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Spring 2010 |
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Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect. On
Making Italians (1861-1920), Chicago and London, University of Chicago
Press, 2007, pp. 430 |
Review by Antonio
Bibbò |
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This volume is
without a doubt a noteworthy achievement in contemporary studies on
post-Unification Italy, and not only because Italian society after 1861
remains, according to Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, “a lacuna in theories of
modernity and nation-formation” (1). The critic mixes here historical
analysis, political theory and cultural studies and addresses both canonical
and less canonical texts of the Italian Ottocento. Along with Collodi’s
eponymous novel and Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropological studies, she
gives very compelling readings of more underestimated and under-studied works
such as Matilde Serao’s parliamentary novel La conquista di Roma (1885), De Amicis’s Amore e ginnastica (1891) and Scipio Sighele’s studies on the
psychology of the masses. One of the most interesting (re-)discoveries of the
author is Maria Montessori’s role in Italian society during the first decades
of the twentieth century. Stewart-Steinberg provides an interesting new
perspective on Montessori, trying to free her from the hagiographic portraits
usually depicted by the followers of her metodo
and, what is more importantly, giving a circumstantiate account of her
relationship with the Fascist regime and partly defending her from any
simplistic association with the authoritarian approach to power typical of
the “Ventennio”. |
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These texts all
serve the same purpose, which is a new analysis of the perennial process of
“Making Italians”, a process that began long before the “conquest of Rome”
(1870) but that, right after that date, started to be felt as an urgent need
for both politicians and intellectuals. Stewart-Steinberg does not endorse a
Marxist point of view, unlike influential critics such as Alberto Asor Rosa,
who conveyed the idea of a split between politics and culture that led
intellectuals to feel a progressive detachment and powerlessness towards
their newly born state. Instead, Stewart-Steinberg highlights that such a
“self-deprecatory staging of powerlessness” (2) showed the Italian
nation-makers’ anxiety towards their role and, more generally, the future of
the state, an anxiety that instead of being an obstacle to Italian modernity,
was rather fundamental to it. As in the works of Michel Foucault – a strong
presence in Stewart-Steinberg’s essay – history is not ancillary to
philosophy, nor is literature to history: on the contrary, they join forces
to make the argument stronger. At the end of the book, the author’s
theoretical structure makes room for Derrida too, especially when she
provides stylistic and deconstructionist readings of Lombroso and
Montessori’s works. |
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One of
Stewart-Steinberg’s main points seems to be a critique of the myth of Italian
backwardness, according to which Italians could never develop a modern society
because of their national character: their lack of “depth”, their
ungovernability, the overwhelming presence of the Catholic Church, and the
lack of a proper middle class. Simplistically, it has been said that this
characteristics made it easy for the newly born state to fall into the
Fascist regime. In order to contrast this Manichaean vision,
Stewart-Steinberg depicts the Italian state as continuously dealing with the
post-liberal dilemma of the need of ideologies to create a bond between a
modern and post-liberal nation and a marginalized subject. The making of the
Italian subject becomes then a “discourse about the anxiety of its own
existence” (5). Like other modern nations, Italy too found in strong
ideologies (coming either from the Left or from the Right) the way of
constructing a social bond that could solve the problem of creating a
national subject, rhetorical and fictional as that way was. |
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Going through the
book, one realizes that after the first methodological and introductory
chapters, the study seems to move from fictional volumes (Pinocchio and other already mentioned
novels) to texts that either try to affect the perception of reality
(Lombroso’s) or open up ways to actually change it, such as Montessori’s
works and the legal texts analyzed in the chapter on infanticide. Such a
choice reflects not only Stewart-Steinberg’s approach to the matter, but
rather the multifaceted aspects of the issue here at stake: the definition of
a national character cannot be just a reflection of what literary works
mirror, nor a product of a governmental policy coming from above, but a mix
of both. |
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The real protagonist
of this book is in fact the so-called post-liberal subject, of which
Pinocchio serves as a good metaphor; as Giovanni Jervis points out, Collodi’s
ideology in Pinocchio – a book he
wrote freely and with few concerns – is less strict than that presented in
his earlier pedagogic books.
Pinocchio’s ambivalence towards power may very well come from such a lack of
(self-)control. Pinocchio is, in the words of Stewart-Steinberg “neither
puppet, nor autonomous subject” (6). Although this can be true for
post-liberal subjects in general, the Italian subject, torn between the power
of the Church and the new State, and his own ungovernability and autonomy,
seems much apt to be vividly depicted as a stringless puppet. Pinocchio’s
movement defines his essence: |
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On the one hand,
because he is a puppet, his movement is heteronomously determined, that is,
dictated or influenced from the outside; he is driven by forces that he
cannot either know or control. On the other hand, because he is without
strings, Pinocchio is self-propelled and autokinetic: he moves because it is
in his essence to do so, insofar as he obeys a kind of internal motor (50). |
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The central problem
is cultural, then. If classical education is no longer viable, mixed forms of
education and self-education should be attempted: according to
Stewart-Steinberg this idea is shared by both De Sanctis and Collodi; and it
will be of course fundamental to Montessori’s pedagogic approach, too:
“school has to become a laboratory where students and teacher work together”
(18). Stewart-Steinberg links this collaboration – that entails a
self-limitation of the students – to Althusser’s idea of “turning toward the
law in an act of mastery and
submission” (19, emphasis mine). And the entire book seeks to inscribe the
problem of the Italian post-liberal subject between these two apparently
contradictory extremes. Even when examining such themes as gymnastics and infanticide,
Stewart-Steinberg is able to never lose touch with the central issues of the
book. |
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The centre of the
book is dedicated to two novels by Edmondo De Amicis and Matilde Serao, which
address the crisis of the male Italian subject as a central issue. In both
stories, the male protagonist is somewhat emasculated by a woman while being,
more or less consciously, the cause of such a crisis. Serao’s La conquista di Roma describes the
rise and fall of a politician from a small and poor southern Italian region.
The chapter begins with an insightful discussion of the Italian need for the
symbolic power of the king as a counterbalance to the Church. Italians have a
“penchant for visualization” (G. Bollati quoted by Stewart-Steinberg, 108)
that makes it difficult for them to conceive a political power in abstract
terms: a president is just a common man, dressed like hundreds of
middle-class men, but Italians needed a kingly figure and a monarchic
apparatus to contrast the Pope (such a symbolic role was mainly held, as
Stewart-Steinberg points out, by Queen Margherita). The protagonist of
Serao’s novel, Francesco Sangiorgio, sets out to conquer Rome, but ends up
conquered and made powerless by Angelica, who has “all the features of the
Cruel Woman who ‘dominates’ the masochistic narratives of the late nineteenth
century” (130) and represents to him a queen-like figure, but is just a
petit-bourgeois “that takes on a fake aura through Sangiorgio’s love” (131).
Francesco becomes then his own puppeteer: he is at the same time hypnotized
by the woman and his own hypnotizer, since his suffering is mainly provoked
by autosuggestion. |
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De Amicis’s Amore e ginnastica, set in Turin, also
portrays an odd love story between a modest accountant and a mannish
gymnastic teacher, devoted to her “pedagogic mission” just as much as he is
devoted to her. Celzani, the accountant, relinquishes
his masculinity in order to win the
teacher’s love. The novella, more intriguing than De Amicis’s better-known
novel Cuore, ends by hinting at a
possible complete reversal of genders between the two characters. Although
Stewart-Steinberg does not indulge in such speculations, her analysis
confirms that a certain feminizing sentimentality or, more generally, a
“crisis of male performativity” (4) are amongst the main worries of Italian
writers of the post-Unification period. Amore
e ginnastica also brings up interesting educational issues. Gymnastics
was in fact introduced in the Italian scholar system by Francesco De Sanctis
and the public debate in Italy was very strong and mainly based on “the
relationship between aesthetic pleasure and social orthopaedics” (151). Two
schools confronted each other, the German one (led by E. Baumann), whose aim
was the rigid formation of characters, and the Swedish one, whose methods
were more natural and “democratic”. The German school ended up as the most
influential in Italy, foreshadowing Fascist militarist tendencies, and the
gymnastic teacher was popularly perceived as a sort of new tyrant. |
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The second half of
the book is dedicated to the infanticide debate, to Lombroso’s positivist
criminology and to Maria Montessori’s pedagogic methods. Infanticide was
paradoxically considered as a loving act in Catholic Italy: when such a crime
was performed by unwed mothers, it was seen as a way to protect the new
nation’s moral values. The infanticide mother was the victim of
circumstances: she decided to kill her baby only in order to preserve the
social structure of her country. Stewart-Steinberg clearly argues how
positivist approach to crime provoked essential changes: legal theorists paid
more attention to criminals than to crime itself and the former were not
considered as autonomous subjects anymore, but also as “victims of
influences” (189). The infanticide debate is one of the most striking issues
raised by the book. Prior to Unification, unwed mothers who killed their just
born children were considered as heroines who gave up their maternity not to
undermine the bases of the state, in which a single mother was just
unconceivable. The infanticide law, then, made this act less and less legally
punishable, considering it as a “honourable choice” of the mother that
preferred to lose her child in order to preserve her nation and her honour as
a honest woman. Stewart-Steinberg demonstrates how, even in a more
secularized Italy, the heroic mater
dolorosa could still be paradoxically praised for such a criminal act.
Marginalization was a key element in the making of Italians, especially as
far as women were concerned. The infanticide debates and Montessori’s metodo played a crucial role in making
marginalization (mainly of women) the “vehicle by which the Church itself
returned as a major political actor after 1870” (3). The political process
was in fact not just one of exclusion: it was gendered because created new
roles for mothers and women. |
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The chapters on
Lombroso and on Montessori, while partly being a deviation from the main path
of the book, are nonetheless quite compelling and offer interesting readings
of their oeuvre. Lombroso, too,
plays an important role in the book, although the emphasis laid on the role
of graphology and spiritualism may be somewhat excessive, if compared to
other fields more crucial to Lombroso’s studies. The discussion on tattoos
and signatures as signs of deviance let the author link brilliantly such an
involuntary feature of man to Marey’s and Mosso’s studies on “the body’s
invisible and unknown movements” (247) that provide a remarkable opening to
the chapter. Everything confirms the post-liberal merger between free will
and automatism. The remaining part of the chapter carries on a complex
analysis of Lombroso’s interests in spiritualism and photography, arguing,
somewhat less convincingly than in the rest of the book, that at the core of
it there was Lombroso’s aim at an “ex
novo creation” (287) of Italians, an attempt at “restituting to modern
life a new form of aura” to be found “in the detritus of Italian society,
that is, in the writing and written bodies of the criminal, the insane, and
the marginalized” (288). The discussion of Montessori’s metodo sums up many of the issues about power and its
relationship to education raised throughout the entire book. The metodo is at the same time an
educational system characterized by an excess of freedom and “dictatorial
tendencies”. This ambivalence, aptly highlighted by the author, can be traced
in the very wording of Montessori’s books and in the accounts given by former
followers of the metodo: a certain
violence seems to characterize Montessori’s speech, although the centrality
of the idea of freedom is never abandoned. The Montessorian directress is in
some ways the “place of encounter” between this tendency to self-education
and the need for an authority: “she had to be present, but present in the
form of a radical absence: she had, in a sense, to make herself into a kind
of “nulla”, into a zero” (362). |
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Stewart-Steinberg’s
is a very ambitious book which links historical analysis to literary
criticism by means of a well-balanced theoretical framework. The author never
neglects history and, in some ways, storytelling: her analyses are most of
the times strongly grounded on historical facts, thus enabling the reader to
autonomously make sense of every single issue. Information is always well
blended with the “telling”, making the book, however dense, a really
enjoyable read. One of the stylistic reasons that make this possible may
actually be regarded as one of the few “flaws” of the whole book. The
author’s heed to style and “writing bodies” is in fact not matched by what
could be called an “unfair treatment” of the many texts quoted in the book.
They are always and extensively quoted in (good) English translations,
showing every now and then some Italian words between square brackets that
make the reader feel as if he is watching one of those Hollywood movies in
which a Spanish character speaks a perfect English sprinkled with incongruous
señor and vamos. Aside from cinematic metaphors, I am perfectly aware that
the amount of quotations would have made the book too depending on footnotes.
That said, some particularly significant quotations, especially those in the
chapters mainly focused on style, could have been presented in Italian: a
lack of editing consistency in this case would have been, in my opinion,
entirely justifiable. Nevertheless, the book’s main focus being on
historical, rather than on literary analyses, this does not result in less
strength or accuracy. |
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Moreover,
Stewart-Steinberg manages to put together many diverse subjects in a somewhat
holistic approach that enables the reader to see small connections between as
various conceptual areas as those mentioned above. Only rarely, for instance
in the chapter devoted to spiritualism, she risks to lose touch with her main
concern, but it only happens on very few occasions. The book then, manages to
keep together what could have seemed a formless matter and proves to be a
long-awaited and really needed attempt at linking historical and literary
approaches with such a complicated issue as the making of the
post-Unification Italian subject. |
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v
Antonio Bibbò obtained a doctorate in Comparative
Literature from the University of L’Aquila (Italy). His main research
interests include Modernist literature (James Joyce, John Dos Passos,
Virginia Woolf), Italian literature of the twentieth century, cinema and
translation studies. His dissertation investigates the presence of choral and
collective narratives in Modernist literature. |
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