
Italy Literature Part 2
PP Pasolini had already made provision for a similar periodization, but referring to language in general, and not only to the language-dialect relationship (in Ulysses, 1956-57, fasc. XXIV-XXV) outlining a first moment, with an average language of the Manzoni type, a second moment, characterized by a koiné resulting from an interregional generic mixture, and a third neorealistic moment aspiring to the mimetic use of an everyday speech but substantially fixed to the reuse of the koiné. A few years later, however, Pasolini also recorded (Rinascita, December 24, 1964) positively the advent of a “technical-scientific” language which, not aligning itself with the previous stratifications, “presents itself as a homologator of the other linguistic stratifications and even as a modifier within languages”. Pasolini’s affirmations, with which the birth of Italian was greeted as a “national language”, had the merit of giving life to an extremely heated debate full of explanations that were undoubtedly productive also on the level of experimentation. The reading and dissemination of the writings of G. Lukàcs and the authors of the Frankfurt school, as well as the arrangement and rereading of the corpus of Gramscian writings, also played an extremely important role in the literary debate of the 1960s. Crucial was, for example., in the debate on realism that took place in the 1950s, a certain type of diffusion of Lukàcs’s work, limited for many years to the translation of the writings belonging to the most recent phase of his thought, that is to the Lukàcs of dialectical materialism understood as the foundation of aesthetics, to the Lukacs of socialist realism and the theory of mirroring; just as, on the other hand, the knowledge of the analysis of art-society relations in the late-capitalist era allowed by the diffusion of the works of W. Benjamin and TW Adorno was fundamental in the formation of the neo-avant-garde. The situation of literary production in verse in the last fifteen years has its roots in the proposals and needs that emerged in the 1950s, in particular with the experience ofWorkshop. Many elements of confusion and ambiguity were in fact implicit in the commitment underlying Pasolini’s neo-experimentalism of Officinaas an element of continuity, rather than breaking, with respect to the worn-out late-hermetic and neorealist codes. The absence of a will of total detachment of the expressive institutes of post-war poetry entailed a strong limitation of the field of research and a substantial permanence, at the bottom of every programmatic declaration of destruction of dogmas, of an equivocal demand for “commitment”, placed no longer in support of official ideologies, but in a generic cognitive function. However, the clearly expressed will to re-establish an authentic contact with reality, that is, not modeled on pre-established schemes, moved in the direction of that deepening of the problem of realism, which constitutes the request with the most consequences of the literary research of the 1960s. . However, this instance was already present, for example. in the preface by L. Anceschi to a poetic anthology of the early 1950s (Lombard line, 1952), in which the “poetics of objects” was spoken of as a line that crosses the twentieth century starting with G. Gozzano and E. Pound.
Thus, for poetry, it is possible to roughly trace three main directions referable in the first place to post-hermetic models, secondly to a line of antilyric objectivism and finally to the area of the neo-avant-garde.
According to REMZFAMILY.COM, the post-hermetic climate, definable through a common reference on which to set eclectic variations of stylistic modules in a multiplicity of heterogeneous directions, manifests its exhaustion in the 1960s. In this sense, the effort to search for new anti-iliric directions, evident for example in the most recent poems of E. Montale through the use of satirical-epigrammatic modules, it appears substantially failed.
Thus, to the more or less linear hermeticism of S. Solmi, L. Sinisgalli, M. Luzi, P. Bigongiari, A. Gatto, L. De Libero, V. Sereni, A. Borlenghi, alongside the continuation of the descriptivism of L. Fallacara or the impressionistic realism of S. Penna, or the intimism of G. Caproni, the emergence of a sort of populist anticalligraphy in C. Betocchi, the appeasement of the obsessive oneirism by L. Piccolo (in Plumelia). That desire to break the metaphysical isolation from objects, which had constituted the distinctive feature of hermeticism, already present in many of the authors already mentioned, continues to determine the introduction of civil, political and social meanings into a structure that remains fundamentally elegiac, as happens for example. in the verses of F. Fortini (Once and for all ; The ungrateful guest ; This wall).
Similarly, the poetry of B. Cattafi (L’osso, anima ; L’aria dry del fuoco), by G. Orelli (In the family circle ; The hour of time).
As for the line that has been defined of anti-iliric objectivism, it should be noted that it is expressed at the level of tension, of research, that is, at a level of programmatic experimentalism, rather than at the level of completed realizations. It was a question of intervening on pre-established, crepuscular and hermetic literary modules, in the light of instances borrowed from neorealism, that is, in search of a different contact with reality. In the variety of outcomes this is the common starting point for L. Erba (The lesser evil), for G. Giudici (Life in verse ; Autobiology), for G. Raboni (The catalog is this ; The unhealthy air ; The houses of the Vetra ; Festa romanorum; Economy of fear), for R. Crovi (Pharisee and publican ; In praise of the deserter), for N. Risi (Elementary thoughts ; Inside the substance ; Of certain things), for R. Roversi (After Campoformio ; The description in act). In this sense, the work in verse by PP Pasolini (The religion of my time ; Poetry in the form of a rose ; Trasumanar and organize) should be read,in which, however, the will to recover reality determines, at the expressive level, a fundamental contradiction between elegiac modules and discursive-rationalizing modules of civil inspiration.