Luca Somigli: Italian Novelists Since World War II 479
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Luca Somigli: Italian Novelists Since World War II 479 ITALIAN NOVELISTS SINCE WORLD WAR II, 1945-1965. Vol. 177 of THE DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY Edited by Augustus Pallotta Detroit-Washington-London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1997. 461 pp. and ITALIAN NOVELISTS SINCE WORLD WAR II, 1965-1990. Vol. 196 of THE DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY Edited by Augustus Pallotta Detroit-Washington-London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1998. 367 pp. he project of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which was begun in 1978 with a volume on The American Renaissance in TNew England and has been carried out with admirable scholarly rigour for the past twenty years, is both simple and ambitious: on the one hand, it aims at providing biographical and bibliographical guides to the works of writers from several national and cultural literary traditions; on the other, by grouping the entries in freestanding volumes organized by period and/or genre, it avoids the common weakness of biographical dictionaries by placing the individual authors in the broader context of the cultural and literary debate of their own time. While the initial focus of the series was on North American and British literature, since the mid-eighties its scope has been greatly expanded to include Latin America, Japan, and the major European literatures. Italy, however, has been singularly under- represented so far, and Augustus Pallotta's two volumes on post-World War II fiction were preceded only by two other volumes on twentieth century poetry published in 1992-1993 (vols. 114 and 128). Pallotta has assembled a large group of collaborators from North America, England and Italy which includes both younger scholars and established novecentisti. However, both volumes are remarkable for their homogeneity: the entries, of consistently high quality, open with a general critical assessment of the author under consideration, then outline in great detail his/her biography, and provide a short analysis of both his/her major works and their reception. Each entry is complemented by a complete bibliography of the author's writings, often including publications in journals, introductions, and other uncollected material, and a select bibliography of criticism. The implied reader of these solidly researched but also thoroughly readable essays is the advanced student who may use them and their bibliographical apparatus as the starting point for a more Luca Somigli: Italian Novelists Since World War II 480 extended research, or the general reader who will find here a useful and accurate introduction to the life and works of the selected authors. Moreover, as quick sources for factual information and specific biographical data, these volumes will also be extremely helpful for twentieth century specialists. Of course, any project of this nature is also to a certain extent an exercise in canon-making, especially when it attempts to draw a map of the contemporary literary landscape. This does not present much of a problem for the thoroughly historicized 1945-1965 period, and in that respect the first of the two volumes edited by Pallotta offers few surprises (in fact, the only curious omission is that of Elio Vittorini, certainly more influential in the post-war period than in the early years of his career, and whose contribution to the debate on the question of dialect literature is discussed in the introduction). Following the standard format of the series, the volume begins with a short introduction by the editor. While the entries in the dictionary do an excellent job of concisely summarizing the career of the individual authors, it is in the editor's opening essay that they become part of the larger narrative of modern Italian literature, and that they can be critically located in relation to the cultural debate. Pallotta accomplishes the task of sketching out this broader picture admirably. Starting with neorealism and the polemics which followed the publication of Pratolini's Metello, he highlights the salient cultural phenomena of the two decades, from the close and yet conflictual relationship between intellectuals and the Communist Party, especially after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, to the rising influence of American culture, from the debate on dialect literature to the emergence of the narrative current of "letteratura e industria" in the 1960s, at the same time not neglecting the fringes of the cultural milieu, from the experience of an outsider like Giose Rimanelli to the persistence of a parallel tradition of the fantastic (Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi, Guido Morselli). In addition to the authors already mentioned, this volume includes essays on Giovanni Arpino, Anna Banti, Giorgio Bassani, Carlo Bernari, Giuseppe Berto, Libero Bigiaretti, Giuseppe Bonaviri, Alessandro Bonsanti, Carlo Cassola, Piero Chiara, Giuseppe Dessi, Rodolfo Doni, Beppe Fenoglio, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Gianna Manzini, Lucio Mastronardi, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Anna Maria Ortese, Ottiero Ottieri, Goffredo Parise, P. M. Pasinetti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mario Pomilio, Vasco Pratolini, Michele Prisco, Lalla Romano, Leonardo Sciascia, Mario Soldati, Saverio Strati, Giovanni Testori, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and Paolo Volponi. Even more interesting is the introduction to the second volume because in this case Pallotta does not simply have to delineate the major cultural tendencies of the period, but also has the task of systematizing a Luca Somigli: Italian Novelists Since World War II 481 literary situation which is still fluid and very much in fieri. Accordingly, he focuses on the shifts in symbolic and literary power since the sixties, charting the rise of the Gruppo '63 against the resistance of the orthodox Marxist literary establishment and of the generation of Moravia and Pratolini, the emergence of a "deprovincialized" line of Italian literature which looked outside of the narrow confines of the national tradition and toward Europe - in other words, the post-modern lineage which has Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco as its two best known representatives - and finally, as a result of this "climate dominated by postmodernism" (p. xxiii), the fragmentation of the current literary terrain, in which the weakening of strong ideologies, and of Communism in particular, has left in its wake a cultural production which may have lost its firm pole star, but is also, for that very reason, especially ebullient and dynamic. However, Pallotta is not simply interested in celebrating post-modern openness and post-ideological fragmentation. The ideological and political implications of post-modernism have recently come under serious scrutiny in North America by Marxist, feminist and post-colonial critics, and the author is clearly conscious of these critiques. As he notes, "Deep down, theirs [post-modern novelists'] is a passive view of life that moves decidedly away from the battleground of ideology, social relevance, and textual meaning of previous generations, and it moves toward a representation of reality in ludic, theatrical, and melodramatic keys" (p. xxi). Italian post-modern narrative thus emerges as a field of possibilities, which includes figures as diverse as the politically engaged Stefano Benni, whose fantastic and decentered novels give voice to the groups marginalized by rampant late capitalism, to the self-absorbed romanzi giovanili of Andrea De Carlo, in which politics is jettisoned as an inevitable betrayal of the needs and desires of the individual. The selection of authors in this volume demonstrates the limited use of notions such as "school" and "movement" after the organized effort of the Gruppo '63 - which, in any case, is well represented with entries on Alberto Arbasino, Nanni Balestrini, Umberto Eco, Luigi Malerba, Giorgio Manganelli, and Sebastiano Vassalli. Thus, in many of the entries the authors are more concerned with tracing a genealogy for the writer under consideration than with locating him/her in relation to the contemporary situation, a useful strategy that allows them to draw the lines of continuity and innovation in twentieth century Italian fiction. For instance, the essay on Daniele del Giudice opens by briefly retracing the tradition of "literature that [...] explored what previously had been considered scientific or technological language" (p. 109), and then goes on to examine the ways in which Del Giudice has inserted himself and at the same time transformed this tradition. What groupings can be made for the writers who have emerged since the late sixties seem to be more a matter Luca Somigli: Italian Novelists Since World War II 482 of recurrent thematic and even generational concerns than the result of common poetic and stylistic principles (hence, for instance, the grouping of Tondelli, De Carlo, Benni, and Del Giudice in the introduction). Many of the figures included in the volume have a complex relationship with the literary milieu, from Gesualdo Bufalino, whose "post-modern" narratives are inflected with a modernist sensibility, to Elémire Zolla, better known - and more controversial - as a cultural critic and scholar of shamanism and of esoteric doctrines, to Franco Ferrucci and Paolo Valesio (the latter also well known as a poet), who live and work in the United States and thus are, in Valesio's words, "Atlantic witnesses," writers at the boundaries between two (or more) literary, cultural, and artistic traditions. In terms of general tendencies, it is perhaps a little surprising to see that the number of women writers