Contemporary Itafian Literature from a Comparatist's Perspective

By ARMANDO GNISCI

In the culture of the Western world, the decade of the nineties--the last years of our century and of the second millennium of the Christian era--has been taken up by the postultimate postdebates on postmodernism and by the rising tide of conventions, books, polemics, journalistic inquiries, photographic exhibitions, and manifestations of the most diverse kinds dealing with the 1900s: the century that has come to an end before its time, the "brief century," in the words of the eminent English historian Eric J. Hobsbawn.

Toward the end of the first one thousand years, the apocalyptic sense of the millennium was of uppermost concern throughout Europe among both the leading classes and the common people. Today, what concerns us most is bringing the twentieth century to definition as well as to closure. Accordingly, the millennium is like a vague phantasm. At best, it is the subject of exercises in erudition for the sake of disquisitions of a historical or religious nature. In the final analysis, the millennium has an elusive quality to it. In a "secularized" society such as the one inhabiting the northern and western sectors of our planet, the advent of the third Christian millennium assumes a secondary role: indeed, it drifts unavoidably from the limelight toward the backstage area. A century, after all, is a unit of time, which we are best able to manage historically and subjectively.

We may recall, in this context, some facts that can show us, beyond any doubt, the "control" we exercise by measuring time in hundred-year stretches. Europe is still in the process of reconfiguring itself territorially in the wake of the balancing and unbalancing forces unleashed by the two world wars of the first half of the century and by the subsequent "cold war." The world is full of nonagenarians and centenarians who can tell us about the century firsthand. One example that readily comes to mind is the German philosopher Hans G. Gadamer, born precisely in 1900. Africa, even while trying to find liberation from the last vestiges of European imperialistic colonialism, falls back into the invisible, pernicious netting of global neocolonialism. Latin America still strives, in one way or another, for revolution in an effort to become, at long last, "nuestra America" (our America), as the Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar puts it, borrowing the expression from the poet José Martí. China and Japan, the great civilizations of the Far East, have experienced modernization--not colonization--in their somewhat conflictive relation with the West and now are asserting upon the rest of the world the centrality of the Pacific region.¹

The millennium, it bears repeating, seems to defy any attempt at a general synthesis as well as any possibility of direct experience. The only vestiges left of its course are ruins--traditions more or less fading away--and stories told in books.

Throughout the entire year 2000, Jerusalem and Rome will be again at the center of the world, the goal of pilgrimages from all around the globe. They will be the appropriate sites for an otherwise unthinkable phenomenon--the "festival" of the millennium--and will remind the whole world that time, which regulates our lives and affairs, the universal calendar, is wide open, kept in full operation by that Christian event. By the same token, Italy will be privileged to feel itself anew as the cradle and destination, the navel and boundary of world history, understood as Euro-Christian history.

However, Italy is, at the same time, a secularized land, and its culture has always been secular in a preponderant fashion. Despite the traditional stereotype espoused by the cultured elite and the belief held far and wide., Dante is not the father of Italian literature. Dante is the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, classical antiquity and the European and Florentine political life of the thirteenth century. These are the ingredients blended into the greatest poetic construction in finite form within the Western tradition--a perfect, unique edifice with its author smack in the middle. The Divine Comedy is text--macrotext, that is, and autotext all in one--in sharp contrast with Shakespeare's oeuvre, to which, passing over Dante's production, Harold Bloom accords a preeminently central position in the "Western Canon." With his dozens of plays, Shakespeare creates a macrotext of plurality--the macrotext of the theatrum mundi. I suggest that, not unlike Homer and Virgil with respect to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, Dante and Shakespeare, with respect to European modernity, stand out ...