‘Far consentire l'animo di chi legge’: Manzoni, the novel and the issue of literary identification. Analysis of the digression on ‘romanzi d'amore’ in Fermo e Lucia

Abstract

This article examines a passage from Alessandro Manzoni's Fermo e Lucia (1821–23), the so-called digression on ‘romanzi d'amore’, where Manzoni pondered the appropriateness of writing of love in novels. By analysing Manzoni's argument closely, in particular his statement that the danger lies in letting the readers identify with the feelings of the character and therefore confusing their world with that of fiction, the article aims to underline Manzoni's perspicacity in realising, first, that the dynamic of identification is at the heart of the novel and, secondly, that the new mode of reading introduced by the novel and based on empathic identification was going to throw into crisis the pedagogical and moralistic conception of art, of Platonic origin, in which he believed. Hence, the article looks at the digression on ‘romanzi d'amore’ as the first manifestation of Manzoni's rejection of the novel as a genre; not simply a formulaic repetition of the leitmotif of the novel as a corruptive genre but the beginning of a meditation that anticipated by almost 30 years the impasse declared by Manzoni in the essay Del romanzo storico (1850): a reflection on the novel within the novel which makes Manzoni's work – intended in its complexity from Fermo e Lucia to I promessi sposi – not only one of the best examples of self-reflexive novels but also an antinovel in the most radical sense of the word, that is a novel that disavows itself.