Italy Literature Part III

But there are, in this generation, the storytellers, the novelists: indeed they are among the most distinguished of today’s literature. However, their narrative, aiming to replace the objectivity of the realist or bourgeois one, against which it arose at the time, a subjectivity entirely imbued with critical and lyrical ferments, is a narrative that cares more for the individual pages or episodes than the whole, composition in a formal sense rather than in a structural sense; a narrative, in short, for the most part not yet “written”. And here too it is necessary to make a distinction between those narrators who remain, albeit with new spirits, on a more or less traditional line, such as Bruno Cicognani, Marino Moretti and Riccardo Bacchelli himself (who even refers to the historical novel, but to transpose it – and the Mill of the Po, 1938-40, he is the highest example of this – his pietas of every human work); and other narrators, such as Aldo Palazzeschi, Enrico Pea, Massimo Bontempelli, who deviate from it to make room for irrational, fantastic and similar tendencies, and who therefore, feeling in a very similar way to that of poets, the need for an expressive renewal, have exerted a singular influence on younger writers and storytellers. Thus, p. eg, Gente nel tempo (1937) or Giro del sole (1941) by Bontempelli, and the Cuccoli brothers (1948) by Palazzeschi, constitute, in the direction of a “magical realism” – understood not as mere poetry, but as effective magic of speech – goals, in their diversity, very remarkable.

Other tastes, other tendencies are those of the “middle” writers, who, having established themselves in the decade following the First World War, in the wake of the experiences of the Ronda, found in the “journey”, in the “evocative” prose, in the “idyll”, in the story with a descriptive background, in “landscapes with figures”, and the like, their appropriate forms. Forms that already marked a development with respect to the Vocian “fragment”, the Rondesque “essay” and the corresponding narrative, since on the one hand, by describing people and countries (especially Italy), one began to re-establish that contact with the ” real “, with the” object “, which the previous generation, in the dominant solipsism, had eluded; and on the other hand, by evoking, transposed into “poetic auras” or vaguely allegorized in “earthly adventures”, the spiritual ambages, anxiety or boredom of nothingness, they gave rise to those anxious themes and modes of “memory” which, mixed with Freudian elements, had a great following among younger writers. Above all, that describing and evoking was a way of narrating oneself and of narrating oneself, objectifying oneself. And over the years, in fact, these forms have taken on an increasingly narrative accent: Even in writers who naturally incline to poetic or evocative prose, such as GB Angioletti (and not only in Donata, 1941, but in the same “journeys” happy, of Old Continent, 1942) and Giovanni Comisso, who has given us new proofs of his ability to transfigure the life of the senses into luminous adventures of the imagination. Or such as Giorgio Vigolo, whose ideal autobiography tends more and more to the architectural composition of a beautiful Roman Baroque; and Gianna Manzini, with his “tales to tell”, sustained, almost “sudden” musical, by a pure inventive rhythm. According to Allcountrylist, Corrado Alvaro, on the other hand, is one of those writers who would most like to escape the lyrical enchantment, that monologizing dialogue (which in part derives from Verga), affecting his stories and novels more in a realistic substance: but in Incontri d ‘ love (1941) and in The Short Age (1946) his greatest gift still remains that choral animation of the landscape and things around astonished, ecstatic characters, almost speaking in a dream. And, in his anxious angelism, Nicola Lisi also makes the figures of his own “fables” or tales speak in a dream, however, silhouetted in a vivid light; while Luigi Bartolini translates his love for “reality” and nature into lively portraits of women and animals, in vague sylvan idylls poetically (or polemically) contrasted with murky city visions. Bonaventura Tecchi has made a great journey along the path of fiction, refining his faculties even more, in one of psychological analysis and representative synthesis. And if the ideal measure of his narration remains the idyll between light and shadow, between realism and elegism (Idilli moravi, 1939; L’isola passionate, 1945; The presence of evil, 1948), the autobiographical motifs always appear better in tune with objectivity . Rather than the novel, the “long story” is better suited to the concentrated qualities of excavation by Giani Stuparich: the felicissima Isola (1942), as proof, with respect to Returning (1941); while Bino Sanminiatelli has advantageously grafted a certain lyrical imaginism into the Tuscan background of his fiction. Veins of an irrationalism and surrealism that do not disdain reality, however, feed both the lexical (a little Dossi-like) and “macaronic” humor of CE Gadda, as well as the lyrical and larval humor of Cesare Zavattini; Achille Campanile, on the other hand, seemed to accentuate the melancholy or crepuscular expressions of his laughter. (And from him and above all from Zavattini derive, with their own tones, some of the most recent humorists, such as Giovanni Mosca and Nino Guareschi).