The Novel: Ebbs and Flows

I have repeatedly argued for the lack of a purely Italian narrative, understood as a great wide-ranging novelistic tradition. This depends on the delay with which this genre established itself here, due to the slow development of the middle class, i.e. “those citizens” (like me) placed by fortune between the idiot and the man of letters” (Foscolo).

The novel has its impulse in the eighteenth century, first in England and later in France. In Italy, as in Germany or Spain, the middle class has not yet developed as a thinking and highly productive class, in a world still dominated by the aristocracy. The eighteenth century is the century of Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, of Radcliffe, of Voltaire, of Rousseau, of Choderclos de Laclos.

The novel arises together with journalism, in a climate of widespread and growing interest in reading, despite the high cost of books and candles, despite the nefarious tax on windows and the lack of time of the working classes. The cost of a novel is equivalent to a week’s wages, whereas the Elizabethan drama had instead been within everyone’s reach with entry to the Globe costing as much as a mug of beer.

The reading of novels increases after 1742, with the success of circulating libraries. The mercantile and bourgeois class begins to leaf through stories for fun, reading becomes more and more a female occupation. Richardson’s Pamela is the heroine of a generation of literate maids, housekeepers of wealthy families with access to their employers’ libraries. The novel will have the same popular success as the television drama that Cinzia Th Torrini has made from it today, the famous “Elisa di Rivombrosa”.

It is in this period that the genres begin to distinguish themselves, first of all the picaresque novel, then the gothic and the epistolary one. A tendency is created to simulate the truth, a reality effect given by the fiction of the manuscript found in the attic, of the letters found by chance in a trunk. The author only pretends to be the editor of the text. The use of the first narrative person is affirmed, the ego becomes the guarantor of the truth, the private gives substance and endorsement to the public. But this eighteenth-century novel born out of the mercantile bourgeoisie still has an edifying function, it implements a linear scheme for which the happiness of the individual coincides in the end with that of society. However, towards the end of the eighteenth century and with the appearance of the first romantic upheavals on the scene, this pattern cracks. Already Laclos and Sade had reversed values and endings, showing that virtue does not always get a reward, as it was for Richardson. And if in England Jane Austen maintains a balance between enlightenment and pre-romanticism, between rationality and feeling, in Italy Foscolo, with Jacopo Ortis’s last letters refers to Goethe’s Werther and ceases to identify with the community but rather, operates a burning tear. The disappointed individual detaches himself from society, fragments himself, puts himself in contrast with what produced him and surrounds him, up to the extreme rebellion of suicide.

Romantic historicism, the re-evaluation of the past as an explanation of the present and spring towards the future, then produces the historical novel, of which Walter Scott is the progenitor. The gothic novel by Radcliffe, Horace Walpole and Monk Lewis had already drawn on a generically medieval setting, with the recurring themes of the beleaguered virgin, the diabolical persecutor, the gloomy dungeons in the gloomy manor. In Scott, however, it is the first time that the personality of the characters derives directly from the historical background that produced it, overcoming sensationalism.

When Manzoni wrote “The Betrothed” in 1821, he made a choice of radical break, using a genre despised by men of letters who, then as now, prided themselves on the lack of a romance tradition in Italy. “The Betrothed” became an editorial case, copies were sold like hot cakes and in the following decades aroused the proliferation of historical novels, in particular those by Tommaso Grossi, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi and Massimo D’Azeglio.

The historical novel, whether it aims at pleasure or at edification and progress, takes root more and more in the habits of the bourgeoisie and spreads unexpectedly. Most of the authors are northerners, they write a classicist prose, enlivened by dialogues drawn from the theatrical experience and with a language mixed with modern Tuscan.

This contributes to the creation of a common medium language, representative of the cultural level reached by the post-restoration bourgeoisie.

The historical novel flows naturally into the positivist and naturalist trend that prevailed throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, in the wake of Comte. If Balzac and Flaubert can be considered precursors of naturalism, the greatest representative is Emile Zolà. Many of his novels reach a very high circulation and obtain both acclaim and disapproval. The influence of positivism on English fiction was less incisive, although it also followed the great social thread à la Dickens. On the other hand, the positivist influence on the great Russian novel (Gogol, Turgeniev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov) is very remarkable.

The feuilleton, or serial novel, was serialized in newspapers and had a large popular following. Readers identify with the heroes, become passionate about their adventures, rejoice in their final redemption. “The mysteries of Paris” by Sue and “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Dumas become best sellers.

The romance novel always follows the same patterns, from the nineteenth century to Harmony, essentially reinventing the tale of Cinderella, of the beautiful and poor with a simple heart who conquers the rich and dark (declined in all ways, from the Byronic and demonic hero, up to today’s sadistic Mr Gray of “Fifty Shades of Grey”), overtaking more famous rivals. In conclusion, there is a happy ending, with the reconciliation of opposites: marriage and passion.

The adventure novel has its peaks in Verne and Salgari, the detective novel in Conan Doyle, with urbanization, the increase in crime, the development of positivist science applied to investigations, but also in Agatha Christie, Van Dine (creator by Philo Vance), Edgar Wallace, and, later, the gangster one in Dashell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

In the meantime, the publishing industry developed, with numerous publishing houses spreading on the market literary products in popular editions, as happens in Italy for the Sonzogno publisher. The magazines in which militant criticism, literary controversy, reviews and serialized novels find space are multiplying. It is aimed at an audience of new users of petty bourgeois or working class extraction, the novel becomes a consumer genre with Tarchetti, Verga, Capuana, D’Annunzio, De Amicis. Historical subjects are abandoned in favor of contemporary ones. All the production of the second half of the nineteenth century is under the sign of realism, with attention to the social question not resolved by the unification of Italy. However, we are often limited to a pietistic and generically humanitarian attitude towards the less well-off classes, to the urban and rural underclass represented with a language that veers from the classical to the false plebeian, where the figure of the worker does not yet find space. (“Heart” by De Amicis or “The Belly of Naples” by Matilde Serao).

Once again, the most popular novel developed more in the rest of Europe than in Italy. While abroad it ranges from the ideological novel by Sue and Hugo, to the historical one by Dumas, to the detective novel by Ponson du Terrail and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to the gothic one by Radcliffe, to the adventurous scientific one by Verne, in Italy the gap between writers and people, between intellectuals and ordinary people is unbridgeable, and our production of popular novels remains confined to Carolina Invernizio, Ada Negri, Matilde Serao and Mastriani of “La cieca di Sorrento”, which has a resounding success.

The best narrative production of the late nineteenth century is always Anglo-Saxon. Masterpieces such as “The Scarlet Letter” by Hawthorne and “Moby Dick” by Melville are born in the United States. In England Kipling, Stevenson and Wells (considered the father of science fiction) exploit the possibilities of fantastic and adventurous narrative to express the problems and conflicts of their time. James develops the technique of the circumscribed point of view, later taken up by Conrad.

In Italy, influenced by Huysmans, D’Annunzio creates the character of Andrea Sperelli, the first true decadent hero like Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Pirandello and Svevo link up with the European tradition of Proust, Kafka, Musil, Joyce and V. Woolf, opening up a research perspective. The coherent construction of the character and the objective reality of the facts lose their importance, the character becomes “consciousness” and moves back and forth in the memory, in the stream of thought and in the unconscious, just discovered by Freud and Jung. The novel becomes essay, narration of ideas, because the reflective element prevails over the narrative one, this happens in particular in Thomas Mann.

While in Europe we move further and further away from naturalism, in the United States a new realism is being experimented, a dry, synthetic way of narrating, which lets the facts speak for themselves with Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, discovered and translated in Italy by Pavese and Victorini.

Here, the gap between high and low literature deepens, a real double market of letters stabilizes, on the one hand consumer novels (Pitigrilli, Da Verona, Liala) on the other intellectuals who write for other intellectuals (Vittorini, Bilenchi, Moravia, Landolfi, Buzzati). We have to wait until the 1930s for the novel to establish itself definitively as an art form. The number of “Solaria” dedicated to Svevo dates back to 1929 and in the same year Moravia’s “Gli Indifferenti” was published.

Opposing tendencies intertwine which go both in the direction of a new realism — writers who recover the regionalist and naturalistic tradition enriching it with a psychological dimension, with Silone, Pavese, Vittorini, Pratolini — and of a realism of a magical type with Bontempelli, Landolfi, Alvaro.

In France Sartre and Camus write intellectual novels, recounting the absurdity and emptiness of existence. All the procedures aimed at deconstructing the traditional novel, such as the interior monologue or the stream of consciousness, are taken to the extreme consequences. In particular with Robbe — Grillet consciousness becomes perceptive psychic activity in the phenomenological sense. Beckett too represents the loneliness, incommunicability and alienation of modern man. The division into genres loses much of its meaning, it becomes difficult to distinguish between diary, essay, reflection, conversation.

Meanwhile, in Italy post-war neorealism is clearly distinguished from the new realism of the thirties which was purely literary. The term, borrowed from cinema, entails precise social needs. The models continue to be Verga and the Americans, but the novels become increasingly socially engaged, realistic, anti-decadent, with a return to tradition, weighed down, however, by ideology.

The highest expression of neorealism is Pratolini in “Chronicles of poor lovers”, but Rea, Brancati, Tobino, Berto, Fenoglio are also fundamental.

With the crisis of neorealism, new expressive techniques are experimented and searched for. In Pasolini realism becomes populism which creates a mimetic identification through the language of the petty bourgeois author with a longed for and mythologized proletariat. In “Ragazzi di vita” the protagonists speak a dialect reconstructed in a philological way but the author still makes himself heard in the lyrical descriptions.

Calvino develops his fantastic vein, while Sciascia, Cassola, Bassani, Ginzburg, Ortese, Pomilio and Piovene each experiment with their own style. The historical novel is revisited in a modern key by Tomasi di Lampedusa and Morante.

From the end of the war to the 1960s, realism and subjectivism continue to alternate in fiction from around the world, from Yourcenair to Brecht, from Böll to Grass. In Russia, the case of Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” broke out, censored and forced by the Soviet regime not to accept the Nobel prize, while Bulgakov surprised us with his “novel in the novel” “The Master and Margarita”. In the United States, African-American and Jewish novelists established themselves. Among them the most important is Saul Bellow. Alongside him we have Roth, Malamud, Mailer, and the beat generation unleashed in the wake of Keruac’s “On the Road”, connected to jazz, hallucinogens, oriental spirituality. There is a revaluation and an awareness of ethnic minorities, Carver’s minimalism is also affirmed, a flat style that voluntarily excludes the reader’s involvement.

The dispute also involves other English-speaking countries, especially the former colonies. South American literature acquires great importance with the game of mirrors by the Argentine Borges and the imagination of the Colombian Marquez in his absolute masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

Meanwhile, with us, the industrial world slowly slips into fictional reality with the theme of alienation, of the robot man, in Ottieri, Parise of “The master”, Bianciardi of “La vita agra”, Arpino. The cultural machine is increasingly articulated in large apparatuses such as Rai, cinema, publishing, schools. Books and films become commodities, publishers become managers who take care of marketing, and the focus is on profit. The large publishing groups consolidate to the detriment of the small artisan publishing houses. From the strategy of the two cultures we pass to a single culture that includes them all. Between 1962 and 1965 there was a boom in encyclopaedias in installments and publications on newsstands. The Oscar Mondadori collection divulges works of all kinds, high and low, schooling becomes general, the university is no longer elite. The intellectual becomes a worker, often unemployed or precarious.

The neo-avant-garde Group 63 opposes this mass culture, decreeing the end of the bourgeois novel, its death with Sanguineti and Balestrini. The protest of 1968 brings the intellectual back into the world and the process of massification of culture resumes (fortunately, I say). Trivialliteratur regains value and diffusion, the cultural industry is aimed at everyone and identifies sectors that attract, for example the female or youth world, and whoever knows how to represent one of these sectors can become its author.

Simenon in France and Scerbanenco in Italy give new impetus to the quality detective genre, Peverelli and Gasperini carry on a romance tradition that does not know how to free itself from tradition, always linked to heroines such as those of Liala, punished with death if barely transgressive, still linked to image of a woman who loves and has no sexual appetites.

But pure intellectuals such as d’Arrigo and Eco continue to act hand in hand, although more and more neo-avant-garde experimentation is extinguished in the return to tradition. The post-1968 climate favors a reflux in the private sector and in regionalism (Tomizza, Sgorlon). The affirmation of the institution of the literary prize means that the choices of the public are strongly influenced.

After the seventies, science fiction continues its path and, during the eighties, fantasy develops, with the great progenitor Tolkien but also other prominent authors (Terry Brooks, Marion Zimmer Bradley, to name a few, in turn descendants of a tradition that ranges from Poe to Reider Haggard, up to the more recent Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter)

One of the major publishing successes of recent years, with which I conclude my brief but certainly not exhaustive excursus, is Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, with multiple levels of reading: thriller, historical novel, philosophical novel. This is the tendency of today’s fiction, to take place on multiple levels, satisfying various types of readers, both those looking for a literature full of nuances, meanings and symbols, and those who just want to follow a good story.

From the end of the eighties until the Wu Ming collective of 93 — with the manifesto of the new Italian epic — a lot of water has passed under the bridge, but it is still recent water and difficult to analyse. In particular, in recent times, the Internet has further standardized the act of writing, making it possible for anyone with talent, or even just narrative ambitions, to communicate without editorial filters, even without even being published. Now even the unpublished text has its diffusion and the novel has become transmedia, collective, with the possibility of evolving and changing through spin-offs and reader fanfiction. There is also a phenomenon of “deconstruction”, in which the texts posted on the net, even the classics, are deconstructed, taken up, modified without the author’s knowledge (I have been the victim with one of my short stories.) We cannot know if this is the future, and if so, it is a creepy future anyway.

In conclusion, I think that no one has a monopoly on talent. As this summary demonstrates, there have always been ebbs and flows in fiction. All styles, all shapes, all genres have had and have equal dignity. The old antithesis between surreal avant-garde and traditional narration, between high and low literature, seems to me to finally have to be overcome and that it would be time for Italians too to develop a great narrative, capable of placing itself in the wake of a wider tradition, not so provincial, a narrative where there could be room for all currents and forms, from the fantastic to the real, from sentiment to intellect, from symbol to plot.