In Defense of the Rose

Abstract

Any history of postmodernism would by necessity include a strong chapter on Italy. In architecture, literature, philosophy and theory, Italian intellectuals have made decisive contributions to the discourse of postmodernism. By the same token, any history of the case against postmodernism would also include a strong, and growing, chapter on Italy. The hero figures of the former narrative, the likes of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Gianni Vattimo, are the villains of the latter. Over a comparatively short span of time, the postmodern has gone from being a pluralistic philosophy of tolerance and emancipation that freed men and women from dogma and offered them a model of humanity based on dialogue and openness to difference to a politically suspect and irresponsible philosophy guilty of reneging on the duty to look reality squarely in the eye, denounce its evils and suggest solutions. Underlying much of the negative reaction on the part of Italian critics, scholars and authors is a sense that the postmodern is not suited to the political and ethical demands of the twenty-first century. The blurb on the front cover of the volume edited by Hanna Serkowska, Finzione, cronaca, realta. Scambi, intrecci e prospettive nella narrativa italiana contemporanea, makes clear what lies behind the move away from the postmodern towards a more realistic approach: “After the postmodern, a new season of commitment and reality in the novel.” In her own introduction to the collection, Serkowska writes: “more than exhausting writers, postmodern literature in Italy—the kind of literature that prized the aesthetic rather than the ethical, deconstructed meaning, and replaced real commitment with irony, and was partial to citationism, rewriting, intertextual games—had exhausted readers reminded of the real by events like September 11th.”1 She is echoed by Gianluigi Simonetti who, in an essay on literature and the armed struggle in Italy, has written: “postmodern hegemony implied and almost theorized, from the thematic point of view, the emptiness of events; it rejected arguments that were too realistic or smoothed over reality’s rough edges,” and led to a refusal to contemplate the urgent and pressing social and political questions of the day.2 Rather than adopt a committed stance, postmodern literature had chosen to play, remain distant, and eschew engagement with a reality that in the twenty-first century has become ever more real, dangerous and life-threatening.3