Decadent Genealogies by Barbara Spackman

Author:Barbara Spackman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

My project, in this chapter, is to take seriously the extensive D’Annunzian project, which touches upon and distinguishes between different classes and sexes. The distinction that results from the copresence of Baudelairean and Lombrosian rhetorics is not, however, between upper and lower classes, male and female protagonists as, respectively, mind and body. The coupling of a Lombrosian rhetoric with women and the lower classes is not simply the result of a denial of the body by the upper classes and its consequent displacement onto the “other.” The two rhetorics of sickness cannot be neatly labeled “Baudelairean upper-class male” and “Lombrosian lower-class female,” for while the Baudelairean rhetoric of convalescence seems not to be employed in the service of female characters, the Lombrosian rhetoric is extended to all the classes and sexes studied by Lombroso himself. The peasants of Terra vergine and Le novelle della Pescara, the virgins Orsola and Anna of Le novelle della Pescara, Tullio Hermil of L’Innocente can all be included under the Lombrosian label. The last character—upper-class male—does indeed belong to a special category, for it is the Lombrosian etiology of genius which characterizes him or, rather, with which he, as narrator, characterizes himself. What is at stake in these D’Annun-zian texts is the invention of several different bodies and physiopsy-chologies, as we shall see.

The problem of “class bodies” has occupied both Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, whose hypotheses may help clarify D’Annunzio’s position not because either explains D’Annunzio’s texts but because neither is adequate to do so. In relation to the ideology of D’Annunzio’s novels and novellas, Sartre’s hypothesis regarding the bourgeoisie’s denial of the body appears to be ancient history. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre analyzes the suppression of the body, its denial and constraint through dress, as an essential part of the bourgeoisie’s constitution of itself as a class. The body, according to Sartre, stands as “the presence in the oppressor of the oppressed in person,” and is thus negated and enslaved just as the proletariat is oppressed and enslaved by the bourgeoisie:

Lastly, more directly and more profoundly, the act of social oppression is itself repeated here together with all its significations: he is really oppressing the workers when he subjects the universality of his own body to countless constraints; it is the worker as the universal class that he destroys within himself or conceals under artificially produced particularities; and it is the repression of the workers’ revolt against hunger, cold, fatigue, etc., which he exercises here against fatigue, cold and hunger as revolts of his body.3

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