Love and politics: Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis

Ugo Foscolo became famous with Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (‘The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis’), bringing together fiction, history and autobiography in an epistolary novel which derived its structure and motifs from three of the previous century's best-sellers: Rousseau's Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire and La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (apart from a host of other sources, including the Bible, Alfieri, Sterne, Gray, Young, and earlier writings by Foscolo himself). The first unfinished draft was completed by a hack, and appeared in three garbled versions (one in 1798, and two in 1799) which were justifiably disowned by Foscolo in 1801. In October 1802 Bodoni published the complete edition as far as Jacopo's suicide. This was subsequently revised and augmented in 1816 and 1817. It dealt, far more clearly than Goethe's Werther, with the contrast between social conformity and individual emotions, which Foscolo clearly described as a political contrast. It suggested, at least a century before Wilhelm Reich, Marcuse and other writers on sexual politics, that political, economic and sexual repression go together. Jacopo cannot marry Teresa because, after Napoleon's cession of Venice to Austria with the Treaty of Campoformio (1797), he has to seek political asylum elsewhere. Her father, already under suspicion, would be further compromised and financially ruined by the match. The unhappy love affair ends with Jacopo's suicide. Foscolo boasted that it was ‘the first book that induced females and the mass of readers to interest themselves in public affairs’ (Essay on the Present Literature of Italy, 1818).

Giovanni Boccaccio entertained a lifelong friendship with his contemporary Francesco Petrarca, which became particularly close after their meeting in 1350. His admiration for Dante was sparked very early on and lasted to the end of his life. Unlike his two mentors, however, Boccaccio does not place his persona at the centre of his work but rather, somewhat slyly, at the periphery. At times he takes on the role of voyeur, as in the Caccia di Diana, and above all in the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine in which the author turns up unexpectedly at the very end (XLIX, 1–6), crouching in the thick greenery where, hidden from view, he has watched the beautiful nymphs and listened to the tales of their joyful and charming loves. At other times, poking fun at his envious detractors, apparently all too solicitous of his reputation and wellbeing, he takes on a tone of amused self-effacement and feigned humility: ‘In the course of my lifelong efforts to escape the fierce onslaught of those turbulent winds [of envy], I have always made a point of going quietly and unseen about my affairs, not only keeping to the lowlands but occasionally directing my steps through the deepest of deep valleys’ (Dec. IV, Intr.). More often Boccaccio's ubiquitous, elusive presence is entrusted to a subtle play of allusions scattered here and there among his fictional characters, notably Idalogo, Caleon, Fileno in Filocolo, Ibrida, Caleon in Comedia delle ninfe, Dioneo in the Decameron, and possibly even Fiammetta (reversing the gender roles) in Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta.

Early life and works

Cesare Beccaria, famous in the 1760s throughout the civilised world for advocating the abolition of torture and capital punishment, wished to stop the affair between his lively and beautiful daughter, Giulia, and Giovanni Verri, the playboy brother of his friends Pietro and Alessandro (renowned editors of Il Caffè, one of the most influential journals of the Italian Enlightenment; see above, pp. 378–80). Pietro arranged Giulia's marriage to the obscure Count Pietro Manzoni, twenty-six years her senior, as if that could stop the affair. In 1785 she gave birth to Alessandro, whom her husband acknowledged although he was (presumably) Giovanni Verri's son. After seven years in a steadily worsening relationship, Giulia went to live with Carlo Imbonati, a wealthy merchant banker, and Alessandro was farmed out to various religious boarding schools which gave him very unpleasant memories but a good classical education. By reaction he became a confirmed anti-clerical and challenger of established authority, ready to join the Romantic movement, and make friends with some of its acknowledged leaders, like Ermes Visconti and Federigo Confalonieri. His nationalism and love of history were stimulated by his contacts with the Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco, while his enthusiasm for poetry was kindled by sympathetic advice from Monti and Foscolo.

Imbonati, who had never met Alessandro, invited him to Paris early in 1805, but died suddenly before his arrival, making Giulia his heiress and laying the foundations of her son's future financial well-being (a fact that later on must have seriously troubled his conscience). Through his mother's circle of friends Alessandro came into contact with a group of intellectuals known as les idéologues, from the views of one of them, the philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who believed that the philosopher's task was chiefly to analyse the origins and mechanism of mental processes: philosophy was to become 'ideology' in the special sense of 'enquiry into the development of ideas'.

Introduction

The history of modern German literature cannot be detached from the social and political history leading from the authoritarian but relatively benign empires of Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph II to defeat in war, the establishment of fragile democratic republics, and the rise of a tyrannical, warlike and eventually genocidal Third Reich which left all of Central Europe in a state of devastation unmatched since the Thirty Years War. The exiled Thomas Mann told a New York audience in 1937: ‘It is in a political form that the question of man’s destiny presents itself today.’ Some authors, like Mann, arrived by complicated routes at a defence of democratic and liberal humanism; others placed their hopes in a conservative revolution or in the dictatorship of the proletariat. A literary history, however, must attend not only to authors’ explicit political choices but, still more, to the visions of society articulated in their imaginative works. And here we shall find a network of images, visions, beliefs and rhetorics which cut across political divisions, often in unexpected and disturbing ways, to give this rich and bewildering period a complex unity. As the late J. P. Stern showed in The dear purchase (1995), the highest achievements of modern German culture can be traced to the same imaginative matrix as many assumptions of the new barbarism. Hitler’s emergence was not inevitable, but the widespread acceptance of his rhetoric was not anomalous.

Heroi-comic poems

Epic poetry, which was so important in the previous century, declined in the Baroque period when heroic ideals had not only waned but were openly ridiculed (one need only think of Don Quixote or of Scarron's Roman comique). In Italy this anti-heroic attitude gave rise to a series of mock-epic poems. The first, and certainly the greatest, of these is La secchia rapita (‘The Stolen Bucket’) by Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1635). After studying law, Tassoni followed the iter typical of many scholars of the time, serving princes and cardinals, and visiting various Italian and European courts. His Dieci libri di pensieri diversi (‘Ten Books of Diverse Thoughts’, 1620) contains observations, meditations and paradoxical statements on all sorts of topics; but the most interesting part is the last, in which Tassoni attacks ancient authors in favour of modern ones. His strong anti-traditionalist statements precede the famous ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’ by many decades. This polemical vein inspired his Considerazioni sulle rime del Petrarca (1611) in which he attacks the principle of imitation adopted by the petrarchisti, whom he blames for decadence in poetry. From this polemical and irreverent background came La secchia rapita. Written between 1614 and 1615 – but published in Paris in 1622, and then, in a revised version, in Venice in 1630 – this poem in twelve cantos recounts the war between the Guelfs of Bologna and the Ghibellines of Modena over a bucket which the Modenese stole from their enemies.

The novel

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the novel developed as a distinct literary genre and began to impress itself on the literary consciousness of Western Europe as the most prestigious narrative mode. As early as 1640, the novelist Luca Assarino could proclaim with pride in his Almerinda (Venice, 1640): ‘This is the great century of the novel’. More revealing for an understanding of the historical and aesthetic reasons for the favourable reception of the new genre is the statement in Giovan Battista Manzini's preface to Il Crediteo (Bologna, 1637): ‘This kind of composition which is called by the moderns romanzo is the most difficult – when written in accordance with the rules of art – and as a result the most marvellous and glorious construct that human ingenuity can build’.

No fewer than 180 novels were published in Italy between 1600 and 1699. The pace of production quickened in the 1630s, peaked in the 1640s and 1650s, and practically came to a halt in the 1660s. Many of these novels enjoyed a remarkable popularity with their contemporaries, some of them going through more than thirty editions or reprints (while the same period saw only three new editions of the Divine Comedy). Moreover, a good number of them were translated into the other major European languages. Unquestionably, the seventeenth-century novel had a clear international character. The Neapolitan book collector Antonio Matina, in a catalogue of his private library compiled in the 1660s, lists ninety-two Seicento titles in Italian, fifteen in Spanish, twenty in French, and some thirty translations from French.

Novelists

Manzoni's novel, a skilful blend of traditional values and new perspectives, pleased everybody, except a few ultra-conservatives and advanced radicals. Thus he could be the holy patron of traditionalists, and at the same time be claimed by some as the ideal forerunner of the new veristi, who, in the latter half of the century, inspired by French naturalism, aimed to make their fiction an even closer reflection of true life. Conservatives and innovators both acknowledged him as their master, in a controversy reproducing much of the theoretical weakness, and cultural and political pointlessness, of the classicism-versus-Romanticism battle. The real divide was between a literature which, in its forms and contents, was still a middle-class monopoly, and the largely oral culture of the illiterate or semi-literate masses which the educated minority did little to enfranchise and empower. The fact that many of the authors mentioned in this section (and others not mentioned) are hardly if ever read today is both a sign of their failure to anticipate the needs and aspirations of the new politically emancipated and educated readership which the Risorgimento would inevitably produce, and of their success in expressing the intellectual narrow-mindedness and political conservatism of their peers, who accorded them a fame which from our vantage point it would be simplistic to judge undeserved.

Changing sides: the Bassville affair

In July 1825, nearly a decade after the appearance of Madame de Staël' article, Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828) reopened the whole debate on classicism and Romanticism, which had been quiescent for some time, with Sulla mitologia, a poetic discourse (sermone) defending the use of mythology in poetry. Monti's leading position in the Italian Parnassus was by then unassailable, though in an age when writers were not above trading insults with one another, he had received his share of obloquy. He had made enemies by surviving and prospering through an age of revolutions and reversals, witnessing the collapse of the old order, the Napoleonic wars, the various political changes from Republic to Empire under French rule, and the restoration of the old order after Napoleon's final defeat. None of these changes had been radical and complete. Napoleon had not made the old social structure obsolete. The Restoration could not undo much of what Napoleon had achieved. True, some of the most persistent and dangerous opponents of each régime had been persecuted, imprisoned or executed; yet many members of the ruling and cultured classes had, by necessity, been left in place or allowed to re-emerge after a short period of obscurity, in order to ensure reasonably efficient administration and transfer of powers. Many proto-industrialists, landowners, lawyers, booksellers, printers, army officers, politicians, and even a few artists and writers besides Monti had been able to live through the changes reasonably unscathed, and had adapted to each new master's demands without necessarily attracting the reputation of spineless turncoats or creating a critical or historical ‘problem’.

Latin and the vernacular

Language was the object of keener scrutiny in the Quattrocento than it had ever been before. Contributing to the intensity of the debates was the enhanced study of rhetoric, and the consequent appreciation of language as an instrument of communication used to enlighten, move and delight its hearers. Italian humanists assumed a disparity between spoken vernaculars, seen as inferior, and written Latin (grammatica), deemed superior because it was ‘fixed’ by rules. But they also grew aware that Latin itself was not ‘fixed’, and that medieval Latin, termed ‘barbaric’ since Petrarch, differed substantially from classical Latin, both lexically and syntactically. Some humanists then distinguished between a volgare illustre, a prestigious written vernacular to be used by poets and scholars, and the Babel of spoken regional dialects that existed in Italy – a situation now called diglossia.

In ancient Rome, humanists asked, what had been the relationship between the language spoken by Romans and the written language of, say, Cicero? Acrimonious exchanges began in 1435, when Flavio Biondo wrote to Leonardo Bruni that, unlike modern Italians, the ancient Romans both spoke and wrote fundamentally the same language. Guarino Veronese was surprised to observe how well modern, even unlettered Greeks spoke the same language that scholars wrote, and believed that this monolingualism also held for ancient Rome. Bruni himself differed: bilingualism reigned in ancient Rome, with one language for the uneducated (like the vernacular in contemporary Italy), and another used by educated writers like Cicero.

The Enlightment in Naples

The various reforms undertaken in the Settecento theatre should be seen against the background of the general questioning of traditional thinking and the adoption of more ‘enlightened’ views in society as a whole. By ‘Enlightenment’ we mean the movement, which affected all branches of learning and which was more or less explicitly political, of emancipation from ignorance, prejudice and authority based on superstition and the abuse of power, a campaign undertaken by the most original and open-minded thinkers of the first half of the century, but more systematically in the second half, on a basis of reason and freedom of criticism, aiming at a fairer social organisation and (in the last analysis) a better life for all. The works of the main proponents of the new philosophy, the philosophes – Locke, Newton and Hume in Britain, Montesquieu/Voltaire and Diderot in France, to mention only a few of the more important – were read and admired in Italy, although their influence varied according to the economic, legal and political situation in the different Italian states.

What has been said about Goldoni would lead one to assign his comedies to the ‘progressive’ culture of his time or to label them ‘enlightened’, but if by this term we mean the followers of the French philosophes and ‘Encyclopaedists’ (from the great Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers which Diderot and D'Alembert began publishing in 1751), who devoted their lives to the ‘spread of light’, then we must concentrate on certain states in particular which we earlier labelled ‘new’ (p. 343): Naples, Florence to some extent, and especially Milan.

This period, which begins before the Reformation and ends with the dawning of the Enlightenment, laid down the foundations of the thought and writing of the modern age and determined the future course of the German-speaking world. Germany in the modern sense did not yet exist, so the territory under discussion is the Holy Roman Empire. We must also remember that in this period most writers moved at will between Latin and German. Not until 1681 do the catalogues for the German book fairs show that more books were being published in German than in Latin.

Books and writers before the Reformation

Around 1445 in Mainz, Johann Gensfleisch (c. 1400–68), better known as Gutenberg, succeeded in printing with movable metal type. He also used paper, invented in the twelfth century, but only readily available in Germany in the fifteenth. Manuscript and print survived side by side and the boundaries between them remained blurred for a long time. Scriptoria producing multiple copies of manuscripts for sale already existed in the fifteenth century, anticipating the mass-production of the printing press, while books in the early decades were so costly as to constitute luxury items on a par with manuscripts. Books were printed on parchment and manuscripts written on paper. Many early printed books were designed to look like manuscripts, while the manuscript itself survived as a prestige tailormade item for rich, usually courtly patrons. But the book as commodity had come into being and it is no accident that the early centres of printing and publishing were important commercial towns on international trade routes: Mainz, Strasbourg, Basle, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Cologne and Leipzig.

Romantic opera

During the Risorgimento opera played a more central part in national life than at any time before or since. When Felice Romani described Donizetti as ‘a patriot of the intellect an the imagination’ and when Carducci exclaimed of Verdi's early operas, ‘Oh songs unforgettable and sacred to anyone born before the '48 [the 1848 risings]!’, they were paying the tribute of several generations to a whole repertory of Italian opera from Rossini to Verdi. From the theatre which was its proper home this music overflowed into the streets (ground out on barrel-organs), into the divine service (as organ voluntaries), into soirées, receptions and other social gatherings, grand or modest. It became a kind of folk music, through which people – as long as they were not completely isolated from civic life – could express themselves, and to which they turned for consolation or inspiration in times of crisis.

More than at any time since the late seventeenth century, opera owed this esteem almost entirely to the music, scarcely at all to the poetry. For fifty years the craft of writing words for opera had been in decline. There is a barbed observation in Mme de Staël's essay on translation to the effect that listening to the words of Italian opera ‘for five hours every day must necessarily make the nation's intellect obtuse for want of exercise’. But Manzoni was to define Italian Romanticism as a cultural movement that aspired to take ‘the useful as its aim, the true as its subject, the interesting as its means’; and Mazzini in his Filosofia della musica was to urge composers to involve themselves in the progress of civilisation and become ‘its spirit, its soul, its sacred perfume’.

The end of political censorship in post-Liberation Italy enabled Italians to take a good look at themselves, to explore Italy stripped of Fascist rhetoric and come to terms with the barbarity of the war and the concentration camps in a supposedly civilised Europe, and to seek political renewal for the Italy that was taking shape out of the ruins of war.

The coalition of anti-Fascist parties soon started falling apart after the war, and the 1948 elections saw a Christian Democrat majority in government and other parties excluded from power. Church influence waxed strong, not only with the threat of excommunication wielded as an electoral stick, especially against the strong Communist Party, but also with the mobilisation of mass piety during the Holy Year of 1950 followed by the Marian Year of 1951. The Republican constitution of 1947, many of whose most important democratising provisions were for decades to remain a dead letter, had marked the high point of radical change. Redistribution of land, however, and abolition of the iniquitous share-cropping system of mezzadria, led to the transformation of the peasantry into modern small farmers, and to the disappearance of the peasant novel by about the mid-1950s, after some of its last and finest instances in the work of Jovine, Silone, Pavese and Fenoglio. Likewise, the mechanisation of agriculture eventually made it impossible for poetry to return to the exquisite nature lyricism of much hermetic poetry from the 1930s to the 1950s.

In modern Italian literary studies, the Quattrocento often appears like Petrarch's personified Philosophy, ‘povera e nuda’: a neglected century compared to her attractive sisters, the Trecento on one side and the Cinquecento on the other. Some of the reasons have to do with the cultural phenomena of the century itself; others with interpretations of the phenomena. To critics for whom a national literature in Italian was and is a top priority, the Quattrocento leaves much to be desired. With the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio in 1374 and 1375 respectively, and no one of equal stature to replace them, the ensuing century – roughly 1375 to 1475 – has been seen as a period of literary desolation, a ‘secolo senza poesia’ (a century without poetry), with ‘poetry’ meaning imaginative literature in the vernacular.

According to this view, blame lay in excessive adulation of classical Latin language, letters and values. Poets were replaced by scholars who gave themselves over to imitating a dead literature instead of carrying forwards the newly founded and vigorous one in their own spoken mother-tongue. The educated élite in the Italian peninsula lost confidence in their own culture, and only the invasions of Italy - first by the French in the 1490s and later by Charles V's troops in the 1520s - brought the decadent classicisers to their senses.

The world-wide reputation of Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) rests largely upon his plays. His name is associated with theatrical innovation, the representation on the stage of shifting levels of reality, masks, role-playing, and the relationship between art and life. His acknowledged masterpiece Seipersonaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) is perennially discussed by critics and theatre historians, and he ranks with Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Shawand Beckett as a colossus of twentieth-century theatre.

His contribution to world literature ought, however, to be assessed in the light of his mastery of two genres, the play and the short story. Some of the plays were based on the stories, with varying success, but the stories cannot be seen simply as the store-house from which the plays are drawn. They outnumber them by five to one in any case, and deserve to be studied in their own right for a fair picture of Pirandello's creative achievement. For an understanding of his philosophic stance, and of his work as a whole, there are essays and novels too which have to be considered. The volumes of poetry, which belong to his earliest period, mark his literary apprenticeship, and while they are of interest, poetry is clearly not Pirandello's natural medium.

His entire oeuvre seems to have been ‘fashioned out of pain’, to echo his own appraisal of Don Quixote. Hisdramatic protagonists, from Enrico IV to the unnamed self-portrait, the grand old man of letters in Quando siè qualcuno (When One Is Somebody), are all motivated by the need to accommodate themselves within an intolerable condition.

Writers and cultural policy

In January 1816 the Milan journal Biblioteca italiana published an article Sulla maniera e l'utilà delle traduzioni ('On the manner and usefulness of translations'), suggesting that Italian writers would benefit from a knowledge of foreign literature. This apparently unexceptional proposition triggered off a fiery debate which raged on and off for a long time, eventually outliving its own usefulness,and is emblematic of the whole period this chapter attempts to survey. Napoleon's invasion of Italy in 1796 and his eventual conquest of the peninsula had led to the establishment of a Kingdom of Italy in the north of the country which was seen by many patriots as a first step towards national unity and independence. With the collapse of the Kingdom in 1814 Milan, the capital of Lombardy, had returned under Austrian domination. It was without doubt the most advanced city in the most developed area of a woefully underdeveloped country. The Austrian plenipotentiary, Count Josef Heinrich von Bellegarde, soon realised that, besides the old aristocracy, traditional supporters of the Habsburgs who had ennobled their ancestors, he might also enlist the support of many radical intellectuals sorely disappointed by Napoleonic totalitarianism, who therefore would not appear as stooges of the new government. Among these were the doyen of Italian poets, Vincenzo Monti, then aged sixty-three; Pietro Giordani (1774–1848), who had become well known eight years earlier for his Panegirico di Napoleone legislatore (‘Panegyric of Napoleon the Law-giver’), and the geologist Scipione Breislak (1750–1826).

The return of the exiles (1945–1949)

East German literature was born out of the grief and desperate hopes of a generation of writers for whom modernism and politics were intertwined. Some of them – Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, Friedrich Wolf, Johannes R. Becher – were children of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie who had become internationally renowned during the Weimar Republic. Others – Eduard Claudius, Hans Marchwitza, Willi Bredel, Adam Scharrer – had come from the working class and began writing about production within the worker correspondent movements of the twenties. Still others – the poets Erich Arendt, Stephan Hermlin, Peter Huchel; the novelists Erwin Strittmatter and Stefan Heym; the playwright Alfred Matusche – first established themselves after World War II. They all devoted themselves after Hitler’s downfall to the creation of a humanistic, anti-fascist literature which would prevail in the German Democratic Republic for forty years from its official foundation in 1949.

History was not to be on their side. Their childhood years had coincided with the height of German military expansionism. With the suffering and chaos caused by World War I, which these writers experienced as young adults, many of them as soldiers, they willingly surrendered their nationalistic inheritance and became cosmopolitans. In the aftermath of the revolutions in Russia, as well as the failed German revolutions in which a number of them participated, they became committed socialists and communists. They identified with the European avant-garde movements of the time and participated in some of the most fascinating artistic and intellectual projects of the 1920s. In 1933 most of these writers were blacklisted by the National Socialists.