Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity: From the Scapigliatura to the Futurist Movement, 1857–1912

It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Charles Baudelaire's poetry and essays on the formation of European literature between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century as well as on the ways in which it has been conceptualized critically. His collection Les Fleurs du mal (1857) certainly belongs in any top-ten list of groundbreaking modernist works, not least for the way in which its prosecution and subsequent censure short-circuited the distance between art and life. Likewise, his famous definition of modernity as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, that half of art of which the other is the eternal and immutable” in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” has been hugely influential and is an almost inevitable starting point for any theory of modernism. It is therefore quite surprising that the book under review did not exist already—that is, that we still lack a detailed exploration of the influence of Baudelaire on his Italian contemporaries and followers. With Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Alessandro Cabiati thus fills a significant gap in our literary history, but this is only the first and most obvious distinction of a study that marks a major contribution to scholarship on the Scapigliatura and nineteenth-century Italian poetry in general.Cabiati begins his investigation precisely with modernity, noting the semantic complexity of this term when applied to aesthetics by Baudelaire and his contemporaries. In this context, it is contiguous with decadence, another term that would enjoy great popularity as a critical category: in Paul Verlaine's well-known description of Baudelaire himself, modernity is associated with “the refinements of an excessive civilisation,” and modern man is characterized by “sharpened and vibrant senses” and a “painfully subtle mind” (2). But there is another way in which Baudelaire's poetry can be described as modern, and that has to do with its realism, which, however, in the context of the debate on poetry in the 1850s and ’60s had less to do with a technique to represent the world and more with a contemptuous critique of the choice of supposedly “unhealthy” or “immoral” subjects, so that, in a circular fashion, realism and decadence come to overlap. From their earliest works, the Scapigliati followed Baudelaire's lesson “at a conceptual, lexical and stylistic level” (21), and the influence of the French poet produced the first truly modern movement in Italian poetry, the first poetic experience to both appropriate and reflect critically on the eclipse of “the religious, aesthetic and sentimental values of Romanticism” by “the forceful intrusion of science and positivist philosophy in literature” (17). The modernity of the Scapigliati thus lies—among other things—in the fact that they are the first generation of poets to attempt to come to terms with a world abandoned by transcendental values.While the book rests on strong theoretical and methodological foundations, lucidly laid out in the first chapter, Cabiati is at his best in his detailed and insightful close readings of the poems that best exemplify his argument. Teasing out the complex network of references that traverse the spectrum of nineteenth-century culture, from classical studies to the burgeoning biological sciences, he demonstrates both their debt to their Baudelairean sources and influences and their original contribution to a fully modern poetic discourse, where style and diction span from the sublime to the trivial and where the aesthetic opens up to all human experiences.At the center of the volume are the works of the three leading figures of poetic Scapigliatura, Arrigo Boito, Giovanni Camerana and Emilio Praga, with a special focus on the decade of the 1860s, when their collaboration and personal and poetic dialogue was most intense. Each chapter considers a series of themes, often articulated through recurrent formal devices, that cut across the production of the three authors. In chapter 2, for instance, the rhetorical figures of the oxymoron and of juxtaposition, already extensively employed by Baudelaire starting with the very title of Les Fleurs du mal, provide the stylistic instruments for a poetic practice that relativizes and subjectivizes the aesthetic experience, coherently with Baudelaire's conception of beauty as extracting the eternal from the transitory. Here Cabiati examines, among others, the numerous works by the French poet and his Italian followers that, by deploying simultaneously contrasting discourses such as the realist language of medicine and scientific anatomy and the idealist vocabulary about the beauty of nature, express a vision of the modern social and cultural world as inevitably fractured and fragmented. The wholeness of classical art does not belong to modernity, as comes out clearly in Cabiati's detailed reading of Boito's 1862 poem “Un torso,” where it can only be the result of the artificial and, in the end, unauthentic work of the “restauratore” rather than of the artist. In chapter 3, Boito's allegorical fairy tale Re Orso, first published in 1864 and variously revised, is the point of entry into a discussion of how the Scapigliati gave poetic form to the psychological dysfunctions of the modern subject by drawing upon a rich literary lineage that can be traced back to Edgar Allan Poe (again, of course, by way of Baudelaire) and to early nineteenth-century psychiatry.The fifth and final chapter fast-forwards to the beginning of the twentieth century, convincingly arguing for a direct line of continuity between the Scapigliati and the earliest examples of futurist poetry, in particular the 1912 anthology I poeti futuristi. The debt of the futurists, in general, and of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in particular, to symbolist poetry is well known, as is the transitional nature of I poeti futuristi, poised between the experimentalism called for by the introductory “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista” and the relative traditionalism of the anthologized poems, the modernity of which does not go much further than the use of free verse. However, as Cabiati rightly points out, this disconnection has been more often noted by critics than carefully analyzed. A close reading of the poems by major and minor futurists of the first hour collected in the volume—Corrado Govoni, Mario Bètuda, Auro D'Alba, Armando Mazza, Marinetti himself—shows a frequent recourse to scientific imagery, macabre subjects, and mental and psychological states derived from the Scapigliati, who constitute an important element of mediation between Baudelaire and the futurists. The crucial difference lies in the fact that while the Scapigliati, and Baudelaire before them, turn their attention to the “organic or symbolic debris of the decadence of modern times identified in progress and commercialisation,” and therefore lay bare the dark side of that scientific and technological modernity, the futurists, on the contrary, celebrate “the beauty and speed of the machine” (274) as a means to achieve a new form of aesthetic experience.If I have any quibbles with this otherwise excellent book, it is that, while all quotes from Italian and French are translated, those from Baudelaire's poems are not—an especially awkward omission in a book addressed primarily to Italianists. Aside from this truly minor matter, I could not recommend Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity strongly enough. It is, without a doubt, a major contribution to the history and aesthetics of Italian modern(ist) poetry.

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