Ed. Overcoming Postmodernism the debate
Editor’s introduction
Claudia Boscolo
Aims and origin
The contributors of this special issue of Journal of Romance Studies all offer a critical
view of a single text. They all engage with different novels as primary material,
but their analysis is based on Italian author Wu Ming 1’s essay New Italian Epic:
Memorandum 1993-2008, the first version of which was published online in April
2008. Wu Ming is the name of a collective of Italian authors based in Bologna,
formerly known as the Luther Blissett Project.1 The collective is currently formed
by four members, known by a number from 1 to 5 (Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, Wu
Ming 4 and Wu Ming 5 – Wu Ming 3 left the group in 2008). New Italian Epic is
commonly known as the ‘Memorandum’.2 It describes and provides a taxonomy for
a corpus of Italian contemporary novels by various authors – including Wu Ming.
The common stylistic and thematic characteristics and similar philosophy these works
share are termed New Italian Epic (NIE). ‘Epic’ is both a noun and an adjective but
all contributors of this issue use it as an adjective meaning epic style. ‘Style’ in Italian
[stile] is a masculine noun, whereas ‘epic’ [epica] is feminine (therefore the Italian
article is ‘il’ rather than ‘la’ NIE). This is important because epic is a literary genre,
whereas this special issue deals with the Italian novel: it is the epic narrative mode of
NIE that expands the boundaries of the novel form.
On its online publication, I was the first reader to be given the opportunity to
respond to this first version, namely the pdf file that had just been uploaded rather
than the much more detailed essay included in the subsequent book entitled New
Italian Epic. The first version was a much shorter, less engaging text of about fifteen
pages. My article was drawn from an email exchange with Wu Ming 1, where I
discussed his essay, and was neither a review nor a critical work: it was simply an
expression of enthusiasm and looked like a blog-post (Boscolo 2008). The Italian
e-zine Carmillaonline then started hosting a section dedicated to articles related
to New Italian Epic, from where the essay could be freely downloaded.3 Within a
month, Wu Ming 1’s short essay had been viewed thousands of times, and more
reactions received, particularly from doctoral students in Italian Studies, but also
from specialists in other areas. The essay attracted a great deal of attention online –
where the fan community produced responses, thus activating what Henry Jenkins
(2006) defines as ‘critical commentary’ – as well as in newspapers, where both
critical and enthusiastic reviews started to appear. It was unusual for the cultural
sections of Italian newspapers to show such interest in a freely downloadable pdf file,
containing a classification of recent Italian fiction, an essay which at that stage had
Journal of Romance Studies
doi:10.3167/jrs.2010.100101
Volume 10 Number 1, Spring 2010: 1–6
ISSN 1473–3536 (Print), ISSN 1752–2331 (Online)
2
Editor’s introduction
not yet found a mainstream publisher. Some particularly harsh criticism suggested
that the essay voiced something controversial that Italian media critics did not want
to acknowledge. Yet it expressed some undeniable facts: Italian postmodernism
had ended, and twenty-first-century Italian fiction had begun to display a different
perspective on reality and an urge for self-representation that aimed to compensate
for the failure of the mass media to provide factual information on Italian politics
and social issues. By ‘self-representation’ here, I mean the way in which an author
or text can be seen to speak for a community. In Italy, which was trying to come to
terms with dark aspects of its history and the recent establishment of a right-wing
government, a particular kind of fiction that included a new form of historical novel
had appeared. Wu Ming 1’s essay examined these works, creating an experimental
morphology of the contemporary Italian novel. This seemed to irritate media literary
critics, who felt their own position was under attack, when, in fact, the short essay
had grown out of a series of online public interventions within the commentary space
of lit-blogs and quality Italian literary e-zines.4 It voiced the general mood that Italy
was, and still is, in need of narratives that can help make sense of the political debacle
of recent years.
Given the interest that the essay inspired during the few months following the first
online version, I organized a round table at the Institute of Germanic & Romance
Studies, University of London, entitled ‘The Italian perspective on metahistorical
fiction: the New Italian Epic’, to enable Wu Ming 1 and a number of scholars
to compare views on recent Italian fiction and to discuss the main points of the
‘Memorandum’ within an academic environment (which in Italy at that point seemed
difficult to achieve). London was chosen as a free port away from Italian academic
and critical lobbies, in order to debate Wu Ming 1’s classification more openly. In
addition to Wu Ming 1, other participants included Vanni Santoni and Gregorio
Magini from Scrittura Industriale Collettiva [Industrial Writing Collective], a group
of young writers based in Florence who at that point were in the process of putting
together a collective novel; Marco Amici, a PhD student in Italian crime fiction at the
University of Cork; Monica Jansen, Professor of Italian at the Universities of Utrecht
and Antwerp; and an audience of both academics and PhD students. The discussion
that ensued inspired the continuation of the project, of which this special issue is
the culmination. In his opening speech at the round table, Wu Ming 1 surprisingly
presented an entirely new paper rather than expanding on the ‘Memorandum’. This
paper, ‘We’re going to have to be the parents’, written in the wake of the suicide of
US author David Foster Wallace in September 2008 and the death of Italian writer
Giuseppe Genna’s father, a year earlier, envisaged the end of an era in politics and
writing.
In January 2009, the ‘Memorandum’ on New Italian Epic was published by
Einaudi (Wu Ming 2009); the volume comprised the original essay, enriched with
and supplemented by the contributions of writers and scholars who had sent their
observations to the Wu Ming collective or published their comments online; the
London opening speech edited and translated into Italian; and an additional essay
written by Wu Ming 2 entitled ‘La salvezza di Euridice’ [‘Eurydice’s salvation’], which
is principally a manifesto of the Wu Ming collective’s poetics. The book triggered new
Editor’s introduction
3
reactions, enhanced by the fact that it was no longer a pirate essay circulating online
and downloaded by amateurs, but now a critical study issued by one of the major
Italian publishing houses. At that point, a new opportunity for experts in Italian
Studies to discuss this work was necessary. Therefore, I organized a double panel at
the Biennial Conference of the Society for Italian Studies, which took place at Royal
Holloway, University of London, in April 2009 (exactly one year after the first online
appearance of Wu Ming 1’s essay). This resulted in the formation of a research group,
which included the speakers of both conferences, Marco Amici, Dimitri Chimenti,
Emanuela Patti, Monica Jansen, Emanuela Piga and myself, with the addition of
Rosalba Biasini who was only present at the panel as a listener and contributed to
the final discussion. We created a virtual critical laboratory online (PolifoNIE, a blog
containing an active commentary section which is still functioning today), where
members could exchange views and discuss their papers before the conference.
One aim of this special issue, which brings together the proceedings of the
round table and the double panel, is to expand upon Wu Ming 1’s definition of
an ‘unidentified narrative object’ (UNO) (Wu Ming 2009: 20, 41–4). The term,
discussed extensively here by Dimitri Chimenti and Emanuela Patti, relates to a
combination of fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, journal and investigation/
report, literature, science and mythology. A UNO is a novel that, like a reportage or
an essay, produces testimony from local documents (newspaper articles, historical
documents, legal documents, letters). However, contrary to reportage, the specificity
of these ‘narrative objects’, as part of the evolution of the novel, lies in the ‘narrative
translation’ they operate on the documents, that is, the way documents are fused
into the story and turned into fiction. Furthermore, as I suggest in my own article,
what appear to be fragments of literary metadiscourse may be excerpts from work by
other critics or by the authors themselves. In addition to the UNO, New Italian Epic
employs a technical terminology that is quite new to literary criticism. In the articles
that follow, terms drawn from Wu Ming 1’s essay are appropriately glossed; fuller
definitions can be found in the ‘Memorandum’ itself. Uchronia [or ‘what if’] is also a
term that recurs several times in this collection of essays. It is borrowed from science
fiction and was coined by Charles Renouvier in his novel Uchronie (1857).
Overview
The aforegoing is the background to this collection of essays. While representing each
contributor’s original work, the articles themselves broadly follow the philosophy of
collective writing, in that most of the material was commented upon and discussed
within the virtual laboratory PolifoNIE before a consistent shape for publication was
formulated. The aim is to engage as thoroughly as possible with the key critical points
of the ‘Memorandum’.
In ‘Urgency and visions of the New Italian Epic’, Marco Amici addresses narration
and mythopoesis as the creation and manipulation of myth and the imaginaire
[imaginative faculty] where ethical-political tension and narrative praxis are strongly
linked. He illustrates how the concept of metahistorical allegory in New Italian Epic
can be understood as an open narrative strategy, in order to expand and complicate
the interpretative possibilities of the narration. He also provides an overview of how
4
Editor’s introduction
the development of electronic media has progressively undermined the cognitive
model of understanding based on visual sequential processing, while, conversely, a
return of the characteristics of orality produced by electronic media coincide with
the techno-communicative transition that is occurring in our time. This produces a
new geography of power, which influences both readers and writers in their intimate
relationship with the written page, requiring a critical gaze that enables orientation
within this new reality. Amici’s hypothesis is that the New Italian Epic works towards
the expression of this urgent need in literature.
In ‘The idea of epic and New Italian Epic’, I discuss how the concept of epic as
we inherited it from twentieth-century literary theory has affected its perception as
a narrative mode, to the extent that during the twentieth century it was no longer
considered a viable mode of self-representation. My view is that such arguments
against epic can no longer be considered valid in a society that has undergone radical
modification from the bourgeois environment where the novel emerged and took
shape in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Italian variant of the
metahistorical romance relates specifically to the Italian context, making a case for
epic to be reintegrated into literature from within the novel, and giving shape to
what Wu Ming 1 defines as ‘unidentified narrative objects’. Desire lies at the basis of
this type of narrative and works as a primary impulse towards the construction of a
narrative corpus whose aim is to investigate history in search of the roots of today’s
social and political impasse. I explore the stylistic features and the main rhetorical
devices of the New Italian Epic, and engage with the problematic of how the blend
of realism and the epic mode results in a search for truth and knowledge.
Dimitri Chimenti’s ‘Unidentified narrative objects: notes for a rhetorical typology’
discusses narrative objects as a form that forcibly modifies the compositional
parameters of the novel. He maintains that the concept of narrative object has the
advantage of providing a literary term, while at the same time it should be understood
only as a provisional definition. He shows how the concept of realism requires
refinement and distinction, since the real is always to be understood as the effect of a
specific way in which reality is constructed at a textual level. In the works he analyses,
realism appears as the result of a psychological, stylistic and rhetorical effect, linked to
the textual codification of reality, rather than to the reality of what is being described.
He defines the textualization of the real by taking language as a starting point, and
considering the way it manifests itself within a text that offers a particular model of
reality. He discusses how grafts, drawings and inserts are used in Roberto Saviano’s
Gomorra (2006) [Gomorrah] to construct the real, not only anchoring a text to the
historical world, but also installing a new cognitive function upon the documents
used within the narrative, which are converted from archival objects into objects of
memory. He concludes that the New Italian Epic carries within itself an inescapable
ethical and political instance of our epoch, in that the archival work of these novels
all give rise to a mythopoetic operation and a rememoration of the past capable of
bestowing depth on the present.
‘Metahistory, microhistories and mythopoeia in Wu Ming’ by Emanuela Piga
focuses on Wu Ming’s Manituana (2007) and Wu Ming 4’s Stella del mattino
Editor’s introduction
5
(2008) [Morning Star], which she treats as metahistorical romances, according to
the definition provided by Amy J. Elias (2001: 46–99). Applying the theory of
microhistory to literature, she treats historical work as a verbal structure in the form
of a narrative prose discourse. She maintains that both narratives refuse the single
viewpoint as an univocal rewriting of history of the oppressed and the victorious, in
favour of a possible alternative history (uchronia or ‘what if’) without the author’s
pretence of being situated on the other side. Piga argues that in these works detached
irony and pastiche leave space for the metahistorical imagination, as a form of
tension and yearning towards history. Mythopoesis is discussed as a creative gesture
that rescues history from a single reading, while containing an articulation of posttraumatic memory. She concludes that the tragic is deeply tied to history and flows
into modern epic, whose plots are interwoven with the texture of the novel. The Wu
Ming collective narrates the demise of myth into history as a form of articulation of
historical consciousness and free search for meaning.
Rosalba Biasini’s ‘Reconsidering epic: Wu Ming’s 54 and Fenoglio’ offers a
comparative reading of Wu Ming’s novel (2002) and Beppe Fenoglio’s novel La
paga del sabato (1969) [Saturday’s Pay] on an intertextual level and from the point of
view of the fascination that Fenoglio exerts on Wu Ming. According to Biasini, this
fascination resides not only in Fenoglio’s preference for themes related to his personal
experience in the Resistance, but also in the example he offers of his representation
of the past. She illustrates how the creation of a national epos in post-WWII Italy
failed, due especially to questions of choice of language and style: the obligation to
comply with the standards imposed by neo-realism prevented authors from working
with language at the level of connotation. However, the celebration of the Resistance
in terms of epic narration can be found in Fenoglio’s unfinished masterpiece Il
partigiano Johnny [Johnny the Partisan], written during the 1950s. Fenoglio’s aim to
recreate epic as a conscious ethical decision emerged from his perception of a general
forgetfulness of historical events in the Italian context. Biasini offers an insight on
epic as a narrative mode that ensures the permanence of memory, and compares the
characteristics of 54 and the classical epic.
In ‘Petrolio, a model of UNO in Giuseppe Genna’s Italia De Profundis’, Emanuela
Patti draws a comparison between Genna’s novel (2008) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
Petrolio (1992), arguing that Petrolio can be considered as the first case of unidentified
narrative object in contemporary Italian literature. While Pasolini cannot be upheld
as a literary model, due to the fact that his work and private life are so tightly
interwoven, in recent years Petrolio has become a point of reference for a writing style
that aims to engage with the full complexity of reality, especially in relation to its
representation. Patti maintains that in order to understand what Genna means when
he rejects the planning of the novel and wants to organize the sense and function of
reality, it is necessary to analyse the meaning of the two parts composing Italia De
Profundis, that is, the ‘narration’ and the ‘story’. She argues that Petrolio could be
considered as a paramount experiment of what Genna would define as ‘narration’
and that it prepared the ground for an experimental narrative oriented towards the
disruption of rhetoric in order to pursue a more complex representation of reality.
6
Editor’s introduction
‘Laboratory NIE: mutations in progress’ by Monica Jansen concludes this
collection of articles by illustrating the Italian debate on the end of postmodernism.
Jansen’s approach situates the ‘Memorandum’ on New Italian Epic within the
context of a wider debate that includes writers like Alessandro Baricco and Antonio
Scurati. She draws a distinction between these authors’ perspectives on the end of
postmodernism, and asserts the originality of Wu Ming 1’s proposal. She discusses
the newness of the New Italian Epic in terms of its functioning within a virtual
community, and compares previous works in line with Wu Ming 1’s assumption that
literature remains the epicentre, because it stimulates the reader to ‘imagine’ reality
and thus co-create it. Jansen also offers a critical reading of Laura Pugno’s Sirene
(2007) [Sirens] from the standpoint of the ‘Memorandum’.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
See Wu Ming Foundation website, at http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/
englishmenu.htm.
For a downloadable pdf file of New Italian Epic, as it first appeared in April 2008,
and also known as version 2.0, see http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/
WM1_saggio_sul_new_italian_epic.pdf. It has become common usage to use the term
‘Memorandum’ to refer to the expanded version of the essay included in the volume New
Italian Epic published by Einaudi, which contains three different essays (Wu Ming 2009).
Furthermore, Wu Ming’s philosophy is based on the Creative Common Licence; this
means that all their novels and essays are freely downloadable from their website. Thus,
many readers, especially outside Italy, read the downloadable pdf (that is, the second
version of the ‘Memorandum’). Therefore, on the one hand, there are two different
versions of the ‘Memorandum’ (the online pdf file and the essay in the book, and there
are marked differences between the two texts); on the other hand, the book contains three
different essays, one of which has the same title as the book.
An ‘e-zine’ (abbreviation of ‘electronic magazine’) is an online magazine. Carmillaonline
publishes book reviews and articles on politics and society. It is characterized by strongly
politically oriented social criticism: http://www.carmillaonline.com/.
A ‘lit-blog’ (abbreviation of ‘literary weblog’) is a blog that publishes book reviews and
articles focused on literature. What differentiates an ‘e-zine’ (for example, Carmillaonline,
or Il primo amore, www.ilprimoamore.com/) from a ‘lit-blog’ (for example, Lipperatura,
http://loredanalipperini.blog.kataweb.it/; Nazione Indiana, http://www.nazioneindiana.
com/; Vibrisse, http://vibrisse.wordpress.com/) is that the former does not have a
commentary space, whereas the latter allows comments by readers. The commentary space
in the most popular Italian lit-blogs often hosts interesting and heated discussions on
questions related to the state of Italian fiction.
Works cited
Boscolo, Claudia (2008) ‘Scardinare il postmoderno: etica e metastoria nel New Italian Epic’,
http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/2008/04/002620.html#002620 [accessed 9
January 2010].
Elias, Amy J. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press).
Jenkins, Henry (2006) ‘Fan fiction as critical commentary’, http://www.henryjenkins.
org/2006/09/fan_fiction_as_critical_commen.html [accessed 19 August 2009].
Wu Ming (2009) New Italian Epic: letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro (Turin:
Einaudi).
Claudia Boscolo
Aims and origin
The contributors of this special issue of Journal of Romance Studies all offer a critical
view of a single text. They all engage with different novels as primary material,
but their analysis is based on Italian author Wu Ming 1’s essay New Italian Epic:
Memorandum 1993-2008, the first version of which was published online in April
2008. Wu Ming is the name of a collective of Italian authors based in Bologna,
formerly known as the Luther Blissett Project.1 The collective is currently formed
by four members, known by a number from 1 to 5 (Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, Wu
Ming 4 and Wu Ming 5 – Wu Ming 3 left the group in 2008). New Italian Epic is
commonly known as the ‘Memorandum’.2 It describes and provides a taxonomy for
a corpus of Italian contemporary novels by various authors – including Wu Ming.
The common stylistic and thematic characteristics and similar philosophy these works
share are termed New Italian Epic (NIE). ‘Epic’ is both a noun and an adjective but
all contributors of this issue use it as an adjective meaning epic style. ‘Style’ in Italian
[stile] is a masculine noun, whereas ‘epic’ [epica] is feminine (therefore the Italian
article is ‘il’ rather than ‘la’ NIE). This is important because epic is a literary genre,
whereas this special issue deals with the Italian novel: it is the epic narrative mode of
NIE that expands the boundaries of the novel form.
On its online publication, I was the first reader to be given the opportunity to
respond to this first version, namely the pdf file that had just been uploaded rather
than the much more detailed essay included in the subsequent book entitled New
Italian Epic. The first version was a much shorter, less engaging text of about fifteen
pages. My article was drawn from an email exchange with Wu Ming 1, where I
discussed his essay, and was neither a review nor a critical work: it was simply an
expression of enthusiasm and looked like a blog-post (Boscolo 2008). The Italian
e-zine Carmillaonline then started hosting a section dedicated to articles related
to New Italian Epic, from where the essay could be freely downloaded.3 Within a
month, Wu Ming 1’s short essay had been viewed thousands of times, and more
reactions received, particularly from doctoral students in Italian Studies, but also
from specialists in other areas. The essay attracted a great deal of attention online –
where the fan community produced responses, thus activating what Henry Jenkins
(2006) defines as ‘critical commentary’ – as well as in newspapers, where both
critical and enthusiastic reviews started to appear. It was unusual for the cultural
sections of Italian newspapers to show such interest in a freely downloadable pdf file,
containing a classification of recent Italian fiction, an essay which at that stage had
Journal of Romance Studies
doi:10.3167/jrs.2010.100101
Volume 10 Number 1, Spring 2010: 1–6
ISSN 1473–3536 (Print), ISSN 1752–2331 (Online)
2
Editor’s introduction
not yet found a mainstream publisher. Some particularly harsh criticism suggested
that the essay voiced something controversial that Italian media critics did not want
to acknowledge. Yet it expressed some undeniable facts: Italian postmodernism
had ended, and twenty-first-century Italian fiction had begun to display a different
perspective on reality and an urge for self-representation that aimed to compensate
for the failure of the mass media to provide factual information on Italian politics
and social issues. By ‘self-representation’ here, I mean the way in which an author
or text can be seen to speak for a community. In Italy, which was trying to come to
terms with dark aspects of its history and the recent establishment of a right-wing
government, a particular kind of fiction that included a new form of historical novel
had appeared. Wu Ming 1’s essay examined these works, creating an experimental
morphology of the contemporary Italian novel. This seemed to irritate media literary
critics, who felt their own position was under attack, when, in fact, the short essay
had grown out of a series of online public interventions within the commentary space
of lit-blogs and quality Italian literary e-zines.4 It voiced the general mood that Italy
was, and still is, in need of narratives that can help make sense of the political debacle
of recent years.
Given the interest that the essay inspired during the few months following the first
online version, I organized a round table at the Institute of Germanic & Romance
Studies, University of London, entitled ‘The Italian perspective on metahistorical
fiction: the New Italian Epic’, to enable Wu Ming 1 and a number of scholars
to compare views on recent Italian fiction and to discuss the main points of the
‘Memorandum’ within an academic environment (which in Italy at that point seemed
difficult to achieve). London was chosen as a free port away from Italian academic
and critical lobbies, in order to debate Wu Ming 1’s classification more openly. In
addition to Wu Ming 1, other participants included Vanni Santoni and Gregorio
Magini from Scrittura Industriale Collettiva [Industrial Writing Collective], a group
of young writers based in Florence who at that point were in the process of putting
together a collective novel; Marco Amici, a PhD student in Italian crime fiction at the
University of Cork; Monica Jansen, Professor of Italian at the Universities of Utrecht
and Antwerp; and an audience of both academics and PhD students. The discussion
that ensued inspired the continuation of the project, of which this special issue is
the culmination. In his opening speech at the round table, Wu Ming 1 surprisingly
presented an entirely new paper rather than expanding on the ‘Memorandum’. This
paper, ‘We’re going to have to be the parents’, written in the wake of the suicide of
US author David Foster Wallace in September 2008 and the death of Italian writer
Giuseppe Genna’s father, a year earlier, envisaged the end of an era in politics and
writing.
In January 2009, the ‘Memorandum’ on New Italian Epic was published by
Einaudi (Wu Ming 2009); the volume comprised the original essay, enriched with
and supplemented by the contributions of writers and scholars who had sent their
observations to the Wu Ming collective or published their comments online; the
London opening speech edited and translated into Italian; and an additional essay
written by Wu Ming 2 entitled ‘La salvezza di Euridice’ [‘Eurydice’s salvation’], which
is principally a manifesto of the Wu Ming collective’s poetics. The book triggered new
Editor’s introduction
3
reactions, enhanced by the fact that it was no longer a pirate essay circulating online
and downloaded by amateurs, but now a critical study issued by one of the major
Italian publishing houses. At that point, a new opportunity for experts in Italian
Studies to discuss this work was necessary. Therefore, I organized a double panel at
the Biennial Conference of the Society for Italian Studies, which took place at Royal
Holloway, University of London, in April 2009 (exactly one year after the first online
appearance of Wu Ming 1’s essay). This resulted in the formation of a research group,
which included the speakers of both conferences, Marco Amici, Dimitri Chimenti,
Emanuela Patti, Monica Jansen, Emanuela Piga and myself, with the addition of
Rosalba Biasini who was only present at the panel as a listener and contributed to
the final discussion. We created a virtual critical laboratory online (PolifoNIE, a blog
containing an active commentary section which is still functioning today), where
members could exchange views and discuss their papers before the conference.
One aim of this special issue, which brings together the proceedings of the
round table and the double panel, is to expand upon Wu Ming 1’s definition of
an ‘unidentified narrative object’ (UNO) (Wu Ming 2009: 20, 41–4). The term,
discussed extensively here by Dimitri Chimenti and Emanuela Patti, relates to a
combination of fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, journal and investigation/
report, literature, science and mythology. A UNO is a novel that, like a reportage or
an essay, produces testimony from local documents (newspaper articles, historical
documents, legal documents, letters). However, contrary to reportage, the specificity
of these ‘narrative objects’, as part of the evolution of the novel, lies in the ‘narrative
translation’ they operate on the documents, that is, the way documents are fused
into the story and turned into fiction. Furthermore, as I suggest in my own article,
what appear to be fragments of literary metadiscourse may be excerpts from work by
other critics or by the authors themselves. In addition to the UNO, New Italian Epic
employs a technical terminology that is quite new to literary criticism. In the articles
that follow, terms drawn from Wu Ming 1’s essay are appropriately glossed; fuller
definitions can be found in the ‘Memorandum’ itself. Uchronia [or ‘what if’] is also a
term that recurs several times in this collection of essays. It is borrowed from science
fiction and was coined by Charles Renouvier in his novel Uchronie (1857).
Overview
The aforegoing is the background to this collection of essays. While representing each
contributor’s original work, the articles themselves broadly follow the philosophy of
collective writing, in that most of the material was commented upon and discussed
within the virtual laboratory PolifoNIE before a consistent shape for publication was
formulated. The aim is to engage as thoroughly as possible with the key critical points
of the ‘Memorandum’.
In ‘Urgency and visions of the New Italian Epic’, Marco Amici addresses narration
and mythopoesis as the creation and manipulation of myth and the imaginaire
[imaginative faculty] where ethical-political tension and narrative praxis are strongly
linked. He illustrates how the concept of metahistorical allegory in New Italian Epic
can be understood as an open narrative strategy, in order to expand and complicate
the interpretative possibilities of the narration. He also provides an overview of how
4
Editor’s introduction
the development of electronic media has progressively undermined the cognitive
model of understanding based on visual sequential processing, while, conversely, a
return of the characteristics of orality produced by electronic media coincide with
the techno-communicative transition that is occurring in our time. This produces a
new geography of power, which influences both readers and writers in their intimate
relationship with the written page, requiring a critical gaze that enables orientation
within this new reality. Amici’s hypothesis is that the New Italian Epic works towards
the expression of this urgent need in literature.
In ‘The idea of epic and New Italian Epic’, I discuss how the concept of epic as
we inherited it from twentieth-century literary theory has affected its perception as
a narrative mode, to the extent that during the twentieth century it was no longer
considered a viable mode of self-representation. My view is that such arguments
against epic can no longer be considered valid in a society that has undergone radical
modification from the bourgeois environment where the novel emerged and took
shape in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Italian variant of the
metahistorical romance relates specifically to the Italian context, making a case for
epic to be reintegrated into literature from within the novel, and giving shape to
what Wu Ming 1 defines as ‘unidentified narrative objects’. Desire lies at the basis of
this type of narrative and works as a primary impulse towards the construction of a
narrative corpus whose aim is to investigate history in search of the roots of today’s
social and political impasse. I explore the stylistic features and the main rhetorical
devices of the New Italian Epic, and engage with the problematic of how the blend
of realism and the epic mode results in a search for truth and knowledge.
Dimitri Chimenti’s ‘Unidentified narrative objects: notes for a rhetorical typology’
discusses narrative objects as a form that forcibly modifies the compositional
parameters of the novel. He maintains that the concept of narrative object has the
advantage of providing a literary term, while at the same time it should be understood
only as a provisional definition. He shows how the concept of realism requires
refinement and distinction, since the real is always to be understood as the effect of a
specific way in which reality is constructed at a textual level. In the works he analyses,
realism appears as the result of a psychological, stylistic and rhetorical effect, linked to
the textual codification of reality, rather than to the reality of what is being described.
He defines the textualization of the real by taking language as a starting point, and
considering the way it manifests itself within a text that offers a particular model of
reality. He discusses how grafts, drawings and inserts are used in Roberto Saviano’s
Gomorra (2006) [Gomorrah] to construct the real, not only anchoring a text to the
historical world, but also installing a new cognitive function upon the documents
used within the narrative, which are converted from archival objects into objects of
memory. He concludes that the New Italian Epic carries within itself an inescapable
ethical and political instance of our epoch, in that the archival work of these novels
all give rise to a mythopoetic operation and a rememoration of the past capable of
bestowing depth on the present.
‘Metahistory, microhistories and mythopoeia in Wu Ming’ by Emanuela Piga
focuses on Wu Ming’s Manituana (2007) and Wu Ming 4’s Stella del mattino
Editor’s introduction
5
(2008) [Morning Star], which she treats as metahistorical romances, according to
the definition provided by Amy J. Elias (2001: 46–99). Applying the theory of
microhistory to literature, she treats historical work as a verbal structure in the form
of a narrative prose discourse. She maintains that both narratives refuse the single
viewpoint as an univocal rewriting of history of the oppressed and the victorious, in
favour of a possible alternative history (uchronia or ‘what if’) without the author’s
pretence of being situated on the other side. Piga argues that in these works detached
irony and pastiche leave space for the metahistorical imagination, as a form of
tension and yearning towards history. Mythopoesis is discussed as a creative gesture
that rescues history from a single reading, while containing an articulation of posttraumatic memory. She concludes that the tragic is deeply tied to history and flows
into modern epic, whose plots are interwoven with the texture of the novel. The Wu
Ming collective narrates the demise of myth into history as a form of articulation of
historical consciousness and free search for meaning.
Rosalba Biasini’s ‘Reconsidering epic: Wu Ming’s 54 and Fenoglio’ offers a
comparative reading of Wu Ming’s novel (2002) and Beppe Fenoglio’s novel La
paga del sabato (1969) [Saturday’s Pay] on an intertextual level and from the point of
view of the fascination that Fenoglio exerts on Wu Ming. According to Biasini, this
fascination resides not only in Fenoglio’s preference for themes related to his personal
experience in the Resistance, but also in the example he offers of his representation
of the past. She illustrates how the creation of a national epos in post-WWII Italy
failed, due especially to questions of choice of language and style: the obligation to
comply with the standards imposed by neo-realism prevented authors from working
with language at the level of connotation. However, the celebration of the Resistance
in terms of epic narration can be found in Fenoglio’s unfinished masterpiece Il
partigiano Johnny [Johnny the Partisan], written during the 1950s. Fenoglio’s aim to
recreate epic as a conscious ethical decision emerged from his perception of a general
forgetfulness of historical events in the Italian context. Biasini offers an insight on
epic as a narrative mode that ensures the permanence of memory, and compares the
characteristics of 54 and the classical epic.
In ‘Petrolio, a model of UNO in Giuseppe Genna’s Italia De Profundis’, Emanuela
Patti draws a comparison between Genna’s novel (2008) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
Petrolio (1992), arguing that Petrolio can be considered as the first case of unidentified
narrative object in contemporary Italian literature. While Pasolini cannot be upheld
as a literary model, due to the fact that his work and private life are so tightly
interwoven, in recent years Petrolio has become a point of reference for a writing style
that aims to engage with the full complexity of reality, especially in relation to its
representation. Patti maintains that in order to understand what Genna means when
he rejects the planning of the novel and wants to organize the sense and function of
reality, it is necessary to analyse the meaning of the two parts composing Italia De
Profundis, that is, the ‘narration’ and the ‘story’. She argues that Petrolio could be
considered as a paramount experiment of what Genna would define as ‘narration’
and that it prepared the ground for an experimental narrative oriented towards the
disruption of rhetoric in order to pursue a more complex representation of reality.
6
Editor’s introduction
‘Laboratory NIE: mutations in progress’ by Monica Jansen concludes this
collection of articles by illustrating the Italian debate on the end of postmodernism.
Jansen’s approach situates the ‘Memorandum’ on New Italian Epic within the
context of a wider debate that includes writers like Alessandro Baricco and Antonio
Scurati. She draws a distinction between these authors’ perspectives on the end of
postmodernism, and asserts the originality of Wu Ming 1’s proposal. She discusses
the newness of the New Italian Epic in terms of its functioning within a virtual
community, and compares previous works in line with Wu Ming 1’s assumption that
literature remains the epicentre, because it stimulates the reader to ‘imagine’ reality
and thus co-create it. Jansen also offers a critical reading of Laura Pugno’s Sirene
(2007) [Sirens] from the standpoint of the ‘Memorandum’.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
See Wu Ming Foundation website, at http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/
englishmenu.htm.
For a downloadable pdf file of New Italian Epic, as it first appeared in April 2008,
and also known as version 2.0, see http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/
WM1_saggio_sul_new_italian_epic.pdf. It has become common usage to use the term
‘Memorandum’ to refer to the expanded version of the essay included in the volume New
Italian Epic published by Einaudi, which contains three different essays (Wu Ming 2009).
Furthermore, Wu Ming’s philosophy is based on the Creative Common Licence; this
means that all their novels and essays are freely downloadable from their website. Thus,
many readers, especially outside Italy, read the downloadable pdf (that is, the second
version of the ‘Memorandum’). Therefore, on the one hand, there are two different
versions of the ‘Memorandum’ (the online pdf file and the essay in the book, and there
are marked differences between the two texts); on the other hand, the book contains three
different essays, one of which has the same title as the book.
An ‘e-zine’ (abbreviation of ‘electronic magazine’) is an online magazine. Carmillaonline
publishes book reviews and articles on politics and society. It is characterized by strongly
politically oriented social criticism: http://www.carmillaonline.com/.
A ‘lit-blog’ (abbreviation of ‘literary weblog’) is a blog that publishes book reviews and
articles focused on literature. What differentiates an ‘e-zine’ (for example, Carmillaonline,
or Il primo amore, www.ilprimoamore.com/) from a ‘lit-blog’ (for example, Lipperatura,
http://loredanalipperini.blog.kataweb.it/; Nazione Indiana, http://www.nazioneindiana.
com/; Vibrisse, http://vibrisse.wordpress.com/) is that the former does not have a
commentary space, whereas the latter allows comments by readers. The commentary space
in the most popular Italian lit-blogs often hosts interesting and heated discussions on
questions related to the state of Italian fiction.
Works cited
Boscolo, Claudia (2008) ‘Scardinare il postmoderno: etica e metastoria nel New Italian Epic’,
http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/2008/04/002620.html#002620 [accessed 9
January 2010].
Elias, Amy J. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press).
Jenkins, Henry (2006) ‘Fan fiction as critical commentary’, http://www.henryjenkins.
org/2006/09/fan_fiction_as_critical_commen.html [accessed 19 August 2009].
Wu Ming (2009) New Italian Epic: letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro (Turin:
Einaudi).