The average consumer consumes his own lie.
But he consumes it as an ethical falsehood, a social falsehood, a psychological falsehood, since in fact it is a structural falsehood. Boldini’s paintings are a perfect example of a context that is unable to assimilate the borrowed stylemes. The formal disproportion between the upper and lower parts of his paintings is indisputable. His women are stylematic sirens, to be consumed from the waist up and looked at from the waist down. There is absolutely no formal reason why the painter should change his style as he moves from the face to the feet. The only possible explanation here is that clearly the face was painted to satisfy the demands of the client and the clothes to satisfy the ambitions of the painter, if it weren’t for the fact that even the clothes are painted to satisfy the clients, if nothing else by reassuring them that only a respectable face could possibly emerge from such a commendable dress.
The term Kitsch does not apply only to the kind of art that aims at producing an immediate effect; other forms of art, and other respectable activities, have a similar aim. Nor does it simply designate a formal imbalance, since that is a characteristic of most ugly works. Nor does it refer only to the kind of work that has borrowed stylemes which have previously appeared in a different context, since this can happen without lapsing into bad taste. Kitsch refers to the kind of work that tries to justify its provocative ends by assuming the garb of an aesthetic experience, by palming itself off as art.
At times Kitsch can occur, as it were, unawares, as an unwitting and almost pardonable error. These cases are particularly interesting because they display a very obvious mechanism.
Let’s take the example of Edmondo de Amicis, a minor Italian author who has unconsciously succeeded in turning a Manzonian styleme to laughable effect. The «borrowed» styleme concludes a famous passage in Manzoni’s story of the nun of Monza. The pages that precede it give a lengthy account of the terrible events that have led Gertrude to embrace the wrong vocation. Having succeeded in taming her rebellious nature, she has now resigned herself to being a nun. Or so the reader thinks, until suddenly Egidio makes his unexpected, and fatal, appearance on the scene: «One of his windows overlooked a small courtyard which formed part of Gertrude’s quarters.
Noticing her once or twice as she passed through the courtyard, or strolled idly round it, he found the difficulty and the wickedness of the enterprise an attraction rather than a deterrent and plucked up his courage to speak to her. The poor wretch answered.»23 Pages and pages of criticism have been devoted to the lapidary efficacy of the last sentence: «La sventurata rispose.» The sentence is extremely simple—three words, an article, an adjectival noun, and a verb —and yet, for all its concision, it manages to tell readers all they need to know about Gertrude’s response, the complexity of her character, and the author’s own moral and emotional response to it.
The word «sventurata» is at once a condemnation and an apology; in its role as subject of the sentence, it defines both the character and her entire life, past, present, and future. The verb is anything but dramatic: «rispose»—»answered.» It informs us generally about her reaction without telling us anything about the tenor of her answer or its intensity. But this is precisely the reason the sentence is so powerful, so expressive in its suggestion of the abysses of wickedness that that simple gesture implies and discloses—the gesture of a nun who, we now realize, was only waiting, albeit unconsciously, for a spark to explode into rebellion.
The sentence occurs at the right moment, to conclude a lengthy accumulation of details with a funereal note that strikes us as an epitaph. A marvelous example of stylistic economy. Was Edmondo De Amicis aware of it while he was writing one of the most memorable pages of his book Cuore? Maybe not, but the analogy is there and deserves some attention. Franti, the bad boy who has been expelled from school. returns to his classroom accompanied by his mother. The headmaster does not send him away because he feels sorry for the woman. She’s disheveled, bedraggled, sopping wet. But obviously the author does not think these details are sufficient to produce the desired effect. So he has the poor woman launch into a heartrending speech, interspersed with loud sobs and exclamation points, in which she tells the headmaster her sad story— violent husband and all. As if this were still not enough, fearing that the reader may still fail to get the picture, the author then wallows in a short description of the woman’s exit: she is pale and bowed, her tattered shawl drags on the floor, her head trembles, she can be heard coughing all the way down the stairs.
At this point, as may well be expected, the headmaster turns to young Franti and tells him «with earthshaking vehemence, ‘Franti, you are killing your mother!’ Everybody turned to look at Franti. And that rascal smiled.» The styleme that concludes this passage is very similar to that used by Manzoni. «E quell’infame rispose»: here, too, we have an adjectival noun as the subject and a verb in the past tense. But this is as far as the similarity goes. Given the context in which it appears, this phrase has an altogether different import.
First of all, it occurs precisely at the moment the reader is expecting a coup de theatre, both to put an end to the scene and to provide some relief to his overwrought emotions. Second, the adjectival noun that represents the subject is so loaded with condemnation that it becomes almost comic when compared to the boy’s actual misdeeds. And third, the verb «smiled» is not nearly so allusive and ambiguous as Manzoni’s «rispose.» Franti’s smile, at this particular point, is the evidence of his cruelty. It says everything there is to say and as definitely as it could be said. This sentence, unlike Manzoni’s, does not lead anywhere. This is the way melodrama ends, and shows how a successful styleme can be wasted and corrupted into Kitsch. The only mitigating circumstance in De Amicis’s case is that he may have done it unintentionally.
When the intention is obvious, then we have a flagrant example of Kitsch, the kind of Kitsch that is typical of Midcult. Kitsch is Cubism applied to sacred art, as if a geometric Madonna were more appealing to modern taste than its Renaissance counterpart. Kitsch is the winged figure that adorns the hood of a Rolls Royce, a Hellenistic touch meant to evoke the prestige of an object that should instead obey more honest aerodynamic and utilitarian criteria. Kitsch is the Volkswagen beetle that flaunts the hood of a Rolls Royce or the stripes of a swanky sports car. Kitsch is the transistor radio with an inordinately long antenna, quite useless to its reception but necessary to its prestige. Kitsch is the sofa with a chintz cover reproducing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a tea set bearing the effigy of Botticelli’s Venus, a bar with decor a la Kandinsky.
The Malayan Leopard
Between the poetic message that invites the reader to enjoy the pleasure of discovery and the Kitsch object that imitates the discovcry of pleasure, there arc several other kinds of messages, from the ones intended for mass consumption—with no artistic aims or presumptions—to artisanal messages which are meant to stimulate various kinds of experiences and aesthetic emotions and which, in order to attain their ends, borrow methods and stylemes from avantgarde art and then insert them, though without vulgarizing them, into a mixed context aimed at producing various effects as well as at creating an interpretive experience. Because of this double function, such a message can often acquire a particular structure and fulfill a useful task.
Between this kind of message and a real poetic message there is the same difference that Elio Vittorini finds between «consumer goods» and «means of production.» But often a message that aspires to a poetic function, though it may satisfy the fundamental conditions of this type of communication, reveals a certain imbalance, some structural instability, whereas the message that aims solely at honestly pleasing its public, at being a marketable commodity, often achieves a nearly perfect balance. This indicates that, in the first case, despite the clarity of its intentions.
The work is a failure, or at least only a partial success, whereas in the second case we have such a successful commodity that the consumer can even appreciate the perfection of its structure; the commodity has managed to revitalize old stylemes in an effective manner. In this instance, we have a singular phenomenon of recovery whereby a commodity becomes a real work of art which can propose. for the first
