SOURCE: "The 'End' of Life: Un uomo provvisorio" in Franscesco Jovine: The Quest for Realism, Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 35-52.

[In the following essay, Procaccini interprets Un uomo provvisorio as a Bildungsroman, in which the central characters attempt to tackle existential dilemmas related to twentieth-century issues of disillusionment and alienation.]

Francesco Jovine's first published novel, Un uomo provvisorio (Guanda: Modena, 1934), relates the dramatic story of a young doctor, Giulio Sabò, who comes from his native town of Restano in Molise to Rome to specialize in neurology, and who eventually returns to his home town to live. The novel is divided into two parts: Giulio's life in Rome, and his return to Restano. While in Rome, he lives a life of indifference and boredom, but upon his return to Restano because of his father's illness, he succeeds in overcoming his apathy and suicidal thoughts by discovering that his actions may be meaningful to others as well as to himself. This discovery is made by Giulio partly through introspection, but mainly through his involvement in saving the life of a child in Restano.

At the core of this novel lies not so much a speculative problem, but rather an existential problem of searching for and questioning certain lost values. Un uomo provvisorio is a Bildungsroman, a work in which Jovine attempts to identify the motivating factors and consequences underlying the modern condition of boredom and disillusionment. The narrative posture is one of looking back and speaking from the perspective of experience. The novel presupposes history to be the source for despair as much as for hope; the necessary condition for knowledge and action. In the novel the protagonist is made to live both conditions at different points in his life; however, by the end of the novel one must repudiate the other. In the first case the protagonist is represented as an intellectual figure incapable of action, one who exemplifies the role of a "tipico prodotto di un'epoca di transizione";¹ in the second case he is represented as the figure converted, one who regains purpose and meaning "per aderire alla vita."²

These conditions serve as important reference points for Jovine in building a thematic and structural basis for all of his future works, or as the critic Mauro states, "[N]ell'ansia continua di una più intensa partecipazione umana ai dolori degli umili, alla vita della terra madre."³ Sapegno likewise believes that Un uomo provvisorio contains in nuce the fundamental themes of all his later writings.⁴

The novel and its themes are born of a hope and a new insight transcending the narrow limits of the abstract, positivistic, and mechanistic thinking represented in Giulio before his return to his home town. This novel, in a sense, represents a psychological trial, an Augustinian analysis of the Self and of the function of this Self. It is, as Jovine tells us, "un fatto personale, un'autobiografia mentale, uno sfogo."⁵

The fact that Jovine himself considered the work a product of a need to confess, further supports the notion that the novel is written because the author felt the need to employ his own experience in order to substantiate his fiction. In this sense Un uomo provvisorio represents the passage from "shadow" to "light," from bad conscience to an appeased and clean conscience; it is Jovine's Vita nuova.

The novel is a moment, a situation, a pretext that allows the author to consider his past and reflect on the present, and in turn project the future of his literary production. No doubt the adjective "provvisorio" not only refers to the protagonist of the novel, Giulio, but also to the novel itself, since it represents a critical, provisional moment in the author's life. In fact, Jovine himself tells us that before the novel he began writing Un uomo provvisorio he had already begun writing what would be his next important novel, Signora Ava (to be published in 1942). In fact, in 1929, he had already written four chapters of Signora Ava when he abruptly stopped writing. In an interview, Jovine says:

Stesi i primi quattro capitoli e poi mi fermai. Non lo sapevo scrivere. Sentivo che dovevo prima sfogarmi, dovevo esprimere qualcosa di molto soggettivo, di intimo, prima di poter obiettivare. Dovevo insomma pagare un tributo alla giovanile esigenza della confessione; ecco così L'uomo provvisorio. . . .⁶

In addition, we might also take into account the fact that besides the general meaning given to "provvisorio" as being provisional, temporary, interim, etc., the etymology of the word (from the Latin provisororis) also connotes the idea of foresight. Considering the novel in this sense would mean that its meaning is closely, if not directly, associated with what we have already said concerning the word "confession." That is, in both instances the characterization of both "blindness" and "insight" imply an acknowledgment of having gone astray, or, to recall Dante's formula, "la diritta via era smarrita."

The wrong path taken by Giulio Sabò represents a generic theme common to Jovine as well as to many of his contemporary intellectuals; namely, the ambiguous and problematic status of being a bourgeois intellectual. From Svevo, D'Annunzio, and Pirandello, down through Moravia, Pavese, and Gadda the motif of psychosomatic ailment was clearly more than a literary metaphor. The problem was how to redirect literature as a personal and social activity so that it may become a personal critique as much as a criticism and a revision of society.

In Un'uomo provvisorio Jovine sets out in his journey in quest of how and in which way literature and its maker might respond to imagined and factual reality: how poetry and society can coexist to serve one another.

1

It would be more accurate to say from the beginning that the protagonist of Un 'uomo provvisorio is really a human condition, indeed a degraded condition, whose chief spokesman is Giulio Sabò. Giulio is an intellectual upper-middle-class bourgeois. His psychological makeup echoes that of Rubè in Borgese's novel by the same name (1924) for like him, Giulio too is depicted as a deceived intellectual, isolated and alienated. The reference to Rubè is significant, just as it is to Michele in Moravia's Gli indifferenti (1929), and to the protagonist of Papini's Un uomo finito, for all of them stand as symbolic representatives of their times. As Pancrazi noted, Giulio and Michele can be seen in the same terms that are applied to Rubè, "un figlio del tempo, e ha il male del secolo."⁸

Giulio Sabò considers himself a victim of circumstances, or, better, of an ideology:

Poi per un secolo si è avuta l'illusione di poter ridurre a schema lucido l'organismo e la vita rinunziando alle credenze delle reazioni non intelligibili; si son voluti distruggere tutti i miti in nome di uno solo: scienza.⁹

Giulio is a doctor who rarely practices his profession; in fact, most of his time is spent in idle thinking—as he puts it, "Io penso solamente" (70). As a result of this passive activity, Giulio divides his time either engaging in useless work, "cose inutili" (10), or in further thinking and reflection on his very thinking, such that he considers the whole process unnatural, and thus exclaims: "Possibile che io non riesca a pensare naturalmente. Ho un maledetto cervello a casellario. Mai un pensiero mio. Forse non è possibile averlo perchè tutto è stato pensato" (71).¹⁰

Giulio becomes a cultural spokesman, exhibiting the fictional role of one who has undergone and suffered the burden of time. So intense is this feeling that Giulio never once thinks he can be free from it. His life, he feels, is a product of historical determinism which does not even allow him the freedom to deceive himself. He declares: "Forse nell'umanità di oggi c'è l'oscurà coscienca di questa impossiblità di scavare, dal cervello decrepito, nuove illusioni" (105).¹¹

With an indifferent and impersonal attitude, Giulio moves passively in life, with no future in mind. He feels his development is primarily biological, hence his feeling for life is restricted to the limited, present awareness that all is without meaning or purpose. Giulio lives a life of boredom reminiscent of many of Flaubert's protagonists, indeed resembling the modern version of boredom diagnosed by Chateaubriand in his Genie du christianisme.

Giulio acts out the Romantic in despair; he is estranged and too self-conscious. Brought to this state by the power of positivistic reasoning, like so many of his Romantic ancestors, Giulio feels the wound of having been torn from a state of innocence. But unlike the Romantic prototype the idea of attempting to recapture what has been lost is anachronistic, only a miming gesture which for an intellectual critic like Jean-Paul Sartre would not have been historically viable.¹²Afraid to deceive himself because this action would mean to be trapped consciously, Giulio instead simply declares himself a victim, as he puts it: "[E]cco io sono una vittima di E. Kant" (106). In other words, thinking to liberate himself from the bondage of myths and illusions, Giulio only realizes the irony of such a quest, and thus exclaims the paradox: "Prigionieri del nostro errore siamo; questa libertà, che terribile schiavitù!" (106)¹³

The dialectical shifting between these two extremes renders Giulio paralytic, and thus gives rise to a feeling of utter uselessness in combatting life and to a vainful attempt to reconcile the diverging poles. In short, the paradox of Giulio's condition is such that while his desire to live is manifested in his constant drive to master life intellectually—itself a source of Promethean power—at the same time he is repelled by its abstract formulas, themselves the source for generating in him his own formula of life: "Vanitas vanitatum" (37). Thus the very act of asserting such a precept implies an exercise of his will to live and the possible attempt to disprove his own formula. Thus, we must realize that, although his revolt against all abstract systems of thought devised by his intellectual drive reduces Giulio to accepting only one reality—his own personal subjective existence—at the same time it allows him at least the possibility of escaping the condition and engaging in an alternative.

Conditions in the city force the protagonist to confront what for him seem to be philosophical problems but which we interpret as psychological problems. We must recall that Giulio was born and lived in a little town in the countryside, and then went alone to live in Rome. The contrast is a sharp one.

Originally he had left Restano for Rome with the desire, recalling so many of Verga's protagonists, to "esperimentare il gentiluomo" (102), to experience the aristocratic condition. His life was to be guided by a literary code, as was the case with many of the characters in Verga's early novels: "[S]i costruiva un'esistenza che poteva essere narrata" (102).

In contrast to this there remained the memory of his childhood life which, according to the references made to it by the narrator, was somewhat secure and happy. For example, when Giulio is forced to return to Restano, he notices, in traveling there by train, that everything still appeared the same as when he left. We are also told some of his childhood experiences, such as the ritual learning and recitation of incomprehensible prayers, listening to an old lady's tales of saints in her native dialect, his fears of the devil who might triumph over God, and his attempt to conquer this fear by imitating peasants who seemed to be not afraid of anything.

Much more than physically distant, therefore, the two worlds are representative of two modes of viewing and understanding life. In leaving Restano, Giulio is torn away from a condition in which he not only feels at home, but also, because of his social status, the son of a land-owning bourgeois doctor, he had acquired a sense of superiority. In Rome, instead, he feels smouldered by a sense of inferiority, an object of observation for others to discourse upon and judge. Giulio's departure and consequential journey is viewed as "l'esilio in altri mondi diversi dal presente; il viaggio in paesi chimerici" (79).¹⁴ The two worlds, therefore, are separated and distanced both spatially as well as temporally, hence mutually exclusive.

Giulio's life in Rome is seen as experience in a wasteland. He is so aware of his isolation that the more he thinks about it the more he feels removed from any social contact. This is so because in Rome he feels he must adapt himself in an alien world in order to feel accepted. He is forced to consider the Self with criteria which are unfamiliar to him. He is literally forced to adapt to a situation which is no longer personal but communitative. He is cut off from that private life of his youth which had a particular history and particular associations. The shift to the city results in his need to articulate his feelings and ideas in such a way that they appear eloquent and convincing, when in fact he knows all too well that they are mere abstractions to save face. Nonetheless, it is this very shift from a situation where Giulio felt emotionally and intellectually immersed (paese) to a state (città) where reflection dominates that aggravates his condition.

Through this movement, a sort of going from inside to outside, from a subjective state to an objective one, Giulio acquires that demonic quality which Lukàcs considers fundamentally characteristic of the novelistic hero.

Such wavering in attitude and feeling reflects, therefore, not only the problematic nature of Giulio but also the transient and suspended state in which he lives. The figure of Giulio is that of a hero who is faceless and anonymous, who is at once everyman and nobody; at once the center and the circumference of a circle. He states it so:

Ecco: Io sono per un istante centro e periferia di tanti circoli che si intersecano, ma sopratutto centro; ma può darsi che nessuno si occupi di me, come io penso, e che io crei questi interessi che non suscito. (31)¹⁵

The central problem and preoccupation for Giulio is that he is a stranger to himself. In such a disconsolate condition, however, the only way for personal salvation is either to engage in rationalizations, as he does when he blames Kant, or to assume the heroic posture of being different, the romantic anti-hero who manages to feel above it all because he is under no illusion. The narrator suggests this ambivalence when he states that Giulio's life "era sostenuta da questo orgoglio cosciente di essere pienamente figlio del tempo, di essere l'avvelenato portatore di tutti i tossici mentali che l'umanità aveva distillato nei secoli" (80).¹⁶

Giulio comes to understand this contradictory feeling only when he realizes the limitation of his method. Giulio lives his life primarily by reflection. While in Rome his real labor is thinking, but to what purpose this ought to be put is never clear to him. His dissatisfaction is, in fact, with his mind, not with his body. We recall that at one frustrating point, Giulio is enraged at the fact that he does nothing but regurgitate his thought, and what he really needs is self-infliction of physical labor. But on reflection he passes over the whole idea and returns to what is more natural to him, reflection.

The juxtaposition of what Giulio is doing versus what he ought to do is revealing because the novel itself is so juxtaposed. In the first part, we have the story of Giulio living in Rome under the conditions we have described. Midway through the novel the story comes to an almost unexpected halt. There has been no real plot up to this point, only characterization and setting. The second half of the novel begins as the narrator informs us that Giulio had been recieving news from home concerning his father's deteriorating illness.

In this ambivalent situation Giulio is called to act, as opposed to reflect; hence a conversion occurs: a shift from reflection to participation, a movement from a provisional and indifferent state to an involved and engaged one.

At this point Giulio's life, as well as that of the novel, reaches a turning point. The protagonist, like the narrative, ceases to become an end in himself; both recover the need to aim and to engage in a critical discourse which goes beyond an aesthetic effect.

Such a critical discourse is designed to likewise "move" the reader to ask not only why this novel was written but also why this novel is being read. A controlling purpose begins to pervade the novel such that what has been taken to be accidental or gratuitous now begins to be viewed as interrelated and forming part of a design. All of this occurs because Giulio begins to look backwards. Time spent in Rome becomes for Giulio a new source of knowledge, an experience to be viewed as a felix culpa. The very condition which brought on despair now opens the way for hope. As a temporal process, history becomes redemptive and redeemable. The past not only may enlighten the future, it may indeed be the very source for creating it. The temporal process once again comes under scrutiny.

2

Time is normally thought of as belonging to three fundamental moments: the past, the present, and the future. In this novel, the distinct and immediate impression is that Giulio and most of the novel's characters live in the present, occasionally recalling their past but with no specific reference to it except to see it as the breeding ground for the present malady, while the future, on the other hand, is very hazy. The idea of projecting one's self into the future, of having a target to aim at, is for all practical purposes nonexistent for these characters, although not to be totally excluded. However, if we consider the role of time for the development of the novel, we can better see how it functions to serve both the structure and the meaning we are to extract from the novel.

On his return back home, Giulio begins to have a series of flashbacks dating to his childhood and his experience in Restano. Such memories instill in him a melancholic and nostalgic desire to be able to recapture those lost feelings. In fact the whole trip on the train is dominated by memories of his past. When he reaches home, other memories of his childhood return to him in an almost passionate manner, causing him to have both guilt feelings as well as a resentment for having allowed himself to reach a point of no return. This is so because he realizes now how superficial his life is, and that a return to Rome would be meaningless. Indeed, the present is continuously violated by past memories, which in turn impede him from projecting any definite plans for the future. His life has reached, as the existentialists would have it, a "cul de sac." To be sure, at a certain point in the second half of the novel a decisive break occurs. Giulio, who has not practiced medicine in years, is urgently called to aid Carletto Lomma, who is dying of diphtheria. The whole plot of the novel has obviously been manipulated to have this scene be the central point of Giulio's drama. Giulio, still indifferent to life as a whole, is convinced by his sister and cousin that he has in his hands the power to save a life. He is told that there is no way the young boy can receive any other assistance except his. Thus, after some initial hesitation, Giulio agrees to help. In a dramatic, but very stilted scene, Giulio manages to act and save the young boy.

Giulio undergoes the cathartic experience, and the necessary conversion takes place. However, we should add that the conversion is not because he has seen the new light or that suddenly there is a meaning in life, but rather because he realizes that his human involvement, although still inadequate in itself, makes more sense than disengagement. He realizes that the active participation in life offers more alternatives than does the passive commitment of intellectualizing with life. The efficacy of the conversion lies in Giulio's discovery that his actions do make a difference, and that the life he had lived up to that time made no difference. Giulio's awareness that life cannot be taken indifferently, the revelation that life is much too mysterious to be understood by the scientific method, and that the Voltairean smile can make us dangerously overconfident is further indication of his conversion. The fact that this "truth" had been up to that point covered by an intellectual veil also raises the issue that Giulio suffers from what René Girard considers characteristic of the novelistic hero, the "mal ontologique," that is, the misdirected search for authentic values in a world where the system of values is no longer clearly stated.¹⁷

As we venture into the second half of the novel, something curious begins to happen. Although Giulio still maintains his despairing attitude toward life as a whole, there seems to be a subtle shift of the position of the problem presented. As we have pointed out, the very fact that Giulio's past and, to a certain extent, his future both come to the surface and assume a particular significance, means that the novel itself is consciously structured by the author to reveal the metamorphosis of the hero who necessarily must comply with the confessional procedure in order to justify the inevitable conversion.

The shift I am referring to is a subtle transference of the basis of the problem. In the first half there is hardly any reference to any specific event or cause which might explain either Giulio's or the other protagonists' condition. The general atmosphere which is depicted is rather abstract. In fact, the narrator tells us nothing except that they feel depressed, tired, and extremely bored. Why this is so is never given. But precisely because the context is abstract and general, and because Giulio' s chief preoccupation is with what may generally be called existential problems, the problem seems to carry metaphysical or psychological overtones. Giulio, as spokesman for the problem, is disturbed because he seems to be driven by some metaphysical quest. Such is indicated by Giulio's primary concern for the world as a whole, a fact which the narrator makes known: "Un giorno [Giulio] aveva pensato al dramma dell'umanità ridotta a due personaggi. 'Io, il mondo'" (77).¹⁸

Initially these two entities exist independent of each other, where the "world" is the dominator and the "I" is the obedient slave ("schiavo paziente"). But at some point in the evolving process man, wishing to dominate, begins to believe this and thus deceives himself in being able to do so. Once this point is reached there is the realization that the whole drama is but a factional scheme of his imagination, a "rappresentazione illusiva" (78).

Consequently, the only possible thing to gather from such fiction is its tragic message: "Il cervello è solo con la rappresentazione del mondo; la tragedia è tutta tra le parete del cranio" (78).¹⁹" The problem is thus seen as a personal struggle, the urge to resolve the existing opposition between himself and the world.

The tension which dominates the first half of the book is essentially psychological or philosophical in nature. In contrast, the second half introduces a different perspective, or rather a different context for reviewing the problems present in the first half. Giulio's attitude is viewed in light of different circumstances. His return to his home town is not seen as either a consoling idyllic experience or as a return to the primative nature characteristic of the romance and the gothic novel.

On the contrary and in contrast to the quasi totally indifferent attitude he experienced in Rome, we now hear the narrator telling us that, despite the fact that Giulio has nothing in common with these people in his region, at least he feels for them because of his painful awareness of their misery. One clear indication of this shift of attitude occurs when Giuilo observes the countryside he travels through as he is about to reach Restano:

Terra aspra e grigia; monti scorticati dalle frane e rugosi di rocce friabili. Una campagna indocile, dura, che ha insegnato a quelli che le chiedono la vita una diffidenza, amara, una chiusa malinconia, una parsimonia crudele. (175)²¹

Another important experience is the jolt Giulio receives in seeing his father dead and the total alienation he experiences when certain rituals are performed by local inhabitants, including his mother, around the coffin, and the triggered recollection of a moment in his youth when, for the first time, he hears the news about the war—the same two themes (the death of the father and the beginning of World War II) that set in motion the protagonist of Borgese's Rubè, as they served to initiate and conclude Zeno Cosini's life story in Svevo's momentous novel, La coscienza di Zeno.²²

The fact is that Giulio begins to feel certain experiences emotionally rather than intellectually. The metaphysical query "I and the world" has by now become "I and society." In the former the subject is in a mirrorlike rapport with the self; in the latter he extends the relation to the Other.

Different circumstances create a new context; thus Giulio's new experience enables him to reexamine himself—an examination of conscience which is personal as much as public, for the reader knows only too well that, by now, Giulio's condition reflects more than an existential crisis.

So far we have seen the hero journey from a degraded state (ontological evil), to the unintentional act of sinning (metaphysical desire), to self-examination. But another step is still needed to complete the journey, that is, the actual act of confessing the sin.

Although we seem to be saying that there are various steps through which Giulio moves, especially from the metaphysical to the historical, we must understand that the process itself is a very subtle one from the protagonist's point of view. The differences and the changes to which we have alluded are primarily noticeable in the narrator's voice.

As for Giulio, his psychological development is both subtle and slow, and this is because tensions as such are difficult to discern since his feelings, for the most part, are given to us by an overly conscious narrator. An attempt to penetrate the mind of the protagonist can only be done indirectly. This is significant because it is consistent with the protagonist's character and viewpoint, despite our being informed by the narrator.

The distance of awareness between the narrator and protagonist would further indicate that any conversion Giulio undergoes must be dramatic and immediate: a Pauline vision rather than an Augustinian lifelong trial to reach true insight. Echoing the character of Emilio Brentani in Svevo's Senilità who "was almost thirty-five years old and had learned nothing" (191), Giulio is about to have the experience of Dante the pilgrim's midlife crisis and salvation.

In the midst of some rather insignificant events Giulio is finally called upon to partake of an important event, the one which will alter his course of life. This, of course, is his saving of a young boy's life. His involvement in the child's suffering ("Il suo occhio attento seguiva la lotta oscura, il dramma che si svolgeva in quel piccolo corpo" [227])²³ and in providing relief to the child's suffering makes him reconsider the meaning of life and brings him to a realization that "[s]alvare si ha il senso di avere ricreato una vita" (233).²⁴

As the child recovers consciousness, Giulio undergoes his own moral reawakening: "C'è tanta luce e tu hai avuto paura del buio. Io ti ho aiutato a rivedere il sole" (234).²⁵ As the childlike Dante and his "dottore" Virgil who likewise return from "l'aura morta" to see the light again ("a rivedere le stelle"), Giulio's eyes are open to the purgatorial experience: "il pianto è dentro" (234).²⁶

As the novel comes to a close Giulio realizes his conversion but also is aware that his intellectual nature is still very much part of him and thus cannot be totally disregarded. The tension at work between the first and the second part of the novel is still present in Giulio's character, a tension between a passive and an active role, a tension which is only partly resolved and mollified by his conversion.

In the closing pages of the novel Giulio is seen walking with Iolanda and reflecting over the event that has taken place. As they discuss and foresee a life with each other, Giulio also recognizes that his own personal problem is far from being resolved completely: "Si svincolò dall'abbraccio e affondò la testa tra le spighe come avesse voluto restituire il suo cervello alla terra" (236).²⁸

Giulio's reaction in this manner symbolically indicates his desire to eliminate the cerebral side of his nature; yet the fact that he wishes to bury his head in the ground, a gesture which prefigures that of Zampano in the closing scene of Fellini's La Strada, also reveals that his reflective nature cannot be eradicated. Both forces, damnation and redemption, are what make Giulio realize his human limitations, as well as his human capabilities. It is this awareness which is ultimately Giulio's conversion and Jovine's confession. Specifically, this means that both author and character are obviously to be viewed as human beings in a rather specific Christian sense, that is being divided in a divided world—by the flesh and the spirit. It would not be unreasonable to suppose that this theme was one of Jovine's primary concerns in this, his first work. His future energies will take this concern for granted; instead he will concentrate on an attitude that will make a radical reversal not only possible, but more to the point, significant.

In the final pages of the novel the image of Giulio wishing to return his mind to the earth reaffirms the essential feature of the novel and the purpose for which it was written. The image helps us to see and understand that the resolution—not solution—of the tension existing in the protagonist's mind and in the novel is in function of establishing a criterion for exercising judgment, that is, judging with purpose and meaning. Giulio's journey and experience away from home and his subsequent return there is, in this respect, also a meeting-up with the narrator who from the beginning has provided the narrative and the reader a point of reference by which the plot and the protagonist's actions could be judged to be purposeful. Giulio's symbolic gesture to reunite himself to the earth thus represents for him as much as for the narrator what we the readers are meant to apprehend: it is toward the earth and from its perspective that the human mind ought to be directed. The shift of focus dramatizes not only the erroneous qualities of Giulio's existence, but much more significantly, it subtly vitiates for the reader any attempt to deify whatever romantic urge there might be to isolate oneself from earthly demands. Giulio's desire to resoil his mind is Jovine's demand to reintegrate his literary work into society.

3

In his rather absolute demand for what I have called a "conversion" Jovine appears to speak like a religious reformer. In actuality the conversion he is after is aesthetic and ideological, not religious. During the early years of Fascism, when the relative status of literature carried political overtones, Jovine was quick to state his position. In a review of Borgese's Rubé, Jovine touches on the significance of the novel. In his view Borgese succeeds in his attempt to

spogliare il suo personaggio degli attributi materiali, di distaccarlo dalle circostanze tra cui la sua vita si svolge per farlo assurgere a simbolo universale del travaglio di una generazione.²⁸

As far as his own views regarding the nature and function of literature, Jovine will declare: "Noi non crediamo all'estro improvviso, ma pensiamo l'arte come una lentissima e spesso tormentosa opera di interiore chiarificazione."²⁹ Art, therefore, must serve the pedagogical function of enlarging and contextualizing one's view of reality, and consequently establish a direct rapport between man and reality based on a profound and historical understanding of it. In this sense, art becomes redemptive, a means to achieve self-awareness and awareness of the world. Couched in religious terms, Jovine affirms in a different context that art must be spiritual nourishment ("il pane dello spirito") because mankind finds himself in a spiritual wasteland ("miseria di spirito").³⁰ Strictly speaking, the poet, the artist, should be a reformer, a mediator; one whose words serve to reestablish communication between men and the world in which they dwell.

Reconsidering, then, what we have said about the protagonist of Jovine's first novel, we might further speculate that Giulio's symbolic gesture to reroot his mind, together with his actual return home, suggests Jovine's indirect project, even if unknowingly, to resensitivize the substantive feature pertaining to man: that he is human, and that to be human is to be implanted, rooted in the earth. ("Human" carries within its root the Latin humus, meaning "earth.") Of course the formulation is Heidegger's; yet there is little doubt that Jovine wishes to portray the human condition in a general Heideggerian sense, that is, that man's existence must be remembered as a "being-in-the-world" (ln-der-Welt-Sein)³¹ A mind, a philosophy that forgets its ground, which abstracts and elevates itself above the actual, daily existence, is meaningless. Certainly Giulio's conversion to act and to action represents precisely what Jovine finds lacking, hence contemptible, in much of contemporary art: "Quello che ripugna, in genere, agli artisti nuovi è la realtà."³² As an emblematic, yet representative figure, Giulio symbolizes the uniquely Christian protagonist—the suffering hero who through and because of an alienated/sinful experience can retroactively review that experience, hence revise it and indeed extract from it a meaning. Of course, this principle is somewhat contrived in Un'uomo provvisorio, for there the protagonist's "interpretation" of his own experience is done by the moralizing narrator who, in fact, is the one who does the reviewing and the revision of meaning. Indeed the distinction between the unstable protagonist and the grounded narrator, so characteristic and crucial in such prototype texts as St. Augustine's Confessions and Dante's Divine Comedy, would appear here anachronistic, to say the least.³³ Nevertheless the structure as such is both relevant and contemporary, for in juxtaposing an erring protagonist with an omniscent narrator Jovine dramatizes not only the old theme of renewal, but more significantly, he recasts the ostensibly spiritual drama into a purely secular, historical context. Giulio's conversion is both psychological as well as spiritual; yet it is also an acknowledgment of the narrator's "correct" posture. However, unlike Augustine's or Dante's narrator—who can at least claim to be speaking from a theologically fixed ground unbound by or independent of time—Jovine's narrator, as with all novelistic narrators, speaks from and operates in time, in history. Accordingly, Giulio's meeting up with the narrator corresponds then to his return to his home town. Together, the narrator and Restano signal both the end of Giulio's inauthentic life in Rome as well as his renewed life in Restano. The theme is clearly one of having to begin all over again; how to reface reality—that very reality which Jovine himself confesses to have ignored, and which so many of his contemporaries he thought were failing to confront.

To renew or begin anew is the dominant theme reverberating throughout Jovine's first novel, even though at the beginning of this chapter I suggested that the real protagonist of Un'uomo provvisorio presents a degraded human condition. These two themes are of course interdependent, for the latter becomes the prerequisite and the necessary cause for the former. The "provisional" element alluded to by the title, namely Giulio's temporary stay in Rome, functions within the novel's structure and the author's plan as a "fortunate mistake," a felix culpa. Giulio's return home and subsequent conversion allows him to view retrospectively, hence to revise not only the mistake and its fortunate occurrence but also the underlying error sustaining his mistake, albeit its fortuitious nature. Most interestingly, towards the end of the novel, as Giulio reflects on his past and projects his life into the future, he recalls and realizes Vico's noted distinction between human and divine knowledge: "[D]elle cose non fatte da noi non possiamo avere certa scienza" (230)³⁴ His error was to attribute to his life in Rome, and by implication to any analogous experience, a cause transcending man, hence divorcing man from the very elements which were the seeds of his mental ailments. The fortunate mistake becomes, as it likewise was for Vico, a happy consequence, for to be in the fallen state is to be aware that human error occurs when man fails to distinguish what we ourselves have made from what God has devised. Human history is a human endeavor, hence can be understood and consequently revised and ultimately renewed. The problem is essentially epistemological rather than ontological, for the main concern regards "how" rather than "why" the human condition is what it is.

For Jovine, the didactic intent of his first work was to differentiate him from so many of his contemporary writers. To be in history is necessarily to suffer the condition of "sin," that is, the condition of living in the body, hence never really to know the "why." On the other hand, to live in history, in the flesh, is to be in quest of, to imagine, that "why." How such a quest should be envisioned and divined is, for Jovine, one of literature's basic purposes and a poet's continual quest.

NOTES

¹ " . . . typical representative of an age in transition." Massimo Grillandi, Francesco Jovine (Milano: Mursia, 1971) 39.

² "In order to cling to life." Gino Giardini, Francesco Jovine (Milano: Marzorati, 1967) 22.

³ " . . . in the constant anxiety to participate more fully in the suffering of the poor, in the life of his mother land." Walter Mauro, Cultura e società nella narrativa meridionale (Roma: Edizioni dell' Ateneo, 1965) 76.

⁴ N. Sapegno, "Il narratore Jovine," Società June 1950.

⁵ " . . . a personal story, a spiritual confession, an emotional release." Interview in La Fiera Letteraria 9 January 1949.

⁶ "I wrote the first four chapters, and then stopped writing. I did not know how to write it. First, I knew that I had to let my feelings out, that I had to express something very personal and intimate before I could be objective. In short, I had to pay tribute to the youthful need to write a confession; thus L'uomo provvisorio." Interview in La Fiera Letteraria 9 January 1949.

⁷ Although the comparison has been frequently made and has its valid points, we should point out that Giulio differs from both Filippo and Michele in a significant way in that he has been given the possibility of salvation or solution of his problems (in his return to his home town), whereas they have no salvation offered to them, nor do they find any. In the case of Filippo, he dies in pathetic circumstances, totally disillusioned with life. As for Michele, the possibility for him to resolve his indifference, either by leaving the city or by becoming capable of loving, is denied him.

⁸ ".. . a child of his times, having the illness of the age." Pietro Pancrazi, Raguagli di Parnaso (Milan: Ricciardi, 1967) 2: 151. For related views and other general observations concerning this novel see Eugenio Ragni, Jovine (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1972); Walter Mauro, "Jovine," in I contemporanei (Milano: Marzorati, 1963); C. Salinari, Preludio e fine del realismo in Italia (Napoli: Morano, 1967); and B. Moloney, "The Novels of Francesco Jovine," Italian Studies 23 (1968).

⁹ "And then for a century one thought that it was possible to clearly systematize nature and life at the cost of renouncing all beliefs thought to be unintelligible; all myths were to be destroyed to the exclusion of one only: science." Francesco Jovine, L'uomo provvisorio (Modena: Guanda, 1934) 230. All subsequent references to this edition will henceforth be included in the text.

¹⁰ "Is it possible that I can't think naturally? I have a pigeonhole brain. Never a thought of my own. Perhaps it's impossible since everything has already been thought."

¹¹ " "It's possible that humanity today is vaguely aware of the impossibility of digging up new myths from its decrepit brain."

¹² For an extensive analysis and critique of the problem, see Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille.

¹³ "We are prisioners of our mistakes; this freedom, what terrible bondage."

¹⁴ " . . . the exile in other worlds different from his own; a journey to chimerical lands."

¹⁵ "And so: for an instant I am the center and the periphery of many circles that intersect each other, although for the most part I feel as the center. However, it's possible that nobody worries about me, as I suspect, and can only imagine the fact that I can be of interest to others."

¹⁶ " . . . was sustained by the pride he took in believing to be a child of his times, to be the poisoned spokesman of all the mental toxins produced by humanity over the ages."

¹⁷ See especially the first three chapters in René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965).

¹⁸ "One day [Giulio] envisioned the human drama to boil down to two actors. 'The world and I.'"

¹⁹ "The mind is alone in the world's drama; the whole tragedy is between the walls of the skull."

²⁰ For the classic treatment of this theme see George Lukàcs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), and Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968). Particularly relevant to the theme is Ezio Raimondi's study of Manzoni's I promessi sposi as a model for what he calls "the novel without idyl." Ezio Raimondi, Il romanzo senza idillio. Saggio sui Promessi sposi. (Torino: Einaudi, 1974).

²¹ "A rough and gray region; hills skinned by landslides and wrinkled with brittled rocks. An obstinate and harsh land which has taught those who depend on it to maintain a bitter distrust, to hide any feeling of melancholy, to be painfully parsimonious."

²² "For a discussion on theme of the war, see Mario Insegni, Il mito della grande guerra da Marinetti a Malaparte (Bari: Laterza, 1970).

²³ "His attentive eye pursued the sullen struggle, the drama taking place in that young body."

²⁴ "Through the act of saving one feels that a life has been recreated."

²⁵ "There is so much light, yet you were afraid of the dark. I helped you to see the sun again."

²⁶ "The weeping is inside me."

²⁷ "While hugging each other he pulled himself away and sunk his head to the ground, almost as if he wished to give his mind back to the earth."

²⁸ "Strip his character of material qualities, remove him from the circumstances that surround him so that he may rise to become a universal symbol of a generation in torment." Francesco Jovine, "Borgese e il romanzo," Diritti della Scuola (Rome) no. 14, 10 January 1932: 45.

²⁹ "We don't believe in spontaneous fancy, but rather in art as an extremely drawn out and often troubling result of an internal awareness." Francesco Jovine, "Corrado Alvaro—narratore," L'Italia Letteraria (Milano), 23 February 1935.

³⁰ ".. . the bread of the spirit." Francesco Jovine, "Bisogno della poesia," Diritti della Scuola 31 January 1932.

³¹ The reference here to Heidegger is, of course, indirect. However, given the spirit of the times during which Jovine and Heidegger lived, I have found it valuable to re-read Jovine, especially his L'uomo provvisorio, in light of a Heideggerian reading. In this instance I have in mind three pieces in particular, "The Origin of the Work of Art," "What are Poets For?," and "Building Dwelling Thinking," all in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971). For a relevant and suggestive reading of Heidegger and his meaning of "earth" as it might be applicable to a reading of Jovine, see Karsten Harries, "Heidegger as a Political Thinker," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy. Critical Essays, edited by Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978).

³² "On the whole, what is repugnant to the modern artist is reality." Francesco Jovine, "Fissare il tempo," Diritti della Scuola 20 May 1932.

³³ For a masterful analysis of this question as it pertains specifically to The Divine Comedy, see John Freccero, "Dante's Prologue Scene," Dante Studies 84 (1966) 1-25. Also see his "Dante's Ulysses: From Epic to Novel," in Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Norman T. Burns and Christopher J. Reagan (Albany: State U of New York P, 1975) 101-119.

For a corresponding critique and incisive revision of the problem as it would apply theoretically to any literary text see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), especially pages 237-274. As for how this issue is relevant to the modern novel, see my "Pavese: Tangency and Circumspection," Lingua e Stile 18.3 (1983): 457-477.

³⁴ "Of the things not made by us, we can have no certain knowledge."