Literature and fascism in Italy, pt. 3

This is the third of a series of posts exploring literature in Italy from before, during, and after the second World War. For part 1, on Bontempelli’s The Chess Set in the Mirror, see here. For part 2, on Calvino’s The Path to the Spider’s Nest, see here.

I want to cheat my initial conception a little and discuss a book from two decades after the end of the second World War, Anna Maria Ortese’s The Iguana.

Before that, I want to introduce two competing ideas. One is the self-conception of authoritarianism and maybe especially of totalitarianism: that it is orderly and rational; that it replaces the imprecision of compromise and difference with the precision of unity and cohesion; that it is math-become-politics; that the trains run on time and all that. The other idea is the reality of authoritarianism, which is destructive, sloppy, and given to patronage and other forms of underhandedness and favoritism; that is fickle, unreasonable, irregular, whimsical. I want to maintain these two ideas in mind because I think we find both in the balance in The Iguana, and in a particularly fascinating way.

The Iguana is a strange story strangely told. A Milanese count sets sail in the Atlantic to find land. He discovers an island with a Portuguese marquis and his brothers living in relative destitution on it. The count, Aleardo, falls in love with an iguana.

One way to read The Iguana is as a story of two Italies, North and South, or, and especially, as a satire of the culture and attitudes of the North. The count is from Milan—the birthplace of Italian fascism, the seat of Italy’s military-industrial complex, and the center of the post-war ‘economic miracle’. The count’s vaguely colonial project (he sets sail to find and purchase land), and the complex sympathy he cultivates for the iguana, might be seen as a metaphor for the complex and tumultuous relation between the actual or the symbolic North and South—between the modern, industrial, commercial forces of the North and the margin of the dispossessed in the ‘internal colony’ that is the South. Appropriately, Ortese herself grew up in Naples and demonstrated in her writing, in particular in her breakthrough collection The Sea Does Not Bathe Naples, a sympathy for Italy’s marginalized poor in the South. You wouldn’t guess her choice of a Milanese count for her protagonist was exactly for purposes of foregrounding a neutral perspective.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about The Iguana is not the central conceit but the choice of narrator, which is what I’d like to focus on in particular. The narrator knows all or most external and internal events in the world of the novel. But the narrator also speaks with authority about the meaning and value of these events, their beauty or ugliness, their setting, their social, cultural, and religious context, their metaphorical salience, and so on. In a few laughingly absurd instances, the narrator instructs the reader in how to interpret what they’re reading. The narrator of The Iguana knows all things and, behold, makes all things, too.

And here’s why I wanted to inject discussion of The Iguana into this discussion of literature under fascism: The narrator and the protagonist of The Iguana seem to me, perhaps separately though certainly in conjunction, a pristine example of the literary embodiment of authoritarianism, and one that captures the tension between the mathematical self-image of authoritarianism and the fickle and unprincipled reality.

Now, of course, choice of narrator is always a choice, and reading seriously means always taking this choice seriously. But one of the subtleties of The Iguana is that the narrator for the most part hews to a type of narrator that is ordinarily invisible, so it is fairly easy to let the narrator go about their business and not wonder about them. Generally a narrator of this sort, to put it simply and coarsely, is not what is going on in a novel, so there is no need to pay it much mind.

This is not the case in The Iguana. Some injections are relatively innocuous: After the protagonist meets the iguana for the first time and hears her speak, the narrator notes that the count doesn’t lose his cool, and the narrator tosses out a little cosmological aside to help us past the surreality of the iguana ourselves: “The world itself, after all, is fairly enigmatic: at the beginning it wasn’t there, and then it was, and no one has any idea where it came from” (18). Why get hung up on a talking iguana? General observations of this sort abound, and often with the intent of improving the credibility of the story.

The narrator gets entangled in more local affairs also. As a work more or less self-consciously in the ‘magic realist’ tradition of Bontempelli, The Iguana makes its philosophical positions and its stake in the literary world fairly explicit. Thus the narrator refers, in a somewhat cynical mood, to the literary fashions of the day, noting that “his [the Count’s] market was interested in poverty, oppression, and if possible in the spicier modulations of love” (25–6). Realism is directly disparaged later, with a favorable nod to a kind of capitalist or libertarian aesthetic, as the marquis and the count debate the relationship between art and traditional form—the count arguing that “sometimes there’s art without life, art without necessity. This is what happens when the wheels of the cultural industry turn entirely on their own” (51). When the marquis here asks what “realism” is, the count responds with a definition of what it “ought to be,” and then adds: “But people, unfortunately, don’t always affirm the awareness that reality exists on many levels, and that the whole of creation, once you analyze the deepest level of reality, isn’t real at all, and simply the purest and proundest imagination” (52). The magic of the magical realism of The Iguana—the talking iguana, for example—is as much a product of a view about reality as it is a consequence of a critical stance toward the realism of mid-twentieth-century Italian literature.

The narrator is apt to lose the thread on occasion too. At one point, after pushing the narrative along a nudge, the narrator then breaks into straight essay format, offering a wandering set of reflections on religion, pleasure, pain, perversity, suffering, and the nature of “Hell” (92–4). The whole of its relation to the story can be distilled into this idea: that the iguana had once been loved by the marquis, but then had been called a devil, and so “knew” evil in a particularly pure and complete way. The comments on Catholics and Protestants, on whether hell is hot or cold, on perversity—they reveal less about the story and more about the degree of relative freedom and authority the narrator feels to wander wherever they want.

The apex of this dimension of The Iguana comes toward the end. The marquis assaults the iguana:

A veritable tempest of blows then pummelled down on her head, from the front, from the back, on the nape of her neck, on her snout, and the sky itself was screaming. (135)

This is a grown man beating up an iguana, who’s maybe two feet long. He’s beating her up for no obvious reason other than the fact that he used to love her and now doesn’t, and that’s just the way things go with repression and violence. The animal meanwhile is not fighting back; she is shrieking in pain. So awful is her suffering that the whole world is shaking with it. It is a deeply, deeply disturbing scene. The narrator’s view?

You are not to be saddened by these events. The poet of our lovely land tells us that everything passes away:

Even the sea has an ending.

With time, the pains of a little Iguana will likewise vanish. And you are not to grow indignant with the unhappy marquis. He was overwhelmed by the fears that a young, but nonetheless exhausted man can feel on seeing the emigration of his very less hope for a satisfying collocation in society. (136)

That has to be some heavyhanded trolling. If Ortese isn’t deliberately making the narrator a controlling lunatic, you’d have to pretend she was just to excuse her from being a lunatic herself.

But there are good reasons to see the narrator’s all-consuming irrationality as part of the design of the work (intentional or not—I am officially neutral). The narrator, in short, is to the story what the count is to the world of the story: a more or less casual colonizer (the count, that is) with an incapacity for self-critical reflection, internally inconsistent views about the world around him, and a streak of imperialist cruelty.

Thus, for example, although the count cultivates a self-image as the iguana’s hero, this yields to the reality that, when the iguana is mocked and chased into a corner, the count does nothing; he simply drowns in the fascination of it all.

Why the Count didn't rise from his perch at the top of the ladder, go down among these people, and take his protégée by the hand, makes for a riddle that only his affection for the little Iguana can explain. He was completely bewitched by her suffering and solitude, by her horrifying intensity and her fantasies, by the unreal, painfilled reality she lived in. . . . He had been so unseated from his normally Olympian calm by all these particulars . . . as to be overcome now by a form of pain—and here, Reader, you are not to be surprised, since he was only a human being—not similar to drowsiness. (105)

“[A] riddle that only his affection for the little Iguana can explain” indeed. But the narrator is versed enough in its logic that they instruct us (“Reader, you are not to be surprised . . . ”) in the protagonist’s distinctively twisted art of cruelty: Take so little interest in the plight of others, even those you see yourself as caring for, that their suffering dulls you, puts you to sleep. The Count actually falls asleep here, to be clear. I’m officially running out of italics.

Nevertheless, it is difficult—thanks to the narrator’s and the Count’s own pathos-infused affection for her—not (of course!) to feel sympathy for the iguana, whose story is essentially this: One man cares deeply for her, then discards her; another man cares deeply for her, then discards her. Sympathy and indifference exist right alongside each other in The Iguana, and they capture, fairy-tale-like, the complex affective internal war, as it were, of colonialism: between an air of respect for the exotic and the hard reality of domination.

This tension comes particularly to the fore at what should be the climax of the count’s reunion with the iguana. Finally, it would seem, they can be together forever, and so on.

The Count’s first impulse was to approach her and take her in his arms, telling her what he intended to do for her and that starting right now she was forever to think of him as her servant and her daddy and she’d bear his name and have all of his money; but then he looked at her better, and something held him back. (150; my emphasis)

What “held him back”? The image of her sweeping the floor:

He suspected—from the out-sized kerchief, her general listlessness, that way of dragging the broom, vexatiously making a mess rather than cleaning—that the creature was scheming to gain by subterfuge what he spontaneously wanted to give her; she was deliberately playing on his feelings. (150–1)

Whether she simply looks that way because she’s recently been violently assaulted, or suffered ongoing abuse at the hand of the marquis, never crosses the count’s or the narrator’s mind. Whether she looks that way because she’s enslaved and slavery is miserable doesn’t seem to enter their minds either. The narrator compares her composure to that of “irritated children.” Rather than take her in his arms, the count critiques her sweeping technique. Then he offers her a bunch of money, and when she lies about cuts on her neck (which her previous “daddy” inflicted on her) he attacks her for lying. And so on.

That’s the climax, the big romantic payoff: acid delivery of lessons in a domestic trade.

The count’s fickleness isn’t restricted to animals. Unsurprisingly, for example, he comes to despise the Portuguese marquis about as easily as he had fallen for him (see 158f.).

What’s important in these transformations is how they capture the tension between the two ideas of authoritarianism I attempted to sketch above. The count’s attitude to the iguana is of course the obvious example. The count can’t fathom the arbitrariness of the marquis’ affection for the iguana, so the count installs himself as her more reasonable keeper, and then—ew, did you see the way she was sweeping?

All of this is a metaphor, by the way. In a wandering fever dream of a conclusion (the count dies in the end, and all of it is him dying), the count is maybe a boy, the iguana is maybe a girl, there’s a trial, but maybe the trial is a trial of all humanity. Pulling back the veil on the whole novel, the narrator writes of the count, in the midst of the trial:

Then he felt that these voyages are dreams, and iguanas are warnings. That there are no iguanas, but only disguises, disguises thought up by human beings for the oppression of their neighbors and then held in place by a cruel and terrifying society. (180)

That, just in case it wasn’t clear when the iguana had earlier demanded a pay raise under the purported terms of her union contract with the marquis, only to discover there was no union (160–61). Actually—of course! you might find yourself yelling for the last twenty or forty pages—the book is about exploitation.

The funniest part of this ‘lesson’ is this. The count shows up at an island, sees the marquis and his two brothers there (and the iguana). We go through the whole rigamarole described above, and then he enters the twenty-page fugue state of impending insanity and death, and in the end—there aren’t italics enough for this—it turns out there is a village just down the way (185). I don’t know that there could be a more pronounced way of capturing, a more pronounced indictment of, the myopia at the heart of the count’s view of things. His pretensions may be colonialist and imperialist, but his understanding is deeply (or superficially, as it were) parochial.

The relation of The Iguana to its time, and to the time before its time, might be seen to work in structural similarities or parallels. The relation between the count and the iguana is like that of North to South; of urban, landowning elite to rural peasant; of Italy generally to its WWII colonies; of humans to nature; perhaps also, I would urge, of narrator to reader. The problems of the count’s colonial project, Ortese seems to want us to notice, are structurally synonymous with the problems of the attitude we occupy toward nature. Then the tension between the self-image and the reality of the count’s (or the narrator’s) colonialist ambitions (or authoritarian tendencies) are synonymous with the sort of tension between stewardship and exploitation in the environmental context. Like the count, we care for things—until we don’t.

Text

The Iguana was translated by Henry Martin for McPherson in 1988; it’s available here.