The Novel

We have repeatedly argued for the lack of a purely Italian narrative, understood as a great wide-ranging romance tradition. This depends on the delay with which this genre has established itself with us, due to the slowness in the development of the middle class, that is “those citizens” placed by luck between the idiot and the scholar “(Foscolo) .

The novel has its impetus in the eighteenth century, in England first and in France later. 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, Radcliffe, Voltaire, Rousseau, 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 was, on the other hand, within everyone’s reach with entry to the Globe which cost as much as a mug of beer.

The reading of novels increased after 1742, with the success of circulating libraries. The merchant and bourgeois class begins to leaf through stories for fun, reading becomes more and more a female occupation. “Pamela” by Richardson is the heroine of a generation of literate waitresses, servants 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 drawn from it, the famous “Elisa di Rivombrosa”.

It is in this period that the genres begin to distinguish themselves, the picaresque novel in the first place, then the gothic one and the epistolary one. A tendency to simulate truth is created, a reality effect given by the fiction of the manuscript found in the attic, of the correspondence found by chance in a trunk. The author pretends to be only editor of the text. The use of the first narrative person is affirmed, the self becomes the guarantor of the truth, the private gives depth and endorsement to the public. But this eighteenth-century novel born of the mercantile bourgeoisie still has an edifying function, it implements a linear scheme for which the happiness of the individual ultimately coincides with that of society. However, at the end of the eighteenth century and with the appearance of the first romantic jolts on the scene, this pattern cracks. Laclos and Sade had already overturned values ​​and endings, showing that virtue does not always get reward, as it was for Richardson. And if in England Jane Austen keeps herself in balance between enlightenment and pre-romanticism, between rationality and sentiment, in Italy Foscolo, with “Jacopo Ortis’s Last Letters”, refers to Goethe’s Werther and stops identifying with the community but rather, works one burning tear. The disappointed individual detaches himself from society, becomes fragmented, puts himself in contrast with what produced 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 a 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 threatened virgin, the diabolical persecutor, the gloomy underground secret in the gloomy manor. In Scott, however, it is the first time that the character derives directly from the historical background that produced it, overcoming sensationalism.

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

The historical novel, whether it has pleasure as its purpose or whether it aims at building and progressing, takes root more and more in the customs of the bourgeoisie and spreads in an unexpected way. Most of the authors are Northern, they write a classicist prose, enlivened by dialogues drawn from the theatrical experience and with a mixed language of modern Tuscan. This contributes to the creation of a common middle language, representative of the cultural level reached by the post-restoration bourgeoisie.

The historical novel naturally merges into the positivist and naturalist trend that dominated all of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, in the wake of Comte. If Balzac and Flaubert can be considered precursors of naturalism, the main representative is Emile Zolà. Many novels reach a very high circulation and get both acclaim and disapproval. The influence of positivism on English fiction is less incisive, although it also follows the great Dickensian social trend. On the other hand, the positivist influence on the great Russian novel (Gogol, Turgeniev, Dostoevskij, Tolstoy, Chekhov) is very remarkable.

The feuilleton, or appendix novel, is serialized in the newspapers and has a large popular following. Readers identify with the heroes, are passionate about their adventures, rejoice in their final redemption. “The mysteries of Paris” and Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo” become best sellers.

The romance novel always follows the same patterns, from the nineteenth century to the 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 sauces, from the Byronic and demonic hero, up to today’s sadistic Mr Grey of “Fifty Shades of Grey”), bypassing more noble rivals. In conclusion there is the happy ending, with the reconciliation of opposites: marriage and passion.

The adventure novel has its peaks in Verne and Salgari, the detective one 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, in Dashell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

In the meantime, the publishing industry developed, with numerous publishing houses spreading literary products on the market in popular editions, as happens in Italy for the publisher Sonzogno. Magazines multiply in which militant criticism, literary controversy, reviews, serialized novels find space. The novel becomes a consumer genre with Tarchetti, Verga, Capuana, D’Annunzio, De Amicis, aimed at an audience of new users of petty bourgeois or working class extraction. 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 unity of Italy. Often, however, we limit ourselves 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 fake plebeian, where the figure of the worker does not yet find space. (“Heart” byDe Amicis or “The belly of Naples” by Matilde Serao).

Once again, the most popular novel has more development 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 one 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 peoples, 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. In the United States, masterpieces such as Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” and Melville’s “Moby Dick” are born. In England Kipling, Stevenson and Wells (considered the father of science fiction) exploit the possibilities of fantasy and adventure fiction to express the problems and conflicts of their time. James elaborates the technique of the circumscribed point of view, later taken up by Conrad.

With us, influenced by Huysmans, D’Annunzio creates the character of Andrea Sperelli, the first true decadent hero like Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Pirandello and Svevo are linked to the European tradition of Proust, Kafka, Musil, Joyce and V. Woolf, opening 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 flow of thought and the unconscious, just discovered by Freud and Jung. The novel becomes an essay, a narrative of ideas, because the reflective element prevails over the narrative one, this happens in particular in Thomas Mann.

While in Europe we are increasingly moving away from naturalism, in the United States we are experiencing a new realism, a dry, synthetic way of narrating, which lets the facts speak with Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, discovered and translated in Italy by Pavese and Vittorini.

Here the gap between high and low literature deepens, a veritable double market in 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 thirties for the novel to definitively establish itself as art. The Solaria issue dedicated to Svevo dates back to 1929 and “Gli Indifferenti” by Moravia was published in the same year.

Opposite trends are intertwined that go both in the sense of a new realism — writers who recover the regionalist and naturalist tradition by enriching it with a psychological dimension, with Silone, Pavese, Vittorini, Pratolini — and a magical realism with Bontempelli, Landolfi, Alvaro.

In France Sartre and Camus write intellectual novels, narrating 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 a phenomenological sense. Beckett also 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.

In the meantime, post-war neorealism clearly distinguishes itself from the new realism of the thirties which is purely literary. The term, borrowed from the cinema, involves 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 sought. In Pasolini, realism becomes populism that creates a mimetic identification, through the language of the petty bourgeois author, with a cherished and mythologized proletariat. In “Boys of Life” the protagonists speak a dialect reconstructed in a philological way, but the author still makes himself heard in the lyrical descriptions.

Calvino elaborates 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 by Morante.

From the end of the war to the 1960s, realism and subjectivism continue to alternate in fiction around the world, from Yourcenair to Brecht, from Böll to Grass. In Russia, the case of Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” breaks out, censored and forced by the Soviet regime not to accept the Nobel Prize, while Bulgakov surprises with his “novel within a novel”, “The Master and Margarita”. African American and Jewish novelists are gaining ground in the United States, the most important of which is Saul Bellow. Next to 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 re-evaluation and awareness of ethnic minorities, Carver’s minimalism is also affirmed, a flat style that voluntarily excludes the involvement of the reader. The dispute also involves the 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 “Il padrone, Bianciardi” of “La vita agra”, Arpino. The cultural machine is increasingly divided into large apparatuses such as Rai, cinema, publishing, schools. Books and films become commodities, publishers are managers who deal with marketing, and the focus is on profit. Large publishing groups are consolidated to the detriment of small artisan publishing houses. From the strategy of two cultures, we move to a single culture that includes them all. Between 62 and 65 there is a boom in encyclopedias in installments and publications on newsstands. The Oscar Mondadori collection disseminates works of all kinds, high and low, education becomes general, the university is no longer elite. The intellectual becomes a worker, often unemployed or precarious.

This mass culture is opposed by the neo-avant-garde of Gruppo 63 which decrees the end of the bourgeois novel, his death with Sanguineti and Balestrini. The dispute of 68 brings the intellectual back to the world and the process of massification of culture resumes (fortunately, we say). The Trivialliteratur regains value and diffusion, the cultural industry is aimed at everyone and identifies sectors that are popular, for example the world of women or youth, 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 free oneself from tradition, always linked to heroines like Liala’s, punished with death if barely transgressive, still tied to the image of a woman who loves and has no sexual appetites.

But pure intellectuals like 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-sixties climate favors a reflux into the private sector and into 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 editorial successes of recent years, with which we conclude our brief excursus by no means exhaustive, is “The name of the rose” by Eco, with several levels of reading: detective story, historical novel, philosophical novel. This is the trend of today’s fiction, that of taking place on several levels, satisfying various types of readers, both those looking for a literature rich in nuances, meanings and symbols, and those who just want to follow a good story.

From the end of the eighties up to the Wu Ming collective of 93 — with the manifesto of the new Italian epic — water under the bridges has passed, but it is still recent water and difficult to analyze. In particular, in recent times, the Internet has further standardized the act of writing, ensuring that anyone with talent, or even just narrative ambitions, can communicate without editorial filters, even without even being published. By now even the unpublished text has its own diffusion and the novel has become transmedia, collective, with the possibility of evolving and changing through spin — offs and fanfiction of the readers. There is even a phenomenon of “deconstruction”, in which the texts posted on the net, even the classics, are deconstructed, resumed, modified without the author’s knowledge (I was a victim of it with one of my short stories). We dont’t know if this is the future, and if so, it is still a disturbing future.

In conclusion, we think that no one has a monopoly on talent. As this synthesis demonstrates, there have always been courses and recurrences, ebbs and flows in fiction. All styles, all forms, all genres have had and have equal dignity. The old antithesis between surreal avant-garde and traditional narration, between high and low literature, must finally be overcome and it would be time for us too to develop a great narrative, capable of placing itself in the wake of a broader tradition of our so provincial, a narrative where there was room for all currents and forms, from the fantastic to the real, from sentiment to intellect, from symbol to plot.