordico villeggiante) che lo inghiotti nel cieco celeste del Tirreno; la camale gioia dell’avventura, estetica e puerile. [Pp. 75-76]

(Shelley . . . How well I understand the vortex/of feelings, the capricious fate (Grecian/in the artistocratic Northern traveler's//heart) which swal¬ lowed him in the dazzling/turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea; the camal/joy of ad¬ venture, aesthetic//and boyish. [P. 15])

Shelley here embodies the passion and politics Pasolini seeks for his own poems. Furthermore, Pasolini could be considered a neo-Romantic both for the egocentricity of his poetic persona and for his dreams of siding with the wretched masses.14 But the adjective “aesthetic” recalls Pasolini’s critique (for their neglect of ideology) of Romantic ideals about the people and, moreover, his critique of Croce’s metahistorical aes¬ thetic classifications. The historical distance between Pasolini’s and Shelley’s political notions should be obvious. It may very well be that Pasolini evokes a predecessor not so much for the content of his verses, in other words because he agrees with Shelley’s positions on the aes¬ thetics of the popular, as for his use of a specific genre or form that presents poetic opportunities. Pasolini asserts that with the sepulchral poem he is in Shelley’s poetic humus. Shelley authored the “Adonais,” which not only is a source for imagery (“Rome, which is the sepulchre,” "Rome,—at once the Paradise,/ The grave, the city, and the wilder¬ ness”) but also evokes the English cemetery in Rome, that displaced

34 See Enzo Sieiliano’s introduction to Pier Paolo Pasolini s Poems (New York: Ran¬ dom House, 1982), p. xii.

Palimpsests and Rome

43

poetic site that Pasolini rediscovers and then reinvents/0 Shelley’s pres¬ ence in the poem strengthens the generic framework Pasolini adopts— the graveyard poem. The reader is also led back to the nineteenth cen¬ tury and to Romantic poetic traditions (Giosue Carducci’s “Presso l’urna di Percy Bysshe Shelley” [At Percy Bysshe Shelley’s urn] comes to mind). By adopting a strategy frequent in sepulchral poems themselves, is Pasolini saying that Romanticism may be buried but it is not dead? One has to approach this question with some caution, since Pasolini’s poetry is also strongly rooted in the post-Romanticism of Pascoli. Although Pas¬ olini rejects the Romantic concept of the popular, he seems nonetheless to adopt certain Romantic literary forms of expression. Pasolini’s attitude might be explained by the fact that Romanticism represents a period in history in which myths of unity were displaced by myths of heterogeneity (national movements themselves, for instance, supplanted the empire). It witnessed in the literary realm the end of strictly codified literary genres and the invention of many more elastic, “spontaneous” ones. One of the innovative traditions that Pasolini revived was the discursive long poem associated with Romanticism, of which his graveyard poem “Le ceneri di Gramsci” is an instance. The subterranean motivations for Pasolini’s ad¬ mitted identification with Shelley in fact go deeper than their passionate, political natures. The question of Pasolini’s revival of the sepulchral genre is compli¬ cated by the fact that English cemetery resident Gramsci himself had something to say about this genre as it was embodied in Foscolo’s “Dei sepolcri.” And if one were not to recall Gramsci’s views of Foscolo, one might imagine Pasolini’s Foscolo to be simply the passionate hater of tyrants who mourned “le sciagure umane” (“human misfortunes”) and who wrote of Italy as a fetid cadaver whose national energy was en¬ tombed in silence. Pasolini’s “L’Appennino,” which figures Italy as the sleeping Ilaria del Carretto in Jacopo della Quercia’s funerary monu¬ ment, certainly draws on this conceit. But the architect of the notion of cultural hegemony had seen in Foscolo’s monumental sepulchral verse the stimulus for exalting national glories and in Foscolo’s belief in the resurrection not of bodies but of “virtu” (“manly courage”) a view all too easily resurrected by Fascism.16 It was Gramsci’s contention that both Foscolo’s definition of a nation and, more generally, the myth of Rome

35 Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, p. 404. 36 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 250.

44

The Poiesis of History

as an origin masked a lack of Italian cultural unity that was ultimately detrimental to revolutionary prospects.37 Gramsci asserts that Rome was used as a rhetorical device, literary in origin, according to which the Italian nation has always existed. Such “decorative” views, Gramsci writes, obfuscate or deny the necessity of battling for a truly national/ popular Italy. He further observed that, as a consequence of such no¬ tions, artists and intellectuals who did not share an “archeological and moth-eaten conception” of the country’s interests were charged with anti¬ nationalism.38 Pasolini himself withstood accusations from some quarters concerning his inability or unwillingness to understand the elusive “na¬ tional interest,” since he wrote in dialect and was seen to have degraded the classes who were to lead Italy to its cultural revolution. In “Le ceneri di Gramsci,” Pasolini’s own politicized sepulchral verse represents the ideological contradictions inherent in traditional national myths by reproaching with Foscolian invective a sleepy, immobile na¬ tion; but there are many new twists: Italy is the land “dove dorme/col membro gonfio tra gli stracci un sogno/goethiano, il giovincello ciociaro”

[Le poesie, p. 76] (“where a young/Roman peasant dozes, penis swollen/ among his rags, a Goethean dream” [pp. 15—17]). That aroused and sleeping peasant would not Fit Foscolo’s criteria for cultural heroes. In the aftermath of the Fascist nationalism whose origins Gramsci had de¬ tected in Foscolo’s mythmaking, Pasolini erases Foscolo’s soldierly pa¬ triotism along with Foscolo’s justificatory invocations to self-sacrifice. Gramsci’s insights may indeed have undone the “Romantic” Foscolo and his “Sepolcri” for twentieth-century purposes; still, Pasolini’s use of the sepulchral verse genre flies, despite the Gramscian expose, in the face of Gramsci’s Marxist views of the genre as representing decorative false consciousness. Another Marxist critic, Alberto Asor Rosa, found that Pasolini’s potrayal of Gramsci partook itself of that tainted tradition, to be as cold, he writes, as a “bas-relief in a cemetery for the fatherland’s heroes.”39 It might be argued, however, that Pasolini faults Gramsci for an overly nationalist vehemence by ironically including him in the patri¬ otic lineup. In Pasolini’s view, Gramsci may have engaged in civic mythmaking. Such a charge might also extend indirectly to Palmiro Togliatti’s “Italian way to socialism.” But let us look more closely, if briefly, into the codes and conventions of the graveyard genre in order to determine how, and why, Pasolini assimilates them into postwar poetic forms. We might begin by observing

37 Ibid., p. 201. 38 Ibid., p. 208. 39 Asor Rosa, “Lo stato democratico e i partiti politici,” p. 617.

Palimpsests and Rome

45

that by means of the ambiguous structure of allusion, which Bally termed an “evocation of a milieu,” Pasolini uses the genre to evoke precisely what Fortini called “the dialectic between an individual des¬ tiny and a collective event.”40 The sepulchral poem encodes, in an openly artificial way, this relation. The traditionally political cemetery genre, in which individual and supra-individual destinies lie side by side, so to speak, appeared then to postwar writers as a form that could be invested with more current poetic concerns. It is an elastic poetic form,41 yet it is not susceptible, for instance, to the imperatives of “verti¬ cal” and antidiscursive modernist poetics. Although to twentieth-century eyes the sepulchral poem seems artificial (since form does not “sponta¬ neously” conform to content), Pasolini’s choice of genre deliberately draws on the milieu of “anachronistic” verse in order to link a content to a codifed formulation: the sepulchral verse genre, in Dante, Foscolo, Pascoli, and others, associates politics and poetry. In the first half of the twentieth century, that link had been substantially lost. Pasolini hypoth¬ esizes a new relationship between literary forms and forms of social and political consciousness such as nationalism. It is significant that he at¬ tempts to avoid easy homologies between the two areas.42 The issue of the value of poetic revival points, however, to a critical bind that also surfaced in Passione e ideologia: Pasolini desires poetic invention and innovation and yet despises the avant-garde for its smug convictions of progress and its dismissal of the past. Paradoxically, he finds that the best way to be innovative is to be traditional in an age of modernism. Writing of the crisis of experimentalism, he asserts: “[But from this crisis] there derives a probably unforeseen re-adoption of pre¬ twentieth-century stylistic modes, or of traditional modes in the standard sense of the term because these modes now fall within the natural con¬ fines of rational, logical, and historical, if not instrumental, language. Traditional stylistic modes become means that enable the kind of experi¬ mentalism that is absolutely nontraditional from the point of view of ideological consciousness. These modes are indeed so antitraditional that they may vehemently and by definition call into question the struc¬ ture and superstructure of the state by condemning . . . those traditions which from the Renaissance to the Counter Reformation and Romanti-

40 Franco Fortini, I destini generali (Caltanisetta: Sciascia Editore, 1956), pp. 78—79. 41 Paul Van Tieghem notes this in La poesie de la nuit el des tombeaux en Europe au XV/IT siecle (Paris, 1921; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), p. 88. u Pasolini was one of Lucien Goldmann’s early critics, in “La Fine delTavanguardia: (Appunti per una frase di Goldmann, per due versi di un testo davanguardia, e per un’intervista di Barthes),” in Empirismo eretico, pp. 122—43.

46

The Poiesis of History

cism have accompanied political and social involution as far forward as Fascism and the current conditions” (pp. 485-86). This is Pasolini’s heroic choice, and his impasse. For if one goes full circle, not only the heterogeneity and freedom of the traditional experimentalists but those of Romantic genres are suspect and as falsely liberatory (witness the issue of how to define authentic popular forms) as the language of Verga’s pseudo-choral novels. This cynicism about literary freedom of course calls into question the openness of the hybrid genre and Pasolini’s own

contaminatio as a literary technique. A full crisis comes about only later, in the 1960s when Pasolini begins to identify the ideology of free¬ dom with the falsely liberatory values of neocapitalism. Then “total con¬ tamination” implies the “death of poetry.”43 Although I have analyzed here if the notion of a literary palimpsest, along with the poetic symbol of civic Rome and Pasolini’s strategy for depicting it, in order to bring to light the presence of a historicizing contaminatio, I still have not presented a specific example of Pasolini’s narrative construction in a more technical sense. “Le ceneri di Gramsci” could certainly be studied in terms of its narratological structure, since it is made up of six sections, or blocks of narration, and since the poet makes use of narrative devices such as interruption (by the use of voca¬ tives and sudden exclamations), refrain (the repeated invocations to Gramsci), and insertions (of landscapes outside the cemetery). The visit to the cemetery alone entails an autobiographical structure articulated by narrative complications. The presence of characters such as Gramsci and Shelley has also tempted critics to dub the poem narrative. More germane to generic transformations is what I shall call a conceptual story.44 The conceptual aspect is in fact what makes these poems long. Given that the narrative characteristics of “Le ceneri di Gramsci” are devel¬ oped within the context of the graveyard genre, we can safely assume that the story here entails a very general probing of the past’s meaning for the present. “Le ceneri di Gramsci” achieves this probing in specific ways that are particularly relevant to the broad themes that preoccupied postwar writers. It is significant, for instance, that although “Le ceneri

43 See Giuseppe Zigaina’s article “Total Contamination in Pasolini,” trans. Beverly Allen, Stanford Italian Review 4, no. 2 (1984): 267—85, and his Pasolini e la morte (Venice: Marsilio, 1987). 44 For the topic of Pasolini’s metrical genres, which I leave aside, see Fortini, Saggi italiani, pp. 126—33; Walter Siti, “Saggio sull’endecasillabo di Pasolini,” Paragone 23, no. 270 (1972): 39—61; and Ciro Vitiello, “Pasolini, Pascoli, Gozzano: La metrica,” Sigma 14, nos. 2-3 (1981): 125-39.

Palimpsests and Rome

47

di Gramsci” is a graveyard poem, it contains no hint of the classic “ubi sunt” theme. It concerns, instead, one intellectual’s way of living the drama of ideas—specifically Marxian, Gramscian, and Romantic ideas. Pasolini’s technical achievement in telling his story is remarkable. It is a unique subset of the trend toward narrative forms as an antidote to lyric dominance. Marco Forti, drawing on the observations of Pampaloni, ex¬ pressed the point: “Standing Croce’s definition of the ‘poetry of poetry’ masterfully on its head, Geno Pampaloni has characterized the essence of Pasolini’s distinctive experiments with the term the ‘poetry of ideol¬ ogy.’ This is an accurate way of capturing his impetuous, irrational, yet ‘Enlightened’ historicism, together with his modern recourse to ideas offered as the antidote to lyric images that have been worn into exhaus¬ tion. Pasolini’s material is above all nourished by common values born from the war and the Resistance, and matured through polemics and crises . . . into a sort of expressionistic objectification of ideas and of history.”45 Forti’s observations are to the point, but they provide no insight into the specific inner workings of the poem. The nature of Pasolini’s poetic narratives has generally been the subject of only brief discussions on the part of critics.46 They have not explained just how the mixed “lyric-epic” genre absorbs the conceptual material, the ideas, or the historicism to which Forti referred. It goes in any case without saying that we are not dealing with foundational myths or with a narrative whose purpose would be the legitimation of a national popular literature as Gramsci conceived such a notion. The narrator is neither a bard nor a national prophet. In fact Pasolini tellingly defined his own lowly narrator’s role in Ragazzi di

vita as that of a “talker to death, a sewer tube, a receiving and transmit¬ ting piece of apparatus through which an unmentionable Rome finds a means of expression.”4' And the elevation of epic genres is as absent from the poems as it is from the novels. A brief analysis of “Le ceneri di Gramsci” in terms of the configura¬ tion of discourse and story demonstrates the poem’s relative narratological simplicity. The date of the poem’s story (the cemetery visit) is ex¬ plicit and straightforward: 1954, “la fine del decennio,” or the end ol the decade following World War II and the Italian Resistance. There is

45 Marco Forti, Le proposte della poesia (Milan: Mursia, 1963), p. 227. 46 Fortini, Saggi italiani, p. 128, wrote that “the poemetti are just so many narrative lyric/epic occasions”; and Forti noted an “epic/narrative” dimension, which appeared in the last sections (in “Romancero,” for instance) of the Friulian volume La meglio gioventu (Le proposte della poesia, p. 224). 47 Pier Paolo Pasolini, All dagli occhi azzurri (Milan: Garzanti, 1965), p. 12.

48

The Poiesis of History

only one narrative setting: the English cemetery with Testaccio nearby. This symbolic space triggers the poet/speaker’s reflections, which consti¬ tute a more complex narrative within the minimal narrative of a late afternoon walk in May. There is no real action (this may seem obvious, but Foscolo’s “Dei sepolcri” and Pascoli’s “Inno a Roma,” for example, are rife with battle scenes and rituals), and it follows that the poem is made

largely

of discourse,

namely,

in

this

case,

the

first-person

speaker’s discourse on intellectual engagement, Gramsci, and the intel¬ lectual’s role in social change. The stories of two lives (of Gramsci and Pasolini) shade into a discourse on history and its temporal complexities. It is in this sense that Pasolini is a civic poet. Yet within the abstract, complex frame of temporal reference that is intellectual history, two points in “intellectual” time stand out, and both are linked to the poem’s story by the mention of the graves of Shelley and Gramsci. The historical moments linked to Gramsci and Shelley receive the speaker’s attention equally in sections 1 and 2 respectively, sections in which the “I” has little relief and the “characters,” especially Gramsci, take center stage: Tu giovane, in quel maggio in cui l’errore era ancora vita, in quel maggio italiano che alia vita aggiungeva almeno ardore, quanto meno sventato e impuramente sano dei nostri padri—non padre, ma umile fratello—gia con la tua magra mano delineavi l’ideale che illumina (ma non per noi: tu, morto, e noi morti ugualmente, con te, nell’umido giardino) questo silenzio. Non puoi, lo vedi?, che riposare in questo sito estraneo, ancora confinato.

[Le poesie, p. 68]

(Young man, in that May when to err meant /one was still alive, in that Italian May/which at least gave life fire, you,//so much less thoughtless and impurely sane/than our fathers—but not father: rather, humble/ brother—even then with your thin hand, you//were sketching the ideal that illuminates/(but not for us: you, dead, and we/dead too with you in this humid garden)//this silence. You must know you can’t do/any more than rest, confined even now/in this extraneous earth. [P. 3])

Palimpsests and Rome

49

Here Gramsci’s story (the epic) unravels within the context of the poet/ speaker’s thoughts (the lyric). One aspect of the poem that makes it reminiscent of Foscolo’s “Dei sepolcri” is that in certain passages, such as the one above, the first-person voice recedes into the background but manages to retain its power. This powerful “I” gives form to the material of a discursive or even didactic content.45 The story revolves around how “the first person” receives his intellectual identity by establishing rela¬ tionships with the historical moments contained and circumscribed in the departed “third persons” of Shelley and Gramsci. In section 1, for instance, the “I” is subsumed among the “superstiti” (“survivors”), those who lived to see the political failure of Gramsci’s revolutionary dreams. Gramsci appears as a man who died young without having to inhabit the ruins of his dreams, whereas the survivors were forced to live with loss. Paradoxically, Gramsci, though dead, remains untouched by that corruption which history brought to an ideal. The poem’s historical horizons have been extended long enough, therefore, to contain and inscribe both the origin of Gramsci’s uncorrupted dream, which must be born into history in order to have life, and the ensuing corruption or death, which comes when the dream is not fulfilled. This opening section contains, beyond historicized identities, multiple temporal trajectories. Pasolini creates these first by juxtaposing the his¬ torical lifespans of Gramsci and of the “survivors. ” In section 2, he then proceeds to complicate the temporal framework by portraying the histori¬ cally distant colonial English buried in the cemetery urns as “non ancora casti” [p. 69] (“not yet chaste” [p. 5]). These long-dead Englishmen are the antithesis of the innocent, virginal Gramsci at the time when he was alive and active in the fight against imperialist ideologies.49 Temporal displacements from the poem’s cemetery occasion and from any particu¬ lar moment in time multiply when these Englishmen, whose empire is long gone,

appear in the present as still-desiring undead,

“uomini

rimasti/uomini” [p. 69] (“men who have stayed/men” [p. 5]); “Ancora di passioni/sfrenate senza scandalo son arse/le ossa” [p. 69] (“Their bones are still burning unscandalized,/with unbridled passions” [p. 5]). We further learn that the cemetery thrives on an intermingling decomposi¬ tion: it is

w I draw my observations here from the detailed commentary of Giovanni Getto in his La composizione dei Sepolcri di Ugo Foscolo (Florence: Olsehki, 1977). 4,Elio Gianola has observed that the May Pasolini refers to might be May 24, 1915, when Italy entered the war against Austria (Poesia italiana del Novecento: Testi e commento [Milan: Librex, 1986J, p. 839).

50

The Poiesis of History grassa di ortiche e di legumi . . . questa nera umidita che chiazza i muri intorno a smorti ghirigori di bosso, che la sera

rasserenando spegne in disadorni sentori d’alga. [Pp. 69-70]

(fat with nettles and legumes . . .//this black/moistness which mottles surrounding walls/into spent boxwood arabesques, which evening darkens// into an unadorned scent of algae. [Pp. 7—8])

Even Nature’s advance in eternal cycles of death and renewal is power¬ less to eradicate the defiant “passions” of these men. In a third directional shift in the narrative, this time in the story proper of the cemetery visit, section 3 dramatically sharpens the relief of the pair Gramsci and “I” by increasing the ratio of dialogue, or, more precisely, the number of times (nine) that “I” invokes “you”: “Li tu stai,” "Hi accosto,” “innanzi//alla tua tomba, al tuo spirito restato/quaggiu,” “la tua tensione,” “tu avessi stilando le supreme/pagine nei giorni del tuo assassinio,” “con £e,” and “il tuo rigore.” It is in this section that Gramsci’s story reaches its climax in his “assassination.” But this story is quickly told, and the only witnesses to the telling are, ironically, the patrician English. The instigators of the industrial revolution and scions of manufacturing capitalism are now defunct observers (“ad attestare”) in this sadly diminished imperial outpost whose past colonial grandeur is “sunk in the centuries.” Their world is now without resonance (“qui nella quiete delle tombe” [“here in the quiet of the tombs”]) except in the sepulchral inscriptions (“le laiche iscrizioni/in queste grige pietre” [“the lay insciptions/on these gray stones”]), and in the silent echoes of “le pie invocazioni” (“the pious invocations”). The only sounds of life come from the vibrating anvils of artisans, which, Pasolini writes, also witness “the end.” The class issue raised at this juncture through the juxtapositon of the imperial English outpost with the Italian working classes brings another turning point in the poem’s narrative. The middle-class Pasolini begins to introduce himself into that world of witnesses. The most confessional part of “Le ceneri di Gramsci” begins here and carries over through all of section 4, where the presence of the “I” is most strongly felt (“Lo

Palimpsests and Rome

51

scandalo del contraddirmi”). The narrative sequence from this point for¬ ward is not divided into units that correspond mechanically to section divisions. As the cemetery setting fades from our attention, and as the discourse turns to a somewhat disordered “discourse” on history and classes, the argument spills over into section 5, itself divided into sub¬ sections (one is on Shelley). These are only elliptically connected, and it seems that Pasolini discarded the previous relative coherence of the se¬ quences (sections 1—3) in sections 4 and 5. As a result, it becomes progressively more difficult to consider the section’s story line to be about what it seemed to be, namely the class struggle. The poet seems to speak only to himself, to shift back to an autobiographical occasion:

Ma come io possiedo la storia, essa mi possiede; ne sono illuminator

ma a che serve la luce? [P. 74]

(But while I possess history,/it possesses me. I’m illuminated by it;/ /but what’s the use of such light? [P. 13])

The undoing of the clarity of the conceptual narrative line is the ab¬ sence of a fixed “you,” of an identifiable interlocutor. As the poem moves to its deepest reflective moments, the interlocutor is the self. The self reflecting on history as something distinct from it comes to the real¬ ization that it is actually within history (“it possesses me”). The “you' returns only in the last tercet of section 5 (in intervening sections Gramsci was referred to in the third and not the second person). The moment is dramatic, since to be outside history, to be able to separate oneself from it, is to be without passion: “Mi chiederai tu, morto disadorno,/ d’abbandonare questa disperata/passione di essere nel mondo?” [p. 77] (“will you ask me, unadorned dead man,/to abandon this desperate/passion to be in the world?” [p.

17]). The poem’s cemetery story comes

back to the fore only for a short moment, and the final section opens with the poet/speaker’s leave-taking from Gramsci. This final section returns to the Roman landscape viewed in the opening, but now seen in an evening light, which enlarges its vastness into dissolution. Like the now widely panoramic landscape, the personal pronoun suddenly emerges in the plural, collective form of an expansive first-person plural in the final lines of “Le ceneri di Gramsci”:

52

The Poiesis of History Ma io, con il cuore cosciente di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita, potrd mai piii con pura passione operare, se so che la nostra storia e finita? [P. 80]

(But I with the conscious heart/ /of one who can live only in history, /will I ever again be able to act with pure passion/when I know our history is over? [P. 23])

The interpretive difficulty of these final lines lies not only in their interrogative form but in the shifting sense of the possessive adjective “nostra” (our). Does it refer to the history of those who live only in history and not in real life—bourgeois intellectuals, in a nutshell? Does it refer to the history of now defeated believers in a historically defeated potential revolutionary transformation? Is Pasolini referring to the end of historical consciousness itself which follows upon the heels of the neo¬ capitalist advance? Pasolini asks, in any case, how his own actions, his own historicizing poetic practice and even his incorporation of intellec¬ tual history into his verses, might endure in some sequel. “Le ceneri di Gramsci” is not one of Pasolini’s more prophetic poems, and it ends with a question and not a peek into the future. If, however, we begin to consider the conceptual story across the whole of his poetry, we may find rather than endless narrative shifts a more clearly developed denoue¬

ment.

CHAPTER

THREE

Ilaria and Italia

In Pasolini’s Roman poems, his representation of the city’s palimpsest and its stratified cultural heritage evokes the buried as well as the issue of cultural reanimation or transformation. He makes politically radical use of the historicizing traces of earlier sepulchral texts of the Italian literary tradition, such as canto 10 of Dante’s Inferno and Foscolo’s “Dei sepolcri.” In the essays of Passione e ideologia he consciously employs a “critical pastiche”1 that sets a positive value on the power of the anach¬ ronistic to disturb destructive modernizing. An experimentalist, Pasolini showed very little interest in creating a unitary work of literature; in¬ stead, he found in hybrid and widely divergent genres an opportunity to mix the orthodox and the unorthodox. The result for Pasolini’s readers is a sense that both history itself and contemporary culture are in danger. Pasolini has put before us the limitations in postwar dreams of social transformation by juxtaposing modern events and ancient ruins. And like the Romantics, Pasolini discovered in Rome that his dreams, like the dreams of those who had gone before, were already at an end.2 Worse, the historical palimpsest stood to be carelessly excavated by the digging machines of building speculators and buried again, irrevocably, by an urban jungle. In the more restricted context of Pasolini’s biography.

1 The formulation is Pietro Citati’s, quoted in an entry on Pier Paolo Pasolini by Gianni Scalia, “Officina e lo sperimentare poetico,” in // Novecento, vol. 9 (Milan: Marzorati, 1979), p. 8596. 2 See Jerome McGann, “The Romantics and Rome,’’ in Roman Images: Selected Pa¬ pers from the English Institute, 1982, ed. Annabel Patterson (Baltimore: The Johns Hop¬ kins University Press, 1984), p. 84. Pasolini’s attitude to history is different, of course; he does not share the Romantics’ notion of periodicity.

54

The Poiesis of History

Enzo Siciliano observed that the “burials” in Le ceneri di Gramsci signal Pasolini’s own exhaustion, “the end of his inspiration and the disap¬ pointing impasse of a generation that had always believed itself to be one step away from great things.”3 I have moved beyond a biographical inter¬ pretation in two ways. First, I have undertaken an analysis of Pasolini’s “Le ceneri di Gramsci” as an instance of graveyard verse and an illustra¬ tion of the author’s place in a European tradition. Second, I have added depth to ideological readings, which ignore the poem’s “form” as a sep¬ ulchral genre, specifically as a genre that presents the reader with the complexities of a literary heritage and of history as it comes to be repre¬ sented in literature. Postwar

sepulchral

verse

has

certain

metapoetical

connotations,

chiefly concerning what is still viable for poetry. Pasolini’s own literary historiography, as it appears in his essays and his poems, was funda¬ mentally important to the development of postwar poetic culture in this regard. Pasolini engaged in a poetic literary historiography and adopted specific poetic “arguments” to this end. The poet Giorgio Caproni noted, without specifically citing Pasolini’s reevocation of nineteenth-century poetry, that Le ceneri di Gramsci contained “a new authenticity, which is precisely that of having brought or brought back into our poetry not only prose but, moving beyond the halo of desperation in which so much of late twentieth-century poetry operates, a suffering that is no longer solely metaphysical but openly and frankly political.”4 My analyses here shall concentrate on the contiguous areas of grief and sepulchral verse in the context of what Pasolini “brought back” to twentieth-century Italian po¬ etry. Consequently, I will direct my attention to Ilaria del Carretto’s funerary monument in “L’Appennino” in the context of the thematics of cultural dominance (that is, tradition). I will consider that sculpture as a figure for the sepulchral Hermetic poetics, spectacular and frozen, that Pasolini seeks to overcome. Like the city of Rome, this sculpture is the locus for critical observations both about the distant past and current affairs, and it is therefore a source for some of the poem’s critical drama, and for the treatment in the poem of the theme of death and aesthetics. “L’Appennino” (1951), the grandiose and visually spectacular open¬ ing poem of the volume Le ceneri di Gramsci is a work whose themes are consonant with, if not identical to, Pasolini’s general critical concerns:

3 Enzo Siciliano, Pier Paolo Pasolini, trans. John Shepley (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 210. 4 Giorgio Caproni, II punto, February 17, 1962 (quoted in Ferretti, Letteratura e ideologia, p. 298).

Ilaria and Italia

55

Illaria and Italia: The rest of the elect. Sarcophagus, Jacopo della Quercia, Lucca Cathedral. Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.

history, the artistic patrimony, classes in conflict, and the Roman pas¬ sions are all present in “L’Appennino,” although it was written four years earlier than “Le ceneri di Gramsci.” Although both may loosely be called sepulchral poems, since each represents a funerary monument, “Le ceneri di Gramsci” is actually set in a cemetery and entails dia¬ logues between an “I” and predecessors. “L’Appennino,” however, con¬ tains no such (silent) interlocutors and is structured rather by a double series of representations with overlapping symbolic connotations: the Apennine mountains and the marble monument to the noblewoman Ilaria del Carretto, sculpted by Jacopo della Quercia in the early fifteenth century. In addition to the central, historicizing symbol of “sleeping’' Ilaria, whose life was cut short by an early death in childbirth, “L'Appennino” presents many nocturnal, stonily sepulchral landscapes and geographical locales of the Italian peninsula and seashores. Section 4 of

56

The Poiesis of History

the poem, which opens on a view of Lazio and Rome, best illustrates the dual figurations of Ilaria, whose synecdochical mark is her closed eye¬ lids, and the Apennines, with their impoverished but “placid and airy” populace. The following lines depict “Italian nights” as though envi¬ sioned, or dreamed, behind the sleeping Ilaria’s lids: Sotto le palpebre chiuse ride tra i pidocchi il mammoccio di Cassino comprato ai genitori; per le rive furenti dell’Aniene, un assassino e una puttana lo nutrono, nelle coloniali notti in cui Ciampino abbagliato sotto sbiadite stelle vibra di aeroplani di regnanti, e per i lungoteveri che sentinelle del sesso battono in spossanti attese intomo a terree latrine, da San Paolo, a San Giovanni, ai canti piii caldi di Roma, si sentono supine suonare le ore del mille novecento cinquantuno, e s’incrina la quiete, tra i tuguri e le basiliche. Nelle chiuse palpebre d’llaria trema l’infetta membrana delle notti italiane . . . molle di brezza, serena di luci . . . grida di giovanotti caldi, ironici e sanguinari . . . odori di stracci caldi, ora bagnati . . . motti di vecchie voci meridionali . . . cori emiliani leggeri tra borghi e maceri . . . Dalla provincia viziosa ai cuori bianchi dei globi dei bar salaci delle periferie cittadine, la came e la miseria hanno placidi ariosi suoni. Ma nelle veline e massicce palpebre d’llaria, nulla che non sia sonno. Forme mattutine

Ilaria and Italia

57

che, precoce, la morte alia fanciulla lego al marmo. All’Italia non resta che la sua morte marmorea, la brulla sua gioventu interrotta . . . Sotto le sue palpebre, nel suo sonno, incamata, la terra alia luna ha un vergine orgasmo nell’argenteo buio che sulla frana dell’Appennino sfuma scosceso verso coste dove imperla il Tirreno o l’Adriatico la spuma. [Le poesie, pp. 8—9]

(Beneath shut eyelids, among his/lice laughs the boy from Cassino,/sold by his parents, on the raging//banks of the Aniene, a killer/and a whore nurse him, through/the colonial nights when Ciampino//blinded with washed-out stars/hums with the planes of monarchs,/and along sick bou¬ levards, the beat //of sex’s sentinels, in devastating/waits around the earthy latrines,/from San Paolo to San Giovanni, to //the hottest comers of Rome you hear/the supine hours of the night ringing /in nineteen fiftyone, there is a cracking//of the quiet among huts and basilicas.//In IIaria’s closed eyelids trembles/the infected membrane of Italian /nights . . . soft with breezes, calm//with lights . . . shouts of young people,/hot, ironic, bloody . . . smells/of hot rags, wet now . . . Quips//from old, Southern voices . . . choruses/from Emilia, weakened in ponds and vil¬ lages,/from vice’s province, in the white//hearts of the bulbs in dirty bars /in

the suburbs of the city/flesh and poverty find placid,//airy

sounds. Yet in the vellum/and massive eyelids of Ilaria, nothing /that is not sleep. Morning’s shapes//that death, precocious, in this girl/bound to marble.

Italy

has

nothing

left/but

her marble

death,

her barren, //

interrupted youth . . . //Under her eyelids, in her sleep,/the earth, incar¬ nate, in the moonlight/has a virgin transport in the silver//dark that on the landslip of the Apennine/declines, steep, towards coasts where/the Tyr¬ rhenian and the Adriatic foam is pearled.)5

The more visionary “L’Appennino” also differs from “Le ceneri di Gramsci” by attending to a funerary monument that is a national treasure and

5 Translation of “L’Appennino” by William Weaver, in Contemporary Italian Poetry, ed. Carlo L. Golino (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), pp. 195—207. Here pp. 199—200. Page numbers are henceforth cited in parentheses in the text. In a few instances, I have modified his translation to make it more literal for the context of my discussion.

58

The Poiesis of History

thus evoking more directly the national historical and artistic heritage than “Le ceneri di Gramsci” does with the “foreign” garden of the English cemetery in Rome with Gramsci’s small cinerary urn. At the same time, the complexity of its figurations raises interpretive difficulties even more insistent than those encountered in “Le ceneri di Gramsci.” The diffi¬ culty might be explained by the fact that here Pasolini measures his own poetic and representational powers against those of Jacopo della Quer¬ cia, who sculpted a venerable national icon visited by thousands of Ital¬ ian school children yearly. “L’Appennino” is, in fact, both about the power of artistic creation, the power to create the “cultural hegemony” that the monument to Ilaria produces and symbolizes, and an attempt to rival such a creation in poetry. Whereas “Le ceneri di Gramsci” drama¬ tizes the encounter of Pasolini the poet and Gramsci the theoretician of “cultural hegemony,” “L’Appennino” presents an even more intricate web of references to the social power of art. Interpretation is complicated even more by the rapid and unwieldy series of historical (“1951”) and geographical references (Cassino, Ciampino,

Roma, Tirreno) and locales (“huts,” “basilicas,” “bars,” “la¬

trines”), all evoked in a familiar mixture of styles.6 Additionally, the figure of Ilaria also undergoes, over the poem’s many long sections, a significant metamorphosis. As the intertwining images flash, tercet upon tercet, the lady “Ilaria” becomes even phonically a constituent of the great “Italia”; she becomes the epitome of what constitutes Italy’s dead “national” art and her womanhood, her difference, an emblem of absence from history in general. In “L’Appennino,” there is little or no evidence of an “I,” a unified speaker (at least in the final version); rather the discourse is carried forward by a multitude of “subjectivities” heard in condensed, overlap¬ ping figurations (“shouts of young people,” “Southern voices,” “choruses from Emilia”). This tumult seems to issue, both from inside the tomb— behind Ilaria’s marble lids—and from some mobile, indeed aerial, ob¬ server (notice the possible anchoring reference to “aeroplani”), who has before him, or her, all of the Italian provinces. I hasten to add, lest I seem obsessed with the ontology of sepulchral verse, that ideological concerns, so evident in “Le ceneri di Gramsci,”

0 A pertinent piece of biographical information appears in Pasolini’s October 15, 1951 (the year in which “L’Appennino” was composed) letter to Giacinto Spagnoletti, where we read of a trip to Lucca (because of a trial connected to “the events at Porziis”) where the monument to Ilaria del Caretto is located, and of many other trips “up and down the stormy or lunar Apennines.” See Pier Paolo Pasolini: Lettere 1940—1954, ed. Nico Naldini (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), p. 456. Also, Pasolini was teaching in a junior high school at Ciampino (the airport) in 1951.

Ilaria and Italia

59

are developed not only in section 4 of “L’Appennino” as they pertain to the subject of national art, but throughout the poem. Like “Le ceneri di Gramsci,” this poem centers on the intricacies of and contradictions in representing national culture, on the topic of cultural hegemony in the Gramscian sense. In this instance, Pasolini considers the problematic character of the Italian Renaissance, which produced Ilaria’s monument and in some way defined Italy as a national culture. The strategy for this important critical issue’s poetic depiction in “L’Appennino” (and it is an issue that engaged two other important twentieth-century thinkers, Gramsci and Croce), is akin to the strategy Pasolini used to treat the issue of the national myths authored by Foscolo and by Gramsci himself. This particular poem also represents the first in a series of poems that depict Renaissance artistic monuments. The most important is “La ricchezza,” on Piero della Francesco’s frescoes of Emperor Constantine’s vision. Pasolini composed this poem about Italy’s artistic heritage in a wide historical perspective with an ulterior motive similar to that in “L’Appennino.” This complex textual creation involves two onlookers’ differing views of the The Dream of Constantine (one the author, one a worker) and presents both a personal journey through Tuscany and a narrative of Constantine’s vision. In short, Pasolini seeks to depict a historical point of reference through which to approach the question of the relation of the past to current history.

Pasolini thereby submits

Piero’s frescoes to “an implicit judgment on what our present is and has; and on its lacks.”7 8 At issue, once again, is the ideological nature of any claim on the past, be it on the part of Piero or the museum onlookers. “L’Appennino” presents a similar expansive if implicit opinion of Italy’s patrimony or “ricchezza.” The geographical reach of “L’Appennino” is, unlike that of the other heritage poems, expansive as well. The Apennines themselves constitute another powerful symbol, and they have long been Italy’s national range. One might cite Aleardo Aleardi’s Risorgimental poemetto “Fuochi nell' Appenino” (Canti, 1864) as an example of political verse that makes use of geographical symbolism in this rather conventional way. Foscolo’s Dei sepolcri also used geographical references in conjunction with natural landscapes in order to depict Nature itself and Earth as a sepulchre. In one famous strophe, Foscolo eulogizes Florence for her abundance of strong souls aflame with a desire to accomplish “egregie cose” (distin¬ guished feats), and we find there precisely an Apennine image (perhaps

7 See Silvio Ramat, “I sogni di Costantino: D’Annunzio, Longhi, Pasolini, Roversi,

in

/ sogni di Costantino (Milan: Mursia, 1988), p. 206. Ramat documents the influence of Roberto Longhi on Pasolini. 8 Ibid. p. 207.

60

The Poiesis of History

descended from Tasso’s “Canzone al Metauro”):9 “Te beata, gridai, per le felici/aure pregne di vita, e pe’ lavacri/che da’suoi gioghi a te versa Appennino!” (“You are blessed, I cry, with happy/breezes ripe with life, and with the pure waters/the Apennines from their yoke unleash for you!”). Pasolini’s coupling of these mountains and the sepulchral draws, it seems, on topoi of modern Italian civic or national verse. It may surprise Pasolini’s readers that the figure of Ilaria del Carretto also appears in the work of at least three other major Italian poets in the years between 1940 and 1955: in Alfonso Gatto’s “Ilaria,” Salvatore Quasimodo’s “Davanti al simulacro di Ilaria del Carretto,” and Giovanni Giudici’s “Al sepolcro di Ilaria del Carretto.”10 Each of these presents della Quercia’s monument in Lucca in different ways, but all dwell on the ambiguity of the “sleeping” figure, her imagined dreams, and on the quintessential lyric theme of a woman who has died young. Giudici writes of Ilaria as a symbol of the unfinished, “an unfinished sentence.” Playing on the “aria” (“air”) in “Ilaria,” Gatto contrasts the eternity of her “spiritus” to the sculptural petrification wrought by Ilaria’s husband in her honor. The additional connotation of “aria” as song and word (as in an operatic aria) indicates that Gatto’s poem is also a reflection on poetry. Quasimodo writes of his paradoxical feeling that the living are far more remote to him than the dead, not a surprising view coming from a translator of the ancient Greek lyric. We may fairly observe, then, that the figure of Ilaria came to represent several postwar Italian poets’ own complex ideas of the past, especially of the poetic past. Each of these metapoetic poems, whether or not they can be classified as elegies, con¬ stitutes a reflection on death as it has been represented in the poetic and the artistic traditions, especially here in the gendered sepulchral genre where the female is a figuration for absence. If one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century notions of literary lan¬ guage has been their close association with death, expressed most elo¬ quently by Maurice'Blanchot, in “La litterature et le droit a la mort,” then what can be said about this modern sepulchral verse with its multi¬ ple levels of analysis of both content and form? Pasolini himself insisted

9 In 1941 Pasolini wrote Luciano Serra about his readings: “But above all Foscolo: he is my author, my master and my guide. I don’t know how many times I reread his odes, his sonnets, I Sepolcri!’’ (Pier Paolo Pasolini: Lettere 1940—1954, p. 83). Further: “Ugo Foscolo, dear Luciano, has other magnificent polemical phrases which will be of use to us” (p. 96). 10 Alfonso Gatto, Nuove poesie (Milan: Mondadori, 1949); Salvatore Quasimodo, Ed e subito sera (Milan: Mondadori, 1942); and Giovanni Giudici, La stazione di Pisa e altre poesie (Urbino: Istituto Statale d’arte, 1955).

Ilaria and Italia

61

that form is content, precisely because form carries with it, in ineluct¬ able and complex ways, an allusion to history. But at a purely thematic level, it is obvious that Pasolini’s literary works and films evince the conviction that death is something more than a physiological event. His Medea kills her brother and scatters his limbs to halt her pursuers. In the film Said, death is a powerful, terrifying threat used by authority to coerce youth. Grief, mourning, and political sorrow frequently appear in Pasolini’s work as moments of intense proximity to death, to deep crises; and thanatologic themes often take the poetic form of the lament, in works such as “II pianto della scavatrice” and I pianti, or, for instance, in one of his earliest poems, “II nini muart,” (“II fanciullo morto,” [The Dead Boy]): Jo ti ricuardi, Narcis, ti vevis il color da la sere, quand lis ciampanis ’a sunin di muart. (Io ti ricordo, Narciso, tu avevi il colore della sera, quando le campane suonano a morto.)11

(I remember you, Narcissus; your coloring/was the evening’s, when the bells/ring a death knell.) The theme of death and its representation has attracted the attention of Pasolini’s best critics, who have most often seen the theme of death as inextricable from the topic of poetic creation. According to a recent read¬ ing by the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, the sound of that death knell fading over Friuli’s Tagliamento meadows can be likened to the fading breath at the ends of lines of verse and to the fading “spiritus” exhaled during speech, which, with its “full,” separate words reduces the body to silence and loss.12 Along similar lines, another critic, Stefano Agosti, has observed that in Pasolini’s poetry the externalized word is “violently inhabited by its own alterity, by mortality itself.”11 Without losing sight of the fact that the themes of memory and grief may fall in the category of a metaphysics of origins, Guido Santato invokes Freud’s views of mel¬ ancholia as a reinvestment of libidinal attachments to a lost object and

" Pier Paolo Pasolini, I pianti (Casarsa: Pubblicazioni dell’Academiuta, 1946), never republished, and Poesie a Casarsa (Bologna: Libreria Antiquaria, 1942), p. 10. IJ Massimo Cacciari, “Pasolini Provenzale?” SubStance 16, no. 2 (1987): 67-73. 13 Agosti, “La parola fuori di se,” in Cinque analisi, p. 154.

62

The Poiesis of History

insists gently on a more psychoanalytical, specifically Lacanian, read¬ ing.14 Santato’s views mesh with Anna Panicale’s detailed study of birth, death, and temporality in Pasolini’s La meglio gioventu, where poetry is seen as an itinerary whose end is the womb/origin and where to advance is constantly to turn back to a prelinguistic or pre-Oedipal phase (hence Pasolini’s choice of the maternal, “dead” dialect for these early poems).15 The interrelations, which characterize the nexus of death and poetry, also extend to his treatment of the literary tradition. The poetics of dis¬ tance, separation, loss, and memory outlined by the critics can be ap¬ plied with some qualifications to Pasolini’s treatment of cultural trans¬ mission, since the notions of distance and proximity are pertinent to Pasolini’s revivals of traditional (“dead,” or “infantile”) poetic forms. His reevocation of traditional icons such as that of Ilaria del Carretto is a case in point. Several precedents for his representation of her figure can be found and studied in this context. Pasolini’s Roma 1950, Diario, a work in which the thematics of death comes dramatically to the fore, constitutes an important transitional stage in the author’s poetic career as he moves from the Friulian period to that of Le ceneri di Gramsci. Luigi De Nardis concluded concerning the interrelations of poetry and death that Pasolini creates there a note¬ worthy “diachronic thickness” in his way of absorbing—through the trope of the living cadaver—life into death and death into life. The result is a “spectral dance” in the two contiguous worlds of life and death.10 This diachronic “thickness” to the thematics of death prevails in the Roman poems of the 1950s, and pertains to the figure of Ilaria.17 Yet how, specifically, does the “timeless” theme of death evolve in Pasolini’s work into a treatment of the political and the historical? To answer this it is first necessary to outline in some further detail Pas¬ olini’s poetics within the context of a diachronic temporality. Cacciari, Agosti, Santato, and Panicale all, to a greater or lesser degree, situate Pasolini’s poetry in what Cacciari, whose interest lies in Pasolini’s Friulian verse, suggested was a world metaphysically opposite to any immediacy, to any denotative or representational intention, a world where words delimit a loss and can never comprehend the object of signification. The birth of the word for Cacciari is a recognition of the

14 See Santato, Pier Paolo Pasolini: L'opera, pp. 15—16. 15 Panicale, “L’ultima gioventu,” pp. 203—13. We can read in Pasolini’s letters that he was studying Freud as early as 1940. See Pier Paolo Pasolini: Lettere 1940—1954, p. 28. 16 De Nardis, Roma di Belli e Pasolini, p. 81; see also Santato’s views on Pasolini’s “sometimes sepulchral nocturnes” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: L'opera, p. 156. 17 De Nardis, Roma di Belli e Pasolini, p. 84.

Ilaria and Italia

63

necessity of silence, but of silence not as the negation of sound, but as the figure of an impossible presence, a Dasein that is as ungraspable as a dream but as vital as external reality. Also significant are Pasolini’s debts to the Symbolist heritage in Mallarme (“Toast funebre”) and Pascoli and indeed to the Italian Hermetic poetry of the 1930s, an example being Mario Luzi’s “Un brindisi.” Luzi’s poem is an exquisite illustration indeed of a poetic formulation in which language has lost its referential power and has broken down to leave behind a “silence” that is usually obscured by the sounds of speech, a silence which is a reminder of ungraspable mortality.18 In this sense, one could say that all poetry is sepulchral, that all poetry marks death’s passing, that all poetry depicts a consciousness of mortality. But despite the fact that Pasolini’s poetry too may be defined as fundamentally elegiac and sepulchral, these two categories cannot alone allow us to understand the “diachrony” in “L’Appennino.” One might approach the topic of literature and death in the context of historicity in a number of ways. Philippe Aries, for one, has made a comparative historical study of representations of the afterworld in art from Medieval times to our own. In a basic, anthropological sense, a number of authors have noted the close interrelation specifically of liter¬ ature and the cultural myths surrounding an afterlife. They reason that any attempt to speak of death is an attempt to objectify nullity; one makes death “exist” by producing a discourse about it that begins with and contains it, or, in other words, one produces death by resorting to the inventiveness that is in language. This line of thought led one thanatologist to the statement that death exists by virtue of poetry.19 These representations vary naturally in the course of history. Another, considerably more abstract, way of considering literary death in the context of historicity is to examine the particular relationship of an author to the text produced by the author, in other words, to examine it in terms of the author’s particular experience of writing. In an article that discusses Maurice Blanchot’s work in Le livre a venir and Le space litteraire, Gianni Vattimo takes up the French writer’s view that the ex¬ perience of writing is that of a mutual nullification of the writer and what is written. Only once it is written, says Blanchot, does literature “make the writer a writer, since before a work’s reception, the writer has no experience of being defined or defining himself as a writer; paradox-

IH I draw here on Gianni Vattimo’s use of the verb “sfondare” (“to break down”) in La fine della modernita (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), pp. 82-83. 19 Jean-Didier Urbain, “Morte,” in Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. 9 (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), p. 521.

64

The Poiesis of History

ically, literature, in its eventual detachment from authorial intentions, renders the writer who produced it superfluous. Blanchot likened the experience of writing to the characteristically human impossibility of ex¬ periencing death. Vattimo’s point is that the experience Blanchot de¬ scribes mirrors what he prefers to call the “radicale storicita dell’esistenza” (“radical historicity of existence”;

my emphasis).20 Vattimo

refines a position that asserts that human beings also experience the impossibility of standing outside of history: Every historical action, and the literary act more than others, ... is the product of works that live only in the “falsification” represented by recep¬ tion, by the uses that society makes of them, by canonization, by “monumentalization.” . . . Literature is an ensemble of techniques to produce beforehand the monumentalizing effect that history exercises on human ac¬ tions in the course of time. That poetry should be written in verse . . . means that words take the form . . . that allows the transmission of monu¬ ments [trasmissibilita monumentale]: in order to resist death, the work takes the form of the cadaver, of the funeral mask.21 [My emphasis] Vattimo’s reflections emphasize the social nature of selective, monu¬ mentalizing historical transmissions in a way that is absent in Blanchot. He ends his essay by noting that although literary works in some way gain their meaning by disappearing (in terms of authorial intent), just as “histories” may disappear, their disappearances are encoded in forms that are susceptible to historical change. Furthermore, not all cultural “deaths,” not all disappearances of traditional cultures, can be accepted “indiscriminantly.”22 Pasolini too is deeply interested in social pressure on cultural transmission.23 Pasolini’s critical and poetic practices focus on the value of discrimination in matters of literary revival and transmis¬ sion in a unique way, as “L’Appennino” with its revival of sepuchral images demonstrates. Although Vattimo does not use words such as “he¬ gemony” and “consent” to describe the process of cultural selection and monumentalizing, his discussions synthesize important ideas that have come to the fore in postwar Italian philosophical culture, a culture to which Pasolini was especially attentive in the early years of his educa20 Gianni Vattimo, “L’essenza mortale della letteratura,’’ Sigma 16, no. 1 (1983): 64. 21 Ibid., pp. 64—65. 22 Ibid., p. 66. 23 This element of discrimination in matters of cultural transmission differentiates Pas¬ olini’s view from those of Baudelaire in “Le palimpseste,” in Paradis Artificiels. Bau¬ delaire joins there the themes of literary tradition, memory, sleep, and the simultaneity of the “palimpseste’’ as it is remembered at the hour of death or “by opium’s seeking’ (Oeuvres completes de Baudelaire [Paris: Gallimard, 1961], p. 452).

Ilaria and Italia

65

tion.24 Vattimo’s observations are pertinent because he rejects teleology, Hegelian Absolute Spirit, and Crocean progression and accentuates the historicizing and not the historicist aesthetics of temporality to be found in poetry. Pasolini clearly felt himself to be immersed in the ineluctable histori¬ city of poetic creation. This becomes apparent in critical observations in which he attempts to distinguish something like “traditionality” from “tradition.” Defining himself as a Pascolian “revolutionary within the tradition,” he hypothesized an antitraditional, transgressive use of tradi¬ tional literary form: Tradition . . . one must at this point in time understand this term in an antitraditional sense, i.e., as continual and infinite transformation, or in other words, as an antitradition moving in a line similar to historicity for history. . . . The official tradition, which in all nations is currently being exalted by misguided propaganda and held forth as the only solution to the contemporary political and social condition of Europe, is completely antihistorical. . . . The best young writers have passed through the antitradi¬ tion’s filter; they have studied tradition in the new poets.25 [My emphasis] “Traditionality” is not identical with official—or hegemonic—culture. In the same way, “historicity” is not identical with official history as it appears in political propaganda. Pasolini’s criticism of the modern Ital¬ ian lyric as it is exemplified by Hermeticism stems, it seems, from its lack of attention to the ideological connotations of “traditionality,” to historically marked literary forms and their philological, stylistic, and generic transformations. This aesthetic problematic appears already in Pasolini’s early poetry in association with the theme of death. Pasolini’s attention to the “life of forms” constitutes an attention to alterity, and his earliest letters docu¬ ment how, as Santato puts it, “disassociation from the real is translated into an absence from the life of others and from one’s own life, in a constant referring and deferring to an unknowable alterity which coin¬ cides with ‘finding oneself at the point of death,’ or in other words with the discovery of an other meaning for being.”26 This philosophy ol crisis—of finding oneself at the point of death—continually affects the 24 A study of Pasolini s attention to philosophy in his letters and other relevant sources has not yet been made. He often wrote of his views in letters to Luciano Serra (see Pier Paolo Pasolini: Letlere 1940—1954). Some address what Gramsci called, in connection to Croce, “ethico-political history,” for example, issues of hegemony and consent in cul¬ tural production. 25 Pasolini, II setaccio 3, no. 3 (1943) (quoted by Santato in Pier Paolo Pasolini: L'opera, pp. 29—30). 26 Santato, Pier Paolo Pasolini: L'opera, p. 34.

The Poiesis of History

66

relations in his poems of the past and present, the old and the new. And it is possible to extend the notion of a crisis inherent in change to the political themes Pasolini incorporated in his verses.

Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, in his anthology Poeti italiani del Novecento, has expressed a view of the relation between literary history and death in modern sepulchral verse more explicitly political than Vattimo’s. In his opinion we can understand twentieth-century lyric verse only in terms of its opposition to bourgeois social institutions and to the growth of cap¬ italism.2' Mengaldo cites Montale and Sereni as poets whose cults of the dead function to conserve and introject the practices of a civilization in which this Sereni s

custom

has disintegrated or been “overcome” (for example,

Sopra un imagine sepolcrale”). What poetry preserves in Men-

galdo’s view is nothing less than humanity’s symbolic and mythmaking activity. If poetry’s social function has been reduced in the era of com¬ modification, its sacredness has increased.28 This view of the modern lyric’s development as a reaction to the com¬ modification of artistic production within a determined historical context indicates just how distant Pasolini’s verses are from the shiver-producing graveyard poetry of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centu¬ ries, from what critics have dubbed the “lugubrious arcadia.”29 His po¬ etry is also distant even from the “rural’’ Pascoli, who in the final terzinas of

Sepolcro

depicts a tombstone where death and nature embrace:

Lasciate quell’edera! Ha i capi fioriti. Fiorisce, fedele, d’ottobre, e vi vengono l’api per l’ultimo miele. Che resti sospesa ai due bracci di sasso muffito! Oh! non nuoce! Lasciate che ancora l abbracci la vecchia mia croce!30

Mengaldo, “Introduzione,” p. xxi. See Giorgio Agamben, Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 52. Agamben, along with Benjamin, has outlined in detail how earlier poets such as Baudelaire so fetishized poetry that it became at once worthless as a commodity and consecrated. 29 For example, Aurelio Bertola’s “Noth clementine,” Andrea Rubbi’s “II hello sep¬ olcrale, Vincenzo Monti’s “L’entusiasmo melancolico. ” Wl Pascoli, Opere, vol. 1, p. 743.

Ilaria and Italia

67

(Leave that ivy! It has flowering/heads. It flowers faithfully, / in October, and bees come there/for the last honey. //Let it remain suspended on the two arms/of the mouldering stone! Oh! it does no harm!/Allow me still to embrace/my old cross!)

Despite the fact that the survivor’s voice in Pasolini’s “Le ceneri di Gramsci” resembles the voice in these verses, Pasolini’s sepulchral poems are unlike Pascoli’s in that they evince no eulogy of nature. Pas¬ olini assimilates something from Pascoli but also distances himself. Pas¬ coli’s cross/tomb hums with activity, but twentieth-century sepulchral representations, especially Hermetic ones, tend instead toward immo¬ bility, toward the epigraphic. How will Pasolini inscribe his own sep¬ ulchral verses within the two traditions represented by Pascoli and the Hermetics? Pasolini is certainly drawn to Pascoli’s “active” side, yet his treatment of Ilaria del Carretto’s funerary statue also positions him in an epigonic relation to some of the great figures of Italian Hermeticism. Statuary tout court functioned in the works of Montale and the early Luzi to thematize immobility, loss, and unfulfillment.31 Alfonso Gatto’s poem

Ilaria

is

the most explicit point of reference for Pasolini. The young bride Ilaria speaks, in Gatto’s version, from the beyond (“di la dal tempo che mi vinse a questo/silenzio” [“from beyond the time which conquered me for this/silence”]), to recall the earthly and a beloved:

. . . S’apra nel mio nome corrente il cielo libero sul mare nudo dell’Alpe e si rispecchi come la rondine nel volo! Spalancare

nella dirotta eternita dell’aria io vedo il grido che m’impetra, ‘ilaria Ilaria,” ed esortandomi poi tace la bocca al suo sigillo . . . : “Dormi in pace . . . ”i'

31 Statues appear in the poetry of Montale, an example being the line "la statua nella sonnolenza del merigio” (“the statue in the aftermoon’s somnolence ) in his lamous “Spesso il mal di vivere” (Often the malaise ol life), and in Luzi, lor example, the lint's “la calma eretta delle statue,/delle statue dal volto stornato dal richiamo/d una vot e d’Acheronte” (“the erect calm of the statues/ol the statues with faces averted by the calling of a voice from Acheron”), in “Un brindisi.” 1 have taken these from a discussion by Mario Specchio, in “The Difficult Hope of Mario Luzi,” in The Dialectic oj Discovery, ed. John D. Lyons and Nancy J. Vickers (Lexington: French Forum, 1984), p. 126. 32 Gatto, Aluove poesie, 1941—49, p. 42.

68

The Poiesis of History

(May the unbound sky open/into my swift-moving name/above the Alp’s naked sea and may my name mirror itself just as/a swallow mirrors itself in flight! I see//the cry which turns me to stone/ open into the air’s broken eternity, Ilaria/Ilaria, it exhorts me and lips fall silent /at his seal . . . : “Sleep in peace . . . ”)

Gatto s themes of petrification, immobility, and loss reappear in Paso¬ lini’s lines on Ilaria del Carretto’s sepulchral statue and establish a con¬ tinuity between the two poems. The coupling of Ilaria with the topoi of mountains and sea, which appear in both is a case in point. This conti¬ nuity is much more localized, of course, than the continuity with general romantic sepulchral traditions. If Pasolini’s poem suggests, in the figure of Ilaria, a dissatisfaction with the restrictions of petrified poetics, a dis¬ satisfaction with the spectacular, immobilizing symbols of Hermeticism itself, it must also be recognized that Pasolini strove to revive tradition, but a tradition studied “in the new poets.’’ In an early poem titled “Lingua” (1947), Pasolini already rivals the Hermetics use of statuary as a figure of anxious immobility by making the illustrious Italian verse measure itself, the hendecasyllable, into a horrible statue

of authority and an object of corrupt desire: Ma tu, o endecasillabo di avorio, o madrigale di viola, o statua di poetiche, tra gli smalti e l’acqua dell’Arcadia, etemamente adulta, ami solo la gioia ... e la purezza. Non vuoi peccati, o pianti, di fanciulli! E dunque/ Puo l’angelo pregare nel Partenone? o il martire tomare giglio? L’amore infine e aridita. Ma si, saro reo d’averti amata, o Autorita, io, l’unico, il Segnato.33

(But you, oh ivory hendecasyllable,/oh violet madrigal, oh statue of/po¬ etics, amid the enamel colors and springs/of Arcadia, eternally adult,/ You love only joy . . . and purity. /You do not care for the sins, or la¬ ments, of the young ones!/And so? Can an angel pray/in the Parthenon? or a martyr turn back into/a lily? In the end love is arid./But yes, I shall be guilty of having loved you,/oh Authority, I, the lone one, the Marked one.)

Pasolini, L usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica, p. 94.

Ilaria and Italia

69

Form, we might paraphrase, is so perfect that desire for it is as strong as the guilt it engenders. Yet further on in the poem we read: Amai la statua piii nuda d’amore: dov’ero came essa era avorio. Come farle indossare i maliziosi calzoni che fasciavano fingenuo mio fianco?

(I loved the statue more nude than Love:/where I was flesh it was ivory./How could I make it wear the bewitching/trousers that bound my naive/hips?) These lines illustrate Pasolini’s idiosyncratic but emblematic yearnings to revise traditional poetic forms. This “Dada” putting of trousers on the statue of poetics would certainly not surface in any Hermetic style. And yet it is not exactly a dismissal of the great monument, the painting of a moustache on Mona Lisa. The long poem “L’Appennino” expands, with important variations, on the thematics of “Lingua,” because it too is a transgressive re-dressing of the forms of poetic authority. We note, for instance, that the ontology of poetic expression is thematized in the sepulchral symbol of Ilaria, but that the texture of poetic utterance is dramatically changed with respect not only to “Petrarchan” Italian verse but with respect to Mallarme or the Hermetics. I’m not referring to a renewed subjectivist impulse that would correct the imper¬ sonality of the Hermetics, who largely followed Mallarme’s declaration “I am now impersonal ... an aptitude belonging to the Spiritual Universe to see itself and to develop itself,”34 or some epic dimension of the poemetti. What is unique to Pasolini’s expression is the layering of po¬ etic figurations for the purpose of creating a sustained viewpoint on the issue of cultural history. The sepulchral monument to Ilaria is for this reason figured within a framework of historical periodization with politi¬ cal overtones.35 The poetic figurations pertain, first to Pasolini’s Gramscian historicization of the sculpture’s aesthetic significance, and, second

34 Stephane Mallarme, letter to Cazalis, 14 May 1867 (quoted in Mario Luzi, Studio su Mallarmt [Florence: Sansoni, 19521, p- 70). My translation. 35 Pasolini, whose sepulchral verse has historical and political connotations, explicitly discusses some shortcomings of Luzi’s poetic potrayal of death in his review of Luzi’s Onore del vero, which appeared at the same time as his own Le ceneri di Gramsci. In this review Pasolini concedes that the consciousness of death is always a poet’s inspiration, but criticizes Luzi for the “purity” of his inspiration (Pasolini, Passione e ideologic,, p. 452).

70

The Poiesis of History

to the poem’s two elaborate tropes for Italy (the Apennines and the fu¬ neral monument to Ilaria). The juxtaposition of these tropes constitutes respectively a spatialization of the “national” in its definition as a People (through the trope of the Apennines) and a temporalization of the same by a rendering of Italian art history (through the trope of Ilaria). “L’Appennino” makes a mountain range a protagonist, the title indi¬ cating the predominance of a spatial, even a geographical or geological relief to the poem’s topography. Mountains do, of course, appear regu¬ larly in lyric poetry, but here Pasolini composes a configuration of scenes that departs noticeably from the Petrarchan prototype of the lover roaming hills and plains or even from the prototypical “psychomachia” of Monte Ventoso:

I Teatro di dossi, ebbri, calcinati, muto, e la muta luna che ti vive, tiepida sulla Lucchesia dai prati troppo umani, cocente sulle rive della Versilia, cosi intera sul vuoto del mare—attonita su stive, carene, vele rattrappite, dopo viaggi di vecchia, popolare pesca tra l’Elba, l’Argentario . . . La luna, non c’e altra vita che questa. E vi si sbianca Thalia da Pisa sparsa sull’Amo in una morta festa di luci, a Lucca, pudica nella grigia luce della cattolica, superstite sua perfezione . . . Umana la luna da queste pietre raggelate trae un calore di alte passioni . . . E, dietro il loro silenzio, il morto ardore traspirato dalla muta origine: il marmo, a Lucca o Pisa, il tufo a Orvieto . . .

Ilaria and Italia

71

II Non vi accende la luna che grigiore, dove azzurri gli etruschi dormono, non pende che a udire voci di fanciulli dai selciati di Pienza o di Tarquinia . . . Sui dossi risuonanti, brulli ricava in mezzo all’Appennino Orvieto, stretto sul colie sospeso tra campi arati da orefici, minia¬ ture, e il cielo. Orvieto illeso tra i secoli, pesto di mura e tetti sui vicoli di terra, con l’esodo del mulo tra pesti giovinetti impastati nel tufo. Chiusa nei nervi, nel lucido passo, tra sgretolate muraglie e scoscese case, la bestia sale su dal basso con ai fianchi le tinozze d’accesa uva, sotto il busto di Bonifacio prossimo a farsi polvere, difeso da barocca altezza nella medioevale nicchia della muraglia. [Le poesie, pp. 5—7] (I//Theatre of hilltops, drunken, lime-sown,/silent, the silent moon gives you life,/tender over Lucchesia, on the fields//that are all too human, burning/on Versilia’s shore; so whole at the void/of the sea, the bemused moon on hulls,//in holds, wrinkled sails, after old,/popular voyages for fish between/Elba, the cape of Argentario . . .//The moon—there is no other life—/where Italy is whitened from Pisa,/shut on the Arno, lost in a dead//festival, to Lucca, modest in the grey/light of its relic. Catho¬ lic /perfection . . . //The human moon from these chill/stones reflects the heat/of lofty passions, as if beyond//their silence a dead ardor/sweated from its silent origin;/marble at Lucca or Pisa, at Orvieto//sandstone . . . //II //The moon kindles/only greyness, where azure/Etruscans sleep; it only//bends to hear liturgical boys/lrom Pienza’s cobbles or/Tarquinia’s

72

The Poiesis of History

on the bare,//resounding hills from the Apennines/it hollows out Orvieto, crowded/on the hill suspended over miniature//fields that goldsmiths plow, and the sky./Orvieto, unharmed by centuries, pulp/of walls, roofs on earthen alleys, the mule’s//exodus through pulp of youths /kneaded into the stone.//Closed in its nerves, its lucid gait,/between riven walls and tilting/houses, the mule climbs up from below//with baskets of flaming grapes/on his flanks, beneath the head/of Boniface, about to be dust, defended//by baroque loftiness in the wall’s/medieval niche. [William Weaver, “Apennine,” pp. 195—97])

In these initial tercets the absence of a lyric “I” who observes and re¬ flects on the analogies between mental and physical states is all the more noticeable, since poemetti, of which this is an example, are tradi¬ tionally very long (“L’Appennino” consists of nearly seventy terzinas di¬ vided into seven subsections). The poem’s speaker has, then, no pro¬ nounced relief, except a stylistic one evident in the metrical schemes and the diction, and an editorial one, since someone is framing and presenting the not-always-contiguous views of hill and dale. (Whether the views belong to a fictional speaker or are to be attributed to the author depends on whether one assumes the text is autobiographical; we can say at least that many of Pasolini’s texts use an autobiographical frame to present historical and ideological issues).36 Over the length of the poem an unidentified eye views the many changes of scenery from a perspective that is essentially aerial, and, in fact, one of the landscape images is Rome’s Ciampino airport as its lights dim starlight over the Apennines.3

The views range from rocky, bleached mountainsides to

small hill towns, from the hilltop fortress at Montecassino to the moonlit Tuscan seashores and cities, and, finally, to the littered outskirts of Rome.38 The poem’s spaces appear at first to eclipse, in the composition, the 36 Franco Brevini, Per conoscere Pasolini (Milan: Mondadori, 1981), p. 92, observed that “more than in the programatic terzine of ‘My Discovery of Marx,’ the move to ‘Le ceneri di Gramsci’ can be understood in the geographical frames of ‘Italia,’ where al¬ though the author still follows the trace of a biographical red line (one may remember Ungaretti’s ‘Rivers’), he dispenses with the psychological overtones of previous sections in order to depict objective landscapes.” Pasolini’s letters also point to some auto¬ biographical elements (for example, a trip to Lucca in 1951). 3 The identity of this “eye” or viewer is not resolved simply, rather its “subjectivity” floats in the poem through a “free indirect style.” Pasolini discusses the device of a “soggetto libero indiretto” (free indirect subject) in “II ‘cinema di poesia,”’ in Empirismo eretico, pp. 167—78. 38 See Francesco Leonetti, “Esame dei contenuti attuali, secondo la serie dei poemetti di Pasolini,” Nuova Corrente, nos. 11—12 (July—December 1958): 52.

Ilaria and Italia

73

temporal and narrative structure. The opening section offers only vast vistas on a darkened map of the Apennines, another sample of what De Nardis calls the “dead universe,”39 whose various locales receive changing intensities of lunar light, weak in the thin air of the mountains and on the white marbles of Lucca and Pisa, strong on reflective Versilian beaches. The composition evinces, and indeed best exemplifies, cinematic effects, with their continuum of viewing.40 Although clauses accumulate in the terza rima rhythm (in an unobtrusive “basso continuo”41), the first section is conspicuously lacking in verbal forms and hence in any temporal anchoring. The principal verb form is the present tense of “to be” instead of verbs of action. The effect is of a gigantic, continual “being.” One initially wonders what ought to be made of such a mighty opening for a volume of poetry with “ashes” in the title, and how one ought to understand it when in the third and subsequent sections Pasolini intro¬ duces a second dominant image, the sepulchral effigy of Ilaria del Carretto, the marble for which may have been quarried in the Apennines: V

E assente dal suo gesto Bonifacio, dal reggere la fionda nella grossa mano Davide, e Ilaria, solo Ilaria . . . Dentro nel claustrale transetto come dentro un acquario, son di marmo rassegnato le palpebre, il petto dove giunge le mani in una calma lontananza. Li c’e l’aurora e la sera italiana, la sua grama nascita, la sua morte incolore. Sonno, i secoli vuoti: nessuno scalpello potra scalzare la mole tenue di queste palpebre. IP. 7]

39

De Nardis, Roma di Belli e Pasolini, p. 87.

40

Agosti draws analogies between Pasolini's cinema and his poems in “La parol a fuori

di se,” pp. 127-54. To be more precise, in Agosti's view the text's construction mimics continuity by constructing a syntactic continuum that functions as an analogue of the real. 41 See Fortini, “Metrica e liberta,” in Saggi ilaliani, p. 327.

74

The Poiesis of History

(Boniface is absent from his gesture,/David’s hand is heavy, holding/the sling, and Ilaria, only Ilaria . . . //Within the cloistered transept/as in an aquarium, her eyelids are/of resigned marble, her breast//where her hands join in calm,/absent being. Here is Italy’s dawn/and evening, its lean//birth, its dying without color. /Sleep, the hollow centuries; no scal¬ pel/can lay bare the tender massiveness//of these eyelids. “Apennine,” pp. 197—99])

[Weaver,

Ilaria’s folded hands have none of the capacity for action of the hand of Michelangelo’s David. She lies supine with none of the mountains’ nor the male’s might. Pasolini counterposes the imposing, timeless, national geographical terrain and an “inanimate’’ historical figure. In terms of the history of class struggles, Ilaria stands metonymically for a defunct aris¬ tocracy. Her monumental Luccan tomb was dismantled shortly after her death when her husband, a Guinigi, fell from power, when, precisely, the aristocracy had conceded its dominance to the growing “middle” mercantile class in the fifteenth century. But in Pasolini’s iconography, “sleeping” Ilaria comes to represent not so much a social class that history has discarded as the cultural patri¬ mony of that class; this patrimony is “Italy” itself, which can be identi¬ fied as a nation by its substantial cultural debt to this elite, those who, like the Guinigi, portrayed themselves in the “rest of the elect.”42 For although the nobleman Guinigi was the patron for della Quercia’s great piece of funerary sculpture, the statue “belongs” to the milieu of the early Renaissance as much as Italian “cultural” nationhood does. The aesthetic nature of Ilaria as a symbol for nationhood well into the twentieth century emphatically reveals an important tenet of Pasolini’s view of Italian national history, which he derived from Gramsci and his predecessors: Italy exists as a nation by virtue of a “cultural” phenome¬ non, the Italian Renaissance, but politically it is weak, which Pasolini links to the female sex. (It is telling that he links Ilaria to youth and neglects her death in childbirth.) In Pasolini’s view, that Italy was late becoming a political entity has important consequences for twentiethcentury Italian literature. The cultural or “rhetorical” construction of Italy, culturally dominant as it may be, was too feeble to establish hege¬ mony. At the same time, the variety and richness of its stratifications, epitomized in Pasolini’s Rome, derive from these “weaknesses” and het¬ erogeneity. Ilaria alludes symbolically to this paradox in her portrayal as 4' Philippe Aries discusses the iconography and morphology of sepulchral monuments in this historical context in L uomo e la morte dal Medioevo ad oggi (Bari: Laterza, 1985). He makes it clear that the image of the “eletti al riposo” (“rest of the elect”) survives in Christianity from an already abandoned eschatological model (p. 116).

Ilaria and Italia

75

both marginalized (female) and dominant (aristocratic). Since the unifi¬ cation of Italy led not, in Pasolini’s view, to a genuine renovation but instead, ultimately, to Fascism, Ilaria is a sleeping beauty never awak¬ ened by a “prince,” or even a “duce” (for Gramsci both the Risorgimento and Fascism were mere “passive revolutions,” which did not truly change the social order). She quite effectively evokes Italy’s brief but splendid emergence (“aurora”) as a cultural collectivity and its subse¬ quent demise, or its subsequent existence only in an al di la or in a dream. That she is female signifies, following a long tradition, elusiveness and difference. Her death or “sleeping” has specific associations, however, with the twilight of the Renaissance and onset of the Counter Reformation. Pasolini’s earliest critical observations about the Renaissance illumi¬ nate his specific iconographic retrievals. In a letter to Luciano Serra, written in 1943, when Fascism could be seen to be near defeat, he links the demise of Fascism with the reemergence, or renewed closeness, of the demise of the Renaissance: Freedom is a new horizon, which I had fantasized about and, yes, desired, but which now, in its raw coming into fact, reveals such moving and unim¬ agined aspects that I feel as though I have become a child again. I felt within me something new springing up and affirming itself, with unfore¬ seen importance: it was the political being that Fascism had without war¬ rant suffocated unbeknownst to me. Now life seems longer to me: the rhetorical Fascist youth is but a state of inexperience and thus we . . . find ourselves, and rightly so, in need of reeducation. And History seems closer, in the events of half a century past which we had approached so neglectfully and temporarily. Do you believe me, Luciano? My nostrils are filled with the scent of recent deaths; the earth of the cemeteries of the Renaissance has just been turned and its very tombs are recent. And we have a true mission, during this frightful Italian impov¬ erishment, a mission not to gain power or wealth, but to attain education, civilization.43 Italy’s freshness and youth are not to be found, the author now under¬ stands, in Fascism’s program for a renewed Rome, for a newly vital “giovinezza” (from the eponymous Fascist song), but Italy’s youth is to begin in the newly near post-Renaissance. It is as though the end of Fascism had swept away history from the Counter Reformation forward. Pasolini does not, I hasten to add, exhort Italy, as Mussolini did, to awaken after centuries of deep drowsiness. And llaria/ltalia in “L’Ap-

u Pier Paolo Pasolini: Lettere 1940—1954, pp. 184—85.

76

The Poiesis of History

pennino” is hardly the combative lady of flesh and blood found in Risorgimental paintings and meant to stir up national desire. However beautiful, Pasolini’s Ilaria resists not only a princely kiss but even the enterprise of artistic reanimation, since “no scalpel/can lay bare the ten¬ der massiveness/of these eyelids.” Pasolini’s articulation in this poem of the problem of a new sense of history, of revival both political and artistic, is a small stroke of genius in that it draws upon a work of art, the statue of Ilaria, which was itself done in a style that mixed past and present in one object. Jacopo della Quercia’s sculpture combined the Medieval manner of Pisan wood sculp¬ ture in the stylized folds of the drapery with both the “new” individual portraiture in the lady’s countenance and an “old” imitation of the an¬ cient Roman sarcophagi, in the putti and garlands of the tomb decora¬ tions. The statue of Ilaria is already a reworking of traditions, and in a sense stands for that process of revision-by-combination, for the mixed style. The “massiveness” of those marble eyelid enclosures of “Italy” are both what is past, the tradition as della Quercia revised it, and what is to come, the weight of the centuries of a new dormancy. The phrase “Italy’s dawn/and evening” echoes the condensed temporality inscribed in the sculpture’s superimposition of styles, which also stands to indicate art’s susceptibility to assimilation—and to “dissimilation.” Style functions like Ilaria’s eyelids: by hiding the eye, the eyelid hides death; at the same time the closed eye announces death. Such, Pasolini seems to suggest, is the cultural inheritance of the Renaissance. How is Pasolini going to rewrite the statuesque and funereal, if mixed, poetics of that epoch and, to judge from the number of poets who wrote verses on the monument, his own epoch? Here we must approach Paso¬ lini’s concept of ideology, which was influenced by Gramsci. Attempting to save the Marxian concept of ideology, as articulated both in the pref¬ ace to the Critique of Political Economy and in The German Ideology, from overly mechanical materialist conceptions of the relationships of economic base and cultural/intellectual superstructure, Gramsci devel¬ oped a notion of ideology/hegemony not only as “false consciousness” but as a potentially positive and unifying “conception of the world.” Pasolini regularly employed the Gramscian term hegemony not only in the fifties but even more frequently in his essays collected in the later Empirismo eretico,

especially when discussing the “Italianization of

Italy” under neocapitalism. An important illustration of the historical complexity of “hegemonies” (the plural is significant) touches precisely on the Italian Renaissance, which Gramsci considered progressive as it contributed to the cultural and intellectual development of Italian and European elites, but essen-

Ilaria and Italia

77

tially reactionary in terms of what he calls national-popular culture.44 Drawing on excerpts of Giuseppe Toffanin’s Che cosa fa VUmanesimo, published in 1929, and on Croce’s view of Renaissance artists as an aristocratic circle, Gramsci was intent on showing that latinate Human¬ ism was in large part responsible for turning intellectuals into a caste, incapable of going beyond aristocratic refinement and an academic, root¬ less cosmopolitanism that actually supported papal cultural dominance.45 Additionally, the epoch (which began a cultural regression, according to Francesco De Sanctis and his followers, due to “foreign servitude”) pro¬ duced only superficial democratic reforms, whereas the Reformation was seen by Gramsci as a true mass movement. Following De Sanctis, but in a socialist vein, Gramsci urges, among other things, renewed contact with the “popular.” It is obvious then, how noble Ilaria came to repre¬ sent an aesthetic figuration of the “absence of a real national life” in Pasolini’s poem.46 A corollary of Gramsci’s view is echoed in modified form in Passione e ideologia, in which Pasolini eulogizes the Communes and attempts to explain a flowering of popular poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in terms of an emergent bourgeois class that was separate from the “feudal/episcopal elite.” Pasolini refers there to the birth of the “communal civilization” as the “highest moment of Italian political history” (p. 164). Ilaria is close to that splendid age and also to its suppression. How do these reflections on the Renaissance affect the poetic present? A quotation from Passione e ideologia is telling in this regard. Pasolini’s observations are tucked away in an essay on Pascoli, at a point in which he is attempting to show an inherent defect in that poet as an “intellec¬ tual” for whom “life [is] in sum reduced to the poetic function. The same limitation applies to La Voce's whole twentieth-century production ... to La Ronda and the Hermetics’ reactions. It is, in the end, a bourgeois or petite-bourgeois, post-Romantic meaning that has been attached to the typical figure of the writer in Italian society from the Renaissance to the present” (p. 269; emphasis added). In his next breath, Pasolini evokes Gramsci’s influential but “moralistic” view that Italian literature is the exclusive product of intellectual elites, “whose stylistic history is the history of individuals protected ... by a social condition that preserves the I in its aesthetic passion aimed at cultivating religious or inward abnormalities or a classicizing or exquisite otium” (p. 269). Pasolini seems to agree, at least on this score, with Gramsci’s view of Pascoli as

44 See Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, p. 188. 4> I draw here on Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo, p. 257. 46 Leonetti, “Esame dei contenuti attuali,’' p. 54.

78

The Poiesis of History

a writer who attempted but failed to overcome the separation of the intel¬ lectual elite from the “people” by adopting an “admitted and militant nationalism,” especially in the “Poemi Risorgimentali.” Pasolini adds, in his conclusion, that Pascoli failed because his lin¬ guistic innovations had no ideological extensions: “His is not the lin¬ guistic broadening of a Manzoni or a Verga. In the case of the latter, one has an ideologically originated realism linked to a vision of the world that presupposes a point of view that moves beyond that world and hence enlarges and at the same time unifies it in its immense complexity (in this case, a linguisitic complexity). In Pascoli that linguistic broadening is always a function of the intimate and poetic life of the /, and there¬ fore, of the literary language in its centralized and ultimately still-tradi¬ tional moment” (p. 271). These two sets of observations contain several pertinent points for “L’Appennino.’’ First, the remarks revolve around national literature and the role of intellectuals, a preoccupation that had surfaced in earlier books, especially Uusignolo della Chiesa Cattolica and, indirectly, “Dov’e la mia patria?” (Where is my nation?), as well as in Pasolini’s theory and practice pertaining to the literary use of dialects.47 Second, Pasolini adroitly transposes his criticism of Pascoli into the poetic structure of “L’Appennino” through

his strategy of “broadening” and

through his rejection of an inward searching /. Third, and more important for “L’Appennino,” Pasolini hints that poetry has routinely engaged in mon¬ umentalizing ever since the Renaissance. But what exactly does that mean? We can say, drawing an anthropological analogy, that the sepulchral symbol in “L’Appennino” effectively represents poetry’s own paradoxi¬ cal, or even fetishistic operations,4* in the sense that the marble effigy of the departed’s form (the body) at one level signals a separation (the body is no longer a body but only the contents of the sepulcher) and hence the distance of the departed’s essence (soul); as such it represents an ac¬ ceptance of death. At the same time, the effigy denies death by provid¬ ing a substitute for the departed’s “form.” The funeral monument com¬ municates a dialectic of acceptance and denial that humans engage in individually and collectively when faced with a loss. By analogy we can say at a second level that poetic language both accepts and denies the

4 See Thomas O’Neill, "11 filologo come politico: Linguistic Theory and Its Sources in Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Italian Studies 25 (1970): 63—78. w As suggested by Agamben, Stanze, especially the chapter “Freud o l’oggetto assente.” Urbain, “Morte,” p. 543, describes a similar ambivalence in anthropological terms in a discussion of funerary rites, which acknowledge separation but render separa¬ tion from the dead acceptable by interrupting the separation with food-giving rituals and preparations for the dead person’s afterlife.

Ilaria and Italia

79

absence of an absolute signified: its presence as form evokes the separa¬ tion and the distance of an essential “signified” and denies that absence of an absolute signified by substituting its own form, the poetic “monu¬ ment” in its place.49 These themes certainly surface in “L’Appennino,” a poem that is also in itself an opinion on poetic monumentalism in Italian cultural history. Yet to understand the temporal, historicizing nature of the poem, we must go beyond the significance of Ilaria’s funerary figure to examine her repeated image in the poem’s seven sections. The long form of the poemetto drastically complicates in fact the vertical poetics of the iso¬ lated symbol. Consider Agosti’s useful term the “continuum of viewing” in the con¬ text of the poem’s opening sections. Although the landscapes presented are not filtered through an “/” who would provide continuity of percep¬ tion, even in the disjointed form of memories, the mountain views are linked not only by a syntactic and metric continuum but by the repeti¬ tion of phrases such as “beneath the moon.” Since, however, the poem presents us with seven long sections, we cannot say that the lexeme “moon” persists as a unit of semantic organization. Agosti correctly ob¬ served that the minimal unit in Pasolini’s poetry is the segment, which is not so much lexical as rhythmical.30 Agosti confined his analysis to the sectional level and did not analyze the relationships between sections, but it is there, in fact, that a “suprasegmental” configuration emerges that allows Pasolini to move away from the “objectivist” poetics of Mon¬ tale, for instance.51 Pasolini’s own poem may be basically a list, but it is a list of historically developed geographies rather than a list of objects with ontological weight. At the suprasegmental level different generic considerations enter into play. Considering “L’Appennino” as an instance of the long poem permits us to examine it more closely in the context of its generic positioning, in both its formal and thematic aspects.

49

Vattimo discusses the issue in “Ornamento monumento,” in La fine della modernita,

in which poetry is seen as posthumous, as “a funerary monument, made to bear some¬ one’s trace and memory over time, for others” (p. 81). 50 Agosti, Cinque analisi, pp. 132—33, asserts additionally that Pasolini’s experimental use of hybrid genres and his experiments within genres (for example with stanzaic form in the poemetto) is part of the poet’s “dantismo,” but that it is secondary, in the context of trying to define his “up-to-dateness,” to how Pasolini deconstructs “discourse” and contracts “sense.” Although this is true, Agosti has not considered Pasolini's use of allusions to “anachronistic” genres to construct a “historical sense.” 51 Pasolini viewed these as reductive “aesthetic rationalism” indicative of an ahistorical approach to the real (Passione e ideolgia, p. 292).

80

The Poiesis of History

The “inter-sectional” relationships in “L’Appennino” are in any case not terribly complex. The first structural articulation appears logically at the end of section 1 and depends simply on the transfer of the thematics of death and silence from the nightscape forward. The word “moon” appears in the first tercet of section 2, which introduces a new semantic element in a chain-like fashion appropriate to the terza rima: the image of Etruscans sleeping in the moonlight. The verb “to sleep” and its con¬ tiguous semantic fields provide the element of continuity in a verbal series that is otherwise rather wildly disconnected. For instance, the closing image of the second section is a “medieval/niche in the city wall” in the small city of Orvieto. As this distorted temporality begins to suggest a dream sequence, the issue of identifying the dreamer becomes progressively more pressing. It is at this point that the phrase “beneath the eyelids,” repeated in each section of the poem, takes on a structuring function. The images presented to the reader move out of the original nightscape to present new sleepers. Indeed, the last four sections revolve around a great num¬ ber of Italian sleepers, whole towns and human figures in turn. Although Ilaria’s closed eyelids are her synecdochical mark, the visions that un¬ fold behind those lids do not necessarily pertain to her individuality, except as she personifies Italy and represents all the other sleepers in the poem—the subjects of visions, dreams, and every sort of angle of vision presented in the text. The following previously quoted lines, which open section 4 depict, for example, visions other than Ilaria’s: Beneath shut eyelids, among his lice laughs the boy from Cassino . . . through the colonial nights when Ciampino blinded with washed-out Stars hums with the planes of monarchs. [P. 199] These lines both present a perspective on the sleeper and are projected from inside the scenes that transpire before an inner eye.52 These two perspectives correspond spatially to the views from above and below. Pasolini foregoes the verbal sequel to the oft-repeated “beneath shut 32 Walter Siti interprets the eyelid in the context of Pasolini’s often-repeated theme of the “membrane”; the latter is both a point of contact and separation and can be related to “the imaginary place in which the possibilities of knowing are played out; the place in which opposites are created as the Fs means of identification” (II Neorealismo nella poesia italiana, 1941—1956 [Turin: Einaudi, 1980], p. 208).

Ilaria and Italia

81

eyelids,” leaving out subject and predicate. Thus the reader cannot readily determine quite to whom the projected visual scenes belong. The busy nocturnal life presented in these tercets certainly contrasts the static marble portrait of Ilaria, and yet the female figure as a subject seems to disappear only to emerge again in the following passage of the same section, which reads: . . . All’Italia non resta che la sua morte marmorea, la brulla sua gioventu interrotta . . . Sotto le sue palpebre, nel suo sonno, incamata, la terra alia luna ha un vergine orgasmo nell’argenteo buio che sulla frana dell’Appennino sfuma scosceso verso coste dove imperla il Tirreno o l’Adriatico la spuma. [P. 9]

(Italy has nothing left/but her marble death, her barren,//interrupted youth . . .//Under her eyelids, in her sleep,/the earth, incarnate, in the moonlight/has a virgin transport in the silver//dark that on the landslip of the Apennine/declines, steep, towards coasts where/the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic foam is pearled. [Weaver, “Apennine,” p. 201]) Ilaria/Italia collapses with the landscape lit by the moon’s rays. Through this incarnation Ilaria, mountains, and earth become one with those other dreamers embodied in the boy from Cassino who dreams with an erection (“membro gonfio”). In the final section, those other dreamers are likened to the inhabitants of Rome, at least those of her non¬ bourgeois classes. All the grammatical subjects of the phrase “beneath the eyelids” (Ilaria, the mountain dreamers, the rural populace, the Romans) come to represent Italy in her “interrupted youth.” The reasons for such an un¬ likely grouping in one poem, along with an explanation of Pasolini’s poetics of “interruption” in general, can be gleaned from his essay “A1 lettore nuovo” (To the new reader). There Pasolini makes explicit the principal analogy of the poem, which proceeds in its last section from the figure of Ilaria to a description of Roman slums; indeed, he made clear just what the subproletariat, the mountain populations, and Ilaria, share: “In the slums of the Roman subproletariat the pre-Alpine spirit

82

The Poiesis of History

persists; the clean earth, the woods, all accumulate formally in the typo¬ graphical spaces dictated by the necessities of the terza rima, in the form of retarding elements.”53 They are what is absent from and dormant in the national life, absent from the “national” Italy of the Risorgimento. They are the necessary interruption that functions to delay a progression (poetically speaking, the terza rima). They are the locus of a paradoxi¬ cal—since it is sexually marked—purity Pasolini attributes to all of the seemingly unrelated dreamers in his poem. It becomes clear in retro¬ spect that the poem is still close to his production in dialect, insofar as it takes “present absence” as a major theme. “L’Appennino,” the opening poem of Le ceneri di Gramsci, is, then, transitional since it presents the theme of formed silence together with the more diachronic themes sur¬ rounding the nation, classes, and history. What is new is that the symbol of Ilaria does not alone constitute the “diachronic thickness”; rather, her figure loses its exclusive association with high culture and is itself part of a series of accumulations and necessary interruptions. Pasolini’s mul¬ tiple subjectivities function as a critique of Italian philosophical thinking on beauty, form, poetry, and the monumental. The issue of who is dreaming the ever-accumulating series of land¬ scapes, which have burst their temporal frames, naturally affects the temporality of the poem—and hence the subject of history. It is difficult to determine the narrative present, a problem compounded by the ab¬ sence of an “I.” Since stagnation and vitality, joined in the tropes Ilaria/ Apennine Italy, is its paradoxical topic, this particular poem does not strive, as some others by Pasolini do, to give us the sensation of the passing of time, much less to represent some advancing, epic, popular struggle. Any story line that seems ready to move ahead is interrupted and turned back.54 And at this juncture we must approach another of Pasolini’s fruitful contradictions: the Apennines and their mountain pop¬ ulaces come to represent the same absence from history’s “forward” march that Ilaria, immobilized in her monument, represents. The “re¬ gressive” Roman subproletarians figure that same absence from history, a removal that becomes a source of vitality: history has ironically saved these people from history, isolating them from its negative, hegemonic side. They have escaped what Pasolini called the “Italianization of Italy.” Ilaria may be released from the weight of her status as a national icon—by the author who interrupts a hegemonic poetic tradition. In this

53 Pasolini, “A1 lettore nuovo” (quoted in Brevini, Per conoscere Pasolini, p. 25). 34 Agosti has studied how Pasolini’s syntax contributes to this dual movement, a prorsus enacted by the discourse and the movement a rebours that results from the poetry (figures, metrics, lexical patterns) (Cinque analisi, p. 141).

Ilaria and Italia

83

strange, not quite allegorical configuration of events, this “absent” or non-Italian history is ultimately the equivalent of a dream. The point is that what is absent or unwritten in history is not therefore nothing any more than a dream is. But what does this other dreamy, and undeniably real, historicity imply in the context of poetic or cultural transmission? This question is central to the poem’s overall construction as a textual “palimpsest.” Pasolini’s structuring of events over the seven sections is based on accumulations of other “moments” and interruptions and not just on those which pertain to Ilaria/Italia. Almost all of the “events” revolve, however, around aesthetic history, which functions as an indica¬ tion of or metonomy for social and political configurations. Architectural history, for example, is another generative matrix of these moments (de¬ pictions of Renaissance portals, Romanic styles, and piazzas, etc.) with which Pasolini counters, in a very original way, the view that historical literature must portray official historical events. Like Gramsci, Pasolini foregrounds the cultural. By the end of the poem, the connotations surrounding the statue of Ilaria as the emblem of Italy’s immobilized and regressive cultural inher¬ itance (the lack of a real national life) have been displaced by much more positive connotations connected to the preconscious dream state, “sotto le palpebre.” The weak Italian nationality associated with Ilaria can also be a strength, a paradoxical vitality linked to the preconscious, pre-historical way of being of the people as they are represented in both “L’Appennino” and “Le ceneri di Gramsci.” Ilaria’s monument repre¬ sents the aestheticizing cultural myth of Italy, which was already inher¬ ent in early Renaissance poetics, at the same time that it situates her in “pre-history.” How Pasolini treats Ilaria is similar to how he textualizes Rome in “Le ceneri di Gramsci.” Ilaria persists as a historicizing ’'resi¬ due” and at the same time as an indication of a “coming before”: she is twilight and dawn, the disappearance of the negative Renaissance cul¬ tural formulation described by Gramsci and the emblem of the poten¬ tiality of dreams, and even death. Pasolini’s use of the sepulchral genre, of course, strengthens this representation. Ilaria is also the positive sign of what Pasolini calls the “retardant,” the power of a historicizing image to disturb the antihistorical modern times and to disturb the inattentive¬ ness of high poetry to the ideological. This power is akin to the power of extraneous elements generally, such as the lowest social classes in the Roman bosom of western civilization in Ragazzi di vita. The historical icon possesses both a contact value and the force of alterity. It inhabits and disturbs, posthumously, the modern age, just as past literary forms may inhabit modern verse. In Passione e ideologia Pasolini further clarifies his view ol specifi-

84

The Poiesis of History

cally Italian history and the literary past. As is often the case, his point of reference is the nineteenth century. In “Notarella su Carducci” (Brief note on Carducci) Pasolini aims to elucidate “coexistent and stratified” (p. 346) currents of Romanticism and Classicism in Carducci. Pasolini criticizes those literary forms which fuse the historical with the mythical (the historical novel during Romanticism, for instance), writing: “In the depths of Carducci’s soul there is a tendency toward the evasive which is typically Romantic: the cult or myth of the past that renders the future utopic—complete with the Romantic armory of ruins, the land of one’s birth, the nation as a mythic element, etc., etc.” (p. 347). One might legitimately ask how Pasolini’s own invective poems on the subject of the nation depart from that climate, since some have found in them “copious humanist perspiration.”55 And Pasolini’s work, although less cultish than Carducci’s, certainly qualifies as a latter-day embodi¬ ment of contrasting currents. What is significant, however, is that his¬ tory appears in Pasolini as a backdrop and not as “the cult or myth of the past.” The backdrop has a specific function in Pasolini’s literary composition,

since, for example,

an essential structural element of

“L’Appennino” is movement from the foregrounded statue to the back¬ ground of the Apennines and back. The art historian’s terminology (de¬ rived from Roberto Longhi) Pasolini adopts in Passione e ideologia indi¬ cates his keen awareness of the backdrop’s importance for current innovations in poetic style, such as his own revival of the poemetto. In Pasolini’s opinion, the Neorealists were the first to introduce a historical background after Hermetic poetics had emphasized the indeterminate “as a grey on which to print greys; without classical luminous fore¬ grounds . . . without any differentiation—a la Proust—between the min¬ imal and the maximal, between the inconsequential, precious detail and large-scale sociopolitical phenomena” (pp. 337—38). In his essay “La confusione degli stili,” Pasolini goes on to fault the Hermetics for the disappearance of Italy from poetry. Neorealism is praised instead for breaking out of certain poetic fixations by using an “antirhetoric and a mixed style; in sum, they rediscovered what stylistic critics call the concrete/sensible. In this instance, the concrete/sensible was Italy, alive and speaking, an Italy that had disappeared for twenty years” (Passione e ideologia, p. 337). It is ironic that the high art of the ventennio was not national and that Italy needed to be dug out again after the war. For Pasolini the Fascist era predates the “Italianization of Italy.”

Enzo Golino, “Gli scrittori e la cultura letteraria nella societa italiana,” in II Novecento, vol. 9, ed. Gianni Grana (Milan: Marzorati, 1979), p. 8584.

Ilaria and Italia

85

One may recall here the cultural debates on the intellectual left con¬ cerning the “Italian way to socialism” promoted by Communist party leader Palmiro Togliatti, whose politics were influential in the Cultural Commission meetings of 1951, the year in which “L’Appennino” was composed. Commission member Carlo Salinari wrote of Italy’s need to save “the nation’s cultural patrimony,” and he proposed his own con¬ trasting currents: a “mediation between Marxist orthodoxy and the Ital¬ ian tradition of De Sanctis and Gramsci.”56 Togliatti himself stated that “socialist culture is such in fact for its content but it is national in its form.”57 This view prevailed until the 1956 Twentieth Communist Party Congress (a subject of Pasolini’s “Una polemica in versi,” the last poem in Le ceneri di Gramsci), after which the public learned of Stalin’s purges. After 1956, many leftist Italian artists and intellectuals began to view with alarm the notion that culture—be it in form or content— should be at the service of “ideological” progress, since it could be used to justify silencing dissent. Pasolini believed that literature can only follow the “serpentine” dividing line between the bourgeois past and an as-yet-unachieved socialist future, and was willing neither to abandon socialism nor to follow a party line. Yet these cultural polemics are in some way the story behind “L’Appennino,” a story which is not directly present but which informs the text by effecting a selection of subject matter (nationhood, the single versus the collective voice) and the selec¬ tion of multiple viewpoints. These are meant to allude to the shifting and conflicting “presences” that are not yet true “interlocutors” or, to use Gramscian terms, that never achieved hegemony. In this light, the story of “L’Appennino” appears to found itself on a drama “of discontent” (p. 328), of dissatisfaction with the whole of Italian cultural life, including cultural politics. It is Pasolini’s dissatisfaction that prevented him from conceiving of himself, or any subject, collective or not, as a spokesman for his audience’s own cultural, historical, and mythic heritage, much less as the privileged narrator of the tale.58 Pasolini’s work exemplified instead both a critique of the “Italian way to socialism” and an example of a new definition of poetry as radical historicity. It is clear from this outline of Pasolini’s view of the relationships of history and literature that he refused to write “mere interior history” and (unlike his Carducci) to write and transmit history as “the cult or myth ol the past that renders the future utopic.” “Residues of the great modes of

56 Quoted in Asor Rosa, “Lo stato democratico e i partiti politici,” p. 599. 57 Ibid., p. 601. 58 Bernstein finds that the privileged narrator is a prerequisite of the modern verse epic (The Tale of the Tribe, p. 14).

86

The Poiesis of History

knowledge of the past” (p. 323) present Pasolini with a gnoseological problem, which he uses to structure poems that continually displace aesthetics and ideology.59 Pasolini steps out of determinism and turns the Marxian imperative to historicize to his advantage: he incorporates histori¬ cal allusions in his poems in order to question received notions of cultural historiography and to reflect the complexities of the literary heritage. “L Appennino” ends, tellingly, by evoking anew Rome’s mixed style: . . . Quaggiu tutto e preumano, e umanamente gioisce, contro il riso del volgare fu ed e inutile ogni parola di redenzione: splende nella piu

ardente indifferenza dei colori seicenteschi, quasi che al sole o all’ombra non bastasse che la sola

sfrontata presenza, di stracci, d’ori . . .

[P. 13]

(Down here/all is pre-human, and humanly rejoices,//against this vulgar laughter was/and

is

useless

any word /of salvation;

here

shines the

most/ / glowing indifference in colors/of the baroque, as if for sun/or shade there was needed only//this bold presence, of rags, gold . . . [Weaver, “Apennine,” p. 205])

In summary, Pasolini’s poetry has successfully stratified, in his own ‘rags ’ and “gold” if you will, literary, intellectual, and social history. The political potentials of civic poetry continue to engage Pasolini and to nourish his critique of Italian poetic history—a critique that in subse¬ quent years finds its clearest expression in the genre of the lament.

Santato, Pier Paolo Pasolini: L opera, pp. 184—85.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Sorrow and Genre

The poetic figuration of Ilaria del Carretto’s sarcophagus in “L’Appennino” demonstrates that Pasolini’s view of Italian poetic history evolved within the context of political history, but it is through the genre of the lament that Pasolini poetically renders what Giorgio Caproni called his “political sorrow.” Poems such as “II pianto della scavatrice” and “Una polemica in versi” in Le ceneri di Gramsci make the losses inherent in historical transformation their primary subject. Pasolini adopts a stylized language of grieving to great effect, drawing both on the folk laments anthologized in his Canzoniere italiano and on a long and illustrious literary tradition. As with the sepulchral elegy, Pasolini’s laments re¬ shape a form that extends from the Old Testament laments, the classical planctus, and the Provencal planh forward to modern laments such as Carducci’s “Pianto antico.” One could in fact isolate elements from these earlier examples and locate them in Pasolini’s verses. The author titled a section of La meglio gioventu “II vecchio testamento,” and we find something of its rhythms in “II pianto della scavatrice,” which contains a recounting of tribula¬ tions reminiscent of Psalms. When Pasolini’s verses resemble Lamenta¬ tions, current history is recast in the voice of despair. The influence of Provengal poetic forms is hinted at in the epigraph to La meglio gio¬ ventu, taken from Peire Vidal, while the political overtones of “11 pianto della scavatrice” and “Una polemica in versi” are distantly reminiscent of Sordello’s versified polemics. Because of the very mixture of elements extracted from the various historical forms of lament, lamentation, and “complaint,” one cannot, on the one hand, view the separate poems as strongly encoded generically. And in this sense, the term “pianto' in the titles of several of the poems can best be understood, in terms ol con-

88

The Poiesis of History

tent, to refer to what Leonetti called simply “the bleeding valve of change.”1 On the other hand, looking at a number of congeneric poems from Pasolini’s corpus allows us to understand how generic references to the lament provide the “coordinates through which the individual poem can be apprehended and understood.”2 A study of Pasolini’s use of this genre as it evolved throughout his poetic career allows us to delve into how he saw the poetic voice itself to emerge in relation to loss and sorrow and, finally, to trace his turn away from poetry to cinema as a new means of expression. Pasolini had already coupled sorrow and the civic in II Setaccio, in an essay written when he was just twenty years old. In his “Ragionamento sul dolore civile” (Discourse on civil sorrow) Pasolini develops several fundamental ideas on the relationship of poetry to love of country. He first analyzes, in the rather philosophical vein that characterizes many of his early writings, what he terms “the thought of the infinite.” This ap¬ pears as a hallmark of his civilization, one that distances, ironically, the concept of the civic itself from a more humble, familial, protective sense of community experienced in infancy and youth. The idea of infinity brings a sorrowful consciousness of mortality, with the result that a sense of social unity exists only as nostalgia. He writes: “The thought of infin¬ ity has at this point separated us from the humble . . . traditions of family existence; the river, the meadow, and the vineyard that protected the infancy of our mothers and our own are fixed behind our footsteps, fixed by an unmoving nostalgia, by an unchanging dream. In the eve¬ nings, we go into our fields or homes and there—trembling—we note time’s beat and the years’ outcrop and their voices; so, slowly, in our sweetest places, we erect our sepulchers.”3 This same sense of mortality led men to, and was counteracted by, the concepts of movement and conquest, “those concepts which in other times laid out the path for mankind: the unknown, glory, travels, strug¬ gle, the nation, God” (Pasolini, “Ragionamento,” p. 57). In Pasolini’s version of the story of the human race, in these times those concepts have exhausted themselves. Even infinity has, paradoxically, become limited. It has, in our twentieth century, been stripped of its “material”

1 Leonetti, “Esame dei contenuti attuali,” p. 60. See Claudio Guillen’s “On the Uses of Literary Genre,” in Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 122. 3 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Ragionamento sul dolore civile,” in Pasolini e “// Setaccio 1942—1943, ed. Mario Ricci (Bologna: Cappelli, 1977), p. 57. Henceforth cited par¬ enthetically in the text.

Sorrow and Genre

89

nature (e.g., the afterlife) by the intervening centuries, which dispelled “mystery.” The unknowable is currently present only in an oxymoronic “wakeful and vigilant lethargy,” and it can be perceived only “through the affectionate symbols of a past that returns and of the present that thus consoles itself in sorrow ... in the rare symbols of one’s birth home, or one’s mother or of something else dear to us” (p. 57). After this long preface, Pasolini explains that the awareness of infin¬ ity’s demise as a material construct allows for a reconstruction in the present of worn-out concepts of community, brotherhood, and nation: “In this way the ancient attributes of human life, which seemed to have been exhausted by long use, have regained their value: solidarity, progress, charity, customs. But above all I would like to dwell on the concept of the nation [patria], which in its very abstract meaning, seems to have difficulty in resurfacing ... by means of some symbol that would purify it. . . . Nonetheless, one may believe in the nation poetically, just as one may believe poetically in God” (p. 58). The concept of civil national sorrow is ready to be stripped of nineteenth-century rhetoric, and to be defined by Pasolini as “a sorrow that exhausts itself in the consciousness of its necessity. It is an attribute of noble populations \popoli], and the fruit of centuries of brotherhood. Will I need to exhort the Italians to consider history? To remember their youth and their very ancient ori¬ gins? Perhaps it would not be utterly useless. . . . History must be earned. The prize corresponds directly to desire’s suffering. He who has the more desperately hoped shall have the greater joy. These are the conditions of civil sorrow, and its ends” (p. 58). The young writer here attempts both to redefine the misguided patriot¬ ism of the Fascist era in which he grew up and to redefine the relations of poetry and love of country. The brief essay illuminates his charac¬ teristic thematic combination of sorrow, the poetic, love, and politics— thematics that understandably are often cast in some reconstruction of traditional literary forms that might evoke the positive force of the ideas. The genre of the lament, loosely defined, had a prominent role in the evolution of Pasolini’s work precisely because as a historically defined form it provided an intersection of style and content suitable for his project of refurbishing the concept of civil sorrow. The form also evinces an important internal development in Pasolini’s work. At the outset of his career, Pasolini’s laments most often portray young departed souls who may be associated either with the ‘"ghosts" ot his mother’s girlhood or of his own boyhood. One example is the poem “Fantasie di mia madre” (Fantasies of my mother), written contem¬ poraneously to “II dolore civile." It represents the mother's grief over a departed male figure and at the passing of the years:

90

The Poiesis of History Pi, cumd l’e domenie, l’e dut un susura: ma il me vis l’e come silensi tal siga. Par lis fras-cis lontanis ’i sint Cenci cianta: quant che ic ’a era vif —in tal di dai afans. Ah, nini, tal me vis, ’a s’ingriimin i agns. (Figlio, oggi e domenica, e tutto un sussurrare: ma il mio viso e come il silenzio nelle grida. Per le frasche lontane sento Cenci cantare: quando egli era vivo —nel giomo degli affanni. Ah, fanciullo, nel mio viso, si raggrumano gli anni.) [P. 56]

(My son, today is Sunday, /all is whispers:/yet my face resembles/the si¬ lence within a crying out./I hear Cenci singing/in the far-off woods:/when he was living/—on the sorrowful day. / Ah, my boy, the years gather/on my face.)

Over a period of approximately ten years, the deaths or endings Pasolini evoked in his laments begin to move in a variety of directions, and we find, for instance, the poem “El Testament Coran,” about a young parti¬ san killed by Nazis. Other early laments are “Corus in muart di Guido,” “11 lament di Pieri,” and the long epic/social drama I turcs tal Friiil. The latter was written in 1944 and contains the kind of lament—with medi¬ eval and Renaissance progenitors—that mourns defeat and destruction. In it the Turkish invasion of Friuli at the end of the Quattrocento, the subject of the work, stands for the German occupation of Northern Italy during World War II.4 These newly historical topics, along with the ori-

4 Brevini has observed that in / turcs tal Friiil “the existential question is projected on the background of a historical collectivity that causes the individual lament to slip to-

Sorrow and Genre

91

gins of some poetic forms and themes, are the subject of a note to the long, poetic “family epic” “I Colus”:

In the “I Colus” ( my mother’s family name) section, the events that tran¬ spire in the years between the Treaty of Campoformido, the resistance at Osoppo in ’48, Sedan, and Caporetto, are “historical” in their extreme humility: they are written in the meter of epic/lyric canzoni, which, inex¬ plicably, are quite scarce in Friuli. Friulian villotte (with modifications) still make up the dialogue between Cenci and Biela Fransesina in Ricciolin d’amore [Curly headed love] (together, nonetheless, with a “Canta alia stesa” from Romagna and other motifs, both lyric and narrative, com¬ mon in the whole of Italian popular poetry).

In “II quaranta quattro”

the final verses are freely translated from the Bible (Jeremiah 5 and Baruch 5).* * * * 5 6

The years in which Pasolini composed the poetic volumes Uusignolo della Chiesa Cattolica and La meglio gioventu6 were, as the passage illustrates, years in which Pasolini began avidly to collect and study popular poetry. His Canzortiere italiano: Antologia della poesia popolare (1955),7 which bears across its cover the phrase “This book was written by the Italian people,” can be studied just for Pasolini’s stylistic experi¬ mentation. There is an entire section devoted to the Friulian four-lined, rhymed Malinconia, a lament form that Pasolini echoes in his own

ward the choral planh,” and that the text was modeled after Tommaseo’s Canti del popolo greco, specifically the “canti cleftici” on the Greeks’ battles against the Turks (Per conoscere Pasolini, p. 37). Santato has remarked on the probable influence, in terms of the epic/social genre, of Nigra’s Canti popolari del Piemonte, with their “village, regional character” (Pier Paolo Pasolini: L'opera, p. 108). Pasolini himself quotes Nigra in a note to La meglio gioventu (Florence: Sansoni, 1954), in which he observes that the narrative genre was not indigenous to Friulian poetic forms and that he has grafted the narrative strain from Piedmont. In the early phase of the development of the lament genre, we can conclude, Pasolini combined the Piedmontese narrative with the content and the often emotional, exclamatory tone of a Friulian “Malinconia,” which is typically very short. Fortini has noted, concerning the general picture of postwar poetry, that the break with Hermetic tastes came about in the North among writers who were “more sensitive to narrative/discursive modes,” associated first with the review Momenti and later with Officina (I poeti del Novecento |Bari: Laterza, 1977|, p. 162). 5 Pasolini, La meglio gioventu, p. 149. 6 For the complex publishing history of the poems in Friulian see Walter Siti's intro¬ duction in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Le ceneri di Cramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 156— 57. 7 Most of the groundwork for Pasolini’s Canzoniere italiano: Antologia della poesia popolare was done in 1952—53.

92

The Poiesis of History

Friulian verses.8 The book also contains a selection of Calabrian funeral chants and a “Lament of the bandit Tramoni.”9 Pasolini’s commentary on the Sicilian “La principessa di Carini” (The princess of Carini) is especially relevant to his use of the lament. He discusses the sixteenth-century composition about the demise of a young Sicilian adulteress (“Chianci Palermu, chianci Siragusa,/Carini cc’e lu luttu ad ogni casa” [“Piange Palermo, piange Siracusa,/A Carini c’e lutto in ogni casa”]10 [“Palermo weeps, Syracuse weeps,/there is mourning in every house in Carini”] at considerable length, revealing in the process his awareness of the philological problems related to the genre to which the poem belongs: This short narrative poem occupies in the South the role that the “Lombard Lady” holds in the North. The analogies are obvious regarding themes and the similar power of influence of the two different forms of popular narra¬ tive; furthermore, similarities abound if we consider the type of questions they have raised and the philological studies that have sprung up around them. In this case it is once again necessary to establish a relationship between the poetic fact and the historical fact and to take into considera¬ tion whether the two are contemporaneous. More general questions and specifically aesthetic ones are grafted onto this issue.11

The relationship between the historical event and the text as it has been handed down to us—whether or not adultery was actually committed by the princess of Carini and at whose hand she died—is not important here. It is important that Pasolini views the aesthetic problems posed by the poem (what it means, for example, that such a poem is anonymous) as subordinate to the critical issue of how to establish “a relationship between the poetic fact and the historical fact.” It is also significant that Pasolini emphasizes the narrative character of the popular lament. Since narrative forms were not in his view indigenous to Friulian poetry, we may see “La principessa di Carini” and other poems of the Canzoniere italiano as models for the epic-style poems he composed in that lan¬ guage. Pasolini makes it clear in his commentary on how “La princi¬ pessa di Carini” has been variously interpreted in light of historical re8 An example of the Malinconia: “Dul di me, dul de me vite,/Dul di me tant zovenin. . . ./Doi la muart a me morose, /Se jo tiri il niimar prin” [Pasolini, Canzoniere italiano, p. 113] (“Pieta di me, pieta della mia vita, pieta di me cosi giovanino . . . Do la morte alia mia ragazza se mi tocca ii numero primo.”) (Have pity on me, pity on my life, on my youth ... If I am dealt the first number. It will be my beloved’s death). 9 Ibid., p. 176. 10 Ibid., p. 309. 11 Ibid., p. 434.

Sorrow and Genre

93

search that the lament, as a genre, has strong associations with the his¬ torical. Pasolini exploited the intersection of history and poetry in his own laments, for example “I pianti,” a long work on his grandmother’s death and burial, and “El Testament Coran.” The “pianto” has, additionally, an “ideological curvature,” which can be traced in some detail, and which can already be discerned in some early Friulian poems and in Uusignolo della Chiesa Cattolica,12 From this standpoint, the serial composition “La scoperta di Marx” (The dis¬ covery of Marx) occupies an important position. Pasolini composed it after Friulian agricultural workers occupied lands under the De Gasperi government in 1948. The poem is not, however, about that event. It is addressed to his mother, Susanna Pasolini, and opens with a reflection on the proximity of birth and timelessness, which vanishes progressively as youth turns into adulthood—which is marked by being in time, in history. Like Pasolini’s sepulchral verse, this poem has a metapoetic dimension: it is also about the “life and death” of poetry itself. To be in time is to fall into prose and death; to be removed from time is to live in poetry:

I Puo nascere da un’ombra con viso di fanciulla e pudore di viola un corpo che m’ingombra o, da un grembo azzurro una coscienza—sola dentro il mondo abitato? Fuori dal tempo e nato il figlio, e dentro muore . . .

Ill

Come sono caduto in un mondo di prosa s’eri una passeretta.

12 The term “curvatura ideologica” (“ideological curvature”) was coined by Mengaldo, Poeli italiani del Novecenlo, p. 781. The poem’s dominant tone is based, according to Mengaldo, in “a ceremonial and mortuary Catholicism, sensual and obsessive, with Ba¬ roque tints” (p. 782).

94

The Poiesis of History un’allodola, e muto alia storia—una rosa— o madre giovinetta era il tuo cuore? in questo ordine manifesto da te il mondo mi accetta?13

(I//May a cumbersome body/with a child’s face/and the violet’s mod¬ esty//be bom of a shadow/or may an azure womb/bring forth a con¬ science—lone//within the inhabited world?/The son was bom outside/ time, and in it he dies. . . .//Ill//How is it that I fell/ into a world of prose/if you were a swallow,//a skylark , and your heart/was mute before history—a rose—//oh young mother? in this/order manifested by you/will the world take me in?)

“La scoperta di Marx” concerns the discovery of a historical world view that seems prosaic to the poet/speaker when compared to his mythic/ poetic youth, the loss of which deserves a lament. Yet recall the value Pasolini placed on civil sorrow; it is possible to see that not only are the myths of heroism, country, and struggle ripe for reconstruction, but also the nineteenth-century notion of history. History is, like love of country and the sense of community, available to us when we are aware of its intrinsic distance, its poeticity. “11 pianto della scavatrice” also stands at an intersection of the poetic and the historical. “La scoperta di Marx” suggests remorse at being in time.14 “Il pianto della scavatrice,” however, constitutes a sustained re¬ flection on temporality and history. With its well-wrought internal struc¬ ture, articulated in six sections of tercets, it is one of Pasolini’s best and most complex compositions. The poem portrays a new, mechanized, vi¬ brating lament issuing from the anthropomorphized excavator working to erect new buildings on Roman soil: Ma tra gli scoppi testardi della benna, che cieca sembra, cieca sgretola, cieca afferra,

13 Pasolini, L’usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica, pp. 139 and 141. “La scoperta di Marx” is dated 1949. 14 Vicenzo Mannino writes: “The Italian language and historical time ‘are the walls' of the new world in which Pasolini enters” (Invito alia lettura di Pier Paolo Pasolini [Milan: Mursia, 1974], p. 63).

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quasi non avesse meta, un urlo improvviso, umano, nasce, e a tratti si ripete, cosi pazzo di dolore, che, umano, subito non sembra piu, e ridiventa morto stridore. Poi, piano, rinasce, nella luce violenta, tra i palazzi accecati, nuovo, uguale, urlo che solo chi e morente, nell’ultimo istante, puo gettare in questo sole che crudele ancora splende gia addolcito da un po’ d’aria di mare . . . A gridare e, straziata da mesi e anni di mattutini sudori—accompagnata dal mu to stuolo dei suoi scalpellini, la vecchia scavatrice: ma, insieme, il fresco sterro sconvolto, o, nel breve confine dell’orizzonte novecentesco, tutto il quartiere. [Le poesie, p. 113]

(But amid the stubborn explosions of the/rock-crusher, which blindly dis¬ members,

blindly/crumbles,

blindly grabs,//as though without direc¬

tion,/a sudden human scream is bom/and periodically returns,//so crazed with pain it seems suddenly/human no longer and becomes once more /a dead screech. Then slowly it’s//reborn in the violent light/among the blinded buildings, a new/steady scream that only someone dying,//in his last moment, could hurl/into this sun, which still cruelly shines,/though softened by touches of sea air .

.

.//The scream is the old excava¬

tor’s,/tortured by months and years/of morning sweat—accompanied //by silent swarms of stone-/cutters; but it’s also the freshly/convulsed earth's, or, within the narrower//limits of the modern horizon,/the whole neighbor¬ hood’s. [Pier Paolo Pasolinis Poems, p. 51])

This lament has for its subject the transformation of the poet’s world as it is embodied in the landscape of Rome (describing specifically the build¬ ing expansion on the city’s outskirts). In his longest poem, Pasolini sings

96

The Poiesis of History

The lament of the excavator: Pasolini at the outskirts of Rome Photo: Angelo Pennoni

Sorrow and Genre

97

his love for the “stupendous, miserable city,” which was for him the very home of “gnosis,” of “experience,” as he winds along avenues and side streets, through the dark corners of Trastevere, and past previous abodes toward his suburban home. At the end of an evening’s urban wandering, the poet comes suddenly upon a building site for a new block of apart¬ ments and contemplates at length a moonlit (there is irony here) excava¬ tor, the digging machine that has crumbled the earth and left a trail of grave-like chasms and now rests on its side, on a motionless, truncated arm. In the poem’s climax, the speaker recounts how one morning from his bed he heard construction workers wielding the exacavator, whose straining revolutions muster this sudden, “human” scream. By evoking workers in the context of urban expansion, Pasolini refers to the Marxian view that the subproletariat must inevitably enter history if there is to be revolutionary change. The excavator’s cry laments change, even change for the better. On the one hand, the “red rag of hope,” which is the poem’s final image both marks the danger zone of the construction site and signifies hope for a socialist future. On the other hand, the class transformation required by Marxian progress im¬ plies the end of the lower and marginal classes’ resistance to the domi¬ nant culture, which marginalization itself had encouraged. Progress means the end of what Pasolini, referring to “a proletarian life,” called in “Le ceneri di Gramsci” the “allegria” (“joy”) of the lowest classes of the Roman “popolo.” In another reading of the construction scene more pertinent to the subject of the literary palimpsest, the murderous excavating machine can be taken as the negative figure of the epuratore (“purifier’), of the scholar-excavator in the essays of Passione e ideologia. The tragically new apartment to be built in the wake of the destruction wrought by the mechanical excavator can hardly be a good home for the expert on “the confusion of the styles.” One possible meaning of the poem is that the excavator is digging a grave for the poet of the palimpsest and that the spot of red is his blood—“questa spenta tinta di sangue” (“this laded shade of blood”)—shed at the “death of poetry.” The “pianto” of the title refers then both to the universalized grief sung by this decrepit machine and to the poem’s own status as a meta¬ literary “pianto.” “II pianto della scavatrice” is one of Pasolini’s most tragic compositions because it presents not only sorrow for what is lost but also sorrow at what is new. The poem’s nocturnal “flaneur ’ (“stroller ) depicts Rome as his splendid Alma Mater who has taught him all he knows;15 what he has learned, however, has changed him. Beyond the 15 Golino discusses the “inno all’Alma Mater” (hymn to the Alma Mater) in Pasolini: II sogno di una cosa, p. 129.

98

The Poiesis of History

thematics of Rome as the home of a vital populace and as the locus of actual and potential destruction by the digging machines of the builders, the text therefore combines a civic sense of loss with a more elegiac sorrow over intimate disappointments. We learn on the opening page of the poem about the anguish that has befallen the speaker: disamore, mistero, e miseria dei sensi, mi rendono nemiche le forme del mondo, che fino a ieri erano la mia ragione d’esistere. Annoiato, stanco, rincaso. [P. 93]

(mystery, misery/of the senses cut me off from//the world’s shapes, which were till/yesterday my reason for living./Bored, tired, I return home. TP. 25]).

At the beginning of the second section we read: Povero come un gatto del Colosseo, vivevo in una borgata tutta calce e polverone, lontano dalla citta e dalla campagna, stretto ogni giorno in un autobus rantolante: e ogni andata, ogni ritorno era una calvario di sudore e di ansie. [P. 97]

(Poor as a cat in the Coliseum,/I lived in a slum of dust clouds/and lime¬ stone, far from city,//far from countryside, squeezed each day/onto a wheezing bus;/and every trip back and forth//was a calvary of sweat and anxiety. [P. 29])

The “story” takes place, according to the speaker, during the same ten years evoked in the phrase “la fine del decennio” (“the end of the dec¬ ade ) in

Le ceneri di Gramsci,

the ten years following the end of

World \fyar II and divided by Pasolini’s traumatic move to Rome. II pianto della scavatrice” presents these years in an explicit narra-

Sorrow and Genre

99

tive review made by the poet/speaker. The narrative frame covers less than twenty-four hours but contains occasions for laments that reflect the entire decade that is Pasolini’s topic. As the speaker is returning home to the Roman outskirts from the center, he reflects on the many other times he has done the same thing before, then with joy. He comes upon the excavator, sleeps at home, dreams (an extended section of the poem), and awakens the next morning to the sound of the “excavator’s lament.” The main verb of the narrative frame is the simple “rincaso” (“I return home”), and it appears several times, for the brief journey occu¬ pies the first three of the poem’s six sections. The tone in these early sections is reminiscent of Leopardi, since the lonely poet reflects on his “difference” while observing Romans prom¬ enading gaily. The poem’s narrative structure resembles that of Leo¬ pardi’s “La sera del di di festa” (The holiday evening) in that it narrates despair and solitude contrasted with the gaiety of others and ends in an outpouring of grief over Rome’s long-departed splendor. Pasolini’s narrative frame is much more extensive than Leopardi’s. The numerous stops on his Roman itinerary evoke disjointed memories that inspire carefully developed thoughts on transformation and stagna¬ tion. These musings retroactively unfold a detailed story of conflict and growth at contact with a changing world that is told with the accents of praise and of unrequited love, a new amor de lohn (love from afar): Un’anima in me, che non era solo mia, una piccola anima in quel mondo sconfinato, cresceva, nutrita dall’allegria di chi amava, anche se non riamato. [P. 98]

(A soul within me, not just mine,/a little soul in that boundless world,/ was growing, fed by the joy//of one who loves, though his love is unre¬ quited. [P. 31])

The articulation of that story of transformation, now over, is of course affected by its arrangements, determined by the despairing state of mind of the narrator in the present, as he contemplates the excavator and cries out in sorrow: Che pena m’invade, davanti a questi attrezzi supini, sparsi qua e la nel lango, davanti a questo canovaccio rosso

100

The Poiesis of History che pende a un cavalletto, nell’angolo dove la notte sembra piii triste? Perche, a questa spenta tinta di sangue, la mia coscienza cosi ciecamente resiste, si nasconde, quasi per un ossesso rimorso che tutta, nel fondo, la contrista? [P. 102]

(Why does such grief invade me, facing/these tools scattered in the mud,/in front of this red warning flag//hanging from a sawhorse in that comer/where the night seems saddest?/Why, facing this faded shade of blood,//does my conscience so blindly resist/and hide, as if obsessed by/a remorse that deeply saddens it? [P. 37])

The passage is not only an example of an exclamatory style typical of laments, it also illustrates how Pasolini is able masterfully to shift tem¬ poral directionality and allow the narration of the past to be replaced by an awareness of the future transformations implied by the presence of the excavator. The form of the lament governs the narrative as the poem recounts what has befallen the speaker. The outpouring of sorrow then interrupts the narration with cries of

why? . . . why?” so sustained that

they constitute a reflective dialogue between the lamenting self and both the city/lover and the excavator/time. The narrative and these outpourings of sorrow alternate in a pattern that one can see in detail by analyzing the verbal sequences. The quickly paced opening section achieves its intensity through a rapid al¬ ternation of past and present moments; the second section deals exclu¬ sively with the past, with the poet s growing love for his new Roman world. The third section is divided almost evenly between past and pre¬ sent, as if to signal the split between the past and present “I,” between the man who was blossoming and the one who has once again been deadened, who has become a specter of himself, who has become the departed one to be lamented. The third section, after the poet/speaker’s hymn to the city and his first moonlit vision of the resting excavating machine and the trenches it has dug, contains an important apostrophe to Time that recalls once again the theme of remorse (“rimpianto”): Su tutto puoi scavare, tempo: speranze passioni. Ma non su queste forme pure della vita ... Si riduce ad esse l’uomo, quando colme

Sorrow and Genre

101

siano esperienza e fiducia nel mondo . . . Ah, giomi di Rebibbia, che io credevo persi in una luce di necessita, e che ora so cosi liberi! Insieme al cuore, allora, pei difficili casi che ne avevano sperduto il corso verso un destino umano, guadagnando in ardore la chiarezza negata, e in ingenuita il negato equilibrio—alia chiarezza all’equilibrio giungeva anche, in quei giomi, la mente. E il cieco rimpianto, segno di ogni mia lotta col mondo, respingevano, ecco, adulte benche inesperte ideologic . . . Si faceva, il mondo, soggetto non piu di mistero ma di storia.

[Pp. 103-4]

(You can quarry into anything, time: hopes,//passions, but not these pure shapes/of life . . . which man is /reduced to, when experience//and trust in the world/are achieved . . . Ah, days at Rebibbia/which I thought lost in a light//of need and which I know now were so free!//Along with my heart, among/the hardships and hazards that had diverted/its progress to¬ ward a human fate,//my mind—gaining in passion the denied/clarity, and in ingenuousness/the denied equilibrium—//was in those days finally at¬ taining/clarity and equilibrium. And blind/regret, mark of my whole struggle with//the world, was being rejected by ideologies/that were ma¬ ture though not experienced . . ./The world was becoming the subject//no longer of mystery but of history. [Pp. 37—39]) We learn here that adulthood’s retrospective view allows the subject to understand remorse at temporal being as a sign of epistemological strug¬ gle and to see that the adult ideologies temper “blind remorse” (my emphasis), which characterizes both the thematics of mourning prevalent in Pasolini’s early work and the melancholia in Roma 1950, Diario. The retrospective view (“now 1 know”) turns what had been perceived of as necessity, the poverty of the symbolically charged Rebibbia era, into freedom associated with historical knowlege and the names of “Marx, or

102

The Poiesis of History

Gobetti, Gramsci or Croce” (Pier Paolo Pasolinis Poems, p. 38). It is ironic that, although these verses have as a theme the tempering of sor¬ row by historical knowledge, or by understanding oneself to be in his¬ tory, they are themselves a lament for the time when that consciousness was unfolding. The discovery of history is in its turn historicized, lost, and lamented. The retrospective view also allows the speaker to evoke his past self as spectral and phantasmatic. This self is in fact evoked in the whole of the fourth section, a dream sequence. As Rinaldi has observed, the dream sequence interrupts the poem’s narrative continuity, but it recon¬ structs “the unity of the phantasm.”16 The sleeper’s room becomes a clearing in which a path appears. The section opens with what seems a strange blend of elements from earlier in the poem and from the speaker’s deep past: Mi stringe contro il suo vecchio vello, che profuma di bosco, e mi posa il muso con le sue zanne di verro o errante orso dal fiato di rosa, sulla bocca: e intomo a me la stanza e una radura, la coltre corrosa dagli ultimi sudori giovanili, danza come un velame di pollini . . . E infatti cammino per una strada che avanza tra i primi prati primaverili, sfatti in una luce di paradiso . . . Trasportato dalfonda dei passi, questa che lascio alle spalle, lieve e misero, non e la periferia di Roma: “Viva Mexico/” e scritto a calce o inciso sui ruderi dei templi, sui muretti ai bivii, decrepiti, leggeri come osso, ai confini di un brucianto cielo senza un brivido.

[Pp. 105-6] Rinaldo Rinaldi, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Milan: Mursia, 1982), p. 124. Rinaldi views this unity as an indication that “the system of the imaginary ‘holds’; despite all, it resists ; however, he offers us no insight into the political references to 1956 superim¬ posed on the erotic dream.

Sorrow and Genre

103

(He’s holding me against his old/sylvan fleece and, with his boar’s/or wandering bear’s fangs, lays his//muzzle on my mouth, breathing a rose’s/ breath; and all around me the room’s/a clearing, and the blanket, cor¬ roded//by the last sweat of youth, dances/like swarms of pollen . . . And in fact/I walk along a road advancing //into spring’s first meadows/ dissolving in a light of paradise . . . / Carried along on the wave of my steps,//light-hearted, poor, I leave behind me,/not Rome’s remote slums: “Viva/Mexico!” is dabbed with whitewash and scratched//in temple ruins, on low walls at crossroads / decayed and light like bones, at the edges/of a sky on fire, unshivering. [P. 41])

Subsequently, the speaker/dreamer takes a second walk, not through Rome but through an Apennine city, along a main thoroughfare, through Renaissance portals, past a Romanic fountain and the caved-in shell of a frescoed church. In these tercets, as in the dream of the bear, the la¬ ment disappears until the end of the section (the confirmation that what has transpired was just a dream comes only in section 5, in the poem’s “anticlimax”17) with the speaker in a state of limbo, unable to recognize the sensations he is experiencing:

E come quegli odori che, dai campi bagnati di fresco, o dalle rive di un flume, soffiano sulla citta nei primi giomi di bel tempo: e tu non li riconosci, ma impazzito quasi di rimpianto, cerchi di capire se siano di un fuoco acceso sulla brina, oppure di uve o nespole perdute in qualche granaio intiepidito dal sole della stupenda mattina. Io grido di gioia, cosi ferito in fondo ai polmoni da quell’aria che come un tepore o una luce respiro guardando la vallata

[P. 108]

17 Fortini, Saggi italiani, p. 140, uses this term. He adds: “It is difficult not to he amazed by the constructive genius which [Pasolini| gives proof of.”

104

The Poiesis of History

(It’s like those smells from freshly/bathed fields or the river’s shores/ blowing toward the city in the first//days of good weather; and you/can’t quite place them and, almost/crazy with regret, try to discover//if they come from fire lit on frost/or grapes or medlars lost/in some granary warmed by this//stupendous morning’s sun./I shout with joy, wounded/to the depths of my lungs by this air//I breathe like light or warmth/as I contemplate the valley/. . . .[P. 45])

The dream section concludes with the rising of the morning sun and the cry of joy. A final one-line ellipsis follows, which signals a telling dis¬ continuity in the transition from section 4 to section 5 and censures, we hear in section 5, “quel basso atto umano/consumato nel sonno mattutino” (“that base human act/consummated in a morning’s slumbers”). And it is precisely the transition between the orgasmic dream and the waking moment that occupies the last two sections of “II pianto della scavatrice.” Sections 5 and 6 unfold in the present of that morning, as the speaker comes to consciousness and the excavator starts its work day. The ellipsis between sections 4 and 5 signals a pause that separates the orgasm from his consciousness of it: “ecco che tu ti accorgi che sogni” [p. 110] (“and now you realize you are dreaming”). Section 5 opens with a view of the poet’s own lower body in bed and describes this “reawakening” in a fascinating way, since the thoughts that come imme¬ diately to occupy his mind revive warring passions: . . . E in te ridesta e la guerra, e Dio. Si distendono appena le passioni, si chiude la fresca ferita appena, che gia tu spendi l’anima, che pareva tutta spesa, in azioni di sogno che non rendono niente . . . Ecco, se acceso alia speranza—che, vecchio leone puzzolente di vodka, dall’offesa sua Russia giura Krusciov al mondo—

ecco che tu ti accorgi che sogni. [P. 110]

(And in you reawake/the war, and God. The passions/are only slightly pacified, the fresh wound’s//barely healed, when you spend/the soul.

Sorrow and Genre

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which seemed already fully spent/in dream actions ending in//nothing . . . Now

the

old/lion,

stirred

by

hope,/reeking of vodka,

from

his

of¬

fended//Russia, Khrushchev swears to the world—I now you realize you are dreaming. [P. 47])

The pivotal final line—“now you realize you are dreaming”—points to the gnoseological problem inherent in the “action” of an erotic dream. The sensations are real enough, but the subject is not immediately aware that the experience is only a dream. So it was for Pasolini’s “Roman love,” and perhaps for the fervor “in ogni paginar in ogni riga/che scrivevo” [p. 104] (“in every page, in every line I wrote”). Significantly, such dreams end in nothing. The same might apply to politics, and in that short phrase “from his offended//Russia, Krushchev swears to the world,” Pasolini seems to assert this. He expresses a polemical view (not out of place in laments) that the hope Krushchev held out to the world was probably an illusion, despite his revelations of Stalin’s purges and his subsequent de-Stalinization programs. (“II pianto della scavatrice” was written before the Soviet invasion of Hungary later in 1956.) Pasolini’s point here is to allegorize, if you will, the oxymoronic na¬ ture of a moment of awakening, of “revelation,” even the revelation of Rome as a “maestro.” In “II pianto della scavatrice,” the “knowledge” of the “unknowing” states, such as the dream, seems to be the only knowl¬ edge or “gnosis” available not only to the poet as he considers his past but to the leaders of the superpowers. Pasolini has brilliantly composed the various strands of narrative and the phantasms of his lamentations in such a way that they converge here at the intersection of the erotic dream and the events of 1956—the end of the “decennio.” In the inter¬ section, the poem’s opening statement of lament reappears because the poet himself is present to the world now only “involuntarily,” as though in a dream.18 In section 6, the poem’s denouement, the sounds of the excavator’s lament reach the poet/speaker’s room from the construction site. The beloved “borgata” is being cleared to make way for clean courtyards and new block buildings, “brulicante/in un ordine ch’e spento dolore” [p. 114] (“swarming/in an order made of stifled grief’ [p. 53]). This “spento dolore” cannot be understood favorably as a release from suffering; it is

18 The dream of section 4^ the preparation for the climax, enacts another disassociation, for it is in that section that “I,” who views himself as another in the dream is constantly referred to as “you” (“tu”) (“tu non li riconosei,” “cerchi di capire”). In all of section 5 “io” is “tu” (“il giorno e ora su di te,” “tu ti accorgi che sogni”).

106

The Poiesis of History

instead suffering muffled or “deadened.” It is part of a syntactical con¬ struction that contains no forward-looking tenses. The excavator cries out its lament as construction workers mutely raise their red rag of hope: Piange cio che muta, anche per farsi migliore. La luce del futuro non cessa un solo istante di ferirci: e qui, che brucia in ogni nostro atto quotidiano, angoscia anche nella fiducia che ci da vita, nell’impeto gobettiano verso questi operai, che muti innalzano, nel rione dell’altro fronte umano, il loro rosso straccio di speranza. [P. 114]

(The crying is for what changes, even if/to become something better. The light/of the future doesn’t cease for even an instant//to wound us: it is here to/brand us in all our daily deeds/with anxiety even in the confidence//that gives us life, in the Gobettian impulse/toward these workers, who silently raise, in this/neighborhood of the other human vanguard,// their red rag of hope. [P. 53])

The flag-raising in these verses is not unlike the one found in the earlier “dream actions ending in/Znothing.”19 Significantly, the adjective “muti” (“silently”) serves to emphasize a void, with the result that the dream of a socialist future symbolized in the red rag cannot be disassociated from the void of a deadened dolor linked to the newly urban Roman outskirts. Like the spectral figure of the dream sequence who can no longer

'' I disagree with those two important critics: Santato who sees the final gesture as a portrayal of a '‘palingenesis in the making’’ (Pier Paolo Pasolini: L opera, p. 177), and Fortini, who reads these lines as evidence of Pasolini’s acceptance of reformist positions. Fortini understands Pasolini’s thematization of hope as a release from the anguish of the postwar years filled with setbacks for the “progress of socialism’’ (i.e., Stalinism). Fortini asserts that the final section of the poem resolves this contradiction between hope and setbacks positively, constituting a “‘yes’ to reform” (Saggi italiani, p. 141). Rather than reading in these lines a contradiction or even a “superimposition” (see Siti, II Neorealismo, p. 169), I understand them to represent the elusive nature even of the histori¬ cal understanding of events that Pasolini confessed were at the basis of his love for the “Roman” world.

Sorrow and Genre

107

achieve a vital presence unto himself, these silent cadres advance into the future with only a red flag, perhaps in the direction of a problematic reawakening of their own. The borgata’s sorrow is distant from the en¬ abling sorrow described in Pasolini’s “Discourse on civil sorrow.” There hope both derives from and fuels the “civil sorrow,” a kind of illuminat¬ ing despair that could have led to a new sense of love of country and community. When this dream of political sorrow as an impetus to the forging of civic bonds fails, the image of the socialist red flag can return only in a new genre, that of the polemic. Pasolini in fact recast the sorrowful final images of “II pianto della scavatrice” in the poem that follows it in Le ceneri di Gramsci, “Una polemica in versi,” and completely changed their tone.20 He inveighs against the bureaucratization of the Party, and accuses its leaders: Avete, accecati dal fare, servito il popolo non nel suo cuore ma nella sua bandiera: dimentichi che deve in ogni istituzione sanguinare, perche non tomi mito, continuo il dolore della creazione. [P. 121; emphasis added!

(Blinded by doing, you have been of service /not to the people’s hearts// but to their flag: forgetful/that in its every institution it must/bleed, so that it won’t once more be a myth,//constant the sorrow of creation.)

We can read here Pasolini’s objection to a cultural politics linked to perspectivism, a concept he described (in a note to the poem outlining its polemic against “apriori-ism”) as a “naive and quasi-illiterate (and also bureaucratic) theoretical coercion” (p. 138). He then advanced his view that “in a society such as our own, a state of sorrow, crisis, and division cannot simply be repressed in the name of some coerced state of health paid for in advance and seen in ‘perspective’” (p. 138). In both his verses and the note, Pasolini underlines suffering’s importance to 20 In June of 1956 Pasolini came under attack in II conlemporaneo for an essay entitled “La posizione,” which complained of perspectivism in that journal and L'Unita. In his note to the poem he counters the charges and explains that his accusations were made in “good faith” (Le poesie, p. 139). The same issues are treated in the two poems, but one is a lament, the other closer to the polemical serventese. “Pianto noted, workers; “Polemica,” party leaders.

depicts, it should be

108

The Poiesis of History

any kind of creativity or change that is more than slogan-making or flag¬ raising. How is it that poetic signification arises out of this sorrow? How is it that Pasolini’s poetics emerged in the context of a thematics of separation and loss, and how did that process lead to Pasolini’s aban¬ donment of poetry? The title poem of Poesia in forma di rosa (Poetry in the form of a rose), a volume of verse collected from the years 1961-64, is contempo¬ rary with the poet s first films and marks a point both of rupture and of transition.21 In it one may follow the course of the death of poetry for Pasolini, as he becomes a ‘poet on the sidewalk.” Simultaneously, one may follow Pasolini s new career as a director and a proponent of an incipient 4 cinema of poetry.”22 It is in the cinematic realm that Pasolini continues in the later part of his career his quest to represent the cre¬ ative power of sorrow, especially political sorrow. I shall begin by shift¬ ing backwards to his beginnings, and I shall next contrast two versions of Poesia in forma di rosa,” which in their differences demonstrate how the serious lament is transformed, and destroyed, by parody. Then, I shift my analysis forward, briefly, to Pasolini’s cinematic theories. I will examine three thematically compatible poems, each containing the image of the rose: A na fruta, from Poesie a Casarsa (1942), “Poesia in forma di rosa,” and “Nuova poesia in forma di rosa.” Pasolini’s roses evoke, in these compositions, a long European lyric tradition beginning with the Roman de la Rose. He does not fail to ex¬ ploit the connotation given in Christian iconography to the rose as Mary, the trait-d'union between Heaven and Earth, nor does he fail to adopt aspects of literary forms linked to her praise, such as the laudi. The tradition is updated, however, and in the poem “11 pianto della rosa,” for instance, the author puts forward a “decadent” speaker who engages in a lament/soliloquy addressed to his mirror image.23 It is best to include, for the practical purposes, the entire first poem and its Italian translation, as close analysis of “A na fruta” yields essen¬ tial characteristics of Pasolini’s earliest poetics:

I draw in my analysis of these poems from my article “Reading Pasolini’s Roses,” in Symposium 36, no. 3 (1982): 207-19. 22 This ^ the title of an essay in Pasolini’s Empirismo eretico, pp. 167-85, written in 1965. Santato, Pier Paolo Pasolini: L opera, p. 122, observes that “the mirror provides the basis for the domination of self-consciousness as the end of dreams, as a tragedy.” He also notes the influence of a modem such as the Rimbaud of Saison en Enfer, which is evident in Pasolini s apostrophe to a devil/double in another, related composition, “II narciso e la rosa” (The narcissus and the rose).

Sorrow and Genre

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Lontan, cu la to piel sblanciada da li rosis, i ti sos una rosa ch’a vif e a no fevela. Ma quant che drenti al sen ti nassara na vous, ti puartaras sidina encia tu la me crous. Sidina tal sulisu dal solar, ta li s-cialis, ta la ciera dal ort, tal pulvin da li stalis . . . Sidina tal la ciasa cu li peraulis strentis tal cour romai pierdiit par un troi di silensi.

(“A una bambina”: Lontana, con la tua pelle sbiancata dalle rose, tu sei una rosa che vive e non parla. Ma quando nel petto ti nascera una voce, porterai muta anche tu la mia croce. Muta sul pavimento del solaio, sulle scale, sulla terra dell’orto, nella polvere delle stalle . . . Muta nella casa, con le parole strette nel cuore, ormai perduto per un sentiero di silenzio.)24 (To a girl: Far off, with your skin made pale by roses you are a rose that lives and does not speak.//But when a voice shall be born in your bosom, you too shall carry my cross silently.//Silently on the attic floor, or the stairs, on the garden earth, in the stable’s dust . . .//Silently in the house, with words tightly held in your heart, already lost along a path of silence.) In ‘ ‘A na fruta,” the speaker of the poem addresses the young inhabit¬ ant of the idyllic Casarsan world in the opening quatrains, which estab¬ lish a number of dynamic and provocative oppositions inherent in Paso-

24 Pasolini, La meglio gioventu, p. 32. Italian translation by Pasolini.

110

The Poiesis of History

lini’s figuration of the girl/rose. Although the girl’s pale skin contrasts the red of some unspecified roses in the first two lines, she is likened to the rose only for abstract qualities in the second two lines: “you are a rose that lives and does not speak.” The contradiction inherent in these two qualifying traits of vitality and muteness seems puzzling initially. Their symbolic meanings become clearer when the speaker explains in the second quatrain how the young girl will paradoxically become mute when she gains a voice: “But when a voice shall be born in your bosom, you too shall carry my cross silently.” The antitheses multiply: the newly born voice will be silent, and its birth will mean the death implicit in a sacrificial crucifixion. The image of the cross implies that the female figure’s acquisition of speech follows an itinerary not unlike that of the Passion and not unlike the speaker’s own. After the girl has borne the poet’s cross, she touches silence and loss suggestive, however, of unredeemed death. As she begins her Leopardian “opre femminili” (“female tasks”) in the third quatrain, she be¬ comes insistently silent and her heart is “lost along a path of silence.” Pasolini’s allusion leads the reader to wonder if this young girl is not in fact distant (“lontana”) in death, like Leopardi’s Silvia. She takes on the phantasmal quality of the revenant in Pascoli’s “La tessitrice” (The weaving girl), a poem in which the subject only gradually realizes that the figure who appears to him is dead. Yet if the distance in which this figure appears is the distance of death, then the significance of the birth of her voice in death is enig¬ matic and ambiguous. Anna Panicale has pointed out that Pasolini in his early period views birth into the world as loss and expropriation, as an end to an infinity of possibilities and expectations present in a “preexist¬ ence” that birth captures and wrestles into finite, coercive shapes. Since this “decline” begins inexorably from the moment of birth, birth itself and existence come to signify the very impossibility of dreams and a future. Such is the fate of the “fruta.” A negative implication in the birth of a voice becomes clearer if tied to this view of time. The birth of a

voice is another, perhaps final, step on the reversed stations of the Cross away from the redemption of the eternal life before birth. The ambiguity of these verses stems from the fact that the girl’s voice is, however, not just an emblem of the coerciveness of language but

silent. This oxymoron may allude to the paradoxical signifying power of what is as unsubstantial yet as real as death. It is not very difficult then to make the step of linking the girl/rose to poiesis. The rose of the first quatrain is in fact juxtaposed to speech: Pasolini writes “a rose that lives and does not speak.” The rose evokes the qualities associated with a

Sorrow and Genre

111

state that precedes (the opening words are “far off’) and is thus exempt from the parlare, and, more globally, from reductive language. If for Pasolini the onset of language means beginning to submit to the power of exterior authority, then it is possible to view the girl’s silent voice not just as the sign of an early death but as a rebellious resistance to repres¬ sion both at a psychoanalytic and a societal level. Pasolini’s choice of dialect as the language for poiesis can be seen as resistance to that same authority. Dialect is therefore to be subsumed in the constellation of “prelinguistic” forces. Like the girl/rose, the dialect is distant, especially from the lyric language of the hallowed poetic tra¬ dition evoked in the poem “Lingua.” Friulian is also “distant” for the majority of Italian readers from the hegemonic cultural language. Gian¬ franco Contini, understandably, called Pasolini’s use of dialect a “scan¬ dal.”25 The dialect poem is also removed visually from the small-print Italian text isolated at the bottom of the page. In Pasolini’s scheme of things, the dying language (in the sense that dialects are heading toward extinction) is the living one.26 Dialect is the language that deploys the vital poetic message—or “form”—in music, meter, and assonance. Our understanding of the complexity of Pasolini’s use of dialect and its link to the girl/rose deepens if we view the Friulian and Italian ver¬ sions not solely as translations but as part of a semiotic process that moves beyond the textual semantics. That Pasolini was aware of this process is clear from his own statement in La meglio gioventu: “The Italian translations at the foot of the page . . . are an integral part of the poetic text: for this reason I executed them with care, almost, ideally, contemporaneously to the Friulian.”2' The bilingualism of the poems is indubitably the sign of psychological struggle between the “maternal" and “paternal” tongues,

a struggle with social and cultural conse¬

quences. Moreover, the reader imitates the poetic process (in Pasolini’s terms) when reading the double poems. The Italian text can not simply refer to some signifieds without first referring to Friulian signifiers. Each text refers to some other text, rather than simply to some referent or to a stable, standard signified. That the Italian text sends the reader back to

25 Gianfranco Contini, in a review of Poesie a Casarsa for Corriere del Ticino, April 24, 1943 (this review can be found in Interpretazioni di Pasolini, ed. Giampaolo Borghello [Rome: Savelli, 1977]). See also Franco Fido’s discussion of the “literary operation” of dialect in “Pasolini e il dialetto,” Italian Quarterly 21-22 (1980—81): 69—78. Thomas O’Neill discusses the general literary milieu and locates sources in Pascoli and Machado in his “Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Dialect Poetry,” Forum Italicum 9 (1975): 343—67. 26 See Santato, Pier Paolo Pasolini: L'opera, pp. 3—4. 27 Pasolini, La meglio gioventu, p. 149.

112

The Poiesis of History

an anterior and more mysterious text is crucial. In this movement the thematics and the poetics of regression are joined.28 The typographical disposition also clarifies Pasolini’s view of the problematic nature of translation itself. In translation—whether from formlessness into form or from one language to another—something is inevitably lost. Pasolini warns his readers of lexical meanings that “I have variously translated in the Italian text but which in reality remain untranslatable.”29 He adds that what he has written about cannot be fully represented in all of its originality, but claims that poetry in dialect comes closer to the real, enigmatic text. The particular linguistic status of dialect and Tzvetan Todorov’s typo¬ logical classification of the principal and secondary meanings of lan¬ guage help us to understand why Pasolini holds this view. Todorov notes that a secondary meaning can result from what he calls a contiguity of signifiers, and what Charles Bally named “evocation by milieu” (for ex¬ ample, pastiche).30 In “A na fruta,” no matter what a signifier such as “sidina” means, the word would take on a special secondary meaning simply by virtue of being dialect. This link helps to pinpoint why Pas¬ olini attributes to dialect such an immediacy or closeness to reality: dialect evokes the milieu of the “atemporal,” rural world of Friuli. The demise of this world becomes the subject of Pasolini’s grief in the poems he composed in the 1960s. In the decade that followed the publication of Le ceneri di Gramsci, Pasolini’s work underwent many significant changes, which affected the evolution of his use of the lament. The 1950s were over, the cold war was receding, and the nation had been transformed by what he calls “the industrial pact” (Passione e ideologia,

p.

332).

Neocapitalism had

wrought a consumer society in Italy, and its homologizing forces had turned Italians into petite-bourgeois consumers intent on cashing in on the economic “boom.”51 Pasolini despaired of these changing cultural

28 Pasolini wrote of himself: “His regression from one tongue to another—an anterior and infinitely more pure one—was a regression along the steps of being. . . . Incapable of mastering the rational through the normal psychological channels, he could only reim¬ merse himself in this regression, only turn back, only walk once again down that path in a place where a happy phase coincided with the enchanting landscape of Casarsa” (Pas¬ sione e ideologia, p. 133). 29 Pasolini, Poesie a Casarsa, p. 43. 20 Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopedique du langage (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 328. 31 For a discussion of Pasolini’s views on the subject and how these views influenced his work, see Naomi Greene’s “Art and Ideology in Pasolini’s Films,” Yale Italian

Sorrow and Genre

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values, characterized, in his view, by a false sense of individual freedom in a time when in fact everyone had become the same. A short lament found in “Poema per un verso di Shakespeare” demonstrates these trans¬ formations: Grido, nel cielo dove dondolo la mia culla: “NESSUNO DEI PROBLEMI DEGLI ANNI CINQUANTA MI IMPORTA PIU! TRADISCO I LIVIDI MORALISTI CHE HANNO FATTO DEL SOCIALISMO UN CATTOLICESIMO UGUALMENTE NOIOSO! AH, AH, LA PROVINCIA IMPEGNATA! AH, AH, LA GARA A ESSERE UNO PIU POETA RAZIONALE DELL’ALTRO LA DROGA, PER PROFESSORI POVERI, DELL’iDEOLOGIA!

ABIURO DAL RIDICOLO DECENNIO!” [P. 439]

(From the heavens where my cradle rocked I cry:/“None of the fifties’ problems/matter to me anymore! I desert the livid/moralists who turned Socialism into an equally/boring Catholicism! Ah, ah, the politically en¬ gaged provinces!/Ah, ah, the race to outdo the other poets in ration¬ ality/the opiate of the impoverished professor!/I renounce this ridiculous decade!”)

Poesia in forma di rosa centers on the disintegration of the poet’s faith in the archaic strengths of the Friulian and the Roman worlds. And in “La Guinea” he speculates for Bertolucci (who lives part of the year in the Apennine village of Casarola) on those “myths” as though they were his lost love:32 Alle volte e dentro di noi qualcosa (che tu sai bene, perche e la poesia) qualcosa di buio in cui si fa luminosa la vita: un pianto interno, una nostalgia gonfia di asciutte, pure lacrime. Camminando per questa poverissima via

Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 311—26, and Millicent Marcus’s essay on Pasolini’s film Teorema in her Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 245—62. 32 Already in “A Bertolucci’’ (1960), anthologized in La religione del mio tempo, Pa¬ solini addresses Attilio Bertolucci, who was himself laden with sorrow at the transforma¬ tions that were annihilating “the old countryside”: “Un nuovo tempo ridurra a non essere tutto questo:/e percio possiamo piangerlo. . . [Le poesie, p. 268| (“A new age will reduce all this to nonbeing:/and that is why we can cry for her”).

114

The Poiesis of History di Casarola, destinata al buio, agli acri crepuscoli dei cristiani inverni, ecco farsi, in quel pianto, sacri i piu comuni, i piii inutili, i piii inermi aspetti della vita: quattro case di pietra di montagna, con gli interni neri di sterile miseria . . . E, li in fondo, il muricciolo remoto del cimitero. So che per te speranza e non volerne, speranza: avere solo questa cuccia per le mille sere che avanzano allontanando quella sera, che a loro, per fortuna, cosi dolcemente somiglia. [Le poesie, pp. 328—29]

(At times there is something within us/(which you know surely, since it is poetry)/something dark wherein life//is illuminated: an inner lament, a nostalgia/swollen with dry, pure tears. / As I walk along this very poor street//in Casarola, destined to the dark, to acrid/twilights during Chris¬ tian winters,/it happens that, in that lament, the most common//and most useless, the most defenseless/aspects of life become sacred; a few homes/ hewn from mountain rocks, with interiors//black with sterile misery. . . .// And, way down there, the remote wall//of the cemetery. I know that for you hope /is not to want to hope; to possess/only this retreat for the thou¬ sands of evenings which march on//distancing that evening, which, luck¬ ily,/ so sweetly resembles all the others.)

He goes on to describe how he had rediscovered Italy’s vanishing “po etry ’/“tears’’ in Guinea and Africa, where he directed films, and to con fess a knowledge that La Negritudine e in questi prati bianchi, tra i covoni dei mezzadri, nella solitudine delle piazzette, nel patrimonio dei grandi stili [P. 336]

Sorrow and Genre

115

(Negritude/is in these white fields, among the sharecroppers’/sheaves, in the solitude//of small piazzas, in the patrimony/of the grand styles.).

Yet there is no use pretending, he proclaims: his love for Italy is over. The setting sun over Casarola is an allusion to “un finito amore” [p. 336] (“an ended love). If this love has ended, so has “the sorrow of creation.” Although poems that we can classify as laments appear in this collec¬ tion, what was once a poetics of discriminating generic revival has slipped into an acrimonious poetics of parody. One of the subjects of this parody is the lamenter as such. The speaker in Poesia in forma di rosa mercilessly derides himself as a “bestia ferita” (“a wounded beast”), a “Don Chisciotte di tre anni, un Or¬ lando noioso” (“a three-year-old Don Quixote, a boring Orlando”). We read accounts of night wanderings, judiciary proceedings, and horrifying solitude, and we hear Pasolini’s weeping referred to as his “vile piagnisteo” (“cowardly bellyaching”). The hauteur of earlier lamentations disappears. Poesia in forma di rosa is also Pasolini’s most autobiographi¬ cal, and confessional, work, and it draws the portrait of an alluring, powerful personality quite different from that of the influential public figure whose byline appeared in later years on the front pages of the

Corriere della sera. The poet’s sense of marginality is so great that it erodes the narrative coherence of many of the poems in the collection.13 At the same time, Pasolini finds personal strength by probing open wounds. He describes his own homosexuality, which he could view as separating him from the world, as an “infecund and most pure love.' Single-handedly, the “feto adulto” (“adult fetus”) pitches a battle against the monster of homologizing consumerism in a world that appears flat, reified, and devoid of phantasms.34 The title poem, “Poesia in forma di rosa,” evinces all of the unwieldi¬ ness these subjects might well suggest. Its two hundred lines were writ¬ ten in a modified, deformed terza rima with a tenuous narrative thread: a taxi ride from Fiumicino airport. Movement to disillusion, mostly with contemporary culture and his own “errors,” constitutes a second narra¬ tive. This second narrative is organized around the figure of a Five-petaled rose. Each of the petals stands for a particular theme. Each is

33

See Beverly Allen, “The Shadow of His Style: The Death and Work ol Pier Paolo

Pasolini,” in The Poetics of Heresy, ed. Beverly Allen (Stanford: Anina Libri, 1984), p. 1. See also Enzo Siciliano’s discussion of the metric and strophic breakdown of Pasolini s verses in “Notes on Pasolini’s Poem ‘La Realta,” Yale Italian Studies 1, no. 3 (19, , 303. 14 See Rinaldi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pp. 202—3.

116

The Poiesis of History

plucked until none are left.35 The “plucking of the rose” also suggests dismemberment of the subject/poet, since the petals are said to be strewn on the taxi floor. The city’s decrepitude becomes his own, a new source of pain and sorrow: Ho sbagliato tutto. Fiumicino riapparso di tra nuvole di fango, e ancora piii vecchio di me. I resti del vecchio Pasolini sui profili dell’Agro . . . tuguri e ammassi di grattacieli. . . . \

E una rosa camale di dolore, con cinque rose incarnate, cancri di rosa nella rosa prima: in principio era il Dolore. Ed eccolo, Uno e Cinquino. La prima rosa seriore significa (ah, una puntura di morfina! aiuto!): Hai sbagliato tutto, brutto, soave! L’idea di aver sbagliato! Io! Capite? Io! Lo smacco, lo scacco. . . . Dentro il tassi i petali del cancro, verso la riaffiorata Roma, col vecchio Pasolini macro di se, sdato, degradato. E, dietro l’errore nella questione linguistica, ecco, petalo incamato su petalo, nella Rosa Cinquina, il Dolore Due: lo “sbaglio di tutta una vita.” [Le poesie, pp. 373—74]

33 These are briefly: (1) Pasolini’s error in the “questione linguistica” (“lingustic ques¬ tion”); (2) “lo sbaglio di una vita” (“the error of a lifetime”), his homosexuality; (3) the “discesa di barbari alloglotti” (“the descent of the dialect-speaking barbarians”); (4) his solitude; and (5) the onslaught of the “non-nati” (“unborn”), with whom he identifies.

Sorrow and Genre

117

(I was wrong all around. Fiumicino/has reappeared from amidst the mud¬ died clouds/and it is even older than I am.//The remains of the old Paso¬ lini/on the outlines of the Agro . . . huts/and massed skyscrapers. . . .// It is a carnal rose of sorrow,/with five incarnate roses,/rose cancers within the primal//rose: in the beginning was Sorrow./And here it is, Five in One./The first succession of rose means//[ah, a shot of morphine! Help!]//You were all wrong, you ugly soft-heart!/The idea of bungling! Me!/Get it? Me! the mortification, the defeat! . . .//Inside the taxi the cancer’s petals,/in the direction of a newly surfacing//Rome, with the old Pasolini big/with himself, disheartened, degraded. /And behind the error in the question of language,//here is a petal incarnate upon a petal,/in the Five-in-One Rose, it’s sorrow number two:/the “error of a lifetime.”) A strange contaminatio has generated this new, hybrid rose, made of petals of dolor. The rose evokes not the girl/mother of “A na fruta,” but carnality and disease. Pasolini adopts liturgical and biblical language, but a primal grief supplants the Logos of gospel beginnings. The rose precedes incarnation and, thus, remains a rose of poetry, only now it is scattered. The lamenter interjects a parenthetical cry for morphine’s re¬ lief at just the point when the poem recalls an anterior, and sacred, text, St. John’s Gospel. The present text and the one Pasolini “rereads” have slipped into parody. This is quite a downfall from his earlier ideal of reconstruction, outlined in his “Discourse on civil sorrow.” Pasolini’s newly parodic tones are even more prevalent in his “Nuova poesia in forma di rosa,” which he called the “imbarazzanti calligrammes/del mio vile piagnisteo” (“the embarrassing calligrammes/of my cowardly bellyaching”). Here, significantly, the plucking of the rose pe¬ tals doubles as a reading of the petal. Openly declaring the rose to be a text, Pasolini grieves in the last stanza: “sfogliai una vana rosa” [p. 475] (“I leafed through a vain rose”). A bitter irony prevails as Pasolini calls up another sacred text, the opening lines of Dante’s heady canto 31 of the Paradiso: “In forma dunque di Candida rosa/mi si mostrava la milizia santa” (“The sacred militia/showed itself to me in the form of a candid rose”). Dante had contemplated tiers of illustrious souls in the Celestial Rose, angels swooping like bees to drink from the flower. Pasolini, in¬ stead, contemplates the motley troops of Italian literary life, his friends of the 1950s and 1960s: Leonetti, Roversi, and Moravia—who leaves everyone “a dibatterci

in

questi/spregevoli

problemi

letterari/vecchi

come il cucco” [p. 472] (“to debate these unworthy literary problems/as old as Methuselah”). Poetic contemplation is ridiculed, as is poetry’s status as prophecy in Pasolini/Jeremiah’s final self-deriding “Nuova poesia in forma di rosa.

118

The Poiesis of History

where he explains his own tragic literary flaws, among them his foolish use of the lament itself:

Piansi a queH’immagine che in anticipo sui secoli vedevo scomparire dal nostro mondo, ma non conoscendo i termini usati nella cerchia eletta di quel mondo per esprimeme l’addio, adoperai cursus del Vecchio Testamento, calchi neo-novecenteschi, e profetai profetai una Nuova Preistoria—non meglio identificata—dove una Classe diveniva Razza al tremendo humour di un Papa, con Rivoluzioni in forma di croce, al comando di Accattoni e Ah dagli Occhi Azzurri— fino a questi imbarazzanti calligrammes del mio “vile piagnisteo” piccolo-borghese. Cosi sfogliai una vana rosa la rosa privata del terrore e della sessualita, proprio negli anni in cui mi si richiedeva d’essere il partigiano che non confessa ne piange. [Le Poesie, pp. 474—75]

(I cried/before that image/which ahead of itself in the march of centu¬ ries/I saw disappearing from our world,/but not knowing the terms used in the elect/circle of that world to express the adieu, I adopted/the Old Testament cursus, neo-twentieth-century retracings, and I prophesied/I prophesied a New Prehistory—not any better defined—where/a Class be¬ came a Race to the great bemusement of a Pope,/with cruciform Revolu¬ tions, at the command /of Beggars and Blue-eyed Alis—/as far as these embarrassing calligrammes/bom of my cowardly, petite-bourgeios,/belly¬ aching.//So/1 leafed through a vain rose/the private rose of terror/and sexuality, precisely in the years/when I was expected to be the partisan fighter/who neither confesses nor cries.)

Having failed at his assigned task, the poet resigns himself to defeat in “ogni campo/. . . , e ora tocca ad altri” [p. 511] (“in every field/. . . , and now it’s the turn of others’ ). Pasolini finds it fruitless to oppose poetry to the pervasiveness of a system of repression by permissiveness and a false sense of well-being. The new Italy and its koine have consoli-

Sorrow and Genre

119

dated their territory. The “Italianization of Italy” has been achieved, and its hegemony triumphs: The complete industrialization of Northern Italy, similar clearly to that of Europe, along with the type of relations that industrialization has brought to the South, has created a truly hegemonic social class. Therefore it is a truly unifying force. I mean to say that the high and petite bourgeoisie of the paleo-industrial and commercial type had never been able to identify with the whole of Italian society, and they simply made literary Italian their own class lan¬ guage by imposing it from above. The nascent Northern technocracy, in¬ stead, identifies itself hegemonically with the entire nation, and it is bring¬ ing forth consequently a new type of culture and language which are effectively national.36

The cultural panorama described here has changed fundamentally since Pasolini composed “L’Appennino,” in which he expressed a certain opti¬ mism because he perceived bourgeois culture as it had developed since the Risorgimento to be weak. Because “commitment appears rhetorical and inadequate,”37 Pasolini’s own polemical use of the literary lament now faces failure. We learn from Pasolini’s Empirismo eretico that he chooses instead a transnational artistic form—the cinema—to protest against the Italian nation and what it had become. Because cinema uses the image as its raw material, it provides in Pasolini’s view a technique for “a sort of

return to the origins, to a point of finding once again ... an originary, oneiric, barbaric,

irregular, aggressive, visionary quality” (emphasis

added).38 In cinema, he was able for a time also to rediscover “the sor¬ row of creation.”

36 Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, p. 20. 37 Ibid., p. 11. 38 Ibid., p. 179.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Epos and Fragment

Attilio Bertolucci’s La camera da letto, a “novel in verse” subtitled “Romanzo famigliare (al modo antico)” (A family romance [in the old style]), was published in 1984 and 1988 in two volumes.1 It is one of the twentieth century’s most powerful attempts to challenge the twofold no¬ tion that poetry is defined by its capacity to touch sublime instants and, conversely, by its incapacity to sustain intensity. The novel in verse is, of course, by nature a daring, even risky, enterprise. It is a form that must confront head-on both the issues that have plagued poetry since the demise of the grand verse epic and those that have plagued all literature since World War II—the fragmentation of narrative and the ultimate inadequacy of realism—issues that its nineteenth-century practitioners did not have to contend with. Since La camera da letto was nearly thirty years in the writing, its material both elucidates the long-term directions of the author’s poetic career, and, on another plane, embodies the con¬ troversies of a span of contemporary Italian literary history.2 Its length

1 Bertolucci, La camera da letto. References to page numbers are to volume 1 unless specified otherwise. Concerning a possible third book, Bertolucci stated on the dust jacket of Book 2: “If the third book of La camera da letto, whose subtitle might be The

Necessary Sickness, is not written, let alone published, you will find its distillation in the pages already written and published in my Viaggio d'lnverno.” 2 Silvio Ramat writes that La camera da letto presents “a gamut of problems that affect poetry’s current potentials and its prospectives as they may be seen in the light of the literary tradition” (“Far romanzo col verso,” 11 Tempo, March 2, 1984, p. 16). And Niva Lorenzini observes in Bertolucci’s work “an operation . . . which is urgently contempo¬ rary . . . and which immerses itself looking backward in twentieth-century poetic history, moving along its whole expanse” (“Attilio Bertolucci o la sfida del monotonalismo,”

Poliorama 2 [1983]: 147).

Epos and Fragment

121

and the breadth of its address actually complicate issues that Pasolini and others spoke to in their poems in the 1950s and 1960s: the need to overcome the limitations of Symbolist and Hermetic poetics, the rela¬ tions between poetry and history, and the effects of the agrarian revolu¬ tion and industrialization on Italian society. Like Pasolini’s poetry, Ber¬ tolucci’s novel in verse achieves a remarkable diachronic thickness, since in the first volume it portrays the Bertolucci family history from the late sixteenth century onward, touching on the youths, marriages, and late years of his parents and grandparents (landowners in the Parma region) and concentrating, in the later chapters, on Attilio’s own child¬ hood and adolescence. In the second volume the author (referred to in the text as “A.”) tells of his own marriage and his family life with his two sons, Bernardo and Giuseppe, up to 1951. With this approach, Berto¬ lucci constructs the novelistic strain in his poetry, its Freudian “family romance.” He also introduces, through generic allusion and subject mat¬ ter, the quintessential^ novelistic issue of bourgeois culture and class relations with astounding deftness. Bertolucci’s technique of constructing plots from uneasy interruptions or pauses and inserting descriptive material to prolong the instant was described by Vittorio Sereni very early on. Sereni’s formulations about Bertolucci’s “world” in La capanna indiana (The indian hut; 1955) ap¬ ply to La camera da letto: “He created his myth from the surrounding elements, as though bathed, saturated, by Parma’s golden light. . . . I’m thinking of certain country homes where the silence is disturbed by a curtain’s rustle, a banging door, of the brief animation that immediately follows and becomes a tenuous obsession. Bertolucci is at once an ob¬ server and an actor in an analogous, barely perceptible train of events.3 This “obsessional” plotting and what might be called double narrative styles—deriving from the split between the spectator and participant Sereni outlined—are indeed modern novelistic hallmarks of La camera

da letto and set it clearly apart from Pasolini’s historicizing experiments in genre within the framework of contemporary poetic politics. The work’s length alone would distinguish it from the vast majority of contemporary poetic texts, but the effect of the unusual genre, which

3 Vittorio Sereni’s observation originally appeared in a 1948 essay titled “La luna sul Farina” and is now anthologized in Gli immediati dinlorni (Milan: 11 Saggiatore, 1962) as “Lettera d’anteguerra,” pp. 13—14. It also appears on the 1973 dust jacket of Attilio Bertolucci’s La capanna indiana (Milan: Garzanti, 1973). Lorenzini wrote, in a similar vein, that the “voice speaking a monologue” in Bertolucci’s verse is divided between the internal and the external, “between a lead and an extra” (“Attilio Bertolucci o la sfida del monotonalismo,” p. 153). For Bertolucci’s “divided self’ see also Mario l^ivagetto’s “Pratica pirica,” Nuovi Argomenti, nos. 23-24 (1971): 221- 33.

122

The Poiesis of History

Bertolucci refers to as a “discorso filato,” or a discourse in a sequence that hangs together, is to do no less than end the dominance of “pure poetry” and the critical biases surrounding and sustaining it.4 Mengaldo has acutely observed that the ante here was artificially high,5 and we might suspect, as we would with any gambler, that impulse or even compulsion are as influential as reason and benevolent intent in the “choice” of the appropriate generic form. It is worth noting from the outset, nonetheless, that Bertolucci, like Pasolini, has cast issues of poetic history in terms of genre and that, in addition, Bertolucci’s attrac¬ tion to the novel in verse as a genre is not motivated exclusively by a desire for poetic realism. Its domain for him is “temporality”: “I was tempted by this. And I was all the more tempted because I had always envied novelists for that veiled and elusive character, Time, who from the Odyssey to the Jerusalem Delivered (‘At the end by then of that long and rainy winter . . .’) reached as far as La Recherche—granted that one clearly may call Marcel Proust a poet?”6 7 I do not want to imply that Bertolucci, in seeking to delve into the more abstract realms of temporality, became impervious to the issues of the day, for in 1956 when he began composing the novel in verse, po¬ etry’s problematic relation with the real was an important issue of con¬ temporary poetics, as he was well aware. With Moravia and Pasolini, he was editing a regional historical anthology of Italian literature, Scrittori

della realta (Writers of reality), and supplying comments on most of its numerous illustrations.

He reveals some of his own Emilian sources for

La camera da letto when he discusses Annibale Carracci’s depictions of “butchers’ shops and bean-eaters,” when he describes Guercino’s love for “open-air scenery” and Romanic sculpture’s eternal motif of trades and seasonal tasks, and when he discusses Pascoli’s portrayal of washer¬ women in “Lavandare.” In the section on Piemonte, he notes how some subjects, such as a flock of sheep, lend themselves to “truth” because they are “domestic things.” On a different plane, and pertinent to real¬ ism in language, Bertolucci wrote at a time when poetry was still trying “to wring the neck of eloquence” and after poetic history had passed out of the Hermetic phase, which had been dominated by elegance and lexi-

4 Bertolucci asserts this on the dust jacket of La camera da letto, Book 1. See Chapter 1, note 4, and accompanying text. 5 Mengaldo, “Appunti tipologici,” p. 52. 6 Bertolucci, dust jacket of La camera da letto, Book 1. 7 Enzo Siciliano, ed., Scrittori della realta: DalVVlll al XIX secolo, introduction by Alberto Moravia, textual commentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini, commentary on the illustra¬ tions by Attilio Bertolucci (Milan: Garzanti, 1961).

Epos and Fragment

123

cal daring (although the Hermetics had contributed to admitting more realistic and prosaic forms such as adverbs into poetic language and to maintaining the semantic expansions of the “Twilight” poets). A study of variants of La camera da letto shows that the author revised his work, following the times, from the general to the particular, from the indeter¬ minate to the determinate, and from the abstract to the concrete.8 When Bertolucci started writing La camera da letto, it was not yet clear whether poetry could or should adopt narrative modes. The innovative potential of narrative had already been recognized in post-Symbolist po¬ etics in general, but the appearance of narrative in later twentieth-cen¬ tury poetry, and specifically postwar poetry, is not easily accounted for. Any formulation of the genesis of Bertolucci’s novel in verse has to take into account a number of narrative genres, including the novel and auto¬ biography as well as more archaic forms such as the pastoral and para¬ literary forms such as the chronicle-like libro di famiglia (family book). The romantic ballad or romanza (which is also the title of a poem in

Fuochi in novembre [November fires]) is also important because of its organization, which is narrative but not epic. It works semantically through repetition and refrain in a way that minimalizes epic-like tempo¬ ral advancement through conflict and the overcoming of obstacles. The romantic ballad also exhibits a strophic organization of textual units that allows for the creation of a complex verbal and temporal texture. If dis¬ crete strophes characteristic of the romantic ballad are used to make up divisional chapters, the result is a breadth that may at its experimental extreme match novelistic discourse—without imitating its dominant pro¬ gressive character.9 It is significant, in this context, that the romantic ballad predates the Symbolist poetics Bertolucci saw as the dominant force in twentieth-century poetry. And if it is true that the poema is anti-Symbolist, it still remains to be seen just how Bertolucci’s poetic language organizes meaning in a nonSymbolist way. La camera da letto is certainly no allegory. The Divine

Comedy was a living influence for both Pasolini and Luzi (and innumer¬ able other twentieth-century poets), but Bertolucci is hardly Dantesque at all (the absence of dramatic dialogue and direct discourse in his work is just one indication of this). Furthermore, we would be hard pressed to

8 Antonio Girardi notes this in “Rilievi variantistici sui poema di Bertolucci,' Stiidi novecenteschl, 28 (1984): 312.

9 Experiments in numbered subdivisions even of short poems appear in Bertolucci s La capanna indiana (“Diario” |Diary| and “Idilli domestici” (Domestic idylls|) and in 1 taggio dinverno (“Discendendo

(Sleeping pill love|).

il colie” |Walking downhill] and “L’amore sonnifero

124

The Poiesis of History

find moral or anagogical levels of interpretation for Bertolucci’s “sto¬ ries.” His works do evince some didactic overtones, but, with their rep¬ resentations of seasonal changes and their at least minimally “informa¬ tive” function, they remind us more of georgics than allegories. La

camera da letto does employ some of the characteristic “devices” of a number of novelistic genres, which could be taken as an anti-Symbolist move. Foremost among these genres is the romanzo di formazione (bildungsroman).10 The notion that Bertolucci uses the bildungsroman to counter the poetics of the word should not, however, be overemphasized, since in La camera da letto he mocks the growing boy in a way that recalls Giuseppe Parini’s “II giorno,” another lengthy story of sentimen¬ tal education in verse.11 Echoes of Parini in La camera da letto remind us that Bertolucci’s poetic innovations depend not only on a newly narrative stance, which can be associated with novelistic discourse, but on a wide range of ex¬ perimentation in poetic genres—some of which are also narrative—in his early works. A selected inventory of Bertolucci’s titles in La capanna

Indiana12 indicates that genre, major and minor, is thematized in this anti-Hermetic collection. We find “Lamento di Massimo Odiot” (Mas¬ simo Odiot’s lament), “Scherzo” (Jest), “Romanzo” (Novel), “Contrasto” (Contrast), “Commedia della sera” (Evening’s comedy), “Romanza” (Ro¬ mantic ballad), “Elegia prima” (First elegy), “Idilli domestici” (Domes¬ tic idylls), “Epigrafe” (Epigraph), “Prova di sonetto” (Trial sonnet), “Sequenza familiare” (Family sequence). Other titles indicate the use of nonliterary or quasi-literary narrative forms: “Antico Testamento” (Old Testament), “Ancora la bella dormiente” (Sleeping beauty again), “Pagina di diario” (Diary page), “Diario” (Diary), “Lettera da casa” (Letter from home), and “Cronaca 1946” (1946 chronicle). The volumes Fuochi

in novembre (1934) and Lettera da casa (1951) are most diverse generically, while the title poem of La capanna indiana (1951) itself is a sustained experiment in the poemetto (short narrative verse, usually divided into short chapters but with a variety of metric and stanzaic forms).

Bertolucci began La camera da letto after he composed this

poemetto and published its first excerpt in 1958. This may explain why

10 See Pietro Citati, “Una storia di famiglia col miele della poesia,” Corriere della Sera, February 16, 1984. 11 Girardi notes this along with the importance of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (“Rilievi variantistici,” p. 316). IJ Bertolucci, La capanna indiana. This edition includes the following previously pub¬ lished works Sirio (Sirius; 1929), Fuochi in novembre (1934), Lettera da casa (Letter from home; 1951), La capanna indiana (1951), and In un tempo incerto (1955).

Epos and Fragment

125

the transitional section In un tempo incerto (In an uncertain time; 1955) lacks the multiplicity of genres characteristic of his work before La capan-

na indiana. The titles in the volume Viaggio d’inverno (Winter journey; 1971), which is even more homogeneous from the generic point of view, refer with some frequency only to diaries or letters (exceptions are “Piccola ode a Roma” [Short ode to Rome] and “Ghost story”). In fact, the poetic “I” has a much more pronounced role in this book than in any of Bertolucci’s other works, including La camera da letto, where the refer¬ ences to an “I” are reserved, especially in the first volume, for a few explicit instances of authorial intrusion and not in the context of the development of the third-person character. The two most important references for the genesis of La camera da

letto are “Romanzo” (Novel) and “Romanza” (Romantic ballad), in Fuochi in novembre. Detailed analysis of these two poems shows that they can be understood not only as samples (and rather contradictory ones at that) of two narrative forms but as evidence of Bertolucci’s use of specific narrative constructive tendencies that reappear in La camera da

letto.13 The following is the “Romanzo” of Fuochi in novembre:

La carrozza parti una sera d’autunno e piii non ritomo. Si sono fatte inchieste, la carrozza non e stata rivista da nessuno. Era vemiciata di bianco, da poco, non era ancora asciugata completamente. I viaggiatori erano una giovane vedova

11 Bertolucci’s interest in this minor narrative verse form appears in his anthological choices, translations, and commentaries in Antologia di poesia straniera del Novecenlo (Milan: Garzanti, 1958). We find there Thomas Hardy’s “A Church Romance” (with its theme of a memory sneaking into consciousness), Jean Pellerin's “La romance de retour,” and this important observation on Roger Allard: “He belongs to the ‘fantaisiste’ school. The term today means little, but between 1910 and 1920, perhaps as a reaction to the most rigid and glacial Symbolism, | there is a return| to an agile, sung poetry, barely veined with irony . . . Some of his ‘romanze’ have definitively entered the ideal anthology of f rench poetry” (quoted in Lorenzini, “Audio Bertolucci o la sfida del monotonalismo,” p. 150). Of the Italian poets who wrote romanze, probably the most influ¬ ential is not Berchet or Luigi Carrer but, as Lorenzini noted, Gabriele D’Annunzio with his La chimera. Girardi adopts the formalist term tenderize coslrullive (“Rilievi variantistici,” p. 311).

126

The Poiesis of History e un bambino, e un giovane di ventun anni. I cavalli avevano sonagliere. [La capanna Indiana, p. 41]

(The carriage left /one autumn eve/and it never returned./Inquiries were made,/the carriage was seen by no one. /It had been painted white,/ recently; it was not yet completely dry./The travelers were a young widow/and a child, and a twenty-year-old youth./The horses wore harness bells.)

The brevity of this “novel” points to a contradictory relationship between the title and the rest of the text. These ten lines have all the ingredients for a story worthy of Stendhal: a plot that hints at lust, illicit flight, mystery, and a trio of characters whose different ages and relationships must be sorted out. Furthermore, the horse and carriage are in and of themselves an anachronistic historical setting. The short novel forgoes suspense, however, and betrays its own ending in the third line—“and it never returned.” Is this “Romanzo,” we wonder, to be read as a legiti¬ mate drama, a parody, or a cliche? Is it worthy of narratological atten¬ tion? Is this kind of nineteenth-century story so well known to us now that it can be represented in a form so terse as to appear fragmentary? Is the issue then the relative banality of the fading novelistic genre, or the short verse form’s incapacity to be anything more than a fragment? To answer these questions we must go back to Bertolucci’s confessed desire to transgress modern verse norms. One of their legislators, Va¬ lery, cited as an exemplary unpoetic sample the phrase “La marquise est sortie a cinq heures” (“The marquise went out at five o’clock”).14 Bertolucci’s “Romanzo” flies in the face of that injunction against com¬ ings and goings; in other words, it is a deliberately failed lyric. It is not so much that any subject in Bertolucci’s view has poetic potential, al¬ though he clearly favors “domestic things”; nor is it a question of widen¬ ing poetry’s horizons into areas, such as adventurous romance, currently reserved for novels or into matters such as nineteenth-century cheese¬ making and agriculture (as Bertolucci does in La camera da letto) not considered literary at all. Rather, crossing disparate genres such as the novel and the lyric, Bertolucci asserts, may produce some interesting hybrids.13

14 Mario Lavagetto noted the relevance of Valery’s distaste for banal storytelling to Bertolucci’s designs at the first public presentation of La camera da letto; cited in Baldo Meo, “Tutto il Novecento in camera da letto,” L'Unita, February 21, 1984, p. 9. 15 Concerning poetic history, Ramat notes the telling way in which Bertolucci presents

Epos and Fragment

127

Bertolucci rearranges, for instance, some of the elements of Valery’s “unpoetic” line. In “Romanzo” the protagonist of the poem—the object of the reader’s attention and subject of the action—is the carriage, and

not a lady or marquise (“The carriage left”). The carriage is of course a metonym; the carriage/container implies the riders/contained, who are the key to the mysterious events excluded from the text proper. The movement of a carriage might, however, be a better subject for a Futurist representation of velocity than a novelist’s bourgeois drama. Yet Berto¬ lucci has not quite gone the Futurist route or even become an “objectivist”: the horse and carriage image is too antiquarian for that. What is significant, instead, is the relationship of the object described to the sequence of verbs. The carriage disappears straight away in the first line, and imperfects fill in the subsequent void with descriptions of the inquiries and then of the riders, thereby thwarting any narrative progres¬ sion. The last words of the last line, “harness bells,” resound nonethe¬ less with significance because they evoke acoustical rhythm. Daily life shades into art. At this point the poem begs the question of its metrical form, of its own acoustical rhythms. A quick metric scan tells us that the poem is made up of two five-line “piedi” (stanzas), each in turn made up of two sentences. The first three lines are all heptameters (“settenari”). This tercet of heptameters (two are “tronchi,” with a final accented syllable) is the most remarkable aspect of the poem’s metrical form. Because these three lines are metrically unified and because they summarize the short narrative, they have the ring of the very non-novelistic ritornello (refrain) of a ballad form. The fourth line is also a “settenario,” although syntactically separate from the previous three. Its accent pattern so em¬ phasizes verbal morphology that it seems ironic: “Si sono fatte inchieste.” Such a long verb in such a short line seems prosaic despite the fact that it conforms to the rules of metric song. Line 5 is a metric surprise, almost a joke after the regularities of the previous four, since it seems at first glance to be an irregular “free verse” line of fifteen syllables.10 Yet

a “romanzo grasped in its own problematic structure.” He further observes how a thematics of absence and waiting appears in Bertolucci’s work that has links with, and differences from, the Hermetic thematics of the “event,” a familiar “plot" in Luzi, and especially Bigongiari’s La figlia di Babilonia. See Silvio Kamat, “Bertolucci o lo searto dell’avventura in periferia,” in Storia della poesia del Novecento (Milan: Mursia, 1976), p. 468. Elena Salibra views the mixed generic aspects of the early Fuochi in novembre as evidence of a typically twentieth-century poetics in which one finds an “interference and . . . transposition among diverse literary genres” (“La poesia oltre il diario. Su Fiux'hi in novembre di Attilio Bertolucci,” Baragone 37, no. 442 [1986|: 103). 16 This juxtaposition of long and short lines is reminiscent of an author Bertolucci

128

The Poiesis of History

the syntagm following the subject, “non e stata rivista da nessuno,” is a hendecasyllable, and the predicate alone, for that matter, is a “settenario.” The point of these high metrical echoes is, of course, that this

Romanzo is a poem and not a novel, despite the romance, surely, be¬ tween the departing widow and the young man who accompanies her. Bertolucci takes us further into the specifics of love stories as they appear in literary genres, in the very different poem, “Romanza” (also in

Fuochi in novembre): Se tu fossi morta potrei ricordare quel giomo d’estate che mi corresti incontro ridendo, fra gli oleandri: le mie labbra tremavano e non osavo guardarti. Se tu fossi morta potrei ricordare i tuoi occhi ch’erano schiariti, tutte le tue parole, e i luoghi, e il tempo estivo sino al dolce morire del giomo. [La capanna indiana, p. 48]

(If you were dead/I could remember that summer’s day/when you ran to meet me/laughing, among the oleanders:/my lips were trembling and I did not dare look at you. /If you were dead/I could remember/your eyes as they brightened,/all the words, and the places, and the summer weather/ until the sweet dying of the day.)

The two poems share the general topic of separation, or departure; as Bertolucci wrote in the title poem of La capanna indiana, “tutto parla/ d’una partenza prossima, un addio” [p. 130] (“everything speaks/of an imminent leaving, an adieu ”). “Romanza” evinces, however, the specific theme of anxiety so prevalent in La camera da letto. “Romanza” does have the same number of lines, the same number of covert stanzas, the same alternation of long and short lines, the same clarity of syntax, and the same suggestions of a refrain and a plot of nascent love as “Ro¬ manzo,” but its first-person voice and its opaque temporality of internal events are enough to make “Romanza” fit the Hegelian notion of narra¬ tive verse as a narration of a spiritual state as it is reflected in events

loves, Jules Laforgue. It contributes to a typographical counterpoint that is structurally akin to Bertolucci’s way of alternating lyric and epic motifs.

Epos and Fragment

129

rather than a narration of the events themselves.1 There is undeniably a minimal narrative (“y°u ran to meet me”) but the story is embedded in the speaker’s discourse, in the two sentences he utters. Furthermore, the enigma of the poem has nothing to do with the outcome of the nascent love story, with the events themselves. Instead, it concerns the relation¬ ship of death and memory, evoked in the context of day’s end and re¬ volves around a much more abstract issue: the conditions underlying the hypothetical situation posed by the speaker.18 This sort of fragmented or fetishized narration is fundamentally differ¬ ent even from the unachieved novel in “Romanzo,” since the potential novel there is not enmeshed in a hypothesis of death. In “Romanzo,” indeed, there is no missing “object.” The carriage may have been re¬ painted, and we may never see it again but it can be grasped. The “novel” contains it and spins its events around it. “Romanza” presents, instead, a decentered ego, for the relationship of the protagonist is to an ungraspable object. The beloved is experienced as an unattainable at¬ tachment. 19 “Romanza” is framed by a set of conditions (death) that will effect something else (memory). Although the encounter of the sexes here is chaste—here there are no dangers that might lead a widow and her lover to resort to disguise (the freshly painted carriage)—it is enmeshed in an even more troublesome situation, a paradox grounded in the most dan¬ gerous topic: “If you were dead /I could remember.” Death is the pre¬ condition of memory, of remembering a lovers’ meeting. It mediates the imaginative process that enables the speaker to recall the meeting and its attendant emotional complications, to put it into images (into those shots of a woman “laughing among the oleanders ), and to narrate it. The framing hypothesis accentuates the notion that it is impossible to hold onto the intangible moments of the past because of the interfering closeness of what Bertolucci called the honeyed present. 0 Past events can be present to us again in memory only if, paradoxically, they are utterly distant, so distant as to be over once and for all: dead (“If you were dead/I could remember”). The present only prolongs the agony of

17 18

G. F. W. Hegel, Estetica, vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), p. 1249. See Bertolucci’s poem “Per N. lontana,” among others, where distance from Ninetta

is connected to silence and “il sonno/dei vivi e dei morti quando il giorno/se ne va

\La

capanna indiana, p. 86) (“the slumbers/of the living and the dead when the day/goes ). 19 Giacinto Spagnoletti advanced the hypothesis that Bertolucci s did not appeal to Italian poetry’s love of “titanism.

weak

poetic

I

According to Spagnoletti, although

for many years considered a minor poet, Bertolucci won out over time ( Memoria e sangue,” 11 Messaggero, June 24, 1971). 20 Bertolucci, La camera da lelto, p. 89.

130

The Poiesis of History

final parting. Bertolucci’s poem “E viene un tempo” (And a time comes) illustrates this notion in the lines la tua persona si fa maturando piu dolce, si screzia il tuo volto di bruna come i fiori che ami ... a quest’ora che volge, con tale disperata tenerezza il tempo prolungando dell’addio.

[P. 117]

(Your person/grows in sweetness with age, your brunette countenance/ looks crushed, like the flowers/you love . . . now as the hour advances/ with desperate tenderness,/prolonging the moment of our adieu.) The signs of the years on the visages we contemplate in a cumulative present are also the signs of distance and the final distance, of an adieu, of a death that menaces but is not yet an event.21 With the hypothesis that the last event has already transpired (“If you were dead”), comes the possibility of the noncumulative present, of an ancient present re¬ membered distinctly, as though it were a photograph of this beloved woman, or a few frames from a film of her (“you ran to meet me”). This paradoxical and anxious hypothesizing is further complicated by the line “my lips were trembling and I did not dare look at you.” That which is being remembered was never seen and can only be remembered as an absence. The images the speaker would recall cannot be recalled, only hypothesized, and this hypothesizing will only be possible after death. That elusive moment in the past is now accessible to the speaker’s present not only because the hypothesis of death has provided him that enabling final distance, but also because through poetic inscription he can imagine and bring into being that flowery, smiling scene. The poem Pensieri di casa” (Thoughts of home) makes even more explicit the interdependence of death, memory, temporal separation, and writing:

Pietro Citati wrote of

a world intimately threatened” and of “the shadow which

makes its nest in the light; death which hides itself in life.” He also praises Bertolucci’s rejection of poetry as the dream of the “mot juste” and his complex but “light” syntax. According to Citati, Bertolucci “unknowingly” modulates “the first laws of an as yet unknown poetic tongue (“Poesia dal miele dolce e velenoso,” a review of Viaggio d inverno, by Attilio Bertolucci, 11 Giorno, May 26, 1971).

Epos and Fragment

131

Non posso piu scrivere ne vivere se quest’anno la neve che si scioglie non mi avra testimone impaziente di sentire neH’aria prime viole. Come se fossi morto mi ricordo la nostra primavera, la sua luce esultante che dura tutto un giomo, la meraviglia di un giomo che passa. [P. 140; emphasis added]

(I can no longer write nor live/if this year the melting snow/does not have me as its witness impatient /to catch the scent of the first violets. //As though I were dead I remember/our spring, its exultant/light lasting a whole day,/the wonder of a passing day.) This characteristic process complicates the meaning of the consolation of memory, the calm acceptance that at first may seem to be the sense of “Romanza” (the interpretation “when you are gone I will still have mem¬ ories of you”), since the intensity of the encounter of lovers there, set in a hypothetical distance, is undiminished.22 The original intensity of the protagonist’s desire (“my lips were trembling”) is actually intensified by the hypothetical posthumous stance. Memory and poetry function not as consolation, but to enact a prolific obsession.25 To interpret memory, and indeed writing, as consolation (the memory of this nascent love lives on eternally) wrongly suggests an acceptance of death—and of the death of desire—on the part of the speaker. Such a misinterpretation would make of Bertolucci’s poem a kind of practice lament, in which the poetic “T is getting used to mourning or trying it on for size. “Romanza” is written in a hypothetical form which denies the possibility of ever needing to he comforted, as if to assert that this death will never be more than hypoth¬ esis, which makes it possible for the poem to displace the anxiety of a potential loss and to be a speculation and not a cry of emotion, to ex¬ press the emotion not expressed when lips trembled but did not speak. “Romanza” may also be as much a dedication to tu as it is a discourse on the travails of the speaker’s desires and their role in the generation of 22

A source for this genre might he found in Paul-Jean Toulet’s "Poemes inacheves,

specifically in his Romances sans musique, especially Romance 11 (quoted in Pierre Olivier Walzer, Paul-Jean Toulet | Paris: Seghers, 1954], p. 1(>8). 23 The word “obsession” is used a great deal by critics of Bertolucci. Antonio Jacopetta lists the comments of Sereni, Luzi, and Pasolini on this topic in Audio Bertolucci: Lo specchio e la perdita (Rome: Bonacci, 1984), pp. 114—15.

132

The Poiesis of History

poetry, but remember that “Romanza” is the poem that stands in sharp¬ est contrast to the novelistic temporality of “Romanzo.” “Romanza” in¬ deed makes memory s displacements and the subjective experience of time the subject of its speculation. Its temporality is the neurotically displaced time of the unconscious, where memory and desire may enact inventions and defenses. If we look ahead to La camera da letto, we see that Bertolucci’s treatment of “you” here might not only shadow the “N.” of other love poems (Bertolucci’s wife, Ninetta) but also pre-figure his treatment of the mother figure in the novel in verse. These sorts of displacements certainly affect the construction of that veiled and elusive character, time, in La camera da letto. In fact, the contrast between “Romanzo” and “Romanza” can also be found in the contrapuntal temporal structures of that novel in verse.24 La camera da letto is both a gripping and ironic bildungsroman and the story of “un amore che mai/potra trovare requie sulla terra” [p. 69] (“a love that shall never/find peace on earth”), of the impossibly intense love of a mother and son. In fact, the Freudian thematics of the work attach themselves to the lyrically portrayed figure of A.’s mother, Maria Rossetti. Her representa¬ tions resemble in important ways the female figure in “Romanza.” She is surrounded by similar enigmas and imaginative hypotheses, and her story is enmeshed in the same kind of narrational difficulties that appear in the short poem. And in some way the whole household and the objects associated with it, from cutlery to bed, become in the novel objects of transition to the mother. It is worthwhile in this context to consider Bertolucci’s remarks on the “family romance” and poetic neurosis. Bertolucci supplies on the dust jacket of La camera da letto some telling words on the subject: I would add that during all the years, during the mornings—not so many but neither a very few—that I attended with a novelist s regularity to the drawing up of my poema, or novel in verse, I would add, I was saying, that

Massimo Cacciari observes: “Together with the rhythms of leaving there resound those of lingering, of the earth where we can rest at length.” From this dissonance “the poem s anxiety is bom . . . from the continual alternation between a scanning of real time and the heartbeat” (in Cacciari’s review of La camera da letto, Eidos 2, no. 2 [1984]: 39). Salibra noticed these contrasting elements in Fuochi in novembre but did not extend her observations to later works. She writes concerning his tendency to adopt diaristic modes:

There exists a story-line which weaves its plots from among the anthol-

ogy s micro-units, but it must continually come into contact with the narrating ‘I,’ with whom it maintains an unstable and fluctuating relation” (“La poesia oltre il diario,” p. 106).

Epos and Fragment

133

now and again I wrote poems, as I always have. In this way, in the folds of the poema, I composed what up until now is my second book of poems, Winter Journey—a book that could have compensated for a potential checkmake of the more ambitious project. Ambitious, I assure you, only in its proportions. In fact I wanted to follow the conspicuously domestic title, The Bedchamber, with the subtitle “family romance.” The term was vaguely derived from an essay by Freud entitled “The Family Romance of a Neurotic.” But what poet is not foremost a neurotic?

Concerning the diary of family events discovered in his family home, which provides some of the story of La camera da letto, Bertolucci adds: “It’s probably an alibi that surfaced after the fact, by chance, if it was not exactly invented.” By this he means that the fantasies in La camera da letto are at least as significant to the genesis of the novel as any factual source (one example being the story of his mother’s courtship). Thus, he openly defines poetry as an invention akin to the inventions of children who, Freud wrote, imagine princely progenitors for themselves and evokes the term neurosis, which one standard textbook defines as a “psychogenic affection in which the symptoms are the symbolic expres¬ sion of a psychical conflict whose origins lie in the subject’s childhood history; these symptoms constitute compromises between wish and de¬ fence.”25 Thus, according to Bertolucci, poetry itself could be considered a neurotic symptom, when it functions as such a compromise. In the dust-jacket copy just cited, Bertolucci describes how he reproduced psy¬ chical conflict by composing two poetic works contemporaneously, thereby managing to walk a fine line between “compensation

and

“checkmate.” In a related statement of poetics, an essay entitled “Dalla poetica dell’extrasistole” (Poetics of the extra systolic beat), Bertolucci describes his conflicting emotions when writing poetry as “the discomfort which derives, when one writes, from the chest’s pressing against the table, the frequent rising of arhythmias . . . with the side effect of pushing one to seek distraction in the city streets” and adds that his heart raced when his poems met the eye of a cherished reader. 0 The author has also specified some of the childhood conflicts that kindled the anxious behavior portrayed in the chapter of La camera da letto titled “Come nasce l’ansia” (How anxiety is born). On a dust-jacket composed for Viaggio dinverno (1971), we read: “A son of the middle-

25 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 266. 26 A first part of Bertolucci s “Dalla poetica deU’extrasistole

appeared in Paragone 2,

no. 22 (1951): 66-69, and a second in Paragone 17, no. 198 (1966): 23—26. Here 1 quote Paragone 2, no. 22 (1951), p. 67.

134

The Poiesis of History

bourgeois agrarian class, grandson on his father’s side of the upper one, but poor from a dearth of land; son on the opposite, mother’s side of a family Catholic, big and rich, and from the lower (and pagan) Po Val¬ ley—he had to maneuver ably to reach a balance.” He records that his younger adulthood was also affected by “Fascism and anti-Fascism, the former to be done in, or, actually, to be repressed, with hysteria and impotence, the second to be loved, or, actually, to be repressed, with assiduousness and impotence.” As in Freud, attachments and conflicts over attachments are at the basis of every life story. From these com¬ ments we can see that Bertolucci applies Freudian notions like hysteria and repression not only to single subjects but to political ones and to social classes in conflict. In La camera da letto, in fact, landed classes, sharecroppers, and dayworkers inhabit a contiguous world, with conflicts not unlike “family” ones. The theme of attachments through “property,” and the related emotion of ownership or possession dominates Viaggio d’inverno, where the term “property” extends beyond a poetic exploration of Parma’s agricultural domain in all of its splendors and seasons and applies to filial affections and disaffections. Bertolucci dramatizes in La camera da letto his continuous struggle to acquire an “equilibrium,” to balance disparate psychic tendencies, both in the family (maternal/pa¬ ternal) and the sociopolitical (Fascist/anti-Fascist) domains. Each of his compromises results sadly in “impotence.” Unresolved conflicts remain a terrain for neurosis, for “disturbances of behaviour, of the emotions, or of thought which make manifest a defence against anxiety and constitute a compromise in respect of this internal conflict from which the subject, in his neurotic position, derives a certain advantage.”2' A symptom of Bertolucci’s neurotic literary compromise is his vacilla¬ tion between a tenuous “ungraspable” composition such as “Romanza” and its counterpart, the novel or “Romanzo.” These titles, which are also the names of literary genres, and these poems themselves provide a means for navigating in what Mengaldo called, in reference to Viaggio d’inverno, “the space, necessarily mobile and temporary, which Berto¬ lucci claims for himself .

.

. that of ‘poema’ or the potential auto¬

biographical novel.” He adds that “the series of Lieder alluded to in the Schubert-style title prepares the sketches [for] or draws fragments and scattered diary pages” for the poema.28 He goes on to make the crucial point that “in this fascinating movement from ‘poema’ to fragment, or in

Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, p. 269. 28 Mengaldo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, pp. 570—71. I would add that the fragmen¬ tary romanza differs from the more imagistic and enigmatic style reminiscent of the Hermetics evinced in '‘Frammento” by Bertolucci (La capanna Indiana, p. 20).

Epos and Fragment

135

two titles already in Fuochi in novembre, between ‘romanzo’ and ‘romanza,’ Bertolucci sums up independently forty years of poetic history.”29 Perhaps Pasolini best understood both the impasse Mengaldo outlines and the “obsessive” formal vacillations and compromises that dominate Bertolucci’s poetic compositions. It is not very surprising that Pasolini, the cultural critic most concerned with the negative effects in postwar Italy of large-scale industrialization with its attendant “commodity fetish¬ ism” and its widespread destruction of the agrarian world, should be the critic most sympathetic to the anxious side of Bertolucci’s work. After all, both poets reacted to the new economic trends with elegies set in rural worlds. Pasolini, in a review of Viaggio d’inverno, begins a short study of his friend’s work by taking up the matter of poetic “conserva¬ tion,” casting his analysis in terms of a Freudian notion of loss. He postulates the threat of a “maternal body without life” and Finds that a related obsessive “philosophy of nothingness” becomes the displaced subject of Viaggio d’inverno. In words that seem to describe perfectly a poetic fetishist intent on creating his poetic talisman, he asserts that verse-making is a way of both accepting and attenuating the prospect of the mother’s dead body: Attilio Bertolucci never intends in any way to elude his obsession. None¬ theless, he has carried out once and for all an inaugural act meant to attenuate it, to happily correct it, to make it a “manner.” In this way he can obey his obsession and continue writing the ever-same verses he so loves and which so console him. At the same time, he can veil that obses¬ sion and, playing precisely with that veil, he can write verses that are always ineffably new with respect to themselves. His obsession is that of losing, once and for all, exactly that ability to veil obsession, of losing, that is, the ability to enjoy life in peace. A fictional Catholicism (an utter absurdity in this book) can mask neither the “philosophy of nothingness” that founds the obsession, nor the . . . lolly of enjoying life. . . . But this poor, smiling Epicurean . . . lies piteously: the other side of Epicureanism is the worn-out consciousness ol a loss worse than death because it precedes death, as though after interment there were another interment.10

The deepest motivation for this poetic practice of distancing and attenua¬ tion lies, in Pasolini’s view, in an inner exorcism ol death, a defense

29 Mengaldo, Poeli italiani del Novecento, p. 571. 30 Pier Paolo Pasolini, review of Viaggio d'inverno, by Attilio Bertolucci, Nuovi Argomeriti 22 (1971), now in II portico della morte (Rome: Quaderni Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1988), p. 271.

136

The Poiesis of History

against “that distant day of mourning.”31 In Pasolini’s analysis, the ungraspable maternal body ultimately motivates this poetic play of veils. Bertolucci masterfully reveals and hides in poetry this rather satisfying obsession with the ungraspable, since “he has succeeded in cloaking reality and conscience without rendering them utterly invisible.”32 Poetry presents its author with the occasion for both relief (“they so please and so console him”) from the anxiety of potential loss and its enactment, since the anxiety of poetic creation remains when the anxiety of separa¬ tion is distant. Poetry s fetishistic function lies then in its dynamic of compromise. Surrogates occupy the space rendered empty by the absent maternal body in substitutions described, this time, by Bertolucci him¬ self: “Attilio Bertoluci was born and lived, as far as possible, in the countryside that embraces Parma, at just the right distance from the small capitol from another age’ to be able to see its bell towers and its minarets (Madame de Stael)—Parma, the sweet, supine, and ungraspable body of a mother (or lover?)” (emphasis added).33 Bertolucci’s poetry reproduces these lived relations of the tangible and intangible, desire and distancing. The same attention to the thematics of the ungraspable appears in “Romanza,” and it remains crucial in the narrative style of La camera da letto. The plot itself comes to be a com¬ promise between the visible and the hidden. This compromise is perti¬ nent to poetry’s inherently neurotic nature and to the fetishistic relation it enacts, hinted at by Pasolini. Furthermore, the issue of the fetish relates

31 Ibid. Pasolini is not evoking Freud’s discussion of the fetish as a substitute for the mother’s “absent penis.” He has generalized the fetish to her whole body. What Pa¬ solini’s discussion most resembles is Freud’s way of describing the “disavowal” that characterizes fetishism:

It is not true that, after the child has made his observation of

the woman, he has preserved unaltered his belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up. In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a compromise has been reached, as is only possible under the dominance of the unconscious laws of thought— the primary processes. Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of every¬ thing; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor” (Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 21 [London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961], p. 154). Mengaldo expressed, more recently than Pasolini, a similar view on the notion of a conflict at the center of selfhood. He writes that Bertolucci’s “vagabond” theme is “a quiet crossing of the spaces of one’s own existence in the direction of something (which repulses and attracts) situated beyond and ‘'after’ them, that is probably none other than death” (Poeti italiani del Novecento, p. 572). 32 Pasolini, review of Viaggio d’inverno, p. 271. 33 Bertolucci, dust jacket of Viaggio d’inverno.

Epos and Fragment

137

not only to narrative questions but to Pasolini’s perception that an at¬ tachment to the manner of past poetic styles produces the veil with which Bertolucci plays as he writes lines “always ineffably new with respect to themselves.” In his review Pasolini left out textual examples, but a poem such as “Esercizi sul settembre” (September exercises) illustrates the type of composition to which he refers. The poem celebrates Nature’s welcome veiling of winter with a deceptively warm September day. That illusion of warmth suggests that the speaker’s own tepid body may itself be only deceptively alive. September leaves are fire-colored but their “metal” may cut thin hands as devoid of warmth and life as the leaves: II calore d’un giorno di settembre e un bene che non devi lasciar perdere, ogni foglio del calendario che stacchi se ne porta via un po’ come si porta via la tua vita giunta al suo settembre. E ancora loderai tu il settembre che avvicina l’invemo, poi che il sole nascente dalle sue albe tranquille e fumide entro i cieli del meriggio arde d’un fuoco che ha solo settembre? Cosi le foglie bruciano in settembre e si fanno metallo, fulva lamina fragile, che spezzano le tue dita smagrite, del colore perso che hanno le foglie a fine di settembre. [Viaggio cTinverno, p. 23]

(The heat of a day in September/is a blessing you must not let go,/every page of the calendar you tear away/carries some of it away as your lile/is carried away having reached its September.//And will you still praise Sep¬ tember/which hastens winter, since the rising/sun from its calm and smoky/dawns burns in the afternoon skies/with a fire had only by September?//So the leaves burn in September/and turn to metal, a tawny/fragile foil; the dark red/that leaves have at the end of September/colors your now thin fingers.)

The season evoked here illuminates the unstable boundaries between the living and the dead, just as its form inhabits the dead poetic past and grants it living warmth. The text might be called mannerist (or its resent-

138

The Poiesis of History

blance to the sestina (although only one word is repeated, “settembre,” twice in each stanza). The form foregrounds both semantic transforma¬ tion and stasis because the same word is transformed by its slightly different semantic contexts. The sestina as a form demands crafty and well-crafted arrangements of a meaningful repetition with a difference that verges in fact on semantic emptiness or the “philosophy of nothing¬ ness” to which Pasolini alludes. Pasolini’s verdict of mannerism might be extended to Bertolucci’s novel in verse because Bertolucci mixes genres to make his verses “inef¬ fably new.” Eugenio Montale expressed an insight similar to Pasolini’s when he noted Bertolucci’s preference for earlier poetic eras and posed the following: “Might it be that it falls to him, and to a few others, to free recent lyric poetry from the fixation of a limited number of schemas and words, perhaps by going back in time in order then to make a leap forward?”34 Bertolucci “goes back in time” to the manners “of great nineteenthcentury culture,”3" from the idyll to the sentimental novel (a verse novel even revives the verse epic to some degree), but how does Bertolucci make his “leap forward”? In order to understand Bertolucci’s choice to write a work—La camera da letto—that vacillates between the romanzo!

poema and the romanza/frammento, we must examine briefly the modern taste for what Montale called “a limited number of schemas and words,” the modern taste for the fragment, and to examine twentieth-century po¬ etry’s apparently final rejection of the narrative verse epic. This rejection of the verse epic may very well characterize late nine¬ teenth- and early twentieth-century poetry and may have been a result of the modern lyric’s retreat into the “intangible” in protest against “com¬ modification” of art. Giorgio Agamben’s theory of cultural production, which is linked to Marx’s theorization of “commodity fetishism,” offers an explanation of this phenomenen that can also aid us in understanding Bertolucci’s poetic compromise in La camera da letto. In his Stanze, Agamben specifically analyzes the modern taste for fragmentary verse in the context not only of Marxian fetishism but of Freud’s attention to the fetishistic relation and disavowal (“Verleugnung”). He explains Freud’s important recognition of the psychical dy-

34 Eugenio Montale, review of Fuochi in novembre, by Attilio Bertolucci, Pan 2, no. 9 (1934): 135 (quoted in Jacopetta, Attilio Bertolucci: Lo specchio e la perdita, p. 46). 35 Franco Fortini recognizes the “eminent literary operation” performed by Bertolucci but finds fault with the poet when he draws on nineteenth and twentieth-century English literature in a way the critic defines as “partly authentic and partly mannered” (Novecento, La letteratura italiana [Bari: Laterza, 1976J, p. 326).

Epos and Fragment

139

namics whereby the fetishist denies the absence of the mother’s penis (together with his own symbolic castration) and allows a substitute object that relieves the anxiety. Thus the fetishist implicity recognizes or ad¬ mits the lack. This substitute for the mother’s missing penis is called a

fetish. Fetishism is characterized, therefore, by a split self establishing or effecting a compromise between denial and acceptance. Agamben then considers the “absent object” in a more general, philosophical sense, and he comes to define the fetish as an ungraspable object that satisfies a human need precisely by being ungraspable. This mode of significa¬ tion is distinct from the symbolic because there is no unlocking of a riddle, no resolution for infinite substitutions. The fetish is concrete, Agamben asserts, and by virtue of being the “presence of an absence" extremely immaterial and intangible: “It refers back beyond itself toward something that can never really be possessed.” “With an infinite poten¬ tial to be a surrogate,” the fetish is regularly collected and proliferates endlessly.36 The rhetorical processes in language, namely synecdoche and metonomy, enact similar compromises in their substitutions, as do higher-level poetic processes. In the chapter of Stanze titled “Eros malinconico” (Melancholic eros), Agamben observed that the “unfinished" fragment in modern poetics stands in a fetishistic relation to the poema, which “can never be evoked in its entirety, but only made present through its negation. . . . The difference compared to normal metaphors in language is, here, that the substituted object (the ‘whole’ to which the fragment refers) is, like the mother’s penis, nonexistent or no longer existent, and so the unfinished reveals itself to be the perfect, exact

pendant to the fetishistic Verleugnung.”3 Of course, Bertolucci is not simply a composer of unfinished verse. Bertolucci’s compromise is to attempt instead the “unfinished novel,

an

impossible genre—the novel in verse.38 He thereby both dismisses mod¬ ern poetry’s rejection of wholeness and flaunts the impossiblity of his enterprise, declaring impasse and “impotence” by juxtaposing poema and frammento, making a masterpiece, paradoxically, out of the “strength of his weakness.” Pasolini asserted that Bertolucci’s mannerism allowed him to play with stylistic veils and therefore to “write verses which are always ineffably new with respect to themselves.” And now it is clear that the novelistic framework in La camera da letto is the hypothesis, the

36 Agamben, Stanze, p. 42. 37 Ibid., p. 41. 38 Paolo Lagazzi noted this tendency in the poemetto “La capanna indiana,” in which he reads both the hypothesis of the novel and the impossibility of achieving it {At til to Bertolucci [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 19821, p. 59).

140

The Poiesis of History

manner, the veil that enables Bertoluci’s endless writing of verses. It is fascinating that Bertolucci not only claimed that the family book source for the novels was an “alibi” for writing, but that he considers the novel a dying artistic form. We can witness once again the dynamic of “Romanza” whereby hypothesizing an imagined death or loss defends against that loss. Bertolucci explicitly refers in La camera da letto to the early 1930s as the age when “ancora il dottor Freud descrive casi clinici/prolungando il romanzo, moribondo generetdella sua classe in via d’immolarsi” [p. 227; emphasis added] (“Dr. Freud still describes case studies,/ prolonging the novel, the moribund genre!of his self-immolating class”). The author, like Freud, prolongs the life of this dying genre. By hypothesizing its demise, Bertolucci constructs a defense: his continuing novel in verse.

La camera da letto contains strains both of “Romanzo” and “Ro¬ manza,” since it is both a generational family history and a story that frames in its hypotheses an enigma (Maria Rossetti’s secrets). The two potentially incompatible and divisive strains make up the poetic play (Pasolini’s veils) of the work. The novel in verse is born then as an impossible but productive enterprise, as a compromise that keeps close quarters with impasse and thematizes its menace. The effect of the two styles of narration and enunciation, of two different ways of framing events, differs fundamentally from the effect achieved in a framed narra¬ tive such as The Decameron, in which multiple storytellers complicate the interpretation and subvert easy access to authorial intention. Berto¬ lucci’s aim is not so much the revival of a forgotten tradition or an accumulation of interpretive complications, as the construction of some¬ thing “ungraspable,” as intense as his Parma or as his loves, yet quite apart from the classic sublime. Luzi describes the same issue in differ¬ ent terms when he observes the difficulty of grasping the musical tones of Bertolucci’s verse; he writes: “It happens for certain prodigious musi¬ cal scores that one could read the text equally and indifferently as some¬ thing sad or happy.

We could read La camera da letto as an epos or a

fragment, “indifferently.” “Romanzo” and “Romanza” may be seen as the models for the narrational styles that achieve that effect of undecidability, but they are, of course, separate poems within a collection, and as such they function contrapuntally only across the ordering of the poems as they appear in

Fuochi in novembre. Bertolucci also experimented with styles in other

39 Mario Luzi, “La capanna indiana di Bertolucci,” Paragone 2, no. 22 (1951): 41.

Epos and Fragment

141

ways pertinent to the novel in verse. In Viaggio d’inverno, long composi¬ tions alternate with very short ones to form a rhythm of structural con¬ trasts.40 These may be constituted by a semantic opposition, such as the one found in the lines “Lasciami sanguinare sulla strada/sulla polvere

sulVantipolvere sull’erba”41 [emphasis added] (“Let me bleed, on the street Ion the dust on the anti-dust on the grass”), or by metric contrasts, such as alternating long and short lines, or by alternations between the use of quatrains and unstructured strophes.

Bertolucci also experi¬

mented with internal counterpoint in narrational styles and in styles of enunciation. “Di molto prima (1933)” (A long while ago [1933]) in Viaggio d’in¬

verno, is a particularly illustrative composition and can serve as a second reading paradigm for the novel in verse. The poem centers on the topos of town and country, as does La camera da letto:

Parma, citta Fuggevoli le ore che il materassaio batte da un nascosto cortile fuggevole e Taprile.

Parma, campagna 0 stagione piii dolce o verde e nera primavera se tu tomi fra noi nello strepito quieto del mattino anche aprile se ne va veloce poi che marzo se n’e andato lasciandoci a mani vuote il sole s’e annebbiato un’altra volta e domenica siamo rimasti soli come una volta. [P. 135]

4(1 Lorenzini observed “metrical contrasts between short, dignified compositions and pages from diaries, letters, and excerpts from the novel in verse” (“Attilio Bertolucci o la sfida del monotonalismo,” p. 153). 41 Bertolucci, Viaggio (Tinverno, p. 86.

142

The Poiesis of History

(Parma, city. // Fleeting are the hours/that the mattress-maker beats out/ from a hidden courtyard/fleeting April .//Parma, country. 11 Oh. sweetest, green and black season /Spring if you come back among us/in the moming’s/still uproar//April too goes off quickly/since March has gone/leav¬ ing us empty-handed/the sun has fogged//It’s Sunday/again/we are left alone/as once upon a time.)

Here town and country are distinguished by contrasting temporalities: in each place time is equally “veiled and fleeting,” only in the town time is measured by the sounds of an urban workman’s activities, and in the country by the silent movements of the seasons. In town, workaday, prosaic rhythms constitute a beating interference—reproduced in the rhymes—picked up by a keen ear, and, as Sereni observed, these mini¬ mal occurrences characterize Bertolucci’s poetic plot. Routine sounds take on the quality of menace, as do heartbeats that break into con¬ sciousness, since they evoke for the anxious listener the fleeting passage of time. Time in Parma’s countryside is measured instead in months, which are further defined into cycles meaningful to a farmer, not a city dweller. April there, before the growing season’s main farming tasks begin in May, is short-lived. This “fleeting April” is effectively juxta¬ posed to a long, repetitious (“again,” “as once upon a time”) Sunday morning’s pause (“still”). One anxious day is “longer” than the month to which it belongs. On an empty Sunday time is a season, then a month, then a day, then only part of a day (“morning”), then dissolves into the anti-time of emptiness (“April too goes off quickly/since March has gone/ leaving us empty-handed”). The country feels the threat of exclusion, separation, and solitude as well as the town. But in the country the speaker’s anxiety is unmasked differently. The speaker addresses “Spring” in a vocative but receives no response. Additionally, the hypothetical framing of these lines (“Spring if you come back”), similar to that employed in “Romanza,” impinges upon the temporal framework so that a precarious moment of transition and void comes very prominently to the poem’s fore: March is gone, and Spring/April is still a hypothesis. The relationship between the title of the poem—“Di molto prima (1933)”—and the rest of the poem in both of its parts constitutes a framing even more enigmatic and hypothetical than the one in Parma campagna. The date 1933 in parentheses is part of the title—not the conventional place for a date reference. The poem itself was published in "Disperse” (Scattered poems), a section of Viaggio d inverno that con¬ tains, its subtitle tells us, poems written between 1955 and 1970. Thus, (although we cannot be sure) it seems unlikely that the date in the title

Epos and Fragment

143

in fact refers to the year in which the poem was written. If the date does not refer to the year of composition, then what is the relationship be¬ tween these lines and the year 1933? Does the title’s parenthetical date make specific the vague reference to temporal distance in the words “di molto prima” (“a long while ago”)? Does the poem’s title, by its histori¬ cal reference, anchor the poem’s date of composition or the date of the events in the poem? Was the title composed or reworked to include a date only when Bertolucci decided to include the composition in the section of scattered poems? Is reference to a date in Bertolucci’s poem to be read as inherently significant for its interpretation in so far as external history must be brought to bear on its poetic contents; and what, again, is there about the year 1933 that can be connected to the eternal theme of the passage of time, which is the poem’s topic? How is this subject noteworthy from a historical point of view, in 1933? Alternately, must the date be understood biographically, as significant to the internal un¬ folding of time in the poem proper, in the subject’s experience of those unfolding hours in Parma town and Parma country? The search for an answer to these questions is complicated by the fact that the poem’s protagonist, the “I,” is subsumed in that uniquely lonely “we”; he is both a participant in the events the poem evokes and extra¬ neous to them or distanced from them, as the title itself asserts. A firstperson narrator of past events in which he or she is involved is always both a participant in the events and distanced from them. This particular poem is interesting because the prominent date stands in such a baffling relation to the contents of the poem, and it therefore affects our percep¬ tion of its narrator and its whole meaning. In this case, the title itself functions as a refracting frame. The discourse of an author steps outside of the anxiety thematized in the text by adding the historical dating as a distancing, metatextual sign of authorship; this separation functions to divide an authorial persona’s neat precision in the title from the verse protagonist’s disconcerting experience of the transitory, from the figure relegated by the title itself to a time “long ago. ” Nothing in the other poems of the section or their particular grouping explains the enigma of this historical reference.

One,

however, ‘Tn

tempi di disimpegno” (Times of disengagement) revolves around the con¬ trast between a dateless day (“un giorno senza data,” p. 139) and the dated, stone markers of wartime executions. These are scattered along a road and become indistinguishable from simple rock piles as night falls “nell’ora di perdizione” (“in the hour of perdition”). This poem presents a much more explicit allegory of the pitfalls then of a faded and fading historical memory than “Di molto prima (1933).'' Optimism about the future and salvation (the opposite of perdition) depend, it seems, on a

144

The Poiesis of History

clear memory. In “Di molto prima (1933)” the memory of spring is dis¬ tant enough to turn even the eternal change of seasons into an uncertain hypothesis (“Spring if you come back”). Historical memory, like a sea¬ son past, is also susceptible to the effects of distance and forgetting. “Di molto prima (1933)” provides an example of how poetry can enact this state. Bertolucci has constructed a text divided into a title and body, which in its divisions enacts a further separation that may or may not imply distance (here the ambiguous relationship between 1933 and the poem’s two sections). Because the text of La camera da letto is also divided into sections and chapters, this specific style of titling can be made central there in a way that is unique in poetry, since extensive titling internal to a text is traditionally reserved to narrative, specifically to novels.42 In this regard. La camera da letto resembles the “Disperse” section of Viaggio d’inverno, since it includes a definite, if undecipherable, “his¬ torical” element, a historical memory that is already slipping away, like the memory of a dead partisan in “Per Ottavio Ricci”: A te l’Appennino autunnale: le foglie di ruggine, il vento, le case chiuse nel sonno, gli occhi chiusi per sempre. La giovinezza muore, sui monti le siepi sono nude e stracciate. Ora il tuo passo s’e perduto, addio e addio ancora, viene un invemo favoloso di nevi e fiamme, un tempo quieto che ci scorderemo di te. Dicembre, 194443

(For you the Appenines’s autumn/the rust leaves, the wind,/homes shut-in with sleep/eyes shut forever.//Youth dies, in the hills/the hedges are na¬ ked and tom./Now your step is lost, adieu/adieu once more, a fabu-

42 Another example of this significant style of titling, which entails the construction of a distance, is found in the poem “Pensando a Roma alia chiesa di San Vitale a Parma” (Thinking of Rome at Parma’s San Vitale church), in Viaggio d'inverno, pp. 118—19, where the narrative describes an encounter at a funeral with old cousins and hence the past, but Rome is not mentioned anywhere in the body of the text. Bertolucci, La capanna indiana, p. 120.

Epos and Fragment

145

lous//winter is coming/made of snow and flames/a quiet time when we shall forget you.//December, 1944.)

Bertolucci indeed constructs La camera da letto as an as-yet-unachieved forgetting of history that treads a fine line between acceptance and de¬ nial of poetry’s complicity in the threatened loss.

CHAPTER

SIX

Compromise and Distance

iVttilio Bertolucci’s La camera da letto owes some of its breadth to its mix of genres, a quality noticed by almost all the work’s commentators, who disagree, however, on its ultimate nature or, to evoke the terminol¬ ogy of the formalists, on its dominant. Is this novel in verse more lyrical or more novelistic? Niva Lorenzini asserts that part of the very satisfying nature of the work lies in the fact that it forces its readers to invent new parameters of reference. Lorenzini herself used a veritable army of these in her attempt to characterize La camera da letto for her own readers.1 A novel in verse certainly challenges theoreticians and critics alike: all poems might in theory be considered narrative because language itself has a temporal and sequential character, but it remains to be seen how the very general category of narration, which extends beyond the bound¬ aries of literary terminology, can usefully describe the specific forms and techniques that enable us to speak of multiple narrative poetic genres in different historical epochs. Giorgio Agamben, using one approach, has referred to how the modem poetics of the fragment function to evoke the poema assoluto—with “poema” referring to the verse epic—which the fragment necessarily recalls by its own lack of such absoluteness. Al¬ though Agamben does not specifically say so, we can safely assume that the poemas he refers to are works such as The Divine Comedy, Orlando furioso, or Gerusalemme liberata, that is, poetic works of a currently unattainable epic nature. Another, and very different, critic, Alberto Moravia leaves the epic

' Niva Lorenzini analyzes La camera da letto in terms of its “verbal flux,” “typographi¬ cal relationships,” “refrains, echoes, [and] parallelisms,” “stratification,” and “score” (“La camera del tempo,” Alfabeta, nos. 62—63 [1984]).

Compromise and Distance

147

out of his discussion of the relations of poetic and narrative genres in twentieth-century literature and examines directly the relations of poetry and, specifically, the novel. In his essay “Poesia e romanzo” (Poetry and the novel),2 Moravia takes as his point of departure one of Baudelaire’s “tableaux parisiens” (no.

100). His choice is particularly significant

since Bertolucci had translated Les Fleurs du mal into Italian prose.3 The particular tableau recalls Bertolucci’s “Romanzo” because it treats in a few lines the novelistic theme of feminine jealousy. Moravia notes that it is enough for Baudelaire to write the line “La servante au grande coeur dont vous etiez jalouse” (“The maid servant with a big heart of whom you were jealous”) in order to suggest a whole story. It does not matter if the poem subsequently turns its attention to other matters, in this case the ingratitude of the comfortable living toward the dead who brave winter outdoors in their cemeteries. Baudelaire’s verses demon¬ strate, according to Moravia, that poetry always possesses a novelistic potential but can dispense with duration and still be poetry. The novel, however, is transformed into a prose poem if it forgoes this duration. Moravia reasons that this is so because poetry has an experimental char¬ acter, but the novel can only be a fundamentally coercive ordering of totality that recounts only the bourgeois world view. Its ideology is de¬ fined by an evolutionary schema from which poetry, not easily classdefined, is exempt. Moravia makes his comments, it must be remem¬ bered, in the light of issues current in his day as they concerned the nouveau roman, already, that is, within the context of post-epic novels, which make a point of eschewing protagonists and plots. It is for this reason that the issue of duration has supplanted that of the narrative verse epic referred to by Agamben (who included only turn-of-the-century poetics in his discussion). The jurisdictions of various genres over duration constitute a problematic that takes on complex ideological con¬ notations, especially in the postwar years—just as another aspect of temporality, history and historicism, occupied Pasolini’s ideological ex¬ periments in genre. In short, Bertolucci is working not only within the framework of the crisis of history and narrativizing historicism, but also within in the con¬ text of the crisis of the novel. A basic query for Bertolucci could be formulated as follows: is modern fragmentary poetry to be defined in relation to a whole that is a lost epic poetic form, to the “poema as-

2 Alberto Moravia, “Poesia e romanzo,” Nuovi Argomenli 22 (1971): 7—12. Pasolini's review of Viaggio (iinverno also appeared in this issue. 3 Charles Baudelaire, / flori del male, trails. 1975).

Atlilio Bertolucci (Milan: Garzanti,

148

The Poiesis of History

soluto,” or to the more contemporary competitor, the novel? On the one hand, we might opt to study the novel in verse by using the model of a horizontal, synchronic “sibling” rivalry—that is, between the novel in verse and the novel in prose. On the other, we might choose to under¬ stand the author’s choice of generic form by understanding it as an in¬ stance of a vertical and diachronic “Oedipal” rivalry between the genre/ offspring and its progenitor—here, between the novel in verse and the narrative verse epic. The question of the generic relations between po¬ etry and novel is not, in either case, easily resolved because we must then choose among competing novelistic genres against which the poetic “fragment” acquires its status as a fragment. Should we think about the picaresque novel, the idyllic novel, the bildungsroman, or the actionpacked thriller of popular ilk? Bertolucci selects his multiple themes in such a way that his readers are forced to consider a diffusion of novelistic topics that challenge the thematic categories of the verse epic and the novel itself. And he does this precisely in order to challenge the prescriptive suggestions that glut¬ ted the realist aesthetics of the immediate postwar years. Still, what shall we make of the poetic form of his narratives even if we separate the novel in verse from the themes connatural to the verse epic? Bertolucci once asserted after all that the most beautiful line of narrative verse in the whole history of Italian literature was Torquato Tasso’s “A1 fine ormai di quel piovoso inverno” (“By then by the end of that rainy winter”) in Gerusalemme liberata. His subsequent discussion of that line has hardly anything to do with its thematic spareness, but with its nature as verse. He describes Tasso’s hendecasyllable as “stagionato, non barbaro, non prerafaellita, non parnassiano, non decadente. Ma neppure, ancora, restaurato e lustrato dal classicismo ermetico, anzi narrativo, umilmente funzionale

a fini

domestici,

nella lunga ombra portata dalla Con-

troriforma”4 (“seasoned, free of metrical imitations of the classics, of Pre-Raphaelitism, of the influence of the Parnassus, of Decadentism. Yet neither is it as yet restored and made polished by Hermetic Classi¬ cism; on the contrary, [it is] narrative and humbly functional to domestic ends, in the long shadow cast by the Counter-Reformation”). Bertolucci presents us with the possibility then that modem verse wrestles mainly with the “whole” of traditional metric form, and not with the “whole” of teleological narration. He subsequently takes up both problems in his novel in verse:

he writes long,

metrically sophisticated and highly

4 Bertolucci, “Dalla poetica dell’extrasistole,” p. 24. He asserts that he read Tasso as he began the novel in verse and that the hendecasyllable began to beat “piii come un pendolo che come un metronomo” [p. 23] (“more like a pendulum than a metronome”).

Compromise and Distance

149

crafted lines in a long poem that stretches almost into dissolution without ever dividing into discrete fragments. He creates a compromise between the novel and the lyric and a new genre: the long fragment. In a sense, La camera da letto exists as both the success and the failure of each of those genres, constituting a carefully constructed distance from both. This constructive tendency underlines Bertolucci’s constant thematic re¬ frain: the thousands of ways of the world “nella tempestosa dolcezza/che avvince e disgiunge” [p. 220] (“in the stormy sweetness/which looses and binds”). Bertolucci binds his poem to both narrative and lyric modes by textually recreating moments of temporal prolonging.5 His poetry departs considerably from the dominant Hermetic poetics of his formative years by insisting, precisely, on duration over simultaneity, on long mornings and afternoons for a boy awaiting his mother’s return, on long winters for spinster aunts awaiting husbands. The generational layout of family his¬ tory also forces readers to note the passage of time. Constantly recurring state-of-the-weather reports—in which seasonal changes indicate both transitional movement and the stasis of eternally returning harvests, har¬ vest moons, icy roofs, hot and poppy-spotted summer fields and days— have a similar function. The effect is certainly that of duration, with what Luzi called an accompanying “brivido che da la sabbia della clessidra” (“shiver produced by hourglass sand”).6 7 A poetics of prolonging seems to govern the very construction of the La camera da letto.1 Bertolucci’s use of metrics is significant in this regard since he uses what Girardi has termed a “metrica debole” (“weak

5 Many of Bertolucci’s readers have noted how nonmetaphorical his poetic language is. Vittorio Sereni notes Bertolucci’s scarce concern with “the essential word” and analogy in general, observing “a taste for and a knowledge of fable and romance which the poetry of those years, in many instances surly and sullen, seemed to have banished from its dominions” (in his review of La capanna indiana, by Attilio Bertolucci, now in Letture preliminari [Padua: Liviana,

1973), p. 35).

Luzi noted the absence of symbols in

Bertolucci’s work: “Behind these domestic objects there is no background, no dense inner life, no metaphysical reserve; emotion is born from things without going beyond them, without converting them into symbols” (“La capanna indiana di Bertolucci,

p.

42). It is interesting to note that in some of the poems of La capanna indiana, Luzi detected errors in “duration and editing” that disappeared, in his view, in the title poem, “an attempt at a continuous poema.” 6 Luzi, “La capanna indiana di Bertolucci,” p. 42. 7 Bertolucci’s poetics can be summarized thematically in a few verses that evoke “un bambino . . . /che . . . gode e soffre e non vuole/che questo tempo si consumi, e muto/lo prolunga sino a non poterne piii” |La camera da letto, p. 721 (“a child . . .

who . . .

rejoices and suffers and does not want/this time to be consumed, and mutely/prolongs it for as long as he can stand”).

150

The Poiesis of History

metrics”), which unchains syntax and facilitates a narrative duration.8 This syntax, the lengthy lines, and the numerous strophic divisions of the chapters all contribute to the effect. By choosing the novel in verse as the genre in which to represent “that fleeting character,” Time, Bertolucci has also reopened a familiar feud within the family of Italian poets. One branch holds to an atemporal poetic purity and another tends to dissolve their verse, in Marco Forti’s words, “in memory’s fluvial expanse, in realistic interlacing . . . , in verse epic rhythms and even those of romance”; and “via Tasso, Ariosto, a certain Parini and a certain Foscolo, Manzoni and Porta, comes . . . the anti-twentieth-centuryism of Saba or Penna, of the late diaristic Montale ... of parts of Betocchi and much of Bertolucci.”9 Bertolucci eschews pure poetry in good company and actively hastens its decline “by adopting meters based predominantly on the hendecasyllable, al¬ most as though to stress a residual ‘epos.’”10 It is indeed his “residual epos” that presents the greatest challenge to the ideal of the pure lyric upheld by much of twentieth-century Italian poetry. The chapters of La camera da letto that pertain to the more distant past, especially the first chapter with its more foundational character, are also the most epic in their style. As long as the writing refers to progenitors as they live out existences imagined in great detail by their future biographer-offspring, the separateness of the past indeed evokes the epic. This genre, however, recedes quickly. Citati observed that subsequent sections concentrating on the author Bertolucci’s character, the more autobiographical ones, could be likened more to a bildungsroman.11 These chapters, which treat A.’s adolescence, come at the end of the first book, and they prevail in the second, which is largely a firstperson narration of the story of A.’s marriage and the birth of his chil¬ dren. The story of Maria Rossetti is in a more loosely articulated form and style, since the story of the love between mother and son constitutes a very different, decidedly non-epic and in fact “unspeakable” plot, which is woven into the other strands of La camera da letto. Bertolucci has put before his readers several subdivisions of narrative form, and we must be careful when attaching terminology to the work to pay attention to the fit of the narrative model to a living form that contains not one but several, various modes of discourse.

8 Girardi, “Rilievi variantistici,” p. 302. y Marco Forti, “II poema-romanzo ‘famigliare’ di Bertolucci,” Nuova Antologia, no. 2152 (1984): 251. 10 Ramat, “Far romanzo col verso,” p. 16. 11 Citati, “Una storia di famiglia col miele della poesia,” Corriere della Sera, February 16, 1984.

Compromise and Distance

151

Examples of residual epic motifs are most prevalent, I have said, in the early chapters. Such themes were already present in brief in Bertolucci’s early work, for instance in following lines where winter is a knight in battle: Vennero i freddi, con bianchi pennacchi e azzurre spade spopolarono le contrade.12 (The cold came /with white plumes and blue swords/and depopulated the neighborhoods.) They reappear in “II vento di Febbraio” (February wind), in which the wind itself is knightly: Amaro principe guerriero dagli occhi azzurri e dal duro cuore, muto e solo nella corte del vecchio Invemo come uno che aspetti e nulla pensi.13 (Bitter warrior prince/blue-eyed and hard-hearted,/silent and alone in old Winter’s court/like someone who is waiting without thinking.) In an interesting transformation of the chivalric verse epic within the novel in verse, the ancestral settlers who migrate from the malaria-rid¬ den Tuscan Maremma to Apennine Emilia and whom Bertolucci makes the earliest protagonists of his family epic are not aristocratic cavaliers but cattle herders on horseback. La camera da letto opens with a scene depicting their relentless search for an unsettled, windless site where they might rest at length. The galloping horses of the poem’s opening lines may remind us of legendary battle horses and brave soldiers, and hence of the classical and later verse epics, but Bertolucci’s noble beasts are workhorses: Dalle maremme con cavalli, giomo e notte, li accompagnavano nuvole da quando partirono lasciandosi dietro una pianura e dietro la pianura il mare e l’orizzonte in un fermo pallore d’alba estiva. I cavalli erano svelti come nuvole a rompere le gole, ad affacciarsi

12 Bertolucci, La capanna Indiana, p. 44. 13 Ibid., p. 54.

152

The Poiesis of History alle valli. Ma ogni volta che l’umido dei prati, il fragore lontano d’un torrente, il soleggiato ondulare d’una proda o altro segno favorevole li tenne alti su un passo, non tardo molto che l’occhio scopri, prima confuso airazzurro delFaria, un fumo uscito lento dal mistero d’un bosco di castagni e presto perso alia vista gia stanca, gia volta altrove, in cerca d’un cammino piii dolce per le bestie, sospinte in la, dopo la sosta inutile, e una cosi breve pastura.

[Pp. 9-10] (From the maremma with their horses/day and night, they were escorted by clouds/from the time they left, leaving/behind a plain/and behind the plain the sea and the horizon/in a summer dawn’s motionless pallor./The horses were swift as clouds/in breaking the cane, in looking out/over the valleys. But every time/that the moisture of the meadows, the far-off/rum¬ bling of a stream, the sunny/wavering of a river bank or another/favorable sign kept them high up over a pass, / the eye was not slow to discover, /first mingled with the air’s blue,/some smoke slowly emerging from the mys¬ tery/of a chestnut wood and soon lost/to weary sight, /already turned else¬ where, in search of/a gentler path for the stock,/driven further, after a pointless pause,/to an all-too-short pasture’s meal.)

The stuff of the epic, foundational story told here and in later ex¬ tended descriptions of the early settlement’s growth is transposed away from chivalrous quests and the agon. And some historical details, such as a hint of the author’s archival research in the phrase “un nome nuovo/ alle Corti appenniniche del Vescovo” [p.

13] (“a new name/in the

Bishop’s Apennine Court”), along with the use of the historical present tense in the narration, detract from the grand, far-off, legendary atmos¬ phere that characterizes the verse epic. There are, additionally, laconic references in this part of the text to historic battles—“i fatti di Francia” (“French events” or Napoleon in Italy)—as well as a mention of a spe¬ cific tombstone date, 1798 (p.

13). These contribute to the reader’s

sense of the poem’s attention to the historical frame and not to the legendary or mythic register. Turn-of-the-century political upheavals are recounted to the now-established settlers by an itinerant stone carver, and are heard by the community around a night fire “come fosse una fola/da rinarrare nelle lunghe veglie,/le sanguinose novita del mondo”

Compromise and Distance

153

[p. 13] (as though a tale/to be told on long evenings,/the bloody news of the world”). This domesticated storytelling itself becomes a theme of La camera da letto, and it appears several times in the opening chapter, in the example just mentioned but also at the end of chapter 1, in which the tame narrational activity is something very different from epic tales with their high purposes. Storytelling is simply a diversionary tactic em¬ ployed by the people in charge of keeping up the family accounts who must work until the wee hours: when stories are being told no one will interrupt them in their work (p. 17). Bertolucci alludes in the final lines of the first chapter to the family-book source for the novel in verse, specifically to the family accounting books that mix ledger entries, di¬ aries, and history in a new narrative form important for the rise of the novel genre.14 In this form, narrative has already taken on the domestic shadings of the bourgeois family novel. The family lineage, frequently eulogized in heroic epics, also appears in this introductory chapter, although it is not terribly glorious: La famiglia arricchisce aguzzando l’ingegno a lume di lucema: stende contratti, baratta, rettifica confini, unificando il suo in un dominio ampio che la sabbia, asciugando l’inchiostro, ingemma argentea sulla carta.

[P. 17] (The family earns its riches by sharpening/its wits under the lamp light: it draws up/contracts, it barters, it adjusts/boundaries, uniting its domin¬ ions/in an ample, ink dominion dried/by silvery sands which be-jewel/ the paper). The family ancestors have good strong blood to back up their paper claims, but their blood lines prove distinction and valor most clearly when cut into “il sangue e il seme” (“the blood and the seed”) of the less vigorous women from the “molle pianura del Po” [p. 18] (“soft planes of the Po”) “dove fioriscono belle donne/oziose, ornate, portate all’amore” [p. 16] (“where beautiful, idle, ornate/women flower, raised to love”). These not-too-dynastic marriages will produce the generation of agri¬ cultural entrepreneurs who would become wealthy landowners, Bertolucci’s

14 See Angelo Cicchetti and Haul Mordenli, “La scrittura dei libri di famiglia,” in Storia della letteralura italiana, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 3 (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 1117-59.

154

The Poiesis of History

twentieth-century protagonists. These progenitors made “il passaggio di classe” (“the class passage”) out of farming in the nineteenth century when the culture of agricultural capitalists replaced the dominant aristo¬ cratic one embodied in the court of the dukes of Parma. Indeed, the union by intermarriage of the mountain stock with that of the agricultural plains is part of the chain of causation that determines the family tensions Bertolucci outlines prominently for his readers, for his father hailed from the mountains and his mother from the plain of Parma. He is the hybrid product of a new class alliance. Hence the conflicts of the “family romance” find their origin in local social history as well as in the necessary conflict of generations described by Freud when he stated that “the whole progress of society rests upon the opposi¬ tions between successive generations” and noted further that “there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task.”10 The lineage/generational theme, related at least since Dante’s Cacciaguida to the conflict between “new ways” and “old ways,” is complicated in this modern novel in verse by just this Freudian theme: the neurosis wrought by development’s changes and de¬ tachments. In a related transposition, the narrator depicts his mother as the most courageous of his ancestors and refers to her many times in the poem as a “giudatrice intrepida di puledre” (“intrepid driver of colts”). He puts the maternal figure, who stuns onlookers with her horsemanship and beauty, at the reins of the family’s “epic” ascendancy. He thereby forces himself into the narrational position of a son. The mother, “Maria Rossetti in Bertolucci,” is, however, also a maladjusted and “damned” figure, undermined by a female illness and haunted by the memory of several dead children. She is the figure, together with the narrator, least able to sever attachments to the “old ways.” The story of a mother does not of course quite fit into the “residual epos” associated with the rise of a prosperous and conquering agrarian capitalism. And it is precisely her story, an unspeakable and unspoken one, that constitutes the marker by which the work measures its distance from the very epos it contains. It is in this carefully constructed tension that Bertolucci crafts his generic compromise. The Freudian thematics that complicate Bertolucci’s rewriting of the verse epic within the context of a family romance are complicated in their turn by his insistence on the importance of the “microhistory” of daily life.

A patently unromantic and hardly chivalric social code

13 Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy¬ chological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 9 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959), p. 237.

Compromise and Distance

155

wrought by new bourgeois generations makes its appearance as a theme early in La camera da letto. It is linked to new cultural developments associated with the rise of the “agrari” or agricultural land owners. Its portrayal comes at the beginning of the second chapter, in which Bertolucci describes his maternal lineage on the cheese-making Rossetti side of the family. He invokes nineteenth-century Parma as a newly transformed world sprung from fertile earth. This ambience provides a contrast to his paternal side’s mountain ways and is epitomized by com¬ merce, roads, and mass-produced textiles fluttering in vendors’ stalls: Qui la terra e umida per canali, ricca, strade agevoli la corrono all’infinito, il secolo la anima di traffici e di guerre, piazze di borghi la rompono, tele stampate sventolando ai banchi, rami fulvi e ferramenta brunite lustrando sugli acciottolati al canto delle nuove romanze dai portici dove l’ombra protegge il cantastorie. [P. 18; emphasis added] (Here the earth is moist with canals, rich,/easy roads run through it end¬ lessly,/the century animates it/with commerce and wars,/village squares divide it, printed/textiles waving on stands,/tawny copperware and bur¬ nished hardware/shining on the cobblestones to the song I of the new melo¬ dies from the porticoes/where shadows protect the storytelling singer.) The “nuove romanze” sung at a summer market under Parma’s protec¬ tive, shady porticoes are part of the secular, commercial culture’s new art forms (“romanza” as an aria as well as a ballad), which had begun to draw on the revival of popular motifs, elevating them into the realms of “high” culture. One need only think of nearby Bussetto’s Verdi. Bertolucci’s own role in La camera da letto as a storytelling bard resem¬ bles in turn that of the already-mentioned narrator of campfire epics, ol legends and lineages; and that of the scribe-like domestic accountant, “annalista” (“annal-writer”) or “copista di giornate” [p. 140] (“days’ copyist”), who at rare moments surfaces as an “I”; and that of the con¬ siderably weaker, updated “cantastorie” (of Old French troubador mem¬ ory), who sings the “nuove romanze” of his own landowning class and positions himself in the much-sought safety of Parma’s porticoes. Of the three, the figure of the “annalista” is the most neutral voice, the voice that registers faithfully, whereas the teller of tales around the fire and

156

The Poiesis of History

the storytelling singer represent conflictual modes whose tensions pro¬ duce the generic compromise of La camera da letto. The first class of narrator carefully and masterfully enacts his inclu¬ sions and omissions for the fola or tale. His is the narrational style of an important character, A.’s entertaining mentor and uncle—a priest also named Attilio who is weakened by venereal disease in his old age and dies in seclusion. A poet, he first appears in a chapter entitled, signifi¬ cantly, “Fola e passeggiata” (A tale and a walk). His narrational style is characterized by a seductive power to hold onto listeners, even if the tale told is only “household stuff.’’ “Fola e passeggiata,’’ which thematizes the socializing and even pedagogical functions of narration, recounts lit¬ tle A.’s day from the time his mother lifts him from his bed linens to dinner time, centering on the boy as the object of his visiting uncle’s captivating animal fables, complete with talking foxes and wolves. The power of that important guest’s “sonorous and male voice” lies in its sacred and dramatic/comic powers of transformation: E dalla sala da pranzo rinchiusa come un acquario o una tomba . . . che viene l’inspiegabile voce arrogante, poi lamentosamente furbastra, infine disperata: sempre cavernosa, assai piii che non comporti la distanza da nulla, la natura del luogo, consacrato a ombrosi pranzi estivi e avvampate vigilie d’invemo . . . Ecco, d’un tratto, la musica cambia, alFignobile invocazione d’aiuto simulata echeggiante, remota, da un attore rotto a ogni effetto, segue un falsetto stridulo e ridente, e la volpe che dice al lupo “Lap, lap, con la coda ti lascio.” Ora parla il narratore della fola, cantilenante ma non contraffatto. E una voce sonora e maschia dalla erre intaccata . . . \

[Pp. 75-76] (From the closed dining room /as from an aquarium or a tomb /comes the unexplainable voice,/first arrogant then lamentfully sly,/finally desperate: always/cavernous, much more than its proximity/would suggest, or the nature/of the room, dedicated to shady/summer dinners and enflamed

Compromise and Distance

157

winter/vigils . . ./Here, suddenly, the music changes—/after that ignoble appeal for help/which simulates an echo, remote,/from an actor who has unleashed all of his effects, /there follows a shrill and mirthful falsetto; it’s the fox/saying to the wolf “Lap, lap, I’m hightailing it.”//Now the tale’s narrator speaks/in sing-song but undisguisedly./The voice is sonorous and male, with a lisping “r.”) This “successful” narrator is juxtaposed to a very different and “un¬ successful” narrational voice in the text who exhorts his readers/listeners not to delve into the story’s shadowy secrets and frequently asserts the impossibility of narrating his tale. The following verses contain just such an exhortation and typify the second, more halting, more charged and enigmatic narrational style; the topic is the boy’s toy boat on the river current, and we are warned not to follow and not to hold back its drift or its destruction: Non seguitelo nella sua corsa, non cercate con la mente di trattenere l’esile sagoma, artificio ligneo disperato, messaggio di un’anima che la vita non vorra risparmiare e percio oggi le ha concesso, pietosa, questo fiore. Presto, troppo presto lo scafo trovera la sua solitaria perdizione, la sua fine, e sara, nell’incerto, nell’ignobile scontro di campagna e citta, un luogo di scarichi e rifiuti, di ruvidi e tardi fiori blu, tenace legato d’una estate finita in una terra mortale. [P. 100] (Do not follow its race, do not/try in your minds/to hold back the slender shape, the wooden/hopeless/artifice, a message from a soul/that life/will not spare and thus/today has/mercifully allowed it this flower./Soon,/too soon, the hull shall find/its solitary/perdition,/its end,/and it shall be, in the uncertain,/ignoble clash/of country and city, a place/for waste and garbage, for coarse, late-coming, blue flowers, the tenacious /legacy of a summer that has reached its close/in a mortal land.)

158

The Poiesis of History

The passage is metanarrative: the author enjoins his readers not to follow any theme to its conclusion (“do not follow”) and not to thwart the agony of a narration that must escape their understanding (“do not/try in your minds/to hold back”). Stories, like toy boats set on the current, must be released to their unknowable endings. It is interesting that the reader nonetheless immediately learns of the toy boat’s shipwreck. And if we were warned away from sad endings by a protective author, he has certainly betrayed the spirit of the warning, hitting us with the surprise that all bad news, even when expected, carries with it. The passage, read as a comment on the relation of author and reader concerning the common ground of an unfolding story, demonstrates a narrative tactic that will recur in the work, Rossetti’s life and death.

especially in the unfolding of Maria

Disarmed readers warned not to insist on

knowing about her tragedy are, even if wary, sorely stung by her final leaving even though it has been endlessly foreshadowed. Bertolucci’s readers will have to follow in turn the two different dis¬ cursive styles of La camera da letto in their forward-moving and halting moments. The narrative construction is variously powerfully directed to portray the effects of historical and generational changes over a long period of time and replete with slow pauses, frozen moments, interludes, lost time, time that never advances and cannot be plotted or understood. The contrasting narrational threads of La camera da letto constitute part of the work’s dramatic tension and parallel the representation of the psychical tensions in the protagonist’s own “hybrid” personality as he has described it in terms of contrasting maternal and paternal legacies. The contrast between these narrative styles and their attendant tempo¬ ralities is all the more apparent when one considers that a careful exam¬ ination of the first book reveals a highly articulated,

impressively

constructed narrative. The ancestral story opening the narration is in part, of course, a fantasy of history, but its narration bears none of the signs of modernist dislocation based on the distortions of imagination. Strophes are well-wrought and function as units of exposition. A wealth of information is conveyed concerning trade routes, crop rotations, and the lives of lace workers. The narrative technique is worthy of the illus¬ trious verse epic, the grandest figure in Italian literature’s own family romance, and is reminiscent, critics have noted, of Carducci or Tasso. Bertolucci’s expertise lies in the area of framing events and control¬ ling their duration. The family history lies within the grand scheme of economic development and attendant migrations (from mountains to plains) and is hence governed by the epochal view of the advance of capitalism and “la nuova borghesia proprietaria” [p. 23] (“the new owner bourgeoisie ”). Yet even within the more epic side of the novel, the do-

Compromise and Distance

159

mestic activities undertaken by the class protagonists are on a scale too small to be either mythic or truly general enough to convince us that the story unfolding before us is meant to be paradigmatic. When in the narrative the epochal events of advancing commercialization and indus¬ trialization are reshaping lives into a fundamental alienation from na¬ ture, suddenly, a male child of the wealthy landowning class is no longer allowed to play in the barn. The threat of a “fall,” not from a higher class position but through the weave of the reassuring rituals of daily life in a bourgeois household, so absorbs some of the characters, including the narrator, that its hypothesis repeatedly becomes the substance not only of the larger family epic but of a whole subset of minimal stories inserted within the main frame. For instance, Giovanni Rossetti as a boy observes a literal potential fall, a minimal life-and-death situation: una bambina su una scala, intenta a un gioco che la mette in pericolo ogni istante e ogni istante la salva come la brezza che si leva smuove e lascia un nastro lento sui capelli. [P. 19] (a girl on a ladder, intent on/a game that puts her in danger/every instant and every instant saves her/as a breeze that comes up will shift/and leave still a loose ribbon on her hair.) These lines on a child’s pleasure in safe risk-taking, like countless others in La camera da letto, illustrate the slight disturbances and threats that constitute its “plot,” the minimal events that backlight a historical plot or design that stands out in negative against this fullness, insubstantial and menaced as it may appear.16 Bertolucci weaves these distinct modes of temporal organization, epic and minimal, into the textual sequences that make up the internal divi¬ sions of the narration, in strophes and chapters, and with contrasts and repetitions, articulates the first book’s architecture. The first two chap¬ ters contain its first structural alternation; the first treats the protago¬ nist’s paternal family heritage and the second the maternal side. The temporal references, which are the raw material of the representation of events in each chapter, work in a parallel manner in an irreversible direction of the ever-diminishing units of measurement: from century, to

16 Siciliano writes: “The personal story runs its course backlighted by the great events of national life” (in his review of La camera da letto, by Attilio Bertolucci, Aluovi Argomenti 10 (1984J: 130).

160

The Poiesis of History

year, to month, day, hour, and instant. Both chapters closely control the focus of the chronologies and both move from the representation of exter¬ nal spaces to domestic, internal ones, in a parallel spatial focus empha¬ sized by the repetitions of certain analogous scenes, of the two house¬ holds’ kitchens, for example, and of someone in each occupied with the family accounts. These chapters are relatively static, since they are the spatial and temporal anchors for the whole novel in verse. Its horizons will not change drastically, but narrative variatio already appears in the third chapter, in which the fit of units of subject matter to units of structure begins to change. The youth of Giovanni Rossetti is first re¬ counted. Then, after an ellipsis of nearly a generation, the courtship and marriage of a Bertolucci and Giovanni’s daughter, Maria Rossetti, unites the two previously distinct and self-contained narrative strands. Chapter 3 divides its attention neatly between the two families and follows the theme begun in chapter 2 of the blending of “il sangue e il seme delle classi” [p. 18] (“the blood and seed of the classes”). Chapters 4 and 5 enhance the variatio in several ways: first by casting the narration at times into a kind of automatic, already familiar future grounded in memory and yet also in tenaciously uncertain expectations. The narrator actually gets ahead of his narrative unfolding and evokes the couple’s future union, and he must beat a retreat in the following verses, which open the chapter titled “11 segreto”:

Dopo un settembre cosi quieto e lucido di sereno, cosi ardente nelle ore di mattino e di mezzogiomo, da gonfiare di polpa le castagne sino ad arrontondame i ricci in una promessa di raccolta che memoria d’uomo qui non ricorda, e venuto il tempo delle piogge sottili, senza fine, della caccia, delle ultime fiere di quest’anno che va morendo: tutto e tutti si preparano all’invemo, . . . non piu distanti si scorgono Natale Fine Principio Epifania. L’invemo rovinante, fangoso, si mischiera con una nuova primavera fredda, bagnata e sporca: marzo e un mese di vecchi e di bambini che se ne vanno, i loro occhi deboli, i loro deboli cuori non possono reggere alle lune stregate delPestate

Compromise and Distance

161

prossima, che macchiera di fiori azzurri e rosa gli avvallamenti, i grembi di una tiepida semenza nuziale. Ma e appena il 9 ottobre, San Donnino . . . [Pp. 34-35]

(After such a quiet and clear-shining, serene/September, so heated in the morning/and the noon hours,/that the chestnut meats swell/to fill their husks in the/promise of a harvest that no one’s memory here/can remem¬ ber,/there came the season of thin rains, endless,/of hunting, of the last fairs,/of the dying year: all/and everyone prepare for the winter, . . ./and not far-off one sees/Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, Epiph¬ any./The ruinous muddy winter/shall mingle with a new Spring,/cold, wet, and dirty: March/is the month of old folk and children/who depart, with weak eyes,/with weak hearts, which cannot bear up to/the bewitched moons of the summer-to-come/, spotting the valleys with blue /and pink flowers, and wombs/with a tepid nuptial seed.//But it is only October ninth, the day of San Donnino . . .) When the unfolding of the past shifts into the future as it loomed in the past, the narrator reins in his narration by dating his “present. A second variatio appears when A.’s parents marry. We are con¬ fronted with a long narrative ellipsis. The marriage itself remains a nar¬ rative expectation until it is alluded to later only after the fact with no further comment. Authorial control, reserve, or repression takes over and the parents’ wedding night remains the secret to which the chapter title (“II segreto”) alludes.17 Chapter 5 jumps to a portrait of the issue of this union, and is about six-year-old Elsa, who entered the world in 1905, the closing date of the narrative ellipsis. The narrative in this chapter is partly flashback, a further variatio, and we learn of the deaths of two earlier children. Finally, in the latter part of chapter 5, the focus of attention turns to “la camera da letto” and to the conjugal embraces that produce A.’s older brother Ugo. As events move closer to the narra¬ tor’s own conception, his voice is for the first time subsumed, signifi¬ cantly, in a collective “we,” and his interlocutor becomes a collective “you,” another narrational variation introduced in this one chapter, fur¬ thermore, the last three pages of the chapter stand in a quotation intro¬ duced by the phrase “Lasciate che l’annalista anticipi’ [p. 44] (“Allow the annal-writer to jump ahead”). These pages signal an important, fi17 The quintessential character of La camera da letto is captured by lorti s comment that it has “a mysteriously Oedipal and typically bourgeois plot ‘famigliare’ di Bertolucci,” p. 255).

(“II poema-romanzo

162

The Poiesis of History

nal, variatio by quoting from an unexplained source that is actually dis¬ tinguishable from the rest of the text only because it is in quotation marks. They also foreshadow the difficult course (reminiscent of the ear¬ lier toy boat) the narrative will take once it meanders slightly later on into a well-developed potrayal of a single subjectivity in the figure of A. This course is prefigured in the following reflection on the family memo¬ ries of Elsa, whom the narrator never knew:

II ricordo della bambina Elsa mutera corso come fanno i canali che, noi camminando accompagnano con voce chiara e uguale per lasciarci poi senza che ce ne accorgiamo, perdendosi chissa dove; ma intanto dentro non e piii come prima, la mente s’e distratta dal suo chiuso penare, gli occhi s’inumidiscono, grati delle cose che illumina in distanza il sole che va via. Cosi si dirama quel che resta di lei sopra la terra e consola i superstiti che il biondo dei suoi capelli e il nero dei suoi occhi conobbero di persona, stupisce e riscalda Fimmaginazione di chi, nato dopo di lei gia ne supera Feta piccola. [P. 46; emphasis added] (The memory of Elsa as a girl/shall change its course as canals do,/the canals we walk along/which with a clear, unchanging/voice accompany us only to abandon us /without our having noticed, losing itself/who knows where; but meanwhile our minds /are not as they were,/and we are dis¬ tracted from our closed suffering;/our eyes mist, thankful/for the things the setting sun/illuminates in the distance./Thus what remains/of her branches out over the earth/to console the living who witnessed first¬ hand/the blondness of her hair and the darkness of her eyes. / Astonishing the child/who was bom after her and already exceeds/the numbered years of her/short life.)

The final three lines refer not to A.’s imaginings, but to those of his brother Ugo, since A. arrives on the scene only three chapters later. Still, when dwelling on A.’s immediate family the narration from this point on takes on a quality of heated imagination as the whole family

Compromise and Distance

163

keeps Elsa’s memory alive through collective reverie (the title of chapter 13). Bertolucci thematizes the difficulty of memory and its directions, yet he also achieves a bit of narrative cunning by uniting the two sepa¬ rate strands of the story in the quite believable and natural context of the link between the two different families: the first grandchild. The subject of memory found in “Romanza” also reappears: clarity for the mind’s present is elusive. Its elusiveness is signaled in the verses above by the metaphor of a setting sun, which leaves what is near in darkness but illuminates the distance. Memory and imagination intermingle in this passage in a way that becomes characteristic of the narrative as the foundational story, along with the residual epic, recedes. That founda¬ tional story is displaced by a new authorial framing of lacunae, of the “secrets” that surround his mother Maria and provide the stuff of fan¬ tasy, of hypotheses, of “family romance.” The poem’s story is therefore no longer framed in the particular distance of history; and its frame is almost no longer a past that predates the narrator’s subjectivity, since the events take place just before his birth and are true memories for other family members. And yet the subject proper of the narration is as yet not present, since A. has not yet been born, and in fact will be present only rarely in the few instances of first-person discourse in book 1, which are nearly all metanarrational. The subject of the narration lacks an immediate presence because A.’s own story—his longings for his mother, encounters with his uncle, rompings in the fields, school¬ ings, and the courtship of N.—unfolds in the third person, not the first. Instead, the chapters before the dark, scrawny infant A., “nero come il pepe” (“as black as pepper”), comes to lie in his mother’s “camera da letto,” depict the intensity of desire present in a mind whose thoughts are almost memories but are either something more or less, fantasies pure and simple or second-hand tales that take on a psychic weight of their own. This dynamic is referred to in the lines that portray Ugo’s imaginary conception of his unknown older sister, and in the paradigmatic ‘‘Ro¬ manza,” where the protagonist imagines a distant but clear memory when threatened with a loss. In this important process, the narrative can be placed neither quite in the third person nor in the first. It hovers between internal and external viewpoints, between the generality ol a separate and distant history and the particular, close experience ol the past known in memory. In fact, Maria’s secret and unexplained anguish in chapter 6, “Sciopero” (Strike), and the story of her desperate, car¬ riage-born pilgrimage for penance in chapter 7, “Pellegrini

(Pilgrims),

are among the most intense and the most effective in La camera da letto because they are illuminated in the still-visible distance, just as the

164

The Poiesis of History

horizon is illuminated by a setting sun. The narration rejects, then, both the heroic epos and the epos of the self.18 And as far as the narrative technique is concerned, chapters 4 through 6 are written in a different, less architectural narrational style that reflects the changing course of the rivulet of plot as it disappears “chissa dove” (“who knows where”). The interlude serves, however, only to enhance, ironically, a bonafide narrative climax: after generations and so many siblings, A. is born, and he elicits a love so strong that it threatens to eclipse Elsa’s memory and to interrupt Giovanni Rossetti and his daughter Maria’s ritual of “impossibile fantasticheria” (“impossible fantasy”):

Approfittando dei pomeriggi sonnolenti d’invemo nelfardore della sala da pranzo che non deve sparecchiarsi, finge la commedia del come sarebbe, quanto alta, quanto bionda (o scurita come accade), se gia vanitosa e di cosa piii vogliosa ormai, e lui gusta l’impossibile fantasticheria, come un ultimo vizio. Sara il nuovo nato a interrompere crudelmente il sogno a cancellare quasi, stingere in Giovanni la figuretta fiammante di Elsa. [Pp. 66-67]

(Availing himself of sleepy, winter/afternoons in the warmth of the din¬ ing/room not cleared of dishes,/he acts out the scene of what/would she be

like,

how

tall,

how

blond/(or

how

dark,

as

happens),

if she

would/already be vain and what she would want above all/by now, and he savors that impossible/fantasy, as a final vice./The new-born boy/will be the one cruelly to interrupt his dream/to erase nearly, to shrink in Gio¬ vanni/Elsa’s flaming small figure.)

The desire to evade the truth of the past conflicts with the necessity of the Past

Elsas death—and hence the speculative fantasy is “impossible.”

The force of this impossible desire for Maria is not diminished at A.’s birth, but displaced:

Lorenzini noted that Bertolucci attempts in this way to “elude protagonistic subjec¬ tivity in search of roots” (“Attilio Bertolucci o la sfida del monotonalismo,” p. 154).

Compromise and Distance

165

Nessuno dei figli, ne la cara primogenita Elsa ne quei due precocissimi morti i cui nomi e volti si confondono anche in te, e neppure Ugo nato malaticcio ma incamminato ormai a una studiosa infanzia, e una quieta adolescenza, ti turbo come questo nelle tante ore lasciate a te e a lui in quella stanza la cui destinazione prima e il peccato dei coniugi, ma presto si fa complice di un amore che mai potra trovare requie sulla terra. [Pp. 68—69]

(None of your offspring, not the dear/first-born Elsa nor those two/very precocious departed ones whose names/and faces blur even for you,/and not even Ugo bom sickly/but on his way by now to a studious/childhood, and a quiet adolescence, /troubled you as much as this one in the many /hours left to you and to him in that /room whose primary assign¬ ment/is married partners’ sin but soon/facilitates a love/that will never find rest on the earth.) The new child, A., also “facilitates” the older generations as they en¬ gage in their perpetual “impossible fantasy.” He is born into an ongoing fantasy, into a process that seems to reverse the Freudian family ro¬ mance—based on the child’s fantasies of the parents—or to make it move in both directions. The elders construct fantasies of their children, which remain mysteries to those children forever. These enigmas are sealed by death but are passed along as lacunae with their attendant fantasized resolutions. They are passed on to the new generations when the offspring, as they mature and have children of their own, weave their own speculative hypotheses, their own “impossibile fantasies.” (We may recall the beautiful, disturbing poems on Attilio’s own children, Ber¬ nardo and Giuseppe.) The theme of emotional turbulence inherent in the continually dis¬ placed psychological attachments between family members set out in the portrayal of newborn and mother reiterates a theme of “Romanza”: the verses hint at the familiar hypothetical death constructed in the sugges¬ tion that their love will find its peaceful union (“requie”) only after life “on the earth.” In chapters 6 and 7, the narration both contains and thematizes the same kind of narrational difficulty, the same “fragmentary” incompleteness due to the unresolved and hypothetical narrational struc-

166

The Poiesis of History

ture, that was found in “Romanza.” If the composition “Romanza” func¬ tioned as a counterpoint to the composition “Romanzo” in the collection Fuochi in novembre, in La camera da letto the enigma of Maria’s experi¬ ences in “Sciopero” functions as a counterpoint to the residual epic and the “narrative resolutions” inherent in the success stories of generations of Bertoluccis and Rossettis, of an advancing entrepreneurial commerce acquiring extensive new lands and bigger homes. We might even view the chapter on the strike, ironically, as a strike itself, a protest against the work of storytelling and epic-making. With the story of his mother Maria Rossetti, Bertolucci inserts the elements of an “unfinished novel,” of irresolution and regression, of what he called, in his poetic statement on the extrasistole, the irregular and intermittent back beat that inter¬ rupts and counters the tickings of real time, the time of resolutions. Maria’s life story is an untellable one engendered in the heat of imagina¬ tion and hypothesis; it interrupts the swift, multigenerational narrative and serves as a prolonging pause, as a break which points to the “impos¬ sible” love of mother and son.19 The failed resolution of the Oedipal plot is destined to be repeated unendingly: the lacunae of Maria’s story can¬ not simply be forgotten. They remain a present absence.

Iv How Bertolucci constructs strophes is also important in this regard. Decentered syntax with copious parentheses contribute to the magmatic character of his verse. Lagazzi notes that Bertolucci in his earliest work made “masterful use of doubles and adjectives in oxymorons ...

in enjambement and in rhythmic chiasmus” (Attilio

Bertolucci, p. 22). Lagazzi has, additionally, a chapter in Attilio Bertolucci titled “II romanzo e le sue figure,” but the book appeared before the publication of La camera da letto. Lagazzi carefully studied the important theme of “lo scarto” (“distance”), but he did not apply it to an extended temporality. He rightly observed a lack of narrative ambition in Bertolucci’s early works—a lack not applicable to La camera da letto, which makes the narrative project a constructive tendency set in counterpoint to the thematics of scarto. I should add that in a later work Lagazzi stated that critics, in their fascination with the Proustian variations in Bertolucci’s work, neglected the spatial constructs of La camera da letto, which he sees as various stops in a “voyage” of “reverie

these are

analyzed in “Gli spazi della camera,” in Voci per un poema (Parma: Edizioni Zara, 1986), pp. 52—84. He demonstrates that the spaces can be understood in terms of a tension between protected loci and ones where the protagonist is at risk (p. 84). His views corroborate my view of the oscillation in the narrational structure of the novel. In my opinion, Bertolucci’s extensive use of subjunctives also functions at the syntactic level to cast attention on the subjective relation between the events narrated and the emotions of the narrator, between the enounced and the enunciation. On page 198, for example, the narrator confesses that some of his speculations are “pura ipotesi” (“pure hypothesis”), and follows with a series of subjunctives, in the verses starting “Non e difficile che la sorella Emma/abbia calcolato ...” [p. 198] (“It’s likely that Sister Emma/may have calculated . . .”).

Compromise and Distance

167

It is in the treatment of Maria’s secret, unnarrated trials, which ap¬ pear in the story before the birth of A., that the ambiguous status of the narrator/protagonist, divided between his role as a participant and a stranger to events, is most keenly felt. The tension Bertolucci constructs between the “poetic” pause and the “narrative” progression is in part a function of the status of the narrator, who takes on the highly developed, structurally significant traits of a novelistic narrator. Later in the story, Bertolucci also directly foregrounds the divided role the child A. has in the story when he becomes an accomplice in the events of the unfolding family romance as it applies to the parent/protagonist and not the child/ protagonist. We learn, for example, that Maria is ill and sends her son, sworn to secrecy, on a mission from the country to the city’s seamy side to buy the oysters forbidden her. His initiation into worldliness, and appetites in general, takes place in this highly charged, forbidden terri¬ tory where he is transformed into an unwitting co-conspirator in his mother’s self-destruction. Whenever the narrator approaches the reasons for her secret suffering, however, another voice interrupts to prevent too much unveiling. In chapter 6, the one preceding the tale of A.’s birth, we read the following about a day in May when newly unionized agri¬ cultural workers went on strike. Maria took over some barnyard tasks, and something unspeakable occurred that may have involved the servant Gemma: Non doveva quella calda giomata primaverile contare granche nella prova di forza fra l’Agraria di Carrara e le leghe di De Ambris, ma molto, troppo, al debole animo di Maria, incerta fra la luce e l’ombra delle arcate annerite, umide, splendide di strame manti e coma, mentre ira e tristezza mischiate interrompono Gemma . . . Risparmiate, non chiedete quel che segui e che Maria serro nel petto come in una stanza cui nessuno potra entrare, o sara pena, morte e dannazione, come nelle favole. Verra il tempo d’aprirla e di sapere; e portera morte e dannazione, o pace, dopo morte e dannazione? [Pp. 56—57; emphasis added]

168

The Poiesis of History

(That hot spring day would not/count for much/within the matching of forces of the Carrara Agraria/and the De Ambris League,/but it mattered greatly, too greatly, to Maria’s/ fragile soul hesitating among the lights and shadows/of the blackened arches, wet/and splendid with fodder, cloaks and horns, /while ire blended with sadness/interrupts Gemma . . . / Spare, do not ask I what followed and what Maria locked/in her bosom as if inside a room where/no one can enter without sorrow, death, /and damnation, as in fairy tales./The time will come to open it and to know;/and it will bring death and damnation,/or peace, after death and damnation?) The closing interrogative signals the narrator’s enduring sense of be¬ wilderment and differentiates this instance of authorial intrusion from an Ariostesque technique for creating suspense. He will not solve the riddle of her damnation, nor will he secure her salvation, since the command “. . . do not ask’’ is directed at him as well. He is one of those not privy to the secret, one of those who tell or read the story without being in it or knowing it completely. Once again, he is an unwitting participant, this time in the narration itself. The anxiety of this deferral (“do not ask. . . . The time will come”) expresses itself in the strength of the narrator’s own unease and divided purpose. This unease is voiced, on the one hand, in his vehement acceptance of the repression of his mother’s story, in his willingness to put off knowing, and, on the other, in his equally vehe¬ ment desire for a resolution, here “peace.” The ambiguous and divided position of the “neurotic” narrator is also apparent in the way he very effectively blurs the borders of his own grammatical person, and there¬ fore his narratorial position, through his addresses to a “you.” The reader may either understand the “you” to exclude the narrator, opening up the possibility that the narrator knows, omnisciently, the secret but will not reveal it, or, quite to the contrary, the reader may understand the “you” to include the narrator as the “tu” of his past self now grouped with uncertain others, making him as unknowing as the readers. The first reading is possible because although the text is in the third person, the story is autobiographical. One might assume that a son would know the nature of his mother’s tragedy. Or is the text’s secret a secret be¬ cause its narrator is not omniscient and indeed because a mother’s trag¬ edy is always as ungraspable as the maternal body? Bertolucci wants both to defer and to retain the possibility of a narrative climax for the poem. We know in any case that La camera da letto thematizes narration itself, on many occasions, especially in the context of the issue of the narrator’s status as an accomplice, witting or unwitting, in the unfolding family romance. A., who is referred to both in the third person and in

Compromise and Distance

169

the second familiar, “tu, ” appears at times as a voyeuristic if boyish novelist-in-training—who watches his family very closely: “Sei tu ora che spii, stando di fuori,/chi sta dentro” [p. 115] (“Now it is you to spy, standing outside,/on those inside”). In this case A. is outside of the plot as “that which is going on inside the family.” Yet in another instance, still pertinent to the issue of the complicity/noncomplicity of A., we read in chapter 20, on “II venditore di ostriche” (The oyster vendor), that Maria’s diet of forbidden oysters and A.’s procuring them have unhappy consequences.

Her “complice, dovra colare/un numero d’anni senza

fine/per scoprire il male e il bene del . . . /agire insensato” [pp. 172— 73] (“accomplice will have to strain/an endless number of years/to dis¬ cover the evil and the good of ... / that senseless action”). His active participation in the loosely defined family romance results in a long deferral of any understanding, “in una/sequenza di giomate che chiudera/un epilogo inevitable” [p. 113] (“in a/sequence of days which will close/an inevitable epilogue”). In the prolonged interim, hypotheses about Maria’s tragic afflictions generate the stuff of fantasy and family romance not only for A., but for Bertolucci’s readers, since by now we, along with the fearful yet inquistive narrator, will have begun to note certain patterns and elements that might be construed as signficant signs of some emerging understanding of the mother’s enigma. The barn setting in chapter 6, for instance, has appeared at several points in the text previously. It harks back in partic¬ ular to chapter 2. There Giovanni Rossetti, A.’s grandfather, delights in his first sexual experiences in the same place that the “secret” events of “Sciopero” take place: the barn. On a foggy and empty winter day “Anche le voci si sono perdute/nel primo attacco dell’inverno, quasi/tutti fossero morti e dimenticati/per sempre” [p. 21] (“Even the voices are lost/at the first onset of winter as though/everyone were dead and forgot¬ ten/forever”). Among barrels, broken chairs, and useless tools, sexual initiation makes its way: le mani che si stringono giovani, caldi i corpi che si sporcano la prima volta, comunicandosi una gioia che le rondini chiamate a raccolta non turbano dall’alta trave.

[P. 21] (young hands which grasp each other, warm/bodies which dirty themselves for the first/time, sharing a joy/which the swallows called to the har¬ vest/do not disturb on their high perches.”)

170

The Poiesis of History

Because the barn is a common ground for master and servant, this early scene suggests a tale of class conflicts and alliances. The tale continues, though transformed, in the evolving story of Maria Rossetti’s marriage to a Bertolucci. The barn in both episodes is an erotically charged point of contact between social classes and the locus of important narrational nodes. The issue of the family’s erotic life surfaces several times in La ca¬ mera da letto. It affects the mysterious bam scene of “Sciopero” because previous lacunae in Maria’s story have pertained, rather pointedly, to that erotic life. And what is missing (“Spare, do not ask . . .”) appears to have been repressed specifically by a sorc-narrator whose arrange¬ ments of the tale are governed by displacements and substitutions re¬ lated to the rising Oedipal tension. The most important of these lacunae occurs when the narrator surreptitiously represses his paternal rival in the chapter on his parents’ marriage (“II segreto”), and we see, or are allowed to see, only Maria Rossetti, in the final scene of the chapter, not in conjugal embrace but trying on a wedding dress: ... la cliente giovane accaldata dalla prova, ridente, silenziosa a tratti, o oscurata nel volto da un pensiero doloroso e caro.

[P. 39] ( . . . the young customer, overly warm /from the fitting, laughing or si¬ lent/at intervals, or her face darkened/by a sorrowful, and dear, thought.)

In this passage the thematics of uncertainty attached to a moody Maria are symbolized by the motif of an uncertain light. She is the most “ro¬ mantic” figure in the poem. Her restless knowledge seems to be linked to the coupling of sorrow and affection. Her enigmatic joys and trials first appear here as the source of the narrator’s perplexity. The delightful spectacle of his mother’s dress fitting as it is imagined by the narrator/ son certainly exemplifies the broad Freudian thematics Bertolucci ad¬ dresses in his work. Her clothes are objects on which the narrator fo¬ cuses his attention, since they are coverings of the ungraspable mother and are adored fetishes, which signal both a proximity to the mother (they are her clothes) and distance from her (they are not her). (The theme surfaces again in the second book, when A. has the cobbler fash¬ ion a pair of green kid boots for N., in the chapter “Le scarpette di chevreau.”) These thematics affect the elliptical barn scene in specific ways,

Compromise and Distance

171

which allow us to connect it, if only tenuously, to the “family romance” in the novel. We can observe, for instance, that censorship and dis¬ placement operate in the son/narrator’s fantasy—an important factor in the generation of the family romance. The narrator/son concerns himself with partial mysteries and secrets, and he evokes secrecy in a way that suggests the kind of illicit erotic relations Freud observed in what he called the second stage of the family romance.20 The specific content of the fantasy remains, however, unavailable to the reader. We are told only that the young peasant bride Gemma, Maria’s confidant, looks on her master’s wife with pity and suffering for what transpires in the barn and that something happens that brings about feelings for Gemma that are strong and secret:

. . . Ecco, Gemma si cala per la scaletta ripida di legno che rintrona del suo cuore in tumulto come se andasse a trovare l’amante, il cavallaro che fascia alia vita una cintura rossa e verde mentre si pitocca fra stallo e aia in ore cui alio sposo contadino gia il sudore si gela sulla pelle.

[P. 53] (Gemma lowers herself/down the steep, wooden ladder/which resounds with her tumultuous heart/as though she were going to meet her lover, /the stableman who fastens about his waist/a red and green belt while/loitering around the stables and the threshing-floor in the hours /when sweat cools on the skin/of her peasant husband.)

At the chapter’s end Gemma simply takes her place next to Maria and a primipara cow beneath the dark arches of the animals’ stalls. The narra¬ tor never returns to the troubling and unresolved emotions that emerged for his mother during the strike. In the next chapter, “Pellegrini,” the reader moves no closer to under¬ standing Maria’s obsessive memories. We see her as she undertakes a pilgrimage to the Fontanellato sanctuary, where her sisters-in-law are giving thanks for having been spared an unmentioned ruin—a reference possibly to the strike. She follows them with her young son, Ugo:

20 Freud, “Family Romances,” p. 239.

172

The Poiesis of History Ma un’altra Maria e venuta a chiedere qualcosa per se, e partita tardi in carrozza guidando una puledra attaccata alia pistoiesa, e porta l’unico figlio e una pena incessante, il ricordo di un giomo che non vuole lasciarla, anche se il trotto echeggia allegro entro i portici in ombra dei paesi attraversati, lungo i campi spogli dalle messi, irti di stoppie aurate, che qua e la un padrone e un fattore misurano lentamente, alzano il volto mireranno la bella donna in cappello e busto cui stringe il braccio un bambinetto in paglia quando la frusta senza necessita infierisce sull’aria tremolante di calura d’una piana che sente il Po vicino. [P. 60]

(A second Maria has come to request/something for herself; she started off late/in her carriage driving a mare/hooked up to her Pistoian perch, and she carries/her only son and an incessant sorrow, /the memory of a day which

does

not

want/to

leave

her,

even

if the

horse’s

trot

happily

echoes/under the shaded porticoes of villages/they cross, along the fields nude/with harvesting, bristling with golden stubble,/which here and there an owner and farm-bailiff/slowly measure/. . ./if they lift their heads they will set their sights on the beautiful/woman wearing a hat and cor¬ set,/whose arm a young boy in straw clings to/when the whip unecessarily rages/in the air trembling with the heat/of a plain which feels the close¬ ness of the Po.)

The image of a mother and son riding in a carriage that appeared in “Romanzo” has reappeared. It returns without the young man and in the context of an already harvested land emptied of activity. In this sense, the theme of the strike itself begun in chapter 6 is carried over here, and it is associated with the poetics of the pause and intermittent rhythms. In this emptied world, the motivations for the void lie unavailable to the observer, as unavailable as the story behind Maria’s “damnation” and the reasons why “the whip unnecessarily rages.” Only in retrospect does the reader discern that Maria’s illness and her association in these two chapters and others with emptiness and “il nulla” signal a withdrawal that means the withholding of motherly pro-

Compromise and Distance

173

tectiveness from her sons. At this particular point in La camera da letto, it is difficult to know if Maria’s story might be related symbolically to class or “civic” strife and rivalry introduced when the “industrial” strike model arrived at the farm. Is Maria’s crisis also the crisis of the family’s social function as it was known in Italy as long as it remained a funda¬ mentally agricultural society although transformed by capitalist com¬ merce? In that society, the family, for generations upon generations, was the repetition of couplings in domestic space—the extended bedcham¬ ber—where generations were produced and consumed their existences, and where work was divided along unquestioned sexual and class divi¬ sions of labor. If death and damnation are to be the consequence of the events that transpired in the barn during a strike, and the interruption of agricultural power relations affects domestic relations so dramatically, then just what is lost on this spring day? What repressed grief for an untold loss then brings about Maria’s destruction, alluded to very much further on in the volume—the length of the deferral is telling—in chap¬ ter 20, “II venditore di ostriche”? To answer this question we must examine at greater length and in some other contexts the thematics of impossible narration, pause, and distance as they are associated with the figure of Maria, in order to understand their importance as a means of distancing that hallmark of any novel: its climax. The prolonged pause in temporal rhythms sup¬ plants, for instance, the potentially climactic topic of the strike in chap¬ ter 6. The ellipsis created by Maria’s untold story and the long text surrounding it also appears to displace the political topic, since the strike is represented, counter-realistically, as “empty” time. The anal¬ ysis of this displacement allows us to inquire as to why and how Bertolucci creates—in a textual form that draws on both novelistic and lyric genres and techniques in an extremely original way—a hypothesis of events neither extraneous nor central to history. The poetics of hy¬ pothesis in “Sciopero” are quite similar in fact to those in “Romanza,” since the strike constitutes a moment of noteworthy “absence,” “un niente da segnalare” [p. 140] (“a nothing that bears marking”). Chapter 6, like the others in the first book of La camera da letto, portrays both something memorable and something quite ordinary about the Bertolucci family. The chapter’s opening line sets the date at 1908 at Casarola and informs us that “II millenovecentootto fu/nella provincia di Parma un anno ricco” [p. 48] (“Nineteen hundred and eight was/a rich year in the province of Parma”) about which there would be little to remember beyond the notes made in “i libri dei conti/mezzadrili” (“the book of sharecroppers’ accounts”). Old Dina and her husband Tanara recall, we are told, how sweet but meager the crop of chestnuts was. The

174

The Poiesis of History

chapter opens then with real sources: ledgers and eyewitness accounts. Yet these have nothing to tell about the strike of Parma. The narrator moves on to the seasonal litany of the harvest, winter, and spring, each with its “tasks.” Indoors, domestic life goes on, while out of doors “viole/e margherite seguirono e nuvole/alternate a schiarite sfolgoranti” [p. 49] (“violets/and daisies came on the heels of alternating/clouds and lightening-like clearings”). Our attention is called in the second strophe to a single day on the plain surrounding Parma where lie the Rossetti lands, and then to the noon hours and to an afternoon ray of sun resting on an idle kitchen broom. We learn that the days are growing longer and that summer and the time of mowing and haymaking is drawing nearer, and we also learn of the departure of A.’s maiden aunts, Maria, “the elder,” and Giulia. In May 1908, agriculture workers were to join the syndicalist effort and strike during the crucial hay harvest:

Per questo maggio e stato scelto dai sindacalisti a piegare la dura difesa degli agrari, con rovina di capitale vivo e morto: mugghia oggi, cinque del mese, a San Prospero l’intera stalla affamata, e inquiete le vaccine non munte con i comi grattano il legno delle mangiatoie consunte, la cupola del cielo si fa torva d’azzurro ai loro occhi umidi e interroganti se la padrona inesperta e stanca le porta alia vasca per bere. [P. 52; emphasis added]

(This

is

why

May

was

chosen

by

the/trade

unionists

to

break

the

tough/defense of the landowners, with wide ruin/of live and dead capital; today,/May 5th, the whole hungry stable/bellows, in San Prospero,/and restless, unmilked cows grate their homs/on the well-worn wood/of the mangers. The sky’s dome/turns grimly azure to their/moist and question¬ ing eyes if the tired, inexpert lady of the manor/takes them to the tub to drink.)

The strophe evinces the familiar grammar of hypothesis. It contains the lines that initiate the “barn scene” but is preceded by strophes that contrast “piccoli uomini/presto incurvati sulle zolle” (“small men/soon curved over clods of earth”) with a “signore” (“landowner”) who has accepted “il passaggio di classe” (“class change”) and who, like his farm

Compromise and Distance

175

hands, spends his days in the field overseeing the work with his staff. It is followed by the story of Gemma, the scab who is to help Maria with the milking left undone by the strikers. Class relations are conspicuously at the center, then, of the chapter’s events, yet the episode in which Maria and Gemma milk the cows moves into a very different topic: the “ruffiana omerta/femminile” (“conspiring/female silence”) among women doing their chores. Despite the fact that the chapter on the strike gravi¬ tates to the subject of capitalist relations of production, the legendary actions of the disaffected agricultural strikers are not presented, and we learn nothing about the theory and practice of the strike, which in those years occupied political thinkers in Europe from the German Socialists to the Russians (the 1905 upsurge), including Bakunin, Luxemburg, and others. Local history is also left out in so far as nothing is said about the combative way in which women especially tried to prevent the removal of animals to non-strike areas and to halt the influx of strike breakers.21 The strike is famous in fact for how the railway workers kept the Parma unions informed of the movements of scabs, and for the fact that socialist families in other Northern regions took the strikers’ children into their homes. The inner workings of party and syndicalist politics do not sur¬ face either. The chapter title constructs, therefore, the same kind of historical reference with ensuing textual distance that appears in the poem “Di molto prima (1933).” The silent, feminine conspiracy that appears instead certainly stands in contrast to what readers might have expected from a chapter on a strike. The surprise is doubled, since the introduction of a strike into the “georgic”

modes,

although

foreshadowed

by

the

contrasts

between

worker and landowner, comes as something of a shock. Since Bertolucci turns to the portrayal of relations between a landowner’s wife and her woman servant, the text itself appears to be in collusion with their fe¬ male silence because it refrains from informing its readers of the context and events of the agricultural strike. The trade union and owner associa¬ tion are named, and a brief reference to soldiers suggests that the army was called in to suppress the strike, but the reference surfaces in a speculation within the story (of the two women) about the whereabouts of Gemma’s boys, who, we are told, may be searching out nests or search¬ ing out the soldiers who had passed by the day before (p. 55). Although the chapter title leads us to believe that what follows might be predomi¬ nantly historical, what is delivered is ultimately not about work or work¬ ing conditions. In other words, the framework of the chapter continues to

21 I draw from Idomeneo Barbadoro’s La sloria del sindacalismo italiano, vol. 2 (Flo¬ rence: La Nuova Italia, 1973), pp. 190—94.

176

The Poiesis of History

be the “agrarian and domestic epos” Vittorio Sereni had observed in La capanna Indiana.22 We might observe here that how Bertolucci introduces history into La camera da letto has something in common with how Pasolini uses the “palimpsest” to demonstrate the difficulties of representing historical time. Bertolucci’s strategy of shifting attention from the broad picture of economics and class struggle to the family’s experience has motivations similar to Pasolini’s displacements within the Roman landscape from the historical center to the outskirts. At the same time, Bertolucci’s depic¬ tion/fantasy of his mother’s sufferings manages to avoid what Pasolini called “mere individual history.” Bertolucci chooses the provincial and the female because are both marginal in comparison to the urban or the national as subjects for history in poetry.23 The power of the marginal in an epoch of strong homologizing forces (such as Fascism and neocapital¬ ism) was, of course, one of Pasolini’s dearly held beliefs. Depicting the “marginal” Italy (provinces where not much is going on, marked by a rather dull “non-history”24) does not, however, imply that Bertolucci is antihistorical. Historical change is registered, especially by the narra¬ tor’s remarks on the newest artifacts of daily life: electric lights instead of candles, cars instead of the horse and carriage, the “bell’eta modema” (“the lovely modern age”): E l’albeggiare, doloroso, dei pochi fari d’auto prima in lentissima nascita per la strada avvallata, poi occhi indomiti, incendi, soli non evitabili da coloro cui e concesso, forse imposto,—conoscere in compagnia dei grandi lungo la notte nel suo primo quarto benigno—riconoscere una marca dal motore che passa non meno di una costellazione dal palpitare degli astri. [Pp. 174-75]

(And the sorrowful dawning of a few automobile headlights/as they slowly come to life along the valley road,/then their untamed eyes, fires, suns unavoidable/for those who are permitted, perhaps forced—to know/in the company of adults during the night’s first,/benign quarter—to recognize the engine’s brand as it/passes/no less than one knows a constellation by the blinking of its stars.)

22 Sereni, review of La capanna Indiana, p. 37. 2i Jacopetta observes that Bertolucci “has made his marginality the path of a revolt in drives and affects” (Attilio Bertolucci: Lo specchio e la perdita, p. 25). 24 Ramat refers to Bertolucci’s work before the publication of the novel in verse, in ’‘Bertolucci e lo scarto dell avventura in periferia,” in Storia della poesia ilaliana del Novecento, pp. 463-66.

Compromise and Distance

177

Undoubtedly, Bertolucci values the local over the national or interna¬ tional, but this does not imply that he makes an antihistorical claim for the primacy of the experience of the ego, or subjectivity. Indeed, we might see this poetic enterprise as being something quite new and in line with twentieth-century interest in an ontology of historical experience, which attempts to conceive of history as a network, or living web, of everyday events and epochal changes, events that are neither timeless and unaffected by historical change nor are they so susceptible to change that generations are discontinuous. And herein lies some of the genius of Bertolucci’s format. It is not so much that the generational schema of the family romance dovetails nicely with the thematics of change and continuity, gain and loss, but also that La camera da letto draws in a brilliant way on the format of the “libro di famiglia” (“family book”), recently studied by Angelo Cicchetti and Raul Mordenti. In these epics of domestic life, a series of pens and voices constructs a family history (ink drying on a page of the family book appears at the end of the poem’s first chapter) in a way that drama¬ tizes some unusual combinational variants of what Emile Benveniste termed “history” and “discourse.” Such books, which evolved from something resembling almanacs and genealogies in the Renaissance into something resembling a diary in the eighteenth century, lend a public dimension to the intimate world of the home. Family books present an atypical form for public discourse, since they tend toward the intermin¬ able and at the same time they are fragments (penned by disparate hands) in a series.23 Bertolucci’s format stems from the “alibi” of a dis¬ covered family book, and like such books La camera da letto dramatizes the distance between, on the one hand, an external, generalized and ever-repeated temporality (years, harvests) that individuals have ob¬ served and noted, and, on the other, the individual who constructs events according to family life’s idiosyncratic events. From the time it attains majority to its passing away, each generation constructs a charac¬ teristic temporality with social implications. What is interesting from a technical standpoint about this influence on Bertolucci’s poem is that the progression in such family books is also characterized by interruptions and pauses in the chronicle. La camera da letto itself has something of the feel of a chronicle, yet it is transformed significantly and distanced from that genre by the prob¬ lematic representations of memories, especially when references are made to a collective family memory, for example ol Fisa.

Although

Bertolucci’s poem has an authorial homogeneity and poetical dimension

2f> Cicchetti and Mordenti, “La scrittura dei libri di famiglia,” pp. 1137-38.

178

The Poiesis of History

that are absent in family books, his fantasized portrayals of his familial predecessors reflect the kind of writing found in such books, especially in the mix of public and private musings. Accounts of events such as a strike or the assassination of a fascist youth (in chapter 17) do not pro¬ vide the basis for the central narration, but are, nevertheless, natural accessories to Bertolucci’s family book.26 Thus in the chapter “Sciopero,” the strike is noted but the family business remains both affected by and distant from external events. In the true family book, the conti¬ nuity of events is also interrupted by the deaths of the family heads who make the entries. Bertolucci’s modern, fictionalized or fantasized rewrit¬ ing of his family’s history uses somewhat different devices of deferral and interruption. To study this structure of interruption is also to study the thematics of impossible narration encountered earlier in the short poem “Romanza.” These devices of interruption are applied most prominently to Maria’s deferred story. If in fact we pursue her story after section 1 of Book One and into the section that treats the transplanting of the Bertolucci family to a town residence, we encounter episodes concerning Maria that may shed light on the earlier events. Yet before any clarification can take place, changes in the internal dynamics of the family (A.’s own unfold¬ ing maturation) provoke a displacement toward the narrator’s changing objects of desire, his discovery so to speak of newly satisfying substi¬ tutes for his fantasies and his family romance, namely Parma. The epi¬ sode of the oyster vendor is as much about A.’s developing neuroses as it is about Maria’s troubling obsessions. It also points to an important tran¬ sition pertinent to Bertolucci’s themes of distance, separation, and void. The family has left the countryside to take up residence, except for summers, in the city. Young A. is sent secretly to acquire oysters in the part of Parma called “il ghetto sovversivo” (“the subversive ghetto”). The oysters the boy procures nourish his mother’s elusive illness and lead her son to spend years searching for an explanation for his mother’s inexplicable behavior. This taboo activity coincides with the beginnings of A.’s adolescence, but more importantly it coincides with a painful, frightful loosening of family ties, described in the following verses: Sara sempre piii difficile vederli riuniti, seppure con dolore divergono da lei riducendosi il margine loro concesso della sua compagnia, scaduti i tempi irreparabili delfamore e delfinfanzia.

26 Ibid., p. 1147.

Compromise and Distance

179

Sallontanano, per allontanare il distacco, lungo strade di citta e di campagna che presto patiranno la luce di un’altra primavera, tentati di volgersi a guardare lei che non s’e mossa, intrepida, gratificata da una giovinezza che non subira offesa, timorosi, fissandola, d’impietrire. [P. 173; emphasis added] (It grows ever more difficult the see them reunited,/although they move away with sorrow/as the margin of time/conceded in her company nar¬ rows,/the unrecoverable days of love and childhood having expired./They take their distance in order to distance the separation,/along the city and country

roads

which

will

soon/undergo

the

light

of

another

spring, / tempted to turn around to look /at the woman who has not moved, intrepid,/gratified by a youth that will not encounter offense,/fearful, star¬ ing at her, of turning to stone.)

At the point in A.’s maturation when his attachment to this Medusa/ mother threatens a stony paralysis—mingled, however, with the hint of an Orphic destiny—the city streets and the country roads begin to fur¬ nish the new, surrogate object for the familiar dynamic of separation and attachment linked to the figure of Maria: Bertolucci elsewhere refers to this city as a “dolce corpo disteso e inattingibile di madre (o amante?)” (“supine and ungraspable, sweet mother’s body [or lover’s?]”).2 Parma is described both as a “circolare materna onniabbracciante piazza” [p. 239] (“circular, maternal, all-embracing piazza”) and as “benigna e irraggiungibile” [p. 137] (“benign and unreachable”); and in the second section of the novel, “0 citta sospirata” (Oh longed-for city), we read that Parma “t’accoglie . . . e ti sporca/del suo amore e dolore in questo/ mutare della stagione” [p. 137] (“Parma receives you . . . and dirties you/with her love and sorrow in this/change of season”). Chapter 16, “In citta” (In town), portrays Parma in terms reminiscent indeed of the vul¬ nerable Maria: “Citta torrentizia, citta di ghiaia e di sabbia,/citta debole, sfiduciata e dolce,/divisa in due ...” [p. 131] (“Torrent-like city, city of gravel and sand,/weak city, untrusting and sweet,/divided in two . . .”). In this section of the poem, Maria has taken her two sons into town among “gente pallida e fina” [p. 135] (“pale and refined people”) to visit a friend, Wanda. Their house in Parma has a walled garden, “verde recluso” (“secluded greenery”), with flowers that emerge from cracked walls and cannot grow in the earth. These both empassion and sadden

27 Bertolucci, dust jacket ol Viaggio d'inverno.

180

The Poiesis of History

A., who, in his new attachment to the town, is referred to as “un’anima vulnerata dall’amore” [p. 133] (“a soul wounded by love”). The city garden is cut off from nature and the countryside but its distance from them intensifies its seductive appearance. A.’s love for the city is in fact characterized by ambivalence, until the time when he will find “una distanza giusta” (“the proper distance”). The town/country tension comes to repeat the tensions of familial ties, the tensions of attachment to and detachment from Maria. A. is portrayed incessantly riding on the tram over the river bridge between a Parma that defies representation and its continguous countryside (the rural outskirt Baccanelli). In these chap¬ ters, the vagabond protagonist could be said indeed to reenact in a spatialized narrative the oscillations of the “neurotic” speaker of “Romanza.” The city is portrayed typically in its distance (like the lover and his mother) beyond a summery wall of trees, in a way that repeats the theme of the well-viewed but distant horizon: “Parma/s’allontana intanto splende nel mezzogiorno/fulgida catasta di silenzio rogo di quiete” [p. 149] (“Parma/moves into the distance and still shines at noon/gleaming stack of silences pyre of quiet”). The city also inspires the enactment of distance (again the “final distance”) and evasion by more direct denial: “la famiglia e entrata nella vertigine amorosa/della vita che i cittadini, signori e poveri, conducono/per contrastare, nel peccato unamine,/l’inevitabile accadimento della morte” [p. 158] (“the family has entered into the amorous dizziness/of the life that her citizens, lords and paupers, conduct/in order, in unanimous sin, to resist/the inevitable event of death ). The flowering of civilization evident in the city’s skyline of cu¬ polas and minarets, its spacious, street-veined piazzas, and its seductive lair-like shops and bookstores appears as a death-distancing activity, as incessant movement, nourished in the hypothesis of another departure— an ever-diminishing destiny leading to death—which no one dares to face: Centro della citta—casa posta nel centro della citta—quante vie stellarmente si diramano da te offrendo una scelta infinita per i freschi inurbati, decisi agli imprevisti eccitanti di una storia personale. Anche tu riluttante, uscito in cerca d’un plein air privilegiato capace di medicare le ferite che ti segnano (a tale fine i tuoi occhi scrutano ansiosi intorno), incontrerai l avventura d una giomata, mentre

Compromise and Distance

181

il destino gia s’accorcia e striscia sul selciato umido di sole dietro quelli che la notte dormono presso di te nelle stanze comunicanti attraverso una finzione di rose? [Pp. 160-61] (The heart of the city—a home placed/in the heart of the city—how many streets/branch out star-like from you offering/an infinity of choices/to re¬ cent country immigres set/on pursuing the exciting contingencies of a pri¬ vate life./You, too, reluctant, having gone out/in search/of a privileged plein air capable/of healing the wounds that mark you/(and cause your anxious eyes to search the surroundings),/will encounter daytime adven¬ ture, while/destiny already grows shorter and slithers/along the sidewalk dampened by the sun/behind those who sleep in your home /in rooms ad¬ joining by means of an imitation of roses?)

The son may have moved outside of the family circle but he still seeks the countryside plein air of his childhood days in order to heal the wounds of separation—from his mother and the country life associated with the idyllic, if restless, union of mother and son. The protagonist never quite becomes a son of Parma, however; he is never quite one of Parma’s own offspring, who “privi dei tuoi lastrici/ hanno voglia di morire, di non essere” [p. 136] (‘‘without your pave¬ ments/wish to die, to be naught”). The truly devoted city dwellers are described as “non intrepidi figli/del secolo, fattisi sui resti/dell’agape umanistica/. . . nel grembo, dove il vento muore, dei vicoli” [p. 206] (“not intrepid sons/of the secular, educated/on humanist agape's ruins/ . . . in the womb of side streets where the wind dies”). The humanistic, and even classical ideal of the city as an object of agape remains for a generation of young men only in a degraded search for love in bourgeois Parma’s coffee houses and bordellos. For A., the tensions of growing up and away from Maria cannot be resolved in Parma’s womb. Indeed, in Viaggio d'inverno, the poems’ protagonist has been transplanted even further from home, to Rome, yet he retains the persona and straw hat ol a country gentleman farmer, a sign that the new city has not claimed him as a son either.28 The failure of the city to calm his anxiety becomes ever more evident

2H Another city, the symbolically charged spa Salsomaggiore, even more than Parma perhaps, serves as a focus for the existential theme Bertolucci develops: how the limits imposed by death and disease stimulate the pursuit of life. The spa is equally tin* ‘Villa di cure e perdizione” (“city of cures and perdition”). It is in the resort that his grand¬ father Giovanni Rossetti “imbocca la strada della sua morte” |p. 122| (“turns onto the street of his death”).

182

The Poiesis of History

to the adolescent who is approaching his manhood as one generation is reaching maturity and another departing this world, with the conse¬ quence of familial crisis felt most keenly by Maria, in the last chapter dedicated to her in the Parma sections of La camera da letto, “La prova della pellicia”: . . . Nessuna meraviglia che sia essa a risentire dolore in questi anni passeggeri che la famiglia giovane raggiunge in ognuno dei suoi componenti un punto diverso ma ugualmente acceso di maturazione nella tempestosa dolcezza che awince e disgiunge. A meta mattina, tutti partiti presto e inclusi in una sfera d estraneita che trasmette terrore— come un’instantanea presa a distanza eccessiva— . . . [P. 220; emphasis added] (No/wonder that it is she who feels/pain/in these transient years/in which the young family reaches in each of its /component parts/a different yet equally vivid point/of ripeness in the stormy sweetness/that binds and unties. At mid/morning, all have left early/and been engulfed in an extra¬ neous sphere which transmits terror—/as in a polaroid shot taken from too far away.)

Bertolucci continues to hammer at the theme of ties that bind and loose and gradually begins to associate these terrifying emotions with those of writing and the emergence of a muse. The interrelated experiences of anguish and joy that A. feels upon an unexpected encounter in town that Maria has orchestrated as a surprise for her family (“dove/la tua entrata gli procurera angosica e gioia. Poi/la confusione ...” [p. 226] (“where/ your entrance will bring anxiety and joy. Then/confusion . . .”) are renewed in the syndrome of the “extrasistole,” where joy and anguish are the signs of poetry. These conflicting emotions cause the writer to move incessantly between the writing table and the streets, between, by extension, poetry’s protection and poetry’s threat. A.’s poetic vocation also comes to be associated with a convalescence, related, it seems, to the same separation anxiety that devastates Maria. On his eighteenth birthday A. contemplates a hand-painted plate and reads its mythological scene symbolically. He wonders aloud how he will

Compromise and Distance

183

muster the energy of his adolescent years to overcome the daily fevers that currently confine him to his home: “Quando poi m’identifico col putto ebbro molle che poggia testa e schiena sul grembo della donna di destra e riceve una ghirlanda di grappoli viola dalla donna a sinistra, ronzando intomo una pianura assorta in olmi anziani e folgorati, padri attristati da una primavera perenne? La circolarita del piatto mi da una vertigine cui non reggo, o e la nausea per aver scoperto che il bambino viene dalla madre ceduto in custodia a un’estranea, e sia pure a una Musa?”29 (When in fact I identify with the soft and intoxicated /cherub who leans head and back/against the lap of the woman on the right/and receives a garland of violet clusters/from the woman on the left,/a buzzing clearing absorbed /in ancient, lightning-struck elms, fathers/saddened by a peren¬ nial spring?/The plate’s circularity makes me/unbearably dizzy, or is it the nausea/of having discovered that the boy-child/is yielded by his mother into the custody/of a stranger. Muse that she is?) The circular narrative read on the plate reaches a crisis for the “cherub” and for his admirer, whose own unfamiliar Muse has taken him into custody from his newly distanced mother. The theme of a creative dis¬ tance (the Muse is a “stranger”) returns in the context of a maternal distance. It is interesting that A. recognizes himself in the plate’s myth and immediately feels ill: the reader of the story is suddenly also its protagonist. The observer is suddenly also a “participant.” In a similar vein, the narrator’s story may also come to coincide with his mother’s enigmatic story, since her biography at times draws him into a participation that slips into autobiography. In one example of this 29 These lines appear to pertain to the last chapter of the first book of La camera da lelto, in which A. receives a visit from an admirer of his poems who engages him in a discussion of the relations, indeed, of illness and poetry; but they appeared in Viaggio dinverno, pp. 129—30, as “Framinento escluso dal romanzo in versi” (Fragment ex¬ cluded from the novel in verse). Maria’s death prefigured here in the fear her son feels, does not occur until book 2 of La camera da letto; it is also evoked in his poem “A sua madre, che aveva nome Maria” (To his mother, by the name of Mary) [La capanna indiana, p. 141).

184

The Poiesis of History

process, readers are following Maria on a country ride in her carriage and learn that she is beset by anguish; A., in an inserted scene in the fields,

suffers a similar malaise.

The author organizes the episode

around their twin anxieties. It turns out that A. has lost his way after school and that the two cannot find each other. Bertolucci’s portrayal of this important, seemingly unavoidable identification dictates the very structure of the novelistic family romance, and it affects the unfolding of A.’s maturation along with how he comes to understand his poetic voca¬ tion. The identification of the son with his mother leads us to ask, for instance, whether A.’s own autobiography is parallel to Maria’s impossi¬ ble story as it is characterized in “Sciopero.” Siciliano has observed that the more this “existential” poem attempts to make itself autobiographi¬ cal, the more it takes as its subject that which can never be explained by autobiography.30 A.’s own story is to be as marred by unresolved (and displaced) lacunae as Maria’s. For Siciliano, the text’s “I” is thrown into the story and “pulverized” there by its immensity. This distance from biography and autobiography, and indeed from life, is seen as a defense against “le ferite che ti segnano” (“the wounds which mark you”), a defense constructed through a distancing that is also “a medicine.” Wri¬ ting within this poetics of distance, “s’allontanano per allontanare il distacco” (“they take their distance in order to distance the separation”), is Bertolucci’s distancing cure. It is possible to extend the notion of the distancing cure from the thematics of the existential and of the family romance to the thematics of the historical. The distance from a historical perspective that Bertolucci constructs around the events he inscribes in La camera da letto is evi¬ dent in the chapter on the strike of 1908 in Parma, and yet the overarch¬ ing temporal structure of the poem belies that distance to some extent, especially because the diachronic thickness of the novel as it unfolds over several centuries is important in constituting his alternative to the schematic representations of history that serve, or have served, dominant ideologies (Fascism, for instance, with its own “fantasy” of Roman his¬ tory). In one basic sense, Bertolucci simply rejects the notion that litera¬ ture is only important in the light of history. At issue in La camera da

30 Siciliano, review of La camera da letto, p. 131. A passage that corroborates this view is found in the story of A.’s childhood visit to the puppet theater, where a kind of ’’residual epic” battle is being enacted and has this effect on the boy: “medicamento sufficiente a rimetterti/in equilibrio termico, a rallentare/i battiti del tuo cuore e allontanare/dalla superficie del tuo essere l’urgenza/pulsante e minacciosa della vita personale” [p. 126] (“a medicine capable of reestablishing/your thermal equilibrium, of slow¬ ing/the beating of your heart and distancing/from the surface of your being the pulsating/ and threatening urgency of personal life”).

Compromise and Distance

185

letto in a more specific way, however, is the relation of historical mem¬ ory and fantasy, where the “historical” family memoire can be hypothe¬ sized and transformed by fantasy in the execution of impossible storytell¬ ing and an analogously impossible history. “Sciopero” is not, in fact, the only instance of the transformation of a historical or historicizing subject into the familiar “un niente da segnalare” (“a void to mark”); the phrase itself, tellingly, appears in the chapter “Un giorno di marzo,” about the conflicts in the early 1920s between Fascists and anti-Fascists in Emilia. We read in that section’s opening pages that years are usually remembered by their winter crop of influenzas, but that 1922 must not have produced any, since it is so hard to recall: Ma forse, quell’anno che la mente rifiuta di ricordare—ed e come un diario di famiglia cui vennero strappati fogli temibili, come il vuoto abbacinante seguito alia rimozione di un ingombro di macerie domestiche in uno spazio urbano— nessuna malattia gratified di colpa ed espiazione la famiglia implicata nel volgere precipitoso della storia. L’ingiustizia doveva trionfare perche i campi producessero un grano poi secco e sonoro nei granai padronali, fresco ai piedi nudi dei figli di proprietari e mezzadri, nell’impegno del gioco; un’ erba in cui affondare muovendosi il carro traballante di sotto, in alto muovendosi cielo e nuvole, voragini di sereno addolcite dal vento scorrente piii in basso, sulla terra, con un respiro gagliardo. Abbondanza e salute per tutta la famiglia—questo soltanto risulta, un niente da segnalare che comprende la consumazione veloce delle membra di Giovanni Rossetti, la sua morte scontata e differita di poco nell’alto letto gia destinato alia liglia. [Pp. 139-40; emphasis added]

186

The Poiesis of History

(But maybe that year the mind refuses/to remember—and it’s like a family diary/from which fearful pages/have been tom, like/the glaring void that follows/the removal of encumbering/domestic mins/in an urban space— /there were no illnesses to reward in guilt/and in expiation the fam¬ ily/implicated in the precipitous course of history. /Injustice was to tri¬ umph/so that the fields might produce a dry/and sonorous grain in the landowners grain fields,/cool on the bare feet of the sons/of owners and sharecroppers engaged /in play; grasses in which the tottering cart be¬ low/sinks as it moves,/sky and clouds moving on high /chasms of clear softened by the wind/flowing lower, on the earth,/a hearty breathing. Abundance/ and health for the whole/family—only this appears, la void to mark that contains/the rapid wasting of Giovanni Rossetti’s/ limbs, his/predictable and/little-deferred death/in the high bed already destined to his daughter.) This rather ironic passage demonstrates the way in which the triumph of injustice in the form of Fascism guarantees for the privileged class that nothing will change for them, or nothing more than the patterns of the clouds, nothing more than nature as the figure for eternal change beyond the doings of humans. It will seem that there is nothing to tell, then, for some people. " Children will still play in the grain heaps, grass will still be cut outdoors under windy skies, generations will rise and be cut down. And yet Bertolucci proceeds to tell us a story and to tell us of the eruption of a historic event into time, which his own class does not experience, for they do not attend to it at all, only to the changes of the seasons. A Fascist youth is killed by the opposition in “uneventful” 1922, and A. s habitual tram ride between city and country is inter¬ rupted by the funeral convoy. He sees a corpse, of a blackshirt, for the First time. The narrator addresses himself as young A. with the following words: “tu che dovrai ricordare e testimoniare il vero,/tenendolo prigioniero nel petto/come in una cantina umida e scura,/guarda” [p. 145] (“you, who will have to remember and to witness the truth,/keeping it a prisoner in your heart/as though in a dark and humid cellar,/look out”). In these lines, Bertolucci once again plays on the twin elements of narratorial distance and complicity: maybe there was something eventful and its memory was repressed (the expression “nel petto” [“in your heart ] was also applied to Maria Rossetti’s burial of traumatic memo¬ ries). The theme indeed of censure makes itself felt more strongly. At the same time, the child/observer is developing a potential for abandon-

This contrast appears much earlier on in the poem. Time is experienced in one way by the landowning son and in quite another when it is marked by the bald spots on the heads of

farm workers who for years lean them against cows’ sides” (p. 20).

Compromise and Distance

187

ing his unwitting complicity in the unfolding story, this time not his mother’s story but the story of his own class, of their impotence and willful censorship of the “truth.” History can be witnessed if not nar¬ rated. And history is told in this chapter, although it can appear only in the displaced context of a child’s tram ride home from school. As in “Romanza,” saving the truth of the past by writing it is compli¬ cated; and it is an obsession that will not admit defeat even in the face of time’s alliance with death. The dimension of loss entailed in history’s unfoldings in La camera da letto is global. What is in fact lost is a whole world—in a word, the agricultural world as it was known to Maria. “Sciopero” evokes the “impossible” story and history of its destruction, seen by Bertolucci to have its origins in those early years of the century. The chapter on the early violent conflicts of Fascism underlines the fact that landowners who broke the strikes became the financiers of the “squadristi.”32 As in the love story of “Romanza,” the story of the “mod¬ ern” destruction of that rural world with its contiguous and contrastive homes—the owner’s villa and the peasants’ “rustico” or living quar¬ ters—is so violent a trauma to the author’s definition of himself, that he can believe it only as much as he can believe in, or know, his own demise.33 The latter appears to be as unknowable as Maria’s story. This theme of “impossible” loss affects the narrator’s whole stance and renders the notion of the “committed” poet problematic. The long passage quoted above on the difficulty of remembering the year without childhood influenzas reveals something important about the narrator’s dual, ambivalent position. The narrator who witnesses and remembers the events of the allegedly uneventful year does not assume the stance of something like a class collaborator, since the child/observer does notice a change in what his cohorts view as a “void.” Yet, simultaneously, in this chapter (and in “Sciopero”) there appear constant evocations of the farm world, whose beauty, whose very landscape is the protagonist’s possession and the subject of the poet’s composition: his role as a propri¬ etor is stressed at many turns. The reader’s attention is therefore di¬ rected to an aspect of that landscape in which class strife and domina-

32 We read in Bertolucci’s endnotes on “Sciopero”: “Agraria di Carrara and Leghe di De Ambris: associations of landowners and peasants before World War I. Parts ol the Agraria, not all members, joined fascist squads” (p. 254). 33 Bertolucci wrote on this theme in Viaggio d'inverno, in the poem “Ritratto di un uomo malato”: “Sono io appartenente a un secolo che erede/di non mentire, a ravvisarmi in quell’uomo malato/mentendo a me stesso: e ne scrivo/per esorcizzare un male in cui credo e non credo” [p. 771 (“I who belong to a century which believes/it cannot lie, see myself in that sick man/lying to myself: and 1 write of it/to exorcise a sickness in which 1 believe and do not believe”).

188

The Poiesis of History

ti°n have a presence but that presence is not in the narrative foreground. The contrapuntal divisions in the divided narrator begin to extend to, and perhaps to figure, the issue of the conflictual psychical structures pertinent to class consciousness and the problematics of class identifica¬ tion.'4 Bertolucci’s particular form of composition draws on the Marxian notion that “civil society is the true focus and theatre of all history,” as opposed to “high-sounding dramas of princes and states.”35 The author directs the reader s attention to historical themes of the Marxian sort, but comes short of representing what could be called civil action: the strikes of 1908 are offstage, which limits the point of view in that episode to the world of the family property.36 The events in the barn seem out of phase with what is going on in the “main frame” set up by the chapter title. That distance also marks the difficulty or even repression of “civic verse” for the bourgeois, landowning author.37 We might even say that ideology itself is disavowed since it is both carefully denied in the treat¬ ment of the strike (which represents a specific ideological position an¬ tithetical to ruling-class interests) and accepted (an ideological subject, the strike, provides the title, and the strike influences what transpires whether the protagonists of events and the narrator himself are aware of ideology’s force or not).

u This topic is addressed in the context of postwar Italian poetry in Siti’s II neorealismo nella poesia italiana, 1941-1956, p. 258. J5 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. W. Lough and C. P. Magill (New York: International Publishers, 1947), p. 26. In the same breath, Marx notes the paradox of change and stasis in a temporality understood in terms of genera¬ tions, in words that evoke Bertolucci’s own distrust of the manipulative potential in writing history:

History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each

of which exploits the materials, the forms of capital, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding ones, and thus on the one hand continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e. g., the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution’’ (p. 38). Marx himself notes that in a strict sense the term

civil society

develops in the eighteenth century, when

“property relations had already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval community. Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie” (p. 27). * Siti has noted the pervasiveness of this “fuori campo” (offstage) in Bertolucci’s fre¬ quent representation of a sound without its image or an image without its attendant sound; he further notes that of temporal slippage,

the missing simultaneity produces an effect similar to that

adding that

‘the exit from the visual field is an exit from the

mirror, a typical place of identification.

Similarly, syntax and metrics do not coincide,

and syntax cannot generally be contained by meter (II neorealismo nella poesia italiana, p. 181. t7 Ibid., p. 183.

Compromise and Distance

189

Another sign of this careful ambivalence can be found in how Bertolucci concentrates his attention on certain “borderline” topog¬ raphies in a terrain always and inevitably defined by class relations (“rustico” versus “civile” and uncultivated terrains versus the useful, cultivated ones): II giardino non e grande, ma tu non Thai conosciuto ancora tutto da quei confini di fianco e dietro casa dove ghiaia mista a erba improvvisa lambisce il mattone che la scopa consuma, viali s’aprono e chiudono capricciosamente, qua rose sfioriscono in disperazione ancora gonfie come chiome la gerani tenaci fiammeggiano stringendo l’erba delle aiuole: questo mistero e familiare ai tuoi occhi ma non la montagnola-ghiacciaia non la cisterna-pescheria o il confinefossato che divide terra inutile e utile, padroni e contadini. [Pp. 77-78]

(The garden is not big, but/you have not yet explored it all/from the bor¬ ders beside and

behind/the

house where gravel

mixed with

sudden

grass/laps brick/worn by brooms; paths open out/and close on a whim, here/roses fade in desperation/still as full as tresses there/tenacious gera¬ niums blaze/forcing the grass into flowerbeds: this/mystery is familiar to your eyes/but not the ice-house mound /not the fish storage’s cistern or the border-/ditch, which divides useless/from useful land, owners from peas¬ ants.)

These border areas are symbolized by the trees Bertolucci portrays over and over again, the ever-present “gaggie” or acacias, which belong nei¬ ther to the garden nor the open fields but flourish in the “free zone.

38 See Girardi, “Rilievi variantistici,” p. 315. Girardi takes the view that the lree zone he evokes constitutes a corrective “to the particular intellectual physiognomy ol the ‘agrarian,’ bourgeois Bertolucci; above all a sort of detachment from one’s own class origin.’’ Others have taken the view that Bertolucci’s distancing of himself from his social class, and indeed especially from its literary glories, is more in the nature of self-punish¬ ment than a spontaneous form of democracy. This second view is found in Siti, // neorealismo nella poesia italiana, p. 185. For Siti, who refers oidy to l iaggio d irwerno in

190

The Poiesis of History

If the position of the narrator is neither here nor there and if the author is unwilling to assume the stance of the civic poet, he is also unwilling to console himself for his losses in some ideologically neutral Arcadian poetic piping. His verses do not evoke some ideally simple, even leisurely attachment to Mother Nature. A process of displacement and distancing could be said to apply, therefore, not only to the novelistic and lyric genres Bertolucci invokes but, at another level of the novel s construction, to its pastoral aspects. Bertolucci adroitly orches¬ trates a movement between the unpossessed open air and the open road of the country fields (traveled by mother and son in their carriage or scoured by the two young brothers) and the confining world of Oedipal anxieties and passionate familial love in the “bedroom” of the title. The latter is the world of domestic transitional objects (bed linens, tapestries, and curtains), which attach the narrator to the maternal world and to the world of the poetic

stanza.” Poetry’s genesis comes about in the oscilla¬

tion between these inner and outer worlds. Which is the “idyllic” world? Leaving this question unanswered, Bertolucci makes us keenly aware of poetry’s growing distance from its past subjects: the civic, the legendary, the fabulous, the pastoral, and the erotic.39 In the historicizing context of the theme of agriculture and its chang¬ ing relations of production, generic considerations could also be applied to Bertolucci s particular use of broadly pastoral frames, since, in a now familiar way, these pastoral frames stand in negative counterpoint to traditional idyllic forms.

If eighteenth-century nobles dressed up as

shepherds and if Renaissance courtiers constructed Arcadian worlds apart from the corrupt and the transitory, Bertolucci instead introduces strikes and strikebreakers—trouble in Paradise here is of a more threatenmg type than intrusion from satyrs. The inhabitants of the rural world in La camera da letto are the exploited and not joyous, or even melan¬ choly, rustics.

Pastoral beauty is evoked in its distance, since, for

Bertolucci, it is dying as a subject for poetry just as the novel is dying as a genre. It is in the imagining of its dying, its being out of phase with respect to the modern present, that it can be remembered and its inten¬ sity evoked. Bertolucci’s pastoral is complicated by the fact that the idyllic world

this case, this void or blank, this “free zone,” is meant to signal a historical shortcoming of Bertolucci s class. I haved noted how Bertolucci labors in La camera da letto both to portray other symbolic voids and to distance himself from them since he as observer/ narrator is able to note the produced’ character of the pause/void accepted as natural by other members of his class. 39 I draw this insight from Ramat, “Far romanzo col verso,” p. 16.

Compromise and Distance

191

collapses or is destroyed by the eventual loosening of familial ties— especially for Maria—in a newly capitalistic world that overwhelms the protagonist and forces upon him the progress of his maturation, his entry into “la bella eta moderna” [p. 175] (“the lovely modem age”). The rural world can only be “regression.” Chapter 21 delves into this theme of “la regressione rurale, beata, estiva” [p. 177] (“rural regression, blessed, summery”), by portraying a late autumn harvest after a summer spent by the Bertolucci family in the countryside. For fourteen-year-old A., these splendid harvests are ever fewer, as they are for his whole “classe privilegiata,/medioalta borghesia agraria, mercantile e professionistica” [p.

175] (“privileged/medium-

high bourgeois class, agrarian, mercantile, and professional”): All’agape meridiana schermata da tele dipinte alle finestre di cui la borghesia ancora, ma per poco, si compiace quasi di vessilli domestici, partecipa per diritto e per gioco il figlio quattordicenne che per prolungare l’infanzia accudisce paziente a preparare il filo di ferro lucido che leghera la paglia. [P. 177; emphasis added] (The fourteen-year-old son, who partakes by right and in play/in the after¬ noon agape screened by hand-painted curtains at the windows/still en¬ joyed by the bourgeoisie, but only for a while,/ as though they were domes¬ tic standards,/prolongs his infancy taking patient care/in preparing the shining wire thread that will tie up/the straw.)

As intimacy with the rhythms not only of nature but of agricultural work recedes into the distance for A., he seeks to remember in verse his youth in this pastoral world (marked, of course, by his passion for Maria). Banished from the protection of mother and Mother Nature, he has been consigned to the protection of the Muse. Forgotten nature in the modern times shall constitute his inspiration, as he seeks in his verses “il palpito aritmico della superstite lucciola moribonda” (“the arhythmic palpitating of a surviving, moribund firefly”).40 Because the be¬ loved rural world is gone or nearly gone (the familiar hypothesis), it can be evoked as a tradition, even as a “manner.” If we think of a number of predecessors who might be evoked both in

40 Bertolucci, “Dalla poetica deU’extrasistole,” p. 24. Pasolini also used the disap¬ pearance of fireflies from the Italian landscape as a central metaphor for his indictment of neocapitalism with its ecological and cultural disasters.

192

The Poiesis of History

the Italian and in other European traditions, it is clear that Bertolucci by comparison has rejected the notion of a pastoral authenticity (found, for example, in Tasso’s Aminta). Bertolucci admired Wordsworth and trans¬ lated The Prelude into Italian, yet his poems are not meant to evoke alienation from some authentic nature, since nature is seen in a postMarxian,

post-Romantic light as “production.” His techniques and

themes are also inspired by twentieth-century English poetry, by, for example, Edward Thomas’s portrayal of rural England in “September Fires” or by the “weather” poems of Louis MacNeice such as “London Rain

or

The Sunlight in the Garden.” These English names are signifi¬

cant because they are a link to a pastoral tradition that provides a differ¬ ent sort of contrast than would comparisons with the Italian tradition. The English pastoral made its response to the industrialization of agri¬ culture in the nineteenth century (Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” comes to mind), whereas this transformation took place in Italy largely after World War II. By drawing on an English tradition, Bertolucci is able in part to distance himself from Italian twentieth-century poetry. It is true that D’Annunzio, for one, forged links to the illustrious po¬ etic past associated with the pastoral genre, especially in the Alcyone, in poems of praise such as “L’aedo senza lira,” “Furit aestus,” and the more historically layered and georgic “Le opere e i giorni.” Bertolucci’s verses, instead, are constructed in such a way as to distance not only D’Annunzio’s praise but also Arcadian utopics and the didascalic over¬ tones associated with earlier poets such as Ruccellai (“Le api”), the courtly frugoni, who wrote his poemetti in blank verse, the Emilian Baruffaldi (II canapaio, 1740), or Spolverini (La coltivazione del riso, 1758). Bertolucci may have chosen to write in a pastoral vein, recogniz¬ ing that a part of the sense of every form derives from the history of that form and what has been said in it, but he has refused any attempt at immersion in “rustic” society. Along with others such as Pavese, Pa¬ solini, Luzi, and Zanzotto, Bertolucci rejected the populist program of integrating peasant and industrial cultures. Bertolucci with this gesture conserves some of poetic history’s memories together with the memory of their attendant lacunae.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

The Interrogative Epos

Mario Luzi’s experiments in both narrative verse,

specifically the

poema, and elegy illustrate his critical thinking on the evolution of mod¬ em European poetry from Romanticism through Symbolism to the postSymbolist and post-Realist eras. The poems collected in Su fondamenti invisibili (1971) are indeed themselves about what Luzi viewed as the most suitable subject for contemporary poetry as it has been determined by this evolution: current relations of the poet with the world.1 In one sense, they illustrate modern poetry’s self-referential and metapoetic functions and are a reflection on poetry’s constants, a reflection nour¬ ished by Luzi’s several volumes of literary criticism and his well-articu¬ lated and well-developed poetics. In another sense, both the poems and the historical essays Luzi composed are of wide critical interest precisely because they frame the historically specific—more than determined— course of modern poetry in the direction of the pure lyric, associated with an absolute poetic power of creation, within several contexts: first, the history of styles, as in the historically motivated variations in the representation of the lyric self; second, the history of ideas, especially the subjective and objective potentials of literary expression; and, third, the current state of poetic affairs seen in the light of the “determina¬ tions” of intellectual and cultural history. Luzi’s poetry and essays at¬ tend to the themes of metamorphosis—fixity and flux, time and history, stasis and revolution,

tradition and invention—and the paradoxical

strength of instability. If history as flux is also the history of sorrow (a

1 “The question is, perhaps, to see what is ttie content of the work of art: I believe it is the relation of the artist and the world” (Luzi, “Un’intervista (ltd 1962,” in Tutto in questions, p. 71).

194

The Poiesis of History

major poem in Al fuoco della controversia [At controversy’s fire] is titled “II grande patema” [The great sorrow]), nonetheless, it is only at the watershed, at “time’s breaking,” that the forces of change may work a renewal. Luzi sees our own incandescent age as at that breaking point, as a precociously decrepit era of violence, as “sangue sparso in viaggi terrestri” (“blood spilled in earthly journeys”),2 with tragic and poetic valences. Within Luzi’s very general thematics of stasis and change, we find considerations on genre, considerations that carefully and forcefully avoid, however, anything smacking of the categorical, superficial, or reductive. He poses, as did Pasolini and Bertolucci, the question “What is alive and dead in postwar, post-Hermetic poetry in Italy?” Luzi’s in¬ terest lies more in the area of drawing out what is vital than in trying to bury what is dead, although in his essays he certainly noted—and possi¬ bly hastened—the retreat of “poetic realism,” a polemical target in his Tutto in questione. Luzi probes what he calls the “sacrifice” of the firstperson voice in the modern lyric’s evolution, thus assuming the familiar critical stance that treats the overly subjective lyric as moribund. He makes the first-person subject a dominant issue for contemporary poetry, so much so that the dissolution of the subject itself takes on epic propor¬ tions.3 He delves into the ways in which earlier generations of poets sought a more “objective” lyric and outlines his own inclinations toward an objectivity sundered from the sort of realism understood as socialist realism. The invention of what might be called a narrativized, horizon¬ tal, or discursive lyric is part of Luzi’s plan, as is attention to twentiethcentury history.4 We read of Trotsky’s train as it “burst into history,” of

2 Mario Luzi, Tutte le poesie, 2 vols. (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), vol. 1, p. 26. Hence¬ forth cited in the text. Unless otherwise indicated, citations will be to volume 2. 3 See Anna Panicale, Saggio su Mario Luzi (Milan: Garzanti, 1987), p. 191. 4 Giovanni Raboni used the term “horizontal” to differentiate Luzi’s Onore del vero from earlier works in which he found a “complete elimination of reference, of a physical, historical or object-related type” (“Luzi e la storia,” in Poesia degli anni sessanta [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976], p. 30). He also observes that certain negative thematics, which persist in later works, such as the suffering of history, are transformed dialectically by a process that “admits and calls its opposite” (p. 33). If history in Luzi is negative, that negativity, Raboni insists, must be historicized. In his view the solitude, hopelessness, and alienation found in the world of Onore del vero stem from the “preindustrial”—and I assume then agricultural—values of the world he depicts, Italy in the 1950s. The histor¬ icity of Luzi s works would then consist in the way he depicts that world’s pessimism— where earthly life and consequently history itself cannot hold the hope that an afterlife holds out—as itself historically circumscribed. That pessimistic view of history is a symptom of dissatisfaction with what history is bringing along in the present. It signifies the resistance of the old culture to the new industrial one, to the historical present.

The Interrogative Epos

195

Esenin’s “suicide,” of Mauthausen and Hiroshima, of napalm in Viet¬ nam, and even of dull bourgeois daily life among Italy’s newly rich. Luzi depicts in a recent work the bullet-ridden body of ex-premier Aldo Moro, kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades, in the car trunk where he was found. The “story” of the agony of history, of the West’s decline along with its now “precarious myths” and “ruined cities,”* * 3 * * quickens the narrativizing impulse in Luzi’s work, yet the author is at pains to make certain that poetry does not become the voice of history and that his poetic treatments of history cannot be read as an accusation against history’s injustices or as indictments with ulterior historical mo¬ tives. Luzi achieves his objectives in a number of ways. For one, he turns the temporal focus of his poemi (long epic or didactic poems) to moments of uncertainty, of rupture, to the “breaking of ages.” The dramatic poem Ipazia provides a good example, since Luzi portrays the violent death of the fifth-century Hellenistic philosopher and mathematician Hypatia at the hands of Christian fanatics at the time of the destruction of Alex¬ andria’s library. There the forces of renewal and loss at work in an upheaval in the course of ideas cannot be separated. Second, Luzi not only dissolves the first-person poetic voice, thereby creating uncertainty about the origins and reliability of the poem’s discourse, but he also orchestrates a series of spatial dislocations and spatial rhythms that bring about the discontinuous quality of his poemi. These qualities em¬ phasize their lack of closure and certainty, and their interrogative char¬ acter. The dissolution of the first-person subject and the spatial disloca¬ tions work together, since in Luzi’s view the flattening of the seifs representation gives way to an opening up of “the entire poetic space.”6 Luzi develops these questioning poetic strategies in an effort to discover his own way “to the conquest of objective expression.” The following excerpt from an interview titled “Dove va la poesia?” (Where is poetry going?) illustrates Luzi’s own desire to renew postHermetic verse within a generalized “desire for a moral and social re¬ demption.”7 The views he expresses are important to the development of

Raboni’s article, with its insistence on the implicit historical themes, which must be extracted from an apparently antihistorical type of verse, was written in 1961, before Luzi took up, in fact, explicit historical themes, especially in Su fondamenti int'isibili, a product not of the 1950s but of the 1960s. ’ See Vanni Bramanti, “Nuova stagione poetica di Luzi," in II Novecento, vol. 9 (Milan: Marzorati, 1979), p. 8180. 6 Luzi, “I Canti di Castelvecchio," in L'inferno e il limbo, p. 189. 7 Luzi, “Dove va la poesia?" in L'inferno e il limbo, p. 55.

196

The Poiesis of History

his postwar poetry, and especially to the theme of the relations between the poet and the world and to the theme of metamorphosis in his inter¬ rogative epos:

I’ll say that what put me ill-at-ease in twentieth-century poetry, already constituted in a tradition, was a sort of a priori or one-sided view of what Heidegger would call ‘being’, a sort of disequilibrium I detected between subject and object, a not-always-creative, and often critical and prejudi¬ cial, centrality of the I in its rapport with the terms of experience. This bothered me, and I launched a genre of poetry, which some said was wont continually to pursue its object while putting off its certainties. It was a Romantic way of reacting, which was able in some measure to satisfy my youthful tension and, perhaps, to protect a principle I held dear: that the world cannot be possessed nor can it be reduced to our specifications— much less to our tics—and it cannot withstand preliminary deformations. Instead, the world continually re-proposes itself.8

The notion that poetry cannot possess the world or mold it according to nervous whims, individual or collective, can certainly be read as a rejection of a narrowly defined realism overconfident of its powers of representation and transformation. From another, broader perspective, Luzi’s views are, however, also a rejection of what he called “the anthro¬ pocentric illusion.’’ The latter was rooted in Romantic thought and reached an apex in the Symbolists’ belief—seen by Luzi to have its origins in a justifiable revolt against positivism—in the power of Spirit and the poetic word to dominate matter and achieve the victory of es¬ sence over existence.9 His rejection of the anthropocentric motivated him to write within “the ways of the natural” and to attend to the existen¬ tial. The historical and the existential are related, but the nature of their contact is understood as a yet-to-be solved and fertile challenge for con¬ temporary thought. The relations of the world, ideas, and history are pertinent to determining just what an “objective” and vital poetry might be. Luzi’s interview demonstrates the motivations behind his tendency to view the challenges facing contemporary poetry in terms of “intellectual problems. ”10 A major intellectual problem is precisely the collapse of an

B Ibid., pp. 53—54. 9 Mario Luzi, Vicissitudine e forma (Milan: Rizzoli, 1974), p. 34. Henceforth cited in the text. 10 Gianfranco Contini, “Mario Luzi,” in Letteratura dell'ltalia unita, 1861—1968 (Flo¬ rence: Sansoni, 1968), p. 923, noted the importance of “essay-writing” in Luzi’s poetry. Achille Serrao asserted that the course of Luzi’s “ideology” can be characterized by a “reflective and discursive measure over an aestheticizing and hedonistic youthful sym-

The Interrogative Epos

197

anthropocentric world view, a transformation of epochal proportions that cannot help but affect humanity’s (and poetry’s) view of its course and its way of narrating epic (epos) in literature. That collapse is at the root of the elegiac character of modem poetry, a character Luzi outlines in an article on Campana titled “Campana, al di qua e al di la dell’elegia” (Campana, this side of elegy and beyond). The consequences of the dissolution of an anthropocentric world view for literary forms is the topic of Luzi’s study of Ugo Foscolo’s unfinished, classicizing epic Le Grazie, subtitled, significantly, “II poema negato” (The denial of the poema). In one sense the thrust of Luzi’s observations on Foscolo stems from his conviction that contemporary views of literary history have misunderstood the “determined” possibilities of contempo¬ rary poetry and have repeated the errors of the most superficial contribu¬ tors to Italian Romanticism—he names Giovanni Berchet—who in fact did not understand “the decisive and irreversible [change] which had come about in our poetry through . . . Foscolo.”* 11 Luzi warns: “At times humanity’s most profound sense of life becomes focused on an expecta¬ tion, within the silence of something unfailing that is coming to life. Woe to those who remain aside and do not realize this. In the face of what transpires, their discourse ends up stuttering.”12 Here, Luzi is speaking not only of the minor pedants engaged in the Romantic polemic in Italy, but, we may infer, to the participants in the overly rhetorical and academic debate on realism in the postwar period.13

holism” (Achille Serrao and Manola Nifosi, eds., Contributi per una bibliografia luziana, [Florence: Comune di Campi Bisenzio, Biblioteca Comunale, 1984], p. 50). Roberto Mussapi views Luzi’s work as an undertaking that composes the project of one’s destiny and has “blood-ties with epic: Dante who follows the flame of love by descending into the Inferno.” This journey is associated with the quest for deep knowledge, a quest to con¬ ceive the world with “intellect” and “love” (“Profezia del presente,” in Mario Luzi: Atti del convegno di studi; Siena, 9-10 maggio 1981 [Rome: Ateneo, 1983], p. 81). Giu¬ seppe De Robertis, reviewing Onore del vero and Primizie del deserto, observes in Luzi “a capacity for discourse . . . which distances him along with a few others, from the recent generation” (in Altro Novecento | Florence: Le Monnier, 1962], p. 502). 11 Luzi, “La polemica romantica in Italia,” in L'inferno e il limbo, p. 119. 12 Ibid., p. 118. 13 Oreste Macri, “Le origini di Luzi,” in La realta del sirnbolo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1968), pp. 149-76, finds in Luzi’s early work “epic” themes, which function as an antidote not to realism—the debates on realism were to come later—but to decadentism. In an essay on Luzi’s pre-war La barca, Macri traced a presence ol quasi-mythical topoi (a heroic humanity strong with caritas, modern-day Penelopes, the “patria italica ) drawn from Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Manzoni, and Carducci. Macri held that the classical reper¬ toire counters the “false novecento” of the experimentalists. He adds that Luzi is partic¬ ularly indebted to Vico and Foscolo. In his opinion, Luzi renews the lyrie tradition by

198

The Poiesis of History

Hence it is possible to read Luzi’s views on Foscolo—slanted as they may seem to Foscolo scholars—as both a statement of his own under¬ standing of the breakdown of anthropocentrism and a declaration of his own critical positions. If the minor intellects of the Romantic era had engaged in useless and belated debates on the suitability of myth as a thematic category for poetry, Foscolo had already set out to reestablish the world of myth as the world of permanent images found “at the heart of existence’s trials” and had drawn myth into a “circle of necessary and interior meanings.”14 For Luzi, Foscolo’s Le Grazie illustrates poetry’s urgent confrontation with the demise of myth as a cultural logic, with the demise of the rational neoclassical world view, and with the despair of failed revolution. His reference is to the French revolution, but it would not be off the mark to note that Luzi could associate himself easily with Foscolo’s “feel for epic vicissitude”15 and, moreover, would want to dis¬ tance himself, as Foscolo in his view did, from smug convictions about the role of “destiny” in historical events—be it in France after 1789 or in Italy after World War II. Beyond these generalities, it is possible to extract from “II poema negato” more specific indications of Luzi’s poetics and, especially, his view of the literary potential of the poema. Luzi does not read Foscolo’s unfinished poem in terms of historical or biographical obstacles to the poem’s completion or in philological terms pertinent to the text’s chaotic variants. Luzi observes instead that the project itself of recasting classi¬ cal mythology in modern verse—in which Luzi glimpses Foscolo’s new detachment from contemporary historical events and a new desire on his part to wrestle with the notion of the intemporal—“needed ... to solid¬ ify itself in a definite cultural design not unequipped . . . with a philo¬ sophical armature” (“II poema negato,” p. 127). Vico’s notion of the evolving course of human history provides this armature at a time when prerevolutionary hedonistic culture had fallen along with revolutionary

disentangling both the Classical and the Symbolist heritages from the “monstrous syncre¬ tism” (p. 157) of the Decadents. Frederic J. Jones views the problem of the generic tradition in a more forward-looking perspective and notes that Luzi “seems ... to be trying to make a refined and rare synthesis of the epic and lyrical strains inherent in the Italian poetic tradition, and thereby to demonstrate that a modern introspective human¬ ism wedded to a wider, religiously oriented, philosophical background is by no means an impossibility” (‘The Petrarchism of Mario Luzi,” in Gallica: Essays Presented to J. Heywood Thomas by Colleagues, Pupils, and Friends [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1969], p. 237). 14 Luzi, “La polemica romantica in Italia,” p. 120. Mario Luzi, “II poema negato,” in Discorso nalurale (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), p. 127. Henceforth cited in the text.

The Interrogative Epos

199

heroism. Foscolo, with Vico, moves the neoclassical idea of myth into anthropology and at the same time he frees myth from the conventional through his creative fictions. Foscolo’s “fiction” has important consequences in literary history, linked to the poet’s “philosophical rethinking of myth joined with an unusual ability to become one with it by virtue of an inexhaustible, protean dislocation of the ego; an ego unbound from its agonistic pose, fluid, omnipresent, and capable of producing the singular effect of add¬ ing to the mythologist a new, surprising mythographer” (Luzi, “II poema negato,” p. 128). Luzi reads in Foscolo the beginnings of a poetically fruitful dissolution of the first-person lyric voice—a hallmark of the Ital¬ ian lyric tradition since Petrarch. The fragmentary quality of Le Grazie is not the result of its being unfinished but is partially a function of this vocal dissolution with its corollary lack of precise limits (p. 130). Fos¬ colo’s original mythological project is submerged by the very multiplicity of his motifs. Myth consequently takes on a life of its own (p. 130). Foscolo ends up writing myth that is only the memory of myth, “the revelatory form of fundamental existential drives,” which inscribes the very possibility of capturing them in writing (p. 131). Foscolo’s poetry captures, then,

the sense of neoclassical myth’s

emergent destruction but also evokes myth’s underlying permanence. Myth is given as a brivido (“tremor”), even though Foscolo had set out to eulogize the civilizing power of Art (Luzi, “II poema negato,” p. 131). As a poet, Foscolo “entered the domain of the unlimited, of the recur¬ ring, of the continuous. Paradoxically, there is no other way to signify this except through the discontinuous, the intermittent moment that cap¬ tures a segment of it” (p. 132). Without eradicating an old cultural logic broken apart by the violent course of history, Foscolo represents its frag¬ ments as the signs of both its demise and its power. In doing so Foscolo writes and rewrites in several stratifications his “discontinuous poema” (p. 133). Mallarme, an important link between Foscolo and Luzi, added to Foscolo’s construction of the poema only a sublime, epigonic resigna¬ tion. Mallarme came to celebrate “music as the only reality countering the illusion of the mythic faun’s dream” (p. 131), yet ultimately he de¬ scribed his own dream’s failure in Le coup de des, where poetry is de¬ feated by chance. In Mallarme we find, in other words, a conscious treatment of the impossibility of poetry’s project. That impossibility be¬ comes poetry’s dominant “intellectual problem.” For Luzi, the inafferrabile (“ungraspable”) nature of the world’s “soul” becomes the most important thematic of Symbolism. Luzi clearly articulates some “objective” considerations on the evolu¬ tion of poetry in the last two centuries, reminding us that woe befalls

200

The Poiesis of History

“those who remain aside.” Modern poetry finds it difficult to conceive of itself as powerfully mythic, to conceive of itself as possessing the power to express a collective belief. Therefore the dissolution of the first-per¬ son subject in the lyric tradition—a by-product of changing views of the poet’s relation to the world—does not lead in the twentieth century to a retrieval of the classical epic but to the interrogative poema marked by fragmentation.16 This quality is the sign of an absence left by the defunct anthropocentric world view, an absence that can be understood only in its historicity, as something effectively over and past yet not replaced by something new; or, alternately, by something new that cannot be dis¬ cerned yet. These thematics and poetics, traced in his study of Foscolo, find their way into Luzi’s interrogative poema and can be classified in three related areas pertinent to poetic creation as Luzi understands it: (1) the role of the spatial representations; (2) the role of the first-person subject, asso¬ ciated with elegy; and (3) the role of multiple voices that supplant the first-person subject. Each of these three areas are pertinent to Luzi’s innovative use of long forms.1 Given that Luzi has chosen the poema as the genre in which to represent the subject of “the relations of the poet and the world,” it is necessary to determine how these three areas, perti¬ nent to Luzi’s compositional strategies and hence to my own categories of analysis, work to this purpose. Rather than outlining, except briefly, the evolution of this style, I have chosen to concentrate my attention on the most representative collection of compositions, Su fondamenti invisibili (1971), in which Luzi makes evident his generic choices by entitling the main section “Tre poemi” (Three poemi). Using these three texts as a point of departure, I advance the hypothesis that Luzi generates poetic figurations of the fundamentally ungraspable, enigmatic, and yet vital nature of the relation of the poet and the world. How Luzi treats the

16 Victor P. H. Li has studied the modem long poem as a product of the demystifica¬ tion of the lyric self, which does not lead to the rediscovery of the classical epic, dis¬ placed by Romanticism, but to a new genre characterized by anxiety and “effortful pro¬ traction,” a genre that is both possible and impossible (“The Vanity of Length: The Long Poem as Problem in Pound’s Cantos and Williams’ PatersonGenre 9 [1986]: 3-20). 17 See Ramat, “Luzi e il poema aperto,” in La pianta della poesia, p. 370. He advises Luzi’s readers to proceed with caution concerning the importance of the narrative verse epic in Luzi, since Luzi’s precedents are also in the “poema in prosa.” Critics have noted the importance of long forms in many of Luzi’s compositions, and not just those entitled “poemi.” Achille Serrao noted that even Luzi’s first volume. La Barca, is “a sort of . . . epic poem which narrates a Humanity whose face we do not succeed in seeing, whose story we do not know, but which we perceive to be in a state of mythic sorrow and movement” (Contributi, p. 26).

The Interrogative Epos

201

issues of the representation of space and the first-person subject, and how he uses multiple voices in his poems are all pertinent to his belief that what must remain uncircumscribed and in fieri—the relations, that is, of the poet and the world—is nonetheless evidence of the human potential for action and signification. Instability converts itself into a strength. The caritas born of the pain of constant struggle in the world of existence takes on dimensions as legendary, and as poetic, as the he¬ roics of the anthropocentric epic. The epos endures, and in Luzi’s work it retains its traditional scope, if not its former diegetic and pedagogical confidence. Luzi is determined to portray the relations of poetry and the world, but that world as it appears in Su fondamenti invisibili owes very little to realism. Still, he does employ a certain form of spatial representation to present the “objective.” The multiple horizons and the shifting direc¬ tions he traces do work to evoke the fact of flux and, paradoxically, its permanence. Indeed, spatial rhythms modulate the movements of Luzi’s work more than temporal rhythms.18 The characteristically indistinct, en¬ igmatic spaces depicted in Luzi’s poetry prompted the commentary of numerous critics. Giacomo Debenedetti in particular was moved to turn his talent to a representative landscape in Onore del vero (1957), the “borgo cupo” (“gloomy village”) of the poem “Nell’imminenza dei quarant’anni.”19 Drawing on Leo Spitzer’s study of the French Symbolists’ use of the conjunction ou to create vague atmospheres, Debenedetti demonstrated that Luzi’s mountainous yet paradoxically “flat” backdrop shuns precise topography. He concluded that Luzi’s spatial “figurations” represent an allegory of the human condition “in its existential aspect— not biographical, not narratable. ”20 These seminal observations both es¬ tablish spatial elements as basic constituents of Luzi’s poetic texts and point to the epistemological, indeed eschatological, values of their spa¬ tial representations. The concept of space is central to any inquiry into the nature of the relationship of the physical world to the metaphysical. In poetry, as Jurij

18 See Panicale, Saggio su Mario Luzi, p. 189, on the subject of “a more spatial than temporal rhythm.” 19 I draw here from my article “Poetic Horizons: Spatial Configurations in Mario Luzi's ‘Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi, ” Stanford Italian Review 4, no. 2 (1984): 177— 207. 20 Giacomo Debenedetti, “Luzi,” in Poesia ilaliana del Novecento (Milan: Garzanti, 1974), p. 116. For a study of early texts see also Silvio Ramat, “Purgatorio e inesistenza in due testi poetici medio-novecenteschi,” Paradigma 3 (1980): 384-403; now an¬ thologized in / sogni di Costantino (Milan: Mursia, 1988), pp. 150-70.

202

The Poiesis of History

Lotman explains, the text simulates with spatial metaphors concepts that by their own nature are not spatial and spatial models are used to organ¬ ize the construction of nonspatial characteristics.21 Luzi’s poetry is par¬ ticularly varied in this respect, and can include in a single breath Purga¬ tory and a pulsar. Luzi leaves aside the humanistic spaces of pastoral and natural landscapes (Debenedetti’s topography'), yet he does not sim¬ ply replace them with the fragmentary or deformed space of the mod¬ ems. Neither are his spaces fantastic, or utopic. Rather, Luzi opts for a suspension of spatial coherence, creating in “Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi” (“In the Dark Body of Metamorphosis”) and his other poemi an unpossessed no-man’s-land without the negative connotations of alienation. The poet/speaker wanders in “Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi,” through a flooded, deserted Florentine street (in the 1966 flood) to a room, a train compartment, a piazza. Spatial relationships and orientation are not based solely on visual criteria, but expand to more abstract notions of measure, movement, and directionality. Complex tex¬ tures of proximity and distance emerge in the numerous subsections of each of the “Tre poemi,” as if to enact Luzi’s declaration that the “the space of poetry is circumscribed by nothing; it is by its nature impalpa¬ ble and insinuates itself everywhere.”22 To insinuate is literally to introduce by turnings, figuratively to sug¬ gest indirectly, gradually. And although a plot is not easily extracted from ‘Nel corpo oscuro,” we may follow the poem’s directions and track its “discontinuous subject-matter.”21 As the reader progresses through the seven sections of the poem, he or she experiences, in Luzi’s words, the direct sense of the vortex” (Tutte le poesie, p. 264), which finds a thematic analogy in the devastations of the flood.

Changing spatial

frames and focus gradually generate nonspatial meanings attached to the thematics of transformation. The original spatial setting of the poem, Florence during the flood, undergoes a well-orchestrated dissolve ac¬ companied by the equally well-orchestrated emergence of new spatial figurations. Luzi’s composition thus follows Foscolo’s lesson in Le Grazie, where the original purpose of the poema dissolves in its several composi¬ tional stratifications. The themes of destruction and renewal, the frag¬ mentary and complete, are superimposed. In their development they es¬ tablish the poem’s rhythms and therefore its own specific temporality.

21 Jurij Lotman, La struttura del testo poetico (Milan: Mursia, 1976), pp. 262 and 264. 22 Luzi, “La creazione poetica,” in Vicissitudine e forma, p. 63. 1 Luzi refers to the poem in these terms in an endnote to Tutte le poesie, p. 264. Su fondamenti invisibili appeared in 1971 as a separate volume, but extracts had already appeared in 1967 and 1969.

The Interrogative Epos

203

The rhythms are not those of the epic, with its agon and climaxes, yet they are, in Luzi’s view, the rhythms of our epoch.

Within a spatial frame of reference, Luzi’s discontinuous subject-mat¬ ter in “Nel corpo oscuro” is translated quickly into the category of the dislocated.

The reader’s sensation of dislocation—with that of the

poem’s speaker—is strengthened by the generalized nocturnal darkness written into the “script” and by a more difficult to define obscurity re¬ ferred to in the title. “Oscuro” implies that habitual spatial coordinates no longer ground events or, perhaps, even perception. Consequently, the interlocutors whom the poem’s speaker meets are difficult to identify and seem out of place or surprising. This state of affairs in turn affects the narrative, since it is difficult to know and to retell what is going on when what transpires does so inside “the body of metamorphosis.” Addi¬ tionally, the poem’s speaker not only insists on his own inability both to perceive exterior reality and to formulate observations about it but is presented by the author essentially as a disembodied voice. Since spatial and even temporal unity depend on vision and hearing, this bodily in¬ consistency creates a surprising dis-integration of space and time in the poem. Nonetheless, if we take Luzi’s suggestion that signification is ever-present, if only insinuated, it then becomes valid to study the poem’s spatial significance in all of its detail. The simplest way to begin is to isolate a characteristic passage and to analyze its meaning, and then to proceed to larger spatial configurations constructed along more complex lines. The most impressive spatial setting appears in the first section, in the “negative images (and nightmares) of the ‘city,’ whose crisis becomes material in Florence submerged and devastated by the Arno” (Tutte le

poesie, p. 264). Because of the wealth of detail in this section, a sym¬ bolic reading is possible of an episode in which the poet encounters a soul who instructs him to pray for the submerged city and to awaken to the surrounding threat of death. Luzi’s extended description of Florence is unusual because spatial references in Luzi’s poems are typically very condensed, often below the level necessary to evoke a complete setting. The first section coheres precisely because of the spatial anchoring and because of the simple narrative thread constituted by the poet s ex¬ change with an “anima randagia” (“wandering apparition") in a deserted street. Since the Florentine setting opens the poem and serves both as a point of departure in the poet/speaker’s “journey” and as a source for poetic imagery throughout the poem, it is logical that the depiction should be complete enough to allow the reader to recognize the Florence

204

The Poiesis of History

of November 1966. Three stanzas from section 1 will serve to show how Luzi sets the scene: “Prega,” dice “per la citta sommersa” venendomi incontro dal passato o dal futuro un’anima nascosta dietro un lume di pila che mi cerca nel liquame della strada deserta. “Taci” imploro, dubbioso sia la mia di ritomo al suo corpo perduto nel fango. “Tu che hai visto fino al tramonto la morte di una citta, i suoi ultimi furiosi annaspamenti d’annegata, ascoltane il silenzio ora. E risvegliati” continua quell’anima randagia che non sono ben certo sia un’altra dalla mia alia cerca di me nella palude sinistra. “Risvegliati, non e questo silenzio il silenzio mentale di una profonda metafora come tu pensi la storia. Ma bruta cessazione del suono. Morte. Morte e basta.” “Non c’e morte che non sia anche nascita. Soltanto per questo preghero” le dico sciaguattando ferito nella melma mentre il suo lume lampeggia e si eclissa in un vicolo. E la continuity manda un riflesso duro, ambiguo, visibile alia talpa e alia lince. [P. 133] (“Pray,” it says “for the drowned city.”/Coming to me face to face from the past/or from the future, an apparition hidden/behind a flashlight searches for me/in the oozy mire of the deserted street./“Quiet,” I plead, uncertain it may be my soul/retuming to my body lost in that mud.//“You who have watched until sunset/the death of a city, its last/furious pawing of air in drowning,/listen now to its silence. And wake up,”/that wandering appari¬ tion continues,/I not quite certain it may be another’s, not my soul/in search of me in the ominous marsh. /“Awake, this silence is not/the men¬ tal silence of a profound metaphor/as you contemplate history. But a bru¬ tal/cessation of sound. Death. Death and no more.’’//“There is no death that is not also birth./Only for this will I pray.’’/Injured, sloshing in slime, I speak to it/while its light, eclipsed in an alley, flashes,/and its after-image sends a glaring reflection /ambiguous and visible to the lynx and the mole.)24 24 Translation by I. L. Salomon, In the Dark Body of Metamorphosis and Other Poems by Mario Luzi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 18. Page numbers cited in the text

The Interrogative Epos

205

This passage portrays the poet and his “soul” within the broad context of a familiar issue: what the poet understands of the world and the eter¬ nal. Such encounters are a hallmark of the Italian literary history (Dante, Petrarch’s Secretum). The self is put to trial in difficult encoun¬ ters, battles with profound confusion, and emerges with newly found truths. Implicit in the image of the soul who carries a flashlight and itself flashes before the poet, the darkness contributes to the speaker’s feeling that he is lost. In the dark, the body loses its chief means for orientation—sight. The voice behind the flashlight also appears as dis¬ embodied—or at least the bright lights of this “interrogation” obscure the speaker’s view. If these characters resemble “shades,” it nonetheless takes an unraveling of the spatial metaphor “ominous marsh” to point the reader specifically in the direction of the Dantesque marshes of Hell, and therefore to allow him or her to understand the opening setting as locus of reckoning. A complex series of metaphors emerges surrounding the city of Florence that are pertinent to Luzi’s attempt to define the relations of the poet and the world. In the second speech, for example, the city is personified as a woman struggling for her life in the flood waters. For the destruction of the city (its churches, paintings, and precious books), Luzi substitutes the idea of death by drowning. He develops two aspects of the metaphor: the inability to reach stable ground or an object to which to cling (“its last/ furious pawing of the air in drowning”) and the silence caused by immer¬ sion under water, or possibly, by death. At the same time, the trope “ominous marsh” moves not so much in the direction of Luzi’s thematic concern with the relations of the ungrounded, death, and the eternal, as in the direction of Dante’s city. A drowned Florence would then be a corrupt civis incapable of providing the civil order necessary for human cooperation.25 A further symbolic meaning for the Florentine setting can be attached to this trope. Within the developing chain of metaphors for the flooded city, the notion of the city as a marsh, a natural rather than an urban setting, displaces the meaning of the historical, flooded Flo¬ rence toward a different realm. Florence is subsumed in nature, where life and death alternate continuously. When the conversation ends, the soul departs in an “eclipse," and in a “flash.” These two images detract significantly from the spatial stabil¬ ity of the scene and confuse its coordinates, since the soul’s “eclipse”

refer to this edition. In a very few cases, I have made minor changes to achieve a more literal phrasing and thus clarify my own discussion. Translations without following page numbers are mine. 25 Luzi wrote one of his longest essays on Compagni's history of Florence, entitled “l.a citta di Dino,” in L'inferno e il limbo, pp. 138—64.

206

The Poiesis of History

tends to erase the street setting by introducing open, even cosmic space. Similarly, the word “reflection” applied to the soul hints at an illusion¬ ary space created out of the play of light. Luzi in a series of distancing and transforming moves has situated the place of the poet/speaker in Florence in 1966, symbolically in the civ is, in nature, and, finally, in a ubiquitous space. If the opening setting in the flood disappears in a cinematic dissolve, what replaces the original spatial stage? The subsequent six sections of “Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi” are not set, in fact, in flooded Florence, although references such as one to “la citta pescosa” (“the city rich with fish”) do appear. Nevertheless, traces of the first setting extend into the poem in complex ways. There are many references to water. These decrease in the middle section only to return cyclically in the last line of the poem, which refers to a “sorgente” (“source”). Abundance and scarcity of water alternate and point to more abstract, less apparent movements and directions in space than those to be found in the relatively stable opening scene. It is important to note that the spatial configurations Luzi creates over the length of the poem are in some respects akin to the well-structured, symbolically articulated spaces of the traditional epic (we have only to think of Ariosto). Luzi constructs and articulates his spatial dislocations in significant ways that draw on generic conventions. Part of the move¬ ment of his work is generated by the action inherent in these changes of location; indeed, the outlines of a very different landscape and different events appear in what follows Luzi’s opening section. There are at least two categories in which new coordinates and struc¬ tures can be sought. The first consists of spatial references in the whole corpus of the poem, which can be classified into various subgroups but which are not presented in any narrative continuity. An example is found in the line “un Natale dignitoso passato a Zermatt” (“a dignified Christmas passed at Zermatt”), which refers to a woman who appears in the poem. The geographical signifier “Zermatt” pertains neither to the flood setting nor to any of the several other settings of the poem where the poet indicates that he is somewhere. Neither does it seem to pertain to the weak autobiography of the poem. A second level of spatial order¬ ing is built on series of coordinates, such as the “deserted street,” that constitute explicit,

if mysterious, loci of the protagonist s presence.

These loci do not necessarily appear in any chronological order, al¬ though they are relevant to the temporality of the poem, which we might define as a state of presence crossed by memory and history. The reader locates these places predominantly through the grammatical indications of the first-person pronouns and the verbs. The first category of spatial references can be extracted from the whole of the text, regardless of their positions in individual syntagmatic contexts, macrocontexts, or temporal

The Interrogative Epos

207

contexts, whereas the second category maps out the relation of the firstperson voice in the poem to the surrounding space. Beginning with the first category, one may analyze and classify the spatial references according to predominant semantic areas and then study the distributions of these subgroups over the length of the poem. The spatial references in “Nel corpo oscuro” are varied enough to cover extensive vertical depth and horizontal extension. The former is vast, even cosmic, but three logical subgroups could be singled out as refer¬ ences to what we might call (1) the earthly surface (cities, geographies, countries, natural landscapes), and then moving to (2) the subterranean (tunnels, mines), and (3) the extraterrestrial (a pulsar, the universe, the infinite). Because the surface category is so extensive, it can be subdi¬ vided into the architectural, the geographic, and the natural. When these categories are applied to each section in turn, several facts become apparent. Foremost, we find that despite stratified spatial ordering, the poet/speaker is located in a ubiquitous space, a space that extends far below and above him and in which distance poses no obsta¬ cle to its perception or evocation. Concerning the individual sections and their mutual relationships, we can note further that the first and third sections of the poem are the most coherent, since they contain elements from all of the spatial categories, including all of the sub¬ categories of the surface. In section 3, for example, the specific refer¬ ences are “Siena,” “Orcia,” “tunnel,” “Tiflis,” “Asia,” “Occident,” “Caucasus,” “Caspius,” “parks,” “infinite.” The geographical refer¬ ences in this section move the poem’s space out of Florence, and out of the West, in an important expansion. Spatial contrast therefore results in movement in a direction. The last section, in which a single reference to water indicates a cy¬ clical movement in the poem, demonstrates instead the smallest number of spatial references (it is also the shortest section): only two, “il punto” (“the point”) and “il ciglio” (“the edge”). Additionally, it is the only section without either geographical or architectural references. Contrast¬ ing this section with the first, we find that the poem ends not in Florence but in a kind of geometric abstraction, since “the point'' is repeated three times. If we examine not the sections themselves but the distribution of the categories of spatial reference over the seven sections, several other movements in the poem’s spatial rhythms become apparent. The sub¬ category “references to nature” shows a very even distribution, since there are one or two references in five of the seven sections. The distri¬ bution is interrupted by a gap in the series in sections 4 and 5. The reader begins to see that this thematic gap in the central sections is a first indication that these two sections are instrumental in Luzi’s way of

208

The Poiesis of History

constructing what he called a “sensation of vortex.” As architectual ref¬ erences diminish steadily in sections 1, 2, 3, and 4 (we are moving away from the city), geographical ones increase. They are most abundant in section 3 (five references). At the same time, no geographical references at all appear after section 4. We can conclude that by expanding the geography and hence the subject’s horizons, and by decreasing both landscape and architectural references in sections 1 through 4, Luzi creates at the center of his poem space for the “vortex.” That vortex reaches its climax in section 4. It coincides with the intro¬ duction of a long reflection on temporality—and history. If section 4 constitutes the poem’s turning point, it is also itself a fascinating treat¬ ment of the theme of time. Luzi’s spatial “directing” has opened the poem s subject matter to the explosion of a specific time, of an epoch, in the following lines:

Ma ancora piii vasto un senso inesprimibile come quando agli stampi vuoti della storia affluisce un metallo nuovo che poco vi si adegua ne altri se ne trovano di pronti alia colata ora, nell’istante irreversibile, o mai. E in quella dispersione di potenza malato nella volonta o drogato un grumo ancora detto anima si avvita su di se, sbanda in un movimento inceppato: e non per poco ma per troppo ardore si logora. . . . Oppure quando un tempo sotto pressione disperde la sua potenza inservibile in una nube vorticosa di scorie e tu stesso in una parte di te—non sai bene quale—soffri, vorresti dormire, ma un’inquieta semicoscienza ti tiene sveglio, non del tutto presente alia metamorfosi e al lungo dolore della nascita di un’epoca.

[Pp. 139-40] (But there is an even greater inexpressible sense/as into the empty molds of history / a new metal flows, barely adequate, / nor are others found ready for the casting now,/this irreversible instant, or never./And in that disper¬ sion of power/sick in the will or drugged/a clot still called soul spins/about by itself and breaks up, its movement impeded:/not by a little but by too much ardor is it consumed. . . .//Or when time under pres¬ sure/scatters its futile power/in a whirling cloud of slag/and your self in one part of you—you know not/what precisely—suffers as you would

The Interrogative Epos

209

sleep,/a restless/semiconsciousness keeps you awake/not completely present at the metamorphosis/and the long grief of the birth of an epoch. [Pp. 22-23]).

The horizons of the past undergo the heat, pressure, and harrowing of a metal casting, and if our cramped and pressured time is solidified, it is also in a double movement dispersed in a cloud of wastes. The scope and purpose of this contracting and exploding space and time remain, however, “not completely present.”

Section 4 of “Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi” presents, in sum, a turning point in Luzi’s spatial rhythms, which are the basis for the poem’s more abstract and multilayered movements. The theme of the “rupture of time,” with its analogy in spatial expansion and explosion, appears here undiluted and has been strategically placed at the poem’s center. It is in this section that we also find a formulation about individ¬ ual experience of and individual reactions to a moment of rupture such as the one described in the “birth of an epoch” above. More specifically, we find a semiconscious “you” who would willingly sleep through the drama (“you suffer, you would like to sleep”). Luzi’s portrayal of the “you” as barely aware and doubtful repeats, significantly, his portrayal of the “I” at many turns in the poem, most memorably when “I” meets “quell’anima randagia / che non sono ben certo sia un’altra dalla mia” (“that wandering apparition/I not quite certain it may be another’s/not my soul”). Are we to understand that in these lines the addressee of the poet/speaker’s words may or may not be himself? Is the vortex effect strengthened by the sense of discontinuity inherent in doubleness of a self that converses with itself? These questions bring us to the second topic related to Luzi’s poema, the role of the first-person subject. In this instance, “you” and “I” are in as uncertain a relation as the poet and his soul in section 1. They are somehow different, mutually unrecognizable, yet they partake of each other. A fundamental uncer¬ tainty surrounding the role of the first-person subject presents itself not only because the ego is divided but because the metaphorical language Luzi adopts in order to represent the self is so varied. We find in fact the following polar opposites to describe the “I”: “me/minatore votato a morte nella miniera,/ poeta che non sta al gioco dell’arte” [“11 pensiero fluttuante della felicita,” p. 123] (“me/a miner destined to death in the mine,/a poet who will not play art’s game”) and “me come . . . uccello/ entrato nelle nubi cornacchia o falco/ . . . cantore di letizia” [p. 125] (“myself like ... a bird/which has entered the clouds, a crow or a hawk/ . . . singer of joy”).

210

The Poiesis of History

If we direct our analysis to the level of genre, we note that the speaker sings as a cantore, the hallmark of the poet, and especially of the epic poet. Yet the fact of the first-person narration in the present tense, in so far as there is an identifiable one, is counter-epic, since the epic as a genre is broadly characterized by third-person narration and use of the past tense. In this sense, “Nel corpo oscuro” refuses to follow the canons of the classical epic.26 At the same time, it does not evince the hallmarks of the pure lyric. Luzi clearly does not favor the immediacy of the firstperson lyric voice speaking from a single emotion and a single instant in time, and he has much in common with most of post-Romantic lyric poetry, with its multifaceted attack on the Romantic and Decadent lyric self.27 As Luzi indicated in his critical writing, overcoming the deforma¬ tion of self-directed poetry became the substance of his verse. A brief study of the locations and dislocations of the first-person sub¬ ject in “Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi” illustrates how Luzi pro¬ ceeds and serves as a prelude to an analysis of Luzi’s related theoretical observations. The representation of the self is related to spatial represen¬ tation because the indistinct and shifting place of the first-person subject is a source of the poem’s plot. This is, loosely, a knowledge-seeking journey, which meets the obstacles of the magmatic character of exist¬ ence and of metamorphosis. More than a narration, this journey, or more accurately movement, appears from within a meditation—complicated by memory—that is itself largely unanchored in spacetime. Leaving aside the fact that the poet/speaker lets slip that he is not even sure that his thoughts are not being thought by someone else and leaving aside other difficulties in isolating a single well-defined poetic voice, it is possible to cite the places in the text where a first-person subject ap¬ pears and to analyze how Luzi configures the self. The setting of section 1, “Florence flooded,” has already been ex¬ plored here in detail. It contains an exchange between “I” and an uncer¬ tain interlocutor called “my soul.” Section 2 provides few spatial anchorings for the first person and hence few indications of his locus in spacetime. It contains an exchange with “comrades” at some time in the past and in an unspecified place and, in another long stanza, a monologue on the subject of youth. The fourth stanza describes “the shadow between the two of an unequal love”

■6 Giuseppe Zagarrio observed that in Luzi “the heroism of the single man has no reason to exist and it is destined perhaps to translate into the species’ heroism” (Mario Luzi [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968], p. 29). Mengaldo provides a typology of the contemporary lyric according to positions on this issue in “Appunti tipologici,” p. 41.

The Interrogative Epos

211

(p. 135) and reveals some information, in a short sequence, about a female figure: “Se ne scusa con me che appena l’osservo/e immergo nei suoi un mio pensiero/svagato in questa luce di lungamo” [p. 136] (“She excuses herself as I hardly look at her/and into her thoughts I plunge one of my own,/pleasure-minded in this light on the Lungarno” [p. 20]). The reader concludes that the poet is describing an encounter in Florence, although there is no indication whether the present space and moment follow from the “deserted street,” which anchors section 1. Two loci of the first-person voice follow each other in the unfolding of the poem as separate moments set in the present tense. Section 3 also presents a problematic setting for the first-person pres¬ ence. It consists of a verbal exchange between the poet/speaker and his “joyous anti-role”: “vuole giungere a me, batte colpi sul diaframma del tunnel / lui che avanza dal lato piu lucente” [p. 138] (“he wants to join me, he strikes blows against the tunnel’s diaphragm/he, the one who advances from the brighter side”). The tunnel’s location remains moot, whether in Florence or elsewhere. It implies passage tout court, and the “anti-role” seems to move into the darkness where the poet/speaker is located. After a short exchange, a tremendous spatial gap occurs in the text and the grammatical subject moves from the first-person singular to the first-person plural: Non siamo ormai molto lontani da Tiflis nell’ora, tra Asia ed Occidente che inchiostra d’un turchino da sillabario i monti quando lui riprende. [P. 138] (Now we are not far from Tiflis/between Asia and the West in that hour/that splatters ink from a skyblue speller on the mountains/when he resumes. [P. 22]). This unexplained dislocation foreshadows the cosmic distances of sec¬ tion 4 and the more difficult and elusive subjectivity of the poem from that section onward. The italic part of section 3 contains a second audi¬ tory clue, a “rullio del treno” (“train’s rolling”), hinting at a mobile location for the poet/speaker, a source perhaps for the section’s frequent changes of scene. Section 4 only once anchors the first-person subject to a specific locus,

“una stanza” [p.

139] (“a room”).

(One may recall

Dante’s

“stanza” in La vita nuova.) This setting suggests that the places the “1" occupies and the movements of events described in the poem are gov¬ erned by the subject’s thought processes and are therefore not suscepti-

212

The Poiesis of History

ble to a formal construction that can be retrospectively interpreted as, say, a narrative series. The poet/speaker may be simply in a room. The reader is presented with uncoordinated meditations and conversations that are mental reenactments or imaginings or dreams, dictated by both emotion and speculation. The mental process subtracts narrative and causal links between the loci of the first-person presence, just as it subtracts unified temporal frameworks. In section 5, the poet’s presence is implied only by conversation, whereas section 6 anchors the poet in a “piazza miracolo” (“miraculous piazza”). In section 7 the the first-person enunciation has no specific location. In summary, there are seven explicit sites of the first-person presence in the poem. The disparate locations indicate the poetic strategy Luzi recognized and analyzed in Pascoli’s poetry: the multiplication of subjec¬ tive possibilities. It is important in recalling Pascoli to reiterate at this juncture that Luzi develops the question of the poetic subject as an intellectual problem influenced by a literary/historical series of transi¬ tions. His critical writings in this area provide ample evidence of a con¬ viction that the poetic possibilies of contemporary verse are determined by its evolution. Luzi’s view of the poetic self is, we have said, conditioned by the death of the anthropocentric outlook, which had laid its foundations in part on the indivisibility of the individual. In specifically literary ter¬ rain, Luzi is dissatisfied with the idea of the poet as demiurge who single-handedly manipulates language into poetry from a point external to language. For Luzi, the poet is molded by language.28 Like Foscolo before him, however, he is unwilling to dispense with an ego and opts for the “protean dislocation of the ego” he discovered in Le Grazie. Al¬ though the “I” occupies disparate positions, it is the source of atten¬ tion to the world. Luzi’s concern with the first-person subject is, however, both more literary and ontological than psychological. Luzi does not proclaim that the speaking subject fails to communicate because it is an exterior form produced by the subconscious. The self is not a noncommunicative en¬ tity revealed only in symptoms. His ontological perspective appears most clearly in his studies of how the Symbolists tried to separate poetry from the personal and existential, from the subjective, in their “absolute”

28 Mengaldo asserts that the notion that the self does not utterly control language, much less retain the ability to touch essence by its manipulations of language into an absolute Beauty, implies the demise of the Grand Style or its presence only as a utopia or a mask (“Appunti tipologici,” p. 40).

The Interrogative Epos

213

poetic creations.29 He traces, in L’idea simbolista, their related attempt to defeat “matter” and empiricism. Luzi wrote in his Studio su Mallarme of a “crisis in the harmonious coinciding of object and subject, which was, in my opinion, latent in the very premises of Romantic philosophy when it championed the absolute exclusiveness of the reality of the spirit against the empirical and phenomenological world.”30 The consequences for Symbolist poets of this crisis was their fascination with technique: “And just as the origin of this singular adventure of thinking resides in a formal quest, so form ... is destined to triumph . . . over the destruc¬ tion of every other possible reality.”31 Luzi’s reading of Symbolist poetics focuses on Mallarme’s idea that poetry must approach the abstract, metaphysical plane of ideas (where the word evokes ‘being’ out of noth¬ ingness) by abolishing the poetic subject. This occurs on the plane of ideas, where events were to follow detached from subjectivity (Luzi also names Hegel here). Luzi believes that Mallarme’s greatest achievement is his “formal quest,” his creation of a “poetry that thinks itself.” As Mallarme put it: “Je suis maintenant impersonel, et non plus Stephane, que tu as connu—mais une aptitude qu’a l’Univers Spirituel a se voir et a se developper, a travers ce qui fut moi”32 (“I am now impersonal, and no longer Stephane as you knew him—but rather an aptitude inherent in the Spiritual Universe to see itself and to develop itself, by means of what I was”). Luzi interprets Igitur’s suicide in Mallarme’s Le coup de

des as symbolic of the poet’s own experience of poetic creation: Igitur’s death equals the death of the first-person poetic voice. In a related essay, “Pascoli e la psiche” (Pascoli and the psyche), we find more on this theme: “In the course of Romantic events Mallarme’s and Pascoli’s poetic myths both represent a moment we might designate as sacrificial: that is, the moment in which the T immolates itself as an improper circumstance, superfluous and distracting, in order that the

29 Claudio Scarpati has studied Luzi’s views of poetic voice in connection with the polemic of the 1930s surrounding the role of the persona in poetry. He shows that critics of Hermetic inspiration were reacting against the Crocean view, which reduced poetry to pure art, by themselves viewing poetry as corresponding to the individual spiritual labric that generates it. To reach the truth of the world, the artist possesses only his individual nature as a means. Luzi’s book on Mallarme exemplifies this sort of criticism, based on spiritual biography. Scarpati observes that Luzi placed the poetic act in an ontological perspective, where the persona dips into essence, searching for an “1 who subsists dis¬ tinct from the human weight which inhabits his voice’’ (Scarpati quotes Luzi’s “Piccolo catechismo,” in L'inferno e il limbo, pp. 75—82, in his Mario Luzi, p. 61). 30 Luzi, Studio su Mallarme, p. 12. 31 Ibid., p. 8. 32 Stephane Mallarme, letter to Cazalis, 14 May 1867, in Luzi, Studio su Mallarme, p.

70.

214

The Poiesis of History

word might pass directly to the universe and the latter might speak for itself.”33 The failure of this “myth” lay in the fact that even the most expert “formal quest” and the most refined technique fail to make the universe speak for itself. Luzi composed a long essay on Mallarme’s checkmate, thematized in Le coup de des (a work whose substance is formed by allusion, by symbols, and by analogies to the drama of impos¬ sible poetic creation). In Luzi’s view, the “suicide” of the first-person voice led Mallarme to attempt a formal dissolution specifically in the poem’s most visible attribute, its revolutionary typography. The result is a “play between movement and fixedness, between becoming and being [which] constitutes one of the essential motivations for the structure and arrangement of the poem and for its fascination.”34 Luzi’s critical essays help us to understand how he sought a way around Mallarme’s demiurge and a way to challenge the canons of Sym¬ bolist poetics even as he utilized some of Mallarme’s “essential motiva¬ tions.” Luzi realized that Mallarme’s tendency to “remove individuality from the word” had important consequences: by taking away the subject, the subjective possibilities are, as in Pascoli, emphasized and multi¬ plied.30 At the same time the “I” becomes part of the text’s motion and rhythm.

Furthermore,

the fragile subject cultivated by Pascoli lets

“things” speak. In Pascoli when “the subjective part of the poet [is] reduced to mere listening, and therefore is concealed and flattened, then things take the upper hand, and they fill the entire poetic space.”36 Pascoli’s “poor, weak man” allows the voice of things to speak through him and to enter into the rhythms of the natural world. A weak subject allows the poet to assume the universality Mallarme sought. Pascoli’s influence is apparent in the character of the poet/speaker in Luzi’s poems, since he too is as much listener as active protagonist.37 One can trace the evolution of this issue in Luzi’s poetics from his essay “La naturalezza del poeta” (The poet’s naturalness) in Uinferno e il

limbo to “La creazione poetica” (Poetic creation) in Vicissitudine e forma. In his earliest theoretical formulations, Luzi insists that the origin of the poetic voice is to be found in the realm of the natural. He drew from Romantic theoreticians like Novalis and Schiller the view that poetry

33 Luzi, “Pascoli e la psiche,” in Vicissitudine e forma, p. 132. 34 Luzi, Studio su Mallarme, pp. 119—20. 35 Ibid., p. 50. 36 Luzi, “I Canti di Castelvecchio,” in L'inferno e il limbo, p. 189. 3 The figure of an “anima fanciulla,” not unlike Pascoli’s “fanciullino,” recurs in Su fondamenti invisibili.

The Interrogative Epos

215

does not oppose nature but exists in nature. The role of the poetic “I” is then to let that natural voice speak. The world is not pure matter; it lives and possesses a voice that poetry must capture. This voice cannot coin¬ cide with any single poet since it is by nature multiple. How various epochs have sought to allow this voice to speak constitutes in part the history of poetry. In “La creazione poetica” Luzi treats precisely this historical issue, articulating it more fully than he had in “La naturalezza del poeta.” In his definition of poetic creation, Luzi seizes upon St. Paul’s distinction (Corinthians 1:4) between speaking in tongues and prophecy, to distin¬ guish between a subjective inspiration and an instrumental language meant for “active mediation.” Using the very different functions of inspi¬ rational and instrumental language as an analytical model, he examines the role of poetic language in contemporary society. He notes that in modern communities speaking in tongues, or “glossolalia,” has only a marginal status even within Christianity. If glossolalia is currently patho¬ logical rather than inspirational, poetry might step in to fill the role that speaking in tongues had in the early Christian community. Poetry might reverse the historical transformation of glossolalia from inspiration into pathology. Luzi further theorizes that organization or institutionalization (in this instance he is referring to the history of Christianity) tends progressively to reject subjective manifestations and that “only in an as-yet nonlegalized community, where the spirit prevails over the letter, does sub¬ jectivity have a right to citizenship” (Vicissitudine e forma, p. 41). Luzi understands the relation of the subject to its discourse, consequently, in terms of historical change and presents the idea that Western civilization repressed individual manifestations by rendering them “useless.” Al¬ though officially repressed by European cultures, glossolalia manifested itself surreptitiously, disguised in other forms, in a “concealed glos¬ solalia masked as discourse and as science” (p. 15). Luzi calls in his essay for a different set of relations within contemporary communities. In a newly conceived polis, no one would declare a legalistic, empirical status for their understanding of the world but would admit its derivation from subjective viewpoints. Challenging the authority of a single, selfproclaimed, universal subject and its potential abuse of power begins in Luzi to have ethical overtones as well as to foreshadow poststructural¬ ism. From the beginning, Luzi makes its clear, however, that poetry is not in the position to guide human society in an epic quest for truth and justice. Writing about Onore del vero (1957), a work already outside

216

The Poiesis of History

Hermetic style, Andrea Zanzotto in fact contrasted Luzi’s uncertain po¬ etic subject to Montale’s stoic, “strong speaking” voice.38 His character¬ ization of Luzi’s antiheroic attitude toward the powers of his voice ex¬ tends to many poems of the 1960s, in Nel magma and Su fondamenti

invisibili, dubbed by Bruce Merry “anti-oracular.”39 It is at this point that stylistic experimentation in the area of weak first-person narration increases. Luzi’s verse also begins to draw heavily on a prosaic and colloquial style.40 Dialogue appears extensively. These innovations sig¬ nify not so much the presence of an objective alterity as a difficulty of separating self and other, a difficulty marked by the first-person speaker s aphasia.41 The “I” is a pre- or subconscious entity whose “half¬ sleep” disturbs perception, the formation of sense, and subtracts the mental from the rational. Luzi creates a speaker incapable of administer¬ ing meaning, an anti-Cartesian subject.42 Luzi takes up in this way Mallarme’s idea that subjective poetic expression is ultimately impossible. The poetic mechanisms he adopts do not, however, use symbol and analogy to suggest enigma or absence. They are properly post-Symbolist. Luzi’s experiments with poetic voice not only suspend meaning in a negative gesture but also generate the “plot” and the structure of the poemi of Su fondamenti invisibili.43 Luzi uses lyric and narrative ele¬ ments in counterpoint to emphasize the “myth” of subjective poetic in¬ spiration. Whether Luzi’s treatment of mythical poetic subjectivity constitutes a bonafide narrative structure is moot. The idea of narrative can be mis¬ leading, especially if one thinks in terms of causal chains of events. It is much easier to assert that Su fondamenti invisibili does not organize the spatio-temporal according to conventions we can associate with pure lyric. A good deal of critical talent has been applied to Su fondamenti M Andrea Zanzotto, “L’ultimo Luzi,” Comunita 59 (1958): 54.

39 Bruce Merry, “The Anti-Oracle in Mario Luzi’s Recent Poetry,” Modern Language Review 68 (1973): 333-43. 40 See Angelo Jacomuzzi, “La poesia di Luzi Su fondamenti invisibiliin Studi in onore di Alberto Chiari (Brescia: Paideia, 1973), p. 684. 41 Scarpati, Mario Luzi, p. 168. 42 Stefano Agosti, 11 testo poetico: Teoria e pratiche d'analisi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1972), pp. 186 and 189. 44 Quiriconi has pointed out that the “I” is itself a component of the rhythms of the poem as they try to capture the world’s pulsing. The “I” is the source of the “contradic¬ tory

in the poem. Because of its multiplicity, there is less need for the numerous

characters/viewpoints found in earlier works, such as especially Nel magma. See Giancarlo Quiriconi, 11 fuoco e la metamorfosi: La scommessa totale di Mario Luzi (Bologna: Cappelli, 1980), p. 260.

The Interrogative Epos

217

invisibili and to Nel magma in order to identify how they differ both from Luzi’s earlier work and from other modern lyric poetry. Most critics take the issue of narrative into consideration. For Jacomuzzi, a narrative di¬ mension allowed Luzi to free himself from a “solipsistic symbolization of the data of the world and history.”44 Yet Jacomuzzi did not fail to notice that while Luzi rejected earlier, elevated styles, he combined them with discontinuous structural articulations and syntax more typical of the modern lyric than any narrative genre. Forti felt that Onore del vero (1957) demonstrated “lyric and discourse together” and that discourse dominated Nel magma, whereas Scarpati enlarged the circle of critical terms and spoke of three planes in Nel magma, “the narrated, the spo¬ ken, and the acted.”45 Bramante complicates things by referring to one poem as a novel.46 His observations are certainly to the point, yet the several critical terms he uses (novel, discourse, narration) are not suffi¬ ciently precise to describe the text. The love story may be novelesque, the meditative parts discursive, the dialogues dramatic, and the journey narrative, but it is nonsensical to speak of Nel magma as a full-fledged novel, drama, or narrative.

Luzi breaks down the barriers between

genres by using compositional styles drawn from several genres. Ramat provides perhaps the most apt terminology related to genre by qualifying the term “poema” as “aperto” (“open”).4' The manner in which Luzi “opens” his poem is of course pertinent to the thematics of the discontinuous and the interrogative narration. And it is easy for terms such as “open” or “discontinuous” to shade into words such as “interruption” or “reversal.,,4S Why Luzi composes, like Foscolo, a “poema negato” is not unrelated to why he accepted the dissolution of the first-person subject without dispensing with it. Like the “deforma¬ tion” the conventional first-person voice presents, conventional narrative is also a coercion of sorts. Narrative confines events and fails to capture all their dimensions, be they historical or existential. If Luzi realized that subtracting the subjective unity led to greater subjective potential

■44 45

Jacomuzzi, “La poesia di Luzi,” p. 677. Claudio Scarpati, “L’ultimo Luzi,” Italianistica 2 (1973): 412. Marco Forti, “Luzi

Su fondamenti invisibili,” Paragone 22, no. 262 (1971): 114. Achille Serrao summarizes

the various critical opinions at length, arguing that Primizie del deserto already evinces the poetic structures that characterize the later Luzi and that Luzi introduced there a historical backdrop and historical symbolism (Contributi, p. 46). 46 Bramanti, “Nuova stagione poetica di Luzi,” p. 8180. 47 Ramat, La pianta della poesia, p. 371. 48 Agosti found “a reversal of the epos” (// testa poetico, p. 179). Panicale found “the law of interruption, ... a discontinuous order that sometimes ties together [voices] and sometimes deranges them” (Saggio su Mario Luzi, p. 196).

218

The Poiesis of History

(in the layerings and weavings of the “I”), it makes sense to hypothesize that by subtracting a narrative unity he might similarly multiply narra¬ tive potential. A passage from the poem “Forse dice l’addio” demon¬ strates explicitly how Luzi conceived of the discontinuous narrative and the epos of the elusive self: “Di me non c’e traccia negli anni/se non come raccontano un viaggio/le impronte nella sabbia d’un deserto.”

,

[Tutte le poesie, vol. 1

p. 176] (“There’s no trace of me over the years/

except the way a journey is told/by tracks in desert sand”). Luzi expands on this framework in numerous ways and makes it diffi¬ cult for his readers to follow a linear, logical, or closed “construct” of the poem’s events, even when they keep in mind that not all ordinary narratives are ordered chronologically. The narrator’s “half-sleep” is one reason for the lack of order, but there are others. The events that do occur do not fit neatly into any narrative typology. Nor is the psychology of the figures developed enough to explain their actions. If anything, both the interlocutors and the first-person narrator erode narrative unity in their series of encounters. The frequent dialogue also constitutes a non-narrated organization, which requires the reader to speculate often about context. Furthermore, the poet/speaker himself engages in long soliloquies, some of which are even on the subject of the impossibility of a linear progression in time:

0 gioventu, per l’uomo perduto in un amore senza limiti, senza ritomo di coscienza, il punto tra memoria e desiderio si sposta, e alia deriva di un gorgo. Passato ed avvenire s’invertono, su se si capovolgono, delfini o tonni nella rete del senso. [P. 135]

(0 my youth! for man lost/in limitless love/without return of conscience, the point/between memory and desire shifts,/adrift in a whirlpool./Time past and future reverse direction/and capsize; dolphin/and tuna in the net of perception. [P. 19])

These meditations mix the speech of the poet with a speculative ordering of the discourse. They do not forward the poem’s events. They do, however, address the psychological experience of time as a whirlpool.” Luzi elaborates at length on the topic of time in Vicis-

situdine e forma, time being of course the raw material of narrative. The

The Interrogative Epos

219

following words can be fruitfully applied to Su fondamenti invisibili: “Thus it happens that between past and present there is a true inter¬ change; namely an image far off in time may be placed in the present’s immediate relief and a live emotion may be displaced in an apparent distance” (Vicissitudine e forma, p. 44). The dynamic character of sub¬ jective time here leads to the complex transformation of original events. This view has important consequences for Luzi’s poetic structures. When he presents the reader with an encounter between voices and the narra¬ tor, Luzi gives no indication of the relationship of past and present, producing a sort of whirlpool-like temporal uncertainty. Luzi works to form a series of present moments, and the structure of the voices and dialogue function to ensure that immediacy. The speech exchange itself emphasizes a duration that is meant to liberate us from the “prison of the past,” to create a moment “where preterite and present coexist” (p. 43). Luzi thus effects a simultaneity of events rather than the progression of events characteristic of traditional narratives. And, in fact, there are few events in the poems beyond the encounters and the movement to and away from certain oft-repeated ideas (love, pain, happiness, change). Hence the verbs that forward this sort of narration are most often “dire” (“to say”) and “pensare” (“to think”) or, secondarily, verbs of hearing and vision. Luzi also uses ellipsis to create “narrative discontinuities,” which de¬ serve greater attention. What happens to the narrative in the intervals between certain encounters? The reader perceives, for instance, that the poet/speaker meets an enigmatic woman a number of times but cannot know what has transpired in between. The uncertainty is multiplied when the speaker suggests that the two interlocutors engage in reading each other’s thoughts. Gaps in events suggest the importance of con¬ structed poetic rhythms that are not unlike natural alternations of ab¬ sence and presence (or of day and night). The nature of these periodic intervals is problematic, however, in sev¬ eral ways, for they do not represent a sheer void, oblivion, or death. Many times over Luzi uses metaphors and images that suggest a more complex articulation of absence and presence. For example, the suspen¬ sion of an event does not necessarily imply its end. The following lines suggest a typical paradox:

. . . e ondate d un rimorso che tende alio spasinw la parte injinitesima di tempo in cui Vazione e sospesa, o il pulsar.

[P. 134)

220

The Poiesis of History

(And waves/of remorse strain to a spasm/in the infinitesimal instant of time/where the event is suspended or the pulsar. [P. 19])

An interval may be too short to be perceived and may present itself in the guise of a continuity. Luzi gives us the example of the “pulsar,” which emits pulsing radio waves that mimic continuity. An apparent absence may be simply a presence of another sort: “un messaggio impercettibile ad orecchio o radar” (“a message imperceptible to an ear or to radar”). A last example of a problematic relationship of presence and absence is found in “II gorgo di salute e malattia”: All altro capo del filo tacque a lungo l’angoscia. Giungeva chiaro il suo mutismo, giungeva forte nel rombo della citta da quel ricevitore alzato. [P. 149] (At the other end of the line anguish was long still./Her silence came clear and strong/above the city’s roar over the receiver off the hook. [P. 101])

Here a silence, or absence, is signaled by an auditory interference. In¬ stead of the anticipated voice, the “city’s roar” invades the allotted space for talk, and because of the absence of a voice only noise is perceived. Nevertheless, an invisible, incorporeal presence is “heard” in the gaps between the words. These lines, which treat the theme of continuity and discontinuity, lead one to speculate about what else occurs in the gaps between epi¬ sodes and events and how these affect narrative structure. Significantly, all we have to go on are the effects of events, although clues to their causes appear in recurring images and metaphors that hint at the absent, mysterious events of an enigmatic narration. The most important of these unexplained events and their effects derive from the theme of wounds. The clue to some sort of absent battle between the poet/speaker and some of his interlocutors comes precisely from the presence of these wounds on the poet s body and on other bodies: “ferito nella melma” (“wounded in the mire”), “una piaga maligna che butta pus” (“an evil sore emitting pus ), “ti buca la retina” (“it hollows your retina”), “profuma la scure che la recide” (“she perfumes the axe which cuts her”). In II gorgo,

the wounds become more collective and suggest a social nar¬

rative: “la giungla carbonizzata attorno in una pausa di bazooka” (“the surrounding blackened jungle in a bazooka pause”), and “affollata rosticceria di salme dopo tutto umane” (“an overcrowded rotisserie of hu¬ man corpses after all”). These collective wounds point to causes operat-

The Interrogative Epos

221

ing beyond the control of a commonly shared desire for justice and or¬ der. The text hides, however, the causes of conflict and pain, and, therefore, the chain of cause and effect upon which narrative resolutions are based. It is useful here to return to Luzi’s views on causality, a notion he relates to the “determined,” or objective, as opposed to the determinis¬ tic. He examines in this context not only history but language, which in its syntagmatic aspect is also a series or chain of events (since one language event will influence another sequentially). Luzi expands his discussion to the shortcomings of the scientific view of the world, which boasts of sure knowledge of causality. He critiques the scientific view by analyzing the determinism of how some scientists have manipulated lan¬ guage and contrasting these manipulations to a “good” use of language: “Within his [a scientist’s] language one word calls up another and the latter finds in the former its perfect justification with no margin for choice or potentially desirable erasures. For other [‘good’] scientists, language is not closed in its fascinating determination, but instead has openings and windows on other languages adopted by reason. For them, the problem of conscience arises before any other . . . they are furnished with a political viewpoint—in the fundamental sense of the word” (Vi-

cissitudine e forma, p. 18). The poet’s creation is, of course, open to tangents off the syntagmatic chain, and to erasures—the equivalent of Luzi’s grammatical and narrative ellipses. The poet, like the “good” scientist, does not rely on determined meanings: “The word is beyond his narrow possession ... it is situated in the current of the world’s activity, in other words, in the nature of creation” (p. 36). The emphasis on action and flux is important, for the poet does not set events, either of language or otherwise, into action. He or she is not the subject of events since, there is “a fundamental mo¬ ment, which already is, and is in fact the first and most radical principle of action” (p. 36). Furthermore, “there is nothing to record except that the thing occurs and in occurring moves and orders a series of thoughts and emotions experienced as fragmentary. ... It is an order that is not imposed . . . but . . . found beyond individual contours" (p. 38). Cre¬ ation is a principle of existence, and the poet uses language in an active way, which counters the stasis of fixed forms and rigid syntagms. In Luzi’s poetics, then, words take on new meanings, which are dis¬ placed from the chain of the syntagm and from the rule of cause and effect. This principle may also be applied by extension to the voices and figures of the poems, as traits are displaced from one to the other, and the stasis of any conclusion is deferred. This literary “action” generates a nonnarrative, nonreductive discourse. Luzi himself characterized this

222

The Poiesis of History

active principle as a “vicissitude,” a word that recurs in his poems, and, foremost, in the title Vicissitudine e forma. It is a term he associated early on with the epos. It appears in Luzi’s essay on Pascoli’s Canti di

Castelvecchio, in association with the theme of the “fanciullino” (“boy child”) and his “veglia” (“watch-keeping”): In “The Log” the watch-keeping that Pascoli brings to life with his ritual movements, with his speaking and his silence, is felt in itself to be the revelation of an elementary, humble, harmonious world; but it is also felt to be a plot, to be an epos in its cyclical nature—something which the refrains and popular-style replications in his narrative manner express very well. . . . The epos of watch-keeping reflects on the object of the conversa¬ tion: the log’s ants driven from their nest by fire: the vicissitudes of that microcosm include by analogy those equally sorrowful ones of humankind.49 [My emphasis]

These observations point to a minimal, nonheroic, and sorrowful epos where the plot has no more shape than the scattering of ants from a burning log. The epos instead narrates an attention (“veglia”) to the vicissitude and not its overcoming. Vicissitude is not, in any case, synonymous with sheer chaos. A dom¬ inant motif of the poems is metamorphosis, and the nature of the events of that process is important in defining Luzi’s own epos. New chains of events are continually formed and transformed. Poetry’s task is to enact this continuity. Given this perspective on action and movement, it comes as no surprise that Luzi’s narrations contain “actions” and movements related to speaking and silence. His narratives turn their attention to the “voicing” of actions that are understood eschatologically rather than tele¬ ologically. The rhythms of his voicings, like those of Pascoli, are as much the poems’ story as is the dissolution of the first-person voice. Over his poetic career, Luzi’s meditations centered on the poetic voice, and they are related to his desire to articulate in his poetry the subjective and objective potentials of literature.

His poems tend to

evolve in this context from monologues into dialogues and then, in Su

fondamenti invisibili, into something like a concert of voices with shifting origins. There Luzi manipulates the similarities and differences in the varied voices of his “characters” into complex patterns that form the weave, or “intarsio, of his epos.”50

44 Luzi, “I Canti di Castelvecchio,” p. 190. 50 See Panicale, Saggio su Mario Luzi, p. 190, for the notion of the “intarsio. ” See also

The Interrogative Epos

223

A convenient point of departure for the specific topic of voice is Luzi’s brief discussion of the mantra, invoked in a series of remarks on “the intrinsic religiosity of poetry.” According to Luzi, the Indian mantra does not distinguish between the sacred and profane word but is related to truths that surpass logic and semantics (Vicissitudine e forma, pp. 50 and 52). Although Western civilization has not institutionalized any ver¬ bal formulation like the mantra, Luzi notes that even in our culture words in poetry go beyond the poet’s own understanding of his creation. Voice represents this sense which always adds more to the word than its signified. The poet must be a listener as much as a speaker, to hear more than what is actually said by the voice, which embodies the extra dimension of speech that poetry possesses. The following are two examples of references to voices with extrasemantic dimensions from Su fondamenti invisibili. In one instance the poet/listener hears una voce non straniera per quanto sciabordita dal mare grosso che le e dietro e dentro una voce alta di nocchiero, diresti, entrata di soppiatto qui nella stanza. [“II gorgo di salute e malattia,” p. 159; my emphasis] (a not unfamiliar voice/though lapped by the stormy sea behind/and inside it, the high voice of the helmsman, /you might say, come stealthily here into the room.)

In another, he hears “quel suo grido / ma di gia piii lontano e come semidetto da unarpa” [“Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi,” p. 145; my emphasis] (“that cry of hers/but already farther off, and as though half-said by a harp”). A longer example is necessary in order to illustrate further connota¬ tions Luzi attributes to voice as an embodiment of creation: La voce sempre udita di donna che fu di mia madre ed ora e sua, la voce sacrificale che scioglie il nodo amoroso e doloroso di ogni esistenza,

Ramat, Storia della poesia italiana del Novecento, p. 528. Ramat expresses his view that these voices/characters originate in a “projection within generational, historical, and individual memory of a Hermetic type, which was precisely the shadow/form/essence reconstituted according to the model of the disappearance and flight of a character, or better yet, according to the model of the character’s reduction to a ‘white,’ presemantic absence/trulh.”

224

The Poiesis of History

Voce afona spogliata della gorga di lei che provvisoria Fimprontd della sua pena e la chiuse nella stretta di timidezza e d’ansia del diverbio in cucina, della preghiera sulle scale, anonima, affaticata dal mare del mutamento e ferma che trapana, rifonde dal principio ogni sostanza, la citta nella pietra, la storia nei suoi eventi. [P. 136] (The voice of a woman always heard,/once my mother’s, now hers, the sacrificial / voice that dissolves the knot/loving and grievous in every life. . . .//Voice deprived of speech in her throat/who temporarily marked/her pain there/and shut it in the strait/of fear and anxiety/during a spat in the kitchen, a pleading on the stairs./Impersonal and steady, wearied by the sea-change/the voice bores through, recasts every substance from the be¬ ginning,/the city in stone, history by its events. [Pp. 20—21])

In this passage, a voice is separated from its articulatory dimension, literally deprived of speech.” It is capable in its detachment of migrat¬ ing from the poet’s mother to another female character. Though “wearied by the sea-change, it is the voice itself that despite separation remains a constant. It engages not in expository discourse, but in a humdrum “spat in the kitchen.” It accompanies existence, almost negligible but significant. Like the wind in Luzi’s Onore del vero, the voice, although intangible and fragile, can be transformed into a force (it “bores through, recasts every substance”). The recasting of every substance wrought by a specifically poetic voice comes, by analogy, not from selecting inherently poetic words from the reservoir of language but from the mantra-like work. Luzi multiplies his concert of voices and in his poemi articulates them into rhythms and movements according to a very particular poetics. His comments on Castiglione, a master of the arrangement of voices into dialogue, seem uncannily applicable to his own writing: If we observe the character of certain rhythmic and syntactic resolutions, especially where the dialogue has allowed for some lively excitement, we might be encouraged to speak of Castiglione’s brand of fantasy, of a partic¬ ular sort of fantasy with musical qualities and effects which displaces the natural signs of a logical object to a largely echoed space. This results in a multiplication of the emotive possibilities of the specific res poeticae while maintaining within a conventional dimension . . . all of the surrounding

The Interrogative Epos

225

and suggestive elements, the tints, decors, and interlocutions: a wealth of material which appears to us as already systematized, organic, and ac¬ quired, in its very description, so much so that any hypothesis of narration is belied.51

The rhythmic effects of voices engaged in dialogue not only bestow movement (“concitazione”), but they affect language’s signifieds by cast¬ ing them into “a largely echoed space.” This echoing space multiplies the poetic potential of, among other things, “interlocutions.” The expan¬ sive dimensions of multiple interlocutors-as-voices are indeed a hall¬ mark of Su fondamenti invisibili, and they can be studied as the most dialogic aspect of the volume. Like Castiglione’s Cortegiano, Luzi’s Su fondamenti invisibili relies on rhythms of “interlocutions” to achieve poetic action through dialogue. The vocal exchanges there are not meant to imititate varying speech styles—individual, regional, social—and the dialogue functions preva¬ lently to create movement with its “nervous, fluid language.”02 Unlike his predecessor, however, Luzi inserts dialogues, in the form of reported speech in quotations, into the stanzas of the poems. And because the “I” of the poem has continual difficulty formulating its enunciations and because both he and, consequently, the reader have difficulty identify¬ ing the speaking voices, it is arduous to fill in the contexts of the speech exchanges. This is most apparent when some of the voices speak only in truncated dialogues.

51 Mario Luzi, “Un’illusione platonica,” in Unillusione platonica e altri saggi, 2d ed. (Bologna: Boni, 1972), p. 27; first ed., 1941; Luzi also discusses Castiglione's court as a spatial figure for his discourse (p. 26), Castiglione’s impersonal lyricity (p. 27), and Castiglione’s representation of “an interior time” in his prose (p. 32). >2 See Alberto Frattini, “Luzi dal monologo al dialogo,” in Poeti italiani tra prima e secondo Novecento (Milan: I.P. L., 1967), pp. 292—93. Some of Luzi’s earlier poetry also made use of less explicit structures of speech exchange. In a review of Primizie del deserto and Onore del vero, Giuseppe De Robertis wrote of “a low-toned colloquium” (in Altro Novecento, p. 504). In Quaderno gotico Fortini noticed elements of dramatic dia¬ logue such as vocatives, interrogatives, and iteration (“La poesia di Mario Luzi,” Comunitd 7, no. 27 [1954|: 57). Luzi’s appropriation of dialogue in quotations reaches a high point in Nel magma. Luigi Paglia considers the change from a more abstract poetic monologue to dialogue an innovative element. He concludes that in Su fondamenti invisi¬ bili, the “ever-less material word . . . loses its weight as a vocal pronouncement and becomes ever-more an inner whispering and an allusive sign” (“Le strutture del dialogo nella poesia di Luzi,” Rapporti, nos. 2—3 |1974|: 227). Critics disagree, however, whether the introduction of dialogue implies either more “realistic” language or more social content. Giuliano Gramigna, for instance, sees dialogue not so much as an open¬ ing towards others as “a preliminary self-identification” (“Trois poetes italiens: Caproni, Luzi, Sereni,” Nouvelle revue franqaise, no. 235 11972): 72).

226

The Poiesis of History

The third stanza of section 4 of “Nel corpo oscuro” consists, for exam¬ ple, of only the following two lines: “—In questo albergo, / in questo alberto—mi ricordano—si uccise Essenin—” [p. 141] (“In this hotel,/ in this hotel—they remind me—Essenin killed himself’). The reported verbal communication supplies some information to the poet/speaker, but the reader has no access to the information that would complete the sense of the utterance: we are unaware of the origin of the utterance as well as the place and the date of the suicide. The twice repeated demon¬ strative pronoun (“questo”) suggests a receiver of the message, as it is a deictic form that gains content only in a context. The deictic demonstra¬ tive and the deictic pronoun “mi” are grammatical indications of the relation of the speaker and hearer. Yet, since the context is not re¬ ported, the reader cannot understand what the implied listener in the text may understand. The dialogue form, dominated in fact by deixis, affects the relationship of the reader to the poetic text. We have only to imagine any number of other, more informative sentences that the writer could have substituted if the aim of the sentence had been to convey something about Essenin’s death in a referential manner or to reveal something about the speakers and hearers of the utterance. This single example demonstrates how little reported speech functions as an infor¬ mation exchange or for literary characterization, and even less to forward the narrative line by reporting events. Critics have hypothesized that conversation and literary discourse are the two extremes of discourse precisely because the former depends most heavily on a mutually dis¬ cerned context and therefore can leave substantial parts unexpressed, whereas the latter is least linked to an immediate situation and its com¬ municative coordinates are the vaguest.53 Luzi effectively plays these two extremes against each other in his verse. Additionally, Essenin’s life itself appears as a truncated expression that duplicates that poet’s vio¬ lently silenced voice. The device of ungrounded dialogue dovetails then with the thematics of metamorphosis and the form of the “poema negato.” A way of further understanding the thematic consequences of un¬ grounded dialogue in Su fondamenti invisibili is to seek out and to an¬ alyze precisely the less communicative of its dialogic aspects. The un¬ communicative voice, the asemantic speechless voice appears within this framework to be the instrument of “silent language. ” George Steiner has examined the notion of silent language in his essay “A Remark on Language and Psychoanalysis,” in which he points out that speech has

53 See for example Cesare Segre, “Discorso,” in Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. 4 (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), p. 1079.

227

The Interrogative Epos

been studied by information theory, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguis¬ tics, but that all of these fields have concentrated mainly on public, externally enunciated speech. Steiner feels that the latter is only a frac¬ tion of discourse’s totality. Discourse not only has a social function but an inner one, which is “counter-factual” and “fictive.”^4 Religious senti¬ ment in particular is often verbally internalized: prayer, invocation, sup¬ plication,

self-admonition,

penitential

scrutiny.

Steiner’s

suggestion

could be fruitfully applied to Luzi’s Augustinian self-interrogation and reflection. One might search for a representation of “silent speech” that utilizes quotation to point to the internal processes of thought and medi¬ tation. Meditation is a key word, and several critics have observed its impor¬ tance in the unfolding of the poems.55 It is often precisely the enigmatic vocal utterance, the truncated dialogue, that sets off a series of reflec¬ tions by the poet/speaker—in the following lines from “II gorgo di salute e malattia,” for instance, which follow a short speech by “la parte bambina dell’anima” (“the child-like part of the soul”): “II dissimile, il diverso/in tutto da me—ne hai fatto esperienza” [p. 160] (“The dissimilar, different/entirely from me—you have experienced it” [p.

104]).

To

which the poet/speaker replies:

“Non e cosi uniforme il cammino della crescita” le dico invece e lascio che lei fonda in due bolle turchine luce e lacrime “ben poco t’assomiglia la mola del mondo.” Conoscenza imperfetta anch’essa, non lo nego: per specchio e in immagine, dicevano un tempo che invero non e tempo—segni forse, spettri anche, pur sempre conoscenza. [P. 161) (‘The way to growth/is not so smooth,”/1 tell her however and let her melt/light and tears into turquoise bubbles./“The grindstone of the world resembles

you

but

little.”/Imperfect

knowledge/even

this

I

don't

deny:/through the mirror and in the image,/was said one time/which is in

54 George Steiner, “A Remark on Language and Psychoanalysis,” in On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 56. 55 Scarpati, for example, noted that the element of meditation in Luzi’s poems has prompted many to label them antihistorical (Mario Luzi, p. 54).

228

The Poiesis of History

truth no time—signs/perhaps, maybe ghosts, yet always knowledge. [Pp. 104-5])

These lines illustrate the mechanism of a “quoted” meditation that fol¬ lows the short utterance of an interlocutor. They also touch on the very thematic of the unsaid, of imperfect knowledge through imperfect signs that cannot express the fullness of meaning. Dialogue in its linking of the stated and unsaid comes to represent this imperfect voicing of knowledge, where what is perfect can be expressed only through the imper¬ fect. Given this quality of the dialogue, it is not surprising that we should find the dialogue of an imperfect “body” and “soul,” with the soul being either the poet’s own or that of someone who is departed or lost to the present. Simple vocative appeals to a soul appeared in Luzi’s earliest work. La Barca. In the series “Morte cristiana,” in Dal fondo delle campagne, Luzi developed the technique into an extensive elegiac exchange between the poet/speaker and the voice of a departed figure, in this case specifically his mother. In AJel magma Luzi makes even more sophisti¬ cated use of verbal exchange in a dialogue between the poet/speaker and an enigmatic figure who prefigures the women of Su fondamenti invisibili (for instance, in “Terrazza” and “L’lndia”).56 The uncertainty concerning the identities of the dialogue’s addressees adds to the imbroglio surrounding the identity of “I.” In the following lines, Luzi hints at the reasons for the shifting voices: e penso al mio bene tenuto in sospetto di vilta d’anno in anno stancarsi di me e lasciarmi—Oppure . . . oppure inopinatamente aspettarmi?— mi chiedo smarrito in questa luce di mimosa e calicantus e conosco a un guizzo di fiamma la forza d’instabilita e d’affano che tiene acceso il mondo nel buio. [“II pensiero fluttuante della felicita,” p. 118] (and I think of my well-being/held in suspicion of cowardice/as year upon year it tires of me and leaves me—Or . . . /or perhaps unexpectedly awaits

56 At least two literary precedents might be invoked for these dialogues with one’s own soul. In book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions (the epigraph to “Nel corpo oscuro” is from Augustine) the soul appears as a participant in an inner struggle for Augustine’s conver¬ sion. Voices of bad habits speak to Augustine in his delirium and the voices of children direct him to turn to a passage of scripture and read. A second precedent, whose source is also in the Confessions, can be found in Petrarch’s Secretum, where Truth as a virtually silent female interlocutor attends the dialogue between Augustine and Petrarch.

The Interrogative Epos

229

me?—/I ask myself in this mimosa and calycanthus light/and I know in a flame’s flicking/the force of instability and sorrow which keeps the world lit in darkness.) Here, the concept “well-being” interacts, if unclearly, with the self, its presence or absence becoming a source of uncertainty and interrogation. It takes on the status of an interlocutor or a figure who by its leavings and waitings comes to reflect the theme of instability as a force (“la forza d’instabilita”). If any self-knowledge and permanency are to be attained, it is not in the surfacing of the deep structure or final essence of the self, but rather in such continual interactions. These interactions spark in turn transformations in the “fuoco elementare della creazione incessante” [p. 126] (“elemental fire of incessant creation”), metamorphosis. The Other, by virtue of its enigmatic differ¬ ence, kindles change in a series of events or states that are linked de¬ spite their fundamental disparity. The metamorphic process ties dis¬ tinctly different entities into a chain, just as the pupa is linked to the butterfly, or wood to ash. The not-always-smooth linking of difference becomes, however, a source for the emotional tensions the poems portray and for their narrative conflicts. Indeed in section 7 of “II gorgo,” the “childlike” part of the soul accuses the transformed adult of forcing dif¬ ference and hence betrayal: “II dissimile, il diverso in tutto da me—ne hai fatto esperienza” piagnucola talvolta nel sonno la parte bambina dell’anima, la parte cucciola come offesa da un tradimento . . .

[Pp. 160-61] (“The

dissimilar,

different/entirely

from

me—you

have

experienced

it.’’/That part of her soul, a child’s or a puppy’s,/sometimes whispers in her sleep/offended by betrayal . . . [P. 104])

Both trust and betrayal unite or divide the voices Luzi evokes. He has abandoned the idea that similarity would ever unite and difference ever divide and has written his poems in such a way that two terms of differ¬ ence become shifting, even oscillating, components of metamorphosis. Not too surprisingly, humanity divides into male and female to embody these poles of difference. Luzi in fact exploits shifting masculine and feminine genders in the voices of “Nel corpo oscuro” in complex ways. In “Nel corpo oscuro” there are over ten instances of utterances by female voices. Some of these are probably one figure in several transfer-

230

The Poiesis of History

mations. Nevertheless, each utterance appears as an individual event in time in the poem’s unfolding. A scant three distinctly male utterances are found in the poem: (1) the one word uttered by the “compagni” (“comrades”), (2) the words of the presumably male “antiparte solare” (“solar anti-role”), and (3) those of “pastore” Giovanni (Pope John). Six of the poem’s voices are not easily identified by gender. These are, in order: (1) the “anima nascosta” (“the hidden soul”), where confu¬ sion results from the female gender of the word “anima” and the male gender of the subject himself; (2) the voice identified by its “grido burbero” (“surly shout”) but whose speech is significantly similar (especially in diction) to that of the “anima nascosta”—imperative and warning; (3) the “voce strappata” (“torn voice”), identified only as “qualcuno” (“someone”), and which constitutes an odd composite of voices 1 and 2, since it gives orders (“Inseguimi!” [“Follow me!”]) yet it presents traits attributed to the female voices such as making eye contact; (4) the voice known by its “sguardo un po’ bambino” (“a slightly boyish gaze”), which has no definite gender (except by default that of “bambino”); (5) the stuttering voice, which utters the words “Non sapevi, non ricordavi” (“You didn’t know, you didn’t remember”) and has no gender identity but exists in “un dormiveglia/ che e l’anima” (“a half-sleep/which is the soul”); and (6) the voice of “la vita” (“life”), which also commands “in¬ seguimi,” but has only the grammatical gender of the word “vita.” In the six instances, Luzi either manipulates the semantic emptiness of gender in language for the purposes of his poetry (that “dolore” is masculine does not add to its semantic content, but that a voice belongs to “la vita,” or “l’anima” can create gender oscillations) or else thwarts identi¬ fication simply by omitting a reference to gender. The technique blurs and destabilizes his voices over the course of the poems. Yet at the same time if one looks at the sections individually, they often show a more unitary series of transformations than is first apparent—although it may not endure outside section borders. An example of voice’s internal transformations within one section, based on a series of transitional metaphors, appears in the seven stanzas of section 5, articulated into four subdivisions separated by asterisks. It opens with the epigraph “Chiesa, Chiesa ...” (“Church, Church . . .”) (taken from a song by Giovanna Marini), which leads us to read the female figure in the section as a personification of the Church. The first stanza portrays a weeping woman and aptly invokes arabesque designs that seem to symbolize the superimpositions of earlier and subsequent female figures: “la guardo/negli occhi bassi perduti nel disegno del kashemir” [p. 141] (“I look at her/in eyes lowered in the arabesque design ).

The Interrogative Epos

231

The woman appears in a historical framework in the next stanza, where her husband is called a victim of the “lager” in a new metaphori¬ cal transformation within section 5. Pulsating drum rhythms of a “drowned” spring target and overpower this figure in an allegorical figuration of history. The Church herself, we may understand, has been coerced into marching with the Nazis and the Fascists. The fifth stanza of section 5 appears, unlike the others, in italics, an indication that the woman portrayed there is not related to the Church. Although she does not speak, the setting in which she appears in a more narrative encounter (indicated by the use of the first person) is again a city with a series of bridges over a river, probably the Arno. Although she seems to have little in common with the watery “anima” met in the flood, she may be linked to the woman of section 2, whom the poet/ speaker also encountered by the Arno. The earlier woman had been portrayed “con un divorzio alle spalle” (“with a divorce behind her”). The figure in the fifth stanza of section 5 has a “casa piena di solitudine” (“home filled with solitude”). Luzi sketches there a moment in which the return to a familiar place causes a sudden recall of lost happi¬ ness: “la sua felicita fotografata da un lampo” (“her happiness photo¬ graphed with a flash”). Additionally, the woman in the fifth stanza, like the Church/woman, is linked by her presence in the following setting to a “positive” water-rhythm (which Luzi contrasts with the rhythms of war): “La citta vuota nel pomeriggio di festal di ponte in ponte infilata

daWarmolsul fiume ombroso alia ricerca del ritmo” [p. 143] (“The city empty the holiday afternoon/a scull threading its way from bridge to bridge/on the shadowy river in search of a rhythm” [p. 26]). The motif of the river in the silence and the regular rhythms of the verse “di ponte in ponte infilata dalFarmo” give a serene character to this woman. Luzi at this juncture brings forth one of the most powerful similes of Su fondamenti invisibili to describe her: “lei che e simile all’albero del sandalo/e profuma la scure che la recide” (“she who is like the sandalwood tree/and perfumes the axes that cuts her”). The tree comparison leads, in a seemingly unending chain, to the figure in sec¬ tion 3, a woman who has “qualcosa della tenerezza d’alberi” (“something of the tenderness of trees”). The last attribute Luzi accords to the figure is her mutability: “Ne la strappa al mutamento questo pensiero/come pensata da un altro o forse neanche” [p. 143] (“Nor does this thought tear her from change/as though thought by another or not at all”). Stanzas six and seven close the extended transformation: now traits from two female figures (the Church and the tree-woman) are displaced to a third figure, at first difficult to identify and again a “character” in a portrait more than a voice:

232

The Poiesis of History Lei, l’agnello, la vittima del brutto risveglio siede ora nel suo angolo franata dentro—puo darsi— ma eretta nell’amara dignita che le resta del comprendere e passa di grandi ore inutili ascoltando con altri orecchi musica gia udita, risfogliando con mente mutata i libri letti e appassisce e risplende della sua rinnovata solitudine, strano evento, perfino grandioso, che le capita non piu grande di lei che lo accoglie tra anima e chacram. [P. 143]

(A lamb, a victim of troubled awakening, /she sits now in her cor¬ ner/crushed it may be—/but erect in her bitter dignity that remains of understanding/ she spends heavy futile hours/listening with different ears to music once heard,/releafing books read with a mind transformed,/and she withers and glows in renewed solitude, /strange event, even majestic, that befalls her/no grander than herself who welcomes it between soul and the life-source. [P. 26])

Several features suggest that this is the same figure as the one in the fifth stanza. Like the woman who left her fragrance on the ax that slew her, this woman is a sacrificial lamb (as was the maternal figure associ¬ ated with the speechless voice). She too resides in a solitary home and is associated with mutability. The “victim” trait also suggests the weeping personification of the Church in the opening of section 5, especially since the metaphorical choice is “agnello,” with its christological conno¬ tations. Lines slightly further ahead refer explicitly to the “pastore della sua angoscia Giovanni” (“John, the pastor of her anguish”). One notes further that this woman does not utter words to “I,” whose presence or absence in her home is not noted. Nor is there the “silent speech” of understanding. She appears solely distant. This had not been the case in the opening stanzas of section 5, where the Church/woman addresses “I.” The first-person subject does not confess, in a speech of his own, his emotions before the victimized woman, but they are implied when “pastor” John comforts him in his guilt. It is significant that Luzi adopts a technique for varying the relations between the first-person sub¬ ject and the object of his narration, changing focus and depth of field. The device is borrowed from narrative forms and would be worthy of Bramanti’s romanzo. Its result, given that we are uncertain concerning the distinctness of Church, lamb, and tree-woman, is the “forceful insta¬ bility” Luzi longed to achieve in verse. Section 5, in summary, is made up of a series of three encounters of

The Interrogative Epos

233

the poet/speaker with what are probably only two figures with some shared traits. Still, the reader experiences these three encounters as distinct present moments: the speech by the Church/woman, followed by the fifth stanza (in italics), and then the portrait of the lamb/woman. Although changes of scene produce separate moments in space and time, the three present moments extend for a certain length of time in the text, and then each dissolves. As the scenes are superimposed, the earlier ones may either be considered as over and absent or simply sus¬ pended, their presence obscured but there. In one sense, the introduc¬ tion of the italic stanzas with the Florentine figure erases the earlier encounter with the Church figure. In another sense, the presence of the Church/woman is simply deferred. She seems to reappear, changed, however, by what has occurred in the intervening text: features of the figure of the italic stanzas settle on the Church Figure. In this sense, the series of representations of women creates a series or movement in time, a directionality. The problem of the interactions of separate moments, separate en¬ counters, and separate figures in the text is complicated further by how the “Tre poemi,” although distinct, pertain to the same horizontal series. The themes of the polis, violence, conflict, and the agon of history are common to all of them. The figurations of women associated with muta¬ bility persist. The third of the “Tre poemi,” “II gorgo di salute e malattia,” opens with moving verses on another forceful “lei,” Luzi’s dead mother: Lei scesa dieci anni fa nel gorgo che all’aspetto poco mutato dei figli non coglie il vuoto d’anima, non sa della tempesta d’aridita venuta piii tardi e ancora con sfocata dolcezza ci sorride e sospira dai Fiori della sua lapide credendoci i medesimi—ignara che proprio di questo mi tormento sotto gli occhi di lei che in effigie ci commisera d’un dolore vero ma in altro tempo . . . [P. 148| (She, descended ten years past into the whirlpool/who from the barely changed appearance of her children/cannot seize the emptiness ol their souls;/she does not know of the storms/of aridity which came later/and with still-unfocused sweetness she smiles at us/and sends signs from her tombstone’s flowers/believing we are the same—not knowing/that exactly

234

The Poiesis of History

that torments me/beneath the eyes which commiserate with us in effigy/for our sorrow, but in another age . . . )

In an elegiac moment, “I” meets his mother’s gaze in the photographic effigy on her funerary monument. Still the “speechless voice,” she sighs instead of articulating in language her commiseration at her children’s sorrow. The subject of change and unchange—where death and life par¬ take of both of these—serves in this opening to introduce related themes,

other “great transitions” (p.

145) that appear in the “Tre

poemi.” And if we in our present torment are children of the past and the departed, the past persists in the present, both “unknowing” and hence distant, yet at one with us because our grief is the same as it has always been. The past in Luzi’s verses, like the mother’s lapidary photo¬ graph, is a kerygma, a message, a voice—a present absence. As in Pasolini, the sepuchral suggestion calls forth the cemetery visi¬ tor’s grasping desire to understand the fragmentary present and an un¬ born future, a dawn, through a communion with the past, with the dead. Before his mother, the poet/speaker utters a prayer in which he steps outside of a single subjectivity and thinks not of his solitary grief but of a collective grief, not of his own past, but of a “world” history that is coming to an end: “Mondo ugualmente duro della fissita e del mutamento che non posseduto non ci possiedi e neppure ci escludi dal tuo tormento—mondo infermo nella nostra mente irritata che non riceve se non le tue particole, i tuoi frammenti, prima del grano di maturita che tarda a scoppiare, prima che la luminiscenza contrastata diventi un’alba non chiuderti nella tua scorza proliferante e sterile non t’eclissare alia sofferenza degli uomini” mi dico non trovando comunione coi morti che in questa preghiera intonata per noi vivi.

[Pp. 148-49] (“World equally harsh/of fixedness and change/you are unpossessed and do not possess us/nor do you spare us your torment—infirm world/in our irritable

minds

which

can

receive/only

particles

of you,

your frag¬

ments,/before the grain of ripeness which delays its bursting,/before the hindered luminescence shall become a dawn/do not close yourself within a proliferating, sterile bark /do not eclipse yourself before men’s suffering”/I say to myself finding no communion with the dead/except in this prayer I utter for the living.)

The Interrogative Epos

235

This passage goes beyond describing the uncircumscribed relations of the poet and the world, a familiar theme expressed in the line “you are unpossessed and do not possess us.” It describes a certain way, a “de¬ termined” way, in which our historical age exists in fixity and change. If Luzi’s figuration of the Church as a sacrificial victim in “Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi” initiates a newly historical allegorization of the often-repeated enounters with “lei” in the poems’ “novel,” this cemetery encounter along with the chain of figurations that follows attaches to the relations of the self and the other—marked by both separation and unity—a historical thematics.57 The thoughts that the speaker’s contact with this departed woman bring to the surface in fact move in the direc¬ tion of contemporary history’s agony, brucia tutti nello stesso stampo” [p.

“la pentecoste del dolore/che 135] (“sorrow’s pentecost/which

bums all in the same casting”). The particles of the world that we can call our own in this age come to us late in a cycle of growth and yet before the explosion of the new, the dawn. Subsequent sections of “II gorgo di salute a malattia” give us what Luzi, in an endnote, called “images of violence and consequent estrangement gathered in our city or polis” and “the same nullifying violence referred to history.” At this juncture we are asked to meditate on the nature of our own age’s “death” and its potential resurrection, as well as on the capabilities of poetry to partake of so great a passing (Tutte le poesie, pp. 264—65). Luzi’s treatment of history is as complex as his treatment of the other challenges to modern thinking he addresses in his poetry: the dissolution of the first-person subject, the breakdown of anthropocentrism, the dis¬ solution of a priori coordinates, the arhythmias of contemporary exist¬ ence. And he is as mordent in his criticism of cheap historicism as he was in his rebukes of facile realism. Just as he sought a more “objec¬ tive” way of employing a first-person voice in his poems, so he sought a more “objective” way of employing history. Ironically, although in some quarters Luzi’s work was viewed as metahistorical, he considered some of his contemporaries inadequate because they championed “a history ante litteram over becoming conscious of actual history.”* The neoreal-

57 Quiriconi observed, in reference to (Juaderno Gotico, that to understand “the phases of Luzi’s approach to history,’’ one needs to look at the issue of an aperture toward the “other,” the “you,” the female figure (II fuoco e la metamorfosi, p. 174). Zagarrio felt that this relation as it appears from the time of Dal fondo delle campagne (the period of Luzi’s mother’s death) brings a “new epic/tragic sense of the relation between ‘she’ and ‘he’” (“Luzi la metamorfosi e la storia,” in Mario Luzi: Atli del convegno di studi, Siena, 9—10 maggio 1981 [Rome: Ateneo, 1983), p. 147). 58

Luzi, Tutlo in questione, p. 64.

236

The Poiesis of History

ist, committed poetry of the postwar period, and later the work of the experimentalists as well, lacked the objectivity that can only be the fruit of a historical understanding of the expressive, and vital, possibilities of the present, the fruit of an understanding of the history of ideas (witness his treatment of the evolution of Symbolism from Romanticism). Yet de¬ spite the shortcomings of the realist impetus, Luzi declares that he shares in its fundamental impulses to address the question of the histori¬ cal in Art, to treat “a temporal transition [trapasso] that was felt as a presentiment in the years of the dictatorship, which matured and was made visible during the war.”59 In his critical writings Luzi also expressed a belief that poetry, be¬ cause it reflects evolving language, is always submerged in history, “in the course and progression of history” (Vicissitudine e forma, p. 42). But, the potential of historical events to fuel the fire of poetic creation must be approached in the context of the contradictions that a historical un¬ derstanding of the world implies. Historical knowledge is not exempt from the effects of the demise of the anthropocentric outlook. Humanity is no longer the protagonist, the unchallenged subject of history. To be genuinely historical, poetry must acknowledge that the cultural logic of historicism, with its corollary cause and effect model, is dead. Histori¬ city remains a vital force in events. And like life, history is an enigma. Its very elusiveness, its startling metamorphoses, may comprise the stuff of poetry because, in verse, history “is converted into a different fluid, or better yet into a continuity that presupposes unlimited iteration . . . and in sum history itself in its totality is transformed into a great meta¬ phor of the human condition and of nature’s process” (p. 42). In poetry, history becomes a metaphorical example of metamorphosis and transformation. The term “unlimited iteration” could well be applied to Luzi’s own figural chains with their horizontal movements and their double cadence of protraction and dissolution. History is as subject to dissolvings and prolongings as any temporal event. It too may suffer the dislocations operated by a “collective” and yet elusive subjectivity where recall can awaken a dead past, where a death-like forgetting is also a necessity, and where recall and forgetting are part of “forceful insta¬ bility.” Furthermore, the human condition Luzi writes of entails life and death questions, which historical topics in verse are well-suited to represent. In a preface to a series of poems entitled “Altre voci” (in Dal fondo delle

campagne), Luzi explains how historical moments in his poems became

59 Ibid., p. 11.

The Interrogative Epos

237

entwined with existential ones during a period of mourning: “The con¬ frontation, the relation, the ‘questions’ concerning life and death are in fact connatural with writing poetry, tautological in some way. But in those years, these questions re-proposed themselves to me agitated by violent transitions [trapassi] in civil forms; they were associated with the consciousness of finding oneself at a temporal discriminant, at a leap undertaken by a civilization lavish with lacerations. My mother’s death gave a kind of religious sanction to that order of thoughts.”60 History’s violent ruptures not only ordered Luzi’s thinking, they also appeared in force in his poetry. And war as both the symbol of an exis¬ tential agon and a specific historical event (World War II) made its way into his poems.61 Initially, it surfaced in verses on the perpetual battles of existence and in nature’s dramas, framed in ruination: biondi cani velati di tristezza e d’assillo fissano nella polvere impronte sconosciute, armoniosi animali si dilungano per le strade dall’occhio deserto e calcinato, pestilenze dai tendini lividi rilucenti balzano su rovine incenerite.

[P. 98] (blond dogs veiled with sadness and worry/stare at unfamiliar tracks in the dust;/harmonious

animals

linger

along

streets

with

deserted,

mortar

eyes;/plagues with grey, gleaning sinews/spring on ashen ruins.)

In later poems the historical material, in this case related to the war theme, undergoes transformations. For instance, in a poem in Onore del vero entitled “A Niki Z. e alia sua patria,” we find the historically spe¬ cific topic of the Turkish/Greek struggle in Cyprus with its “gemiti/ d’uccisi inguistamente” (“wails of the unjustly murdered”), and the explicit image of a hanged man in the wind. In “II gorgo di salute e malatia,” we find another war, the one in Vietnam: “la giungla carbonizzata ... in una pausa di bazooka” [p. 152J (“the charred jungle ... in a bazooka’s pause”). In each of these poems history, sorrow, and injustice appear together. 60 Luzi, Tulle le poesie, vol. 2, p. 8. In Viclssiliuline e forma we read also that “poetry attempts to grasp life and prolong the moment; it could not do this without a conscious¬ ness of death” (p. 39). 61 Serrao has extensively studied this specific theme and, more in general, the ways in which Luzi introduced history into his poems in Contribuli per una bibliograj'ia luziana. He also extensively summarizes the viewpoints of critics who have seen Luzi’s work in a more “metahistorical” light.

238

The Poiesis of History

Assuming that part of the evolution of Luzi’s verse is an increased attention to history, along with a rejection of what he called “opinion changes” and “news reports,” what forms does history take in his verse?62 First of all, in terms of genre, there is no epic quality to this history. There is no triumphal ending, no national pride, no lesson on what his¬ tory teaches by example. History appears in a difficult-to-perceive di¬ mension that is not unlike the dislocated spaces Luzi has created in what one critic called an equally minimal and maximal historical space.63 Nor does the notion of breathing life into the past beguile Luzi. Although he searches the past constantly, he is not looking for any sort of ultimate origins, nor is he indulging a taste for antiquarianism.64 Two points are signficant. First, history functions precisely as a voice divorced from a

protagonist, first-person singular or plural. Luzi in fact treats history as he treated the shifting voices in Su fondamenti invisibili, for example in the Cyprus poem:

Che voce gia sentita ridere e implorare tra isola e isola e che strido di rondine guizzata tra nube e nube viene e mette fine al letargo sulla riva dopo anni e anni di mare. Chi sei? non so, ma certo qualeuno come te m apparve altrove in lembi di citta visti e perduti dietro un velo di pioggia o sotto un cielo diviso tra una nuvola e un sorriso. [Vol. 1; p. 249; my emphasis]

Franco Fortini takes note of this rejection in his “Introduzione a Discorso naturale,” in Mario Luzi: Atti del convegno di studi, Siena, 9-10 maggio 1981 (Rome: Ateneo, 1983), p. 52. \fye read that with Luzi’s idea of a universal and uninterrupted creation “of bodies and spirits it would seem that Luzi overcame his devaluation of and revulsion toward history which in both the young and the mature Luzi had been very strong.” Fortini considers, however, that Luzi excludes from his vision of history “the moment of human production of the world, of the violence that man wreaks on nature and himself in order to reproduce himself, and which we call work” (pp. 52-53). The maximal space would be the vast horizontal embrace of time and of our species’ journey in it, and the minimal space would be “the imperceptible signs, the minimal gestures, which seem ungraspable.” See Zagarrio, “Luzi la metamorfosie e la storia,” p. 147. One notes in fact an abundance of expressions like “ eta” (“age”), “evo” (“eve”), and “epoca” (“epoch”), juxtaposed to words such as “istante” (“instant”) and “attimo” ( moment ), which dislocate the conventional spans of history by deforming them either in the direction of the longest run or the shortest, two directions which then coexist in their difference and add threads to the weave of the narrative. I draw some classifications of attitudes towards the past from Fredric Jameson’s essay “Marxism and History,” in The Ideologies of Theory, especially p. 152.

The Interrogative Epos

239

(What voice once heard in laughter and entreaty between island and is¬ land/and what screech from a swallow darting/between cloud and cloud puts an end/to the lethargy on the shore

after years

and years of

sea.//Who are you? I do not know, but certainly someone like you ap¬ peared to me elsewhere/in strips of towns seen or lost/behind a veil of rain or under a sky/divided between cloud and radiance. [P. 65])

Second, Luzi treats history as part of his project to address the “cur¬ rent relations of the poet and the world.” Contemporary history and po¬ etic history intermingle, and their relations are not serene. Yet this hy¬ brid history, and not official history or a comfortable teleological one, is the history that unfolds as the motivating force in Luzi’s epos.60 The past is a question, and poetry magnifies its uncertain, even ungrounded sta¬ tus, thereby multiplying its potential and force in the present, just as the ungrounded subject in poetry multiplied the potential of subjectivity: “So in what sense does poetry save the past? Only by redeeming it from its condition as past, from the abasement of the souvenir. Poetry reinserts it therefore . . . into time’s circulation. Time is, for better or for worse, fully present in the language of political creation just as it is present in nature. Memory therefore remains a sovereign faculty, not because it freezes time but because it frees it from fixedness and captures its work¬ ing signs. ... So it comes about that between past and present there is a true interchange, and an image far off in time is placed in the immediate relief of the active present” (Vicissitudine e forma, pp. 43—44). A poem that appears in Al fuoco della controversia brings the not-sodistant past of murdered authors Garcia Lorca, Mandelstam, and Paso¬ lini into time’s circulation: A Granata, nel gulag siberiano, a Ostia— una riprova superflua, una preordinata testimonianza oppure sulla lunga controversia un irrefutabile sigillo?—si chiede lei depositaria inferma di misura e di arte mentre escono il poeta e l’assassino l’uno e l’altro dalla metafora e s’avviano al sanguinoso appuntamento ciascuno certo di se, ciascuno nella sua parte. [Tutte le poesie, vol. 2, p. 172)

65 Luzi elaborates on his notion of the movement of an idea as the event of poetry in “Idea ed evento,” in Scritli, ed. Giancarlo Quiriconi (Venice: Arsenate, 1989), pp. 221 — 24. He distinguished the idea-event in poetry from the idealistic notion of poetry as a category of the human spirit.

240

The Poiesis of History

(In Granada, a Siberian gulag, Ostia— / a superfluous confirmation, a pre¬ ordained testimony/or upon the long controversy/an undeniable seal?— she, the infirm/custodian of measure and art,/asks herself/while poet and assassin alike/step out of metaphor/and set off to their bloody engage¬ ment/each certain of himself, each in his role.) If this poem, the postscript (“Poscritto”) to another discontinuous dia¬ logue, “Brani di un mortale duetto” (Excerpts from a mortal duet), is a moving commemorative, it is not an orthodox elegy. It does not “save” or redeem the past except by removing it from “the abasement of the souve¬ nir.

In no way do these poets’ lives constitute parables, and in no way

are the deaths justified. What instead Luzi moves to “justify” in his questioning of three poets’ violent deaths is, once again, poetry’s diffi¬ cult struggle with the world it inhabits. The poetic agon is dramatic, real, it has stepped out of metaphor. Poetry lives and acts in the world as it is represented by these three deaths: of Lorca, murdered by nation¬ alists at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, of Mandelstam, whose epigram on Stalin allegedly led to his exile to Siberia in the 1930s and death in 1942, and of Pasolini, whose murder in 1975 some believe had political motivations. These synchronic spatial references emphasize the omnipresence of the agon. And they enact Luzi’s assertion that in poetry an image (gulag, Ostia, Granada) from the past may be placed in the “immediate relief of the active present.” Once again, Luzi reminds us of our age’s inherent violence, of the violent crises that mark modernity. Pasolini’s murder testifies to the so¬ cial displacements that created the Roman slums where he lost his life, and the assassinations of Garcia Lorca and Mandelstam testify to the repressive violence of Spanish Fascism and Soviet Communism under Stalin. The brutality of each of these deaths attests not only to political failures but the “brutality of a social and productive process that is vio¬ lent in and of itself even before its violent political consequences: from any angle of observation, in any aspect through which one may approach the subject, the outcome is a subtraction of humanity.”66 Yet the deaths evoked in this poem are the deaths of poets, and the voice who asks herself their meaning is at one level allegorically the voice of an interrogative poetry. The deaths are, furthermore, the result of the “role” these men assigned to poetry, the role of a revolt, a protest, and specifically in Pasolini s case, a lament. The revolt and the lament

66 Mario Luzi, “Considerazioni su un secolo,” Prospettive nel mondo 3, nos. 29-30 (1978): 68.

241

The Interrogative Epos

are evidence, in Luzi’s view, that poets from the nineteenth century onward have been struggling to recover from the wound inflicted on po¬ etry by the demise of humanistic culture. This culture cast poets in a central role, as divine creators, and in general glorified human selfconsciousness as an instrument of dominion over nature and the world. The “Copemican” revolution has finally reached the realm of art, al¬ ready eroded by “massification.” Poetry was dethroned. Poetic history from the Symbolists’ dreams of mastery to antipoetic and antitraditional Dada is a product of this “depotenziamento” (“disempowerment”).6' It is possible to understand “Poscritto” as a reflection on poetry’s capacity for “action” and at the same time as Luzi’s own attempt to surpass the elegiac mode, which was the result of poetry’s displacement from its central epistemological position. Luzi frames these poets’ en¬ counters with the powers that annihilated them in the context of a battle with gladitorial proportions (another poem in Al fuoco della controversia stages a boxing match). But the poem is formulated as a question so that the events of the showdown are not only offstage but patently not suscep¬ tible to an unequivocal interpretation. Poetry utters an interrogative and registers events, still “questioning” cultural and political authority. Yet if death and controversy were certain for these three, is this cer¬ tainty “superfluous,” “preordained,” or “undeniable”? The question Luzi poses is whether the poets’ encounters with the world are to be understood as unexceptional in their predictable defeat. Is poetry’s de¬ feat a commonplace of posthumanist thinking, its “death” as foreseeable as any death, as much a defeat as any death? Luzi formulates the ques¬ tion then whether single truths—here these poets’ historical, violent deaths—always validate in a banal way an absolute truth. Or can the commonplace be transformed from “confirmation” into a “seal

of au¬

thenticity? Where is the passage from the banality and insignifance of certain facts to a genuine restatement? Luzi posed similar questions about twentieth-century verse. Is there creativity, or is there only repetition? And if poetic creativity remains, why has it come to be understood as being opposed to the real? How can poetry escape from categories that bind it into a conception of loss, related either to the loss of the “real” as defined by nineteenth-century positivism or of the “absolute” defined by humanism? II the “myth

of

absolute creativity led to a fetishization of poetic activity, did it expose poetry to the risk of becoming an elegiac monument characterized by

07 Luzi, “Leopardi net secolo che gli succede,” in Scritti, p. 185.

242

The Poiesis of History

apathy in the face of sorrowful realities? By incorporating the “poetic” transitions and metamorphoses inherent in epochal changes can contem¬ porary poetry overcome its sepulchral leanings? Just as the wound of history must remain open until the negativity of a lost past is transformed into something as yet only potentially positive, so poetry’s questions (“si chiede/lei”) must persist.

Conclusion

Notions of the relations between historical and poetic understanding are complicated, we learn in the poetry and criticism of Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi, by the modem epoch’s intensive investigations of subject/ob¬ ject relations. Descartes’s questioning of the self-evidence of experience in the wake of the Copernican revolution—when we learn that the uni¬ verse is not as we perceive it to be subjectively—occurs in the early stages of the investigative process. Changing notions of subjectivity sub¬ sequently exert an ever more important influence in modern poetic his¬ tory. For Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi, they specifically affect the areas of poetic voice and the problem of a poetic structuring of tempo¬ rality. The subjectivization of certain realms of knowledge, including the historical, is also the basis for a growing “world-alienation’'—the term is Hannah Arendt’s—in the modern age. The result for the poets studied here is a real loss of social community, of commonly held conceptions— for example, a common notion of poetry’s social and historical functions. This loss is not unrelated to the modern age’s view of politics as a form of inevitably subjective self-interest (which “universal'' poetry ought to transcend) and its view of time as mere sequence and process with no universal purpose, much less greatness. This world-alienation generates a large share of modern poetry’s subject matter. It seems to go hand in hand with poetry’s evolution away from epic and didactic forms in the direction, instead, of becoming the genre of social and political separa¬ tion—as opposed to, say, the novel with its emphasis on social integra¬ tion. In the investigations of subject/object relations that have affected realms of modern knowledge-seeking, poetry seemed to have landed heavily on the side of privileging the subjective powers, to have privi-

244

Conclusion

leged the singularity of being. And it suffered as a consequence, in the view of many of its modern practitioners, from a loss related to a retreat into purity and essence. Poetry’s separation from history would only con¬ firm this, especially from the moment when history as narrativizing historicism came to dominate the nineteenth century and to ally itself with positivist sciences. Yet the map of epistemological hierarchies and shifts that invest no¬ tions of the poetic is more complex than the statement of poetry’s pre¬ sumed subjectivity implies. After the Enlightenment fewer poetic texts may have thematized historical deeds than did so in, say, Tasso’s times, and perhaps the Italian tradition—apart from certain Risorgimental themes is particularly weak in this area. Although historical thematics have diminished for poetry, the general issue of the relations between literary fiction and history, truth, and objectivity, raged in the nine¬ teenth century as they continue to do in the late twentieth. Furthermore, throughout the nineteenth century, as well as the twentieth, the epochs of history continued to be viewed as closely related to poiesis as a mak¬ ing, to aesthetic history, to the history of human creations.1 The authors examined in this book share an awareness that history is inscribed in literary forms and that literary forms have their place in the aesthetic underpinnings of the writing of history. If history as a subject matter cannot be separated from the history of emplotments and poetics of history, is it possible really to speak at all of a fracture between poetry and history? And would not history always be inscribed not only in language itself but in all the arts because they inescapably allude, consciously or unconsciously, by exclusion or inclu¬ sion, in rebellion or in collusion, to a history of forms? In this frame¬ work, the relations of poetry and history cannot be seen in terms of a

1 See Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). It is precisely in his Lectures on Aesthetics that Hegel “elaborated his theory of historical writing itself, which he saw as one of the verbal arts and hence conceived to fall under the imperatives of the aesthetic consciousness

(\fyhite. Metahistory, p. 85). Marx as well, in a famous passage

of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, evoked history in association with human creations when he wrote of the well-stocked warehouse of cultural traditions from which men must inevitably borrow to resurrect theatrically from the past concepts, costumes, and watchwords to aid them in reconstructing a new scene of history. Nietzsche, al¬ though in a very different emplotment of historical consciousness, which “envisioned a liberation from history that was simultaneously a liberation from society,” also centered his view of history around notions of “reinterpretations and rearrangements” of cultural and aesthetic traditions (White, Metahistory, p. 363). Each epoch has its own “poetics of History ’—to reiterate White’s terminology—and according to a dialectic of these, hu¬ man history unfolds—or at least attains some configuration for the present.

Conclusion

245

presupposed distance between historical topics—be they great deeds or everyday life—and the poetic. And it is precisely in looking at a history of forms that one indeed can confirm that much of modern poetry shrinks from genres associated with dominant historical discourse, mainly narrative and didactic ones, and it embraces others, notably the lyric among the traditional tripartite divi¬ sion into epic, dramatic, and lyric. Subsequently, we witness in turn an antilyric reaction in the twentieth century—and in Pasolini, Bertolucci and Luzi. For them, specific reconceptualizations of history itself can emerge from experiments in antilyric genres such as the novel in verse or the poema. The significance of historical becoming in modern thinking had of course undergone intensive questioning over several centuries. Christian teleology and “mythology” as historical models had long since been—as far back as Voltaire—undone by “philosophy of history.” Subsequent theories of rational historical progress additionally had long been made susceptible to the question of which elements of history were the funda¬ mental ones, with Marx proposing the centrality of economic modes of production and distribution as opposed to “ideological” notions of the historical, which favor elements such as rights, philosophical ideas, or the state. The possibility of generalizing a “science” of historiography was investigated in Italy by Benedetto Croce, who found historiography to be superior to science because it constitutes an individualizing form of knowledge of a constantly changing, unrepeatable reality. Croce’s cri¬ tique of “abstract” notions about historical “directions” may have led to his opposition to Fascist ideology with its use of history as a justification for colonialism. After World War II, the extremely influential historical problematics Croce brought forward were complicated by ever-widening definitions of the horizons of historicity—in the phenomenologists, Heidegger, and in Western Marxism with its interest in the structures of cultural domination that affect subjective realms. Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Luzi within this context attempted to disas¬ sociate themselves from the cultural logic of historicism and at the same time attempted to re-encode or to figure historical becoming and disap¬ pearance in their poetry. Pasolini developed his notions both of the pal¬ impsest and literary “contaminatio” as figures of historical and poetic composition, claiming that readings and writings of the past are always ideologically motivated. Sepulchral verse and the lament were among the genres in which he chose to put forward his own political beliefs. Bertolucci framed the subject of historical change and loss—especially the demise of “rural” Italy—in an impasse between the telling of offi¬ cially historical events and the workings of poetic phantasy, so that his-

246

Conclusion

tory becomes “impossible.” His novel in verse as a generic formation represents this impossibility because it is both epos and a fragment, a novel and a lyric. For Luzi, an intelligent critic of cheap historicism, history speaks in an ungrounded voice. Its elusiveness forms the very stuff of poetry—for Luzi a concert of voices and a composition of spaces. Generic experiments in the long narrative poem, in the novel in verse, in sepulchral verse, the lament, and in elegy all provide the means of re¬ encoding history for these authors. In these experiments we find addi¬ tionally a reading of cultural history, a kind of “allegory” (a la Walter Benjamin) of changes in the concept of history itself within the aesthetic. We also find sophisticated readings of a national literary tradition that share a concern over the “modernization” of Italy. Our poets’ recastings, their “readings” of historically distant genres, do not so much fall under the category of classifying activity, of variants or, even less, of “innova¬ tions” or improvements in long-standing genres. Instead, they engage themselves in a conscious rewriting of generic history, which means to display historicity itself, the historicity in poetic writing. Hence these poetic works display a high degree of awareness of transformations in the cultural heritage, an awareness of conflicting traditions. It is in this context that each has inscribed a poiesis of history.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 1, 8 Agamben, Giorgio, 66n, 78n, 138—39, 146-47 Agosti, Stefano, 26n, 61, 73n, 79, 217n antilyric, 3-4, 8, 11, 40, 47, 150, 245 Arendt, Hannah, 2n, 243 Aries, Philippe, 63, 74n Asor Rosa, Alberto, 17n, 44, 77n autobiography, 12, 26, 123, 150, 168, 183-84 avant-garde. See modernism ballad, 4, 123, 127, 155 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 7-8, 246 Bertolucci, Attilio, 1—5, 13—14 and distance, theme of, 129-31, 135-36, 149, 163, 184 and impasse, theme of, 133-36, 139-40 as mannerist, 135, 137-39 and mother, figure of, 132, 150, 154, 166-73, 176, 179-83, 191 separation, theme of, 128, 130, 136, 178-82 works: La camera da letto, 121-24, 125, 132-33, 140, 149-92 “Di molto prima,” 141-44

“Romanza,” 128-32, 134, 140, 163, 166, 173, 178, 187 “Romanzo,” 125-28, 134, 140, 166, 172 bildungsroman, 1, 124, 132, 148 Blanchot, Maurice, 60, 63—64 Cacciari, Massimo, 61—62, 132n Carducci, Giosue, 84—85, 197n Croce, Benedetto, 1, 31, 42, 65, 245 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 28, 33n, 125n, 192 Dante, 10-11, 24-26, 35-36, 40, 117, 146, 154, 197n, 205 death, and poetry, association with, 60—65, 128—31; see also elegy; sep¬ ulchral verse De Nardis, Luigi, 62, 73 elegy, 1, 4-7, 63, 135, 193, 197, 23334, 241, 246 epos. See verse epic Fascism, 16, 75, 134, 178, 184-87 fetishism: of commodities, 138 and poetry, 78-79, 135-37, 241 Forti, Marco, 47, 150, 161n

258

Index

Fortini, Franco, 18, 45, 46n, 47n, 73n, 238n

Jameson, Fredric, In, 9n, 13n, 238n

Foscolo, Ugo, 26, 34, 36, 43, 48-49, 59-60, 150, 197-200, 202, 212 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 133, 135-36, 140 and disavowal, 138-39 and the “family romance,” 121, 154, 163, 165, 168-71, 184

lament, 5, 61, 89-93, 100, 245 Leopardi, Giacomo, 6, 21, 39n, 99 literary engagement, 4, 8-10, 18-19, 187-89 Lukacs, Georg, 1, 8-10 Luzi, Mario, 1-7, 9-11, 13-15, 140, 149

Gatto, Alfonso, 67-68 genre, 2, 9-10, 88, 194 experiments in, 4, 122, 141, 147, 245-46 family book, 123, 133, 153, 177-78 and historical material, 1, 91, 94 mixed forms of, 2, 4-6, 12-13, 24, 76, 86, 117, 126, 146-49, 245 retrievals of, 3, 24, 45, 64 Gramsci, Antonio, 1, 4-5, 7, 9, 30, 32-33, 43-44, 48-50, 58, 75-78 hegemony, cultural, 8-9, 58-59, 64, 74, 76-78 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 196, 245 Hermeticism, 3-4, 54, 63, 67-69, 84, 121-22, 124, 148-49 historicism, 14, 47, 147, 245 history: and class relations, 39, 50-51, 74, 106-7, 158-59, 174-75, 187-89, 191 family, 121, 140, 153, 158-59 ideological nature of, 59 micro-, 154-55, 176-77 poetics of, 244-45 of trade unions, 173—75 see also mourning; narrative: and history ideology, 4-7, 14, 184 Italian Communist Party, 18, 85 Italy: industrialization of, 8, 119, 159, 173 rural, 14, 24, 135, 173, 180, 190, 245

anthropocentrism in, 6, 196—98, 201, 236, 241 and critique of the lyric, 18-22, 194-97 the first-person subject in, 209-16 history in, 193-97, 235-40 Marxism, view of, 17-19 poetic subjectivity in, 195-96, 199200 poetic voice in, 222-33 spatial rhythms in, 201-12 time in, 218-21 works: “A Niki Z. e alia sua patria,” 237-39 “II gorgo di salute e malattia,” 159, 220, 223, 227-28, 233-35 Ipazia, 195 “Nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi,” 135-36, 202-12, 223-24, 226-28, 229-33 Nel magma, 217 “II pensiero fluttuante della felicita,” 228 “Poscritto,” 239-42 Mallarme, Stephane, 6, 63, 69, 199, 213-14, 216 Marx, Karl, 76, 97, 188, 244n, 245 Marxism, 17, 21 Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 12n, 66, 122, 134-35, 136n, 210n metrics, 127-28, 141, 148-49 modernism, 4, 7-8, 33, 45, 10-11 Montale, Eugenio, 16, 67, 79, 138, 150, 216 Moravia, Alberto, 122, 146-47

Index

mourning: and history, 87—88, 102, 190, 234— 35, 237, 243, 245 and narration, 129, 162—63 and poetic subjectivity, 105 and poetry, 6, 61—62, 78—79, 101, 135, 144-45 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo: sor¬ row, theory of narrative, 10—11, 47 and history, 1, 4, 142, 144, 147, 151-59,186-88,194-95, 217, 245 interrupted, 130, 132-33, 157-58, 160-68, 172-79, 186-87, 217, 219, 221-22 see also poetry: and narrative Neoreahsm, 9—10, 12, 15, 19, 29-30, 84 novel in verse, 6, 11, 120—22, 140, 146-49, 153, 246 Pascoh, Giovanni, 12, 26, 28, 48, 66— 67, 77-78, 122, 212-14 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1-14, 17—18, 122, 239-40 on Bertolucci, 135—36 critique of contemporary lyric, 19— 22 as filmmaker, 24, 29, 61, 88, 108 on Gramsci, 36—40 history, view of, 59, 64—65, 86 on the nation, concept of, 82-84, 89 on popular poetry, 30-32 the Renaissance, view of, 59, 7477, 83 Roman poems, 23—24, 26—30, 33— 34, 83, 97-98, 113, 175 sorrow, theory of, 88-89, 107, 115-117 works: “L’Appennino,” 54—60, 69-86 “Le ceneri di Gramsci,” 33—52 La Divina Mimesis, 25

259

“Lingua,” 68—69 La meglio gioventu, 108—12

“Nuova poesia in forma di rosa,” 117-18 “II pianto della scavatrice,” 97108 Poesia in forma di rosa, 108, 115-17 “Una polemica in versi,” 85 Roma 1950, Diario, 62 “Sonnetto primaverile, X,” 2829 “L’umile Italia,” 23 L’usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica, 78

pastoral, 123, 175, 190—92 Pavese, Cesare, 16 poema, 3, 11, 123, 134, 139, 146—48, 193, 217 poemetto, 3, 11, 79 poetic subjectivity, 7, 58, 73, 125, 128-29, 163-64, 194, 215, 243-44. See also Luzi, Mario: poetic subjec¬ tivity in poetic voice, 13, 199, 215, 243. See also Luzi, Mario: poetic voice in poetry: and fragmentation, 12, 126, 134, 138-39, 148-49, 165, 199-200, 246 and “high culture,” 2, 4, 30-31, 155 and lyric dominance, 2-3, 24, 122, 150, 193 marginality of, 1-2, 7, 243-44 and narrative, 10, 12-13, 31, 91, 115, 121, 123-26, 146-49, 19495,216-22 and neurosis, 132—34, 154, 182—83 popular, 30—32, 91, 155 stratified forms of, 24, 30—33, 69, 83 temporality of, 12—13, 93, 122, 150, 218-21, 243 see also mourning postmodernism, 3, 8, 215

260

Index

Quasimodo, Salvatore, 16 Raboni, Giovanni, 194—95n Ramat, Silvio, 16n, 22n, 59n, 120, 127, 150n, 176n, 190n, 200n, 223n realism, 2, 4, 8-10, 120, 122-23, 148, 194, 196 reflection theory, 14, 18 Resistance, Italian, 14-16, 19-25, 47, 144-45 Romanticism, 21, 26, 31, 41-43, 53, 84, 193, 197, 210, 214 Rome: Bertolucci in, 181 nationalism, and the myth of, 43— 44 as palimpsest, 23-24 in the poetic tradition, 24-26, 33 as sepulcher, 26, 28-29 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo: Ro¬ man poems Salinari, Carlo, 85 Santato, Guido, 33n, 61-62, 65, 86n, 91n, 108n, llln

sepulchral verse, 5, 7, 34-36, 43-45, 54-55, 60-63, 66-67, 78-79, 234, 242, 245 Sereni, Vittorio, 121, 149n, 176n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 33, 35-40, 42 Siciliano, Enzo, 159, 184n Siti, Walter, 188-90 socialism, 10, 85, 106 Steiner, George, 226-27 Symbolism, 3, 6, 28, 63, 121, 123-24, 193, 196, 212, 216, 236 Togliatti, Palmiro, 85 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 25—26 Vattimo, Gianni, 63—65, 79n verse epic, 4, 11-12, 47, 91, 120, 123, 138, 148, 150-54, 158, 194200, 243, 245 White, Hayden, 4, 244n Wordsworth, William, 42, 192 Zanzotto, Andrea, 216

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jewell, Keala Jane. The poiesis of history : experimenting with genre in postwar Italy / Keala Jewell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-2645-6 1. Italian poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and history—Italy. 3. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1922—1975—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Bertolucci, Attilio—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Luzi, Mario—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ4088.L46 1992 851'91409358—dc20 92-52762