Antonio Gramsci and the Myth of America in Italy During the 1930s

34 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW WILLIAM BOELHOWER ANTONIO GRAMSCI AND THE MYTH OF AMERICA IN ITALY DURING THE 1930s Antonio Gramsci is usually not included among those Italian intellectuals who turned to North America for an alternative cultural and political model during the 1930s and 1940s, and when he is included it is naturally his immediately accessible observations on "Americanismo e fordismo" that are discussed rather than his broader interest in cultural creations.1 It is by evaluating the latter interest, however, that one can find not only a more pertinent context for assessing his contribution to this dimension of the Italian cultural debate of the '30s but most of all what unwittingly proves to be a comprehensive criticism of the mythic approach of the "Americanisti" (in particular, Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese and Giaime Pintor). Of course, Gramsci wrote relatively little on American culture and was not in contact with those who were the major protagonists in debating the myth of America, simply because he was already under arrest in 1926 and was in prison throughout the '30s until a year before his death in 1937. Nor were Vittorini or Pavese able to know of Gramsci's prison notebooks (Quadernidelcarcere) previous to 1950, when the first volume was published by Einaudi, and by then their interest in American things had lost its intensity, both having become sympathizers of the Italian Communist Party. In spite of these limiting conditions, though, Antonio Gramsci was debating the same themes during his imprisonment as the Americanisti were: the problem of creating a new national-popular vision of culture based on the common man or the proletariat; that of bridging the traditional gap between the intellectuals and the people; that of creating a new literary style capable of expressing a neorealistic aesthetic. Contrary to them, however, his approach to these issues is based on the philosophy of praxis, his original version of dialectical materialism, and on a broad sociological perspective of literature, which allowed him to escape the idealist and mythic categories of his contemporaries and also provided him with a framework for his remarks on American literature. Already in 1929 Elio Vittorini expressed the intellectual vacuum his generation was left with in Fascist Italy: "Distant in memory and in literary astronomy, Croce's aesthetic left us cold like a nocturnal star; furthermore, what one needed was not artistic canons but a sure and palpable reality, a land to which one could firmly attach oneself."2 Under the Fascist regime the intellectual climate was stifling. One could either 35 BOELHOWER conform, speak out and thus land in prison as Gramsci did or escape into the pure realm of literature, as the Americanisti for the most part chose to do. After all, Italian culture was traditionally academic and selfenclosed at least as far back as the Renaissance, Gramsci points out in a major section of his prison notebooks. Or as Pavese says in Saggi letterari, "Italian intellectuals already pretend that they are free because they can choose to perpetuate the exquisite and futile academy."3 The Fascist cultural program had its own "national-popular" themes which were to be expressed in cultural creations and these required both a positive evaluation of peasant culture and values as well as an implicit condemnation of industrialism and "Jewish pluto-democracies."4 It is not surprising, then, that the importing of American literature and values was contrary to the Fascist cultural scheme. As Pavese explained in 1945, "Foreign voices sustained us in our efforts to understand and to live: each of us frequented and intensely loved the literature of a people, of a distant society and spoke about it, translated it and made an ideal country of it. In Fascist language all that was called a mania for foreign things."5 Clearly the most famous case of Fascist censorship dealt with the suppression of Vittorini's commentary for the anthology Americana, the manifesto of the American cultural myth, which was first published in 1941 and contained translations by Eugenio Montale, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese and Vittorini— but this I will come back to later on. Then there is the case of Fernanda Pivano whose brother was mistakenly arrested in her place...