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'A Historian, a Poet, and a Semiologist: Perspectives on a Decade'

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'A Historian, a Poet, and a Semiologist: Perspectives on a Decade' The Historian, the Poet, and the Semiologist: Perspectives on the Post 68 Decade Robert Lumley (University College London) It is May 1968. The barricades go up in the Latin quarter of Paris as students occupy the Sorbonne. Students and workers march in their hundreds of thousands. The biggest general strike in history is called. General De Gaulle, the president of the Republic, flies to a French military garrison in Germany. For two months Paris wins back its reputation as the centre of European revolutions. Our poet is in Paris at the time. Or does he go there in order to find out what is happening? Anyway, he telephones back to Italy to report. He reads out the transcriptions he’s been making of the words, phrases and slogans that cover the walls around the university, in posters, in graffiti. In the Tartaruga gallery in Rome the gallerist Plinio De Martiis has organized a rolling exhibition called Teatro delle mostre (Theatre of Exhibitions): young artists are each given complete control of the space for one day in which they can do whatever they like. That day De Martiis and the artists transcribe the words and phrases read out by the poet in Paris directly onto the walls of the gallery. It is May 1968. She is in Dar es Salaam living in the old quarter on the Morogor Road. She is not yet a historian or does not think of herself as such. When she left Italy, she thought that she would not return. She had graduated. She had sold off her collection of Science Fiction and all her furniture. With her compagno she went in search of adventure and revolution in Africa. In 1968 she is working with FRELIMO –Frente de Libertação de Mozambique – the liberation movement that was 242 http://congress70.library.uu.nl/ ROBERT LUMLEY (UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON) fighting Portuguese imperialism in Africa. A knowledge of languages makes her useful as a translator and interpreter. As for our semiologist, I’m not sure exactly where he is when the May-June events are being played out in Paris. But I picture him at the university in Bologna. The events in France don’t entirely come as a surprise to him. The university in Turin had already been occupied in November-December the previous year, and in January some 36 universities in Italy were under occupation, including his own. He will have spoken with his friend the poet about developments. They had both been active members of the experimental Gruppo 63 and the poet was now editing a new review, Quindici, to which he contributes. Many readers will already have guessed the identity of the semiologist – Umberto Eco. The poet is, of course, Nanni Balestrini. The historian is Luisa Passerini. I have chosen these three figures as I believe that they can offer vantage-points from which to look again at the decade of the 1970s. I say “look again” deliberately as their publications also have a bearing on my own work on the period, notably States of Emergency. Cultures of Revolt in Italy 1968 to 1978. For me this conference has given me a welcome opportunity to revisit and perhaps revise earlier ideas and concerns. Balestini, Passerini, Eco. Why them? Firstly, they are intellectuals ‘on’ or ‘of’ the left who actively engaged, in their different ways, with the politics of post 1968 Italy – politics, that is, in its widest sense. They are, in this respect, part of the longer story of impegno discussed by Jennifer Burns in her study Fragments of Impegno. Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative (2001). Their writings in the 1970s – articles, poems, 243 THE HISTORIAN, THE POET, AND THE SEMIOLOGIST: PERSPECTIVES ON THE POST 68 DECADE books, pamphlets – deal either directly or indirectly with contemporary events and debates. Secondly, Balestrini, Passerini and Eco have written restrospectively about the experiences of ‘before’ and ‘after’ 1968. They have analysed and interpreted these experiences against the grain of how they were being represented in the mass media in the 1980s, a decade that saw the celebration of values and ideas that were the antithesis of those of the 1970s. Thirdly, the writings of these three figures are significant not just for what they are trying to say but for how they are trying to say it. They adopt interesting strategies in relation to form and genre that traverse and subvert traditional boundaries. The historian borrows devices more often associated with fiction. The semiologist writes novels. The poet turns historian. What I want to do here is to identify some key texts that are simultaneously about the politics of post 1968 Italy and about the process of writing about that politics. In this sense, the texts are also meta-texts. In part, the approach delimits an area for analysis in terms of period and place – namely, the post 1968 decade seen from the 1980s and the Italian context. I hope, however, that the paper will also raise questions that go beyond this framework – questions about memory, literary and other genres, politics. Nanni Balestrini and L’editore When Nanni Balestrini ‘exhibited’ his I muri della Sorbonna at the Tartaruga gallery in 1968 he was linking the literary avant- garde and the emergent political contestation (Calvesi 1968). The writings were so many ‘found words’. Nothing was invented. There was no individual authorship or creativity. No signatures. No authentication. His work was a copy. As an artist- poet, Balestrini was making a verbal assemblage, putting together what he had found and making it strange by transposing the writing from one context (the walls of Paris) to another (a gallery in Rome). But the action could also be read as political. 244 ROBERT LUMLEY (UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON) He was spreading the word, carrying out propaganda: “POPULARIZE THE STRUGGLES OF THE DIVINE MARQUIS”, “POWER TO THE IMAGINATION”, “IT IS PROHIBITED TO PROHIBIT”, “LEAVE FEAR OF THE REDS TO ANIMALS WITH HORNS”. In fact, the show marks a turning point in Balestrini’s work in this respect. In the early and mid 1960s Balestrini combines texts drawn from every kind of source. His Cronogrammi, for example, consists of words and sentences cut out from newspapers in their original typology and turned in collages (Balestrini 1963). His Tristano (1966) is described in the book’s blurb as “un romanzo senza trama e personaggi, il suo stile è, se così si può dire, il ‘non stile’: il livellamento anonimo del linguaggio derivato da un cumulo di materiali stilistici ‘prefabbricati’: stile dei romanzi rosa, stile dei libri di geografia […]come se spezzoni di molti film fossero stati capriciosamente 1 mischiati” .TPF FPT Balestrini’s method of working is described by fellow poets as Dadaist in the manner of Kurt Schwitters’s collages or non-sense in the manner of Alice in Wonderland. After 1968, however, Balestrini increasingly uses politics and political discourse as the raw material for his work. He also makes greater use of formats that can be seen as more accessible to a wider public, a public constituted in good part by those involved in or close to the social movements of the time. Not that he stops writing poetry. Not that he accepts the distinction between the poetry and the ‘novels’ that he writes. But the novels are the privileged vehicle for the political. They can be grouped into those produced at the time of the events described or shortly afterwards – Vogliamo tutto is 1 TP PT “a novel without a plot or characters, his style is, if it is possible to say such a thing, a non-style: an anonymous levelling of the language derived from Mills and Boon women’s fiction, geography textbooks […] as if they were segments of film capriciously mixed up.” Translations are by author unless otherwise indicated. 245 THE HISTORIAN, THE POET, AND THE SEMIOLOGIST: PERSPECTIVES ON THE POST 68 DECADE published by Feltrinelli in 1971; La violenza illustrata by Einaudi in 1976; and those written after a greater gap in time: Gli invisibili and L’editore, published by Bompiani in 1987 and 1989 respectively. Balestrini’s linguistic experimentation, however, runs through all the work. In La violenza illustrata, for instance, a press report of a demonstration is broken up: a sentence breaks off in the middle and then runs on a few lines later; words fracture and fragment. Sometimes Balestrini freezes scenes of violence as Andy Warhol does with his silk screen prints of road accidents, suicides and electric chairs. Sometimes he goes in the opposite direction, recreating in language the sensations of confusion, pain, anger and loss of the political demonstrator. Vogliamo tutto is the best known of the romanzi. Set in the Hot Autumn of 1969 when strikes, sabotage and demonstrations paralyzed the Fiat motor company and the city of Turin, when workers shouted the slogan “vogliamo tutto”. The io narrante, the first person narrator, is a Southern factory worker. Much of the text was directly derived by Balestrini from tape-recordings with a militant young worker that he had got to know. The collective voice and the language that mixed political jargon with a popular vernacular would have been instantly recognizable to contemporaries. At the same time, the structure of Vogliamo tutto with its short episodic chapters and paragraphs and its andatura strofica was described by a critic at the time as evoking the chanson de geste, particularly the Chanson de Roland (Spinella 8). Except that that book celebrates the epic feats of the proletarian not those of the knight. The great battle at the end is the battle fought on 3 July 1969 between police and demonstrating workers and students in corso Traiano.
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