Nella prefazione all’edizione italiana del Rosso e il nero di Stendhal (1913), Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960), il traduttore del romanzo, presenta alcune sue opinioni relative al necessario ...rinnovamento culturale e letterario che costituirà poi il suo Novecentismo, difeso nella rivista letteraria “900” (1926-1927). Il presente articolo esplora come Bontempelli, attraverso le osservazioni sulla vita di Stendhal e la tragica esperienza di Julien Sorel, traccia un parallelo implicito con il proprio momento storico, considerando il ruolo dello spirito rivoluzionario delle avanguardie in tale rinnovamento. Tuttavia, implica anche che ciò debba essere controbilanciato dall’idea classica di arte e letteratura, dove la tradizione è vista come un’intima e profonda continuità tra manifestazioni di inaspettata novità. Anche se Bontempelli simpatizzerà in seguito con il Futurismo italiano, è proprio tale equilibrio che rende la sua proposta culturale e letteraria per la “Terza Epoca”, il Novecentismo, unica nel panorama letterario italiano. Questo saggio considera i suoi scritti del 1913 nel contesto della società di massa emergente, e quindi gli aggiustamenti editoriali e linguistici che furono necessari per l’edizione, e li paragona contemporaneamente alle riflessioni bontempelliane fatte sul tema negli anni a seguire.
From the earliest pages, Massimo Bontempelli’s La Vita operosa (1921) seems to mix the characters of an autobiography, a narrative text and, it could be said, of an autofiction. The first is ...certainly the re-enactment by the narrator of some facts of his own existence, the reminder attributed to the memories, the autobiographical pact, justified by the subtitle (Avventure del ’19 a Milano), established with the readers, often called in question. Various situations and characters, however, are clearly unlikely: the Daimon with whom he maintains constant dialogue, the golden “waterfalls” pouring into the streets, the magical mirror with which the seventh chapter ends. All this, in line with the program of magical realism, would seem to authorize the recall of some aspects of Doubrovsky’s autofiction. On the other hand, the individual “adventures” of the narrator, who does not hesitate to express controversial judgments about the society around him, are real selfcontained narrative inserts, as shown in the subdivisions of the chapters. So, in the text, we have three planes intersecting. And this makes Bontempelli’s operation more important, an operation that does not run out, therefore, only in the will to rebuild space and time.
Modern visual culture in Italy is often disjoined from the effects of the World War I so that a sort of critical amnesia results. Campbell provides some general background to the effects of war on ...perception in Italy and describes how the war forced its participants to doubt the reality of what they were witnessing. He shows how Bontempelli's novel anticipates and objects to a post-war imperative to seeing and makes explicit the loop of war-time targeting and peace-time visual media.
The Faithful Lover Olson, Ray
Booklist,
07/2007, Letnik:
103, Številka:
21
Book Review
By the time Bontempelli (1878-1960) wrote these stories, which won Italy's foremost literary award, he had long forsaken futurism, which extolled violent movement and speed, to practice what he ...called in the 1920s realismo mágico. That's right, magic realism, which in Bontempelli's hands is a subtler, more transformative cousin of surrealism. He aimed to write of reality as if it were a dream, and of dreams as if they were reality.
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