Palazzeschi and the Neo-Avantgarde (in "Mosaici" online journal)

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La neo-avanguardia italiana: 50 anni dopo

Palazzeschi and the Neo-Avantgardeby Mimmo Cangiano (Duke University)

è Palazzeschi che realizza la verità dell’avanguardia

Guido Guglielmi, Dialettica del Futurismo

One of the tasks that any literary Avant-garde must face is having to build a tradition of its own. But there is afundamental difference between the way it looks at the past and the way the same past is seen by othermovements. The question is not whether to claim some form of validating continuity achieved throughsuccession and linearity with tradition (with the masters), but to establish a relationship in which the veryconcepts of tradition and contemporaneity are irretrievably changed. The change can be achieved by theprogrammatic disavowal of the past, as in the case of Marinetti’s Futurism and his pursuit of novelty at anycost and apology of permanent conflicts. On the other hand, as in the case of the Neo-Avantgarde, this changecan be achieved by the consciously paradoxical use of traditional material where the past is each timereassembled from the point of view of the present, and thus contaminated by a reinterpretation exalting themilitant responsibility of the point of view (hence Giuliani’s suggestion to re-read Dante through Sanguineti,and what Guido Guglielmi called Il Novecento di Sanguineti).(1)

The purpose of this essay is neither to discuss the general aspects of the Avantgarde nor to highlight thedifferences between the historical Avantgarde(s) and the Gruppo 63. I would rather discuss the reasons why,among the many Avantgardists in Milan, Florence and Naples, the Neo Avantgarde chose to direct itsattention to Palazzeschi, to the point of taking him as a model (despite the Fine dei modelli) to apply equallyagainst Marinettism and against the aesthetic idea that in those years was being developed in Lacerba, theliterary journal to which Palazzeschi contributed extensively.

The beginning of this reappraisal can be traced back to 1961, to an essay by Sanguineti entitled Palazzeschitra liberty e crepuscolarismo, likely motivated by important intuitions by Luigi Baldacci on the renewedinterest in the early works of Palazzeschi. Sanguineti places Palazzeschi, together with Gozzano andCorazzini, in a triad that during the early twentieth century attempted to overcome the influence ofD’Annunzio by dint of ‘irony’, ‘sentimentalism’, and ‘grotesque’, and initiated in the subversion ofPalazzeschi’s early works (I cavalli bianchi and Lanterna) a parody of the Romantic sublime, considered bySanguineti as ‘il grande problema segreto di tutta la cultura borghese’:(2)



Un bel giorno, ci sia concesso romanzare un poco la nostra interpretazione, Palazzeschi scopre chequelle poesie che egli veniva seriosamente componendo, quelle poesie in cui immetteva una cosìformidabile carica liberty […], scopre che diventano tollerabili, semplicemente se non vogliono riuscireintenzionalmente grottesche, in una lettura intenzionalmente, esplicitamente grottesca.(3)

While underlining the reversal that takes place between the two parts of :riflessi in 1908, Sanguineti – if wetoo may be allowed to novelize a little – was fighting on at least three fronts: the first one was the Dannunzianculture of the time; the second one was the culture of the ‘lyrical word’ of the years Sanguineti was writing in(so hard to let go of in our country) and, the last one, as it can be seen in the final part of the essay, was theinstauration of a sublime value underlying, in his opinion, the Avantgarde movement that Palazzeschibelonged to, that is, Futurism, which ‘voleva sostituire, al sublime della tradizione, un sublime inedito, aprezzo, ovviamente, di distruggere i musei, le biblioteche, a prezzo di fare tabula rasa del sublime allavecchia maniera’.(4) The pages dedicated to the short poem L’incendiario (with its partial rejection in the1913 reissue), for a long time considered the most ‘futuristic’ of Palazzeschi’s writings, are the first signs ofSanguineti’s taking distance from Marinetti. The Neo Avantgarde would consolidate this detachment withpurposefully militant intentions, by doing away with subliming aestheticisms and beginning to viewMarinettism (already politically compromised) as a subversive, petit bourgeois ideology typical of animperialistic age. Accordingly, the Neo Avantgarde judged Marinetti unable to be organically situated withinthe new epistemological horizon (the ‘crisis of Foundations’), incapable of understanding the newrelationships of production. Of these, Futurism can only grasp the more spectacular aspects, so its art, stilloperating within a mimetic paradigm, ends up expressing a reconciliation with the world that ultimatelycapitulates to the reification of the world.

In 1973 Guido Guglielmi pointed out further important aspects, identifying Futurism as not only the source ofa different kind of literary sublime but also as a response in aesthetic terms to new economic conditions inwhich the aestheticization of politics described by Benjamin is presented as a ‘concezione letterario-esteticadell’azione’:(5)

Marinetti ha […] la mira a un trasporto di emozioni, a effetti pesantemente comunicativi. Non è perciòl’inganno delle interpretazioni ideologiche o della falsa coscienza che si vogliono eliminare.

Estetizzare la politica significò per i futuristi assegnarle valori immaginari, fornire sostituti analogici allesituazioni storiche.(6)

If, on the one hand, Guglielmi acknowledges the blow inflicted by Futurism to a traditional conception of art(against which the Neo Avantgarde is fighting as well), on the other hand he finds in Futurism both anunspoiled capacity for the artistic sublimation of reality and the assumption of the privileged point of view ofthe ruling classes, an assumption that exalts the propagandistic power of suggestion of language, which, assuch, utters a vigorous ‘Yes’ to reality – thus achieving the sublimation of reality in order to preserve theillusoriness of individual choice. But what differentiates Palazzeschi is that he sees the relationship betweenart and reality as a negative one. The former, ostensibly serving as pure entertainment, opposes to the latter adoubling of itself that is both its transfiguration and its critique. Here Guglielmi mentions Nietzsche only inpassing, but it is clear that the image that he is developing (as it will become evident a few years later) is thatof a Nietzschean Palazzeschi who creates a simulacrum of reality sub specie theatri that, while exhibiting theabsence of metaphysical foundations of its own, inevitably alludes to the metaphysical foundations of reality,and, consequently, to the impossibility of its transformation materialized by the unveiling of coerciveideologies.

It does not surprise then that in February 1974 the journal il Verri, directed by Luciano Anceschi, came outwith a monographic double issue on Aldo Palazzeschi, which symbolically contains creative pieces (forexample by Sanguineti, Porta, Arbasino, Spatola, and others) dedicated to the now elderly writer, and criticalarticles exploring new aspects of his work (for example by Barilli and Curi).(7)

In the introduction penned by Anceschi, Palazzeschi emerges as the author who ‘nella sua generazione […]forse fu l’unico a rifiutarsi di trasformare i principi nuovi in dogmi’,(8) thereby setting himself apart from hispeers, whether Futurists or Rondisti. His was a “mobile” perspective, a fact no doubt appreciated byAnceschi, himself being the theorist of an open aesthetics. And yet the former pupil of Banfi, with an eyealready on the new generation that had gathered around him, declared:

È



La critica ormai può vedere in Palazzeschi uno stimolo insigne della tradizione del nuovo? […] È vero:

l’avanguardia mette propriamente in discussione (anche nega) l’idea stessa di tradizione, ma a sua volta

istituisce essa una tradizione nuova […], sembra proprio che una volontà di lettura più aperta e

comprensiva di Palazzeschi richieda il rilievo o alcuni rilievi degli aspetti per cui Palazzeschi ha una sua

presenza forte, intensa, e anche segreta […] di sollecitazione.(9)

It is my belief that the interest shown in Palazzeschi by a critic such as Anceschi was based on grounds

different from those underlying the interest of critics such as Curi and even Sanguineti. While Anceschi was

above all interested in the inevitable relativistic outcome of Palazzeschi’s production –Palazzeschi’s

subversive attacks aiming at constantly challenging (ideological) facts – the Marxist faction of the Neo

Avant-garde gave greater consideration to the condition of the poet-intellectual at a time of passage from

capitalism to imperialism, and was especially interested (as proven by Curi’s essay in il Verri) in the

historicizing capacity of Palazzeschi’s parodic operation, that is, to the disclosing of a ‘reversal’ which,

against the horizon of alienation, is presented as a new existential condition. Thus, it is again within this

perspective, that is, the antagonistic relationship that Palazzeschi’s poetry establishes with reality, that the

opposition to Marinetti’s Futurism arises. Unlike Sanguineti, however, Curi does not resolve this opposition

by excluding Palazzeschi from the number of ‘true’ futurists, but rather sees a dialogic relationship between

Palazzeschi and Marinetti, hence proceeding to the textual analysis of what is closest to Marinetti in

Palazzeschi (again L’incendiario) and of what is closest to Palazzeschi in Marinetti (the manifest entitled

Teatro di Varietà).

It is significant then, that Edipo, Empedocle e il saltimbanco presents, for the first time, the other important

opposition mentioned above: the one between Palazzeschi and the other writers associated with Lacerba.

Inevitably, the surge of interest in Palazzeschi had to distance him not only from Marinetti’s technological

sublime but also from the poetics of disinterested clownism developed by Papini and especially Soffici: a

poetics that, in Curi’s words ‘solo in Palazzeschi […] opera con totale coerenza e rigore’,(10) because in the

first case it leads once again to an ideal of pure poetry of impressionist nature, where the nonsense of the

world (as pointed out by Lukács in The Parting of the Ways) finds redemption in the visual recomposition of

a Subject that exalts Life and the life flow (represented in art) as an immediate non-alienated given.

Therefore,

Ciascuno di questi rivoluzionari non è mai tanto rivoluzionario da non conservare gelosamente una sua

religione e un suo idolo […]: Marinetti la religione della velocità, l’idolo della macchina, Papini e Soffici

la religione della poesia, l’idolo della sua purezza.(11)

The Neo Avantgarde’s defense of the model set up by Palazzeschi can be considered as an implicit attack

against both the long-standing idealistic conception of art (the construction of aristocratic models of freedom,

the social privilege of the artist, etc.) and the reinforcement of lyricism through the pragmatic, promotional

word, because both are at the service of a positively understood reality. But what the Neo Avantgarde is

looking at is, to paraphrase a famous definition, a poetics in which art as ideology reappears as self-criticism

of art itself.

In 1976 an important conference on Palazzeschi was held in Florence under the direction of Lanfranco

Caretti. It is interesting to remark that Sanguineti himself, concluding his intervention (again on

L’incendiario), draws a direct line of continuity connecting Palazzeschi to himself and his fellow travelers:

Che se oggi, ‘uomini nuovi’, come quelli che appaiono nel finale del vecchio Codice, solcano il cielo

della poesia novecentesca, ancora, – e sembrano – dice Palazzeschi – ‘nuovi uccelli’ – e magari, ormai,

‘novissimi’ – costoro possono sentire come straordinariamente azzeccate, poveri incendiari estremi,

poveri estremi saltimbanchi, questo paio di battute del piccolo coro finale, in quel vecchio libro, appunto:

– Dove vanno?

– Vanno a cercare Perelà.(12)

Here, in the contrast between the two ‘incendiaries’, the poet and the arsonist (without forgetting ‘che a forza

di “scherzare con il fuoco”, di divertirsi con incendi non veri, a forza insomma di mere parole, non si riesca

poi, proprio come accade alla fine del poemetto, a dischiudere la gabbia a un piromane vero’(13)), implicitly

appeared the characterization of Gruppo 63 as a ‘cold Avantgarde’ – an Avant-garde that unlike its historical



precedents was compelled to programmatically deal with a sensible attenuation of its more anarchic and

Romantic elements, due to the vanishing of immediately available political options, and forced to relate to the

Social Democratic sentiments that were spreading among the working class. The interest for Palazzeschi was

also related to this aspect. It was no longer possible to advocate, like Marinetti did, the abolition of the

separation between art and life; it was instead necessary to reform the relationship between the two terms by

excluding from the transformation of language into a commodity any possibility of an innocent usage of

words. Accordingly, poetry as the estranging act of writing verse, would carry out the task of reflecting the

estrangement that had already become an integral part of historical dialectics. It is also clear that in this

perspective the ‘capovolgimento carnevalesco’(14) operated by Palazzeschi appeared to the Neo Avantgarde

as an important antecedent, that is, the expression of the exasperation (in the text) of the contradictions of

reality, taken to the limit where these contradictions are no longer controllable.

At the conference, Barilli observed that the gap between Marinetti and Palazzeschi was also inevitably based

on the important Futurist theme of technology:

sussistono anche i temi attorno ai quali l’accordo va in briciole, e questi riguardano addirittura una delle

molle propulsive di tutta la concezione futurista, cioè il ruolo da assegnarsi alla macchina, o più in

generale alla tecnologia. Al fervore entusiastico di accettazione da parte di Marinetti fa riscontro la

diffidenza di Palazzeschi.(15)

But this is just another aspect of the same issue: the exaltation of technology forms a dyad with the will to

produce ‘un certo naturalismo descrittivo-mimetico’(16) which, once more, establishes a positive relationship

with reality but it is strongly rejected by both Palazzeschi and the Neo Avantgardists.

The other important theme discussed at the conference, as mentioned above, was the relationship between

Palazzeschi and Nietzsche, particularly in his first two novels :riflessi and Il codice di Perelà. On the one

hand, the discussion focused on leaving behind the Dannunzian-style reading of Nietzsche (predominant in

Italy during the early twentieth century) and, on the other hand, on the crisis/disappearance of the Subject

aiming at substantiating, regardless of any psychological impasse, a reaction that is at the same time critical

and utopian:

Perelà è il reagente utopico che viene a rivelare, lui l’uomo dell’inconsistenza, lui l’uomo di fumo,

l’inconsistenza di tutte le situazioni sociali tipiche: il banchiere, la regina, il poeta, il critico e via

discorrendo.(17)

As clearly explained in Curi’s intervention, the thesis ‘di un’assunzione parodica dell’insegnamento di

Nietzsche’(18) (assumption that soon, especially in France, increasingly was presented as the ‘real’

Nietzsche), based on the transcendental (not transcendent) topos of lightness, acts as an additional element

capable of establishing, in artistic creation, a paradoxical relationship with reality. This relationship aims at

denouncing, through the text’s humorous approach, the world’s order as governed by fictitiously defined

units, or fictitiously defined authorities, in which the parodically nihilistic redoubling of reality takes sides at

the same time for and against reality. On the one hand, such doubling exalts the immanent value of the

possibilities it offers (provided by the text), but on the other hand it criticizes (again, through the text) the

false totality of sense that it allows for. In more ideologically correct terms, we could say that the text

assumes unto itself (makes integral to itself) the specific alienation of a moment in history only to give it back

as a critique of that moment, avant-gardistically embodying the unrealizable suggestion of a totally Other

society (the one depicted in Il controdolore) that functions as an extreme critique of the existing one. Then we

cannot be surprised by Sanguineti’s words:

abbiamo amato molto Palazzeschi. Credo di poter parlare a nome di una generazione. […] Noi

cercavamo un’avanguardia innocente e in Italia non la trovavamo. Palazzeschi era uno dei pochi

personaggi innocenti, nel momento dell’avanguardia, a cui potevamo fare riferimento.(19)

It was again Guido Guglielmi, in a monograph dated 1979 (L’udienza del poeta), who sketched the main lines

of the studies carried out that far, and related Palazzeschi not only to the principal movements of his period

but also to the century’s main philosophical currents, starting with the critical masterpiece that opens the

volume (the essay Il sogno di una cosa), in which the main subject of the work is not even mentioned but it

appears in transparency in the reflections on the concepts of ‘reconciliation’, ‘harmony’, ‘contradiction’,

expounded through the works of Benjamin, Adorno, and Lukács. Guglielmi’s purpose is to highlight the



nihilistic content of Palazzeschi’s operation while saving (in the shock that accompanies the dissonance) theunderlying truth – that very truth that no longer presents itself positively and that can be recuperated only inthe shock of the discovery of its loss:

È l’inconciliato che diviene ora la cifra del conciliato. Il perduto diviene la metafora del salvato.(20)

Guglielmi expands and explains some of the critical intuitions described so far, starting with the repeatedlymentioned paradoxical relationship that the text establishes with reality:

Palazzeschi ha animato uno spazio paradossale, discontinuo rispetto allo spazio reale, eppure incomunicazione con esso. Esattamente uno spazio scenico.(21)

And he also explains how that same operation grafts with Palazzeschi’s idea of comedy:

Il suo, cioè, è un gesto dimostrativo che, nel proporre un ordine immaginario e possibile, intende darluogo a uno scambio comunicativo sulla base di due codici divergenti, produrre contrappunti […]provocare occasioni di fraintendimento […]. Il riso nella poesia di Palazzeschi rivela, in sostanza, unadiversa modalità di mondo.(22)

Guglielmi then linked this subversion to the new possibilities of a language that reveals itself as separatedfrom its own objective referent, hence capable of producing a dysfunctional double of that which it critiques– the critique of its ideology insofar as it claims to be a positive truth:

La posta del gioco è quella di portare il mondo davanti alla rappresentazione della sua contingenza edella sua fine. E ciò che provoca indignazione è appunto la prospettiva di sfaldamento del senso.(23)

Thus Guglielmi reveals in Palazzeschi one of the fundamental characters of Avantgarde, viz. the ability tobreak the order of language as a reflection of the order of reality, rejecting, in accordance with Nietzsche’slesson, the calcifications that thought imposes on reality, and explaining once and for all the distance fromMarinetti’s Futurism (as the latter is based upon the image of a radically different utopia):

E per proteggerla dall’ossessione del positivo e dalle mistificazioni, sempre e magari involontariamenteterroristiche (come nel pragmatismo futuristico di Marinetti), Palazzeschi ne fa, rispettandone lanegatività, un impossibile.(24)

This is so because in Palazzeschi there can be no re-mythologizing of art and life in which the myth oftechnology compensates for the disenchantment; there is instead an attack on reality carried out by theunreality of the conscious self, using disenchantment itself as a weapon and breaking down immutabilitythrough nihilism, showing, in the explosion of laughter, the incongruity of existence:

Le ideologie innalzano e eludono la realtà: si tratterà di lacerarne il velo. Il riso sarà uno strumento dismascheramento.(25)

In other words, the point is to sabotage language (as in the well-known E lasciatemi divertire!), becauselanguage not only reflects the structure by which it is determined, but reinforces the structure itself. Thus thedistortion of language institutes a new kind of ideology aiming at dissimulating the ‘valenza pratico-suasoria’(26) of the speech act as a ‘sperimentazione critica delle gerarchie del reale, quale è vissuta nelleparole’(26). The crisis of textuality becomes the crisis of the symbolic-ideological order at work in the text,and it is to this, rather than to the more linguistically formal techniques, that the Neo Avantgarde addresses itsinterest. Because in this way Palazzeschi promotes and intensifies the opening of fissures in a realitypurported to be closed, and in the clownish vocation (which is a humorous opening to debate and tomisunderstanding), he shatters the hierarchic value of language and reality, sustaining the breach of aclassifying Logos presented as a fictitious order that mortifies life, the rationalization and regularization of anorder – inevitably bourgeois – that tends to disrupt what Palazzeschi called ‘fantasia’ and that consists of allthe possibilities that reality contains. The disorder and subversion created by laughter aim to release thesepossibilities, smashing the apparent unidimensional nature of the world. And it is precisely in this negation ofonly one Truth expressed by ideology that the Romantic image of a negative truth Benjaministicallyreappears, reactivated by the acknowledgement of its loss revealed by laughter.



In such manner Palazzeschi’s work manifests itself – an avantgardist ‘canon’ – as doubly destabilizing: itunderscores the latency of a revolutionary truth and, by subverting all the now historically powerless stylisticinstitutions, it develops the structures of a language that is socially antagonistic, inasmuch as it is critical ofthe existing order and therefore at the same time revelatory of that antagonism.

Starting in the 1990s we see a gradual decline in the old Gruppo’s interest for the themes related toPalazzeschi. This was not a rejection but rather the definitive acquisition by all the critics of the ideasdeveloped in over two decades of discussion; these ideas became the material for further (and oftenconflicting) reflections, chiefly among Florentine circles based in the Centro Studi Aldo Palazzeschi directedby Gino Tellini. Between 1999 and 2002, Tellini published two collective volumes containing some of thelatest considerations on Palazzeschi by the Neo Avant-gardists. In particular, in 1999, while Curi returns forthe last time to the need to historicize the significance of Palazzeschi’s work, outlining the dialectics ofdandyism from Baudelaire to Palazzeschi and reaffirming, supported by Marx, that ‘quel “divertimento” nonsoltanto non è un puro atto gratuito ma è la conclusione tragico-farsesca di un capitale processo storico’(28),Guido Guglielmi focuses on the modification of Palazzeschi’s poetics at the time of Due imperi… mancati(1920), implicitly reasserting, now far from the harshly critical tones of previous years, that the sympatheticconnection between the Neo Avant-garde and Palazzeschi was firmly anchored to the artistic results of hisearly production:

Perelà era un’allegoria del possibile, una figura illimitata in cui il possibile si imponeva sul reale; e loliberava. La guerra sperimentata in prima persona riconduce al reale. E la condizione del reale limital’elemento visionario.(29)

This aspect had already been asserted at a 2001 conference by Sanguineti, in his Postille per un vecchiocodice, where he confirms the unbridgeable gap between Palazzeschi and Soffici’s homo ludens in Primiprincipi di una estetica futurista and states again what he considers fundamental:

che in Palazzeschi, come […] in tutta la grande poesia e in tutta la grande arte di questo secolo che ci èappena morto ieri, tra le nostre braccia, la pulsione anarchica, eversiva e ribellistica, libertaria erivoluzionaria, è la pulsione decisiva, la matrice stessa di ogni possibile valore, nell’ideologia come nellinguaggio.(30)

And this, we can easily see, is the beginning of a drawing of conclusions on a relationship now forty yearsold. It is no surprise then that at this same conference Curi begins to take stock of this relationship, touching(as I have also done in this essay) on what seems to be the threefold aspects of the matter: the relationshipbetween Palazzeschi and the other ‘Avantgardes’ of his time, his direct influence on the Neo Avant-garde,and his contribution to the theoretical idea of the Avant-garde.

Curi frames the relation with Marinetti more precisely than in the past, by expounding the role played byFuturism in the works of Palazzeschi:

L’incontro con l’avanguardia, e in particolare con il focoso Marinetti, deve averlo stimolato […],facendo nascere una consapevolezza di sé e una fiducia nelle proprie possibilità che prima probabilmentegli mancavano. […] Funzione dell’avanguardia, d’altro canto, è proprio quella di provocare lo sviluppodi energie latenti o inespresse e, suscitando anche reazioni antagonistiche, di portare sodali e avversari auna più lucida conoscenza delle proprie ragioni.(31)

Secondly, and referring precisely to the different use of Nietzschean themes, Curi revises the distinctionbetween Palazzeschi on the one hand and Marinetti (and Papini and Soffici) on the other, affirming that

il grottesco palazzeschiano nasce dalla consapevolezza che la società è malata e incapace di rinnovarsi eche solo l’umorismo, rovesciandone il modello, può fornire un ritratto corrispondente alla sua veracondizione (32)

and reiterating once again that the ‘entertainment’ motif does not pertain to the clownish vocation of the‘disinterested’ artist but lies in the necessity to recognize the fracture between the writer and the public, and‘la catastrofe del senso’(33) elicited by the discovery of belonging to a human condition, i.e., to a socialstructure, based on the market and on the reification of every product, aesthetic products included. Thisproduces both discouragement and rebellion, and possibly also a breach in the pact between the artist and the



class he belongs to: the repudiation of a hallowed tradition, the siding with an intellectual cruelty that aims toreveal the economic bases on which the new art is founded.

If Marinetti was the first to understand art as a production subordinate to the laws of the market, and thereforean object of consumption requiring the continuous production of new formal models (and continuouspublicity); if Marinetti was the first, in other words, to understand the autonomy of the work of art as fiction;then Palazzeschi was the first (with Lucini) to try to use this understanding against the mimetic subservienceto reality, alienating himself from his own synthesis and acknowledging to be parodically incapable of afictitious recomposition of the chaos, achieving an ‘allegoria della frantumazione e disgregazione delsoggetto’(34) which is the aim of the possibility of ‘getting it off’ with the world, in other words thedenouement and denouncement of a contradictory structure of reality and society where everything is culture.

Esiste una ciclicità dell’avanguardia, giacché essa si ripresenta puntualmente ogni volta che la violenzadella storia chiede che ne siano scossi i paradigmi attraverso la violenza del linguaggio e la crudeltàsuprema della derisione.(35)

This is again Curi speaking, when at the end of his essay he examines how some Neo Avant-gardists (Ishould mention at least Arbasino and Pagliarani) directly use Palazzeschi’s poetics and intuitions. At the coreof Curi’s reading is the ‘construction of a tradition’ with which this essay also started (‘la Nuova avanguardiacrea la propria tradizione e Palazzeschi ne è il principale rappresentante’(36)), but we should not forget thatthis construction is supported – it could not be otherwise – by specific historical reasons, and that the motivesfor any convergence should be sought in the recurrence of certain issues that are not only, as Curi affirms, offormal nature (can formal problems even exist separately from historical discourse?). On the other hand, if, asaffirmed by Adorno, the Avant-garde arises from the impossibility of tracing universal artistic canons, then itappears within a precise intent that we might call historicist, and aims not only at attacking the Art institutionbut also the formal harmony that any artistic creation purports – its illusion of being intact and accomplished,like the world that it sustains and promotes. I believe that the true basis of the relationship betweenPalazzeschi and the Neo Avant-garde is the refusal of any fictitious harmony (even when disguised asdisorder); the coup, to return to Benjamin, that aims at making the contradiction unforgettable,allegorizing/revealing in it contradictions that are much more constitutive, much more structural.

1 Guido Guglielmi, ‘Il Novecento di Sanguineti’, in Ironia e negazione (Torino, Einaudi, 1974), pp. 203-09.

2 Edoardo Sanguineti, ‘Palazzeschi tra liberty e crepuscolarismo’, in Tra liberty e crepuscolarismo (Milano,Mursia, 1961), p. 85.

3 Ibid., p. 84.

4 Ibid., p. 99.

5 Guido Guglielmi, ‘Dialettica del Futurismo’, in Ironia e negazione, p. 181.

6 Ibid., p. 182.

7 Barilli was probably the first both to highlight the importance of Palazzeschi’s manifestos appearing inLacerba (L’antidolore, Equilibrio, Varietà and his column Spazzatura) and to place him in a Pirandelliandialectics to which he surely belongs – the one between life and form, a dialectics common to the entirelandscape of European Modernism. He was also the first to directly correlate Palazzeschi’s writing techniquesto those of certain Neo Avant-gardists. Cf. Renato Barilli, Gli inizi del narratore, in il Verri, February 6(1974), 16: ‘anticipatore di esperienza successive (la chiacchiera di Arbasino, lo “stile basso” di Sanguineti)’.

8 Luciano Anceschi, Intervento, in il Verri, Febbraio 5 (1974), 9.

9 Ibid..



10 Fausto Curi, Edipo, Empedocle e il saltimbanco (1974), in Perdita d’aureola (Torino, Einaudi, 1977), p.

124.

11 Ibid., pp. 130-31.

12 Edoardo Sanguineti, L’incendiario, in Palazzeschi oggi, Atti del convegno di Firenze 6-8 novembre 1976,

ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Firenze, il Saggiatore, 1978), p. 69.

13 Ibid., p. 61.

14 Ibid., p. 63.

15 Renato Barilli, ‘L’antidolore’, nell’opera collettiva Palazzeschi oggi, p. 78.

16 Ibid., p. 80.

17 Edoardo Sanguineti, ‘Interventi’, in Palazzeschi oggi, p. 160.

18 Fausto Curi, ‘I “Buffi” o la fine dell’utopia’, in Palazzeschi oggi, p. 212.

19 Edoardo Sanguineti, ‘Tavola rotonda’, in Palazzeschi oggi, p. 323.

20 Guido Guglielmi, L’udienza del poeta. Saggi su Palazzeschi e il Futurismo (Torino, Einaudi, 1979), p. 11.

21 Ibid., p. 26.

22 Ibid., pp. 32-33.

23 Ibid., p. 58.

24 Ibid., p. 77.

25 Ibid., p. 112.

26 Edoardo Sanguineti, La missione del critico (1986) (Genova, Marietti, 1987), p. 211.

27 ID, Per una letteratura della crudeltà (1967) Ideologia e linguaggio (Milano, Feltrinelli, 2001), p. 109.

28 Fausto Curi, ‘Dal “saltimbanco” all’ “umorista”. Per un’interpretazione storica di “E lasciatemi divertire”

‘, in La ‘difficile musa’ di Aldo Palazzeschi. Indagini, accertamenti testuali, carte inedite, ed. di Gino Tellini,

in «Studi Italiani», XI, 1-2 (gennaio-dicembre 1999), 15.

29 Guido Guglielmi, ‘Gli imperi mancati di Palazzeschi’, in La ‘difficile musa’ di Aldo Palazzeschi. Indagini,accertamenti testuali, carte inedite, p. 107.

30 Edoardo Sanguineti, ‘Postille per un vecchio codice’, in collettiva L’opera di Aldo Palazzeschi, ed. di

Gino Tellini, Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Firenze, 22-24 Febbraio 2001, Firenze, Olschki, 2002), pp.

142-43.

31 Fausto Curi, ‘Palazzeschi e le due avanguardie’, in L’opera di Aldo Palazzeschi, p. 53.

32 Ibid., p. 56.

33 Ibid., p. 60.

34 Andrea Cortellessa, ‘Controdolore e retroguardia. Aldo Palazzeschi tra “Spazzatura” e “Boccanera” ‘, in

La Rassegna della Letteratura italiana, VIII, 2-3 (maggio-dicembre 1996), 108.

35 Fausto Curi, ‘Palazzeschi e le due avanguardie’, in L’opera di Aldo Palazzeschi, p. 63.

36 Ibid., p. 66.



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