Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality

A Case of Possible Difference

Derek Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351906678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Derek Duncan's timely study is the first book in English to examine constructions of male homosexuality in Italian literature. In admirably clear and elegant prose, Duncan analyzes texts ranging from the 1890s through the 1990s. He brings canonical authors like D'Annunzio and Pasolini together with under-appreciated writers like Comisso, and also looks at less conventionally literary genres. Duncan takes on the thorny theoretical issues surrounding questions of gay identity and also provides a sound historical context for his discussion of how Italian narrative sheds light on Italian homosexuality and on the broader issues attending contemporary sexuality, including complicating factors such as race. While the early texts considered were produced at a historical moment when 'homosexuality' as a culturally meaningful entity had yet to crystallize, recent autobiographies show the authors reflecting explicitly on questions of gay identity and what it means to be a homosexual male in present-day Italy. In charting the emergence of the homosexual in twentieth-century Italy, however, Duncan's focus is less on questions of identity than on the meaning attributed to sex between men in the broader cultural context. His book is a significant contribution to Italian literary criticism and to gender, gay, and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

Choice Objects: The Bodies of Gabriele D’Annunzio

Luigi Settembrini (1813–76) was one of the great heroes of Risorgimento Italy. He spent the years leading up to Unification in prison because of his opposition to the Bourbon regime. After his release, he took up the Chair of Italian Literature at Naples University and served as a senator in parliament. During his incarceration, he wrote a homoerotic novella, ‘I neoplatonici’ [The Neoplatonists], that remained unpublished until 1977. Benedetto Croce, the Neapolitan Idealist philosopher, whose work has shaped much twentieth-century Italian thought, was instrumental in suppressing the text in case the nature of its content tainted both the national hero and the national cause (Settembrini 1977: 11). ‘Masking’ its author, ‘I neoplatonici’ is presented as a translation from the Greek. It is the story of two boys who grow up together, fall in love, and learn to take temperate delight in each other’s body. Their philosophy teacher approves of their relationship, citing countless Greek heroes who loved boys in their youth. Some, he adds, carried on doing so well into maturity and old age. The boys’ relationship is premised on equality and reciprocity. They support each other in study and in war, free from wasteful pastimes and emotions. While they both eventually marry, in obedience, it is noted, to the laws of their fatherland, they occasionally sleep together in fond embrace, well into old age.

It is difficult to know exactly what Settembrini’s novella has to say about homosexual practice and relationships in nineteenth-century Italy at least on a referential level. It does reveal the availability of ancient Greece as a mechanism through which sex between men could receive some form of public articulation. It also goes significantly beyond the classical pederastic model with its hierarchies of age, power, and pleasure to intimate the vision of a long-lasting erotic intimacy where the object choice is not exhausted by sex, but is anchored in an emotional attachment to a specific individual. The patriotic dimension of the relationship perhaps comes as a surprise, but in many respects the contours of the relationship are very familiar.

But to what extent is such familiarity misleading? The authors of Omosessuali moderni, a recent study focusing largely on homosexual comportment in contemporary Italy, stake their claim for the modernity of the objects of their study on the basis of their irrevocable difference from homosexuals of days gone by. According to their definition, ‘modern homosexuals’ have sex with other homosexuals rather than heterosexuals (of either gender); they no longer imitate the behaviour and dress of the opposite sex; sexual activity is not seen as active or passive but as hetero- or homosexual; relationships are based on equality and reciprocity whereas once they were structured round inequalities of social and sexual authority; the days of the furtive encounter are gone and the identities of modern homosexuals are reinforced by a rich and exclusive social and institutional network. While this definition seems to possess a high degree of intelligibility, I would suggest that the stark, supposedly transparent alterity of the past and the sheer knowability of the present are claims that, at the every least, need to be tested. How exactly do we know what it was like then? What indeed is it like now? What residues remain that invite confirmation of difference, or indeed continuity, between then and now?

While Hellenic culture gave Settembrini a means of articulating a version of homosexuality, its elitist model was less influential than that of positivist science in the bourgeois society of post-unification Italy. ¹Unification in 1870 had not pacified Italy. In the decades that followed, civil unrest accompanied demographic change to undermine confidence in the heterogeneous body that Italy had become. As part of a more general attempt to take the country in hand, a group of anthropologists, mostly with medical training, came to the fore in the effort to map and make sense of a population whose swarming diversity was perceived to be a threat to the nation. Dominant in this group was Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) whose studies over a number of decades, while never uncontested, trained social thinking towards the significance of the symptomatic body and its constitutive role in social organization. He focussed on the bodies of exceptional individuals whose distance from the norm was revealed precisely by the abnormality of their embodiment. Keen to measure and photograph forcibly compliant subjects, Lombroso believed atavism and degeneracy were the keys to understanding inappropriate physical difference. While the notion of atavism imagined certain somatic features to represent throwbacks to earlier stages in evolutionary development, degeneracy indicated pathological formations resulting from social diseases such as alcoholism or syphilis. Their broader import was, as Mary Gibson points out, that ‘both presumed that all individuals could be ranked on an evolutionary scale teleologically leading towards the apex of civilization, marked by the virtues of the white, European middle classes’ (2002: 21). Lombroso’s apparent literalness in making the material body the absolute marker of the national health moved easily into the terrain of metaphor. David Forgacs has analysed the ways in which social investigation in late nineteenth-century Italy imagined the nation as a rhetorical body with a frighteningly real propensity for physical disease leading to moral and political disorder. The bodies of the socially undesirable – the urban poor, people from the South, women – were figured as so much polluting, diseased waste imperilling the integrity of the idealized nation whose co-ordinates were reflected in the normative frame of the middle-class man. The attempt to document or catalogue the nation was shot through with fears of contamination and infection that proximity to those categories of contagion entailed.

In his effort to catalogue abnormality, Lombroso cast his net wide. As such, those he called ‘men of genius’, whose heightened capacities in one area were inevitably accompanied by diminished potentialities in others, rubbed shoulders with homicidal criminals and the Calabrian peasantry. Women generally were never very far from the demonic figure of the prostitute whose depraved sensuality incarnated the female criminal tendency. Daniel Pick is correct to underline that much of Lombroso’s work was driven by the ‘chimera of national unity’ (1989: 119), but I would want to shift emphasis to suggest that his work was also fuelled by a perception of a crisis in reproductive sexuality. Atavistic or degenerate traits were the unpredictable symptoms of a heterosexuality gone wrong. Men of genius were thought to be sterile and criminals had infantile, feminine natures that drew them to pederasty. That the criminal deviancy of female prostitutes was thought to be perceptible in their masculine features suggests that heterosexuality had indeed been perverted.

It is in this context that homosexuality comes to be viewed as an element in a more general pattern of social disorder. In ‘Du parallelisme entre l’ homosexualite e la criminalitee inée’, a short article published in 1906, Lombroso makes explicit his view that homosexuality, as an atavistic symptom, is akin to criminality. The proof for this is necessarily found on the body itself – at least in some cases. Conceding that there is such a thing as an occasional homosexual who will engage in same-sex activities for a limited period only, his attention focuses on the ‘born invert’ who, in some 40 per cent of cases, has bodily characteristics, typical of the other sex. In men, these include the absence of body hair and the capacity to lactate. The rest, that is the majority, of homosexuals have no particular traits that give them away. Without exception though, all homosexuals share a common psychology. Yet it is worth noting that for Lombroso, this would be symptomatic of the somatic type rather than an aspect of what a hundred years later might be called subjectivity. Invariably amoral, usually criminal, the distinguishing feature of this common psychology is its ‘strangeness’. Homosexuals are prone, amongst other things, to jealousy, telling lies, spreading gossip, and, in addition, can claim a heightened aesthetic sense. A lot of them work in the theatre. The innate nature of homosexuality leads Lombroso to advocate leniency in dealing with homosexuals for after all, the parents – epileptic, neurotic, or alcoholic – are to blame. Whereas Settembrini figured his boys as ideal citizens, Lombroso clearly does not. The scant documentation that has been discovered relating to homosexual activity in this period backs him up. But as these records come from police or medical sources, this conclusion is not surprising (Wanrooij 1990: 191–3; Barberi and Colombi 2001: 251–4).

One of the striking aspects about Lombroso’s admittedly short article is that the homosexual is defined in terms of an ontology that appears to exclude any consideration of sexual practice as an a priori determining factor in the attribution of something like a sexual identity. The physical and psychological characteristics denoting homosexuality adumbrated by him appear both familiar and strange, some ‘modern’, some not. The charge of effeminacy still has some currency although that of lactation probably less so. What is perhaps most interesting about Lombroso’s work in retrospect is its obsessive interest in the human body as a social marker, and the value he attributes to reading it accurately as a political imperative. In this sense what the modern reader might perceive as an inaccurate, or indeed unintelligible, interpretation of the body needs to be tempered with a conscious hiatus in understanding that mirrors the temporal gap between the articulation of the interpretation and its reception.

It is with this suspension of the confident claim to know what the past was like that for the remainder of this chapter I will focus on the work of Gabriele D’Annunzio and the attention he pays to a symptomatic reading of the male body. While it may seem odd to begin an investigation of gay sexuality with a reading of a famously heterosexual writer, there are some good reasons for doing so. D’Annunzio came to prominence as a writer at the same time as ‘modern homosexuals’ were coming to the fore. Although he does not write about them, he does, as Barbara Spackman has demonstrated, belong to the same cultural climate as Lombroso, sharing a common repertoire of ideological assumptions, participating ‘in the decadent rhetoric of sickness and health, decay and degeneration, pathology and nomalcy’ (1989: 32). Spackman traces D’Annunzio’s genealogical affiliations with Lombroso that intersect in unpredictable fashion with Baudelaire, Nordau and others to muddy any suggestion of paternal influence or inheritance. Unlike Lombroso who tries to hold difference at a distance, D’Annunzio prefers the terrain of abnormality. His valorization of sickness and the symptomatic eviration that afflicts his upper-class male protagonists free him to cross boundaries of gender. Yet such crossings do not disturb the choice of sexual object. In this sense D’Annunzio’s men remain resolutely straight. Bearing in mind Lombroso’s aetiology of homosexuality, however, they are less securely positioned. Settembrini’s configuration of eroticized male friendship also calls them, retrospectively, into question. Homosexual traits, I will suggest, characterize D’Annunzio’s men. I will not suggest that they are homosexual in any modern sense of the term. They are more accurately symptomatic of a crisis in late nineteenth-century normative heterosexuality, and the vicissitudes of genealogy will be a recurrent theme of what follows.

D’Annunzio writes about the kind of men Lombroso cautions against. They worry his readers. As Spackman observes in the conclusion to her study: ‘[D’Annunzio’s] rhetoric of sickness provided the occasion and alibi for an alterity that positivism labelled criminal, that literary critics have found offensive, and that Fascism, with its celebration of virility, found indigestible’ (1989: 215). It is my suspicion that the unease this alterity provokes is due in no small measure to the fact that D’Annunzio does not keep alterity at arm’s length, and also to its uncanny proximity to homosexuality, at least as a discursive formation.² Unlike Lombroso and his associates whose explorations of abnormality veiled their own normative embodiment, D’Annunzio purposely subjects his own body and its alterity to scrutiny. It is an alterity that is explicated, as I will show, in social and gendered terms. However, rather than emphasize the feminization of D’Annunzio’s male protagonists and invite consideration of the effects of this rhetoric of degendering, I look instead at the ways in which masculine identity is articulated in the relationships between and amongst men themselves. I am interested here in how the homosocial spectrum is carved up.

By anticipating the incoherence of the D’Annunzian body, I want, amongst other things, to demonstrate the value, and even the necessity, of bearing in mind Teresa de Lauretis’s insistent conflation of gender, sexuality, and the body. Critics, as I’ve said already, can spend too much time establishing the boundaries of what are not separable entities. While this book is broadly about ‘something like’ male homosexuality, what I aim to do in this chapter is propose an alternative approach to the work of definition by looking at the perplexing fluidity of masculine boundaries in D’Annunzio73x2019;s work without trying to resolve their fluidity by naming them. I want to show that while he writes almost obsessively about men, their bodies and their interest in each other’s bodies, he does so in a way that invites, but also refutes, the confident use of terms such as ‘homoerotic’ or even ‘homosexual’. D’Annunzio’s articulation of masculinity is deeply ambiguous. By that I do not mean to imply that he or any of his male characters should be ‘unmasked’ and revealed on some level as really gay. The invocation of Settembrini and Lombroso is not to offer an interpretive key. Rather, the idea is that the attention D’Annunzio pays to the significance and representation of the male body in itself challenges conventional expectations that the male body remain unremarkable, because unremarked upon. It results in a remarkability that is wholly inconclusive.

The Writer’s Body

Few writers can have been so famously embodied as Gabriele D’Annunzio. Always eager to remain in the public eye, he courted fame, and infamy, through repeated acts of self-dramatization that called into question the status of his body. At 17, for example, he ensured his celebrity as a promising young poet by reporting his untimely death in a Roman newspaper. His heterosexuality became a common cause. The orchestrated, and widely reported, scandal of his elopement and marriage, and subsequently, the publicity that inevitably accompanied his liaisons left little doubt about his sexual preferences. In 1883, the publication of a scandalous collection of verse, Intermezzo di rime, led him to be branded a pornographer in the eyes of the respectable and aspiring middle classes (Wanrooij 1990: 39). The great nationalist poet Carducci as a result withdrew his support for the young writer (Woodhouse 1998: 46). His most famous lover was the celebrated actress, Eleonora Duse. Isadora Duncan referred to him as ‘perhaps the most wonderful lover of our times’ (Alatri 1983: 46). As a pastime, he was keen on tableaux. He was an astonishingly charismatic political orator. In later life, his heroic wartime exploits added a different dimension to his public persona, proving him to be as courageous in battle as he was victorious in love. Such gaudy displays of masculinity can, however, be suspect, particularly in a man with such an overt fondness for theatricality and display, ever eager to be photographed, avid for public recognition. His endless quest for the public gaze meant that his body was necessarily on constant display. This body did sometimes appear at odds with the extreme expressions of virility he was associated with. The prominent Neapolitan publisher, Edoardo Scarfoglio in his memoir, Il libro di Don Chisciotte, paints a distinctly feminine portrait of the young D’Annunzio shortly after he arrived in Rome: ‘when I first saw that young lad with his curly hair and sweetly feminine eyes and when he spoke to me and introduced himself in a voice that was also quite womanly, I was taken aback and gave a start, strangely impressed’ (1920: 23). Scarfoglio was not alone in being physically impressed by the charming Abruzzese who soon conquered Rome with ‘his girl-like appearance, words and gestures’ (24). Success, however, turned the ‘girl’ into a ‘flirt’ and soon the young Gabriele had given himself over to the mob, surrounding himself with ‘vulgar youths and clerks’ before finally submitting to the ‘the flattery of women’ (28). Scarfoglio viewed D’Annunzio’s corrupted femininity as signifying his rejection of art and his absorption into the cultural mass market of Rome in the 1880s.

Scarfoglio’s reading of D’Annunzio’s body invents a social narrative of gender and class disaffiliation that reflects the disordered state of the nation and can securely be located in the discursive anxieties about the national body analysed by Forgacs (1992). Yet Scarfoglio probably goes further than he intends in suggestively positioning the degendered D’Annunzio as a lesbian, the feminized object of female desire. As yet D’Annunzio’s lesbianism has warranted little serious discussion; it is, however, worth considering for it perhaps goes beyond the emphatic masculinity and the luxuriant effeminacy with which he is contradictorily associated.³ In Di me a me stesso, a collection of fragments published after his death, D’Annunzio exhibits an array of gendered identifications initiated in the body itself. Whereas in 1916 he emphatically declares: ‘I was given a harsh, wild strength: the rage of the male, and there is nothing feminine in me’ (1990: 79), he later displays a greater ambivalence. In a piece dated September 1927, he notes how the sexual act abolishes difference: ‘at the height of sexual pleasure, the self is wiped out, the individual disappears. Both sexes swell and grow immense. In the external folds of the rose, fingers search for humanity’s root. Fingers around the erect rod grasp the world’s pivot. Appearances flow and surge over sempiternal ideas. In our union, all unions…’ (100–101). The power of the sexual act to erase difference and then to permit new identifications is discovered two years later when, as the result of a particular movement of his partner’s body, he enjoys the illusion of becoming a woman: ‘I am in her and pressed against her, thigh against thigh, breast against breast. She moves to rub against me. She thinks she is a woman with another woman. At last she utters a name: Sélysette. I abet her tribad fantasy. The strength of my imagination turns me into a woman. I myself plead with her to call me ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality: Something like a Subject
• 1 Choice Objects: The Bodies of Gabriele D’Annunzio
• 2 Race and the Fictions of Homosexuality
• 3 Travelling with Fascism: The ‘Strange Couplings’ of Giovanni Comisso
• 4 The Little Boys’ Room: Pasolini’s Approach to Homosexuality
• 5 Pier Vittorio Tondelli: Nationalizing the Gay Body
• 6 Speaking Out: The Subject of Gay Autobiography
• Afterword Possible Subjects
• Bibliography
• Index