«Un felice viaggio». Poesia e destino in Bartolo Cattafi: 1951-1961

This doctoral thesis analyzes the relationship between poetry and destiny in Bartolo Cattafi, focusing on the first decade of his poetic activity, encompassing the publication of Nel centro della mano (1951) and Qualcosa di preciso (1961). Preceded by a preface that summarizes its content and by a chronology of Cattafi’s life and works, the thesis is divided into three main parts: an introduction, eight chapters and a conclusion. In the introductory part, it is carried out a preliminary discussion on the role of destiny and poetry in relation to the most significant events of Cattafi's life, which he himself make thematically relevant in his texts. The first chapter analyzes the poet’s debut, Nel centro della mano (1951), whose literary influences and possible models are reconsidered, especially in the case of biblical sources, medieval culture, anthropology and Sicilian folklore. A series of words of undoubted symbolic significance have been then isolated. This recursive lexicon is the one through which the poet reiterates, in his lyrics, the indissoluble bond existing between poetry and destiny, experienced by Cattafi as an internal state, of an inviolable nature, and a sign of election, in a similar way to the epic hero of the classical and Christian-medieval tradition. In the second chapter, dedicated to Partenza da Greenwich (1955), the analysis focuses on how Cattafi’s poetic language and his interpretation of destiny develop, freeing the plaquette from the traditional interpretation which makes it only a short and intense travel log inspired by his life facts. It is shown, on the contrary, an extensive use of literary and theological sources as well as underlined the effective tie with the main motifs of Nel centro della mano. They consist in a continuous search for signs, tinged with an explicit apocalyptic component, capable of giving meaning to the existence of man, perpetually waiting to be redeemed from his own condition of suffering; a suffering due, as the existentialists put forward, to the mere fact of existing, of having been “thrown”, according to Heidegger’s terminology, into the world. The detailed analysis of the texts of the 1950s led to the identification of a conspicuous set of literary and philosophical-theological references, stimulating new interpretations that seem decisive in understanding an author mistakenly considered “without a solid and consistent cultural asset”. The study of Cattafi’s poems has been supported by several original documentation form the poet’s archive: letters, autographs, notebooks and block notes that survived the fires with which Cattafi used to destroy his paper material, along with the volumes composing his library. They show something more than a mere, widespread cultural curiosity, which consists in specific and thematically coherent interests, such as Apollinaire, the French and Spanish symbolist poets, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European novel (Melville, Conrad, Verne, Joyce, Hemingway), minimalism, existentialism and the Nouveau roman. The first two plaquettes show also a poet aware of his own poetic language. For this reason, chapters three and four are assigned, respectively, to the reconsideration of Montale’s real influences on Cattafi and to the investigation of the relationships between Cattafi’s poetry and that of Sereni. Although inevitably influenced by the lexical and expressive reservoir of Italian Ermetismo, Sereni’s poetry provides an alternative to that experience and defines the specificity of Cattafi’s. The attempt to overcome the linguistic area of the Ermetici made possible, in chapter five, a comparison between Zanzotto’s Dietro il paesaggio, published in the same year in which Cattafi made his debut. The role played in both cases by Sereni’s poetry as well as a series of complementary references, including Lorca, Surrealism and Heidegger (this last one derived, in both cases, from Stefanini's interpretation) highlighted significant stylistic and ideological affinities between the two poets. Chapter six proposes a recapitulation on Cattafi’s poetry in the wake of Le mosche del meriggio (1958), the book-anthology with which Cattafi rethinks and reorders his own previous poetry. The evolution, in pessimistic terms, of the relationship between poetry and destiny is particularly evident in the last section of the book, which contains almost all unpublished poems; the subject’s relationship with the world and the interpretation of destiny as an “inevitable fact” or an elective sign seem now to be forcefully compromised. This perspective unravels and develops further in Qualcosa di preciso (1961), a very essential plaquette of nineteen poems which stages a reality modeled on the urban-industrial disposition of the city of Milan in the second half of the 1950s. Progress is shown in all its paradoxical nature and consistency. At this height, Cattafi’s poetry is part of a debate that involves many intellectuals of the time in Italy and Europe. This is why it is strongly affirmed the autonomy of Cattafi’s imagery and style, who consciously renounces the ideological a priori and the stylistic choices of Italian Neorealism, on the one hand, and Neoavantgarde, on the one other. The poet shows instead an interest for phenomenology and how the so-called “New Literature”, which was developing in France, makes use of both Heidegger’s and Husserl’s ideas through Sartre. The profound restlessness that transpires in Qualcosa di preciso emerges definitively in L’osso, l’anima (1964), to which chapter eight is dedicated. L’osso, l’anima’s poems, written between 1961 and 1962, are proof of a lucid and prescient gaze on the consequences of progress, especially with regard to atomic energy, artificial intelligence and the humanoid. Cattafi wonderfully anticipates the masterpieces of Kubrick and Dick and does so in total autonomy, recovering both Heidegger’s and Adorno’s ideas on the civilization of technology as well as the artistic-literary experiments coming from France and England, where the theater of the absurd, the the experience of the Nouveau Roman and Sarraute’s prose (supported by Sartre at the end of the 1950s) convey Cattafi’s particular interpretation of both reality and human relationships. The widespread tension between the repeated naming of things and the weakening of the communicative quality of language are the most evident consequences of this change in the Cattafi’s cognitive paradigm, which moves on the verge of nihilism. Paradoxically, it is precisely the absolute risk of nothingness that leads Cattafi to delve deeper into one of the concepts at the center of his poetry, the soul (anima), supposed by the ideas of Romains, the author cited at the beginning of Qualcosa di preciso. A relevant character from a poetic and ideological point of view, Romains contrasts the illusion of progress by establishing a political proposal capable of marking, in intellectual terms, the twentieth century; “Unanimism”. Cattafi, who was most likely inspired by this movement, just as Romains did not give up in the face of the inevitable and tangible anguish of his time, facing it consciously and revealing its dangers and false myths. The interpretation of destiny and poetry then takes on apocalyptic traits representing the coherent evolution of the poet’s previous ones, now cloaked in an increasingly radical pessimism. The volume concludes by stressing the specificity of Cattafi’s poetry in the second half of the twentieth century in Italy. The question to be answered dealt with the continuous misunderstanding that occurred in the evaluation of Cattafi’s lyric poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, too easily considered by criticism to be the product of an epigone of modernism, who in the best of cases entertained with the text a relationship of an almost exclusively instinctive nature.