Humanity, Hybridism and Liminality in Tommaso Landolfi (1939-1950)
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/104806/ Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications Humanity, Hybridism and Liminality in Tommaso Landolfi (1939-1950) by Paola Roccella A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies University of Warwick, School of Modern Languages and Cultures September 2017 3 Contents Acknowledgments p. 6 Declaration p. 7 Abstract p. 8 Introduction p. 9 Chapter 1: Landolfi, Leopardi and the Twentieth-century Fantastic Introduction p. 21 Leopardi and Zibaldone in 1937 p. 24 Landolfi‟s Textual Operation p. 29 Tradition and Modernity p. 34 Conclusion p. 41 Chapter 2: The City and Outer Space Introduction p. 45 An oblique political critique? p. 47 From the city to the province: questioning the Fascist myth of the land p. 51 The sense of festivity and the countryside p. 57 The encounter with the other: questioning anthropocentrism p. 61 A matter of purity: questioning race p. 66 The triumph of alterity: witchery and lycanthropy p. 70 The way to the Sabbath p. 74 Conclusions p. 78 Chapter 3: A Gothic counter-narrative of the Italian civil war Introduction p. 80 Racconto d’autunno, neorealism and Gothic machinery p. 83 Conveying instability: a liminal text p. 100 Giving voice to the victims p. 105 4 Conclusions p. 112 Chapter 4: A Journey from the Moon to Madness Introduction p. 115 The tradition of the Cosmic Journey in Western Culture p. 117 An Italian Aspiration to „Map the World‟ p. 121 Cancroregina and Popular Culture p. 124 Behind the Scenes of Science Fiction p. 127 On the Border between Mania and Melancholia p. 132 Cancroregina: a Liminal Entity p. 140 Conclusions p. 144 Conclusions p. 146 Appendix 1 p. 156 Appendix 2 p. 161 Appendix 3 p. 167 Bibliography p. 171 5 Acknowledgments I would like to thank everyone who has helped me in completing this thesis: Dr Attilio Scuderi for encouraging me to continue on to a PhD after finishing my masters degree; Dr Angelo Mangini, who first suggested this topic to me and who also spurred me to pursue doctoral research; my supervisor, Dr Fabio Camilletti, for supporting me throughout the development of this project and for his many insights on vampires, witchcraft and lycanthropy; Dr Jennifer Burns, Prof. Ann Caesar, Dr Mila Milani and Dr Caterina Sinibaldi for reading and providing valuable feedback on parts of the work; Dr Bryan Brazeau and Dr Sara Miglietti for their patience and generosity in proofreading parts of my dissertation and for instilling me with motivation and energy when I lacked both. I am also grateful to the Centro Studi Landolfi in Siena for allowing me to access their archives, which contain a number of important materials on Landolfi. My thanks also go to my friends and colleagues, Elio, Georgia, Giacomo, Gianmarco, Gioia, Linde, Mary Jane, Martina, Masha, Sara B. and Valentina, with whom I shared laughs, knowledge and endless coffees. Among them, I am deeply indebted to Monia Andreucci for her constant friendship and support that enabled me to overcome many difficulties. Finally, I am especially grateful to my father, who watches over me and is with me at every step; and to my mother, my unquestionable role model – and the most voracious reader I have ever met. 6 Declaration This thesis is submitted to the University of Warwick in support of my application for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. It has been composed by myself and has not been submitted in any previous application for any degree. Parts of the materials in Chapter 3 were presented at various academic conferences and reworked into an article entitled „Landolfi‟s Racconto d’autunno: A Gothic Counter-Narrative of the Italian Civil War‟, which is currently under review with Italian Culture. 7 Abstract This thesis analyzes the three texts forming the so-called „Fantastic trilogy‟ by Tommaso Landolfi: La pietra lunare (1939), Racconto d’autunno (1947) and Cancroregina (1950), in the light of the cultural and historical environment in which they were produced. I argue that these novellas incorporate and obliquely problematize specific tensions of the period running from Racial Laws (1938) and the Pact of Steel (1939) to post-war reconstruction. Building on recent scholarship on the subversive role of the Fantastic, the study provides a more comprehensive view of Landolfi‟s early production and challenges accepted views on his Fantastic as exclusively ironical, intellectual and free-play. This thesis also investigates the sources through which Landolfi delineates this oblique form of socio-political critique. Whereas scholarship in the past has widely recognized that Landolfi draws inspiration from nineteenth-century French, Russian and German classics in the genre of Gothic and Fantastic fiction, this contribution draws attention to the way Landolfi negotiates this traditional repertoire through input from both Italy‟s „high‟ literary tradition (Dante, Leopardi, Manzoni, D‟Annunzio), Italian folklore and other non-literary sources (i.e. occultism and psychiatry). This thesis considers Landolfi‟s work from fresh angles, applying recent Anglophone theoretical frameworks (including theories on post-humanism, on the subversive role of the Fantastic and political readings of Gothic fiction) to his writing and probing his portrayals of dynamics and tensions that continue to challenge us today. Additionally, it makes use of the anthropological notion of „liminality‟ to underline the intrinsic thematic, textual and narrative ambiguity of the three novellas. I claim that the texts‟ liminality – involving slippery entities, settings, situations and narrative modalities that do not fit any precise category – voices the cultural and political instability of the decade under analysis. The study makes a deeper, and more nuanced, contribution to the literature on Landolfi, reflecting upon the author‟s strategies for problematizing contemporary historical and cultural issues by means of a fiction only apparently detached from reality. 8 Introduction The literary production of Tommaso Landolfi (1908-1979) – not only a writer, but also a translator and literary critic, whose activity stretched from the 1930s to the 1970s – has, since the late 1970s, increasingly attracted scholarly attention. This critical appreciation coincided with the beginning of the debate on the Italian Fantastic, a genre of which he is normally seen as one of the most paradigmatic writers.1 At the same time, Landolfi has scarcely enjoyed the fame of other canonized twentieth-century „Fantastic‟ authors such as Dino Buzzati or Italo Calvino. Scholarship, in the past, tended to explain his lack of popularity to the greater public with his alleged inaccessibility as a writer. For instance, Guglielmo Petroni asserts: „Le immagini di Landolfi sono l‟involucro dorato e quasi impenetrabile, pur se trasparente, che nasconde un fitto centro intellettivo [...]. Come le cose lucidissime e perfettamente rifinite che riflettono la luce in maniera tale che spesso ci ingannano e ci fanno pensare che siano dotate di una fonte di luce propria‟.2 Similarly, Giuseppe Dessì claims, in reference to La pietra lunare that „tutta la narrazione è tenuta in piedi da una razionale magia, da un espediente tecnico, la cui stessa razionalità permette al Landolfi di uscirne quand‟egli voglia e di riposarsi su una piattaforma d‟ironia [...]. Rimane [...] il senso di una non comune abilità, che rivela, oltre tutto, il coraggio di far decisamente della letteratura per la letteratura, con piena e lucida coscienza‟. On the same line of thought, Pietro Pancrazi defines Landolfi „scrittore di ingegno‟.3 His refined style and language – full of archaisms, regionalisms, neologisms, intertextual references and quotations – as well as the content of his works, which are dense, cryptic and ambiguous, reinforced the idea of Landolfi as an elitist author, and of his oeuvre as self-referential intellectual free-play.4 More recent scholarship, however, has, instead, attributed Landolfi‟s limited fame to his troubled editorial life, which prevented him from reaching a broad audience.5 Landolfi‟s 1 „La riscoperta – o scoperta – di Landolfi comincia nel momento preciso in cui il fantastico acquisisce, anche in Italia, una nuova importanza agli occhi della critica, diventando un oggetto di ricerca degno di interesse‟. Stefano Lazzarin, „Trentacinque anni di teoria e critica del fantastico italiano‟ (dal 1980 a oggi)‟ in Il fantastico italiano. Bilancio critico e bibliografía commentata (dal 1980 a oggi) ed. by Stefano Lazzarin, Felice Italo Beneduce, Eleonora Conti, Fabrizio Foni, Rita Fresu, Claudia Zudini (Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2016), pp. 1-58 (p. 12). 2 Guglielmo Petroni, „Landolfi e La pietra lunare‟, Prospettive, 3, 8 (1939), 16, pp. 148-153. 3 Pietro Pancrazi, „Tommaso Landolfi scrittore d‟ingegno‟, in Scrittori nuovi, ed. by Pietro Pancrazi (Bari: Laterza, 1946). 4 Giuseppe Dessì, „La pietra lunare‟, Primato, 1, 1 (1940), 13-14. 5 „Il problema di Landolfi non è mai stato nel genere di letteratura che lo connota („difficile‟, „élitaria‟ e tutto quanto è stato detto), ma nel fatto che al grande pubblico in realtà non è mai arrivato. Le poche volte 9 progressive isolation, beginning in the 1950s, within the intimate setting of his family manor in Pico Farnese, in the Frosinone area, was the result of a series of biographical events, economic difficulties, and frustrations in his career as a writer, which he himself defined as „una carriera sbagliata‟.6 As a consequence, the traditional perception of Landolfi as a disengaged and isolated author has been questioned, particularly as concerns his early production and his relationships and collaborations with a dynamic circle of intellectuals and artists in Florence and Rome throughout the 1930s.