Taking on the Undertaking

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:18:06 +0000
Num. 33

Giorgio Bassani's remarkable bibliography is published ten years after his death

On the tenth anniversary of the death of one of the most important voices in twentieth-century literature it seems fitting and due to remember Giorgio Bassani with a portrayal and a recollection born out of the reading of the formidable volumes of the Bassani bibliography edited by Portia Prebys that saw light precisely on the occasion of the celebration.

Worthy recognition of one who lavished his energy in making Ferrara known in its double dimension as a city that gave and continues to give an important contribution and, at the same time, serves as an instrument, through his writing, of reality sharing. Such is the purpose put forward by all those who have chosen to represent the man and the history in which he lives, in order to extract a model and a truth. And if the first volume proposes, as a didactic tool, the route of the flowering of form within which content is realized (and not by chance this De Sanctis-derived thought can easily be applied to anyone one like Bassani believed in the possibility of the novel), the second compares contemporaneity, our being modern, with a discussion that is born over time - seventy-odd years - in readers and critics who measured themselves against the pages of the poet-narrator. This is the task entrusted to writing and this work, I believe, can contribute to rendering homage to and thanking Bassani for what he wanted Ferrara to be. In the case of Bassani, his pages and his work stand in an admirable relationship and one of extreme originality; this means that, at the express will of the author himself, all his work can be condensed into a singularity, which is proclaimed and flaunted by the very same pages that form the novel of Ferrara; but at the same time the sections proposed by Prebys - Poetry, Narrative, Essays, Translations, Italia Nostra, Interviews and Various - in part flow into the Romanzo di Ferrara and in part are excluded but tied to the project of narrating. Here, then, more than offering an exhaustive bibliography that, perhaps too modestly, Prebys considers above all a help for foreign students, even if the task is performed excellently by her, these two volumes retrace the project dearest to Bassani: what is the meaning of writing? Bassani proposes in the ne varietur [unchangeable nature] of the Romanzo di Ferrara not so much and not only an aspect more properly inventive, but a series of reflections (be they interviews, be they essays, be they combinations of fiction and critical meditation) that all converge in a single goal: that of mirroring reality through an instrument, writing, that inevitably gets transformed into the concept of poetry, according to the classical definition that Bassani was well aware of and that borrowed from his impeccable classical preparation. Care and taste that were inculcated in him at Ferrara's Ariosto Classical Lyceum or by his young friends during their daily trips back and forth to Bologna, once he enrolled in the University. Those daily trips that led him to seek out and find his own way through direct contact with the teaching of the highly admired Roberto Longhi and of his peer Francesco Arcangeli who taught him above all to analyze and resolve the problem of writing; a way of "seeing" that did not mean adopting his own method for the visual arts and then applyi ng it to a writing project according to the ekphrastic principle of the sister arts; but rather revealing through writing ways of expression that in the visual arts take on a determining role, almost as if space could substitute time or, in the most successful case, meld with the latter to create/reflect reality in its most complete acceptance, that of truth and beauty together. The challenging quest undertaken by Portia Prebys reckons with all of this by never selecting, in the sea of paperwork by and on Bassani, a linear path already defined by a posteriori critiques, but forging forward into the forest of documents without ever favouring any one of them; since the document itself is a tessera of a mosaic where "everything holds": including the fleeting piece, the slipcover flap, and the "occasional" piece, the latter a benefit in the Montalian declination. Thus the monument that he is erecting aere perennius ["more lasting than bronze"] and that allows us to place Bassani within the twentieth-century canon, is that which he dedicates to writing; to a kind of writing in history and for history. But, be careful! Each page, each note is knowingly tied to that project, and, therefore, inevitably it is "a writer's calling-card", it is, in the end, a literary "product" that must be observed, studied, put into context, in that particular function which is peculiar to poetry, to waxing poetic: the representation of truth in history. This is the difficulty and, at the same time, the solution that Bassani gave to his singular project, to his dream of the novel. It is certain that, as can be derived from the author's reflections and those of his critics, Ferrara becomes the prima donna of his literary world. One can also read the texts of Bassani's civil engagement, those that stream into his writings for Italia Nostra. These are fundamental texts that reflect Bassani's ethical stature and his extraordinary capacity to interpret the hardship and outrage provoked by hands on the cities, on the landscape and the fight undertaken and carried out to affirm civil reasoning through his creature, Italia Nostra. But - and here stands the exceptional character of Bassani's teaching - his capacity to connect the problems of living in society and for history are reflected in them, with a style possible only for a purebred writer. At that point, those pages spread out lucidly through the use of a kind of writing that always and by its very nature is connected to poetry as a representation of the world, as testimony to the offense brought to humanity, like cracks, or wounds, that have irremediably sealed Bassani's existence and work. The diversity that rendered him unique is also the spring that projects him to witness the disfigurement inflicted onto the world in which we live. The written intervention, the project for Italia Nostra, though remaining unique and specific, thus acquires added value, that of a word that does not retreat, that must not retreat from its poetic role. In the sense of poiesis, the making of the mind. Bassani was perhaps among the last writers who believed in the possibility of the novel; and just now, when that form is in an almost irreversible crisis, we can confirm that Giorgio Bassani belongs to that category of European novelists that he himself privileged with jealous confidence: Manzoni, Verga, Thomas Mann, Proust, not extraneous to our contemporaneity but a load-bearing structure for the concept of "modern". It remains to be noted, only because it is the most researched and well-known problem regarding Bassani, that he belonged to the stock of the "different". Jewish and profoundly tied to Italian culture, torn by an ideological monstrosity from the world of his loved ones, but also from his depths belonging to the Italian character, understood as interior civility, "nobility of spirit" as the title of Rob Riemen's beautiful book declares and which, not by chance, cites in exergo one of Bassani's celebrated phrases. This never-healed wound, followed by a never-pardoned offense, was triggered by having tried to exclude, through the banality of evil, the future novelist from that nobility of spirit which all of Europe had collaborated in shaping. From this a double reaction: a political one that concrete form in the resistance fought and suffered in the name of nobility of spirit but also, and in this stands the greatness of the writer and the intellectual, in projecting and building what Foscolo thought concerning the role of poetry, an eternity in history entrusted to the Romanzo di Ferrara.