SF Criticism in Italy, In and Out of the University*
[*Grateful thanks to Dr Marie-Christine Hubert, who translated the quotations
from Italian. For a better understanding of the following pages, I refer the reader to my
previous reviews on Italian SF criticism published by SFS, especially to "25
Years of SF Criticism in Italy (1953-1978)," SFS #19 (1979):320-26.]
SF criticism in Italy is taking well-meaning but not always impressive steps forward.
At the university level, there is still a strong inclination to consider SF as an
intriguing but basically ambiguous field of research, placed somewhere between mass-media
culture--boosted up, but also disgraced, by the Spielberg gang--and contemporary debris
derived from nobler literary loins (gothic and utopian fiction, etc.).
The intensive and sometimes exclusive use of Todorov's Introduction à la
Littérature Fantastique is a clear token of a certain kind of only partially
informed attitude towards SF. From this point of view a very interesting book is I
piaceri dell 'immaginazione, edited by Bianca Maria Pisapia (University of Rome),
which collects a fair number of good essays on theoretical problems connected with the
definition of "fantastic" and "fantastic literature" and on a few English and
American authors belonging to this vast area. We move from Swift to the Gothic novel, from Brockden Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne to Mark Twain and James, but SF as a recognizable
entity (I don't say genre) never materializes, not even as a part of the 19th-century
American romance (despite the works of, say, Bruce Franklin and David Ketterer). In an
ambitious and elaborate essay by Stefano Gnisci "Reale Immaginario Fantastico"
(Pisapia, pp. 36-62) "so-called science-fiction" (p. 59) is simply one of the many
tunes the complex relationship between Realism and Imagination (quizzically labelled
RI) is played upon: "a polymorphous universe in which the fabulous and the gothic,
romance and science-fiction, utopian and 'black visions,' the supernatural and terror, the
esoteric and the enigmatic, ancient times and the future meet and are tossed together on
the waves of the RI sea" (p. 55). A mare magnum indeed--or rather, a Poesque mare
tenebrarum. According to Dr. Gnisci, any critical attempt aimed at creating artificial
boundaries among genres belonging to the same "magnetic field" of 20th-century
Fantastic Literature should be defined through the two opposing forces represented
respectively by Kafka and by Borges. Other authors can only move towards the former focus
or the latter, be they called Wells or Meyrink, Lovecraft or Vonnegut, Lem or Calvino,
Tolkein or Stapledon (p. 61). (Lists made up at random are peculiarly patchy. What
happened, for example to Bulgakov or to Blixen?)
All the same, brilliant insights are extremely valuable when they stand on the solid
rock of an exhaustive bibliography--except that the bibliography devoted to SF at the end
of I piaceri dell 'immaginazione (pp. 310-16) is erratic and far from complete.
The contributions by Teresa de Lauretis, both in Italian and in English, are ignored,
while a team of popular journalists like De Turris and Fusco is given three entries (maybe
because they live and work in Rome?). Patrick Parrinder is excluded; James Blish is there
with More Issues at Hand, but not with the previous Issues at Hand.
Lois and Stephen Rose's The Shattered Ring is another casualty, as are old but
valuable texts such as Of Worlds Beyond by L.A. Eshback and Science Fiction
Now edited by Basil Davenport. Although
SFS is dutifully mentioned, I cannot find any
hint whatsoever of Foundation or Extrapolation. And why is Ketterer's New
Worlds for Old placed in a separate section on "Anglo-American Literature,"
together with the "classical" works of Fiedler and Levin?
So SF is seen simply as a small and not particularly exciting area of
"Imagination," but is also considered--even more unfortunately--only as a corrupted
development of the great utopian and dystopian tradition. This is apparent when one
remembers that in the wealth of symposia and publications devoted to Orwell in the crucial
year 1984, nobody in Italy really thought it worthwhile to deal with the relationship
between Orwell and post-war SF. Stefano Manferlotti (University of Naples), author of
brilliant essays and books on Orwell, gives equal room in his Anti-Utopia to
Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984, and Burgess's A Clockwork
Orange, but carefully avoids all allusions to the term science fiction. When he
quotes in a footnote Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, he does so while
strongly disagreeing with Suvin's "extremely risky [azzardatissima]
hypothesis" that literary utopia is "the sociopolitical subgenre of science
fiction" (p. 31). As a coherent consequence of this attitude, Dr. Manferlotti forgets the
vital anti-utopian line of SF in the '50s, to which attention was drawn by Kingsley Amis's
New Maps of Hell and, in Italy, by Ruggero Bianchi and myself at least. If
Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is actually mentioned by Manferlotti a couple of times,
no reference is made to Vonnegut's Player Piano and Cat's Cradle or to The
Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth, while Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar
is relegated to a footnote in a long list of modern utopias placed on imaginary islands.
Manferlotti, to be sure, limits himself to British authors and to a thorough analysis of
the British literary and cultural milieu. This decision, however, is itself questionable,
especially as it leads him to totally ignore Le Guin, (whose concept of "ambiguous
utopia" he nevertheless makes use of).
The problem is that even a good critic--such as Manferlotti undoubtedly is--adheres to
a credo that not only separates utopian/dystopian fiction from SF, but also considers SF
as a sort of bastard, worthless legacy (something like Lear's Edmund) good for a
quotation or two, and otherwise to be brushed aside. Most illustrative of this attitude is
the critical stance of Vita Fortunati (University of Bologna), Italy's most
brilliant and active scholar in the field of English utopian literature. Some of
her statements sound like a death-knell. In her lecture "Dall'utopia alla fantascienza," subsequently
published in an impressive miscellaneous volume on "the forms of" utopia, we
discover that SF writers are deeply interested in technological progress, but not in any
of its real political or social implications (p. 263). There is not even, in SF, a
convincing image of the future world, because "the present where the SF writer lives
and works is paradoxically presented as a society of the future, what we would call a
utopia" (p. 264). The scientific spirit itself, as embodied in SF, is utter sham:
really paradoxical that in science fiction, where one would expect to find a celebration
of science and a rational view of problems and phenomena, one finds instead a backsliding
towards magic, alchemy, or in any case something irrational and possibly even religious"
The fact that both Fortunati and Manferlotti underestimate the impact of H.G. Wells,
whose scientific romances constitute a necessary link between 19th-century utopias and
20th-century anti-utopias and SF, is critically dangerous in my opinion. Fortunati's
conclusions do not seem to focus on a particular work, nor to distinguish between average
products and novels by Vonnegut, Dick, Ballard, Le Guin, and the like: "We are
dealing with a type of literature which is generally conservative, consoling and evasive.
From a literary point of view it can be said that science-fiction novels, unlike utopian
novels, seem to be mostly the kind of work which cannot be read on more than one level"
Fortunati and Manferlotti are specialists in the field of English literature; and for
that reason, they tend to share the cautious response that many Italian intellectuals had
in the '50s and '60s (and that some of them still have today) towards a literary genre
largely identified with American mass culture and its cheap mythology of technological
triumph. On the other hand, scholars of North American literature, in Italy at least, seem
to be more open-minded (or, if you want, less selective). This is true not only of those
familiar to readers of SFS, Alessandro Portelli and myself, but also of Ruggero Bianchi
(University of Turin) and Franco La Polla (University of Bologna). By the same token,
however, their fascination with contemporary and post-modernist forms of culture pushes
these critics towards folk-music and urban experience (Portelli), avant-garde theater
(Bianchi), or TV and cinema (La Polla).
On the whole, and more so than within the Anglo-American academic circles, SF emerges
from Italian criticism of it as a rich cognitive mine. This is especially evident in the
interdisciplinary context of the travel narrative explored in a special issue (March
1984) of Il lettore di provincia, edited by Bruno Pompili (Professor of French
Literature, University of Bari). Among the contributors happily joining forces, we find V.
Fortunati on Paltock's Peter Wilkins, B. Pompili on Defontenay's Star,
B. Brunetti on the beautiful Cancroregina by Tommaso Landolfi, A. Catalano on
Calvino's Cosmicomics, C. Pagetti on P.K. Dick.
The one magazine in Italy wholly devoted to SF criticism is La città e le stelle,
for which I am editorially responsible. Five issues have, with much travail, appeared so
far, the last of them devoted exclusively to SF criticism. For better or for worse, La
città e le stelle is certainly the one place where university-based critics proceed
with their investigation of SF. Here I would particularly single out friends and
colleagues both at Pescara's Università Gabriele D'Annunzio (D. Guardamagna, L.
Marchetti, F. Marroni, O. Palusci, N. Vallorani, S. Valori) and elsewhere in Italy
(Laura Di Michele, Naples; Alessandro Monti, Turin; Fernando Porta, Salerno).
It is outside the academic field that we must look for other signs of vitality. There,
too, for reasons which sometimes seem in contrast to the academic highbrow attitude, but
which are equally limiting, SF is considered a minor subgenre. Consider the views of one
of our best writers and literary journalists, Oreste Del Buono, who has a strong and
active experience with comics, detective fiction, cinema, and TV, but maybe not as strong
a grasp of SF as a literary genre. Del Buono, in his Introduction to the Italian
translation of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, proclaims: "Suvin supports
the idea that SF is of noble origin, but, sad to say, SF, like most widely-distributed
subgenres produced by the publishing trade, has coarse if not ignoble origins" (p. vii).
The real starting point is, for him, Gernsback's popular science and fiction, and, later
on, the American pulp magazines of the '20s and '30s. For Del Buono, SF deserves no more
than a merely sociological approach, and Suvin's opus deals with an imaginary SF, not with
the "real" one: "Gernsback's SF is not really the SF to which Suvin has erected
a monument. There appear to be almost no links between the two. Yet the only historical
SF there is, is the coarse movement which was organized and publicized by the Luxemburg
electrical engineer among fanatics like himself" (p. xiv). In a witty but clearly
unsatisfactory conclusion to his Introduction, Del Buono invites his readers to consider The
Metamorphoses as an SF novel in itself, written by an SF hero: "Try seeing
Professor Darko Suvin as a character in or rather a hero of SF, one of those improbable
heroes whose boundless passion for SF leads them to choose a difficult or practically
impossible task and who, amazingly, reach their incredible goal" (pp. xiv-xv).
The translation of Suvin's Metamorphoses, printed in Italy by the highly
reputed publishing house "Il Mulino," has been a major event on its own, as
witnessed by the lively debate raised by reviewers for Alfabeta, L'Indice,
and Tuttolibri. Other critical books on SF have been recently translated into
Italian: Patricia S. Warrick's The Cybernetic Imagination in SF (as Il
romanzo del futuro. Computer e robot nella narrativa di fantascienza ), and
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night (as La fantascienza e la
signora Brown ). Works such as Robert M. Philmus's Into the
Unknown will, I hope, be translated in the future, thus allowing a fresher and less
conservative look at the link between utopia and SF and at the crucial role played by
Wells's "scientific romances" (which I tried to emphasize again in a recent
monograph of mine: I Marziani alla corte della Regina Vittoria ).
The one recent Italian critical study worthy of notice is that of Antonio Caronia, a
faithful connoisseur of SF, well known as a brilliant journalist, and, in the past, a
left-wing controversialist. His Il Cyborg, although indebted to Warrick's Cybernetic
Imagination, shows a great deal of personal research, together with a heartfelt
involvement with postmodernist French criticism (Baudrillard, Lyotard, etc.) and with
Freudian psychoanalysis. Il Cyborg is full of clever insights, though these are
not always developed, perhaps owing to the limited number of pages allowed to the author.
Caronia emphasizes the transformation of the human body into a sort of hybrid compound,
seeing this transfiguration as one of the peculiar aspects of SF. He also understands it
as a renewal of the old literary theme of identity: the fundamental differences between
human and machine, natural and artificial intellect, tend to disappear and to be replaced
by a new emotional and physical identity. "The body of man is naked" and the body of
the cyborg "could be an allusion to one of man's oldest dreams: that of immortality"
(p. 113). In Il Cyborg, the analysis of specific texts by C.L. Moore and James
Tiptree Jr., Pohl, and Dick, implicitly points once again to the limits of a certain kind
of criticism, where more often than not examples and quotations are carefully avoided, in
order to deal with a too-vague and all-encompassing crop of novels and authors.
Equally deplorable is the cyclical discovery of SF as a "new" field of research.
Maybe one has to deny historical development and knowledge of the past in order to be
"postmodern" and fashionable. This is the case with Antonio Fabozzi and Gianni
Mammoliti in their article in Alfabeta; they have to read David Brin to declare
that SF (literature and film alike, without any differentiation) is all about
"transmutation"--is, indeed, "a new modern nightmare" metaphorically
connected with terminal cancer and anthropological mutations.
Of course, problems of criticism arise not only in Italy and in the study of SF. What
Roger C. Schlobin complained about concerning the study of fantasy literature a couple of
years ago can be quoted here as a useful memento to all the discoverers of the no longer
"new" maps of hell, inside and outside the university: "People write about
fantasy as if they were the first ever to do so. They gallop over significant earlier
work, and each study cavorts in an intellectual vacuum. It's as if the past never
existed" ("The Scholarship of Incidence: The Unfortunate State of Fantasy
Scholarship," Extrapolation : 335).
Caronia, Antonio. Il Cyborg. Saggio sull'uomo artificiale. Roma-Napoli:
Edizioni Theoria, 1985. 127pp. L.7,000.
Del Buono, Oreste. "Introduzione all'edizione italiana" di Darko Suvin, Le
metamorfosi della fantascienza. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985. xv + 376pp. L.30,000.
Fabozzi, Antonio, & Gianni Mammoliti. "Transmutazione," Alfabeta,
85, (June 1986):28-29.
Fortunati, Vita. "Dall'utopia alla fantascienza: la metamorfosi di un genere
letterario," in L'utopia e le sue forme, ed. Nicola Matteucci (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1982), pp. 255-269 [353pp. in toto,] L.20,000.
Le Guin, Ursula K. La fantascienza e la signora Brown. [Trans. of The
Language of the Night]. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1985.
Manferlotti, Stefano. Anti-utopia. Huxley, Orwell, Burgess. Palermo: Sellerio,
1984. 157pp. L.12,000.
Pagetti, Carlo. I Marziani alla corte della Regina Vittoria. Pescara: Tracce,
Pisapia, Bianca Maria, ed. I piaceri dell'immaginazione. Studi sul fantastico.
Roma: Bulzoni, 1984. 340pp. L.24,000.
Pompili, Bruno. "Il viaggio e il suo racconto," special issue of Il lettore
di provincia, 56, (March 1984), 107pp. L.4,000.
Suvin, Darko. See Del Buono.
Warrick, Patricia S. Il romanzo del futuro. Computer e robot nella narrative di
fantascienza. [Trans. of The Cybernetic Imagination in SF]. Bari: Dedalo,
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