An avantgarde of university professors, charging up and down the peninsula from one congress to the next, living out of a suitcase and writing their notes in sleeping cars. Oh, other people have suggested this as some kind of denigration, but I myself offered it prophylactically as part of my advance commemoration, because that’s how things were: the Italian avantgarde was the cultural sickness of the generation of consumer prosperity.
So all this led to an avantgarde accused by the high priests of the Establishment of being an Establishment itself, but one which wanted to destroy the existing Establishment with Establishmentarian methods. An avantgarde which has been accused of being a secondary appendage of neocapitalism, and earned the hostility of all those writers who relied on being contributors to the Corriere della sera to cultivate their image, and worked out their revolutionary impulses from inside the safe protection of the grantdispensing industrial complex.
For years this avantgarde had been attacked by official communists, those chorusmasters of socialist realism, on the grounds that it constituted the extreme tactic of the formalist right. But the same people, after 1968, realized that it constituted the extreme tactic of Chinese extremism, and it was very funny to see the official weeklies of the Party quite recently exhorting their younger enthusiasts not to neglect literature and formal values, not to plunge too naĜvely into the political adventure of the prise de la parole.
Perhaps the most sensible way to approach the history of our group (or to write its funeral eulogy) would be to sketch a generational history of what went on: at the beginning of the last decade a certain number of writers, critics, and scholars—already linked by similarities in their intellectual formation and reading, in their objectives and shared rejections—decided to hold periodic meetings to discuss the problems which exercised them, publish books together, and set up a sort of «front.»
The group was not an organ for the expression of rebellion on the part of young untested writers who would have suffered at finding themselves excluded from power at the edge of the system. The majority of the group’s members were already inside the system and shared in its power right from the opening meeting at Palermo in 1963. Their problem was precisely the definition and analysis of this power which they had been forced to wield.
I say «forced» because that constitutes a specific generational phenomenon. The group gathered together writers who had been formed in the fifties—the years of the great peace, the two socalled «white decades»—at a period when university struggles took place inside the comfortable womb of representative organizations and the individual could choose whether to submit to party bureaucracy or commit himself to a personal cultural specialization.
But even the personal cultural choice (which meant taking stock of the new dimensions of an industrial society, of the new systems in communication, hence of the whole new dimension of superstructural processes) condemned these young theorists to a type of invisible integration. We had just graduated from college and did not need to fight too hard to earn a living. And so people used to ask us if we would like to do TV programs in the same way the nineteenthcentury Bohemian anarchist student was offered proofs to check or aristocrats’ sons to take out for walks.
The Gruppo 63 was born because certain people, working inside established institutions, had made a different choice, both on the front of cultural politics and on that of culture as a political act. On the former front, the project consisted of blowing up the invisible structures of the «tiny clique» which governed culture.
To do this, we had to criticize this literary club’s selfmasturbatory hermaphrodite machinery, for it constituted a basic power group. We had to pour ridicule on to the whole system of literary prizes, which witnessed aspiring candidates who go out walking the evening before the jury meets, with an electrocardiogram chart in hand and a groping plea to the judges. «You see, I’ve not got long to live, give me one last chance . . .»
All in all it was hardly a profound development, but at least it had an immediate importance. Since we started out from a position of power, it ought to be pretty clear that we hardly ran any risk. We were unloading a surplus which no longer attracted us, and which even caused us a sense of contagion and shame. Certainly we threw away a number of possibilities by acting like this, but it hardly left us begging on the streets. We haven’t exactly been what you might call heroes.
On the second front (culture as a political act) the operation was more complex and farreaching. The goal was to proceed, by way of a criticism of the miniature system of official culture, to a critique of the grand system of bourgeois society. This had to be carried on without losing sight of the existing status quo.
At that time the international situation was «frozen» in a state of peaceful coexistence, while the national political scene was «frozen» in a crucial dilemma: adherence to the CenterLeft, or passive rejection of the CenterLeft? Since we had inherited and grown up in a field of exclusively cultural possibilities, there was no direct way we could affect root structures. Of course, there were certain political choices open to us, movement toward one particular party rather than another. But these were only individual decisions which did not reach out to commit all of us.
In fact, only one path was open to us: we had to call into question the grand system by means of a critique of the superstructural dimension which directly concerned us and could easily be administered by our group. Hence we decided to set up a debate about language. We became convinced (and nobody has gone back on this idea) that to renew forms of communication and destroy established methods would be an effective and farreaching platform for criticizing—that is, overturning—everything that those cultural forms expressed.
At all events, we had one clear idea: if one was moving toward a point of total rupture at the level of literature, art, and philosophy—at that level of «culture» which constitutes the global communication by which a society continues to exist—it was absolutely no use to «communicate» our plans by way of known and tested media; on the contrary, we had to smash the very media of communication. This was the «poetics» of the Gruppo 63—and the single common aim at the heart of a group of writers who each had their own private axe to grind anyway.
Immediately in this kind of sociological sketch, in these initial reflections about a poetics and an ideology, an inevitable question comes to mind: In what sense did the new avantgarde differ from or match the historical one? Perhaps we can take Renato Poggioli’s valuable study Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia and try to trace the recurring features in movements of the avantgarde down through history:
- Activism Adventure; Aktion; Sturm; Excitement
- Antagonism Antitradition; Bloodymindedness;
Opposition to other movements - Nihilism Terrorism; Scourge of institutions
- Demagogism Self-propagandizing; I’m the king
of the castle - Cult of youth Production; Creation; Rejuvenation
- Cult of modernity Futurism; No more Latin in class
- Games Dada; Let the children have their fun
- Self-sacrifice The individual dies to allow the
rebirth of another - Revolutionism
to. Domination of the
opus by its poetics
Of all these elements, apparently only numbers 9 and to were present in our avantgarde.
Nanni Balestrini’s aim, in his organization and public relations work, was to use the periodic meetings of the Gruppo 63 to forge a model of literary activity which could terrorize the Establishment. The image projected by these young writers who met in public, after the fashion of the German Gruppe 47, to discuss their work in progress without necessarily giving each other support, in fact quarreling and tearing themselves to pieces with unimaginable fe rocity, was an image calculated to strike terror into the hearts of all but the bravest.
I myself heard an established Italian novelist, for example, express alarm at the idea of violating his solitude as a writer faced by the blank page and coming down with us to Palermo to talk about uncompleted pages. However, if we allow some of the theoreticians to express their views, we shall see that the terrorist attitude gradually gave way to a more measured assessment of the historical situation and generational opportunities that faced the group.
Guglielmi: «At the present moment there is no reason for avantgarde activity in the historical sense of the term. What we need at present is a new critical conscience. Terrorism itself is reactionary. We have the advantage of being in a state of absolute availability (what Marcuse would have called repressive tolerance), so what gates should we break through, since all gates are open to us?
«Contemporary culture is in the same situation as a city from which the enemy have retreated after sowing every street with mines. Of course, one is not going to march into the city like some conquering hero and then get blown to bits like an idiot. It’s a better plan to send in reconnaissance patrols equipped with geiger counters. Better take an experimental attitude.
«How can we approach the situation? For a writer there’s only one approach: language. For language is not detached in any way from the historical reality of a situation. The anonymous stereotyped language typical of modern Italy, a language which hasn’t developed from an evolution of dialects, but in fact represents the percolation downward of mass media communications, is one which acutely reflects a social condition. It mirrors an alienation which the writer can only fight against by working with
