The postponed revolution: reading Italian insurrectionary leftism as generational conflict....

The postponed revolution: reading Italian insurrectionary leftism as generational conflict.

The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democrat party, is commonly seen as the paradigmatic event in postwar Italy's long and bloody history of insurrectionary violence. Moro was held for several weeks, and eventually shot, by a notorious group of left-wing extremists, the Red Brigades, founded in 1970 by Renato Curcio, Alberto Franceschini, and Margherita Cagol. When Franceschini published his memoirs, Mara Renato ed io, in 1988, he included a chapter titled "Il filo rosso," in which he describes the ties of the Red Brigades to a group of former partisans who had refused, at the end of World War Two, to hand over their weapons to the new Italian government, deciding instead to stash them in the countryside and eventually handing them over to Franceschini. By including this anecdote, Franceschini suggests the Red Brigades should not be compared too hastily to left-wing insurrectionary groups active in other countries during the same period (such as the Red Army Faction in the German Federal Republic, or Action Directe in France), but that they should rather be treated as a specifically Italian phenomenon, to be understood first and foremost in terms of Italy's historical and sociopolitical peculiarities. In his celebrated essay on the Moro kidnapping, L'affaire Moro, novelist Leonardo Sciascia argued a similar case, although he related the Red Brigades not to the partisans but to another clandestine organization, whose activities are no less central to Italian history: the mafia. "Sono una cosa nostra," Sciascia said of Moro's kidnappers, "quali che siano gli

addentellati che possono avere con sette rivoluzionarie o servizi segreti di altri paesi" (Sciascia 136). This system of reference, structured around the triangle partisans-mafia-Red Brigades, informs a number of literary accounts of Italian insurrectionary leftism. The novels La voce nel pozzo, by Nerino Rossi, and Lo spasimo di Palermo, by Vincenzo Consolo, are two particularly striking examples. The following paper will dwell only briefly on Rossi, but consider in some detail the narrative strategies by which Consolo elaborates on the basic triangular scheme. It will be shown that these two authors share a peculiar technique for conceptualizing Italian history: their use of the motifs of family and generational conflict. Analyzing this technique will allow for a discussion of how various concepts of history--as progress, repetition, or a peculiar blending of both--are articulated and contested in the work of these writers, and in that of Consolo in particular.

Before embarking on the analysis of the historiographical interpretations implicit in the novels of Rossi and Consolo, it will be helpful to survey the facts of Italian insurrectionary leftism, situating them in the context of the student movement, mafia violence, and Italy's ever-changing political scene. (1) First, it ought to be stressed that the genesis of the postwar Italian state, like that of the two German states, is inextricably fled to the beginnings of the Cold War. The formation of prime minister Alcide De Gasperi's postwar cabinet was closely watched by the US government of Truman, which seems to have feared the distinct possibility of an electoral transition to socialism in Italy. In January of 1947, De Gasperi

returned from negotiations on financial aid in Washington and unexpectedly dissolved his cabinet, in which communists and socialists had held such key positions as the ministries of foreign affairs and finance. De Gasperi's failure to form a more centre-right cabinet was seen by many Italians as closely related to Truman's decision to freeze all US loans to Italy (from January until May 1947). After another cabinet was formed, this one purged of leftist members, massive aid was provided, and Italy's i billion debt to the USA was cancelled. Prior to the elections of 18 April 1948, US Attorney General Tom Clark declared that "those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States" would not be allowed to live in the USA; the State Department issued a document explaining that US immigration law prohibited Communist Party voters from entering the country. This was in addition to massive anticommunist propaganda in Italy (in the form of letter-writing campaigns, Voice of America broadcasts, and anonymous books and magazine articles). During the years that followed, the CIA subsidized right-wing trade unions; the Italian-American Labor Council contributed 50,000 to anti-communist labor groups. (2) For decades afterward, the dominant political party was that of the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, DC). Nonetheless, the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) continued to enjoy substantial support; communist sympathies were too much a part of the culture to simply disappear. The CIA maintained a presence in Italy.

Some aspects of its covert operations were known by the mid-1970s, thanks to the revelations of former agents such as Philip Agee. (3) Today these operations are suspected to have been related to Gladio, a project for creating a "stay-behind net" of US-trained

paramilitary troops meant to wage an insurrectionary guerrilla war in the event of a communist takeover. Gladio began taking shape between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, and involved the creation of secret weapon depots in a number of European nations. The project first attracted major public attention in 1990, when an Italian investigation into a 1972 car bombing determined that the explosives had come from a Gladio depot; there were 139 such depots in Italy alone. Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti declared in 1990 that some 600 people were still on the Gladio payroll for Italy that year. (4) Although largely unaware of this history, the generation of Italians that made up the student movement of the late 1960s was inclined to associate politics with secrecy, corruption, and violence; the general climate of anti-Americanism during the years of the Vietnam War also contributed significantly to the popularity of revolutionary programs imported from Southeast Asia, China, Cuba, and the various Latin American "urban guerrilla" movements.

The student movement began taking shape in 1967, when students set out to raise public awareness of the military coup in Greece (April 1967) and the ongoing war in Vietnam. In Trento, protesters organized a seminar on Vietnam and called for the establishment of a "Negative University," a self-governed student body operating independently from the university's official institutions. By 1968, half of the 36 Italian universities had been occupied. At Rome University, an attempt to hold exams on the conditions posed by the students, which included public discussion of grades, ended with university director

D'Avack calling the police. There resulted the "Battaglia di Valle Giulia," one of several violent clashes in this and other cities.

During the same period, and reflecting a response to the harsh working conditions in Italy's industrial north, factory workers in Milan, Pavia, Trento, Porto Marghera, and Bologna began to organize outside the existing trade unions, forming "Comitati unitari di base" (CUBs). The CUBs included student members and demanded the shortening of the workday without a reduction in wages. Crucially, they were conceived of not just as economic, but as political organizations; they openly contested the PCI's "politica di piano," which sought to integrate leftwing parties and trade unions into the government's economic decision-making process, rather than questioning the capitalist framework of that process. One of the most important campaigns of the CUBs was directed against the "gabbie salariali," the system of paying different wages for the same work from one region of Italy to another. The activities of the CUBs reached a first climax during the "Autunno caldo" of 1969, when militant factory workers engaged in prolonged street-tights with the police in Turin. That same year, terrorism became a media issue: on 12 December, a bomb exploded in the National Agriculture Bank on Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing 16 and injuring 87. Other bombs exploded in Rome the same day. The bombs in Milan and Rome provided the justification for the arrests of many left-wing activists and led to the death of at least one, the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, who "fell" from the fourth floor of Milan's police headquarters on the night between 15

and 16 December, having been held for four days without charges being brought against him.

In their historical survey of this period, L'orda d'oro 1968-1977, Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni argue that the explosion in Piazza Fontana was a "strage di stato" organized by the government in order to create the conditions for dismantling the extraparliamentary left (Balestrini and Moroni 340). This interpretation of the event was endorsed by many left-wing activists at the time.

Moroni and Balestrini quote a situationist pamphlet that appeared in Milan after the massacre, suggestively titled "Il Reichstag brucia?" and declaring that "La bomba di Milano e esplosa contro il proletariato" (Balestrini and Moroni 341-42). The Piazza Fontana massacre was linked, in the minds of many observers, to rumors that Italy was on the brink of a right-wing coup. Historian Giorgio Galli has emphasized that an authoritarian turn modeled on that of the Greek colonels was feared not just by left-wing fringe groups, but also by large sections of liberal democratic culture (Galli 21).

In addition to an increasingly aggressive labor movement, Italy was characterized at the time by a vibrant extraparliamentary left: two important organizations were Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua. The government's insistent focus on left-wing groups during the investigation of the Piazza Fontana massacre seems to have fostered a sense, among leftwing activists, that the time had come for organizing political opposition clandestinely. Moroni and Balestrini quote a

popular song of the time, "La ballata del Pinelli." One of its verses threatens revenge for the death of Pinelli: "Ti hanno ucciso per farti tacere / Perche avevi capito l'inganno / Ora dormi non puoi piu parlare / Ma i compagni ti vendicheranno" (Balestrini and Moroni 348). Another song announced "che e suonata / l'ora del fucile" (Balestrini and Moroni 398). From this and other sources it emerges that the formation of groups such as the Red Brigades was partly a consequence of the state's response to the events of December 1969. In an extended interview given during the 1990s, Mario Moretti argues that "un discorso generale sulla violenza" was replaced after Piazza Fontana by the beginnings of a more practically oriented theory of "lotta armata" (Moretti 15-16).

By 1970, a number of insurrectionary groups were carrying out kidnappings and assassinations. On 17 September, two bombs exploded outside the home of Siemens boss Giuseppe Leoni. On 26 March of the following year, an organization known as the Gruppo Il Ottobre attempted to kidnap housing administrator Alessandro Floris and killed him when he tried to defend himself. On 17 May 1972, Milanese police officer Luigi Calabresi was assassinated; Calabresi was, by most accounts, directly involved in the death of Giuseppe Pinelli. "Calabresi fascista / Sei il primo della lista" and "Calabresi, sarai suicidato" were popular slogans of the extraparliamentary left.

The first Red Brigades pamphlets, featuring the symbol of the five-pointed star, began to appear in Milan in the spring of 1970. Like

other clandestine organizations forming at the time, the Red Brigades began to target individuals identified as "nemici del popolo."

Burning the cars of factory bosses, responding to the violence of neofascist groups who had taken over entire neighborhoods, and helping to organize the occupation of houses earned the Red Brigades (then at best a semi-clandestine organisation) the status of popular heroes in the working-class suburbs of Milan. March 1972 saw the first Red Brigades operation that targeted an individual. Led by Renato Curcio, the group kidnapped Siemens boss Idalgo Macchiarini in Milan.

One of the insurrectionary organizations that emerged after Piazza Fontana, the Gruppi d'Azione Partigiana (GAP), lost its leader, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, that spring. Feltrinelli's mangled body was found on 15 March 1972; he had died while assembling explosives in the countryside. Feltrinelli had been an outspoken advocate of "lotta armata." Founder of an archive on the Italian labor movement and one of the country's most acclaimed publishers, he had been personally familiar not only with Fidel Castro and internationally known theorists of guerrilla warfare such as Regis Debray, but also with a number of German and Italian militants, including members of the Red Army Faction and Red Brigades cofounders Curcio and Franceschini. Unlike the Red Brigades, the GAP operated on the assumption that a right-wing coup was imminent, and that the appropriate strategy for combating the state was that of a rural (rather than an urban) guerrilla. The name of Feltrinelli's group was intended to evoke what he perceived to have been the "guerra rivoluzionaria" of the partisans. The GAP

dissolved following Feltrinelli's death. A number of its militants joined the Red Brigades, although this organization was itself going through a difficult period. Having narrowly escaped arrest in Milan, its leaders had relocated to Turin. According to Curcio, the rise in police activity following the death of Feltrinelli almost caused the Red Brigades to disband; workers at FIAT's Mirafiori factory in Turin convinced him and his comrades to continue their operations and seek closer ties to the labor movement.

On 12 February 1973, trade unionist Bruno Labate was kidnapped and interrogated for five hours by a Red Brigades commando. Accused of having orchestrated the infiltration of labor groups by right-wing activists, he was chained, with his pants removed and a sign around his neck, to the main gate of Mirafiori. On 28 June, Alfa Romeo executive Michele Mincuzzi was given the same treatment as Labate. FIAT boss Ettore Amerio was interrogated for eight days before being released.

Crucially, assassinations were not yet on the agenda. This was still true, according to Curcio, on 18 April 1974, when the Red Brigades kidnapped magistrate Mario Sossi. Nevertheless, this operation marked another change of strategy: the extension of the struggle beyond the factory and the decision to attack "il cuore dello stato." The Sossi kidnapping was sufficiently spectacular to focus considerable media attention on the Red Brigades. The operation also demonstrated the group's ability to pressure the government. On 20 May, three days before Sossi's release, eight convicted members of the Gruppo Il Ottobre were granted "liberth provvisoria" in response to

pressure from Sossi's kidnappers. That the decision was quickly revoked did not reduce the symbolic impact of this concession. The magistrate Francesco Coco, who had protested the decision to release the prisoners, would be assassinated on 8 June 1976.

By 1974, the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by an informant: Silvano Girotto, also known as "Frate Mitra," was a Franciscan monk and former member of the foreign legion who had spent several years in Latin America and won the confidence of Curcio and Franceschini by boasting about having participated in guerrilla operations. As a result of Girotto's police contacts, Curcio and Franceschini were arrested on 8 September. Curcio would later escape from prison with the aid of a Red Brigades commando led by his wife Margherita Cagol. 1974 was also a year of right-wing terror: on 28 May, a bomb exploded in the midst of a trade union demonstration against neofascist violence in Piazza della Loggia, Brescia, killing eight and injuring 94; on 4 August, a bomb planted by neofascists exploded on a train travelling from Rome to Munich (the Italicus), killing 12 and injuring 105.

On 6 May 1975, the Nuclei Armati Proletari (NAP), one of the smaller Italian insurrectionary groups, kidnapped magistrate Giuseppe Di Gennaro. Di Gennaro was released after five days. The kidnapping of Milanese lawyer Massimo De Carolis, one of Democrazia Cristiana's most right-wing members, ended more bloodily: De Carolis was interrogated and shot by a Red Brigades commando. The leader of this commando, Walter Alasia, was also partly responsible for the 4 June

kidnapping of industrialist Vittorio Gancia. The other Red Brigades member supervising the Gancia kidnapping was Margherita Cagol. When, on 5 June, members of the carabinieri (Italy's military police) discovered the rural hideout of Alasia and Cagol, gunshots were exchanged and Cagol was killed. Alasia escaped, but died following another shootout on 15 December. The death of Cagol prompted a notorious Red Brigades statement featuring the statement "Che mille braccia si protendano per raccogliere il suo fucile" According to Renato Curcio, both Cagol and Alasia were shot in cold blood. Curcio himself would be arrested again on 18 January 1976, following a 20-minute shootout. 22 March of that year saw the arrest of another Red Brigades leader, Giorgio Semeria.

Despite these arrests, violent attacks on the authorities and those favoring them continued in 1977. On 13 February, Valerio Traversi, a government minister in charge of prison reform, was shot in the legs or "gambizzato" by a Red Brigades commando. On 28 April, the Red Brigades assassinated Piemontese lawyer Fulvio Croce. On 2 June, journalist Indro Montanelli was shot in the legs. ("Gambizzamento" had originally been a mafia practice; the Red Brigades appropriated it as a brutal alternative to straightforward assassinations.) 1977 also saw a unique reprise of 1968 in Italy. During the spring of 1977, a multitude of social protest movements (feminist, anti-capitalist, for the reorganization and self-management of the university) erupted throughout the country. Clashes with the police and the carabinieri were frequent. Francesco Lorusso, a Lotta Continua

activist, was shot in the back by a police officer on 11 March. Massive streetfights took place in Rome the same day. Also in March, roughly a thousand carabinieri occupied the university campus in Bologna; they would go on to raid the headquarters of various extraparliamentary groups, arresting 131 activists. By 14 March, the police were massively present throughout the city. In Rome, a legal decree was issued suspending the right to demonstrate for 15 days.

1978 is the year of the Moro kidnapping. Besides being president of the Christian Democrats, Moro was widely credited with having masterminded the coalition between DC and the PCI known as the "compromesso storico." This partnership reflected a recognition, on the part of DC, both of the Communist Party's recent electoral success (the PCI had received 34,4 of the votes in 1976, only 4.3 less than DC) and of the willingness for compromises with the center-right signaled by PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer's policy of "eurocomunismo." This policy was based on an explicit rejection of Soviet authoritarianism and a firm commitment to parliamentary democracy; it effectively opened the door to an alliance with DC. The PCI's rightward move was also evident during the Moro kidnapping itself, when the cabinet's refusal to negotiate with the Red Brigades was most ardently voiced by Berlinguer--the beginning of an increasingly hardline approach to insurrectionary leftism. Both DC and the PCI would be repaid for the (at best) moderate success of this policy with a decline in their popularity; in the 1980s, votes would increasingly shift away from these two parties to the Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI)

of Bettino Craxi. (Craxi's embroilment in the corruption scandals of "Tangentopoli" would then pave the way for the next major transformation of the political scene: the dissolution or fragmentation of most existing parties and the rise of Silvio Berlusconi's populist Forza Italia.)

Moro was seized by the Red Brigades commando "Walter Alasia" on the morning of 16 March 1978; his driver and bodyguards were shot. Then under the leadership of Mario Moretti, the Red Brigades demanded the release of left-wing militants imprisoned in Turin. The government stubbornly refused to negotiate, despite Moro himself urging greater flexibility in a series of letters. An appeal published by Moro's family on I May likewise failed to bring about a change of policy. Moro was eventually shot by Moretti. Before his death, he penned an embittered request for his removal from the membership lists of the Christian Democrat party. His corpse was found on 9 May, in the trunk of a car parked halfway between the residences of DC and PCI.

The Moro kidnapping was followed, in 1979, by a string of further armed attacks: the assassinations, by members of the left-wing insurre c-tionary group Prima Linea, of Emiho Alessandrini, the Milanese lawyer responsible for investigating the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre, and FIAT engineer Carlo Ghiglieno (on 29 January and 21 September, respectively), and the shooting of Antonio Varisco, a high-ranking officer of the carabinieri, by the Red Brigades (on 13 July). On 11 December, Prima Linea members read a proclamation in a Turin business school before

shooting five professors and five students in the legs.

The period 1979-80 was one of increased state repression, as the government intensified its crackdown on the various insurrectionary groups and their suspected supporters. On 7 April 1979, public prosecutor Pietro Calogero ordered the arrest of numerous members of the extraparliamentary left, among them Toni Negri (now one of the most influential theorists of the "anti-globalization" movement), accusing them of complicity in the armed operations of the Red Brigades.

The sacking of thousands of FIAT workers in 1980 was widely felt to mark the end of Italy's "Autonomia Operaia" movement, with which intellectuals such as Negri had been closely associated.

Now increasingly divorced from their roots in the labor and social protest movements, and perceived to be acting in an increasingly senseless and serf-referential manner, armed insurrectionary groups continued to break the headlines. In January of 1980, business manager Sergio Gori was assassinated in Mestre. On 12 February, Vittorio Bachelet, a professor of law and friend of Aldo Moro, was assassinated in Rome. On 2 May, members of Prima Linea made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Sergio Lenci, an architect responsible for expanding Rebibbia prison. On 28 May, journalist Walter Tobagi was assassinated in Milan. The bomb planted by neofascists at Bologna's central station on 2 August was terrorism on a grander scale: it killed 85 and injured 200. 1980 was also the year of the D'Urso kidnapping: Giovanni D'Urso, a magistrate, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on 12

December. In return for his release, the Red Brigades demanded the immediate closure of the notorious Asinara prison. Slightly more than two weeks into the kidnapping, on 28 December, a revolt broke out in another prison, Trani. More than a dozen guards were taken hostage. The revolt was put down with extreme brutality by a special task force. The Red Brigades responded by assassinating carabiniere Enrico Galvaligi on 31 December. They continued to hold D'Urso, declaring on 4 January 1981 that he had been condemned to death, but that his sentence had been "suspended." D'Urso's daughter Lorena appeared on television to plead for his life and he was found alive, on 15 January, in a car parked in front of the Italian ministry of justice.

Red Brigades leader Mario Moretti was arrested some three months later, on 4 April. Kidnappings continued to be carried out in rapid succession after this date. On 27 April a Red Brigades commando kidnapped Ciro Cirillo; he was freed on 28 July. On 20 May, Giuseppe Taliercio was kidnapped; he was found dead on 6 July. Business executive Renzo Sandrucci was kidnapped on 3 June and released on 23 July. On 17 December, members of the BR-PCC (Brigate Rosse per la Formazione del Partito Comunista Combattente), a Red Brigades splinter group, kidnapped US general and NATO commander James Lee Dozier; Dozier would be freed by the police and the carabinieri on 28 January of the following year.

A week after the assassination of Bachelet, on 19 February 1980, Patrizio Peci, leader of the Turinese Red Brigades, was arrested along with Rocco Micaletto. This marked one of the major setbacks for the

organization, along with the death of several Red Brigades members during a shootout in via Fracchia, Genoa, on 28 March. Peci became a police collaborator or "pentito"; by some accounts, he directed the police to via Fracchia. Pentitismo became rampant in the 1980s. Creating collaborators through intimidation, torture, and the incentive of a reduced sentence became the state's main strategy in its attempt to crack down on militant groups. (5) One result was the rapid spread of distrust and violence among imprisoned militants. On 8 February 1982, three imprisoned Red Brigades members attempted to murder their comrade Immacolata Gargiulo in the high security prison Palmi; Gargiulo was a known collaborator. On 27 July, in Trani prison, Red Brigades member Ennio Di Rocco was stabbed for the same reason. Maria Giovanna Massa survived an attempt on her life in Voghera prison.

Giorgio Soldati was strangled in Cuneo prison. Carmine Palladino was killed on 10 August.

Compounding the already heavy toll of insurrectionary violence, state repression, and one of Italy's most difficult economic periods, mafia violence increased dramatically during the late 1970s and early 1980s. During the immediate postwar period, the mafia had carefully adapted to the changing socioeconomic structure of the Italian south, shifting the focus of its operations from Sicilian agriculture to the racketeering of small businesses, as well as engaging in large-scale land speculation (particularly in Palermo). From the late 1960s onward, the mafia was also active in drug dealing and money laundering operations. It had forged close alliances with a number of Christian

Democrat politicians such as Giovanni Gioia and Vito Ciancimino.

Attempts to crack down on the mafia led to a number of brutal murders, of which the best known are perhaps those of the magistrates Cesare Terranova (1979), Gaetano Costa (1980), and Rocco Chinnici (1983).

Piersanti Mattarella, a Christian-Democrat governor who broke with his father Bernardo's tradition of maintaining a "peaceful" relationship with the mafia, was murdered in 1980; the Sicilian regional secretary of the PCI, Pio La Torre, was killed in 1982. A number of victims were police investigators, such as Boris Giuliano, or members of the carabinieri, such as Giuseppe Russo and Emanuele Basile. Mafia violence attracted extensive media attention following the murder of Palermo's police prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and his wife in 1982. The corruption scandals of Tangentopoli, which ended the roughly ten-year hegemony of the PSI in 1992, would reveal the dramatic extent of the mafia's ties to the politically powerful.

Despite continuing terrorist violence (the 1984 assassination of US diplomat Leamon Hunt; the 1985 shooting of economist Ezio Tarantelli; the assassinations, in 1986 and 1987, of Lando Conti and Licio Giorgieri; the shooting of Christian Democrat senator Roberto Ruffilli in 1988), the late 1980s began to see public discussion on the granting of pardons to those incarcerated during the previous decade. On 23 April 1988, Renato Curcio publicly dissociated himself from recent activities conducted in the name of the Red Brigades; a similar statement was issued by other imprisoned Red Brigades members on 23 October of that year. Taking note of this development, president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro declared himself in favor of

reconsidering many of the harsh sentences passed during the 1970s. The debate on pardons continued throughout the 1990s, a period that saw no terrorist acts from the left or the right and also coincided with a relative decline in mafia violence.

How has this history been represented in Italian literature? As noted above, a number of writers have resorted to comparisons between the Red Brigades and the partisans or the mafia, as well as to the motifs of family and generational conflict. (6) Like the mafia invoked

by Sciascia, the family is inserted by these writers into the clash between the state and the insurrectionary as a third protagonist. It occupies a curious middle ground: the insurrectionary typically breaks with his family, which is associated with the social order he contests, but the break is often problematic, seldom a clean one, as the insurrectionary's family relations catch up with him. The ideal of clandestinity, central to the ideology of the Red Brigades, clashes with that of the family. If the ideal of the family is that of a community in which secrecy and alterity are reduced to a minimum (one in which every interlocutor is "familiar"), then in so far as the insurrectionary has not relinquished his family ties, his clandestinity becomes problematic. The protagonist of Carlo Castellaneta's 1995 novel Cerchi nell'acqua joins an armed insurrectionary group loosely based on the Red Brigades and soon finds herself haunted by the family she has left behind. It turns out to be the one middle-class institution she cannot renounce:

Si ha un bel persuadersi e leggere e imparare che dall'istituto della famiglia discendono tutta una serie di umane bassezze: classismo, razzismo, senso di proprieta, egoismi d'ogni genere, ma quando tocca a te e come se fossi la prima ad affrontare questa rivoluzione sempre rimandata, questa contro la famiglia, l'unica che non si fa mai. (Castellaneta 64) It is worth noting, as an aside, that this "rivoluzione sempre rimandata" is scarcely an issue in, for example, the German literature on the Red Army Faction. Rather than assuming that this fact is due to inherent differences between the political conflicts in Italy and the German Federal Republic, one can relate it to the frequent use, on the part of Italian writers, of family metaphors. The family is so central to many Italian novels on the Red Brigades that, in numerous cases, it becomes not so much an additional component of political conflict as an opportunity to grasp such conflict in its entirety. Even a writer like Nanni Balestrini, whose concerns are in some ways closer to those of German authors, gives a family of sorts a prominent place in one of his novels: like many of the actual families in other novels, the group of friends at the heart of Balestrini's novel L'editore (on the death of Feltrinelli, Balestrini's former employer) functions as a microcosm of society, "una piccola societa contradditoria" (Balestrini 285).

Related, although not identical to the motif of the family is that of generational conflict. Both Nerino Rossi and Vincenzo Consolo use the generational motif to place postwar Italy's insurrectionary

violence in its historical context. Both have long proven themselves devoted literary chroniclers of Italian history: Rossi wrote the first novel on Tangentopoli, Il detenuto, and Consolo first attracted critical attention by his account of the 1948 elections, La ferita dell'aprile. Consolo's narrative strategies are in many ways more complex and interesting than Rossi's. It will, however, be useful to preface their analysis with a brief consideration of Rossi's 1990 novel La voce nel pozzo. There, the political violence of the Red Brigades is compared to the struggle of the partisans, and the Red Brigades and the partisan conflicts are identified with the younger and the older generation. Some brief remarks on this novel will begin to clarify how the motif of generational conflict is used to narrate postwar Italian history.

La voce nel pozzo's middle-aged protagonist Aristide is a former partisan, now a professor of law and a member of Italy's ruling Christian Democrat party. The novel opens with Aristide returning to his hometown of Castenaso, where he meets his mother and his former comrades Ivo and Giovanna. The latter is concerned about her son Luca, who has joined the Red Brigades and disappeared without a trace.

Giovanna asks Aristide to track Luca down. He does so successfully, but Luca refuses to renounce militancy and soon disappears again.

Giovanna's attempt to buy back her son by handing her savings over to the Red Brigades also fails. The novel ends with the kidnapping of a prominent politician (an episode based on the Moro kidnapping). Luca is not heard from again. Aristide resigns from the Christian Democrat party

and decides to spend the rest of his life in Castenaso.

A central theme of the novel is the failure to overcome what Aristide sees as an illusionary faith in the progressive character of violence. This theme is expressed in a recurring metaphor, that of a voice echoing inside a well. Early in the novel, Aristide recalls his childhood game of shouting into the local well: "Una risata, un abbozzo di canto, un urlo, e la eco trasmetteva tutto questo ingigantito al resto del mondo" (Rossi, La voce nel pozzo 12). Rossi suggests the tragedy of the Red Brigades consists in their mindless "echoing" of the militarist rhetoric of the partisans. In so far as he is himself a former partisan, what Aristide "hears" in Luca is the echo of his own voice. Aristide's choice to engage in legal, parliamentary politics is also related to the motif of the echo; having changed his convictions, he still hopes to "make himself heard" metaphorically, much as he once literally amplified his voice by shouting into the well. Hence the narrator says of Aristide: "Quel gioco della voce nel pozzo non l'aveva scordato. Anzi, in un certo senso, aveva continuato a farlo a lungo nella vita" (ibid.). When Aristide resigns from politics altogether, he does so out of an awareness that he and others have failed to drown out the echoes of past violence. The more recent calls for nonviolent change have failed to take effect. In this sense, Aristide feels his generation has failed: "Tutta la sua storia, come quella della sua generazione, stava ubbidendo semplicemente alle leggi di sempre" (Rossi, La voce nel pozzo 178). The model of

politics as armed struggle has prevailed, and the ideal of a nonviolent society has not been realized. The historical continuity of violence remains unbroken. Far from being revolutionary, the violence of the Red Brigades is all too familiar: "Nulla dunque che la terra non avesse gia visto" (ibid.).

The motif of generational conflict is used, then, to formulate a particular view of history, and this view is founded on the continuity of insurrectionary violence. The elements of the problematic or conceptual field within which postwar Italian history is interpreted include the notion of a historical causality escaping human control and that of a rhetoric of revolution both preserving the memory of past violence (that of the partisans) and inspiring new violence (that of the Red Brigades). The basic pattern presented in La voce nel pozzo--a generational conflict becomes emblematic of larger historical conflicts, and these are read in the light of a peculiar historical fatalism--is not specific to this novel. Like La voce nel pozzo, Consolo's Lo spasimo di Palermo takes family relationships--those of two sons to their fathers--as its starting point for an examination of the historical trends by which left-wing militancy is conditioned.

The protagonist of Consolo's novel, Gioacchino, travels to Paris to meet his expatriate son Mauro, who was never a Red Brigades recruit, but one of those members of the legal left deemed guilty by association. Throughout his visit, Gioacchino remembers his own childhood during the final years of the Second World War, dwelling at

length on the death of his father, who was executed by German soldiers for harboring a deserter. In the dosing chapters of the novel Gioacchino returns to Italy, somewhat unhappy about his meeting with Mauro, who he feels refuses to recognize him as a father. Gioacchino muses on the lawlessness rampant in his country, in particular on the activities of the mafia. The novel ends with the assassination of a magistrate outside Gioacchino's house; the assassination takes place while Gioacchino is writing a letter to Mauro.

Consolo establishes an analogy between the relationship of Gioacchino to his father and that of Mauro to Gioacchino. He suggests both can be understood in terms of patricide. Gioacchino is haunted by the suspicion that he may have revealed his father's hiding place to the Germans: "Non sono mai riuscito a ricordare, o non ho voluto, se sono stato io a rivelare a quei massacratori, a quei tedeschi spietati il luogo dove era stato appena condotto il disertore" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 126-27). If Gioacchino is indeed responsible for his father's death, then his is an actual patricide, whereas that of Mauro is metaphorical. Mauro's patricide consists in his refusal to treat Gioacchino as a father; he never addresses him by that title. This refusal is founded on a rejection of Gioacchino's entire generation: the generation that witnessed both fascism and its defeat, but failed to make the transition to a society more pacified than that of Christian Democrat rule. As Gioacchino writes to Mauro: "So, Mauro, che non neghi me, ma tutti i padri, la mia generazione, quella che non ha fatto la guerra, mail dopoguerra, che

avrebbe dovuto ricostruire, dopo il disastro, questo Paese, formare una nuovo societa, una civile, giusta convivenza" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 126). The troubled relationship of Gioacchino and Mauro is presented as that of Italy's first postwar generation to the one that followed, the generation of student protest and militancy. This relationship is characterized by subdued hostility, unspoken accusations, and a failure to communicate. Gioacchino comments repeatedly on a metaphorical silence between him and his son: "Il silenzio, ancora e sempre, il silenzio duro si stendeva tra di loro" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 52).

Gioacchino also speaks of another silence: that concerning his own patricidal guilt. Gioacchino is a former writer. By his own account, his choice to become a writer was that of confronting his responsibility for his father's death: "Il bisogno di trasferire sulla carta ... il mio parricido" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 127).

Gioacchino's decision to abandon writing is related by him to his failure to absolve himself of his guilt, or even to understand it: "Ho fatto come te, se permetti, la mia lotta, e ho pagato con la sconfitta, la dimissione, l'abbandono della penna" (ibid.).

Gioacchino's literary projects were a "lotta" like that of Mauro and his generation; both were failed attempts to come to terms with the preceding generation. In this sense, "La storia e sempre uguale" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 9). It is "l'antica tragedia sempre in atto" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 67). By implication, left-wing militancy was, like the

straggles of the legal left, the consequence of an inability to understand history as it manifests itself in the relationship of one generation to another.

Consolo's preoccupations are largely the same as Rossi's: the failure of the older generation to communicate its insights to the younger (expressed through such motifs as silence, writer's block, an unsatisfactory encounter) and the continuity of violence and lawlessness. These preoccupations are articulated within a conceptual field founded on the notion that generational relations constitute the best Interpretative paradigm for the analysis of Italy's political conflicts. More than in Rossi's novel, the family serves as the motif by reference to which Italian history is interpreted. A form of violence that occurs within the family (patricide) becomes the guiding metaphor by which political violence is understood. The transgression of the "law" on which the institution of the family is based (respect for the father) becomes the paradigm for understanding the political transgressions of the insurrectionary left.

At the heart of this problematic is the theme of the persistence of violence, and in particular of clandestine and extralegal violence.

Consolo identifies a proclivity for this kind of violence as a specific characteristic of Italy. The film character Judex, who is refered to throughout Lo spasimo di Palermo, symbolizes this faith in a justice outside the law. Judex is "la figura del giustiziere che guidica e sentenza fuori dalle leggi" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 129).

His story rests on the premise "che Judex alla fine avrebbe vendicato gli innocenti, vinto gli avversari" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 21). As such, he becomes a symbol of the political violence of the Red Brigades, but also of the mafia. The faith he expresses--that in justice outside the law--is one of Italian history's continuities; a Judex film Gioacchino saw during the 40s returns to haunt him during his visit to Paris (where he watches the end of that film for the first time) and informs his reflections on the mafia violence he witnesses following his return to Italy. The time between the first (disrupted) screening of the Judex film and the second screening in Paris is the time of history as experienced by Gioacchino: "In quel taglio, quel vuoto, in quel buio erano i fotogrammi segreti della sua storia, della vita sua oscura e inconclusa ... delle colpe sepolte e obliate" (Consolo, Lo spasimo di Palermo 47). The "vuoto" is also that of problems whose solution has still to be found, such as that of how to pacify Italian society.

Given the continuity of these problems--and, in particular, the persistence of an irresponsible attitude towards illegality and violence--it is only appropriate that a number of Gioacchino's memories from the postwar period should foreshadow left-wing militancy and events associated with it. One of Gioacchino's memories is of a cache where the guns of the partisans were deposited; as a young boy, Gioacchino stole a number of these weapons and mounted a mock attack on the local orphanage. Another memory concerns a postwar protest march that foreshadows the demonstrations of the 1970s. Both memories suggest

the generation of militancy acted on tendencies that preceded it.

That Consolo's novel should end with an episode of violence (the assassination of a magistrate by the mafia) underscores the point that Italy has not succeeded in overcoming these tendencies and breaking the continuity of injustice, subversion, and violence. Gioacchino's failure is that of a man who can only describe and foresee further episodes in this cycle of violence; in his last novel, he foresees the police hunting for his son. By abandoning literature, he concedes defeat to the destructive momentum of history; the explosion that concludes Lo spasimo di Palermo occurs after Gioacchino has risen from his desk, leaving there his unfinished letter to Mauro. This unfinished letter becomes a symbol, like Gioacchino's visit to Paris, of an abortive attempt to understand the mechanisms of historical violence by establishing a dialogue between generations. Unfinished and unmailed, it does not succeed in breaking the silence between Gioacchino and his son.

Constrained by state repression to leave Italy physically, Mauro has also abandoned Italian history, renouncing the possibility of resolving its conflicts, be it by responding to his father's attempts at establishing a dialogue, or by becoming a father himself (a possibility he explicitly rejects). In this profoundly pessimistic vision of Italian society, the left-wing activist's exile is only one manifestation of a more general kind of exile: that of the historically and politically conscious citizen who can never, Consolo suggests, feel truly at home in a country torn by injustice and violence.

It is worth noting that this pessimistic vision of Italian society can already be found in Sciascia. In L'affaire Moro, Sciascia uses his own hypothesis concerning the analogy between the Red Brigades and the mafia to explain what he describes as the indifference of the Italian public to the Moro kidnapping. He argues that the 1978 kidnapping is merely a replay--an echo, Rossi might say--of earlier clashes between the government and illegal organizations: "Da cio quella che pu6 apparire indifferenza: ed e invece la distaccata attenzione dello spettatore a una piece che gia conosce, che rivede in replica, che segue senza la tensione del come va a finire ed e soltanto intento a cogliere la diversita di qualche dettaglio nelle scene e nell'umore degli attori" (Sciascia 137). If the Red Brigades can only re-enact a drama that is already familiar, it follows that they are not, properly speaking, a revolutionary movement. This is indeed the position that Sciascia takes. Despite their rhetoric of violent transformation, the Red Brigades are, to him, only a pawn in a larger power game determined by what he sees as the classic Italian approach to politics: the principle, voiced famously in Lampedusa's Gattopardo, that change should be accepted only in so far as it helps maintain the status quo. The Red Brigades have succeeded in subtly altering certain power relations, yet the outcome of these changes is not revolution, but the fortification of the existing system of governance:

La loro ragion d'essere, la loro funzione, il loro "servizio" stanno esclusivamente nello spostare dei rapporti di forza: e

delle forze che gia ci sono. E di spostarli non di molto, bisogna aggiungere. Di spostarli nel senso di quel "cambiar tutto per non cambiar nulla" che il principe di Lampedusa assume come costante della storia siciliana e che si puo oggi assumere come come costante della storia italiana. (Sciascia 138) For both Sciascia and Consolo, Italian history is full of promised transformations--but the promise is repeatedly broken: the revolution is postponed. Given this congruence between the views of Sciascia and Consolo, the critic Concetto Ternullo's rejection of comparisons between these two writers is perhaps overhasty. Ternullo's monograph on Consolo concludes with an unsympathetic reading of Lo spasimo di Palermo, lamenting what Ternullo identifies as the novel's proselytizing tone and disparate structure and culminating in the judgement: "No, non 6 Consolo. Almeno il Consolo che conoscevamo" (Ternullo 70). It remains now to briefly consider Lo spasimo di Palermo in the context of Consolo's earlier publications, in order to demonstrate that the narrative strategies described above are not, as Ternullo would have it, departures from such novels as La ferita dell'aprile (1963) and II sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio (1976), but rather an extension of tendencies already evident in those works.

In his critical introduction to La ferita dell'aprile, Gian Carlo Ferretti notes that this early novel by Consolo addresses a theme that will recur in later novels: "il problema del potere" (Ferretti vi). At first glance, La ferita dell'aprile is a simple

coming-of-age story, charting the experiences of its protagonist in a religious school during the immediate postwar years. Yet as Ferretti rightly points out, the protagonist's experiences in the religious "istituto" also provide a metaphorical account of larger (political) power relationships in Italy: "Il rapporto tra adulti educatori e giovani educati si vien configurando sempre piu come un conflitto tra repre ssori e ribelli tout court" (ibid.). In Laferita dell'aprile, 18 April of 1948 is at once a political and a personal date: it is the day of the Italian republic's first elections, but also that on which the protagonist's coming-of-age process ends. What Ferretti does not say, although it emerges very clearly from his analysis, is that this prefigures the narrative strategy of Lo spasimo di Palermo as outlined above: historical events are interpreted in terms of personal experience, and that personal experience is one of generational conflict (in Laferita dell'aprile, a conflict between the young students and their elder teachers). Seeing as Laferita dell'aprile ends not with an act of rebellion, but with the protagonist becoming an adult in the sense of internalizing the values of his teachers, this novel also prefigures the pessimistic ending of Lo spasimo di Palermo: "Il finale e ... segnato dal pessimismo e dalla sconfitta," creating "un sottile ritornante contrasto" with what Ferretti, writing at the end of the 1980s, identifies as "alcune fasi di facile ottimismo collettivo degli ultimi decenni" (Ferretti ix).

Such scepticism in the face of the rhetorics of progress and

revolutionary transformation is even more apparent in Consolo's later//sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio. This novel, set in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, offers a striking portrait, in the form of the protagonist Mandralisca, of a highly educated Sicilian nobility that has embraced the Enlightenment ideologies of science and progress, but remains dumbfounded in the face of the illiterate peasantry's insurrectionary struggles for social justice. The novel ends with Mandralisca visiting a prison in which a group of peasant subversives was temporarily incarcerated, and where they have scrawled on the walls revolutionary slogans whose clumsy Italian contrasts markedly with Mandralisca's own learned discourse. Published in 1976, this novel could not but evoke contemporary Italian class issues in the minds of its readers, especially since the "Autonomia Operaia" movement was largely fueled by the migration of former landworkers to the industrial north. The contrast between oral and literary culture, associated with an analogous contrast between the wealthy and educated few and the subaltern masses of the south, is in many ways suggestive of the failure of northern industrialists, politicians, and journalists to understand the demands of the dispossessed farm workers become FIAT employees (just as it raises interesting questions concerning the interaction between these workers and northern intellectuals like the Marxists of Potere Operaio). Here too, then, there is a strong sense of "immutabilita della storia" (Ferretti xii), although it is not clear that this is simply a question of a straightforward recurrence of the same.

Like the Rossi of La voce nel pozzo, with his motif of a violence that echoes from generation to generation, Consolo often seems open to the charge of a fatalism that conceives of history as mere repetition.

In fact, the closing pages of Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio suggest a somewhat more subtle view of history, whose analogies with the central motifs of Lo spasimo di Palermo are worth considering. Simply put, the Consolo of Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio portrays history not as a circle, but as a spiral. Not only does Mandralisca devote his extensive spare time to studying the spiral shapes of snailhouses, but the prison he visits in the novel's closing chapter is also spiral-shaped. Mandralisca informs us that the Latin for "snailhouse" is "cochlea," which immediately evokes associations of the human ear, and hence of southern Italy's oral culture. More importantly, the spiral-shaped prison provides an image for a conception of history as neither linear nor circular, but both--a notion that foreshadows the generational motif of Lo spasimo di Palermo by accomodating both repetition and change. Like the Sicilian prison, history is for Consolo something that "non possiede scale o scaloni in verticale, linee rette, spigoli, angoli o quadrati, tutto si svolge in cerchio, in volute, in seni e awolgimenti" (Consolo, Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio 141). There may be progress, or at least transformation, but not of a linear sort; there are also "echi," as in Rossi's well (Consolo, Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio 43).

While a comprehensive account of Consolo's strategies for

conceptualizing Italian history and their development throughout his work would transcend the bounds of this paper, the brief sketch just offered ought to have indicated that it is far from clear one can discern a clear break between La ferita dell'aprile and Lo spasimo di Palermo. At the risk of being overly schematic, it might even be suggested that the generational motif of Lo spasimo di Palermo can be read as a synthesis of the narrative strategies employed in La ferita dell'aprile and Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio, combining as it does the theme of a conflictual relationship between the young and the old with the concept (already implicit in that of the generation) of persistence-through-change. A generational conflict is always a conflict between subjects both distinct and inextricably connected. In this sense, the generational motif, like that of the echo, allows for a subtle polemic against any rhetoric of the radically new. The history of postwar Italy, at once tumultous and characterized by the constancy of organized illegal violence, has long been associated with the burden of what is frequently called "trasformismo"--a constant rearranging of the political scene (evident in the rapid succession of cabinets and political parties) that fails conspicuously to escape certain recurring sociopolitical problems. It is against trasformismo and the rhetoric of easily achieved transformations that Consolo and Rossi formulate their narratives. Perhaps the motif of patricide in Lo spasimo di Palermo provides the clearest example of how Consolo contests such rhetoric. It will be recalled that in this novel, the motif of patricide (metaphorical and actual) is associated with both father and son. There is considerable irony in this. For if the motif of patricide

seems at first to suggest a radical break with the past, then by making the father himself patricidal Consolo reminds his readers that the idea of a radical break is itself far from new--thereby questioning its validity, and ultimately urging us to conceptualize history neither as linear nor as circular, but in terms of an ongoing interaction between past and present, progress and return.

It is worth stressing, in conclusion, that there are certain dangers associated with the use of the generational motif as a strategy for historicizing postwar Italy's insurrectionary violence. There is the danger of falling back, from the sophisticated model of history as a spiral movement articulated in Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio, into the more crudely fatalist vision evident in such phrases as Rossi's "Nulla dunque chela terra non avesse gia visto" (Rossi, La voce nel pozzo 178). While Italian history in many ways makes necessary a polemic against the promise of a transformation as radical as it is easily achieved, the mere persistence of certain sociopolitical phenomena (such as that of organized insurrectionary violence) does not justify a blurring of the stark differences between groups such as the mafia, the partisans, and the Red Brigades. To be sure, all three of these groups are characterized by clandestinity and the use of extralegal violence, yet it hardly needs to be stressed that their motivations and programs are quite different, as are the details of their strategies. This is evident, for example, in the displacement, by the Red Brigades, of the partisan strategy of rural resistance (still endorsed by Feltrinelli) by the very different

strategy of the "urban guerrilla." And while some degree of scepticism is certainly appropriate when dealing with the rhetoric of revolution formulated by postwar Italy's left-wing activists and the insurrectionary groups that took shape in their shadow, it remains true that this rhetoric was not a sham but a genuine credo, whereas the parasitic character of the mafia has always placed it at odds with the project of a profound sociopolitical transformation. Sciascia's point that the Red Brigades were useful to a conservative political culture should not lead one to conflate their program with the conservatism of both the mafia and large sections of Italy's political establishment. One needs to remain sensitive to the fact that the use of the generational motif always carries with it the danger of stressing the theme of continuity over that of change. In an important survey of the Italy of the 1980s, Paolo Virno has emphasized that, continuities notwithstanding, this period was indeed one of radical transformation, and the same could be said of the entire postwar period: the dissolution of southern Italy's rural culture and the ensuing migration of southerners to the industrial north during the 1950s and the 1960s were qualitatively new, as were the student movement, the restructuring of the Italian economy in the late 1970s, and the political events of Tangentopoli and their aftermath (Virno 1997). The challenge posed by this history to the writers who set out to represent it is that of grasping its character as a site of contestation for a plurality of political subjects that mutually transform one another--a site of contestation in which the old never reappears without being contaminated by the new.

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Notes

(1) For a more detailed account of insurrectionary leftism in postwar Italy, supplemented by interviews with many of the protagonists, see Zavoli. For useful background on the left-wing culture from which the Red Brigades emerged, see Balestrini and Moroni.

(2) On these machinations and their historical background in the USA, see Caute; Smith; and Holt and Van De Velde. The statement by Tom Clark is cited in Caute 15.

(3) See Agee and Wolf; and Colby.

(4) See Bettini.

(5) On the use of torture, see Moretti 248. On prison violence in general, and on the practice of making prisoners "'run the gauntlet" in particular, see the interview with Andrea Morelli in Marco Turco's 1996 TV documentary Vite sospese.

(6) While they cannot be analyzed here, it is worth mentioning three novels in which the generational motif is central: Natalia Ginzburg's Caro Michele, Ferdinando Camon's Storia di Sirio.

Parabola per la nuova generazione, and Erri de Luca's Aceto, arcobaleno.

(7) The most comprehensive published survey of the relevant German literature is by Hoeps.