Romanità and reality

The goal of this series is to study the diverse landscape of the novel in Italy during and after the rise and fall of fascism. In particular, I’m interested in how novels of the period address the relationship, broadly construed, between myth and reality. Beyond its more obvious excesses of control and coercion, Mussolini’s regime was given to virtually manic excesses of self-mythologization. Indeed, over time this gave rise to a variety of strategic postures, as fascism recalibrated its aesthetic ambitions from overt theatricality to more restrained, administrative forms of authority. If art can’t escape being “about its time,” charting nodes in the career of literature during the fascist era is a crooked march.

Every novel expresses some way of negotiating its present. At a minimum, it is its own argument that it should have been written and now should be read and its contents appreciated in some fashion or another. In some instances it can pretend, more or less explicitly, to capture the reality of its present in a sort of mirror reflection, and then the motif of present-negotiation is evident. But in other instances a novel can suggest or offer an occasion for looking away. Often the author isn’t master of these dynamics, and in this last case perhaps most especially. Most escapist fantasy, for example, is obviously thinly veiled allegory. Escaping the present through literature can be seen as a gesture of protest or exhaustion—that is, an expression of a mode of negotiating the present. The present manages its way to the surface of the work somehow.

This relationship between the novel and its present becomes particularly stressed in certain political climates—and, to put not too fine a point to it, in certain bad political climates such as fascist Italy, which is the subject of this series. Allow me to propose a seriously weak definition of a bad political climate as one that constrains the production of art, and I’ll add, incompletely, that by “political climate” I mean not just a government or regime but, additionally, the network of beliefs, tendencies, behaviors, norms, and institutions, broadly construed, that justify it. The most obvious stressors in a bad political climate work quietly at preventing the production of literature or art at all. And then, of course, there is the stressor of censorship, which is particularly acute in political climates dependent on favoring certain narrative forms or ideals and disfavoring others.

Authoritarianism from, say, 1920 to 1960 was, among other things, an uncontrolled experiment in aesthetics involving two related ideas. The first was that art and aesthetic experience are powerful, so should be mobilized by regimes to press a particular political vision. The second was also that art and aesthetic experience are powerful, with the different consequence however that ‘subversive’ art should be suppressed. The intensity of both impulses is a defining lesson of the period. At least in the Americas, in Europe, and in Asia, this aesthetic now appears historically specific, however. Parades, banners, and national literatures have given way to the minimal, ambient, administrative aesthetics of the present. I will gratuitously note one consequence of this difference: A free literature, like a free press, is no longer sufficient evidence of good government.

This supplies one justification for considering art and literature under more overtly controlling regimes like Mussolini’s. The political threats are real; they are impressed on the works; the evidence of the assertion of power through aesthetics has the potential for being more easily, more directly traced. But even in these cases certain facts about art keep interpretation well below the line of certainty. Bontempelli publishes a story about a boy who travels into a mirror in the year of Mussolini’s March on Rome. What does the one have to do with the other? Maybe nothing, maybe everything, maybe something. What we do know is that fascism of the period favored certain narratives over others. One of the preferred narratives, by the way, was that the March on Rome was a mass revolutionary uprising and not a complete charade, which of course was entirely false. Mussolini was waiting in Milan while the “march” was going on; it was only after being politely summoned by the king to form a government that he took an overnight passenger train to Rome. Power and narrative are inextricably bound up with each other. What could a story about a boy traveling into a magic world of talking chess pieces have to do with all that? Maybe nothing, etc.

Art is perhaps related to its present, then, but indeterminately and obscurely. Even in the ‘ideal’ circumstance (such as fascist Italy), where a regime overtly favors one sort of art, and actively suppresses another, there is at least one important gap between authority and its exercise. It is that governments—and probably the bad ones in particular—often have no clue what is good for them, and even when they do (even if they had explicit instructions telling them what art was good for them and what art was bad), applying rules of this sort is exceedingly difficult, and governments are not exactly masters of the difficult.

Imagine you’re a censor evaluating, say, Oliver Twist. The novel is obviously critical of English society and politics. But it is also a story about the triumph of the individual; it is also a celebration of English law. Oliver’s exceptionalism turns out to have a reason: He’s actually a rich kid who’s found himself in the wrong place; he’s of ‘good stock’ (not like one of these run-of-the-mill child laborers, you see, who probably deserve their lot, lol). One of the ‘goods’ of the ending is the restoration of his social standing. Oliver Twist could be then read as a long argument for the view that, although here and there badly administered, English laws and values are the right ones and, if only the reader will join the cause, too, they will prevail. Of course, there’s a lot of “England sucks” you have to wade through to get there, but that negativity has the ‘benefit’ of legitimating the ultimate triumph. (Dickens, he’s just like you! He thinks England sucks! Now, watch this . . . .) But forget your own perspective. How’s “your average reader” going to interpret it? What if they don’t get past the first hundred pages of workhouses and child labor and all that? What if they never learn Oliver is good because he’s from a ‘good’ family? What if they never learn virtue is a blood inheritance? What are they going to think about your hereditary monarchy then?

Artists also have to eat. Perhaps the intuition to hold the director of Triumph of the Will morally accountable to a degree we might not hold, say, a worker assembling German tanks is complex or misguided. Now, if the Nazis were right about the relationship between art and power, then Leni Riefenstahl carries an immense burden. On the other hand, if films are just window dressing to Blitzkrieg (after all, bullets and bombs are what do the killing, not parade B-roll), perhaps the factory worker deserves a bit more moral scrutiny here. The response to this version can then be a response to the first: Yes, but the factory worker also has to eat.

All of that should be enough to demonstrate the conceptual spine of this thought: There is no obvious line demarcating a regime’s defenders from its detractors. There is no obvious line demarcating a work as complicit, or even a complicit genre of work, from a work or genre that is subversive. The indeterminacy of reception, the imperfections of actual political processes, and—which I haven’t mentioned—the non-neutrality of the publishing industry all speak against such tidy distinctions. A way of recognizing this without allowing it to lapse into handwaving at ‘concrete’ questions would be to say that works are inevitably enmeshed or woven into the fabric of their times. They cannot in any obvious way stand outside of it. The question about ‘the politics of’ a work then might be reposed like this: How does a work manage to negotiate this relationship, that is, to its present?

If you were a censor interested in categorizing works as subversive or not, you might distinguish between, say, realist and non-realist works. Then, if your goal were to advance or at least not to prevent the advancement of the interests of the regime, you might, out of hand, favor the latter for its seeming innocuousness over the former for its potential subversiveness. Indeed, works such as Moravia’s Time of Indifference or Alvaro’s Revolt in Aspromonte are potentially subversive in just this way, shining a light as they do on the miseries of fascism, without offering any sort of consolation. By contrast, works such as, say, Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon or Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, ‘realist’ as they are, conform perhaps more closely to the Oliver Twist idea that injustices are misadministration, not wrong principles at work; that institutions can be salvaged.

On the other hand, the non-realist works are not an ideological monolith either. Bontempelli, Buzzati, Vittorini, and Calvino all fall perhaps on the side of the non-realist, but, however displaced their narratives may be, it is nevertheless possible to read these allegorically as addressing their present. In fact, from a reader’s perspective, it might just be a condition of sense that they do, in some way, address their present. Gadda and Malaparte present a sort of grotesque non-realism that challenges sense and order. They aren’t overtly political, perhaps, but they have an unmistakably critical edge.

Governments of Mussolini’s sort—like some contemporary governments, too—thrive on casting the relationship between fact and fiction into doubt, thereby blurring the line between aesthetics and authority. The advantage of hindsight, and of relative critical distance from the fascist period in Italy, is that it allows us to see more clearly the range of possibilities for literature in the present.

Texts

This is a working bibliography of novels written and/or published in Italy or by Italian writers from 1922 to the fall of fascism, with some residual outliers. Most are collected on this Bookshop shelf. Links below take you to posts discussing the work.

• 1922: Massimo Bontempelli, The Chess Set in the Mirror
• 1923: Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
• 1926: Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
• 1929: Alberto Moravia, The Time of Indifference
• 1929: De Chirico, Hebdomeros
• 1929: Massimo Bontempelli, The Son of Two Mothers
• 1930: Corrado Alvaro, Revolt in Aspromonte
• 1933: Ignazio Silone, Fontamara
• 1933–1934: Elio Vittorini, Red Carnation
• 1938: Emilio Lussu, One Year on the High Plateau
• 1938–1941: Carlo Emilio Gadda, Acquainted with Grief (The Experience of Pain)
• 1940: Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe
• 1941: Elio Vittorini, Conversation in Sicily
• 1942: Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City
• 1944: Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt
• 1945: Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli
• 1947: Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nest
• 1947: Ennio Flaiano, A Time To Kill
• 1948: Cesare Pavese, The House on the Hill
• 1957: Carlo Emilio Gadda, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana
• 1963: Beppe Fenoglio, A Private Affair
• 1963: Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon
• 1965: Anna Maria Ortese, The Iguana