In the land of Dante, beyond the historical prestige of poetry and the commercial success of the narrative, today the test is imposed as a source of original ideas. A phenomenon that is stated in the work of Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris, Roberto and Giorgio Agamben
Calasso
By Alejandro Patat
for the nation - Rome, 2011
thirty years ago in Italy, the novel loses force and is binding, beyond the historical prestige of poetry, essay. There is a market data. The novel continues to be the result of higher sales in bookstores. Poetry, for its part, has a small audience, composed mostly of young poets. The force of the essay is more a realization of the intellectual world, which assigns to the genus two major factors in the evolution of the entire literary system. First, having circulated powerful new ideas that help us understand the contemporary debates and generate lasting: the final demise of the ancient peasant culture identity Italian crisis of modern thought, the relationship of today's Italy with ancient and medieval world, the weight of these legacies in the constitution of this, the need for an unsystematic thinking to deal with the reality of today's world, the definition of a new multiracial and multi-European destination in terms of current migration processes, the internal contrast between the North, alleged expression of a modern industrial Europe, and South, alleged expression of an atavistic and early modern Europe, the danger of political and moral disintegration of the country and the urgent definition of life in all discussions of biopolitics. Here are some of the most important issues that the Italian trial has been addressed in the past 30 years.
Second, while in Italy the contemporary novel spurned dialogue with the literary tradition in favor of a search for languages \u200b\u200bfrom the film and new forms of communication, the test has been taken over by the weight of that tradition. In short, even if the essay has dealt with aesthetics, religion, criticism of culture or political philosophy, has made a very strong literary tradition, attentive to the heritage of poetry and prose of the past and the visible aspiration to enter the future canon of great literature Italian.
While gender statement implies a growing number of readers, the test is not a popular character, if people understand any expression that can be consumed by large segments of society. On the contrary: the Italian culture, born and developed over the centuries as an elite culture (from Dante and Petrarch to Leopardi aristocratic and refined cultural project Einaudi), with a few moments episodic mass literature (such as If Salgari), continues today with all its innovation in the forms of the test, while gender is not at all new, but a coded form of literature from several centuries ago.
In his beautiful book The shape of saggio (The essay form), not yet translated into Castilian, Alfonso Berardinelli, perhaps the most influential literary critic in Italy, explains that, over the centuries, the genre has accompanied the development hegemony of poetry and narrative. Although part of budgets and procedures with strong stylistic literary value, the test has played in society, current affairs and history, and address multiple issues, often rubs the language of various disciplines. Contemporary literature and modernity itself is unimaginable without trial. The test-
Berardinelli says, "is strictly subjective, occasionally concrete and, especially, sticks to his object of analysis or study from life experience and reading of the author, no systematic or totalizing desire. Shuns the rankings and schematics.
The modern essay was born in the eighteenth century as a form of demolition of thought (of others) and is presented as the expression of secular self-consciousness. Even then, for example, Rousseau, embodied the anti-dogmatic tendencies, skeptical, ironic and heretical. The essayist can assume the appearance of an old philosophe, an opinion or an intellectual critic and interpreter of society and culture.
De Manzoni
Leopardi The dispute between the essay and the novel is not new in Italy. When, in 1850, Alessandro Manzoni published a famous essay against the historical novel, many intellectuals and, above all, many writers who wrote and the way the author of The couple felt perplexed. The historical novel-held-is a hybrid of history and invention, an invitation to madness emotional and conceptual imprecision, a mixture of historical truth and fictional creations. How is it that the author of the greatest Italian historical novel has attacked so strongly to that genre? Some think that Manzoni did banish the excessive spread of foot Italian Narrative After the bride and groom. His criticism would have been directed instead to the new storytellers and historical novels born in his name.
other hand, its position was due to a typical ideology of the Italian literati. By then, the Italian literature was synonymous with poetry. Manzoni
When he returned to his play for the final edition of 1840, made three key changes: the toscanización of language (as opposed to latent origin of Milan), including more than one hundred prints Gonin, studied by the author in every detail, and published at the end of the novel, the "History of the infamous column" with which they entered the field test. So while the first change can be accused of linguistic conservatism, the other two show their revolutionary vision of the novel. Iconographic innovation implies that a narrative can and should complement the picture. The final essay, historical, are proposed to contain the "spillover" of fiction. The Italian novel comes sharply "defined" and passes the baton to the essay form as a form of historical truth. Manzoni operation is the founding act of the modern constitution of Italian literature. Or rather, of Italian culture as a whole. One has the impression that the author Milan, who in the 30 years subsequent to 1840 he resigned to write stories, he wanted to say instead of writing novels, it would be better than the Italians write essays. As
Manzoni Grooms was the most important work for the nineteenth century Italian, the moral Booklets (1837 and uncensored posthumous edition, 1845) Leopardi, have been and remain the most significant test for the twentieth century and today. Two works distant in time for only three years marked the intellectual life of the last two centuries. Even the title Operette morality (operetta, "little book" is the diminutive of the word opera, "work") makes clear that there is in that systematic text no pretense of thinking. When building a book almost incomprehensible to his time, he established himself as Leopardi manzoniano antimodel. Through short narratives and dialogues, aiming at a philosophical language (the songs are perfect, the genius and suicide, love and death, ancient and modern, pleasure) against philosophy as the ultimate truth. Liveliness, humor, irony, mockery, false imitation, splits, are the key rhetorical parody of this short text by Leopardi.
The Italian trial is unthinkable without Leopardi. With it ending any illusion old "(to use his words) to systematize the world. And at the same time, he begins a fragmentary thought, perceived as debris, scrap, rest deprivation. Leopardi mark a boundary and every thinker has become more here or beyond his work.
After War
Throughout the twentieth century, the fate of the Italian trial has been mixed. Suffice here to mention some key cases. In the field of literary criticism, Giacomo Debenedetti (twentieth-century poetry and the novel of the twentieth century) has left indelible marks. In the field of art, Roberto Longhi tests are still indispensable. If today we read the history of modern art from the rupture of Caravaggio's pictorial language, we owe it to his landmark trial on the Italian painter. What about adding the influence of thought and style of Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks? Or the prophetic writing of Pier Paolo Pasolini?
On November 2, 1975, when Pasolini was murdered in a field of Ostia, a few kilometers from Rome, the most violent disappearance of Italian artist of the second half of the twentieth century suddenly left its mark on the end of physical and mental commitment to intellectual with their ideas and society in which they live. Without it, Italy was almost speechless. Pasolini forced exclusion from the political world (we now know that his crime had nothing to do with a simple act of violence of a street kid) is a metaphor for the exclusion of intellectuals within the power in Italy. Since then, refugees on the periphery of power, failed and discredited by the political power of Italian intellectuals have written extensively as a form of resistance to the real threat of political disintegration, moral and cultural development of their country. A large number of writers and intellectuals (Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris, Roberto Calasso and Giorgio Agamben, among others) embarked on the trial, probably in search of land to retain a stronger bond with their own cultural roots, but above all, as the only discourse genre that is still possible articulated configuration of thought.
UMBERTO ECO: BETWEEN THE MODERN READER AND HISTORICAL HERITAGE
University Professor of semiotics and medieval aesthetic, ironic, bright, capable of creating bridges between academic culture and the common reader, Umberto Eco is responsible for a vast theoretical production ranging from Open Work (1962), and integrated Doom (1965), Treaty on general semiotics (1975), Lector in fabula (1979) and The Limits of Interpretation (1990) to recent studies History of Beauty (2004) and History of ugliness (2007). All reality appears to Eco as a semiotic system of signs infinite, that the human being decoded. A concept highlighted in this rich body of writings: the idea of \u200b\u200breader, subject to the intellectual Eco assumes the function key social reality, and for men Eco, the full meaning of their existence.
Author of novels-from The Name of the Rose (1980) to the cemetery in Prague (2010), Eco also has made them the ultimate meaning of his prose and often his ideas have penetrated through the maze of characters and their storylines. In all this vast production, the test that has marked the Italian culture and literature, perhaps underground, has been Postscript to The Name of the Rose, first published in the journal Literate in 1983 and later included as an appendix of his famous novel in the successive reprints.
Apostilles In Eco tries to resolve one of the most pressing problems in Italy: coexistence with the distressing and crippling legacy of the past. To do this, define a postmodern aesthetic as the favorable attitude to the mix of styles and registers from tradition. "The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it can not be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be re-visited: with irony, but are not innocent." Have transformed a medieval convent XIV century on the stage of an enigma about laughter (in the center of the investigation is the alleged book of Aristotle on comedy) has been one of the ways of Eco working to re-enter the center of the great Italian culture in the century of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Of course, as game is not as innocent as unbiased return to origins.
Claudio Magris: EUROPE AND ITS IDENTITY "CONTAMINATED"
In The Hapsburg Myth in Modern Austrian Literature (1963), beginning of Germanic Magris, scholar and critic, works great, central to the author were proposed to analyze documents of an era with which to rebuild an entire cultural and historical panorama. After having published similar studies spanning the works of Wilhelm Heins, Joseph Roth and Hoffmann, Magris changed the itinerary, experimenting with a mixed between the novels, essays and travel writing in the Danube (1986) and Microcosm (1997), his true masterpieces. In the first, described in first-person impressions and emotions of an indefinite trip along this river. Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade are seen through the eyes of those who recognize that the Austro-Hungarian Empire could exist only because of its potential multiplicity and never with the idea of \u200b\u200bunifying the Germanic spirit. Magris's speech is not organized as a thesis: it flows elusive and changing as the river that runs: "Since Heraclitus, the river has been the quintessential figure questioning of identity." Microcosmos (1997) deepened the desire for an open, vague story of a pilgrim, not establish categories or parameters. While Danube penetrated some way into the lives and works of great personalities of Hapsburg (Sissi, Heidegger, Kafka, Svevo), Microcosmos preferred the intimate places, family and individual in the universe of Venice, Trieste, Slovenian and Dalmatian. Thus, compared to the fury of war exploits irrational in the Balkans in the late twentieth century, as a symbolic place puts Magris Coffee San Marco in Trieste, a true "sea port, or the 11 miles to go from Grade to Aquileia, in Venezia Giulia, including Byzantine mosaics covered by water and basilicas and rusty barges. Faced with the absurd claim of ethnic purity, the new winds bring to Europe, Magris records in measured tone, disconsolate and skeptical, all that is mixing, hybridization, passage.
and disillusionment in Utopia (1999), Infinity Travel (2005) and the latest Alphabets (2008), Magris has met his newspaper articles from the past 40 years. In the latter, which analyzes classical and contemporary literary texts, it is clear evolution from the earlier books. Roberto Calasso
: THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS OLD
Personality is complex indeed Roberto Calasso. The persistence obsessive, almost pathological, with which aims for more than 30 years an elusive goal as writers is among the restless, dissatisfied with self and situation. In an interview with an Italian newspaper, after the recent publication of his latest book L'burning, confessed: "For almost 30 years now try to explain what unspeakable. But I have not succeeded yet. There are times when fleeing tenaciously word. Stendhal or Balzac could speak with incredible efficiency and accuracy about the world around them. I do not think that today there is someone in a position to do the same. " Calasso books trying to "say" this, but in the eyes of the author himself, not enough.
The first books, The Ruin of Kasch (1983), The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988) and Ka (1996), took care to explain the meaning of the ancient religion. Those who followed, K. (2002), Pink Tiepolo (2006) and La Folie Baudelaire (2008), attempt, however, picking through the ruins of modernity, the remnant of antiquity. Calasso refers to the period in which men not only dialogue and interaction with the gods, but also feel part of a transcendent, unearthly. In K. , Calasso analyzes Kafka's work from that key. Guilt, punishment and sacrifice, the author's favorite themes of Prague, would be loaded with a strong sense of religion that transcends the psychological fact. The voices of each character does not express a pure desire, but are carriers of the arcane, the dimension of pre-history in which men lived with the gods. If humanity has lost all contact with the mythical, Kafkaesque inquiry is a desperate attempt to restore at least the consciousness of the loss. "For Kafka," he writes, paradise was not a place where someone had lived in the past and that memory had been preserved, but a permanent and invisible. " Calasso goes in search of evidence of contact between the gods invisible and men. His intelligence and culture are dazzling and, at times, suffocating. Impeccable style, very high, epiphanic, which mixes fiction and biography, narrative, critical, has become inimitable.
Giorgio Agamben: PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE
The vast work of Giorgio Agamben has two directions. On one side are the tests that will delve into political philosophy and philosophy of law, on the other, specifically the writings of literary character from a philosophical perspective. In the first part Homo sacer (1995), Remnants of Auschwitz (1998), State of Emergency (2003) and The Sacrament of language. Archaeology the oath (2008). In his second line, more linked to Italian literature, prose highlights della Idea (1985) and Categorie italiane (1996), not yet translated, where Agamben returned to a project designed to Italo Calvino and that was cut short, summarize in a few pages foundational categories of Italian literature.
Agamben's contribution to contemporary thought has not yet been calculated. His influence is enormous. Perhaps his most important work remains Homo sacer, reissued with new interventions in 2005. The homo sacer (sacred man) was in the Roman world, the individual who, being tried for a crime he could be killed without the murderer was convicted of murder. But in addition, could not be sacrificed, ie could not be killed according to the rites of ancient sacrifice. Hence, for centuries, it has insisted on the ambiguity of the sacred: that which is beyond the human but at the same time, the disgusting, dirty. Therefore, "sacred" concept becomes a dark and impenetrable: the holy and the unclean touch. The aim of Agamben is untie the intricate development of the ideas that led to this concept by separating the religious worldview of legal and political order of the old society. For the sovereign power, the sacredness of life means being subject to death and abandonment. "For too long, one of the privileges of sovereign power was the right to life and death, "wrote Foucault. And Agamben adds:" You can not say more clearly that the primary basis of political power is a life completely removed and that returns policy to the extent that can be eliminated. "
But in ancient times, the holy man was part of a" state of exception ", modernity became the strategy of power in a" permanent state ". For Agamben , Jewish extermination is the paradigm of modernity. Its consequence is the final crisis of the concept of human life. All current discussions about the biogenetic, euthanasia, abortion, plant life, brain death is the demonstration that our biological body has become biopolitical body, with an increasingly fragile ability of individuals to decide their own fate.
The essay form of Agamben is parallel to the mental process that accompanies it. All paragraphs of text are concatenated into a subtle way. Jump one is a huge risk, because the building logical and argumentative, always thought of as solving a puzzle latent historical consolidated collapses. What Agamben proposes is not easy: go into the intricate path of its ideas and its hypothesis requires extreme concentration, a keen attention to detail, but once conquered the summit, one has the impression that this is one of the most original essayists of our time.