[an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Beginnings & Endings, Vol. 18 Introduction

Dino S. Cervigni

Two years ago, in proposing the topic for AdI’s current issue, I wrote that the conclusion of the second millennium and the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era, in spite of or perhaps precisely because of such endings’ and beginnings’ artificiality, offer a most appropriate time — a unique and privileged kairos — to investigate the meaning and function of, as well as the many relationships between, beginnings and endings.

In fact, books and the human beings who write them; the historical and literary periods in which both artifacts and their authors are situated; the books’ internal structures and material configurations as well as their authors’ lives: in brief, every human being’s life and all human artifacts are, by their intrinsic nature, situated within a beginning and an ending. At the same time, the purpose of every individual, humankind as a whole, and the sum of all their activities and products seek to create ever new beginnings in order to postpone indefinitely, as it were, the ineluctability of the individual’s and humankind’s end.

1. Toward a Theory of Beginnings & Endings

The first section of the volume deals primarily with theoretical analyses aimed at uncovering the multifaceted aspects of endings and beginnings in humans and their artifacts. These essays have different starting points, which range from Vico to contemporary authors.

In "Vico’s Beginnings and Ends: Variations on the Theme of the Origin of Language," Roberto Maria Dainotto starts out with a series of questions: Is Vico’s Scienza nuova the beginning of a new scientific prose, or is it rather the symptom of a nostalgia for the classical world’s system of values and beliefs that has now come to an end? The essay brackets away these questions to claim instead the importance of the theme of origin: namely, a topos where beginnings and endings coincide, as is the case in the writing of the Scienza nuova.

In his essay, "La definizione dell’Incipit," Aldo Nemesio starts from an empirical observation; namely, that the narrative incipit found in 18th- and 19th-century novels does not present specific characteristics capable of differentiating it from the body of the text. On the basis of this evidence, he proposes to shift the focus of the research on the narrative incipit from the text itself to the reader’s behavior in reading the novels’ initial words. Accordingly, Nemesio’s essay provides the data of an experiment he has conducted among students who were asked to read the narrative incipit of eight different texts.

Giuliana Adamo, by contrast, seeing the novels’ narrative beginning and ending as a datum, offers a very insightful and useful overview of many critical approaches to the study of narrative beginnings and endings that have been developed in the second half of the 20th century. Her essay, entitled "Twentieth-Century Recent Theories on Beginnings and Endings of Novels," ranges from the controversial issue of the definition of textual limina (Aragon, Jean, Pope, Lintvelt) to the identification of their ambiguous nature (Barthes, Cornille, Brombert, Calvino, Coletti, Hamon, Herrnstein Smith, Lintvelt, Del Lungo), their interpretation in terms of speech acts (Genette), the setting up of models for their classification (Del Lungo, Lintvelt, Torgovnick), and finally the recent blooming of popular, non-academic texts on the same subject (Ensign, Fruttero & Lucentini, O’Connor, Papi and Presutto, Schwamental and Straniero, Weaver).

In his "Tabucchi Echoes Lacan: Making an End of ‘Postmodernism’ from the Beginning," Jonathan Smith, while focusing on Tabucchi, deals with far-reaching theoretical considerations. Smith’s starting point is the consideration that Tabucchi’s writings between 1975 and 1997 articulate an intellectual as well as a literary project. This project begins, as it were, from a reading of Lacan, Blanchot, and cognate authors at odds with the classic formulations of Italian postmodernism proposed by Eco and Vattimo in particular, and it ends with the diagnosis of an "end" of the credibility of historical narratives of progress from past authoritarianism to present democracy. In this sense, from the "beginning," Tabucchi takes issue with a fundamental principle of Italian culture, which is deeply rooted in the national tradition, with a view to "ending" its dominance, and thus "beginning" a more searching examination of Italian national identity than the tradition permits. Hence two of Tabucchi’s frequently recurring fictional themes: the residual Fascism of the republican period, and the exploration of this problem through the metaphor of the more recently democratized Portugal.

In his "Beginning/Ending, Openness/Consistency: Models for the Hyper-Novel," Massimo Riva focuses precisely on these issues as they pertain to contemporary novels. Riva’s point of departure is Italo Calvino’s last, unfinished memo for the next millennium, which deals with the concepts of beginning, ending, openness, and consistency. Accordingly, Riva ties Calvino’s notes on these issues to the writer’s own musings on the hyper-novel, and he also explores Calvino’s fundamental anxiety over the nature (and future) of narrative art in the age of electronic media, most tellingly expressed in Se una notte d’inverno un viagiatore. . . .

The journal’s first section concludes with Charles Klopp’s essay, entitled "Writers from the Margins and the Canon in the Year 2000: New Beginnings or Business as Usual?" Kloppfocuses on beginnings and endings from a different perspective; namely, the "fraying" of the literary canon in Italy in the so-called marginalized writers. Hence — Klopp argues — the importance, at millennium’s end, of taking stock of the state of the literary canon in Italy. Here, as in many other areas of Italian intellectual life, immense changes have taken place. In his survey of new kinds of fiction by what he calls "Italophone," "unlettered," or "marginalized writers," Klopp examines several examples of writings new to the Italian canon. In concluding, he suggests that a "fraying" or "decomposing" of canonical boundaries is perhaps typical of the operations of the literary establishment throughout the twentieth century.

2. Medieval & Renaissance Texts: Closure, Open-Endedness, Narrative Cycles

It is well known that medieval authors’ view of beginnings and endings is often affected be their Christian perspective, according to which humans and their artifacts carry, and therefore should also evince, their Maker’s presence in them. Dante’s entire opus bears out such a Judeo-Christian perspective. Accordingly, in the essay entitled "From Beginning to End: Dante’s Fourfold Judeo-Christian Mytho-Poiesis," I propose to read Dante’s works ¾ from the Vita nuova to the Commedia, but also his linguistic, encyclopedic, and political writings ¾ from a unifying perspective focusing on myth and Northrop Frye’s theory of archetypes. I thus seeks to show how Dante’s oeuvre rests on the fourfold Judeo-Christian myth that fully describes every human being’s existence, individually as well as within the context of a universal community that unfolds along a temporal and historical axis: humankind’s creation, fall, renewal, and redemption, precisely from beginning to end.

Medieval authors, obviously, Dante included, bear out differing approaches to the complex issue of beginnings and endings. Thus Rebecca S. Beal examines the tale of Narcissus from the Roman de la Rose, the episode of Pier della Vigna in Inferno 13, and the metamorphosis of Fileno in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, in order to show how the ending of the intercalated narrative may resist closure even while validating the resolution of the larger narrative.

Luigi Monga, in his "Cycles of Early-Modern Hodoeporics," examines travel literature from the 14th to the 19th centuries in order to investigate travel cycles in hodoeporic texts and practices. Whereas Renaissance travel narratives usually focus on the journey’s bare facts, with the notable exception of Montaigne’s Journal, 18th-century intellectual curiosity and 19th-century égotisme gradually put the writer’s moi at the center of the literary discourse. Thus, Monga argues that the voyage becomes a quest: the discovery of one’s own self in its relationship with the surrounding world.

Armando Maggi examines the concepts of beginning and ending in the vast journal of Saint Veronica Giuliani. In particular, Maggi studies how this mystic visualizes the beginning and the ending of a divine insight in the form of a mental emblem or "impresa." In Veronica Giuliani’s imprese, an insight announces itself as the opening of her heart wound. Throughout her journal we read of the repeated closing (ending) and sudden opening (beginning) of this wound, even before the stigmata are inscribed on her body. Thus pain and blood are the signs marking both the beginning and the end of a divine communication in the heart.

3. Beginnings & Endings in Modern and Postmodern Literature

A cluster of essays focuses on beginnings, endings, and/or the process of formation of human subjectivity in modern and postmodern literature and film.

In "‘That in Giving Me Life, You Still Remain Alive’: Fetal Beginnings and Maternal Endings at Two Centuries’ Ends," Cristina Mazzoni focuses on 19th- and 20th-century texts on maternity. Her analysis bears out literary, scientific, and theoretical connections between the beginning of a human subject (as fetus) and the ending of another (the pregnant woman, the mother). This fascination, perhaps even obsession, with existential beginnings and endings is especially visible in texts from the ending of the 19th century to the beginning and ending of the 20th century.

In the next essay entitled "Writing for the Third Millennium: Gadda and the Unfinalizability of Life," Norma Bouchard assesses the lack of completion in Gadda’s narrative discourse, from his earlier texts to Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. Gadda forces the reader into an open-ended itinerary across beginnings, middles, and endings, thereby running counter to the most basic and widely shared assumptions about narrative as a textual structure of intelligibility (Kermode’s The Sense of an End) and as a paradigmatic form (Brook’s Reading for the Plot).

Then, in her essay, "From Start to Finish: Intertextual Roads of Reading between Manzoni, Tozzi, and Calvino," Silvia Ross explores the interrelationships of beginnings and endings in those three writers, centering her analysis on the act of reading and the recurring image of the road.

Focusing exclusively on Calvino in her essay entitled "Principio senza fine: l’iper-romanzo di Italo Calvino," Assumpta Camps analyzes Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore . . . in order to focus on the novel’s literary themes and narrative structures and thus highlight Calvino’s postmodernity.

Olimpia Pelosi analyzes Guido Piovene’s Le stelle fredde. Her starting point is the novel’s incipit, which is configured like a desolate foreboding of an end: the author’s reflection on the posthumous condition of western mythography, a ritual song on the agony of the symbolic archetypes of a plurimillenary cultural cycle that the author views as dead simulacrum no longer capable of pointing to any beyond. While also comparing Piovene’s novel with some of the works by the American postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon, Pelosi pursues her analysis by means of a postmodern approach that involves entropy and chaos theories applied to literature.

In "Il finale del Partigiano Johnny," Alberto Casadei examines the endings of various works by Beppe Fenoglio in order to demonstrate that in Partigiano Johnny the protagonist’s death is both necessary and inevitable. In fact, Casadei argues, the representation of death in other novels of the Italian Resistance bears out the reading proposed for Partigiano Johnny.

Finally, in "The Unending Process of Subjectivity: Gendering Otherness as Openness in Pasolini’s Decameron," Colleen Ryan-Scheutz analyzes the dynamic and unending process of subjectivity in Pasolini. She thus sets out to show how the open-ended nature of the tales’ conclusions and the links between them bear out a gender discourse that celebrates otherness. She also identifies certain female figures as vital and regenerative sources of self-knowledge for the male subject, pointing out that their presence and activity allow the process of human subjectivity to continue.

4. An Intellectual’s Wanderings at the Turn of the Millennium

An intellectual’s wanderings at the turn of the millennium — Riccardo Campa’s "Divagazioni di fine millennio" — conclude this issue’s numerous attempts to analyze human society’s complex cycles and dichotomies throughout its history. In a series of far-reaching interpretive investigations on areas and themes as varied as literature, philosophy, history, and socio-politics, Campa’s intellectual musings underscore the problematic nature of human experience that comes through apparent contradictions and inconsistencies, thereby offering challenging reflections on the outgoing millennium and the future that faces humankind.

5. Hymns to a Millenary Beginning and Ending

Celebrating for the ending of the second millennium and the beginning of the third one, poets from Italy and North America invite us to reflect imaginatively on the passing of time, human emotions and passions, love, and God. These poets are: Laura Stortoni, Tomaso Kenemy, Mario Baudino, Roberto Mussapi, Gabriella Galzio, Roberto Cariffi, Giuseppe Conte, Rosita Capioli, Massimo Maggiari, and Alessandro Carrera.


Conclusion

Thus, AdI 2000 provides the scholars with a vast gamut of investigations dealing with theoretical principles as well as individual authors from the Middle Ages to our own times, in the best tradition of an open, intellectually solid, and oftentimes challenging forum. It is the editor’s intention to continue such stimulating debates. AdI 2001, in fact, will pursue the ethical implications of literature and scholarship; AdI 2002 intends to focus on the literature of exile, to be followed in 2003 by another volume on travel literature or hodoeporics.

In conclusion, AdI 2000 — entitled Beginnings/Endings/Beginnings — has provided scholars of Italian culture and literature with an open forum to investigate theoretical issues and specific literary and historical texts in order to shed light on the function, meaning, and interrelationship of beginnings and the endings in human artifacts, endeavors, and human lives themselves. The first word "Beginnings" in the title implies the mysteriousness and difficulty inherent in the inception of human life and all human endeavors. At the end of the title, however, the same word emphasizes the perennial human hope that life might continue forever, always evolving in ever new beginnings of undertakings, activities, and forms of life. The central position of the word Endings, by contrast, bears out the human condition’s ineluctable end, just as we read in Dante. He, in fact, portrays life as a "flight" toward its end (Purg. 20:39) and a "race" toward death (Purg. 33:54). At the same time, he also depicts God as "padre d’ogni mortal vita" (Par. 22:116), who wants his children to share "di vita etterna la dolcezza" (Par. 3:38).