Writing of the Body in Postwar Italy Giuliano Migliori a Dissertation
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Writing of the Body in Postwar Italy Giuliano Migliori A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies. Chapel Hill 2019 Approved by: Federico Luisetti Maggie Fritz-Morkin Serenella Iovino Ennio Rao Roberto Dainotto Angelo Castagnino © 2019 Giuliano Migliori ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Giuliano Migliori: Writing of the Body in Postwar Italy (Under the direction of Federico Luisetti) The main trajectory of this dissertation is to examine the centrality and ambiguity of human bodies in relation to the crisis of modern subjectivity in literary and critical responses in the Italian cultural milieu after World War II. The paradigm of the body will be considered in its porosity to, and of, the established cultures in which it is inscribed and decoded; by contrast, it also functions as a pole for social and epistemological resiliencies. Thus, following dynamics of re-appropriation and re-signification of the idea of the body, in a dialectic within the history of bodies in Western traditions, this investigation will engage in a variety of discourses on and of the body that emerge during and after the explosive tragedy of World War II. Despite the wide array of studies of imageries of the human body – whether visual or literary, cinematic or poetic – this study intervenes innovatively in the current debate on postwar bodies by looking at three major areas of conflict and bodily warzones: Italian Holocaust narratives (in the accounts of Primo Levi and Liana Millu), Liberation novels through a focus on the cityscape of Naples (by looking at Curzio Malaparte and Domenico Rea’s literary strategies) and the eco-bodily tragedy in the physical and telluric poetic languages of the Northeast (Andrea Zanzotto and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s early poetic interplay between war, nature, and human imageries). This dissertation, therefore, traces the body’s peculiar mode of existence (and persistence) as a ‘human’ trope in iii the representation of ‘personal’ and ‘collective’ war trauma and the project illustrates how the second world conflict demarks a turning point in the analysis of the human body. iv “Ai corpi invisibili del Mediterraneo e a quelli sacri della terraferma” v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 1: LA MALADIE OF THE BODY: PRIMO LEVI AND LIANA MILLU’S CORPOREAL TRAUMA ………………………………………………………………………23 WHOSE BODY IS THIS? ON STAYING VISIBLE …………………………………. 29 (OUR) BODIES FROM THE SKY …………………...……………………...…………47 THE BODY OF THE OTHER…………………………………………………………. 53 CHAPTER 2: BODIES IN WARZONES: NAPLES, THE MYTH AND THE ALLIES….….. 65 THE SKIN-FABRIC BEHIND THE BOOK………………………….…………………69 SAVING ONE’S OWN SKIN…………………………………………….………………….…73 PLEBEIAN SKINS…………….........………………………………..………………… 96 SPACCA-NAPOLI ………………………………………………………………….…102 GESÙ, FATE LUCE…………………………………………………………………....114 CHAPTER 3: IN THE VALLEYS OF MEMORY: ANDREA ZANZOTTO AND PIER PAOLO PASOLINI’S CORPSE POETRY…..……………………………….…………………123 NAMING THE TRAUMA …………………………………...………………………. 128 ZANZOTTO’S BODY-BOTOLE …………………………………………………….. 135 OH, A BODY-WORD …………………………………………………………………146 PASOLINI AND THE INCORPOREAL LIFE OF/IN CASARSA…………………….150 PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE ‘ITALIAN BODIES’………………..……………162 CONCLUSIONS .……………………………………………………………………………...169 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………174 vi INTRODUCTION “They [the philosophers] want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing themselves into angels, they change into beast; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights.” (Montaigne 856). “the fate of the body as an idea, like that of subjectivity to whose emergence it is linked, is haunted by the foreclosure of its past meanings and histories.” (Judowizt 1) The main trajectory of this dissertation is to examine the centrality and ambiguity of human bodies in relation to the crisis of modern subjectivity in literary and critical responses in the Italian cultural milieu after World War II. The paradigm of the body will be considered in its porosity to, and of, the established cultures in which it is inscribed and decoded; by contrast, it also functions as a pole for social and epistemological resiliencies. Thus, following dynamics of re-appropriation and re-signification of the idea of the body, in a dialectic within the history of bodies in Western traditions, this investigation will engage in a variety of discourses on and of the body that emerge during and after the explosive tragedy of World War II. Despite the wide array of studies of imageries of the human body – whether visual or literary, cinematic or poetic – this study intervenes innovatively in the current debate on postwar bodies by looking at three major areas of conflict and bodily warzones: Italian Holocaust narratives (in the accounts of Primo Levi and Liana Millu), Liberation novels through a focus on the cityscape of Naples (by looking at Curzio 1 Malaparte and Domenico Rea’s literary strategies) and the eco-bodily tragedy in the physical and telluric poetic languages of the Northeast (Andrea Zanzotto and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s early poetic interplay between war, nature, and human imageries). This dissertation, therefore, traces the body’s peculiar mode of existence (and persistence) as a ‘human’ trope in the representation of ‘personal’ and ‘collective’ war trauma and the project illustrates how the second world conflict demarks a turning point in the analysis of the human body. It is now a corporeal fragmentation of the living, informing new approaches to the reading of “personaggio-uomo” as a “personaggio- corpo,” a tragic corporeality on stage (di Paolo 11). This corporeality is exhibited in many radical forms that intensify both a reification of the subject and that of the world: the sexual, the visceral and the organic are core functions of literary discourses and historical representations of trauma, warzones, diseases. Corporeality also implies a return to the intimate sphere, revalorizing senses and pre-rational fields. It bridges the human to the natural as part of an ecological understanding of the living. In other words, speaking about our bodies determines a flux of meanings and signals spanning from introspective to expressivity, from private to public spaces, from being to seeming. While focusing in a variety of literary projects (hardly classifiable as autobiographies, memories, diaries, historical reportage, fictional tales, and poetic metamorphosis), this study will meet bodies becoming places to be inscribed and objects of alienation and violence, not only in concentration camps but also in liminal spaces, such as in occupied cities under attack. In addition, literary spaces will also display bodies that serve as ‘speaking’ subjects of resiliency, modes of socio-political revolt and ecological protagonists in the nature-culture divide (particularly in poetic reflections on the limits of human language and expressivity). Thus, postwar cultural production, until the advent of Neo-Avant-Garde appears to be deeply invested in a continuous search to 2 understand the corporeal, shifting often between being viewed as an ‘object’ and becoming a speaking ‘subject’ platform, ethically rehabilitated. This analysis does not attempt to recreate another categorization of the human body to fill in a loophole in the history of ideas nor will it propose a unilateral reading of Italian postwar narratives of the body. Borrowing Dalia Judowizt’s assertion, a fearful disposition to treat the human body as a simple idea in the changing modes of historical paradigms represents an on-going dilemma for anyone approaching the endless tradition of codifying the epistemic existence of our bodies. In line with Judowizt, I view the sphere of corporeality as an openness through which I illustrate the cultural struggle for postwar Italian identities, addressing gender and racial issues, as well as historical dichotomies of the sacred, the human and the natural. Thus, this study, like others in the fields of Italian corporeal literatures, adopts a multilayered approach, rather flexible, rooted in interdisciplinary frameworks due to the mobility – physical, metaphorical, ethical, historical – that bodies as characters assume. In so doing, by recalling Umberto Galimberti’s utterance of “significato fluttuante,” this work bridges critical approaches to the philosophies of embodiment who expose unequal dynamics of societal powers (human/animal – cultural/natural) and the socio- historical ambience in which bodies emerge through literary ventures. Current trends in cultural studies, feminist thought, post-human and also more broadly the so-called “Anthropocene era” have drawn an awareness to literary modes, social uses and political transformations of our thinking of the human body. Bodies do not passively meet our classifications or our orderly viewpoints. Instead, they elude places, symbols, people’s representations due to the ambiguity of their nature as well as the mobile histories of their reminders. Bodies’ discourses challenge the ways of individual perceptions, interact with forms of the ‘external,’ topics of freedom and agency while also tending 3 to be the objects of medical and ethnic numbering. Bodies are prominently physical and sensorial, yet transcend any singularity given by their nature of being-for-here