An idea of Italy

On the face of it, contemporary Italian intellectuals have a more prestigious existence than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Whether as writers, academics, journalists or film-directors, Italian intellectuals are courted by political parties of all persuasions to add lustre to their slates at election time, and wooed by the media as influential opinion makers. The contact Italian intellectuals have with the institutions of civil society comes from a long tradition going back to the Middle Ages. Indeed, Italian society has consistently relied on its intellectuals, rather than its political class, to supply the nation's agents for social change. When Dante, for example, in his De vulgari eloquentia examined the panoply of local dialects to find one on which to base a supraregional language for the peninsula, he turned to the literary idiom of his fellow poets, which seemed to him the only noble and unifying element present in an Italy rife with factionalism.

On the threshold of the new millennium, as Italy prepares to play an ever more active part in the European Union, it is not inappropriate that students of Italian culture should ask: 'What is contemporary Italian national identity, and what will the adjective “Italian” mean in the future?' The essays in this volume have primarily looked back over cultural developments in post-unification Italy from the perspective of late twentieth-century contemporaneity. They have also occasionally sought to make conjectures about possible future developments. In this brief epilogue, my focus will be on the present and the future, a prospective stance reflective of some of the collection's general aims, and conditioned of course by current realities. The question of what 'Italian' now signifies, and what the adjective may well encompass in future years implicitly or explicitly informs all that follows.

Italy was belatedly born as a nation under the sign of a constructed political and linguistic unity. Unification has always been more a dream than a reality, however, in spite of the many efforts over the last century to bring about national unity. Historically, Italian society and culture have been fragmented, and today there is an increasing, and new, fragmentation under pressure from both internal and external forces. Among these forces are greatly increased immigration, mainly from socalled developing countries, the revival of regionalism and widespread Americanization.

There should be no argument that the transformations in popular music that we associate with the rise and development of rock were the result of white fascination with black music. During the 1950s, increasing numbers of white teenagers tuned into radio stations that were programming music for black audiences, began to request recordings by black musicians at their local record stores, and tentatively ventured into nightclubs in black neighbourhoods in order to hear black performers. Rhythm and blues music seemed to promise some young white listeners a different relationship between the pleasures of the body and the dominant social formation of modern industrialised America. Whether racist primitivism or liberal cross-cultural identification, this white fascination with black music was nothing new (see McClary and Walser 1994).

In 1828, Thomas D. Rice, an itinerant musician, watched an older African–American with rheumatism perform a strange twisted dance while singing, ‘Weel about and turn about and do jus so; Every time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.’ Rice was an experienced performer who was looking for gimmicks to add to his act. He learned this song and dance, wrote new verses and used burnt cork to make himself up to look like his source for this material. The act created a public sensation and toured major entertainment centres, including New York and London. Not surprisingly, this interpretation of African–American culture was a misinterpretation. The melody to ‘Jim Crow’ had been a familiar English tune and the words – neither unusual nor especially clever – were mostly Rice's creation.

The biggest selling pop single of all time is the version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ Elton John recorded as a tribute to Princess Diana, and his Westminster Abbey performance of the song, during Diana's funeral service in September 1997, can be considered as the ultimate British pop moment. It was controversial. Pop music is still regarded as a vernacular form unsuitable for a religious occasion, a vulgar form unfit for royalty; and Elton John was not an obvious representative of the state (though he was soon to be knighted, joining Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Paul McCartney, and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber in the official pop pantheon). He was chosen to sing because he was an intimate of Diana and, in this respect, simply represented her social circle. But it was precisely because she was an Elton John fan that Princess Diana could be described as ‘the people's princess’: John was an appropriate singer at her service not just as a personal friend but also as the emotional voice of a generation.

In the 1970s Elton John and his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, perfected the musical form that came to dominate Anglo-American pop music in the last decades of the century: the rock ballad. They took the sentimental song (as commercialised in the late nineteenth century), keeping its easy melodic lines, its use of rising pitch to unleash emotion, its lyrical sense of expansive self-pity, but giving it a new rock-based dynamism (in terms of rhythm and amplification).

In March of 2000, the head of the United States-based MTV Networks outlined, to a journalist, his techniques for understanding the tastes of teenagers. ‘We actually in some cases put people under hypnosis’, said 54-year-old Tom Freston, ‘and we will videotape their lives.’ As he spoke, albums by teen stars Britney Spears and ‘N Sync were breaking all-time records for first-week sales of new titles in the United States. While alarmed rock critics bemoaned the predictability of adolescent tastes, Freston saw teenage culture as an elusive, mysterious world. To understand it, he had recourse to the methods of the psychotherapist and anthropologist.

The consumption of popular music has long been seen as chaotic and incomprehensible, even when it seems to confirm the crudest laws of hype and fashion. While trends seem driven by their own, unstoppable momentum, the popularity of any given recording or musical style is notoriously difficult to predict. Long-term prognoses about the music industry's development have regularly proved wrong, and even the rosiest of cyclical booms will often coincide with predictions of that industry's imminent obsolescence. Alongside the image of millions of consumers rushing to shops to purchase Britney Spears’ ‘Oops! … I Did It Again’, newspapers offered the spectre of thousands of United States college students in their dormitories, busily (and perhaps illegally) down-loading songs from the Internet. As album sales, in the United States and other countries, continued their upward climb in 2000, Internet industry newsletters spoke of a dying industry, deserted by consumers who now demanded music in cheaper, more convenient forms.

The Macchiaioli and the unification of Italy

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the term 'Italy' was an abstract concept that intellectuals and artists since Dante had used to describe their imagined homeland rather than a political reality. The first group of artists who presented themselves as linked to the nation were the Tuscan Macchiaioli, whose emergence was made possible by the Prima Esposizione Italiana ('First Italian Exhibition') that was held in Florence in 1861, a matter of months after unification. (The name 'Macchiaioli' was taken from macchia which means 'sketch' or 'sketch technique'.) It was at this exhibition that, for the first time, artists who were living and working in different parts of the Italian peninsula were grouped together. As is well known, the centuries-long fragmentation of the Italian states and the numerous foreign dominations had signifi- cantly contributed to the absence of a 'national' art or culture. Moreover, the divided state of the peninsula did not facilitate exchanges between different regions. Not surprisingly, many nineteenth-century artists who, with unification, wished to expand their boundaries and horizons considered Italian life and art to be marked by cultural provincialism.

Call it soul, call it funk, call it hip-hop; the deep-down core of African–American popular music has been both a centre to which performers and audiences have continually returned, and a centrifuge which has sent its styles and attitudes outwards into the full spectrum of popular music around the world. The pressure – both inward and outward – has often been kept high by an American music industry slow to move beyond the apartheid-like structures of its marketing systems, which, though ostensibly abandoned in the days since the ‘race records’ era (the 1920s through the 1950s), continue to shadow the industry's practices. However much cross-over there has been between black and white audiences, the continual reiteration of racial and generic boundaries in radio formats, retailing and chart-making has again and again forced black artists and producers to navigate between a vernacular aesthetic (often invoked as ‘the street’) and what the rapper Guru calls ‘mass appeal’ – the watering down of style targeted at an supposedly ‘broader’ (read: white) audience. So it has been that, within black communities, there has been an ongoing need to name and claim a music whose strategic inward turns refused what was often seen as a ‘sell-out’ appeal to white listeners, a music that set up shop right in the neighbourhood, via black (later ‘urban contemporary’) radio, charts, and retailers, and in the untallied vernacular traffic in dubbed tapes, deejay mixes, and bootlegs.

Any discussion of the role of technology in popular music should begin with a simple premise: without electronic technology, popular music in the twenty-first century is unthinkable. As a point of departure, however, such a premise demands that one develop an understanding of music technology as more than a random collection of instruments, recording and playback devices. Technology is also an environment in which we experience and think about music; it is a set of practices in which we engage in making and listening to musical sounds; and it is an element in the discourses that we use in sharing and evaluating our experiences, defining, in the process, what music is and can be. In this sense, the ensemble of electronic devices that are used to make, distribute and experience contemporary music are not simply a technical ‘means’ through which we experience music. Technology has become a ‘mode’ of music production and consumption: that is, technology has become a precondition for music-making, an important element in the definition of musical sound and style, and a catalyst for musical change (Blacking 1977). However, technology does not simply determine music-making. Pop artists and consumers have often used technology in ways unintended by those who manufacture it. In this way, pop practices constantly redefine music technologies through unexpected or alternative uses.

In 1978, the sociologist Richard Peterson suggested that American popular music was on the verge of its third great revolution of the twentieth century. The first two revolutions, Peterson (1978) claimed, had been ushered in by jazz and rock. The beginnings of the third were to be glimpsed in the rise of disco music, which made dance clubs a powerful force in popularising new records. As Peterson made this prediction, disco records sat atop sales charts in Europe and North America, and the disco film Saturday Night Fever was on its way to becoming a major box-office success. Two years later, when much of disco culture appeared to have collapsed, Peterson's prediction would look like an embarrassing miscalculation. It would take twenty more years, shifts in terminology, and a whole set of technological, social and economic developments before his claim of a dance music ‘revolution’ seemed worth re-considering. In 1997, commemorative books and anniversary dance parties celebrated a decade of frantic dance music activity in Great Britain and Western Europe, amid signs that even white North American youth, long faithful to rock, were migrating towards dance clubs and the sounds of dance music.

The second edition of The Faerie Queene was published in 1596. It contained three new books which dealt with the virtues of friendship, justice and courtesy. The ending of the 1590 first edition of the poem was altered so that Amoret and Scudamour were not reunited in a hermaphroditic embrace at the conclusion of Book III. Instead their story ceases to be a tale of private heterosexual bliss and becomes part of a wider focus on love as a social and public force. As in Book III, Scudamour suffers mixed fortunes in war and is afflicted by horrible jealousy, but he eventually manages to lead Amoret away from the Temple of Venus, albeit without the obvious triumph of the ending to the first edition. Amoret, who has been participating in a civilised and modest discussion of love's virtues (reminiscent of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier) is terrified at Scudamour's approach. He is criticised by the figure of Womanhood for 'being overbold' (IV, X, 54), words that explicitly recall the motto over the door of the inner chamber in the House of Busyrane that Britomart should 'Be not too bold' (III, xi, 54).1 Scudamour has taken on the role of the traditional Petrarchan lover. He displays his shield to Amoret 'On which when Cupid with his killing bow / And cruell shafts emblazond she beheld, / At sight thereof she was with terror queld, / And said no more.' In seizing her hand and forcibly removing her from the Temple of Venus he sees her as a 'warie Hynd within the weedie soyle', boasting that 'no intreatie would forgoe so glorious spoyle' (IV, X, 55).

What does it mean to write the life and times of a major writer in the era of poststructuralist literary theory? What it doesn't mean, of course, is to contrast the current situation with some pretheoretical paradise in which the exercise would have been unproblematic. The fact is that the study of literature is by definition theoretical; it is simply that the terms of the debate differ between then and now. An example of how one method challenges another can be seen by glancing at the impact of new, or practical criticism, on two of the favorite kinds of Dickens studies from earlier in the century. Prototype studies attempted to identify the “real” human beings behind Dickens’s characters, while topographical studies sought to identify the “real” places which formed the inspiration for the settings of Dickens’s novels. New criticism, which flourished as a movement in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to remove literary texts from the historical arena through a concentration on their structure and language, and so was committed to a rejection of this implied equation of art and reality. This approach was superseded by new kinds of theory which problematized, among other matters, the existence of an external reality without the experience of the observer as subject and suggested that the author was now dead, as a challenge to the traditional role of the artist as creator of fictional worlds which mirrored both external reality and the writer’s personal life. But whatever the differences between new criticism and poststructuralist literary theory, they do have one thing in common in their stress on the primacy of language. Contemporary theory has, of course, taken this position further by way of the concept of textuality, the notion that the individual and the world, as well as the literary artifact, are written; that is, are inscriptions of those ideological formations which are the distinguishing features of major historical epochs.

Edmund Spenser is England's first great pastoral poet. In 1579, at about the age of twenty-seven, Spenser inaugurated his literary career by publishing The Shepheardes Calender, a collection of twelve pastoral eclogues each named after a month of the year. The poet began with pastoral in imitation of Virgil, who had published his Eclogues before his didactic poem, the Georgics, and then his epic, the Aeneid. In late antiquity, Suetonius, Donatus and Servius all understood Virgil's career model to be identical with his life pattern, as reported in his epitaph: 'Mantua gave birth to me, the Calabrians snatched me away … I sang of pastures, fields, and princes.' During the Middle Ages, John of Garland accommodated the progressive life-career pattern to a circular cosmic image, the rota Virgilii (Wheel of Virgil), which presents a series of concentric circles divided by three spokes, each demarcating a writing style, a life style, a social rank and corresponding imagery (plant, animal, implement) (fig. I).

In the sixteenth century, Spenser was thus able to understand pastoral as a developmental genre within a Christian universe. His most notable contribution to the form was to yoke the progressive Virgilian career pattern to the circular life pattern of the Christian calendar.

Events and Personages

Edmund Spenser lived at a time when the charged relation between the two 'contexts' of this chapter, Britain and Europe, was changing drastically, and, as we will see, his own relation to these shifting contexts was often equivocal. Inserting Spenser into historical contexts can be problematic, and, certainly, no amount of 'context' can finally decide the meaning of Spenser's life or work. In the several books of The Faerie Queene and elsewhere, we find an ongoing mediation on historical contexts that is an index both of Spenser's own uncertain placement within them and his indeterminate effect on them. Sometimes this dialectic can be traced quite clearly: not only can Spenser's work be set 'within' these historical contexts, but these contexts themselves are, to an extent, being defined by him as he writes. In the later years of the sixteenth century, for instance, one of our contexts, that of 'Britain', was not yet assembled as an effective political union. Strictly speaking, 'Great Britain' would not come into existence until 1801. But Spenser invested in the imagining of such a polity throughout his career, and some of our conception of 'Britain' as a splendid fusion of disparate nations we owe to him. 'How brutish is it not to vnderstand', cries Arthur in the second book of The Faerie Queene, looking up from a chronicle titled Briton moniments, 'How much to [Britain] we owe, that all vs gaue, / That gaue vnto vs all, what euer good we haue' (II, x, 69). In other places, however, the dialectic between Spenser and his contexts is less easy to discern.

Dickens and language: one of the great love-matches of literary history, with a bottomless dowry to boot. It often seems as if the untapped reserves of the English vernacular were simply lying waiting for Dickens to inherit them - by marrying their riches to his story-teller’s instinct. No one ever wrote prose that way before. And at the same time few writers have ever sprung their manner from such outright imitation. The style of Dickens’s novelistic career begins in pure derivation, a sustained send-up not only of the Johnsonian high style of journalistic and parliamentary claptrap in the eighteenth-century Age of Rhetoric but of Sir Walter Scott’s editorial aliases and their prefatory paraphernalia - and then finds its true quasi-oratorical tone amid the cleared debris of tradition. Here is the launching sentence of his debut novel:

Realism in Dickens’s time was magical, for the city was a fairy-tale come to life, grim, exhilarating, and transformative. To describe this urban world was to create a new Bible, encompassing heaven and earth, and all that lies between, the keynote struck at the beginning of Bleak House:

Personal experience fed the literary work: when Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, London was a city of horse-drawn carts and carriages, entered through city gates like Charing Gate, Newgate, with its formidable prison, and Kennington Toll Gate. When Dickens died fifty-eight years later in 1870, the gates and city wall had been pulled down and built on, and London turned into a sprawling monumental city, transformed by the industrial revolution, especially the railroad and entrepreneurial capitalism as well as the British imperial venture, into the first world-city.

Two early examples suggest the importance of visual art in Dickens’s conception of his own role. One is the title of his first book, Sketches by Boz and Cuts by Cruikshank, which doubly insists (the parallel of the two artists, the author as sketcher) upon the similarities of writing and drawing. The other is the first image in the last number of Nicholas Nickleby, Daniel Maclise’s portrait of Dickens, subsequently incorporated as the frontispiece to the first edition (figure 1), a formal representation of the writer and the fact of his literary success. Replacing the fourth illustration of the final number, in some sense this image also illustrates; but rather than picturing some portion of the text, the portrait refers beyond it and beyond the writer’s mere textual presence to his life as a public figure. We see Charles Dickens supplanting Boz, a personage emerging from a pseudonym, his face rather than his prose the guarantor of identity, as if visuality has replaced the uncertainty of a mere name, mere words, with a self both recognizable and authentic (“Faithfully yours,” as the valediction over his signature declares). With this new public image attached to his writing, Dickens complicates the very conception of his “identity” (a term that can refer to the singular essence of some thing or person as well as to its equivalence to something or someone else): to know the writer we must see his face – see it, that is, formally rendered by a major contemporary painter. Presenting the “real” Dickens with a picture, illustrating the author, the portrait locates both the writer and his fiction within Victorian visual culture.