Two Italies: Rhetorical Figures of Failed Nationhood
*Mariella Pandolfi *
The representation of Italy as a nation divided or even manquée, a fragile and artificial union of two divided and estranged Italies, raises questions about alterity understood in both collective and individual terms. Generally, we suppose that the consciousness of a group can be integrated through a rhetoric of alterity; insiders reinforce their own identity by constructing an external, deterritorialized “other.” In the Italian historical context, however, the rhetorical construction of a South opposed, and even inimical, to the North escapes this pattern to produce a more richly complex figuration. On the one hand, southerners continue to invoke the figure of a land invaded, of centuries of foreign oppression, of the abandonment of an artistic heritage — a position which places the South in the realm of alterity to Italian nationhood. On the other hand, a reciprocal figure emerges in which this alterity must be internalized in order to imagine a territorially integral Italy.
The South, then, is represented by a double figure: on one side, the passive product of alterity externalized, and on the other side, the internalized other in an active national subject (“Italy”). But in this paradox, we can begin to see the possibility of political change. For while the rhetorical figure of externalized alterity reveals continued victimization and with it immobility, the figure of an internalized other demands the recovery of its historicity. In other words, for Italian nationhood to succeed in its project of agency and historical coherence, it must overcome the otherness of the South. And this work of overcoming is only possible through the production of a historical consciousness.
Some southerners, including intellectuals, would counter the deeply ingrained Italian motif of a rupture between a hard-working North and a poor, parasitic, and mafia-ridden South by denouncing the northern region as a capitalist wasteland with a long history of starving its own workers and peasants, as well as appropriating southern resources. But such an image masks the deep continuity of a national structure of political power in which southerners have been significant participants. Curiously, the Western press has also missed the existence of this structure, focusing rather on the presumed “instability” of the Italian political élite. Did not the same powerful persons and groups directly and indirectly govern an Italy “presumed” to be ungovernable until the political earthquake of 1992?
Among intellectuals, Italian anthropologists have generally accepted the opposition of North and South and, for political reasons, concentrated their research efforts on the latter. Southern Italy was to them what the formerly colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas were to the anthropologies of the former colonial powers: England, France, and the United States. Already in the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries had defined the Italian South as indias de por aca (“our own Indies”), only marginally less savage, pagan, and ripe for conversion than the indias of the European empires across the ocean. In treating the South as a dominated and colonized land, Gramscian anthropologists in the postwar period reiterated a similar theme, although without the stigmatizing labels of savagery and paganism. If North and South were integrated and co-dependent, this was because the South, with its large mass of undifferentiated rural peasants and tiny but powerful economic and cultural élite, served as the North’s indispensable pool of subjugated and disempowered labor. Here too, the power of the rhetorical configuration of Southern Italy as continually menacing separation from a radically different North goes unremarked, subordinated to the co-dependence between southern peasants and the northern capitalist economy that Gramsci emphasized (see Gramsci 1978; Said 1995: 21—40).
Yet Gramsci’s vision of territory differed from the dangerous and arrogant categorizations of some proponents of the Southern Question, and he was careful to dissociate himself from their essentialism. Such geographical determinisms, according to which the South was separate and backward, corrupt and parasitic, because of its climate, topography, agrarian regime, only legitimated the authoritarian and imperialistic stances of the North. Rather, territoriality was a political perimeter; it referred to a peripheral place subject to imperial and strategic domination by the center. It defined a category to be understood in the same way that we understand countries that have been subjected to imperial domination, imperialism being a particular mode of capitalist domination.
Italy’s political landscape of the 1970s, with its corrupt links among the Vatican, political parties, the mafia, and elements of Freemasonry, is comprehensible only from a perspective that eschews the contrastive geographies of North and South. The regime that constructed this landscape fell in 1992, one of many casualties of the recent changes in the global balance of power. Significantly, moves to replace the outdated political élite with a new and forward-looking political class have been accompanied by the revived topos of “two Italies” — an organized and hardworking North opposed to a chaotic and dangerous South. No less than in the past, such a representation masks entrenched interests and powers. Easily discernible under the camouflaging rhetoric of efficiency, modernism, and liberal democracy, the opposition North-South repositions Southern Italy as the territorial watershed between Italy as Europeanized (or Americanized) and Italy as African.
I would like to suggest that this auto-orientalist construction of a double Italian identity was overcome only for the briefest moment when the Fascist regime proclaimed its agenda of transforming Italy into a late colonial empire. It was only during that historical fragment, that brief period of twenty years, that intellectuals and political leaders came to construct a representation of a unitary national identity. Only then did the many complex elements that composed the Italian nation come together to affirm that identity, overriding and obliterating the rhetorical strategy of an Italy divided between North and South. In the international upheavals of the 1920s, when the nation-state of Italy was in fact quite fragile, the Fascists generated the collective dream, indeed delirium, of achieving superpower status, giving birth to a national identity that had been up to then paradoxical. North and South as enemies did not figure in the everyday discourse of fascist intellectuals. An image of Italy as a Utopian project, a hazy veil that hid complex differences, grew to cover the entire national territory. The Southern Question gave way to the rhetorical figure of Italy defined as the direct descendant and inheritor of Imperial Rome.
Between September 1943 and April 1945, this fiction came tumbling down like the house of cards that it was, and once again Italy found itself divided, this time by the Gothic Line.1 On one side, the South witnessed the American landing in Sicily and the liberation of Naples, while on the other side the North writhed in agony under the last spasms of the Fascist Republic of Salo, which only ended with Mussolini’s execution by partisans in April 1945 and the liberation of Rome. These eighteen months signaled the loss of a coherent representation of national homogeneity and of the possibility of an undivided national confederation; a loss that could not be recovered. There followed the emergence of the polarized discourses of Italian Marxist culture, with its rhetoric of resistance, and of Italian anti-communism, which characterizes the resistance against the Fascists as the work of traitors, only interested in settling personal scores, perpetrating massacres under the cover of an ideology of freedom, and betraying their own kin who were under arms.
In literature and cinema, if not in anthropology, one discovers the tragedy of this contradiction: the two faces of the Americans as enemy and liberator, of the Germans as friend and assassin. No wonder that the generation that lived these events has failed to transmit the memory of them to their successors. A fracture in the collective memory has been born of the yearning to mask or even erase this suffering and shame — a fracture that has blocked the process of modernization and democratization in Italy over the last fifty years. We may even suggest that the Italian love affair with the ideals of freedom and resistance, and the headstrong embrace of America, constitute a collective engagement in a cathartic ritual. And, thanks to Marshall Plan assistance, it was soon possible to construct an image of a country rising from the ashes, producing the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, joining the ranks of the industrialized West, yet still unsure of belonging.
In the 1960s, the massive immigration of peasants from the South to the North transformed the urban proletariat, a process emblematic of the occasionally violent foreignness lying between North and South, as portrayed, for example, in Visconti’s film “Rocco and His Brothers.” The events of 1968 in Italy were produced as a unified discourse of national protest, but it must be noted that the protagonists of ‘68 were the children of that generation who lived through, repressed, and no longer spoke of the collective shame of the war. In other words, the impossibility of creating a representation of Italian civil society as a whole, with all its conflicts, tragedies, and paradoxes, repeatedly manifests itself as the trope of the continuous drama of Italian life, in which rhetoric and historical tragedy are blended. In the end, even’ crisis becomes linked to the millennium-long struggle between North and South, perceived as preventing the modernization of the nation, its full participation in European life as an equal partner, and the evolutionary transformation of the nineteenth-century nation-state into a contemporary democracy.
This narrative, it should be noted, paints a picture of Italian history on a linear canvas rather than one constructed from the contingencies of life. It is a rhetorical figure that anesthetizes civil society, activates the same cathartic ritual of the “Liberation,” and impedes the emergence of more concrete and contextualized visions of history. An alternative analysis of civil society was erased the day after the Enemy was transformed into Liberator, Ally, and Savior; the day after the fascist powers — the Italians and the Germans — became defined as the enemy. This was the historical transformation of alterity from an externalized formation to an internalized one — a formation sedimented as a silent memory. Herein lies a history whose uncovering would depart from the tired mold of the opposition of North and South and the paradox of failed national identity.2
Notes
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The opposition between nation and patria in the years between 1943 and 1945 is one of the central themes debated in contemporary Italian historiography. This is not the place to enter this debate, which goes on between historians and political theorists (see especially Galli della Loggia 1996 and Viroli 1995), except to note the absence of Italian anthropological reflection on this contemporary ideological concern.
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Corrado Alvaro, in his novel l’Italia Rinunzia of 1945, tells, in emblematic fashion, of the traumatic transformation in Italy that inverted allies and enemies (Germans and Americans) in 1943 and marked the repression of national memory.
Right from the first day of the war, a large segment of Italy looked forward to and fervently hoped for defeat. Every Italian had his ear cocked to the news from Radio Londra (the BBC), to speeches that continually repeated that the Italians and the Allies were friends at heart, that it was only necessary that Italy rid itself of the yoke of fascism for harmony and good relations to reign. Many Italians believed in Radio Londra . . . even though their sons were fighting in Africa, in the Balkans, and in Russia. If there ever was a tragic dilemma for Italians, this was it — seeing one’s own son fighting for what was perceived as a foreign cause; seeing soldiers on leave listening to Radio Londra and exhorting them to desert; seeing civilian neighborhoods bombed and thinking the “enemy” was right; justifying what could rightfully be called a civil war, Italians killing Italians and destroying Italian houses. There are enough of these stories to paint a tragic picture of the moral madness a people suffer because of dictatorship. Was all this a sense of justice? A feeling of the truth? A desire for penance? It was simply the catastrophe of a people that had lied to itself (Alvaro 1986: 34-6; my translation).
In examining the same passage, Ernesto Galli della Loggia underscores Alvaro’s grasp of (in his words) questa tremenda realtà — the fragility of the Italian collective memory at that historical moment (Galli della Loggia 1996: 8).
References
- Alvaro, Corrado (1986[ 1945]) l’Italia Rinunzia. Palermo: Sellerio.
- Galli della Loggia, Ernesto (1996) La morte delia patria. Bari: Laterza.
- Gramsci, Antonio (1978) “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.” In Selections from Political Writings 1921—1926. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
- Said, Edward (1995) “The Methodology of Imperialism.” In After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash, pp. 21-40. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
- Viroli, Maurizio (1995) Per amore della patria. Patriottismo e nazionalismo nella storia. Bari: Laterza.