Reopening a debate on the canon, retracing the controversies that this notion sparked throughout postmodernity, insisting on the present relevance of the problems it has raised will strike many as critical exercises in the dustiest archaeology. Contemporary theoretical and taxonomic interests seem to have thoroughly digested that long debate, which has in any case been formally shelved for at least fifteen years. And yet this apparent digestive capacity, so to speak, might be read as a most ominous symptom: not posing oneself a problem of the canon does not mean having resolved its contradictions. An accelerated gastric transit is no less worrying than an indigestion.

The illusion that claims the contrary rests on a decidedly partial definition of the concept of the canon. It would have us understand the canon, in essence, as a list of works whose selection and juxtaposition imply specific criteria of choice and, naturally, equally specific criteria of evaluation. As Romano Luperini (2001) observed some time ago, the continual updating of the memory of a given culture, a memory meant to be always active and selective, in fact describes a table of values that varies over time. Across the epochs, it is therefore embodied in progressively different literary works, according to the didactic and cultural prescriptions promoted by the social institutions charged with that function: the present, as we know, continually rewrites the past.

According to this definition, postmodernity would have shattered the monolithic cohesion of a supposed and almost ahistorical traditional culture, fragmenting it into lists of works of a less universal character, which some call constellations.

To this idea of the canon, however, as some critics have never ceased to stress, it is always necessary to add another that completes it. And it does so, literally, by contradicting the first: the canon, in this case, is not a list of works implying a criterion of selection and evaluation. Rather, it indicates a concept of a legislative order, encompassing the set of norms that found a given tradition and that are drawn from a single work or from a fairly homogeneous body of works: the variation of this corpus over time is quite limited. The drafting of the canon is normally carried out by a legislating man of letters of middling worth, and it falls precisely at the moment when a given tradition begins to reflect upon itself, legitimizing itself in relation to other traditions. In fact, the aesthetic codification of a set of norms functions as the ideological legitimation of a specific line within that same tradition. It is, in other words, the direct and shared expression (obviously not by everyone, but by the majority of the ruling groups) of a certain political hegemony.

Romano Luperini defines this model as the a parte objecti of the canon, and the other as the a parte subjecti. Although in every literary tradition it is always possible to reconstruct the logic of both, the absolutizing of the a parte subjecti canon in postmodernity betrays from the outset the liberal-liberist formal flaw onto which the dominant cultural logic of at least the last thirty years is grafted: everyone is free (and is compelled to be) to build his own constellation. Every constellation, however debatable, will in the end enjoy equal dignity, if not before the tribunal of taste, then certainly before that of its legitimacy. Freedom, posited as an absolute value, loses its own opposite dialectical pole. On what grounds we should, and could, exercise it remains rather mysterious in liberal accounts and, to tell the truth, even in some of those by the disappointed survivors of the post-Marxist milieu. It matters little: the single individual now appears as the master (a god, at times) of his own little world: each is granted the benefit of his own opinions and one may even defend the theoretical legitimacy of the scale of values on which they are built.

The utterly banal phrase, wrongly attributed to Voltaire, according to which, even while not sharing someone’s ideas, one ought to fight to the death for his right to express them, rests on the rather foolish notion that democracy should work on the basis of an indiscriminate acceptance of people’s opinions and behaviours. On the contrary, as is true both historically[1] and theoretically, democracy and freedom, in order to function, require not the tolerance but the respect of the other, a respect that descends solely from the discriminating capacity of judgement (cf. Cataldi 2001). In the mid-1990s, Christopher Lasch described to perfection the advance of the “enlightened self-interest” of those who proclaim themselves determined to respect everyone, indiscriminately, defining such conduct as a “tourist’s approach to morality” (1995: 77). The victory of that approach, today made flesh in the virtual tribunes of the social networks, at last reveals its foully reactionary character, and in effect extinguishes the fundamental coordinates of the spirit of the Enlightenment, namely criticism, discussion and debate. We thus witness the stubborn transformation of public discourse into a raving mercantilism of slogans that insult the intelligence yet, as is evident, prove quite effective on the Western masses (if a democracy without citizens is unthinkable, one should ask why, then, our higher educational institutions bet on ever more vocational skills, rather than on the building of a critical knowledge essential to civic conscience, and I fear the answer would prove particularly disturbing). Such squadrist chatter still exploits that enlightened self-interest of which Lasch spoke, far beyond anything the weak thought that then promoted it could have imagined.

If it is true that without generalizing one cannot do history, it is equally undeniable that doing history through generalizations always presupposes historically determined criteria, founded on specific values. With respect to literary history, for instance, one may consider literature in re, in Anceschi’s formula, as a symptom, and thus from a perspective that binds reality and representation together along a tortuous path requiring anamnesis, study and interpretation, but above all requiring a value judgement able to discriminate what must be preserved from the rest. Or else one may consider the ideas that sustain the structures and the workings of this “surrounding literature” of ours as unrelated, independent, endowed with an autonomous life, as if what happens in literature simply happens, occurs because the disposition, the temperament, the bent of the writers who produce it dictates it, and one may thus think that every possible constellation is legitimately worth preserving.

In the age of great surveys, in which the most intelligent and significant studies seem to me to aspire to map a confused present, in a war of labels that try (in vain) to account at last for the sense of the age we are living through, two fundamental aspects are, in my view, missing, both bound to our idea of the canon and to the underestimation of its a parte objecti. The first concerns the very capacity to express a value judgement: to take possession of the object of study, to defend the perspective through which we have appropriated it, but above all to aim at the sharing of values that such a reading implies. To do this, our table of values must be explicit and must allow others to subscribe to it, to reject it, or to debate its meaning. The second concerns criticism’s capacity for self-criticism: the objective decline in the social importance of literature almost always goes hand in hand with the frustrated exercise of the literary critic’s profession, a critic who may choose whether to fall in with the mercantile system’s substantial indifference to “the values in formation” and to “the dialogue that ought to produce them” (Cataldi 2001: 143), or else to retreat into the weak position of the “guild” or the “critical tendency” (ibidem), renouncing any extra-literary and universal tension. On this last point, however, I believe criticism must reflect carefully. First. The dominant ideological discourse is currently founded on a kind of longing for the fine world that once was or, if one prefers, for the good old days. The populist right founds its own discourse on precisely this. Literary criticism takes part, in its own way, in the spirit of the age when it laments the disappearance of an era in which literature sat upon the throne of the humanistic idea of man and confidently brandished the sceptre of the privileged medium, avoiding any confrontation with other media. Did that era really exist? Personally I do not believe so: rather, it seems to me that there existed an era in which a ruling class took substance and defined itself by means of a certain cultural policy and organized a pedagogical discourse in which literature was entrusted with a particular task, undoubtedly a leading one compared with our present. To look upon the past with melancholy, seeing in it a sort of golden age, is, as one would once have said, a particularly cunning form of false consciousness. As if, let us say, the stances taken by Bembo, by Leopardi, by Montale, by Fortini or by whomever you like, before ’89, had ever meant anything to the tanner, the peasant, the metalworker or the delicatessen keeper. Or as if the crisis of humanistic knowledge prevented each of us from independently teaching literature every year to hundreds of students, many of whom, precisely because they enrol in a humanities degree in times of crisis, appear decidedly motivated. Second. In the strict present, precisely when our relationship with reality reaches the highest degree of perspectivism, public discourse no longer distinguishes reality from truth. Here too criticism takes part, in its own way, in the spirit of the age, not because, as some think, our narrators are returning to reality after decades of abstraction, but simply because certain rhetorical strategies for representing the real are mistaken by readers and, often, by the writers themselves for reality, so that the search for the true proceeds on the model of the sciences, as an attempt at approximation and adjustment to the symbolized real, that is, to reality, disavowing the specific function of literary truth, which is historically, from the Enlightenment to the postmodern, of an interpersonal order or of revelation, as Todorov taught once and for all.

2. It is thus only by appealing to the centrality of the a parte objecti canon in the twentieth century and, hybris, even in our own day, that certain literary phenomena can be explained not idealistically, that is, not as if ideas had legs and muscles, but through the study of the complex relations that materially interconnect reality and literary representation.

The discrepancy between the literary work and the common language in the Italian tradition, of which, as I said, Ojetti and Gramsci give an account, at two different moments of our modernity, is evidently a reflection of precise and shared choices in the codification of literary language laid down by the a parte objecti canon, defended by critical practice or, at times, criticized, and therefore recognized as significant, choices that emerge precisely at moments when forms of democratization of public discourse impose a redefinition of the composition of the ruling class. When Bembo accomplishes the normative feat of the Prose della volgar lingua, proposing as universally established a canon founded on the illustrious fourteenth-century Florentine represented by Petrarchan poetry, he takes care to distil literary language of any stylistic lapse, that is, of the risk that it might harbour the clumsiness and coarseness of the spoken tongue. Although prose, whose model of reference was Boccaccio, might even allow itself, in the representation of the tale, forms of imitation of the common language, the transmission of literary contents to posterity had to occur by way of a monolingualism as illustrious as it was archaizing: thus, even in the case of Boccaccio, the invitation was to take the great frame narratives, in which the author expressed himself in his own language, and not the moments of imitation of popular speech. To any eclectic theory and to the superiority of the Florentine of his own day, Bembo could easily reply that imitation of the Petrarchan model surely guaranteed the most illustrious manner of speech. Implicit in this choice, however, is a preference of genre: the identification of poetry with the forms of the lyric (and the marginalization, for example, of narrative poetry or of didactic poetry), as we know, comes from here. And from here comes too the difficult superimposability of the a parte objecti and the a parte subjecti of our canon, for if it is true that, as Roberto Bigazzi writes, “for patriotic ends no distinction is made between literary genres” (2001: 119), still the formalization of certain discursive properties within a hegemonic genre means that individual texts are produced and enjoyed on the basis of the norm established by that codification. One cannot help but recall, in this regard, the difficult placing of the Dante of the Commedia over the centuries, down to the twentieth, where still, as we know, Croce (1922: 55 ff.) held that the ‘structure’ of the work must absolutely be severed from its poetry, that is, that the “otherworldly faith”, to use his terminology, and the “most powerful feeling for worldly things” were to be considered neither “intrinsic”, nor “generative”, nor “dominant” with respect to the lyric moment. And again, even in an exceptional critic like Gianfranco Contini, some decades later, one could find, with a different metaphor, an idea not entirely unlike Don Benedetto’s, if, as he declared in the days of the celebrations for the centenary of 1965, from that fine little Book extraordinary arias could be excised. For Contini, as for Croce, in short, “the verbal execution, to be verified with wonder and dismay at every opening of the page” prevailed “over the construction and the narrative development” (Contini 1970: 477).

3. If this debate on poetry is well known, thanks also to the work of deconstruction carried out between the 1950s and the 1970s by the neo-avant-garde, the one on prose is far more complex. In this regard, in fact, one must consider that the tradition of prose has undergone a fracture, an interruption that poetry never suffered. The decline in the transmission of experience between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries in fact brings about the crisis of the literary forms in which experience set itself up as authority, namely, on the one hand the proverb and the maxim, in whose place we now find the slogan, and on the other the oral tale. The subject of experience and the subject of knowledge come to be superimposed from the revolution of modern science onward, and the legitimation of truth occurs from that moment on through forms of experience that are controlled, measured and rationed. Traditional experience is thus deprived of its own value. In becoming calculable it loses, in fact, its own authority. The experiment, in this sense, is precisely the transformation of experience into the site of knowledge. The expropriation of experience brings about a revolution of the literary genres (and therefore of the ideology that had favoured the formalization of specific recurring linguistic acts). This goes hand in hand with the nascent right of an immense multitude of men to leave traces, to put it with the title of a section of an important essay by Guido Mazzoni (2015). The modern idea that individuals are differences is the implicit premise of the literary genres hegemonic in modernity. Such genres, in fact, “are conceived so as to let difference, idiosyncrasy, spread, not to reduce it” (Mazzoni 2015: 7). The history of the right to leave traces is deeply interwoven above all with the history of the modern novel. While the sciences of the soul of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries turn into modern psychology and reflection on social life progressively gives rise to sociology, making a matter of knowledge what had previously belonged to the field of experience, the novel begins to recount, for instance with Defoe and Fielding, “lives similar to the purely private ones of its readers” (ibid.: 3), thus taking into itself the existences of those non-representative individuals that for millennia European culture had “confined to a cultural underworld” (ibid.: 4). In short, as Mazzoni writes, “European literature becomes able to recount the minute particularities of social life precisely when, at the other end of the cognitive spectrum, there arise sciences founded on the premise that the differences between individuals can be erased and traced back to centres of gravity, to conceptual laws and to mathematical formulas” (ibidem). But this success of the novel coincides, of course, with the devaluation of the narratives of the oral tradition, that is, of those very forms charged with the transmission of experience and, at the same time, with the devaluation of an idea of literature as a progressive adjustment to a learned tradition. This explains, perhaps, the difficult placing of narrative within the palimpsests, even the contemporary ones, of our a parte subjecti canon. On the one hand it is a problem of Italian criticism, since the ideological composition arranged by the a parte objecti canon of the “ruling cadres” has often determined, even over the long run with respect to the humanistic institution of our tradition, a reading of the narrative text, and therefore of the novel as well, through the instruments historically dedicated to the analysis of the poetic text, so that elocutio has always represented the centre of hermeneutic interest at the expense of dispositio and inventio. On the other hand it is a problem bound to the very nature of the narrative text in prose, namely the fact that the rewriting of “genres of wide dissemination” (Bigazzi 2011: 128), before the advent of the bourgeoisie, was carried out by a culturally aristocratic elite that could thematize and represent the small, unsophisticated public (of women, for example) by grafting its own discourse onto the oral tradition of the tale. In this way the exemplarity of an experience was communicated, and transferred to whoever listened to it. With the hegemony of the novel, in the modern age, that same public, having widened over time until it became a mass public, can only see itself mirrored in the solitude and the bewilderment, as Benjamin would say, of the modern writer: it is no longer experience that is communicated, but the lack and the impossibility of experience. For this reason the mimicry of the oral is so problematic in the modern novel, and all the more so in a tradition like the Italian one: its representation reminds us of our solitude and our perplexity (Benjamin again) before the life outside us.

Notes

[1] I am thinking of all the times that democratic states, in order to defend themselves against real political dangers, arbitrarily suspend democracy, as was done in Italy to combat red terrorism in the 1970s, or in the United States, more recently, to combat Islamic extremism.

Bibliography

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