An Intermedial Phenomenology of Seeing in ‘Neo-Modernist’ Italian Writing

Curzio Malaparte, Giovanni Testori, and the Visual Arts (1944-1960)

Abstract

While the role of the visual arts in modernist writing has become well-established, particularly in the Italian context (Palazzeschi, Bontempelli, Savinio), the centrality of the image in text continued well into the postwar period. ‘Neo-modernist’ writing perpetuated modernist style and form via Proustian ekphrasis albeit with different objectives: namely re-capturing the aura of the art object in a moment of cultural homogenization and presenting social critique of the “affluent society” through altered modes of perception and phenomenology of seeing (Merleau-Ponty). This paper focuses on how Curzio Malaparte and Giovanni Testori engage in strategies of intermediality and visualization as key aspects of a literary style at the threshold between modernist form and novel postwar subjectivities. Malaparte, through a wide range of pictorial references in La pelle (1949), wrests painting from an idyllic antiquarianism, and instead employs it as a crucial vector of memory and vitality. A similar approach to visualization occurs in Testori’s Dio di Roserio (1954), where the imagistic subjectivity of the main character paints a Brianza textured by Cezanne, hurtling towards the destruction of solidarity wrought by the boom economico. A close examination of visibility in Malaparte and Testori’s fiction offers a powerful rebuttal to the hegemonic position of neorealism in Italian culture after World War II, which prescribed to varying degrees a cultural politics dependent on “realistic” representation in service of a new humanism, and shows the continued relevance of painting in mid-century European fiction and Neo-modernism.