Italian Theory and Criticism 2

Italian Theory and Criticism 2. Twentieth Century The history of Italian literary theory and criticism in the twentieth century can be written, for the pre-World War II period especially, as a series of attempts to grasp and develop, or to critique and overcome, the thought and influence of Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). Although he hated and seldom used the word, the "structure" of Croce's immanent Spirit gave it impressive range and legitimizing power. In a way, it can be said that he adapted G. W. F. Hegel to Immanuel Kant: stop the Absolute Spirit from its spiraling through history and rest it on a fixed, "olympic" architecture, balancing it atop four basic categories, namely, the aesthetic, the logical, the economic and ethical, and the historical. This also permitted the adaptation of a dualist scheme: art and philosophy were the idealized, pure disciplines of which the economic, the pragmatic, the lived everydayness that go into the making of history were but the concrete aspect and evidence. Croce's fundamental aesthetic principles can be summarized as follows: art is an autonomous spiritual category; it falls under the sphere of theory; it is constituted by images and intuitions uncontaminated by intellectual, moral, practical, or material concerns. In other words, art does not distinguish, is not analytical, and cannot be philosophical, being pure fantasy. In the work of art, intuition and expression coincide. But this does not mean that Croce's aesthetic was irreducibly abstract, for as an erudite historian he placed great importance on concrete philological research and documentation, and he was a thoroughly militant critic. The polemic over verism, which held that art had to attain a maximum level of impersonality, reaching a sort of perfect mimesis with the unfolding of everyday reality, compelled Croce to consider whether, on the contrary, it was art that was necessarily personal, unique, the expression of one single individual's emotion or vision, and as such in tune with a representation of a pure form or spirit. In this view, naturalistic and realistic writing tend to lose aesthetic power and consistency, and it is lyric poetry that is enthroned as queen of the arts, Euterpe replacing Calliope. Croce studied most intensively the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, times during which the arts both raised the tension of individual expression and self-assertiveness and also introduced a more psychological time scale. During these centuries we see the emergence of subjectivity as it attempts to be more scientific and secular. But the Grund is: there is one unrepeatable human life, with its own specific, unique voice. In the Logic (1909) Croce gives a fuller exposition of his epistemology: thought and knowledge can in fact be linked, but the "method" of reasoning, the discourse of interpretation, proceeds by artfully written syllogisms. Philosophy explains art, phenomena, indeed reality itself, by using concepts that can be organized according to the laws of induction and deduction. Yet philosophy is not reality. In the later, more readable version of 1912, the Breviario di estetica, Croce reiterates that art is an a priori synthesis of feeling (sentimento) and intuition that has turned into a full, complete representation. From this brief sketch of the premises, we expect several corollaries to follow. There is no "content" to look for in an artwork. Art expresses the sentiments of its author. Poets cannot be compared, as each is unique. Translation is impossible; it is only a pedagogical necessity. The responsibility of the interpreter is to capture "the mood or state of being (stato d'animo) of its author." Finally, since all arts aspire to the purity of the lyrical, understood as the vox anima, the question arises whether it is at all possible to write literary history or a history of literature, for in the background Clio demands to be heard. The problem is the following: if we try to write a literary history, we are doing no more than tracing a map that is fundamentally conceptual, a philosophical enterprise, and we would be treating individual works of art as if they were laboratory objects or logical constructs. This has no bearing on aesthetics, for it is a logical problem; in principle we should not even call it literary history, but the philosophy of art, as the aesthetic category is one and universal. As a result, Croce would only write "monographs." But history, as it turns out, is of the four probably the most problematic cornerstone in Croce's edifice of Spirit. In Croce's thought and in that of three generations of scholars, critics, and historians, the notion and understanding of history certainly underwent the greatest amount of development, in a sense forcing Croce to make occasional modifications to his aesthetic in order to be coherent. It must be remembered that the aristocratic, secular liberalism that underlies his thought was badly shaken by World War I, then a decade later again by the rise of fascism. In the early stages, history was identified with aesthetics, insofar as what can represent a concrete individual person is a pure form. In this conception, not only distinctions such as those between what is real and what is not are illogical; time and space themselves are thought to be incidental, contingent: they are "ingredients" of Spirit, Croce argued, and not "ordering" principles. There can be no history of the expressions of Spirit, because history is spirit in the making. By the 1920s Croce's absolute idealism identified history with the philosophy of history. In the 1930s this was further elaborated into an even broader ontology wherein historicism became the truth of humanism, serving as the foundation of culture, legitimizing its claim to being human, and, finally, motivating the claim that history is the need of and search for freedom. But the fundamental separation between the two categories, between that of art or the aesthetic and that of thought or the logical (or scientific), remained. It could only be bridged by a third faculty, that of judgment. To even begin to think about what history is one must acknowledge the necessity of linking spirit to individual, or as Croce states in the first paragraph of the 1902 Aesthetics, fantasy and intellect, the individual object with the universal one, the single things and the relations among them. As a result, in evaluating a work of art we undertake two separate and yet interconnected pursuits: we reconstruct the personality of the author, and we characterize the "moment" in which the work happened in terms of whether it achieved the a priori synthesis of intuition and expression. Insofar as art is a special event, and the expression of human genius, we do a critique of taste. The fact that the earlier, pivotal notion of art as individual lyrical expression was later altered to become art as cosmic expression only proves that history was to become the necessary common ground to both art and philosophy. In the later stages of Croce's thought, in short, the poem expresses no longer solely an individual contingent reality but an entire universe. According to Mario Puppo (La critica letteraria del novecento, 1985), the monographic conception of history is not the exasperated manifestation of an individualistic notion of the work of art, celebrating the author as model or authority against some hierarchy, but rather, and almost to the contrary, historiographical research focused on the work itself, on its unity and uniqueness. Critical judgment for Croce is, at one and the same time, philosophical (because it seeks to establish an intellectual mediation), aesthetic (because it speaks to the values of the work), and historical (because it is the locus where the two coincide). And yet, owing to his conception of spirit, Croce ultimately believed that there was no substantial difference between the critic and the artist, for what obtains at most is a distinction of degree, not of originality and authenticity. One may overhear here echoes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even Oscar Wilde, as well as an uncanny hermeneutic predisposition. Through his journal La Critica, begun in 1903, and subsequently through the industrious editorship of authors from abroad as well as from less-traveled corners of the Italian cultural grid, Croce intervened in all sectors of critical and theoretical discourse. Marxism and sociology were banned early on from any aesthetic and literary evaluation, so much so that there later developed a sort of "leftist idealism" or "idealistic materialism." This can be perceived already in Antonio Gramsci and will be variously developed in the work of literary historians such as Natalino Sapegno (whose "comment" to The Divine Comedy has been studied in Italian high schools for over 40 years) and, since the 1960s, Giuseppe Petronio. Idealist-historicist principles underlie also the crucial and influential work of the Indo- European linguist Giacomo Devoto, whose criticism did have the advantage of focusing on the parole, although the background assumption concerning the langue was that it consisted of four aspects, the literary or controlled, the habitual, the expressive, and the technical (Studi di stilistica, 1950). This reproduces Croce's later scheme in La poesia (1936), wherein artistic expression is said to be--or is interpretable according to the categories--sentimental or immediate, poetic, prosastic, and oratorical. Devoto's criticism and linguistics pulled more toward Karl Vossler and Leo Spitzer, very important interlocutors on the Italian scene, than toward Ferdinand de Saussure, for whose influence we must wait until the 1950s. On the same horizon we find the stylistic contributions of Cesare De Lollis and, later, Aldo Schiaffini. These critics adapted the Crocean paradigm to account for aspects that had been left undetermined and therefore dangling.

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