Alberto Godioli.: Laughter from Realism to Modernism

This monograph forms part of Legenda’s “Italian perspectives” series, the founding editors of which are Professor Zygmunt Barański and Professor Anna Laura Lepschy. In it Alberto Godioli explores the works of four of the most influential authors in twentieth-century Italian literature: Luigi Pirandello, Italo Svevo, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Carlo Emilio Gadda, focusing on the role played by humor in their work and the original manner in which each of them portrays his own social context through the medium of humor.

Whereas previously Godioli had the opportunity to address various specific aspects of the works of prominent authors such as Gadda and Pirandello, in this monograph he provides an ample and systematic overview of how humor, viewed as either a theme or a stylistic register, served as a source of inspiration for the aforementioned writers. The result is a precise and intriguing analysis of their work, encompassing both major texts and some less widely known. It reveals on the one hand the connection between the four Italians and earlier European literature and on the other the originality of their art, an originality, as Godioli explains, which was forged by the social conflicts apparent in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. Together with some keen textual analysis, this portrayal of the relationship between the authors and the world around them is one of the principal merits of Godioli’s piece.

The first aspect examined is the humor encountered in Pirandello, seen as an insecure escape-route from the restrictions imposed by society and “a fragile optimistic counterpart to the fear that the only room left for originality might in fact be insanity, or even death” (p. 28). In this regard the Pirandello of the novellas appears not too far from the existential pessimism of Dostoyevsky. However, Godioli illustrates how Pirandello distances himself from the romantic notion of individual isolation, also appropriated by Dostoyevsky. The Sicilian author focuses on the comic aspect of this isolation, and in his work there is no trace of the pathos with which Romantics described the contrast between individual and society. In fact, Godioli provides a masterful explanation of how this isolation becomes the lynchpin of paradoxical situations such as that of the protagonist of La patente, who wants to capitalize on his grotesque reputation as a jinx, or that of Zi’ Dima in La giara, who decides to lead a normal life while enclosed in a jar.

The cheerfulness of Pirandello’s bizarre and yet impressive figures, ridiculed and marginalized by society, together with his sense of humor, creating and describing grotesque characters even when simultaneously highlighting the tragedy of their situation, represent the only – albeit barely plausible – means of escaping to “somewhere else” (“un oltre”, p. 43, p. 47), an alternative place to the life imposed by society and which avoids both death and madness. On the one hand the humor in Pirandello gives substance to the historical and psychological desire to escape civilization and on the other it does not oblige one “to face the consequences of these fantasies in coherent and responsible terms” (p. 47).

Somewhat different is Italo Svevo’s approach to the world and its inhabitants as he describes them. Godioli explains how the Triestian author portrays a world in which characters often use irony to affirm in their private lives that which society fails to acknowledge, namely their right to consider themselves as individuals blessed with higher intelligence and greater talent than others. Svevo’s perspective on his protagonists is merciless and illustrates how they often employ irony as a form of bad faith in order to distance themselves from a world which fails to appreciate them, their solace lying in the illusion of their own superiority. Svevo exploits this irony to reveal the common mentality of the bourgeois intellectual, as in Una burla riuscita (1926) where the protagonist is a mediocre clerk with literary ambitions and a clear certainty that he is destined for greatness. Thus while ultimately accepting a compromise with the petty bourgeois mentality, he, despite reality, attempts to persuade himself that he is both different and superior.

Whilst Pirandello examines this opposition through the lens of his own humor, which spans both laughter itself and sympathy for that which the laughter conceals, and Svevo, using sarcasm, explores the opposition between social nomos and individual originality, Palazzeschi extols and exalts individual originality, placing it in opposition to the homogenizing tendencies of social and cultural advancement. Godioli provides an abundance of textual reference to illustrate how the portrait painted by Palazzeschi of the bizarre individual is far from the romantic pathos in which earlier literature cloaked the portrait of a man distinguished from the masses by a particular quality. For Palazzeschi this representation of the “buffo” is a playful celebration germane to the spirit of the avant-garde. As with Pirandello and Svevo, Godioli also analyses the influence on Palazzeschi of nineteenth-century French literature (particularly Maupassant, Balzac and Flaubert), emphasizing the finesse with which the Italian author re-elaborated and even reinvented the themes encountered in the aforementioned French authors to produce aesthetically original results which easily compete with the latter in terms of their literary genius.

Like Palazzeschi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, the fourth author analyzed, voices a similar critique of the conformist tendencies of bourgeois society. On the basis of Leibniz’s philosophy, with which Gadda was very familiar, the Lombardic author uses his work to explore and exploit the infinite variety of the world, reviling the various manifestations of homogenization. For example, he considers “‘Il tipo ‘unico’ o ‘mediamente corretto’ di lingua italiana, auspicato da molti su basi unitaristico-egualitarie […] una generosa utopia” (The ‘standard’ or ‘average’ type of the Italian language, one sought for by many as based on unitary-egalitarian grounds […] a generous utopia) (SGF I 1190–91), extolling instead the beauties of lexical variety. Furthermore, he also rails against the wicked bourgeois teachings and the egalitarian principle in politics (“la idea fissa d’una equalità morale dei bipedi” (the fixed idea of an alleged moral equality between bipeds) RR I 617, says Gonzalo, a character in one of Gadda’s most important works: La cognizione del dolore). The opposition between the peculiarities of the misfit protagonists of Gadda’s writings and the social tendencies towards normalization is a subject that the author envelops in ridicule.

Godioli provides accurate and illustrative examples of how the convoluted personalities of his characters are always depicted as grotesque. Moreover, he also underlines how Gadda also subtracts from the opposition between exceptional individuality and a society composed of a multitude of mediocrities that pathos in which Romantic culture had clothed it. Nevertheless, his description of the Lombardic bourgeoisie retains a criticism of the ridiculous habits and self-important comportment of this social class, his criticism displaying an entertaining satire in which Godioli traces stylistic and thematic allusions to such great European authors as Flaubert, Dickens, and Balzac.

In general terms he underlines how in the works of these four writers, representing the bedrock of Italian modernism, the tension between the individual and the massification of modern society is perceived as still ongoing, in contrast to the description of the same tensions in Joyce, Musil, Kafka, and Eliot for whom the process of homogenization was already complete.

The book culminates in a discussion on the four authors’ originality, and underlines how, albeit with different accents, Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi and Gadda focus on the conflict between diversity and mimetism. Also discussed is their dissimilarity from other European authors such as Dickens and Balzac, who satirize the uniformational tendencies of society but do not question its fundamental seriousness and dramatic potential. Indeed, Godioli explains that the Italian modernists subvert the very dramatic tones of Romantic and Realist literature and in doing so manifest their tendency to poke fun at everything and illustrate “the intrinsic ridiculousness of human life” (p. 125).

Written in an elegant, polished style, Laughter from Realism to Modernism. Misfits and Humorists in Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda is a precious source of information and reflection for researchers and students interested in the topic of humor in twentieth-century Italian literature and equally for any reader wishing to gain a better insight into the named authors.