Of miracles and catastrophes: the new avantgarde at the dawn of the economic boom.

   But afterwards there occurred violent
   earthquakes and floods; and in a
   single day and night of misfortune
   all your warlike men in a body sank
   into the earth, and the island of Atlantis
   in like manner disappeared in
   the depths of the sea. For which reason
   the sea in those parts is impassable
   and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and
   this was caused by the subsidence of the island.--Plato, Timaeus

The recent history of post-reconstruction Italy could very well read like the tale of a new and perhaps more modest Atlantis:

   Over 60 years ago there existed a new nation
   in the heart of the Mediterranean
   sea, populated by a noble but
   humiliated race that, having come
   into possession of new--albeit
   borrowed--wealth soon became an
   important center for trade and commerce.
   This was the new--and
   much improved--Italian Republic.

Granted, Italy cannot boast a mythical origin such as that of Atlantis, but it can claim the patronage of newly acquired friends. And yet, the hopes brought on by the Economic Miracle in the 1950s, which propelled Italy into a period of great socio-economic development, also brought with it its own cataclysmic transmutations in the field of the arts. The aim of the present study is to examine the intellectual debate begun with the rise of a new experimentalism initiated by Group 63, focusing on its criticism of both Neorealism and the historical avantagarde in view of the socio-politic and cultural transformations brought on by the Economic Boom.

The So-Called "Miracle": Neorealism and Revision

Putting the fairy tale aside for a moment, let us focus on the specifics of some of these great changes. The 40s see an Italy in great political turmoil. Soon after Mussolini's deposition in 1943, Pietro Badoglio called for a new government to negotiate a peace with the allies. With the Germans banished, and Italy liberated by the allies the Badoglio's interim government gives way to a provisional government headed by Enrico de Nicola that paves the way to a new republican Italy. With Mussolini and the monarchy gone, Italy was stripped of what had been its two central symbols of national unity, opening up an era of rapid political and social transition. (1) After the war, the antifascist intellectuals face new ethical and political tensions. They attempted to rearticulate a national identity that would successfully banish the highly stylized and often obscure literature of the Fascist period. (2) For a good number of them, redefining what it meant to be Italian became a cultural imperative, not merely outside the ideological models set forth by the regime, but in the context of a newly negotiated peace with the allies. This antifascist cultural movement characterized by a return to a clear expository language, would take the name of Neorealism; a term that illustrates a certain literary and film production from 1943 to 1952, in other words from the time of the liberation to the start of the Economic Boom. Neorealist novelists, poets, and filmmakers dedicated themselves to a momentous act of historical revision, initially focusing on narratives of individual courage and militant resistance. For instance, novel like Beppe Fenoglio's highly autobiographical I ventitre giorni della citta di Alba (1952) depicts the heroic actions of a battalion of soldiers joined by a group of young farmers at the time of the Allied liberation. Similarly, Roberto Rossellini's landmark film Open City (1945) portrays the harrowing struggle of everyday women and children as they sought to shield members of the resistance from the Nazis forces occupying Rome. Such works came to epitomize a new progressive and democratic Italy by creating a unitary and heroic vision of a people ravaged by war, yet still dignified in their common suffering. At the same time, by initially focusing on a segment of Italy's recent history between Mussolini's deposition and the Allies' liberation (roughly between July 1943 and April 1945), these works bypassed that perilous connection to a now defunct Fascist regime.

Neorealism's efforts to heal the wounds of recent traumatic events met with great popular approval, establishing itself as the new voice of an emerging postwar Italy. Between 1949 and 1952 about fifty Neorealist novels were published, and just as many movies were produced. Ironically, they ultimately resulted in the creation of a new status quo, as the movement gradually turned dogmatic, having exhausted its original intent (see Barberi Squarotti 127-30; Luperini 390-98). Neorealism became too limited in subject and approach, often exploited by the intellectuals of the Italian Communist Party, ultimately too engrossed in past events or too ideologically driven to truly relate Italy's present condition. It is no surprise then that by the 1950s novelist Italo Calvino and then-scriptwriter Federico Fellini, who had been staunch supporters of their Neorealist colleagues, had begun to disassociate themselves from them seeking new avenues of expression in the fantastic and the uncanny. Already in his Neorealist novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947), Calvino projected the period of the Italian resistance onto a mythical dimension, in order to find an alternative to a neorealist populist celebration. By 1952, Calvino will have rejected any pretence of realism, in favor the fairytale-like plot of his novel II Visconte dimezzato. Similarly, Fellini who had begun his film career as a scriptwriter for Rossellini, opted for a more personal and expressionistic style, following current trends in French film--more specifically New Wave Cinema--, culminating in his notorious film La dolce vita (1959).

What had happened to warrant such drastic shifts in the arts? WWII had begun to rouse Italy from its cultural provincialism by forcing a closer interaction between different segments of the Italian population that would have otherwise remained isolated (see Ginsborg). By the late 40s, the post-war economic hardships forgotten, Italy had undergone a period of economic growth due to American aids made available by the Marshall plan--a new illusory affluence that would quickly lose momentum since it did not spring from preexisting conditions for wealth. By 1951 the country had joined NATO, and was about to become a new member of a global market economy. In fact, by signing The Paris Treaty the country joined the European Coal and Steel Community, and by 1957 became one of the founding members of the EEC. (3) The sudden increase in productivity, a so-called Economic Miracle, brought a hasty development in the industrialized north, and a subsequent exodus of workers from the rural areas toward these rapidly growing urban centers. Italy's new industry-based economy directed its energies on motor-vehicle manufacture, oil and related products while reducing agricultural production to a fraction of its output. This hasty urban expansion provided its own structural problems since the Italian government was not immediately capable to foresee the need for social structures to support such growth. These migration patterns would in large part contribute to the demise of peasant culture throughout the country and to the rise of a bourgeoning middle class (see Clark 348-73; Romano and Vivanti 383-438). Italian contemporary writer Luciano Bianciardi reflects not without a touch of sarcasm:

   Il miracolo ve lo montiamo sul
   serio, noi. E aumentata la produzione
   lorda e netta, il reddito nazionale
   cumulativo e pro capite ... il numero
   delle auto in circolazione ... la tariffa
   delle ragazze squillo ... il biglietto
   del trame il totale dei circolanti su
   detto mezzo, il consumo del pollame
   ... l'eta media, la statura media, la
   produttivita media, e la media oraria
   al giro d'Italia. Tutto quello che c'e
   di medio e aumentato. (156-57)

Bianciardi's compelling words point to an equally important aspect of this economic 'miracle,' the rise of mass culture. The sudden economic and urban development, coupled with changes in labor and educational structures, heralded equally astounding cultural transformations. The greater availability of secondary and higher education, the subsequent rise in enrollment, and the increase in disposable income and leisure time contributed to a greater demand for items of cultural consumption. Aided by the improved output of industrial manufacturing and distribution, the publishing industry was now able to offer affordable paperbacks, as well as new cultural products aimed at a growing mass readership.

In this changing socio-cultural environment the Neorealists' obsession with the period of the second world conflict lost its appeal, and neorealist depictions of an underdeveloped, and victimized Italy began to look like a nostalgic retreat into an imaginary time in which the human and moral potential of Italians appeared starker in the face of wartime distress. It is ironic that the Neorealist writers, who had lenta voice to the war experiences of the common people, would see in the rise of new sector of cultural production wholly dedicated to a mass audience something of a threat to their endeavor.

Two Generations in Conflict: The Demise of Realista

The 1950s witnessed the rise of new literary journals that addressed the socio-economic transformations of Italy due to the Economic Boom. Among them, II Verri (4) stood out as the voice of a younger generation of intellectuals for whom the war had been but a childhood memory rather than a passage into adulthood. Among its contributors the journal counted such illustrious names as Angelo Guglielmi, Umberto Eco, Alberto Arbasino, Renato Barilli, and Edoardo Sanguineti, all of whom continue to be important figures in the present Italian intellectual sphere. (5) The aim of Il Verri and its contributors soon became the systematic criticism of the Neorealists' outright indifference to the evolution of a new Italy. To this young generation of intellectuals the Neorealists did not merely seem outdated or ideologically compromised, but most importantly guilty of having renounced the very realist principle that had motivated their work. In his "Cahier de doleances sull'ultima narrative italiana," first published in II Verti in February of 1960, Barilli accused Neorealist writers of offering a too reductive appraisal of reality, merely reproducing the set of values that regulated human action rather than truly represent reality. Barilli instead called for a reexamination of precisely that totalizing "common sense" that had reduces communication to tautology ultimately seeking what lied beyond or rather beneath it. Soon after Arbasino joined in indicting the Neorealist writers for their adoption of antiquated philosophical ideas that perpetrated the intellectual alienation begun with Fascist censure. Their failure lied in their refusal to be open to new scientific, cognitive, and philosophical paradigms indigenous to a bourgeoning neocapitalist society (cfr. Barilli 1969-90; Arbasino).

Writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini became a central figure in this debate, more specifically for his experimentalist literary program as articulated in bis journal Officina. Taking his cue from the Neorealists, but like his younger colleagues, feeling the need to replenish its now stagnant forms, Pasolini vied for a renewal through what he termed a 'neoexperimentalism.' This was to be accomplished, he argued, by returning to the literary practices of turn of the century French realism and Italian naturalism. (6) The members of Il Verri accused Pasolini of being reactionary and regressive on the basis that such narrative strategies, born in different historical and cultural conditions, would not be capable of reflecting and elucidating the contemporary realities of the country.

Il Verri soon moved from the criticism of the Neorealists and their sympathizers to the search of a new artistic language unencumbered by ideological bias. (7) Clearly influenced by new developments in structural linguistics, the contributors of Il Verri agreed that representation is reduced to mystification at the precise moment in which the artist views it as transparent mediation of reality. Language could no longer be viewed as that which gives shape and meaning to a chaotic reality, but a set of rules and conceits that separates its users from reality. It would be a grave mistake to view reality and its representations as homologous entities. Language is not a transparent descriptive medium but an arbitrary organized system of signs, concepts, and categories that is incapable of securing an unproblematic relationship with the world; it may offer coherence but not accuracy or authenticity, thus leaving both writer and reader to confront the alienating rift between sign and the world. (8)

This aesthetic and formal investigation culminated in a new vision of the creative process as exemplified in a 1962 article by Umberto Eco, perhaps the most renowned member of the group. In Del modo diformare come impegno sulla realta, Eco suggested that there is a kind of alienation internal to all forms of artistic discourse. In his view, by enforcing a shape on the world through an ordered narrative, the committed neorealist artist at once objectifies and loses himself in the object he has created, since the form he adopts would be affected by the same crisis he intended to criticize. (9) For in his attempt to render "poetic" and personal a specific ideological discourse the neorealist writer would be unable to grasp the specific "concrete objective relations" he aimed to denote. Thus, realistic form

   si fa significante grazie a una mistificazione attuata con
   l'applicazione di strutture narrative che esigono comunque la
   soluzione di una premessa, la conclusione ordinata, la fine di un
   inizio, e non consentono un inizio senza fine. (Eco 223)

Ultimately, Eco argues, realisms leads to mystification when it treats languages as a transparent medium of social critique thus revealing a basic lack of self-awareness. The search for logical, chronological, and formal coherence characterizing realistic representation cannot ensure a specific ordered world-view. To proclaim oneself a realist is paradoxically to negate the structures that give shape to 'reality' instead falling victim to the pretences and prescriptions of the object. In short, the realist artist unknowingly commits to the same mystification and alienation he denounces in bourgeois literature by favoring a lower common linguistic register in order to combat the injustices of a new industrial and technological society. Realism leads to mystification when it lacks self-awareness by viewing languages as a transparent medium of protest. Such is the case of neorealist artistic practices that paradoxically lead to obscuring the very power relationships they mean to expose and denounce. It follows that for Eco and his colleagues the essential problem of realism was not merely one of an antiquated stylistic approach, but rather one of a more general epistemological crisis of all foundational truths. For this reason, Il Verri promoted writers interested in new cognitive models able to rise above this epistemological impasse; writers capable of breaking down and breaking free from the determinism of realistic practices.

Among the Italian writers featured in Il Verri, Carlo Emilio Gadda became a primary example, in an Italian context, of a new kind of excessive language able to subvert its very systemic limitations by displaying its internal inconsistencies. In an article first published in Il Verri in 1960, Angelo Guglielmi argues that Gadda's forceful rejection of conventional literary realism in favor of a fragmented and disjointed narrative appeared as a more viable way to portray the disorienting effects of contemporary society (Guglielmi, Vero e falso 50-56). In contrast with Pasolini's more deterministic Naturalism, Gadda's often-grotesque narrative, rejects any moralism of the sort to be found in Neorealist texts. Gadda's most discussed novel, Quer Pasticciaccio (1957), emerged as the prime example of the way literature may yet contribute to an ultimate denial of preconceived hierarchical orders and successfully collapse naturalistic determinism. The multi-vocal parodic language characterizing this novel, its deliberate misspellings mimicking a low colloquial register, along with an often-disjointed plot, short-circuit any ideological superstructure by distorting or pulverizing traditional narrative forms. For analogous reasons, the works of international writers such as James Joyce, Robert Musil, and Alain Robbe-Grillet were often cited as examples of subversion of the very reification intrinsic to realistic representation. The technical innovations of

these authors along with their anti-realist attitude would allow to free literature from its perceived limitations, and would become key to the articulation of a new avantgarde poised to overcome the constraints of its historical predecessor.

The Phoenix: Death and Rebirth of the Avangarde

In 1961, key contributors of Il Verri published an anthology of poetry entitled I novissimi (Giuliani). The poetry collected therein offered a clear example of the type of literary language sought by this new generation of writers, a language that rejected the lyricism of open and dynamic verse, or the elegiac tone of a moral. Instead it seized on the immediacy of an unconscious, pre-grammatical gesture escaping mere rhetorical effect. The poets showcased in this anthology organized a series of conferences and public readings, experimenting with visual and electronic media. In October 1963 in Palermo's Hotel Zagarella, this group of writers and intellectuals came to be called Group 63. They also attempted to conceive a first provisional program that would reflect and extend the critical work that begun with Il Verri. They once again affirmed that realism and its pretensions of objectivity were no longer apt to represent the vigor of contemporary industrial and technological society. Moreover, the group agreed that this new avant-garde must do away with other remnants of a now defunct literature, starting from the last residues of the Romantic tradition--namely, beauty and the sublime--, and the ideological precepts of the historical avantgarde.

Group 63's rejection of these principles exacerbated its ideological distance from the historical avant-garde. On the basis of its newly acquired awareness of a general epistemological crisis, the members of Group 63 rejected the avantgarde's utopian horizon. Central to this attitude is the simple recognition of the ideological impasse of the old avantgarde, a kind of skepticism towards the organizing, compelling, and revolutionary force of the artistic form. (10) In today's world the radical potential of such ideologically charged practices had been reduced to mere cliche, a knee-jerk response to the needs of the very market it once aimed to subvert. (11) All members of Group 63 in varying degree concured that ideological or political engagement would no longer be a viable option. Angelo Guglielmi sees this crisis as the sign of a new Gestalt that demands that the antiquated means by which the writer made sense of the world be discarded. The writer, no longer able to truly "reflect" reality outsides of historically predetermined forms must now self-consciously engage the very embedded nature of his/her own work, from a material, non-sentimental perspective. This newly established relationship with the content of literature, in his opinion, leads to a kind of linguistic excess that may filter reality only in fragments. This new experimentalism is in no way a reprisal of the ideological principles of its antecedent but rather a desire to reflect the world without giving a shape to it. While agreeing with Guglielmi that the Neovanguard cannot return to the ideological mandate of the historical avantgarde, both Edoardo Sanguineti and Renato Barilli believe that Neovangard art can nonetheless obstruct the totalizing forces of the cultural machine.

A 'new' visionary avantgarde should take the place of the old one, one capable of diverting and extending the very system of relationships upon which the subject and its broken artistic forms are predicated. This new art must reclaim its own autonomy and henceforth reject its teleological bias by becoming self-signifying. In so doing, the individual would no longer be alienated from the supporting structures of production, but rather estranged from their very claim to objectivity. Thus unburdened from the drive to comment on or transcend his/her present historical situation, the neovangardist writer simply bares witness to its disorienting effects, mimicking the general state of alienation of contemporary life without offering a consolatory respite from it. As we shall see, this also implies a changed relationship between reader and text.

The experimentalism of Group 63 proposed to overturn literary language and its faulty certainties by rejecting a seemingly naturalistic correspondence between representation and meaning. Neovanguardist art renounced its mediating role by replacing instruction with exposition. The Neovangard text conveys its meaning through construction rather than through a univocal, albeit ideologically embedded, message. No longer focusing on the connotative value of language, the author denotes the violent contact with an alienating material reality. Language, and its symbolically charged objects, thus becomes the subject of this innovative process. Rather than seducing the reader by providing a totalizing view of the world, the writers of Group 63 set off a forceful collision between the art object and its audience. This in turn triggers an emotional disturbance forcing its audience to critically peruse the text and the world with different eyes. In short, unlike the French Surrealists the art of Group 63 does not constitute an act of resistance toward reality proper, or a search for authenticity, nor does it pretend to transcend reality, as was the case for Futurism. (12) While drawing inspiration from both these movements, the proposed Neovangardist object impedes the possibility for any absolute symbol to crystallize. The Neovanguard instead questions the absolute nature of the mechanisms through which the world as we perceive it is articulated and rendered visible, thus changing the very status of literature in order to override its estrangement from other spheres of everyday life. (13)

Even as Group 63 rejected the expressiveness of artistic forms, form was refunctionalized within a new grammar of disorder ultimately revealing the art object's essential incongruence and discontinuity. The artist chooses prevarication over a clear pronouncement with regards to his/her present dismal situation, in order to obstruct an eventual absorption in an alternate but nevertheless ordered world-view which Group 63 perceives as the ultimate fate of the historical avantgarde. In contrast, the Neovangardist should question the very conventions he/she appropriates, and reveal their epistemological bias, by disallowing concordance and closure. (14) Art would thus remain open and ambiguous with respect to form in its traditional sense. (15) By becoming the very symptom of this intellectual crisis this new avantgarde art hoped to maintain a connection to the social milieu from which it springs. (16) It establishes a direct tie to what it sees as a dystopian world, thus actively engaging the subject's alienation. In fact, the way in which art forms the material of its exposition is in itself a marker of the type of relationship the artist institutes with the world. Going back to Del modo di formare, Eco argues that the neovangardist writer's denial of any stable order is motivated first and foremost by his/her abnegation of his/her privileged position. By the rejection of a subject-centered narrative, the neovangardist makes a self-effacing irrational gesture. In view of the fact that:

   Fare un apparente discorso sul mondo raccontando un "sogetto" che
   abbia immediati riferimenti alla nostra vita concreta, puo essere il
   modo piu palmare e tuttavia inavvertibile di evadere ... una
   problematica attuale ridotta nell'ambito comunicativo legato a
   un'altra situazione storica, fuori dai limiti del nostro tempo e
   quindi di fatto non dire niente su di noi. (Eco 221)

If the rules through which the object becomes visible are no longer experienced as transparent it becomes clear that its effects are conditioned by and conditional upon those same structures. Objectivity itself fails as principle of authentication, since form can only provide a provisional order, ultimately insufficient to legitimaze individual experience. Paradoxical as it sounds, the traces of the human will that produced the art object become its distinguishing trait; a human and artistic will that has taken it upon itself to protract its presence beyond its own physical limitations in spite of the conscious risk of objectification. This creates the conditions of possibility for a new autonomy in the very perception of those traces, allowing both the artist and his/her audience a chance to "re-cognize," to examine them, not as part of his/her own experience of alienation, but as metaphors of that experience. It follows that this first-level or formal estrangement can surface only through the artist's self-awareness of alienation and its effects on the subject. For this reason the object of this new avantgarde must always be at some level self-referential, evading and denouncing the double movement of alienation--from and to something. (17)

The Neovangardist, as conceived by the members of Group 63, would employ and exploit the mechanistic features of language in order to open them up and expose them. (18) By breaking with literary conventions and socially inscribed relationships from within these normative systems, the new writer could potentially reap new and unexpected results. In this manner, Group 63 believed, literature continues to tell us something about ourselves, and our social condition. Rather than striving for a balance between form and function, the new artist should offer an element of surprise, a series of internal contradictions that disallow any systematic and uncomplicated reading by playing with the audience's formal expectations. The self-conscious and self-referential contemporary artist, aware that the literary conventions available no longer apply to his/her specific historical situation, must create new formal structures that function as epistemological metaphors of chaos. The reader is then forced to disengage from the set of linguistic and formal devices that would otherwise impede his/her interpretive autonomy, by separating forms from their immediate effects on the subject. The Neovangard artist must stage a type of alienation; that of form experienced as such, while halting that of mystification by obsessing with the formal semantic ambiguities intrinsic to language. This exercise ultimately makes form the new content of art and halts mystification.

Eco suggests that the new avangardist becomes a kind of anthropologist, adopting the same discursive strategies that constitute the object of his/her observation, while at the same rime distancing him/herself by way of reductive mediation (Del modo diformare 224); a kind of double-coding that gives rise to a metalanguage in constant tension between the individual's control over the object and the alienating effects of the object over the subject. Eco proposes an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to appropriate all technical and specialized languages tied to the specific cultural milieu, such as technical jargon, political cliches, and popular slang in order to reveal the ways in which they become significant within the alienating discourses from which they have been taken. In order to explore the way in which the individual is acted upon by these external circumstances, the writer-anthropologist must map the very objective configurations of these conditions. At the same, while still accumulating partial fragmentary descriptions in the way of a conventional narration the neovangardist writer must never re-inscribe them within a single interpretation. Since language can never represent anything but itself, each of these sublanguages remain bound to their respective context. (19) The forms of such "anthropological" writing must display the absence or crisis of all parameters of judgment and behavior and can never be reduced to a series of causal or reasonable relationships. Neovanguard writers can only reflect on the complex and irresolvable relations that afflict each character, calling attention to the estranging effects of 'meaningful language,' in order to avoid a passive acceptance or imitation. The writer must no longer seek narrative order but order of form which must remain separate from the situation described. The neovangardist writer confronts the contingent status of objectification reclaiming it through the traces of the self present in the language of his/her shaping. Alienation is thus transformed into a category of knowledge that determines the reader's every action and thought, ultimately becoming the constitutive principle of his/her relationship with the world.

Conclusions

The widespread cultural ramifications of Italy's socio-economic development during the Economic Boom continue to haunt Italian intellectuals today. While some critics like Giulio Ferroni in his Dopo la fine have lamented the 'posthumous' status of literature due to the erosion initiated by the avant-garde and cemented by the expansion of mass culture, it is also true that literature is able to surpass both the conditions that have produced it, and the cultural babble of the conflicting voices it generates.

While many literary critics accused Group 63 of a perplexing and anti-humanistic approach, its members insisted that it is precisely through their new way of modeling a confusing reality while retaining its undeniable disorder that the contemporary artist can truly speak to it, as well as about it. Essentially, this new avant-garde art maintains its connection to the social milieu from which it springs, by becoming the very symptom of the intellectual and social crisis of late capitalism. Consciously artificial and adventurous, mimicking and subverting the narrative cliches of popular culture, the writing of Group 63 is concerned with demonstrating that any general or universal understanding is faulty and artificial. We might say that it performs the death of a now aged Atlantean literature, divesting language of its canonical, ideological, and moral interests, moving from the realm of the political to the realm of the discursive. In this sense, it establishes a stronger, more significant tie to what it sees as a dystopian world, thus actively engaging the subject's alienation.

In closing, it would be unfair to state that Group 63 is entirely apolitical. Quite the contrary, literature, though autonomous by virtue of being a creative pursuit, is also a linguistic act, and, as such, is obliquely involved with ideology in a broader sense. After all, every language act, even one that points towards nihilism, must first acknowledge its discursive relation with a reality outside itself even when aiming to reject it. The writers of Group 63 are driven by the simple acknowledgment that--whether it be Neorealism or the historical avantgarde--the institutional transmission of culture inevitably modifies the message it aims to communicate. This materialistic view of the artist as producer of consumables within a cultural marketplace shapes a new type of art that can no longer have the intellectual strength of conviction of its predecessors, but that nevertheless offers an ideologically "weak" alternative. In this light, the work of Group 63 cannot merely be considered as the one cataclysmic event in the otherwise glorious ideologically committed Italian literature. Instead we would be better served to view it as a turning point away from an essentially positivistic perspective of both Neorealism and the historical avantgarde. As such, the work of Group 63 deserves further attention as a bridge to much of Italy's Postmodern and most recent production with which it shares a new awareness of the changed dynamics between literature and culture.

REFERENCES

Accame, Vincenzo. Il segno poetico. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1981.

Arbasino, Alberto. "La gita a Chiasso." Il Giorno 23 Jan. 1963.

Ballerini, Luigi. La piramide capovolta. Venezia: Marsilio, 1975.

Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio. La narrativa italiana dei dopoguerra. Bologna: Cappelli, 1968.

Barilli, Renato. La barriera del naturalismo: studi sulla narrativa italiana contemporanea. Milano: Mursia, 1964

--, e Angelo Guglielmi. Gruppo 63. Critica e teoria. Torino: Feltrinelli, 1976.

Bianciardi, Luciano. La vita agra. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1962.

Calvino, Italo. "Cibernetica e fantasmi." Una pietra sopra: discorsi di letteratura e societa. Milano: Mondadori, 1995.

Calvino, Italo. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Torino: Einaudi, 1947.

--. Il visconte dimezzato. Torino: Einaudi, 1952.

--. "Cibernetica e fantasmi." Una pietra sopra: discorsi di letteratura e societa. Milano: Mondadori, 1980. 199-219.

NOTE

(1) With the 1946 referendum the Italian people vote to eliminate the monarchy in favor of a new constitutional government. As a result, King Umberto is exiled to Portugal. In addition, the 1947 peace treaty leads to adjustments to the bordering territories and to the signing of a treaty with Austria granting special status to Southern Tyrol. Cfr. Candeloro 11.

(2) The major accusation laid on the cultural production of the years of the regime--in particular that which was not in direct support of Fascist ideology--was its inability to directly confront the contemporary historical events, choosing instead a language at once alienated and alienating. It is perhaps symptomatic that one of the major poetic movements at the rime was that of hermetism, which as the name suggests could only offer murky and incomprehensible images. Headed by Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale and greatly influenced by French symbolism, the hermetic poets opted for a violent clash between a bleak reality and escapist fantasy too weak to pose a real opposition to fascist propaganda. For a more in depth look of postwar criticism of the literature of the tentennio, see Manacorda.

(3) While it is true that Italy was recognized as a "natural" member of the Atlantic Alliance and the European Community, one cannot disregard the irrefutable fact that the America allies feared that keeping Italy out would bolster its leftist bent so prevalent at the end of the war. Italy's admission is thus a strategic containment of what appeared as the country's radical potential, which would soon be reduced to the nonthreatening centrism of the Christian Democratic party. This strategic alliance and its motivations are corroborated by Truman's memorandum dated March 2 1949. Cfr. Stephanson.

(4) Created in 1956 by Luciano Anceschi and published in Milan, this literary journal is still active today. For more informations on the activities of Il Verri, consult Mondello 36-48.

(5) Members of Group 63's continued to be involved in the Italian literary scene even after the group disbanded remaining true to their progressive directives.

(6) It is interesting to note that this is not true for his cinematic production, in particular Teorema and La ricotta, in which metanarrative and defamiliarizing strategies point toward a late-modernist aesthetic. On the literary and cultural project of Pasolini and his Officina, see Mondello 9-22; Ferretti 212-17, 278-83. For one of the most salient articles against Pasolini by a member of Group 63 see Angelo Guglielmi, "Pasolini, maestro di vita" first published in Il Verri 3 (1960), later republished in Vero e falso 79-84.

(7) Il Verri is certainly not the only journal that attempt to deal with the changed status of literature in contemporary society, Il menabo for example, headed by Elio Vittorini and Italo CaNino was also the stage of a fierce debate about the contested relationship between culture and industry. (Mondello 23-35; Vittorini 5-15).

(8) While these conclusions with regard to the nature of the work of art display a strong similarity to structuralist concepts of the art object, the writers of Il Verri turn the Saussurian teaching on its head, evidencing a post-structuralist slant. Language as an arbitrary system of signs, is unable to offer a direct contact with the real or the 'given as such.' The new writer must instead critically engage language in order to show the fallacy inherent in its claim to objectivity. To do so, the new writer must invert the very relationship between decoupage and agencement in an attempt to subvert the very structural models that validate her/his artwork in an attempt to transcend the very limitations inherent in the structuralist view of language.

(9) In Eco's view this disengagement or alienation translates into a cyclical movement between invention and mete reproduction of old forms, creativity, and disaffection. Any formal device can be either liberating by stimulating artistic creativity or alienating if reduced to mere convention. Just a couple of years after the publication of Eco's article, Frank Kermode dedicated one of his most poignant studies on the function of formal ordering or concordance in narrative, and the risk literature incurs when viewed as something more than fiction. In order to evade such degeneration of literature into a totalizing myth Kermode too calls for a heightened self-awareness of its forming and formal devices through which it comes into being (Kermode 38-40).

(10) Guglielmi, Avanguardia e sperimentalismo 36-44, 53-62; Sanguineti 54-58, 65-86; Barilli, La barriera dei naturalismo 146-66. This renewed skepticism toward the potential of art displayed by Group 63 toward artistic form has been viewed by Monica Jansen as the literary counterpoint to the contemporary trend of weak thought, particularly predominant in Italian postmodern literature.

(11) The novelty offered by formal experimentalism can similarly become fodder for derivative and uninspired cliches, since avantgarde practices have remained implicated in the very object they appear to oppose, as has been the casa for Dadaism for example where the lines between advertising technique and avant-garde practices are significantly blurred. This kind of repetition thus remains caught in the cogs of the very machine it aims to denounce, since it nonetheless strives for correspondence and order between two different systems. It is then no surprise that Eco in the aforementioned article points out that the avant-garde's drive for concordance may have different goals than that of the Neorealists, since it aims to replicate the set of socio-psychological mechanisms that support and rationalize a given societal organization.

(12) The experimentalism that characterized Futurism, was focused on representing several aspects of forms in motion in order to portray the dynamic character of twentieth-century life. In particular, this avantgarde movement glorified danger, war, and industrialism, which in their eyes provided the absolute symbols of this new age.

(13) The artistic tradition, to which even the avantgarde has been canalized, has been rendered impotent since at the level of representation there no longer is any correspondence between phenomena and their expressions. In a similar reificatory move the ordered word-view on which societal regulations are founded does not reflect the dissolutive forces that lie beneath, but rather conceals them.

(14) This new avantgarde is not the single way in which art is capable to introduce an element of disorder and discontinuity within every form reproduces order and concordance. Eco singles out two other strategies of internal disruption, namely parody and the assimilation of modes of expression utilized by the mass media. The first accomplishes a generic and formal disorder internal to the appropriated model that empties out the original's ability to produce meaning. The second hassles the very structures of conventional culture by exacerbating and ultimately refunctionalizing its alienating affects ("Del modo di formare" 223-25).

(15) This is a view of art that is more extensively articulated by Umberto Eco in a critical article, "L'opera in movimento e la coscienza dell'epoca" published in 1959 in Incontri musicali, which would be included in his Opera aperta in 1962.

(16) Fausto Curi points out that the Neovanguard is in no way detached from neocapitalism, but rather shares the same principles, making it unable to return to an avantgarde denialor subversion of this specific historical condition. Instead it can act as a symptom, that exacerbates or--to use Guglielmi's word--"mirrors" neocapitalist society (21-30).

(17) Eco distinguishes two types of alienations, a first belonging to the philosophical tradition--Enffremdung or alienation with respect to something--a kind of surrender to the world of objects in which the individual is acted upon (a becoming something other in relation to the thing). The second is a definition Eco derives from Marxist theory--Verfremdung or estrangement of the individual with respect to the thing--that describes the individual's alienation from the object as a result of the act of production, which in turn objectifies him/herself and the network of social relations that make up his/her world in that object. As a result the individual no longer recognizes the object as his own creation ("Del modo di formare" 199-207).

(18) Much like Italo Calvino in his 1967 essay "Cibemetica e fantasmi," Umberto Eco offers a definition of the text as "narrative machine." Both appear to be inspired by the interdisciplinary link between advances in modern linguistics and new avantgarde experimentalism. Eco's originating from his experience with Gruppo 63, Calvino's hailing from his involvement with Tel Quel. More specifically Eco proposes that in order to maintain an open dialectic between integration and compromise (possessing the object and being possessed by it) the artist must build a machine which, though deceptively easy too handle, would provide a fair amount of difficulty for its user. For Calvino's reference of text as machine, see Calvino 199-219.

(19) One of the most apparent examples of such linguistic pastiche can be found in the production of fellow Group 63 member Nanni Balestrini.

REFERENCES

Accame, Vincenzo. Il segno poetico. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1981.

Arbasino, Alberto. "La gita a Chiasso." Il Giorno 23 Jan. 1963.

Ballerini, Luigi. La piramide capovolta. Venezia: Marsilio, 1975.

Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio. La narrativa italiana dei dopoguerra. Bologna: Cappelli, 1968.

Barilli, Renato. La barriera del naturalismo: studi sulla narrativa italiana contemporanea. Milano: Mursia, 1964

--, e Angelo Guglielmi. Gruppo 63. Critica e teoria. Torino: Feltrinelli, 1976.

Bianciardi, Luciano. La vita agra. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1962.

Calvino, Italo. "Cibernetica e fantasmi." Una pietra sopra: discorsi di letteratura e societa. Milano: Mondadori, 1995.

Calvino, Italo. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Torino: Einaudi, 1947.

--. Il visconte dimezzato. Torino: Einaudi, 1952.

--. "Cibernetica e fantasmi." Una pietra sopra: discorsi di letteratura e societa. Milano: Mondadori, 1980. 199-219.

Clark, Martin. Modern Italy 1871-1995. New York: Longman, 1996.

Candeloro, Giorgio. Storia dell'Italia moderna. Vol. 11. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1986-1991.

Curi, Fausto. Ordine e disordine. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1965.

Del Pero, Mario. L'Alleato scomodo. Gli USA e la DC negli anni del centrismo (1948-1955). Roma: Carocci, 2001.

Eco, Umberto. L'opera in movimento e la coscienza dell'epoca." Incontri musicali. (1959).

--. "Del modo di formare come impegno sulla realta." Il Menabo di Letteratura 5.11 (1962).

--. Opera aperta. Milano: Bompiani, 1962.

Fenoglio, Beppe. I ventitre giorni della citta di Alba. Torino: Einaudi, 1952.

Ferretti, Gian Carlo. "Officina." Cultura, letteratura e politica negli anni Cinquanta. Torino: Einaudi, 1975.

Ferroni, Giulio. Dopo la fine. Torino: Einaudi, 1996.

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. Milano: Garzanti, 1957.

Ginsborg, Paul. "Resistance and Liberation." A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.48-53,

Giuliani, Alfredo, ed. I novissimi: poesie per gli anni '60. Torino: Einaudi, 1972.

Guglielmi, Angelo. Vero e falso. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1968.

--. Avanguardia e sperimentalismo. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1968.

Jansen, Monica. Il dibattito sul postmoderno. In bilico tra dielettica e ambiguita. Firenze: Cesati, 2002.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966.

Luperini, Romano Il Novecento : apparati ideologici, ceto intellettuale, sistemi formali nella letteratura italiana contemporanea. Vol. 2. Torino: Loescher, 1981.

Manacorda, Giuliano. Storia della letteratura italiana contemporanea. Roma: Riuniti, 1977.

Mondello, Elisabetta. Gli anni delle riviste: le riviste letterarie dal 1945 agli anni 80. Lecce: Milella, 1985.

Romano, Ruggiero, and Corrado Vivanti. Storia d'Italia. 6 vols. Torino: Einaudi, 1972-1976. Vol. 6.

Sanguineti, Edoardo. Ideologia e linguaggio. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1965.

Stephanson, Anders. Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

Veltri, Lucio. Letteratura e caos. Poetiche Italiane della "neo-avanguardia" italiana degli anni Sessanta. Milaon: Mursia, 1992.

Vittorini, Elio. Le due tensioni. Appunti per una ideologia della letteratura. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1967.

RITA GAGLIANO

Temple University