英文通俗文學中的義大利他者與南歐東方主義化的政治

Abstract

This work sets itself the goal to analyse the way in which the discourses that have been employed in rationalizing the divide between the north and the south of Europe find an outlet in the context of today’s popular Anglophone literature. This study aims at individuating such discourses, in their explicit or implicit expression, in contemporary Anglophone popular works set in Italy. This work proceeds from the much discussed, celebrated, and problematized application of Michel Foucault’s theories to the field of Oriental studies, but diverts the focus of inquiry from the East/West divide to the divide, within European borders, between the north and the south. The object of this inquiry consists in a certain discourse on the south of Europe I regard as running parallel to the discourse of Orientalism, a fantasizing about the counties and cultures of the European south which has, as one of its functions, that of reiterating a certain cultural hierarchy based on a perceived divide between more and less rational places, places that better conform to a certain notion of modernity, and places that exist to remind the moderns of a different existential experience. To Italy in particular, this discourse has assigned a specific kind of “otherness” on which I will try to shed some light through my discussion of popular literary examples of the contemporary era. In the present study, I wish to direct my attention to the circumscribed context of popular novels, memoirs, relocation narratives, and travel accounts written in the first person. I am persuaded that these literary contexts make particularly visible the manufacturing of a temporal difference as a prolific producer of cultural difference. In spite of momentous differences in representation, it is my contention that Italy’s exoticization is still implicit in many contemporary texts: journalistic narratives, travelogues, and literary works of imagination. In order to investigate the temporal margin that seems to separate Italy from modernity, and often seems to translate itself into a convenient narrative device for “adventures in another time,” I have used Johannes Fabian’s seminal critique of anthropology Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983). I will argue that the authority of anthropology is employed (in a much diluted and popularized form) in numerous narratives to legitimize pseudo-scientific analyses of the other based on personal observation “in the field,” a process made possible by a series of assumptions on the intelligibility of certain practices seen as signifying and witnessing a previous stage of historical development. I find that a good number of contemporary popular narratives on Italy (novels, memoirs, or exploration narratives), elaborate their accounts adopting, as a conceptual pivot, a dichotomy between fully modern and less modern cultures. At times explicit, at times implicit, this dichotomy is the major opposition from which all others derive. In this perspective, a single standard definition of modernity is taken as the universal measure of human progress and advancement. In his The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (1993), David Spurr argues that the apparently straight-forward divide between more and less modern cultures serves to justify and reiterate a series of value judgements and ideologically charged assumptions. If modernity is “the process which transforms a traditional, ‘pretechnological’ society into one marked by technology and economy of the machine, rational and secular concepts of authority, and a high degree of differentiation within the social structure,” (1993: 69- 70) every form of social organization that features a different cluster of characteristics automatically becomes the target for more or less authoritative remarks on its pre-modern, archaic, or undeveloped state. Consequently, as Spurr argues, “nations are classified as more or less developed forms of a single species that reaches its highest degree of refinement in the Western post-industrial state.” (1993: 70) I find that this particular vision has percolated to everyday discourses and practises, and expresses itself noticeably in contemporary popular works about (or set in) Italy. The depiction of Western societies as objectively ahead in history denies “coevalness” to a number of other societies, including some which are generally thought of and classified as Western. This study will attempt at making certain similarities in the approach to the observation and description of Southern European cultures, and Italy in particular, recognizable across the work of contemporary authors of popular literature who write in English. I do not wish to argue that the works of such authors are comparable in every respect, but I do wish, at the risk of incurring a certain degree of abstraction, to make the point that colonial discourse has survived the end of colonial rule, and expresses itself today, in the post-colonial world, in popular narratives (among other media) that exemplify, beyond their apparent vocation to light entertainment, an hegemonic attitude which can be studied through an analysis of its taxonomy of concepts and values. The deconstruction of this world of ideas, a world that is at the same time powerful and elusive, has, as its broad objective, not to identify ideologies as the expression of a conscious effort to somehow support and promote a specific hegemonic view of the world, but to see discourse as a basic expression of social practice, and to expose its many layers by “stirring up and dispersing the sedimented meanings dormant in texts.’” (Parry 2004: 17)

This work sets itself the goal to analyse the way in which the discourses that have been employed in rationalizing the divide between the north and the south of Europe find an outlet in the context of today’s popular Anglophone literature. This study aims at individuating such discourses, in their explicit or implicit expression, in contemporary Anglophone popular works set in Italy. This work proceeds from the much discussed, celebrated, and problematized application of Michel Foucault’s theories to the field of Oriental studies, but diverts the focus of inquiry from the East/West divide to the divide, within European borders, between the north and the south. The object of this inquiry consists in a certain discourse on the south of Europe I regard as running parallel to the discourse of Orientalism, a fantasizing about the counties and cultures of the European south which has, as one of its functions, that of reiterating a certain cultural hierarchy based on a perceived divide between more and less rational places, places that better conform to a certain notion of modernity, and places that exist to remind the moderns of a different existential experience. To Italy in particular, this discourse has assigned a specific kind of “otherness” on which I will try to shed some light through my discussion of popular literary examples of the contemporary era. In the present study, I wish to direct my attention to the circumscribed context of popular novels, memoirs, relocation narratives, and travel accounts written in the first person. I am persuaded that these literary contexts make particularly visible the manufacturing of a temporal difference as a prolific producer of cultural difference. In spite of momentous differences in representation, it is my contention that Italy’s exoticization is still implicit in many contemporary texts: journalistic narratives, travelogues, and literary works of imagination. In order to investigate the temporal margin that seems to separate Italy from modernity, and often seems to translate itself into a convenient narrative device for “adventures in another time,” I have used Johannes Fabian’s seminal critique of anthropology Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983). I will argue that the authority of anthropology is employed (in a much diluted and popularized form) in numerous narratives to legitimize pseudo-scientific analyses of the other based on personal observation “in the field,” a process made possible by a series of assumptions on the intelligibility of certain practices seen as signifying and witnessing a previous stage of historical development. I find that a good number of contemporary popular narratives on Italy (novels, memoirs, or exploration narratives), elaborate their accounts adopting, as a conceptual pivot, a dichotomy between fully modern and less modern cultures. At times explicit, at times implicit, this dichotomy is the major opposition from which all others derive. In this perspective, a single standard definition of modernity is taken as the universal measure of human progress and advancement. In his The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (1993), David Spurr argues that the apparently straight-forward divide between more and less modern cultures serves to justify and reiterate a series of value judgements and ideologically charged assumptions. If modernity is “the process which transforms a traditional, ‘pretechnological’ society into one marked by technology and economy of the machine, rational and secular concepts of authority, and a high degree of differentiation within the social structure,” (1993: 69- 70) every form of social organization that features a different cluster of characteristics automatically becomes the target for more or less authoritative remarks on its pre-modern, archaic, or undeveloped state. Consequently, as Spurr argues, “nations are classified as more or less developed forms of a single species that reaches its highest degree of refinement in the Western post-industrial state.” (1993: 70) I find that this particular vision has percolated to everyday discourses and practises, and expresses itself noticeably in contemporary popular works about (or set in) Italy. The depiction of Western societies as objectively ahead in history denies “coevalness” to a number of other societies, including some which are generally thought of and classified as Western. This study will attempt at making certain similarities in the approach to the observation and description of Southern European cultures, and Italy in particular, recognizable across the work of contemporary authors of popular literature who write in English. I do not wish to argue that the works of such authors are comparable in every respect, but I do wish, at the risk of incurring a certain degree of abstraction, to make the point that colonial discourse has survived the end of colonial rule, and expresses itself today, in the post-colonial world, in popular narratives (among other media) that exemplify, beyond their apparent vocation to light entertainment, an hegemonic attitude which can be studied through an analysis of its taxonomy of concepts and values. The deconstruction of this world of ideas, a world that is at the same time powerful and elusive, has, as its broad objective, not to identify ideologies as the expression of a conscious effort to somehow support and promote a specific hegemonic view of the world, but to see discourse as a basic expression of social practice, and to expose its many layers by “stirring up and dispersing the sedimented meanings dormant in texts.’” (Parry 2004: 17)