The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (review)

In recent years, various studies have analyzed culture's role in the making of fascism, and examined the evolution of cultural policy and cultural production during the Ventennio. This scholarship has composed a complex picture of heterogeneous roots, hybrid aesthetics, and ambivalent, often conflicting policies. In such a composite picture, a central theme however emerges: a myth of heroic regeneration—both an ethos and a rhetorical resource for the creation of mass consensus—animated fascist aesthetics and fueled the regime's interpellative power. Mary Ann Frese Witt takes a new, comparatist approach to this theme in her study of the "search for modern tragedy": the effort to regenerate decadent, bourgeois culture by reviving the mystique of ancient tragedy.

Witt builds on seminal scholarship, such as Zeev Sternhell's work on the origins of fascism in early twentieth-century Franco-Italian cultural movements. She defines her field of study as "aesthetic fascism," a term with which she refers to transnational currents in literature and the arts from the early twentieth century into the 1940s ("the phenomenon of writers and intellectuals drawn to fascism through aesthetics" [2]). In particular, she focuses on "the aesthetic approach to fascism on the part of certain exemplary writers in Italy and France as it relates to their theories of modern tragedy and their attempts to create it" (4). Acknowledging that her approach does not cover the extent of these authors' importance, she offers close readings of works by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, Thierry Maulnier, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Henri Montherlant, and Jean Anouilh; and she draws upon reviews, journalistic commentaries on modern tragedy, and theoretical discussions to examine the political implications of the texts.

Other scholars have underscored fascism's extensive use of the theatrical and the spectacular. Witt's work, however, is original in both scope and argument: she investigates the fusion of political ideology with the aesthetic search for modern tragedy in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy; and she argues that the emphasis on the poetic "spirit of tragedy" as a source of mythic regeneration is central to the ideological aesthetic of "Mediterranean" fascism, which developed to a large extent independently of German nazism. According to Witt, such a confluence of aesthetic and political discourses (based on a mythology of regenerating sacrifice, the abhorrence of bourgeois mediocrity, and the celebration of the "ecstatic union" of leader and crowds) occurred at the turn of the century in both Italy and France.

There are two key figures in this study: D'Annunzio, who plays a pioneering role in creatively interpreting the Nietzschean dialectic of Dionysian excess and Apollonian form, as well as in bringing together aestheticism and nascent antidemocratic, nationalist/imperialist ideology; and Pirandello, who exposes, in metatheatrical fashion, the relativist void that underlies the fascist rejection of a progressive view of history for a mythical/tragic vision of eternal returns. Witt also follows the search for a modern tragedy, worthy first of nationalism and imperialism and later of fascism, in Italian journalism, criticism, and theory from the beginning of the century through the 1930s. She then examines how the search is pursued, in both convergent and divergent ways, by fascist intellectuals in the France of the 1930s—writers "who felt that a shared 'Latinity' and classical heritage allied them in aesthetic matters more closely to Italy than to Nazi Germany" (15).

While the search for modern tragedy is only one aspect of fascism's hybrid aesthetics, and while there is much more to fascism than its cultural dimension, Witt's book is an important contribution to the study of the cultural humus in which fascism took root. There is, in fact, a deep connection between the spirit of tragedy and other crucial components of the fascist ethos, namely the religious and the military: a common drive to incorporate and transcend irreconcilable contradictions. As I argued elsewhere, a recurrent configuration can be...