Rereading The Garden of the Finzi-Continis almost sixty years on – 1962 – the impression of a language that does not sit within history, but defines itself solely in relation to literature as high tradition, is formidable. And this despite Vittorini’s call to update a literary language felt as behindhand and nineteenth-century when set against an anthropology that, at the turn between the 1950s and the 1960s, had by then become industrial: the essay around which an intense debate opens in “il menabò”, Industria e letteratura, dates from 1961.[1] Even, one must add, despite the disruptive entry onto the scene of the neo-avant-garde. Italian literary language – narrative no less than poetry – struggles to produce literary objects without giving the impression that the question in the foreground is precisely that of belonging to literature. Pasolini was right – and he said it apropos of the neo-avant-garde – to speak of Italian writers as men of letters who represent themselves as men of letters.[2] In a game, then, that risks remaining wholly internal to the preordained codes of literature.

From this a twofold difficulty follows. Upwards, when the language keeps itself, even in its programmatic simplicity, too close to the decorum that seems to befit literature. And so it produces the wholly unwanted effect of sounding like mannerism. One need only think of the clear, rational, Enlightenment language, as it has been called, deployed by Calvino, which at times can verge on self-parody. In any case the bond with the traditional models remains demanding, if not binding: Verga for Pasolini – such is the case of Ragazzi di vita –, the Manzoni of Storia della colonna infame for Sciascia’s essayistic narrative, to give two examples. Even where the intention is not mannerist, these are choices that neutralise novelty, drawing it back onto nineteenth-century patterns. Precisely the defect that Vittorini pointed to,

Nor is what happens very different when the language descends towards the low, in the attempt to escape, by way of the everyday, the threat of literature: it seems very difficult, if not impossible, to give form to the mimesis of an everyday, if not popular, speech without immediately lapsing into the artifice of dialect. Artifice because here too it is a matter of a stereotyping cliché that closes once again upon literature. Not to forget that when one speaks of dialect at least two further knots present themselves. The dialect of the twentieth century has nothing to do with that of Ruzante or of the characters of the commedia dell’arte, comic by statute and able to identify objectively a low condition, in which local colour has a substantive function. If instead we think of the destiny it had in twentieth-century poetry – from Biagio Marin to Pasolini, Loi – dialect in no way represents the entry into literature of a popular, non-literary diction, but rather the highly cultivated way out for continuing to write lyric poetry without running aground amid the shallows and the interdictions that afflict literary Italian. Especially in the second postwar period. Ever since Pascoli, moreover, the solution of dialect is hyper-refined, certainly not the index that allows one to register a lowering of tone.

The second question is that, by force of circumstance, dialect is unable to represent a sort of standard of the national low register – as argot can –, on the contrary it is incurably marked by a localistic patina. Not a dialect as a base that enriches the potentialities of literary language from below, but the plurality of dialects. With all that this entails. It is the problem that touches so many contemporary writings, where the choice of a language closer to everyday communication and to speech issues directly into local connotation, or at any rate implies it; one sees it against the light. It is a fiction of reality, not reality itself. And not only in narrative, for that matter: narrative seems rather to endure the fallout of cinema and television (the borders fell some time ago). With the result of an estrangement that subtracts reality and may even provoke allergic reactions. Such is the effect, for instance, of the ever more pervasive spread of Romanesco. At best, everything resolves into the comic, returning, however, to Ruzante and the commedia dell’arte. Most of the time it is merely an artificial operation.

The underlying problem remains the extreme rigidity of Italian literary language. Which, however, cannot be read solely as a problem internal to literature. It would even be facile to think so. It represents, rather, a knot of identity, in relation to the country’s history. The rigidity and the character of abstractness that invest the language reflect the historical weakness of national identity. The whole question appears reversed with respect to the way Manzoni framed it in the nineteenth century. Language is not the high road to national unity. Even if the project has, over the long term, largely been realised, it is precisely the fragmentation of identity that the country continues to maintain (or reproposes in new forms) that renders the updating of literary language precarious and unstable, locking it into a clot of social and political reasons difficult to disentangle.

Moreover, though this is a concomitant fact, it should not be forgotten that prose has no great tradition in Italy; one might even say that prose and the novel are relatively young acquisitions, in need of developing, with all the difficulties of the Italian case, a language capable of accounting for the manifoldness of the world. But if this is the profile of narrative language, genetically more open to contact with the dynamics of history and society, poetry labours under an inflexibility greater still, if that is possible.

The twentieth century did not lack attempts to set against the ever-lurking Petrarchan monolingualism the myth of the plurilingualism – and therefore of a greater flexibility and openness to history – of Dante: Contini, Pasolini, Sanguineti, in ways very different from one another, but they did it. Always, however, while remaining within a paradigmatic idea of the tradition: Dante vs Petrarca. Even the nexus between history and language – with its demand for a language opened out like a fan, not monolithic – of which Dante is supposedly the bearer is partly a falsification, or at least a partial reading. To build a working hypothesis on the language of Malebolge, as Sanguineti does,[3] is to ignore (intentionally?) that the point of arrival of Dante’s language is the Paradiso, not the Inferno, and that the Paradiso does not represent the utmost adherence to reality, but rather the reconstitution of a sense of the world on the basis of a solidly reaffirmed centrality of the language of poetry. Which makes it – at root – an operation not too dissimilar from that of Petrarca. What is certain is that, by making the monolingualism of poetry and the lyric paradigm coincide, Petrarca raises an insurmountable barrier against history and therefore against the possibility of contaminating languages. He makes poetic language an empty formal structure, and for this reason infinitely versatile, so long as one remains within the lyric code that it defines. Its success, one must add, depends less on Petrarca than on the Petrarchist tradition that installs itself upon him. In effect locking poetry onto the lyric posture and onto the automatism of the selective language that accompanies it.

The history of Petrarchism runs across Europe, it is not an Italian phenomenon – which accounts for its normative power –; in Italian literary culture, however, it becomes the epiphenomenon of a stiffening of poetic forms that lasts down the centuries. Since something always fails to appear that might resemble the Preface to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1802): “the language of such Poetry as I am recommending is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men”. The language really spoken by men is, on the contrary, excluded in advance by the impermeability of the code.

Returning to the contemporary, the beginning of the twentieth century is marked by an abrupt rupture and by a broadening of the base of the language, but this – often on the part of the protagonists themselves: the Crepuscolari are exemplary in this respect – is perceived as a loss of the lyric horizon of discourse and therefore of poetry as such. Indeed – and here too it is chiefly the Crepuscolari – as a renunciation of the representation of the self as poets. The reasons for this crisis reside not only in language but in the relationship between the poet and society, of which language is precisely the telltale sign. The response generated by the crisis of the early twentieth century is markedly conservative and entails no opening, no greater readiness towards relativised and historicised languages. So much so that between the 1920s and the 1930s the dominant line of poetry aims to react to this sense of loss by restructuring a lyric and strongly classicistic order of poetic writing. The central channel of poetry – for convenience let us keep calling it Hermeticism –, as it develops from Ungaretti onwards, with Quasimodo and Gatto and then, on a rather different front, more ideological and less technical-formal, with Luzi, Bigongiari, Parronchi, to give a few names, does not represent an experimental strategy or an avant-garde, but rather the reconstitution of a paradigm of poetry in its specifically lyric form. The Petrarca-Leopardi genealogy proves fundamental in Ungaretti’s reflection between the 1920s and the 1930s;[4] and no less so is the classicism of Rilke and, above all, Valéry. A stronghold so entrenched and closed in upon itself is not easily dented by the war and the postwar years. In the decades that follow, Hermeticism continues to mark itself as one of the most recognisable and enduring forms of resistance and identifiability of poetry in the twentieth century, precisely by virtue of the fixity of the language it carries with it, as against the disorder of the languages more in contact with history. The rupture and abandonment of traditional forms remains, in any case, a complex and not painless operation, full of aftereffects.

If we take Salvatore Quasimodo’s war poems – Giorno dopo giorno, 1947 – the entry into history is constantly balanced (or, if one likes, hampered) by the re-emergence of the modes and the language of the lyric tradition: “gazzella” and “mitraglia” can coexist within the same fabric (Lettera). Nor is the situation very different in Fortini’s first collection – Foglio di via, of 1946. Fortini, if some years later, maintains in the most trenchant terms the impossibility of any compromising of poetry with history: what he calls “poesia-valore” can be nothing other than lyric poetry, strictly anchored to the tradition.[5] That in the concreteness of the texts the picture then appears more mobile only in part corrects a position strongly marked in a conservative sense. In defence of an institution, poetry, that cannot but identify itself with its highest forms. As with Zanzotto: Petrarca and Petrarchism – one need only think of La beltà, 1968, and Galateo in bosco, 1978 – still identify the language of poetry, however much a relic in fragments, while Hermeticism represents the last great poetic season.

It is not that in Fortini or Zanzotto, to take up the two examples again, the pressure of history and of its languages is not felt, but it is felt overturned into the negative. And consequently the historicised language – not the absolute language of poetry – enters bearing this stigma. This is true also of the Montale of the Bufera, 1956. History breaks through in the Conclusioni provvisorie – not only there, of course – as a grotesque reversal. There is no seriousness in that language, which is a language undergone and therefore parodied. It is no accident that in the Silvae, the most demanding section of the Bufera, there reappears, and in a decidedly lofty register, the Dante-Eliot line, as a bulwark against history and a model of self-representation. The prefiguration of himself as dead in Voce giunta con le folaghe registers the poet’s estrangement from the world and achieves the aim of preserving the auratic quality of the lyric. Sergio Solmi’s last collection – Dal balcone, 1968 – stages a dialogue between the poet and Leopardi (A Giacomo Leopardi), in an operation in no way different from Montale’s. The catalogue of poets who espouse this attitude could go on and swell: it is the sign, a statistical one too, of a difficulty (and a resistance, precisely) in updating contemporary poetic language. So that the lyric code can no longer be employed, while the language of modernity is forbidden, because incapable of becoming poetry.

Besides funereal self-representations, the sense of the stalemate can translate into long periods of silence. For Sereni, after Diario d’Algeria, 1947, one must wait until 1965 for Gli strumenti umani, the third collection. More or less the same interval of time – and in years only slightly out of step – separates Montale’s La bufera from Satura, published in 1971. It is not that Montale or Sereni no longer write – they write little, of course – but they undergo an enormous difficulty in preserving from history the intangibility of the atemporal language of the lyric. Montale does not even believe it can still be done: with Satura one enters another world, the reverse of poetry, the parody of one’s own lyric modes as an extreme rebellion against history.

History implies a broadening of the spectrum of language, but poetry struggles to move on this terrain. Even the neo-avant-garde recovers history, the languages of communication, as objects to be contested, certainly not as ones with which to strike up a dialogue, since they are the linguistic signs of consumerist modernity. Even if in the negative, when it comes to poetry the landscape is always the traditional one, no longer usable; or else the historicised language, but only in forms of comic-grotesque reversal.

A different opening registers from the 1970s onwards. To the zeroing-out of the Petrarca-Leopardi tradition there corresponds the opening of the basin of poetry to sectors of language not of strictly literary pertinence: contemporary philosophy – from Heidegger to Deleuze, Guattari, Bataille – in the first place (one need only think of Milo De Angelis or Mario Benedetti). Poetry forms itself upon a ‘literature’ that almost no longer coincides with the exclusivity of the poetic tradition. Or, where it does, and this too is important, it does so thanks to a baggage of readings strongly decentred with respect to the customary primacy of poetry in the Italian language, opening instead onto international horizons that may be very distant indeed. This entails a broadening of the language; one that by no means excludes – from the 1990s it becomes more evident – the recovery of models internal to the tradition – Fortini for Antonella Anedda, Montale-Sereni for De Angelis – but outside any canonising rereading. Even if it is clear that the unhinging of boundaries and the disaggregation of genres, especially among the less shrewd, produces a vast zone of indeterminacy, in which it is by no means a given to define what the objects are that the book form and editorial policies continue to propose as poetry. And a discourse not very different from the one on poetry could be carried over to contemporary prose.

Notes

[1] Cf. Stefano Giovannuzzi, «Industria e letteratura». Vittorini, «Il menabò» e oltre: metamorfosi di un dibattito, in «Levia Gravia», XIV (2012) (monographic issue: Cinquant’anni dopo: letteratura e industria).

[2] Cf. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La fine dell’avanguardia, in Id., Empirismo eretico, cit., and now in Id., Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, ed. by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude with an essay by Cesare Segre, chronology ed. by Nico Naldini, 2 vols., Milan, Mondadori, 1999, vol. ii.

[3] Cf. Edoardo Sanguineti, Interpretazione di Malebolge, Florence, Olschki, 1961.

[4] Cf. at least Giuseppe Ungaretti, Difesa dell’endecasillabo [1927] and Riflessioni sulla letteratura [1935], in Id., Vita d’un uomo. Saggi e interventi critici, ed. by Mario Diacono and Luciano Rebay, Milan, Mondadori, 1974,

[5] Cf. Franco Fortini, Mandato degli scrittori e fine dell’antifascismo, III, Al di là del mandato sociale [1964-’65], in Id., Verifica dei poteri, Milan, il Saggiatore, 1965.

Stefano Giovannuzzi teaches Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Perugia. His work has focused mainly on twentieth-century literature, and on poetry in particular. Among other things, he edited the edition of Amelia Rosselli’s Opera poetica (Milan, Mondadori, 2012).