Rivel-Azione

It is in a gesture towards fostering such an interdisciplinary approach, if only by highlighting the need for it, that we planned and organized the international conference Rivel-Azione. Politica della poesia e poesia della politica in Europa e nel Mediterraneo in età contemporanea, which was held virtually in February 2022 (when the Pandemic was still raging) and hosted by L’Università degli Studi Roma Tre. The event brought together almost forty experts representing different generations and different disciplines: contemporary historians, literature historians, art historians, as well as experts in comparative fascist studies and the philosophy of aesthetics. The fruit of this experiment in breaking the mould of the conventional understanding of how art and politics intersect and interact was a stimulating forum of debate, collaboration, and disagreement on the nexus between the two spheres, with particular reference to Giolittian and Mussolinian Italy, in a symposium that ran over two days and six sessions. The first two, dedicated to Italian poetry before the Second World War, form the basis for the present collection of essays. In those sessions, elements of literary, artistic, aesthetic, and historical studies mixed in a way that turned them into a sort of laboratory which it would be nice to think might combine explosively to at least crack the wall (in the spirit of Boccioni explored in Larissa Maria Müller’s in this volume) that for too long has been erected between specialist fields in the human sciences, particularly artistic and political studies.

The risks and limits inherent in the relationship between history (and historiography) and poetry (and literary studies) were explored by Roland Barthes in a critical essay of 1960 where the French semiotician and philosopher of literary meaning emphasized, in terms which echoed the arguments of Plato’s attack on art as ‘lies’, the distance that separated ‘two continents’: on the one hand the ‘world’ with its phenomenological ‘exuberance’ and complexity, and on the other the ‘work of art’ with its ‘appearance of uniqueness’ and ambivalence. The idea of that these two continents were somehow complementary was according to him nothing less than a ‘dream’ and the impossibility of turning it into reality compelled the academic, at least epistemologically, to opt for one or the other field of study.⁵

A contrasting perspective was offered by Walter Benjamin who interpreted poetry as an instrument for the negation of the world and the anticipation of utopia by exploiting narrative’s inbuilt capacity for conjuring up figurative simulations of alternative realities.⁶ Seen through this lens, poetry’s function is precisely to keep alive the dream of a different existence and the realization of a new world now perceived not just possible but urgent.⁷ As a result Benjamin considered the lyrical and poetic response to problems existing in external reality as valid only to the extent that it served to highlight and conceptually elaborate the ongoing crisis of politics and acted as a catalyst to questioning and revolting against the status quo; however artistic production became unnatural and unhealthy when instead of challenging the power system it implicitly upheld it through the contemplation or embellishment of the present social and cultural order.⁸ Moreover, within the Marxist tradition other points of view coexist about the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Ernst Bloch, for example, is closer to Benjamin. One element which emerges clearly from his polemic with György Lukàcs is that, when confronted with the identification of fascism (i.e. the generic form of politics) with irrationalism, the (Stalinist) myth of socialist realism and the invocation of the Enlightenment rationalist tradition typical of the Hungarian thinker, Bloch stressed the genuine element of aesthetic and moral revolt found in Expressionism, even within its petit bourgeois variants.

More trenchant and radical still are the positions adopted by Bertolt Brecht in his theoretical writings. His revulsion against the canons of bourgeois art and his deep vein of irony subvert the very idea of ‘great’ poetry and literature or the assumption that they should necessarily inspire a sense of respect, awe and the sublime.⁹ His sustained campaign against them stemmed from a key principle of the avant-garde of the day, namely that the ‘good old’ had to be rejected along with the axiomatic faith in ‘Man’ and progress, so as to make way for the ‘bad new’.¹⁰

In either case, whether it is considered in negative terms as an ephemeral old individualist dream or as acquiring a positive dimension through its role of evoking a new mass utopia of liberation without any concrete action, poetry still ends up, especially in Italy, irremediably split off and disconnected from history as such. Even after the crisis of the liberal system and the rise of Fascism (i.e. the specific Italian movement), the poetic arts – consistent with Benedetto Croce’s reflection of 1923 on poetry and non-poetry – have remained traditionally associated with an atemporal, aestheticizing and absolute vision essentially incompatible with the relative ‘prose’ of politics and with the collective sphere of contemporary history.¹¹

Between the 1960s and 1970 in the period of the so-called ‘cultural turn’, debates about the renewal of Italian cultural criticism put particular stress on the need to overcome the distinction between art and politics through new synergies and imaginative syntheses. From the orbit of literary criticism works started to become published which were able to ‘carefully locate humanist styles of literary creativity within the historiography and the ideological history of the contemporary age.’¹² In this context Roberto Tessari cited as examples Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano by Carlo Salinari, Scrittori e popolo by Alberto Asor Rosa and Letteratura e mito in D’Annunzio by Ezio Raimondi, considering them pieces of research which were impressive in the insights results they produced and the new perspectives they opened up, even if they adopted different approaches while sharing an unmistakable, but sometimes self-defeating, moral and ideological agenda.

The basic weakness of such analyses, however, is that identifying the influence of particular historical periods and cultural processes detectable in the works they analysed had the effect of encouraging later experts to focus simply on the task – which is not an immediately historiographical one – of reconstituting the Zeitgeist of various epochs, which meant neglecting historical conjunctures and nodes which are constituted not only by biographical experiences, but also by the substantive politico-cultural options and subliminal social influences which shape an artist’s worldview, aesthetics, and actions. As Cesare Cases put it so succinctly, ‘every form of art is a product of its time, but in order for the artist to express him/herself it must be structured according to strict internal norms, with the result that the generative force of history always coincides with that of aesthetics’, and, we would add, ends up being absorbed into it. As Andrea Cortellessa has shown, the critical impasse has been broken by the increasingly wide-spread adoption of an approach of recognizing that ‘poetry is made with the raw materials of history’.¹³

Here it is worth citing Andrea Zanzotto’s observation that creative works seems initially to serve only to ‘ramble aimlessly and obfuscate, but in the end illuminate just how much has conglomerated and become substantive in history’.¹⁴ Talking about poetic works, Natalino Sapegno has remarked on the growing trend for historians to investigate ‘their intrinsic historicity, the possibility that a constant dialectic exists between those creative facts and the reality of which they are simultaneously both the mirror, the recreation, and generative component’.¹⁵ The social canons, moral values, and framework of ideals shaping the works of artists have thus come to be increasingly interpreted in terms which are connected to the principle nodes of history.

The realization by intellectuals that they are not the ones who ‘shape and condition by themselves historical circumstances […] but the circumstances which affect them and mould them according to their own logic’,¹⁶ helps explain the anxieties and ambivalences of their literary production. However, it does not enable historians to grasp the historical and performative role not just of the word, but the image – by which I mean imaginative techniques of visualization, myths, symbols and rituals – of modernity, in other words, their active contribution directed to anticipating and determining mental customs and habits which are crystallized in specific conceptions of life and politics. Modris Eksteins offers an important insight into the impact of modernism on the history of the first half of the 20th century when he writes ‘very few critics have ventured to extend these notions of the avant-garde and modernism to the social and political as well as artistic agents of revolt, and to the act of rebellion in general, in order to identify’ that ‘broad wave of sentiment and endeavour’ that underlay the powerful processes of ideological redefinition at work in the 19th century.¹⁷

The question of the relationship between art and life becomes increasingly urgent in the passage from the 19th to the 20th century.¹⁸ The crisis of traditional religious and moral and the inability of scientific progress to respond to the identity crisis of the average inhabitant of the modern city, to need values, gave rise to ground-breaking forms of artistic experimentation by what was now known as the avant-garde who produce works shot through with tensions of an overtly political nature. In the work of Wilhelm Dilthey aesthetics and poetics are finally considered in their relationship to the dynamism of contemporary lived experience in its historical articulation.¹⁹ At the beginning of the 20th century, pioneers in philosophy and psychoanalysis began to explore the idea of art as a profound element in the fusion of form and life, identity and history, an element with the power to rework ancient myths and universal images to make them relevant adapt to the historical context in which the artists found themselves.

The contributions of literary criticism and historiography obviously become compatible once they adopt an approach which, while still accepting the 19th century as the age of the primacy of politics, also recognizes in the currents concerned with the search for the sacred and the celebration of the irrational, intuitive and self-reflexive, not a regressive deviation from the direction of history, but the thrust towards an alternative, respiritualized, re-enchanted modernity. The plethora of bids at the turn of the century by ‘creatives’ of all kinds to discover or generate what Peter Berger calls a new nomos²⁰ are thus to be seen as a phenomenon profoundly correlated to the long crisis of modernity and to the seismic, high profile politico-ideological forces that generated them and still dominate the historical memory.²¹ The almost infinite variety of new aesthetics and manifestos, programmes, tendencies, schools, movements, and literary currents offer an inexhaustible mine of material to process and interpret to the contemporary historian interested in exploring the fundamental contamination and enrichment of artistic forms and ideas by the main historical and political conjunctures of modernity. Besides, the long stream of original artistic works that poured forth between the 18th and 19th century – whether ‘programmatic’ or ‘epiphanic’ (to use the important distinction suggested by Roger Griffin)²² – have been in constant dialogue, and sometimes heated argument, with history. It was artistic and literary creations that played a fundamental role in articulating the sense of the crisis of the liberal bourgeoisie between the fin de siècle and triumph of the belle époque and which in doing so adumbrated the tragedies of the 20th century.²³

The experience of the First World War as a fracture and caesura in Western civilization gave rise to a tragico-dramatic perception of European history associated with the image of the ‘decline of the West’ but also with the myth of the regeneration of humanity. Artistic elites had a major role in the renewal of mentalities and political discourses, and in the elaboration of that intricate universe of symbols, myths, blueprints for the future, and collective rituals which underpinned the seismic and mostly catastrophic transformations which from the Great War onwards affected all nations, and not just European ones.²⁴ The very meaning of poetry, as we have stressed earlier, emerged from the conflict thrown into disarray by an experience which had a major impact on a number of major writers in the whole of Europe, either engaged directly in military action, or else mediated and filtered indirectly in ways which energized new types of literature and aesthetic whose authors were more aware than ever of art’s performative power and of their unique public role which they now saw as in way secondary in the task of transforming modern societies.

The role of creative artists and poets in the chaotic aftermath of a bloody war, whose destabilizing effect was enhanced by the Russian Revolution which it did so much to precipitate, is still the object of many research projects and in-depth studies.²⁵ When the chaos was resolved by the ascendancy of an ultranationalism which often had totalizing aspirations, many writers and artists of the time not only adapted to the goals of the regime, but embraced them, finding in the attempted revolution outlets for their longings for the absolute and a new ‘sacred canopy’ which had been a Leitmotiv of the literature the pre-war years.²⁶ Alongside other artistic forms which were recognized as particularly relevant to the New Italy, the cultural production of symbols became under Fascism one of the few areas of continuous experimentalism, and one of the most sophisticated instruments for constructing the ‘factory of consensus’,²⁷ and at the same time, one of the literary forms most able to register the impact of the dictatorships that arose in various national contexts.

The following volume certainly makes no claim to give a full picture of the many trends, currents, and leading protagonists of the literary scene in Italy from the end of the 19th century till the establishment of Fascism. In fact, the ten essays represent only a quarter of the papers presented at the conference, which themselves were only a minute sample of the potential topics calling for serious research in this rich area of creativity and activity. The contributions have been above all selected to emphasize a fundamental principle for the historian of literature: the need to interpret some poetic works not solely as texts but as unique products of a particular context, thereby providing them with a historical significance and making them live, to use Fausto Curi’s incisive formula.²⁸ By maintaining a focus on the temporal dimension and context of works, the recognition of the part of poetic production where the connections with history and politics are most dense can stimulate new reflections on and insights into the nexus between singular poetic experiences and some key nodes of the history of united Italy until the Second World War.

But the main purpose of this book is to illustrate some examples of the continuous interweaving of themes and aesthetic sensibilities with politics and the capacity of poetic language to give expression to hopes, passions, tensions, fears and dilemmas that characterized a long period in the life of the nation in which multiple, often contradictory, points of view confronted each other. A secondary aim is to reinforce the fruitfulness of an open collaborative approach to cultural history which, through new symposia, seminars, workshops, and other collective initiatives, explores the nexus between the sense of History and the sense of Art as a further vantage point from which to understand the ideological, symbolic, and mental universes that typify modernity.

In this context I would like to thank those who participated in the conference but whose have not contributed essays to this volume, even though they contributed to enrich its themes, interpretations and perspectives: in particular, the two valuable discussants Giuliana Chamedes and Marla Stone; not to forget Constantin Iordachi, Thea Santangelo and Luca Somigli. A special thanks must go to Roger Griffin, co-author of this volume, as well as a fundamental source of support and scientific-intellectual reference points in its conception and realization. His enthusiasm helped make the conference project become a reality by ensuring that the convention cast its net for potential contributors as wide as possible, while his intellectual curiosity has always been a source of valuable theories and insights on the exquisite permeable membrane that has always separated – but also provided the interface for – the spheres of aesthetics and politics. The synergy and reciprocity of the two which emerges so clearly from the resulting conference papers and essays will hopefully help overcome what Sanguineti characterized as ‘the exclusive and self-obsessed ethos’²⁹ of the traditional history of poetry in Italy and of a significant part of its contemporary history, and thereby deliver on the initial promise of the cultural turn half a century after it proclaimed its coming revolution in the human sciences.

1 Vincenzo Gioberti, Del Primato morale e civile degli Italiani, II (Brussels: Meline, Cans e compagnia, 1843), 514.

2 Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics. Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996); Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World. Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual history of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Modernism 1914–1939. Designing a New World (London: V&A Publications, 2006).

3 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn. Selected Writing on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London, New York: Verso, 1998); Victoria E. Bonnell, and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1999).

4 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1987); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); David Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in the Twentieth-Century (New York: Routledge, 2006).

5 Roland Barthes, ‘Storia o letteratura?’ [Histoire ou littérature, 1960], in Roland Barthes, Saggi critici (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), 78.

6 Cesare Cases, La critica sociologica, in Maria Corti and Cesare Segre, eds., I metodi attuali della critica in Italia (Turin: ERI, 1970), 33.

7 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Discorso su lirica e società’ [Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,1957], in Note per la letteratura 1943–1961 (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 46–64. On Adorno’s intervention from a historical point of view see Robert Kaufman, Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism. Today. Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity, in Tom Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 354–375.

8 On Benjamin’s approach, Fredric Jameson, ed., Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism. Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács (New York: Verso, 1977); Russell Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

9 Bertold Brecht, ‘Concorso di poesia lirica dell’anno 1927’ [Lyric-Wettbewerb 1927], (1927), in Bertolt Brecht, Scritti sulla letteratura e sull’arte (Turin: Einaudi 1973), 29–35

10 Bertolt Brecht ‘I saggi di George Lukács’ [Die Essays von Georg Lukács, 1938], in Brecht, Scritti sulla letteratura e sull’arte, 177.

11 Cf. Benedetto Croce, La poesia. Introduzione alla critica e storia della poesia e della letteratura (Bari: Laterza, 1980; first published 1936). On the persistence of such interpretations cf. Fausto Curi, La poesia italiana del Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1999), 3; Roberto Antonelli, Tempo e spazio nella storiografia letteraria, in Alberto Asor Rosa, ed., La scrittura e la storia: problemi di storiografia letteraria [Scandicci (FI): La Nuova Italia, 1995], 171; Gianfranco Contini, La parte di Benedetto Croce nella cultura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1972).

12 Roberto Tessari, Il mito della macchina. Letteratura e industria del primo novecento italiano (Milan: Mursia, 1973), 8.