Delirious Naples

A Cultural History of the City of the Sun

Pellegrino D'Acierno, Stanislao G. Pugliese, Pellegrino D'Acierno, Stanislao G. Pugliese

• Verlag: Fordham University Press
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823280001
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: Städtische Soziologie

This book is addressed to "lovers of paradoxes" and we have done our utmost to assemble a stellar cast of Neapolitan and American scholars, intellectuals, and artists/writers who are strong and open-minded enough to wrestle with and illuminate the paradoxes through which Naples presents itself. Naples is a mysterious metropolis. Difficult to understand, it is an enigma to outsiders, and also to the Neapolitans themselves. Its very impenetrableness is what makes it so deliriously and irresistibly attractive. The essays attempt to give some hints to the answer of the enigma, without parsing it into neat scholastic formulas. In doing this, the book will be an important means of opening Naples to students, scholars and members of the community at large who are engaged in "identity-work." A primary goal has been to establish a dialogue with leading Neapolitan intellectuals and artists, and, ultimately, ensure that the "deliriously Neapolitan" dance continues.

Writing and Singing Naples

SEVENTEEN

Anna Maria Ortese: Breaking the Spell of Naples?

Andrea Baldi

Napoli is used to following its citizens everywhere, like a shadow, if they move away.

—FABRIZIA RAMONDINO

Anna Maria Ortese entertained a deeply ambivalent relationship with Naples, where, between 1928 and 1948, she spent her youth and most of her early adulthood, falling prey to the allure of the place and, at the same time, resisting and denouncing its dangerous fascination. This backdrop and its dwellers occupy center stage in the author’s oeuvre, despite her temporary relocations, starting in 1939, and her definitive “flight” from the city in 1952, to return there only very few times and for brief periods, because of the controversies stirred by Il mare non bagna Napoli (The Bay Is Not Naples, 1953).¹ Ortese’s writings tenaciously harbor and transfigure the impressions and recollections of her Parthenopean experiences. This insistence marks the long trajectory that extends through some of the narratives collected in L’infanta sepolta (The Buried Infanta, 1950), her second book, where at times she refashions her urban encounters in visionary terms, culminating with Il cardillo addolorato (The Lament of the Linnet, 1993), set in the capital of the Bourbon kingdom at the twilight of the eighteenth century and shrouded in melancholy light, drawing on folkloric and fantastic motifs (an image that counters the contemporary city, filled with “Spanish and natural horrors”).² In the four decades between these two works, two other landmarks stand out in regard to her Neapolitan attachments. Il mare non bagna Napoli,³ a collection of powerful exposés and short stories, scrutinizes the city’s postwar devastation, with an eye prone to seize hallucinatory images and incidents. In Il porto di Toledo (The Port of Toledo, 1975)⁴ Naples metamorphoses in the eponymous Spanish town, becoming the stage of a dizzying, idiosyncratic memoir that disrupts narrative and linguistic conventions, revealing Ortese’s initiation to life and writing as a “theology of loss.”⁵

Looking at the southern city through the “dark lenses” of her hypersensitivity and ethical rigor, Ortese cannot celebrate the “piece of sky fallen to the earth” (pezzo di cielo caduto in terra),⁶ the land of enchantment consecrated across a long literary and popular tradition. Even when she lowers her guard, catching a glimpse of its splendor and letting it tempt her, she immediately rejects its lure as a spell cast over its destitute citizens, making them vulnerable to self-destructive illusions. While fascinated by Naples’s sky and coastline, Ortese is dismayed by the sight of its dejected humanity. At times she describes the city as a cemetery, which threatens to enchain and annihilate her, suppressing her literary vocation. In a letter to writer Paola Masino, she confesses: “I have written other things, perhaps fine things, and I want to write more, but here in Naples I have the impression that I am laying in a beautiful grave covered with grass. Everyone is dead, I breathe in the odor of putrefaction.”⁷ Surrounded by these specters, Ortese feels the need to flee from social and cultural marginality and to resist the entropy of a city in constant struggle to survive. In the aftermath of World War II, she depicts “the capital of the South” as a phantasmagoric and bewitching spectacle. Even though the city is filled with the promises of a lavish nature, in her eyes it shows the ruins of a decaying civilization.⁸

Ortese’s reading of Naples reworks stereoptypes associated with its traditional culture. She resents its “idleness” and “its popular tunes” as “lethal,” and stigmatizes the alleged radiant sensuality of its populace as a blind retreat from the harshness of the everyday, with dire consequences: “here the emotions were a religion, and for this very reason they collapsed into vice and madness.… In this darkest pit, only the fire of sex was burning, under the black sky of the supernatural.”⁹ Dazed by the scores of children left alone in bleak alleys, she censures the erotic frenzy that agitates the lower classes, with the blessings of the church, in “the city presided over by Saint Gennaro.”¹⁰ This furious sexual passion engenders a vicious cycle of uncontrolled procreation and further misery, where the “nature-city” (città-natura) reveals its double-edged quality of “generating and corrupting physis” (physis generatrice e corruttrice).¹¹

Ortese’s critique stems from a firsthand, prolonged experience of life in the streets, gathered through tireless walks in the urban labyrinth. She tries to forget herself and her disillusions by roaming in impoverished districts, which she will later describe in her writings, and venturing in enchanting Parthenopean neighborhoods. Instead of seizing the bright palette of the city’s natural setting, she envisions it shrouded in a bleak aura. To the question, “Is Naples gray or colorful?,” she replies,

In the act of donating herself, nature [during the summer] reveals the city’s limits to the Neapolitans. The alleys become excessively narrow, most houses have no view of the sky, those living here who are deprived of joy, or have only a fake, secondhand joy, are countless. The hope that survived in this desolation … and that for a moment made some exhausted human beings quiver gives way to nature’s monotonous certainties and gloomy ecstasies. Thus, the too many colors and the famous blue of Naples turn out to be changeable and false: its gray, and light gray, which sometimes exudes blood, turn out to be authentic, eternal.¹²

The reference to blood alludes to violence ready to erupt in this scene of dreariness and dejection: the body of the city is always on the brink of hemorrhaging. In this sketch Ortese’s description recalls Walter Benjamin’s sharp verdict on Naples: “Fantastic reports by travellers have touched up the city. In reality it is grey: a grey-red or ochre, a grey-white. And entirely grey against sky and sea. It is this, not least, that disheartens the tourist.”¹³ However, whereas Benjamin’s eye is that of a riveted, diffident onlooker, espousing the perspective of an inquisitive visitor, the gloomy atmosphere of the place has left indelible traces in Ortese, who shares a profound connection with its inhabitants.

The contrasts that afflict Neapolitan life appear especially grim when Ortese and her family return to the city in 1945, after having fled the bombing of Campania, barely escaping the ravages of the war. Amid the rubble, Ortese finds her former neighborhood devastated and “transformed beyond recognition,” and she endures a “whole year of despair.” She cannot identify the city of her youth—already afflicted by disturbing contradictions—in the present state of moral dissolution, where physical destruction and material need are exacerbated by a ruthless will to survive. This fever has infected the Neapolitan lumpenproletariat, which is consumed by the veneration of money, to be garnered at all costs, including the sexual exploitation of vulnerable subjects: “The whole city was one diabolical market-place, where everything was for sale: cigarettes, bread, women, and saddest of all, even children’s innocence.”¹⁴

What made Ortese’s portraits of Naples particularly scorching at this time was the tragic experience of the war, still fresh in her mind, which she could not reconcile with the quest for pleasure and the gross inequalities she observed: “I was coming from the war time, when I had traveled throughout Italy: in the midst of fire, iron, and terror. And when I went back [to Naples] I felt how tenuous human life was; and it was folly to see this, all that southern sorrow, the people reduced to nothing, and the euphoria of the well-off who were enjoying themselves.”¹⁵

In the attempt to exorcise images of degradation and grief, the narrator escapes a direct, unsettling contact with life in the streets and temporarily renounces the flânerie that she had cherished in the prewar years,¹⁶ taking the vantage point of her window. In a dream of immobility and amnesia, she retreats within her four walls and searches for relief in fleeting images from her past (as Adorno has claimed in regard to Kierkegaard, “Thus the flâneur promenades in his room; the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardeness”).¹⁷

To be an outcast (or to feel like one)¹⁸ in Naples, where there is no spark of hope, is lethal. When Ortese steps outside her interiority, she witnesses a population split between brutal mercantilism and a religious formalism that condones the quasi-pagan worshipping of idols. As a spectator of Catholic celebrations that carry almost orgiastic overtones,¹⁹ she dissects the unholy alliance of the sacred and the profane that had puzzled so many foreign visitors since the eighteenth century. These traces of “primitivism” appear particularly shocking as they clash with the dramatic shift to modernity in Italy’s northern regions.

Ortese finds this condition unbearable, a...