Re-Imagining La Resistenza: the Reception of Italian Social Songs in the Postwar Era

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RE-IMAGINING LA RESISTENZA: THE RECEPTION OF ITALIAN SOCIAL SONGS IN THE POSTWAR ERA

JEREMY ARTHUR FRUSCO

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF MUSIC

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

Per Federica e Simona, chi mi hanno ispirato una grande passione per la lingua e cultura italiana

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank my family and friends for their continued and unyielding support throughout the years. I am also deeply indebted to my professors both past and present. My research would not have been possible without the hospitality of the Istituto Ernesto de Martino, Simona Wright,

Silvia Lectrix, and Cesare Bermani; the advice of Cristina Ghirardini; the funding provided by

University of Florida’s Center for European Studies, Department of Music, and Office of

Research; and the kind responses from the Italian Studies Listserv that provided early support for my research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 6

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 7

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 10

2 “MARCIAM, MARCIAM”: ITALIAN SOCIAL SONGS AS TEXTS OF THE ITALIAN RESISTANCE ...... 29

“Marciam, marciam” ...... 29 Music and Memory ...... 41 Conclusion ...... 43

3 PERFORMING PIN: SOCIAL SONG AND THE SENSES IN CALVINO’S IL SENTIERO DEI NIDI DI RAGNO ...... 45

Culture, Memory, and Canti Carcerati ...... 47 Performance and Plot / Performance as Plot ...... 50 Conclusion ...... 59

4 CONFRONTING THE FASCIST PAST: RECOLLECTION AND RECONCILIATION IN BERTOLUCCI’S THE CONFORMIST ...... 60

Representation in the Cinematic Language of The Conformist ...... 64 Song: Spectacle and Performance ...... 70 Conclusion ...... 75

5 RE-IMAGINING FASCISM: POLITICS AND IDENTITY IN PORCO ROSSO ...... 77

National and Cultural Depictions in Porco Rosso ...... 80 Political Undercurrents ...... 82 Space and Place as Discursive Elements ...... 89 Conclusion ...... 92

6 EPILOGUE ...... 94

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 104

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 108

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

2-1 The text to “Il bersagliere” and “Marciam, marciam.” ...... 31

3-1 “Le quattro stagioni,” strophes as presented in Italo Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1993, p. 6, with accompanying translation and original construction underneath...... 51

3-2 Metamorphosis of “La bella Margherita” with accompanying translation...... 54

5-1 The text to “Le temps de cerises.” ...... 88

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2-1 Sample Verse and Chorus of “Marciam, marciam”...... 35

3-1 Reconstruction of the major-key section (mm.18-30) of “Le quattro stagioni.” ...... 48

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Music

RE-IMAGINING LA RESISTENZA: THE RECEPTION OF ITALIAN SOCIAL SONGS IN THE POSTWAR ERA

Jeremy Arthur Frusco

May 2014

Chair: Silvio dos Santos Major: Music

Decades of political oppression and war in the early twentieth century founded an existential crisis that has persisted long into the postwar era. By resisting Fascism and German occupation during the Second World War, the Italian Resistance (1943-1945) became emblematic of enduring protest, antifascism, and individual agency. Among the partisan’s tools was a broad repertoire of social songs. Just as the partisan itself was appropriated in the postwar era, so too were the songs of Italy’s war-torn landscape; each inflected political discourse in the postwar era. I argue that social song is crucial to the act of memory, and recollections of Italy’s past thus hinge upon such acts of performance.

This thesis comprises four case studies on Italian social songs and their appropriation by postwar media that addresses an evolving discourse on memory and history. The first case study examines “Marciam, marciam,” a social song synthesized from preexisting texts and music in

1943 that inherited rich intertextual significance. The second case study addresses the narrative functions of song in Italo Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947), focusing on Calvino’s manipulation of song texts in both its literary and historical context. In the third study on

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), song combines with his cinematic language to comment on the Fascist past. The final case study analyzes how Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso

(1992) illustrates issues that continue to plague the Italian people: politics, identity, and individual culpability for the acts of war.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The Second World War left more than the Italian landscape in ruins. Lost amidst staggering casualties was the devastation of any national sense of identity among the surviving

Italian people. Decades of Fascist political conformism and the ravages of German occupation deeply complicated any true sense of what it meant to be “Italian,” and yet vestiges of social tradition remained present throughout the war as stubborn beacons of cultural solidarity. The persistence of Italian social song throughout and beyond the Second World War was a demonstrative act of resistance and resilience. Moreover, where Fascism sought to deconstruct and misconstrue the Italian people as a collective whole, the partisan Resistance renewed their individuality and promoted the reevaluation of Italian cultural ideals. Of the many arms taken up by the partisans, it is perhaps social song that continues to captivate the Italian imagination in the postwar era. This is not without its share of troubles, however. Addressing the issues of memory and recovery, an Italian friend and fellow musician Marco recently suggested to me that “we

Italians have not fully reconciled with that area of our past.”1 He posed an intriguing problem, an existential crisis on a national level. As my research on the use of social songs during the Italian

Resistance reflected similar questions, we arrived at the same conclusion: the Fascist era and the

Italian Resistance continue to underlie discourses surrounding the Italian people in the postwar era. Moreover, though depictions of social song in postwar media play a deeply significant role in political resistance and identity formation, more must be done to further understand the sociocultural importance of song in modern Italian history. Perhaps this was, in part, Marco’s point; we must confront the specter of the Italian Resistance if we are to fully understand its significance, and I believe that music is our gateway.

1 Marco G. Visconti-Prasca, telephone conversation with the author, June 27, 2013.

From novels, to films and genre revivals, the songs of the Italian Resistance have greatly contributed to the formation of a lasting historical memory on the subject. But memory is a problematic construct; how Italians have chosen to remember their past is crucial, and, according to Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of the formation of a collective memory, such acts hinge upon the careful selection of what is being remembered.2 In the latter half of the 1940s, a style of engagement in both literature and film known as neorealism emerged. Though Italian author

Italo Calvino famously denied that neorealism existed as any sort of school,3 there were indeed common themes and tropes among the neorealist authors and directors.4 Chief among them was a certain transparency of style and an unfiltered depiction of quotidian life. Despite this, transparency is, ironically, a conscious style in and of itself. “But realism in art can only be achieved one way––through artifice,” wrote French philosopher André Bazin, “Every form or aesthetic must necessarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even be considered.”5 Bazin thus uncovers the core conflict in the formation of memory: the selective process of remembering and forgetting. As Paul Ricoeur

2 Indeed, Halbwachs wrote that "The individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory. … But, as we have seen, they most frequently distort that past in the act of reconstructing it." In Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 182.

3 Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 1993 [1947]), VIII.

4 For a further discussion of neorealism and the problematic notion of defining any true identifying set of characteristics, see Christopher Wagstaff, “Rossellini and Neo-realism,” in Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, ed. David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Lowell-Smith (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 36-49. In addition to cinematic traits, neorealism has been prescribed a moral responsibility by many scholars. For an examination of neorealist’s moral imperative, see Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” in Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 50-61.

5 André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 26.

outlined in his Memory, History, Forgetting, this multivalent process of creating a historical narrative shapes the perception of both the past and present.6

Italian social songs are direct ports to the cultural and social world of their performers. In a letter to Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1955, Italo Calvino wrote that

your introduction to Italian popular songs is fundamental not only for sorting out the whole set of problems related to poetry and folklore, but for a critical approach to contemporary Italian literature, which has in fact revolved around its relations with the world and language of the people.7

Calvino’s letter acknowledges the importance of song as a representation of the voice of the

Italian people. This is central to the idea of extracting a sense of identity and culture from the common man, and stands in opposition to the now defunct Fascist ideology of a collective people who do not have any individual sense of identity. Following Calvino’s insight, we might extrapolate the significance of social song as a means of foregrounding a national identity that stems upward from below instead of from the top down.

Calvino went on to suggest that the period just after the war was among his most creative, citing the wealth of material in the form of stories about the Resistance:

the first and most creative period of my narrative work lasted as long as I had to work up material that came from below already in the form of a finished story: the partisan stories I heard being recounted in the evening in the detachments, which had already circulated by word of mouth with their own imprint of the marvelous and the threatening that was typical of the people.8

Indeed, the Second World War was a historical watershed that agitated the collective consciousness of the Italian people. What remained was a deep-seated preoccupation with the

6 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Ricoeur traces the fascination with memory all the way back to Socrates and Aristotle, underscoring principles of memory’s fallibility, the coupling of memory and imagination, and the ways in which the act of memory informs the creation and manipulation of history.

7 Italo Calvino and Michael Wood, Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 102.

8 Calvino and Wood, Italo Calvino: Letters, 104.

war, evidenced both by Calvino’s admission of its ubiquity in everyday life and by the fact that his own product of this creative period was novel about the war itself.9 We must remember the fictional dimension of these recollections, however. As Ricoeur argues, “What is at stake is the status of the moment of recollection, treated as the recognition of an imprint. The possibility of falsehood is inscribed in this paradox.”10 The atrocities of war galvanized the Italian people to materialize their experiences, in an attempt to reconcile with them, as sharable and consumable stories.11 Calvino alludes to the persistence of postwar storytelling, writing that “These are phenomena that happen rarely now, this taste for telling stories; it only happens, one might say, in times of war, so much so that even today we can still hear people in trains who have not yet tired of telling episodes from the war.”12 As the temporal distance lengthens between the initial event and its recollection, the greater chance becomes of its distortion.

The intentional inclusion of social songs in literature, film, and music in the postwar era thus demands our interpretation. What can we conclude when authors such as Italo Calvino, or filmmakers like Bernardo Bertolucci, choose to include examples of the extant Resistance repertoire? Moreover, what do the songs themselves convey? Many of the social songs associated with the Resistance contain a rich cultural lineage that reaches far back into the late- eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Associations with the Risorgimento or the French

Revolution abound, and the appropriation and reconstruction of song texts throughout the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries promoted a continuous reprisal of sociopolitical themes.

9 Italo Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno was first published in 1947.

10 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 10.

11 An allegorical bridge might be constructed here connecting this process to the later postwar economic boom whereby material culture and commodification insinuated itself into the culture surrounding a burgeoning Italian economy.

12 Calvino and Wood, Italo Calvino: Letters, 104.

I argue that these recollections, especially the invocations of social song, belie a greater preoccupation with historical identity and conflict. Through an investigation of the use of social song in literature, cinema, and the Resistance movement, I suggest that music as a social process was––and remains––a critical element in identity formation and a key factor in the creation of a collective historical memory for the Italian people.

And what do we mean when we say “social songs”? Here, “social” modifies the word

“song” which, at its core, is the marriage of text and music. “Social” brings to mind many things, including society, community, people, demonstrations, performance, popular music, folk music, and many others. An association with folk music is equally perplexing, as it too has long evaded proper definition. In 1955, the International Folk Music Council (IFMC) adopted this working definition:

Folk Music is music that has been submitted to the process of oral transmission. It is the product of evolution and is dependent on the circumstances of continuity, variation, and selection. … The term can therefore be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by art music; and it can also be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten, living tradition of a community. But the term does not cover a song, dance, or tune that has been taken over ready-made and remains unchanged. It is the fashioning and refashioning of the music by the community that gives it its folk character.13

Although rooted in old-fashioned binaries (art versus popular, high versus low, sophisticated versus unsophisticated), the definition put forth by the IFMC does highlight several important aspects of folk music. The notion of an evolving practice is corroborated in the heritage of the social songs examined in this study, and the appropriation of text and music––frequently attributed to a singular source and author––into a greater social performing tradition forms the

13 Maud Karpeles, "Definition of Folk Music," Journal of the International Folk Music Council 7 (1955): 6.

backbone of such an “unwritten, living tradition of a community.” Tethered to the notions of

“folk” and “popular” music, social song encapsulates a living and organic performance tradition.

We find similar definitions of social song in Italian scholarship. For example, Gianni

Bosio wrote that

The songs of protest, of complaint, of political and ideological affirmation, of contrast, from the period of the Italian Unification (considered from the time in which the capitalist development began) to today, [are defined] precisely in terms of the interests of the working classes … for convenience, social songs [encompass everything from] the internationalist song “All’armi all’armi,” to the cries of the Mantuan farmers “La boje,” to the hymn of Turati, to “Bandiera rossa,” and to “Tarlo” by Fausto Amodei.14

Common across the disparate criteria that Bosio attributes to the definition of social songs is a fixation on class and sociopolitical motives. It is through such a wide scope that Bosio considers songs spanning over one hundred years as belonging to the same ilk. In turn, Cesare Bermani writes that

The social song is thus, since its origin, a phenomenon of the border between official cultures (both the dominant and its opposition) on the one hand and popular culture on the other, sometimes using lyrics and music derived from hegemonic cultures (bourgeois or socialist hymnody, Romantic arias, music dramas, operettas, popular songs, military marches and airs, etc.), sometimes of folksy production (especially the easy-to-learn metrical and musical forms of storytellers, firmly rooted in northern Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, which, thanks to the texts delivered on leaflets and the mobility of storytellers in the squares and at fairs, easily spread throughout Italy), sometimes within the folk tradition (especially the material widely used by farmers, highly malleable and transformable according to many situations, that was represented

14 Quoted in Cesare Bermani, Pane, rose e libertà. Le canzoni che hanno fatto l’Italia: 150 anni di musica popolare, sociale, e di protesta (Rizzoli, Italy: BUR Biblioteca Univ. Rizzoli, 2011), 1. Personal translation. Original: “I canti di protesta, di denuncia, di affermazione politica e ideologica, di contrapposizione, dal periodo dell’Unità (considerando il momento a quo come il punto d’inizio convenzionale dello sviluppo capitalistico) a oggi, proprio in funzione degli interessi delle classi lavoratrici, vengono definiti, per comodità, canti sociali: dal canto internazionalista All’armi all’armi, al grido dei contadini mantovani La boje, all’Inno di Turati, a Bandiera rossa, al Tarlo di Fausto Amodei.”

by short verses, ballads and verse-forms, and which can be defined as “imperfect monostrophism”).15

Bermani underscores the unique positioning of social song from the outset. As a cultural practice located between the official and the popular––the “high and low,” social song embodies both hegemony and plurality. Indeed, the “highly malleable and transformable” quality of many social songs is what gives them semiotic potential as meaningful and significant vessels of history and culture.

Charles Peirce’s concept of semiotics established a theoretical system that pointed outward to the world in the attempt to understand how sign systems functioned socially and culturally. Peircian semiotics is thus particularly relevant within the disciplinary framework of the humanities. Thomas Turino co-opts Peircian semiotics in his research, adopting the social angle of music-making to inflect how signs and systems of signification function within the realm of music and performance. His adoption of Peircian semiotics thus provides a key element of my analysis of social song. At the core of Turino’s distillation are three main concepts: the object, sign, and interpretant. The object is, as we might presume, a thing––something which can be imagined or described in some way. The sign relates to the object in that it signifies it through representation or affiliation (i.e., something that stands for something else). What is perceived as meaning, or the effect produced by signs, by the individual who interprets or otherwise

15 Cesare Bermani, “Guerra guerra ai palazzi e alle chiese…”: Saggi sul canto sociale (Rome: Odradek, 2003), 1-2. Personal translation. Original: “Il canto sociale è quindi, sin dalle sue origini, fenomeno di frontiera tra culture ufficiali (sia dominante sia di opposizione) da un lato e culture popolari dall’altro, utilizza a volte testi e musiche provenienti dalle culture egemoni (innodia borghese o socialista, arie de romanze, melodrammi, operette, canzonette di consumo, marce e arie militari, ecc.), a volte di produzione popolaresca (sopratutto moduli metrici e musicali da cantastorie, di facile apprendimento, massicciamente radicatisi nell’Italia settentrionale nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento e, grazie ai testi consegnati a fogli volanti e alla mobilità dei cantastorie per piazze e fiere, poi diffusisi in tutta Italia), a volte interni alla tradizione popolare (sopratutto quel materiale di largo uso contadino, fortemente plasmabile e trasformabile a seconda delle situazioni, rappresentato da strofette, stornelli e strambotti, che può definirsi di ‘monostrofismo imperfetto.’”

experiences them is considered the interpretant.16 Each of these elements contributes to our apprehension of the world around us through the metacommunicative processes of signs and signification.

These three elements may be conceived of in multiple types and varieties. For example, the interpretation of a sign can occur in three primary ways: rheme – the possible reality that is represented by a given object; dicent – a direct representation of the object as it is perceived in and affected by its actual existence; and argument – the symbolic and linguistic premises on which and object is assessed.17 Between each element exists a complex of relationships that produce meaningful associations and experiences. As a relationship of co-occurrence between the sign and object, the semiotic concept of the index is especially relevant to the discussion of social songs; it provides the greatest opportunity to consider contextual elements within the act of interpretation. As Thomas Turino writes:

indices are fluid, multileveled, and highly context-dependent. … indices signify our personal and collective experiences in a particularly direct manner, they are “really” attached to events and aspects of our lives, and hence are experienced as real; they are signs of our lives, not signs about them.18

The relationship between sign and object is trifold for it comprises the icon, index, and symbol.

Discussing how these relationships affect musical meaning, Turino writes that “iconic and indexical signs are signs of our perceptions, imagination, and experiences, whereas symbols are more abstract signs about things as generalities. … It is possible for musical sounds to function

16 For a complete distillation, see Thomas Turino, “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music,” Ethnomusicology 43, no 2 (1999): 221-255 and Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

17 Turino, “Signs of Imagination,” 229-30.

18 Turino, “Signs of Imagination,” 236.

as symbols, but not without the intervention of language.”19 Through these complex relationships between sign and object, musical language can be interpreted semiotically. Within the sphere of social song, the performance, musical characteristics, existing lexicon, and multiplicity of contexts all contribute significantly to the formation of intra- and extramusical meaning. This,

Turino writes, is the expressive capability of music:

Any musical unit is comprised of a number of components including: pitch, scale type, timbre, rhythmic motion, tempo, melodic shape, meter, dynamics, harmony, (where applicable), specific melodies, quotes, genres––all sounding simultaneously. Any of these parameters can and often do function as discrete icons, indices, rhemes, and dicent signs which may be meaningfully combined to produce a macrolevel sign, although the signification of certain components may be foregrounded in the musical context. This multi-componential aspect of music cannot be overemphasized as a basis for music’s affective and semiotic potential.20

Long understood to be one of music’s expressive assets, the ambiguity and “multi-componential” qualities of a musical work provide a plethora of patterns and representations to unpack. By approaching the repertoire of the Resistance with particular attention to the systems of signs and references both within and without the music, a deeper understanding of their significance as agents of political opposition comes into focus.

It is not surprising that social songs have flourished in the past 150 years in Italy. The confluence of myriad song traditions was an unintended byproduct of military conscription.

Transmission of social songs and traditions was greatly aided by the circumstances of war and conflict––of which the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries certainly had no shortage.

Cesare Bermani explains:

In addition, the social songs, of course, are passed along if they are sung and transmitted through personal contact. Of great importance in the spread of social

19 Turino, Music as Social Life, 13.

20 Turino, “Signs of Imagination,” 236-37. Author’s emphasis.

singing are those channels of communication that can be defined as popular or of the classes, to distinguish them from mass communication (mass media). They participate in social life and promote––unlike mass media––a horizontal communication. After the national unification, the main channels of social communication were the military, prison and confinement, and internal migration (especially important during the rice paddy harvest seasons) and abroad. … With the forced cohabitation during trench warfare of thousands of people of different regional origin, from different cultures and backgrounds, the First World War [has proven] to be not just a huge melting pot of cultures but also a multi-channel communication of different popular cultures simultaneously present throughout the country.21

War and conflict were thus unparalleled sites of exchange and transmission for social song, providing for the horizontal spread of culture and tradition among disparate groups instead of a unilateral, vertical, imposition from above. The latter is, of course, one of the chief provocateurs of war itself, and as such we can infer that any horizontal transmission greatly contributed to the communal feelings of resistance among partisan fighters.

The texts of many social songs have been gathered in anthologies and collections from

Italian historians and ethnomusicologists such as Cesare Bermani,22 Roberto Leydi,23 Alberto

21 Bermani, “Guerra guerra”, 4-5. Original: “ Inoltre i canti sociali, certo, si tramandano se c’è che li canta e li trasmette per contatto personale. Grande importanza nella diffusione del canto sociale hanno quei canali di comunicazione che possiamo definire popolari o di classe, per distinguerli dalle comunicazione di massa (mass media). Essi aderiscono al vivere sociali e sono portatori – a differenza dei mass media – di una comunicazione orizzontale. Dopo l’unificazione nazionale i principali canali di comunicazione popolare erano stati il servizio militare, il carcere e il confino, le migrazioni interne (importantissima sopratutto quella stagionale in risaia) ed estere. … Con la convivenza forzata in una guerra di trincea di migliaia di uomini di diversa provenienza regionale, di diversa cultura ed estrazione sociale, la prima guerra mondiale si rivelerà quindi non solo un enorme crogiolo di culture ma anche un multidirezionale canale di comunicazione di diverse culture popolari compresenti nel paese.”

22 Bermani’s prolific writings both catalog and examine the significance of social song traditions over the past 150 years. Examples of his publications include Pane, rose e libertà (see above); Cesare Bermani "I canti sociali italiani," Musica/Realtà: Rivista Quadrimestrale 24, no. 71 (July 2003); and“Guerra guerra ai palazzi e alle chiese . . .”: Saggi sul canto sociale.

23 Roberto Leydi’s research and participation in the social song traditions of Italy contributed greatly to our understanding of them. His book Canti popolari italiani: Testi e musiche (Milan, Italy: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1973) is a monumental work concerning the cataloging of popular songs in Italy. Canti popolari italiani was compiled alongside fellow musician Sandra Mantovani, with whom Leydi and several other musicians created the musical group Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano in the early 1960s. Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano was a folk revival group that revisited and recorded the many genres of the social song repertoire.

Lovatto,24 and Diego Carpitella.25 Other seminal researchers, including Gianni Bosio and Ernesto de Martino, are now immortalized as figureheads of the most prominent social song archives in

Italy.26 With the work of such scholars, the origins and development of many social songs have been documented or otherwise conjectured; some songs have their roots in anthologies of poem texts that can be traced to the early-nineteenth century, while others were composed and written in the midst of war itself. The orality of the Italian social song tradition, its history and sources, complicates the notion of a proper historiography. As to how this kind of history should be approached, Cesare Bermani suggests that

this type of history is a new type of history, a type of history in which the protagonist is of the people, not a person who knows how to write, not a person who can make a written and logically-organized testimony. The only real possibility to record this history is to move closer to the authentic protagonists, to the popular masses, on a level not of the distanced sociologist, of the scientist that goes to watch the work of the farmer through a lens, but to establish a collaboration I would call affectionate between those who interpret and those who ask and those who answer.27

Oral history, then, requires a delicate relationship between the source and interpreter. The most direct means of fostering this connection and yielding a tangible product is through the process

24 Of the many writings of Alberto Lovatto, one significant example of his contribution to the study of Italian social songs is Canzoni e Resistenza (Turin, Italy: Consiglio Regionale del Piemonte Torino, Italy, 2001), which he edited as a collection of conference proceedings pertaining to the first conference in Italy on the subject of Resistance songs.

25 Diego Carpitella was an important Italian ethnomusicologist. Present at ethnomusicology’s inception in Italy, Carpitella edited the published proceedings for the first conference in Italy regarding the discipline: L’etnomusicologia in Italia (Palermo, Italy: S. F. Flaccovio, 1975).

26 The Circolo Gianni Bosio in Rome, Italy, and the Istituto Ernesto De Martino just outside of Florence in Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.

27 Cesare Bermani, “Le origini e il presente: Fonti orali e ricerca storica in Italia,” in Introduzione alla storia orale: Storia, conservazione delle fonti e problemi di metodo, ed. Cesare Bermani, 2 vols. (Rome, Italy: Odradek, 1999), 11. Personal translation. Original: “questo tipo di storia è un tipo di storia nuova, è un tipo di storia in cui il protagonista è il popolo, non è la persona che sa scrivere, non è una persona che sa fare una testimonianza scritta e organizzata logicamente. L’unica possibilità reale di scrivere questa storia è appunto di avvicinarsi ai suoi protagonisti autentici, alle masse popolari, su un piano che non sia quello del sociologo distaccata, dello scienziato che va a guardare con la lente come è fatto il contadino, ma quello di stabilire una collaborazione direi affettuosa tra chi interpreta e chi risponde.”

of transcription. Oral sources do not belong to the ether, so-to-speak, but rather are rendered through more concrete items such as transcriptions. This process can have a manipulative effect, however. Alessandro Portelli explains that “The transcription transforms the sonic material into visual material, with a irreparable and reductive manipulation.”28 This is a process that plagues many ethnomusicologists,29 and proves equally problematic in the assembly of “authentic” documents for further musicological inquiry.

The production of a musical document begets a further preoccupation in the study of music––a need to categorize and quantify an otherwise abstract and ephemeral art form. Italian social songs have largely been grouped according to theme. There are canti carcerati (“prisoner songs”), canti anarchici (“anarchist songs”), canti narrativi (“narrative songs”), canti partigiani

(“partisan songs”), and many others. These genres are quite fluid, however, and we find examples such as prisoner songs in collections of anarchist songs,30 or narrative songs being sung by partisans.31 That even these genre names are not fixed (e.g. canti carcerati, canti di carcere, and canti prigionieri could all be construed as prisoner songs) further underscores their malleability. Theme can be discerned via text, but also by context. Where and when the songs were sung impact the way in which they are later perceived as belonging to a particular social

28 Alessandro Portelli, “I problemi di metodo: Sulla diversità della storia orale,” in Introduzione alla storia orale, 150. Personal translation. Original: “la trascrizione trasforma materiali sonori in materiali visivi, con irreparabili effetti di riduzione e manipolazione.”

29 Dutch ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst, founder of the term “ethnomusicology,” addresses the particular challenges of transcription in his Ethnomusicology (1950), writing that “the all-important thing is to have a perfectly open mind as regards the piece to be heard and transcribed. One must be on one’s guard against the temptation to presuppose or imagine the presence, in exotic phonograms, of the particular rhythmics and the equality of bar-length typical of most Western music, or of involuntarily hearing the strange melody ‘harmonically,’ i.e. as if it were based on unplayed harmonies.” In Jaap Kunst, Ethnomusicology: A Study of its Nature, its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities to which is Added a Bibliography, 3rd ed. (Amsterdam: The Hague, 1959 [1950]), 40.

30 See, for example, the inclusion of the prisoner’s song “Le quattro stagioni” in the collection of anarchist songs: Leoncarlo Settimelli and Laura Falavolti, Canti anarchichi (Rome: Savelli, 1975).

31 See Chapter 3 for my discussion of the narrative song “Chi bussa alla mia porta” and its use in the novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947).

setting or political movement. As such, the appropriation of songs from one context to another can complicate the (already complicated) process of labeling the musical work. The notion of genre with regard to Italian social song can likewise be perplexing. Genre favors repeated musical practices that have been codified through imitation and function. Are there specific musical gestures that contribute to the definition, differentiation, and delineation of one social song from the next? These are largely for the contextual audience to define. Many cultural expectations conspire to create the dubious categories in “genre.” Jeffrey Kallberg underscores this notion of genre as a contract––an exchange between the composer and the listener, in common understanding, of conventions that may be used or misused to coerce meaning out of the work.32 This rose to particular relevance in the late 1950s and 1960s with the Partisan repertoire revival by the band Cantacronache, as well as further reprisals of social song repertoire in the latter half of the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. How a piece of music is performed, and whether this coincides with our expectations, greatly impacts its reception and sense of significance.

While the study of Italian social songs can rarely be relegated to a strict positivistic endeavor (i.e., one that favors the musical work as a reified document from which all facts and analyses must emerge), the notion of the document still remains present––albeit tethered to the social context in which it is born. Margaret Bent addresses the intersection of the document (as musical fact) and critical analysis, writing, “while some level of music criticism is possible without source criticism, source criticism can only be done well when it embodies music criticism.”33 In this way, she urges for a reevaluation of the traditional hierarchy of fact-gathering

32 Jeffrey Kallberg, “The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin’s Nocturne in G Minor,” 19th-Century Music 11, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 243.

33 Margaret Bent, “Fact and Value in Contemporary Scholarship,” The Musical Times 127 (1986): 87.

and music criticism; the lower tier of fact-gathering must be critically-informed and vice versa.

Ernesto de Martino speaks to a similar necessity of the multi-componential approach to music study, alluding to the

academic blunder of folklore as an “independent science” and [stating] that the “folkloristic material” can, for a historically-oriented mind, rekindle itself to engage a particular historiographic issue (of social and economic history, ethico- political, literature, artistic, religious e even philosophical). … To think and write a history requires an issue and a document: two conditions that establish and expand themselves forming the unity of a historical work: effective. With the document, the issue rests ungrounded and imprecise. Without an issue, the document rests inert.34

It should be noted, however, that any claims of authenticity must be regarded with skepticism.

The process of historiography is necessarily multivalent, encompassing both the document and the “issue,” but the position of the researcher is equally as important. As is commonly the case,

Laurence Dreyfus reminds us that “[the historicists] fail to take stock, as do all objectivists, of their own historicity.”35 The context in which a document is produced must be considered alongside the context in which it is examined. In the musicological debate concerning positivism and music criticism, Leo Treitler argued that “the analysis of music, like the analysis of anything, is best conducted in the context of all the information that relates to it.”36 As such, we see the importance of considering all the elements that conspire to render meaning in the study of music as a social process. It is by no stretch then, that the study of Italian social songs (and Italian

34 Ernesto de Martino, “Storia e folklore,” Società 10, no. 5 (October 1954): 944, 940-942. Quoted in Cesare Bermani, “Le origini e il presente,” 5. Personal translation. Original: “sproposito accademico del folklore come “scienza autonoma” e affermava che “il materiale folkloristico’ può, per una mente storicamente orientata, ravvivarsi per entro un particolare problema storiografico (di storia economica e sociale, etico-politica, letteraria, artistica, religiosa e persino filosofica). … Per pensare e scrivere una storia occorrono il problema e il documento: due condizioni che si determinano e concrescono insieme formando l’unità del lavoro storico: effettivo. Senza il documento il problema resta gratuito e impreciso, senza il problema il documento resta inerte.”

35 Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended Against its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” The Musical Quarterly 69 (1983): 301.

36 Leo Treitler, “Music Analysis in a Historical Context,” in Music and the Historical Imagination, 67-78. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 78.

ethnomusicology at large) has been historically interdisciplinary.37 The rich intertextual significance embedded in social songs is of chief importance in understanding their position in political protest.

In this thesis, I present several case studies that illustrate the ways in which social songs were manipulated and employed in postwar media. Chapter 2 centers around the song “Marciam, marciam.” Composed in 1943 by Antonio Di Dio just months after the onset of the German occupation of Italy, “Marciam, marciam” invites us to examine and interpret its broader significance within the time period. It is a synthetic work, a composite of several pre-existing elements newly rendered in light of the Italian Resistance. The text, while penned by Di Dio, is adapted from an earlier song titled “Il bersagliere, nuova canzonetta a spese di Petrino Giuseppe”

(The Rifleman, a new song devoted to Petrino Giuseppe). The melody is likewise appropriated from the military march “Passa il reggimento” (The Regiment Passes). A cursory reading of the text for “Marciam, marciam” shows subtle similarities to the French national anthem “La

Marseillaise.” An analysis of the text of “Marciam, marciam,” as well as a semiotic reading of its performance, reveal its significance as a vessel of historical meaning and an agent in the process of memory formation. Moreover, songs like “Marciam, marciam” not only offer us a glimpse of partisan life, but foreground some general values and beliefs of the Resistance fighters.

Appropriation of preexisting songs was commonplace, and the refashioning of particular songs against their original purposes further underscored the political agenda espoused by many performers.

37 In his foreward to L’etnomusicologia in Italia, Italian ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella states that music study has been undertaken by other fields in the decades preceding the first official ethnomusicology conference in 1973, namely in the area of folklore studies. Likewise, he articulates that the interdisciplinary collection of proceedings is not to be construed as a superficial elision of the identity and autonomy the discipline, but rather an affirmation of its breadth and accommodation of myriad disciplinary perspectives. See Diego Carpitella, L’etnomusicologia in Italia, 10.

As Thomas Turino writes, “the arts are a realm where the impossible or nonexistent or the ideal is imagined and made possible, and new possibilities leading to new lived realities are brought into existence in perceivable forms.”38 As we will see in Chapter 3, the performance of song is a powerfully discursive act in literature that renders the inner world of the performing character and mediates their outer one. My research suggests that the use of social songs in Italo

Calvino’s novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947) foregrounds the role of performance as a plot device and how song became a way of mitigating the social and emotional distress of war. What is more, the narratives engendered by the presence of music of Calvino’s novel project a fuller understanding of the neorealist tropes. Performance, then, amounts to both a reactionary and defensive act for the protagonist, as well as a literary and genre apparatus for the author. Both aspects underscore a greater awareness of the functions of social song in war and Resistance culture, and from here we begin our exploration into the implementation of music in postwar media.

Looking at song and cinema, Chapter 4 discusses Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist

(1970) and addresses how Fascism has been eschewed in postwar Italy through a deep preoccupation with the psychological origins of Fascism, the moral abdication of the people, and how deviance sought shelter in power. Bertolucci admitted to constructing the film using a cinematographic memory, drawing influence and inspiration from the Fascist films of the thirties––an admission of the origins and fabrication of collective memory itself.39 Though

Bertolucci derives his subject matter from the Fascist twenties and thirties, The Conformist is not necessarily a documentary look at the Fascist past. Instead, it is a meditation on why and how

38 Turino, Music as Social Life, 18.

39 Gideon Bachmann, “Films are Animal Events: Bernardo Bertolucci Talks about His New Film, ‘1900,’” Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 13.

Fascism persisted. Maurizio Viano wrote of Bertolucci and his contemporaries that they,

“suspicious of a popular revival that froze Fascism into a finite historical period and overlooked its persistence in contemporary Italy, chose to stay away from [films about the Resistance].”40

Not content to follow in the footsteps of Rossellini and the neorealist tradition, Bertolucci,

Pasolini, and others chose to address the evolving issues of postwar Italy. The lingering specter of the Resistance and Italy’s Fascist past demanded scrutiny, and Bertolucci’s attempt to reconcile with these areas of Italy’s collective past is illustrative of a growing awareness of the

Italian people’s historical culpability. The presence of social song within Bertolucci’s film points to a greater awareness of their agency as political, discursive acts both during and beyond the

Fascist era in Italy.

Chapter 5 continues our discussion of film through the framework of imagination.

Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (1992) imagines the story of an Italian World

War I fighter pilot who is cursed to resemble a pig. It is a peculiar entry in the production lineup from Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Other titles, such as Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Spirited

Away (2001), or Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) make no fine distinction of their geographic whereabouts––settling instead for an overall pastiche of European-ness or otherworldly ambience. Porco Rosso divides its scenery, however, between the Italy-annexed islands off the coast of modern-day Croatia and Milan, all of which are rooted firmly in the Fascist 1920s. This direct historical connection figures into much of the discourse that occurs underneath the colorful, animated surface of the film. I argue that Porco Rosso contains a historically-based re- imagining of the Fascist era in Italy which engages in the overall cultural discourse on memory.

This idea becomes complicated when we consider Miyazaki’s point of reference as a Japanese

40 Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 86.

man (read: from the outside looking in). How does this historical, social, cultural, and geographical distance play into his treatment of the subject matter? The inclusion of “Le Temps des cerises,” a song closely associated with the Paris Commune, discloses a particular political awareness within the construction of the film’s historical subtext. In all, Miyazaki’s imagined

Italian landscape gives rise to an evolving discourse on politics and identity in the Fascist era–– one perpetuated well into the postwar era both in Italy and abroad.

In the 1990s, Renzo De Felice wrote of the troubling reality of a contemporary Italy unable to fully reconcile with its past, remarking that “It has created only a series of alibis that assumes the form of the self-pity and the denigration of a people that the intellectual class doesn’t know or to which it attributes features that it does not have.”41 To the question of why and how it happened, he wrote that “the country lacks the scientific habitus, true researchers are lacking, it lacks a vision of the world able to look beyond political pragmatism … The fundamental themes needed to settle accounts with our own history … and, closely related to it, on the disintegrative tensions that permeate Italian society today, are experienced by the intellectual community as an indistinct and undesirable background noise.”42 Positioned from within the Italian intellectual community, De Felice identified a core issue in the history and identity of Italy: irreconciliation with the Fascist past. So long as Italy remains in denial of its political history, a critical appraisal of its past will remain the responsibility of outsiders divorced from the persuasions of its culture and politics. To this I wonder, how do Italian social songs continue to function in the postwar era? The partisan repertory revival in the late 1950s and early ‘60s by the band Cantacronache, or recent performances of “Bella ciao” by Turkish

41 Renzo De Felice, Rosso e nero (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi), 24. Quoted in Stanislao G. Pugliese, ed, Fascism, Antifascism, and the Resistance: 1919 to the Present, trans. Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2004), 286.

42 De Felice, Rosso e nero, 24. Quoted in Pugliese, Fascism, Antifascism, and the Resistance, 286.

protesters, suggest some lasting cultural import. How these songs were used during and after the

Second World War reminds us of the agency of song, performance, and protest––one that can nuance our understanding of political resistance even today. Whether crystalized in memory, nostalgically recalled, or whimsically imagined, revisiting Fascism and the Resistance can offer us valuable insight into the checkered past of Italy and, within its music, unfold a challenging narrative of identity and conflict, memory and recovery.

CHAPTER 2 “MARCIAM, MARCIAM”: ITALIAN SOCIAL SONGS AS TEXTS OF THE ITALIAN RESISTANCE

“Music is not a universal language,” Italian ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella once said, though he acknowledged that it “has its dialects.”1 Universal or not, music can (and often does) function as a kind of language––one replete with the expressive capabilities of a semiotic system.

The significance of a social song does not only rest in its lyrics, but also the context and style in which it is sung. When these are considered together, they render the true agency of the music.

The context-dependent nature of this process recalls Carpitella’s admission of music’s many

“dialects”; Because there may be several contexts in which the music is produced, performed, and consumed, the musical experience itself is variable and multiple. How the partisan

Resistance repertoire of social songs acquired these associations, and how they continue to be shaped by our historical memory, is of great importance if we are to fully understand their function as a discursive aspect of historical and contemporary recollection. The collective performance of music contributed in significant ways to this unfolding sense of agency and unity among the partisans. Through a systematic semiotic analysis of social song repertoire positioned with regard to the people who consume it, they emerge as texts––examples of a collective historical memory––that embody the social and political ideologies that made them viable and effective rallying cries during the Second World War.

“Marciam, marciam”

Like many social songs in use during the Second World War, “Marciam, marciam” had a rich pedigree that harked back to the political and military songs of the previous century. Penned

1 Quoted in Cesare Bermani, "I canti sociali italiani," Musica/Realtà: Rivista Quadrimestrale 24, no. 71 (2003): 81. Personal translation. Original: “la musica non é una lingua universale, ed ha anch’ essa i suoi dialetti.”

by Antonio Di Dio in late December of 1943,2 “Marciam, marciam” underwent many revisions and modifications over the course of the Resistance and further into the postwar era. Both the text and the tune were separately appropriated. As A. Virgilio Savona and Michele L. Straniero report, the text had many similarities to a preexisting military song from the nineteenth century identified as “Il bersagliere, nuova canzonetta a spese di Petrino Giuseppe” (“The Rifleman, a new song devoted to Petrino Giuseppe”).3 A comparison of the texts in Table 2-1 shows that Di

Dio’s appropriation is quite faithful to the depiction of the soldier as inexhaustible and infallible.

What is missing, however, is the particular reference to a governing body. Di Dio’s political reality is quite different, and Italy’s constitutional monarchy––the governing body of reverence in “Il bersagliere”––was effectively rendered impotent in the early twenties by Mussolini and the

Fascist regime. German occupation, following the Armistice of Cassibile in September of 1943, had combined with the extant Fascism throughout Italy to create a political and social climate that deeply complicated any sense of national identity. Political groups that had previously been suppressed, as well as disenfranchised soldiers and citizens, spearheaded the Resistance. The common denominator was antifascist sentiment, which later versions of “Marciam, marciam” made no attempt to hide with strophes such as “descending from the mountains/ with guns always ready/ driving the Germans out/ and massacring the Fascists.”4 With a common enemy, the collective Resistance established a potent site for communal identity construction, one that anticipated a new sense of nation and patriotism.

2 A. Virgilio Savona, and Michele L. Straniero, Canti della Resistenza italiana (Milan, Italy: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli: 1985), 254.

3 Savona and Straniero, Canti della Resistenza italiana, 256.

4 Alberto Lovatto, Canzoni e Resistenza (Torino: Consiglio Regionale del Piemonte Torino, Italy, 2001), 224. Personal translation. Original: “scenderemo giù dai monti/ coi fucili sempre pronti/ e dei tedeschi da far scappa’/ e dei fascisti da massacra’.”

Table 2-1. The text to “Il bersagliere” and “Marciam, marciam.” Text to “Il bersagliere, nuova canzonetta a spese di Petrino Giuseppe” (c. nineteenth century). O trecce bionde e nere Oh braids blond and black Venite alla finestra Come to the window Che passa il bersagliere For the rifleman passes sulla riva del mar. on the shore of ocean.

Il bersagliere è forte The rifleman is strong È prode ed è cortese He is brave and courteous Egli ama il suo paese And he loves his country La patria ed il suo Re. The country and its King

O bella brunettina O beautiful little brunette L’Italia è bella assai, Italy is very beautiful, Il bersaglier cammina The rifleman walks E non si stanca mai. And never tires.

Il bersaglier al campo The rifleman in the field Col suo cappello adorno, With his hat adorned, La sera e la mattina Night and day Cammina sempre intorno. Always walking.

Col zaino sulle spalle, With a backpack on his shoulders, Fucile e baionetta, Rifle and bayonet, Per monte e per la valle Through mountains and valleys Cammina sempre in fretta. He moves with haste.

O bella brunettina, O beautiful little brunette L’Italia è bella assai, Italy is very beautiful, Il bersaglier cammina The rifleman walks E non si stanca mai. And never tires. Il bersaglier al campo The rifleman the field Sen va col reggimento, He goes with his regiment, Veloce come un lampo Quick as a flash E con le piume al vento. With his feathers to the wind.

Coi muscoli d’acciaio With muscles of steel Ei tien la scorciatoia, As he occupies the shortcut, Torna ridente e gaio He returns laughing and gay Al grido di: Savoia! To the cry of “Savoy!”

Table 2-1. Continued Antonio Di Dio composed the text for “Marciam, marciam” on December 23, 1943 in the company of the Brigata Patrioti Val Strona (a partisan group in northern Italy).

Text, as composed by Antonio Di Dio and published by Aristide Marchetti:

Mamma non piangere se più non tornerò Mama do not cry if I do not return Vado sui monti a cacciar l’invasor! I go to the mountains to hunt the invader! Se vincerò a casa tornerò. If I win I will return home. Se morirò, mai più ti rivedrò. If I die, I will never see you again.

O cara amata patria O dear beloved homeland Per tutta la sua terra For all your ground Gli indomiti patrioti The indomitable patriots Fermeranno la guerra Will stop the war E attendono il momento And await the moment Per la calata al piano For the downfall E liberar l’Italia To liberate Italy Da tutti gli stranier. From all the invaders.

Marciar, marciar. We march, we march, Marciar ci batte il cuore We march to the beat of our hearts Si accende la fiamma Ignite the flame, La fiamma dell’amore The flame of love Si accende la fiamma Ignite the flame, La fiamma dell’amore The flame of love Quando vedi un patriota passar! When you see a patriot pass!

Non c’e’ tenente né capitano There is no lieutenant, nor captain, Né colonnello né generale Neither colonel, nor general. Questa é la marcia dell’ideale This is the march of the ideal Questa é la marcia del partigian. This is the march of the partisan.

E sotto il sole ardente And beneath the blazing sun Con passo accelerato With quickened pace Cammina il patriota Walks the patriot Con zaino affardellato With overstuffed backpack Cammina il patriota Walks the patriot Che stanco mai si sente Who never tires Cammina allegramente Who walks cheerfully Con gioia con amor. With joy and love.

English historian Dennis Mack Smith points to the lasting impact of the Resistance in the political and social consciousness of wartime and postwar Italy, writing that

certainly their achievements were a big factor in restoring Italian morale and self- confidence. Some of the best elements of the country were prominent in the Resistance, and it provided a fine training in social consciousness as well as a new manifestation of idealistic patriotism. No one who lived through such an experience could forget it; never before had ordinary citizens participated so actively in national life. From many sources––neo-realist films, the poetry of Quasimodo, or in the writing of Pavese, Vittorini, and Pratolini––the impression emerges that this liberating war against Mussolini and Hitler penetrated far more deeply into the conscience of contemporaries than the nineteenth-century Risorgimento had done.5

As Smith argues, the Resistance was crucial to the awakening of a political activism against

Fascist and German oppression. It should be noted that the various partisan groups were not necessarily collaborative or even amicable; there were many instances of in-fighting and general uncooperativeness. The implication, however, is that the resultant product was an increased sense of agency regarding the formation of a national and political identity. According to Turino, participatory music can often yield a sense of “sameness,” an equalizing quality in which its participants are momentarily bound together through a common practice despite their disparate backgrounds:

within the bounded and concentrated frame of musical performance that sameness is all that matters, and for those moments when the performance is focused and in sync, that deep identification is felt as total. This experience is akin to what anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) calls comunitas, a possible collective state through rituals where all personal differences of class, status, age, gender, and other distinctions are stripped away allowing people to temporarily merge through their basic humanity.6

5 Dennis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 420-21.

6 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 18.

The performance of social songs during the Resistance seems much more intuitive considering this proposed property of participatory performance. Uniting through a common goal, the partisan fighters enlisted the aid of group performance in ways that subtly shaped their sense of collective identity, as well as reinforcing their core values and beliefs.

The text of “Marciam, marciam,” across its many iterations and performative contexts, serves as a testimony to the cause of the Resistance. Immediately, the title suggests movement, something that must be done, activity instead of passivity––“we march.”7 The use of the plural pronoun, “we” with the verb “to march” signifies a collective and collaborative action. The indexical link between the song itself and the physical act is a powerful reminder of the song’s agency as a facilitator of physical action and as a vessel for historical significance. Although

“Marciam, marciam” is now the song’s incipit, it was not the original first strophe. Alberto

Lovatto recalls that, sometime after Aristide Marchetti’s publication of Di Dio’s original text,

“[the original first strophe] of the song (‘O beloved homeland’) fell rapidly into disuse and ‘We march, we march’ then became the shared property of all the partisan groups.”8 Reflecting dissent from the prevailing political ideologies of the time, relinquishing the acknowledgement of a “beloved homeland” is a poignant reminder of the complex and conflicted political climate.

According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “patriotism prompted a large number of Anti-Fascist adhesions, although each Resistance force had its own vision of patria and many distrusted the language

7 The title, like the rest of the lyrics, is slightly variable from context to context and across various versions of the song. For example, “Marciam, marciam” may be found listed as “Marciar, marciar” (in which case the title would more closely read “to march, to march”).

8 Lovatto, Canzoni e Resistenza, 221. Personal translation. Original: “[La prima strofa originale] della canzone (‘O cara amata Patria’) cadde rapidamente in disuso e ‘Marciam, marciam’ divenne poi patrimonio comune di tutte le formazione partigiane…”

and sentiment of nationalism after decades of Fascist demagoguery.”9 I would argue that their country, Italy, was less tangible to them than their fellow comrades and Resistance fighters.

Figure 2-1. Sample Verse and Chorus of “Marciam, marciam”

9 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Liberation: Italian Cinema and the Fascist Past, 1945-50,” in Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation, ed. by R. J. B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 87.

As such, they invoked and experienced their own community through their singing; the truncated strophe better serves their allegiance to their fellow partisans––with whom they felt a greater rapport and sense of collective identity. This sense of community is underlined in the strophe that is not sung in the 1964 recording by the Caprara family for I Dischi del Sole: “Together we are proletariats/ forming a battalion.”10 In these two lines we have arrived at the sociopolitical nucleus of the text. No longer content to function as human laborers, the “proletariats” of the text are instead collaborating in a collective act of resistance. Their shared social status is among the things that bind them together as a group. A cultural cohort, as Turino defines it, forms when individuals come together on the basis of shared habits and similarities to their individual sense of self.11 Small groups of like-minded individuals formed factions that not only reflected a collective political goal, but also a shared social perspective.

The connection to the proletariat begets a deeper historical association. As Savona and

Straniero note, the positioning of the verse “Together we are proletariats/ together we form a battalion. / We march, we march …” is highly reminiscent of the French national anthem “La

Marseillaise,” whose refrain states “Aux armes, citoyens,/ Formez vos bataillons,/ Marchons, marchons!” (“To arms, citizens, form your battalions. We march, we march!”).12 A rallying cry of the French Revolution, “La Marseillaise” established a musical precedent that had far- reaching influence well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a military march tune, none are more emblematic of resistance and triumph than “La Marseillaise.” While the lyrics may be generic, to suggest a spiritual kinship between these two texts is not unfounded. For a

10 Lovatto, Canzoni e Resistenza, 225. Personal translation. Original: “In piedi siam proletari/ formiamo un battaglione.” Recording: Cesare Bermani, "Marciam, marciam," I Caprara tra città e campagna, Recorded 1964, I Dischi del Sole 523/25, CD. 11 Turino, Music as Social Life, 111.

12 Savona and Straniero, Canti della Resistenza italiana, 257.

tune that was rampant in popular and art music, and whose appropriations were scattered near and far across the social song tradition,13 the historical narrative encapsulated by “La

Marseillaise” would have been at least peripherally acknowledged if not immediately apprehended.14 The myriad manifestations of “La Marseillaise” contribute to what Turino calls

“semantic snowballing,” where “old indexical connections may linger as new ones are added, potentially condensing a variety of meanings and emotions within a highly economical and yet unpredictable sign.”15 In addition to the historical associations to the French Revolution, to general military and resistance demonstrations, this textual reference now assumes a new significance by virtue of its position within the Italian Resistance movement during the Second

World War. Just as the text was lifted from a riflemen’s tune, and the text itself references that of

“La Marseillaise,” the melody for “Marciam, marciam” was derived from its own unique source: the military march “The Regiment Passes” by Alfredo Palombi.16 Whether “Marciam, marciam” was strictly intended to be performed alongside a marching group of partisans is of little consequence; the historical implication is made through the act of borrowing. Moreover, the musical properties of the march rhythm, alongside historical affiliations with revolutionary march hymns, imbue the text with extramusical associations that belie the tune’s origins.

The proletariat, or partisan, of “Marciam, marciam” is an idealized one. In a self- aggrandizing act of song, the performer adopts the projected image of an inexhaustible and

13 The music of “La Marseillaise” is used as the basis for several antifascist and anarchist songs, such as “Le chant des partisans,” “Canto degli affamati,” and “Inno dell'internazionale [Inno della pace].” 14 Bermani writes that “La Marseillaise” was printed in Italy around 1793-1794 and it immediately inspired adaptations in the following years. Cesare Bermani, “Guerra guerra ai palazzi e alle chiese…”: Saggi sul canto sociale (Rome: Odradek, 2003): 25.

15 Turino, Music as Social Life, 9.

16 Lovatto, Canzoni e Resistenza, 223. Personal translation. Original: “La melodia della canzone partigiana e’ infatti desunta da una marcia militare ‘Passa il reggimento’, composta da Alfredo Palombi.” Translation: “The melody of the partisan song is in fact gathered from the military march “The Regiment Passes,” composed by Alfredo Palombi...”

infallible man. This partisan does not stop for anything in his course against the enemy, and, as a man, he shows great enthusiasm, grace, and vigor. Despite the backdrop of the Second World

War and his responsibility to fight, the partisan is happy to be a part of the Resistance. This representation does not demonstrate the dangerous climate of war––or, rather, what he stands to lose. Alongside the glorification of the individual partisan, “Marciam, marciam” is a celebration of the defiance of authority––the first step toward political and social freedom. According to

Alberto Lovatto,

The ideological nucleus of the song... lies in the words: ‘There is no tenant, or captain, or colonel, or general, this is the march of the ideal, this is the march of the partisans!’ Such words lend themselves well to representing the point of view largely diffuse among the partisans in the region--polemic views against the groups of officials that... thought to institute a unity of discipline within the barracks that favored the promoted with perks for the officials and all the chores for the poor.17

In many ways, the text of “Marciam, marciam” represented the idealized life of the partisan, a life without the oppressive structure and strictures of the Fascists or Germans. It posits a life where it is possible to form a Resistance in the hopes of winning back their lives and ensuring their own well-being. While this last part is largely what occurred, the military resistance itself was far from ideal, necessarily difficult, and often quite tragic. Despite this, the prized image of the partisan continues to be projected by songs such as “Marciam, marciam,” demonstrated here by the phrase: “I would like to marry a partisan!”18 In a caustic political and social climate, there was confidence and comfort in the notion of the desirable partisan figure. We might assume that

17 Lovatto, Canzoni e Resistenza, 222. Personal translation. Original: “ Il nucleo ideologico della canzone... sta nelle parole: ‘Non c’e’ tenente, né capitano, né colonnello, né generale, questa e’ la marcia dell’ideal, questa e’ la marcia del partigian.’ Tali parole infatti si prestavano bene a rappresentare un punto di vista largamente diffuso nel partigianato della zona, polemico verso quei gruppi di ufficiali che... pensavano di instaurare nella unita’ una disciplina a un modo di vita da caserma col trattamento speciale per i graduati, tutti i diritti per gli ufficiali e tutti i doveri per la truppa.”

18 Alberto Lovatto, Canzoni e Resistenza, 225. Personal translaton. Original: “un partigiano vorrei sposar!”

the author, Antonio Di Dio, did not write the text to reflect his own interests in marrying a fellow partisan, but instead to implicate that women wanted a heroic man, masculine and strong.19 In fact, the image of the partisan is a projection of the qualities that men imagined to be desirable by women––an extension of the extant social expectations and traditional values of Italian society. The life of a partisan thus spanned both political and social spheres, and became a way of reclaiming the traditional cultural values eschewed by the Second World War.

Lastly, a look at the musical rhetoric in “Marciam, marciam” discloses an awareness of the expressive and communicative capacities of music. Turino, in addressing how signs are interpreted in art, describes Gregory Bateson’s concept of the frame “as metacommunicative conventions about how signs within a given interaction or context are to be interpreted.”20 Thus our interpretation of the signs and expressive gestures of a given art form (or communication in general) is affected by the way in which those gestures are presented or preempted. The recording of “Marciam, marciam,” done in 1964 by Cesare Bermani with the Caprara family of performers from Mantua, is inflected by this sort of social framing. As a document of a preserved social tradition, Bermani’s recording reflects the music within the frame of authentic social song.

The recording thus derives significance and meaning from the attendant expectations that such a notion evinces. From the diverse and sometimes clashing vocal timbres, to the ebb and flow of metric adherence among the participants, the resultant recording exudes a sense of folk

19 Savona and Straniero write that “Anche la variante scherzosa ‘un partigiano vorrei sposar’ è quindi una trasformazione di lezione antecedente, come già dimostra la versione cantata dai bersaglieri più su riportata.” (“Also the joking variation ‘I want to marry a partisan’ is therefore a transformation of the preceding text, as demonstrated by the version sung by the rifleman shown earlier.”) Savona and Straniero, Canti della Resistenza italiana, 258. The text of Il bersagliere is much more romantic than that of Marciam, marciam, but the precise parallels between the two regarding this line remain unclear. Savona and Straniero go on to say that “Sembrerebbe quindi che il Di Dio si sia limitato ad adattare alla nuova situazione della guerra partigiana le parole di una delle lezioni del vecchio canto bersaglieresco senza aggiungervi in realtà molto di suo.” (“It would therefore seem that the Di Dio [text] is limited to simply adapting the new partisan war to the words of the old rifleman tune without adding much in the way of his own.”)

20 Turino, “Signs of Imagination,” 237.

authenticity and veracity because it retains elements of performance of social song that suggest a largely unmediated (read: unpolished) and collective, spontaneous act. At the same time, the recording rejects our expectations of an indexical relationship between the marching song and its physical action. The performers, out of practical necessity for the recording itself and the lack of a need for any sort of military demonstration, are presumably stationary. The added accompaniment of a guitar provides the driving acoustic pulse of the song. Schizophonia, or “the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction,” yields a representation of the social song that complicates the construction of many of these indexical relationships in music because the original context is thus removed (and yet, at times, is still understood).21 In a performance tradition that went largely unrecorded, recordings such as

Bermani’s are among the few sonic texts of the Resistance repertoire that can be analyzed.

Genres, Turino writes, “cue us to expect and interpret metaphoric expression and other iconic and indexical language.”22 Thus the labels of social song such as antifascisti, narrativi, carcerati, anarchici, etc. embody a host of musical characteristics and expressive gestures that are in and of themselves framing devices. A social song typically facilitates social activity, whether it be marching, toiling in the fields, or rallying around a common cause. Often considered spontaneous or, at least, tied to a physical activity of some sort (e.g. labor songs), we come to expect social songs to be simple and musically accessible. Moreover, the performers of such songs are not expected to be particularly well-trained musicians. Gritty recordings, varied vocal timbre, and minimal accompaniment all project a sense of authentic and spontaneous performance. All of these expectations converge in our apprehension of a performance or recording based on its perceived genre affiliation.

21 Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Random House, 1977), 90.

22 Turino, Music as Social Life, 15.

Music and Memory

Jennifer C. Post asserts that “musician’s identities over time are built on memories that are continually constructed and reconstructed both cognitively and symbolically. Performance not only mediates and embodies historical memory, but also social and political ideas and ideals.”23 How these social songs have been preserved and further reproduced are critical contributors to their social and cultural value. Alberto Lovatto writes of how he first heard

“Marciam, marciam,” recalling that “[it] had substantial musical coincidences with ‘The

Regiment Passes’––which I learned from an old bandsman who whistled to me the tune and recited the title.”24 While this passage demonstrates the fact that the song was taken from a preexisting one, a more important aspect is the method in which the song was shared. The old bandsman whistled the tune of the song from memory, implying that the song, itself, was firmly imprinted in his mind. This is a powerful method of dissemination, and the construction of a collective historical memory is predicated on the retention of such experiences.

But how is memory constructed? Paul Ricoeur, in his monumental Memory, History,

Forgetting, tackles the theoretical concept of collective memory set forth by Maurice Halbwachs who suggested that memory is only formed in the presence of others as a collective action. In the attempt to refute the notion that memories can ever be solely attributed to the individual, Ricoeur posits that our memories are never devoid of other human beings and that “the social framework ceases to be simply an objective notion and becomes a dimension inherent in the work of

23 Jennifer C. Post, Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9.

24 Lovatto, Canzoni e Resistenza, 223. Personal translation. Original: “Che ‘Marciam marciam’ avesse sostanziale coincidenza musicale con ‘Passa il reggimento’ l’ho appreso da un anziano bandista, che mi ha canticchiato il tema e citato il titolo.”

recollection.”25 It is the social setting that becomes a key agent in the creation of memories.

According to Halbwachs and Ricoeur, then, the social song repertoire and the partisan regiments themselves were key agents in the formation of a lasting collective memory made even more potent by the shared experiences of place and time, singing, and marching.

“There are no recollections to which words cannot be made to correspond,” wrote

Maurice Halbwachs, “We speak of our recollections before calling them to mind. It is language, and the whole system of social conventions attached to it, that allows us at every moment to reconstruct our past.”26 I would argue that this observation could include the semiotic language of music as well. In the act of remembering we engage the constructs of communication to give meaning and value to what is being remembered. As such, this process becomes highly contested and inherently subjective. The remaining texts, be they songs or other written records, “are not innocent acts of memory, but rather attempts to persuade, to shape the memory of others,” wrote

Peter Burke, “…[moreover] as we read the writings of memory, it is easy to forget that we do not read memory itself but its transformation through writing.”27 The process of writing and producing records allows for more efficient and lasting memories. These tools are wielded, for better or worse, as artificial extensions of our natural capacities. Explained by Jeffrey C. Olick’s as “technologies of memory,”

there are mnemonic technologies other than the brain. Historians of memory, for instance, have demonstrated the importance of various forms of recording for our mnemonic capacities. These affect both individual rememberers as well as societies. For individuals, being able to write a note or record a message or take a photograph vastly extends the capacity to ‘remember,’ not simply by providing

25 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 122-23. 26 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 173.

27 Peter Burke, “From ‘History as Social Memory,’” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey C. Olick et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 189.

storage space outside of the brain but by stimulating our neurological storage processes in particular ways; in this manner, we have become genuine cyborgs with what several authors have called ‘prosthetic’ memories.28

Thus the physical document as an embodied historical memory yields a double-edged sword.

What enables us to extend beyond our natural faculties also permits a corrupting and persuasive manipulation of the recollection of observed phenomena. What is more, this act, according to

Halbwachs and his predecessors, is deeply entrenched and utterly dependent upon the social setting in which it is conducted. As such, the act of memory construction and consumption is to a degree always collective and never singular. As a “technology of memory,” the text, recordings, and other artifacts associated with the social songs of the Resistance both augment our capacity to remember the historical event and obscure any truly objective recollection of it.

Conclusion

“Marciam, marciam” is but one of many extant texts from the Italian Resistance.

Embedded within it are significant historical and cultural references that paradoxically situate it within a real historical tradition and yet position it against any such definition. Written and composed from an amalgamation of preexisting texts, it thus encapsulates the disparate traditions and cultural heritages that conspired to create a single, singable document. From the mold of a

Risorgimento riflemen’s song, to the tune of a military march, and with passing glances to the historical tradition of revolutionary calls to arms, “Marciam, marciam” offers a tantalizing confluence of historical recollections and invites further discussion on the concept of recollection itself. Borrowing from Charles Peirce’s concept of a socially- and culturally-engaged semiotics, the association of music with particular activities, such as the co-occurrence of a marching tune with a military demonstration, locate the expressive capacities of music within the interpretative

28 Jeffrey C. Olick, “From ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,’” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey C. Olick et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 228.

acts of the listener. Whether abstracted as text and a collection of genre assumptions, or reified in recordings with their own interpretive posturing, social songs embody a multiplicity of meanings. Just as music has its many dialects, so to do social songs have their many readings, interpretations, and potentialities as historical texts charged with the politics of presentation and representation far beyond their original intended purposes.

CHAPTER 3 PERFORMING PIN: SOCIAL SONG AND THE SENSES IN CALVINO’S IL SENTIERO DEI NIDI DI RAGNO1

“Most of all: the true document is not the song being sung in general, but the song sung by a determined bearer of folklore . . . in a certain environment and in a given moment, that is, the song accompanied by the scenic backdrop of the people that makes, with every concrete action, a vivid depiction of popular culture.”

– Ernesto de Martino, “Il folklore progressivo emiliano.”2

In a testimony written in 1988, Italian composer Luciano Berio spoke of his good friend and fellow artist Italo Calvino, saying: “Italo was intimidated by music. He was not very musical, rarely went to concerts, was tone deaf, and music only brought about in him a slight interest when there were words to understand.”3 Despite a waning interest in instrumental music, song crept into Calvino’s literature as early as his first foray into the novel with Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno in 1947. The sensory perception of song is not lost to the written word, however.

Calvino employs actual social songs in his fictitious novel, citing real-world examples of a historical tradition. His novel thus reaches into a collective historical memory of not only the general events of World War II, but also the songs that provided a sonic backdrop for the partisan Resistance. How does social song function within the realm of Calvino’s fiction, and what is the meaning of its use? These songs have a multivalent identity: most immediately, they

1 Fragments of this chapter have been reworked and refined from my paper “‘Marciam, Marciam’: Italian Social Songs as Texts of the Resistance,” given at the Italian Pop Music as Poetry conference at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. March 31, 2012. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

2 Quoted in Cesare Bermani, "I canti sociali italiani," Musica/Realtà: Rivista Quadrimestrale, 24, no. 71 (2003), 82. Personal translation. Original: “C’e’ di più: il documento reale non e’ la canzone cantata in generale, ma la canzone cantata da un determinato portatore di folkore [...] in un certo ambiente e in un dato momento, cioè la canzone accompagnata da quel movimento scenico del pubblico che fa di ogni concreto atto di produzione culturale popolare un dramma sceneggiato vivente.”

3 Luciano Berio, “La musicalità di Calvino,” in Italo Calvino: la letteratura, la scienza, la città, ed. Giorgio Bertone (Genoa: Marietti, 1988), 116. Personal translation. Original: “Italo era intimidito dalla musica. Non era molto musicale, andava raramente ai concerti, era stonato e la musica suscitava in lui un po’ d’interesse solo quando c’erano parole da capire.”

function within the novel as critical plot devices; beyond this, they enter into a greater social and political discourse on the war.

In this paper, I examine the real songs within the novel and evaluate their most immediate meaning for the developing plot. I argue that the identity of the novel’s protagonist as a performer figures prominently into the historical narrative constructed by Calvino––one that hinges on both the depiction of the Second World War and the social functions of song. By exploring the political messages behind Calvino’s chosen repertoire, I suggest that these songs conceal a greater historical and social significance for the text. Lyrically, they inform the novel through their many thematic tropes that resonate with the partisan lifestyle. In addition, these songs belong to the extant repertoire of the Resistance movement that further locates the fictitious events of the novel within a (very real) collective historical memory. What is more,

Calvino plays with the construction of these songs in his novel to great literary effect–– highlighting their thematic significance and rendering them as plot devices. The performance of these social songs both conceal and reveal the strong political sentiments coursing throughout the novel. It is by this interaction between concealment and invocation that we may frame a term,

“performative concealment.” Though a song may project certain themes, its performance does not necessarily bestow ownership of them on the performer. In this way, one can express real sentiments through a veil of performance whereby sincerity may be obscured. Their inclusion by

Calvino demands that we investigate the historical and sociocultural affiliations embedded within the texts themselves.

Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno centers around a boy named Pin. By the first ten years of his life, he has lost both parents and now lives with his sister––the town prostitute. His conflicted childhood innocence is painfully apparent from the outset of the novel, and comes to bear on his

relationship with the surrounding world as the story unfolds. Calvino introduces the young boy through an act that will prove central to his character: song. Indeed, Pin embodies an entertainer, a jester, a singer of songs whose performances will intersect at critical points with the narrative.

In the following analysis, I will examine two particular examples of song in the novel and posit their literary and extra-literary functions. Calvino introduces the first of these songs, “Le quattro stagioni,” (“The Four Seasons”) at the very beginning––establishing both the main protagonist and the partisan lifestyle that beckons him. The second example is “Chi bussa alla mia porta,”

(“Who Knocks at My Door?”) a song rooted in the nineteenth century that Calvino manipulates to suit his plot and its political subtext. Together, these songs evince a sociocultural awareness that locates the fictitious events of the novel in a greater historical context.

Culture, Memory, and Canti Carcerati

The first intersection between song and narrative occurs in a tavern in the very first chapter. The local vagabonds of the seedy tavern call upon Pin to sing to them. He obliges and, given no specific request, responds with two strophes of “Le quattro stagioni”––a song that belongs to the tradition of canti carcerati, or prisoner songs. The lyrics recount an incarcerated man’s wistful recollection of his past life and love––a thematic trope not uncommon to songs in this tradition. This is, to be sure, not a child’s song, but Pin sings it in the hopes of gaining acceptance from the adults––though he often settles for simply antagonizing them. For the men of the tavern, these songs are records of their implied incarcerated past. For Pin, who evidently was not a “real”4 prisoner prior to these events in his life, these songs project a surrogate identity that gains him momentary access to the adult world. He can express many concepts that he has

4 Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1993 [1947]), 7. Calvino writes that: “Pin proprio in prigione non è mai stato … Ma nella guardina dei vigili un po’ c’è stato rinchiuso, e sa cosa vuol dire, e perciò canta bene, con sentimento.” (Pin has never been a true prisoner … But he once stayed locked in the guard tower for time, and knows what it feels like, and for this he sings well, with sincerity.)

yet to experience through the text of song. When he sings of love, we surmise that he has not yet been in love. The same issue arises when he recounts the life of a prisoner––a life of which he certainly has had no significant experience. In essence, Pin lives vicariously through these and other songs in imitation of the men of the tavern.

Figure 3-1. Reconstruction of the major-key section (mm.18-30) of “Le quattro stagioni.”5

But what, exactly, does Pin sing? “Le quattro stagioni” is a strophic song. The text contains five strophes of two stanzas each. The harmonic structure of the first stanza, a simple

5 The last measure of the minor-key verse (m. 17) has been included to reflect the key and meter change. Text alignment done with the aid of the recording done by Canzioniere Internazionale, Gli Anarchici: Antologìa de la canción libertaria italiana (1864-1969), Cetra Folk vol. 15/16, LPP 212/213 (CD) 1973. I have corrected a few errors in harmony from the transcription provided by Settimelli and Falavolti. D-major is not necessarily the key of the song itself, which may be freely transposed to fit the singing voice.

quatrain, is in the key of D-minor.6 The second stanza, comprising two quatrains, is accompanied by a shift to the parallel key of D-major which then closes in D-minor, signaling the return of the first stanza. The closing cadence also ensures that the song will always end in the minor mode, for it concludes there after the final stanza. And how do we read this performance? For those who have never heard “Le quattro stagioni,” the tune is left to be constructed in the mind of the reader. If we consider Calvino’s audience––Italians whose lives bridge the greater portion of the early-twentieth century––we might begin to understand how a popular tune could emanate from the printed text. This song, and others like it, could be heard throughout the country in the daily life of the partisan. Whether a reader imagines a fictitious melody or recalls the real thing, “Le quattro stagioni” invites them to engage history and its cultural artifacts.

As recollections of the past, canti carcerati belong to a larger discourse on collective and historical memory. Wulf Kansteiner explains that “Collective memories originate from shared communications about the meaning of the past that are anchored in the life-worlds of individuals who partake in the communal life of the respective collective.”7 Prisoners of war––any war–– constitute the general collective in this case. Elaborating further, Kansteiner reminds us that,

Methodologically speaking, memories are at their most collective when they transcend the time and space of the events' original occurrence. As such, they take on a powerful life of their own, 'unencumbered' by actual individual memory, and become the basis for all collective remembering as disembodied, omnipresent, low-intensity memory. . . . Concern with low intensity collective memory shifts its focus . . . to rituals and representations of the past that are produced and

6 I use D-minor for the present study in accordance with the transcription found in Leoncarlo Settimelli and Laura Falavolti, Canti anarchichi, (Rome: Savelli, 1975), 146-147.

7 Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 302.

consumed routinely without causing much disagreement. . . . These repetitive representations form the backbone of collective memories.8

Canti carcerati or, more specifically, their invocation, provide a considerable foundation for the formation of collective memory. As abstracted, emulated, or even contrived subject matter, songs of prison life speak to generalized experiences that are empathetic to actual prisoners but nonetheless untraceable to any specific source. What is more, the nature of their performance yields a commodified memory that can be produced and consumed by others. Calvino’s use of canti carcerati in his novel relies heavily on this performance tradition to construct a contextual narrative to support his plot. Readers aware of the history of songs such as “Le quattro stagioni” are afforded a deeper understanding of the realm within the novel.

Performance and Plot / Performance as Plot

Let us remind ourselves that these performances occur squarely within the domain of literature. As such, Calvino acts as an arbiter for our senses by manipulating song’s remaining method of conveyance––its lyrics. He frames the opening passage of the tavern scene in a peculiar way by setting the text apart from the body of the narrative. Going further, the verse of

“Le quattro stagioni” found in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno has been altered. Normally a double quatrain,9 Calvino splits the two and rearranges them (as shown in Table 3-1). Each half has a distinct theme, but their wording betrays their original order. Calvino concedes to the narrative with his construction of this passage. While the song has themes of incarceration, they are not revealed until after the story introduces them as critically important. In the interlude between the stanzas, Calvino writes:

The men listened in silence, with downcast eyes as if they were listening to a hymn in church. They had all been prisoners: he who was not a prisoner was not a

8 Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” 302.

9 Settimelli and Falavolti, Canti anarchichi, 68.

man. And the old song of the convicts was full of that discomfort that comes of the bones each night in prison, when the guards pass by and rap on the cells with an iron bar, when slowly the quarrels and the cursing fade, and all that remains is the lone voice that sings that song, as Pin has now, and no one shouts to quiet him.10

Table 3-1. “Le quattro stagioni,” strophes as presented in Italo Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1993), 6, with accompanying translation and original construction underneath. Calvino’s construction:

Ma Quando penso all’avvenir But when I think of what will happen della mia libertà perduta of my lost freedom, vorrei baciarla e poi morir I would like to kiss you and quickly fade mentre lei dorme… all’insaputa… away while you slept… unknowing…

Original construction:

Amo la notte ascoltar I love to listen at night il grido della sentinella. The calls of the sentry. Amo la luna al suo passar I love the passage of the moon quando illumina la mia cella. as it illuminates my cell. Ma Quando penso all’avvenir But when I think of what will happen della mia libertà perduta of my lost freedom, vorrei baciarla e poi morir I would like to kiss you and quickly fade mentre lei dorme… all’insaputa… away while you slept… unknowing…

10 Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 6. Personal translation. Original: “Gli uomini ascoltano in silenzio, a occhi bassi come fosse un inno di chiesa. Tutti sono stati in prigione: chi non è stato mai in prigione non è un uomo. E la vecchia canzone da galeotti è piena di quello sconforto che viene nella ossa alla sera, in prigione, quando i secondini passano a battere le grate con una spranga di ferro, e poco a poco tutti i litigi, le imprecazioni si quietano, e rimane solo una voce che canta quella canzone, come ora Pin, e nessuno gli grida di smettere.”

Calvino’s arrangement appears to reinforce the resultant mood in the tavern. By displacing this quatrain, Calvino frustrates the tonal motion of the song itself. As shown in Figure 3-1, the two quatrains in their original order yield a continuous musical phrase that ends in the tonic minor.

Rearranged, the verse now proceeds through the minor key and ends back in the parallel major.

The brief cadence in minor sets the tone for the sullen, pensive patrons who take the opportunity to reflect on their implied incarcerated past. When the song returns, we are brought to the parallel major where Pin ends his performance––taking a cue from the patrons and asserting his own manhood through the performance of prison life.

This manipulation of the implied music is suggestive in and of itself, but the agency of the surrounding narrative makes this performance much more vivid. To readers who have heard

“Le quattro stagioni” before, the imagined minor tonality perfectly accompanies the sunken mood of the tavern audience. To those without prior knowledge of the tune, Calvino’s interlude colors our imagination––providing its own melancholy. In this way, the written word invades our imagination and establishes an emotional precedent. This melancholy persists through the second quatrain, effectively rewriting its implied tonality. If we consider this to be the case, then

Calvino’s reorganization of the text yields the same result as the original song––the essential mood is sad one. In order to diffuse this pathos and rile up the tavern patrons, Pin immediately transitions into the song “La strapazzata” (or “The Mistreated One”)11––a real and raunchy tune that catalogues the various parts of a woman’s body. We are never given the song’s title, however.12 Also peculiar to this example is its literal construction on the page: it is absorbed into

11 Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 7. For full lyrics, consult Giuseppe Vettori and Enrica Tedeschi, Vaffanfulla!: Parolacce e porcherie nei canti goliardici e in otto secoli di letteratura per uomini soli (Rome: Lato side, 1978), 65.

12 Moments before this, we are given the name of the tune “Torna Caserio” and a description of another song. Preliminary research has yielded little on these songs, but they present an opportunity for expansion on the repertoire of Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno.

the narrative––unlike “Le quattro stagioni” moments before it––and it fades into the background.

This time, the men of the tavern participate by taking charge of the chorus and raucously singing along with Pin. Moments later, the scene shifts away from the tavern. And thus we are catapulted into the conflicted and morally-suspect world of the young protagonist.

One other explicit use of social song emerges later in the novel––this time to greater literary extent. Chapter seven establishes the makings of an explosive, action-packed scene. The partisans, awaiting the opportunity to engage in a substantial attack on the Germans, are huddled together in their two-story hut. Pin has been motioned to sing a song, a version of “Chi bussa alla mia porta,” while the chief is making covert advances toward a fellow partisan’s wife. The two narratives––that of the song and the novel proper––unfold simultaneously, both reaching their climax together through the eruption of an overfed fire. The resulting flames run rampant through the hut, destroying it along with several possessions. Calvino’s literal construction of this passage is unique in the novel. The lyrics are isolated, repeated, and then juxtaposed with short sentences of continuing narrative. This disjunct text setting serves a particular literary function. As a consequence of the confusing construction of this passage, Federica G. Pedriali argues that the reader “overlooks the incident in an act of unfocused browsing.”13 Thus the “fire- song” serves as a literal diversion for the act that it accompanies. The overfeeding of the fire is possible through Pin’s distraction––one grafted by Calvino onto the reader via a tangled passage of alternating prose.

13 Federica G. Pedriali, "'Piu per paura che per gioco?' Three textural explorations of Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno," Modern Language Review 93, no. 1 (January 1998): 64.

Table 3-2. Metamorphosis of “La bella Margherita” with accompanying translation. 1829 – Egeria 1947 - Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno

Chi bussa alla mia porta? Chi bussa alla mia porta, chi bussa al mio porton Chi bussa al mio porton? Chi bussa alla mia porta, chi bussa al mio porton. “Son il Capitan dell’onde, Son il vostro servitor.” Sono capitan dei mori con la sua servitù Sono capitan dei mori con la sua servitù. Se sei buon servitore, Adesso ti vengo a aprir. Deh ditemi o Godea dov’è vostro figliol La bella in camicetta Deh ditemi o Godea dov’è vostro figliol. La porta vien a aprir. Mio figlio è andato a guerra non può più ritornar “Ditemi un poco, mia bella, Mio figlio è andato a guerra non può più ritornar. Dove è vostro marit?” Mi marito sta in Francia, Il pane che lui mangia lo possa soffocar Non puossi rivenir. Il pane che lui mangia lo possa soffocar.

“Ditemi un poco, mia bella, E l’acqua che lui beve lo possano affogar Se vi sta a sentir?” E l’acqua che lui beve lo possano affogar. La bella diede un sguardo, Conobbe il suo marit. La terra che lui calca si possa sprofondar La terra che lui calca si possa sprofondar. Si butta in ginocchioni, E gli chiese perdon. Che dite mia Godea son io vostro figliol “Io non perdono donne, Che dite mia Godea son io vostro figliol. Che hanno tradito me!” Perdonami figliolo se parlai mal di te Messe mano alla spada, Perdonami figliolo se parlai mal di te. La testa le tagliò; La testa fece un zombo, La spada tirò fuori la testa le tagliò E in mezza alla casa andò La spada tirò fuori la testa le tagliò.

In mezza alla sua camera La testa fece un salto in sala se n’andò Ci nascerà un bel fior, La testa fece un salto in sala se n’andò. Fiore di Margherita, Ch’ è morta per amor. In mezza a quella sala ci nascerà un bel fior In mezza a quella sala ci nascerà un bel fior. Sonate le campane, Ch’ è morta Margerita, Il fiore d’una mamma uccisa da un figliol È morta per amore, Il fiore d’una mamma uccisa da un figliol. È morta, non c’è più.

Table 3-2. Continued 1829 – Egeria 1947 - Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno

Who knocks at my door? Who knocks at my door, who knocks at my front door Who knocks at my front door? Who knocks at my door, who knocks at my front door. “I am the captain of the waves, Your servant.” I am the captain of the Moors with your servant. I am the captain of the Moors with your servant. If you are a good servant, Then you will let me in. Speak to me, oh joy, where is your son The beauty in the blouse, Speak to me, oh joy, where is your son. The door begins to open. My son has gone to war never to return “Speak to me, my beautiful, My son has gone to war never to return Where is your husband?“ My husband is in France, He chokes on the bread he eats Where he cannot return. He chokes on the bread he eats.

“Speak to me, my beautiful, And the water he drinks may drown him Will you stay and listen? And the water he drinks may drown him. The beauty throws a glance, She recognizes her husband. May the earth he tread collapse under him May the earth he tread collapse under him. If she falls to her knees, The church will pardon her. What are you saying to me, joy, I am your son “I do not pardon women What are you saying to me, joy, I am your son. Who cheat on me!” Forgive me my son if I speak wrongly of you With hand to sword, Forgive me my son if I speak wrongly of you. Her head is cut; Her head rolls The sword is drawn past the head it cut And lands in the middle of the The sword is drawn past the head it cut. house. The head falls to the floor and rolls In the middle of the room, The head falls to the floor and rolls. There grows a beautiful flower. Margherita’s Flower, In the center of that floor there grows a beautiful flower Who died for love. In the center of that floor there grows a beautiful flower.

The bells chime The flower of a mother killed by a son The Margherita is dead, The flower of a mother killed by a son. Is dead for love, Is dead, and gone.

Once again, Calvino’s choice in repertoire directly reflects the scene at hand. The song

Pin sings around the fire has its roots in “La bella Margherita,” a text that dates back to at least the early 1800s in a collection of Italian folk songs and poems by Wilhelm Müller.14 But the lyrics have changed dramatically. Like “Le quattro stagioni” in the first chapter, Calvino has manipulated the song’s text. The crucial difference between these two renditions lies in the identity of the man. “La bella Margherita” of the 1820’s is a tale of a husband and wife. The husband has been away, stationed in France for some time, and his wife has since found satisfaction in other men. Upon his return, the husband adopts a disguise to test his suspicions of her infidelity. Through his wife’s willingness to entertain a “stranger,” he concludes that she has in fact cheated on him before and sentences her to death. The song’s themes are by-and-large historically nonspecific and therefore lend themselves to easy appropriation and revision by others. But the song is nonetheless centered around the tropes of war and lost love. Calvino’s “La bella Margherita” takes its cue from the dialogue preceding its performance in the novel.

Another character asks Pin to sing the song (here referred to by its incipit: Chi bussa alla mia porta).15 He, in an ever-playful and nefarious mood, asks who it is that she would like to come knocking at her door. The end result is a tale of a bastard child, orphaned at birth, who returns to find and kill his mother. Calvino’s rendition therefore juxtaposes the woman, this time a mother instead of a wife, with her son instead of her husband. This changes the song’s narrative drastically. The woman’s transgression is no longer infidelity, but speaking ill of a solider––her

14 (Of Winterreise fame). The earliest version – moreover the only version – that I have found is the following: Wilhelm Müller and Oskar Ludwig Bernhard Wolff, Egeria: Samlung Italienischer Volkslieder, (Leipzig: Ernst Fleicher, 1829).

15 Though the text may be derived from the poem “La bella Margherita,” the song is most frequently titled after its incipit. Several examples include “Chi bussa alla mia porta” (Emilia), “Che é chi é che bussa” (Toscana), and “Chi é, chi é che bussa” (Lazio). Each of these feature the same basic plot and mirror the repetitive construction of the one featured in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Transcriptions and text may be found in Nunzia Manicardi, Canti Narrativi Italiani (Bologna, Italy:Arnaldo Forni, 1994), 230-236.

son. This alone is reason enough to kill her. The fundamental shift in relationship between the two characters is equally significant. We are no longer discussing conflict between adults, but instead between generations. This functions as an allegory for the war at hand. The partisan

Resistance was fought by men and women of all ages, but found particularly strong support in the younger generation––those discontent with the rise of Fascism. In this way, Calvino’s alteration foregrounds a more significant political subtext. The song’s peculiar ending provides an easy soapbox for political commentary. Whether or not we accept the beautiful flower as an emblem of partisan victory––a prospering nation and culture free of German and Fascist oppression, the message is clear: the partisan Resistance is a personal one, a physical battle waged on an emotional plane.

The display of physical strength by the son in “Chi bussa alla mia porta” stands in stark contrast to the traditional role of the child in neorealism. Children in neorealist works are sources of rich allegorical meaning, and are typically characterized by a sense of inability, incapacity, and yet piercing clarity. As Gilles Deleuze writes, when “in the adult world, the child is affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing.”16 Indeed, the child is susceptible to “everyday banality”, one which may “reveal itself in a visual and sound nakedness, crudeness and brutality which make it unbearable”,17 and such susceptibility conspires to overwhelm him. In Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Calvino demonstrates this through a self-reflexive projection of his own insecurities onto the main character. Calvino’s intimidation in the face of nonverbal music emerges in one of the very few instances where it is mentioned in the narrative. The day of the big battle between the partisan fighters and the

16 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3.

17 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, 3.

passing Germans is contrasted with beautiful pastoral imagery. Pin awakens, having been left out of the skirmish, to a radiant morning. Calvino writes: “The day was blue like the others, which scared me to see it so, a day with birdsong, which scared me to hear them sing.”18 This passage fuels many observations about Pin’s world and Calvino’s literary style. Despite the relative innocuousness of the scenery, it strikes fear in Pin’s heart. The introduction of the non-verbal, which is to say the incomprehensible, music suggests an admission on the author’s part of his own private battles with his senses. Likewise, Pin’s sensory overload indicates an inability to cope with his surroundings. The blue sky, come gli altri, is an acceptance of the many identical days that preceded it; this simultaneous distinction and non-distinction is troublesome, for it demonstrates no tangible progression. The relative stasis implied in the indistinguishable days is a source of personal terror to those who are living in its endless void. Moreover, Pin’s inability to fully apprehend such a blue sky locates him within the evolving character tropes of the neorealist movement. Through performance, however, Pin’s world becomes mediated, distanced, and momentarily accessible. It is the performance of song and its accompanying powers of concealment that allow Pin to traverse the difficult and overwhelming sensory experiences of wartime Italy.19 Like the pistol that Pin so desperately wishes to wield, song promises a sense of agency not otherwise bestowed upon him. Unlike the pistol, however, Pin inherently knows how to brandish song. It is his only means of defense.

18 Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 117. Personal translation. Original: “È un giorno azzurro come gli altri, che fa paura vederlo così azzurro, un giorno con canti d’uccelli, che fa paura sentirli cantare.”

19 David Ward corroborates this notion, writing that “Calvino also suggests that the audaciousness of the imagination can be a precious weapon in our engagements with the difficulties presented by everyday reality.” In Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-46 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1996), 115.

Conclusion

Returning to Luciano Berio’s reflection, we find in his testimony an affectionate nod toward what he considers to be the innate musicality of Italo Calvino:

his work is, in effect, one of the most musical in the literature of this century by virtue of its multiplicity, of that polyphony of expressive levels with which he had such difficulty experiencing in music. His creative journey, with the mobility of all his levels of reality, is in fact the ideal comparison to musical architecture: like a construction of interlocking pieces in a musical process in continual transformation.20

Calvino confronts the memories of war through the virtuosity of his oeuvre. He was indeed a musician of sorts, negotiating expressive and literary states with the deftness of a skilled performer. His embrace of social songs as cornerstones of his narrative suggests an essential understanding and respect for their agency. Addressing the neorealist writers, Nicola

Chiaromonte writes that, “Morally speaking, theirs was a problem of responsibility: could the writer remain aloof from his surroundings, unmoved by a world in turmoil, unaffected by the crisis of all social and moral values?”21 The short answer appears to be “no.” Through the eyes of a child, then, Calvino effectively distanced the immediate world in which the novel unfolded.

Instead, his true engagement stems from his repertory of song that appeal to a more general collective memory of history––one that confronts the atrocities of the Second World War through the act of performance.

20 Luciano Berio, “La musicalità di Calvino,” 117. Personal translation. Original: “sua opera che è, in effetti, una della più musicali nella letteratura di questo secolo, anche in virtù di quella moltitudine, di quella polifonia di livelli espressivi che lui aveva difficoltà a percepire nell’esperienza musicale. Il suo percorso creativo, con la mobilità di tutti i suoi livelli di realtà, è infatti idealmente paragonabile a una architettura musicale: come una costruzione di frammenti internamente partecipi di un processo musicale in continua trasformazione.”

21 Nicola Chiaromonte, “Realism and Neorealism in Contemporary Italian Literature,” College English 14, no. 8 (May 1953): 432.

CHAPTER 4 CONFRONTING THE FASCIST PAST: RECOLLECTION AND RECONCILIATION IN BERTOLUCCI’S THE CONFORMIST

Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970) was among the vanguard in

Italian cinema that confronted the pressing question of “why Fascism?” In a cinematic age that shouldered the political burdens of a problematic, postwar nation, Bertolucci’s film––based on a book of the same name by Alberto Moravia in 1951––offered both a reflection on the past and a warning for the future. Though he employs both a challenging and unique cinematic paradigm, his specific use of song is often overlooked. Moreover, a consideration of these songs and their attendant historical meanings projects a fuller understanding of both the context for-–and the critique of––the Fascist backdrop for the film. The most explicit example comes at its very conclusion. Just after the protagonist Marcello confronts a specter of his past, two groups of marching men appear from either side of the Colosseum’s hallway. On their path toward collision, each group is singing a different song: one, the Italian anthem “Fratelli d’Italia,” and the other the French “L'Internationale.” Both are songs of great importance to national identity, and the collision of the two in the final scene presents a jarring commentary on the unstable political and social identity of the Italian people. A discourse on difference and power, The

Conformist foregrounds the illusions of Fascism through a complex narrative that subtly addresses how Fascism has been eschewed in postwar Italy. Moreover, The Conformist is ideologically rooted in discourse on history and memory. Through an examination of

Bertolucci’s cinematic technique and narrative, I argue that the use of social song within the film as a recollection of the Fascist past suggests a heightened awareness of its agency throughout the

Fascist era and, implicitly, the war itself.

At the heart of The Conformist lies central conflict between public and private identity.

The protagonist, Marcello Clerici, is deeply preoccupied with his perceived inner difference that stems from a homosexual encounter at an early age. Privately, Marcello is a conflicted man.

Having been propositioned by an older man in his youth, a young Marcello took the man’s pistol and sought violent retribution. His memories of that event are colored with guilt and grief, and have since come to bear on his public persona. We, as audience members, are invited to observe

Marcello’s psychological battle through an emotional transparency evinced through cinematic technique. As R. T. Witcombe suggests, Bertolucci’s film features “an expressive mise en scène which mirrors the emotion of characters … [through] the dynamics of cinema composition. The track, the tilt and the crane are vital elements.”1 Bertolucci makes full use of his expressive cinematic language; wide-angle shots, diagonal perspectives, and surrealist scenes populate the film, providing a direct port from the outer world of the characters to their inner selves. As

Robert Zaller notes, “The Conformist is often obliquely angled, particularly from above, or busy in corners askew from the principal action. The camera’s perspective thus continually antithesizes that of the characters’, carrying on a running critique of the action, and implying a different order of reality.”2 Unable to fully reconcile with his past, Marcello seeks the protection of a higher power––the Fascist party. Not content to simply hide in the crowd, Marcello instead wishes to be the crowd. Marcello’s conception of “normal” does not embrace individuality so much as discards it, and his Fascist sympathies reflect a yearning for group solidarity beyond the practical and political impulses espoused by most party members. Marcello seeks absolution in

1 R. T. Witcombe, The New Italian Cinema: Studies in Dance and Despair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 78.

2 Robert Zaller, “Bernardo Bertolucci, or Nostalgia for the Present,” The Massachusetts Review 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1975): 819. For more discussion concerning Bertolucci’s cinematic language in The Conformist, see also Robert Phillip Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 54.

the collectivity of Fascism, and he thus proposes a plan to surveil his former professor and antifascist sympathizer as a personal form of penitence for his past.

Marcello thus adopts the many characteristics of Fascism in an attempt to assimilate himself. According to Umberto Eco’s conception of “Ur-Fascism,” “the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons––doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”3 In the scene in which Marcello is told to assassinate his professor (a change in plans unforeseen by Marcello which thoroughly complicates his already guilt-ridden persona), the gun given to Marcello becomes a momentary plaything. He awkwardly poses with the weapon, ultimately pointing the gun to his head in near self-effacement. Bertolucci unknowingly, though uncannily, provides a visual analogue for Eco’s conception of the Ur-Fascist in this scene. Indeed, even the notion of concocting an assassination figures into the characterization of Fascism as transfigured power play. The multivalent system of signification in the scenes of The Conformist thus works to elaborate upon the political and personal world of the protagonist.

The conflation of Marcello’s past transgressions and his political affiliation foregrounds an important moral aspect of Bertolucci’s film. Millicent Marcus, commenting on Bertolucci’s own admission of the social consciousness embedded within his film, further traces the significance of its moral dimension:

Bertolucci’s desire ‘to make the public leave with a sense of malaise,’ to force his viewers to confront their Fascist past and to rethink their relationship to it,

3 Umberto Eco, “Eternal Fascism,” New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995. Quoted in Stanislao G. Pugliese, ed, Fascism, Antifascism, and the Resistance: 1919 to the Present (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2004), 295. Author’s emphasis.

constitutes a plea for moral responsibility akin to the early neorealists’. As a reaction to the Fascist film industry, and to the ideology it espoused, the neorealists deplored any form of escapism and insisted that the public once more take charge of its political destiny. Similarly, Bertolucci’s film may be seen as a parable of what happens when an individual, and by extension when an entire populace, abdicates responsibility for its moral condition.4

While the neorealist connection is a problematic and potentially reductive one, The Conformist does follow in the footsteps of neorealist cinema––if only ideologically. Fascism, to Marcello, is a powerful refuge, an equalizing force that seeks to strip away his individual identity. This is what he wants, after all, in a peculiar twist of intent that is thrown into relief when a Fascist official confronts him, saying: “Did you ever ask yourself why people want to collaborate with us? Some do it out of fear, most of them for the money. For faith in Fascism, very few. But you, no. I feel that you're not governed by any of these reasons.”5 Marcello’s sexual deviance, though we might consider any form of deviance in this case, is his primary motive to conform to the

Fascist doctrine. “Fascism, then,” writes Witcombe, “stems from an imbalance in the mind. It is a form of sexual aberration first, and a perversion of civic and bureaucratic duties after.”6 The moral complications of Bertolucci’s film challenge us to reflect on current political climates and consider such a moral abdication as a critical element in the formation of large-scale political movements. As Marcus notes, “the agent is not morally accountable for his actions, he is merely the conduit of some external authority whose dictates he follows as a matter of duty.”7 This

4 Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 286.

5 Bertolucci spoke of this character trait in Marcello Clerici, saying that “Marcello is really a very complex character, searching to conform because of his great, violent anti-conformism [(i.e. his sexual deviancy)]. A true conformist is someone who has no wish to change: to wish to conform is really to say that the truth is contrary.” Marilyn Goldin, “Bertolucci on The Conformist: An Interview with Marilyn Goldin,” Sight and Sound 40 (Spring 1971): 66.

6 Witcombe, The New Italian Cinema, 95.

7 Marcus, Italian Film in Light of Neorealism, 290.

conception of non-negotiable compliance with an authoritarian government has provided an ethical crutch upon which to justify unethical actions––one that Marcello gladly co-opts in the face of his own personal perversions.

Representation in the Cinematic Language of The Conformist

In an interview regarding his later film 1900 (1976), Bertolucci acknowledged to interviewer Gideon Bachmann that The Conformist was an exercise in “cinematographic memory”:

But certain things I do not think it is necessary to have lived, oneself. The same was true for The Conformist, which takes place in years that I did not live at all. I applied a sort of cinematographic memory. The cinema is a gigantic, collective memory, which can help one a lot in this way. I made The Conformist just by remembering the films of those years. Even when they are fictional, if films concern the present they are always violently documentary––I am telling you that the cinema always ends up being a documentary.8

Here, Bertolucci demonstrates a keen awareness of the multivalent, which is to say multi- temporal, process of recollection––an act that is firmly anchored in the present and only fleetingly rooted in the past. Paul Ricoeur, addressing the problematic notion of the temporal space transgressed by memory, reminds us that the recollection of an event is both a rational and affective act:

the notion of temporal distance is inherent in the essence of memory and assures the distinction in principle between memory and imagination. Moreover, the role played by estimation of lapses of time underscores the rational side of recollection: this ‘search’ constitutes ‘a sort of reasoning.’ This does not prevent the body’s being involved in the sort of affection that is displayed in the hunt for the image.9

8 Gideon Bachmann, “Films are Animal Events: Bernardo Bertolucci Talks about His New Film, ‘1900,’” Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 13.

9 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 18.

This “sort of reasoning,” by Ricoeur’s model, is a critical aspect of Bertolucci’s cinematic storytelling. The timeline of The Conformist is entirely disjunct and spans decades, freely switching between points in time through flashbacks. As a result, the “estimation of lapses of time” is both foregrounded in the narrative through constant reflection by the protagonist and obfuscated for the viewer who must struggle to piece together coherence in the narrative itself.

As Peggy Kidney writes, “[the flashbacks] portray the character’s psychological state as a product of past events which are continuously present.”10 The flashbacks are narrative devices constructed for the film; Bertolucci chose not to borrow the linear narrative present in Moravia’s book.11 As such, we find that the act of remembering lies at the core of the film’s narrative structure, one grafted onto the subject matter by the director himself.12

Maurice Halbwachs draws particular attention to the external pressures from society on the act of remembering:

But I believe that the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society. Is it not strange then that society causes the mind to transfigure the past to

10 Peggy Kidney, “Bertolucci’s The Conformist: A Study of the Flashbacks in the Narrative Strategy of the Film,” Carte Italiane 7, no. 1 (1986): 48. Further discussion on Bertolucci’s experimentation with the temporal dimension can be found in Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci, 47.

11 T. Jefferson Kline further comments on this distinction between film and novel, writing that “Bertolucci’s use of flashbacks is unusual not only for its disregard of chronology but also for the tendency to use flashbacks out of flashbacks. Progression occurs clearly by association rather than logic. Each scene presents images and/or information that must be stored and read associatively rather than analytically. The viewer is forced to watch in the way an analyst listens, for clues that can later be pieced together to form an interpretation. What is most cinematic about this arrangement is that the narrative “authority” of the film has been vested both in the associative process of the main character and in an omniscient camera. Rather than imitating Moravia’s omniscient narrator, Bertolucci has, to use Nick Brown’s phrase, situated the spectator simultaneously in many places in the film’s text, imitating instead the multiple identities of dreams.” T. Jefferson Kline, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 92.

12 Bertolucci acknowledges in an interview with Marilyn Goldin that his late ‘60s and early ‘70s films rely on the past (both his own personal one and that of the collective Italian people) to comment upon the present: “My own father was an anti-Fascist, but obviously I feel that the whole bourgeoisie is my father. And Fascism was invented by the petit bourgeois. And there’s the fact of having made two films about the past, not having arrived at making films about the present. Or rather, they are two films that arrive at the present by speaking of the past,” in Goldin, “Bertolucci on The Conformist,” 66. Further discussion of the difference between Bertolucci’s and Moravia’s treatment of the timeline in The Conformist can be found in Kline, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom, 92-93, 104- 105.

the point of yearning for it? Rousseau has said that of the Christian religion: “Far from binding the hearts of citizens to the state, it detaches them from it as from all the things of this earth. I know nothing that is more opposed to the social spirit.” May I not paraphrase and say that the cult of the past, far from binding the hearts of people to society, in fact detaches them: there is nothing more opposed to the interest of society? But note that, whereas the Christian prefers to terrestrial life another which for him is at least as real and which he locates in the future, people well know that the past no longer exists, so that they are obliged to adjust to the only real world––the one in which they now live. They look back only intermittently at vanished time and they never linger there for long. Moreover, how can one fail to see that if people in society were always like a stretched spring, if their horizons were limited to groups of their contemporaries (indeed of those contemporaries whom they find around them), if they were constantly forced to behave in conformity with their customs, tastes, beliefs, and interests, they might well bow before the social laws but they would endure them only as a harsh and continued necessity? Would they not consider society only as an instrument of constraint and not exhibit any generous and spontaneous enthusiasm for it? … Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events in their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exacts, we give them prestige that reality did not possess.13

Conformism, it seems, arises from a societally-imposed imperative to reconstruct the past in order to justify the present. This is not to say that all remembering is bad, however. While the

“cult of the past” is no stranger to the Fascist doctrine, it is the retrospective appraisal of past actions that allows us to fully understand and come to terms with them. As George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”14 The reconstruction of the past in The Conformist therefore takes on several important responsibilities.

On the one hand, Bertolucci’s “cinematographic memory” is an interpretive gesture that has at its core a mimetic (of ‘30s cinema), but also figurative, aesthetic goal. On the other, the subject matter of The Conformist demands a degree of moral engagement. Despite the multifaceted

13 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 51.

14 George Santayana, Life of Reason, “Reason in Common Sense,” 5 vols. (New York City: Scribner's, 1905), 284.

motives for Bertolucci’s retrospection, the memory being evoked is ultimately spurious. As

Marcus affirms, “Bertolucci’s reconstruction of the Fascist years is thus several removes from any attempt at direct representation and becomes, instead, a personal interpretation of the ways in which Thirties culture saw itself.”15

It is no surprise that Bertolucci’s The Conformist amounts to a type of critique on Fascist culture. As Mellen argues, “‘Fascism’ thus becomes a metaphor for man’s need to set first his own internal house in order; the failure of this crucial process of self-examination explains why these films point with such bitter irony to the absence of coherent resistance to Fascism.

Bertolucci [especially is] convinced that self-consciousness must precede attempts at activism.”16

By reconstructing the circumstances that lead many to conform to the Fascist doctrine,

Bertolucci further critiques the social and political motives (or lack thereof) of the Italian people in the early-twentieth century. But, as Bertolucci himself admitted, The Conformist was not solely intended to be a film about the past but rather one that informs and comments upon the present in relation to the past. As such, we must affix a critical lens to the ways in which the film has engendered discourse on Italian culture and society in the postwar era.

Bertolucci invites the Italian public to acknowledge their own nostalgic attachment to the

Fascist era. When posed a question concerning Italy’s nostalgia for Fascism and its relation to

The Conformist, he responded with an emphatic

Yes! That’s why I say The Conformist is a film on the present. And when I say that I want to make the public leave with a sense of malaise, perhaps feeling the presence of something obscurely sinister, it’s because I want them to realize that however the world has changed, feelings have remained the same. Feelings, that is, about normality and abnormality… For Italy, the film is very savage.17

15 Marcus, Italian Film in Light of Neorealism, 309.

16 Joan Mellen, “Fascism in the Contemporary Film,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Summer 1971): 19.

17 Goldin, “Bertolucci on The Conformist,” 66.

Nostalgic representations in The Conformist coincide with the dichotomy espoused by Svetlana

Boym in The Future of Nostalgia. Boym characterizes two forms of nostalgia: restorative and reflective; “Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.”18 The Fascist preoccupation with the past is an inherently restorative one––an obligation to revive and succeed the glory of Italian cultural ancestry.

Maurice Halbwachs’s view of society as an instigator of memory formation also corresponds to the motives for restorative nostalgia. This is the foreground and political context for the world in

The Conformist. The film, however, engages in a reflective nostalgia as seen through the perception of its protagonist. Marcello continually reflects on, and fleetingly dwells in, his past experiences. These are not experiences that he wishes to reconstruct and relive, however; rather, they insidiously creep into his mental space (and thus into the realm of cinema) as persistent reminders of his personal deviancy––here seen as the interplay between normality and abnormality as outlined by Bertolucci. “Social thought is essentially a memory and … its entire content consists only of collective recollections or remembrances” wrote Maurice Halbwachs,

“But it also follows that, among them, only those recollections subsist that in every period society, working within its present-day framework, can reconstruct.”19 The interplay of deviance and conformism in The Conformist remains relevant, then, because of its persistence in the sociocultural landscape of post-Fascist Italy.

One final consideration regarding the role of representation in the cinematic language of

The Conformist is the presence of illusion and oneiric sequences. They belie a further

18 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41.

19 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 189.

philosophical engagement through the Analogy of the Cave from Plato’s Republic, which describes a group of prisoners chained together in a cave with a small fire behind them as their only source of light. Shadowy images are cast onto the wall in front of them by passing objects in front of the fire. These shadows are substitutions for real objects that cast them, but they are perceived as real to the prisoners who cannot otherwise see their source. As such, the analogy underscores the illusory aspect of indoctrination (manifested in the film as blindness) and control––metaphors upon which the cinematic language of The Conformist is constructed.20

Marcus elaborates on the role of Plato’s Cave in The Conformist, suggesting that

What Bertolucci is telling us, in making this analogy, is to beware of the seductive allure of the shadows on the screen, to perceive them critically, not to endow them with power over us. Fascism worked because people succumbed to illusion, granting moral authority to superior forces which legislated their own ethics and imposed them on a passive, uncritical, irresponsible public. By owning up to the illusory nature of his art, Bertolucci is taking moral responsibility for it and is urging his viewers to accept its fictions for what they are.21

By alluding to the same sense of illusion that formed the backbone of Fascist rhetoric,

Bertolucci’s film thus enters into a larger discourse on the Fascist era. Moreover, these sequences are often ensnarled with the flashback scenes, which further suggests the illusory and deceptive nature of recollection. Indeed, when flashbacks are introduced, they demand the audience’s engagement in order to be clarified and comprehended. Kolker alludes to this sense of an active audience, writing that

Time and events slip through Clerici’s grasp and, when caught, take the appearance of things partly seen, wrongly perceived, or perceived with such distortion as to signify to the viewer the lack of clarity within Clerici’s memory and is perception of the events at the very time in the fiction they were meant to

20 For a concise overview of Plato’s Cave in The Conformist, see Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci, 96.

21 Marcus, Italian Film in Light of Neorealism, 302. Bertolucci explicitly makes this connection himself between Plato’s Cave and modern cinema on several occasions. See: Bernardo Bertolucci, et al., “Bernardo Bertolucci Seminar,” American Film Institute Dialogue on Film 3 (April 1974): 21 and Goldin, “Bertolucci on The Conformist,” 65.

occur. The viewer is, in turn, required to perceive and understand the misperceptions and to respond to the considerable energy and visual acumen that Bertolucci demonstrates in creating them.22

Once again, we find that misperception, whether through blindness, misremembering, dream-like sequences, or other means, lies at the heart of the film. What is more, the task is often shifted to the audience who must then make clear sense of the cinematic and allegorical language. In short,

Bertolucci’s film requires a cinematic engagement, one that enjoins the audience to co-opt a self- consciousness surrounding their historical past. Only then might the sins of Italy’s Fascist past be reconciled.

Song: Spectacle and Performance

Much of Bertolucci’s film can be considered in terms of spectacle and performance.

From dance, to song, and even identity itself, Marcello’s life and external world are constantly being projected as a kind of performance. “With Marcello,” writes Angela Dalle Vacche,

“performance is an act of simulation whose reward is the pleasure of conforming to a system of authority”23––though we may extend this to apply to other characters and instances of performance within the film. To aid in his narrative, Bertolucci features several social songs––as well as dancing24––throughout his film. The most prominent is the French left-wing anthem

“L’Internationale,” which is repeated several times. Others include a Fascist military tune, a children’s instructional song from Northern Italy, and the Italian labor movement anthem “La bandiera rossa.” These songs reflect the terrain upon which this film is staged, spanning both

22 Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci, 88-89.

23 Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 67.

24 Millicent Marcus, among others, has argued that “dance has served as the moving image of social conformity” in Il conformista. Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 303.

Italy and France, and also evoke a wealth of extramusical affiliations regarding their historical and sociocultural significance.

As a framework for addressing the use of song and dance in The Conformist, Angela

Dalle Vacche establishes the difference between performance and spectacle:

A performance is a particular type of spectacle in that it assumes the work of performers whose voices, gestures, and actions are consumable by either a potential or an actual audience. Performance brings to life the mise-en-scène which, until that moment, is frozen into a spectacle. The discourse of spectacle is based on passivity and is comparable to a monologue. Performance, instead, is dialogical. A tacit recognition of boundaries, or a mutual acknowledgement of roles, must take place between actors and spectators. … In The Conformist, spectacle and performance refer, respectively, to the passivity fostered by consent and to the desire of seeing one’s own identity represented as an acting subject.25

If we view the musical moments of The Conformist in this way, they reveal significant narrative potential. What does it mean when we encounter song as a performance (e.g. Manganiello’s private singing in the garden) and as a spectacle (e.g. the converging bands in the final scene)?

The earliest instance of song in the film is actually not a social song at all, but rather a popular tune being recorded and performed for a radio broadcast. As Marcus notes, the choreographed dance spectacle of the three identical women singing in close harmony with one another demonstrates a blind and unconditional conformity towards a specific goal.26 Here, the performance itself is unnecessary. The radio broadcast will not transmit the visual elements of the spectacle, and thus they are rendered impotent. Borrowing from Dalle Vacche’s conception of the spectacle, this scene is inherently monologic. While it has all the trappings of performance––the choreographed dance routine, the identical outfits, close harmony, and related dramaturgy––, they occur from behind a glass window at a physical distance and in a ideological

25 Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror, 66-67.

26 Marcus, Italian Film in Light of Neorealism, 303-304.

vacuum. The singers are not intending to engage Marcello in this scene, but rather the thousands upon thousands of listeners on the radio. What is more, they do this to liven up Fascist apologist

Italo Montanari’s political broadcasts. The female trio’s singing, as well as Italo Montanari’s broadcast itself, is but spectacle because they do not recognize any voice other than their own.

They do not invite dialogue, for it has no place in the one collective voice of the Fascist people.

Manganiello, the Fascist assigned to watch over Marcello as he undertakes his plans to assassinate Professor Quadri in Paris, sings several of the social songs featured in the film. He is a comedic character whose vain chicanery suggests yet again the incompetence and, at times, silliness, of strict Fascist adherence. After having lost sight of Marcello in the streets of Paris,

Manganiello takes pause in a park. He is speaking aloud his thoughts, addressing Marcello in his absence, to which an old woman comically reproaches him for speaking to the (French) birds in

Italian. Manganiello sits, and begins to sing to himself, crooning “Le donne non ci vogliono più bene, perché portiamo la camicia nera.” Known by its incipit, “Le donne non ci vogliono più bene” is a Fascist military song written in 1944 by Mario Castellacci.27 This is a peculiar choice, however, because the chronology of The Conformist spans the years of 1917-1943. Despite this rather prescient and wholly anachronistic moment in the park with Manganiello, we are given a glimpse of the musical narrative from which he, and, by substitution, his fellow Fascists stem.

Manganiello’s soliloquoy of sorts ends with a reiteration of their assassination plans: “I understand you,” he says to the absent Marcello, “but the operation must be quick and decisive.”

With that he takes a seat on the park bench, and the camera tracks to the right just far enough so the trunk of a tree obscures Manganiello’s figure. Only when his bodily presence is removed do we begin to hear his song, perhaps a reminder of the immaterial but ever present Fascist ideology

27 Cesare Bermani, “Guerra guerra ai palazzi e alle chiese…”: Saggi sul canto sociale (Rome: Odradek, 2003), 18.

that governs Manganiello’s course of action. He also introduces another song to the narrative during the car ride to Savoy, where Marcello shares with him the details of a profound dream.28

In it, a blind Marcello is taken to Switzerland to be operated on by Professor Quadri. After a successful surgery, Marcello leaves with the Professor’s wife Anna. It is a rich meta-narrative, but Manganiello does not engage him in discussing it. Rather, he focuses on the most banal detail of the dream and recalls a childhood song he used to sing about Switzerland: “La Svizzera, la

Svizzera, al Svizzera … xe una nazion!" Set to the tune of O, Tennenbaum, this is a simple instructional tune meant to reinforce a child’s comprehension of geography. Manganiello trivializes Marcello’s prophecy, of which Marcello takes no further heed.

Bertolucci’s use of “L’Internationale” as a discursive element within the narrative further belies his understanding of social song’s political and historical agency. We hear the tune at different times throughout the film, first on French soil in Paris and then within the heart of Italy inside of the Colosseum. The first to sing the song is a lowly flower merchant on the streets of

Paris. She offers Marcello a violet from Parma, which he promptly buys once he learns of its origins.29 As if his payment was inserted into a jukebox, the merchant and nearby street urchins finish their transaction with a rendition of the first strophe of the song. Joan Mellen writes of this scene as a distinct moment of foreshadowing:

The flower girl, as she sings, follows Marcello and Anna, fascist and fascist collaborator. Following them, she is appealing in image and song to a higher code of values than the ones Marcello and Anna pursue. That her call for the solidarity

28 Manganiello begins to sing a different song earlier in the car ride, with the lyrics: "Mammi tagliatrice non la lascio, grido … ferrite …. passo.” He mumbles the second line, making an intelligible transcription difficult. The first line, however, focuses on a “tagliatrice” or “cutter.” While this often translates to one who cuts diamonds, their may be a narrative analogue in the reference to the seamstress and fabric cutter who crafts Gina’s dress for the evening dance. I have yet to be able to positively identify this song as a preexisting one.

29 It is interesting to note the importance here of the town Parma. Bertolucci was born in Parma, and has spoken about its French cultural elements and its (historically) communist lean. See Joan Mellen, “A Conversation with Bernardo Bertolucci,” Cineaste 5, no. 4 (1973): 21.

of those oppressed by Fascism goes unheeded foreshadows the destruction that will come to both characters at the end of the film.30

Bertolucci thus wields this act of song as a narrative device, and brings it to fruition in a final climactic scene.

The final scene of The Conformist is as bewildering as it is metaphorically rich. In the wake of Mussolini’s downfall, antifascists have taken to the streets of Rome in boisterous celebration. Marcello has lost the security and shelter of an overarching ideology to keep him

“normal,” and his vulnerability is demonstrated in a flagrant display of blame and projection.

Walking with his friend and former Fascist comrade Italo Montanari through the halls of the

Colosseum, Marcello observes an encounter between an older man and a boy. He recognizes the proposition and exchange, and turns to see a ghost from his past in the flesh. The man who propositioned him at a young age, whom Marcello was certain he had killed in retaliation, is very much alive. This is the most devastating revelation of them all, for Marcello’s entire life has been devoted to rectifying this egregious sin. Every subsequent act, especially the murder of Anna and

Professor Quadri, were predicated on the notion of atonement for, as we now know, an act that never occurred. Marcello thus transfers this guilt to the man who molested him, accusing him of the crimes that he himself committed. Marcello, wholly broken at this point, proceeds to out his former friend Italo by proclaiming his Fascist affiliations. In this moment, the halls of the

Colosseum fill with the approaching sounds of singing voices.

As Marcus reveals, the final scene is indebted to Jean Renoir’s La vie est à nous:

[Renoir’s] model for political cinema is nonetheless repudiated in the finale of the film which both recalls and subverts the corresponding scene in La vie est à nous. Renoir’s film concludes on a choral note as members of all social classes join in singing “L’Internationale” while the crowds of The Conformist celebrate Mussolini’s downfall by singing two separate songs as once––”L’Internationale”

30 Mellen, “Fascism in the Contemporary Film,”18.

and “Bandiera rossa.” The addition of this second song is a cynical stroke of genius on Bertolucci’s part, for it reveals the failure of that solidarity of the Left which Renoir’s film so triumphantly announced and which the Italian Resistance promoted as its postwar revolutionary hope.31

The confluence of these two songs creates a textual nexus for the film. In the same stroke,

Bertolucci renders both Marcello and the Left-wing political aspirations ineffectual. What is more, Marcello does not have a place in this political demonstration. In the wake of Fascism,

Marcello has forfeited his claim to such a celebration. His bewilderment, and indeed our own, at this scene recalls the subjectivity of Bertolucci’s cinematic style. As the two opposing and approaching bands collide with Marcello at the center, he remains unaware, as if in a trance, of their very existence. Occasionally being jostled, Marcello and Italo are traversed by the bands, like a ghost through a wall, rather than being subsumed by them. Having already established a conceptual link between the camera and Marcello’s subjectivity, we might then conclude that this spectacle––and we may call it that since there is no tacit agreement between the bands and

Marcello, they coexist but never truly “interact”––is akin to the surrealist gestures seen throughout the film. While far more believable than, say, the Fascist officer’s desk that was piled with acorns, this scene presents a sense of fantasy and psychological stress. It is far from coincidence that the ultimate point of intersection is the body of Marcello himself.

Conclusion

Bertolucci’s film may be a representation of the Fascist past, but the implications of his film deeply affect the present. “The impulse to consider the phenomenon of collaboration, not of resistance,” writes Marcus, “makes The Conformist a cautionary tale––one that enjoins us to heed our history lest we relive its worst moments.”32 Of the many motives for collaboration,

31 Marcus, Italian Film in Light of Neorealism, 310.

32 Marcus, Italian Film in Light of Neorealism, 285.

Bertolucci foregrounds a preoccupation with difference and the desire for sameness. Morally speaking, The Conformist is a reflection on the suspect and specious idea that a political system can absorb the culpability of its adherents. Rather, Marcello demonstrates that individual moral responsibility is the true battleground on which the war is waged. Mellen furthers this notion, writing that

“In an important sense The Conformist … [is] not about Fascism alone. [It is] as much concerned with the interaction of man as a fundamentally neurotic being with a world of institutions which, almost mysteriously, have been created in support of his neuroses. Men like [Marcello] find too much opportunity to accommodate the needs of their weak and unsteady egos. The quest for psychological health in these films is rendered almost hopeless by a society created in the image of man’s deepest frustrations.”33

In this way, Marcello encapsulates the psychological conflicts that lay at the foundation and formation of political ideology, Fascist or otherwise. In addition to Marcello, Bertolucci employs a cast of characters who embody the processes and products of the political climate. Through performance and spectacle, Bertolucci reminds us of the insidious nature of Fascist politics.

Likewise, recollection and representation in Bertolucci’s cinematic language seek to implicate the Italian people in the precarious act of remembering. Appealing to the historical and sociocultural baggage of the social song repertoire, The Conformist’s mise-en-scène is further elevated toward an intertextual narrative indebted to the recollection of, and future reconciliation with, a Fascist past.

33 Mellen, “Fascism in the Contemporary Film,” 19.

CHAPTER 5 RE-IMAGINING FASCISM: POLITICS AND IDENTITY IN PORCO ROSSO

“I’d rather be a pig than a Fascist,” he says, taking a drag of his cigarette and pulling his hat further down to cover the face of a wanted man. For Marco Pagot, the protagonist of Hayao

Miyazaki’s animated film Porco Rosso,1 this statement is more than an exaggerated comparison: it is his reality. Cursed to resemble a pig, Marco’s porcine features project an obvious set of boundaries around which those within and outside of the film must negotiate his identity by its audience. In this way, his literal appearance is dramatically offset through striking facial features which foreground a fundamental quality of difference between him and the rest of the people in his world. But issues of identity in Porco Rosso do not rely on just the visual aspects of the characters and scenery; they are confronted and expressed through musical elements and narrative subtext as well. Indeed, to be “Italian” in Porco Rosso is to engage a complex of contextual and intertextual signs borrowed from history and the juxtaposition of media present in the animated film. I argue that the projection of national and personal identities in the film relies on the multivalent system of signs and symbols that includes historical events, geographic specificity, national stereotypes, and musical evocations of region and culture that stem peculiarly from an outside––that is, Japanese––perspective. In short, Porco Rosso contains historically-based imagery and subtext that are filtered through the visual-musical lens of a cultural and geographic “other.”

As Bruno Nettl once wrote with regard to ethnomusicology, “I believe that the best approach is to reconcile one’s self to being an outsider, providing a limited if unique view. In the

1 Hayao Miyazaki, Porco Rosso, DVD (Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2005).

end, this is [the ethnomusicologist’s] proper role …”2 Extrapolating further, Miyazaki’s distanced point of reference to Italian Fascism must not be taken as a form of inadequacy.

Rather, Miyazaki’s film enters into a discourse on Italian political and cultural history that persists well into the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. His contribution is a unique one. Indeed, Miyazaki’s imagination colors the realm of the Fascist twenties, throwing into relief a political subtext that comments not only upon past events but how they are perceived in the present––especially by outsiders. Paul Ricoeur wrote of the concept of imagination, explaining that

As a countercurrent to this tradition of devaluing memory, in the margins of a critique of imagination, there has to be an uncoupling of imagination from memory, as far as this operation can be extended. The guiding idea in this regard is the eidetic difference, so to speak, between two aims, two intentionality's: the first, that of imagination, directed toward the fantastic, the fictional, the unreal, the possible, the utopian, and the other, that of memory, directed toward prior reality, priority constituting the temporal mark par excellence of the ‘thing remembered,’ of the ‘remembered’ as such.3

Ricoeur’s chief aim is to uncover the truth, so-to-speak, in memory. To do so, he must first divorce it from the blatantly fantastic and fictional products of the imaginary. Memory and imagination are thus not to be conflated. “Memory is on the side of perception, as concerns its thesis of reality,” he writes, “… But now here is the reversal. [The act of imagination] takes place on the terrain of the imaginary. It results from what can be called the hallucinatory seduction of the imagination. … The incantation is equivalent to the voiding of absence and

2 Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005 [1983]), 159-160.

3 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 6.

distance.”4 It is here that we may situate Porco Rosso. Miyazaki’s intent with Porco Rosso is not to invoke an accurate historical memory (should such a thing even exist), but instead to imagine the realm in which such events took place. Distanced and detached, Miyazaki is approaching his own absence of an Italian cultural and historical past with imagination. What follows is a surprisingly poignant portrayal of sociopolitical themes that foster continued discussion on the

Fascist stigma of twentieth-century Italy.

Unlike many of Miyazaki’s films, the setting of Porco Rosso can be located roughly in history.5 Marco is introduced as an ace pilot of World War I. Since the end of the war, he has deserted his post in the air force and instead makes his living as a bounty hunter chasing sky pirates. He cannot do this in Italy, however, as his desertion makes him a wanted criminal with the Fascist government. As such, he has made a home in one of the many desolate islands in the

Adriatic Sea off the coast of modern-day Croatia. The Italian presence in the surrounding coastal towns suggests the mid-1920s, when Italy annexed part of that region under the Treaty of Rome.

Further locating the events of the movie in the mid-to-late 1920s is the pathos of economic depression that hangs over the film. The effects of the First World War are still present in Italy and its surrounding territories, and the tattered economy creates a occupational void that factors into the plot in significant ways––such as with Marco’s friend and mechanic, Piccolo, who must entrust the labors of his business to the women of all ages from his extended family because the men have gone off in search of work. Politically, Porco Rosso depicts the Fascist government during the inter-war period. The transience of the government in the coastal towns contributes to

4 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 53. Here “incantation” is borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrasing. Ricoeur constructs this passage around excerpts from Sartre’s The Imaginary: The Psychology of the Imagination (1940).

5 Some films, such as Kiki’s Delivery Service, are based on vague European locations and feature a general European aesthetic, but do not reflect a specific historical time period.

a feeling of lawlessness under which the sky pirates and bounty hunters can thrive. In contrast, the political environment of Milan, Italy, is demonstrated to be much more strict; covert operations to capture Marco by the secret police and the air force are swiftly undertaken once he crosses over the country’s official borders.

National and Cultural Depictions in Porco Rosso

As an animated film, Porco Rosso is indebted to its visual medium. The transference of meaning and associations of signs and symbols is often displayed in the animation itself.

Recalling the scene at Piccolo’s workshop, the extended greetings and introductions to his all- female staff play into an Italian stereotype of large families. Amongst the myriad workers are three old women identically dressed in hooded robes. Their faces are wrinkled, drooping, and their noses are bent and bulbous––a visual trope that recalls the popular children’s book Strega

Nona (Grandma Witch, 1975) by Tomie dePaola. The female troupe of laborers immediately begins work on cleaning up the shop and preparing it for Marco’s repairs. The scene ends, however, with an improvised banquet table spanning the length of the workshop. The day concludes, presumably, with the most important act of business: family dinner. The course consists of (you guessed it) spaghetti (and meatballs?) with the ever-present glass of red wine.

The tradition of family dinner is highlighted by the comedic sequence in which Marco begins to eat before the prayers have officially been given––one of which is thanking God for Marco’s money, as it will keep the struggling shop in business. Miyazaki thus spares no expense in his narrative, creating a pastiche of imaginary traits and tropes that signifies a particular, though utterly caricatured, “Italy.”

The film’s soundtrack also serves to highlight themes of Italian identity. Before leaving for Milan, Marco’s decision to seek repairs in the Italian city is underscored by the track titled

“Fio-Seventeen”6–named for Piccolo’s teenaged granddaughter, a prodigious airplane engineer.

What is most striking about this piece of music is its choice of instrumentation. While much of the soundtrack is scored for a conventional orchestral ensemble, soundtrack composer Joe

Hisaishi introduced the distinctly Italian mandolin to the orchestration. It is by no coincidence that we hear the instrument for the first time when Marco nostalgically recalls the Italian lifestyle, citing its delicious food, beautiful women, and plentiful amenities. In truth, the final location of Marco’s journey is irrelevant in this case; the evocation of a traditional, even mythic,

Italian culture is the imagined destination. Through intentional placement, the uniquely Italian sounds of the mandolin further reinforce the associations cited by Marco with Italian culture––a potent and suggestive, if perhaps subliminal, coding of the musical sounds with their accompanying significations.

Woven into the European-ness of Porco Rosso are trace elements of Japanese cultural values and beliefs. Dani Cavallaro suggests that “Both Marco’s and the pirates’ ethical values echo the doctrine of bushido (‘the way of the warrior’), a strict code originally associated with the samurai class”––a code that emphasized steadfast loyalty, honor, and devotion.7 The honorable qualities of the sky pirates, in particular, form a narrative turning point in the film; Fio emphatically rouses them out of their crusade against Marco by appealing to their common code of ethics. Channeling an inner sense of integrity and honor, the pirates shelve their mercurial temperaments for a more controlled and restrained attitude. Instead of outnumbering Marco, they agree to a more honest one-on-one battle.

6 Joe Hisaishi, Porco Rosso (Kurenai no Buta), Tokuma TKCA-71156, (CD), 1997, track ten.

7 Dani Cavallaro, The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 97.

Italian identity is not the only nationality to be contested and wielded in Porco Rosso; indeed, non-Italian characters create to a dialogue with the Italian political, social, and cultural themes that course throughout the film. The principal antagonist of the film, Donald Curtis, is an

American pilot hired by the Mamma Aiuto8 pirate gang to defeat Marco. He is a sharply satirized caricature of American ideals and identity. His infatuation with Gina, the owner of the popular

Hotel Adriano, and later Fio is characterized as childish and naive––in direct opposition to the more sophisticated and reserved romance of Gina and Marco. Commenting on the constructed rivalry between Curtis and Marco, Wood suggests “a clear distinction between the American character, associated with qualities of brashness and immaturity, and his European rival, associated with qualities of age and experience. Their rivalry encodes difference within the narrative, allowing two distinct identities to be formed.”9 Curtis’s character is built upon pretenses of bravado, self-aggrandizing behavior, and an infatuation with “making it big” in

Hollywood. He states his ambitions clearly, wishing to leave his life as an ace pilot for the silver screen of Hollywood, and then progress onward to being President of the United States. This sense of personal and political mobility––a tongue-in-cheek jab at capitalism––is a foil for the relative lack of political and personal ambition under the oppressive Fascist regime of Italy and serves to further extrapolate the political subtext behind the film.

Political Undercurrents

Miyazaki’s film borrows its fundamental ideology and partial narrative from Roald

Dahl’s short story “They Shall Not Grow Old.” Originally collected in Over To You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946), “They Shall Not Grow Old” recounts the mysterious absence of a

8 The pirate gang’s name translates to “Mother, help;” one could speculate many points of significance here, especially the rendering of the pirates as childish, naive, and bumbling fools.

9 Chris Wood, “The European Fantasy Space,” Post Script - Essays in Film and the Humanities 28, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 118.

British Royal Air Force fighter pilot flying over Palestine during the Second World War. On a routine flight to survey the Bayreuth port, a pilot named Fin encountered heavy fog. Within its miasma he felt helpless, mysteriously guided along by its beckoning. He eventually emerged from the cloud into a wash of blue color. It is here that Fin observed an ethereal line of planes, a ghostly procession of downed fighter pilots––knowing no alliance, bearing no grudge––and he joined them. He recalled the feeling of no feeling, of instead experiencing only the present moment. He passively drifted toward the bright white light and grew more and more ardent of becoming one with it. Suddenly, his plane broke from the line and proceeded away from the light while he struggled in vain to redirect his course. In the distant presence of salvation, and in the denial of transcendence, he desperately wished death upon himself. Coming to, he perceived only the short passage of time since initially taking up his surveillance mission––much to the puzzled reception of his crew who believed him to be dead. Fin finally recalled his prophetic experience after viewing a fellow pilot's death in a later air fight. His gut reaction, that his comrade was “a lucky, lucky bastard,” betrayed his own feelings of his role in the war. Death was, in fact, greater and more admirable than life, and reprieve from the atrocities of war was a powerful, pitiful desire.10

This scene is directly paralleled in Porco Rosso. In fact, it provides the crux for the movie and the greatest possible explanation for Marco’s disfigurement. Marco’s morphed visage is a direct port to the twisted and troubled inner world of his character. In Hegelian terms, our understanding of Marco’s identity is predicated upon the apprehension of both his appearance and essence. Harry Brod explains that, according to Hegel, “essence shows itself through its appearances; appearances are the appearance of essence. The essence of something is not some

10 Roald Dahl, Collected Stories (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2006), 68-73.

additional thing that lies behind or beyond that thing but it is rather the way in which the thing appears as what it is.”11 As such, our understanding of Marco’s identity is externally located.

Through the outward manifestation of Marco’s turbulent inner world, Miyazaki brings to the forefront the essence of Marco’s character––the roots of his identity which are steeped in residual regret. Dani Cavallaro goes further, suggesting that

It could be argued that Marco willingly embraces his bestial identity not only as a punishment commensurate with his unredeemable sense of guilt but also as an irreverently graphic indictment on the hypocritical values upheld by his culture in order to camouflage the actual tragedy of warfare. In this respect, the protagonist is essentially refusing to be glorified by recourse to the vacuously lofty label of “national hero.”12

Marco’s rejection of such labels manifests itself in the many jaded remarks he makes throughout the film pertaining to his appearance, among them the pertinent line: “I’d rather be a pig than a

Fascist.”

An interesting, albeit contrived, correlation arises in the way in which the image of the pig exists as emblematic of Italy in cinema. Porco Rosso shares this aspect with the landmark

Pier Paolo Pasolini film Mamma Roma (1962). As Maurizio Viano wrote, “Pasolini begins the film with the image of Mamma Roma pushing three little pigs, which Carmine ironically calls

Fratelli d’Italia (“Brothers of Italy,” the title of the national anthem). By first associating pigs with national pride, and then by showing a microcosm of pimps and whores celebrating a wedding, Pasolini creates a biting critique on Italians as prostitutes.”13 This is, of course, markedly different from the way in which Marco’s disfigurement plays into the narrative of

11 Harry Brod, Hegel's Philosophy of Politics: Idealism, Identity, & Modernity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 56.

12 Cavallaro, The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki, 97.

13 Maurizio Viano, “Mamma Roma,” in A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 88.

Porco Rosso, but it is not without some similarity. In both cases, the pig is a stand-in for vice, contempt, and bitterness toward national identity.14 Miyazaki uses the image of the pig in many non-Italian contexts throughout his oeuvre, but here it exists in partial complicity with a cinematic precedent that both informs and intercepts our interpretation. What does it tell us, then, when we consider the elevation of such a terrible symbol above that of Fascism? Antifascism thus plays a critical role in engendering meaningful discourse on Italy’s political history.

Although Miyazaki’s narrative surrounds the skirmishes of pilots and pirates, pacifism prevails. Despite clinging to their honor, the air pirates and bounty hunters are portrayed as bumbling fools who are easily manipulated. What forms the greatest conflict within the narrative––the dogfight between Marco and the American pilot Curtis––is reduced to a humorous display by the film’s end. And yet political subtext courses through the plot.

Demonstrations of the Fascist regime can be found in several scenes, including a military parade outside the Banca Nazionale where Marco retrieves money to repair his plane. Alongside flagrant displays of political affiliation through numerous flags, badges, military personnel and machinery, and armbands worn by the citizens,15 the banker attempts to gather donations from

Marco in support of government projects. Militaristic music, replete with march rhythms and brass instrumentation, scores the political demonstrations. Such music can also be found in

14 Further consideration could be given to the anthropomorphizing of animals in historical-political acts through an analysis of Art Spieglman’s graphic novel Maus (1991). Spieglman assigns animals to the different characters in this semi-biographical depiction of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. Pigs play the role of non-Jewish Poles, alongside the Jews as mice and the Germans as Pigs. The inclusion of more than one animal invites further allegory based on nature and the interaction of animals in a biological hierarchy, but the use of the pig may well contribute to the burgeoning trope of the pig as an emblem in cinema. Especially rich is the connection to be made between Maus Mamma Roma and Porco Rosso with regard to the pig as an allegory for bitterness toward a problematic national identity.

15 Black was the official color of the Fascist party. In Porco Rosso, military regalia features purple and green color schemes.

scenes depicting combat. The theme for the Mamma Aiuto pirates16 is also composed in march rhythms and brass accompaniment. These musical features are rich in extramusical, indexical associations. Commonly tied to military demonstrations, their invocation here serves to draw upon the expectation of the listener to make meaningful semiotic connections between the abstracted musical sound and its common real-world application. The use of such musical topoi and their indexical significance further emphasize the militaristic imagery and transmit much of the film’s associations between political display, power struggle, and the recollection (but also anticipation) of war.

In reconciling political and personal identity, Jason J. Howard writes that,

As social agents we experience cultural existence most viscerally in light of how we formulate the terms of our own accountability. It is precisely because of this that the legitimacy of any political identity depends not only on how the right to self-definition is articulated through political practices, but, more importantly, how the authority that supports these practices is discovered and experienced by the agents whose lives such policies attest to governing.17

In a world governed by Fascist politics, one where self-definition is slighted in fervent adherence to the unified whole, any such notion of individuality is rejected. Marco’s refusal to adopt the moniker of “national hero” is reflected here, whereby his own accountability (that of his intrinsic disgust for the acts of war he committed) contributes to the cultural and political object that now attempts to govern him. By virtue of such scenes of political spectacle, the social frame in which

Marco positions himself routinely bypasses self-definition in favor of overt demonstration of political identity through the ubiquitous color schemes of the political party and the armbands that supersede any distinction between clothing and appearance.

16 Hisaishi, Porco Rosso (Kurenai no Buta), track two, “MAMMAIUTO.”

17 Jason J. Howard, "Political Identity and the Dynamics of Accountability in Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Patriotism and Trust in the Modern State," in Identity and Difference: Studies in Hegel's Logic, Philosophy of Spirit, and Politics, ed. Philip T. Grier (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 245.

In addition to Marco’s antifascism, other facets of Porco Rosso evince similar political sentiments. One of the film’s female protagonists, Gina, performs nightly at her hotel and cafe to a crowd of regulars which include pilots and pirates alike. On the occasion that we, as spectators, get to experience her performance, she sings the French Communard theme “Le temps de cerises.”18 A brief movement of upward mobility for the working class in the late-nineteenth century, the Communards (and the establishment of the Paris Commune), demonstrated a potentiality for political success of the middle and lower classes––the primary demographic of the Hotel Adriano, and thus a particularly potent message to spread through the performance of song.19 This song is also heard in the very beginning of the film, wafting through the air from

Marco’s radio as he reclines on the beach in his secret cove. It was also featured prominently in the Japanese theatrical trailer. The soft, almost languid, verses of Gina’s performance are accompanied only by a piano––a scene that completes the essential nightclub performance dramaturgy with a glittering gown that delicately shapes the performer. The words themselves are soft and soothing, though they belie something much more serious. Indeed, the references to cherries, which fall “like drops of blood,” conjure up the painful imagery of devastation and loss in the wake of political upheaval. One question is worth asking, however: Why a French song?

Surely there must have been a suitable Italian one? One possible interpretation is that the song was chosen as a means of further juxtaposing European identity.

18 Cavallaro, The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki, 99.

19 The original song by Jean-Baptiste Clément (1866) is comprised of four stanzas. The version performed here contains the first two and only part of the final stanza.

Table 5-1. The text to “Le temps de cerises.” Quand nous chanterons le temps des cerises When we sing of the time of the cherries Et gai rossignol et merle moqueur The cheerful nightingale and mocking blackbird Seront tous en fête Will all be in celebration. Les belles auront la folie en tête Pretty girls will have folly on their minds, Et les amoureux du soleil au cœur And lovers, sunshine in their hearts. Quand nous chanterons le temps des cerises When we sing the time of the cherries Sifflera bien mieux le merle moqueur The mocking blackbird will sing the best.

Mais il est bien court le temps des cerises But it is quite short, the time of the cherries. Où l'on s'en va deux cueillir en rêvant Where some may go to gather earrings, in a Des pendants d'oreille... dream. Cerises d'amour aux robes pareilles Cherries of love in gowns alike, Tombant sous la feuille en gouttes de Falling beneath the leaves like drops of blood… sang… But it is quite short, the time of the cherries–– Mais il est bien court le temps des cerises Coral pendants that one picked in a dream! Pendants de corail qu'on cueille en rêvant! J'aimerai toujours le temps des cerises I will always love the time of the cherries. C'est de ce temps-là que je garde au cœur It's that time that I keep in my heart–– Une plaie ouverte! An open wound!

As a matter of cultural import to the Japanese audiences for which Porco Rosso was originally intended, the staged performance of French song recalls the greater historical association with which high-class entertainment and covert transmission of ideas occurred in a tavern (read: salon) atmosphere. This also highlights the notion of spectacle common in the film;

Gina’s performance is not only mere entertainment, but it is to be respected and quietly observed––as referenced by several characters who immediately quiet those who are speaking during her song.20 While the significance of this song may be lost on some of the younger tavern- goers, there are many old patrons for which the political upheaval in the wake of the Franco-

20 This notion of spectacle as inherently monologic is further corroborated in Angela Dalle Vacche’s writings of performance and spectacle in Bertolucci’s The Conformist in The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)––see Chapter 4.

Prussian war is a distant, yet distinct, memory. Indeed, the nascent Fascist demonstrations reopen old political wounds, and the French resistance sentiments gain renewed relevance.21

Space and Place as Discursive Elements

With regard to the depiction of detailed landscapes in the film, Cavallaro writes that,

The animation also exhibits a keen visual sensitivity to the historical and economic climate of the specific period in which it is set. This is especially apparent in the representation of proto-industrial parts of northern Italy, where a profusion of bucolically calm sceneries simultaneously evokes a comfortingly peaceful mood and an alarming atmosphere of stagnation.22

Indeed, the imagery of the film can be unpacked in many meaningful ways if the historical and political context is taken into account. Economic depression pervades the discussion of money

(of which there is never enough), and the distinct shortage of male labor––most of whom have emigrated to find gainful employment elsewhere. In conjunction with the political atmosphere of

Fascist italy, the economic hardships faced by the characters in the film lead to many peculiar occupational choices, of which bounty hunting and engineering airplanes are just a few. But it is not so much the work itself that is important; where it takes place, rather, contributes to a particular discursive theme in the film: isolation.

Staged from the opening scene in which we are guided to Marco’s camp via a descent from the vertiginous cliffs that surround his private island cove, the notion of isolated space and place contributes to the overall implications of covert, illegal, and private activity within the narrative. Partly political, partly private, the use of isolated space reflects the motivating factors which act on the characters at any given time. Marco’s cove, for example, can be interpreted

21 As I have demonstrated in Chapters 2 and 4, there has been no shortage of musical and extramusical references to French political history in the repertoire of Italian social songs. Whether appropriated and refashioned into Italian tunes, or simply reproduced in their original French, international exchange was certainly commonplace. That the two political contexts would be conflated in this scene is no surprise, given the kinship between historical and political movements of each nation-state.

22 Cavallaro, The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki, 102.

according to his status as a wanted criminal and the need to hide from prying government eyes, but it can also be considered a form of self-isolation and punishment––a hermetic existence according to his own need for penitence.

Perhaps the most consistent showcase of private, isolated space is the Hotel Adriano.

Built on a lone island in the middle of a vast lake, the hotel quite literally isolates itself from the coastal towns that surround it. In addition to its main propriety––that of selling the privacy of individual rooms, the hotel contains a tavern which acts as a base of operations for the sky pirates among other patrons. The tavern is in a cellar, tucked away from the outside, and its dim but cozy atmosphere invites much private and personal discussion. The emphasis on privacy within the tavern is demonstrated when Marco disposes of a journalist and photographer who anxiously pester him about his conquests against the Mamma Aiuto gang. Likewise, The Hotel

Adriano has another private space: Gina’s garden. Much of the exposition of Gina’s character takes place in this semi-sacred space; the garden is a secluded spot reserved for her own contemplation over life and love, and it thus serves as discursive location in which the romantic narrative of the movie unfolds.

Dimly-lit spaces comprise many of the peripheral locales visited by the main characters.

When Marco seeks to purchase new ammunition for his plane, he turns to an old friend whose shop is conspicuously hidden amongst the alleyways of the town. In stark contrast to the sunny streets where Fascist sympathizers are holding ebullient demonstrations, the shop is cramped, dingy, and subdued. The shopkeeper speaks to the political climate at the time, saying “I think there’s going to be another change in government,” to which Marco replies “I have no country, there are no laws for me here.” Simply declared, Marco associates with no country and therefore no place; his self-imposed isolation is explicitly admitted in this exchange.

While in Milan, Marco attends a screening of a silent cartoon. Dressed in his usual trench coat with the collars upturned, wide-brimmed hat, and sunglasses, his overall appearance is almost sarcastic in its portrayal of camouflage. The film depicts a battle featuring anthropomorphic characters engaged in battle. There is a rabbit protagonist adorned with pilot goggles and a bumbling, bloated antagonist in the form of a pig. The pig is ultimately defeated and, unsurprisingly, this prompts Marco’s discontent. Marco’s old friend, who still flies for the

(now fascist) Italian Air Force, sighs upon Marco’s exit from the theater and softly admits his approval of the film. A short scene packed with political pathos, Miyazaki demonstrates in a rather candid way the pervasiveness of political propaganda––going so far as to showcase its power over adult minds. Returning to the notion of pig-as-emblem, this short film-within-a-film projects the macrocosm of political and personal struggle that enveloped the Fascist era of Italy.

The (Fascist) rabbit is locked in a mortal struggle with the pig (or Italy)––its enemy. That the pig is subdued is no fluke; this cartoonish evocation of political propaganda stages the very battle upon which Miyazaki’s film is based––that of the struggle to maintain national and personal identity amidst the oppressive Fascist, wartime era. Marco’s discontent with the outcome of such a battle and his exiting of the theater are strong admissions of his own agency to change his course.

Before leaving, however, Marco engages in a brief conversation with his old friend. “The age of the free-wheeling adventurer is over,” says the friend, “nationalism, patriotism, they may seem boring but they’re all in your lap.” A conflict between the freedom of choice––one which is easily afforded by a rogue pilot––and the confines of political affiliation is hidden in this statement. Marco’s rejection of any such affiliation permits him to be a “free-wheeling adventurer,” a subtle political jab that underlines the importance of individuality and exploration.

What is more, it is through this act of reckless adventure that we, as spectators, are even invited to view upon the Italian landscape, the “exotic” locales, and the historical and political context in which the film is based––without such a quality in the main protagonist, these elements would have been closed off to the public audience in collusion with the overall political sentiments of control and oppressive constraint.

Conclusion

Located within Porco Rosso is a dynamic framework that is built upon a constant exchange of signs and symbols, associations and affiliations, and music and meaning. Through the partnership of visual and musical media, Miyazaki mitigates the adult themes of political repression and war. He by no means evades them, however. Showcases of political power, continued militaristic skirmishes in the form of air fights, and the lasting economic effects of

World War I all contribute to a pathos that haunts the film. Matters of identity sit at the core of the film; rumination on personal identity is only valuable insofar as it reconciles with the greater political and national tides that govern it. This is seen most explicitly in the visual transformation of Marco’s face, an act that directly parallels the inner turmoil of a former war pilot. Miyazaki’s own imagination in turn crafts a vibrant world in which the tropes and themes of political Italy play out. Through his fiction, Miyazaki is able to confront difficult themes while retaining an air of levity. In addition, basing his fantastic premises on realistic locations and time periods conjures up a more specific critical commentary on the notions of identity and culture. Porco

Rosso may appear to be a light-hearted tale, but it invites us to engage in a serious political discourse surrounding the events of the Fascist era. As Boym reminds us, “The notion of shared social frameworks of memory is rooted in an understanding of human consciousness, which is

dialogical with other human beings and with cultural discourses.”23 Real or imagined, Miyazaki urges us to contemplate what it means to be victims of war and oppressive culture by opening up such a dialogue. Only through collective understanding, awareness, and self-consciousness can we truly reconcile with the Fascist past.

23 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001): 52.

CHAPTER 6 EPILOGUE

“I sensed that another battle was beginning: longer, more difficult, and more extensive, even if less bloody. Now it was no longer a question of fighting against arrogance, cruelty, and violence––easy to detect and to hate––but against interests that would try to rekindle themselves treacherously, against habits that would soon reaffirm themselves, against prejudices that would not want to die: all things that were much more vague, deceiving, and fleeting.”1

– Ada Gobetti, Diario partigiano (1956)

Ada Gobetti’s anticipatory remarks on the end of the Second World War on the rise of a new political reality in Italy speak to the uncertainties and fears that surrounded the evacuated society of mid-1940s Italy. With a clean slate and fresh start, the postwar era sought a renewed vitality in the political system. The disparate oppressed parties that hid in covert existence throughout the decades of Fascism, and who sprang up in the Resistance effort, now looked to a new system of government for representation and legislature. Opposing their progress were myriad issues; stark polarization between parties, Cold War politics, corruption, and the avoidance of any reconciliation with the Fascist past all chipped away at the integrity of the

Italian Republic. The figure of the partisan, heretofore existing as a miscellany of political and personal beliefs rallying behind the common call of antifascism, was thus fractured into its constituent parts. How the image of the partisan has been eschewed in postwar Italy is of critical importance to not only the formation of a more unified Italian national identity, but also a final reconciliation with Italy’s Fascist past.

There were many reasons to be a partisan. As Guido Quazza argued, there were two principal motivations for the “Resisters”: antifascismo politico (political antifascism) and

1 Ada Gobetti, Diario partigiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 414. Translated by Jomarie Alano. Quoted in Stanislao G. Pugliese, ed, Fascism, Antifascism, and the Resistance: 1919 to the Present (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2004), 282-83.

antifascismo esistenziale (existential antifascism). Very few partisans (he cites 10-15%) joined the Resistance out of true political antifascism––that is, out of an incompatibility borne of conflicting political ideology. Rather, the significant majority developed an “existential antifascism” which translated to an imperative to drive out the oppressive political party and return their lives to relative normalcy.2 Dichotomies are seldom useful, however, and in reality there was a multiplicity of factors, motives, and intentions to take up arms. Renzo De Felice, in turn, sustains that there existed a “gray area” in which participants operated independent of strong political or social affiliations:

The great mass of Italians, even though a few managed not to get involved, did not only avoid taking a clear position for the Resistance, but looked on from the sidelines in favor of the Italian Social Republic. And doing so provided the partisan movement, as well as a good number of fighters, with a favorable environment to live and grow: a large grey area composed of those who managed to survive between the two camps, impossible to classify socially and expressed across all walks of life from the bourgeois to the working class. I do not believe that we are speaking clearly of opportunism. I prefer the concept of opportunity: each choice was seen as a mere necessity, as a lesser evil to avert the situations too dangerous or, at least, to postpone them in time.3

The reductive tendency to cast the Resistance in polarities defies the true intentions and motives behind the Resistance in the first place. This “grey zone” accounts for many such motives, not the least of which was individual well-being and survival.

2 Guido Quazza, “La scelta partigiana,” in “L’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale e nella Resistenza, ed. Francesca Ferratini Tosi, Gaetano Grassi and Massimo Legnani (Milan: Fresco Angeli, 1988), 460-66. Quoted in Philip Cooke, The Italian Resistance: An Anthology (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 45-51.

3 Renzo De Felice, Rosso e nero, ed. Pasquale Chessa (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995), 58-59. My translation. Original: “La gran massa degli italiani, sebbene pochi furono coloro che riuscirono a non essere coinvolti, non solo evitò di prendere una chiara posizione per la Resistenza, ma si guardò bene dallo schierarsi a favore della Rsi. E così facendo fornì al movimento partigiano, oltre a un buon numero di combattenti anche il contesto favorevole per vivere e svilupparsi: una grande zona grigia composta da quanti riuscirono a sopravvivere tra due fuochi, impossibile da classificare socialmente, espressa trasversalmente da tutti i ceti, dalla borghesia alla classe operaia. Non credo sia giusto parlare di opportunismo. Preferisco il concetto di opportunità: ciascuno scelta fu vissuta come mera necessità, come male minore per allontanare le situazioni troppo rischiose o almeno rinviarle nel tempo.”

The diversity of the partisans thus embodied a powerful message for Italians; they were emblems of political agency, individuality, and mobility and power. They represented the capacity for political change, which was desperately needed after decades of Fascist rhetoric sought to strip individual agency from the population at-large. The 1946 elections for a

Constituent Assembly to draft the constitution proved an early litmus test for the political landscape to follow. The largest support rallied around the Christian Democrat (DC, aligned to the Right) party, followed by the communists (PCI, aligned Left). Smaller groups, including a neo-fascist party, the old liberals, and the Party of Action (PdA) garnered lackluster support.

British historian Dennis Mack Smith writes that these results “proved that a ‘third force’ had little backing: the intellectuals of the Left Center were already breaking up into half a dozen doctrinaire factions more interested in splitting hairs with each other than finding an agreed middle way between communism and clericalism.”4 Indeed, the failure to drum up collaborative political support among the lesser parties would yield a largely bipolar political system. Without a common enemy, those who previously collaborated in the Resistance, but who now sought vastly different political realities, entered into a bitter and extended period of non-negotiation and Cold War politics. What followed in the proceeding two decades amounted to political failure and weakness. The constitutional Republic was still susceptible to the latent persuasions of Italian culture and society, among them the Catholic Church, the ghost of Fascism, and political corruption.

Years of Fascist rhetoric had instilled a counterproductive set of beliefs and values in the postwar policymakers. From the wholesale abdication of moral responsibility seen in the

4 Dennis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 423.

mediocre attempts at a Fascist purge and the evasive rhetoric of Benedetto Croce,5 to the retention of anachronistic and superfluous fascist institutions and appointments, it was clear to see that the Fascist past weighed heavily upon the collective conscience of Italy. Antifascist sentiment reentered the public domain with the Tambroni affair in 1960: “Tambroni had attempted to include politicians from the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) in his coalition, but protests throughout Italy, which saw thousands of ex-partisans taking to the streets, had prevented this from happening. As a result, the Resistance re-emerged as a powerful political and cultural force.”6 The Resistance, divorced from its original context, came to signify any antifascist movement. As De Felice pointed out, very few people originally undertook the

Resistance for political reasons; appropriating the Resistance as a purely political agenda was inherently incompatible with the true motives of many of the partisans.

Tensions further elevated in the late 1960s with student protests against the education system, which in turn galvanized worker protests in 1969 over working conditions. As Smith writes, “both movements, by industrial workers and students, were disruptive and traumatic while they lasted, but had positive results in challenging some of the residues of fascism and in revealing popular wishes for a more equitable and open-minded society.”7 The social upheaval of these protests ushered in a decade of political turmoil (the so-called anni di piombo or “Years of

Lead”) in which parties employed acts of terrorism to capitalize on national unrest and fear. The terrorism of the 1970s was seen as a reprisal of Resistance tactics, a call-to-arms for revolution

5 David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-46 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1996), 73. Benedetto Croce’s argument hinges upon the notion of historical continuity––upon which the Fascist blight was but a parenthetical note. This follows suit with another commonly-believed notion, that the Italian people were inherently “good” (brava gente), and that Fascism was foisted upon them by an outside force. Croce likened Fascism to a virus in this way.

6 Philip Cooke, The Italian Resistance, 14.

7 Smith, Modern Italy, 455.

against a perceived political threat. This was problematic, of course, since the political landscape had changed and an oppressive war was no longer present to justify such egregious acts of violence. In this way, the figure of the partisan was gravely distorted and reconfigured as a means of posturing political opposition.

Italy never achieved that central, national sense of identity that coalesced––albeit briefly–

–under the guise of the antifascist Resistance. The figure of the partisan, this individual who stood for political agency and moral and ethical righteousness, became disassembled in the postwar era, divided up amongst political parties that then distorted it to their own political image. This sense of overcoming fascism, resisting it, and coming out victorious was repeatedly denied as the Italian political system continuously proved itself to be incompetent or, at the very least, susceptible to the same vices that made Fascism thrive. The utter failure of the Italian political system to instill this feeling of individual culpability and ethical guidance was the ultimate letdown for those that thought the partisans were ushering them into an era of prosperity and political security. The political inheritance of Italian history was one of corruption, non- collaboration, and failure.

Italy’s political past thus persists in the collective consciousness of the Italian people.

From the rise of Fascism, on through the Italian Resistance at the height of the Second World

War, and continuing well into the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, issues of national identity have continued to complicate how Italians see themselves. Their history (all history, in fact) is a construct, a collection of memories that have been curated to produce a particular narrative. In much the same way, music accords a similar process of shaping and reshaping historical narrative to the Italian people through its association with and signification of historical and political events. Music, therefore, cannot be deemed innocuous. Its presence in

postwar media poses serious questions. What does it mean that social songs were given a specific place in the narrative of a neorealist novel, or formed the crux of the climactic scene of a 1970’s film? As a key agent in memory and identity formation, the performance of social song not only contributes to a sense of community and belonging, but it also solidarity. The process through which the social song repertoire was shaped during the Italian Resistance recalls the act of memory itself. Synthesizing disparate elements, songs like “Marciam, marciam” embodied a confluence of preexisting texts and thus their accompanying significations––appropriated and altered according to the whims of each performer. They were a form of boosting morale, of activism, and of cultural preservation.

The importance of participatory acts in society, and how flexible cultural experience permits a greater degree of exchange, should not be underestimated. Svetlana Boym writes that

culture has the potential of becoming a space for individual play and creativity, and not merely an oppressive homogenizing force; far from limiting individual play, it guarantees space. … Perhaps what is most missed during historical cataclysms and exile is not the past and the homeland exactly, but rather this potential space of cultural experience that one has shared with one’s friends and compatriots that is based neither on nation nor religion but on elective affinities.8

This is what Calvino alluded to when he spoke of the prevalence of postwar storytelling in a galvanized population;9 this is what elevated social song as an act of identity-formation for the partisans of the Italian Resistance; and this is what Carlo Levi wrote of while in political exile in the very opening lines of Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945).10 Right or

8 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 53.

9 Italo Calvino and Michael Wood, Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 104. See Chapter 1.

10 “Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return to my peasants as I promised when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise. But closed in one room, in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, in the presence of

wrong, it is such “elective affinities” that drive social efforts among individuals. For the Fascists, such affinities were stripped of their “elective” modifier, instead being dictated by the will and wishes of the Fascist State. The Italian Resistance was a retaliatory departure from this culturally-confined arena of Fascist politics. This newfound latitude contributed to a greater capacity for communal engagement, one that often found its expression in song.

The historiography of Italian social song is deeply entwined within the historiography of the Resistance and Italy’s historical past. How Italy’s political past has been eschewed in the postwar era greatly contributes to how the songs of the Partisans, and of the war in general, are both conceived and received.11 Under Fascism, critical and intellectual pursuits would have been strongly discouraged. As Umberto Eco outlined in his examination of the universal traits of “Ur-

Fascism” or Eternal Fascism, “culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes.”12 As such, any intellectual inquiry into the cultural value of a creative pursuit was contrary to the internal logic of the Fascist doctrine. In the postwar era, some approaches to folklore studies were similarly ill-received––though this time for sociocultural reasons. Italian historian and ethnomusicologist Cesare Bermani recounts the many researchers whose approaches were considered “deviant” in the 1950s:

Rocco Scotellaro (who wanted to reconstruct “the story of the struggle, of the hope and aspirations of the famers, visions––dare I say beliefs––at the center and in the midst of their issues”), Ernesto de Martino (who wanted to meet the Southern farmers “to attempt to bring them into a collective history”), Gianni Bosio (who wanted with the “Workers movement” to study the organizational death.” Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of A Year, trans. Frances Frenaye (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 [1945]), 3.

11 Renzo De Felice has argued for a more critical historiography of the Resistance in which “[looks] beyond the political pragmatism” of postwar, propagandistic conceptions and further uncovers the ways in which the Resistance has been shaped and reshaped by political rhetoric. See De Felice, Rosso e nero, 24. Quoted in Pugliese, Fascism, Antifascism, and the Resistance, trans. Stanislao G. Pugliese, 286.

12 Umberto Eco, “Eternal Fascism,” New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995. Quoted in Pugliese, Fascism, Antifascism, and the Resistance, 292.

100

forms rising up from the class struggle), [and] Danilo Montaldi (who established the testimonies of the marginalized, then pejoratively known within the sphere of the Leftist parties as “subproletariats”) were all considered in the 1950s as “deviants.”13

Common to each of these researchers––all of whom came to be seminal figures in the

Italian field of music and folklore studies––is a class-based pluralism that sought to engender greater representation of the lower classes in scholarship. Indeed, the notion of a subaltern class, of economic and social “others,” plagued postwar Italy as it entered into an economic boom that further divided the North and the South.14 Diego Carpitella acknowledged this with regard to music scholarship––though it certainly applies to a broader disciplinary swath––when he argued that “critical comparison means analysis of ‘alterity’ and questioning on one’s own (or at least alleged) culture.”15

Such cultural dichotomies were further established in the conservative rhetoric of the postwar era. Cesare Bermani records that

Neither could there be anything different within the so-called left-wing culture of [the late 1960s] which, in the controversy of the “Workers movement” had

13 Cesare Bermani, “Le origini e il presente: Fonti orali e ricerca storica in Italia,” in Introduzione alla storia orale: Storia, conservazione delle fonti e problemi di metodo, ed. by Cesare Bermani, 2 Vols (Rome, Italy: Odradek, 1999), 5. Personal translation. Original: “Rocco Scotellaro (che voleva ricostruire ‘la storia delle lotte, delle speranze e delle aspirazioni dei contadini, visti––oso credere––al centro e sulla strada dei loro problemi’), Ernesto de Martino (che voleva incontrare i contadini meridionali ‘per tentare di essere insieme in una stessa storia’), Gianni Bosio (che voleva con ‘Movimento operaio’ studiare le forme organizzative emergenti direttamente dalle lotte di classe), Danilo Montaldi (che fissava le testimonianze dei marginali, allora chiamati nell’ambito dei partiti di sinistra con una punta di disprezzo ‘sottoproletari’) erano tutti negli anni Cinquanta considerati dei ‘deviazionisti.’”

14 As Dennis Mack Smith writes, “the political unification of Italy had not resulted in its economic unification but had even tended to widen the gap between the capitalist North and the semi-feudal, traditional and often self-sufficient South.” Smith, Modern Italy, 432.

15 Diego Carpitella, “Premessa,” in L’etnomusicologia in Italia, ed. by Diego Carpitella (Palermo, Italy: S. F. Flaccovio, 1975), 11. Personal translation. Original: “Confronto critico significa analisi pertinente dell’‘alterità’ e rimessa in discussione della propria (o almeno presunta tale) cultura.” One of the more immediate bridges between this study and the major trends in musicology is the concept of exoticism, alterity, and “otherness.” While exoticism often manifests in depictions of Western and non-Western characteristics––usually the flamboyant use of the latter to elevate or better conceptualize the former, the juxtaposition of any established community with a marginalized “other” could easily be substituted. For more on exoticism, see Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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borrowed the conservative distinctions typical of an antagonist, such distinctions between small history versus great history, between narrative and summary, between philology and history, between “inferior” and “superior,” between “subaltern” and “hegemony.”16

Thus the issues of social class and caustic political rhetoric implanted themselves in the discourses surrounding folk music and its study in the mid-twentieth century. Such dichotomies persist even today in the pervasive, universal approach to categorizing spheres of music as

“high” or “low”––the ubiquitous, though thoroughly spurious, monikers of classical and popular music often co-opted by the general populace.

The trend toward disciplinary inclusivity––a greater consideration of the multivalent nature of a musical work, its performance, and historical context––has led to a broadening of the scope of music literature in Italy and throughout the world. Intersections between media abound in the postwar era, challenging us to further consider how Italian social songs, the Fascist past, and political rhetoric combine to create and recreate the history of popular song in Italy. As such, the retrospective glance toward the past in each of these case studies issues to us a challenge–– namely, that memory cannot be trusted as an objective entity. The fallibility of the human memory, the political agenda espoused by those who create and shape the course of history, conspire to render the historicity of such postwar recollections impotent. But, as Paul Ricoeur reminds us,

To memory is tied an ambition, a claim––that of being faithful to the past. In this respect, the deficiencies stemming from forgetting … should not be treated straight away as pathological forms, as dysfunctions, but as the shadowy

16 Bermani, “Le origini e il presente,” 9. Personal translation. Original: “Nè poteva esser diversamente all’interno della cosidetta cultura di sinistra di quegli anni che nella polemica su ‘Movimento operaio’ aveva mutuato dalla storiografia conservatrice le distinzioni tipiche dell’antagonista, cioè le distinzioni fra piccola storia e grande storia, fra cronaca e sintesi, fra filologia e storia, fra ‘inferiore’ e ‘superiore,’ fra ‘subalterno’ e ‘egemone.’” The concept of “hegemony,” simplified as the dominance of one group over another, belongs to the theories of Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci. This concept has been adopted in myriad disciplines and discussions of inequality as it relates to class, but may also be expanded and abstracted to include dominance in cultural circles, communities, etc.

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underside of the bright region of memory, which binds us to what has passed before we remember it.17

Thus I propose that this study be viewed in light of what social song can tell us, rather than what it explicitly cannot. “To put it bluntly,” Ricoeur cautions, “we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place, has occurred, has happened before we declare that we remember it”18 As crystallizations of a particular moment in time, social songs and their postwar iterations offer us a glimpse of how the collective performance of song functioned in times of war and conflict, and how they promoted the creation and preservation of identity in the presence of crisis.

17 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 21.

18 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 21.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jeremy Arthur Frusco holds a Master of Music in Music from the University of Florida and a Bachelor of Arts in Music, with minors in Italian and physics, from the Honors Program at

The College of New Jersey, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Jeremy’s many areas of interest in the study of music include history and memory, nostalgia, war and conflict, nationalism, identity, popular music, and social and cultural movements. Jeremy’s research invites interdisciplinary engagement, and he regularly calls upon neighboring disciplines in the humanities such as ethnomusicology, Italian studies, cinema studies, and philosophy to inform his work.

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