while visiting a foreign city, has walked into a bar, both to kill time and (with a generally vain, often unconscious hope) to alleviate loneliness. It is difficult to imagine a more unbearable or a more depressing situation; yet we all understand it, and accept it as quite «literary.» Why? Because literature has told us that if we sit alone at a bar something will happen to us: a voluptuous blonde may suddenly appear, as in a detective novel, or, as in Hemingway, there may be a subtler but equally inevitable revelation of nada in the course of the most banal dialogue. Thus, a squalid, meaningless situation becomes perfectlyacceptable thanks to the false glamor cast on it by the application of narrative structures that demand a solution for every premise, an acceptable conclusion and an end for every beginning—since these structures do not allow for a beginning without an end, unlike some other narratives and some movies (Antonioni’s, for instance), which dare show us incomplete situations, such as we often find in life, without the consolation of a finale, the reassuring return to the tonic, to conclude everything we start.
It. For the notion of modo di formare («way of forming»), see Luigi Pareyson’s Estetica.
12.As Elio Vittorini has justly noted in a recent issue of Menabb, «today, that narrative that concentrates in its language the full weight of its responsibilities coward the world is much closer to assuming a historically active meaning than any literature that approaches things via their presumed prelinguistic content, treating them as themes, issues, and so forth.»
- Thus, narrative technique becomes the real content of the movie and its most important statement. If the story appears unclear to the viewer, it is because it is also unclear to the author, the director—who, however, prefers to respect this obscurity as real rather than to impose on it a false order. In other words, he prefers to let the situation create his movie than to create a situation through his movie. Another example of this sort of movie is Godard’s A bout de souffle (Breathless), whose development is seemingly affected by the same psychic disorder that affects its hero. As a literary example, we can cite Conjectures on Jacob, by Johnson, in which the inner split of the narrator, expressive of the moral, political, and geographic division of Germany, is also reflected in its narrative technique. 1965), pp
- Alain19R 20 20, 21 bbeGrillet, For a New Novel (New York: Grove Press,
- See Umberto Eco, «Il tempo di `Sylvie,'» in Poesia e critics 2.
- RobbeGrillet, For a New Novel, p. 22
17.Maurice MerleauPonty, Signs, tr. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press. 1964), p. 240.
- In 1 Novissimi, Milano, 1961. Whereas Sanguineti fends his way
through the swamp of culture making use of all the words and phrases that have been fatally compromised by tradition, Nanni Balestrini prefers to go through the daily swamp of newspapers. commercials, and common talk. Those who see Balestrini’s experiments (his handwritten poems, not his electronic compositions) as expressions of Dadaism forget that when Dada pulls words apart and randomly glues them back together elsewhere, its aim is to provoke the reader and stimulate his mind by replacing the order of his reasoning with an unexpected and fertile disorder. Balestrini, instead, maintains that he does not create disorder by upsetting an order but rather discovers this disorder in place of order. - Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art
i. Eco is referring to what in Italy was known as «idealistic criticism,» according to which Dante’s Paradiso was less «artistic» than his Inferno since it dealt with theological (that is, «conceptual») matter, whereas the latter was concerned with more «human» passions.— Translator’s note. - To verify this point, Nanni Balestrini and I once decided to write a precise and accurate «description of seven lost, or never written, poems,» in which we would give an exhaustive explanation of their stylistic features. the structure of their lines, their use of blanks, their lexical choices, punctuation, use of foreign or invented words, and so on. Then we planned to add a critical essay explaining the meaning of the poems, and why their structure was so important that, once described, it was unnecessary to write the poems. This would not have been a game. Quite the contrary. In fact, the idea was so serious and fraught with consequences that it immediately invalidated our project of writing either the description of the poems or the essay, since the very idea of such a kind of writing was already more meaningful and important than the writing itself. In short. we started a sort of circular process that would never have ended had I not put a sudden halt to it by deciding to write this essay, which, being a description of the very circularity of this situation, has become its metadiscourse. But the essay has managed to elude the centripetal pull of that vertiginous situation, just as its epigraph manages to remain on the brink of the oneiric abyss it evokes. In other words, this essay is the direct result of the terror felt at the mere contemplation of such an abyss.
- «Anticipazioni sulla ‘matte dell’arte’ » Anticipations on the death of art, in Nuove prospective della pittura italiana (Bologna: Edizioni Alfa, 1962).
I would like to correct Raffa’s point as follows: rather than making a distinction between the works and the doctrinal surplus that justifies them, we could speak (at least insofar as the more successful ones are concerned) of works that arc the doctrinal communication of themselves, their own justification, their own surplus.
5.Milan: Ceschina, 1962.
6.Francesco de Sanctis, «Alla sua donna» (Torino: Einaudi, 1960; orig. pub. Leopardi, 1855), p. 400.
7.I am thinking of Luigi Pareyson’s «aesthetics of formativity,» and, in particular, of the relationship he draws between style, content, and matter in art, and of the idea of critical interpretation as a penetration, mediated by congeniality, into a physical universe of formed matter in which every procedural project would find its solution in a modo di formare, a particular «formal approach.» When Pareyson defines art as «formativity for formativity’s sake,» he is not escaping into the irresponsible realm of formalistic (not to say calligraphic) complacency; nor is he excluding the possibility that an artist may be motivated by very precise and compelling moral and political ideas; nor is he excluding the possibility that these ideas may in fact lend value, taste, and vigor to the work. Rather, he is trying to restrict the context of the artistic process to those formal activities that do not want to turn the art object into the pretext for an end that’s essentially extraneous to the object itself (whether this end be the presentation of a poetic, or a prayer, or mere propaganda). According to Pareyson, to form artistically means to lend value to all the elements that participate in this form, so that they may be appreciated, interpreted, and judged as one formed object. An artist can elaborate a poetics on a theoretical level, and the words he will use to do so will be a convenient vehicle for his ideas; but the moment he sets out to produce a work that is also its own poetics, he must form this poetics in order to give it an organic consistency which, in turn, will allow it to be enjoyed as object and not as an abstract model.
- The Structure of Bad Taste
- Ludwig Giesz, in Phaenomenologie des Kitsches (Heidelberg: Rothe Verlag, 196o), suggests a few etymologies for the term. According to the first, it would date back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when the American tourists who visited Munich and wanted to buy a cheap painting would ask for a «sketch.» As a result, the German term Kitsch started to be applied to all the knickknacks bought by people eager to undergo an «aesthetic experience.» On the other hand, the verb kitschen (to gather mud along the road) already existed in the Mecklenburg dialect. The same verb could also mean «to retouch furniture in order to give it a ‘vintage’ look,» whereas the verb verkitschen means «to sell cheaply.»
- Walther Kill, Deutscher Kitsch (Gottingen: Vandenhock & Riprecht, 1962). Killy’s essay introduces an anthology of characteristic fragments drawn out of German literature. The authors he used for his pastiche are, in order: Wester Jansen, Natal von Eschtruth, Reinhold Muschler, Agnes Gunther, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nathanael Jiinger.
- Hermann Broch. «Einige Bemerkungen zum Problem des Kitsches,» in Dichten und Erkennen. (Zurich, 1955). Translated as «Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,» in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Universe Books, 1969).
- Luigi Pareyson, in «I teorici dell’ Ersatz.» De Homine 56 (1963), a short essay that reiterates the main theoretical issues already discussed in his Estetica. In his polemic against the calm recognition of the «digestibility» of the artistic product, Pareyson makes a distinction between the generic «artisticity» that pervades all human work, and art as the «culmination and the climax» of this attitude, as «norm and model.» education of taste, proposal of new «ways of forming.» intentional forming for form’s sake. According to him, the product of the cultural industry would be nothing more than simple expressions of «artisticity,» and, as such, subject to both consumption and wear. Of course, among the processes of artisticity, Pareyson does not include all those works of art which, on the basis of a particular poetics, or of the general tendency of a historical period, intentionally aim at the attainment of heteronomous ends (whether pedagogical, political.
