Italy beyond Gomorrah

Roberto Saviano and Transmedia Disruption

Floriana Bernardi

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786600196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

When Roberto Saviano published Gomorrah in 2006 he exposed the Camorra, an organized crime network with global reach emanating from Naples. This ground-breaking work became an international best seller, inspired a film, and a new TV series. The author received so many death threats from the Camorra that he remains under police protection. Italy beyond Gomorrah investigates the conditions and modalities by which the huge media phenomenon developed around Roberto Saviano after the publication of Gomorrah and the ways in which this has engendered a political discourse starting from his ‘denuncia’ of the mechanisms of the modern mafia and its bosses. Focusing on Saviano’s disruptive work and the representation of his ‘charismatic body’, redefining the figure and task of the modern intellectual, the book stresses the agency of literature and the relevance of the internet and major social networks in the creation of networks of subjectivities and establishing ethical-political duties which are grounded in a ‘passional communication’ between the writer and his audience, as well as on a micropolitics of affects. Through the interpretation of Saviano’s work it also provides provide a cross sectional insight into Italy in the post-Berlusconi age.

ONE

Introduction

Italy beyond Gomorrah

POSITIONINGS #1: THE OBSERVER

Edgar Morin maintained that whatever the phenomenon approached by a scholar is, it is also necessary that the scholar himself or herself becomes the object of study, since his or her figure could disturb the study object or, to some extent, he or she could project himself or herself in it. According to Morin, whatever research one starts in the field of humanities, the first steps to accomplish are self-analysis and self-criticism (Morin 1962: 16). Accordingly, I would like to start this book clarifying my positioning towards the subject-object of study: Roberto Saviano as a public persona and the media, cultural and political phenomenon engendered by the publication of his non-fiction novel Gomorra. Viaggio nell’impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra in 2006 (hence referred to as Gomorrah, if not differently specified).

When Gomorrah came out, I read it in one breath, as I was fascinated by its pressing, passionate and outraged writing style, a writing of resistance and vision alike. This reading was an ‘event’ (Bowman 2011: 116); it definitely marked a transformative moment in my perception of reality, both of the reality immediately next to me and of the much more distant reality, yet rooted in the same flows of criminal ideology and money. After my ‘encounter’ with Gomorrah something ‘happened’: the urgency to know and understand these power dynamics, hidden to general public and to the majority of citizens until then, became pressing for me. Also, it provoked even greater awareness and certainty about the value of people’s knowledge and responsibility in individual actions within a community, especially in common everyday life choices. Indeed, Gomorrah changed my way of thinking and disrupted my ‘language’, if we mean by this term the ‘Umwelt’, that is the modelling social practice by means of which individuals mould themselves, organize and plan the world around them, producing signs and values within different social contexts and human relationships among people (Calefato 2008).

Then, in the following years, I have eagerly followed Roberto Saviano’s voice, finding it always convincing and trustworthy; I have read every new article, and I have watched and listened to every TV, radio and web contribution of his. When possible, I have also been present at some of his public events: in a public square of Polignano a Mare in a hot and humid Apulian summer night; in the Feltrinelli library of Bari for the launch of the books Vieni via con me (2011b) and Zero Zero Zero (2013); at the ‘Piccolo Teatro’ of Milan in February 2010 and, finally, in April 2016 when I enthusiastically managed to have a conversation with the author in the theatre backstage after his performance.

During my waits before the entrance in theatres and libraries protected by the police, while I was standing in incredibly long queues together with dozens and dozens of my (almost) peers looking forward to exchanging a few words with the ‘writer-pop star’, receiving an autograph on their books or taking a picture with him, I perceived the absolute singularity of all those situations. That huge multitude of people was not crowding there for a popular musician, singer or famous actor, but for a young journalist and writer who usually deals with mafia issues, often reckoned as boring and difficult matters to understand for the vast majority of non-expert public. While I was talking to some of the people in the long queues, or ‘stealing’ some information from the crowd here and there, it was evident that those multitudes were mostly made up of ‘fans’ of Roberto Saviano. Almost all of them were Saviano’s assiduous readers and spectators, and they were generally very ‘attached’ to that man/writer as they invested (or had invested) a high degree of emotions and affections in him. I could not stop wondering how and why this process had been possible: I wondered how it had been possible that an audience mostly numbed by the almost edulcorated journalistic and mainstream media narrations about Italy – a country in ruins from a political, social and economic point of view – always gathered in such copious quantity to listen to a fierce and yet visionary narration of reality, a narration based on people’s responsibility and (counter)power, as single individuals and as a community. Did all this happen only thanks to the power of mainstream cultural industry, and particularly thanks to highly influential editorial and television marketing? Did all this happen thanks to the power of the ‘author-brand’ Roberto Saviano, whose logos are Gomorrah covers, the writer’s name and face on newspapers, magazines and advertisings? Or rather, did this also happen for different reasons, involving values, passions and affections, which do not exclude, nevertheless, the risky and undecidable appeal of Roberto Saviano as a text, symbol and cool brand, at least so far? This was the starting point of my research.

Therefore, this book suggests a possible reading and deconstructive interpretation of the huge alterdisciplinary media event developed around Saviano after the publication of his best-seller Gomorrah (2006c). Particularly, it investigates the conditions and modalities by which this phenomenon started, the several disruptions Saviano provoked in Italy with his first book and subsequent transmedia interventions, and his cultural translation and reception into a mainly Anglo-American context. Additionally, by means of a focus on Saviano’s disruptive work and the representation of his charismatic body redefining the figure and task of the modern intellectual, I will try to highlight both the agency of literature and the relevance of Internet and major social networks in the creation of networks of subjectivities. As I hope it will be clear, these are the latest useful tools to establish ethical-political duties grounded in a ‘passional communication’ between the writer and his audience as well as in a micropolitics of affects. Simultaneously, the book intends to provide a cross-sectional insight into Italy in the (post-)Berlusconi age through an understanding of Saviano’s transmedia work.

POSITIONINGS #2: THE RENARRATION OF THE AUTHOR-BRAND

In the Anglo-American market

Before starting the deconstruction of the phenomenon Saviano with a principal focus on Italy, the country where it originated, in this short introduction I would like to give an account of the narrative frames allowing the construction of the literary fame of Roberto Saviano in the Anglo-American book market. According to Serena Bassi, in spite of the well-documented resistance to translation in the Anglo-American book markets (2015: 3), Roberto Saviano, an unknown and translated author, has been capable of reaching best-selling status even there. As Bassi puts it, this is due to the fact that ‘the effectiveness with which a book is marketed may largely depend on the story that is being told about the book and its author’ and its appeal to current tastes. Indeed, Bassi uses the notion of ‘author-brand’, a media-friendly and recognizable personality with which to sell the literary product, to explain the renarration of Roberto Saviano in Britain and the USA. Particularly, for Bassi ‘an author-brand is often made up of a story of what the author is like as a person, how she or he came to write that particular book and what significance the publication of the book had in her or his life’ (3). In the case of Roberto Saviano, Bassi argues that when he began to attract the attention of the British media, by the end of 2006, Saviano was first translated in accordance with the Italian articulation of his author-brand, that is a national anti-Mafia hero (see chapter 2). Later on, instead, when the news of a bomb attack intended to kill him before Christmas was out in 2008, followed by an open letter signed by six Nobel Prize winners in solidarity with the writer, the narrative frame for Saviano’s ‘author-brand’ translation changed. Since then, both in the British and in the American press, the Italian writer has started to be associated with Indian author Salman Rushdie. Roberto Saviano became addressed as ‘Italy’s Salman Rushdie’ – the author of The Satanic Verses (1988) condemned to death together with his publishers by a fatwa pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini – and as ‘a symbol of the universal right to freedom of speech’. Of course, as Bassi points out, the comparison between the writers was based on their biographies, not on their literary style or issues faced, and it served to foreground the fact that Saviano was forced into hiding following the publication of his book. Additionally, according to Bassi, this representation was coherent with the widespread narrative of a present marked by global threats and insecurity dominating media and Western state institutions in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, including in Italy (Brunetti and Derobertis 2014). Finally, in Bassi’s view, Saviano is part of the flourishing intellectual industry of ‘the scenario trade’, including journalists, academics, film directors and popular writers, defined as ‘scenarists’, who compete for promoting their specific ‘scenario’ to become the one that is most frequently referred to (11). Accordingly, as a ‘scenarist’, Saviano presents himself as capable of providing us with a map of the world we live in, based on the metanarrative of globalization and economic world order discussed in Gomorrah. Thanks to these strategies, the book marketing working for the cultural translation of author-brand Roberto Saviano in English has justified the reasons why Saviano deserved (and deserves) a translation in the Anglo-American market; that is, the critique of organized crime within the global capitalist economy Saviano has also discussed in Zero Zero Zero (2013), his second non-fiction novel dealing with drug trade, cocaine and world criminal capitalism.

As I wrote before, and as we are going to see throughout the book, the power of mainstream cultural industry, the highly influential editorial and television marketing and the power of the ‘author-brand’ are all crucial factors in our case study. Nevertheless, they are only some of its crucial factors. Indeed, from a semiotic perspective, insofar as ‘Roberto Saviano’ can be recognized as a brand, it/he suggests values towards which we should tend as well as individual senses and social meanings in the name of which it builds, articulates and enacts its subjective identity (Marrone 2007: 333). For, brands have always to do with narratives and passions, identity and communication, enunciations and plurality of voices, styles and genres; they have also to do with bodies and sensoriality, as well as with figurative and visual strategies. As it is evident, these are all semiotic phenomena constitutive of brands expressing their inner essence and truth (334). Brands are discursive constructions produced by a number of underlying processes of signification involving different aspects: economic, social and cultural (15); for this reason, most of the elements related to brands I have listed earlier will be discussed in the book. In other words, my focus is not ‘Roberto Saviano’ as a brand in itself, but on the complex network of processes of signification and relations constituting the branding of a new discursive formation for Italy.

POSITIONINGS #3: LOOKING BEYOND

The idea of ‘beyond’ lying underneath the title of this book is multifaceted. First, in its simplest deployment, the word refers to what happened in Italy after the publication of Gomorrah in terms of reactions to this book. Specifically, it refers to the literary and cultural debate the book aroused (chapters 2 and 3), Saviano’s following transmedia interventions and disseminations (chapter 3) and people’s massive demonstrations of solidarity with the writer after he was assigned police protection, which started within the virtual world or the so-called beyond measure realm (chapter 4).

Second, the term ‘beyond’ hints at the backlit representation of Italy emerging from my narration and analysis of the phenomenon Roberto Saviano. The returning image one can get highlights a largely widespread corruption, criminal organizations’ infiltrations into economy, politics and communication, an eternally unsolved southern question, high unemployment rates, gender and class divide and also a great deal of conservatism in the cultural industry and in most intellectuals’ approach to it. Thus, the picture seems to show a country stuck at an impasse, where the state of things always stays more or less the same and where, despite people’s awareness and numerous surges of upheaval, the only possible solutions to this complex condition seem to be emigration or an eternal uneven fight of resistance.

However, third and more importantly, the word ‘beyond’ makes reference to a specific historical conjuncture of Italy, the period of and after the publication of Gomorrah (2006c), characterized by what I deem as a crisis. But let me explain it better. As Stuart Hall puts it, ‘A conjuncture is a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape’ (Hall and Massey 2010: 57). Additionally, with reference to Gramsci’s thought, Hall uses the notion of conjuncture in a broader sense: ‘As a way of marking significant transitions between different political moments; that is to say, to apply it as a general system of analysis to any historical situation’ (58). Accordingly, still following Hall, in order to analyse a conjuncture it is necessary to describe how the complex power of hegemony works at its different levels of expression: political, ideological, common sense, cultural and economic (65). Nevertheless, conjunctures can be interrupted and disrupted; therefore the in-between space between two different conjunctures is usually characterized by a ‘crisis’, defined by Hall as the period when ‘the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed, or, as Althusser said, fuse in a ruptural unity’. In Hall’s view, crises are ‘moments of potential change’ whose outcome is not given or predetermined; indeed, society may move on to another version of the same conjuncture, or to a somewhat transformed version of it, or relations can be radically transformed (57).

Well, when Saviano published Gomorrah (2006c), Italy was still living under a Berlusconian conjuncture which, however, was slowly coming to an end after dragging Italy to general decline, in coincidence with the no longer-hideable tragic wave of effects on the country caused by the collapse of the global financial and bank system Berlusconi had always tried to deny. From a Western and worldly perspective, the conjunctural crisis we are still going through started in the economy, and probably so it was in Italy too. However, as I wrote before, every conjunctural crisis is also a crisis of politics, culture, ideology, and sometimes it is exactly the task of intellectuals that of creating crisis. This is what Umberto Eco argues when, in dialogue with Stuart Hall advocating both an analytical task and an ‘anticipatory function’ of intellectuals, he affirms that nowadays perhaps the task of intellectuals is to meditate on how to help governments in solving the crisis and to show the way to turn upside down the sense of disillusionment and powerlessness every crisis carries with it (Eco and Hall 1985: 115).

This sense of disillusionment and powerlessness was largely felt in Italy when Gomorrah came out. Therefore, as I am going to show throughout the book, my claim is that Saviano’s work did provoke a crisis in the country: his interventions caused disruptions in many realms of culture: literature, journalism, media, politics, in the way of perceiving Italy and the global market, in people’s perception of mafia issues and also in the representation of intellectuals. The point now is to understand whether this crisis has actually led to a radical rupture of the previous paradigm or whether it has been just a temporary crisis where social forces have been unable to transform things very deeply, and which has been (or will be) basically followed by a return to a ‘business as usual’ condition.

Finally, the word ‘beyond’ is here to be meant as a period of transition, still open and undefined, where what we can do as scholars and citizens is reasoning on what has been left behind and what can be envisioned for the future, beyond the event of Gomorrah.

POSITIONINGS #4: READERSHIP

The book is addressed both to specialist audience interested in study fields like Italian contemporary literature and culture, cultural studies, sociology of culture and communication, media and journalism studies, social semiotics, political theory and activism, translation studies, and to non-specialist audience, simply interested in Roberto Saviano and his production and ethical-political intervention. For this reason, I have done my best to write a readable book both for academics and for non-specialist readership. However, expert readers will soon recognise the interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter, mainly oriented from a socio-semiotic perspective – meant as the whole of discourses and practices intervening in the formation and/or transformation of the conditions of interactions among individual and collective subjects (Marrone 2001: xvii) – but also integrated with a number of core notions of cultural, audience and translation studies.

To my knowledge, until now no volumes have been published dealing with a complete and detailed analysis of Roberto Saviano as a writer and media phenomenon. Therefore, another main objective of this book is to fill this empty space and provide a thorough and scientific analysis of Roberto Saviano’s work, especially suitable for non-Italian readers. The readers will tell if my intention was a too ventured pretension, yet I hope this book will remain an honest account to an interesting page of Italian contemporary culture.

TWO

Who is Saviano?

Undecidability of an intellectual-pop star

DISRUPTIONS IN THE ITALIAN DEBATE ON INTELLECTUALS

With his article titled ‘Intellettuali, non una voce – il declino dell’intellettuale italiano’ (Intellectuals, not a single word – the decline of the Italian intellectual), published in the Italian newspaper l’Unità on 18 February 2004, literary critic Romano Luperini aroused a strong debate on the need of re-defining the task and function of contemporary intellectuals, a word which entered the Italian dictionary only under the Fascist regime. Luperini meant by task the duty assigned to intellectuals by institutions, implying knowledge and a whole of specific skills, in return for a wage; public or private funds for research; a status, some tasks – included the bureaucratic ones – and the collocation within a hierarchy. With the word ‘function’, instead, Luperini referred to the intellectual activity following its own logic, striving for freedom from conditionings, thus aiming at getting ahead of institutions and real authorities in order to obey just the ethics of research and the destinies of humankind. In the same article Luperini denounced the intellectual, political and economic decline of Italy, which had begun in the 1980s and which, in his opinion, had reached its peak in the first years of the new century. The reasons for this decline, emerging from the contributions to the debate of several writers and journalists, were to be found in the lack of cultural and political discussion among writers; the lack of dialog and controversy among critics and li...