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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2016
This article offers an account of a recent debate in the cultural pages of the Italian press on a polemical work of literary criticism entitled Pasolini contro Calvino, in which the two authors are shown to represent emblematically different attitudes towards literature, cultural institutions and the culture industry in post-war Italy. The debate surrounding this claim is examined in substance, but also as an illustration of the workings of culture in 1990s Italy.
1. Benedetti, Carla, Pasolini contro Calvino. Per una letteratura impura, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 1998; Fiori, Cinzia, ‘Cosí il mito di Calvino oscurò Pasolini’, Corriere della Sera, 6 January 1998. I would like to thank Marco Belpoliti and Barbara Placido for their help in gathering material from Italy at short notice; and Zygmunt Baranski and Martin McLaughlin for letting me read and refer to forthcoming material.Google Scholar
2. All quotations in this paragraph are from Benedetti, quoted in Fiori, Cinzia, ‘Cosí il mito’.Google Scholar
3. Moresco, Antonio, ‘Calvino, ovvero come la retorica può uccidere la letteratura’, Corriere della Sera, 8 January 1998.Google Scholar
4. A sideswipe at the philosophical response to postmodernity in Italy, parallel in interesting ways to Calvino's literary postmodernism, embodied by Vattimo's, Gianni and others' pensiero debole (weak thought). See Vattimo, Gianni and Rovatti, Pier Aldo (eds), Il pensiero debole, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1983.Google Scholar
5. Camon's article is referred to in Bonura, Giuseppe, ‘Pasolini non contro, ma a braccetto di Calvino’, L'Avvenire, 9 January 1998.Google Scholar
6. Capriolo, Paola, ‘Calvino bocciato dai lettarati col cuore in mano’, Corriere della Sera, 9 January 1998; and also ‘I nemici di Calvino? Volgiono colpire la vera letteratura?’, Corriere della Sera, 13 January 1998. For Tabucchi's article, see n. 12 below.Google Scholar
7. Bonura, Giuseppe, ‘Pasolini non contro, ma a braccetto di Calvino’, L'Avvenire, 9 January 1998; his textbook on Calvino is Bonura, Giuseppe, Invito alla lettura di Italo Calvino, Mursia, Milan, 1972 (updated edition 1985).Google Scholar
8. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, ‘Ma c’è anche un Calvino nascosto. E piú umano', Corriere della Sera, 10 January 1998; and see also his ‘Calvino contro Pasolini? Ebbene sí, però bisogna scandagliare di piú’. La Talpalibri, supplement to Il Manifesto, 29 January 1998. Ferretti's works on Pasolini, Calvino and the publishing industry include Letteratura e ideologia, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1964; Pasolini: l'universo orrendo, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1976; Le capre di Bikini, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1989; Le avventure del lettore. Calvino, Ludmilla e gli altri, Manni, Lecce, 1998 (the latter reviewed in January 1998 alongside Benedetti); and Il mercato delle lettere, Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1994.Google Scholar
9. Bonino, Guido Davico, ‘La critica schizofrenica. Calvino–Pasolini duello falsato’, Tuttolibri, supplement to La Stampa , 22 January 1998.Google Scholar
10. D'Orrico, Antonio, ‘Perché non possiamo non dirci calviniani’, Sette, 15 January 1998, p. 81.Google Scholar
11. Rosa, Alberto Asor, (ed.), Letteratura italiana. Le opere. Vol 4. Il Novecento, Einaudi, Turin, 1996. In this critical anthology of twentieth-century authors, only three have more than one of their works treated: Pirandello, Calvino and Pasolini.Google Scholar
12. Tabucchi, Antonio, ‘I cambi di stagione della letteratura’, Corriere della Sera, 15 January 1998; see also Nardi, Giovanni, ‘Principi e cospiratori alla corte di re Calvino’, Il Giorno, 20 January 1998.Google Scholar
13. Ammaniti, Niccolò el al., Gioventù cannibale, Einaudi, Turin, edited by Brolli, Daniele, 1996. For an account of this phenomenon, see Bernardi, Claudia, ‘Pulp and Other Fictions: Critical Debate on the New Italian Narrative’, Bulletin of the Society of Italian Studies, 30, 1997, pp. 4–11.Google Scholar
14. Capria, Raffaele La, ‘La letteratura? Non vale niente senza “anema e core’”, Corriere della Sera, 17 January 1998.Google Scholar
15. Rosa, Alberto Asor, ‘Il triangolo di Narcisi’, La Repubblica, 21 January 1998.Google Scholar
16. Guglielmi, Angleo, ‘Ma Calvino ha vinto la sfida del '900’, Corriere della Sera, 22 January 1998.Google Scholar
17. Petrolio, Pasolini's unfinished novel published in 1992, is a key point of reference for much of the debate, and for Benedetti: even Pasolini's detracttors seem to acknowledge, as here, that this text is an extraordinary and unexpected validation of the Pasolinian mode of apocalyptic literature. See Melis, Federico De (untitled), La Talpalibri, supplement to Il Manifesto , 22 January 1998.Google Scholar
18. Belpoliti, Marco, ‘Pasolini–Calvino: Requiem per il libro’, La Talpalibri, supplement to Il Manifesto , 22 January 1998.Google Scholar
19. Calvino, Italo, Fiabe italiane, Einaudi, Turin, 1956, and Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Canzoniere italiano, Guanda, Parma, 1955.Google Scholar
20. Perrella, Silvio, ‘Il puro e l'impuro’, Diario, supplement to L'Unità, 28 January 1998.Google Scholar
21. ‘Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili’ , in Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Descrizioni di descrizioni, Garzanti, Milan, 1996, pp. 58–64.Google Scholar
22. See, for example, Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars. The Struggle to Define America, Basic Books, New York, 1991; Hughes, Robert, Culture of Complaint. The Fraying of America, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993.Google Scholar
23. I draw here and below on material from Gordon, Robert and McLaughlin, Martin, ‘Words and Silence. Pasolini and Calvino’, unpublished paper, 1994.Google Scholar
24. For more detail, see Perrella, Silvio, ‘I commiati di Calvino. Breve e divagante parabola degli anni settanta’, Autografo, 19, 1990, pp. 57–73; McLaughlin, Martin, Italo Calvino, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 1998, chapter 9.Google Scholar
25. The Palomar passage is now in Calvino, Italo, Opere, vol. ii, Mondadori, Milan, 1992, p. 960; Pasolini's letter to Calvino is now in Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Lettere luterane, Einaudi, Turin, 1976, p. 180; Fortini's comment is in Fortini, Franco, Attraverso Pasolini, Einaudi, Turin, 1993, p. 46.Google Scholar
26. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘Basta con le polemiche: salutiamo Calvino, leggiamo Primo Levi’, Liberal, 12 March 1998, pp. 118–21, p. 120. Berardinelli has in mind particularly Marco Belpoliti, recent editor of Levi's Opere (Einaudi, Turin, 1997), and of a collection of essays (Primo Levi, Marcos y Marcos, Milan, 1997). It is interesting to note that Asor Rosa, a not so young scholar, also seems to be a recent convert to the virtues of Primo Levi, and to be so for precisely the reason that a moral and testimonial response to the present in the form of narrative is perhaps the only residual role left for literary forms (see Rosa, Alberto Asor, ‘Primo Levi una risposta all'orrore’, La Repubblica, 6 January 1998).Google Scholar
27. Sec especially his editorial letters to authors, collected as Calvino, Italo, I libri degli altri, Einaudi, Turin, 1991.Google Scholar
28. On the lack of literary imitators of Pasolini (although cases have been made for writers such as Tondelli), see Baranski, Zygmunt, ‘The Importance of Being Pier Paolo Pasolini’, in Baranski, Zygmunt (ed.), Pasolini Old and New, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, forthcoming, 1998.Google Scholar
29. Eco, Umberto, Apocalittici e integrati. Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa, Bompiani, Milan, 1988 (1st edn, 1964).Google Scholar