Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction

Introduction: The Historical Novel and the Dialectics of Genre

Introduction The Historical Novel and the Dialectics of Genre Immediately after publishing his historical novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed)! in 1827, Alessandro Manzoni renounced the entire genre of historical fiction. A best-seller ante litteram, I promessi sposi, like the great epic poems of the past, would remain a model to respect, but not to follow. "Ammirami, e fa altrimenti" ("Admire me, and do otherwise"), Manzoni advised in Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de' componimenti misti di storia e d'invenzione (On the Historical Novel and, in General , on Works Mixing History and Invention, 1850), a controversial essay indicting the historical novel as a flawed combination of facts and fiction that betrays both the homogeneous formal unity that aesthetics demands and the absolute truthfulness to the past that history requires. In Der historische Roman (The Historical Novel, 1937), Georg Lukacs argued that Italy's political and social fragmentation precluded the development of historical fiction after Manzoni's masterpiece. Lukacs believed that Manzoni was the 'sole great artist who could overcome the "objective unfavourableness of Italian history and ... create a real historical novel" (The Historical Novel 70). Unlike Walter Scott's, Manzoni's theme was not the crisis of national history, but the critical conditions in the life of Italian people caused by Italy's fragmentation and dependence on the intervention of foreign great powers. The nature of Manzoni's theme, however, showed that I promessi sposi "had to be an only novel, that it could have been repeated only in a bad sense" (Lukacs, The Historical Novel 70). From Lukacs's humanistic perspective, since art should mirror reality's deep organic wholeness, Italy's political and social fragmentation resisted a unified account and was therefore unrepresentable.2 1 Introduction In spite of Manzoni's and Lukacs's views, historical fiction has known an almost unbroken development in Italy. Where I promessi sposi furnished the classical model for the genre, Manzoni's Del romanzo storieo provided a polemical, theoretical challenge for those who aimed to revise the genre of historical fiction. In the wake of Manzoni's success, a number of novels simply imitated, without questioning, Manzoni's model of I promessi sposi, thus contributing to both the canonization and the conventionalization of the genre.3 This study focuses on three twentieth-century novels that reshape the genre of historical fiction by directly confronting the aesthetic and philosophical challenges posed by Manzoni's Del romanzo storieo. These novels are Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958), Elsa Morante's La Storia (History, 1974), and Umberto Eco's Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980). Because of their innovative and constructive contribution to the genre, these novels constitute Manzoni's legacy. Transformative and revisionist, these "critical" historical novels embark on a discussion of the meaning of writing within the genre of historical fiction, thus participating in the evolution of the genre while also charting its historical development, assessing its aesthetic function, and evaluating its hermeneutical power. Critical historical novels demonstrate that a given work and the genre to which it belongs are not paralyzed in a fixed and unchanging relationship and thus refute all normative philosophies of genre.4 These normative philosophies equate genres with literary archetypes endowed with a number of essential attributes elevated to the rank of universal foundational principles . Far from being mere conventional repertoires of themes and motifs-historically mutable forms with a certain temporal persistence due to the simple reason that "they have been tested and found satisfactory" (Guillen 121)-genres are seen as a priori categories that precede the literary historian's codification .s In this view, genres quite mechanically establish a number of recurring themes and a set of formal conventions that specific texts strive to reproduce in order to guarantee their belonging to the genre in question. The repertoire of stock themes, stylistic devices, and narrative strategies that form a literary work constitute the stable generic model that shapes 2 The Historical Novel and directs the creation of all other literary texts claiming to share certain generic features. In this panorama, variation within the genre occurs only in relation to the number of the prescribed conventions, and deviation from the generic norm refers to the closeness of the imitation of such conventions, which is hfgh in periods of strict generic codification and lower in periods of stronger creative independence.6 While rejecting strictly normative...