Facts, Fictions, Fakes: Italian Literature in the 1970s

In her article, Jennifer Burns examines the apparent ‘silence’ of the literary scene in Italy in the 1970s, a period which is remembered in Italian social and cultural history for the various protest movements, acts of political violence, and the inability of ‘professional’ politicians to understand the new developments within society. The article explores the literary activity of some Italian writers at the ‘centre’ of the literary scene, such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Leonardo Sciascia, and analyses the reasons why such ‘committed’ authors abandoned fiction to engage in journalism. Burns’ thesis is that the tension found in Italian society marginalised traditional literary forms, such as the novel, since the writer, in order to be read, needed to be ‘rapid, precise, shocking’. Increasingly the newspapers and literary magazines gave more space to lengthy articles or open letters in which writers discussed, among other issues, the long-debated problem of the role of the intellectual and culture in modern society. Burns points out that on the whole literature seemed to emulate what was happening in society at large; as conventional forms of associations and political organisations broke down, literature could only provide a testimony in forms that privileged subjective experience and expression. Thus, the main production of these ‘years of tension’ seems to be represented mainly by confessional, autobiographical and diaristic writing. At the ‘periphery’ marginalised voices expressed their anger and frustration texts of ‘protest’, extremely successful at the time, but now remembered only as ‘colourful souvenirs’ of what used to be defined ‘sub-culture’. Burns’ conclusion is that in such confusing and confused times, when social and political reality, with all its different versions of plots and subplots, was so difficult to interpret as to appear ‘invented’, authors abandoned the creation of their own fictional worlds in order to scrupulously analyse the text of Italian society.

-marginalized by the political establishment at the centre -provides a counterpoint to the sterile tension at the centre, marking out a gap between centre and margins, between the political establishment of 'professional' politicians and strategists and the movements comprised of 'amateur' activists and revolutionaries.This is a gap in communication and in understanding, which allowed the violence and tension of the years of terrorism to be perpetuated.This article will explore that gap, looking at the literature -or, more precisely, the activity of writers -during the decade, to see whether the tradition, which had been powerful in the 1940s and 1950s, of commitment ('impegno') in literature was revived in response to the threat to the Italian democratic republic posed in the 1970s. 4n accounts of Italian literature, the 1970s have a peculiar status, as a liminal space between more clearly-defined identities, and largely a space of residues rather than of 'becoming'.Michael Caesar, for example, writes: 'The fiction of the 1970s tends to fall between a working-through of problems left over from the experimentation (and the resistance to it) of the previous decade and the return to a generally more circumspect and circumscribed kind of fiction-writing which will characterise the Eighties'. 5Though always in debate, prose literature had some measure of an identity in the decades following the war; but in the 1970s, little remains.On the one hand, educational reforms and the move to mass-market publishing in the 1960s created a larger, hungrier market for conventional, 'readable' novels, and the 'bestseller' was perhaps the publishing phenomenon of the 1970s.On the other hand, critical theory and creative practice had worked to de-bunk the conventional novel in favour of experimental writing exploring subjecthood and the act of writing itself, and privileging form over content. 6 the writing I shall consider here, the novel all but disappears, and the concept of narrative is severely tested.'Literary interventions' is the only blanket term which serves to describe the output of my selected writers: pieces of writing conventionally unrecognized as 'literature', but deriving from a literary consciousness and a literary tradition, and expressive of an effort to intervene in a public situation.My focus will be, with reference to the division in the political sphere, established authors at the 'centre' of the literary sphere -Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini -who began their careers in the post-war environment of the committed, neorealist novel, and retain a sense that literature should serve some sociopolitical purpose.I shall consider their work in the light of that of young, 'marginalized' writers at the periphery of the literary sphere, who come to writing as a further means of voicing political dissent; and lastly, as a 'key' of sorts to 1970s Italian writing, the work of another older and yet in many ways 'marginal' writer, Leonardo Sciascia. 7lvino was based in Paris throughout the 1970s and thus physically abstracted from the Italian cultural and political scene.He appeared to stop writing novels, producing three works of prose fiction at either end of the decade, but none conventionally describable as a novel, and all ostentatiously removed from any 'realistic' representation of contemporary Italian society. 8However, at the centre of contemporary Italian society is another side to Calvino's intellectual activity in the decade -his journalism -which is prolific and polemical. 9lthough a great part of the 'commitment' of both Calvino and Pasolini had been expressed since early in their careers in journalistic work, there is a difference in their activity in the 1970s: namely, that they write front-page articles in mainstream, highbrow newspapers, rather than page three items (the page reserved for cultural topics in Italian newspapers).In other words, they take the place of political commentators, displacing their intellectual activity quite markedly from the cultural to the political sphere.
Pasolini engages Calvino in a direct correspondence in the newspapers which circles around the definition of the role of an intellectual or writer in current circumstances.In a journalistic 'letter' to Calvino, he describes his anger at the failure of fellow intellectuals to speak out about the current chaos: 'No-one has joined in to help me move forward and develop my attempts to explain all this.Now it is the silence which is "catholic"' (italics in text). 10Pasolini persistently calls his interlocutor to account: the structure of the letter is dominated by a list of citations of Calvino's article, introduced by the phrase, 'You say' ('Tu dici'), each followed by the simple question, 'Why?' ('Perché?'),probing for further explanation.The last such instance is particularly telling: 'You have written a "cahier de doléances" in which are set out facts and phenomena for which you offer no explanation, just as Lietta Tornabuoni would, or any TV journalist, even a polemical one.Why?'. 11This demonstrates that Pasolini considers the activity he and Calvino are engaged in to have a value greater than mere 'journalism'.That it is written journalism (rather than the more consumer-friendly television) clearly adds value, but Pasolini suggests that he and Calvino have something special and invaluable to offer by the very fact of being writers of literature: they have the capacity to attempt, at least, to provide deeper explanations.
Pasolini describes this process in an article written in 1974, in which he claims repeatedly, that he knows what is going on behind the masquerade of democratic government: I know because I am an intellectual, a writer, who tries to follow everything which is going on, to be familiar with everything which is written about it, to imagine everything which is not known or is kept secret; who connects even the most disparate facts, who puts together the scattered and fragmentary pieces of a whole, coherent political picture, who re-establishes logic where arbitrariness, madness and mystery seem to prevail. 12 is significant here that the methods of arriving at truth, at the knowledge of which Pasolini so insistently claims possession in this article, are the methods of literary hermeneutics: trying to follow what is going on, using the imagination to fill gaps and silences, coordinating disparate facts and putting together a complex jigsaw, making sense of what appears nonsensical.The writer-intellectual -and he specifies that he himself is a writer -by virtue of her literary training, is endowed with the capacity to understand better than, or at least, differently from, other individuals.
In an article written in 1977 (well after Pasolini's death in November 1975), responding to an accusation by the DC that intellectuals had fostered the environment in which terrorists could operate, Calvino too defends the specificity and ethical integrity of the writer's role: 'Those who maintain their faith in the power of the word are supposed to be responsible for the violence?I believe that the guilty one is always the one who remains silent'. 13Like Pasolini, he foregrounds the damaging and irresponsible quality of silence.He then declares his view of the writer's function in adverse political or social circumstances: 'If we write in newspapers we do so so that the space in which the word can function is not closed off.Not so that the written word can set anyone's conscience to rest.The responsibility to say and to repeat that which must be said and repeated increases with the increasing gravity of the times'. 14The first sentence suggests some explanation for why Calvino's journalistic writing has displaced his fictional writing.The space for writing has become acutely restricted, he suggests: newspapers are the last place where a writer can seek a reader, or readership, which will respond with some urgency.The writer must demand the reader's attention, rather than gently soliciting it.Calvino seems to be suggesting and demonstrating that, in a climate of fatal ambiguity and acute tension, there is no space for the luxury of the fully-rounded, carefully-nurtured, consolatory, traditional novel, and instead a writer's contribution must be rapid, precise, demanding, shocking.This suggestion is reiterated, in different terms, by the 'marginalized' writing which emerged directly from the protest movements of the 1970s. 15These texts aimed, or claimed, to represent directly the angry underclass(es) which formed the basis of the political protests of the period: the students', workers' and women's movements.To analyse in detail the range of these texts is not my aim here, but the identification of some key features contributes something to an understanding of the place (or displacement) of Italian 'literary' writing in general in the 1970s.
Language use in these texts represents a striking departure from convention.Stripped of literary embellishment, the language aims to reproduce immediately that used by militants in the period of protest.For example, Vincenzo Guerrazzi's North and South United in Struggle (1970) focusses on the graffiti scrawled by workers on the walls of the factory toilets: the one 'marginal' place where they are free to express themselves. 16This is an indicator of language use in these protest novels in general: graffiti is language which aggressively and arrogantly demands to be interpreted, it is the written equivalent of protest chants. 17In these works then, the space of the novel, the literary space, is being occupied by political protest.
Testimony is clearly an important concept in these texts which seek to represent immediately an experience of social and political significance, and one which has the potential to unite centre and margins.In the 1960s, the idea of the writer as a witness to contemporary reality had been juggled amongst a number of writers, including Calvino, Pasolini, and Giorgio Manganelli. 18It offered a substitute for the role of committed writer which seemed to have been de-bunked by the literary theoretical developments of the decade, chiefly structuralism, which cast doubt upon the stability and predictability of the hermeneutical process.This version of testimony, generally speaking, still resided at the 'centre'; that is, the writer was conceived of as having no particular role as leader, but at least as being a spectator with a privileged and unique oversight of contemporary society (this is connected with the 'special' capacity of the writer to seek deeper explanations evoked by Pasolini and Calvino above).In the 'marginalized' writing of the 1970s, however, the witness is conceived of as a participant with a special insight into a specific and excentric activity or experience.Less a witness than the plaintiff, perhaps, the narrator's account of her experience represents a detailed 'j'accuse', rather than the 'cahier de doléances' Pasolini attributed to Calvino in the quotation above.This technique has particularly powerful resonances in the writing from the feminist movement, and relates to the practice of consciousness-raising ('autocoscienza') which underpinned the feminist movement in the 1970s in Italy.The 'voicing' in texts by Italian women writers of the 1970s of the 'silencing' of women -of their exclusion and even incarceration -is both a political and textual strategy.For example, Giuliana Morandini's ...And Then They Shut Me Away (1977), reports the experiences of women in a mental health institution. 19The confessional, autobiographical, epistolary and diaristic forms privileged by women writers of the period (used also by male writers) broaden out the interpretive field of the concept of testimony, and express a specifically literary marginalization, in that these are all genres conventionally associated both with women writers and, more generally, with 'lower' literary status.All forms which aim to broadcast subjective experience, to make the individual signify on the universal level, these are subversive of literary and political convention, reinforcing the 1970s mantra that 'the personal is political'.
The writing from the movements is embedded in its context, in the initiative to attack and break down conventional forms of social and political organization, and of expression.Individual authors were claiming not just to be the spokesperson of the movements but to embody the plural, heterodiegetic voice of the protesters.Hence the problem of fakes: can one writer genuinely represent a sub-culture, or is the very attempt to inscribe that experience a prescription or proscription, replacing a complex, organic reality with a complete simulacrum which is ultimately little more than a souvenir?It is a question of testimony: in the judicial sense, testimony is supposed to contain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.It should be a full but unembellished eye-witness account of a series of events, offered up for public record, with no intention of provoking a specific response.But in practice, and certainly in journalistic and 'literary' practice, the testimony is reportage: an 'I'-witness account of events experienced by an individual conscious of his special position and with a reader or audience, and its response, firmly in mind (note the prominence of the first person subject pronoun in the quotations from Calvino and Pasolini above). 20The commercial success of the 'protest' texts is a rough measure of their proximity to the unembellished truth: Guerrazzi's novel is little known and extremely difficult to obtain; Pigs With Wings (1976), the authors of which were revealed not to be the teenaged students they claimed to be, is a well-known success, re-printed in 1996 with a top ten sales rating. 21The texts which are successful and remain current are those which are most 'colourful' -again, souvenirs of excursions into the 'exotica' of sub-cultural activity whose appeal is voyeuristic, and almost colonial.One core initiative, practised by writers both of the 'centre' and the 'periphery' in the 1970s, is to minimize the fictionality of their writing and maximize its factuality.At the centre, this is achieved in the fairly conventional way of writing journalism instead of novels; at the periphery, it is achieved in more provisional ways, by using broadly conventional but 'unliterary' forms, such as the diary or chronicle, as the templates for texts which are directly engaged with current social and political issues.Reversing Dante's dictum, the 'beautiful lie' ('bella menzogna') of fiction is hidden behind veils of fact; illusion has the semblance of truth. 22Why?There is no simple explanation, but there are a number of possible contributory factors, such as the effects of structuralism and post-structuralism in problematizing representation and interpretation; in the protest movements, the need for expression of the experiences of marginalized social groups to form part of their protest; the opacity of the activities of the political establishment which might seem to demand direct questioning and commentary, rather than allusive reference.I quoted Pasolini above, presenting the writer-intellectual as the individual 'who re-establishes logic where arbitrariness, madness and mystery seem to prevail': he is describing the contemporary political environment, but his description might also, more conventionally, be read as one of the fictional text.In other words, he is suggesting that the practices of literary hermeneutics are the only ones adequate to the task of interpreting contemporary Italian politics.
Leonardo Sciascia explores precisely this suggestion in a number of texts written in the 1970s, but here I shall concentrate on The Moro Affair (1978). 23Whilst offering no solution, he poses in complex ways the very question about the relationship between literature and an ambiguous reality which is at the heart of the 'problem' of Italian literature in the 1970s.The full version of this text is tri-partite: lined up adjacent to one another are Sciascia's personal account of and response to the case (this is the main part of the text), a bare chronology of the events of the case, and a transcript of his own report on the case, in his capacity as member of parliament.In aligning thus three types of testimony -the subjective or personal version, the objective or historical version, and the judicio-political or public version -Sciascia is demonstrating that there are various ways in which an event signifies, various languages by which it can be understood.The Moro Affair provides not the solution but the question, and it is fundamentally a question of hermeneutics.How, he asks, do we -writers, readers, intellectuals, politicians, citizens -interpret a reality as irrational, as morally and intellectually incomprehensible, as Italian politics in the 1970s?As I have said, it is a question of hermeneutics.In the central account of the Moro affair -his own account -Sciascia privileges literary modes of interpretation.He focusses on the notorious letters sent by Moro to the press during his captivity, and he uses the skills of a critic to judge both Moro's intention in writing them and the response of the receivers and readers.Referring both to Pasolini and Pirandello, he turns the affair into a literary text in which Moro is not just a central, tragic character, but is a textual principle in himself, a signifier and a signified.This is not to circumscribe the 'real' impact of the event: the effect of Sciascia's treatment is to expose it in its magnitude as the cypher of an immense ethical crisis.Only if we let textual practices inform our interpretation of reality, he suggests, can we attempt to grasp the full and complex meaning of that reality.This suggestion has resonances of Jacques Derrida's notorious declaration that 'il n'y a pas de hors texte'. 24 Italy in the 1970s, then, writing and reality seem to mimic one another.Just as I have shown that there is a powerful element of fact in the fiction of the decade, so is there a powerful fictional element in the factual events of the decade.Baudrillard has commented on the theatrical and exhibitionist quality of terrorist activity, linking Italian terrorism in the 1970s to the tradition of the 'commedia dell'arte' so as to label it 'terrorismo dell'arte'. 25audrillard's judgments are perhaps best treated cautiously, but even the more sober historian Martin Clark comments: 'It was a national melodrama, difficult to take too seriously unless you knew someone personally affected'.He talks of the Red Brigades 'beginning in romantic, even quixotic style'. 26Sciascia too, in The Moro Affair, comments at a certain point that 'now we are in the realms of the surreal', and the grotesque absurdity of the affair is partly what invites the references to Pirandello. 27Sciascia, Clark and Baudrillard respond to terrorism in Italy in the 1970s as something larger or stranger than life, something more like fiction.
Again, this foregrounds a hermeneutical problem: there is a switching of the codes of interpretation.In the political sphere, those who operated the 'strategy of tension', who stirred up terrorist activity in order to frighten people into submission to authoritarian rule, were disrupting accepted norms of interpretation of political behaviour and asking people to accept their version of the truth, their 'plot', and sub-plots.In other words, they were demanding on the part of the populus a 'willing suspension of disbelief' -Coleridge's description of the undertaking a literary text demands of its reader in order for it to function successfully.So in the topsy-turvy, almost carnivalesque world of Italian public life in the 1970s, the codes have been switched.Reality demands the suspension of normal criteria of differentiating between real and make-believe, and it seems to be writers -customarily fiction-mongers -who are instructing their readers to refuse to suspend disbelief.The apparent 'silence' at the centre of the Italian literary scene in the 1970s can be explained as the ventriloquist displacement of the literary voice away from creation of fictions to scrupulous interpretation of the bizarre 'text' (and sub-texts) of public life.