STRETCHING THE STANDARD: PHILOSOPHIES OF STYLE IN THE WORK OF ITALO SVEVO, CARLO EMILIO GADDA, AND PIER PAOLO PASOLINI Deborah Amberson A DISSERTATION in Romance Languages Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2004 VIIA eM Ga” VP Cah Chee Supervisor of Dissertation Graduate Group ChairpersonUMI Number: 3152012 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and. photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3152012 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48108-1346Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of my committee, Professor Millicent J. Marcus, Professor Kevin Brownlee, Professor Victoria Kirkham and Professor Jean-Michel Rabaté, for their invaluable help and guidance.ABSTRACT STRETCHING THE STANDARD: PHILOSOPHIES OF STYLE IN THE WORK OF ITALO SVEVO, CARLO EMILIO GADDA, AND PIER PAOLO PASOLINI. Deborah Amberson Professor Millicent J. Marcus This dissertation constitutes an investigation of the stylistic policies of Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Pier Paolo Pasolini, authors who, in very different ways, have cast doubt on the normative linguistic model of literary Tuscan imposed from on high by the institutions of Italian cultural tradition. Using the authorial treatment of standardized national language as a springboard to discuss the philosophies which inform the authors’ poetics, this project focuses principally on a programmatic subversion of the traditional model of a fixed and individuated subjectivity. Arguing for a functional rationale behind Svevo’s infamous, “scrivere male,” this chapter considers the author's erratic style as a Deleuzian “stuttering” of canonical literary style, a strategy by means of which the author proposes a subjectivity of process founded upon a principle of ill-health and nicotine, an authorial programme in whichZeno as incurable smoker comes to embody the Svevian ethical project. Carlo Emilio Gadda constructs his characteristically macaronic linguistic network in order to posit a logic of multiplication that places matter in a state of necessary and ever variable relation. In this fluctuating reality, an investigative logic which replaces the traditional process of rational elimination with a capricious proliferation proves incapable of providing a unilinear account of the events surrounding the crime in question, a procedure which parallels the author's conviction that language necessarily constitutes an unpredictable and inescapable system of proliferation. The final chapter on Pier Paolo Pasolini focuses on a new Pasolinian style which emerges in the final decade of the author's life and which, in his most controversial novel, Petrolio, marks the creation of a declared non-style which serves to posit an ethic of non-productivity and self-abnegation at the heart of consumerist Italy.Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii ABSTRACT iii Table of Contents v Introduction 1 An Ethics of Aberration: Italo Svevo’s Linguistics of Rhythm and Health 25 Infinite Deduction: A Rhizomatic Proliferation of Style and Self in Carlo Emilio Gadda 96 Non-style and Non-compliance: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Final Refusal to Produce 163 Conclusion 226 Bibliography 231Introduction Liltalia é fatta, ora bisogna fare gli Italiani. Massimo D’Azeglio, 1867. Literary Italian constitutes a veritable can of political and philosophical worms. Centuries of political disunity on the Italian peninsula, war and foreign rule contrived to produce an Italian people entirely bereft of a linguistic common ground, a circumstance which gave rise, amongst other things, to a predicament referred to as the “questione della lingua,” a perpetual debate which secks to determine the most appropriate language for the country’s literature. However, this linguistic question, which, in varying ways, continues to trouble the Italian intellectual, bears ideological consequences which carry the Italophone writer far beyond what one may consider to be the more traditional boundaries of literary expression and spurs him to assess the political nature of the artificially established status of Italian as national language. My project constitutes an investigation of the stylistic policies of Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Pier Paolo Pasolini, authors who represent a variety of literary movements and tendencies within the Italian twentieth century and who, in very different ways, have cast doubt on the normative linguistic model of literary Tuscan imposed from on high by the institutions of cultural tradition. Rather than executing a philological study of the work of these novelists, I ask not how their style 1stretches or reconfigures what one might call a more literary Italian but why it does so. In short, I use their treatment of language, or languages as the case may be, as a springboard to discuss the politics and philosophies which inform their poetics, focusing principally, on what I consider to be a programmatic subversion, common to each author, of the traditional model of a fixed and individuated subjectivity. Considering the individual authors as milestones along the road of an Italian twentieth century which moves from a modernist through a Marxist, to a postmodern ethic, my dissertation identifies an Italian politics of literary language and style which, in challenging the coherence of the philosophical category of identity, stretches and ultimately subverts the ideological foundations and structures of a standard literary language crucial to the concept of nation, driving the eternal linguistic question onwards to new political and philosophical horizons. ‘The Origins of the “Questione della lingua” Prior to addressing the various positions adopted by these authors, an attempt must be made to chart the emergence and eventual establishment of the language conceived of as the official language of the Italian peninsula. A glance at the Italian Duecento offers the somewhat confused spectacle of the emergence of a literature in the Italian vernacular.! While the early years of the Italian thirteenth century "To refer to the literature produced in the thirteenth century as ‘Ttalian’ literature is, in truth, a fallacy as the literature produced during this period in fact constituted a production written in the various dialects which 2witnessed the development of the poetic tradition associated with the newly-established religious orders,? the Sicilian imperial court of Federico Il offered the most systematic contribution to the establishment of an Italian literary production by virtue of vibrant cultural ties with the troubadours of the provencal courtly tradition. Emperor Federico, himself author of a composition which survives today, actively encouraged the literary vigor evident during his thirty years in power, from 1220 to his death in 1250, and many of the poets who emerged during this period were in fact functionaries in his imperial court. Subsequent to the death of the Emperor, the cultural centre moved northwards and the second half of the Duecento saw the cultural emergence of both Bologna and Florence. Bologna, a university city since approximately 1088, became a centre of learning and produced, among others, the poet acknowledged by Dante Alighieri as literary father, Guido Guinizelli. However, it is Florence which became the incontestable cultural center of literature in the vernacular, ultimately establishing its own dialect as the linguistic model to be emulated in literary production. La Scuola Toscana and Dante Alighieri Florentine adopted this position of supremacy as a result of the cultural importance of the Florentine Comune together with the presence existed in the peninsula and presented no common linguistic denominator. However, for the sake of syntactical simplicity I will refer to the literary tradition which emerged during the Duecento with the jeneral if somewhat incorrect term of Tialian literature * The most famous example of the literature produced from within the religious orders is perhaps Saint Francis of Assisi’s “Cantico delle creature” written in Francis’ native Umbrian dialect.of what became known as the “Scuola Toscana,” a collection of poets who transplanted and modified the literary production of the imperial court of Sicily. Against the backdrop of the Florentine Comune the courtly lyric of the Sicilian School was drawn beyond the almost exclusively amorous subject matter evidenced in the production of the court of Federico Il and adapted itself to the municipal setting of Florence. The subsequent rise and popularity of the tradition instituted by the poets of the ‘dolce stil novo’ strengthened Florentine’s position as literary vehicle of the Italian peninsula. This position was further reinforced by the efforts of Dante Alighieri who, by means of the Divina Commedia and his twin treatises on the vulgar tongue, De vulgari eloquentia and the Convivio, both highlighted the peculiar linguistic turmoil of his world and demonstrated that the Florentine vernacular was equipped to express the emotional and philosophical heights of the most sacred or noble subject matter, earning for himself the oft used appellation “padre della lingua italiana.” In his linguistic treatises Dante laments the absence of linguistic unity in the peninsula and makes evident his resentment of those scholars and letterati who, by means of their knowledge of Latin, transform the production of learned literature into a business or a “donna meretrice,”3 a circumstance permitted by the nobles whom Dante hoped to convince of the worth of the “vulgare latium.” In all probability it was during his period of exile from Florence that Dante perceived the similarities * Dante Alighieri. 11 Convivio Lx, (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993), 66.between the existing dialects, similarities which led him to believe in the possibility of a unified language forged by means of a body of poets and scholars drawn to the vernacular by the “naturale amore alla propria loquela.”* These poets and scholars would, in turn, advance the vernacular to the level of Latin, rendering it capable of expressing “altissimi e novissimi concetti convenevolmente, sufficientemente e acconciamente, quasi come per esso latino,” a level of excellence which Dante demonstrated in his own Divine Comedy. Linguistic Models of the Renaissance As Dante was superseded by Petrarch and Boccaccio, literary language tended to lose the somewhat plurilingual aspect evident in Dante’s work and was transformed into the more distilled and univocal Tuscan advocated in Pietro Bembo’s Renaissance treatise on the “correct” literary language, Prose della volgar lingua (1525). In Bembo’s treatise a debate between Giuliano de’ Medici, Federigo Fregoso, Ercole Strozzi and Carlo Bembo (brother and spokesman of the author) provides a forum for the discussion of the preferred literary language. While several members of the panel opt for the current language of the court, Carlo Bembo, towards the end of the first book, insists that “la lingua delle scritture [...] non dee a quella del popolo accostarsi, se non in quanto, accostandovisi, non perde gravita, non perde grandezza.”S Pietro Bembo 1, , in Ibid, 55, * Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2002), 203.advocated the use of the purified Tuscan dialect of Petrarch’s poetry and Boccaccio’s prose while those in favor of a literary use of the “lingua cortegiana” promoted the dominance of a language comprised of elements derived from the various regional dialects. Baldassare Castiglione, the Lombard author of Il libro del Cortegiano upheld the concerns of the champions of this “lingua cortegiana,” and, in supporting his reservations regarding the literary Tuscan standard with the implication that as a Lombard, his use of Florentine would not ring true, and thus his linguistic stance became a strategy “per non fare come Teofrasto, il qual, per parlare troppo ateniese, fu da una semplice vecchiarella conosciuto per non ateniese.”6 This comment on the part of the author of Il libro del cortegiano illustrates the extent to which Florentine remained an artificially imposed vehicle of literary expression, at times almost to the point of constituting a foreign language, while the “ingua cortegiana” would, in theory at least, provide the opportunity for a far more sincere means of expression echoing Dante’s insistence on the natural love for one’s own language. ‘The Risorgimento and the “soluzione manzoniana” La Questione della lingua made a forceful return to the forefront of literary debates during the years of the Risorgimento which preceded the political unification of the individual Italian states. During this period the ited in Laurie Jane Anderson, Challenging the Norm: The Dialect Question in the Works of Gadda and Pasolini. Stanford Honors Essay in the Humanities, no.20. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1970), 6 6principal contribution was made by Alessandro Manzoni who sought a linguistic vehicle accessible to all literate members of society for his historical novel J Promessi sposi. Having published the novel in 1827 in the dialect of the Milan area after a prior modification which produced the definitive title of Ipromessi sposi, Manzoni remained dissatisfied with the results of his labor. Subsequent to a brief sojourn in Florence, he came to the conclusion that the Tuscan dialect represented optimum possibilities for universality and the novel was rewritten once again to produce the definitive edition of 1840. For Manzoni the essential criterion in his search for a suitable linguistic vehicle for his novel was that it be a living language capable of communicating with the broadest range of Italians possible, thereby realizing a linguistic unity which mirrored his political aspirations concerning the unification of the Italian peninsula. Manzoni rejected the idea of a national language comprised of elements from regional dialects on the grounds that this would hinder communication and contribute further to the existing linguistic chaos. In 1846 Giacinto Carena published his dictionary of a common Italian language drawn from various dialects entitled Prontuario di vocaboli attenti a parecchie arti, ad aicuni mestieri, a cose domestiche ed altre d’uso comune per saggio d’un vocabolario metodico della lingua italiana. Parte prima, Vocabolario domestico. On receipt of a copy from the author, Manzoni responded by letter and offered, amidst much flattery, a criticism of Carena’s attempts to forge an Italian language fromcomponents of dialects other than Florentine as he explains that he is of the “scomunicata, derisa, compatita opinione, che la lingua italiana é in Firenze, come la lingua latina era in Roma, come la francese é in Parigi.”? Manzoni defends the existence of the various dialects on the grounds of the essential role they play in daily communication and, in a hypothetical debate with those who would abolish them in favor of an artificially imposed Esperanto comprised of dialectal components, he describes the chaos which would reign if “per uno strano miracolo, tutti questi che chiamate dialetti cessassero tutt’a un tratto d’esistere” (Manzoni, 1900) Daily communication would be thrown into a state of turmoil as even within the confines of a single city “in un crocchio, in una famiglia amongst “la parte meno istrutta delle diverse popolazioni,” as well as in the more educated circles of “le persone civili, colte, letterate,” dialogue would no longer be possible as, Manzoni exclaims, “[qluante cose, quanti a identi giornalieri, quante operazioni abituali, quanti sentiment comuni, inevitabili, quanti oggetti materiali, sia dell’arte, sia della natura, rimarebbero senza nome!” (Manzoni, 1900). It is, in fact, what Manzoni considers the vitality of the dialects, brought about through their indispensability in daily interaction, which reinforces his defense of the establishment of Florentine as national language. He explains that those who have accused Florentine of being nothing more than a dialect are, in 7 Alessandro Manzoni, “Sulla lingua italiana: Lettera al Sig. Cavaliere Consigliere Giacinto Carena” in ute le opere, Vol. 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1973), 1989.fact, paying it the highest compliment by affirming its status as “una lingua vera e reale, formata, vivente, operante, riconoscibile per quel mezzo che tutte le lingue, per una societa d'uomini che la favellino, € Yadoperino tutti e a tutto” (Manzoni, 1770). Manzoni’s advocacy of Florentine comes about partly as a result of Tuscany’s literary and historical supremacy, a circumstance which endows it, even for those who oppose establishing this “dialect” as national language, with a certain superiority. Yet, at the base of all Manzoni’s linguistic choices lies his firm conviction that a national language’s primary function is that of communication, a conviction which leads him to denounce the belief that a language entails “non I'idea universale e perpetua d’un istrumento sociale, ma un concetto indeterminato e confuso d’un non so che letterario” (Manzoni, 1901). As a result of his studies, Manzoni became a prominent figure in the field of linguistics of the Unified Italy. Appointed president of the Commissione per l'unificazione della lingua he presented a report in 1868 entitled “Dell'unita della lingua e dei mezai per difonderla,” a report in which he assessed the condition of the Italian language and presented a plan for encouraging Tuscan throughout the peninsula. However, despite Manzoni’s dedicated work in the field of linguistics, the plan for the implementation of his theories which included his conviction that only ‘Tuscan teachers should be employed in Italian schools throughout the country, was unfeasible in a country whose populace was largelyilliterate and continued to communicate in dialects which were, for the most part, mutually incomprehensible. He also became concerned at the prospect of Rome being named the capital city of the Italian nation, a circumstance which would result, he felt, in a division between the cultural and administrative capitals as this would constitute “un caso singolare che il capo della nazione fosse in un luogo e la sua lingua in un altro.”8 Reactions to Manzoni’s Florentine Model ‘The “soluzione manzoniana” generated considerable criticism amongst the most noteworthy of which we might locate the contributions of Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829-1907) and Giosue Carducci (1835-1907). In his famous preface (1873) to the inaugural issue of the new journal Archivio glottologico italiano, Ascoli gave voice to his criticisms of what he considered Manzoni’s limited and limiting solution to the absence of linguistic unity in Italy. Focusing on the historical changes in the Italian dialects, Florentine included, he called attention to the problems associated with imposing a normative regional model on the rest of the country, criticizing in particular Manzoni’s recommendation that Tuscan teachers be employed throughout the country, as though required to civilize the remote regions of Italy. Carducci too objected to the prescriptive nature of the Manzonian linguistic model of current Florentine and fashioned instead a language which, though allowing ® Cited in Laurie Jane Anderson, ibid, 12. 10space for current Florentine expressions, also drew on the classics of Italian and Latin, thereby countering Manzoni’s rejection of a verbose or bombastic vehicle of literary expression. Other poets too rejected the Manzonian model of literary expression and introduced linguistic elements to their poetry which would find no place in the scheme propounded by the author of I promessi sposi. For example, while Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) sought often obscure linguistic elements from Greek, Latin and various Italian dialects to give full and colorful expression to the wide range of his human emotions, Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912), rejecting the aulic tradition, focused his poetic attention on the tangible world of rural experience and introduced a wide use of onomatopoeic elements and an often technical vocabulary in an attempt to shy away from the excesses of poets such as D’Annunzio, ‘Twentieth Century Deviations This was the linguistically variegated situation which confronted Italy and its letterati at the dawn of the twentieth century. In a politically unified nation in which regional dialect and illiteracy dominated, the language of literature was still ill-equipped to reflect the diversity of the Italian nation and literary language became an obvious artifice synthetically constructed and maintained, often entirely detached from the cadences of the various languages of communication employed in the different regions of the newly-established state. At the turn of the century the linguistic models to emulate consisted of the literary triad of unCarducci, Pascoli and D’Annunzio, each of whom, although scornful of the restrictive Manzonian model, produced a lofty style far removed from the varieties of the spoken tongue. Even those who would broaden the scope of literature in an attempt to reflect the reality of Italy’s common man and echo the cadences of his speech were forced to confront the dilemma inherent in a country in which there existed no common version of the spoken language. An obvious example of this stylistic ambition lies in the Sicilian writings of Giovanni Verga which, set against the backdrop of the world of the Sicilian peasantry, echoed the cadences of the island dialect in his free indirect discourse. A similarly unsatisfactory situation faced the poetic world at the beginning of 1900s. While the chasm between the traditional lofty, bourgeois language of literary expression and the reality of an Italy characterized by linguistic division had, as illustrated above, induced certain poets to adopt an elevated ‘dannunzian’ tone alien to the Italian populace, others instead sought a more direct contact with the supposed banality of daily existence. Among the first poets of the Novecento to deliberately repudiate the lofty terms of the “traditional” model were the Crepuscolari or Twilight poets who in the face of the positivism of bourgeois society and the decadent poetic tradition epitomized by D’Annunzio created a poetry centered on the small, seemingly unimportant and most certainly unheroic objects of daily provincial life. The title “crepuscular” was coined by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese in an 2article published in “La Stampa” on the first of September 1910 and referred to the twilight of the tradition inaugurated by such as Carducci, Pascoli and D’Annunzio and the dawn of a new era in Italian literature. Antonio Gramsci’s and Linguistic Hegemony Within the twentieth century, one of the most important contributions to the still unresolved linguistic debate was made by the Sardinian co-founder of Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Arrested by the Fascist authorities in 1926, Gramsci spent his lengthy incarceration writing his Quaderni del carcere, a collection of notebooks in which he recorded the range and diversity of his political, social and linguistic theories. The importance which he accorded the linguistic question might be explained by his studies at the University of Turin where he came into contact with the linguist Matteo Giulio Bartoli (1873-1946). Bartoli’s school of thought saw linguistic change as a process through which certain dominant social or national groups exerted influence over the speech of a secondary community. In Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci, Franco Lo Piparo argues that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is essentially influenced by his grounding in historical linguistics and goes so far as to suggest that, without his background in linguistics, “non si sarebbe constituito lintero edificio teorico gramsciano e la nozione stessa, centrale, di ‘egemonia’ non avrebbe avuto la sua fisionomia e, forse, nemmeno si sarebbeformata.”® Thus, for Gramsci, the evolution of a language retained the imprints of political and social conflict as well as constituting a model against which to assess the nature of power struggles within other domains of culture as he explains that languages develop not by parthenogenesis but by a process of “innovazione per interferenze,”!9 by which, often within the same nation, “una nuova classe che diventa dirigente innova come ‘massa’ il gergo dei mestieri ecc. cioé delle societa particolari” (Q. 6, 1930-32, 28). Though the examples given by Gramsci refer primarily to historical transformations of national or ethnic languages, he makes it clear that such modifications can also occur within one nation-state and that, at a more local level, the influence may extend from one dominant social group to a subordinate social community. Gramsci’s insistence on the essentially historical nature of language led him to staunchly criticize the linguistic solutions propounded by Alessandro Manzoni on the grounds that Manzoni’s substitution of a rigid and prescriptive version of the Florentine dialect for all other regional variations ignored the historical and social complexities of each individual language or dialect: “ogni lingua é una concezione del mondo integrale, non solo un vestito che faccia indifferentemente da forma a ogni contenuto” (Q. 5, 1930-32: 57 bis). In ° Franco Lo Piparo, Lingua, intllettuali, egemonia in Gramsci (Bari: Laterza, 1979), v. " Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Milan: Einaudi, 1975), Q. 6, 1930-32, 28, Hereafter text citations from Quaderni will be given in paranthesis, “4