Dannunziana
The Lund University Library has four English-language biographies of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the diminutive dictator of Fiume. Here’s a short, superficial review of each, with the first sentences as examples of the grand prose that his ghost has inspired in other historians (I’m not the first victim…).
THE POET AS SUPERMAN - A Life of Gabriele D’Annunzio
Anthony Rhodes (London 1959)
The circumstances in which the Italian people had increased, particularly between the Alps and Tuscany, their inheritance which had survived the Dark Ages, their geographical position, and finally their climate, had made them, by the sixteenth century, the greatest imaginative and creative community known on Earth since the Greece of Pericles.
Once you’ve plodded through all the dependent clauses, you begin to wonder what this has to do with the poet-superman. Is he the final fruit of this grand history, the culmination of this “imaginative” - or, as Benedict Anderson would put it, imagined - community?
THE FIRST DUCE - D’Annunzio at Fiume
Michael A. Ledeen (John Hopkins University 1977)
On the ninth of August 1918 the citizens of Vienna were subjected to a unique aerial bombardment. The skies were filled with pieces of colored paper, which were tinted red, white, and green, the colors of the Italian flag. They were propaganda leaflets, and the text began in a spectacular manner: “Viennese! We could now be dropping bombs on you! Instead we drop only a salute.”
Catchy beginning! That’s the kind of history writing we’d all like to do, secretly. It’s also D’Annunzio in a nutshell. Well done. Can’t wait to read the rest.
Gabriele D’Annunzio - THE DARK FLAME
Paolo Valesio (Yale, 1992)
Revisionism, revisionism: These words seem technical and cold. But their humanist importance is clear when we remember that revisionism means making amends for the injustices that literary history sometimes commits (as inevitably happens), as it abandons without explanation certain lost jewels at the side of the road marked by its positive conquests.
This is obviously a revisionist approach to D’Annunzio’s literary work. Because of his Fascist connections, his work has been stigmatised and forgotten, yes, perhaps even unjustly. But he was already half-forgotten in the 1930’s, when Mussolini wanted to keep him quiet, as a living mummified monument to the roots of Fascism in Fiume.
Gabriele D’Annunzio - DEFIANT ARCHANGEL
John Woodhouse (Oxford 1998)
Italy is a country more accustomed than any to the problems of living with genius, but Gabriele D’Annunzio presented symbiotic difficulties which his fellow countrymen found particularly trying. In their time-honoured fashion the Italians resolved the problem by creating a dilemma: they divided into opposing camps [...]
It’s funny, because it’s a stereotype. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s possible to write about this guy without turning into some kind of idol worshiper or apologist. D’Annunzio himself played around with stereotypes of Italy and the people; on one hand, the negative image of the lazy mandolin-player, on the other hand, the manly Roman legionaries conquering the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum - “Our Sea”!
I’m glad I didn’t read these books before inventing the character Leon d’Oro. It’s a bit frightening to make a parody of someone who is taken so seriously by many scholars, even though they not only acknowledge, but relish all his crazy escapades.
February 4th, 2008 at 9:50 am
He has hardly even showed up in the comic yet! You’re building up too much tension! This is frustrating!
V`(oo)´V;
February 6th, 2008 at 12:58 am
And he won’t show up for, like, ages… :(
24 hours Goldenbird time, 5 months real time. (my work tempo)
gomen nasai
m(_ _)m