One cannot but declare all of this to be an example of work in decline, worthy at most of a pornographic trader in junk novels. Joyce is a typical exponent of modern decadence, a festering and infectious cell even in our own literature. Why? Because, with his anticlassicism, he stands in opposition to the figures of ancient and modern Latin civilization, against whom he has taken a satirical attitude. He confers an impure and subversive character to his revolt by removing Universal Rome from the altar and replacing it with the gilded idol of Jewish internationalism—an internationalism that for many years has supported too many currents of modern thought. The fact is that Joyce has played court to that organization of Jews, proponent of men and ideas, which has especially held the field in Paris. Joyce is against all that is Latin, whether it be imperial civilization or Catholic civilization. He is anti-Latin for an ulterior motive. His jibes against Rome and the papacy, made in a clownish and shameful manner, would be less irksome if it were not apparent that concealed in them was a form of enticement toward the children of Israel.
- But does the contemporary novel really have to descend from the pond to the sewer, and here in Italy of all places, crucible of moral renewal and spiritual restoration? Must Joyce be taken as a model, an author in whom morality, religion, sense of family and society, virtue, duty, beauty, courage, heroism, sacrifice—in other words, Western civilization as well as genuine humanity—are all lost and the Jewish worm destroys everything?
- This is the truth, and little weight should be given to defenses of Joyce from the pens (sold to whom?) of Corrado Pavolini, Annibale Pastore, or Adelchi Baratono, not to mention Montale, Benco, Linati, Cecchi, or Pannunzio. And it is easy for Pannunzio to say that “the real problem for Italian literature is to become European once and for all, to graft itself onto the powerful trunk of foreign literature and to be truly original in doing so, to have something of its own to say, through observation, love, suffering, in our own reality that we find around us, which is not the usual repetition of the far-from-pitiful tales of Aunt Teresa or Uncle Michele and, worse still, the pseudo-poetical description of fantastic journeys, pointless returns, tram rides in suburbia (how much travel there is in this literature!).”
- The real attack on the spirit of new Italy is in narrative prose itself, where a whole miserable net has been woven, from Italo Svevo, a Jew thrice over, to Alberto Moravia, a Jew six times over, to fish out from the murky depths of society repugnant figures of men who are not “men” but inert beings, besmirched with base and repugnant sensuality, physically and morally sick . . . And the masters of all these narrators are those pathological lunatics named Marcello Proust and Giacomo Joyce, foreign names and Jews right to the bone, and defeatists to the roots of their hair.2
[Appeared in Almanacco del bibliofilo—Recensioni in ritardo: Antologia di singolari e argute presentazioni di opere letterarie antiche e moderne, famose, poco note, e sconosciute, edited by Mario Scognamiglio (Milan: Rovello, 2009).]
The end
