Novecento: The new “status” of the intellectual and this new function of literature and the birth of the European Community

Pascoli with his regression into childhood, with the symbolic dimension of his apparent impressionism and, above all, with the breaking of boundaries between pre-grammatical, grammatical and post-grammatical language, as Contini showed, which was the breaking of the boundaries between rational and irrational. Pirandello with his poetics of humor, the feeling of the opposite which tended to the deformation of things and characters and the vivid awareness of man’s setback and impotence, of the randomness, unpredictability, relativity of human events, of the anarchic condition in which modern man came to live, of the lack of an organic social fabric, of the domination of things over men. Svevo who definitively broke the structure of the nineteenth-century novel, with the awareness of the dissociation in which the person lived, of the deadly disease, individual and collective, for which it could be said that the bourgeois has even lost the hope of a human fruition of life. Gozzano who summarized, “in the last exhausting and self-ironic use of the traditional metric-stylistic, the sense of the consciously mortuary testimony of an objective world reduced to pure formal shocks of a lost order.” What matters most, however, was that he questioned the universal function of art in its public and traditionally political scope. The “hegemonic role of the bourgeois intellectual, conscience and guide of the rising society” was emptied, that culture intended to realize “in itself its own separate, alternative universality, and to constitute itself as a specific contradiction of society”. In all this frantic search for a cultural identity of twentieth-century man, between the past that pursues him and the future that awaits him, even liberalisms took on more marked values. The first reveals an idealistic nature and the other assumed an empirical matrix. Freedom, for the former, belonged to the category of the spirit and for the others to the empirical one. The first expressed the concept of freedom in the singular meaning that it is conceptually one and indivisible, whatever the actions of man are, and the other turned to a freedom that has multiple faces according to the way it was possible to manifest it I can identify these ways of representing the concept of freedom according to a line of thought which in Italy was headed by Croce and the other by Anglo-Saxon culture. This resulted in two models of life in which the culture of freedom was expressed in one case, with respect to the other, with “arrogance” when they determined a rationalistic culture from which one wanted to derive the discourse that those who did not think with their own convictions were a cretin. The idealistic matrix of liberalism led us to suffer the dictatorships of ideas and men in the name of an “abstract freedom” and better to say capable of leaving its values intact even if one was rotting in a prison or committing the genocide of an entire people in concentration camps or in bloody warfare. With the same idealistic culture, the intellectual and the opinion maker were built in Italy those “monsters of con-sociativism” with many “isms”: socialism, federalism, centralism, communism, but which in practice have never been able to express their contents fully or for what people wanted and expected from them. This has led us to a continuous rupture in the relationship between man and the society that represented him. Therefore, understanding the 20th century also means understanding how the civil and moral conscience of peoples has been reached and matured over the centuries. Many date back to the sixteenth century the great revolutionary turning point, with the advent of industrialization, which had Great Britain as its leading nation. A country, at that time, was essentially made up of farmers, sheep breeders and weavers. But the real reasons for the change could be recognized from the spiritual evolution of Europe in terms of exchanges between the main nations of which it was composed. A change that was characterized by the spirit of Christianity in the Middle Ages. The ruling classes of the time drank from a unique source of culture so much so that we could speak of a “Medieval University International”. Well, from that distant inspiration, in the second half of the 20th century, I rediscovered a hope that became the reality of a united Europe as it was in the spirit of our ancestors. And things have come and been changed even in spite of the pessimism of the protagonists. “I remember, for example, what the British ambassador Russel Bretherton said when he contemptuously left the table at the Messina conference on June 2, 1955 organized by the Minister of Italian Foreign Minister Gaetano Martino”: “I am leaving happy because I see that you would not agree, you would not combine anything.” And even if you did something, it would be a disaster. Well, from that “dreaded disaster” the European Community was born and baptized, two years later, by the Treaty of Rome. (by Novecento stories of my time by Riccardo Alfonso)