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

458ComparativeDrama aware ofhow Renaissance memento mori driUed in the lessons of mortality ... we rarely contemplate human remains within the home.... The household, it seems, was spacious enough to embrace the work of recycling corpses; cookbooks placed the human body imaginatively in proximity to death, carnality, orality" (197). However, the psychoanalytic cum historical discussion does not synthesize as weU here as in other parts ofStagingDomesticity, hence oral phase and incorporation (204) and the operations of household hierarchies do not Uluminate one another. Furthermore, some key critical concepts are left implicit until the end of the chapter. One example is WaU's valid and interesting critique of the "homiletic tradition" which loses force (215-16). Greater emphasis on these enduring issues ofgenre in this chapter, and fuUer reflection on the historiographical lineage ofdomesticwork (forexample,Alice Clark, Louise Tilly, and Joan Scott, and the complex heritage of Marxist study) would strengthen an already strong book. Ann C. Christensen University ofHouston Mary Ann Frese Witt. The Searchfor Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 259. $45.00. The dust jacket informs us that in this study, Mary Ann Frese Witt "explores the work of a group of European writers and artists who came to fascism by way of aesthetics." That is a fair description, but it might be said ofthis group that their art was as regrettable as their political destination. Today, who has patience for the work of Gabriele D'Annunzio and his fanatic followers, or Thierry Maulnier, Robert Brasillach, Drieu La Rochelle, and Henry de Montherlant in France? Ofcourse,Witt does, but then she is a verypatient critic. Some ofher readings, perhaps, are longer than might be warranted bythe plays. However, her meticulous and valuable intellectual history of Italy and France between the wars amplyjustifies dus effort. For readers who may not be familiar with the writings of the fascist literati, this is an important study. At least two of the playwrights covered—Luigi Pirandello and Jean Anouilh—have claims on our attention, and Witt provides shrewd insights into their work by reconstituting the political and aesthetic debates out ofwhich their art emerged. Witt uses the term "aesthetic fascism" to delineate the nexus of ideas that shaped the dramaturgy of these figures—a term more nuanced than "fascist aesthetics,"which carries the implication ofparty propaganda. The playwrights Reviews459 under consideration varied in their political commitments, but aU were drawn to a movement in the arts inspired by reactionary thinkers, among them the earlyinterpreters ofNietzsche.A key figure in this study is Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), who haUed the rise ofMussoUni but drew mainly on his reading of Nietzsche for his dramatic credo. (That he misread Nietzsche is an important point not treated byWitt.) D'Annunzio was deafto Nietzsche's irony, and turning his subtle aphorisms into briefs for fascist drama, he glorified the wiU to power (as domination), the superman (as a political type), irrationality (as a critique of modernity), Dionysian spectacle (as a means to sway the masses), transcendence of good and evU (as a platform for self-aggrandizement), and nostalgia for the classical world (as a call to arms for the new Rome). It is little wonder that D'Annunzio's plays resemble second-rate Italian opera scaled for grand outdoor productions. Indeed, such productions occurred, and Mussolini admired them. Today these inflated plays (at least in English translation) are barely readable; they are stilted, bombastic, narcissistic, and declamatory. Witt labors to bring she ofthem to life through detailed examination: TheDead City, Fedra, Iorio's Daughter, The Ship, Glory, and Beyond Love. But the work resists reanimation, even at the hands of a skUled critic. Witt makes a case for D'Annunzio as "the primary figure responsible for attempting to apply Nietzsche's ideas in The Birth ofTragedy to the actual creation of modern tragedy" (33). But a stronger case can be made, I think, for Eugene O'NeiU, who read Nietzsche with better understanding and with better result. (In the 1920s O'NeUl modeled his most successful plays on The Birth of Tragedy.) According to Nietzsche, the tragic hero embodies the coUective identity ofthe community, symbolized by the god Dionysus...