“Epic fiction is the sole epistemological instance where the I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a third-person qua third-person can be portrayed.” This is the central proposition in Käte Hamburger’s Die Logik der Dichtung (1957), later adopted by Dorrit Cohn as the basis for Transparent Minds (1978). In their view, the most definitive characteristic of narrative fiction is its ability to render the epic or novel hero’s interiority transparent, thus allowing the reader to access the characters’ subjectivity. Through this lens, these two scholars analyze the modalities through which consciousness is manifested in narrative form. These are the fundamental concerns, for years overlooked by criticism, which constitute the theoretical basis of this thesis. Through close readings of Realist and Naturalist literature, this thesis argues that “serious” representation (in the Auerbachian sense) of individual consciousness is not reserved exclusively to upper-class characters, but is also granted to the men and women of the popolo, with necessary differences in degree and form. The emergence in the diegesis of a subjectivity socially distant from that of the author’s is an essential issue without which such works could not be fully understood. However, some preliminary conditions are necessary, which concern the type of the character entrusted to mediate the story to the reader. These principles emerge in the first case study: I promessi sposi, Italian literature’s foundational text for the representation of the poor in the novel. Although Manzoni’s masterpiece may appear to be the exemplary omniscient novel, there are many instances found in the text in which the narrating voice withdraws, entrusting the central perspective to a character. Although these diegetic instants do not eschew their typical didactic flourish, interiority is reproduced through extensive formal techniques. This is notably applied to Renzo, the peasant silk-weaver compelled in his journey from the countryside to Milan into a sort of Bildungsroman: he is a figure from the periphery figure who becomes a small landowner. However, he does not ultimately undergo an acculturation which might estrange him from his original social strata and rescue him from aivety. It is mainly to characters similar to Renzo that rustic literature writers and naturalist writers reserved the “serious” representation of character’s subjectivity. These are characters who embody the idea of social mobility (downgraded, parvenus, etc.) or who exceed the dimension of everyday life (intellectual heroes, orphans, etc.). I promessi sposi, along with Scènes de la vie de campagne by Honoré de Balzac and the Les veillées du chanvreur cycle by George Sand, demonstrate the scope of mimetic representation of the poor. More than a cistern of themes and style, these works form the canon of subjectivation in rustic literature, which spread in Lombardy and Veneto during the long eve of the decennio di preparazione. These works were severely beholden to moderate safeguards, which appear, notably in Giulio Carcano’s narratives, in the restricting forms of the idyllic. A new demand had materialized. Intellectuals needed to make the rural masses function in the hegemonic framework of the bourgeoisie, from which these texts directly emanated. However, in their writings, these authors do not restrict their representation of the peasantry as a vehicle for general emotions, to a token populism. Often, they portrayed their material conditions with an objective lens. Most notably, they utilized techniques to represent psychic life, with which they granted their characters’ subjectivity expression: their pains, their emotions, and their hopes betrayed. It becomes a question of other-directed characters. Despite employing countless devices to simulate authentic interior lives, the author gave the poor an artificial and tendentious narrative autonomy. The contents of their thoughts instrumentally serve the purpose which the writer aims to communicate. However, there are significant, individual exceptions: in some stories by Caterina Percoto, the introduction of popular characters’ voices implicitly challenges the heterodiegetic narrator’s value system, and by extension the bourgeois Weltanchauung. Meanwhile, in the Novelliere campanguolo, Ippolito Nievo assigns the récit to a yokel, who expresses his class grievances in the first person. This narrative phenomenology is later revived, from a bourgeois perspective, in Le confessioni d’un Italiano (1867). The final section of this thesis examines Verist and Naturalist literature, which constitute an excellent specola for observing a turning point in 19th century narrative at large. From Madame Bovary (1857) onwards, the author increasingly withdrew into the backdrop of the text, entrusting a subjectivity other than their own with mediating the story’s consciousness to the reader. It becomes a matter of one or more characters who, despite being described in the third person, focalize the narrative; in Franz Karl Stanzel’s terminology, this is an instance of figural narrative situation. The world depicted in the text is the world as it appears to a certain character, observed from their point of view, and tinted by their emotions; authors adopt a variety of stylistics to render this perception, the reality reflected in the gaze of this third person, uncoincidentally named the “reflector” by Stanzel. He discussed this concept in the age of the psychological novel, when the «psychological analysis» was considered by many, in France as in Italy, as a legitimate methodology of naturalism. Writers, on the other hand, conceived that it was only suitable to employ it for specific characters (primarily the bourgeoisie, artists, and aristocrats); this is the price of disparity and a class prejudice. Nevertheless, in these authors’ writings, numerous points of discontinuity emerged. The delegation of the reflector was not precluded to figures from the Fourth Estate. Moreover, marginal subjectivities are individualized through pronounced traits, silhouetted on a narrative or choral background. Through analysis of some representative French texts – Germinie Lacerteux (1865) by the brothers Goncourt, La fortune des Rougon (1877), L’assommoir (1877), Germinal (1885), and La terre (1887) by Émile Zola – and a survey of the narratives of Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, and Federico De Roberto, it is shown how the naturalists attributed a “soul” to each character, with which the reader is encouraged to sympathize.
«La finzione narrativa è il solo luogo conoscitivo in cui l’io di una terza persona può essere presentato nella sua soggettività». È questo l’assunto più importante di Die Logik der Dichtung (1957) di Käte Hamburger, ed è a tali riflessioni che Dorrit Cohn si rifà in Transparent Minds (1978). Nella persuasione che la caratteristica più propria della narrativa di finzione sia la possibilità di rendere trasparente l’interiorità di un eroe epico o romanzesco, permettendo al lettore di partecipare alla soggettività dei personaggi, le due studiose analizzano le modalità attraverso cui la coscienza si manifesta nel dominio narrativo. Si tratta di questioni fondamentali, per anni trascurate dalla critica, che costituiscono lo sfondo teorico del lavoro di tesi, che ha per oggetto la letteratura realista e naturalista. Esso si impernia sulla convinzione che la rappresentazione ʻseriaʼ (nell’accezione auerbachiana) delle coscienze individuali non sia riservata ai personaggi altolocati in maniera esclusiva, bensì accordata, con le dovute differenze di forma e grado, anche agli uomini e alle donne del popolo; e che anzi l’emersione nella diegesi di soggettività socialmente lontane da quella dell’autore sia un aspetto essenziale senza il quale tale produzione non potrebbe intendersi appieno. Tuttavia, sono generalmente necessarie delle condizioni preliminari, che riguardano la caratterizzazione del personaggio di cui l’autore intende condurre l’approfondimento soggettivo. Tali principi si evincono già nel primo case study: I promessi sposi: l’atto fondativo, nella letteratura italiana, della rappresentazione romanzesca degli umili. Sebbene il capolavoro manzoniano si presenti infatti come un caso tipico di romanzo onnisciente, si sono rinvenuti tratti più o meno ampi, nel testo, in cui la voce narrante si ritrae, affidando a un personaggio la centralità della ʻvisioneʼ. Non che l’istanza diegetica rinunci alle impennate didattiche; tuttavia, l’interiorità è riprodotta per mezzo di un’ampia strumentazione di forme. Significativamente, ciò vale soprattutto per Renzo: un contadino filatore di seta costretto, nel suo viaggio fra il contado e Milano, a una sorta di Bildungsroman; un marginale che diventa un piccolo possidente, ma che non subisce un’acculturazione che lo estranei dal suo strato sociale d’origine e lo liberi dalla sua ingenuità. Un personaggio socialmente ibrido, e al confine tra due mondi. È principalmente a caratteri consimili – personaggi che incarnano l’idea della mobilità sociale (declassati, parvenus etc..), o che eccedono la dimensione del quotidiano (operai intellettuali, orfani etc.), facendosi portatori di una devianza – che gli scrittori campagnoli e naturalisti diedero in dote un plot teleologicamente orientato, la possibilità di un destino individuale e la storia di una coscienza. I promessi sposi – insieme a Scènes de la vie de campagne di Honoré de Balzac, e soprattutto il ciclo de Les veillées du chanvreur di George Sand, di cui sono presentate le principali possibilità mimetiche della soggettività popolare – costituirono, oltre che un serbatoio tematico e linguistico, anche il canone della soggettivazione della letteratura «rusticale», che si diffuse nel Lombardo-Veneto durante la lunga vigilia del «decennio di preparazione». Tale produzione fu gravemente ipotecata dalle cautele moderate, che si tradussero, specie nella narrativa di Giulio Carcano, nelle forme limitanti dell’idillio. Si materializzava infatti una nuova esigenza: il bisogno, da parte degli intellettuali, di funzionalizzare le masse rurali nel quadro egemonico della borghesia, di cui questi testi erano più o meno direttamente un’emanazione. Tuttavia, nel concreto della scrittura, gli autori non si limitarono ad esternare una generica compartecipazione emotiva – di segno populistico – nei confronti dei contadini; invece, essi ne dipinsero talvolta le condizioni materiali con piglio obiettivo; e soprattutto si avvalsero delle tecniche della rappresentazione della vita psichica, con cui diedero espressione alla loro soggettività: dolori, emozioni, speranze tradite... Malgrado adotti tutti gli espedienti volti a simulare l’autenticità del loro vissuto interiore, l’autore concede però agli umili un’autonomia narrativa fittizia e tendenziosa. Ciò accade anche in Ippolito Nievo, la cui produzione rusticale, se rapportata al caso di Carcano, è a tratti persino più capziosa, a dispetto del suo fervore democratico e della sua poetica dalla marcata connotazione civile; e ne Le confessioni di un italiano (1857) lo scrittore dedica al popolo uno spazio solo marginale. Ma si sono individuate eccezioni significative: in alcuni racconti di Caterina Percoto l’affiorare della voce dei personaggi popolari mette implicitamente in discussione il sistema valoriale del narratore eterodiegetico, e dunque la Weltanchauung borghese: le istanze pedagogiche convivono problematicamente con la pulsione realistica della scrittrice. L’ultima sezione della tesi prende in esame la letteratura verista e naturalista, che costituisce una specola privilegiata per osservare una svolta che riguardò la narrativa dell’Ottocento nel suo insieme. Da Madame Bovary (1857) in poi, infatti, l’autore sempre più spesso si occulta nel retroscena del testo, affidando a una soggettività diversa dalla sua il compito di mediare al lettore i sensi del racconto. Si tratta di un personaggio (o più di uno) raccontato in terza persona ma che funge da fuoco della rappresentazione: è la situazione narrativa figurale, nel lessico di Franz Karl Stanzel. Il mondo esibito dal testo è il mondo quale appare a tale personaggio, osservato dal suo punto di vista, tinteggiato dalle sue emozioni: molti ritrovati di stile sono adoperati dall’autore a rendere queste percezioni, la realtà quale si riflette nello sguardo di questo terzo, non per nulla definito da Stanzel riflettore. Si parlò al tempo di romanzo psicologico, e l’«analisi psicologica» fu considerata da molti, in Francia come in Italia, una metodica legittima del naturalismo; ma gli scrittori la ritennero idonea, nella loro teoria, solo a determinati personaggi: essenzialmente borghesi, artisti e aristocratici. Il prezzo di una differenza e un pregiudizio di classe. Nondimeno, nella pratica degli autori, la delega al personaggio riflettore non è preclusa ai caratteri del Quarto Stato; e non è infrequente che una soggettività marginale si individualizzi mediante tratti marcati, stagliandosi sulla campitura narratoriale o corale che le fa da sfondo. Attraverso l’analisi di alcuni testi francesi rappresentativi – Germinie Lacerteux (1865) dei fratelli Goncourt, La fortune des Rougon (1871), L’Assommoir (1877), Germinal (1885) e La Terre (1887) di Émile Zola – e una ricognizione della narrativa di Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana e Federico De Roberto si è mostrato come i naturalisti attribuiscano, anche ai caratteri del Quarto Stato, un’ʻanimaʼ con cui il lettore è invitato a simpatizzare; scavo analitico che, soprattutto nel caso di Zola, conferisce a tali personaggi una profondità introspettiva autenticamente rivoluzionaria.
Soggettività e Quarto Stato. Modalità della rappresentazione interiore nella narrativa realista e naturalista
SCARAVILLI, Guido
2023
Abstract
“Epic fiction is the sole epistemological instance where the I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a third-person qua third-person can be portrayed.” This is the central proposition in Käte Hamburger’s Die Logik der Dichtung (1957), later adopted by Dorrit Cohn as the basis for Transparent Minds (1978). In their view, the most definitive characteristic of narrative fiction is its ability to render the epic or novel hero’s interiority transparent, thus allowing the reader to access the characters’ subjectivity. Through this lens, these two scholars analyze the modalities through which consciousness is manifested in narrative form. These are the fundamental concerns, for years overlooked by criticism, which constitute the theoretical basis of this thesis. Through close readings of Realist and Naturalist literature, this thesis argues that “serious” representation (in the Auerbachian sense) of individual consciousness is not reserved exclusively to upper-class characters, but is also granted to the men and women of the popolo, with necessary differences in degree and form. The emergence in the diegesis of a subjectivity socially distant from that of the author’s is an essential issue without which such works could not be fully understood. However, some preliminary conditions are necessary, which concern the type of the character entrusted to mediate the story to the reader. These principles emerge in the first case study: I promessi sposi, Italian literature’s foundational text for the representation of the poor in the novel. Although Manzoni’s masterpiece may appear to be the exemplary omniscient novel, there are many instances found in the text in which the narrating voice withdraws, entrusting the central perspective to a character. Although these diegetic instants do not eschew their typical didactic flourish, interiority is reproduced through extensive formal techniques. This is notably applied to Renzo, the peasant silk-weaver compelled in his journey from the countryside to Milan into a sort of Bildungsroman: he is a figure from the periphery figure who becomes a small landowner. However, he does not ultimately undergo an acculturation which might estrange him from his original social strata and rescue him from aivety. It is mainly to characters similar to Renzo that rustic literature writers and naturalist writers reserved the “serious” representation of character’s subjectivity. These are characters who embody the idea of social mobility (downgraded, parvenus, etc.) or who exceed the dimension of everyday life (intellectual heroes, orphans, etc.). I promessi sposi, along with Scènes de la vie de campagne by Honoré de Balzac and the Les veillées du chanvreur cycle by George Sand, demonstrate the scope of mimetic representation of the poor. More than a cistern of themes and style, these works form the canon of subjectivation in rustic literature, which spread in Lombardy and Veneto during the long eve of the decennio di preparazione. These works were severely beholden to moderate safeguards, which appear, notably in Giulio Carcano’s narratives, in the restricting forms of the idyllic. A new demand had materialized. Intellectuals needed to make the rural masses function in the hegemonic framework of the bourgeoisie, from which these texts directly emanated. However, in their writings, these authors do not restrict their representation of the peasantry as a vehicle for general emotions, to a token populism. Often, they portrayed their material conditions with an objective lens. Most notably, they utilized techniques to represent psychic life, with which they granted their characters’ subjectivity expression: their pains, their emotions, and their hopes betrayed. It becomes a question of other-directed characters. Despite employing countless devices to simulate authentic interior lives, the author gave the poor an artificial and tendentious narrative autonomy. The contents of their thoughts instrumentally serve the purpose which the writer aims to communicate. However, there are significant, individual exceptions: in some stories by Caterina Percoto, the introduction of popular characters’ voices implicitly challenges the heterodiegetic narrator’s value system, and by extension the bourgeois Weltanchauung. Meanwhile, in the Novelliere campanguolo, Ippolito Nievo assigns the récit to a yokel, who expresses his class grievances in the first person. This narrative phenomenology is later revived, from a bourgeois perspective, in Le confessioni d’un Italiano (1867). The final section of this thesis examines Verist and Naturalist literature, which constitute an excellent specola for observing a turning point in 19th century narrative at large. From Madame Bovary (1857) onwards, the author increasingly withdrew into the backdrop of the text, entrusting a subjectivity other than their own with mediating the story’s consciousness to the reader. It becomes a matter of one or more characters who, despite being described in the third person, focalize the narrative; in Franz Karl Stanzel’s terminology, this is an instance of figural narrative situation. The world depicted in the text is the world as it appears to a certain character, observed from their point of view, and tinted by their emotions; authors adopt a variety of stylistics to render this perception, the reality reflected in the gaze of this third person, uncoincidentally named the “reflector” by Stanzel. He discussed this concept in the age of the psychological novel, when the «psychological analysis» was considered by many, in France as in Italy, as a legitimate methodology of naturalism. Writers, on the other hand, conceived that it was only suitable to employ it for specific characters (primarily the bourgeoisie, artists, and aristocrats); this is the price of disparity and a class prejudice. Nevertheless, in these authors’ writings, numerous points of discontinuity emerged. The delegation of the reflector was not precluded to figures from the Fourth Estate. Moreover, marginal subjectivities are individualized through pronounced traits, silhouetted on a narrative or choral background. Through analysis of some representative French texts – Germinie Lacerteux (1865) by the brothers Goncourt, La fortune des Rougon (1877), L’assommoir (1877), Germinal (1885), and La terre (1887) by Émile Zola – and a survey of the narratives of Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, and Federico De Roberto, it is shown how the naturalists attributed a “soul” to each character, with which the reader is encouraged to sympathize.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
---|---|---|---|
SCARAVILLI_tesi.pdf
embargo fino al 14/05/2025
Dimensione
4.27 MB
Formato
Adobe PDF
|
4.27 MB | Adobe PDF | |
SCARAVILLI_ abstract inglese.pdf
accesso aperto
Dimensione
436.22 kB
Formato
Adobe PDF
|
436.22 kB | Adobe PDF | Visualizza/Apri |
SCARAVILLI_abstract francese.pdf
accesso aperto
Dimensione
381.86 kB
Formato
Adobe PDF
|
381.86 kB | Adobe PDF | Visualizza/Apri |
SCARAVILLI_abstract italiano.pdf
accesso aperto
Dimensione
376.57 kB
Formato
Adobe PDF
|
376.57 kB | Adobe PDF | Visualizza/Apri |
I documenti in UNITESI sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14242/167989
URN:NBN:IT:SNS-167989