ITALIAN PERSPECTIVES 22

Giraffes in the Garden of

Italian Literature
Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo,
Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda
Deborah Amberson

Modern Humanities Research Association and

Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature
Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo,
Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda
 LEGENDA
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 ITALIAN PERSPECTIVES
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In the light of growing academic interest in Italy and the reorganization of many
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1. The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi 1817-1837, ed. by Prue Shaw
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3. Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative, by Rita Wilson
4. Elio Vittorini: The Writer and the Written, by Guido Bonsaver
5. Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste, by Elizabeth Schächter
6. Italo Calvino and the Landscape of Childhood, by Claudia Nocentini
7. Playing with Gender: The Comedies of Goldoni, by Maggie Günsberg
8. Comedy and Culture: Cecco Angiolieri’s Poetry and Late Medieval Society, by Fabian Alfie
9. Fragments of Impegno, by Jennifer Burns
10. Contesting the Monument: The Anti-Illusionist Italian Historical Novel, by Ruth Glynn
11. Camorristi, Politicians and Businessmen, by Felia Allum
12. Speaking Out and Silencing, ed. by Anna Cento Bull and Adalgisa Giorgio
13. From Florence to the Heavenly City: The Poetry of Citizenship in Dante, by Claire E. Honess
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15. Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy: The Making of a New Genre, by Lisa Sampson
16. Sweet Thunder: Music and Libretti in 1960s Italy, by Vivienne Suvini-Hand
17. Il teatro di Eduardo De Filippo, by Donatella Fischer
18. Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969–2009, ed. by
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19. Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy 1340-1520, by Rhiannon Daniels
20. Ugo Foscolo and English Culture, by Sandra Parmegiani
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 Giraffes in the
Garden of Italian Literature
Modernist Embodiment in
Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda

Deborah Amberson

Italian Perspectives 22
Modern Humanities Research Association and
2012
 First published 2012

Published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association and

LEGENDA is an imprint of the

Modern Humanities Research Association and

© Modern Humanities Research Association and 2012

ISBN 978-1-907975-26-4
 CONTENTS
❖

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Corporeal Revolutions: Interrogating Modern and Modernist Embodiment 14
Controlling the Dangerous Bodies of Scientific and Social Modernity 14
Shocked Bodies: Technology, the Metropolis and the Human Sensorium 18
Modernist Constructions of Alternative Bodily Spaces 23
2 Corporeal Arrhythmia: Svevo’s Stylistics of Limping and Potentiality 39
Bodies in Motion 40
Arrhythmias of Material Embodiment 44
Health and Predatory Action 47
Svevian Bodies of Temporal Rupture and Waiting 49
Embodied Music 57
Stuttering in Style 63
3 Blind Refusal: Tozzi’s Stylistic Phenomenology of Hypersensitivity 76
Convulsive Bodies of Emotion 77
Shame and Material Embodiment 81
Disgust and the Borders of the Body 84
Animal Epistemologies 90
Sensory Assault and Pre-Oedipal Bodies 97
Styling Sensory Blindness 100
4 Bodies, Borders and the Offended Self: Gadda’s Stylistic Ethics of Misogyny 117
Configurations of Bodily Identity 118
The Feminine, the Fascist Horde and Weininger 127
Subverting a Masculine Ethics of Becoming 130
Ethics and Horror of Matricide 134
Judging Singular Bodies 137
A Stylistics of Singular Presence 143
Conclusion: Italian Giraffes, Italian Bodies 159
Bibliography 165
Index 173
for Bob, my father
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
❖

Many people have helped in the writing of this book. Special thanks, however, are
due to Elena Past for her encouragement and her invaluable comments on previous
drafts of this text. I am also indebted to Millicent Marcus, my doctoral dissertation
supervisor at the University of Pennsylvania. I would like to thank friends and
colleagues at the University of Florida for their advice and support. Special mention
must go to my friend Gianfranco Balestriere and I thank Dragan Kujundzic, Carol
Murphy, Sherrie Nunn, Martin Sorbille, Mary Watt, and Brigitte Weltman-Aron.
I am grateful to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of
Florida for providing a Humanities Scholarship Enhancement grant which allowed
me to carry out research for this book. Gratitude is also due to Dr Graham Nelson,
Managing Editor of Legenda, and to Professor Simon Gilson and Professor Zygmunt
Barański, Editor and former Editor of the ‘Italian Perspectives’ series.
Chapters 2 and 4 include revised elements of articles published in Forum italicum 39,
2 (2005): 441-460 and MLN 123, 1 (2008): 22-39. My thanks go to the editors of these
journals for allowing me to incorporate the updated sections of this material.
Finally, I thank friends who have provided support in a variety of ways, especially
Silvia Carlorosi, Francesco Caruso, Fabiana Cecchini, Chris Cook, Ellie Laughlin,
Joshua McWilliams, and Mike Volk. I also express my love and gratitude to my
mother, Bernie, and my brother and sister, Alex and Jessica, for their support and
continued encouragement.
d.a, July 2011
 INTRODUCTION
❖
Three Giraffes in Italy’s Literary Garden

Writing to Bonaventura Tecchi in March of 1926, Carlo Emilio Gadda describes

his peculiar status within the Italian literary community as that of a kangaroo or
a giraffe: ‘Come soggetto strano, come giraffa o canguro del vostro bel giardino:
ecco quel che posso valere’ [Like a strange character, like a giraffe or a kangaroo in
your beautiful garden: this is what I can be ].1 What is striking about Gadda’s choice
is not so much the undeniably non-Italian nature of the giraffe and the kangaroo
but, rather, the somewhat ungainly physicality of both animals. The enormously
long neck of the giraffe and the hopping gait of the kangaroo make it impossible
to conceive of the animal without thinking of its material body. This cannot be
said, for example, of the equally ‘exotic’ parrot who can be conceived in terms of
vibrant colours abstracted from the materiality of the bird. Gadda selects animals
that simply cannot be disentangled from their rather inharmonious physicality. In
highlighting this insistent materiality, Gadda also designates his central concerns,
as his writing, in fact, revolves around a defining nexus of body, subjectivity and
style. In other words, Gadda returns insistently to the relation between human
subjectivity and embodiment, and he develops a style that performs his vision of
human material embodiment. A similar attention to body, subjectivity and style
informs the writing of Italo Svevo and Federigo Tozzi, authors whose writing is
marked by the same supposed peculiarity that characterizes Gadda’s work. In short,
it seems that Gadda was not the only giraffe wandering through the harmonious
literary Italian garden. Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature investigates this
central nexus in the work of Svevo, Tozzi and Gadda and considers it as evidence of
a programmatic attempt to renegotiate human embodiment in order to validate an
alternate space of lived corporeality, an authorial agenda that locates these giraffes
squarely in the ambit of modernism.
Beyond their mutual attention to questions of embodied identity, Svevo, Tozzi
and Gadda are also bound by the nature of their reception within Italian literary-
critical circles, a reception that already suggests their status as ‘giraffes’. Indeed, in
the case of each author, we note a somewhat arduous or circuitous route toward
critical acclaim or recognition. Each of the authors seemed initially to stump the
Italian critical establishment, and to generate a variety of responses that ranged from
an initial disregard with respect to Svevo, to misrecognition and misclassification
of Tozzi, and, in the case of Gadda, a continued emphasis on the curious novelty
of his work. Accordingly, after a life spent in laborious and frustrated pursuit of
critical acclaim, Svevo achieved enthusiastic recognition both in and beyond Italy
2 Introduction

in the final decade of his life. Tozzi’s fate at the hands of the critics manifests the
most variable and even contradictory itinerary as he was classified and re-classified
by successive generations of Italian critics. Gadda was recognized throughout his
writing career as a novel and strange author who shared much with stylistic currents
and practices of a literary past. Despite this curious status, Gadda achieved what
might be described as overnight cult status late in his career when he was embraced
by the writers of the Italian neoavanguardia in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Turning initially to the details of Svevo’s laboured journey to critical acclaim, we
must address the ‘caso Svevo’ [Svevo case], the term applied to the sudden literary
celebrity achieved by the author in his sixties. Svevo had, in fact, published two
novels in the 1890s, Una vita (1892) and Senilità (1898). However, beyond a small
number of somewhat unf lattering reviews, these novels passed almost entirely
unnoticed.2 In the face of a total lack of critical acclaim, Svevo appeared to abandon
his literary activities following the publication of Senilità. This renunciation, as well
as his disillusionment with literature, is made clear in the pages of his diary: ‘Io, a
quest’ora e definitivamente ho eliminato dalla mia vita quella ridicola e dannosa
cosa che si chiama letteratura’ [I have now and forever eliminated from my life that
ridiculous and noxious thing called literature].3 Yet Svevo’s withdrawal from the
field of literature was not definitive. He began working on La coscienza di Zeno in
early 1919 and the novel was published in May 1923.4 Initially the novel prompted
little critical attention.5 Svevo shared his despair with his friend James Joyce who
responded with reassurances about the quality of the work: ‘Perché si dispera? Deve
sapere ch’è di gran lunga il suo migliore libro’ [Why do you despair? You must
know that this is your best book by far].6 Joyce’s support, however, was more than
moral and, in fact, in the same letter, he recommended that Svevo send copies of
the novel to Valery Larbaud, Benjamin Crémieux, T. S. Eliot, and Ford Madox
Ford, critics and writers with whom Joyce planned to intercede on Svevo’s behalf.
The response on the part of Larbaud and Crémieux was enthusiastic. Larbaud wrote
to Svevo in January 1925 praising his work and requesting copies of his other two
novels. In effect, this attention in French literary circles marks the beginning of the
‘caso Svevo’. Just over a year later, in February 1926, Larbaud and Crémieux edited
a special edition of the French literary journal Le Navire d’Argent, dedicated to the
work of Svevo. In these pages, Crémieux heralds the unknown Svevo as the first
and only analytical novelist produced by contemporary Italy (Ghidetti, 19).
While Svevo was being ‘discovered’ in France, a young Eugenio Montale com-
mitted himself to publicizing the author’s work in literary-critical circles. Having
obtained copies of Svevo’s three novels thanks to a mutual friend, Roberto Bazlen,
Montale published his ‘Omaggio a Svevo’ in December 1925 in the Milanese paper
L’Esame. In this short article, Montale describes the nascent French admiration
for an Italian author who, he writes, is possessed of a ‘forza spontanea e sincera’
[spontaneous and sincere force].7 Further attention followed. Writing in L’Ambrosiano
in February 1926, Giuseppe Prezzolini recognized the value of Svevo who, though
challenged stylistically, manifests the ‘coraggio di guardare nell’uomo quotidiano
e comune, con una spaventosa illuminazione’ [courage to consider quotidian and
common man, with a frightening illumination].8 Critical debate continued after
 Introduction 3

Svevo’s death in September 1928.9 Giacomo Debenedetti’s 1929 article ‘Svevo e

Schmitz’ is of particular importance here, as the Turinese critic underlines the
problematic status of Svevo’s Italian identity.10 In his ref lections on the ‘caso Svevo’,
the critic describes a process of legitimization of the Triestine author, a process
that he compares with the preparation of an official membership or identity card
(Debenedetti, 28).11 Svevo himself was fully and humorously aware of his status,
as he makes clear when, writing to Crémieux in May 1928, he compares his
acceptance in Italian literary circles with the introduction of a ‘pezzo d’aglio nella
cucina di gente che non ne vogliono sapere’ [piece of garlic into the kitchen of
people who wish to know nothing about it (Svevo, 1966, 874)]. Though Svevo’s self-
characterization does not suggest the same resolute materiality of Gadda’s giraffe,
the reference to garlic suggests the body in its insistence on a sensory intensity that
contrasts meaningfully with the supposed decorum, grace and measure of Italian
literary tastes.
Tozzi criticism has manifested a very curious evolution that saw the author
described as everything from a naturalist to an expressionist, from an a-ideological
author to a conservative Catholic and, finally, from an intellectually naïf narrator
to an erudite student of modern psychology. Turning initially to what might
be termed the naturalist phase of Tozzi criticism, we must start with Giuseppe
Antonio Borgese’s identification of the edificatory value of Tozzi’s writing. In
fact, subsequent to Tozzi’s early death in 1920, Borgese co-opted his work into a
project of novelistic reconstruction that rejected the fragmentism of artists such as
the vociani. This literary agenda is described in Borgese’s 1923 Tempo di edificare,
where he describes Tozzi as ‘uno dei primissimi edificatori nella nuova generazione
letteraria d’Italia’ [one of the very first builders of the new literary generation of
Italy].12 Other early critics, however, such as Alfredo Gargiulo dismissed Tozzi’s
work on the grounds of its pathological ‘esasperazione egocentrica’ [egocentric
exasperation].13 Largely sidelined for the three succeeding decades, Tozzi was
resurrected, so to speak, in the 1960s when critical attention finally conferred
on him overdue recognition as one of the most important, most modern and
most innovative of the narratori of the Italian Novecento. As in the case of Svevo,
Giacomo Debenedetti made a significant contribution to this critical debate, so it is
he who should receive credit for much of the attention paid to Tozzi. With his 1963
reading of Con gli occhi chiusi, Debenedetti liberated the author from the confines of
the Sienese provinces in order to place his innovative work firmly in the narrative
avant-garde of expressionism.14 Debenedetti offers a portrait of an a-ideological
author for whom narration is equivalent to the act of the ‘primitive’ who paints
animals on the walls of his cave in order to dominate a frightening reality.15
Conceptual sophistication, moreover, is absent: ‘le sue idee, sempre comunque
assai embrionali, sono di tutt’altra natura da quelle che si ottengono attraverso
i libri o la elaborazione mentale e intellettuale’ [his ideas, always however quite
embryonic, are entirely different from those developed in books or through mental
or intellectual elaboration (Debenedetti, 2001, 60)]. For Debenedetti, then, Tozzi’s
is not a naturalist narrative because it records events instead of explaining them
(Debenedetti, 1988, 92).
4 Introduction

Though largely accepting of Debenedetti’s claims for a very modern Tozzian

expressionism, many critics have subsequently offered convincing counter-
arguments to this portrait of a naïf author without ideology. Ferruccio Ulivi, Paolo
Getrevi and Franco Petroni amongst others have discovered an ideological Tozzi
in their exploration of the religious and, specifically, Catholic dimension of Tozzi’s
inspiration.16 Addressing, amongst other concerns, Tozzi’s previously overlooked
association with Domenico Giuliotti and La Torre (1913), the Catholic journal that
they founded together, these critical voices opened the door to an analysis of a social
and ideological conservatism in Tozzi’s early work as well as in his later novels. A
further evolution in Tozzi criticism is evident in the analysis of the author’s studies
in psychology. In fact, Debenedetti’s portrait of a talented dilettante was definitively
replaced by that of an erudite though self-taught intellectual, thanks to those critics
who addressed the author’s studies in the field of philosophy and psychology and,
in particular, his intellectual passion for the work of William James.17 This brief
sampling of divergent and even mutually contradictory positions concerning Tozzi
illustrates the degree of critical confusion that, for decades, enveloped the work of
this Sienese giraffe.
Gadda was, of course, fully aware of the classificatory difficulties he posed
for the critical establishment, as his self-definition as giraffe illustrates. However,
although it has become commonplace to claim that Gadda was not appreciated by
his contemporaries, there are many examples of critical interventions that suggest
quite the opposite.18 Though largely appreciative of Gadda’s work, these earlier
critics frequently underscore his novelty and the resulting difficulty in locating
him within a contemporary literary context. In 1931, Carlo Linati wonders whether
a charmingly baroque author such as Gadda can find success in a period domi-
nated by neoclassical writing.19 Raffaello Franchi describes a Gaddian art that is
‘veramente singolare’ [truly singular].20 Writing in the same year, Giuseppe De
Robertis identifies a complex, bristling, and utterly novel author who, despite being
a humorist, is Italian (the word is underlined to highlight the singularity of the
concept).21 Elio Vittorini hails an excellent and novel author whom he locates in a
specifically Lombard historical tradition of satire that seemed to have disappeared
entirely at the close of the seventeenth century.22 Reviewing Il castello di Udine
in 1934, Gianfranco Contini further broadens the temporal spectrum as he draws
Gadda’s work toward the Renaissance ‘pasticheurs’, from the Italian macaronic
tradition to Rabelais.23 What this gradual extension of the classificatory field
illustrates is precisely the need to stretch the contemporary spectrum of critical
categories in order to find a suitable niche for this Milanese giraffe.
Beyond these shared difficulties of classification within a literary-critical canon,
what else binds these authors? What justifies a study that focuses on these three
writers whose publications cover such a broad span of time, from the 1890s to the
1960s?24 Why not include the other, no doubt numerous, cases of Italian authors
who have achieved recognition late in their literary careers or, alternatively, who
have been hailed as entirely novel within an Italian context? The short answer, as
indicated above, is what I consider to be the distinctive nexus of body, subjectivity
and style that emerges in the work of the three authors and that prompted, at least
 Introduction 5

in part, the difficulties of critical classification. The longer answer, on the other
hand, broaches the particularities of their treatment of human embodiment and, in
fact, diminishes the apparent difficulty of classification within an Italian context by
placing their work against the broader backdrop of a European and international
modernism preoccupied with questions of corporeality. In fact, we might note a
critical tendency of sorts to classify each of these three authors by means of reference
to non-Italian authors. Svevo is frequently associated with the Mitteleuropean culture
of his native Trieste and becomes, then, an Italian(ish) version of Robert Musil with
Zeno, in particular, becoming a Triestine ‘man without qualities’. In addition,
Svevo’s representation of memory in La coscienza di Zeno has prompted comparisons
with Proust. On ‘discovering’ Tozzi, Debenedetti establishes inf luential parallels
with the nightmarish qualities of Franz Kaf ka’s literary universe. Gadda, on the
other hand, is often termed the ‘Italian Joyce’ as his supposed encyclopaedism and
his macaronic style are connected with the work of the Irish author. Alternatively,
he is associated with French author, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, on the grounds of a
shared attention to a Rabelaisian physicality and stylistics.25
The non-Italian authors selected as points of reference are all, of course,
undisputed giants of literary modernism, a classification traditionally avoided by an
Italian critical orthodoxy that preferred the specificity of terms such as Decadent-
ism, Symbolism, Crepuscularism, Futurism, and Hermeticism.26 The modernist
label is, indeed, notoriously vague, covering a diversity of artistic movements that,
housed in various countries, stretched from the militant avant-garde movements
of the first two decades of the twentieth century, through the arguably more
conservative ‘high’ modernism of the 1920s, and on to the more overtly politicized
production of the 1930s. Modernism, therefore, is characterized by its great formal
and ideological variety, a circumstance underscored by a broad spectrum of critics.
While Eugene Lunn, for instance, defines the movement in terms of ‘multiple
revolts against traditional realism and romanticism’,27 Michael Levenson identifies
a generalized sense of crisis, a term that, though overused, ‘still glows with
justification’.28 Richard Sheppard identifies no fewer than nine distinct traits or
tendencies in a modernism that he too defines as a response to a perceived moment
of crisis.29 While it is not my intention here to review the entirety of critical
positions on modernism, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the critical
tendency to approach literary modernism by means of a recurrent set of critical
oppositions central to which is that traditional account that attempts to distinguish
between a conservative high modernism of aesthetic and subjective autonomy and
a social modernity of mass culture and technological innovation.30 Indeed, Matei
Calinescu describes an ‘irreversible split’ between ‘modernity as a stage in the
history of Western civilization — a product of scientific and technological progress,
of the industrial revolution, of the sweeping economic and social changes brought
about by the development of capitalism — and modernity as an aesthetic concept’.31
Moreover, Calinescu elaborates, cultural or aesthetic modernity is defined by its
‘radical antibourgeois attitudes’ and its disgust in the face of ‘middle-scale values’,
a disgust that generates the ‘consuming negative passion’ of cultural modernity
(Calinescu, 42). Central to this critical paradigm is the emergence of a mass culture
6 Introduction

industry whose ‘prearranged harmony’ is described by Adorno and Horkheimer as

a ‘mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art’.32
Moreover, so-called high modernism locates itself, for Adorno, in antagonistic
opposition to this mass cultural model.33 This critical view became one of the most
inf luential representations of literary modernism. Indeed, though Andreas Huyssen
sets out to interrogate the reasons behind the critical resilience of this ‘great divide’
between ‘high art’ and mass culture, he writes that ‘modernism constituted itself
through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other:
an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture’ (Huyssen, vii-viii).34
At the core of this oppositional paradigm is the formal and stylistic sophistication
of the modernist text, a quality that, for Adorno, exemplifies its attempted refusal
of commodification. As with modernism itself, modernist form and style resist
monolithic description. In broaching a body of artists bound by a self-conscious
exper ience of modernity as something entirely new, critics have identified in
the modernist experimental bent an aesthetic self-ref lexiveness with respect both
to artistic tradition and to the formal component parts of the given medium.
Lunn describes this as a tendency amongst modernists to highlight ‘the media or
materials with which they are working, the very processes of creation in their own
craft’ (Lunn, 34). In addressing the specifics of the literary field, he underscores
the modernist adoption of a form that ‘reveals its own reality as a construction or
artifice’, a goal achieved by a variety of means including ‘visual or linguistic dis-
tortion to convey intense subjective states of mind’ (Lunn, 35). Lunn also points to a
modernist inclination toward simultaneity and juxtaposition or montage, a practice
by means of which ‘narrative or temporal structure is weakened, or even disappears,
in favour of an aesthetic ordering based on synchronicity, the logic of metaphor,
or what is sometimes referred to as “spatial form”’ (Lunn, 35). In this paratactical
configuration, narrative organization abandons sequential logic in favour of an art
that is ‘without apparent causal progression and completion’ (Lunn, 35).35 This is
the vision of a modernism described by Malcolm Bradbury and James MacFarlane
as indicative of a ‘new era of high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-represent-
ationalism, in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards
style, technique, and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life’.36
I present this sampling of positions on modernism in order to differentiate a
traditional critical stance from the more recent scholarship that tends, for the most
part, to minimize ideological and aesthetic oppositions between modernism, high
or otherwise, and modernity. Instead, many scholars now propose a modernism that
is deeply implicated in the social, economic and technological paradigm shifts that
define modernity as a whole. While Astradur Eysteinsson writes that modernist
aesthetic practices do not ‘directly reflect social modernity or lend us an immediate
access to its distinctive qualities’, he argues that modernism constitutes an ‘attempt
to interrupt the modernity that we live and understand as a social if not “normal”,
way of life’.37 Jonathan Crary goes further and insists that ‘any effective account
of modern culture must confront the ways in which modernism, rather than
being a reaction against or transcendence of processes of scientific and economic
rationalization, is inseparable from them’.38 It is this desire to locate modernism
 Introduction 7

within the social and economic context of technological modernity that animates
Bradbury and McFarlane’s well-known description of a modernist art ‘of the
destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the world changed
and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial
acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. It is the
literature of technology [...] Modernism is then the art of modernization’ (Bradbury
and McFarlane, 27). Marshall Berman provides an equally all-encompassing
definition of a modernism contingent upon a ‘maelstrom of modern life’ that
encompasses the ‘industrialization of production’ responsible for the transformation
of human experience and environment, the acceleration of life, and the transfer of
millions of people to the urban centres of the West.39
What emerges in this correlation of the experience of modernity with mod-
ernism is a modernist art of the living human who is both the subject and the
object of modernization. Moreover, this same modernist art insistently underscores
the embodied dimension of human existence, namely, the fact that modernity
is experienced in and through the material human body. Thus, notwithstanding
its great variety, literary modernism might be understood as a stylistically self-
conscious engagement with the experience of human embodiment in the face
of a social and technological revolution felt on, by, and in the body, modifying
not only the rhythms of its daily movements, practices and interactions, but also
its epistemological and ethical status. This is very much the case made by Sara
Danius in her study of the definitively ‘high’ modernist Proust, Mann and Joyce.
Indeed, Danius places this living embodied subject of modernity at the forefront
of modernism, as she convincingly argues that technological innovation is not just
a feature of the aesthetics of high modernism but is, in a real way, constitutive of
those same aesthetics (Danius, 3). Modernism, then, responds to a perceived crisis
of human epistemological authority, a crisis that is, first and foremost, one of a
human sensorium outstripped by the accuracy and scope of technological devices
such as the camera and the phonograph. Accordingly, the human body becomes
the site of a subjective and even inexact encounter with the phenomena of reality.
Indeed, Danius identifies modernism as a ‘general gravitation toward a conception
of aesthetic experience based in a notion of the immanence of the body’ (Danius,
194). Ulrika Maude adopts a similar stance as she writes that modernism charts
our relationship with our own bodies and our reality in the light of technological
innovation.40 Tim Armstrong underscores the indissoluble bond between the
material experience of modernity and modernist discourses on embodiment when
he writes that a broad ideological variety of modernists ‘saw the body as the locus
of anxiety, even crisis’.41 Moreover, he identifies a fascination with, specifically, the
‘limits of the body’, whether in terms of corporeal energies or perceptual capacities,
and he defines modernism as an attempt to ‘intervene in the body’ (Armstrong,
1998, 4, 6). Literary modernism, then, must be considered as a generalized albeit
varied re-negotiation of human embodiment, a re-negotiation that is not just
aesthetic in scope but is also an epistemological and ethical ref lection on the lived
experience of a radically transformed social and economic reality. It is, moreover, in
this chorus of assorted modernist voices that Svevo, Tozzi and Gadda’s stylistically
8 Introduction

informed attention to the body and embodiment finds resonance. In this light,
their zoological peculiarity in a harmonious garden of Italian literature suggests an
affirmative engagement with embodiment as, beyond the traditional Italian canons
of literary measure and prescriptive grace, each author charts new embodied ethical
practices and maps alternate sensory and corporeal regimes.
The chapters that follow plot this modernist interrogation of embodiment. The
chapter entitled ‘Corporeal Revolutions: Interrogating Modern and Modernist
Embodiment’ aims to contextualize, both artistically and socially, the corporeal
meditations of Svevo, Tozzi, and Gadda. As such it addresses, firstly, the broader
context of the body of social and technological modernity. The chapter opens
on the radical contradictions of a human body that is at once the subject and the
object of modernization. As the subject of modernity, the body houses increasing
knowledge about itself and its environment. Yet, as object, the body succumbs to
the weight of this knowledge. As the evolutionary sciences open the door to the
concept of biological regression in the atomistic living body, the objectified human
form poses a threat to the ideal of progress and, paradoxically, to a society conceived
in terms of a hierarchized organic metaphor. This hazardous body must be rendered
docile and, by virtue of the intensification of the disciplinary regimes identified
by Michel Foucault, must become an efficient cog within an industrial capitalist
edifice described by Karl Marx in terms of its dehumanizing instrumentalization
of the labouring human body. The modern metropolis is the space in which these
developments are most deeply felt and lived. Indeed, this chapter will also encompass
ref lections on the embodied experience of urban modernity and will focus, in
particular, on discussions of the bodily shock triggered by the encounter with
the urban centre. This technologized and shock-ridden metropolis will be linked
with a critique of modernity that encompasses an alleged loss of epistemological
authority on the part of the human sensorium as well as concerns regarding a
perceived destabilization of the body both in its organic and gendered dimensions.
My discussion of the perceived crisis of modernity will encompass thinkers such as
Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel as well as the more dubious reasoning of Max
Nordau and Otto Weininger. These discourses concerning the body of modernity
provide a social and cultural context for a modernism that, rather than simply
diagnosing and lamenting a crisis of the human organism, moves beyond this critical
space in order to reclaim and revalidate the ethical and epistemological subjectivism
of this imperfect living body. This chapter will consider these modernist bodies
focusing, in particular, on those configurations that foreground hypersensitivity,
infirmity, potentiality, sensorial empiricism and gender, considerations central to
the writing and thought of Svevo, Tozzi and Gadda.
Having explored the question of modern and modernist embodiment, I will
move to a sequence of three critical-interpretive chapters that deal separately with
the thought and writing of each author. These chapters are organized chrono-
logically and begin, therefore, with Italo Svevo in the chapter entitled ‘Corporeal
Arrhythmia: Svevo’s Stylistics of Limping and Potentiality’. In his novels Una vita
(1892), Senilità (1898) and La coscienza di Zeno (1923), I argue that Svevo proposes
an arrhythmic embodiment by means of which the body adamantly asserts its
 Introduction 9

material presence. This is a mode of embodiment that, explicitly differentiated

from an animalistic regime of predatory domination, revolves around a temporal
rupture deriving from a continued suspension of bodily action, a suspension that
introduces Svevo’s crucial arrhythmia. Svevo’s protagonists, from the hypersensitive
Alfonso Nitti, through the senile Emilio Brentani, and, finally, on to the famously
hypochondriac Zeno Cosini, inhabit bodies defined by the category of potentiality.
Indeed, while animalistic action diverts focus from the acting body toward the
domain impacted and transformed by the performed action, the protagonists’ ability
to act but repeated refusal or failure to do so insists on the workings of the body itself.
This is a programmatic dimension of Svevo’s thought that, in La coscienza di Zeno,
underpins an entire project of embodied culture constructed on Zeno’s arrhythmic
and limping organism. This arrhythmia carries equal weight when considering
Svevo’s distinctive writing style. He writes in an Italian imbued with Triestine
dialect and he measures this language against the supposed rhythmic regularity of
a canonical Tuscan. Repeatedly confronting his irresolute protagonists with active
and healthy antagonists capable of conversing f luently in Tuscan, Svevo, I will
argue, invites us to consider his infamous ‘scrivere male’ or ‘bad writing’ as a key
component of his theorization of a materially self-aware human embodiment. Thus,
Svevo’s writing, described as erratic, awkward and ugly, performs Zeno’s limp and
his inability to play the violin without furiously beating the rhythm with his entire
body. This erratic or limping style, I argue, is founded on a determined principle of
irregularity that seeks to render the cognitive triumph of an arrhythmic body and,
simultaneously, to challenge the validity of a stable and majoritarian Tuscan model
characterized, like the healthy, by a lack of corporeal self-knowledge.
My analysis of Tozzi’s literary and stylistic considerations of embodiment
follows in the chapter entitled ‘Blind Refusal: Tozzi’s Stylistic Phenomenology of
Hypersensitivity’. Tozzi is most frequently considered as an author whose thought
and style are shaped by an introspective exploration of the mysteries of the human
psyche. Focusing on his principal novels, Adele (1979), Ricordi di un impiegato
(1927), Bestie (1917), Con gli occhi chiusi (1919), Il podere (1921), Tre croci (1920), and
Gli egoisti (1923), I propose instead a reading that places the sensory experience of
material embodiment at the forefront of Tozzi’s thought and writing. This focus on
embodiment, in fact, tallies with the work of an author for whom the thought of
William James remained a crucial point of reference. Like James, Tozzi stresses the
role of sensation in the encounter between world and self. However, unlike James,
for whom perception leads to the abstract organization of concept, Tozzi creates
characters who seem to remain at the level of sensation. As with Svevo, questions
of bodily action are central to Tozzi’s thought. However, while Svevo humor-
ously underlines the cognitive validity of arrhythmic embodiment of non-action,
Tozzi describes a schizophrenically hypersensitive f lesh overwhelmed by sensory
stimuli experienced as an assault. This assault also comes from the body itself, as
the f lesh is repeatedly represented as an uncontrollable dimension that twitches,
stutters and blushes. Here, the embodied subject suffers a shameful incarnation tied
to an abject f lesh (Levinas, Kristeva) that relegates the human to the level of an
epistemologically blind animal (Heidegger). However, this often terrifying space
10 Introduction

constitutes an alternative mode of embodiment intended to counter a paternal order

founded on the active and violent domination and exploitation of bodies. Tozzi
writes this space of hypersensitive embodiment in a style that renders the immediacy
of non-conceptualized sense perception. Frequently described as paratactical, anti-
hierarchical, visionary and oniric, Tozzi’s style and narrative organization shun
abstract causality in what I consider to be a deliberate authorial attempt to perform
in style the embodied experience of a schizophrenic subject who dwells beyond the
paternal metaphor.
Gadda’s work is analysed in the chapter entitled ‘Bodies, Borders and the
Offended Self: Gadda’s Stylistic Ethics of Misogyny’. Focusing my analysis on
his novels La cognizione del dolore (1963) and Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana
(1957), as well as his treatise Meditazione milanese (1974) and the anti-fascist pamphlet
Eros e priapo (1967), I address Gadda’s obsessive return to the porous borders of a
gendered body. Though his novels are inhabited by a broad variety of bodies, Gadda
suggests three distinct constructions of subjective identity, each grounded in a
corresponding configuration of the body. These three embodied identities, namely,
a self-consciously permeable male monad, a proliferating and memorably grotesque
peasantry, and a bourgeois femininity fixated on maternity, develop in conf lict
one with the other. This, however, is an essential antagonism by means of which
the author addresses the ethical shortcomings of a subjectivity intent on stability
and permanence. Here, Gadda gives full voice to an apparent misogyny inspired
by the thought of Otto Weininger. However, Gadda’s is a profoundly ambivalent
misogyny. Indeed, as he opposes a femininity of carnal passivity intent on
accumulation and self-preservation by means of maternity to an ethical masculinity
equipped to shape the future, Gadda’s gendered categories crumple in on themselves.
Indeed, it is the carnal female body that reveals the deep offence committed by a
modernity that performs an epistemological, legal, social and scientific exploitation
of feminized bodies, an exploitation operated, for the most part, by a masculine
ideological authority. Thus, Gadda includes ambivalent instances of a matricide that
is corrective of an ethically deficient femininity and, at the same time, profoundly
unjust in its devastation of a female body constructed as passive object to a lethal
and masculine penetration. Moreover, Gadda’s famously baroque or macaronic style
embodies this ambiguity. Shattering linguistic order and stability by incorporating
a variety of styles, registers and points of views, he comes to write the proliferation
of the material body in a highly self-aware game of authorial anonymity, a game
that strives to give voice to a feminine materiality.
My conclusion, ‘Italian Giraffes, Italian Bodies’, returns to the question of the
traditional Italian critical resistance to the label of modernism in order to argue
that, while such classifications as Decadentism and Symbolism might permit a
greater analytical precision, they intensify what Italo Calvino identified as an Italian
cultural isolation stemming from what he saw as the untranslatable nature of the
Italian language. Moreover, in the specific cases of Svevo, Tozzi, and Gadda, this
critical attitude fails to recognize writing that, at once European and deeply Italian,
was above all modernist. The sustained attention they paid to bodily materiality
places these Italian authors securely amongst the ranks of Proust, Joyce and Kaf ka
 Introduction 11

where, like their non-Italian counterparts, these ‘giraffes’ contemplate and write the
rhythms of an embodiment intent on subverting the rational and instrumentalizing
project of modernity and reclaiming the subjective body of lived experience.

Notes to the Introduction

1. Carlo Emilio Gadda, A un amico fraterno: lettere a Bonaventura Tecchi (Milan: Garzanti, 1984),
p. 43. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the following chapters are my own.
2. Writing in the Corriere della sera in December 1892, Domenico Oliva is critical of Una vita as
a novel, though he does recognize certain qualities in its author: ‘sebbene scarso d’interesse,
sebbene d’un valore tecnico assai limitato, questo romanzo rivela una coscienza artistica ed un
osservatore dall’occhio limpido’ [though of little interest, though of limited technical value, this
novel reveals an artistic consciousness and a keenly observant eye], cited in Il caso Svevo: guida
storica e critica, ed. by Enrico Ghidetti, (Rome: Laterza, 1993), p. 3. Ghidetti also includes part
of a somewhat favourable review of Senilità written by Silvio Benco (pp. 8–10). Though Benco
objects to the author’s choice of title on the grounds of the novel’s lack of synthesis, he praises
an authorial sincerity (Ghidetti, p. 8).
3. Svevo, Opera omnia III, Racconti, saggi, pagine sparse (Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1968), p. 818. The diary
entry is dated December 1902.
4. In a letter to Benjamin Crémieux, Svevo writes that he began working on the novel four
months after the arrival of Italian troops in Trieste, a detail that dates the start of composition
to February 1919. Svevo, Opera omnia I, Epistolario (Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1966), p. 825.
5. In his ‘Profilo autobiografico’ Svevo describes an initial ‘incomprensione assoluta ed un silenzio
glaciale’ [absolute incomprehension and a glacial silence]. The only significant exception
to this was Giulio Caprin, whose attitude Svevo describes as one of hostility (Svevo, 1968,
pp. 809–10).
6. The letter was written on 30 January 1924 and is included in part in Ghidetti, pp. 14–15. Svevo’s
friendship with Joyce dates from 1906 when he began studying English with the Irish author at
Trieste’s Berlitz School.
7. Eugenio Montale, Carteggio con gli scritti di Montale su Svevo (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), p. 72.
Montale published a further presentation of Svevo in Il Quindicinale, January 1926.
8. Giuseppe Prezzolini, ‘Rivelazioni: Italo Svevo’, from L’Ambrosiano, 8 February 1926, repr. in
Ghidetti, p. 24.
9. The literary journals Solaria and Il Convegno dedicated entire issues to his work in 1929.
10. The article was initially published in Il Convegno in 1929, repr. in Giacomo Debenedetti, Saggi
critici. Nuova serie (Rome: O.E.T. Edizioni del secolo, 1945), pp. 27–85.
11. Richard Robinson writes that the ‘caso Svevo’, or the ‘battle within Italy for the acceptance
of supposedly badly written novels such as those of Svevo’, was ‘caught up with the political
programme of an increasingly Fascist state’. He also writes that the poor reception of La coscienza
was led by Triestines and was a ‘symptom of the nationalist (recently irredentist) culture of 1920s
Trieste’; Robinson, ‘From Border to Front: Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno and International
Space’, Journal of European Studies 36.3 (2006), 243–68 (p. 262).
12. Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Tempo di edificare (Milan: Treves, 1923), p. vii. In an interpretation
similar to Borgese’s reading of a naturalist Tozzi, Luigi Russo establishes parallels with Verga’s
work; Russo, ‘Federigo Tozzi’, I narratori (Milan: Principato, 1958), pp. 273–76.
13. Alfredo Gargiulo, ‘Federigo Tozzi’, originally published in L’Italia letteraria, 12 June 1930, cited
in Martina Martini, Tozzi e James: letteratura e psicologia (Florence: Olschki 1999), p. 52.
14. Giacomo Debenedetti, ‘Con gli occhi chiusi’, Aut Aut, 78 (November 1963), repr. in Il personaggio
uomo (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), pp. 81–101.
15. Giacomo Debenedetti, Il romanzo del Novecento (Milan: Garzanti, 2001), p. 202.
16. I would mention the following texts: Ferruccio Ulivi, Federigo Tozzi (Milan: Mursia, 1963);
Paolo Getrevi, Nel prisma di Tozzi. La reazione, il sangue, il romanzo (Naples: Liguori, 1983);
Franco Petroni, Ideologia del mistero e logica dell’inconscio nei romanzi di Federigo Tozzi (Florence:
Manzuoli, 1984).
12 Introduction

17. Chief amongst these critics are Marco Marchi and Martina Martini. I would mention here
Marchi’s inf luential article, ‘La cultura psicologica di Tozzi’, in Tozzi in America, ed. by Luigi
Fontanella (Rome: Bulzoni, 1986), pp. 33–48; Martina Martini, Tozzi e James. Letteratura e
psicologia (1999).
18. Riccardo Stracuzzi makes this point quite strenuously. He attributes the erroneous commonplace
to Gadda’s own oversensitivity in the face of any critical intervention and also ascribes the most
inf luential pronouncements on this incorrect commonplace to writers and scholars of the
Italian neoavanguardia, in particular Alberto Arbasino and Angelo Guglielmi; ‘Gadda al vaglio
della critica (1931–1943)’, ed. by Riccardo Stracuzzi, ‘Prefazione’, Edinburgh Journal of Gadda
Studies, Supplement 7, 6 (2007), <http://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/journal/supp7reviewed/
stracuzcegreviewedpref.php> [accessed on 2 June 2011], section 1. In his review of Gadda’s
relationship with the critics, Giorgio Patrizi describes Gadda’s ‘discovery’ by the neoavanguardia
as the discovery of a ‘father’ whom others had ignored or only acknowledged in part; Patrizi,
ed., La critica e Gadda (Bologna: Cappelli, 1975), p. 14. However, rather than a ‘discovery’, this
elevation of Gadda reveals an affinity with the author. This is evident in Arbasino’s identification
of Gadda’s literary ‘nipotini’ [nephews or grandchildren], a group in which he places himself as
well as Pasolini and Testori. Arbasino’s article, ‘I nipotini dell’ingegnere’, appeared in 1960 in Il
verri and is repr. in Arbasino, L’Ingegnere in blu (Milan: Adelphi, 2008), pp. 173–86.
19. Originally published as Carlo Linati, ‘Un umorista. Carlo Emilio Gadda’, in L’Ambrosiano, 8
May 1931; repr. in Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, Supplement 7, 6 (2007), <http://www.
gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/resources/reviews/linaticeg1931.php> [accessed 2 June 2011].
20. Originally published as Raffaello Franchi, ‘La Madonna dei Filosofi’, in L’Italia letteraria, 3, 9
August 1931, 1; repr. in Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, Supplement 7, 6 (2007), <http://www.
gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/resources/reviews/franchiceg1931.php> [accessed 2 June 2011].
21. Originally published as Giuseppe De Robertis, ‘La Madonna dei filosofi’, in Pègaso 3, 6 (1931),
753–55; repr. in Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, Supplement 7, 6 (2007), <http://www.gadda.
ed.ac.uk/Pages/resources/reviews/derobceg1931.php> [accessed 2 June 2011].
22. Originally published as Elio Vittorini, ‘Evviva la frusta!’ in Il bargello, 21 May 1931: 3; repr. in
Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, Supplement 7, 6 (2007), <http://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/
resources/reviews/vittorinceg1931.php> [accessed 2 June 2011].
23. Originally published as ‘Carlo Emilio Gadda, o del “pastiche” ’, in Solaria, 1 ( January-February
1934), 88–93, repr. as ‘Primo approccio al Castello di Udine’ in Gianfranco Contini, Quarant’anni
d’amicizia (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), pp. 3–10 (p. 4).
24. The reference here to the 1960s ref lects the dates of publication of Gadda’s works. In fact, the
texts to which I refer in my chapter on Gadda were actually composed in a period that stretches
from the 1920s to the 1940s.
25. Albert Sbragia, in fact, writes that Gadda falls ‘between Joyce and Céline’, connecting Gadda’s
macaronic encyclopaedism with Joyce, and the abject physicality represented macaronically in
his texts with the work of Céline; Albert Sbragia, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), pp. 24–26. Stracuzzi notes that Carlo Bo is
the first to establish the parallel with James Joyce: ‘Gadda al vaglio della critica (1931–1943)’,
‘Prefazione’, Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, 6 (2007). It should also be pointed out that
Gadda has been compared with the Italian Scapigliati and, more specifically, with Carlo Dossi
(Linati, ‘Un umorista. Carlo Emilio Gadda’). Other comparisons of Gadda’s work have been
made with Piero Jahier, with dialect poets Porta and Belli and, of course, with fellow Lombard,
Manzoni.
26. Mario Moroni and Luca Somigli address this critical resistance in their introduction to Italian
Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2004). I shall return to this question in my conclusion.
27. Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 34
28. Michael Levenson, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999), p. 4.
29. Richard Sheppard, ‘The Problematics of European Modernism’, in Theorizing Modernism, ed.
by Steve Giles (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 33. Sheppard describes these nine responses as
follows: 1. the nihilist response (e.g. sado-masochistic double bind of Kaf ka’s early writings);
 Introduction 13

2. experience of ecstatic release, occasionally incorporating use of drugs, alcohol or violent

experience (e.g. early Expressionists); 3. mysticism (e.g. Yeats’ esoteric hermeticism); 4.
aestheticism (e.g. Symbolists); 5. turning away from modern age in the form of a conservatism
that embraces the past or a socialism that anticipates a utopian future; 6. primitivist elevation
of pre-modern or non-European cultures; 7. idolatry of the modern age (e.g. Italian Futurism,
early Vorticism); 8. constructivist assertion of need for modern classicism; 9. renunciation
of nostalgia or desire for epiphany in a modernist anticipation of postmodern acceptance of
plurality (Sheppard, pp. 33–40).
30. Sara Danius lists these oppositions as follows: ‘art/commerce, art/instrumentality, art/industry,
aesthetic discourse/communicative discourse, art/market, aesthetic value/economic value,
beauty/utility, autonomy/reducibility, innovation/standardization, originality/reproducibility,
high culture/mass culture, body/machine, organic/mechanical, individual/collective, minority/
majority, elite/masses, and so on’; Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and
Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 29.
31. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 41.
32. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum,
1994), p. 126.
33. Andreas Huyssen describes Adorno’s dialectical understanding of modernism and mass culture
as follows: ‘Adorno never lost sight of the fact that [...] modernism and mass culture have been
engaged in a compulsive pas de deux. It indeed never occurred to Adorno to see modernism
as anything other than a reaction formation to mass culture and commodification’; Huyssen,
After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986), p. 24.
34. While Huyssen accepts that the boundaries between high modernism and avant-gardism
are ‘f luid’ (Huyssen, p. viii), he maintains the opposition because ‘no other single factor has
inf luenced the emergence of the new avant-garde art as much as technology, which not only
fueled the artists’ imagination (dynamism, machine cult, beauty of technics, constructivist and
productivist attitude), but penetrated to the core of the work itself ’ (Huyssen, p. 9).
35. Lunn also identifies the modernist tendencies toward paradox or ambiguity as well as its focus
on the ‘demise of the integrated individual’ (Lunn, pp. 36–37).
36. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’, in Modernism:
A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane
(London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 25.
37. Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 6,
emphasis in original.
38. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 85.
39. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 16.
40. Ulrika Maude, ‘Modernist Bodies: Coming to our Senses’, in The Body and the Arts: Writing the
Body, ed. by Ulrika Maude, Jane McNaughton and Corinne Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), pp. 116–30 (p. 117).
41. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 4.