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Abstract
This essay examines levels of interaction and intersection between culture and justice as they are represented in some recent works of fiction and non-fiction in Italy. It looks briefly at a specific strand of crime/noir fiction to see how it can function as a vehicle for the articulation of principles of justice and ethics, before directing attention to a more in depth consideration of an equally popular, though non-fictional, genre, which pursues the same aim through the deployment of different strategies.
Notes
1 This is what Giancarlo De Cataldo identifies as the principal responsibility of the investigator in the foreword to Crimini italiani, ed. by Giancarlo De Cataldo and Massimo Carlotto (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), p. v.
2 Saviano states that ‘[n]on mi interessa far evadere il lettore. Mi interessa invaderlo’: La Repubblica 3 May 2007. Available at <http://www.robertosaviano.it/articoli /se-lo-scrittore-morde/> [accessed 1 July 2011].
3 This is the view expressed, for example, by Goffredo Fofi in his afterword to the latest Italian edition of Cornell Woolrich’s New York Blues (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006). Here Fofi argues that, having become a mass product, the Italian noir has ‘perduto il suo veleno, che nei casi migliori o più neri era anche un antidoto. [Il noir] non serve più, nella pletora delle sue soluzioni, a capire, a chiedersi, a cercare un senso, a reagire’. Also available at http://www.feltrinellieditore.it/SpecialiLibriInterna?id_spec=1117 [accessed 29 April 2012]. Similar positions have been expressed by Valerio Evangelisti, particularly in his critique to the genre contained in Distruggere Alphaville (Napoli: L’ancora del Mediterraneo, 2006), and by Wu Ming 1, in NEW ITALIAN EPIC versione 2.0. Memorandum 1993–2008: narrativa, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro (available at <http://www.wumingfoundation.com> [accessed 29 April 2012]. For a discussion of recent critical assessments of the Italian noir, see Elisabetta Mondello (ed.) Roma in Noir (Rome: Robin Edizioni, 2010).
4 Evidence of this can be found by consulting Alice Web, the largest database of titles published in Italy, updated monthly and released on DVD. The Alice online catalogue is available for consultation on a timed trial basis, and is hosted on the website of distributors Licosa to whom I am grateful for granting me access: <http://alice.licosa.com/> [accessed April 29 2012].
5 Data on sales are collected by Nielsen Bookscan and made available in various forms through other channels. La Stampa, for example, publishes it in the insert Tuttolibri every Saturday. The information from Tuttolibri is also disseminated through a number of websites. One I have consulted is Il club degli invisibili (http://libri.ilclubdegliinvisibili.com/tag/nielsen-bookscan/ [accessed 3 September 2011], which also contains reviews of the best-selling books. Il club degli invisibili has an area entirely dedicated to the noir.
6 See for example Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary, ‘Sotto il segno della metafora: Una conversazione con Giancarlo De Cataldo’, The Italianist, 29.2 (2009), 350–65; Elena Past, ‘Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio’s Literary Courtroom’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 31.2 (2010), 127–48; Nicoletta Di Ciolla, Uncertain Justice. Crimes and Retribution in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and ‘The Mythopoietic Function of the Noir: Gianrico Carofiglio Towards a New Mythology of Justice’, Italica, 86 (2010), 706–27.
7 De Cataldo talks about selecting from true events — for example those regarding the Banda della Magliana, one of the central themes of Romanzo Criminale (2002) — only those elements which are necessary to make a good plot, considering everything else as redundant. See Antonello and O’Leary, p. 358. Cacopardo declares unethical any use of actual cases from his work at the Consiglio di Stato as material for his novels: ‘Niente di Agrò deriva dalla mia esperienza professionale. Agrò deriva dall’osservazione del mondo contemporaneo e dei rapporti potere economico-politica. (...) Un solo freno: non racconto né racconterò mai in forma di romanzo e simili, i contenuti di ricorsi che tratto come Consigliere di Stato. Ricorsi che rappresentano vicende umane e che non ho il diritto di usare’: Interview with Roberto Mistretta, http://www.robertomistretta.it/commenti.asp?id=12 [accessed 1 April 2012]. Carofiglio claims that creating the character of Guido Guerrieri meant stepping into a professional microcosm — that of defence lawyers — diametrically opposite to his own, and describes the experience as straying away from his own world: ‘Dicono che non mi sono allontanato molto dal mio mondo. Invece io credo di essere andato lontanissimo: non c’è viaggio più lungo di quello che ti porta a guardare la tua realtà quotidiana dal punto di osservazione opposto al tuo’: Interview with Enrica Brocardo, ‘Guerrieri sono’, in Vanity Fair, 26 September 2006.
8 I am using Hyland’s description of metadiscourse as an array of features used by the author to direct the readers’ interpretation of materials along particular lines. Ken Hyland, ‘Persuasion and context: The pragmatics of academic metadiscourse’, Journal of Pragmatics, 30 (1998), 437–55.
9 ‘Noi raccontiamo la realtà, inventiamo ma facciamo politica. Le nostre sembrano fiction ma sono reportage, inchieste alternative. In un Paese pieno di domande senza risposte troviamo un pubblico sempre più appassionato e numeroso’, declared Lucarelli in 2001: Massimo Vincenzi, ‘Da Camilleri a Lucarelli l’Italia si colora di giallo’, La Repubblica 3 August 2001. Available at <http://www.repubblica.it/online/cultura_scienze/noir/portante/portante.html> [accessed 16 June 2012].
10 Raffaele Donnarumma, ‘Nuovi realismi e persistenze moderne: narratori italiani di oggi’, Allegoria, 57 (2008), 26–54. Alessandro Perissinotto, La società dell’indagine: riflessioni sopra il successo del poliziesco (Rome: Bompiani, 2008).
11 Donnarumma, p. 36.
12 Wu Ming 4, ‘Tra specchio e martello’, Giap #3/4 IX serie, at <http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/Giap/giap3_IXa.htm> [accessed 4 April 2012].
13 Perissinotto, p. 80.
14 The value of the genre as a means to uncover illicit practices is acknowledged, for example, by Loriano Macchiavelli. His definition of the noir is that it is a virus that invades the healthy body of literature: ‘Tendenzialmente il giallo è sempre stato un possibile motivo di squilibrio, un virus nel corpo sano della letteratura, autorizzato a parlare male della società nella quale si sviluppava’. In ‘Loriano Macchiavelli e il destino del giallo: La sconfitta del vittorioso’: Interview with Maria Agostinelli, http://www.railibro.rai.it/ interviste.asp?id=15 [accessed 20 June 2011].
15 Valerio Evangelisti, Distruggere Alphaville, p. 15. Also available as ‘Periferia di Alphaville. 23,25, ora oceanica’, at http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/2006/06/001796.html#001796 [accessed 4 April 2012].
16 Roberto Saviano, Gomorra: viaggio nell’impero economic e nel sogno di dominio della camorra (Milan: Mondadori, 2006). Organized crime and its devastating effects on Italian society have been the subject of many works of fiction and non-fiction. Antonio Franchini’s L’abusivo (Venice: Marsilio, 2001) and Nanni Balestrini’s Sandokan (Turin: Einaudi, 2004) present a context colonized by the camorra. Franchini, whose eponymous ‘abusivo’ is his reporter friend Giancarlo Siani, killed by the camorra in 1985, writes a highly charged novel in which the objective accounts of the uncontested hold that the organisation has on the territory, and of the slow and ineffective work of police and magistrates in the investigation into Siani’s murder, blend with the sentimental descriptions of the author’s own family. Unlike Balestrini in Sandokan, both Franchini and Saviano speak from inside the world they describe. They are part of that context, and make it clear to the reader in their texts: ‘[L]ottare contro la realtà cambiando nomi, sfondi e situazioni [è] una specie di affronto alla naturalezza e mi costa uno sforzo anche quando è necessario’ (p. 96) says the autodiegetic narrator in L’abusivo, intolerant of the conventions imposed by fictional writing and inviting his identification with the author. Similar testimonial markers that indicate the authorial involvement with the events narrated are present throughout Gomorra, and, together with Saviano’s well-documented personal history post-Gomorra, they are a guarantee of authenticity. For a comparative analysis of the novels of Franchini, Balestrini and Saviano, see A. Casadei, ‘Gomorra e il naturalismo 2.0’, in Memoria in Noir: Un’indagine Pluridisciplinare, Moving Texts, ed. by M. Jansen and Y. Khamal, (London: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 107–22.
17 Gianfranco Bettin, L’erede (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1992). Bettin writes for the Espresso-Repubblica group, as well as for other publications. He is among the founder members of the Italian Green party, has been a member of the Venice City Council and of the Veneto Regional Council and is author of many essays on political and current affair issues. He has written on the impact of reckless environmental policies, for example Petrolkimiko. Le voci e le storie di un crimine di pace (Milan: Baldini e Castoldi, 1998); of political terrorism, for example La strage: Piazza Fontana; verità e memoria (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999); and of immigration, for example Gorgo: in fondo alla paura (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2009). He is also author of several novels.
18 Gianfranco Bettin, Eredi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2007).
19 Many family tragedies have occupied the airwaves as well as becoming the subject of non-fictional writing. From the events in Cogne in 2002 to the Avetrana murder in 2010, innumerable essays, television and radio programmes, blogs etc. have been focussing on the significance, root causes, and possible consequences of this explosion of violence within the family.
20 Lucarelli’s books on unresolved mysteries include I veleni del crimine (Turin: Einaudi, 2010); La faccia nascosta della luna: storie di delitti e misteri tra musica, cinema e dintorni (Turin: Einaudi, 2009); Storie di bande criminali, di mafie e di persone oneste: dai Misteri d’Italia di Blu notte (Turin: Einaudi, 2008); and Misteri d’Italia: i casi di blu notte (Turin: Einaudi, 2002). He is the author and presenter of a programme on unresolved Italian crimes, which started broadcasting in 1998 as Mistero in blu. The programme went through a number of name changes (from Blu notte, to Blu notte — Misteri italiani to Lucarelli racconta) and has been shown on RaiDue and RaiTre. Since 2010 it has earned a prime time slot.
21 Vieni via con me (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2011). The book’s publicity announces that it aims to make accessible to the public stories that tell of the ‘new and old wounds that afflict our country’. See http://www.vieniviaconme.feltrinelli.it/libro/ [accessed 21 June 2012].
22 Entitled Quello che non ho, and written with Fabio Fazio, the new programme was broadcast on La7 on three consecutive nights, starting on 14 May 2012. In the weeks prior to the first programme, La 7 publicized the event through short cryptic and tantalizing advertisements, providing no official information on content. A flurry of activity started on a number of social networks — Facebook and Twitter for example — where the public responded to consultations on title, content, and topics.
23 Edizioni Becco Giallo take their name from the eponymous satirical periodical founded by Alberto Giannini in 1924, which used drawings to divulge information in defiance of fascist censorship. It was closed down by the regime in 1926, when Giannini was forced to escape to France. Symbol of the magazine was a blackbird with its beak wide open, a sign of its mission to speak out. After the first threats from the regime, the blackbird was drawn with a padlock holding the beak shut. See http://main.beccogiallo.net/chi-siamo/ [accessed 3 September 2011].
24 http://main.noicimettiamoilbecco.net/presentazione/ [accessed 3 September 2011].
25 At the time of writing, the homepage featured an article on the Ustica disaster and one on the mafia killing of Mauro Rostagno. It is interesting that for both cases the involvement of the institutions (political forces and secret services) was posed as a hypothesis.
26 Gigi Riva, ‘Sostiene Cancogni’, L’Espresso, 19 August 2009, p. 61.
27 I am using Gramsci’s notion of common sense, expressed in Quaderni dal carcere. The edition I have referred to is Selections from the Prison Notebooks, transl. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
28 Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella, La casta (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007).
29 Horace, Sermones I, 1,24.
30 Ainis wrote for La Stampa, il Corriere della Sera, and has recently joined L’Espresso. He is often invited as a guest in television (e.g. Annozero) and radio programmes. Roberta De Monticelli also writes articles for periodicals: an extract from her most recent essay ‘Le nuove regole della buona politica’, written for MicroMega, was published in La Repubblica, 21 June 2011. Many of her presentations and participations in debates are available on YouTube.
31 Michele Ainis, L’assedio: La Costituzione e i suoi nemici (Milan: Longanesi, 2011).
32 Roberta De Monticelli, La questione morale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2010).
33 The expression is a reference to the ‘libertà dei servi’, a concept expressed in Maurizio Viroli, La libertà dei servi (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010). The pairing of the concepts of freedom and slavery has become popular lately, in the notion of ‘servi liberi’. The expression was coined at the convention organized by Giuliano Ferrara on 8 June 2011 at the Teatro Capranica in Rome, ironically (or defiantly, in the minds of the organizers) called ‘Adunata dei liberi servi del cavaliere’.
34 The definition from Goffredo Fofi is contained in an interview given to Oreste Pivetta and included in La vocazione minoritaria. Intervista sulle minoranze (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2009).
35 This is the argument put forward by Ainis in Le libertà negate: come gli italiani stanno perdendo i loro diritti, (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004).
36 De Monticelli quotes Giulio Andreotti’s comment on television at the news of the killing of Giorgio Ambrosoli, which was ‘Se l’è andata cercando’. De Monticelli notes that in Italy ‘anteporre il proprio dovere e la giustizia al proprio vantaggio è cercare grane’: La questione morale, p. 52.
37 Michele Ainis, La cura (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2009).
38 La deriva: perché l’italia rischia il naufragio (Milan: Rizzoli, 2008) shows the risks posed to the competitiveness of Italy and of the Italians on the world stage by the self-referential and corporatist mentality of its leaders. Vandali: l’assalto alle bellezze d’Italia (Milan: Rizzoli, 2011) raises the alarm on the progressive destruction of the Italian landscape and artistic patrimony; Licenziare i Padreterni (Milan: Rizzoli, 2011), whose title is taken from an expression used by Luigi Einaudi to refer to unworthy politicians, revisits all the problems already made public in La Casta to show how the promises made by politicians to ‘sober up’ and re-establish a real contact with the citizens have not been maintained. In the intentions of the authors, outlined in the blurb, Licenziare i Padreterni is a ‘civil invective’ prompted by their love for Italy and in the hope of a ‘politica migliore. Nella speranza di un riscatto’.
39 The latter grew exponentially after the trailer of the documentary made from their unauthorized biography of Silvio Berlusconi (Silvio forever, dir. Roberto Faenza and Filippo Macelloni, 2011) was censured by RAI and Mediaset, unleashing the insubordinate ‘popolo del Web’.
40 See Paul Ginsborg, Stato dell’Italia (Milan: Mondadori, 1994); Italy And its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State, 1980–2001 (London: Penguin, 2003); Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power And Patrimony (London: Verso, 2005); L’Italia del tempo presente: famiglia, società civile, Stato, 1980–1996 (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2007); Salviamo l’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 2010). Also Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart Of Italy: travels through time and space across Italy (London: Short, 2003).
41 Gramsci, p. 424.
42 On the opportunistic use of this expression, first pronounced by Welfare Minister Fornero to justify her proposed radical reforms to the pension system in Italy and now wielded by politicians as a tool to placate public outcries against their alleged attempts to align Italy with more wholesome European customs, see Marco Travaglio, ‘“Ce lo chiede l’Europa”, che palle’, L’Espresso, 6 March 2012 (<http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio/ce-lo-chiede-leuropa-che-palle/2175667> [accessed 29 April 2012]. There are also a number of blogs and Facebook pages which use this expression as a title. Although their content and the quality of the contributions published vary enormously, they are fora that gather expressions of dissent against the Italian ‘cultura del malaffare’, and are a measure of the level of public discontent.