Structures of resistance: the affinities between text, culture and society in the works of Luciano Bianciardi

Between 1958 and 1965 Italy became a modern country at par with other industrialized European nations. The abruptness of technological advancements (known as the “miracolo industriale”) brought unexpected problems to a country that had for the most part an agricultural based economy. An alienation between the worker and the industrial workplace ensued, aggravated by the former's obligation to work in an industry whose impersonal methods (management; work distribution; production) estranged him from the very work that sustained his livelihood. The necessary involvement in, yet sense of exclusion from industry, along with the unconstrained infra-structural changes emerging rapidly, engendered a widespread conceptual uncertainty at the super-structural (culture) level that was both felt and voiced by many literary intellectuals and writers of the time. Literary intellectuals upheld that an unprecedented industrial revolution, rooted in a specific historical context, elicits cultural, social, and ideological shifts in perception that must be critically addressed. They argued that if literature is to assume a critical stance in opposition to an industrial world, this can only be achieved through a literary form that must redefine its representative function along the lines of subjectivity, not objectivity. This study will examine the literary implications of industrialization in the Italy of the 1960's with reference to two authors whose works amount to an aesthetic rebellion against material capitalism. Departing from Bakhtin's “dialogical criticism” and a “possible worlds theory of fictionality,” and expanding to include Edwina Taborsky's semiotic model of “society as text,” I will examine Bianciardi's novels, his political and social articles, as well as his short-stories. Then I will compare some of Luciano Bianciardi's works with Paolo Voloponi's Memoriale and La macchina mondiale, in the hopes of arguing three points. Bianciardi's and Volponi's aesthetic transfigurations of capitalist society envisioned revolutionary states of affair through a conscious interrogation and transgression of generic and discursive properties. Thus, a 1960's narrative of subversion and resistance is born. Secondly, in revealing how the literature of an industrial renaissance self-consciously rebelled against the literary canon of mimesis and mediated on its creative procedures as forms of ideological-literary subversion, my research will illustrate that Bianciardi' 1960's narratives (including Volponi's two novels) contributed to the perpetuation of a self-advertising narrative that revised and addressed social issues by symbolically and subjectively transfiguring industrial content, thereby challenging us to mediate on our roles as “creators,” writers and critics of the conceptual categories that constitute the social text. Thirdly, given the scarcity of criticism on Bianciardi's social articles and short stories, my dialogical heuristic will reveal the author's experimentalism. In doing so, I will argue that Bianciardi deserves to be considered not only an autobiographical writer (as most critics perceive him) but an “experimentalist” whose progression as a novelist treating historical and modern themes—like Italian unification and the “miracolo industriale”—testifies to an increased use of symbolism, subjectivism and meta-fictionality by which fiction's role in supplying society with alternatives to the status quo is expressed.