Simona Wright 255 FRANCESCA SANVITALE

Simona Wright 255 FRANCESCA SANVITALE: A POETIC AND NARRATIVE EXPLORATION Francesca Sanvitale, one of Italy's most renowned contemporary authors, was born in Milan in 1928 to an aristocratic but decayed family from Emilia Romagna. At the age of twelve her family moved to Florence. In that city she attended school and subsequently the university, where she graduated with a degree in Italian Literature under her mentor, Giuseppe de Robertis. Shortly after graduating, Sanvitale started her career as a journalist at the Florentine publishing house Vallecchi. She also accepted several assignments as reader and editor for various Italian publishing houses, among which were Bompiani and Mondadori. She worked as a manuscript reader for Elio Vittorini, influential intellectual and writer of the period. This demanding apprenticeship forged Sanvitale's literary experience in a twofold manner: on the one side it provided her with an extensive knowledge and comprehension of European and world cultures and on the other it helped her to refine her writing style. This period of intense learning culminated with Sanvitale's move to Rome in 1961, where she entered a national competition and was awarded a job on the Italian national public television, RAI. Working for RAI, the writer remembers, was a particularly stimulating experience for it provided an excellent opportunity to employ the new medium as an effective and pervasive cultural and educational tool. Furthermore, television and its modes of communication captivated the attention of many Italian intellectuals, who actively participated in the development of original broadcasting programs: "Questi intellettuali, [tra i quali vi erano] Umberto Eco, Furio Colombo, Angelo Guglielmi, Raffaele La Capria, Renzo Rosso, furono attirati dalla possibilità di usare un nuovo mezzo espressivo e poterlo condizionare, renderlo originale."1 During the first years at RAI, Sanvitale set out to write her first Simona Wright 256 novel that would be published with the title Il cuore borghese. After seven years of consistent labor, the author had completed a narrative that was structured as a compact succession of situations, juxtaposed not by a consequential or chronological story line but rather connected by the main characters' stream of thoughts, considerations and observations. The work clearly emerges as a personal response to the crisis of the traditional novel, which had been at the center of vehement scrutiny and criticism in the Sixties, particularly from many European literary movements as the French École du regard, and the Italian Gruppo '63. The protest voiced by these movements focused mainly on the obsolescent structure of the nineteenth-century novel, which was deemed unsuited to embody the dynamic transformations inherent in contemporary society. Modern culture and civilization called for more complex and heterogeneous modes of aesthetic expression and the novel was to conform to the tenets of this new philosophy or to succumb to inevitable decadence and death. Influenced in part by contemporary movements and in part by her inclination toward such authors as Robert Musil and Robert Walser, Sanvitale organized the philosophical structure of Il cuore borghese by first establishing strong cultural and intellectual bonds with the Mitteleuropean and modernist literary tradition. The plot follows no evident chronological pattern but it is rather organized as a sequence of disconnected episodes and scenarios that form a vast human fresco depicting and dramatizing the individual's search and inability to act in the external world and to react to the dilemmas and challenges that it poses. Every chapter in this mosaic is frozen in time, a fragment of a life where there seems to be no recognizable beginning or end, no discernible cause-effect progression. The main characters, Julius, Olimpia, Claretine, Tullio and their child, Fati, navigate through the story, intersecting paths and intertwining their self-exploration and self- analysis into dialogic and dialectic patterns. Every character is also isolated in an indefinite space and time, where s/he becomes prey to long meditative sequences in which thought processes leave no space for action. The narrative transforms itself into a long introspective discourse, where observation and reflection overshadow the objective world. Julius and Olimpia, Tullio and Claretine, are the opposing couples, the emblems of a generation of intellectuals who grew up during the Second World War and the Resistance, who are now adults, faced with Francesca Sanvitale 257 the inconsistencies of their human relations, constantly oscillating between intensifying or relaxing their sentimental bonds. Julius works for a national television channel; completely entrenched in his professional life he seems incapable of transforming his ideology into constructive action. Olimpia, who is neglected by her husband, searches unsuccessfully throughout the narrative for a stimulus, a relationship, a passion that will enable her to recover and regenerate her disarranged self. Tullio and Claretine represent the mirror image of the first couple, whose relationship is gradually being destroyed by Tullio's failure as a husband and by Claretine's sexual and emotional superficiality. Although in love with her husband, in fact, she never ceases to betray him. Tullio's indecision is an ulterior cause of failure. When his marriage shows symptoms of a crisis he decides to return to his native provincial town and to remain there, entangled in projects that will never materialize. Isolation, solitude, and hopelessness are the negative consequences of the characters' apathy, the seal of their diseased existence. Sanvitale stages her story in the capital of Italy, in the bourgeois interiors of Roman houses and squares, in a historical period apparently bursting with the activity and vitality emanating from Italy's economic boom but internally undermined by serious deficiencies and weaknesses at the private and personal levels. In return, as has been pointedly observed, the crisis experienced by the single individuals projects itself in the nation, in its social, political, and historical reality that only superficially appears calm and unchanging. It is to dramatize this concealed but impending crisis that Sanvitale negates in the novel any concept of conventional plot, abolishes any idea of time, discredits the possibility or the actuality of even the simplest decisions and most inconsequential actions. In one of the novel's chapters, "Stati d'animo: giochi e divagazioni," the above mentioned stylistic components are emblematized in Olimpia's card game: Olimpia sta persistendo nel suo gioco, ha buttato per la decima volta le tre monete. Ritenta nuove combinazioni e gli ideogrammi si mescolano come i numeri per i dadi. Anche il numero è un ideogramma, ciò che lei cerca ha qualcosa in comune con i risultati meccanico-magici della matematica. Nel numero si supera il caos per entrare nelle combinazioni dell'eterno: lo spazio si libera dal tempo, il mondo si rappresenta simultaneamente — cause ed effetti — per Simona Wright 258 concetti sintetici; si abolisce la convenzione del futuro.2 For the originality of its structure, the modernity of its thematic content, the penetrating analysis of the characters and their dramatization, and last but not least, for its exacting language and style, Il cuore borghese should be regarded as a turning point in both the Italian literary universe and in Sanvitale's career as a writer. Il cuore borghese represents also the conclusion of a human and poetic evolution that had taken seven years to come to its culmination. Thus, at the time of the book's publication, the author had already recognized three fundamental components in the writing of literature that she elucidates as follows: the first is the necessity for the narrative project to convey a "sense of reality." The narrative process is anchored to the details of the objective world and therefore it is through the emergence and the significant presence of reality around us that events can be defined, comprehended and interpreted, that actions and emotions can carry a spiritual meaning and a subjective message. Furthermore, it is precisely the choice of details that distinguishes the novelist and shapes his or her expressive domain. The second essential characteristic of a literary work is its inclination to be a human narrative, encompassing not only, as resulted in Il cuore borghese, the protagonists' intellectual and mental quarries, but all aspects of the human quest. The third characteristic recognized by the author is the primarily aesthetic function of literature. Recognizing the necessity to liberate it from the constraints of an exclusively social discourse, from the limitations of a purely didactic mode, the mode in which the neorealist movement had attempted to entrap literature for years, and realizing that literature's basic principles derive from the exploration of the individual's nature and desires, Sanvitale set out, after a long period of silence, to write her second novel, Madre e figlia. The book appeared in 1980 and marked a complete transformation in the author's thematic and stylistic creativity. Sanvitale had undergone a conscious narrative metamorphosis. She had ascertained that writing emanates from the exploration and investigation of the most secret and concealed spheres of the subconscious, and most significantly, she had learned that the process of poetic invention cannot be disassociated

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