SOURCE: “Manzoni on the Italian Left,” in Annali d'Italianistica, Vol. 3, 1985, pp. 97-110.

[In the following essay, Dombroski considers the ideological character of Manzoni's I promessi sposi, particularly as the novel's concerns with social class have been perceived by Marxist critics.]

A number of themes emerge in the history of Manzoni criticism which enable us to define a nucleus of problems that have a special relevance for the practical concerns of the political Left. By far the most important of these problems, historically speaking, regards Manzoni's attitude toward the popular masses. Much of the work of Italian Marxists on Manzoni consists of showing how the representation of social reality in I promessi sposi determines the ideological completeness of Manzoni's narrative system, and within this social reality the place of the humble believer is no doubt of crucial importance. The canonical text on this issue is Gramsci's. His notes have become the subject of a debate in which contending interpreters have sought to defend specific political positions.

Gramsci, we know, was passionately interested in the relationship between culture and society and, as we might well expect, this interest affected the way he discussed literature. Why is Italian literature not popular in Italy? Why do Italians show a definite preference for foreign authors? Gramsci's answer to these questions is consistent throughout the Quaderni del carcere and forms the basis for his critique of Manzoni. Simply put, “non esiste in Italia un blocco nazionale intellettuale e morale,” and, therefore, there is no national cultural hegemony, which means that Italian intellectuals have failed to respond to the needs, aspirations and emotional make-up of the populace. As a result, the cultured classes exist detached from the people-nation; they produce a literature that—its esthetic qualities aside—is neither popular nor national and thus does not represent the collective social mind. On the other hand, the popularity of foreign novels and their continuing interest result mainly from the fact that the social and intellectual concerns they explore satisfy the people's real, psychological needs (Quaderni 1:334).

The issue for Gramsci is not whether works of literature contain an acceptable moral, religious or political ideology, but why they are read, to what degree and by whom. Gramsci knows that readers encounter literary works in particular social and historical contexts and that their response or interpretation is dependent on this fact. He also knows that the historical subject of Manzoni's novel is the “humble believer” who determines the work's potential audience by encoding within himself an image of the kind of human identity its author fosters and is seeking to diffuse. The incontestable fact that the poor in I promessi sposi occupy a central place in the action only tells us that Manzoni has acknowledged their importance for historical fiction. More important by far is Manzoni's “attitude” toward the poor: how he reacts to their presence in history.

It is on this point that Gramsci draws an important comparison between Manzoni and Tolstoi. Both are the authors of religious narratives, but while Tolstoi has a “democratic” understanding of the Gospel and views the populace as a genuine source of ethical and religious life, Manzoni is a product of the Counter Reformation: his Christian beliefs are a blend of “aristocratic Jansenism” and, with regard to the poor, “Jesuitic paternalism.” In contrast to the candid and spontaneous wisdom expressed by Tolstoi's humble believers, which, according to Gramsci, illuminates the minds of the learned, Manzoni endows only his “great” characters with a profound inner being. Unlike Tolstoi, he does not share in the emotional lives of the poor and, removed as he is from their lot, he writes about them with ironic detachment. His fascination with them, his promoting them to the rank of protagonists in his story, are largely effects of his concern for historical verisimilitude. In other words, although Manzoni's humble believers are the novel's energizing force, they are for Gramsci subordinated to the problem of writing a historical narrative. Tolstoi's religious art, Gramsci implies, is therefore ultimately more “realistic” than Manzoni's for the simple fact that he considers the moral and historical questions as one and the same. The problem of representing God's presence in history becomes essentially for Tolstoi one of showing how God speaks through the poor. Manzoni, on the other hand, “è troppo cattolico per pensare che la voce del popolo sia la voce di Dio: tra il popolo e Dio c'è la chiesa, e Dio non s'incarna nel popolo, ma nella chiesa. Che Dio s'incarni nel popolo può credere il Tolstoi non il Manzoni” (Quaderni 3:1703).

It is noteworthy that Gramsci, in expounding his argument on the non-national popular character of I promessi sposi, will in another instance take the side of the political reactionary Filippo Crispolti against Angelandrea Zottoli, who in his Umili e potenti nella poetica del Manzoni (1931), was among the first of Manzoni's critics to pose the problem of the centrality of the humble believer in I promessi sposi. With Crispolti's article in hand (“Nuove indagini sul Manzoni”), Gramsci refuses to frame the question in the pure and simple terms of historical presence and esthetic focus because he recognizes the difficulty of uniting coherently Manzoni's choice of subject matter with the author's psychological posture toward the pure, reiterating his claim that Manzoni depicts his humble believers as being devoid of “vita interiore” and “personalità morale profonda”: they—he quotes Crispolti—are “animals” and Manzoni treats them with the “benevolence of a Catholic society for the protection of animals.” In sum, between Manzoni and his humble characters stands the Church which conditions an attitude not of equality but of benevolent condescension. In other words, Manzoni, in contrast to Tolstoi, is not concerned with the problem of uniting the great, the poor and the middle classes in a spectrum of human existence that is both national and popular, but rather that of representing the age-old struggle between the strong and the weak, with great complexity and on a large scale (Quaderni 2:895-96).

However destructive and incontrovertible, Gramsci's criticisms of Manzoni articulate a problem fundamental to the most basic comprehension of I promessi sposi: the question of ideology—what kind of understanding of people and history does the novel express and promote by virtue of its form; what logic of history, class affiliation and biography produces the sequence of events, the characters and their authorial interpretation. For the non-militant, academic Marxist, Manzoni's detachment from the sentiments of the humble may prove to be a moot point, yet it is nevertheless an effect of the author's ideology that cannot be denied or ignored, except with the most astute of exegetical strategies. By this I do not mean that Gramsci's critique of Manzoni is wholly correct, or that its inferences constitute stable meanings indispensable to subsequent Marxist interpretations. Underlying Gramsci's judgments is the simple question “for whom has Manzoni written” and “what framework of assumptions do the author and his audience share.” His notes single out an important symptom of a determinate structure, which specifies a particular ideological orientation; it imprints Manzoni's work with a cultural attitude and thus displays it as a social practice. By identifying Manzoni's posture toward his humble characters as “benevolently condescending,” Gramsci shows what its practical social uses might be.

What is furthermore inferred by Gramsci's notes is that Manzoni's emotional detachment from his humble characters helps realize a historical narrative in which poetry and history remain distinct. In order to foreground history, Manzoni had to present a source of probability that was specifically historical, and that he did by representing the society, language and events of the Seicento. The effect he promotes through his attitude toward the poor is also largely historical. The unlettered or semi-literate Christians he depicts lived in a world which was that of the Church, and, as there were transcendent reasons for titles of nobility, the humble believer too had his raison d'être. Within the divine plan, he was, according to seventeenth-century religious preachings, an object to be fathered by the great and the rich on whom, in the ideal pre-bourgeois Christian social order, his subsistence depended. Gramsci, of course, was not concerned with the degree to which historical probability in I promessi sposi becomes structurally prominent. It was sufficient for him to point out why the novel had never become truly popular and why it did not represent a national consciousness.

The question of “national consciousness” is central also to the second most influential of Marxist texts on Manzoni: namely, the pages Georg Lukács devotes to I promessi sposi in The Historical Novel. But the perspective Lukács deploys is radically different from Gramsci's, although, as we shall see, not necessarily incompatible. As a study of genre, Lukács' work demonstrates how the “historical spirit” and the novel interact to portray the “totality of history,” and, particularly, how in the historical process the past becomes a necessary precondition for the present. Unlike Gramsci, who theorized the causes and conditions of the lack of a national cultural unity in Italy, Lukács takes as his starting point the “objective unfavorableness” of Italian history. In his view, Manzoni's purpose was to write a novel which would “rouse the present,” and “which contemporaries would experience as their own prehistory” (70). Lukács leaves untouched the social identity of those contemporaries and, therefore, the meaning of their sense of history's “objective unfavorableness” in relation to the cultural projects they sought to promote. It is thus possible for Lukács to frame the question of “national consciousness” in universal terms, declaring that Manzoni's historical subject was “the critical condition of the entire life of the Italian people resulting from Italy's fragmentation” (70). Gramsci, by contrast, viewed Manzoni's way of rewriting history as a symptom of that very problem of disunity.

In specific terms, Lukács argues that what appears to be at the literal level the simple story of the “love, separation and reunion of a young peasant boy and girl” is symbolic of the “general tragedy of the Italian people in a state of national degradation and fragmentation” (70). The actual historical experience of Renzo and Lucia becomes the allegory of the master narrative of Italian history itself. The novel's actual historical events, for Lukács, are significant insofar as they are figures of a general truth: “the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole.” By attributing to the novel a fundamentally allegorical character, Lukács does not run the risk of reducing it to a kind of abstract cause, simply because the history he refers to represents the natural condition of an entire humanity. His essential point is, then, that the sameness and immobility, characteristic of Italian history, could only be incorporated in one, grand totalizing scheme, in one novel, superbly original and historically profound, yet—for the concept of history it embodies—unable to capture the historically typical in a way comparable to Walter Scott: “Despite all the human and historical authenticity, despite all the psychological depth which their author bestows on them, Manzoni's characters are unable to soar to those historically typical heights which mark the summits of Scott's works” (71).

This brings us to the most important and suggestive point of Lukács' interpretation, one that presents the basic elements of the ideological question in Manzoni, which could not be classified simply in terms of the then current meanings of “conservative,” “reactionary” or “liberal.” Lukács' observations are important because they apprehend the contradiction underlying Manzoni's historical perspective, the same contradiction that is transformed into “history” in I promessi sposi: they show that, while Manzoni writes Italian history by depicting a “concrete episode taken from Italian popular life,” he equates that history with a state of being—eternal, absolute, unchangeable and exemplary.

Lukács' discussion of Manzoni, although brief, is acute. For, after he has identified the process by which “history” becomes equated with “eternity” and the “humanity” of Manzoni's popular characters with “nature,” he can then point to the absence in I promessi sposi of a “world-historical atmosphere” which “manifests itself in a certain limitedness of human horizon on the part of his characters” (71). The fate of Lucia, he argues, “is really no more than an externally menaced idyll, while an inevitable pettiness attaches itself to the negative characters of the novel.” The crucial effect of such a mode of representation is that it does not “reveal dialectically the historical limits of the whole period.” The romance codes which Lukács refers to function to disrupt the historical process, causing it to become, paradoxically, the destiny of Italian history, and, therefore, the novel as the novel of that destiny.

In a general sense, Lukács' perspective indicates that the symbolic lives of Manzoni's characters, in spite of their well-depicted “class-conditioned psychology,” prevent them from becoming truly “historically typical”: they fail to represent salient aspects of a particular historical milieu. This issue may be seen to involve also Gramsci's criticisms of Manzoni, whose principal fault was found in the lack of genuine sympathy toward his popular characters. Questions about a writer's attitude toward his characters are ultimately questions about what he thinks his characters should be. But the subject itself of historical fiction poses obvious limits to the free reign of fantasy, for it demands that a certain historical probability or verisimilitude be respected in the creation of representative individuals. Gramsci believed that Manzoni's Catholicism caused him to repress his characters' historical individuality. He saw it, moreover, as the generative force behind an irony rooted in the transcendental norm of Divine Providence. Hence, for Gramsci, Lukács' concept of a master narrative at the base of Manzoni's popular story leads inevitably to the impoverishment of actual historical experience. In Gramscian terms, reality, through Manzoni's allegorical rewriting, becomes then divested of its revolutionary potential. Put differently, Lukács' reading of I promessi sposi could be said to provide a philosophical framework for understanding Gramsci's criticisms, because the contradictory historical process he defines within the novel can, concretely speaking, only derive from the impulse on Manzoni's part to reconcile two opposing social ideologies: while Manzoni predicts a new society based on reason and human industry as a means of overcoming the backwardness of Italian culture, he also regulates the social and political stimulus by keeping that society within the boundaries set by a transcendent and absolute religious norm. These, in sum, are also the terms of Gramsci's general portrayal of a Manzoni in whom we find elements that are “technically bourgeois” next to the many visible marks left on his Catholicism by the Counter Reformation.

Whether or not the attitudes and observations just discussed meet the needs of a modern criticism, they draw their strength from the stimulus they provide and also from the number of critical problems they bring to light. Especially important to subsequent Marxian approaches to Manzoni is that associated with his social ideology. During the sixties, the Manzoni debate on the Left centered largely around the question of how to define his “bourgeois attitudes”: the extent to which they were in fact “bourgeois” and their specific features.

The contending interpretations of this period may be reduced to two fundamental positions. The first, argued by Natalino Sapegno, advocates a return to De Sanctis' idea of a “democratic” Manzoni who, in consolidating the “real” and the “ideal,” “poetry” and “history,” offers the most highly developed model of the bourgeois outlook. In an attempt to temper Gramsci's judgments, Sapegno updates De Sanctis by maintaining that Manzoni's critique of tradition meets the needs of a progressive bourgeois ideology: “De Sanctis aveva giustamente messo in rilievo la novità dell'opera del Manzoni, in quanto essa si poneva e aveva coscienza di porsi in contrasto con tutta la tradizione precedente, petrarchesca e aulica; aveva pertanto sottolineato il senso profondo della sua poetica realistica, in quanto esigenza e proposta di soluzioni narrative, e cioè antiliriche e prosastiche, e di un linguaggio popolare. In questo senso, Manzoni era per lui lo scrittore moderno per eccellenza, il rappresentante più insigne della cultura borghese uscita dalla rivoluzione, quello che meglio di tutti rispecchiava in sé l'equilibrio e l'umanità di quella cultura.”¹ For Sapegno the motivating force behind I promessi sposi is a conception of socio-political unity based on Christian principles of human equality. In this sense, Manzoni's choice of humble characters as the story's protagonists, which marks a reversal of traditional esthetic hierarchies, situates him squarely on the side of historical progress.

Two themes of this argument are noteworthy: 1) Manzoni's “bourgeois” perspective is totally compatible with Christian principles which in fact constitute its foundation, and 2) the humble and popular masses, or proletarian strata of society, as represented in the novel, are one and the same. The former is a notion which will draw together otherwise disparate points of view, while the latter will be called immediately into question.

Against this latter assumption and against the general notion of Manzoni as a “progressive bourgeois” Gian Franco Vené argues the opposite case: that Manzoni's strong bourgeois convictions prevent him from creating humble characters who are veritable representatives of the popular masses, that Renzo and Lucia, from the standpoint of class affiliation, are not “common people” but “petty bourgeois.” This also involves showing that, in representing the great and the powerful, Manzoni, at the same time, sets forth universally valid ethical standards that go beyond class interests. Furthermore, Vené sees at the thematic center of I promessi sposi not the poor and the humble but rather the great and the powerful, whom Manzoni depicts as morally superior. He also argues that the new, categorically egalitarian, bourgeois morality reflected in the novel is in fact the morality of its “powerful” figures, of the Cardinal and the Innominato. Vené provides an adequate historical grounding for his argument, showing that in Italy, in contrast to England and France, bourgeois economic interests were shared by an aristocracy which not only accepted but also worked to foster its own embourgeoisement. For Vené, then, Manzoni had no intention whatsoever to oppose aristocratic and middle class values. His cultural project, on the other hand, was to etch out an ideal of Christian virtue and of moral nobility which he hoped would become in the end the virtues of society. From the standpoint of practical politics, this plan did not entail passing the reigns of power from one class to another but restoring degraded values according to a process that was both “revolutionary” and “conservative”: “Rivoluzionario nel senso che per la prima volta per società si intende l'insieme di tutti gli uomini; a tutti gli uomini i nuovi prìncipi debbono sapere progere il loro aiuto; conservatore nel senso che si cerca di transferire nella nuova concezione della società una aristocrazia rinsanguata, despositaria di certi valori morali che non sono di tutti, né da tutti raggiungibili” (120).

So, according to Vené, Manzoni sees the relationship between the great and the humble to be essentially of a functional type: one that enabled the middle class to continue ruling and, in order to safeguard its hegemony, to evolve in the direction of proletarian interests. Finally, these ideological tactics are for him thoroughly consistent with the rise of the bourgeoisie in Italy: “Né servilità né dominazione: questo è il messaggio che i vati della borghesia inviano alla società. Libera e responsabile emancipazione di ogni individuo: è lo stesso messaggio che gli economisti inviano ai detentori del capitale ancora troppo legati alla tradizione delle concessioni monopolistiche; ed è la stessa premessa teorica che gli intellettuali intendono rivolgere al popolo” (108-09).

Although with Vené we have a rather persuasive argument against Sapegno's notion of a “democratically progressive” Manzoni, the argument is not entirely convincing, because (like the one it opposes) it cannot resolve the contradiction posed by the novel's ending. What, in sum, do we make of Lucia's antibourgeois questioning of Renzo's newly acquired secular outlook? Can experience transmit the requisite knowledge for making people self-sufficient? And Lucia's ultimate reliance on God, taken by the narrator as the story's essential meaning—how is this consistent with bourgeois morality? It must be—Vené concludes—that Manzoni himself did not believe that the beneficent intervention of extraordinary individuals, such as the Cardinal and the Innominato, could suffice to bring about social change and thus regulate society according to right moral principles.

If Vené brings much sceptical doubt to bear on the notion of Manzoni as a “progressive bourgeois,” he does so in a way that separates the author's social ideology from its esthetic realization. A more substantial criticism of the De Sanctis-Sapegno thesis, and one which is unmistakenly more militant since it seeks to reveal both the ideological and esthetic limitations of I promessi sposi, comes interestingly not from the Marxist camp but rather from Alberto Moravia, a literary intellectual who can be best described as “radical bourgeois.” What Moravia fastens onto in I promessi sposi is Manzoni's “arte di propaganda” which—he remarks—in its effort to produce a kind of “realismo cattolico,” anticipates the tactics to be later deployed by Socialist realism (307-08). Polemics aside, Moravia's argument may be read as an attempt to explode the myth of a “bourgeois” Manzoni and the value of his critique may be located precisely in his endeavor to call attention to the political, social and esthetic conservatism mirrored in the novel. Briefly, Manzoni, according to Moravia, has not written a bourgeois novel, but one of Catholic propaganda. He goes on to formulate the relationship of esthetics to politics in I promessi sposi as follows: instead of confronting his own time, Manzoni chose to write a historical novel about an episode in the seventeenth century in order to justify “forcing” all of Italian reality into the ideological frame of Catholicism. Manzoni's own age did not permit him to write a novel that was both Catholic and universal; so he looked back to a time when Catholicism and reality were identical, in which the forces hostile to Catholicism could not claim to be positive either historically or esthetically, in which propaganda was poetry and poetry was propaganda. For Moravia, Manzoni's ideology conforms to the Catholic interpretation of life, which has many affinities to the kind of social and political rule fostered by Italian Christian Democracy in the fifties and early sixties.

The problem as Moravia poses it is this: Manzoni does not create his ideology as do, say, Stendhal and Dostoievsky, but rather accepts the preexisting ideology of the Catholic Church. He thus adopts an attitude toward the lower classes which—to echo Gramsci's charge—is notably condescending. At the same time, because he is an accomplished artist, he realizes the art of propaganda in a genuinely poetic way, one which produces a vision of reality antithetic to what were the dominant, bourgeois aspirations of his time, so convincingly expressed in the works of his great European contemporaries.

Moravia's criticisms of Manzoni are developed on a higher level by Guido Bollati in the essay “Un carattere per gli italiani” (1: 987-97), which likewise addresses the question of Manzoni's antibourgeois ideology. However, for Bollati there is no distinction to be made between Manzoni the Catholic propagandist and Manzoni the literary artist, because both of these activities are, in his view, to be subordinated to the author's function as an ideologue. By focussing on Manzoni as a moralist and political thinker, Bollati is able to examine his writings against the background of similar ideological projects at work in post-Restauration Italy. Manzoni occupies a central place in the strategies deployed by the wealthy Lombard landowners in the creation of an independent national state. On the other hand, his work also reflects an entire constellation of themes, which, in one form or another, have dominated bourgeois anti-capitalism: namely, the tendency manifest in certain sectors of the European bourgeoisie to keep in check the democratically progressive impetus provided by the French Revolution. For Bollati these operative concepts constitute the aporia or self-engendered paradox to be found at the ideological base of the Risorgimento: “La sfasatura anacronistica tra i due momenti non ammette, secondo logica, alcuna soluzione intermedia: si tratta o di incanalare la rinascita italiana in un solco di progresso radicale, mettendolo in sintonia con quella spinta rivoluzionaria; o di coordinarla alla spinta opposta, anche a rischio che in ragione dell'arretratezza italiana il progresso di emancipazione ne risulti rallentato fino al limite di un accantonamento, di attesa indefinita” (988). Confronted with such an impasse, Bollati's Manzoni has chosen to subordinate the local and immediate political problem to the more general concern of preserving and restoring in the modern age the society of Christian humanism which the utilitarian reasoning at the basis of the French Revolution threatens to destroy.

At this juncture in Bollati's argument, the positions set forth by Gramsci and Lukács become truly operative. Having singled out in Le osservazioni sulla morale cattolica the passage where Manzoni places in opposition Christian ethics and utilitarian political reasoning, Bollati shrewdly points out how Manzoni's choice of renouncing politics for Christian principles blocks off in an eternal and unchangeable historical frame a kind of “conservative Utopia.” Here the only desirable change is that which leads from universal warfare to the universal benevolence of a society where social classes are also changeless and absolute. This “Utopia of beneficence,” as Bollati calls it (997), was Manzoni's answer to liberalism.

There can be no question that Bollati sees in the Manzonian Utopia an act of rhetorical subterfuge and in his quarrel with utilitarianism a tactic to discredit liberalism and thus prevent any possible transition to democracy and socialism. In fact, at the core of Bollati's argument looms the idea of Manzoni as a “bourgeois reactionary.” To the historical nightmare of a proletarian revolution Bollati's Manzoni opposes a culture of universal values; to a starving populace, who could benefit from the social programs inspired by utilitarian thought, the luxury of a Christian civilization. Thus Bollati, in pursuing these ideological sanctions, turns the tables most effectively on previous Left criticism and presents Manzoni in a wholly negative light. His object, however, is not to deny Manzoni the recognition he has deservedly received, but to show how and to what extent his work has contributed to the formation of an “Italian character”: the homo italicus whose generically conceived, natural (non-historical) existence thrives under the protection of the Christian tradition and the Catholic Church.

Bollati's thesis raises the same problem as the previous interpretations: in its zeal to capture the real identity of Manzoni with his age, it fails to grasp the differences or openings, especially in the novel, which resist the ideological closure forced on them by this kind of reading. Nevertheless, his essay succeeds admirably in providing a historical rationale for both the Gramscian notion of a paternalistic, condescending Manzoni and to Lukács' sense of the absence in I promessi sposi of a “world historical atmosphere.” By focussing on Manzoni's principal theoretical text, Le osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, Bollati calls our attention to its importance in relation to Manzoni's general ideological project. Still, this reading, suggestive as it is, does not go far enough along the lines he proposes. In particular, it does not extend to the novel to show how it too fulfills an ideological function as a hegemonic work which justifies a particular form of class domination. Such an undertaking will be the work of Augusto Simonini. But before the publication of L'ideologia di Alessandro Manzoni (1978), Italy's institutionalized Left made another sustained attempt to appropriate Manzoni as a forerunner of a democratically progressive ideology and, now, herald of “historical compromise.” The work which best exemplifies this tendency appeared, significantly, in Critica marxista: entitled “La struttura ideologica dei Promessi sposi,” Salinari's essay presents a number of interpretative possibilities which, because of the far-reaching political implications of his argument, deserve careful reading.

Salinari begins his article by citing a passage from the Quaderni del carcere, where Gramsci speaks of “spunti più nuovi … tecnicamente borghesi” in Manzoni: namely, the novelist's praise of commerce and banking and his denunciation of rhetoric. However, for Salinari we have in Manzoni not just the presence of a few hints, but rather an “organica concezione borghese della società assunta nel momento della sua espansione, con la carica ideale e rinnovatrice che la contraddistingueva in quella prima fase, carica che si esauriva solo più tardi con il processo di stabilizzazione della nuova classe dominante” (183). This being his general thesis, Salinari goes on to single out the following themes in I promessi sposi: 1) Manzoni's critique of pre-bourgeois legal norms and institutions, 2) his support of liberal economic principles, as, for example, the law of supply and demand, 3) his condemnation of the worldiness of the Church, and 4) his ideological posture vis-à-vis the popular masses. In discussing these themes, Salinari is concerned to stress the fundamentally bourgeois perspective adopted in the structure of the fictional experience recounted in the novel. He sums up Manzoni's ideology as that of “un intellectuale ‘organico’ della borghesia lombarda nel periodo della restaurazione, vale a dire della classe sociale più progressiva in quel periodo storico, nella regione italiana nella quale essa si era sviluppata con maggiore ampiezza e con caratteristiche autonome. E la sorgente più autentica della sua ispirazione è un impegno etico-politico” (194).

Salinari's major point is not his description of Manzoni's place in Restauration culture or his view of Manzoni's social class as the most progressive of the time, but rather his endeavor to accommodate Manzoni within a Gramscian political perspective. This strategy is often at odds with Gramsci's manifest meaning, as for instance when Salinari draws connections between the cultural project of a “progressive organic intellectual” and his attitude toward the irrational impulses of popular masses. For Gramsci there would be little doubt that Manzoni's censure of the “irrationality” of collective violence shows that he has not assimilated the personal experience of those disinherited and oppressed masses he claims to represent, but rather portrays them as ignorant of their own real interests. To recognize, as Manzoni does, that the masses are motivated by just demands and yet are unconscious of their actions means that the pressures they exert on the ideological structures of society must be diminished. Salinari is undoubtedly correct in showing how Manzoni's morally based pragmatism and anti-Jesuitic religious stance are consistent with the tradition of Lombard Illuminism. The fact that the populace is assigned a “subaltern” role in the political process proves that in the last analysis Manzoni is more concerned with the threat of a proletarian uprising that might arise from a Jacobin-type radicalization of the bourgeois revolution. Indeed, it is hard to see how such a position may be construed as “progressive,” when its primary concern is to deny the passions of the oppressed an operational legitimacy.

Salinari becomes even more provocative when in concluding his discussion he contrasts Manzoni and Leopardi: the former a standard bearer of an enlightened, revolutionary class, the latter an isolated pessimist, cut off from the historical process. This position in favor of the cultural strategies of the Lombard bourgeoisie, seen as the vital force in modern Italian history, carries with it also a positive reevaluation of the official Romantic movement. For it calls our attention to the cultural politics of major intellectual groups, ascribing a greater importance to the organizational phase of their activities than to the ideological contents of their works.

By contrast, Augusto Simonini, in response to Salinari, undertakes an extensive analysis of the way I promessi sposi functions on the ideological level. His purpose is to submit Manzoni's texts, chiefly the novel, to symptomatic analysis, that is, a mode of interpretation that points out the specific ways I promessi sposi elaborates a socio-political message out of an ostensibly neutral subject matter (the rediscovered manuscript), already inscribed into the course of history. Simonini's methodological starting point is a view of the cultural sphere as an arena of class conflict and revolutionary struggle and the literary work as a strategy designed to shut out of the reader's consciousness certain truths about history. For Simonini Manzoni is not the “democratic thinker” Salinari makes him out to be: neither in the modern sense of the word nor in the meaning given to the term in Manzoni's time. Instead, his ideological orientation was one of the most coherent and intransigent forms of socio-political moderatism. This derived not so much from a conservative desire to restore the past as from the need to place internal controls on the development of liberalism, lest it give rise to a democratic social movement. In other words, Manzoni—here Simonini restates Bollati's position—understood well that the social dangers inherent in liberal egalitarian principles constituted a real threat from the Left. As a result, Manzoni's manifest sympathy toward the humble believers appears only at first glance as the expression of Christian brotherhood.

But where Simonini differs from his predecessors is in the way he reveals the extent to which the ideological function is present at all levels of the narrative. The sort of interpretation demanded by Manzoni's novel must, in his view, take into consideration two different modes of ideological expression, which produce two different esthetic effects. First, there is Manzoni's critique of the feudal, aristocratic and absolutist ideals and institutions that dominate the historical context chosen as the novel's setting. Here Simonini is in agreement with Salinari (and, for that matter, practically all previous Manzoni criticism) in stating that Manzoni targets an entire world of foreign domination and the social and intellectual evils and personal violence it cultivates. In Manzoni's negative and corrosive portrayal of this society, ideology and style go hand in hand: “In questo versante si hanno le prove migliori della sua arte: ideologia e stile si richiamano e si alimentano a vicenda, fondendosi quasi senza residui” (39). When Manzoni, however, represents the world as he thinks it should be, “si ha invece quasi sempre una sfasatura ricorrente tra nucleo concettuale ed espressione letteraria” (39). For Simonini this separation or disjointedness between ideological manipulation and esthetic production springs objectively from a disalignment between Manzoni the Christian and Manzoni the ideologue who has become the “organic intellectual of moderate liberalism”: “L'astuzia, la sagacia dell'uomo di parte, di classe, di consorteria se ne impadronisce e vi svolge dal di dentro un'azione frenante e deviante, da quinta colonna. Nella misura in cui l'uomo cede alla prevaricazione delle sue istanze ideologiche, nei suoi limiti ed eccessi, anche l'artista è travolto. Si hanno allora i momenti più fiacchi, meno autentici della sua arte” (40).

In the last analysis, Simonini argues that there is good and bad ideology in I promessi sposi: a “positive” code designed to subvert the old order, existing alongside a “negative” text that seeks to contain human experience and aspirations within the limits imposed by the ideology of Christian right reason. To overcome this opposition, which inescapably recalls the Crocean distinction between poetry and non-poetry or, more precisely, between art and ideology, we must assume that both compositional moments are part of a process of compensatory exchange and that their opposition serves only to censure or devalue their motivating impulse. One easily sees that Manzoni's novel embodies, as Bollati has remarked, a profound Utopian impulse. But to understand the kind of ideological gratification at work in the text we must abandon the wholly negative connotation the phrase “utopia della benevolenza” evokes in Bollati's interpretation.

A useful way of looking at the problem is to follow the very suggestive tact proposed by Federic Jameson in The Political Unconscious and view Manzoni's novel as a cultural text whose function as a “legitimizing strategy” for Catholic moderatism cannot be understood simply as the result of the imposition of ideology on the reader. For, if it is to be seen truly as a hegemonic work in the Gramscian sense, we must logically rule out that it exercizes its control by force, but rather that it promotes ideological adherence by offering “substantial incentives” in the form of Utopian impulses. In this light I promessi sposi raises the same question Jameson asks of all cultural texts: “how is it possible for a cultural text which fulfills a demonstrably ideological function, as a hegemonic work whose formal categories as well as its content secure the legitimation of this or that form of class domination—how is it possible for such a text to embody a properly Utopian impulse, or to resonate a universal value inconsistent with the narrower limits of class privilege which inform its more immediate ideological vocation?” (288). Jameson's answer is simply that all class consciousness is in its very nature Utopian insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity. Whether or not completely satisfying, this response reveals the conceptual limits of the Marxist approaches summarized above. While there can be little doubt that Manzoni's politics were in fact those of moderate liberalism, and while we cannot deny that Manzoni's class affiliation generates the kind of ideological compromise expressed in I promessi sposi, we can no longer be content with knowing how the novel, and Manzoni's work in general, carries out its specific ideological task. By this I do not mean that Bollati's and Simonini's political readings cannot be thoroughly substantiated, but rather that their arguments in the final analysis prove what we already take for granted in political criticism: that a side is to be taken against or for a particular form of class consciousness.

In conclusion, it may be helpful to recall one of Gramsci's fundamental precepts: that popular literature represents the collective mind—which is just a simpler way of phrasing Jameson's idea of literature as the “symbolic affirmation of a specific historical and class form of collective unity” (291). The concrete historical problem in Manzoni that I think has yet to be sufficiently noticed by any Marxism regards the psychological character of the audience on which Manzoni so painstakingly has inscribed his work. Lest we view I promessi sposi as a mere instrument of class domination, we must integrate the deconstructive or symptomatic analyses, so well executed in the criticism reviewed above, with a complementary phase of reading. This should be directed at an integral understanding of the lived system of meaning and values that constitutes a multilateral hegemonic process, which in the last instance supplies the historical logic for those impulses diffused by the literary text. Along these lines in L'apologia del vero I have attempted to give an instructive example of how in I promessi sposi the ideological compromise expressed in the accommodation of religious and secular interests may be seen as a strategy aimed at nourishing the utopian longings of a class that was, historically speaking, bourgeois in its aspirations, but still essentially prebourgeois in its effective capacity to realize those aspirations. My purpose is not to divert attention from the profoundly ideological character of the novel, but instead to suggest that its ideology articulates a social unity, concretely reflected in the precariousness dominating a particular historical conjuncture, and that this “lived system” of relations dictates the modalities for the symbolic structuring of experience.

Finally, ideological analyses of the kind reviewed above tend to overlook the complex process by which Manzoni brought his novel to its final form. The making of I promessi sposi did not entail simply the transition from an original concept (realized in Fermo e Lucia and later deemed unsatisfactory) to the structurally definitive texts of 1827 and 1840. In fact, it called for a much slower operation, carried out over several intermediate drafts or “minutes,” which involved a careful redimensioning of characters and episodes. Recent philological inquiry has illuminated, better than ever before, the ongoing tension between Manzoni and his subject matter: how Manzoni plucked away at his own text, refusing and unraveling previous narrative solutions and repressing certain provisional impulses until his story took on the shape dictated by his changing attitude toward his art and his commitment as a social novelist.² This difficult and problematic gestation can never be accounted for totally in the finished product. The struggle involved in the production of I promessi sposi is effaced by a deceptive transparency of ideological closure. No matter what ideology is generated by Manzoni's art, or what social and political attitudes the outcome of his story seems to embody, they all exclude the process which, in Manzoni's case at least, was never a simple, coherent fulfillment of preestablished aims and goals. So when we discuss ideology in I promessi sposi, let us keep in mind, among other things, that ideology is not simply an end product, fully shaped and seamless, but instead the lived experience of production, contradictory and at times illusive, which indicates a lived relation to the social world.

Notes

1. “Manzoni tra De Sanctis e Gramsci,” Ritratto 107.

2. See, in particular, Toschi, Si dia un padre a Lucia and also, at this time in press, by the same author I tegoli di Casale.

Works Cited

Bollati, Guido. “Un carattere per gli italiani.” Storia d'Italia. Torino: Einaudi, 1972.

Crispolti, Filippo. “Nuove indagini sul Manzoni.” Pègaso (agosto 1931): 129-44.

Dombroski, Robert S. L'apologia del vero: lettura e interpretazione dei “Promessi sposi.” Padova: Liviana, 1984:

Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni del carcere. Ed. Valentino Gerratana. 4 voll. Edizione critica dell'Istituto Gramsci. Torino: Einaudi, 1975.

Jameson, Federic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Atlantic City: Humanities Press, 1978.

Moravia, Alberto. “Alessandro Manzoni o l'ipotesi di un realismo cattolico.” L'uomo come fine e altri saggi. Milano: Bompiani, 1964.

Salinari, Carlo. “La struttura ideologica dei Promessi sposi.” Critica marxista 12.3-4 (1974): 183-200.

Sapegno, Natalino. Ritratto di Manzoni ed altri saggi. Bari: Laterza, 1962.

Simonini, Augusto. L'ideologia di Alessandro Manzoni. Ravenna: Longo, 1978.

Toschi, Luca. I tegoli di Casale. Firenze: Sansoni, 1985.

———. Si dia un padre a Lucia: studi sugli autografi manzoniani. Padova: Liviana, 1983.

Vené, Gian Franco. Letteratura e capitalismo in Italia. Milano: Sugar, 1983.