A New Century of the Impossible: Giovanni Papini’s “Fantastico Interno”

Introduction

Giovanni Papini¹ was a nonconformist and controversial Italian cultural figure. As well as being a prolific writer and essayist, he is also remembered for his associations with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Italian Futurists. Less well known are his forays into fantastic literature that principally comprise three collections from the early twentieth century: Il tragico quotidiano (1906), Il Pilota cieco (1907), and Parole e sangue (1912). While these stories are discussed in studies dedicated to Papini’s cultural and literary contributions, they are rarely discussed in the wider context of Italian fantastic literature.² However, Papini’s understated contribution to fantastic literature is worthy of more focused attention, not only because these three collections mark the most substantial addition to the corpus of Italian fantastic literature since it began in the late 1860s with Ugo Tarchetti, but also because of their singular style and the ideas expressed within them. Beyond the peninsula Jorge Luis Borges saw fit to include a story of Papini’s in his international Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940), and even personally edited a collection of Papini’s stories entitled Lo specchio che fugge (1975). More importantly for what concerns the Italian tradition, Italo Calvino advocates that Papini marks a watershed moment between centuries. During the nineteenth century “il fantastico resta nella letteratura italiana dell’Ottocento un campo veramente «minore»” (Saggi II 1665), but then, “il racconto fantastico italiano si stacca dai modelli ottocenteschi e diventa un’altra cosa (o cento altre cose),” for which, as a date, “potremmo indicare il 1907, data del Pilota cieco di Giovanni Papini” (1693). Papini himself does not shy away from self-laudatory comments where, with Futurist-like rhetoric, he claims “io, come artista, come scrittore, ho creato un genere, nuovo in Italia, di storie assurde, inverosimili, e irreali” (Filosofia 876), but while Calvino points to Il Pilota cieco as a turning-point, this article will explore another aspect of Papini’s fantastic literature, the preface to the earlier collection, Il tragico quotidiano (1906), where Papini outlines his thoughts toward a “fantastico interno” which sets him apart from his predecessors. Subsequently, this article will look at how Papini’s theory resonates with four of his fantastic narratives: “L’ultima Visita del Gentiluomo malato” (1906), “Storia completamente assurda” (1907), “Il Ritratto Profetico” (1912), and “L’Uomo che ha perduto sé stesso” (1912) (the inconsistent capitalization of titles throughout this article is Papini’s own). Not only does a close analysis of these narratives articulate Papini’s musings on the fantastic in different and more nuanced ways beyond the declamatory rhetoric of Il tragico quotidiano, but they are also part of an important contribution that Papini makes to Italian fantastic literature in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Per un fantastico interno

The literary fantastic, as Jackson notes, “comes into its own in the nineteenth century” (24), with a particular geographical distribution: “Il modo [of the fantastic],” Ceserani continues, “ha avuto le sue radici in un preciso periodo storico e in precise aree geografiche e culturali: il trapasso fra i secoli diciottesimo e diciannovesimo, e certe regioni della Scozia, dell’Inghilterra, della Germania e della Francia, con qualche appendice in Polonia, nei paesi dell’Est e nel New England” (15); Italy is notably absent.³ Beyond the peninsula, the fantastic literature of the nineteenth century is replete with figures such as ghosts, vampires or other forms of the impossible, topoi which are typically confirmed by external character reactions and other narratives signposts that underpin many theoretical models of the fantastic. Caillois, for example, articulates the fantastic in terms of a collective awareness of impossible occurrences:

le fantastique est rupture de l’ordre reconnu, irruption de l’inadmissible au sein de l’inaltérable légalité quotidienne, et non substitution totale à l’univers réel d’un univers exclusivement miraculeux.

(161)

the fantastic is a rupture in the understood order, an irruption of the inadmissible into the unalterable legality of the everyday, and not a complete substitution of the real universe with an entirely miraculous one.

Speaking across national...