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Abstract
This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.
Notes
1. There are a number of very good recent biographies of D’Annunzio in English: Woodhouse’s Gabriele D’Annunzio is the most academic and comprehensive; Hughes-Hallett’s more popular The Pike is a skilful interpretation of the poet and an enjoyable read; while in D’Annunzio the French writer Philippe Jullian does an excellent job placing D’Annunzio within the European context of Decadent literature and aestheticism.
2. Il Piacere was originally translated by Giorgina Harding in a highly bowdlerized version, but has more recently been carefully translated by Gochin Raffaelli as Pleasure. I have based my reading on the original Italian Il Trionfo della Morte and have drawn the quotations from Arthur Hornblow’s translation, The Triumph of Death, page references to which are hereafter cited in the text. This translation is heavily edited and missing some key passages, notably about Ippolita’s complexion turning “olive.” Most importantly, Giorgio’s meditation on Nietzsche and Zarathustra has been excised. When quoting from those passages I have added the page numbers from the original Italian to my translations. The Triumph of Death still awaits a modern English translator. For an excellent account of how the novel was reworked and edited for an English audience originally, see Woodhouse, “Trionfo della Morte,” 239–60.
3. The book is dedicated to Matilde Serao whose realistic, sociological novel about the Neapolitan urban classes, Il Ventre di Napoli (1884), exemplifies the kind of realist literature from which D’Annunzio wanted to distance himself.
4. Quoted in Giordano Guerri, D’Annunzio: L’amante guerrerio, 72. Guerri is a historian of Italian fascism and currently the president of the Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani. Il Vittoriale is the “hermitage” and mausoleum D’Annunzio built at Lake Garda towards the end of his life. Guerri, along with Paola Sorge, author of D’Annunzio, are two public intellectuals who have been at the forefront of rekindling popular interest in D’Annunzio’s works.
5. In his famous essay “The Work of Art,” 217–51, Benjamin noted the Futurist and Fascist proclivity to beautify the machine, death, and destruction and pointed out how such appeals were part of the aestheticization of politics.
6. D’Annunzio’s creative “borrowing” from Verga’s style and narrative structure has been examined in Paratore, D’Annunzio e Verga.
7. Härmänmaa notes that D’Annunzio was responding to market forces that encouraged the production of texts with violence and sex. See her “Celebrating Decadence,” 698–714.
8. Praz, The Romantic Agony, 420–21; see also the original text, La Carne, la morte, 377–78.
9. Rhodes, The Poet as Superman, 35.
10. The Italian scholarship on D’Annunzio and the Abruzzo is substantial. Härmänmaa provides a very useful account of that work in “Celebrating Decadence.” The main sources include: Giannangeli, D’Annunzio e L’Abruzzo; Mariano, L’Arte di Gabriele D’Annunzio; Tiboni and Abrugiati, Trionfo della morte; Circeo, L’Abruzzo; and Masci, Gloria alla Terra! Much of this scholarship is extraordinarily thorough and resourceful about D’Annunzio’s relationship to his home province and its language, cults, rituals, and history of violence. For a broader discussion of D’Annunzio’s contribution to a national imaginary and the ways in which various Italian writers have represented the “national-popular,” I have relied on Asor Rosa, Scrittori e Popolo. Asor Rosa follows a Gramscian tradition and treats D’Annunzio as a writer who contributed to the literary construction of “barbaric populism” which was chiefly the creation of a group of petit-bourgeois intellectuals and, as I elaborate, was filtered through the influences of Nietzsche, Wagner, and Decadent literature. Asor Rosa’s book, originally published in 1965, has been updated in 2015 and includes a new section called scrittori e massa, which examines Italy’s transformation since the 1960s and the withdrawal of the new generation of intellectuals from engagement with national, regional, and popular issues into solipsism and individualism.
11. See Giannangeli, “D’Annunzio e l’Abruzzo del mito,” 51–68, and Härmänmaa, “Celebrating Decadence.”
12. For examples of invented traditions that combine anthropological and historical insights, see Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition. Perhaps the most influential work on national imaginary is Anderson’s Imagined Communities.
13. Williams used the phrase “structures of feelings” in The Long Revolution. For the social or cultural historian, recapturing or reclaiming the animating ideas and feelings of a period is always problematic. There are, however, discernible patterns within cultures and examining the textual references that point to the lived experience within a culture is a fruitful way of reconstructing the past and linking it to the present.
14. A detailed treatment of D’Annunzio’s candidacy and speeches is found in Gentile, “D’Annunzio come deputato,” 237–58. D’Annunzio’s famous letter is quoted in Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio, 164.
15. During the period he was writing The Triumph of Death D’Annunzio published several articles in the Italian press on the ideas of Nietzsche and Wagner: “La bestia elettiva,” published in Il Mattino in 1892, and three articles on “Il caso Wagner” in La Tribuna in 1893. For the English translation of “La bestia elettiva,” see Schnapp,“The Beast Who Wills,” 265–78. For the influence of Nietzsche on Italian intellectual culture of the period, see Michelini, Nietzsche nell’Italia di d’Annunzio. The scholarship on D’Annunzio and Nietzsche is not as vast as that on D’Annunzio and Wagner and for good reason. D’Annunzio had a superficial understanding of Nietzsche and used his ideas mostly to justify his own transgressive behavior and megalomania. The power of music was for him decidedly more important than that of ideas and he felt that only music could express the subjective unease induced by modernity. His relationship to Wagner (and music) remained important throughout his life. D’Annunzio’s three articles on the debate between Nietzsche and Wagner are collected in Il caso Wagner; see also Sorge’s introduction, “D’Annunzio tra Wagner e Nietzsche,” 1–19.
16. Nietzsche’s unsent letter to Carducci has fed a certain historical curiosity about the philosopher’s last year of lucidity. See Stern, “The Trouble with Publishers.”
17. Though the two never met, Nietzsche had a lasting admiration for Carducci. For Nietzsche’s letter to Carducci, see also Benozzo, Carducci, 85.
18. While still a student at Cicognini College, the young D’Annunzio bought a copy of Carducci’s Barbarian Odes on his first visit to Bologna in 1878. He described reading it as an epiphany and the poems deeply influenced his own early poems.
19. See Schnapp, “Nietzsche’s Italian Style,” 247–64.
20. The Will to Power was partially falsified by Nietzsche’s doctrinaire sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche. In the 1960s the Italian scholars Colli and Montinari did much of the pioneering work to reclaim Nietzsche from Fascist and Nazi interpretations, especially with regards to The Will to Power. The Colli and Montinari edition of Nietzsche’s complete original work is currently being published in English by Stanford University Press. See Nietzsche The Complete Works.
21. For an informative account of the influence of Wagner in Italy and the debates between Nietzsche and Wagner, see Mila, Cronache Wagneriane, 47.
22. See Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 14.
23. See Nietzsche’s Preface to “The Case of Wagner,” xxx.
24. The original Italian reads: “Riccardo Wagner… ha rivelato a noi stessi la parte più occulta di nostra intima vita.” Il caso Wagner, iii.
25. Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo, 96–97.
26. The political significance of verismo is given substantial treatment in the first chapter of Asor Rosa’s Scrittori e popolo. The rise of verismo in opera begins with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and includes other works such as Ruggero Leoncavalli’s Pagliacci and Puccini’s Tosca. See Mallach, Autumn of Italian Opera. D’Annunzio was turning away from verismo by the time the opera Cavelleria rusticana came out and was dismissive of Mascagni’s work when he first heard it and called him a band-leader. Later he had a productive and somewhat stormy collaboration with him. On the relationship between the two, see Celati, Il vate e il capobanda.
27. Sorge, Sogno di una sera d’estate, 7. Sorge provides a biographical sketch of the major and minor figures that were part of Il cenacolo. For a more personal account of the relationship between D’Annunzio and Michetti, see Di Tizio, D’Annunzio e Michetti.
28. In 1999 there was a major retrospective exhibition of Michetti’s work in Naples. See the Catalogo della Mostra retrospettiva.
29. Quoted in Wilcken, Il poeta nel laboratorio, 289.
30. The relationship between D’Annunzio and Wagner, like that of D’Annunzio and the Abruzzo, is the subject of a large number of studies. See in particular Paratore, “D’Annunzio e Wagner” 101–17; Corazzol, Sensualità senza carne; Mila, Cronache Wagneriane; and Sorge, “D’Annunzio tra Wagner e Nietzsche.”
31. James at first showed great admiration for the Italian poet but grew more critical of him. See James, Selected Literary Criticism.
32. For James’s commentary on D’Annunzio’s representation of exasperated sensibility, see Hughes-Haslett, The Pike, 201.
33. Lewis discusses D’Annunzio’s novels and nationalism in Modernism, Nationalism and the Novel.
34. On the importance of the countryside to the modern nation in both Maurice Barrès and D’Annunzio, see Tosi, “Il personaggio di Giorgio Aurispa,” 96–113.
35. “Noi tendiamo l’orecchio alla voce del magnanimo Zarathustra, o Cienobiarca; e prepariamo nell’arte con la sicura fede l’avvento dell’ÜEBERMENSCH, del superuomo” (Il Trionfo, 12).
36. On the relationship of D’Annunzio’s novels with imperialism, see my “Sex, Geography and Death,” 35–68, which draws on both Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and Said’s Orientalism.
37. For an overview of the influence of Huysmans’ Against Nature on Decadent literature, see Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination.
38. Spackman in Decadent Geneologies offers an insightful reading of the Casaldordino scene and its connection with the discourses of sickness and degeneration of both Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau.
39. Hornblow excised the section on Nietzsche, thinking the philosophical passage interfered with the narrative. But the passage is crucial to understanding Giorgio’s wish to overcome his weakness and justify the murder of Ippolita. “Dove vive il dominatore… forte e tirannico, franco dal gioco di ogni falsa moralitá… determinato ad elevarsi sopra il Bene e sopra il Male per la pura energia del suo volere…”? (Il Trionfo, 219). Later, Giorgio makes reference to the need of the Superman to resist and fight: “tutta la ridevole e miserevole effeminazione della vecchia anima europea, tutte le mostruose rifioriture della lue cristiana nelle razze decrepite” (221).
40. Furness has examined the influence of Wagner on European literature of the period and offers a brief and perceptive analysis of The Triumph of Death in Wagner and Literature.
41. Examining the “correspondences,” “homologies” or “entanglements” between the formal structures of a narrative and the historical and sociological settings has been the focus of a new generation of scholars since the 1960s. See in particular Eco, Il Superuomo di Massa.
42. The superfluous man is a figure that emerges from Russian literature and captures the nihilism and fatalism of a generation of young, bored men. D’Annunzio was aware of this literary figure through his readings of Russian literature and Dostoevsky in particular. See Chances, “The Superfluous Man.”
43. For Mann’s excoriating comments on D’Annunzio, see Reflections, esp. 420–35.
44. Mann’s position was, to put it simply, that politics was Apollonian and art was Dionysian. Mixing them is dangerous and artists should stick to an ironic self-distancing from political life. Resistance to Fascism, and indeed to any form of reactionary movement that “aestheticised politics,” requires, however, a more activist response and has its own risks. Hence Benjamin’s call in “The Work of Art” to “politicise aesthetics.” Benjamin’s remark asks us to think more critically about aesthetics and dig into its various cultural and psychological underpinnings as a way of understanding and countering its powerful appeals.
45. The Fiume escapade is discussed in Leeden, The First Duce; see also Gumbrect, “I rendentori della vittoria,” 253–72.
46. Eco discusses the concept of “fuzzy totalitarianism” in “Ur-Fascism,” 12–15. For an early commentary on D’Annunzio and the relationship between politics and aesthetics, see de Felice, Pampaloni, Paratore, and Praz, Gabriele D’Annunzio.
47. Since the pioneering work of Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, first published in 1993, there has been a significant increase in studies on fascism and its relationship to aesthetics. For a broader discussion of fascist aesthetics, see “The Aesthetics of Fascism”; see also Mosse, Masses and Men; and Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle.
48. See Theweleit, Male Fantasies; see also Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality; and Spackman, Fascist Virilities.
49. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Mio Cinema, esp. “Il sesso come metafora del potere,” 215–19. Pasolini is an appropriate figure with whom to close this examination, for he was among the few contemporary Italian intellectuals who lucidly explored both the utopian and dystopian dimensions of sexuality and power.
50. Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” is both a critical exposé of the Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s attempt at public rehabilitation and a brilliant analysis of how her films, particularly Triumph of the Will, represent a transformation of history into theatre. The film may be aesthetically pleasing but hidden underneath its chilling beauty are the messages of control, submissive behavior, and the glamorization of death.