Magic Realism and Real Politics: Massimo Bontempelli's

Literary Compromise

Keala Jewell

Modernism/modernity, Volume 15, Number 4, November 2008, pp. 725-744

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.0.0033

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/257369

Access provided by Dartmouth College Library (11 Feb 2018 09:15 GMT)
Magic Realism and Real Politics: Massimo
Bontempelli’s Literary Compromise

Keala Jewell

That the foremost literary practitioner of magic realism in modernism / modernity

Italy, Massimo Bontempelli, was also the head of the National volume fifteen, number
Fascist Writers Union for crucial years in the mid- to late-1920s four, pp 725–744.
is no accident of history. Mythic discourse about the nation, the © 2008 the johns hopkins
people, and Mussolini propelled fascism’s rise to power and university press

consolidated its consensus. Discourse on magic falls within that

phenomenon and had distinct political connotations and weight
in fascist arts. The “magic” component in magic realism could
suggest a transcendent fascism, evoking a wondrous, eternal
form of being to associate with Italian landscapes and the Ital-
ian populace.1 The strong presence of working people in Italian
magic realism in painters such as Gisberto Ceracchini, Felice
Casorati, and Ferruccio Ferrazzi illustrates this politics of magic.
Virgilio Guidi’s painting “In Tram” [“On a tram”; 1923][Figure
1] shows humble folk on a vehicle whose windows provide an Keala Jewell holds
enchanted view onto a still, clear ring of mountains rather than titles in French and
an urban landscape. They go about their jobs in an imaginary, Italian Languages
and Literatures and
doubled space that is both modern in its subject matter, the
Comparative Literature
tram, and ageless in its depiction of a geological landscape. The at Dartmouth College.
exalting in this way of Italian workers provides one significant Her most recent book
link to Bontempelli’s activism in the fascist corporativist union studies intersections of
(“sindacato”) for writers. “Syndicalism” as a political movement— literature and art his-
splintered even into various groupings with differing political tory: The Art of Enigma:
views—institutionalized the importance of class, and the fascist The de Chirico Brothers’
Politics of Modernity
labor movement was a significant component of the regime as
(PSUP, 2004). Her cur-
it was gaining power and claiming the status of a revolution.
rent research is on
Unionism and a practice of magic realism clearly have points of Magic Realism in fascist
contact and continuity. What can Bontempelli’s activism in the Italy.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

726

▲
Fig. 1.Virgilio Guidi, “The Tram,” Rome, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. By permis-
sion of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

writers union teach us about a complex period of history during which the negotiation
of differing ideological positions in conjunction with differing artistic practices had
such high political stakes? A discourse of magic, I shall argue, mediates these troubled
negotiations and qualifies realism in a way that allows magic realism to become an
important component of fascist activism. The practice of magic realism within this
historical framework is not simply a return to order through figurative techniques
in painting in the years after World War I and a traditional prose style and narrative
structure in literature; it is equally an attempt to ground an artistic practice that is
properly fascist in its actions.2 I propose to study here two exemplary novels penned
by Bontempelli paying close attention to historical contextualization in order to bring
to light the political allegories the works offer.
A first, necessary step to understanding the practice of magic realism in the mid-
twenties in Italy is to review its critique of realist representation. Bontempelli evolved
multiple strategies for the purpose of signaling his belief that the old realism had run
its historical course. Like other talented modernists who moved in various post-realist
directions––abstraction, Futurism, the New Objectivity, and surrealism––Bontempelli
drew up a compensatory strategy. In the work that Bontempelli produced directly after
World War I, his most experimental, he used literary forms such as the mini-novel or
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
the brief comic dialogue to counter realist narrative conventions. Experiments in nar- 727
rative framing produced multiple perspectives that also defied realist presumptions
about time and space. The author definitively eschewed the teleological finality of the
epic and the nineteenth-century novel, a choice that moves the works deeper into the
realm of mystery. The editor-in-chief of the journal ‘900, Cahiers d’Italie Et d’Europe
from 1926 to 1929, Bontempelli also moved aggressively in critical writings to attack
nineteenth-century European realism, calling it literature for crickets.3 Linked to
positivism and an outdated culture, realism no longer held up, he thought, either as
an aesthetic or an epistemological grounding. He blasted realism for sterility, petit-
bourgeois sentimentalism, anemia, and a defeatist obsession with the downtrodden,
cowards, the banal, and every low subject prevalent—in his view—in modern writing.4
A new realism, the author suggested, would have to found itself on the actualizing
power of invention and the imagination.5 Literature, art, and music are creative activi-
ties. These practices produce their own discursive reality and, by this logic, their own
realism.6 A similarity is constructed in which this realism is construed as a power that
matches magic.
As his practice of magic realism was emerging, Bontempelli intensified his efforts
at troubling the old realism using new creative strategies. He undoubtedly shared
some of the convictions of the painters of the “Novecento italiano” group, with their
modernizing neo-classicism. Aiming for wide audiences, Bontempelli, an accomplished
journalist, argued for balance and simplicity, holding up Italian Quattrocento painting
as a model of precision distinct from realism. He constructed relatively clear temporal
directionality in his narratives, using distinct calendar time. Despite the style’s dose of
harmonious classicism, its magic component throws a wrench into narrative cohesion.
Bontempelli moved boldly, devoting some hard work to the study of magical discourse
in Western cultural history. He authored a book­­entitled Il libro degli arcani [Book of the
Arcane; 1928]7 in which he researched spells, potions, talismans, alchemy, the evil eye,
palm reading, zodiac signs, and the philosopher’s stone. Hermetic thought dating back
to Neo-Platonism along with alchemical references is well represented. An especially
long portion of the work is devoted to “envoûtement,” or possession. Bontempelli’s
attention to the subject’s vulnerability to dissolution is telling—and reminiscent of
Ernesto de Martino’s anthropological study of threats to self-presence in his book Il
mondo magico. If a character suffers possession, the narrative will splinter because the
self of the character is fragmented. What will the other characters do and how will the
troubling of a self be negotiated by other individuals and by groups?
Negotiation is a key element of the plots Bontempelli built around an eruption of
magic into the world of daily life: Bontempelli’s distinctive narrative constructions stage
dramas about social compromise. These narratives revolve around social identifications
that are shown to be in flux. Various sectors of the social world enter, in this type of
emplotment, into a distinct agon whose resolution will depend on alliances. Stagnant
beings incapable of stretching and morphing because they are bound into deadened
social identifications are the losers. Those open to negotiation are the protagonists.
The success or failure of any compromise formation represented in the narrations is
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

728 dependent on multiple factors. Who initiates and controls the encounter? Who goes
between? Can the distribution of power at a given historical moment change through
alliance-revision? The successful binding of individual subjects into an ideal, functional
political organism is at stake.8
How exactly does the author set the narrative into motion in such a way as to put
negotiation into play in the emplotment? Magic is key. Mysteries and miracles typi-
cally govern the plot sequences and automatically put the fictional world at a remove
from any familiar chronology or normal shape for events. For example, a dead child
is reincarnated into a living one so that he comes to have two mothers in the novel Il
figlio di due madri [The Son with Two Mothers]. The mystery of the revenant produces
an array of violently divergent opinions on what could have transpired. Subsequently,
proposals for various, drastically different solutions dominate the plot: a theosophical
society tries to intervene, a mother is kidnapped and stowed away in a mental institution,
and a “zingaro” (“gypsy”) kidnaps the boy. Ultimately none of the proposed courses of
action in this novel solves the enigma incarnate of the disturbing child, and readers
are left unknowing of his fate at its end.
No solid compromise solution emerges in this quintessential example of magic
realism, and no plot attains its resolution for very specific reasons. This is a historical
novel, set in 1900 in pre-fascist years in which Italy, Bontempelli thinks, was at the
mercy of an inadequate liberal government and a politics of pure expedience. This
historical novel stages a pointed non-ending and a failure of knowledge because no
group’s discourse exercises sufficient vision or willpower to undertake self-modification
even in the face of great necessity.9 Every proposed action is associated with social
factions or groups that put forth their own plans but whose imaginative powers have
gone stale: the bourgeoisie, medical doctors, churchmen, and judges. As this emplot-
ment demonstrates, narratives about weak, insufficient competing discourses are the
raw material of Bontempelli’s critique of the past. This fact suggests that putting the
magic back into a modernity supposedly fraught with de-magification is not as high on
Bontempelli’s agenda as reconceptualizing and re-building the ties between literature
and the social fabric. Active innovation and realization take place in this view only in
the realm of the mental, the imaginative, or what was often termed “spirit.” Active
imagination is the solution to the stagnation of an era moving from an old order to a
new one.10 Imagining is in this theory infinitely available to social subjects who gain
agency from it.
The link between action and imagination appears explicitly in many places in Bon-
tempelli’s writing, and in the following short passage where we read, “L’azione e la
immaginazione sono molto più concordi che non si creda, e spesso trovano vie e sbocchi
comuni. [Action and imagination are more concordant than one presumes, and they
often find common paths and outlets.] 11 When Bontempelli casts imagination and real-
izing as powerful forces at the disposition of socio-political subjects who are constantly
enjoined in power struggles, we shall not be surprised that he might underwrite the
political philosophy of actualism theorized by Giovanni Gentile. Gentile chaired a
1924 commission aimed at reforming the Italian constitution in a fascist direction. He
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
advocated a strong state with powers to enact new, fascist legislation and to enforce it. 729
One subject addressed by the commission was precisely the role of syndicalism, and
Gentile pursued within this commission his conviction that the negotiation of union
interests and state interests could and should take place in corporativist institutions
created by fascist reforms of the Constitution.12
Moving from Gentile’s actualist thinking to Bontempelli’s general fascist activity
beyond his unionism, we should note that the author had close ties to the regime from
its early days and well into the 1930s, becoming a member in 1930 of the elite Acca-
demia d’Italia founded by Mussolini. Well-connected to various Ministers of Culture,
the author wrote for the fascist-inspired Paese nuovo and Corriere italiano. Numerous
editorials and published speeches, published and unpublished correspondence, docu-
ments at the Central State Archive, and the diaries of other writers and politicians all
testify to Bontempelli’s belief in fascism and its head of government, Mussolini. Mus-
solini’s archives contain significant correspondence from and pertaining to Bontem-
pelli. As a playwright, his works were consistently, if not always immediately, granted
the requisite nulla osta for staging from the Ministry of Popular Culture.13 Finally,
Bontempelli called his entire critical production, collected in the volume L’avventura
novecentista, the documenting of “uno stato d’anima incline a cercare armonia tra il
letterario e il politico” [a state of mind inclined to seek out harmony between literature
and the political].14
By the late 1930s, though, a growing disaffection with the fascist regime led to
Bontempelli’s dissent, which took several forms: public speeches that were judged
anti-fascist by authorities and a refusal to occupy the university chair offered to him
when Attilio Momigliano had to vacate it subsequent to anti-Semitic legislation in
1938.15 In 1939, Bontempelli’s Fascist Party card was revoked.16 Confinement to Ven-
ice followed, meaning that Bontempelli could neither publish nor leave the city for a
year. When the war was fully engaged, Bontempelli was again judged an anti-fascist;
he narrowly dodged police raids. The author made a considered decision at that time
to change his political allegiance, as did many other intellectuals with fascist pasts
who managed to redeem themselves.17 When the war ended, under the banner of the
Popular Front Bontempelli ran for the senate of the newly minted republic and won.
After an unsuccessful defense in Senate hearings, Bontempelli was unseated for his
past exaltation of fascism.18
How did this form of political activism fit with the fiction and literary criticism?
Bontempelli’s contemporaries already questioned how he could claim to be a fascist and
yet fall short of an unambiguous allegiance to nationalism. French was the language of
his journal ‘900. That in and of itself was suspect. A 1926 article in L’italiano signed by
“Torcibudella” wondered how ‘900 could be the “rassegna dell’imperialismo fascista”
[review of fascist imperialism] and publish communists like Philippe Soupault.19 Ital-
ian ultra-nationalist fascists charged Bontempelli with misguided Europeanism and
a pro-urbanism inconsistent with the rural Italian cultural values they vociferously
favored. Literary scholars have over the years been just as puzzled: some believe any
discussion of the allegiance to fascism is reductive,20 some that the fantastic, magical
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

730 qualities of his fictions helped Bontempelli distance himself from fascist policies, and
still others that the writer actually cancels out political contents through fantasy.21 Bart
van den Bossche is one of a few scholars briefly to have examined analogies between
the thinking put forward in L’avventura novecentista and fascist discourse on historical
“becoming” in terms of the imagination as mediation.22 Shining the spotlight directly
on Bontempelli’s re-semanticization of realism along with his distinctive mixing of it
with a discourse about magic can move the critical thought in a new direction.23
When Bontempelli moved to shift the sense of the word “realism” toward “real-
ization,” he did more than scorn a pre-fascist literary past judged putrid.24 Placing
an emphasis on literary action moved the writer’s charge away from furnishing any
proscribed political content.25 A work of fiction does not in this view need to trumpet
the victorious fascist March on Rome of 1922, the nation, or its history to be fascist.26
Narratives governed by wondrous events of magical origin can legitimately prevail over
nationalist themes and still represent the fascist epoch. Rather than depict political
material per se, Bontempelli typically generates plots with marvelous, awe-inspiring
events that interrupt social cohesion. Protagonists must skillfully negotiate obstacles if
the impasse is to be resolved. For those actors who rise to the challenge of negotiating
enigmas, an adjustment of their actions takes place, and this adjustment takes the form
of a shift in identifications. When something super-human comes into being, subjec-
tivities shift. Magic in Bontempelli has in fact little to do with escaping the political
impingements on literary or artistic subject matter, as so many critics have maintained.
Nor is it solely de-structuring.27 Bontempelli deploys his magic to construct narrations
that very clearly feature rival discourses and their corollary rival courses of action.28
Given the centrality of this kind of narration in Bontempelli’s fiction, it is not sur-
prising that Bontempelli might gear up for action and take up his post as “Segretario.”
Bontempelli covered this office over several critical years (1926, 1927, 1928) in the his-
tory of fascist union movements. Union in this context refers to the fascist corporativist
unions. These had original nuclei in fascist labor unions born before Mussolini came
to power in 1922; after that date they evolved via a series of pacts (Palazzo Vidoni) and
legislation (Carta del Lavoro [labor charter]) in tandem with changing political policies
of the regime. These union groups were, obviously, not opposed to fascism, and any op-
position unions were promptly dissolved. Fascist, corporativist unions were historically
instrumental in disciplining workers’ rights movements and in imposing limitations on
dissent. They fostered specific ideological models: the sindacati became, over several
steps, the representatives of employee interests in the fascist government institution
known as the corporation. These government bodies brought together in one institution
representatives of owners and of unions, along sector lines. The arrangement was in
theory supposed to increase productivity and wealth while promoting equality.29 The
corporations had complex governing boards and legal statutes covered all aspects of
their endeavors. 30 (The authors and publishers corporation was governed by “Regio
decreto 3 novembre 1927, no. 2138 “Approvazione del nuovo Statuto organico della
Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori.”) Heading up the writers union conferred
advantages: access to political leaders and government officials.
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
One suspects that Bontempelli never would have been appointed to the high office of 731
Secretary had he not been in Mussolini’s good graces.31 We know from various sources
the nature of some of the prestigious duties of the secretary and important officials,
such as traveling domestically and internationally to lecture about Italian literature,
delivering public literary readings, and adjudicating literary prizes. We also know that
Bontempelli battled for improved copyright law and pension benefits. Bontempelli’s
ear was attuned to more than bread and butter issues though. It was attuned to the
cultural politics of the regime.32 Heading the writers union would not necessarily mean
churning out propaganda or enforcing the censorship of literature –– at least in the later
twenties since artistic practice was not legislated in a strict sense of the word (secretar-
ies in office in the thirties, including Filippo Marinetti, did promote the government’s
political line to a much greater extent33). The interactions between art and the fascist
state were more complex than that.34 Nonetheless, the negotiation of difficult issues
with higher officials was one of the secretary’s charges, and Bontempelli continued to
negotiate his own views with them even beyond the years of his official appointment
at the writers union. To give one example, the Ministry of Culture discouraged the
depiction of suicide in literature. A letter filed at the Ministry documents a request by
Bontempelli to waive the policy for a short story that touched on self-inflicted death.
A series of letters ends with Galeazzo Ciano’s judgment that the topic was inoppor-
tune.35
If we move beyond the secretary’s exact offices to study the writers union in the
context of broader fascist union movements in the nineteen twenties, we start to see
that Bontempelli’s tenure as secretary came squarely during years when fascism was
forcefully consolidating its political hold over the country. Scholars have rarely touched
on the significance of Bontempelli’s activism within this larger picture. Francesca Pet-
rocchi fruitfully studied the fascist writers unions, but it was not her intent to examine
individual writer’s activities. Historians such as Renzo De Felice, Francesco Prefetti,
and Marco Cuzzi have reconstructed the complicated history of fascist labor unions
and the corporations without focusing, naturally, on literary history. Historical materials
concerning the earliest part of Bontempelli’s tenure as secretary are more plentiful than
those from its final phase. We do not know, to date, why his tenure ended and in what
year. Scholars have asserted with confidence, however, the importance of inter-class
compromise to the conceptualization of the fascist model of labor relations in which
unions (also organized in their own horizontal confederations of unions) interacted
with employer confederations within the institutional context of the corporations. The
conciliatory character of early fascist labor unions and, later, of the corporations as well,
was championed by Mussolini himself.36 According to this ideology as it developed in
corporativist directions, the working class does not aim for the conquest of state author-
ity or the overturning of class domination. Unions and owners’ organizations working
together are supposed to overcome antagonism for the greater good, productivity, and
the progress of fascism and the Italian people.37 Fascist corporations, as regulatory
organs of the economy, aspired to the realization of a state of equilibrium that would
benefit the whole nation. 38 The corporations were, additionally, thought capable of
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

732 trumping both democracy and communism and were thought of as a Trojan horse in
the battle to expand Italian fascism across Europe. 39
The Italian peninsula was at the center of it all, just as the Mediterranean is etymo-
logically in the “middle of lands.” Corporativism, Italianicity, and Mediterranean-based
Europeanism dovetailed. Italy’s geographical position was presumed by Bontempelli to
be the basis of richness and multiplicity. In that middle place, differing strands of history
and multiple cultural influences join together in one people, the Italians. The supreme
values of Italianicity were in this view its longevity and hybridity –– the Greeks, Latinity,
Christendom, and the new fascist era. Italianicity and the European were presumed to
be coterminous, at least within certain parameters. (Northern Europe, along with the
Mitteleuropean, was thought of as Mediterranean Europe’s hinterland.) The corpora-
tions, significantly, were thought to be of a piece with fascist Italy’s inclusiveness because
they held together an amalgamation –– this time of classes. (Let us not forget, though,
that the sindacati were not inclusive.) The notion of amalgamation ultimately provided
a theoretical underpinning for a political model designed to nurture a universal fascist
world order.40 This internationalist or universalist political perspective garnered the
support of a larger number of thinkers, writers, and painters than one might imagine,
given the familiar propensity to equate fascism solely with ultra-nationalism.41
The writer with whom Bontempelli initially co-edited ‘900, Curzio Malaparte,
was an important interlocutor in disputes over the desirability of modernizing labor
relations and the geopolitical potentials of labor power. At issue, precisely, was the fit
between workers, the people, Italianicity, Europe, the past and modernity. Malaparte
argued, even before the corporativist structure was put in place, that fascist unions
should facilitate a return to a civilizing Italian culture of yore.42 In that sense they
would be anti-modern. 43 The corollary was an anti-British, pro-Catholic stance we
are familiar with –– Protestant, industrialized Britain as the plutocratic octopus. Along
with other fascist intellectuals, the editors of ‘900 also despised Lutheranism—their
shorthand for Northern Europe and its misguided attachments to democratic rights
and Bolshevism. Both were viewed as barbaric compared to a Mediterranean-centered
culture that boasted Latinity in its genealogy. Bontempelli was probably the Italian
writer who pushed hardest for a Mediterranean-based Europeanism, together with
the partisans of the journal Anti-europa (against Europe as it was conceived of by the
League of Nations and Pan-European movements). Part and parcel of this political
vision, Bontempelli’s union activism hinged on his belief in the historic destiny of Ital-
ian fascist culture to re-model Europe along Italian lines. Italy’s role was exactly to
bring equilibrium: “il suo ufficio di suscitatrice di civiltà e di equilibrante del mondo
si rinnova d’èra in èra” [her function of giving rise to civilization and giving balance
to the world is renewed era after era].44 That general renewal could only function if
Italy could itself be renewed in certain balanced ways. Like Malaparte, Bontempelli
was no advocate of British and American models of modernity, with their excess of
newness and materialism. Convinced that nationalism was inadequate to the task of
renewal, Bontempelli advocated the view that Italy and Europe had to be conceptual-
ized together, on the basis of an Italian tradition of extreme inclusiveness (in his view):
“il suolo d’Italia amalgama rapidamente ogni incrocio” [the Italian soil rapidly amal-
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
gamates every cross-fertilization].45 Fascism as a political order was in Bontempelli’s 733
view an ideal container for the multiplicity he read backwards into his own culture.46
Fascism alone, he boasted, had no fear of bastardization. Quite the opposite, fascism
gained in power from it.47 Among the forms of amalgam Bontempelli theorized was,
clearly, his inter-classism.
At this point it is necessary to examine Bontempelli’s changing view of magic realism
in the context of his changing perspective on unionism itself, since both underwent
important transformations. In a chronological sense, Bontempelli’s union activism
coincided with activity of the journal ‘900: in 1926 Bontempelli was on the national
council of the “Federazione Nazionale dei Sindacati Intellettuali” [National Federation
of Intellectuals’ Unions] that had gathered up various unions, including the writers’
union that he headed as secretary.48 An article in La fiera letteraria that appeared in
the fall of 1927 documents Bontempelli’s appointment to the offices of secretary of the
writers’ union when it came (in a political regrouping) to belong to the “Confederazione
nazionale dei sindacati fascisti” (not a corporation but a horizontal grouping of those
unions that were allowed to enter into the corporations as the sole representatives of
their laborers).49 In an interview in the same issue, Bontempelli put forth his goal to
remedy the marginalization of writers, due, he believed, to poor wages and isolation
from politics. The fascist writers union is destined, we read, to make sure that writers’
“costume” [custom] can be grafted onto the connective tissue of national politics.50 The
centerpiece of his program was to extend the job classification “writer” beyond literati
to anyone who writes for a living, such as technical writers and textbook authors. Ar-
chival documents in the “Segreteria Particolare del Duce” show that in March of 1928
he still was the “segretario nazionale.” His title appears in a letter offering ex-officio
membership in the writers’ union to the Duce.51
Three months later, in June of 1928, a major change began to unfold: the regime
moved to weaken the corporativist unions when, at the time of a congress of the
“Confederazione nazionale dei sindacati fascisti,” high Fascist Party officials suggested
the confederation had been unable adequately to move forward with the necessary
elimination of class tensions.52 The over-arching organization of unions was disbanded
within a few months and in its place six smaller national unions were born. One was the
artists union, with branches for writers, painters, and musicians. Bontempelli remained
at the head of the writers’ section. According to Nicola Tranfaglia, the break-up of the
Confederazione led to a significant loss of political influence. As a pressure group, the
broad confederacy had achieved some labor reforms, though they were not comparable
to what transpired in other European countries before Hitler. With the confederation’s
breakup, the regime gained greater political control by keeping corporativist unions
technical and allowing industry owners to increase their power in labor relations within
and beyond the corporations.53
It was in the summer of 1928, just when the confederation of unions was dissolved,
that Bontempelli’s journal ‘900 began its second series (it died in June of 1929). In
1928, Bontempelli was also at work composing his last novel (in his view) in the style
of magic realism. The novel was Il figlio di due madri, published in 1929. By 1930
already, the author had declared that the otherworldly and supernatural were to have
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

734 no place in his fiction. The novel he wrote according to the new premise was composed
in the winter of 1930 and published in the spring of that year: Vita e morte di Adria e
i suoi figli [The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children]. If the discourse of magic
was discarded as a literary component, how did the realism qua realizing change? If
the magic goes, does the practice of literary compromise change? How does a chang-
ing view of the value of corporativism affect magic realism as itself a compromise? A
comparative analysis of the two novels suggests some answers and reveals some of the
purposes of magic in this crucial period of literary history.
Il figlio di due madri is a historical novel set in 1900. Bontempelli zeroed in on one
modern, middle-class Italian family rife with conflicts that threaten its unity because
an enigma envelops them. The novel tells the story of a miraculous eruption of the past
into the present: in the park at Villa Borghese in Rome a seven-year old boy, Mario,
spontaneously becomes a different boy. This second boy, Ramiro, is a revenant: he
had died seven years earlier, in 1893. The boy comes to have two mothers: Arianna
Parigi and the mother of the boy who had died, Luciana Veracina. The child repre-
sents a knot of enigma that no human being, it seems, can untie. The entire edifice of
institutions that both defend the family and rely on it as a foundation collapses. The
class system, the state, and the patriarchy break apart as all scramble in panic to figure
out what happened and what to do. One can only read this as an invective against the
pre-fascist era enmeshed in a web of bourgeois institutions. I would like, though, to
concentrate on the structuring of the plot and the system of characters in the novel
in order to respond to an important question: Why does Bontempelli generate in the
figure of this ungraspable son not only a mystery but also a structural go-between, an
intermediary who functions to articulate a series of fearful doublings in the novel that
end up making the narration itself impossible to close or resolve?
In the action, one or the other family constantly grabs Mario/Ramiro to shuttle him
physically across the city of Rome. The narrative architecture dramatizes, in its unend-
ing narrative tug-of-war over the boy, discourse systems at odds with one another. The
narrative opens with the mysterious transformation of the child and then introduces a
series of characters who must negotiate the doubleness and struggle for physical and
psychological control over a helpless seven-year old caught in the juggernaut. The
symbolic representatives of social institutions—family, class, the Catholic Church,
the state justice system, and modern science to name the most important—all react
forcefully to the enigma of Mario. Bontempelli systematically links textual characters
to social identifications and demonstrates multiple interpellations on the part of an
oppressive social order. Will rigid, unyielding social institutions be able to negotiate
the magical transformation?
A crucial site of tension, the Parigi family is at loggerheads even within its tiny
constellation. The narrative takes on mythic proportions as the author portrays a failed
alliance at the center of a (he believes) quintessential societal institution, the Italian
family in the years after Italy’s political unification. The father, Mariano, is utterly un-
equal to the task of regrouping. At once domineering and complacent, he refuses to
believe in the magical rebirth of a dead boy into his own son’s body. A practical-minded
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
businessman who minimizes mystery and is always absent at crucial turning points, he 735
obtusely defends his skeptical thinking and enlists like-minded men, scientists and doc-
tors, who try to resolve the mystery with one form or another of purported rationality.
Bontempelli made Mr. Mariano Parigi and his male cohort the weakest contenders in
the race to solve the child’s enigma.
Closer to truthfulness, if far from what Bontempelli considered positivist and de-
featist realism, two women, the mothers, struggle to recognize and make something
out of the crisis that grips them, and this is the case even though the two are opposites
in terms of their social identifications. Arianna is a stolid housewife and Luciana is a
free-spirited musician who travels between Rome and the seaside, is half-Austrian, and
has conceived her son out of wedlock. Arianna resides in a well-to-do part of Rome
that was urbanized after 1870 (Ludovisi) while Luciana lives first among the people,
in Trastevere, and then at San Felice Circeo –– the mythical home of the sorceress
Circe –– on bluffs overlooking the Mediterranean. Only unabated anguish draws the
women into one another’s worlds and into a compromise alliance. As a new family
architecture emerges, the two women come to stand for unity in difference. Each
knows that maternal love, which they think should be prime and indivisible, has been
split irrevocably. Each recognizes that the other faces the destruction of a sacred bond
that founds her being. As the plot advances, the two women will attempt progressively
to join forces and ally themselves for the good of the child. The mothers decide that
both will live with the boy, alternately in each other’s homes.
In order to set up differences between the two women, which then have to be
negotiated, the author uses the strategy of complicating gendering. The troubling of
gender (and social) stability accumulates as the narrative unfolds, and while united by
their anguish, the women retain differences in their degrees of (presumed) female-
ness. Arianna remains all woman and all weakness, modesty, obedience, and tears –– a
mater dolorosa. Without a son, she is physically broken and her heart gives out at the
novel’s end. Luciana becomes over the span of the novel (about two months) by con-
trast androgynous within the rigid system of gender identifications the novel presents.
Critics have ignored the fact that any notion of development or Bildung is connected
only to Luciana, just as they have erred in thinking that the two mothers represent
irreducible difference when in fact shared grief binds them. Luciana, a musician, is
presented at the novel’s beginning as independent, without a man at all –– or even
a boy, since her son had died seven years earlier. She is called both “la dominatrice”
[female dominator] and a New Woman. She outsmarts the men in the novel, includ-
ing her alienist. At one point, Mario’s father has Luciana kidnapped, committed, and
declared mentally incompetent for believing that her son has come back to life after
seven years. He has her spirited away by carriage to a mental asylum where the alienist
determines her cure: relenting. Luciana catches on that a cure will result in yet another
death of Ramiro for her, and she counters his administrations: “che cosa vuol curare
in me, dottore? . . . l’immaginazione?” (89) [what do you want to cure me of, doctor,
my imagination?].54 Luciana plots an escape from the asylum and climbs a tree with
branches over the asylum’s periphery fence; she spends a night there before she drops
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

736 to safety and freedom. Meanwhile, Mario’s father and the alienist are convinced that
“è materialmente impossibile che sia uscita dal recinto” (99), “è certo, è matematico,
che la scomparsa non è fuggita” (100) [it is materially impossible for her to have gone
beyond the fence; it is certain, mathematically certain, that this vanishing lady has not
fled]. An alliance of fools, in the form of the positivist doctor and the money-driven
father, “non lo avrebbero mai immaginato che una signora sola, in cura psichica po-
tesse scalare una quercia, strisciare lungo un ramo” (109) [could never have imagined
that a woman alone, under psychiatric treatment, could climb an oak and slide out
over a branch]. Only a supreme imaginative strength—or what Bontempelli thinks is
supreme, i.e., a woman who could climb a tree—allows the heroine to negotiate her
escape and set out again to struggle to reclaim her son. Luciana does something manly
and unexpected, climbing, so that her gender identity appears in the novel as mixed
and therefore strengthened. This gender mixing is reinforced several times, when Lu-
ciana drives a submissive fiancé to suicide and ultimately manages to bend the father
who had had her committed to her will. Bontempelli intuits the recasting of gender
roles in modernity, and he represents stronger females not so much as usurping male
power as strengthened by their hybridity, or compromise, with maleness. These New
Women become a reservoir for strong imagination that in turn suits them for action.55
That active trait is linked to divinity/magic so that Luciana, surrounded by an aura,
undergoes a virtual apotheosis.56
The openness and hybridity of Luciana’s identifications increases over the novel’s
span. The process moves into its final, most shocking (from Bontempelli’s perspective)
stage in her quasi-amorous encounter with the magical figure of Solwanah, the sea-
faring “zingaro” [“gypsy,” the term Bontempelli uses instead of Rom] who becomes her
magical helper and vassal in love. An intense dialogue with Solwanah, set on the bluffs
above the Mediterranean, produces additional strength and will to action in the woman.
She learns about the gypsy’s travels and that his mother ship has been prohibited from
returning to Italy (anti-vagrant legislation directed at the Rom populations had been
enacted in 1926, a historical fact reflected backward I presume to the earlier period).
Ramiro is on that ship. Luciana determines that she must take an extreme step and
join her child and the gypsies who are holding him for her. She plots with Solwanah
to blow up the bluffs at San Felice Circeo, the site of her ex-fiancé’s suicidal plunge to
death. The plan is to abscond once the symbolic impingement of the past is exploded.
Solwanah excogitates the complex plan, he starts to execute the grand action, and then
he is accidentally dismembered himself in a horrific dynamite blast. Since Solwanah
alone knows where the child and mother ship are, the boy is lost. Narrative closure is
also stymied. Luciana remains alone and powerless at novel’s end, despite the fact that
she is the only character to have garnered strength through her (presumed) openness
to hybridity. Bontempelli leaves his readers with the message that what Luciana is—an
artist, a woman, a free woman, manly, open to otherness—was not enough to allow her
to make something out of the enigma that was visited upon her. She remains bereft
but at an advance compared to the other characters.
The character that nearly matches her in the potential for negotiating an action-
oriented alliance with others is Solwanah himself. In this character as well, sexedness
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
and gender identification do not completely correspond. His figure is part of a pro- 737
gressive, gentle blurring of gender, class, ethnic, and racial lines that unfolds over the
course of the book and tempers the early, too-neat separation of the novel’s characters
into female believers and male non-believers. Solwanah is a mildly androgynous
figure, making him an apt accomplice for and mirror to the forceful Luciana. Both
stand allegorically for what Bontempelli supposes to be creative de-racination and
a fertile split from established culture. In the case of Solwanah, the gypsy is made
quintessentially mobile, hybrid, and open to change and flux through a fundamental
stereotype the author puts into play and that appears in a number of painters in the
magic realism current, as the 1928 painting “Zingari” [“Gypsies”] by Massimo Campigli
demonstrates.57 [Figure 2] There a nude, nomadic, male figure appears on a still white
horse and two larger-than-life gypsy-women become figures of magical doubleness and
temporal transcendence. They read into the future­­–– the cards on display –– and yet
they are placed in an ancient past, a landscape with a Roman aqueduct in terracotta
colors of ancient memory. In Bontempelli’s elaborate fantasy, Solwanah is of Finnish
origin, blond, with sparkling, metallic eyes, tattoos on his arms, and the tattered, salt-
laden clothes befitting his life as a wanderer on the seas. 58 He is a master traveling
tinker and a stand-in in this plot for a fairy godmother. He alone has the equivalent of
the magic wand when he pulls his disappearing act with the magical boy. Despite his
male sexuation, Solwanah acts in the manner of the mothers, believing in the enigma
of the boy’s return from the dead. The author puts cross-gendering into play when he
writes a narrative of male care-giving. Bontempelli creates a gypsy-character who can
credibly (he thinks) take on the function of a being that, by his indeterminacy, can go
between now-separated entities: mother and child. When the enchanted boy sets sail
on the gypsy ship and disappears from the narrative, the enchanting tinker from across
the waters becomes the intermediary to the intermediary—to the child who had once
gone between the two mothers and their two worlds. When Solwanah dies, the means
to negotiate enigma is lost.
The novel closes with Luciana sitting on rocks at the water’s edge, looking out on a
formless dawn seen paradoxically as closure and a seal:

Allora Luciana si mise a sedere sulla ghiaia al margine del mare. Il mare aveva ripreso a
respirare, qualche spuma leggera salì a bagnare i piedi di Luciana, che non si mosse. Le
costellazioni giravano sopra il suo capo nel nero morbido del cielo: . . . una dopo l’altra
scendevano l’arco e andavano quetamente a posare nei neri letti dell’orizzonte, qualche
onda piana si spinse a bagnare le gambe di Luciana, e si ritraeva. Luciana non sentiva, e
lontano guardava. Le costellazioni ora si dissolvevano nell’aria impallidita; sotto l’alba il
mare tornò immobile, liscio, bianco come una distesa di latte fino all’ultimo cerchio dove
si chiude e suggella col cielo.59

[Now Luciana sat down on the pebbles at the edge of the sea. The sea had resumed its
rhythmical breathing. A light foam reached her feet, wetting them, but she didn’t move.
The constellations were making their rounds above her head in the soft black sky. . . .
One by one, quietly, they descended the arc of heaven to take their rest in the dark bed of
the horizon. Slowly, very slowly, waves began lapping at Luciana’s legs, then pulling back.
Luciana stared into the distance and felt nothing. Now the constellations were vanishing
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

738

▲
Fig. 2. Massimo Campigli, “Gli Zingari” [the gypsies], 1928, Museo di
arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto.

into the fading night. At dawn the sea was a flat, gleaming expanse, white as milk, all the
way to the furthest curve which encloses and seals it to the heavens.]60

How should this ending be read? Might proximity to the sea suggest contact with the
enigmatic boy afloat somewhere on the mother ship, so that ending eases into futurity?
Might cycles and continuity be predominant –– night, dawn, and day –– so that ending
is temporary and ever surpassed by beginnings? Or might merging and dissolving into
nothingness, the dropping of the constellations first into the sea’s horizon and then the
merging of starlight into daylight, be linked by Bontempelli less to questions about
the interlocking of past, present, and future and linked more to questions about social
solvency? When the stars in their conventional configurations sink into the horizon
and disappear in a novel so focused on the potentials of compromise groupings, one
might read this scene as pertinent to the dissolution or breakdown, symbolically, of
social constellations that are the very subject of the book.
Is the dissolve of celestial bodies a sign that at a symbolic or allegorical level the
constellations of yore are doomed and disappearing so that a new era will dawn? Are
the 1929 readers of the novel and those that follow looking at the sunset and night of
pre-fascist history, in which the state lost authority over the justice system, a too-skeptical
church lost its credibility, patriarchy lost control over families, and all were impotent to
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
move forward? If that is the narrative that has been rolled out by the author then, yes, 739
we must be looking at an ending, since fascism followed and supplanted that world.
The novel from this standpoint narrates in order to realize a critique of the past.
In somewhat perverse fashion, though, Bontempelli’s novel undoes that specific
critique. The text furnishes its readers over its entire extension too many examples of
the continual and multiple failures and losses in that pre-fascist era and world. Enough
negativity might impart the lesson that it was that historical period to have been deficient
and to have required corrective action. Yet constant, unending stories of disaster and
impotence together contribute to the sense that no action could counter that much
failure. What political system could, old or new, pre-fascist or not, achieve a credible
rehabilitation? What each subject owns has been ripped away. There is, additionally,
no narrative closure in Bontempelli’s emplotment. By not supplying a hard and fast
closure to his narration of a pre-fascist world order, Bontempelli leaves open the po-
tential for its repeated failings to infiltrate or contaminate a future that is not supposed
to harbor it. When will this story end? Where and how and among what parties can
some mediation between endings and beginnings be realized?61
In sum, one may read this novel as a reflection on how social constellations ought
–– like corporations in fact –– to be empowered. Yet one may also read against the grain
a denial of that imperative in the text’s un-ending failures that reify loss. The author in
Figlio worked hard to show failed compromise-into-alliance thereby suggesting that an
opposite could come into being: successful compromise-into-alliance. To return to the
Europeanism discussed earlier, the discourse of compromise could still be imagined
as potentially generating a powerful position for the continent’s citizens: Italo-centric,
Mediterranean-based Europeanism. However, another tendency of the emplotment,
repetition of failure and denial of closure, undoes what is supposed to be an ideological
actualization.
The structural ambiguity risks becoming more than onto-political. If one consid-
ers this novel as itself an intertwining of the entities “magic + realism,” this kind of
literature and this novel itself may have failed to produce a powerful alliance of the
component two strands, just as the social factions of Figlio failed effectively to join
forces. What Bontempelli may not have known about his own novel as he wrote it was
that he was narrating the ambiguities of magic realism itself. Il figlio di due madri was
Bontempelli’s last novel in that style. He wrote a comparison of Figlio and Adria that
revolves around their uses of magic:

Tuttavia quel romanzo non era ancora la conquista definitiva. L’uomo e il mondo veduti
come un miracolo e un mistero, tale è sempre stata la mia ansia. Ma nel Figlio di due
madri uno degli elementi del mistero veniva ancora da un aldilà, che rimaneva in parte
irresoluto e però mandava tra la luce qualche ingombrante ombra. Mi occorreva, in quello
spazio translucido raggiunto in pieno con i migliori idilli. . . far vivere una umanità cui
tutto il mistero e il miracolo venga dal di dentro; dalla sua passione, dal suo volere. . . .
Questo non ha potuto avvenire se non oggi, con Vita e morte di Adria e dei [sic] suoi figli,
che per ciò è il mio primo romanzo, il mio primo libro. Comincio ora.62
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

740 [However, that novel was not a definitive victory. I had always been anxious that man
and his world be seen as a miracle and mystery. But in The Son of Two Mothers one
element of mystery still came from a beyond that remained unresolved; but that beyond
cast an ungainly shadow in the light. In that trans-lucid space that I had achieved in my
best idylls, I needed to bring alive a humanity whose mystery and miracle came from
the inside, from passion and will. . . . This came to pass only with The Life and Death of
Adria and Her Children, which for this reason is my first novel, my first book. I begin
now.] (My translation.)

Let us return briefly to Bontempelli’s tenure as the head of the several avatars of
the fascist writers union. His continued political activism in that institution suggests he
considered there was a future for his theory and practice of political compromise—at
least until the summer of 1928 when his broad Confederazione was split into six smaller
entities and corporativist unionism was already losing power. Might Bontempelli have
been disenchanted? Or, might he have, instead, believed that corporativist unions had
outgrown their political usefulness, as the regime claimed, and had become an obstacle
to the totalizing consolidation of power? More knowledge of Bontempelli’s politic views
in these years would help in answering the question and in understanding how those
politics could have affected this author’s and others’ conceptualizations and practice
of magic realism. What we do know for now is that when his writers’ union lost agency
just as the fascist regime was forcefully consolidating its power by various means, the
novel Bontempelli next wrote did two things: it left aside discourse on magic and it
sported a distinct narrative closure—making it quite different from Figlio.
Vita e morte di Adria e i suoi figli, like Figlio, dramatizes a fractured genealogy
and fragile family. Like Figlio, it also features the supposed degeneration of post-
Risorgimento Italy and more generally of modern European liberal democracy in
the first fifteen or so years of the twentieth century. It shows the same ineffectual
men and the same unimaginative upper middle-classes, hidebound by conformity
and materialism. The protagonist Adria is an extraordinarily beautiful diva of upper
middle class Roman society and a sartorial genius that locks her seamstresses in her
personal atelier to work on secret fashion creations. Her hundreds of dresses, each
worn once, hang color-coded in an immense hall. Her nightly high-style appearances
at the Teatro Argentina are cause for monumental celebrations. The skilled, creative,
womanly Adria is able to turn herself into a cherished, ritual object and thereby to
found the stability of her cohort.
Her status as cult object begins to detract from her agency as a mothering subject
though: Adria determines that motherhood damages her beauty and disturbs her steady
devotion to a super-human, sublime mode of being. She decides that she will see her
two children on Saturdays only, for a scant hour. The children’s intense longing for Adria
occupies a good deal of the novel thereafter. Five years after the dramatic suicide of
an admirer, at age thirty, the diva determines she must retreat from society and family
altogether because the myth of her otherworldly beauty risks destruction as she ages.
Without its deity, her cult could disintegrate, and with it social cohesion. She must
move to Paris. She walls herself up in a small home, retaining one personal servant
and contact with others only through letters and telephone. What wreaks havoc in the
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
narrative structure of Adria is not, then, a miracle or magic. The narrative turns on an 741
act of violent separation, as in Figlio, but this time it is the incomprehensible gesture of
one mother. Some years later, Adria’s old Parisian neighborhood is to be razed to make
way for new buildings, so rather than being forced into the open, she places herself in
the attic and lights herself on fire. This is a clear demise and a narrative closure. Adria’s
active withdrawal pre-empts the negotiation found in Figlio. There are no figures of
mediation in fact in this later novel. The husband dies of a heart attack at the piano.
The son becomes a weakling and a drug addict. The daughter becomes a spy for the
Italians in the war against the Austro-Hungarians and is shot by a firing squad.
Is Bontempelli unable not to people his novels with desperate, innocent offspring
whose fates undo the author’s plan to teach his readers that the abandonment of the
past is an imperative? (He counts, of course, on the idea that conventional family is
the quintessential site of social negotiation.) Bontempelli wants to show us a histori-
cal socio-political formation that had to go. There should be no regrets about losing
an inadequate thing. Then we are shown children who just want their mother, are
separated from her, an undergo trauma from which they cannot recover. A potentially
healthy separation from her, a maturing, is shown to be impossible because their desire
for Adria is buried in their psyches to fester endlessly. The undercurrent present in
Figlio surfaces here as well: what culture and what subjects in what historical period
would not grieve for the compromised victims Bontempelli has written into his novels?
If grief in the fictions is universal and unending, how can History as it moves into a
fascist future undo the damage and trauma in any satisfactory way?
Adria, as compared to Figlio, empowers a single character and treats the consequenc-
es of her actions on a small group. In the earlier novel, “magic” creates an ontological
disturbance of epic proportions. The potential to enter into alliances and the failures
of diverse groups to enter into compromise was larger than life. Bontempelli drops a
discourse on magic in Adria and thereby also affects both the subject matter and the
emplotment tied to compromise found in Figlio. When he drops the “magic” in magic
realism, clearly the formula for its own internal compromise has to change: realism-
as-realizing starts to carry more weight and to dominate. The focus of the new novel
moves to this single, act-driven protagonist, Adria. There is less multiplicity because
of the focus on one will to act upon others. By the same token, there is less discourse
on the need for compromise and alliance because of the lack of multiplicity. The new
narrative structure in Adria without the “shadow” of magic discharges Bontempelli’s own
attention to alliance-building according to a corporativist ideology. He shifts away from
compromise and the negotiation of social difference. Interestingly, this slippage occurs
when Bontempelli’s corporativist unions were losing ground in the shifting configura-
tions of political power that take place so strikingly in the late nineteen twenties––the
years of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and consensus. Since the fascist regime was
already consolidated, why would Bontempelli in fact need to urge his 1930 readers to
join into alliances? Fascism was finally ready to act as a totality. It was realized.
We know now that that power was all too real. We know its consequences. We also
know fascism failed. When fascism was defeated during World War II, Bontempelli
vowed to try out political activism again, joining the Popular Front and the Left. He
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

742 won a senate seat in the new Republican Italy of 1948 but was quickly unseated for
his fascist past. As in Figlio, the negotiation of endings carried on for Bontempelli
un-endingly.

Notes
1. Emily Braun discusses Franz Roh’s 1925 formulation of the term “magic realism” and Bontem-
pelli’s deployment of magic briefly in Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics Under
Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 110-111, noting that Bontempelli’s plot
deploys magic, a fact which serves to differentiate his literary magical realism from the “static” magi-
cal temporalities and styles of the Italian Novecento painters who were so influential in the spread of
European magic realism. Braun discusses Sironi’s own distinctive “expressionist” depictions of workers
together with his fascist aesthetics in “Expressionism as Fascist Aesthetic,” Journal of Contemporary
History 31, no. 2 (1996), 286-87. The ideologies of the two men, Sironi and Bontempelli, have common
traits in that class is a dominant subject and that represented groups of classed people are frequent
and significant. Their shared fascist ideology links the two. Bontempelli does not, however, favor the
deforming portraits and perspectives that Braun identifies in the expressionist Sironi. His poetics of
“compromise” also shuns extremes, so that sharp, deforming caricature and the grotesque are virtu-
ally absent, causing the work to differ in tone from other European magic realisms, such as the New
Objectivity movement in Germany. The development of the latter predated Nazi rule, while instead
Bontempelli’s style evolved in tandem with fascist rule).
2. Massimo Bontempelli, in L’Avventura novecentista [AN from here on] (Florence: Vallecchi,
1938), 228, 292, emphasizes art as an act, and the individual work of art is termed “attuazione.” The
terms recall Giovanni Gentile’s philosophy of “attualismo” [“actualism” or “actualist” idealism], a term
also found in Giuseppe Bottai’s writing.
3. Bontempelli, AN, 266, 224 for the attack on Cesare Lombroso.
4. Bontempelli, AN, 215.
5. Bontempelli, AN, 466.
6. Bontempelli, AN, 277, where he describes journalists who ask him if young Italian writers pro-
mote realism or fantasy. He replies that Art employs both to create worlds of its own.
7. Massimo Bontempelli, Il libro degli arcani, Getty Museum Special Collections, Massimo Bon-
tempelli Papers; Box 27, Folder 21.
8. This point is touched on usefully by Ruth Ben-Ghiat in terms of ‘900’s importance as a fore-
most discourse on Italianicity competing with others, in Fascist Modernities (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004); on p. 26 she discusses competing notions of Italianicity founded on sup-
posed either rural or urban values, and on p. 28, she demonstrates how intellectuals like Bontempelli
who were Europeanists furthered an “intertwined agenda of domestic consolidation and imperial
expansion.” See for the contrast between supposed urban vs. rural values also Walter Adamson, “The
Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of Il Selvaggio,” Journal of
Contemporary History 30, no. 4 (1995) 555-75.
9. This was apparent to contemporary observers, since, for example, Umberto Bosco’s entry in
the 1937 edition of the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana,
1937), Vol. 7 (1930), 438, on “Bontempelli” outlines “adaptability and versatility” in modern times as
the main concern of the author’s writing.
10. Bontempelli, AN, 214: “Da anni vado compiendo sforzi nobilissimi per incitare i nuovi scrittori
alla immaginazione attiva” [for years I have been engaged in the most noble efforts to incite the new
writers toward active imagination].
11. Bontempelli, AN, 172.
12. Francesco Prefetti, Il sindacalismo fascista (Rome: Bonacci, 1988), 100.
13. Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Ministero della Cultura Popolare, Direzione generale teatro e
musica, ufficio censura teatrale, folders, b. 479, b.491, b.551, b.591, b.643.
14. Bontempelli, AN, 5.
15. G. Turi, Stato educatore. Politica e intellettuali nell’Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002),
136-137. Cited in Mirella Serri, I Redenti: Gli intellettuali che vissero due volte. 1939-1948 (Milan:
 Jewell / massimo bontempelli’s literary compromise
Casa Editrice Corbaccio, 2005), 105. Serri addresses the general question of epuration, for Bontem- 743
pelli, 295.
16. Bontempelli asserted that writers ought not be controlled by political authority, AV, 324-325.
17. For the term “redeemed” see Mirella Serri, I Redenti, 7.
18. Italian Senate documents track these developments. See Giuseppe Proli in “Eleggibilità di
Bontempelli” (Tipografia del Senato di Dott. G. Bardi: 1950).
19. “Torcibudella,” “Le disgrazie di Bontempelli,” L’Italiano nos.10-11, (July 15-30,1926).
20. Ugo Piscopo, Massimo Bontempelli: Per una modernità dalle pareti lisce (Naples: Edizioni
Scientifiche Italiane: 2001), 374.
21. Elena Urgnani, Sogni e visioni: Massimo Bontempelli fra surrealismo e futurismo (Ravenna:
Longo, 1991), 25.
22. Bart van den Bossche, “Miti per il Novecento: L’avventura novecentista di Massimo Bontem-
pelli,” Narrativa 16 (1999), 30-31.
23. I draw the term “resemanticization” from Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideol-
ogy, and Social Fanstasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 130.
24. Bontempelli, Critica fascista 4, no. 22 (1926), 416.
25. Bontempelli, AN, p. 285: “il realismo magico (esattamente identico a ‘poesia’), sta al disopra
del ‘qualche cosa da dire’” [magic realism is exactly identical to “poetry”; it is above “something to
say”], 285.
26. Bontempelli, cited in a special section on the writer in a 1933 issue of Quaderni di segnaletica.
In the piece, Bontempelli composed an ironic prayer begging not to have to write about Italy anymore.
Now in AN 320-21.
27. I differ here from Elio Gianola, who finds the irrealism to be de-structuring in “Massimo
Bontempelli,” Letteratura italiana contemporanea, eds. Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, vol.
2 (Rome: Lucarini, 1980), 802.
28. Gianola notes that Bontempelli’s use of irony worked as an “honest compromise”; “Massimo
Bontempelli,” 796.
29. Francesca Petrocchi, Scrittori italiani e fascismo: tra sindacalismo e letteratura (Rome: Archivio
Guido Izzi, 1997).
30. The Royal decree states that the Capo del Governo, Mussolini, appoints the President. The
decree is published on the site of the current legal counsel for the Writers’ Association available from
www.ubertazzi.it.
31. See Marinella Mascia Galateria, Alvaro-Bontempelli-Frank: Lettere a ‘900 (Rome: Bulzoni,
1985) where we read “Domani vedo il Presidente,” i.e., the “presidente del consiglio,” Mussolini,
111.
32. Petrocchi, Scrittori italiani e fascismo, 8.
33. Francesco Sapori, Scrittori di Roma (Rome: Sindacato Nazionale Fascista Romano degli Autori
e Scrittori, 1938) refers to a need for “buona condotta morale e politica dal punto di vista nazionale”
[good moral and political from the national standpoint], quoted from the Statuto of the “Sindacato
nazionale fascista romano degli autori e scrittori,” 49.
34. See Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Fascinating Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History 31 (1996):
235-44, for a guide to the broad debate on fascist aesthetics in tandem with political ideologies. The
article introduces a special issue in which Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Emily Braun, and others address the issue
of how political positions interfaced with experimental artistic modes.
35. This exchange took place in 1934 when Bontempelli was no longer secretary, on letterhead
from the Academia d’Italia, ACS, Ministero della Cultura Popolare archive, Gabinetto, b.4, f.13
“Bontempelli, prof. Massimo.” My hearty thanks go the historian and archival expert Dott. Alessandro
Visani for locating this dossier.
36. See Benito Mussolini, “Fascismo e sindacalismo,” cited in Prefetti, Il sindacalismo fascista,
20.
37. See Prefetti’s discussion of the convictions of Edmondo Rossoni, Sindacalismo fascista, 77,
and Alfredo Rocco, 124-25.
38. Marco Cuzzi, L’internazionale delle camicie nere: i CAUR, Comitati d’azione per l’universalità
di Roma, 1933-1939 (Milan: Mursia, 2005), 26.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

744 39. Cuzzi, L’internazionale delle camicie nere, 13.

40. For a detailed discussion of the historical scholarship see Cuzzi, L’internazionale delle camicie
nere, 18-36.
41. For a discussion of the intersections of modernity, “hybridity,” nationalism, and “europeismo”
see Keala Jewell, The Art of Enigma: the de Chirico Brother’s Politics of Modernism (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 56-57, 108, 137-39
42. Curzio Malaparte, cited in Francesco Perfetti, Il sindacalismo fascista, vol. 1 Dalle origini alla
vigilia dello Stato corporativo (1919-1930) (Rome: Bonacci, 1988), 30.
43. Petrocchi, Scrittori, p. 21.
44. Bontempelli, AN, p. 70.
45. Bontempelli, AN, p. 63.
46. The notion took concrete form in the 1927 Carta del Lavoro [labor charter], in article 1.
47. Bontempelli, AN, 127. Mussolini’s “revolution” was, we read, not at the expense of “regioni di
periferia, ma lascia intatte tutte le conquiste delle loro storie singole laboriosissime” [regions on the
periphery, rather it leaves in tact all of the achievements of their single, most laborious histories].
48. Petrocchi, Scrittori, 24.
49. See the unsigned article “Il segretario Bontempelli,” La fiera letteraria 42 (October 16, 1927),
1. In an interview on the same front page, Bontempelli mentions the “superiori gerarchi” who had
been behind the new organization, explaining that the intellectual’s union could not address the exact
needs of writers, artists, and musicians. I would like here to thank both Manuel Rota and Claudio
Pellegrini for helping me to grasp the political nature of corporativist unions. See also David D.
Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1979) and as well as a review of it by Victoria de Grazia, The Journal of Modern History 52,
no. 3 (1980), 542-45.
50. Petrocchi discusses Bontempelli’s later view, mid-thirties, in Scrittori italiani e fascismo, 56-
57.
51. Letter to Mussolini, ACS, Segreteria particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, Fascicolo
551.747, “Sindacato degli Autori e Scrittori.”
52. Nicola Tranfaglia, “La costruzione del regime,” L’avvento del fascismo e il regime, vol. 20 of
La Storia d’Italia (Novara: De Agostini Editore, 2005), 358.
53. Petrocchi, Scrittori, 13, notes that by 1934, when another statute was written, the writers’
union had become an association designed to further an ideal fit between the interests of business
and the interests of the fascist state.
54. Bontempelli, Il figlio di due madri (Milan: Se, 1989), 89.
55. Bontempelli, Figlio. Luciana is explicitly linked to literature: “le sue tendenze imaginose e
romanzesche” [her imaginative and romance-like tendencies], 39.
56. Bontempelli, Figlio, “La parola di Luciana sonò nella stanza come una voce d’oltremondo;
come un giudizio, un’apoteosi, un vangelo” (61) [Luciana’s words sounded in the room like a voice
from beyond the tomb; like a judgment, an apotheosis, a gospel.]
57. In an early chapter Luciana is cast as a gypsy-like incessant traveler “viaggi improvvisi e sconessi”
[sudden, disconnected travels]; Bontempelli, Figlio, 39-49.
58. Bontempelli gives the group an “other” European identity, unrelated to “Asian” gypsies. An
anti-Asian discourse was in any case prominent in Bontempelli’s conceptualization of the European
continent.
59. Bontempelli, Figlio, 46.
60. Bontempelli, The Boy with Two Mothers, trans. Estelle Gilson, in Separations: Two Novels of
Mothers and Children (Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson & Company, 2000), 170.
61. I have benefited in this analysis of Bontempelli’s ambiguous narration from the innovative
work of Alessia Ricciardi in her The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), where she writes on modernist narratives of subjectivity in terms of
their ambivalent positions on pastness, especially chapter 1, “The Twilight of Mourning.”
62. Bontempelli, AN, 290.