Culture and Politics: The Politecnico Experience

marx-scouras 83 Danielle Marx-Scouras Culture and Politics: The Politecnico Experience "It is not freedom of speech which is lacking, but rather the freedom to be heard." —Gianni Scalig Few Italian writers have had such a deep-felt and far-reaching influence on Italian cultural history from the 1930s to the present as Elio Vittorini. To trace his role as a cultural militant and organizer is to be afforded a privileged look at thirty of the most turbulent years of Italian culture and society: a period extending from the Fascist regime to World War II and the Resistance, and from post-war Reconstruction and the Cold War years to the industrial boom of the sixties. Following Vittorini's political trajectory means reliving the extraordinary tensions of a generation of Italian intellectuals who were initially left-wing Fascists, subsequently antiFascists , then Communists, and finally dissidents. Yet aside from his fiction, Vittorini is hardly known to the American public. American Italianists are largely to blame for such oblivion. Conservative in nature, Italian hterary studies in the United States have focused on Vittorini's novelistic activity, and, in particular, on his masterpiece, Conversation in Sicily (1941). These studies have overlooked or barely alluded to that cultural militancy which made Vittorini one of contemporary Europe's major intellectual figures. For in addition to being the author of eleven works of fiction, Vittorini was also: 1) the editor of two avant-garde cultural journals, // Politecnico (1945-47) and // Menabò (1959-66); 2) the author of more than one thousand essays, selections from which are gathered in Diario in pubblico (1957, 1970) as well as hundreds of letters to cultural and political notables from all over the world;1 3) the author of notes outlining a new theory of literature, putlished posthumously as Le Due tensioni: Appunti per un 'ideologia della letteratura (1967); 4) the translator of Shakespeare, Defoe, D.H. Lawrence, Poe, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Saroyan, and Lorca; 5) the promoter of new writers and the director of innovative literary collections for the Bompiani, Einaudi and Mondadori publishing houses between 1942 and 1966. Vittorini's prolific and ambitious cultural enterprise was pursued under the sign of continual search and movement. Always responsive to evolving historical processes, always willing to redefine his literary project according to the changing social moment, Vittorini never remained immobUe 84 the minnesota review or aloof, and never allowed his mind to be imprisoned by any sort of intellectual method or political doctrine. An autodidact of humble class origins, he remained an anti-conformist by vocation. Free of a classical and traditional formation, Vittorini would defend his marginality throughout his life by refusing to advocate any orthodox system or language, be it academic culture or political partisanship. He would repeatedly insist that he was exactly the opposite of what is intended in Italy by a "man of culture."2 Vittorini's "poetic sansculottism" (Calvino) would make him the butt of both academics and Communist intellectuals, who always regarded him as a "parvenu of literature" (Fortini). Critics and politicians never quite forgave him for being encyclopaedic, eclectic and anarchic, too concerned with the hie et nunc, which disrupted his writing and gave his work an unfinished nature. In short, Vittorini and his work were without a clear and assignable identity that would relay them to a pre-established intellectual or political domain. What mattered to Vittorini, however, was not literature as a series of completed works, but rather culture as a project, program, or manifesto, open-ended and free of artificial closures.3 Vittorini believed that "the value of life is not in coherence, but in evolution or progress, and the merit of men is in the will to progress, or at least to change in order to progress."4 We shall limit ourselves, in this article, to a discussion of // Politecnico , for this project occupied a pre-eminent place in Vittorini's cultural militancy and in post-war Italian intellectual history. Unlike many other enthusiastically begun but quickly aborted journalistic endeavors, the twoyear Politecnico experience continues to be at the center of polemics over the interrelationships between culture and politics, and the role of the intellectual in contemporary society. In particular, during...