Journal of Romance Studies Volume 10 Number 1, Spring 2010: 1–6 doi:10.3167/jrs.2010.100101 ISSN 1473–3536 (Print), ISSN 1752–2331 (Online)
Claudia Boscolo
Aims and origin
Th e contributors of this special issue of Journal of Romance Studies all off er a critical view of a single text. Th ey all engage with diff erent novels as primary material, but their analysis is based on Italian author Wu Ming 1’s essay New Italian Epic: Memorandum 1993-2008, the fi rst version of which was published online in April 2008. Wu Ming is the name of a collective of Italian authors based in Bologna, formerly known as the Luther Blissett Project.1 Th e collective is currently formed
by four members, known by a number from 1 to 5 (Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, Wu Ming 4 and Wu Ming 5 – Wu Ming 3 left the group in 2008). New Italian Epic is commonly known as the ‘Memorandum’.2 It describes and provides a taxonomy for
a corpus of Italian contemporary novels by various authors – including Wu Ming. Th e common stylistic and thematic characteristics and similar philosophy these works share are termed New Italian Epic (NIE). ‘Epic’ is both a noun and an adjective but all contributors of this issue use it as an adjective meaning epic style. ‘Style’ in Italian [stile] is a masculine noun, whereas ‘epic’ [epica] is feminine (therefore the Italian article is ‘il’ rather than ‘la’ NIE). Th is is important because epic is a literary genre, whereas this special issue deals with the Italian novel: it is the epic narrative mode of NIE that expands the boundaries of the novel form.
On its online publication, I was the fi rst reader to be given the opportunity to respond to this fi rst version, namely the pdf fi le that had just been uploaded rather than the much more detailed essay included in the subsequent book entitled New Italian Epic. Th e fi rst version was a much shorter, less engaging text of about fi fteen pages. My article was drawn from an email exchange with Wu Ming 1, where I discussed his essay, and was neither a review nor a critical work: it was simply an expression of enthusiasm and looked like a blog-post (Boscolo 2008). Th e Italian e-zine Carmillaonline then started hosting a section dedicated to articles related to New Italian Epic, from where the essay could be freely downloaded.3 Within a
not yet found a mainstream publisher. Some particularly harsh criticism suggested that the essay voiced something controversial that Italian media critics did not want to acknowledge. Yet it expressed some undeniable facts: Italian postmodernism had ended, and twenty-fi rst-century Italian fi ction had begun to display a diff erent perspective on reality and an urge for self-representation that aimed to compensate for the failure of the mass media to provide factual information on Italian politics and social issues. By ‘self-representation’ here, I mean the way in which an author or text can be seen to speak for a community. In Italy, which was trying to come to terms with dark aspects of its history and the recent establishment of a right-wing government, a particular kind of fi ction that included a new form of historical novel had appeared. Wu Ming 1’s essay examined these works, creating an experimental morphology of the contemporary Italian novel. Th is seemed to irritate media literary critics, who felt their own position was under attack, when, in fact, the short essay had grown out of a series of online public interventions within the commentary space of lit-blogs and quality Italian literary e-zines.4 It voiced the general mood that Italy
was, and still is, in need of narratives that can help make sense of the political debacle of recent years.
Given the interest that the essay inspired during the few months following the fi rst online version, I organized a round table at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, entitled ‘Th e Italian perspective on metahistorical fi ction: the New Italian Epic’, to enable Wu Ming 1 and a number of scholars to compare views on recent Italian fi ction and to discuss the main points of the ‘Memorandum’ within an academic environment (which in Italy at that point seemed diffi cult to achieve). London was chosen as a free port away from Italian academic and critical lobbies, in order to debate Wu Ming 1’s classifi cation more openly. In addition to Wu Ming 1, other participants included Vanni Santoni and Gregorio Magini from Scrittura Industriale Collettiva [Industrial Writing Collective], a group of young writers based in Florence who at that point were in the process of putting together a collective novel; Marco Amici, a PhD student in Italian crime fi ction at the University of Cork; Monica Jansen, Professor of Italian at the Universities of Utrecht and Antwerp; and an audience of both academics and PhD students. Th e discussion that ensued inspired the continuation of the project, of which this special issue is the culmination. In his opening speech at the round table, Wu Ming 1 surprisingly presented an entirely new paper rather than expanding on the ‘Memorandum’. Th is paper, ‘We’re going to have to be the parents’, written in the wake of the suicide of US author David Foster Wallace in September 2008 and the death of Italian writer Giuseppe Genna’s father, a year earlier, envisaged the end of an era in politics and writing.
reactions, enhanced by the fact that it was no longer a pirate essay circulating online and downloaded by amateurs, but now a critical study issued by one of the major Italian publishing houses. At that point, a new opportunity for experts in Italian Studies to discuss this work was necessary. Th erefore, I organized a double panel at the Biennial Conference of the Society for Italian Studies, which took place at Royal Holloway, University of London, in April 2009 (exactly one year after the fi rst online appearance of Wu Ming 1’s essay). Th is resulted in the formation of a research group, which included the speakers of both conferences, Marco Amici, Dimitri Chimenti, Emanuela Patti, Monica Jansen, Emanuela Piga and myself, with the addition of Rosalba Biasini who was only present at the panel as a listener and contributed to the fi nal discussion. We created a virtual critical laboratory online (PolifoNIE, a blog containing an active commentary section which is still functioning today), where members could exchange views and discuss their papers before the conference.
One aim of this special issue, which brings together the proceedings of the round table and the double panel, is to expand upon Wu Ming 1’s defi nition of an ‘unidentifi ed narrative object’ (UNO) (Wu Ming 2009: 20, 41–4). Th e term, discussed extensively here by Dimitri Chimenti and Emanuela Patti, relates to a combination of fi ction and non-fi ction, prose and poetry, journal and investigation/ report, literature, science and mythology. A UNO is a novel that, like a reportage or an essay, produces testimony from local documents (newspaper articles, historical documents, legal documents, letters). However, contrary to reportage, the specifi city of these ‘narrative objects’, as part of the evolution of the novel, lies in the ‘narrative translation’ they operate on the documents, that is, the way documents are fused into the story and turned into fi ction. Furthermore, as I suggest in my own article, what appear to be fragments of literary metadiscourse may be excerpts from work by other critics or by the authors themselves. In addition to the UNO, New Italian Epic
employs a technical terminology that is quite new to literary criticism. In the articles that follow, terms drawn from Wu Ming 1’s essay are appropriately glossed; fuller defi nitions can be found in the ‘Memorandum’ itself. Uchronia [or ‘what if’] is also a term that recurs several times in this collection of essays. It is borrowed from science fi ction and was coined by Charles Renouvier in his novel Uchronie (1857).
Overview
Th e aforegoing is the background to this collection of essays. While representing each contributor’s original work, the articles themselves broadly follow the philosophy of collective writing, in that most of the material was commented upon and discussed within the virtual laboratory PolifoNIE before a consistent shape for publication was formulated. Th e aim is to engage as thoroughly as possible with the key critical points of the ‘Memorandum’.
In ‘Urgency and visions of the New Italian Epic’, Marco Amici addresses narration and mythopoesis as the creation and manipulation of myth and the imaginaire
the development of electronic media has progressively undermined the cognitive model of understanding based on visual sequential processing, while, conversely, a return of the characteristics of orality produced by electronic media coincide with the techno-communicative transition that is occurring in our time. Th is produces a new geography of power, which infl uences both readers and writers in their intimate relationship with the written page, requiring a critical gaze that enables orientation within this new reality. Amici’s hypothesis is that the New Italian Epic works towards the expression of this urgent need in literature.
In ‘Th e idea of epic and New Italian Epic’, I discuss how the concept of epic as we inherited it from twentieth-century literary theory has aff ected its perception as a narrative mode, to the extent that during the twentieth century it was no longer considered a viable mode of self-representation. My view is that such arguments against epic can no longer be considered valid in a society that has undergone radical modifi cation from the bourgeois environment where the novel emerged and took shape in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Th e Italian variant of the metahistorical romance relates specifi cally to the Italian context, making a case for epic to be reintegrated into literature from within the novel, and giving shape to what Wu Ming 1 defi nes as ‘unidentifi ed narrative objects’. Desire lies at the basis of this type of narrative and works as a primary impulse towards the construction of a narrative corpus whose aim is to investigate history in search of the roots of today’s social and political impasse. I explore the stylistic features and the main rhetorical devices of the New Italian Epic, and engage with the problematic of how the blend of realism and the epic mode results in a search for truth and knowledge.
Dimitri Chimenti’s ‘Unidentifi ed narrative objects: notes for a rhetorical typology’ discusses narrative objects as a form that forcibly modifi es the compositional parameters of the novel. He maintains that the concept of narrative object has the advantage of providing a literary term, while at the same time it should be understood only as a provisional defi nition. He shows how the concept of realism requires refi nement and distinction, since the real is always to be understood as the eff ect of a specifi c way in which reality is constructed at a textual level. In the works he analyses, realism appears as the result of a psychological, stylistic and rhetorical eff ect, linked to the textual codifi cation of reality, rather than to the reality of what is being described. He defi nes the textualization of the real by taking language as a starting point, and considering the way it manifests itself within a text that off ers a particular model of reality. He discusses how grafts, drawings and inserts are used in Roberto Saviano’s
Gomorra (2006) [Gomorrah] to construct the real, not only anchoring a text to the historical world, but also installing a new cognitive function upon the documents used within the narrative, which are converted from archival objects into objects of memory. He concludes that the New Italian Epic carries within itself an inescapable ethical and political instance of our epoch, in that the archival work of these novels all give rise to a mythopoetic operation and a rememoration of the past capable of bestowing depth on the present.
(2008) [Morning Star], which she treats as metahistorical romances, according to the defi nition provided by Amy J. Elias (2001: 46–99). Applying the theory of microhistory to literature, she treats historical work as a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse. She maintains that both narratives refuse the single viewpoint as an univocal rewriting of history of the oppressed and the victorious, in favour of a possible alternative history (uchronia or ‘what if’) without the author’s pretence of being situated on the other side. Piga argues that in these works detached irony and pastiche leave space for the metahistorical imagination, as a form of tension and yearning towards history. Mythopoesis is discussed as a creative gesture that rescues history from a single reading, while containing an articulation of post-traumatic memory. She concludes that the tragic is deeply tied to history and fl ows into modern epic, whose plots are interwoven with the texture of the novel. Th e Wu Ming collective narrates the demise of myth into history as a form of articulation of historical consciousness and free search for meaning.
Rosalba Biasini’s ‘Reconsidering epic: Wu Ming’s 54 and Fenoglio’ off ers a comparative reading of Wu Ming’s novel (2002) and Beppe Fenoglio’s novel La paga del sabato (1969) [Saturday’s Pay] on an intertextual level and from the point of view of the fascination that Fenoglio exerts on Wu Ming. According to Biasini, this fascination resides not only in Fenoglio’s preference for themes related to his personal experience in the Resistance, but also in the example he off ers of his representation of the past. She illustrates how the creation of a national epos in post-WWII Italy failed, due especially to questions of choice of language and style: the obligation to comply with the standards imposed by neo-realism prevented authors from working with language at the level of connotation. However, the celebration of the Resistance in terms of epic narration can be found in Fenoglio’s unfi nished masterpiece Il partigiano Johnny [Johnny the Partisan], written during the 1950s. Fenoglio’s aim to recreate epic as a conscious ethical decision emerged from his perception of a general forgetfulness of historical events in the Italian context. Biasini off ers an insight on epic as a narrative mode that ensures the permanence of memory, and compares the characteristics of 54 and the classical epic.
In ‘Petrolio, a model of UNO in Giuseppe Genna’s ItaliaDe Profundis’, Emanuela Patti draws a comparison between Genna’s novel(2008) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
‘Laboratory NIE: mutations in progress’ by Monica Jansen concludes this collection of articles by illustrating the Italian debate on the end of postmodernism. Jansen’s approach situates the ‘Memorandum’ on New Italian Epic within the context of a wider debate that includes writers like Alessandro Baricco and Antonio Scurati. She draws a distinction between these authors’ perspectives on the end of postmodernism, and asserts the originality of Wu Ming 1’s proposal. She discusses the newness of the New Italian Epic in terms of its functioning within a virtual community, and compares previous works in line with Wu Ming 1’s assumption that literature remains the epicentre, because it stimulates the reader to ‘imagine’ reality and thus co-create it. Jansen also off ers a critical reading of Laura Pugno’s Sirene
(2007) [Sirens] from the standpoint of the ‘Memorandum’.
Notes
1. See Wu Ming Foundation website, at http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/ englishmenu.htm.
2. For a downloadable pdf fi le of New Italian Epic, as it fi rst appeared in April 2008, and also known as version 2.0, see http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/ WM1_saggio_sul_new_italian_epic.pdf. It has become common usage to use the term ‘Memorandum’ to refer to the expanded version of the essay included in the volume New Italian Epic published by Einaudi, which contains three diff erent essays (Wu Ming 2009). Furthermore, Wu Ming’s philosophy is based on the Creative Common Licence; this means that all their novels and essays are freely downloadable from their website. Th us, many readers, especially outside Italy, read the downloadable pdf (that is, the second version of the ‘Memorandum’). Th erefore, on the one hand, there are two diff erent versions of the ‘Memorandum’ (the online pdf fi le and the essay in the book, and there are marked diff erences between the two texts); on the other hand, the book contains three diff erent essays, one of which has the same title as the book.
3. An ‘e-zine’ (abbreviation of ‘electronic magazine’) is an online magazine. Carmillaonline publishes book reviews and articles on politics and society. It is characterized by strongly politically oriented social criticism: http://www.carmillaonline.com/.
4. A ‘lit-blog’ (abbreviation of ‘literary weblog’) is a blog that publishes book reviews and articles focused on literature. What diff erentiates an ‘e-zine’ (for example, Carmillaonline, or Il primo amore, www.ilprimoamore.com/) from a ‘lit-blog’ (for example, Lipperatura, http://loredanalipperini.blog.kataweb.it/; Nazione Indiana, http://www.nazioneindiana. com/; Vibrisse, http://vibrisse.wordpress.com/) is that the former does not have a commentary space, whereas the latter allows comments by readers. Th e commentary space in the most popular Italian lit-blogs often hosts interesting and heated discussions on questions related to the state of Italian fi ction.
Works cited
Boscolo, Claudia (2008) ‘Scardinare il postmoderno: etica e metastoria nel New Italian Epic’, http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/2008/04/002620.html#002620 [accessed 9 January 2010].
Elias, Amy J. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press).
Jenkins, Henry (2006) ‘Fan fi ction as critical commentary’, http://www.henryjenkins. org/2006/09/fan_fi ction_as_critical_commen.html [accessed 19 August 2009].
