The Scapi^lia-uire.: experiments in narrative. Rovani, Tarchetti and Dossi ANN CAESAR submirred for the degree of Ph.D., Bedford College, University of London. ProQuest Number: 10098479 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10098479 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT The thesis explores the diversity and experimentalism that typifies the narrative writings of the Scapigliatura. It offers a reading of key-texts by Rovani, Tarchetti and Dossi which focusses on the narrative techniques and structures which are used in the construction of meaning. Although critical attention addresses itself to the text and the narrative elements distinctive to it, it considers too the influence that context and circumstance exercise over the production of the work. The introduction looks at the particular problems that Italian Unification of I86I with its accompanying political and cultural changes brought to the writer. This is followed by the body of the thesis which is made up of readings of specific texts. Chapters 2 and 3 study Tarchetti’s and Rovani's very different attempts to produce committed, didactic writing with the instruments of popular fiction and the devices of the feuilleton. The 4th chapter discusses Dossi's semi-autobiographical fiction, L'altrieri and Vita di Alberto Pisani, in which although here too the narrator interpellates the reader through the medium of the text, empirical questions relating to the reading-public and the political climate no longer present themselves. The fragmentation of text and self that is witnessed in Dossi's writing returns as a theme in the discussion of Tarchetti's racconti fantastici in the last of the genre-related chapters. Here the function of the fantastic is examined together with the narratological elements of the genre. The last two chapters take up one aspecr of this; the assault the fantastic makes on our sense of the integrity of character. The textual construction of character is discussed in relationship to Tarchetti's novel Fosca, where it is inscribed as an unstable, ambivalent category dependent on who is employing the linguistic register at any given time, and Dossi's misogynistic treatise La desinenza in 'A' which has to find the devices to construct and sustain a reductionist image of all women as Woman fixed in a few immutable iraits. 4 Table of Contents Foreword. 7 Chapter 1. Political unity and cultural disunity. 9 1.1 The political background. 9 1.2 The Milanese Scapigliatura. 18 1.3 The changing role and conditions of the writer. 25 1.4 Attitudes to narrative. 43 Chapter 2. I. U. Tarchetti: Paolina and Una nobile follia. Popular fiction and political reality. 57 2.1 Paolina: author and narrator. 57 2.2 Character, setting and plot. 53 2.3 Una nobile follia: the "romanzo-saggio" 73 2.4 Narrative voices. 83 Chapter 3. G. Rovani, Cento anni. 91 The teller and the tale. 3.1 The novel and history. 91 3.2 The constraints of circumstance, time and politics 94 3.3 The reader and the text. 100 3.4 The narrator and the text. 105 Chapter 4. C. Dossi: D'altrieri and Vita di Alberto Pisani. Narrative constructions of self. II8 4.1 Carlo Dossi and autobiography. II8 4.2 L'altrieri; "Lisa", early childhood and the imagination. 120 5 4.3 "Panche di scuola", the limitations of learning. 127 4.4 "La Principessa di Pimpirimpara", fracture of the self and fragmentation of the text. 131 4.5 Vita di Alberto Pisani: Dossi the writer and Pisani the protagonist. 137 4.6 Reality and the imagination. 144 4.7 The fragmented text. 147 Chapter 5- I. U. Tarchetti: Racconti fantastici. 152 Textual freedom and psychological transgression. 5.1 The non-fantastic tales. 152 5.2 The fantastic: background. 157 5.3 "Le leggende del castello nero". l64 5.4 "I fatali". 172 5.5 "Unr spirito in un lampone". I8I Chapter 6. I. U. Tarchetti: Fosca. The instability of character. 184 6.1 A problematical novel. 184 6.2 A novel of transgression. 187 6.3 Text and context. 191 6.4 The construction of character: Fosca through the doctor's eyes. 197 6.5 Fosca's own view of herself. 205 6.6 Fosca through the narrator's eyes. 209 Chapter 7. C. Dossi: La desinenza in 'A'. The structures of misogyny. 213 7.1 Amori and La desinenza in 'A*: androgyny and misogyny. 215 7.2 La desinenza in 'A': Carlo Dossi, author and critic. 220 7.3 La. colonia felice and La desinenza in 'A* : writing and ideology. 224 7.4 La desinenza in 'A': character and frame. 237 7.5 Construction of character, Act 1, Scene 1. 241 7.6 Three women: Isa, Elda and Eugenia. 244 Afterword. 253 Notes. 255 Bibliography. 308 Foreword The writers of the Milanese Scapigliatura have presented critics with an apparently intractable problem. Their importance has been acknowledged both for the historical significance of the period they lived through and for their own awareness that literature had no find a new social function and forms appropriate to it. Critical evaluation, however, of the literary merits of their individual works, from Carducci and Croce on, has generally found their writing disappointing, so attention has been concen­ trated on the contribution they have made as a movement to Italian cultural history. It is this notion of a unifying thread which will integrate uhem in the literary canon that is the nub of the problem. They nave successfully resisted any attempt to identify them definitively as a cohesive group organised around an anti­ conformism of life-style and attitudes, leaving space for successive generations of critics either to draw up fresh registers of their members (recently critics such as Bigazzi and Bettini have dismissed Rovani from the ranks of the Scapigliatura) or even to deny that such a grouping exists at all; such is Marcazzan's approach when he reduces the movement to a number of "incontri piutrosto fortuiti". Work aimed at identifying in their narrative fiction or in their critical writings a common aesthetics has also proved unsuccessful, leaving Binni to condemn them for "la mancanza di una vera poetica organica, coerente" or Romano relegaring most of them to the much less innovatory - and more provincial-sounding "secondo Romanticismo lombardo". The present thesis shares with other critical works, such as those by Mariani and Ghidetti, the assumption that the socio­ cultural background exercised a considerable influence on the literary product; I am thinking in particular of the Grub Street conditions, the effects of serialisation, a new public and the changing relationship between writer and readers. It believes too that the writings of the Scapigliatura have a function as a cultural clearing-house, recuperating aspects of Romanticism that were lost through the nationalistic bent of Italian culture in the immediately preceding years as well as introducing into Italian literature, through original works as opposed to translations, forms and genres which were being elaborated elsewhere in Europe. Where it differs fundamentally is that it sets out to examine the writings of the Scapigliatura in terms of the questions and problems that the individual text raises and not in response to external issues imposed by a reading which seeks to intergrate the work in a literary canon. These specific writings by Rovani, Tarchetti and Dossi have been chosen because each of them is in some way innovatory either in the text's response to the socio­ cultural problems associated with writing fiction at that time, or in its exploration of the structures of story-telling which lead to questions about the narrative act itself. The thesis is postulated on the belief that the Scapigliatura have in common a decision to produce an autonomous form of artistic expression, which owes no debts to the patria or the establishment, but which does have a serious commitment to narrative experiment. By opening up the body of the text and examining its components, it sets out to discuss the range, heterogeneity and complexity of these experiments with narrative. Chapter 1. Political unity and cultural disunity 1.1 The political backf-round Life in pos"-Unification Italy brought with it for the Milanese Scapigliarura along with many Italian intellectuals of the day a disillusionment mounting at times to a sense of personal betrayal. An initial reaction of disappointment and anti-climax was to be expecwe: after the conditions which had given rise to the expression c: unity and national mission had been, at least in part, resolved, but it was exacerbated by the circumstances in which unity was obtained and by the structures through which it was maintained. Pasquale Villari observed of his contemporary Italy: Chiunque... oggi esamina se stesso, s'accorgera, se è stato pairicota, che la sua condizione nella societa era nel passato piu morale, che non è oggi. Allora c'era uns guerra, una speranza, un sacrificio ed un pericolc oontinuo che sollevava lo spirito nostro. Oggi invece e una lotta di partiti e qualche volta d'intéressa, senza un Dio a cui sacrificare la nostra esistenza, Questo Dio era allora la patria.