Strategies of Resistance in Bassani's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"

• In Event: The History of Fiction and the Fiction of History

Abstract

This paper focuses on Giorgio Bassani's deployment of screen memories to represent the unspeakable (the persecution during fascism of the Jewish population of Ferrara, Italy) in his 1962 novel "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis."

Bassani's topos of inner enclosure, with its detachment from outside influences, is brought to unprecedented literality and poignant effect. As a fictive place that evokes the "landscape of the mind" of classic literary renditions of locus amoenus, it simultaneously harkens back to historical Jewish ghetto with its painful legacy of exclusion that became all too real in 1938 with the passage of the racial laws in Italy. Following those laws, the fictional garden in the novel became a recreational meeting point, and a psychological refuge - a haven for young men and women of different social classes and upbringing.
Bassani underscores personal and social precariousness by narrativizing a spatial dimension that is traversed by time. Unfolding along the temporal trajectory of transformation from ethnic discrimination to persecution in the city of Ferrara, the tragic background in the public sphere permeates deeply, and inevitably intersects, the quintessentially private nature of the main plot. His prose guides the reader into perceiving how stillness in the midst of a maelstrom can provide the necessary starting point for resilience and resistance, a temporary immobility that can function as shield and barrier. Delays, deflections, and deviations are part of this strategy in which the reader has only indirect access to the tragic events and is, for that reason, forced to look deeper into the causes of uneasiness and discomfort.
The use of screen memories coincides with his placement of narrative decorum as an inviolable barrier against the irrevocable loss of meaning associated with the leveling of class and sexual distinctions that occurs in ethnic persecution.
In Italian literature of the 1950s and 1960s decorum was frequently used as a marker of social class. It served to delimit a narrative space within which sexuality and normativity could be articulated. It also provided a discursive hinge for creating "overdetermined bodies" - characters whose actions (or inactions) are imbued with moral didacticism or are exemplary of a particular ideology or social condition that allow the writers to make indirect social commentary.
Critics have pointed to an imaginative space that Bassani has carefully constructed to lead the reader astray, a trap akin to a spider's web, that induces "interpretive vertigo," but the function of this counterintuitive device or the reason for the multiple "traps" which Bassani utilizes have not been explained. My paper revisits this imaginary space and argues that the postulation of an "interpretative vertigo" and "traps" coincides with a strategy of forcing the reader to read "indirectly" what would otherwise be too painful to see.
The Garden is littered with monuments - chronotopic inscriptions that commemorate a loss too vast to contemplate without filter or adornment. Similar to Freud's "Screen memories," they simultaneously recall and displace. Less traps than deviations, their effects can be experienced immediately as dilatory and disorienting-they require a map, or a method as in Freud's case, to be fully accessed and described.
The "map" that Bassani provides to represent the unspeakable is the counter-discourse of displacement and decorum. The loss of a future perspective for the Jewish community, is filled by a narrative insistence on memorializing the present, a strategy underpinned by the careful calibration of decorum in erotic or class connoting settings. The muted, the understated, the circumscribed and the controlled are pitted against the discourse of excess and radicality, functioning as an artistic, social, and political critique of intolerance.

Author

• Chiara Ferrari, City University of New York, College of Staten Island