Literature and fascism in Italy, pt. 1

This is the first of a series of posts exploring literature in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in Italy.

Let me begin from what seems to me a more or less unproblematic premise: States that imprison or kill dissidents merely for being dissidents, or that cancel popular elections, or that censor the press, are all bad states. By any of these metrics, Mussolini’s Italy was a bad state. I am not collecting ideas about historical or political realities here; this will do.

With that as a premise, the question I want to pose over the course of a few posts is this: How did writers before, during, and after Mussolini’s reign absorb and/or deflect the force and reach of the bad state? Rather than dwell on this question in any sustained theoretical fashion, I want to begin by considering a work published in the year of the March on Rome: Massimo Bontempelli’s The Chess Set in the Mirror.

Some literary schools in Italy in the 1920s

Bontempelli inherits a literary establishment being stretched in a few different directions, and two in particular:

• the verismo movement, which sought to depict reality as it is; and
• the decadent movement, which sought to depict human excellence and excess.

You might say that both movements depend on the idea that there is a conflict, perhaps an inevitable one, between the natural world and the imagination, and that we ought to favor one as the site of literary exploration.

Bontempelli himself favored a sort of synthesis of these movements under the banner of what he called (before the use of this expression in, for example, Latin America) ‘magic realism’. Magic realism is the attempt in literature and other arts to depict the imaginary in the natural world—in other words, to see the imaginary and the natural as compatible; to overcome the dichotomy of reason and nature. The Chess Set in the Mirror is one of Bontempelli’s first explorations of this possibility.

The Chess Set in the Mirror

In The Chess Set, a boy is transported into a mirror that has the magical power of capturing every self-conscious being who looks into it. In the world of the mirror, there is no time or aging. The boy meets his grandmother as a young woman, along with her family’s porters and a burglar who stole from her. In the world of the mirror, there are no social divisions or classes. The world of the mirror is a sort of ideal reflection of the natural world—say, a kind of socialist ideal, or some hallucinatory version or projection of that ideal.

Presumably because chess is an exemplar of rationality, chess pieces are endowed with consciousness and live in the world of the mirror (whereas furniture, for example, does not). But the chess pieces play chess themselves in the mirror world; they have no masters. One of the kings expresses the view that, in fact, the world of the mirror is the real one. The boy pities him for being such a fool.

For obscure reasons (the obscurity of the justification being part of the point), the world of the mirror becomes hostile to the boy, precisely as, in the years since the end of World War I, the socialist experiment in Italy had become hostile to the upper classes (creating one impetus for the rise of fascism). Eventually the boy is physically attacked (by the pawns, of course) and must escape. In the real world, chess is a mere game; in the world of the mirror, chess is serious business.

The Chess Set was written by an interesting author at an interesting time. Bontempelli would go on to join the fascist party officially in 1924 but broke from it beginning in the mid-1930s. The Chess Set represents, almost transparently, bourgeois anxiety about a politically unstable time, and perhaps a degree of uncertain optimism about fascism as a vehicle for shepherding Italy into the modern age. I want this to serve as one bookend of our investigation of writing in fascist Italy.

Alice and The Chess Set

There is an obvious comparison here to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and not only for reasons of content (a kid wanders into a mirror world; some chess gets played; etc.); Carroll was also widely read and admired, in a “one of us” sort of way, among the French surrealists (by Breton, for example) with whom Bontempelli was in conversation in the 1920s.

One crucial difference, however, is that, whereas in Carroll the mirror functions as a vehicle of a lighthearted critique of authority, in Bontempelli it serves to exemplify the terror of the absence of authority. The mirror world Alice discovers is playfully nonsensical; the mirror world in The Chess Set is violently so. Carroll is writing in the 1860s and 1870s, at the height of British imperialism; Bontempelli is writing at the tail end of the Biennio Rosso, a two-year period of social unrest and uncertainty. The mirrors, indeed, reflect different political realities, and different attitudes of the upper classes toward authority.

Having this comparison in mind is a useful way to appreciate the extent to which—to put it one way—Bontempelli’s Chess Set is more than just a story about a kid, a mirror, and animated chess pieces. It’s a story about violence in the absence of human, personal authority. The trope is all too familiar: You can have a little bit of authoritarianism, or you can have violent anarchy. Typically, at the end of the story, the boy is not revealed as the hero of his own escape; he says, presumably to one of his parents (“a voice”), “I was waiting for someone to let me out of here.” There are certainly worse ways of capturing the fear and anxiety of the upper class in Italy in the 1920s.

The boy in The Chess Set

In the next post, I want to discuss Italo Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, published twenty-five years after The Chess Set, and serving as the other bookend, as it were, to twenty-five years of fascism in Italy.

To afford a comparative perspective, consider the boy in The Chess Set. Unlike Alice, he is essentially uncurious in any fundamental way. He is awed (though quickly underwhelmed) by the strange terrain of the mirror world, but he never once questions his conviction that the world he knows is the real one, and that what the king and other beings of the mirror world believe is not only false but pitiably foolish. In that respect, the child is a fully realized epistemic subject. He doesn’t change as a result of his trip; there is no “I’ll never drink again” moment. Moreover, the violence the boy encounters is not actual violence; the world he lives in is not an actually violent world; all of that happens in the parallel reality of the mirror.

Coda

Bontempelli writes The Chess Set. Then Mussolini becomes dictator. Over the next quarter-century, Italy censors the press, arrests and exiles dissidents, cancels elections, invades and colonizes Libya and Ethiopia, joins forces with totalitarian governments in Germany and Japan, passes laws stripping Jews of their rights, goes to war against the Allies, and about half a million Italians are killed as a result of all this.

And that’s when Calvino writes The Path, about a child trying to make sense of the violent world around him.