Radioactive Readings

While the association of Italy with nukes in the title of this remarkable book might strike us as far-fetched, Anna Mariani's work makes an urgent and convincing claim for their interdependence. Italy had, and still has, no nuclear arsenal of its own, but it houses hundreds of American bombs and is thereby tethered to global strategies of deterrence based on the threat of mutual mass destruction. What is more, the physicists who pioneered nuclear fission, some of whom emigrated to the US to complete the work that would lead to the bomb, were Italian. These ragazzi di Via Panisperna—named for the address of the Institute of Physics at the University of Rome—were led by Enrico Fermi, who went on to produce the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on the campus of the University of Chicago.But it is Mariani's subtitle that will be the point of departure for my analysis, with its singling out of the bystander as her book's protagonist. In the nuclear age, Italian intellectuals necessarily “stand by” as accomplices, given their country's implication in the history and the ongoing state of the nuclear threat. The uneasy awareness of this complicity is the subject of the book's five chapters, each of which is devoted to a single author (Moravia, Calvino, Morante, Sciascia, and Pasolini). While none of these names would immediately come to mind if one were asked to identify leaders of a national anti-nuclear campaign, Mariani astutely reveals how the threat of annihilation deeply preoccupied each of these authors, whose writings on the subject marked significant turns within the course of their respective bibliographies—a point I will emphasize in the pages to follow.Among the most ingenious techniques for characterizing the poetics of these bystanders is Mariani's often surprising choice of texts—little known journalistic pieces or short stories that add richness, depth, and nuance to the canonical works on which these writers’ reputations were built. The effect is that of montage—understood in general terms (we'll consider it in a narrow, technical sense in the Pasolini chapter) as the juxtaposing of disparate elements to release a new energy of interpretation. In the case of Moravia, for example, whose landmark novel Gli indifferenti enacted a poetics of resignation, the nuclear threat prompted a turn toward civic engagement, leading the author to campaign for, and win a seat in, the European Parliament. During this time, his writings took journalistic form in the “Letter from Hiroshima” and assumed a fictional guise in “There's a Neutron Bomb for Ants Too.” In her analysis of this latter text, two techniques emerge as keys to Mariani's interpretation of the poetic bystanders’ work: allegory and scale—terms that will recur throughout her study. The allegorical reading of ant extermination in the short story has the effect of miniaturizing the otherwise inconceivable scale of destruction at Hiroshima. In fact, scale becomes a problem for all of Mariani's intellectuals who tried to face the “metaphysical intractability” (13) of nuclear destruction. Spatiotemporal scale becomes a concern of Calvino with regard to the disposal of nuclear waste in the essay “The Superfluous” (78). The same writer conducts an “experiment in scale” to expand our “moral imagination” in Cosmicomics (88), and Morante's struggle with the immeasurability of mass death makes it impossible for her to represent Hiroshima in the narrative of La Storia, her epochal novel of World War II.Mariani's chapter on Morante is also of particular interest for its focus on a critically neglected element of this monumental text. I'm referring to the historical chronology that introduces each year of the fictional narrative. As Mariani notes, the border between these two modes of writing is porous, especially with regard to tone in the passages where the “indignation that palpitates in the novel” (120) seeps into the chronicle, violating the latter's neutrality by rendering judgment on the facts it purports to convey. Mariani will insightfully pronounce this framing device a “full-scale parody of historical discourse” (121). Yet the most striking paratextual move—one that is easily overlooked, but that Mariani's nuclear perspective brings into sharp focus, is the epigraph attributed to “un sopravvissuto di Hiroscima.” The originator of this citation remains unidentified—a fact that heralds the exclusion of Hiroshima from the narrative since the scale of suffering precludes transforming a victim's story into a fictional mode capable of eliciting a degree of empathy adequate to the event.Despite Morante's “failure to convert atomic explosions into episodes that are narratable in the novel form” (123), she did not hesitate to express her anti-nuclear stance in speechmaking. She did so in an address entitled “For or Against the Atom Bomb” delivered in both Turin and Milan in 1965 before publishing the written version in a literary journal that same year. In her exegesis of the speech, Mariani astutely points out how Morante herself engages in textual analysis to expose the trivializing effect of mass media coverage with respect to nuclear matters. The banalization of the term “atomic” as a synonym for “superlative,” “sensational,” “unprecedented” (107) is a case in point. Most stunning is Mariani's revelation of an incomplete novel, written between 1958 and the mid-1960s, entitled “Without the Comforts of Religion” in which the origin of the term bikini is traced back to the Pacific atoll made uninhabitable by atomic testing. The link with the trope of the “sexy bomb” (109–10) is not far to seek, as we will see in her chapter on Pasolini.Among the great virtues of Mariani's scholarship in general is her blending of thematic concerns with an acute awareness of what makes her objects of study quintessentially literary works. The attention to the literariness of these texts—the focus on the medium-specific creative techniques that make them works of art, worthy of the closest attention to the concrete vehicles of their content—is a hallmark of her approach. This dual perspective—thematic and linguistic (the latter in the broadest possible sense)—counteracts the temptation to engage in purely ideological or theoretical argumentation. Throughout this study, the author is exquisitely attuned to language—its lexical, grammatical, and syntactic power to enact meaning. Moravia's gift for lowering his linguistic register to make familiar the unthinkable, Calvino's ability to establish a rhetorical bond of intimacy with his reader in an article on radioactive waste, the “nervous parataxis” regarding his anxiety about how to dispose of it, the same writer's “frenzied accumulation of synonyms” (95) to describe a protagonist's “implosion” in Cosmicomics, and the penning of an abnormally long sentence—an entire page in length “graphically [suggesting] the continuity between all the time dimensions, thereby spatializing the thousand-year periods” (89)—these are just a few examples of Mariani's surpassing skill as a close reader of her chosen texts at the service of interpretation.That Mariani's skills of textual analysis are not limited to written works is made abundantly clear in the chapter dedicated to Pasolini's 1962 documentary La rabbia. It is in this chapter that Mariani offers a rich overview of the essay-film as a genre, linking it to Pasolini's signature use of montage to make familiar images strange, to remove them from usual contexts and rearrange them in new relationships to activate spectators’ awareness (168). Nothing could be more startling in this regard than the juxtaposition of the mushroom cloud and a headshot of Marilyn Monroe. On the surface, this editorial move posits the obvious equation of female sexual allure—the blond bombshell—with nuclear power. But Mariani adds considerable depth and nuance to this linkage by exploring the semiotics of such images, and the underlying logic of their connection. The mushroom cloud functions as a paradox—both signifying and hiding the explosion itself—a visual expression of what cannot be seen. Only at a distance, Mariani argues, “can catastrophe become an aesthetic object,” only at a distance “can the bomb resemble a frothy, enchanting mushroom” (175). The link with the image of Marilyn Monroe, in her gorgeous iconic guise, serves a similar purpose, inserting an aestheticizing distance from a deeply troubled life story, while at the same time shrinking that distance by inserting a series of still photos of Norma Jean Baker before she became the celebrity frozen in the headshot juxtaposed with the mushroom cloud. What ties the mushroom cloud and the headshot together, then is the “infinite photographic reproducibility” of such imagery (172–73) and consequent aesthetization/anesthetization of its effects.Throughout the book, Mariani's interest in the relationship between genre and nuclear concerns bears noting—the historical novel in Morante, science fiction in Calvino, the allegorical short story in Moravia, and the essay-film in Pasolini. Her analysis of Sciascia's nuclear fiction hinges on the mechanisms of the inchiesta letteraria, and in particular the anomalous generic direction in which the story of Ettore Majorana, one of the ragazzi di via Paisperna, leads him. In the context of Italian nuclear complicity, according to Mariani, the cynical, ironic, detached, Enlightment-inflected approach adopted by Sciascia in his investigative fiction gives way to hagiography in The Mystery of Marorana. Such a surprising and radical turn in Sciascia's literary practice reflects the author's unstinting admiration for Ettore Majorana's choice to “disappear” from the group of Italian scientists on the road to developing the bomb. Like Melville's scrivener, Majorana “prefers not to,” he chooses saintly withdrawal rather than pursue the atomic project, as if he saw the catastrophic consequences of what he had abetted in its nascent stages. As such, Sciascia's protagonist occupies the position of a nuclear accomplice whose guilt impels him to act, as does the writer himself who inscribes his uneasy awareness of Italian nuclear responsibility, and his admiration for someone who attempted to “set a different course for history” (160).Hovering over the entire study is the theme of engagement and the creative mechanisms that Mariani's five protagonists employed to express their own awareness of the nuclear peril and to induce their readers/viewers to do likewise. In the case of Calvino, Mariani presents herself with the most formidable of challenges—to argue that this author's turn in mid-career to the literature of extravagant imaginative play marked by Cosmicomics is really not a withdrawal from engaged writing, but rather a diverse, more oblique and difficult invitation to reader involvement in nuclear thought. Here she articulates a dissenting opinion in the face of the critical consensus that Calvino had become “ludic and vacuous” (8) with Cosmicomics, arguing instead that its poetics is in keeping with the author's 1960s view that literature can educate “only if it is difficult and indirect” (84). It is on the allegorical level, Mariani claims, that Calvino's foray into outer space delivers its anti-nuclear teaching, that the writer activates a hermeneutical process whereby readers will come to expand their “moral imagination” (88) about matters on earth.Mariani's acute insight into the mechanisms of nuclear-aware writings (and filmmaking) as invitations to activist engagement on the part of readers/viewers finds far more obvious exemplars in the chapters on Moravia, Morante, Sciascia, and Pasolini. But the meaning of “activist” can vary among the responses that Mariani's protagonists aspire to produce. For the filmmaker, the inducement to decipher the logic of montage—to fathom the rationale behind unexpected juxtapositions of images—leads his viewers “not simply to watch: they must also act.” But Mariani goes on to clarify that “action does not mean mobilizing (which would be an unrealistic and ingenuous expectation) but rather, choosing, engaging critically, interpreting” (179). In the Morante section, the explicit spur to nuclear-awareness-through-interpretation takes the form of the “koan”—a species of Zen riddle that defies logical resolution and thereby serves as a critique of the “instrumental reasoning” (13) that led to the bomb. Nowhere in the book is the clarion call for committed art more emphatic than in the above-mentioned pages devoted to the “For or Against the Atomic Bomb” speech, “which does not just demand a commentary: it demands a responsory.” She defines this highly resonant term as “a way of approaching the text that engages in dialogue with it, that reacts actively to its prompts, that restores their context and at the same time extends them into the here and now” (101).Mariani's otherwise unimpeachable study, however, avoided Italian terms, understandable in her outreach to a broad, Anglophone public. While this constitutes a very minor problem in the use of English titles for works such as La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno's conscience) and History (La Storia), where the translations reduce the ambiguous doubleness of coscienza and storia, she also shied away from the term impegno, preferring engagement (with its French reverberations) and commitment. This meant skirting the rich, specifically Italian historical context of the term, something which Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug confronted head on in the very title of their 2009 volume Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. While Mariani does not overtly situate her study in relation to Italian letteratura impegnata from its anti-Fascist underpinnings and its Marxist-inflected roots to its more recent manifestations, she nonetheless charts a course of great literary-critical consequence. What she models is a hermeneutics of impegno, requiring readers to do the interpretive work that makes them coproducers of meaning, charged with the cognitive and ethical responsibility inherent in such a procedure.Let me end with a return to the word responsory as a dialogue issued by a text that may refer to issues contemporaneous to its writing, with the potential to extend that dialogue into the readers’ “here and now.” My own reading of this urgent and remarkable book was informed by the here and now of climate change—the subject of Mariani's coda. As she succinctly put it: “The world is still going to end, but the apocalypse has changed guises” (184). Through the critical exercises that Mariani so expertly models—rhetorical analyses of mass media means for anesthetizing public consciousness, the insistence on acknowledging our positions as complicit bystanders of the status quo; the quest for ways to understand the arts as vehicles of not just commentary but responsory; the need to perceive the nuclear peril as “concretely approachable” and apocalypse as thinkable; and the effort to expand the horizon of our moral imaginations—Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age requires us to take up our role as observers who are no longer willing to just “stand by.”

Art · Bystander effect · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Italian Literature and Culture · Psychology · Social Psychology