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  • Contesting the Monument: The Anti-Illusionist Italian Historical Novel
  • Daragh O’Connell
Ruth Glynn Contesting the Monument: The Anti-Illusionist Italian Historical Novel Leeds, UK: Northern Universities Press, 2005. Pp. v + 148.

The Irish academic Ruth Glynn states in her introduction to this excellent study that the problem with the recent postmodern critical-generic terminology and neologisms in the domain of the Italian historical novel ('historiographic metafiction', 'romanzo neostorico', 'romanzo contro-storico', etc.) is that they "pose a generic alternative to the historical novel and imply that the genre of the historical novel is no longer extant" (3). Glynn's study seeks to redress this tendency by reexamining modern and contemporary Italian historical fiction through the prism of recent critical paradigms while simultaneously articulating the Romantic novelistic tradition from which they derive [End Page 226] much of their energy, force, and inspiration. The resultant work is a fascinating study of genre, critical pitfalls, and a fresh and insightful examination of some of Italy's most complex and rewarding exponents of the historical novel.

Chapters 1 and 2 offer a critical overview of theoretical approaches to the historical novel. In the first of these, Glynn posits each historical novel's philosophy of history—"which might be linear, cyclical or static in nature, regressive or progressive, determined by human or supernatural forces" (18)—as the only safe platform from which to examine these multifaceted texts. In chapter 2 Glynn examines and avails of the critical approach of Kurt Sprang, inspired by Brechtian poetics, with regard to the Latin American historical novel in order to navigate through the contesting areas of its Italian equivalent. She therefore employs his terms, "illusionism" and "anti-illusionism" and states: "Sprang employs the term 'illusionist' to denote traditional historical novels which seek to create a world totality and order by narrative means, while the term 'anti-illusionist' describes those novels which seek to undo or lay bare the illusions of traditional positivist history" (19). She subsequently chooses De Roberto's I vicerè, Pirandello's I vecchi e i giovani, and Morante's La storia as a testing ground for this bipartite formula.

The remaining five chapters of Contesting the Monument are devoted to individual authors and one exemplary historical novel from each. The authors are all postwar writers: Leonardo Sciascia (Il Consiglio d'Egitto), Vincenzo Consolo (Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio), Sebastiano Vassalli (La chimera), Umberto Eco (Il nome della rosa), and Luigi Malerba (Il fuoco greco). The choice may seem arbitrary but Glynn argues successfully that each one reveals at various instances elements of her anti-illusionist thesis. Moreover, the chosen texts span a period from 1963 to 1990, with each decade and the critical discourse that underpins it suitably represented.

In chapter 3 Glynn deftly handles the dualistic construction of Il Consiglio d'Egitto, replicated in the antithetical figures of Di Blasi and Vella. She views the novel as constituting the first anti-illusionist text of the Italian postwar canon, with the microhistorical and metanarrative modes of later works present here in embryonic form. These two strands, or modes of narration—and here the influence of Carlo Ginzburg's microhistorical writings and Hayden White's investigations of historiographical textuality and narrativity are cogently examined—are what will give the volume its critical force, as she neatly differentiates the subsequent texts under these two paradigms. Thus, Il Consiglio d'Egitto is seen as an establishing, foundational text, crucial in determining the future role and elaboration of the anti-illusionist novel. [End Page 227] Moreover, Sciascia's concern with the act of writing, the presentation of history as fiction, the alignment of history and power, and his call for a history from below will find suitable responses in the texts analyzed in the subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4 offers a detailed analysis of Consolo's Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio (1976). Of all the novels examined in this volume, this perhaps is the most complex and problematic with regard to easy categorizations. Largely neglected in anglophone criticism until recent times, Consolo's plurilingual-polyphonic masterpiece is given a fresh interpretative analysis in this chapter. Glynn places the novel within the microhistorical strand of writers (Vassalli's La...

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